The World of Homer
German epos, are scarcely mentioned, or not at all in the _Iliad_
(where they could only appear in digressions), and the poet merely
touches on their fortunes when Odysseus meets them in Hades. From the
guilt and the misery of the "far-renowned brides of ancient song,"
Homer averts his eyes. Even to Clytemnestra, though her sin cannot be
hidden, he allows the _bon naturel_ which Mary Stuart justly claimed
for herself. We are reminded of the tenderness of Chaucer for the fault
of Cressida, "Ne me list this sely womman chyde."
Homer himself never blames Helen, he regards her with the affection
and pity of Hector and Priam: it is the Trojan women and Penelope, her
cousin, who speak frankly of Helen and the ruin which she wrought. In
the _Iliad_ she does not, "where'er she came, bring calamity"; she is
penitent, she longs for home, and her lord, and her one child, the
little maid Hermione. She scorns the cowardice of her lover, and, in
the third Book of the _Iliad_, the poet plainly declares that she is.
the unwilling victim of Aphrodite. In the _Odyssey,_ wherever she
appears, she brings beauty, grace, charm, and quiet, and her appointed
home is in the temperate meadows of the Elysian land.
Homer does not dwell on the passion of love; he could not do so in
an epic of war, and in an epic of a man seeking to win, on the sea,
"the return of his company." But each epic turns on and is _motive_ by
love; the _Iliad_ springs from the lawless love of Paris and Helen; the
_Odyssey_ from the wedded love of Odysseus and Penelope. The Wrath of
Achilles, too, arises on account of his lost love. In the instance of
Paris, love has turned to the most tragic end: the passion of Helen is
changed into bitter contempt and inconsolable regret.
The loves of youth and maiden, the whispered _oaristys_ "from rock and
oak," are seldom the theme of Greek poetry; in the Epics they would be
as out of place as in the _Chanson de Roland_. The loves of Troilus and
Cressida were, to Chaucer, the central interest of the Trojan leaguer;
no such place could they hold in Homer: he has an infinitely larger and
nobler topic. Yet he who listens may hear "The awakened loves around
him murmuring," in the lines that, through the din of battle, just
mention some old amour of gods with mortal maidens, of mortal men with
fairies of the woods and hills.
Considering the warlike nature of the _Iliad_, the parts played by
women, by Helen, Andromache, Hecuba, and the touches that bring forward
the wifely tenderness of Theano, are almost surprising; while the whole
poem is dominated by the maternal love of Thetis, that magical figure
of sorrow, foreboding, and affection, without which the character of
Achilles would be jejune, and bereft of occasions to display its _fond_
of tenderness and melancholy. Of course we are told that all these
women are "late," and formed no part of the original lay of the Wrath:
that is to be expected of critical sagacity.
The magnificent passages on Helen, Andromache, and Hecuba; the humorous
descriptions of Hera; Athene, her divine father's darling, and of
Aphrodite; the unnatural hatred of Althaea; the caprice of Anteia; the
pathos of the dirges of Briseis for Patroclus, of Helen for Hector; the
remorseless jealousy of the mother of Phoenix, when his father loves
a mistress among her maids, all supply "the female interest" in the
_Iliad_.
There is not so much "female interest" as in the _Volsunga Saga_, but
women occupy the same position, are regarded with the same deference;
they are free, on earth and in Olympus, they give their counsel and
even carry their point, as in the Icelandic sagas. In the _Odyssey_,
Arete and Nausicaa appear exactly in the fashion of Wealtheow,
Hrothgar's Queen, and her daughter in _Beowulf_,[1] they grace the
company and still the quarrels of men.
The whole view of women is what we may call "northern"; it is the
view of the sagas, of the English and the Teutonic epics; and is
remote from the spirit of the partly orientalised poets of Ionia.
But for the bequest of ancient heroic tradition the poets of Athens
could not have created their noble heroines. Attic life, Ionian life,
could not produce such women; and Aeschylus and Sophocles fall back
on memories of heroines who are not Ionian and are not Attic, in the
great majority of cases. Christian Europe at various times, in the age
of the chivalrous romances, and in comedy generally, fell far below
the old northern and Achaean view of the women's part. To chivalry,
adultery was a duty, to our European comedy it was a jest: marriage
was a _bourgeois_ business. But even to historic Greece the sanctity
of the marriage-tie was a serious matter: adulterous intrigues are not
the theme of Greek poets and comedians, as they have been ever since
our Middle Ages. Lancelot, and still more Tristram, would have been
stigmatised as Paris is by Hector; and Guinevere and Iseult would have
heard more reproaches from their own sex, than Penelope and the Trojan
women bestow on Helen. The Gods are a sinful and adulterous generation,
in the mythical view; but in the religious view they warn Aegisthus
against his sin and its consequence.[2]
Turning to the legal position of women, we do not know much about
the civil penalty or fine for adultery (μοιχάγρια), but Menelaus,
the soul of honour, is eager to avenge himself in the duel. The fine
for adultery may have been the equivalent of the bride-price paid by
the bridegroom. Hephaestus, in the song of Demodocus, demands the
return of the bride-price which he gave for the faithless Aphrodite,
the ἔεδνα.[3] The bride-price, often mentioned, is a well-known
institution, obsolete in historic Greece but familiar to the poet. In
very rare cases in Homer, a man may receive a bride without paying
a price for doing some great public service: in some circumstances
the father will even give a dowry with the bride.[4] In the most
notable passage where dowry (μείλία) is mentioned by the poet, he
plainly shows his knowledge that the giving of dowry is an exception
to the general rule; for he mentions the rule--the wooer pays the
bride-price ἔεδνα, but in his sore need of Achilles, Agamemnon offers
his daughter "without price" (ἀνάεδνον), and _plus_ such gifts as no
man ever endowed his daughter with.[5] This is no proof that the poet
of Book ix. lived in a later age than that of the bride-price. He
merely recognises what, in an age of bride-price, must have been the
fact, that in unusual circumstances, when the alliance of a man was of
crucial importance to the father, he would buy instead of selling his
daughter's marriage. People were never such pedants as not to infringe
a custom, not sacred but a secular bargain, when strong need came on
them.
In another instance the husband was King Priam, whose alliance was
worth buying by the aged father of the bride. "Circumstances alter
cases," as critics often forget, and such rare divergences from the
usual rule are not proofs of late interpolation. The Icelanders gave
dowries with their daughters, but when Njal was especially eager for a
bride for his foster son, he offered to reverse the process and give
ἔεδνα, bride-price.[6] In the case of the marriage of Penelope (a very
peculiar instance, as there was no proof that she was a widow, and as
it is not easy to see who "had her marriage"), we hear of bride-price
"such as is meet to go with a dear daughter." This return of the price,
or of part of it, was familiar to the Laws of Hammurabi and of the
Germans of Tacitus.[7] We may, with the separatist critics, suppose
that the passages about returning the bride-price of Penelope when
she goes to her second husband,[8] belong to a later period than the
body of the Epics; or, more probably, that a variety of customs may
coexist (that they may we have proved), and, in any case, Penelope's
people were anxious to get her off their hands in one way or another,
her situation being irksome and anomalous. Rare must be the examples
of interpolated details, when a case so anomalous as that of Penelope
is seized on as proof of the presence of later social practices. The
passages about Penelope are peculiar. In _Od_. ii. 53, Telemachus says
that the wooers have no mind to go to the father of Penelope, who
αὐτὸς ἐεδνώσαιτο θύγατρα. If we take this to mean "will endow her,"
the writer does not know the meaning of ἔεδνα; but I conceive him to
say, "will fix the bride-price," or make the terms.[9] Compare _Iliad_,
xiii. 384, ἐπεὶ οὔ τοι ἐεδνωταὶ κακοί εἰμεν, "we will not make hard
marriage terms," that is, will not demand a heavy bride-price.
In _Od_. i. 278, ii. 196, Telemachus is bidden to take his mother to
her father, "they will give the marriage feast and ἀρτυνέουσιν ἔεδνα,
many such as should follow with a dear daughter." Mr. Murray says that
the writer of these lines "mistook the meaning of estim because he had
forgotten the custom" (_R. G. E._ p. 152). But even Aeschylus knew that
ἔεδνα were gifts from the bridegroom (_Prometheus_, 559, quoted by Mr.
Murray); and if the author of the passages in _Odyssey_, i. ii., did
not know, he cannot have read the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_. This is so
improbable, for even the author of the very "late" song of Ares and
Aphrodite (_Od_. viii. 318) knew all about the legal nature of ἔεδνα,
that we can hardly suppose the writer of the passages in _Od._ i. ii.
to have fancied that ἔεδνα meant "dowry."
One thing is certain, that the prehistoric usage of bride-price almost
uniformly prevails in the poems, with a trace of such variations in
custom as actually occur, when circumstances or affection demand it, in
every stage of human society. The bridal customs are not pedantically
stereotyped in Homer, but variations in accordance with circumstances
do not prove lateness or earliness, any more than such female names
as Alphesiboea, Phereboea, Polyboea, and others, indicating that a
daughter, on her marriage, will bring many kine into her family,
"express the excuse which the parents made to themselves for venturing
to rear the useless female child."[10]
Not even in Australian black society are girls more apt than male
babies to be killed as _bouches inutiles_, they are far too valuable
to their brothers or maternal uncles, being exchanged for other men's
sisters or nieces as brides. The cattle-owning barbaric societies of
Africa are not addicted to female infanticide, much less could Homeric
society be with its wealth and its tenderness of heart. In Greek
non-Homeric legend how often do we hear of a baby-girl being exposed?
It is the boys who suffer, in the hope of defeating some prophecy.
Homeric society is infinitely remote from that in which girls were too
expensive and useless to keep.[11]
Homer is the last author in whom we can hopefully look for survivals of
savagery, or of cruel and filthy superstitions. In the Epics there is
not a harlot, common as they are in the ancient Hebrew books. It is not
to be supposed that the ancient profession was unknown, but all such
things are ignored in deference to a taste more pure than that of early
Ionian society and of historic Greece from first to last. The tone of
taste and morals is, in short, Achaean, like the poet himself;[12]
Shakespeare, in _Troilus and Cressida_, makes Patroclus mimic Nestor; he
"coughs and spits,
And with a palsy fumbling in his gorget,
Shakes in and out the rivet,"
in "a night-alarm." Shakespeare has read of the night-alarm in _Iliad_,
Book x., but not there did he find, nowhere in Homer could he find "the
faint defects of age" made matter of merriment. In Homer nobody coughs!
The Homeric idea of the family is symbolised in the wedding bed which
Odysseus fashioned with his own hands, making it fast to the trunk of