The World of Homer
Argo encounters the rocks on her outward and eastward way, before she
enters the Euxine. Homer knows that Jason loved Hypsipyle in Lemnos,
whether on his way to or his return from Aietes. Pindar says on his
return westward to Greece, after he has visited Oceanus, the Red Sea,
and Africa. The common story, as in Apollonius Rhodius, makes Jason
love Hypsipyle in Lemnos as he sails eastwards and outward bound to
Colchis. If he wooed her thus, on his way home, _with Medea,_ as
Pindar tells, one can only say that he was a brave man.
Let us next, before going deeper into the "Saga," examine the case
of Thersites, the impudent demagogue of _Iliad_, ii., never again
mentioned by Homer. Mr. Murray is rather surprised "to find that
Thersites is really an independent saga-figure with a life of his own,
and very distinguished relations. He was a son of Agrios, the savage
Aetolian king, and first cousin once removed of the great Diomedes.
His mother was Dia, a palpable goddess." He was killed by Achilles for
jeering at his grief over the slain Amazon, Penthesilea. Achilles was
purified by Odysseus, but Diomede took up his feud.[33]
In Pherecydes (fr. 82), Thersites is an Aetolian, thrown over a rock by
Meleager for his cowardice in the boar hunt, but not killed.[34]
All this about Thersites is really "saga" stuff,--invented about the
date of the _Aethiopis_. But Thersites was no hero of "saga" in the
time of Homer. Had he been the son of a goddess (otherwise unknown)
and of "a savage Aetolian king" (Homer's Aetolians are as civilised as
his other peoples), the poet would have said so. He is most careful,
we saw, to tell us who his heroes are (except the Athenians), even
when they only appear for the purpose of being slain. But he says not
a word about the genealogy and antecedents of Thersites, who is only
a man of the λαός or host, food for bronze. "The savage king of the
Aetolians," Agrios, has been picked out by some one suffering from
la manie cyclique, who was anxious to tell "what became of them all,"
from _Iliad_, xiv. 114-125: "no doubt an interpolation," says Mr. Leaf,
"like many others, of the genealogical school connected with the name
of Hesiod."
Here, at all events, whether the genealogy be late and Hesiodic or not,
Diomede gives to Agamemnon his genealogy, in Aetolia.
Portheus
_______|__________________
| | |
Agrios Melas Oeneus
|
Tydeus
|
Diomede
The _manie cyclique_ inserted
Agrios
|
Thersites, for it was desired to tell what became of Thersites;
and--not to lose sight of a person so notable as Thersites--the poet
made Achilles kill him, a much older man than Achilles, for his
mockery. Then Diomede (who does not remonstrate when Odysseus calls him
the basest, socially, of the host, and beats him) takes up his feud
when he is slain.[35]
Homer has plainly no idea that Thersites is of royal and divine
lineage, all that is a later invention of "the cyclic mania," and
is as old, at least, as the age of the Ionian cyclic poet of the
_Aethiopis_.[36] The very scholiasts said that Homer marked the base
birth of Thersites by saying nothing about his parentage and home.
In Homer, as in the earliest _Chansons de Geste_, there is the knightly
poetic legend; and in the Cyclics, at least in the case of Thersites,
there are the later expansions and continuations made under the
influence of _la manie cyclique_. The _dénouement_ of the _Telegonia_,
the last of the Cyclics, is purely absurd. Telegonus marries his aged
stepmother, Penelope, and Telemachus marries his father's mistress,
Circe!
To explore the relations of Homer and of "saga" to _Märchen_, or
popular tales, attached to real or fabulous heroes and heroines of the
past, would require a volume.[37] Almost all Greek pseudo-historical
tradition consists of a string of _Märchen_, known all over the world:
any student of folk-lore who reads the Achaean legends in Grote can
identify the masterless _Märchen_ which have been attached to the
heroic figures. In exactly the same way, _Märchen_ are attached to
Charlemagne in the _Chansons de Geste_; to Arthur in the romances;
and we might as well look to them for political and personal history
as to Homer. Naimes, Ganelon, Olivier, the expedition of Charlemagne
to Constantinople, his wars with the Saracens, and other persons and
events in the _Chansons de Geste_, yield no material to the historian;
nor do Lancelot, Galahad, Palamedes, and Tristram, and Arthur's foreign
conquests in the romances. What history there is rests obscure.
On the other hand, an attempt has recently been made to extract some
grains of "tribal" history, before and after the Achaean migration to
Asia, from the names of the heroes in the _Iliad_, and from the places
where, in post-Homeric Greece, they received worship. This effort is
made by Dr. Erich Bethe, in his _Homer und die Heldensage_, and Mr.
Murray follows Bethe in _The Rise of the Greek Epic_. We may take a
notable example of the method in the case of Hector. "Hector seems to
belong to Boeotia." It may be worth while to examine the reasoning
on which this most unexpected opinion is based. The idea was first
propounded by Ferdinand Dümmler in a short _Anhang_ to Studniczka's
_Cyrene._ "Hector was worshipped as a hero in Boeotian Thebes," says
Mr. Murray, quoting Dümmler, and Dümmler's source is apparently
Pausanias.[38] If the Boeotians in the time of Pausanias regarded
Hector as of Boeotian birth, the fact would be curious. But they did
nothing of the kind. "The Thebans show the tomb of Hector near the
Well of Oedipous. They say that Hector's remains were brought here
from Ilium in accordance with the following oracle: "Ye Thebans, if
you wish your country to be wealthy, bring to your city from Asia the
bones of Hector the son of Priam, and respect the hero at the bidding
of Zeus."[39]
This was a real or an _imaginary_ case of the body-snatching of which
Herodotus speaks frequently. The relics of St. Hector would be valuable
to Thebes. The Thebans, in fact, may have wished to propitiate a hero
who had slain, according to Homer, many Boeotians in battle, and who
might still be hostile, and even fight against them in battle, as
dead heroes were apt to do. Pausanias (ix. 4. 3, ix. 39. 3) mentions
also the graves of certain Boeotian heroes, one of them wounded, the
other slain by Hector, as still honoured in Boeotia. Hector slew, or
wounded, or fought Homeric heroes from Phocis and from Boeotia; and
Epeigeus, a suppliant of Peleus (_Iliad_, xvi. 570 _et seqq_.), and
an Aetolian hero, an Athenian, a Mycenaean, an Elian, and so on.
What follows? These names of heroes slain by Hector, Thessalians,
Aetolians, Phocians, and Boeotians, are thought to suggest that, as
Mr. Murray translates Dr. Bethe, "Hector, or rather the tribe which
honoured Hector as their hero, migrated by this road,"--by the road on
which these Aetolians, Thessalians, Phocians, and Boeotians--or the
tribes which honoured them as heroes--used to live. "More accurately,
the tribe gradually, in how many centuries none can tell, moved in
a south-easterly direction, driven by a pressure which was no doubt
exerted by the Aeolic tribe represented in the Epos by Achilles."
"These are no pictures of phantasy that I let loose to play about
here," says Dr. Bethe (p. 16).
What else but phantasies can we possibly call them? That Hector's tomb
was shown in Thebes, does by no means prove that he, or a tribe which
was the Hector tribe, once lived in Boeotia. Heroes, like saints,
had tombs and chapels in many regions where they were not born, and
which they never visited. The grave of St. James was shown--in Spain!
Ariadne's ashes had been shown in Argos. Hector, in the _Iliad_, killed
the men in his way. In addition to the victims chosen out by Dr. Bethe,
he slew Stichios, an Athenian; Amphimachus, an Elian, and Periphetes of
Mycenae.[40]
This does no more prove that Hector was a Boeotian than that he was an
Athenian. He slew Schedios, a Phocian, yet he was no more a Phocian
than an Athenian, he merely killed the men whom he met. If we are
to argue, that he or the tribe which honoured him was driven out of
Aetolia and Thessaly down to Boeotia, Phocis, and Attica, we must,
by parity of reasoning, argue that the Hector tribe (in Gaelic, the
MacEachans), were driven into Peloponnesus, to Mycenae and Elis, for
Hector slew Periphetes of Mycenae, and Amphimachus, of Elis.[41] The
Mycenaean, Elian, and Athenian are not mentioned by Dr. Bethe. Nor can
Hector be converted into a Boeotian by the circumstance that he fought
a kind of courteous duel with Aias, while Aias was really the Locrian
Aias, we are told, and so a neighbour of the Boeotian Hector.[42]
Hector's relations with Aias[43] are far from neighbourly and friendly.
This instance of Hector is one of many in which the names of heroes are
taken to represent "tribes" which had a cult of these heroes, though
Homer knows nothing about this cult as practised in heroic Greece,
except in Athens. We learn nothing from Homer about "tribes" or clans
with a sacred eponymous hero, or with any "hero" in the sense of the
word as used in the Greece of history. We cannot assume that the
_Iliad_ introduces, in the combats of heroes, memories of tribal wars
in Greece in the pre-Homeric age, and transfers them, in the shape of
single combats, to the plain of Troy!
Heroic relationships were claimed long after Homer by peoples like
the Dorians and Romans and English and many others, merely to connect
themselves with the great legend of Troy; and the Greek cults of
heroes, a religion unknown to Homer, were carried into regions with
which Homer's men had no connection. We might as well look for Cymric
tribal wars in the feuds and names of the knights in the Arthurian
romances, or for Irish tribal feuds in the names of Ferdiad and
Cuchullain, as for prehistoric migrations in the names of Hector,
Leltus, Stichios of Attica, Periphetes of Mycenae, and Amphimachus of
Elis.
"Hector," we are told, "was a great 'slayer of men,' and his victims
in the _Iliad_ make a sort of road from Thebes upward to the bounds of
Achilles' region."[44] They also "make a sort of road" to Mycenae and
Elis by way of Athens: that is the history of the tribe, preserved
in the names of his victims,--names which, it appears, "are short"
for defeated tribes. As for the evidence of a Helen tribe at Sparta,
because Helen had a shrine and worship there, we have no evidence that
the Achaeans had any heroic shrines or hero-worship,--the evidence
is that they had none,--but the assumption is that Homer represents
"another stream of history," and, apparently, that his people turned
tribal names and tribal gods of an unknown past, into heroic men and
women. The opposite theory is that the hero-worshipping people of
historic Greece devoted themselves to such patron saints as they knew
through Homer, as the Arabs have saints whom they know about through
the Hebrew Scriptures.
I am not aware that in the bardic history, or "saga" of any people,
tribes are spoken of under the names of their tribal heroes in such a
way as to cause confusion. None is caused by Judah, Benjamin, Ephraim,
and so on in the Old Testament, but in other Biblical cases there may
be trouble. Local _tribes_, as far as I am aware, are nowhere named
by patronymics; certainly they are not in Australia, India, America,
and Africa, except, among the Zulus, by the name of a man plus Ama,
AmaFinn, and so forth. Thus the theory that Hector is the name of a