The World of Homer
a living tree that it might never be moved.[13] and adorning it with
inlay of gold, silver and ivory. According to many critics, of whom
Wolf is the earliest, the final books of the _Odyssey_ are later than
the rest, and the idea of a separate chamber for husband and wife
is late. Other critics, when they find mentions of such a separate
chamber (δάλαμος) in other parts of the Epic, explain them as late
interpolations. They appear once again to forget that in no civilised
society is there absolute uniformity of detail in all the arrangements
of domestic life. An interesting example may be found in Scott's
description of the hall and house of Cedric the Saxon,--the hall
floored with "earth mixed with lime, trodden into a hard substance,
such as is often employed in flooring our modern barns," the rafters
"encrusted with a black varnish of soot" (the _melathron_), the walls
"hung with implements of war," "the low irregular building," are like
the house of Odysseus. There were "buildings after building."[14]
Contrasted with these arrangements were the castles of the Normans,
"tall, turreted, and castellated buildings."
"In the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_ the houses are normally one-room halls.
The master and mistress live in the _megaron_ in the daytime and sleep
there at night ... grown-up sons and daughters have separate 'halls' or
_thalamoi_ built for them close by."[15]
On this showing, Odysseus had chosen to adopt a different arrangement,
it does not quite follow that the account of his house is late;
it would be hard to prove that _thalamos_ (chamber) and _megaron_
(hall) are identical, we hear of no outside _thalamos_, like that of
Telemachus, occupied by a girl, and the whole topic demands very minute
criticism. But the question of Aegean and Achaean architecture is at
present the subject of controversy among architectural specialists.
The happiness of wedded life has never been more nobly praised than
by Homer in the famous speech of Odysseus to Alcinous. Adultery is
laughed at only among the gods. Moreover, we never hear of lightness
of behaviour in girls, except when a God is the wooer, and that is
reckoned an honour, the woman is sought for in marriage by mortals.
In Ionian tradition, as has been said, on the other hand, the girls
beloved by gods are severely punished, like Tyro.
Fidelity is not expected from men when absent at a long siege, or lost
in unknown lands, like Odysseus, who does not scruple to tell Penelope
about Circe and Calypso. At home the fidelity of husbands depends on
the characters of the pair. Laertes is fond of a fair handmaid, but
dreads the wrath of his wife, as the father of Phoenix, in a similar
case, found that _he_ had good reason to do. The bastards of whom we
hear are probably sons of the captives of the spear, brought home as
Agamemnon unadvisedly brought Cassandra. Theano, wife of Antenor,
"nurtured his bastard, like her own children, to do her husband
pleasure."[16] Teucer also, a bastard, was brought up by his father
in his own house.[17] There was one law for the men, another for the
women, and Dr. Johnson approved of this moral system in England.
The domestic relations are very pleasingly portrayed in the _Iliad_.
Homer, to be sure, knows that family life is not always monotonously
peaceful and affectionate. In the long speech of Phoenix (Book ix.)
we see a son, Meleager, who has a feud with his maternal uncles and
is under his mother's curse. This family feud, in which the wife and
mother takes sides with her own kin against her husband or sons, is a
common motive in the oldest Teutonic Epics, and even in the historic
traditions of the Camerons.
But it is among the Olympians that Homer finds his blustering, teasing
yet placable husband and father, Zeus; his shrewish wife, Hera; his
rather spiteful daughter, Athene; and his lady of pleasure, Aphrodite,
whose intrigues are a jest. The affection of Zeus for his daughter,
none the less, is happily displayed, while among men the fraternal
affection of Agamemnon for Menelaus is his most agreeable trait.
Parents and children, except in the woeful adventure of Phoenix, are
always on the best of terms, as in the households of Odysseus, Nestor,
and Alcinous; and the petulance of Priam towards his sons, after the
death of Hector, is excused by his age and intolerable sufferings.
"With his staff he chased forth the men, and they went before the old
man in his haste."[18]
In short, though wives were bought with the bride-price, it seems
probable that the affectionate Homeric fathers allowed more latitude of
choice to their daughters than has, in many periods, been permitted by
ourselves in England, and no literature in the world displays a happier
domestic life, a life more gentle, true, and loving than the old Epics
of the mail-clad Achaeans.[19]
[1] _Beowulf_, 611-628, 1162-1174, 1215-1231.
[2] _Odyssey_, i. 36-43.
[3] _Odyssey_, viii. 317-320.
[4] _Iliad_, xxii. 51, ix. 146-158.
[5] _Iliad_, ix. 146 _et seqq_.
[6] _Story of Burnt Njal_, vol. ii p. 81.
[7] Germania, R. G. E. p. 151, note 1, citing Ham. 160, 163, 164.
[8] _Odyssey_, i. 278, ii. 195-197.
[9] See Pierron, "qu'il s'entendra avec le prétendant." Merry and
Riddell translate, "will accept gifts of wooing for his daughter."
Leaf: "get the bride-price for his daughter."
[10] _R. G. E._ p. 151.
[11] No society is less affluent than that of the Australian tribes.
But this does not provoke preferential female infanticide. See Spencer
and Gillen, _Native Tribes of Central Australia_, pp. 51, 52, 264;
_Northern Tribes_, p. 608; Howitt, _Native Tribes of South East
Australia_, pp. 749, 750.
[12] See Appendix, "The supposed Expurgation of Homer."
[13] Odyssey, xxiii. 183-204.
[14] _Odyssey_, xvii. 266.
[15] _R. G. E._ p. 153.
[16] _Iliad_, v. 69-71.
[17] viii. 281-284.
[18] xxiv. 247.
[19] Mr. Murray refers me, for female infanticide among Greeks, to a
letter in _Pap. Oxyz_., 744: "Keep a male. Cast out a female child."
These may have been the manners of late Egyptianised Greeks, but I am
not dealing with them. See p. 40 _supra_ under note 2.
CHAPTER VI
THE HOMERIC WORLD IN WAR
On the fringe of the horizon, in Homer's day as in our own, always hung
the cloud of war. In war, men were as cruel as they have usually been.
A successful siege of a city involved the slaying of its defenders, and
the carrying away of the women, "to make another's bed, and draw water
from another's well." Hector, when the broken oaths of the duel[1] make
it certain that Troy must perish, looks for no better fortune to befall
Andromache; may the earth be mounded above him before that day!
Though a truce is granted for the cremation and burial, with one common
cairn, of the men who fall in a great battle,[2] it is not Achilles
alone who would fain refuse burial, and rest in the House of Hades,
to an enemy. Hector intends to give the body of Patroclus to the dogs
of Troy, and to fix his head on the palisade above the wall.[3] The
fury of Achilles, when he learns from Iris the intentions of Hector,
has thus more excuse than is usually supposed. Homer himself found
such deeds in the tradition; and though he regards them with horror,
he cannot expurgate them. The insults lavished by Achilles on the
dead Hector are ἀεικέα ἔργα, deeds of shame.[4] But the deeds of
Hector would have been as shameful. The treatment of Hector was not
sensational enough for the refined taste of the Athenian tragedians.
Sophocles and Euripides make Achilles drag the wounded but living
Hector.[5]
The tragedians here followed a tradition that was not Homer's; it
may have come, Mr. Murray suggests, from the lost Cyclic poem _Iliou
Persis_, the _Sack of Ilios_. The Cyclic poets of 750-650 B.C. are in
all ways more superstitious and barbarous than Homer; theirs is the
taste of a later age than his, and, as we shall see, they are usually
followed by the Athenian tragedians. They preferred the "sensational"
and the "harrowing," and did not shrink, in the _Andromache_, as in
the Ionian _Sack of Ilios_, from the brutal murder of Hector's child,
Astyanax. Homer's men are never child-murderers. City sackings were
as cruel as those of Cromwell in Ireland, of Monk in Dundee; our own
dealings with Badajoz and Ciudad Rodrigo are more recent examples,
and these were towns of our allies. But Homer's men do not, like the
Assyrians, torture prisoners of war; such captives were starved,
tortured, and literally caged, to extract ransom, during our Hundred
Years' War with France; as Cromwell's prisoners, after Dunbar, were
starved in Durham Cathedral. In Homer, ransom is sometimes accepted,
in the earlier days of the siege. Achilles, especially, took ransoms
and was merciful. Contrast the ferocity of Agamemnon, who refuses
quarter, and slays a man to whom Menelaus was giving quarter.[6]
Agamemnon actually cuts off the hands and head of one foe, and throws
the head into the throng! He desires that not even the male child
in the womb may escape! (_Iliad_, vi. 56-60). There are chivalrous
passages, as when Hector and Aias exchange gifts after an indecisive
passage of arms, and when Diomede and Glaucus recognise their ancestral
friendship; but there are plenty of cases in which victors exult with
cruel humour over their fallen foes, in the spirit of Arthur in
Layamon's _Brut_. (1200 A.D.).
The dead, except in the case of Eetion on whom Achilles had ruth, were
always stripped of arms and armour, if the victors were not impeded.
The hut of Idomeneus held many such Trojan spoils. There are hints
of a custom of tearing the tunics, or chitons,[7] but they are vague
and unimportant. No doubt the act, when performed, was intended as an
insult, but it is only alluded to twice or thrice: in one case the
tunic is "of bronze," answering to the current term _χαλκοχίτωνες_,
"bronze-clad."[8] The case is obscure.
_A la guerre comme à la guerre_. The morals of war in Homer are not
unlike those of war everywhere in the matter of "atrocities." The siege
operations were very inefficient. The Achaeans were not able to invest
Troy, and they never dreamed of an escalade. Without a scaling-ladder
Patroclus "thrice clomb on the corner of the lofty wall," and was only
thrust back by Apollo.[9] But scaling-ladders are never mentioned; a
night attack is never contemplated. The famous Wooden Horse is the
only hint of an approach under a wooden cover on wheels (the mediaeval
"Sow"); and if it was anything of that sort, Homer did not understand
its nature. The efficient fighting in the open was done by chariotry
(the owners usually dismounted and fought in line or column); as in
most ancient oriental countries, Scotland in Roman times, and Ireland
in the Late Celtic period, perhaps as late as 300 a.d., also in early
Britain. By the date of the Black Figure vases (sixth century B.C.)
and in seventh century art, the painters often introduce mounted men:
the "late poets" abstained from doing so, it appears, except the late
unspeakable _Stümper_ of the Doloneia, according to Reichel.
The tactics, as far as we can make a coherent picture of them, were
peculiar, but not unexampled.
At the beginning of a pitched battle the knights (owners of chariots)
dismounted, and formed a thick and serried line of infantry: behind
them came the nameless host, concerning whose armour we have no
information. The light-armed archers and slingers showered their
missiles, and the combat might last for hours. At "the break of the
battle," when one side had broken the enemy's line, the victors pursued
either on foot, or, more generally, in their chariots which had been
stationed behind them in the close combat; while the vanquished leaped
into their chariots and fled, save the brave who retired face to the