The World of Homer
_Iphigeneia in Aulis_. He may be following the _Cypria_.) She was
tempted by letters forged by Odysseus, says Dictys Cretensis, who may
be following the _Cypria_.
The Greeks, the storm abating, sail to Tenedos, where _Philoctetes is
bitten by a snake and carried away to howl in Lemnos_. This might be
taken from _Iliad_, ii. 718-725. _At Troy on landing, the Greeks lose
Protesilaus,_ slain by Hector. Here again the _Iliad_ may supply the
fact, not naming Hector. The author of the _Cypria_ has now, we see,
filled up his empty nine years by various expedients and delays. He
next tells of the embassy to ask for the return of Helen and the stolen
property; the embassy he could get from _Iliad_, iii. 204-207: _a
subsequent fight at the wall of Troy_ from _Iliad_, vi. 435-439, where
it is described briefly by Andromache.
At what precise period the Greek commissariat took the form of
three girls with fairy gifts, who produced corn, wine, and oil, is
uncertain; but the incident was in the _Cypria_, on the authority of
Pherecydes.[25]
The _Cypria_ says that Aphrodite contrived an interview between Helen
and Achilles, Thetis was chaperon, and that Achilles restrained the
Greeks, who wished to go home. _That Achilles sacked Lyrnessus and
Pedasus, and sent Lykaon captive to Lemnos_, was to be read in the
_Iliad_ (xx. 92, xxi. 55 ff.), where also the story of Briseis and
Chryseis, given in the _Cypria_, was to be found. But not in the
_Iliad_ was Palamedes, with his murder by Odysseus and Diomede, whence,
in the _Cypria_, came the will of Zeus to sunder Achilles from the
Achaean host.[26]
We now perceive how much of his material the Ionian author of
the _Cypria_ could obtain from out Homer. We note the marks of
non-Achaeanism and lateness, and of Ionian geographical knowledge, in
the reference to Tauris; in the Attic Nemesis; in the per-sonifications
of moral qualities; in the intended human sacrifice; in the _Märchen_;
in the telling of the tale of Theseus and Ariadne; in the hero-worship;
and in the introduction of the Nauplian anti--Odyssean Palamedes.
The lateness of the poem declares itself also in the naming of the
Peloponnesus. The use of very childish _Märchen_ is un-Homeric: Homer
uses _Märchen_ to better purpose. (See "Homer and the Saga.")
* * * * *
Perhaps few who have had the patience to read through this tedious
analysis of the vast and wandering metrical pseudo-chronicle, the
_Cypria_, with its marks of bad taste, Ionicism, and lateness, will
maintain that, in character, it is on a level with our Homer, or is in
age contemporary with his society.
Weary as is the task, we must in conscience expose the similar lateness
and Ionic character of the other Cyclic poems on the Trojan affairs.
The authorship of the _Aethiopis_ was attributed to Arctinus of
Miletus. Tradition called him "Homer's pupil."[27] As condensed in the
summary of Proclus, the _Aethiopis_ was a mere _doppelgänger_ of the
_Iliad_. Taking up the tale after Hector's death, and under the shadow
of Hector's prophecy of the doom of Achilles, "in the day when Paris
and Phoebus Apollo slay thee in the Scaean gate,"[28] the _Aethiopis_
fills out the story.
The Amazon, Penthesilea, comes to aid Troy, and is slain by Achilles,
who is stirred by pity for the beauty of his victim. For this Thersites
taunts him, and he slays the wretch: so he needs purification, _in
accordance with Ionian ideas_.
The _Aethiopis_ went on to mark the usual distinction between the
Homeric and Ionian epic. Diomede took up the blood-feud for Thersites,
and, in Homeric law, Achilles must have paid the blood-wyte, or gone
into exile, or "tholed the feud." Even the Scholiast[29] knew that this
was the Homeric (as it was the Icelandic) law. But the Ionian makes
Achilles sail to Lesbos, to sacrifice to Apollo, Artemis, and Leto, and
be purified (in pig's blood probably) by Odysseus.
Thus the Ionian makes us certain that he was of an un-Homeric state
of society. He dates himself in similar fashion, when he makes Memnon
(who, as in the _Odyssey_, slays Antilochus) receive after death
the gift of immortality; and when he makes Thetis carry the body of
Achilles (burned in the _Odyssey_) to be the worshipped hero of the
isle of Leuke in the Euxine. There, when Ionian colonists reached the
Euxine, Achilles became a ruling religious hero, recognised by Alcaeus
(Fr. 49). "The Locrians in Italy," according to Pausanias, had a cult
of Aias, whose armed ghost wounded Leonymus of Croton in battle. (In
post-Homeric Greece the ghosts of heroes appeared in mortal wars, as
St. James fought for Cortes against the Aztecs. Homer could conceive
no such folly.) The Delphic oracle dispatched Leonymus to Leuke, where
he found Achilles happily married to Helen, who sent by Leonymus a
message to the poet Stesichorus, that had libelled her. Patroclus and
Antilochus were with Achilles in Leukê, etc. etc.[30]
If the _Aethiopis_ is earlier than these Ionian colonies, if Leuke in
fable meant "the isle of light," then the colonists identified the
Euxine isle with the isle of light, and so worshipped the dead Achilles
of Leuke. The Ionian trading cities, of which Miletus was chief, had
begun to adopt the new religious ideas that grew up, after the Homeric
age, in honour of the national heroes.[31] It is more probable that
the Ionians had never dropped the rites and religions of the conquered
races, and merely added Achilles to Erechtheus. They had no spite
against Achilles, who had never, like Agamemnon and Diomede, been their
master.
For the rest, the story of the _Aethiopis_ is conducted on the lines of
the _Iliad_, as far as the events included in the poems, ending with
the death of Achilles in the Scaean gate, permit imitation; and all
concludes with a lament or _regret_, a funeral, and funeral games, as
in the _Iliad_.
The _Little Iliad_ contains several main incidents, of which seven
were, or may have been, expansions of hints in the _Odyssey_ and
_Iliad_. The additions are the theft of the Palladium, a kind of fetich
ignored by Homer; the magical power of the arrows of Philoctetes over
the fate of Troy; the introduction of Sinon, as followed by Virgil in
the _Aeneid_; and a long story about Aethra, mother of Theseus and
slave of Helen in Troy, and about her grandsons, sons of Theseus, whose
presence in the Achaean host is unknown to Homer. In _Iliad_, iii. 144,
Helen has, in an interpolated line, an attendant, "Aethra, daughter of
Pittheus." This was enough for the Ionian poets; for, as Aethra was
the name of the mother of Theseus, "naturally the later poets took
advantage of it in order to find a place for the Attic heroes in the
main body of epic narrative."[32]
Mr. Leaf makes _Iliad_, iii. 144, "a clear case of an interpolation of
a later myth," a myth introduced here to please the Athenians. Aethra
and the rape of Helen by Theseus, to avenge which the brothers of Helen
carried the mother of Theseus away, were depicted and described on
the chest of Cypselus,[33] and painted by Polygnotus, following the
_Little Iliad_ of Lesches, on the _Leschê_ at Delphi. But here Aethra
was with the Homeric maids of Helen (Panthalis and Electra), but was
being recognised by her un-Homeric grandson, son of Theseus, Demophon.
According to the _Little Iliad_, Aethra escaped to the Greek camp: by
permission of Helen, Agamemnon restores Aethra to her grandsons.[34]
Ionia could only drag fair Helen into the Athenian legend of Theseus
by averring that he carried her off when she was a child, and that she
was brought back to the house of Tyndareus her sire by her brothers,
Castor and Polydeuces. They also seized Aethra, the mother of Theseus,
who accompanied Paris and Helen to Troy, and was still in Helen's
service after the ten years of the leaguer. Now as Theseus in his prime
was contemporary with the youth of Nestor, and as Nestor was, say,
seventy in the tenth year of the war, the mother of Theseus must have
been more than a centenarian when she was the _suivante_ of Helen, in
_Iliad_, Book iii. But Ionians stuck at nothing in the effort to bring
themselves into touch with the great Achaean enterprise; that is, stuck
at nothing except at interpolating their fables into the _Iliad_. They
could perhaps insert, as in _Iliad_, iii. 144, a mention or two of
Theseus, and some lines on Attic heroines in _Odyssey_, xi.
There can be no more conclusive proof that Ionians did not possess the
power of adding what they pleased to the Achaean epics.
The _Ilion Persis_, or _Sack of Troy_, was a poem attributed, like
the _Aethiopis_, to Arctinus of Miletus. Herein occurs the affair of
the Wooden Horse, familiar to readers of the _Odyssey_ in the lay of
Demodocus at the board of Alcinous.[35] Demodocus tells enough to serve
Arctinus with a theme which only needs expansion. The story was given
much as Virgil and Quintus Smyrnaeus render it; we have the portent
of Laocoon and the serpents, which causes Aeneas and his men (not as
in Virgil) to retire to Mount Ida. In the song of Demodocus, Odysseus
gets most of the credit of success; the hero in _Odyssey_, xi. 504-537,
gives the glory to Neoptolemus--and himself. In Arctinus, Odysseus
murders the child of Hector, Astyanax (an un-Homeric cruelty); Odysseus
is always degraded by the Ionians and usually by the Attic tragedians.
Aias Oileus's son enrages Athene by dragging down her image while
struggling with Cassandra; hence the sorrows of the Achaeans on their
way home. The sons of Theseus carry to Athens their aged grandmother,
Aethra. Could anything be more characteristic of the Athenians than
the fact that the heroes looking out from the Horse, in a bronze group
on the Acropolis, were Attic, the two apocryphal sons of Theseus, the
Athenian Menestheus, and Teucer, "who expresses the Athenian claim to
Salamis"?[36]
By a truly Ionian touch, Polyxena, daughter of Priam, is sacrificed at
the tomb of Achilles. It seems probable that the _Iliou Persis_ really
took up the story with the suicide of Aias (from this part of the poem
a fragment is quoted in the scholia to _Iliad_, xi. 515),[37] and that
the poem contained the whole prowess of Neoptolemus at Troy, and the
affair of the bringing back of Philoctetes from Lemnos. The prominence
of Aeneas expands the hint in _Iliad_, xx. 307, 308, the prophecy of
Poseidon that he and his children will long rule over the Trojans.
Throughout the _Iliad_, Aeneas is protected by Aphrodite, and is looked
on jealously by Priam, as a Stewart might look on a Hamilton; for,
failing issue of Priam, Aeneas succeeds to the Trojan crown. The whole
poem, wherever Aeneas appears, is affected by the tradition that he did
continue the Trojan line.
The sacrifice of Polyxena at the tomb of Achilles appears to be
peculiar to Arctinus. It would be interesting to know whether or not
any Ionian poem was the source of the story of Polyxena as given by
Dictys Cretensis. In Dictys, Patroclus moves Achilles to be reconciled
to Agamemnon: the army goes into winter quarters, and Trojans and
Achaeans meet on friendly terms in the grove of Thymbraean Apollo;
Achilles sees Polyxena at a sacrifice, and falls in love with her.
Hector offers her as the price of his treason to the Achaeans, which
annoys Achilles. At Polyxena's request he later restores the body of
Hector to Priam. At a subsequent meeting in Apollo's temple, Paris
stabs Achilles to death. After the capture of Troy, Odysseus advises
the sacrifice of Polyxena to the ghost of Achilles, but Euripides and
later writers make the ghost or voice of Achilles demand her death. In
other respects, as to the fate of the Trojan ladies, Dictys follows
Arctinus.
All this tale deeply affected the mediaeval tale of Troy. Meanwhile,