The World of Homer
tortured" (as Sinon is in Quintus Smyrnaeus). Yet mediæval professors
of chivalry never mutilated, I think, foes (not being rebels) slain in
fair field. Homer's men did, I have shown; and nobody expurgated the
melancholy facts. As to cruelty to living foes, Euripides and Sophocles
make Achilles drag the living Hector behind his chariot, while Homer
makes it plain that Hector is stone dead.[18]
One can only say that Homer shows better taste than the tragedians.
If this good taste is due to late expurgators, if, in a Homeric lay,
Achilles did drag the living Hector, one can only wish that Sophocles
and Euripides had been on the moral level of the expurgators. Whoever
_they_ were, their taste was vastly superior to that of the tragedians.
I would attribute the better taste to Homer. The odious tale may be
of Ionian invention: the Ionian poet makes Odysseus a child murderer.
In the _Tain Bo Cualgne_, Ferdiad drags a very odious dead man at his
chariot wheels, not a living man. Homer was probably, indeed certainly,
on a higher level of taste than the ancient Irish epic-makers: on
this point they are at one with him. The great tragedians preferred
a more horrible story--not, of course, because they approved of such
proceedings. In King Lear, Shakespeare has horrors undreamed of in his
sources, in _Märchen_ and chronicles. He followed a French story in
Sidney's _Arcadia_, and pleased "the groundlings." To "groundlings"
Homer did not sing: Sophocles and Euripides wrote for the cultured Pit
of Athens. For that reason, or because they found their story in some
unknown source, and liked the horrible, they made Achilles torture a
living enemy.
There is a passage in the _Iliad_ (xiii. 573) in which a man, speared
from behind through the bowels, "where a wound is most baneful to
wretched mortals, writhes about the spear ... for a moment, not for
long"; his life follows the spear withdrawn. This is not a pleasant
picture; but war, in fact, is not pleasant. Mr. Murray conceives the
line which he renders "he struggled quite a little while, not at all
long," to be a later palliative or expurgative addition; like the
same formula in Odyssey, xxii. 473, where it is applied to the dying
struggles of the hanged women-servants of Odysseus. This may be so,
or may not; the fact that the line _is_ a formula, like those of our
ballads, makes me incline to think it ancient. The point is not of
much importance, and cannot be decided. The horrible death inflicted on
the treacherous thrall, Melanthius, in the _Odyssey_, is a proof that
Homer's men could be very cruel to a treacherous thrall; but so could
the Norsemen be, as in the scarcely quotable parallel case of Wolf the
Unwashed. In the sagas generally we hear of few such cases, though many
must have occurred, abroad, in Viking raids. In the _Iliad_ there is
no treacherous thrall; if such an one there were, he would have been
treated like Melanthius.
I understand Mr. Murray to argue that the _Iliad_ has been expurgated,
but not quite successfully, of traces of poisoned arrows; while
the _Odyssey_ (l. 257-264) has the story of Odysseus seeking for
arrow-poison at Ephyre, where poison was, we elsewhere learn, a
marketable commodity. Ilus would not give it, for he feared the
gods; another man gave it, as he dearly loved Odysseus. The story is
not a true story, but a fable told by Athene. All it proves is that
arrow-poison was known, but was hateful to the gods. As to Mr. Murray's
arguments that such words as _ἄφυκτος_, not "to be escaped," applied to
arrows in the _Iliad_, and "bitter" (πικρός) and "groanful" and "not
long to be supported" as proofs of the practice of poisoning arrows,
I can only say that I do not think the inference necessary. _Πικρός_
means "sharp," according to Liddell and Scott; unpoisoned arrows cause
groans enough; the heroes "do not long support" flesh-wounds from
_spears_, but "retire hurt." That Agamemnon expects Menelaus to die
(iv. 134) when arrow--smitten in the belly, is very natural. Menelaus
would have died had the arrow bitten deep, but it merely grazed him
through several interstices of his armour. Pandarus shot with a fresh
arrow, "unused before," "whose poison has not been rubbed off." I reply
that in meditating an important shot, any archer would use a fresh
arrow if he could, because the feathers would have been in better trim
and the shaft unstrained, the point unblunted, exactly as a man would
use a new spear in a tournament.
In the _Iliad_, men have strong bows, with iron or bronze points.
People with these advantages do not use arrow-poison, the resort of
races with blow-pipes, or with weak bows and arrow-points of bone,
corrupt human bones by preference.
As to human sacrifice, a frequent topic in the Cyclic poems and the
Greek dramatists, I have treated the subject elsewhere. I do not think
that it was expurgated from the _Iliad_ by men who let it stand in the
Cyclic poems and the drama, but that it was not in Achaean manners. In
the legends told of human sacrifice by Pausanias, the peoples concerned
are usually Ionian or Athenian. The timid Calchas of _Iliad_, i. 74-83,
who dare not name the cause of Apollo's wrath unless Achilles will
guarantee his safety, could never have bidden Agamemnon to sacrifice
his daughter Iphigeneia, who is not one of the Over Lord's three
daughters, in the Iliad.
Mr. Murray suspects that stories of sacrifices of maidens "would have
been rejected from the _Iliad_, not only because human sacrifice was
a barbarity, but also because the stories involved too intense an
interest in women."[19] As I am intensely interested in Helen, Hecuba
and Andromache, in the Iliad, the argument seems to me strange. As to
Mr. Murray's theory that the Cretan king was done to death at stated
intervals,[20] the topic cannot be treated satisfactorily here. I do
not believe that anything of the sort described occurred anywhere,
and I am surprised at the remark, "We have no tradition of Minos's
death."[21]
The Minyan story of the intended sacrifice of Phryxus and Helle is
a world-wide _Märchen_, with sacrifice substituted for endophagous
cannibalism.
Finally, I do not suppose that the ferocities of Achilles towards
Hector, and at the funeral of Patroclus, are an expurgated version of
a lay in which they were narrated with pride and pleasure.[22] It was
customary, in Homeric warfare, to maltreat the dead; but Achilles went
too far, and persevered too long. He is, as Mr. Murray says, "a man mad
with grief, a man starving and sleepless," a man who knows that Hector
intended to mutilate his friend and give his body to the dogs. But
these excuses do not palliate the perseverance of Achilles in outrage,
or his slaying of the twelve Trojan captives. Sacrificed they were not.
There was no ritual for such a slaughter, 'and, as a matter of fact, it
is crowded into a shamefaced line and a half.' You would expect this
sacrifice to have at the very least twenty."[23]
You might expect that, if you believed that the Achaeans had a ritual
for human sacrifice! If they had, which I deem inconceivable, we
may readily believe that the spirit of historic Hellas would have
expurgated eighteen and a half of the twenty lines.
Much of this theory of expurgation of the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_ seems
to me to rest on the assumption of εὐφημία. This means abstention from
ill-omened words in poems recited at a great public festival. It is
impossible for me to understand why words referring, for example, to
the habitual and legal purification of homicides, or to the established
cult of heroes, should be deemed "ill-omened" at the recitations, in no
way religious, at a public holiday, and yet be deemed "well-omened" in
the performances of Athenian tragedy.
If the superstitions of the conquered races were not those of the
conquerors, they could not be in the epics of the conquerors. If they
were not there, _les intellectuels_ of Athens could not expurgate them.
[1] _R. G. E._ p. 134.
[2] _Iliad_, xi. 145-147.
[3] xiii. 202-204.
[4] xviii. 176-177.
[5] xiv. 496-505.
[6] xvii. 39.
[7] xviii. 175-177, xvii. 126.
[8] _R. G. E._ p. 131.
[9] _Iliad_, vi. 416-419.
[10] _R. G. E._ p. 134.
[11] _R. G. E._ pp. 245-246.
[12] _R. G. E._ p. 173.
[13] This archetype, Mr. Murray has just said, is "unknown."
[14] _Prolegg. to Study of Greek Religion_, 1903, p. 329.
[15] _Ibid_. pp. 327, 328.
[16] _Ibid_. p. 329.
[17] _R. G. E._ pp. 116, 117.
[18] Ajax, 1031. Andromache, 399.
[19] _R. G. E._ p. 123.
[20] _Ibid_. p. 127.
[21] See Roscher's _Lexikon_, s.v. Minos.
[22] _R. G. E._ pp. 130, 131.
[23] _R. G. E._ p. 131.
THE ALLEGED ATHENIAN RECENSION OF HOMER
Wolf could not but confess that the _Iliad_, as we possess it, is an
unity, better or worse; is a literary structure. How, then, did it come
to be what it is, if it were the work of several authors in several
ages? Wolf replies, "History speaks! The voice of all antiquity, and,
on the whole, the consent of all report bears witness that Pisistratus
was the first who had the Homeric poems committed to writing, and
brought into that order in which we now possess them."[1]
This amazing statement shows that there are classical scholars who
mean, when they speak of "History," something that no historical
student means when he uses the same term. About any dealings by
Pisistratus with Homer, history is mute as the grave. Not only is there
no record--that is, no contemporary public inscription--testifying
that Pisistratus or any other person "first had the Homeric poems
arranged and committed to writing," there is not even a hint of a
reference to any tradition of this event, in the great Historians of
the following century, Herodotus and Thucydides, none in Aristotle,
none in Ephorus (in the fourth century B.C.), none in the remains of
Aristarchus and other famous Alexandrian grammarians. History is silent
even as to a rumour. We know that Dieuchidas, a Megarian historian of
the fourth century, said something about its being Solon rather than
Pisistratus who did something in connection with Homer. We know this
from a mutilated passage in an author of the third century, Diogenes
Laertius. That is all.[2] Tradition from the time of Pisistratus
himself to that of Cicero speaks no articulate and intelligible word as
to what, according to Wolf, the voice of all antiquity declares. When
we come after five centuries of historic silence to Cicero, we do not
find him agreeing with Wolf that Pisistratus first had the poems of
Homer committed to writing, but saying that "he is said" (by whom?) "to
have been the first to have arranged, in their present order, the books
of Homer, previously in disarray?"[3]
Cicero speaks only of what "is said." The unvouched for report
mentioned by Cicero half a milennium after the date of Pisistratus is
not history, of course; is not evidence. Long before Cicero, in the
fourth century, Ephorus and Heraclides Ponticus told other stories
about the coming of Homer to Sparta, stories equally unhistorical. The
author of the pseudo-Platonic dialogue, _Hipparchus_, represented the
second son of Pisistratus as the first to bring Homer to Attica, and to
regulate Homeric recitations. None of these writers stands for History,
none of them agrees with another; they had no historical knowledge of
whatever facts there may have been.
We are in presence (1) of variants of a tradition doubtless founded
on fact, namely, that at an unknown date an Act was passed in Athens
regulating the recitations of Homeric poetry at the Panathenaic
festival; by some accounts an Act limiting the recitations to "Homeric"
poetry alone; and (2) of a legend that Pisistratus, or his second