Homer: The Complete Epic Poems + A Biography of the Author E-Book

Homer

• Herausgeber: Book House Publishing
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

This book contains several HTML tables of contents.The first table of contents (at the very beginning of the ebook) lists the titles of all novels included in this volume. By clicking on one of those titles you will be redirected to the beginning of that work, where you'll find a new TOC that lists all the chapters and sub-chapters of that specific work.Here you will find an in-depth biography of Homer and his complete epic poems.- The Iliad- The Odyssey

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Homer

THE COMPLETE EPIC POEMS

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Table of Contents

Homer — An Extensive Biography

The Iliad

The Odyssey

Homer — An Extensive Biography

by W. E. Gladstone

 

Chapter 1 — Homer the Man

Chapter 2 — The Homeric Question

Section 1 — Plots of the Poems

Section 2 — Against the Separators

Section 3 — Wolf and the Transmission by Memory

Chapter 3 — History

Chapter 4 — Cosmology

Chapter 5 — Geography

Chapter 6 — Mythology; Or, the Olympian System

Chapter 7 — Ethnology

Chapter 8 — Ethics of the Achaian Time

Chapter 9 — Polity

Chapter 10 — Europe and Asia, or Trojan and Achaian

Chapter 11 — Characters

Chapter 12 — Art, and the Arts

Chapter 13 — Homer’s Place and Office as a Poet

Chapter 1 — Homer the Man

1. Homer’s Unique Position. — The poems of Homer do not constitute merely a great item of the splendid literature of Greece; but they have a separate position, to which none other can approach. They, and the manners they describe, constitute a world of their own; and are severed by a sea of time, whose breadth has not been certainly measured, from the firmly-set continent of recorded tradition and continuous fact. In this sea they lie, as a great island. And in this island we find not merely details of events, but a scheme of human life and character, complete in all its parts. We are introduced to man in every relation of which he is capable; in every one of his arts, devices, institutions; in the entire circle of his experience. There is no other author, whose case is analogous to this, or of whom it can be said that the study of him is not a mere matter of literary criticism, but is a full study of life in every one of its departments. To rescue this circle of studies from inadequate conceptions, and to lay the ground for a true idea of them, I have proposed to term them Homerology. Of this Homerology, I shall now endeavour to present some of the first elements in their simplest form. And at the threshold, postponing for the moment our notice of the controversies involved in what is termed the Homeric question, let us see how far we can acquire an idea of the poet himself, and the conditions under which he lived.

2. Homer his own Witness. — When we use the word Homer, we do not mean a person historically known to us, like Pope or Milton. We mean in the main the author, whoever or whatever he was, of the wonderful poems called respectively, not by the author, but by the world, the Iliad and the Odyssey. His name is conventional, and its sense in etymology is not very different from that which would be conveyed by our phrase, “the author.” This is a Primer of Homer. That is to say, it aims at giving elementary knowledge respecting him and the works with which his name is coupled. In such a design, it is requisite above all to let the reader understand that we know nothing either definite or certain respecting Homer, unless in so far as it can be gathered from the poems he composed. Yet they very rarely use the first person, — only once in a passage of any importance; and exclusively in invocations to the Muse (Il. ii. 424-93); so that they convey no direct information whatever about the bard. It does not follow that our indirect knowledge must be small or untrustworthy. Great artists may be knowable from their works; and there is a singular transparency in the mind, as there is also in the limpid language of Homer. Old as he is, the comprehensive and systematic study of him is still young. It had hardly begun before the nineteenth century. With the primary source of information found in his text, we have to combine two others: (1) the scattered notices supplied by ancient tradition, and (2) the valuable and still growing illustrations furnished by the study of language, and by the discoveries, and learned study of ancient remains.

3. Our Earliest View of Him. — At the first dawn of the historic period, we find the poems established in popular renown; and so prominent, that a school of minstrels takes the name of Homeridae from making it their business to preserve and to recite them. Still, the question whether the poems as we have them can be trusted, whether they present substantially the character of what may be termed original documents, is one of great but gradually diminishing difficulty. It is also of importance, because of the nature of their contents. In the first place, they give a far greater amount of information, than is to be found in any other literary production of the same compass. In the second place, that information, speaking of it generally, is to be had nowhere else. In the third place, it is information of the utmost interest, and even of great moment. It introduces to us, in the very beginnings of their experience, the most gifted people of the world, and enables us to judge how they became such as in later times we know them; how they began to be fitted to discharge the splendid part, allotted to them in shaping the destinies of the world. And this picture is exhibited with such a fulness both of particulars and of vital force, that perhaps never in any country has an age been so completely placed upon record. Finally, amidst the increase of archaic knowledge on all sides, we begin to find a multitude of points of contact between the Homeric poems and the primitive history of the world, as it is gradually revealed by records, monuments, and language; so that they are coming more and more to constitute an important factor in the formation of that history.

4. Subsidiary Testimony. — There are indeed traditions, and there are fragmentary remains in verse, ascribed to his brethren in art or to himself, about Homer and about the subjects of his poems. But there is not one of these which we can trace with certainty to the date of the poems, still less of the occurrences set forth in them. They are such, in amount and in consistency, as to warrant the belief that they have a solid substratum of truth; but we cannot fix precisely either their outline or their details. We cannot trace them even orally, far less in a written form, up to, or near to, such a point as to give them anything like the character of contemporary evidence about Homer, given from without. These traditions and remains make their appearance, for the most part, as already subsisting in the first beginnings of the regular history of Greece; but Homer and Troy lie far back in the prehistoric period, the period during which men had not come to the use of certain, definite, and continuous records.

5. Due Reserve in Judgment. — Much of what the text contains is direct information, but much also is only suggestive. It would be inconvenient, in a work of this kind, to load every sentence with qualifications. Better that it should be understood from the outset that, in what is called the Homeric question, the propositions set forth cannot claim an historic certainty, but are given as rationally deducible from the study of the text, and from comparison with the studies which former generations have bestowed upon it. The authority of past generations, however, is not so high in a case of this kind, as in many others. For, in former times, Homer has been simply enjoyed as a great poet, rather than examined. Even now the work of extracting and methodising the contents of the poems, so far as they are capable of being viewed in the light of facts, has not been fully accomplished.

6. The Bard of the Heroic Age. — We learn from the poems that, even before the war of Troy, the profession of the minstrel had become an object of general interest, and had thus early taken its place in the public competitions, which were of high national importance among the later Greeks. For, in the catalogue of the Greek or Achaian army, Homer finds it convenient to mark the town of Dorion, part of the dominions of Nestor, as the place where the Muses punished Thamuris the Thracian, for having boasted that he would beat them, goddesses though they were, if they entered the lists against him. For this offence, as he was on his way to a match of this kind, they deprived him of the gift of song. Nothing could more clearly denote the high position of the bard as such, than its having tempted Thamuris into this presumption. The representation is sustained by all the other notes in the poems. The Bard was an essential member of the courts of princes, a trusted friend and counsellor of their families. His person had even a kind of sacredness attaching to it, apparently beyond that of the seer or prophet. No priest, and no minstrel, is ever engaged in the military service of the Homeric age. His office indeed implied more than the possession of a mere human gift: he habitually sang by an inspiration from on high. It was his duty to descant upon the freshest and most interesting subjects: and the events at Troy were reckoned to have pre-eminent attractions, even at the distant court of Alkinoos, before Odusseus had reached his island home. The profession of the Bard ranked among the standing professions of the age. These collectively supplied the social wants of man; but the special, distinctive office of the bard was to give delight. In cases, again, of domestic mourning, the bards led the laments over the dead: possibly gathering for such an occasion from allied houses, for on the great celebration of the obsequies of Hector, and in this instance only, bards are historically mentioned in the plural number. It must be added that, besides supplying song, the minstrel had the humbler yet joyful office of accompanying the dance; and he appears before us in this capacity upon the Shield of Achiiles.

7. Probable Position of Homer. — This Bard of the poems is commonly attached to a particular reigning family. In the case of Thamuris (Il. ii. 596) such a connection, though not named, is implied. But as we thus hear of the itinerancy of a stationary bard, so there may well have been itinerants by profession. This appears to be the life which we may reasonably suppose Homer to have followed, on such grounds as follow: (1) Both because his works have survived the action of time and its revolutions, which have obliterated every contemporary production, and on account of the surpassing nature of the works, we must assign to their author a decided pre-eminence among the men of his class and time. This may render it questionable whether he could have been tied down as a family retainer to a narrow corner of a narrow country. (2) A connection with a particular family would almost certainly have left signs of it upon the face of the poems. But, while the poems are intensely national, they are nowhere sectional. (3) His works show an acquaintance with geography, which was evidently for the most part founded on personal inspection, and presumes his free movement over the circle of Achaian experience. And he refers specially to the effect of travel in enriching and quickening the mind.

8. Tradition of his Blindness. — It is supposed by many that the poet was blind. In support of this idea it is noticed that he touches with a peculiar tenderness of sympathy the case of Demodokos, the Bard of Alkinoos in the Odyssey; whom the Muse, loving him right well, deprived of the sense of sight, but endowed with the sweet gift of song. A tradition, perhaps true, perhaps mythical, grew up, of Homer’s blindness; and it was handed on, in a passage of singular pathos, forming part of one of the Hymns, which is ascribed by Thucydides, but beyond doubt wrongly ascribed, to the author of the poems himself. What may be asserted with confidence is that Homer, if blind at all, was only blind in later life. For, as he is the most objective of all poets, so it is especially the imagery of sight, which supplies him with a chief part of his inexhaustible resources. His sense of light, of form, and of motion was beyond anything vigorous and prolific; and though his perceptions of special colour were very indeterminate, yet even colour has supplied him with a number of effective touches, largely in excess of what other poets generally have been able to obtain from it.

9. Itinerant, but in his Country only. — We are then probably to conceive of Homer as of a Bard who went from place to place to earn his bread by his profession, to exercise his knowledge in his gift of song, and to enlarge it by an ever-active observation of nature, and experience of men. There is no sign, anywhere in the poems, of his having had living personal contact with foreigners, except individually, or of his having visited foreign lands. Although it is plain that he had busied himself with efforts to learn all he could about these, he seems to anticipate and realise in himself that later Hellenic spirit, which divided the world into Greeks and barbarians, and to keep an opaque curtain hung all round, or an indefinite distance interposed, between his own dear people and other races and empires, which at the time, as we now know, bore the most conspicuous parts in the drama of human history. It is plain that he lived, and practised his art, within the limits of his country. But what was his country?

10. Was he an Asiatic Greek? — On all hands it will be admitted that Homer sang to Greeks. Nor does any one suppose that he sang to Greeks of the Italian, or other western, colonies. It has however been extensively believed, that he was a Greek of Asia Minor. And as there were no Greeks of Asia Minor at the time of the Trojan war, nor until a wide and searching revolution in the peninsula had substituted Dorian manners for those of the earlier Achaian age, which Homer sang, this belief involves the further proposition that the poet was severed by a considerable interval of time from the subjects of his verse. The last-named opinion depends very much upon the first; and the first chiefly, if not wholly, upon a perfectly vague tradition, which has no pretence to an historical character.

11. Why so Reputed. — The manners belonging to the age of the Trojan War were swept violently out of Greece by the Dorian revolution, after a period of uncertain length, commonly taken at eighty years. Long after this revolution, civilisation had to make a new beginning in the Greek Peninsula. Homer if known there before, yet during the troubled time, and under a strong barbarising influence, must in all likelihood have been swept away by the flood. It is an acknowledged proposition that the emigrants from Greece who settled in Asia Minor, carried with them the remains of the anterior civilisation, and became for some ages, in their new seats, its main representatives. If the poems of Homer existed at the time, there can be no room for doubt that they shared the destiny of the surrounding elements of culture. From the period of the settlements in Asia civil and social progress seem to have been continuous within them. We now find ourselves upon the lines of established polity, and, after a while, of regular record. It is therefore from this era and this region, that we immediately derive our Homer: it is from thence that he was imported, or reimported, into Greece. Nothing then can be more easy than to account for the belief that Homer was an Asiatic Greek. For the Greeks of Asia were those who could produce the oldest recorded title to claim the poems as their own. It was disputed indeed, as by Athens and by Argos: but on the whole it vaguely prevailed; and it now awaits the judgment of an age distinguished by increased care and enlarged advantages in critical inquiry.

12. Reasons in Disproof. — The question then has to be decided, in the absence of all really historic testimony, by the internal evidence of the poems. This evidence, I venture to say, strongly supports the belief that Homer was an European, and if an European, then certainly also an Achaian Greek: a Greek, that is to say, of the pre-Doric period, when the Achaian name prevailed, and principally distinguished the race. Among the presumptions, which tend to show that he was not of the Doric time or the Asiatic region, are these: —

(1.) The Achaian name became insignificant in the Doric time, and never found its way into Asia; but it may justly be called the great national name throughout the poems.

(2.) The Dorian name, if predominant in the Greek peninsula at the period when the poems were composed, would naturally find an important place in them. It is, on the contrary, but twice used, and is wholly insignificant.

(3.) A poet of Asia, or of the Dorian epoch, would probably have called the pre-Doric Greeks by the race-name of Hellenes, which must by that time have been widely spread; but this name is hardly found in the poems, and it has not yet arrived at an established meaning.

(4.) The Ionians attained, in Asia Minor, to a very high position, and traces of this fact would surely have been found in a poet of their blood. But the Ionians of the poems are entirely in the background, and may even appear to be disparaged, as a soldiery, by the epithet “tunic-trailing,” which is the only one applied to them.

(5.) At the period of the Greek migrations to Asia, the Aeolian name was soon established, and became historical as a great race-name. There is no such name in the poems; but only the name of Aiolid, a patronymic. Aiolos is, in Achaian Greece, not the eponymist of a tribe or race, but only the (real or mythical) ancestor of a family.

(6.) In the Asiatic Aiolis was included the plain of Troy. Had Homer sung in that region, to people familiar with the local features, he would have described them with thorough accuracy. But his account of the plain, though full of characteristic points, has not as yet been reduced to a complete consistency with those features.

(7.) Athens hospitably entertained the fugitives from the Dorian conquest, and would naturally stand high with a bard belonging to their race. But the place of Athens in the action of the Iliad is very secondary: and the single passage, in which it is panegyrised, is one of the few widely held to be spurious.

(8.) The notes of personal and local colouring drawn from the peninsula in the Greek Catalogue, both inland and along the coast, are numerous and vivid. But, in the description of the Asiatic coast south of Troas, and reaching to Lycia, there are but three epithets belonging to natural features; these three all refer to objects on the coast, not inland, and there is only a single notice of a town or settlement. He could hardly have been a native of the country, with which he shows so inferior an acquaintance.

(9.) Mr. Wood, assuming that the Zephuros of Homer corresponds with our west wind, defends the declaration of the poet that it, with Boreas, blows from Thrace, by saying it is a westerly wind as respects Ionia. But the Zephuros of Homer is a north-west, not a west wind, and the poet (Il. ix, 5) is describing its effect on the Aegean Sea: he therefore requires no defence, and raises no presumption respecting Ionia.

(10.) In Il. iv. 52, Hera is made to suppose the possible’ destruction of Argos, Sparta, and Mukenai. From this passage it is argued that the poet knew of the Doric revolution, which transferred the seat of power from Mukenai to Argos. But that revolution elevated Sparta, left Argos as it was, and did not destroy, if it depressed, Mukenai.

(11.) On the other hand, it is strange indeed if a poet, who had witnessed so vast a convulsion, composed 27,700 lines with no other or clearer allusion to it than this, which is most faint, and indeed very equivocal.

(12.) The Hymn to Apollo, cited by Thucydides, which represents Homer as dwelling in Chios, is demonstrably not the work of Homer; and only expresses that later tradition as to his birth and habitat, which did beyond doubt come extensively into vogue.

(13.) The twentieth Iliad contains a prophecy that descendants of Aineias, yet unborn, should reign over the Trojans. This is perfectly in harmony with the supposition that the poet flourished between the siege of Troy and the Dorian Revolution; and that he may have seen more than one generation after the war, born and reigning in Troas.

(14.) The traditions found in Homer, which relate to Asia Minor, are such as might easily have been gathered from report. For example, silver was found in Chalubè near the Euxine (and it is still found there); and the Phrygians, aided by Priam, had fought with the Amazons on the River Sangarios. Even so he knows the wealth of Egyptian Thebes, names for it a king and a queen, and gives an account of the trans-Egyptian Pygmseans. Compare with these slight notices the wealth of his legends from within the Greek peninsula.

(15.) In the later mythology of Greece, we find copious legends, eg. those touching Kubelè and the Kabeiroi, which were derived from Phrygia. This is readily explained by the contact of the Asiatic Greeks with that country. But there is no trace of these legends in Homer. It is probable, then, that he did not share that contact.

(16.) But the argument which is the strongest, and which I cannot but deem in itself irrefragable, is one that cannot be fully appreciated except upon a close and minute study of the poems. It is that the men, the manners, the institutions that Homer sings of with such an intimacy of living familiarity, such a prevailing sense of nearness, were essentially Achaian, ceased to exist, in their Achaian form, upon the Dorian Revolution, and could hardly have been reproduced by a poet remote from them in time, especially when there were no aids of literary and historical record. For it must be borne in mind that the poems are undoubtedly anterior to the use of writing for any of these purposes.

13. Conclusion. His Name. — It appears then easy to understand why Homer should have been widely (though not uniformly) supposed to belong to that Hellenic region in which he first, so to speak, set his foot on dry ground; in which, that is to say, his poems had their earliest contact with palpable and continuous history. But also not difficult to see that he was a Greek of the Achaian mould, and therefore of the Achaian period, and with his seat in the peninsula.

And, this being so, it appears not unreasonable to picture to ourselves the Father of all known poetry traversing the hills and vales of Greece, from court to court, from festival to festival, in free communion with nature, in large observation of man, and in the constant practice of the glorious art, which requited hospitality with the delight of song. It should however be observed, that of his real name we have no record whatever. Like to Poietes, the Maker or Poet, as he was called, by way of homage to his paramount excellence, m later times, is Homeros, the Fitter. The word may have been suggested by the single passage of the Odyssey, in which we have the kindred verb homerenein (Od. xvi. 468), used to describe the meeting together of persons from a distance. There is probably no other instance of a name thus indisputably unauthentic, which is now so inextricably welded into the mind and memory of man, that if by any accident the true name could be discovered, it would scarcely have a chance of displacing the Active one.

Chapter 2 — The Homeric Question

The controversies summed up under the name of the “Homeric Question” cannot be passed by even in an elementary work; but I shall endeavour to be as little technical as may be. They involve: —

1. The unity of authorship for the Iliad.

2. The unity of authorship for the Odyssey.

3. The unity of authorship for the two jointly.

4. The general purity and soundness of the text.

Of these the first, as distinct from the others, carries

us over ground appropriate to my design; for the framework cannot be severed from the substance and merits of the work. The same may be said of the third. The second, though it falls within the scope of the sceptical argument, is so little contested that this point need not be dwelt on at much length. Under the fourth head I shall only notice the Wolfian attack, and the subject of transmission by memory, it being my purpose to give the reader as much of a living Homer himself as possible, and as little of what is only about Homer.

 

Section 1 — Plots of the Poems

1. The Title of Iliad a Misnomer. — The plot of the Iliad is one of the capital subjects, not yet thoroughly explored, to which the attention of every student should be directed. Much criticism aimed at it has really been founded on the title, rather than on the poem. It is hardly fortunate; for it draws off attention from the real subject, which is the Wrath of Achilles. With the beginning of this wrath it begins, and with the cessation it ends. The war is taken out of its normal course by the demand of Chruses the priest for the restoration of his daughter; it is replaced, after the disturbance, with the close of the obsequies of Hector. The poem is properly a personal poem; but upon one stupendous character is hung a tissue of action, which gives it the necessary breadth, and stamps it as among all human productions perhaps the most intensely national.

2. Opening of the Terrestrial Plot. — In a division of booty, such as regularly took place on the capture of a town, Chruseis, the daughter of a priest of Apollo, has been appropriated to Agamemnon, the leader of the host. The father demands restitution, which is refused by the possessor of the prize. Vengeance is invoked, and the god sends a plague among the army. Achilles causes the general Assembly to be summoned, and appeals to Calchas the augur to declare the cause of the calamity. Calchas proclaims it to be the capture and detention of Chruseis. After a fierce debate, Agamemnon the king announces that he will restore the maid, but will appropriate Briseis, the prize of Achilles, in her stead. Achilles is warned from heaven not to lay hands on him; and the double transference takes effect. Achilles then betakes himself to his mother Thetis; and she obtains from Zeus an engagement, that the Trojans shall have the upper hand in the war until justice shall be done, and due honour paid to her son. Thus the terrestrial scheme of the poem is fairly launched.

3. The Celestial Plot. — But it has also a celestial scheme. A persistent controversy in the council of Olumpos accompanies the struggle upon earth, in which the several deities take part, mainly according to their ethnical affinities. Poseidon, who has suffered wrong in Troy from Laomedon, Hera, the great national divinity of the Greeks, Athene, the personal protectress of Achilles, of Odusseus, and of Diomed (both these goddesses having also a private grudge) of themselves suffice to give a preponderance against Troy. But the cause is fundamentally righteous; and Zeus, the supreme representative of deity, cannot contravene it, although he greatly regards the known piety of Hector, leader of the Trojan forces. The gross wrong done to Achilles is artfully made use of, to place the Sire of gods and men for the time on the other side: and with him Apollo, who is the only remaining deity of the first rank, and who invariably reflects his will. Such is the point of departure for the celestial, or Olympian plot; and, to mark it sufficiently, means are at once found to introduce us to a remarkable scene, which exhibits the converse, banquet, and course of daily life among the gods.

4. The Second Assembly and the Array. — Agamemnon, receiving through a dream the promise that he shall now take the city, determines nevertheless to test the spirit of the army, by formally proposing to them that they shall go home. They take him at his word, and rush to the ships. They are only brought back by the decision, presence of mind, and vigorous action of Odusseus, who rallies the dispersed assembly, and warms them with the recital of a good omen. Nestor hereon advises a formal array of the army, with a view to improved discipline, now more needful in the absence of Achilles. Thus, after a solemn sacrifice, is introduced the Catalogue, or Domesday Book of Greece. Priam and Hector, hearing of this muster, undertake a like operation, and a less detailed “state” is exhibited of the Trojan host with its allies.

5. The War in the Absence of Achilles. — Nothing is ever placed in competition with the colossal figure of Achilles; but, as he is now absent, Homer obtains space for the exhibition of the other principal Achaian chieftains and their feats. The whole of the Books, from the Third to the Fifteenth inclusive, are so contrived that a real superiority, both of honour and of force, is assigned all along to the national side; while, to fulfil the aim of the poem, the Trojans gain the upper hand by means of various expedients, such as divine intervention, the use of the bow, which entails no danger to the person employing it, and the interference of the heralds to save Hector, upon his combat with Aias, from utter defeat. The operations commence with a single battle between Menelaos and Paris, who owes his safety to being carried off by Aphrodite. On the issue of this combat the entire war was to depend; but Pandaros, under the crafty suggestion of Athene, breaks the compact by treacherously wounding Menelaos with an arrow. Meanwhile Helen had come forth to see the single combat, moved without doubt by her interest in Menelaos, and anticipation of his victory: and she is made to apprise Priam of the names of several leading Achaian chieftains, who are within view from the walls.

6. The Achaian Fortunes at the lowest Ebb. — Homer, by the means I have named, reduces the Greeks to such a point that, in the Ninth Book, Odusseus and Aias are sent on an embassy of reparation to Achilles. He remains however sternly inexorable, and the fortune of the war continues adverse, though spendid feats of arms have been and are performed, especially by Agamemnon, by Aias, and by Diomed, who has wounded two of the Trojan deities, Arès and Aphrodite. A fosse and rampart, which the Greeks have constructed, is assailed; Sarpedon drags down the battlement, Hector breaks open the gates; Zeus restrains the action of the Hellenising divinities; at length Hector lays hold of the vessel which brought Portesilaos, and calls for fire to burn it. Aias, after long resistance, is finally exhausted. The Trojans set fire to the ship: this supreme honour being carefully withheld from the Trojan leader.

7. Patroclos fights, and dies by Contrivance. — The moment has now arrived which Achilles had fixed in his mind as the last, up to which he could maintain his rigid abstention. He sends the Myrmidons, under his bosom friend Patroclos, into battle. The tide is at once turned. Sarpedon, perhaps the first warrior on the side of Troy, is slain by Patroclos. The victor is then slain himself, nominally by Hector, but only after being disabled, and in great measure disarmed by Apollo, and wounded by Euphorbos. It is a cardinal rule with Homer, that no considerable Greek chieftain is ever slain in fair fight by a Trojan. The most noteworthy Greek, who falls in battle, is Tlepolemos; and Sarpedon, who kills him, is leader of the Lycians, a race with whom Homer betrays a peculiar sympathy. The threadbare victory of Hector is further reduced by the success of the Greeks in recovering the body of Patroclos. In the meantime Achilles is apprised of the catastrophe through Antilochos, elder son of Nestor, and a favourite of the great chief.

8. The Manifestation of Achilles. — The sun of the Trojan fortunes has now set. In the last eight Books of the twenty-four, the figure of Achilles towers aloft, and overshadows every other. His grief is as portentous, as his wrath. Through his mother Thetis, the celestial artificer Hephaistos is put in motion to furnish him with arms, in lieu of those which Patroclos had borne, and Hector had appropriated. The scale, so to speak, of the poem, is now raised, in order to glorify its great hero; all the dimensions are everywhere colossal. The battle of the gods is announced. When it takes effect, the Hellenising deities have a marked superiority; but the poet, who always honours Apollo and his mother Leto, has contrivances for keeping them out of the fray. The Trojans fall in whole sheaves before Achilles; no Trojan chieftain makes the smallest head against him. He slays Astcropaios, son of the River-god Axios, valiantly fighting, but in vain. His only real opponent is the River-god Scamandros, who endeavours to carry him away by virtue of the strength of his deity in flood. Even this, however, is not conclusive, until he has called in the succour of his brother Simois. Hera then obtains the aid of Hephaistos, who, as a superior god, checks the flood with fire. Achilles is thus set free, and the city is only saved from immediate capture, to follow on his entering with the fugitives, through the stratagem of Apollo, who, in the likeness of the Trojan prince Agenor, entices him away.

9. Contrivances for the Battle with Hector. We now approach the main issue; and there is nothing more artful in the poem, than the way in which Hector, who was of proved inferiority to other Achaian chiefs, is brought beamingly into action with Achilles; in part by his over-weening self-confidence, which prevents him from taking refuge within the walls; in part by his fear that, if now he adopt the waiting game, he will be reproached by the prudent Ponludamas, who had advised it long before; and finally, after he has taken to flight and thrice made the circuit of the walls, by the stratagem of Athene, who, under the figure of his brother Deiphobos, exhorts and persuades him to stand, that they may jointly contend with the terrible warrior. So it is that the fight begins. But, after the first stage of it, Hector finds that the personated Deiphobos has disappeared. Now his case is desperate; and from despair he becomes, perhaps it may be said for the first time, a hero. Zeus and Apollo, he finds, no more protect him. Destiny presses hard upon him. “Let me not then die inert and inglorious, but do a noble deed, which shall resound through all posterity” (xxii. 304).

He falls, of course, in the unequal fight. The Achaian soldiery, gathering round his body, admire its beauty, but deface it with gashes. The fierceness, which is so powerful a constituent of the character of Achilles, is now drawn off from Agamemnon, and concentrated on the remains of Hector, as the slayer of his friend. These he ties from the ancles to his chariot, and drags along the plain to his quarters, while passionate laments are raised within the city for the champion they have lost.

10. Reconciliation with the Living, and Honour to the Dead. — To conclude the great drama of the Wrath, it now remains to give emphasis to the reconciliation with Agamemnon; to obtain the release of the dead Hector from dishonour; and to signalise by noble obsequies the demise of the man who, by his character and his arms, had been the main prop of Troy. The first is effected by the solemn Games, in which Achilles exhibits in its perfection the character of the liberal and courteous gentleman. For the second and more difficult purpose, the agency of his mother Thetis is employed to suppress the yet smouldering fires within his bosom, and both Iris and Hermes are at the same time despatched from the Divine Assembly to set Priam in motion, and conduct him to the camp as the suppliant of Achilles. In the interview which follows, although the great chief is still tempted towards wrath with even the aged father of the man who slew his friend, yet pity and sorrow obtain the mastery. They weep profusely together. The body of Hector is delivered and received with all pious care, a truce of eleven days is granted for the obsequies, and on them the curtain falls.

11. The Artful Balance of the Poem. — The nicest art is exhibited throughout the poem, in a jealous reservation to the chiefs on the Achaian side of a marked military superiority, while their opponents are maintained just at such a modified pitch of dignity and valour, as to leave entire and unimpaired the glory, or credit, of worsting them.

12. Sustained Parallelism of the Divine Action. — But, together with this terrestrial action, an Olympian or celestial plot moves on parallel lines, from the exordium to the end. The sensible, though not unlimited, difference of nationality between Trojan and Achaian is accurately reflected in Olumpos. The Trojan section of the Divine Court consists in part of deities apparently not yet recognised in Greece: Ares, Aphrodite, and lastly the Sun, to whom no active share is allowed. Then there is Scamandros, a purely elemental deity, and also purely local. Their inferiority to the Hellenising deities is made up by the action of Zeus through Apollo, until the termination of the Wrath. From first to last the game is played above with the keen interest of living men, and it is made visible to our eyes at the interstices of the terrestrial action.

13. Moral Adjustment of the Poem. — While such is the theurgy of the poem, the main lines of its morality are strong and clear. Agamemnon, for his greed and tyranny, is wounded in his most sensitive part, namely, the feeling of a thoroughly politic general and monarch for his people, and for his power. Achilles, who is on the side of right in this quarrel, is nevertheless punished, by a protracted agony of grief over his lost friend, for the excess which he allows to deform his sense of wrong. But neither of these aims are so pursued as to neutralise that general movement in the fortunes of the war, which is demanded by the moral order of the world. The cause for which the Trojans fight is a bad cause, and receives the defeat which it deserves.

14. National Aim and Feeling. — Hector, though regarded for his personal qualities, fights in an evil quarrel, and dies. Next to the ethical, the national aim is with the poet the most essential; and the absence of the Protagonist from the field gives him an opportunity of glorifying the exploits of the other chieftains, each of whom could not fail to be an object of peculiar interest in his own proper part of Greece. Moreover, these high exploits of the associated chiefs, which required space and detail for their full exhibition, not only did honour to the nation generally when measured against the Trojan performances, but formed a scaffolding, as it were, on which to build up the yet greater achievements of Achilles, and give more marked elevation and prominence to their really preterhuman scale.

15. The Plot an Argument not against the Unity, but for it. — If these views be correct, the plot of the Iliad is one of the most consummate works known to literature. The objections which have been founded on it to disprove the unity of the work are, it may be said, objections of very small stature. And not only is it not true that want of cohesion and proportion in the Iliad betrays a plurality of authors, but it is rather true that a structure so highly and delicately organised constitutes in itself a powerful argument, to prove its unity of conception and execution.

16. Alleged Minor Discrepancies. — With regard to discrepancies in the text, every effort to show them in mass may be declared to have failed. The markings of time, by division into day and night, are clear and consistent. The theory of some travellers, which placed Troy at a distance of six or eight miles from the sea, supplied a weapon against the poem, which represents backward and forward movements of the armies between the walls and the ships as repeated on the same day. But that theory has been found untenable. Moreover, the recent discoveries of Schliemann have made it appear probable, that Troy was seated on the hill of Hissarlik, at a distance from the shore, even as it now is, of less than three miles, which was probably shorter at the epoch of the poem. Almost the only real discrepancy of the text is in the case of Pulaimenes, leader of the Paphlagones, who is slain by Menelaos in the fifth Book, but weeps among the mourners at the death of his son Harpalion in the thirteenth.

17. The Destructive Theories. — A more serious question is raised with reference to the general structure of the poem. Achilles is the protagonist, or hero of the poem, as Odusseus is of the Odyssey. In the Odyssey, every book either produces or stands directly related to the hero, whereas Achilles disappears from the seven Books between the first and ninth, and from the six between the ninth and the sixteenth. This is, without doubt, a very peculiar arrangement. It has tempted Grote to propound the division of the poem into an Achilleis, which should contain the Books where the great chief is active, and an Ilias, composed of the Books when he is in eclipse. But the very eminent historian has in this speculation enlisted no disciples. And it may be observed generally, as a material, though not a decisive fact, that while the destructive criticism bestowed upon Homer has had, especially in Germany, very extensive support, no particular scheme, set up to replace that of the unity of the poems, has met with any degree of favour.

18. Plot of the Odyssey. — The beauties of the Odyssey in characters and in detail cannot be exaggerated: but there was nothing like the same amount of mental effort required for the construction of the plot. It begins with an Olympian Council, which determines that Odusseus shall be brought home from the Island of Kalupso, where he has been detained for many years. At the same Athene designs that while the Suitors, who woo Penelope, are engaged in riotous living at the palace, Telemachos, now come to manhood, shall pass over from Ithaca to the mainland, and make inquiries about his father. In executing this plan, he obtains much intelligence respecting the return home of the chieftains, and the lengthened tour of Menelaos on the south-east coast of the Mediterranean. In the fifth Book, we have the release of Odusseus from Kalupso, and his return homewards as far as Scherie, the land of shipmen; a place described by Homer apparently upon the basis of accounts, which had reference to the topography of Corfu. Here he is hospitably entertained, and a vessel is prepared to carry him to Ithaca. Before setting out he describes, in Books ix.-xii., his own extended wanderings to the coast of Africa, then into the far west and north, then to the east and the Under-world, and again, after he has made way on his journey homewards, his being again driven out into the centre of the great sea, northwards, where he became the guest, the darling, and the prisoner of Kalupso. After being deposited in Ithaca, he betakes himself first to the cottage of the trusty swineherd Eumaios. Here Telemachos meets him; and from hence, disfigured and thus disguised by Athene, he ventures down to the city, and makes full proof of the insolent mind and purpose of the Suitors. The trial of the bow is proposed to them by Penelope; and the person who draws it is to have the reward of her hand. They all fail. Odusseus himself performs the feat: and then comes the terrible slaughter of the guilty and reckless men. It is followed by the disclosure of himself to Penelope, and his re-establishment in power, after a scene of recognition with his father Laertes, and a civil war in miniature against the party who adhere to the Suitors. There is a curious realism in the difficulties which beset the re-establishment of Odusseus in his dominions. It seems to bear witness to a truly historical character in the narrative.

19. Theurgy of the Poem. — The divine action, parallel with the human, is maintained from first to last. It may however be described as a manifestation of close providential superintendence, without the marked interpositions of the Iliad. There is no division of parties in Olumpos. Only Poseidon persecutes the hero from a personal grudge; and the Sun, Helios, becomes hostile from a like cause at a particular point. On the other hand, the interests of the hero, and those of his house, are sustained by the ever-wakeful prudence and energy of Athene.

20. The Two Plots Compared. — The two plots may be briefly compared. In the plot of the Odyssey, symmetry is obvious at first sight. In the plot of the Iliad, it has to be sought out; and the relevancy and proportion of the parts are only seen in full when we bring into view, together with the highly national character of the poem, the circumstances of the minstrel, itinerant among the courts, festivals, and games of Greece, and naturally led to give alternate prominence to the performances of the respective chiefs, with whose names this or that part of the country had a special connection. The plot of the Iliad is in reality a far more subtle, far less imitable work. Each poem hangs upon a man: the Iliad upon the wrath of a man. Each poem is intensely national; but the nationality of the Iliad is exhibited in the struggle with an alien and offending power; that of the Odyssey in the comparison and contrast between Achaian life on the one side, and foreign and partly fabulous scenes, manners, and institutions on the other. The Odyssey is more strange in adventures; but its ordinary tone within the Hellenic zone is calmer and more subdued, and tends less, except when near the crisis, to warm the blood of the reader. There is in each a parallelism between the divine and the human actions. It is but rarely, in the Iliad, that grandeur and rapid force give way, to allow the exhibition of domestic affection: yet this exhibition is as remarkable and unequivocal as the more splendid features of the poem. Conversely in the Odyssey, the family life supplies the tissue upon and into which is woven the action of the poem: yet upon occasion it rises into a grandeur that is extraordinary. The scene of Hector and Andromache equals the Odyssey in tenderness; the slow preparations, moral as well as physical, for the great Vengeance on the Suitors, in their stem sublimity, perhaps may match with anything in the Iliad: so that each poem, from base to summit, has a somewhat similar largeness of range. The Iliad is carefully finished to the end; and, if it flags at all, flags in some of the middle parts, while the great issue remains suspended: the last Book of the Odyssey, while it carries a sufficiency of identifying marks, exhibits a manifest decline in force, as if the mind and hand of the master were conscious that their work was done, and coveted their rest.

Section 2 — Against the Separators

1. Objections of the Separators. — Many, who firmly hold the separate unity of each poem, decline to refer them to the same author. The controversy with these Chorizontes, or Separators, forms the gravest branch of the Homeric Question.

This school of disputants first appeared among the Alexandrian critics about two centuries B.C. The arguments, variously handled at different times, are mainly as follows: —

(1.) There has been alleged a difference of grammatical forms indicative of a later date of composition for the Odyssey.

(2.) Differences in the narrative.

(3.) Differences in the religious department.

(4.) Differences in the manners, the political and social picture.

2. Reply to Objection (1). — As to the gram matical forms, the reply has been, a, that the variance is insignificant; b, that it tends to exhibit the use of older and less expanded forms in the Odyssey rather than the reverse; c, that the use of such forms cannot show the Odyssey to be later; d, that neither do they show it to be earlier, for the amplitude of the less archaic forms harmonises with, and may be accounted for by, the greater majesty of style required for the more majestic subject of the Iliad.

3. Reply to Objection (2). — As to the narrative, without doubt the Odyssey makes additions to the Iliad, but they relate to a period after the action of the Iliad closes. It is however urged that, in the Odyssey, there appears on the stage Neoptolemos, a full-grown son of Achilles, about whom the Iliad, in the ninth year of the war, is silent. It may be added that Achilles speaks of Briseis as having been at least in contemplation his wife: and that, even at this date, he belongs to the younger rather than the elder group of the Greek chieftains. But in Montenegro, men of or under thirty-five often have a son able to bear arms. On various grounds, we may assert that he had no wife living at his home. But we cannot therefore assert that he had never had one. There is however a wider question: namely whether, in assigning whole decades of years to the drama of the war, Homer proceeds as a chronicler, or conventionally for the purposes of his art. Even were there a merely chronological discrepancy, we might urge that it perhaps belongs to a field in which poetical colouring is allowed, and that in any case it affords too narrow a ground for an argument on authorship.

4. Reply to Objection (3). — As to differences in the religious department, the objection taken is twofold. First, it is held by some that the divine order exhibits m the Odyssey a higher morality. But in truth both poems work out strictly the divine counsel and the ends of justice; both connect morality with piety; both exhibit elements of corruption in the celestial hierarchy; in both there are gods, who show signs of lust and of vindictive passion. If their mirth is marred by their fighting in Iliad xxi., they have to wink in the Odyssey at the persistent opposition of Poseidon to the divine counsels in favour of the return of Odusseus.

It may be doubted whether the higher ethics anywhere in the Iliad undergo such serious disparagement as in the intrigue of Ares and Aphrodite (Od. viii.); in the declaration of Athene to Odusseus in the thirteenth Book that she was in heaven, as he on earth, the person most deeply versed in guileful arts; and in the exhibition of Hermes (Od. xx.) as the official teacher of thieving and of perjury.

The second point of the objection is, that the composition and attributes of the divine hierarchy in the two poems do not agree. Iris is employed as the divine messenger in the Iliad, commonly, though not exclusively; Hermes in the Odyssey. The Sun is a sleeping partner in the Iliad, whose personality is only detected by a phrase or two; in the Odyssey, he is active and jealous, both as a ruler upon earth, and as a member of the Olympian court. Hephaistos is the husband of Aphrodite in the Odyssey, but of a somewhat ideal Charis in the Iliad. It might be added that the Hera of the Iliad shares freely in the divine government of affairs, but she has no practical part in the Odyssey; and that Poseidon, whose proceedings are subject to the direct control of Zeus in the Iliad,, has a much more unchecked action in the Odyssey. Some minor differences will be noted elsewhere; but these are important. They would justly lead us to surmise duality of authorship, if the poet were in the two works dealing with the same scenes and races. But, in a large part of the Odyssey, he passes beyond the limits of the well known or Achaian world. He was perfectly aware that there were national varieties of religion; and it is to these that the foregoing differences seem to be really referable. If this be so, the mythological diversities seem to represent not diversity of authorship, but sagacity and circumspection in the representation of manners as to both poems respectively; and so far as these qualities are rare ones, they go to make it likely that two works, in each of which they are remarkable, proceeded from the same brain.

5. Reply to Objection (4). — As to differences in the political and social sphere, it is true that various details of life appear in the Odyssey, which are wanting in the Iliad. So do many details of military life currently appear in the Iliad and not in the Odyssey. It could not be otherwise. Camp life is one thing, civil life is another. No argument can be founded upon diversities, which belong to the nature of the scenes pourtrayed.

There is however a political variance, which does not at once fall within this explanation. The title of Hasileus, or King, is used in the Iliad with the utmost restraint, and only for some eight or ten Greek persons. But in the Odyssey every Suitor is a basileus. To account for this, we must advert to the revolutionary effect, which the Troic expedition could not but tend to produce in Greece, like the Crusades at a later date in Europe. Upon the prolonged absence of the chief lord, nothing could be more natural than that the petty lords, having for the time no superior, should affect the sovereign title. But the broad principles of polity set forth in the Odyssey appear to be identical with those of the Iliad.

6. Arguments for Unity. Improbability that there should be Two Poets of such rank. — But those, who defend the unity of the double work, do not rest satisfied with mere replies to objections.

The positive grounds for ascribing the Odyssey to the author of the Iliad may be partially stated as follows.

Either of these poems places its author at an elevation among the poets of the entire civilisation of the world, which is very peculiar. The judgment of the Greeks, without doubt very strong in constructive appreciation, gradually but firmly drew a broad line between these and the many competing productions, handed down from the prehistoric age, and assigned to their author a position of solitary grandeur. He long held it alone: some would say he holds it still: some would place Dante by his side, yet more would so place Shakespeare; few in comparison would admit any other claim. That one such poet as our Homer should have arisen in an age stinted in the materials of thought, possessed of little hereditary training, an age without aids and appliances, and of manners including a large barbarous element, is marvellous. To suppose the existence of two men, each of them a supreme poet, appears to be a very daring paradox. As the aloe is said to flower once in a hundred years, so it seems to be but once in one or two thousand that nature flowers into this unrivalled product. Either the Iliad or the Odyssey suffices to stamp the character. It is not agreeable to analogy to suppose a personality of so transcendent a kind to have been so soon repeated, and on so limited a stage.

7. Correspondence of the Poems in Great Outlines. — Some minds will derive a more solid satisfaction from the positive evidence of correspondence in all the great outlines of the two poems. In cases where the conceptions of a poet are faint and shallow, such correspondence might mean little more than the mere absence of discrepancy. But in Homer every character, every idea, is sharply cut, and full of vitality. The correspondence of wooden blocks is not remarkable, the correspondence of human forms and faces often is. Now there is not a department of life or thought, in which close correspondence between the two poems is not the general rule: and the objections of opponents have been endeavours to show particular exceptions. If we take first the mythology: the divine personages are alike intensely charged with human elements; they generally act, govern, love, and hate on the same principles: the Olumpian polity, a marvellous formation, is similarly conceived and worked. If we turn to the human characters, the evidence is yet more many-sided. We see that the hand, which drew Andromache, was the hand to draw Penelope. We find, not always a circumstantial identity where the same personage appears in the two poems, but a new shade of colour, or modification of attitude, in just proportion to the change of position. The distressed Helen of the Iliad becomes the favoured Helen of the Odyssey, vested in a queenly calm, but still with recollections which serve to chasten pride. The impassioned Achilles of the Iliad reappears in all his grandeur, but beneath a veil of solemn sadness, as befits the Underworld. But in a character like that of Menelaos, where the change of circumstances is more material than moral, the delineation remains without any sensible alteration. Take again the extreme difficulty of drawing effectively a character like that of Odusseus. In one sense, much that is new in him comes out in the Odyssey: but what so comes out is simply the complement of the less-developed picture of the Iliad. For instance, his concise speech (Od. viii.), in reply to the insult of a prince of the Phaiakes, is, to say the least, one of the most crushing replies on record: immensely removed from the studied, artful calm of his address on the mission meant to appease Achilles. But it is in full harmony with the account given by Antenor (Il. iii.) of his oratory, which drove as the snow-flakes drive in winter. The passionate element of his nature, thus glanced at in the Iliad, is amply developed in the Odyssey. So the polity, the professions, the stage of advancement, both for the fine and the useful arts, the high refinement of manners, combined with occasional signs of recent or surrounding savagery, might all be drawn out as fresh proofs of an identity of origin. But we must not fail to observe one other concord. It is found in the steady bent of mind, which, without any kind of moroseness, uniformly enlists the sympathy of those who hear or read on the side of good, and leads them, as by the hand, to the condemnation and even contempt of evil In every single case where he portrays a character radically vicious, Homer contrives that it shall be regarded not only with disapproval, but with aversion. There are few among Christian poets, who can match him in this vital particular: and the harmony of the two poems, in a point so characteristic, again points in a marked manner to their springing form a single mind.