The World of Homer
They are not like the Spartans or the Macleans, with their traditional
rule of never retreating.
War may be a duty, in the eyes of Homer, but it is not a pleasure;
and this is the more singular as, in early societies, the bard, who,
like Ian Lom,[1] does not fight himself, is fond of provoking men to
battle. Though Odysseus, in his feigned tales of himself as a Cretan
adventurer, speaks of piracy, and of raids on the coasts of Egypt,
and though casual homicides are lightly mentioned, the Homeric is a
peace-loving world. The wild justice of the blood-feud, after a fatal
blow struck in anger, exists, and, as a rule, the slayer goes into
exile, to some friendly prince, and thus avoids the feud of the dead
man's kin.
On the Shield of Achilles was depicted a scene at the _Althing_ (to
use the Icelandic expression): "The folk were gathered in the assembly
place; for there was a strife arisen, two men striving about the
blood-price of a man slain; the one claiming to pay full atonement,
expounding to the people, but the other denied him, and would take
naught." The people are taking sides, and shouting, the heralds
restrain them, the γέροντες (the _probi homines_ or _prud'hommes_) sit
listening, on stone seats in the sacred circle.[2] The public sense
had enabled the slayer to remain at home, if the kin of the dead would
accept the blood-wyte, and allow the feud to be pacified. As Aias says
to Achilles, "a man accepts recompense of his brother's murderer, or
for his dead son; and so the manslayer for a great price abides in his
own land...."[3] Probably it was usual to accept the blood-price if
a man had been slain openly, sword in hand; but when a premeditated
murder was committed, actual revenge was desired. There was nothing
reckoned mean or contemptible in the pacific arrangement: in heroic
Iceland it was hard indeed to induce men to accept it.
These are the manners of a settled people, who will bear much for
the sake of peace, and of a people free from superstitious dread of
the blood curse, and ignorant of the filthy rite of purification by
the blood of swine, which was a regular piece of ritual in historic
Hellas, and is familiar to Aeschylus,[4] the Ionian epic poets, and
to Apollonius Rhodius. Certainly the rite was unknown to Homer, who
mentions many homicides but says nothing of purification or of
pollution. This point is later studied in detail. The life of the
heroes in peace is the life of all early aristocracies who do not idle,
and do not intrigue in a Court. The women spin and embroider, like
Penelope and Helen, and keep their eyes on household affairs, and on
their poultry, mainly geese. Nausicaa sees to the washing of the linen.
The men hunt hares and boars, and attend "days of law" in the legal
courts, and take part in funeral games. As yet we hear of no periodical
games, such as the Olympian, Isthmian, and Pythian, though the legends
of historic Greece pretend that these were founded in pre-Homeric times.
The princes also looked well to their lands. Odysseus alone is
mentioned as a skilled ploughman, carpenter, and shipwright, as some of
the Icelandic heroes are swordsmiths, but we see little of any prince
but Odysseus in peaceful life. There are professional artisans, whose
services are highly valued, carpenters, potters, bronze-smiths, and
weavers.
The women meanwhile are amused by the visits of Phoenician pedlars, who
bring goods and gauds of every kind, and steal a child or carry away a
serving maid if they have the opportunity, as in the case of Eumaeus.
After supper the minstrel of the prince chants lays, like Demodocus
in Phaeacia. As Spenser observed in Ireland, and as the Brehon laws
declare, the minstrel was highly honoured and trusted; the minstrel of
Agamemnon is charged, during the war, with the care of Clytemnestra.
These poets did not accompany the host to the war, where Achilles
solaced himself by singing to the harp "the renowns of men."[5]
Such is the general picture of Homer's world in time of peace, as
far as the days and works of the princely class and the gentry are
concerned. They are richly equipped with cups of gold, and furniture
inlaid with ivory and silver, even in the house of Odysseus. This
was but the dwelling of a king of a rocky isle. Entering the hall of
Menelaus, Telemachus bids his companion, the son of Nestor, marvel at
the gleam of bronze, gold, electrum, silver, and ivory.[6] Apparently
the home of Nestor in Pylos was not so rich and lordly. The house of
Menelaus is a picture of a dwelling rich in such treasures as have
been found in the Royal graves of Mycenae and in the palace of Cnossos
in Crete. In the house of Odysseus we hear of no bathroom and bath,
in which the girls of the house bathed princely guests and gave them
change of raiment.[7] Weapons adorn the walls (in the house of Odysseus
only), unless this be a later addition to the picture.
In the Homeric hall, each guest had his own little table and his chair.
The prince and his wife sat in the centre, beside the fire, under the
chief pillars. Honoured guests sat by them; the beggar was placed on
the threshold, with his mess of meat. As in heroic Ireland, where the
rules were very minute, some portions of the flesh were more honourable
than others. In the lost _Thebais_, Oedipus curses his sons, Eteocles
and Polynices, because they send him, not the shoulder, but the haunch
(ἰσχίον)[8] This is a very archaic touch.
Homer's world is aristocratic. The poet, none the less, has his eye
on the folk; on the honest poor woman who carefully weighs her wool;
on the aged female thrall who is busy all night over her task of
grain-grinding, and prays that the wooers who have broken her strength
may now eat their latest meal. He is keenly interested in the work of
artisans, such as the currier and shield maker who wrought the great
shield of Aias; in the fisherman with his nets, or line and bait; in
the diver for oysters; in the woodmen with their axes; in sowing and
ploughing, and the relative merits of oxen and mules as plough-beasts;
in the quarrel between two farmers over their boundary balk in the
common field; in the lot of the hind of a landless man, the hardest lot
of any; in gold-workers and spinners; shepherds, hunts-men, herdsmen;
in the potter who "sitting by his wheel maketh trial of it whether it
run"; in the virtues of a swineherd, a slave, who is noble by birth,
like Eumaeus; in all seafaring men down to the pursers and stewards;
in the laughing girls that gather in the vintage, while a boy makes
sweet music, and sings the song of Linus with delicate voice; in the
ploughman who has a drink of wine at the end of the furrow; in the
gardener with his orchard, the watering of a plot as it is done to this
day in the East; the fruit trees that Odysseus as a child was given
"for his very own"; in the smith's warm forge where masterless tramps
sleep at night; in the beggar men with their wallets, who crouch on the
outer part of the threshold; in the old cadger who goes on the errands
of the wooers; in the little girl that runs till she is weary by her
mother's side, and catches at her skirt, praying to be taken up in her
arms; in the children who build castles with the sea sand; in boys who,
"always fond of mischief," stone the wasps' nest, and make the angry
wasps a common nuisance; or cudgel the stubborn ass that is too strong
for them; in all poor wayfarers who wander under the protection of
Zeus; in all suppliants who, having slain a man, embrace the knees of
the prince to whom they flee. All mankind are as interesting to Homer
as the gallant youths at the bridal dance who wear "daggers of gold in
baldrics of silver"; such bronze daggers with gilded blade-centres as
were found in the tombs of Mycenae and elsewhere.
It is plain from Homeric descriptions of palaces, and of works of
art, that his age had not lost touch with or memory of the Aegean
culture. Whether some great Aegean or Mycenaean palaces with friezes
of cyanus (dark blue glass paste), and of metals, were still in a
habitable state, in Homer's days, or whether only the tradition
of their glory survived,--as memories of Roman buildings dwell in
the early Anglo-Saxon poem on the _Ruined City_ of the Romans in
England,--it is clear that plenty of Aegean artistic work in gold
and other metals, cups and sword hilts, was preserved, and known to
the poet. The Achaeans did not invade merely to destroy, like the
Anglo-Saxon invaders of Romanised Britain. Far more civilised and
refined than these rude hordes, they could appreciate and preserve as
well as burn and break,--in an hour of furious sack,--the treasures of
the more civilised race. But these treasures they could not imitate and
reproduce, apparently (they are often spoken of as the work of the god
Hephaestus), and the ancient Aegean art waned and passed under new and
crude influences.
Much as Homer delights in works of art, and vividly as he describes
them, and describes the toil of weavers, carpenters, shipwrights,
ploughmen, reapers, and vintagers, he never shows us a painter at
work on wall or vase, nor a mortal hand delineating, in any material,
men and women; except when Helen is weaving a great purple web, and
embroidering thereon, or interweaving there-with, "many battles of
horse-taming Trojans and mail-clad Achaeans."[9] This art implies some
knowledge of drawing and painting: from the Homeric age we have no
relics of this art; but such webs might, like the Bayeux tapestry, last
long, and might be imitated, and it may have been from such old Aegean
fabrics or copies of them that Homer took his idea.
[1] The bard of the Macdonalds in the year of Montrose.
[2] _Iliad_, xviii. 497-504.
[3] ix. 632-634.
[4] _Eumenides_, 273.
[5] _Iliad_, ix. 186, 189.
[6] _Odyssey_, iv. 70-75.
[7] _Ibid._ iii. 464-469. The word for bath, ἀσαμἰνθος, is thought,
like other words with the same termination, to be of the language of
the Aegean race, whoever they may have been: the termination is common
in place-names, and names of flowers.
[8] Kinkel, _Epicorum Graecorum Fragmenta_, p. 11.
[9] _Iliad_, iii. 125-127.
CHAPTER V
MEN AND WOMEN
In all modern times Homer has been admired for his noble, tender, and
chivalrous sense of what is due to women; for his pictures of the
perfect mother, Thetis; the perfect wife, Andromache; the perfect
maiden, frank, stainless, and kind, Nausicaa; for the woman of immortal
charm, Helen; while, when he does touch on the less lovable humours
of women,--on the nagging shrew, the light o' love, the rather bitter
virgin,--he selects his examples from the divine society of the Gods.
It is an instance of the high and noble taste of the poet and his
audience, that he dwells most on the best and most charming of the
women in old traditions, and is manifestly reluctant to tell of any
evil deed, or any cruel sorrow of a lady. Yet legend was full of women
fierce and revengeful as Brynhild; such women as Medea, who slew her
own children; Ino, who hated her step-children; Althaea, who, to avenge
her brothers, burned the brand that was the life-token of her son,
Meleager of the golden hair. There was hateful Eriphyle, bribed by the
gift that drew her lord to his doom; there was hapless Epicaste, wedded
to her son, the slayer of his father; there were unhappy Chloris, and
unhappy Tyro, mother of Pelias and Neleus by Poseidon, and victim of a
feminine revenge. But this part of the tale is Ionian or Athenian, not
Homeric. In Homer a woman is not dishonoured, but more highly esteemed,
because she has been loved by a god. In Attic traditions she is
cruelly punished by her own kinsfolk.
The wicked and ill-fated ladies who remind us of heroines in ancient