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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
In "The World of Homer," Andrew Lang delves into the enchanting landscapes, cultural paradigms, and heroic figures that characterize the epics of Homer, notably the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey." Through a blend of meticulous scholarship and lyrical prose, Lang navigates the interplay of myth and history, providing readers with a vivid contextual tapestry that enhances understanding of these ancient texts. He employs a narrative style that is both engaging and informative, allowing the modern reader to appreciate the nuances of Homeric literature while exploring its enduring significance in the Western canon. Andrew Lang was a prominent Scottish poet, novelist, and folklorist, whose diverse scholarly pursuits informed his interpretations of Homer. His extensive background in classical studies, coupled with a passion for mythology and folklore, undoubtedly propelled him to explore Homer's world in greater depth. Lang's dedication to narrating ancient stories reflects his belief in the power of literature to bridge temporal and cultural divides, imbuing his work with both academic rigor and a sense of wonder. This book is a compelling invitation for readers, scholars, and enthusiasts of classical literature alike. Lang's insightful exploration not only enriches one's understanding of Homer's epics but also introduces the beauty and complexity of the ancient Greek world. Those seeking to engage with the roots of Western literary tradition will find "The World of Homer" an indispensable resource. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
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The World of Homer
Table of Contents
Introduction
Where poetry meets the evidence of a vanished age, this book explores how the songs attributed to Homer grew from and shaped an entire world.
The World of Homer is a work of literary criticism and cultural history by Andrew Lang, a Scottish man of letters active in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Published in the early 1900s, it appears at a moment when archaeology and philology were transforming the study of early Greece. Lang writes for the general reader as well as the student, situating the Homeric poems within the social and material landscape they evoke. His focus is not on retelling the epics but on clarifying the cultural textures that make their settings and characters intelligible.
At its core, the book offers a guided tour of Homer’s milieu: palatial halls and shorelines, councils and feasts, armor and ships, ritual and song. Lang’s prose is lucid and confident, favoring narrative momentum over technical dispute while still engaging with evidence from texts and material remains. The mood is exploratory rather than dogmatic, inviting readers to imagine how a society of heroes, households, and gods might have understood itself. Without presuming specialist knowledge, the book connects the familiar rhythms of the Iliad and the Odyssey to the practices and expectations that govern their worlds.
Among its abiding concerns are the values and institutions that structure Homeric life: honor and reputation, gift exchange and hospitality, oath and supplication, kinship and command. Lang treats these not as abstractions but as forces that shape decisions, relationships, and conflicts. He considers how divine presence inflects human action, how memory and song transmit fame, and how warfare and homecoming frame the horizon of experience. The result is a portrait of a society at once distant and recognizable, where public esteem, domestic care, and the longing for stability are perpetually in conversation.
The study also situates itself within scholarly debates that animated its time, including the long-standing Homeric question about authorship, composition, and the relationship between oral tradition and written text. Writing in the wake of major archaeological discoveries, Lang weighs what material culture can and cannot tell us about the poems’ backgrounds. He acknowledges uncertainty where evidence is limited, yet he shows how comparative detail—names, objects, customs—clarifies meaning. Readers encounter a careful balance: respect for the epics’ artistry, openness to scientific inquiry, and caution about drawing conclusions that outpace what the record supports.
For contemporary readers, the book matters because it models a way of reading that is historically attentive and imaginatively alive. It illuminates how stories of siege and return, of fragile peace and recurring conflict, resonate across times and cultures. It asks what happens when personal duty collides with public expectation, how households anchor identity, and why journeys of loss and recognition endure. By tracing the interplay between narrative and world, Lang helps readers appreciate both the Iliad’s landscape of war and the Odyssey’s landscape of wandering without reducing either to mere background or allegory.
Approached as an invitation rather than a verdict, The World of Homer promises an experience of guided discovery: a clear voice, a humane curiosity, and a steady attention to evidence. It will appeal to readers who want Homer not only as great poetry but as a window onto an early Greek imagination and its living habits. Students will find orientation; general readers will find context that deepens pleasure; seasoned admirers will find synthesis. In drawing the contours of the Homeric world, Lang offers a companion that sharpens perception while leaving room for readers’ own encounters with the poems.
Synopsis
Andrew Lang’s The World of Homer surveys the social, political, and religious landscape reflected in the Iliad and the Odyssey. Treating the poems as primary evidence, Lang assembles a portrait of the age they depict, while noting limits and uncertainties. He compares Homeric descriptions with contemporary archaeology—most notably the discoveries at Troy, Mycenae, and related Aegean sites—to test details of weaponry, palaces, and burial practices. Without pursuing literary criticism as an end, he addresses the date and coherence of the epics only insofar as these bear on custom and material culture. The book aims to situate Homer’s heroes within a recognizable historical milieu.
Lang begins by sketching the geographical horizon of Homer: the Achaean coalition, the Troad, and the island world spanning Ithaca, Crete, and the Cyclades. He notes the practicalities of seafaring—seasonal winds, coastal navigation, and ship types—alongside the dangers of storms and piracy. Place-names, harbors, and overland routes anchor the poems in familiar terrains, while distant locales preserve a sense of wonder. The setting includes palatial centers with megaron halls, storerooms, and workshops, surrounded by farmland and pasture. By assembling these spatial cues, Lang characterizes a world at once expansive and interconnected, in which travel, alliance, and conflict were sustained by the sea.
Turning to institutions, Lang outlines kingship (basileia) as personal rule grounded in lineage, wealth, prowess, and counsel. Leaders preside over councils of elders and open assemblies, where speech, persuasion, and public acclaim matter. Justice derives from custom and oath, with compensation and arbitration preferred to blood-feud when possible. Heralds, seers, and envoys hold recognized roles, and guest-friendship (xenia) establishes bonds across regions through ritual welcomes and reciprocal gifts. Household ties, fosterage, and sworn alliances knit elites into a wider network. Lang emphasizes how authority depends on consensus and honor, not codified law, yet operates within shared expectations that regulate conduct in peace and war.
In warfare, Lang assembles Homer’s evidence for tactics, arms, and ethos. Bronze predominates in weaponry; chariots convey nobles to battle, though fighting is largely on foot. Round and tower shields, spears, swords, and boar’s-tusk helmets appear, with notable variety in gear and style. Duels, ambushes, and massed assaults coexist, as do sieges and raids. Spoils are apportioned publicly, ransoms are negotiated, and heralds protect messengers. Funeral rites—cremation mounds, games, and offerings—affirm status and communal memory. Throughout, the code of honor shapes decisions about courage, mercy, and restraint. Lang correlates these details with excavated armor, grave goods, and fortifications to clarify their historical plausibility.
Lang then examines the household (oikos) and daily life. The megaron centers domestic and ceremonial activity, with storerooms, courtyards, and workshops adjoining. Women manage households, weaving textiles and supervising servants; marriage involves dowry and alliance. Slaves include war captives and household-born dependents, while skilled artisans—smiths, carpenters, tanners—work under patronage. Feasting punctuates social life, with shared meat, wine, and formal toasts. Hospitality requires baths, seats of honor, and exchange of gifts. Bards perform tales that carry lineage and fame across generations. Lang compiles such scenes to illuminate diet, dress, furnishings, and labor, showing how status is displayed through abundance, craftsmanship, and ritual propriety.
On economy and exchange, Lang highlights a system balancing gift, booty, and barter. Cattle, tripods, and fine textiles serve as measures of value; coined money is unknown. Metalwork is central: bronze is common, iron appears but is rarer, and gold ornaments signal prestige. Trade links reach the eastern Mediterranean, with Phoenician traders as intermediaries for luxury goods, dyes, and crafted items. Piracy and raiding coexist with commerce, blurring lines between acquisition and exchange. Shipbuilding skills support mobility and wealth. Lang assembles these elements to portray a warrior-aristocratic economy where generosity, display, and reciprocal obligation regulate flows of goods as much as strict market mechanisms.
Religion, for Lang, permeates conduct and decision. The gods—Zeus, Athena, Apollo, Poseidon, Hera, and others—act anthropomorphically, accepting sacrifice and prayer while shaping outcomes through signs, dreams, and direct aid. Omens, seers, and vows guide choices; purity rules govern sacrifices and supplication. Fate (Moira) stands as a boundary even for gods, while personal excellence and divine favor interact. The dead inhabit Hades, with funeral rites securing honor and transition. Lang distinguishes cult practice from mythic narrative, using the poems to illustrate altars, hecatombs, libations, and festival gatherings. The result is a practical picture of piety aligned with household duty and communal celebration.
Addressing poetry and authorship, Lang notes the elevated yet formula-laden diction, recurrent scenes, and conventional epithets that ease performance and memory. He discusses singers (aoidoi) attached to courts and the later role of reciters, considering how long narratives could be composed and transmitted. The question of unity and date is reviewed in practical terms: consistency in customs and equipment, alongside occasional divergences—such as burial forms—suggests layers of tradition within a broadly coherent picture. Archaeological parallels from Mycenaean sites support many material details. Lang presents these points to clarify how the epics can serve as historical witnesses without requiring precise authorship solutions.
Lang concludes that the Homeric poems preserve a distinct social order: a maritime, aristocratic society of councils and feasts, oaths and guest-gifts, bronze arms and monumental houses, framed by active gods and binding custom. While not a handbook, Homer offers consistent information about equipment, rites, and etiquette that aligns in substantial measure with remains from the Aegean Bronze Age. The World of Homer thus provides a compact reconstruction of this milieu, guiding readers through geography, institutions, war, domestic life, economy, and cult. The central message is clarity: to set Homer’s heroes within their own world and show how that world coheres across poem and artifact.
Historical Context
Andrew Lang’s The World of Homer is set conceptually in the Aegean basin of the Late Bronze and Early Iron Ages, centering on the Greek mainland (Mycenae, Tiryns, Pylos), the islands (Euboea, Ithaca, Crete), and the Anatolian littoral where Ilion (Troy) is identified with Hisarlik. The temporal horizon spans roughly 1600–700 BCE, with particular emphasis on the 9th–8th centuries BCE, when the Homeric epics likely coalesced. The landscape is maritime and fragmented, yet bound by sea lanes reaching Cyprus, the Levant, and Egypt. Lang maps a society of warrior elites, palace remnants, and village communities, using archaeology and comparative history to render the political and social ecology that Homer’s poems presuppose.
The Trojan War tradition and the Late Bronze Age collapse form the central historical matrix of Lang’s book. Classical chronographers such as Eratosthenes dated the fall of Troy to 1184 BCE, aligning with archaeological destructions in the eastern Mediterranean around 1200 BCE. Heinrich Schliemann’s excavations at Hisarlik (1870–1873, 1878–1879) and at Mycenae (1876) electrified Europe by revealing stratified cities and rich graves, including Grave Circle A and its famous gold masks. Wilhelm Dörpfeld’s stratigraphic refinements in the 1890s distinguished Troy VI and VIIa as late Bronze Age fortifications; Troy VI fell c. 1300–1250 BCE (perhaps by earthquake), while Troy VIIa was violently destroyed c. 1180 BCE. On the Greek mainland, palaces such as Pylos and Mycenae experienced conflagrations around 1200–1190 BCE, coinciding with the wider upheavals often associated with the Sea Peoples and systemic breakdown of palace economies from Anatolia to the Levant (e.g., Ugarit’s destruction c. 1190 BCE). These events left a memory of ruined citadels and displaced elites. Lang connects Homer’s descriptions of cyclopean walls, boar’s tusk helmets, and chariot elites to Mycenaean material culture, while noting practices in the epics—iron tools, cremation burials—that belong to the subsequent Early Iron Age. The book therefore presents the Trojan saga not as pure myth but as a poetic palimpsest layered over genuine late Bronze Age warfare and its aftermath. By synthesizing Schliemann’s and Dörpfeld’s finds with the poems’ detailed topography and martial customs, Lang argues that the epics preserve authentic recollections of Aegean conflict even as they reflect the social realities of later performers and audiences.
The Mycenaean palatial system (c. 1600–1200 BCE) underpins many institutions visible in Homer. Monumental citadels at Mycenae, Tiryns, and Pylos featured megaron halls, storerooms, and cyclopean walls, while elite burials ranged from 16th‑century BCE shaft graves to 14th–13th‑century tholos tombs like the so‑called Treasury of Atreus at Mycenae. Administrative centralization, redistribution of goods, and patronage of specialists are testified by architecture and standardized ceramic production. Courtly gift‑exchange, feasting, and display of prestige goods created networks among ruling houses. Lang depicts this world as the deep background for Homeric basileis, whose banquets, heirloom armor, and competitive generosity mirror palatial etiquette. He emphasizes continuities in elite ideology despite the fall of the palace bureaucracy.
After c. 1200 BCE, the Early Iron Age (c. 1100–800 BCE) saw population contraction, village societies, and a shift from centralized palace economies to household‑based production. Iron tools and weapons gradually replaced bronze by the 10th–9th centuries BCE. Burials diversified; cremation becomes prominent in some regions, while inhumation remained elsewhere, mirroring the mixed funerary customs described in the epics. Sites such as Lefkandi on Euboea (c. 1000–950 BCE) reveal elite households with wide trade contacts even during demographic troughs. Politically, authority devolved to local chiefs and councils. Lang situates Homeric society primarily in this milieu: small kingdoms, assemblies of elders, and personal retinues, with lingering memories of Bronze Age grandeur preserved as cherished heirlooms.
The 8th century BCE marks reaggregation: the rise of poleis, the articulation of assemblies and councils, and the emergence of Panhellenic sanctuaries. The first recorded Olympic Games occurred in 776 BCE at Olympia; Delphi developed as an oracular and diplomatic hub. Traveling singers and rhapsodes performed at festivals, creating a shared repertoire that fostered Panhellenic identity. Later Athenian tradition associates the Peisistratid tyranny (6th century BCE) with organizing Homeric recitations, reflecting earlier processes of standardization. Lang reads these institutions back into Homer’s scenes of councils, public persuasion, and inter‑community diplomacy. The poems’ wide geographic canvas and concern with justice and consensus echo the integrative functions of these early Archaic networks.
Mediterranean exchange and Greek colonization (c. 10th–7th centuries BCE) supplied the material and imaginative horizons of the epics. Euboeans founded Pithekoussai on Ischia c. 770–750 BCE; the famous Cup of Nestor inscription (c. 730 BCE) from there attests to epic motifs in early Greek writing. Contacts at Al Mina (modern Syria) and with Phoenician centers such as Tyre and Sidon carried metals, purple dye, glass, and luxury goods. The Greek alphabet, adapted from Phoenician signs in the late 9th–8th centuries BCE, enabled eventual fixation of the poems. Lang correlates Homer’s references to Sidonian craftsmanship, Egyptian wealth, and exotic textiles with this web of exchange, arguing that the epics reflect a cosmopolitan Aegean rather than an insular frontier.
Nineteenth‑ and early twentieth‑century archaeological discoveries decisively shaped Lang’s reconstruction. Schliemann’s campaigns at Hisarlik (from 1870) and Mycenae (1876), followed by work at Tiryns (1884–1885), revealed palatial architecture, rich grave goods, and war gear consonant with Homeric descriptions. Dörpfeld’s stratigraphy in the 1890s clarified Bronze Age levels at Troy and the form of the megaron. Arthur Evans’s excavations at Knossos beginning in 1900 exposed a pre‑Mycenaean Cretan civilization and Linear scripts, expanding the time depth of Aegean complexity known to Lang. Finds such as boar’s tusk helmets and ornate bronze blades provided tangible analogues for epic equipment. Lang’s book integrates these events, using empirical discoveries to contest skepticism and to anchor Homer’s world in recoverable historical societies.
As social and political critique, The World of Homer exposes the costs of a warrior aristocracy: endemic raiding, enslavement, and the precariousness of life bound to honor and vengeance. Lang highlights the tension between charismatic kingship and collective deliberation, showing assemblies that can restrain rulers only when persuasion prevails. He details stratified households where women and captives negotiate limited agency within patriarchal norms, and where wealth concentrates through plunder and gift‑exchange rather than equitable law. By juxtaposing heroic ideals with scenes of famine, ransom, and ritualized violence, the book interrogates mythic glory and underscores the fragility of justice in small monarchies—inviting readers to scrutinize power, inequality, and war as enduring structures rather than romantic episodes.
The World of Homer
PREFACE
In 1895 I published Homer and the Epic (pp. 424), containing a criticism of Wolf's theory[1], if theory it can be called, which is the mother of modern Homeric criticism. I analysed, book by book, the Iliad and the Odyssey, observing on the modern ideas of interpolation and the modern objections to many scores of passages which, as a rule, I defended from charges of "lateness" and inconsistency.
I added chapters on the Lost Epics of Greece, on Archeology, and on the early Epic poetry of other ages and peoples which offers analogies, more or less imperfect, with Homer.
On the whole my conclusions were identical with those of Signor Comparetti, in his preface to his learned book on the Finnish Kalewala. He says:
"The anatomical and conjectural analysis which has been applied so often and so long … to the Homeric poems and other national epics, proceeds from an universal abstract principle, which is correct, and from a concrete application of that principle, which is imaginary and groundless."
The true principle, recognised since the end of the eighteenth century, separates the "personal" and learned Art Epics, like the Æneid and the Gerusalemme Liberata, from those which belong to the period of spontaneous epic production, "when Folk-singers fashioned many epic lays of small or moderate compass." (Perhaps Folk-singers is hardly the right term. Such songs of exploits as the Borderers "made themselves," as Bishop Lesley said in 1578, were not "epic lays," but ballads like "Jock o' the Side," and "Archie o' Cafield," and "Johnie Cock," despite its name the most romantic of all.)
"These epic lays were called 'national' or 'popular,' not only by virtue of their contents, sentiment, and audience, but mainly because the poetry which takes this form is natural, collective, popular, and hence 'national' in its origin and development." (By "collective" I understand the author to mean, not that a whole country-side automatically and collectively bellows out a new ballad, but that the original author uses traditional formulae in verse wherever he can, and that his ballad is altered in the course of recitation by others, so that any version which has been obtained from recitation is, in fact, one of many variants which have arisen in course of time and recitation.)
"The baseless application of this principle is to regard the national poems not as creations of a single poet, but as put together out of shorter pre-existing lays (either by a single person at one time, or by several in succession), until the final fashioning of the poem. And this process is conceived of as a mere stringing together, without any sort of fusion, so that a critical philologist, thanks to his special sharpness and by aid of certain criteria, would be in a position to recognise the joinings, and to recover the lays out of which the poem has been made up.
"With this preconceived idea people have gone on anatomising the Epics; from Lachmann to the present day they have not desisted, although so far no positive satisfactory and harmonious results have been won. This restless business of analysis, which has lasted so long, impatient of its own fruitlessness, yet unconvinced of it, builds up and pulls down, and builds again, while its shifting foundations, its insufficient and falsely applied criteria, condemn it to remain fruitless, tedious, and repulsive. The observer marks with amazement the degree of intellectual shortsightedness produced by excessive and exclusive analysis. The investigator becomes a sort of man-microscope, who can see atoms but not bodies; motes, and these magnified, but not beams."
Comparetti proceeds: "No doubt before the epic there existed the shorter lays; but what is the relation of the lays to the epic? Is the epic a mere material synthesis of lays, or does it stand to them as a thing higher in the scale of poetic organisms—does it move on a loftier plane, attaining higher, broader conceptions, and a new style appropriate to these?" Notoriously the epic infinitely transcends in scale, breadth of conception, and grandeur of style any brief popular lays of which we have knowledge. It never was made by stringing them together.
So much for the little lay theory. "But there remains the nucleus theory" (the theory of "the kernel"), "for example of an original Achilleis" (the Menis) expanded by self-denying poets into an Iliad. Comparetti does not believe that a poet would fashion lays "to be inserted in a greater work already constructed by others, nor that he would have done this with so much regard for other men's work, and with such strict limitation of his own, that the modern erudite can recognise the joinings, and distinguish the original kernel and each of the later additions."
Here Wolf anticipated Comparetti, he did not believe that the additions could be detected.
But Comparetti does not reckon with his host. The astute critics tell us that the later poets did not compose "with so much respect for other men's work"; far from that, the poet of Iliad ix. calmly turned the work of the poet of Iliad xvi. into nonsense, we are told (see infra, "The Great Discrepancies"). Again, the critics will say that a later poet did not "fashion lays to be inserted in another man's work." He merely fashioned lays. Much later other men, the Pisistratean, or Solonian, or Hipparchian Committee of Recension, took his lays and foisted them into the middle of another man's work, making every kind of blunder and discrepancy in the process of making everything smooth and neat.
Comparetti goes on: "The difficulty is increased when we have to do with epics which seem in all their parts to be composed on a definite plan, which exists in the final poem, not in the supposed kernel. The organic unity, the harmony, the relation of all the portions, which are arranged so as to lead up to the final catastrophe, are such as to imply the agreement and homogeneity of the poetic creation in a common idea, and, moreover, resting on that idea—a limitation of the creative processes."
Comparetti, I fear, forgets that his "man-microscopes" see none of these things; "they see the mote, not the beam." Finally, granting the pre-existence of a mass of poetic material, "He who could extract from this mass the epics which we possess, and not a kind of Greek Mahabharata, would have produced, at all events, such a work of genius that in fairness he must be called not merely the redactor, but the author and poet."
How true is all that Comparetti says of "this restless business of analysis, which has lasted so long, impatient of its own fruitlessness, yet unconvinced of it! It builds up, and pulls down, and builds again, while its insufficient and falsely applied criteria condemn it to remain fruitless, tedious, and repulsive."
"Our little systems have their day." "They have their day, and cease to be." The little system which explained the Iliad as a mass, or rather a concatenation of short lays, "has had its day." The system of a primal "kernel" (Books i., xi., xvi., and so forth)—a kernel more archaic in language than Books ix., x., xxiii., xxiv.—is also perishing, "stricken through with doubt." The linguistic analysis of Miss Stawell (Homer and the Iliad, 1909) and, in America, of Professor Scott, has fatally damaged the linguistic tests of books for earliness and lateness.
The most advanced German critics find that Book i. of the Iliad is no longer that genuine kernel which, with certain other passages, represents the primal Menis, or "wrath of Achilles," as opposed to the later accretions of three or four centuries. Das ist ausgespielt! The "kernel" hypothesis is doomed. Its cornerstone—Book i. of the Iliad, is, by the builders of new theories, rejected; it is now one of the latest additions to the Iliad.[1] Only to one point is criticism steadfast. The Iliad must be a thing of rags and tatters; and it is torn up by the process of misstating its statements and finding "discrepancies" in the statements misstated.
Again, as even Comparetti's "man-microscopes" could not well help seeing that the epics, though not good enough as compositions for them, still are compositions; have, in a way, organic unity, harmony, adjusted relations of all the portions, some critics tried to account for the facts as the result of the labours of the Pisistratean, or Solonian, or Hipparchian Committee of Recension at Athens, in the sixth century B.C. But so many critics of all shades of opinion have rejected this hypothesis, even with scorn, as "a worthless fable," "an absurd legend," part of Homeric mythology (Blass, Meyer, Mr. T. W. Alien, D. B. Monro, Nutzhorn, Grote, and many others), that it can scarcely be restored even by the learned ingenuity of Mr. Verrall.[2]
In defect of the late Recension, which is wholly destitute of historic evidence, a poet, a Dichter, has to be sought somewhere, and at some period of the supposed "evolution" of the Iliad. He may lawfully be sought, it seems, at any period of the history of the poem, except at the point where, in fact, the poet is always found, namely at the beginning. The search for the poet will never find him anywhere else. He cannot be made to fit into the eighth or seventh or sixth century; it is useless to look for him at the Court of Croesus! A poem purely Achaean had an Achaean author.
None of the many critical keys fits the lock. The linguistic key breaks itself, it cannot break the wards.
Archaeology is used as a test of passages very early and very late; and the archaeology is also wrong, demonstrably fallacious. The archaeologists themselves, Mr. Arthur Evans and Mr. Ridgeway, will have none of Reichel's key. Whatever archaeology may prove, it does not prove what Reichel and his followers believed it to demonstrate. If I succeed in convincing any separatist critics that the costume and armour in the Iliad are much less like the costume and armour of Ionia in the seventh century B.C. than like those of Athens at the end of the sixth and beginning of the fifth centuries, these critics will probably be grateful. Here, they may perhaps say, is proof of our late Athenian recension, by which the actual Athenian dress and armour of 540–480 were written into the ancient poems.
I would agree with them if the members of the Committee of Recension had excised the huge Homeric shields, introduced cavalry in place of chariotry, iron instead of bronze weapons; excised the bride-price in marriage law, introduced the rite of purification of homicides by pigs' blood, and generally, in a score of other ways, for example by introducing hero-worship, had brought the Iliad "up to date." But as I cannot easily conceive that only armour and costume were brought up to date, I suppose that the whirligig of time and fashion had reverted in Athens to hauberks of scales in place of the uniform use of back-plate and breast-plate, and had also deserted the Ionian and early Hellenic cypassis, the Aegean loin-cloth or bathing-drawers for the longer and loose Homeric chiton.
If each critic would publish his own polychrome Iliad, with "primitive" passages printed in gold, "secondary" in red, "tertiary" in blue, "very late" in green, with orange for "the Pisistratean editor," purple for the "diaskeuast," and mauve for "fragments of older epics" stuck in the context, and so on, the differences that prevail among the professors of the Higher Criticism would be amazingly apparent.
One writer of a book on Homer has accused me of neglecting "science" in favour of mere literary appreciation, and of "trying to set back the hands on the clock of criticism." Really I want to clean and regulate that timepiece, which reminds one of
"The crazy old church-clock And the bewildered chimes,"
in Wordsworth's poem.
Never were chimes more bewildered, verdicts more various, and contradictions in terms more innocently combined than in the higher criticism of Homer. It is necessary and right that men's opinions should alter, in consequence of reflection, and of the increase of our knowledge of prehistoric Greece, through the revelations of excavators on the ancient sites of a rediscovered world. It is natural that Homeric critics should sometimes contradict themselves and each other. But they contradict each other so constantly and confidently that, clearly, their conclusions are not to be called conclusions of science.
That in one book a critic should reject, let us say, the hypothesis of the "Pisistratean recension" of the epics, and, in his next book, accept it, is nothing. Reflection has caused him to change his opinion. But when, in one book, in one chapter, perhaps in one page, a critic, without perceiving it, bases his argument on contradictions in terms, then his house is founded on the sand, and needs no tempest to overthrow its pinnacles and towers.
Through indulgence in fantastic theory-making, and through disregard of logical consistency, Homeric criticism has become, as Blass vigorously put the case in his latest work, "a swamp haunted by wandering fires, will-o'-the-wisps."
In 1906, in Homer and his Age, I again studied the Homeric Question, with particular reference to fresh archaeological discoveries, and to the contradictory methods, as I reckon them, which critics have employed in the effort to prove that the Homeric epics are mosaics, composed in, and confusing the manners and usages of, four or five prehistoric and proto-historic ages.
I do not now reprint either of my earlier books on Homer. Further study appears to have made many points more clear than they were. It is especially clear that "the Ionian father of the rest," as Tennyson calls Homer, is not Ionian; that the early Ionian settlers in Asia respected Homer's matter, which is Achaean, and did not intermingle with it any traits of their own very different beliefs, rites, tastes, morals, usages, armour and costume.
By the term "Ionian" I here mean to speak of the works composed in the Ionian settlements in Asia, probably in the eighth to seventh centuries B.C., and of the non-Homeric beliefs, rites, usages, costume and armour of the same people and period. Most of these beliefs, usages, and rites also mark historic Hellas, and very probably existed in the early populations of Greece before the dominance of Homer's Achaeans.
On the chronological period, as determined by archaeology, in which the Iliad and Odyssey were composed, I am fortunate in having the support of Mr. Arthur Evans, the chief authority in this matter; while Mr. T. W. Allen, our leading textual critic, is persuaded of the fact of Homeric unity. Where language is concerned (as has been said), the linguistic Appendices to Miss Stawell's Homer and the Iliad (1909), with the minute and elaborate studies of Professor Scott of the North-Western University, Illinois,[3] seem to me to overthrow the separatist conclusions as to the presence of an earlier stage of language and metre in some books; a later, or "Odyssean" stage in other books of the Iliad. I have seen scarcely any public criticism in reply to Miss Stawell and Professor Scott on these essential points, in which I have not scholarship enough to pretend to be a judge.
Meanwhile my friend, Mr. Shewan, has in preparation a comprehensive criticism of the separatist arguments, especially those drawn from language and metre; a work which, I venture to think, it will not be easy, and will not be fair, to ignore.
All my writings on the Homeric question are, necessarily, controversial. The reaction against the suggestion of Wolf, against a critical tradition of a century's standing, has begun in earnest. But the friends of that tradition are eminently learned, and occupy the highest places in scholarship and education. Scholars as eminent, who differ from them, as a rule, are content to keep their own opinions, and remain silent. If the views of the reaction, of the believers in Homeric unity, in the epics as the wonderful legacy of the brief prehistoric Achaean age, are to prevail, the opposing ideas must be assailed, and if possible confuted. In all controversy the constant danger is the tendency to misunderstand opponents. As a rule, A. supposes B. to be holding this or that position. A. assails and captures it, but B. was holding quite another position. A. has misunderstood his case. Critics of works of mine, on other subjects, have often missed my meaning, and I am therefore constrained to suppose that I may have, in like manner, misconstrued some of the opinions of others, which, as I understand them, I am obliged to contest. I have done my best to understand, and will deeply regret any failures of interpretation on my part.
Mr. Gilbert Murray, whose opinions I am obliged to oppose in the course of "the struggle for existence," has, with very great kindness and courtesy, read my proof sheets, and enabled me to give a less inaccurate statement of his position. On one point where I had misapprehended it, I have added an Appendix, "The Lost Epics and the Homeric Epics."
I owe more than I can easily express to the kindness of my friend, Mr. A. Shewan, of St. Andrews, who read and corrected my first proofs (any surviving errors are due to my own want of care), and who has lent me books and papers from his Homeric collection.
Mr. R. M. Dawkins, Head of the British School of Athens, has had the goodness to read my chapters on Homeric, Ionian, and historic armour and costume, and I have quoted the gist of his letters on points where he differs from my conclusions. The topic of female costume is peculiarly difficult and disputable.
A. LANG.September 9, 1910.
[1] Vinzler, Homer, p. 597 ff.
[2] See Appendix B, "The Supposed Athenian Recension."
[3] "Odyssean Words found in but One Book of the Iliad" (Classical Philology, vol. v. p. 41 ff.). "The Relative Antiquity of the Iliad and Odyssey tested by Abstract Nouns" (Classical Review, vol. xxiv., p. 8 ff.).
APPENDIXESTHE CATALOGUETHE SUPPOSED EXPURGATION OF HOMERTHE ALLEGED ATHENIAN RECENSION OF HOMERTHE LOST EPICS AND THE HOMERIC EPICS (WIEDERHOLUNGEN)INDEX
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONSMOULDED PITHOS FROM SPARTAFrontispieceSACRIFICE TO ATHENEDAGGER WITH LION-HUNTERSTIRYNTHIAN VASE: MAN IN HAUBERKCRETAN SEAL-IMPRESSION, MINOAN ARMOURMENELAUS AND HECTOR FIGHTING OVER EUPHORBUSWARRIORS ARMINGLADY POURING OUT WINE FOR WARRIORPRINCESS FROCK: TIRYNSCOSTUME OF WOMEN: TIRYNTHIAN VASEMETOPE OF ATHENE, OLYMPIATHE FATES ON THE FRANÇOIS VASEARIADNE, THESEUS, AND MINOTAURHISTORIC GREEK COSTUME
THE WORLD OF HOMER
CHAPTER I
HOMER'S WORLD. THE FOUR AGES
"Homer's world," "the world that Homer knew," these are familiar phrases; and criticism is apt to tell us that they are empty phrases. Nevertheless when we use them we think of that enchanted land, so clearly seen in the light of "the Sun of Greece"; in the light of Homer. It is a realm of splendid wars, of gleaming gold and bronze, of noble men and of the most beautiful of women, which shines through a rift in the mists that hide the years before it and the years that followed. Can what appears so brilliant, so living, so solid, have been unreal, the baseless fabric of a vision; of a dream, too, that Homer never dreamed, for there was no Homer? The Homeric picture of life, the critics tell us, displays no actual scene of past human existence, and is not even the creation of one man's fantasy. It is but a bright medley and mosaic of coloured particles that came together fortuitously, or were pieced together clumsily, like some church window made up of fragments of stained mediaeval glass. "Homeric civilisation," says a critic, "is like Homeric language; as the one was never spoken, so the other was never lived by any one society."[1]
It is the object of this book to prove, on the other hand, that Homeric civilisation, in all its details, was lived at a brief given period; that it was real.[1q] This could never be demonstrated till of recent years; till search with the spade on ancient sites that were ruinous or were built over anew in the historic times of Greece, revealed to us the ages that were before Homer, and that succeeded his day. By dint of excavations in the soil we now know much of the great Aegean or Minoan culture that was behind Homer; and know not a little of the Dark Ages that followed the disruption of his Achaean society.
In studying Homer, and the predecessors and successors of the men of his Achaean time, we find ourselves obliged to take into account Four distinct Ages, and the culture of two or perhaps three distinct peoples; the pre-Homeric population of the Aegean coasts and isles; the Homeric Achaeans: and the historic Greeks, who appear to descend from, and to hold of both the pre-Homeric and the Homeric strains of blood and civilisation.
Turning then to what we shall style the Four Ages, we observe first, that which is called the "Late Minoan," namely the bloom, in Crete and on the mainland, of a civilisation even then very ancient, having its focus, and chief manifestation, in the isle of the Hundred Cities. Here the art is most graphic, a revelation of the life; the palaces are most numerous and most magnificent; the towns are most tranquil, being unwalled, as the palaces are unfortified; while the arrangements, as for sanitation; and the costume of the women at some periods, are quite modern in character. Separate bodices and skirts, heavily flounced, were worn; through all varieties of fashion the dresses were sewn and shaped. Men did not, as a rule, wear the Homeric smock or chiton, but loin-cloths or bathing-drawers. Brooches or fibulae[2], like safety pins, were not in use.
This culture had also in a less remarkable degree affected the mainland of Greece. It was an Age of bronze, for weapons and implements, with this peculiarity, that, while arrow tips were often of stone, beautifully chipped flint, or of keen black glass-like obsidian, iron was known, a few large finger-rings of iron occur in graves; the metal being rare and strange. It was an Age of linear writing, on clay tablets, or in ink with pen or reed. The dead, perhaps occasionally embalmed, were buried in shaft tombs hewn deep in the rock; or in "beehive"-shaped sepulchres with chambers, often sunk in the side of a hill. With the dead were laid their arms of bronze, golden ornaments, crystal and ivory, and silver, and cups and vases of peculiar fashion, fabric, and decoration.
Concerning the language or languages of the people of this First Age, nothing is known with certainty, as their writing has not been deciphered. We know that they were and had long been in touch with Egypt, and the highly civilised Egyptian society. Egyptian objects are found in the ruins of Cretan palaces; Cretan pottery is abundant in the soil of Egypt; and their envoys, in Egyptian wall-pictures, bear ingots and golden cups of their fashioning, as presents or as tribute to Egyptian kings. Their palaces, about 1450–1400 B.C. (?) were sacked and consumed by fire, but their culture, and even their writing, continued to exist with dwindling vitality. Of the religion we speak later.
Then comes the Second Age, the period represented in the Homeric poems. Greek is their language, whether the people of the Cretan culture on the mainland of Greece had previously spoken Greek, or a cognate language, or not. Iron had ceased to be a rare metal used only for rings; it was now employed for tools and implements, occasionally for arrow-heads, and was an article of commerce; but bronze was the metal for swords, spears, and body armour; and stone was no longer used for arrow points; leather no longer, as previously, sufficed for shield coverings, bronze plating was needed. The dead were not now buried merely, they were cremated, as often in ancient central and northern Europe, and as in these regions the bones were placed in urns of gold, bronze, or pottery, wrapped in linen, and bestowed in a stone-built chamber, beneath a mound or cairn of earth, on which was set a memorial pillar.[2]
Treasures do not appear to have been buried with the dead, as a rule. A new costume, a northern costume, had come in, not sewn and shaped, as in the previous age, but fastened with pins and fibulae, "safety pins," such as were in use in northern regions, in the basin of the Danube, Bosnia, and North Italy. This is the costume and these are the pins and brooches described by Homer.
The Third Age, subsequent to the Homeric, is a dark period; illustrated by the vases and other objects found at ancient "Tiryns of the mighty walls"; and by the contents of the cemetery outside of the Dipylon gate at Athens; in Cretan sites and elsewhere. The nature of the civilisation (called "the Dipylon") will be described later. It is the fully developed age of iron for weapons and implements; riding of horses is superseding the war-chariots, common to both preceding periods; art is represented by both decadent Minoan work, and rude vase-paintings of human existence. The dead, with humbler treasures, are more frequently buried than burned; cairns are not raised over them; the costume of women appears to have been, occasionally at least, a survival from or revival of that of the First Age, the separate skirt and bodice.
The Fourth Age is the archaic or "proto-historic" period of Greece. It is represented by objects found in the soil of Sparta of the ninth to seventh centuries; by objects of the eighth to seventh century used by Ionian settlers in Asia, as at Ephesus; and by "proto-Athenian" "post-Dipylon" vases and other archaic remains in art; while, later, come the Black Figure vases of the early sixth century, to which succeed the more accomplished painters of the Red Figure vases (late sixth and early fifth centuries). In this period male costume was often more of the first or Aegean, than of the second or Homeric Age.
Now, according to the majority of critics of Homer, the life, with all its details, which he describes, is not that of a single age, our second, but is a mosaic of all Four Ages. "The first rhapsodies were born in the bronze age, in the day of the ponderous Mykenaean shield—the last in the iron age, when men armed themselves with breastplate and light round buckler. The whole view of life and death, of divine and human polity had changed."[3]
If this be true, the Homeric world as depicted in the poems existed only in fancy; it is a medley of four periods extending over some six centuries or more, and the Homeric picture must be a mere chaos as regards costume, manners, rites, armour, tactics, laws, geographical knowledge, domestic life, and everything. Is it such a chaos? The critics say that it is, and seek for proof in the poems. They find anachronisms and inconsistencies as to armour (but not costume), as to rites, as to marriage laws, as to houses, as to tactics, as to land tenure; but the inconsistencies and anachronisms at most are petty, and, we are to argue, at most represent such minute variations from the norm as occur in all societies, savage or civilised.
For the Homeric period, except in the case of the fibulae marking the change of costume in the Second Age, we have little evidence except in the Homeric poems themselves. No Homeric cairns with their characteristic contents have been discovered by modern scientific experts, a point to be discussed later. But for our Fourth Age we have literary evidence, that of the remains and epitomes of the Cyclic poems[3], composed in Ionia, about the eighth to seventh centuries, by the poets of the Ionian settlers in Asia, who were dominated by Attic, not Achaean traditions. These poems, we are to show (see "The Cyclic Poems") differ immensely, in descriptions of rites and of religion, and in the characters of heroes, in their pseudo-historic legends, and in geographical knowledge, from the pictures given by Homer. The Ionian armour, too, and round or oval blazoned bucklers worn on the left arm, as displayed in archaic and early Black Figure vases, are widely different from Homeric armour, and from the huge Homeric shield, unblazoned, suspended by a belt or baldric.
The Fourth Age, in fact, is represented by its own epic poetry, and by its own art; and its representations of armour, religion, rites, personages, and traditions, are never intruded into our Homeric epics. The two ages stand apart. The Homeric world is not that of the Fourth Age. There is no mosaic, except in the epic poetry of the Fourth Age, which imitated the Homeric poetry, but is full of conspicuous anachronisms in essential points.
Though the details of life in the Second and Fourth periods—the Homeric or Achaean and the Ionian, stand conspicuously apart, modern criticism, we have said, represents them as inextricably mingled in our Homer, and naturally thus confused, for what is most ancient in our Homer is said to have been worked over and recomposed by the poets of Ionia; in Ionia, we are told, Homer had a second birth, and our Homer is half-Ionian.
The critical case is well stated thus: "There is, on the whole, a striking resemblance between the life of Homer's heroes in its material aspects and the [Aegean] remains" [of our First Age] "which have been discovered at Tiryns, Mykene, and elsewhere. The two cultures are not identical, but, beyond doubt, the Homeric resembles in the main the Mykenaean rather than that of the "Dipylon" (so far as we know it), or the archaic Greek. The ancient tradition is on the whole truly kept in the Epos. Yet in many points we can see traces of apparent anachronisms," whether the departure from the "Mykenaean" be "due to a later development of that culture itself, or to an unintentional introduction of elements from the very different conditions of later Greece."[4] In the Epics carried to Asia, says our author, "much of the old was faithfully preserved, though adapted to new hearers, much being new added." "We meet with so many inconsistencies so closely interwoven that the tangle may well seem beyond our powers to unravel."[5]
When novelties were intentionally added the purpose was to please listeners later by many centuries than those for whom the original poets sang; to please the active commercial citizens of Ionia, who had not the polity, nor the armour, nor the war-chariots, nor the weapons, nor the costume, nor the beliefs, nor the burial rites, nor the marriage customs, nor the houses, nor the tactics, nor the domestic life, and had more than the geographical knowledge of the people who listened to the original minstrel. Each of the novelties supposed to have been introduced to gratify new hearers, each novelty in armour, weapons, tactics, would only produce in the Iliad an unintelligible and chaotic blend, such as, the critics tell us, actually was produced—a tangle which we cannot unravel. The fighting scenes, in particular, thanks to the retention of old armour and tactics, and the simultaneous introduction of novelties to please practical readers, must have passed all understanding, and, as we are told, they make nonsense. No practical hearers in that case could have endured the confusion, a point to be demonstrated in detail.[6]
Let us remember, too, that the novelties said to have been introduced were of the pettiest kind. The Iliad and Odyssey retain a non-Ionian polity: non-Ionian burial rites; non-Ionian marriage customs (in which a change is detected in one case); non-Ionian houses; non-Ionian shields, non-Ionian armour, non-Ionian military tactics; while truly and specially Ionian rites and beliefs and geographical knowledge are all absent. Why should poets who were innovating have left the whole Homeric picture standing except in certain minute details of corslets, greaves, bride-price, and upper storeys and separate sleeping chambers in houses?
It is our opinion, therefore, that the details of life in the poems are all old and all congruous; while we find the "much new" abundantly present, not in Homer, but in the fragments and summaries of the contents of the "Cyclic" Ionian Epics, dating from the age (770–650 B.C.) when the novelties are supposed to have been most copiously foisted into the Iliad and Odyssey—in which, as a matter of fact, they never appear. Far from altering the old epics, I hope to show that the Ionians laboured at constructing new epics, the "Cyclics"; partly for the purpose of connecting their ancestors with ancient heroic events in which, according to Homeric tradition, their ancestors played no part; partly to tell the whole tale of Troy.
The task of these Ionian poets was later taken up by the Athenian tragedians, and a non-Homeric, we may say almost an anti-Homeric tradition was established, was accepted by Virgil and by the late Greek compiler, Dictys of Crete; and finally reached and was elaborated by the romancers of the Christian Middle Ages.
It is not easy to do justice to this theory except in a perpetual running fight with the believers in the Ionian moulders of the Homeric poems into their actual form with its contents. Now few things are more unpleasant than a running fight of controversial argument, the reader is lost in the jangle and clash of opinions and replies, often concerned with details at once insignificant and obscure. Into such minutiae I would not enter, if they were not the main stock of separatist critics.
On the whole, then, it seems best to describe, first, as far as we may, the age preceding that of Homer, and then the Homeric world, just as the poet paints it, without alluding to differences of critical opinion. These are discussed later, and separately.
[1]Church Quarterly Review, vol. xi. p. 414. It is easy to recognise the anonymous writer.
[2] It does not follow, in my opinion, that the change in burial customs necessarily implies the advent of a new and strange "race" on the scene. Mr. Ridgeway writes that the discovery in the Roman Forum of "graves exhibiting two different ways of disposing of the dead—the one class inhumation, the other cremation, of itself" is "a proof of the existence of two races with very different views respecting the soul." ("Who were the Romans?" Proceedings of the British Academy, vol. iii. p. 7. (Tiré à part.) The word "race" has the vaguest meaning, but the Tasmanians are usually supposed to have been a fairly unmixed "race." Yet they buried, as do the Australian tribes, in a variety of ways, cremation, inhumation, tree burial, and in other fashions, and all sorts of beliefs about the soul co-existed. (See Ling Roth, The Tasmanians, pp. 128–134.) Methods of burial do not afford proof of varieties of "race."
[3] Leaf, Iliad, vol. ii., 1902, p. x.
[4] Leaf, Iliad, vol. i. pp. xiv, xv.
[5]Ibid., vol. ii. p. x. Much of the "new," we must remark, was added, on this theory, not "unintentionally," but consciously and purposefully.
[6] See "Homeric Arms and Costume," and "Homeric Tactics," infra.
CHAPTER II
HOMERIC LANDS AND PEOPLES
Homer conceives of his heroes as living in an age indefinitely remote: their epoch "has won its way to the mythical." They are often sons or grandsons of Gods: the Gods walk the earth among them, friendly, amorous, or hostile. From this fact, more than from the degeneracy in physical force which Homer often attributes to his contemporaries, we see that the mist of time and the glamour of romance have closed over the heroes.
But this might happen in the course of a pair of centuries. In the French Chansons de Geste[4] of 1080–1300, Charlemagne (circ. 814), a perfectly historical character to us—has become almost as mythical as Arthur to the poets. He conquers Saracens as Arthur conquers all western Europe; he visits Constantinople; he is counselled by visible angels, who to some degree play the part of the gods in Homer.
Perhaps two or three centuries may separate Homer from any actual heroic princes of whom traditions have reached him. Modern research holds that the Achaeans of Homer, by infiltration and by conquest, had succeeded to more civilised owners of Greece.
But Homer has nothing to say about a conquest of Greece by the Achaeans, Danaans, Argives, and the rest, from the north, except in two cases. He speaks of combats with wild mountain-dwelling tribes in Thessaly, in Nestor's youth. Nestor knew "the strongest of men who warred with the strongest, the mountain-dwelling Pheres,"[1] shaggy folk, says the Catalogue, whom Peirithous drove out of Pelion in northern Thessaly, and forced back on the Aethices of Pindus in the west.[2] It appears, from recent excavations, that the age of stone lingered long in these regions, and the people were probably rude and uncultivated, like the Centaurs.
The recent excavators of Zerelia, north-east of the Spercheios valley, the home of Achilles, write that their discoveries in the soil "clearly point to the fact that in prehistoric times the cultures of North and South Greece were radically different. This probably indicates an ethnological difference as well."[3] Before the period when "Late Minoan III." pottery occurs in Thessaly, the people used stone tools and weapons, and knew not the potter's wheel. It may not, therefore, be too fanciful to regard Nestor's tales of fights with a wild mountain race as shadowy memories of actual Achaean conquests in Thessaly, where Aegean culture arrived very much later than in Southern Greece.
Secondly, Homer twice speaks of regions as "Pelasgian[5]," in which he represents the actual inhabitants as Hellenes and Achaeans, not Pelasgic. These regions are the realm of Achilles in south-west Thessaly; and Epirus.[4] But the actual Pelasgians whom Homer knows are allies of Troy; they dwell on the North Aegean coasts (where Herodotus found living Pelasgians), or reside, with Achaeans, Dorians, True Cretans, and Cydonians, in Crete. These facts indicate Homer's knowledge that, in some regions, Achaeans had dispossessed "Pelasgians," whoever the Pelasgians may have been. Again, Homer makes Achilles address the "Pelasgic Zeus" of Dodona in Epirus, in which he locates Perhaebians and Eneienes.
It thus appears that he supposed the Achaeans to have driven out Pelasgians from Epirus and Thessaly, at least, if not from southern Greece. It may well seem to us strange that as the Achaean settlement in Crete, or at least in parts of Crete, must have been comparatively recent when Homer sang, he never mentions so great an event. But reasons for and a parallel to his silence are not hard to find. If, as many authorities hold, the great Cnossian palace had fallen, and the Cretan civilisation had sunk into decadence before the Achaeans arrived in the island,[5] they might meet with but slight resistance; great feats of heroism might not claim record. Again, the Norman Conquest gave rise to no Anglo-Norman epic. The invaders already possessed their epic tradition, that of Charlemagne, borrowed from "the Franks of France," while they presently, in the twelfth century, took up and expanded the epic traditions of the Welsh and Bretons, in the Arthurian cycles of romances. In the same way, for all that we know, the Achaean epics may have a basis in the traditions of the earlier and more civilised populations usually styled "Pelasgians." The manners, however, of the Iliad and Odyssey are Achaean, as the manners of the French romances of Arthur are not Celtic, but feudal and chivalrous.[6] Homer, in any case, conceives of his own race as at home in Greece and Crete, and he has nothing to say about Greek settlements on the Asiatic coast. To him the inhabitants of Miletus are not the Ionian colonists. "Carians uncouth of speech" dwelt by the banks of the Meander, and the Asiatic allies of Priam are people "scattered, of diverse tongues."[7] For purposes of convenience all parties to the war understand each other's speech.[8]
In Odyssey, xix. 172–177, Homer gives an account of populous Crete, with ninety cities, and a mingling of various tongues, "therein are Achaeans, and True Cretans high of heart, and Cydonians, and Dorians in their three divisions, and noble Pelasgians." Did they vary in language, or in dialect and accent merely? We cannot know, we cannot be sure that "True Cretans" were the pre-existing Aegeans. The Cydonians dwelt beside the Jardanus; Jardanus is also a river-name in Elis. Mr. Leaf thinks of the Semitic yârad, "to flow" (Jordan), but we have other such river-names, Yarrow, and the Australian Yarra Yarra; the word may be onomatopoeic, expressing the murmur of the water.
Homer, in any case, does not despise the Asiatic allies of Troy as "barbarous," does not think them alien wholly, as the poets of the Chansons de Geste regard the Saracens—worshippers of Mahound and Apollon. The Asians have the same gods and rites as his own people; Glaucus and Sarpedon are as good knights and live in precisely the same sort of polity as Aias or Achilles. Homer does not think of the strife as between Hellenes and Barbarians, that is a far later idea never interpolated into the Epics. All men are children of the Olympians.[2q]
It would appear that Homer sang before the northern invasion, usually called "Dorian," caused the Achaean and Ionian migrations from the Greek mainland, and the Greek settlements on the Asiatic coast (950–900 B.C.?). He never alludes to these events, but it may be said that he deliberately conceals them.
The account which Homer gives of the Achaean heroes and their realms is to be found in the Catalogue of the Ships in Book ii., a passage of three hundred lines. It is, perhaps, not very probable that this long list was usually recited at popular gatherings, and there is much dispute as to its date and purpose. We relegate to an appendix some remarks on the debated questions. Whether the Catalogue, or most of it, was part of the original Iliad or not, most of it was certainly composed at a time when the condition of prehistoric Greece was well known, when a lively tradition of its divisions still existed; moreover, it is the work of a poet, and Milton deemed it worthy of imitation in Paradise Lost.
The Catalogue was omitted from many manuscripts of the Iliad, probably because it was thought tedious reading. But to us there is poetry in the very names of "rocky Aulis," and "Mycalessus of the wide lawns," and "dove-haunted Thisbe," and "Lacedaemon lying low among the rifted hills." The author wrote "with his eye on the object," and the doves of Thisbe have survived many empires and religions, still floating round their old domains and uttering their changeless note.[9] "Pleasant Titaresius" still mingles his clear waters with the chalk-stained Peneius, and Celadon brawls as when Nestor heard its music.
