The World of Homer
the men who took and sacked the palace of Cnossos in Crete about 1400
B.C., or whether the spoilers were "Pelasgians," that is, people
living on the mainland in Cretan conditions of culture, driven from
the mainland by the Achaean irruption; or whether the palace was
wrecked during an internal revolution before the Achaeans came to the
island.[11] Homer undeniably regards Idomeneus as an Achaean and a
descendant of Minos; and Minos as a son of Zeus.[12] Rhadamanthus of
his blood, is "the golden-haired," like Menelaus, Meleager, and some
other heroes.[13] We are not here concerned with discrepant traditions,
and with the idea that Minos is an Aegean as Pharaoh is an Egyptian
name of kings in general. That may be so; Minos may have been a figure
in Cretan legend before the Achaeans came thither; if so, they adopted
him as their own. We are only stating Homer's view of the relations
between Crete and the Achaean power on the mainland.
Homer's Catalogue of the Asian allies of Troy is brief, and contains
only about sixty lines. There was a Trojan Catalogue in the _Cypria_,
a lost Ionian epic poem of the eighth century, and as the Ionian
colonists in Asia knew the country of their settlement well, it is
likely to have been copious. Beginning, in Homer's Trojan Catalogue,
with the Dardanians under Aeneas, who may be said to represent "the
Orleans branch" of the Trojan royal family, we next hear of the Trojans
under Pandarus, who, in fact, broke the solemn oaths of truce, and
sealed the doom of Ilium (_Iliad_, iv.), but who somehow as "Sir
Pandarus of Troy" acquired another kind of ill fame among our mediaeval
poets. He dwelt by the Aesepus. "At the extreme north of the Troad,
where the Hellespont opens out into the Sea of Marmora," lived Adrastus
and Amphius. Asius led forces from Sestus and Abydus, on both sides,
European and Asian, of the Hellespont: there were also Pelasgians,
apparently from the European side. There were, from Europe, Thracians
and Cicones; the chief Thracian contingent arrived later (see _Iliad_,
Book x.). The Cicones, with whom Odysseus has trouble when first he
leaves Troy, in the _Odyssey,_ are also European, as were probably,
in origin, the people of Troy itself. European are the Paeonians,
the Paphlagonians, again, are Asiatic; the Alizonians are remote
and unrecognisable. Then we have Asiatic Mysians and Phrygians, and
Maeonians from near Sardis, and under Mount Tmolos inland. The Carians
of Miletus (later an Ionian city) follow, the Meander is their river;
last come the Lycians under Sarpedon (whom legend connects with Crete),
and Glaucus; another Glaucus was son of Sisyphus of Ephyre (Corinth),
in Argos, and was father of Bellerophon. Bellerophon, again, was sent
to his death in Lycia, by Proetus, who had married a Lycian princess.
The Lycian Glaucus of the _Iliad_ is a grandson of Bellerophon
(_Iliad_, vi.).
According to this story, Greeks freely passed to Lycia and intermarried
with Lycians. Only the Carians are described as "barbaric" in language.
Homer knows not, we said, the distinction of Hellenes and Barbarians;
the Greeks did not know it till the struggle of their Asiatic colonies
against Lydia and Persia produced the sense of "racial" repulsion. In
Homer any Greek prince going to Asia is courteously treated, perhaps
settles there like Bellerophon, or makes hereditary guest-friendships,
like the ancestors of Glaucus and Diomede.
The distinction which Homer does know is that between god-fearing
men, with cities, laws, and rulers, on one hand, and men who are like
the Cyclops, lonely, and lawless (_Od._ ix. 112-115). The Cyclops is
not so godless as he boasts himself to be; he does pray to his father
Poseidon, but he is wholly lawless, and each man is king in his own
family. The cannibal Laestrygones, even, have a king and a city, though
their manners are disgusting. Homer cannot easily, we see, conceive
of men whose polity and cities are not like those with which he is
familiar. He may have heard vaguely of far northern tribes abiding by
their fiords in the land of amber, the land of the nightless summer
and of the sunless winter. Such tales would come with the amber from
the Baltic coasts, for which merchants bartered the bronze swords and
vessels of their own civilisation. He had certainly heard of "the proud
Hippemolgoi," drinkers of mares' milk, nomad Scythians north of the
Danube, living like Tartars on koumiss.[14] If he has heard of any
empire in the Asian _hinterland_, he may speak of it as one of the two
Ethiopian realms; but here all is mythical.
Egypt, too, appears in the tales of Odysseus when he represents himself
as a Cretan adventurer, a raider in the lands by the river Aegyptus.
Helen has been in Egypt, and received the drug _nepenthes_ from the
wife of the king, just as she has been in Egyptian Thebes, and carried
treasures thence (_Od_. iv. 130 ff.). Achilles[15] knows the wealth
of Egyptian Thebes, and its hundred gates, and countless charioteers.
Sicily is known to the _Odyssey_, a poem of Ithaca and the west, and
of "perilous seas in fairy lands forlorn"; it is not mentioned in the
_Iliad_, a poem of the east and the Asian shore. The Phoenicians are
familiar as traders (_Iliad_, xxiii. 743), and are much better known,
as is natural, to the sea-poem, the _Odyssey_. The appearance of the
Phoenicians in the _Odyssey_, when they sell jewels to the women and
kidnap the child Eumaeus, has been spoken of as work of the seventh
century B.C.; a scene of contemporary life in that late age. But Mr.
H. R. Hall, writing on early relations between Greece and Egypt, as
depicted in Egyptian wall-paintings of the eighteenth Egyptian dynasty,
represents commerce between the Aegean peoples of Greece and Crete as
filtering through "Phoenician channels." The Phoenicians were active
navigators and were merchants then and afterwards, that is, from the
sixteenth century B.C. onwards. A fresco in an Egyptian tomb of the
early date shows the arrival of "beaknosed" Phoenicians "in voluminous
and multi-coloured robes," one of them carrying "a small Mycenaean
amphora," at the Theban quays.[16] This being so, it is not so easy
to bring down the Phoenicians of the _Odyssey_ to the seventh century
B.C. The Sidonians make the goods which the Phoenicians transport, but
the Phoenician slave of the father of Eumaeus declares that she comes
from the town of Sidon, and the Phoenician sailor knows her parents
(_Odyssey_, xv. 415-433). No very clear distinction seems to have been
drawn between Phoenicians and Sidonians.
These Semitic peoples were persistently credited, till lately, with all
the finer works of art and craft which Homer mentions. The discovery
of the art of Minoan Crete has made this unqualified attribution
impossible.[17] Certainly Homer conceives of the Semites as doing a
large trade, and as kidnapping children in the Greek seas; but their
own art was imitative, and it is unlikely that, in Homer's time, the
characters of their alphabet had ousted those of Aegean civilisation.
It is curious that the place in which Phoenicians exercised most
influence, Cyprus, was also the place where the Phoenician alphabet
was so long in supplanting the native syllabary, akin to the unread
documents of Minoan Crete.
We may thus conceive Homer's ancestors, by 1400 B.C., as men far from
savage or barbarian,[18] who then succeeded to an Aegean civilisation
much more luxurious and artistic than their own; and, centuries later,
when Homer sang, the glow of the Aegean culture still flushed the sky:
its art was known to the poet.
[1] _Iliad_, i. 266-268.
[2] _Iliad_, ii. 741-744.
[3] _Proceedings, British School of Athens_, xiv., 1907, 1908, p. 223.
[4] _Iliad_, ii. 681-684, xvi. 233-235.
[5] Mackenzie, "Cretan Palaces," in _Brit. School of Athens_, xii. pp.
216-258.
[6] The parallel has been brought to my notice in detail by Mr. J. W.
Mackail; it had already occurred to me in a general way.
[7] _Iliad_, ii. 867, ii. 804.
[8] In the line just cited, and in the Carians Βαρβαροθώνω of _Iliad_,
ii. 867, we cannot positively know whether Homer is thinking of
different languages, or of differences in accent and dialect.
[9] Leaf, on _Iliad_, ii. 502.
[10] Save in the interpolated name of Theseus, twice, and in doubtful
parts of _Odyssey_, xi.
[11] These various views are held, or have been held, by Mr. Evans,
Mr. Ridgeway, Dr. Mackenzie, and others (_Monthly Review_, 1901, pp.
121-131; _Times_, Oct. 31, 1905; _Annuals, British School of Athens_,
xi. p. 14; _ibid._ xii. 216 _et seqq._, xiii. 423 _et seqq._). In Dr.
Mackenzie's ample arguments, cf. Hogarth, _Ionia and the East_, pp. 32,
33, the Pelasgians were the sackers of Cnossos. The evidence is mainly
archaeological, and might be argued over endlessly.
[12] _Iliad_, xiii. 450.
[13] These views are suggested by Professor Ridgeway in a paper read to
the British Academy; see _Athenaeum_, June 5, 1909.
[14] _Iliad_, xiii. 5, 6, and Leaf's note.
[15] _Ibid._ ix. 381. Mr. Leaf attributes the lines to "some person
with a dull chronological mind," who remembered that Thebes in Greece
had been left in ruins by the war of the Epigonoi. "He forgot, however,
that Egypt is elsewhere unknown to the _Iliad_." If a place is unknown
because no one has occasion to mention it, unknown is Thebes to the
_Iliad_. But to say that a poet familiar with Crete never heard of
Egypt; that Egypt was rediscovered between the dates of composition
of _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_, is arbitrary. We might as well say that
Shakespeare, who never mentions tobacco, never heard of the weed, or
that no Biblical author ever saw a cat (out of the Apocrypha).
[16] B. S. A. viii. 174.
[17] See Hogarth, _Ionia and the East_, pp. 83-86.
[18] _Ibid._ pp. 112-115.
CHAPTER III
HOMERIC POLITY. THE OVER LORD
As Homer conceives the period of his heroes, they live in a perfectly
well known stage of society, illustrated in later northern Europe by
the French _Chansons de Geste_; by the most ancient Irish stories
in prose mixed with verse; and even to some extent by the Arthurian
romances. Every prince has his castle and town or towns, his lands,
pasturage, tilth, and orchards; he is, in the Irish phrase, a _righ_.
He is surrounded by the γέροντες,--in Irish the _flaith_, the gentry
or squires, who held "rich lands remote from towns," and possessed
war-chariots.[1] The princes and gentry with war-chariots alone take
notable individual parts in the fighting, whether they fight mounted
or dismounted. It is the gentry who offer a rich demesne, vineland
and tilth, to Meleager, imploring him to take part in their war.[2]
It appears to me that the gentry themselves held land in severalty,
perhaps contrary to the old letter of the law, and in possession rather
than in property.
The question of Homeric land tenure, as of all early land tenure
before written records, is very obscure. There existed "common
fields" certainly; but were they common property, each freeman having
no more than his strip; separated, we know, from that of others by a
longitudinal "balk" or boundary? We hear of men wrangling across the
balk, "with measures in their hands, in _a common field_, striving
for their right within scanty space."[3] Such quarrels were common in
the Scotland of the eighteenth century, under the "run-rig" system
of common fields; but then the men were tenants. They may have been
free-holders in Homer's time, each with his assured "lot" (κλὴρος)[4]
The Irish tribal free man had a right to one of these lots, which were
redistributed by rotation, but many lots came gradually into the hands
of each of the _flaith_, squires, (γέροντες), who were rich in cattle,
and let out the cattle to poor lease-holders, for returns of rent in