The World of Homer
Hero-worship; propitiation of the dead; purification of homicides by
blood; initiatory ceremonies, mysteries, witchcraft, and so forth,
these are practices with which we are familiar in savagery, in
barbarism, and, by way of survival, in the rites and customs of the
most highly civilised races. They exist in various degrees in different
races and societies. In Northern society, as we know it in the sagas,
most of these superstitions are comparatively rare. Ghosts were
believed in by Gunnar and Grettir; very able-bodied ghosts they were,
a kind of vampires. But they were not propitiated, they were met with
the steel axe and short sword, or with muscular force in the wrestling
match. Their bodies were mutilated and then burned, as in the case of
the vampire Glam in the Grettir saga.
There are few, if any, traces of hero-worship in early Teutonic and
Scandinavian literature. Of purification from homicide in baths or by
aspersions of swine's blood I can remember no Northern example.
The original purpose of this nasty practice is, apparently, to throw
the pursuing ghost of the slain man off the trail of the slayer; but
the heroes of the Icelandic sagas recked not a fig for the feud of the
ghost. "Soul and body, on the whole, are odds against a disembodied
soul," in their opinion, hence the absence of the Greek rite of
purification by blood.
The Northerners had, doubtless, their various rustic rites and revels,
originally intended to promote the fertility of nature. But if they
once had initiatory ceremonies and mysteries like savages, these appear
to have been forgotten by the time of the heroes of the Icelandic
sagas. Witchcraft was an article of belief, but was held in great
disesteem. There are legends of sacrifices of kings, but these are
somewhat shadowy and remote.
As a consequence, if the Teutonic and Scandinavian people had
possessed a great epic poet, working in accordance with the ideas of
his people as they existed at the time of the occupation of Iceland,
his poem would, I conceive, be as silent as the Homeric epics about
hero-worship, ghost-feeding, purification of homicides by blood,
sacrifices of girls, initiatory ceremonies, and mysteries like those of
Demeter and Dionysus. Of second-sight we would hear, as we do in the
_Odyssey._ The magic would be worked by mortals, not by a fair goddess,
Circe. Ravening monsters like Grendel and his mother, in _Beowulf_,
with their refraction in the Grettir saga, and vampires like Glam,
would afford sport to the heroes; whereas in the _Iliad_ we have only
the Chimaera to represent such monsters, and the Chimaera is alluded to
but slightly.
Thus, as regards the whole chapter of the superstitions "characteristic
of the conquered races" in Greece[10] (and characteristic of the
historical Hellenes and of Athens in her lustre), the supposed
Scandinavian epic would be as pure as the _Iliad_. The absence of
mention of hero-worship, ghost-propitiation, divinised mortals,
purification by blood, sacrifices of girls, initiations and mysteries,
would be quite natural and unaffected.
The poet could not speak of beliefs and rites which were not in the
manners of his people. In the same way, and for the same reason, Homer
scarcely hints at anything in this chapter of superstitions and usages.
Like the Scandinavians of the heroic age, his people had not these
things in their manners.
As the oldest Achaean poetry must necessarily have been pure from
the usages and beliefs of the conquered races, as the Achaean or
Northern spirit ignored what, according to Mr. Murray, it actually
persecuted,[11] we need not attribute this ignoring of such beliefs
and practices to expurgation in a later age. The Ionians, as soon as
we meet them in the dawn of actual history and in the "Cyclic" poems,
are believers in ghosts, worshippers of heroes, and they practise
purification by blood. People do not expurgate from older poetry the
things consecrated by their own law and religion and celebrated in
their own poems: things which could not be present, too, in the old
poems of the uncontaminated Achaeans. Yet Mr. Murray appears, if I
understand him, to incline to a theory that hero-worship, for example,
was distasteful to the Ionian cult of the Delian Apollo, and perhaps
for that reason was, in early historic times, expurgated from the
_Iliad_. But certainly, given Homeric ideas about the dead, who could
not help or hinder, hero-worship did not and could not exist in Homeric
society and poetry. Moreover, if the Achaean spirit did "prune away
or ignore" such ghostly matters, the Delian expurgators could find
nothing here to expurgate. As to blood-purification, Apollo himself
was purified, and, in art, holds the purifying pig above the homicide.
So purification was "Apolline," and what was Apolline was safe from
Apolline expurgation.
I now collect passages on the expurgators from Mr. Murray's writings.
EXPURGATION
"The middle and later generations of the Homeric poets ... were mainly
responsible for the work of expurgation."
"Homer has cut out" certain stories of human sacrifice, cannibalism,
and "mutilations of the Hesiodic gods" "for their revoltingness" (p.
122).
"Homer, if we may use that name to denote the authors of the prevailing
tone of the _Iliad_" (p. 131).
So far the "expurgations" appear to have been done mainly by the
Homeric poets themselves "in the middle and later generations." Yet, as
to superstitions, the first uncontaminated Achaean poets must have been
the purest of all.
It is admitted that the poets did not in the same way "expurgate" the
"Cyclic" epics.
"If the educational use of the _Iliad_ began in Ionia as early as the
eighth century, which is likely enough, we can hardly help supposing
that it had some share in these processes of purification with which we
have been dealing" (p. 133).
Here it appears that, probably by the eighth century, the _Iliad_
was a distinct poem, recognised as such, and subject to processes of
purification from which the _Cypria_, for example, and other "Cyclic"
poems escaped.
"The Epos" has "its prevailing Achaean tone," owing to "the prestige
of the Achaean chiefs, the convenience of the Achaean institutions of
the Saga and the Bard," and "the partial return to the migratory life"
(p. 245). If, then, it is really the austerity, and freedom from low
superstitions, of the conquering Achaean race that our epics represent,
the "Cyclic" poems, if equally old, should be equally austere, and
equally free from superstition. But they, notoriously, were full of the
superstitions of the conquered races. Why did the middle generations
of Homeric poems leave _them_ alone? Because already selected for
recitation?
If the Achaean or Northern spirit, "the clean and lordly Northern
spirit," made our epics so pure, what was left for the spirit of
historic Greece (by no means Northern, or specially clean or lordly) to
do in the way of purification?
It is plain enough that the clean and lordly Northern people became
mixed with the pre-existing populations in Greece, like the Normans and
the Cromwellian English settlers with the Irish. "As the population
became more mixed, which was the case everywhere on the mainland, the
result was that the old pre-Hellenic stratum of beliefs and emotion,
re-emerged" (p. 246), for example, in worship of the dead, which is
un-Homeric and un-Achaean.
Are we to suppose, then, that while the Achaeans were sinking to the
pre-Hellenic level in such matters, all the superstitions of the
conquered races found their way into the Homeric poems, and had to be
purged out again, in Delos, or at Athens, where these superstitions
were in full force? If so, the descendants of the pre-Hellenic
populations inserted the superstitions into the _Iliad_ where they had
not been previously, and then cut them out again.
It is not easy to understand how stories "far too primitive and
monstrous for Homer" "had been expurgated from Homer centuries back"
(p. 247), centuries before Aeschylus, who introduced Io, once the
mistress of Zeus, later a cow, in his _Prometheus_. If Homer or the
Homeric poets were clean and lordly Achaeans, they never would have
dealt at all in a story "far too primitive and monstrous for Homer," or
for any one but Major Weir. It does not appear to me that this theory
of expurgation, all important as it is, can be easily understood. If
later Greece expurgated the Homeric ferocities to the dead, why are
they left standing? If the Achaean spirit got rid of the superstitions,
why need we invoke later influences, Delian, Ionian, Athenian?
Then the old questions re-arise, why were the "Cyclic" poems of the
heroic times left unexpurgated; why is the Attic drama tinged with what
is too monstrous for Homer, if Homer was purged a generation, or two
or three, earlier than the generation of Aeschylus? To account for the
expurgations, we are to consider the establishment by law of Homeric
recitations at Athens (see "The Alleged Athenian Recension of Homer").
Concerning the date of this event, and everything else connected with
it, all is vague. Mr. Murray writes: "The recitation was established
about the end of the sixth century ... so much seems historically
clear." (I wish anything were historically clear in this business!)
"It matters little that, in attributing the institution of this
recitation to a definite founder, our authorities waver between three
almost contemporaneous names, Solon, Pisistratus, Hipparchus. Whichever
it was, the main fact remains the same. General considerations tell
somewhat against Solon, and in favour of the tyrants." Now, as our
authorities, all late, differ totally as to the name (and so, as to the
date) of the man who instituted the recitations of Homer, it is plain
that they had no good authority. "The Solonian laws and constitution
were promulgated in 594 B.C.," says Grote; that was at least eighty
years before a date "about the end of the sixth century." The men are
far from being contemporaneous. Hipparchus was murdered in 514, in the
thirteenth year of the tyranny of Hipparchus, and Hippias, if anybody,
not Hipparchus, should have made a law regulating Homeric recitations.
All is vague; but if Thucydides correctly says that Hipparchus was
slain in consequence of a quarrel arising out of an odious non-Homeric
vice; and if, as Thucydides says, Aristogeiton died "not easily," if
he was tortured to death, as later authors tell, then the society of
Athens was little likely to expurgate either uncleanness or cruelty, if
they found such matter in Homer.
Political and personal history being so vague and dim in the sixth
century, literary history cannot be in better case; practically we know
nothing beyond the fact that a law regulated the recitation of Homer at
the Panathenaic festival.
How these recitations and hypothetical earlier Ionian recitations
contributed to the expurgation of the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_, must be
stated in Mr. Murray's own words. I may first observe that, in his
opinion, "the body of the poem" (the _Iliad_), "even in the latest
parts, is clearly Ionian; the ultimate nucleus something else,
something older and more Northern."[12] How, if this be true, the
Ionians are only once named in the poems, while the Athenians are but
perfunctorily mentioned, is what always puzzles me!
A long extract in which Mr. Murray gives his views must now be quoted:
"In the remains of the earliest Greek poetry we are met by a
striking contrast. As Mr. Lang has told us, 'Homer presents to the
anthropologist the spectacle of a society which will have nothing to
do with anthropology.' By Homer, of course, Mr. Lang means the _Iliad_
and the _Odyssey_; and we may add to those poems a stream of heroic