The World of Homer
prehistoric Boeotian local tribe seems to me fantastic. We might as
well look for remnants of tribal history in Kay, Gawaine, Naimes, and
Ganelon.
Surely it is an error in historical method to reason as if pre-Homeric
Greeks were as addicted to divinising men, building their shrines, and
sacrificing to them, as the post-Homeric Greeks were in the seventh
and all later centuries. We might as well argue that the apostolic
Christians practised mediaeval saint-worship, and adored and built
innumerable chapels to dead Saints, because this was the custom of
mediaeval Christianity.
To sum up, we have proved that our Homer, in his treatment of old
tradition, is a noble poet, that he stands aloof from all the others of
Greece in his refusal (save in the _Odyssey_, a romance) to introduce
the wild elements of _Märchen_, the childish miracles; while he is
equally remote from the methods of the pseudo-historians like Eumelus
as known to us, and all the Hesiodic genealogisers and inventors of
eponymous heroes; and from the _manie cyclique_ of the Ionian Cyclic
poets. Really no fact can be more certain; and this fact, even if it
were not corroborated by all the others, would prove our Homer to be
"alone, aloof, sublime."
[1] Castren, _Ethnol. Vorlesungen_, pp. 164-169.
[2] Von Hahn, _Griechische Märchen_, 1.
[3] Pausanias, i. 19, ii. 34.
[4] Child, _English and Scottish Ballads_, vol. i., "Riddles wisely
Answered."
[5] Yen. A., _Iliad_, ii. 336. Rzach, _Hesiod_, p. 326.
[6] For many cases in _Märchen_, see Mr. Crookes' _Folk-Lore_, vol.
xix. p. 156.
[7] Roscher's _Lexikon_, vol ii. p. 2594.
[8] _R. G. E._ pp. 161, 162.
[9] Textually, for, in _Iliad_, vi. 200, 'Ἀλλ' ὄτε δὴ καὶ κεῑνος
ἀπήχθετο πᾱσι θεοῑσιν (referring to Bellerophon), Mr. Murray renders,
"But when he also was hated of all the gods," and asks, "Why the
phrase, 'when he also'?" Homer is, "one may almost say, quoting from
an existing poem." Now I understand Glaucus in this "he also" to refer
to the remark of Diomede (vi. 140) on Lycurgus's being "hated of all
the gods." He repeats the very words of Diomede. "Here is another man
who, like Lycurgus in _your_ story, was _hated of all the gods_."
Consulting Mr. Leaf's note (vi. 200), I find that this is also the
opinion of Ameis: Mr. Leaf thinks it "too far-fetched." The distance
is sixty lines (vi. 140-200). In his translation of the passage in
Leaf, Lang, and Myers, Mr. Leaf translates, with Monro, "even he," even
Bellerophon, whom the gods had loved. Surely no textual quotations by
Homer from the so-called "Eumelus" need be imagined.
[10] _R. G. E._ pp. 164, 165.
[11] Pausanias, I. I.
[12] _Ibid._ iv. 4. 1.
[13] Frazer, _Pausanias_, vol. iii. p. 2, citing Clemens, _Strom_. i.
398, ed. Potter.
[14] Eumelus in Kinkel, p. 188.
[15] Pausanias, ii. 3. 10.
[16] Pausanias, ii. i. i.
[17] _Ibid_. ii. 3. 10, 11.
[18] "Medea," Reseller's _Lexikon_, ii. 2. 2492.
[19] Seeliger, Roscher's _Lexikon_, ii. 2. 2496.
[20] Roscher, _Lexikon_, vol. i. 342.
[21] _Iliad_, vi. 171.
[22] "Pegasus is omitted by Homer as a monster," Mr. Murray justly
observes (_R. G. E_. p. 162, note I). No other poet omitted "monsters";
not Pindar for one, or Hesiod.
[23] _R. G. E_. p. 163.
[24] _Theogony_, 956-962.
[25] _Odyssey_, x. 137.
[26] _Odyssey_, xii. 57-62.
[27] _Theogony_, 1011-1015.
[28] Roscher, _Lexikon_, vol. i. pp. 108, 109.
[29] Mimnermus, Fragment 11. Bergk.
[30] _Argonautica_, iii. 309 ff.
[31] _Iliad_, vii. 468, 469, xxi. 41, xxiii. 747.
[32] _Pythian Odes_, iv.
[33] _R. G. E._ pp. 185, 186. All this comes from the _Aethiopis_,
or _Sack of Ilios_, followed by Chairemon in his tragedy, _Achilles
Thersitoctonos_, with scholia on the Philoctetes (445), Quintus
Smyrnaeus (of the fourth century a.d.). Dictys Cretensis, the prose
compiler of the second century a.d., does not mention Thersites.
[34] do not enter into the theory of his relations (1) to the
_pharmakos_, driven out of Athens as a human scape-goat, and whipped,
perhaps sacrificed; or (2) with Theritas, a name of Ares in Laconia,
according to Pausanias. Homer in his Achaean way never alludes to the
cruel and lewd, or magical affair of the _pharmakos_.
[35] _Iliad_, ii. 246-248. "I deem that no baser-born man (χερειότερον)
came with Agamemnon." χερειότερον "virtually = χερείονα, see Iliad, i.
80" (Leaf), where a king is contrasted with ἀνδρὶ χέρηῑ, "a meaner man"
(Leaf, in Leaf, Lang, Myers, _The Iliad_, p. 3).
[36] The Cyclic story also demonstrates its un-Homeric origin by
dragging in "the hocus-pocus of purification" (_R. G. E._ p. 134). But
Usener, seeing, in Sir Walter Scott's words, "further into a millstone
than the nature of the millstone permits," makes Thersites = Theritas =
Enyalios (Hesychius), and suggests that two sacrifices by Spartan lads
to Enyalius and Achilles, after a fight with fisticuffs, and ducking of
the vanquished, may be "the ritual form of the old battle of Achilles
and Thersites" =(?) "the common annual rites of the slaying of Winter
by Summer, or of one vegetation god by another" (_R. G. E_. pp. 186,
187). There was not much of a "battle" between Thersites and Achilles!
The millstone, really, has a hole through it. To Homer, Thersites is a
nobody. His rank, relationships, and fate are due to the later "Cyclic
mania," and to "poetic justice."
[37] Will nobody write it?
[38] _R. G. E._ p. 196.
[39] Pausanias, ix. 18
[40] _Iliad_, xiii. 185, xv. 329, 638.
[41] xv. 636-644.
[42] Bethe, p. 15.
[43] _Iliad_, xiii. 801-832 and _passim_.
[44] _R. G. E_. p. 197.
CHAPTER XVII
THE STORY OF PALAMEDES
There is one hero of the Cyclic Ionian poems, at least of the _Cypria_,
whose story illustrates the depth and width of the gulf which severs
Ionia from the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_. The _Cypria_, like the Attic
traditions used by Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and the Sophists,
such as Gorgias, displays a strange hatred of Homer's favourite hero,
the taker of the city, Odysseus. He, in most of the plays where he
appears, is a peculiarly mean character: in the _Iliad_ he is as noble
and resolute as he is sagacious: in the _Odyssey_ he is _ruse_, because
his desperate situation, alone in a throng of foes, requires cunning.
Only Agamemnon once, in one of his tempers, accused Odysseus of "evil
wiles" _(Iliad_, iv. 339). Professor Mahaffy has offered an explanation
of "the degradation of Odysseus" (and of other Homeric heroes) "in
Greek literature" very different from that which I shall venture to
suggest.[1] Mr. Mahaffy thinks that "the Attic standard of morality,
the standard of Aeschylus and Euripides ... was higher and not lower
than that of the Ionic court poets, and that the degradation of the
Homeric heroes was partly owing to a moral advance, and not a moral
decay, in the Greek nation." But what has Homer to do with the morality
of Ionic court poets, about whom we have no information, unless the
Cyclic poets were court poets? In Mr. Mahaffy's opinion, the Sicilian
Epicharmus began the attacks on "Odysseus the Knave." "At all epochs
and among all Greeks, lying and dishonesty were prominent vices."
Certainly they were in historic times. Traitors were too well known
to historic Greece, but Homer seems never to have heard of treachery.
Odysseus has his ruses in the _Odyssey_, and therefore, Mr. Mahaffy
thinks, the Greeks, knowing their own weak point, falseness, attacked
it through Odysseus. Epicharmus began the assault, Pindar followed
Epicharmus, and, in the Nemean Odes, vii. viii., belittled Odysseus
(all in the interests of honesty), while Sophocles in the _Philoctetes_
carries on the crusade.
It did not occur to Mr. Mahaffy that the crusade began, long before
Epicharmus and Pindar, in the Ionian _Cypria_. In the Nemean Odes, vii.
viii., Pindar naturally belittled Odysseus, to whom were awarded the
arms of Achilles, which the hero, Aias, desired to win. Athens always
claimed Aias as a friend and ally, wherefore, and in pursuance, as we
shall see, of the feud of Palamedes, Attic poets favoured Aias and
maligned his successful rival. They also backed Philoctetes against
these "tyrants," the Atridae; they had no grudge against Achilles,
though they could not represent his chivalry. Mr. Mahaffy does not
mention Palamedes at all, does not see that the Athenians take up
the Ionian grudge, and is "somewhat impatient of all the fashionable
enthusiasm about Homer's grace, and refinement, and delicacy of
feeling."
It is to Ionia, and not, primarily, to the advanced morality of
republican Athens, morality certainly not Homeric, that we must trace
the degradation of Odysseus in the literature of later Greece and of
Rome. Ionia followed the example of the base-born Thersites (_Iliad,_
ii. 220). The true cause of this degradation is that Ionia possessed,
in Palamedes, a hero infinitely wiser, braver, and more learned and
inventive than Odysseus, and that the death of this very perfect
knight, of whom Homer never says a word, is attributed to the jealousy
and cruelty of the Ithacan, and of his chosen companion-in-arms,
Diomede. All this appeared in the _Cypria,_ and, later, Attic wits
perhaps improved on the story, and implicated the Atridae and the whole
Achaean host, as well as Odysseus, in the guilt of maligning, falsely
accusing, condemning, and stoning Palamedes. It was to punish this
collective guilt, we shall see, that Zeus, in the _Cypria_, detached
Achilles from the Achaean cause.
Manifestly all this tale, known to us first in the _Cypria_, is
un-Achaean and un-Homeric, and the question arises, did Homer know
the story? If he did, and if he believed it, he deliberately chose
to ignore it, and to represent Odysseus and Diomede in the most
favourable light. But did Homer know about Palamedes; when Homer sang
had Palamedes his place in the Trojan "saga"? I think not, for reasons
to be given. To understand the subject, we must examine what remains
of the tale of Palamedes as found in the fragments and epitome of the
_Cypria_, and then consider the later expansions and additions.
The _Cypria_ takes Menelaus to Crete before Helen's abduction; and in
the legend as arranged in a late age in the prose of Dictys Cretensis
(made in the first or second century A.D.), Agamemnon also is in Crete,
with Palamedes, son of Clymene and Nauplius of Nauplia, on business
connected with the inheritance of Atreus. How far Dictys follows the
_Cypria_, how far he works here on other legends, and how far he
invents, it is not easy to be certain. The _Cypria_ certainly yielded
the fact that, when Helen eloped, Menelaus was not at home, but in
Crete. Probably the _Cypria_ explained why he went thither.[2] The
real hero of Dictys and, I suggest, of the _Cypria_ is Palamedes, a
character unknown to or ignored by Homer, but of high importance in
post-Homeric Ionian and Athenian poetry. In all of these Palamedes is
the best man in council and in the field, and is the victim of Odysseus
(a very base scoundrel) and of the Atridae. It is clear that Palamedes
occupied a prominent place in the _Cypria_, for a "part or rhapsody" in
it "appears to have borne the special title of _Palamedeia_."[3]
This rhapsody must have contained much information which is not
preserved in the summary of the _Cypria_. About Palamedes we learn no
more from the brief epitome and scanty fragments of the _Cypria_ than
that (1) he detected and unmasked the feigned madness of Odysseus, when
he tried to shirk the summons to the Trojan war; (2) that Palamedes was
treacherously drowned, when angling, by the Homeric companions-in-arms,
Odysseus and Diomede. (3) According to the _Cypria_, the Achaean host,
once landed in Asia, was perishing for lack of supplies, but Palamedes