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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
In 'Yale Classics (Vol. 1),' readers will embark on a captivating journey through the rich and varied landscape of Classical Greek literature. This anthology showcases an impressive selection of works that mirror the diverse literary styles prevalent during antiquity, ranging from poignant tragedies to philosophical treatises, and from lyrical poetry to stirring rhetoric. The anthology curates pieces that highlight themes of heroism, fate, morality, and the pursuit of knowledge, inviting readers to explore pivotal insights into the human condition. Notable standout pieces illustrate the enduring impact of Greek thought on the arts and sciences, revealing the timeless allure of these foundational texts. The anthology features contributions from an array of legendary Greek figures, whose writings have profoundly shaped Western thought. Figures like Aristotle, Plato, and Homer, alongside poets like Sappho and Pindar, represent the vibrancy and complexity of Athenian democracy, philosophical enquiry, and literary innovation. Collectively, these authors encapsulate the spirit of the Greek Classical era, providing a window into its historical and cultural tapestry. By juxtaposing different voices and genres, the collection aligns itself with both the intellectual and artistic movements of its time, offering rich implications for modern scholarship and thought. 'Reading 'Yale Classics (Vol. 1)' offers a unique opportunity to immerse oneself in the multifaceted worlds of ancient Greek literature. The anthology's distinguished range of authors and works serves as an invaluable resource for students, educators, and enthusiasts eager to engage with the profound narratives and ideas that have influenced countless generations. This collection not only serves as a testament to the Greeks' literary prowess but also fosters an enlightening dialogue between the past and the present, paving the way for continued exploration and appreciation of these classic texts."} In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - An Introduction draws the threads together, discussing why these diverse authors and texts belong in one collection. - Historical Context explores the cultural and intellectual currents that shaped these works, offering insight into the shared (or contrasting) eras that influenced each writer. - A combined Synopsis (Selection) briefly outlines the key plots or arguments of the included pieces, helping readers grasp the anthology's overall scope without giving away essential twists. - A collective Analysis highlights common themes, stylistic variations, and significant crossovers in tone and technique, tying together writers from different backgrounds. - Reflection questions encourage readers to compare the different voices and perspectives within the collection, fostering a richer understanding of the overarching conversation.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
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Yale Classics (Vol. 1)
Table of Contents
Introduction
This volume gathers a continuous conversation about human excellence, civic order, and the ties between mortal action and enduring memory. From epic and hymn to lyric song, tragedy and comedy, inquiry into the past, philosophic dialogue, rhetoric, biography, and ethical reflection, the works of Homer, Hesiod, Archilochus, Alcaeus, Sappho, Alcman, Anacreon, Theognis of Megara, Simonides of Ceos, Bacchylides, Pindar, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Herodotus, Thucydides, Plato, Aristotle, Lysias, Demosthenes, Apollonius, Callimachus, Theocritus, Plutarch, and Epictetus trace a shared pursuit of wisdom through varied forms.
Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, together with the Homeric Hymns, establish a scale of action and song in which gods and mortals meet, memory shapes identity, and fame contends with fragility. Hesiod answers on a complementary register: Theogony orders the divine world, while Works and Days turns toward labor, justice, and the rhythms of communal life. Their juxtaposition frames a spectrum from cosmic origins to the ethics of everyday conduct.
Greek Lyric Poetry carries this inquiry into more intimate and civic modes. Archilochus and Alcaeus sharpen the edge of public and personal speech; Sappho and Alcman refine the lyric of desire and community; Anacreon explores festivity and restraint; Theognis of Megara and Simonides of Ceos weigh praise, blame, and memory; Bacchylides and Pindar elevate celebration into meditation on achievement and responsibility. Across these voices, song calibrates emotion with measure, binding private experience to shared values.
On the tragic stage, Aeschylus’s The Oresteia, comprising Agamemnon, The Choephori (The Libation-Bearers), and Eumenides, examines the passage from inherited wrong to deliberated justice. Sophocles, in Ajax, Antigone, and Oedipus at Colonus, probes steadfastness, law, and the dignity of endurance. Euripides, through Medea, Hippolytus, and Bacchae, intensifies the tensions between impulse, belief, and civic order. Balancing these gravities, Aristophanes offers The Comedies of Aristophanes with Frogs, Birds, and Lysistrata, where laughter tests opinion and remakes public speech. The Life and Work of Aeschylus, The Life and Work of Sophocles, The Life and Work of Euripides, and The Life and Work of Aristophanes situate these dramatic voices within the broader landscape of Athenian culture.
Herodotus, in The Histories, explores human affairs through curiosity about causes and customs, while The Life and Work of Herodotus reflects on the aims and reach of such inquiry. Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War, alongside The Life and Work of Thucydides, turns analysis toward power, decision, and collective fate. Philosophy intensifies these questions: Plato’s Republic, The Apology of Socrates (Plato), Symposium (Plato), and Phaedo (Plato), together with The Life and Work of Plato, consider justice, argument, friendship, and mortality; Aristotle’s Poetics, Politics, and Nicomachean Ethics, framed by The Life and Work of Aristotle, articulate principles of art, community, and character.
Public speech and later poetry extend the dialogue. The Orations of Lysias and The Philippics (Demosthenes) demonstrate persuasion shaped by law and urgency. Hellenistic art of narrative and form appears in Argonautica (Apollonius), the Hymns of Callimachus, and The Idylls of Theocritus, where myth is reimagined and setting becomes a thought-bearing space. Plutarch’s The Rise and Fall of Greek Supremasy and The Life and Work of Plutarch, together with Theseus, Solon, Themistocles, Aristides, Cimon, Pericles, Nicias, Alcibiades, Phocion, and Demosthenes, study leadership and the moral texture of public life. Epictetus closes the arc with The Enchiridion, distilling ethical practice into disciplined reflection.
Read together, these works reveal how form shapes thought: epic remembers, lyric measures feeling, tragedy tests limits, comedy revises convention, history interrogates events, philosophy reasons about the good, rhetoric acts in the city, biography weighs example, and later poetry renews tradition. Their concerns remain immediate—justice and persuasion, community and conscience, power and responsibility, suffering and hope. The arrangement from Homer and Hesiod through Greek Lyric Poetry, The Tragedies of Sophocles and Euripides, The Comedies of Aristophanes, the inquiries of Herodotus and Thucydides, the arguments of Plato and Aristotle, the speeches of Lysias and Demosthenes, the art of Apollonius, Callimachus, and Theocritus, the portraits of Plutarch, and the counsel of Epictetus offers a coherent field in which foundational ideas continue to be tested and renewed.
Historical Context
Socio-Political Landscape
From the Homeric epics through Hesiod and the early lyric poets, these works arise from societies transitioning from heroic chieftaincies to city-states. Power clustered in aristocratic houses that sponsored symposia, where Archilochus, Alcaeus, and Anacreon thrived. Colonization across the Mediterranean intensified rivalries and exchange, while hoplite warfare forged communal identities. Class distinctions were stark; enslaved people and resident foreigners lacked political rights, and women’s voices, as in Sappho and Alcman, circulated within constrained spaces. Poetic performance was public and competitive, yet also dependent on patrons and cult. Law codes and nascent civic institutions framed debates about labor, justice, and kinship in Works and Days.
In Classical Athens, dramatists and historians wrote amid democracy’s experiments and imperial ambition. Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides staged tragedies at state festivals funded by liturgies, embedding political deliberation in ritual. Aristophanes exploited comic license yet risked prosecution in a litigious culture. The Persian Wars and the Peloponnesian War shaped Herodotus’s inquiries and Thucydides’ austere analysis of power. Orators like Lysias and Demosthenes navigated juries, assemblies, and faction, with the Philippics resisting Macedonian hegemony. Social stratification persisted; citizenship was narrow, slavery ubiquitous, and women excluded from formal politics. Censure for impiety shadowed intellectuals, culminating in Plato’s Apology of Socrates.
After Macedonian conquests, Hellenistic monarchies reorganized authority around courts and bureaucracies, shifting patronage from city to king. In Ptolemaic Alexandria, Callimachus, Apollonius, and Theocritus composed for scholars and rulers, as libraries and museums institutionalized literary prestige. Cosmopolitan mobility complicated civic identities, while Greek power met local traditions across the eastern Mediterranean. Meanwhile, Greek cities negotiated autonomy under Macedonian, then Roman ascendancy, contexts vital to Plutarch’s moral biographies. Demosthenes’ warnings acquired retrospective pathos; rhetorical training became a pathway to status. Under the Roman Empire, Epictetus taught Stoic discipline to diverse audiences, addressing freedom and obligation within stratified, interdependent communities.
Intellectual & Aesthetic Currents
Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey establish a monumental hexameter archive whose formulaic artistry shaped all later genres. Hesiod reoriented epic toward instruction, aligning myth with work, justice, and genealogy in Works and Days and Theogony. Archaic lyric reinvented perspective: Sappho’s intimate address, Alcaeus’s civic invective, Archilochus’s corrosive satire, and Alcman’s choral experiments recalibrated voice, meter, and occasion. Professional choral poets—Simonides, Bacchylides, and Pindar—fused encomium with theology, staging victory and memory as public capital. These modes articulate shifting relations between household, polis, and cult, and they cultivate a self-conscious poetics attentive to performance, audience, and the ethics of praise.
Theatre and inquiry forged complementary disciplines. Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides refined tragedy’s architecture—chorus, stasima, and agon—while Aristophanes weaponized laughter to test policy and taste. Herodotus pioneered historia as curiosity-driven research, blending ethnography with narrative art; Thucydides recast history as rigorous causation and rhetoric under conditions of crisis. Plato’s Republic, Symposium, Phaedo, and Apology stage philosophy as drama, probing justice, eros, mortality, and civic speech. Aristotle systematized knowledge: Poetics theorized mimesis and catharsis; Politics and Nicomachean Ethics articulated virtue, constitutions, and deliberation. Lysias and Demosthenes reveal stylistic craft calibrated to law and assembly, shaping emotion and reason.
Hellenistic aesthetics valued polish, erudition, and brevity. Callimachus’s Hymns exemplify learned miniaturism; Apollonius’s Argonautica revitalizes epic through philological exactitude; Theocritus’s Idylls invent pastoral scenes that refract urban audiences. Institutions fostered textual scholarship, cataloging, and editing, transforming composition and reception. Plutarch’s Lives adapted moral philosophy into comparative biography, teaching through exempla; Epictetus’s Enchiridion distilled Stoic practice into portable counsel. Across the collection, genres cross-pollinate: oratory borrows from drama, biography from history, and philosophy from myth. Advances in stagecraft, choral music, and book production widened horizons, while debate over scale, novelty, and tradition structured rival schools and manifestos.
Legacy & Reassessment Across Time
Subsequent eras repeatedly re-situated these texts. Alexandrian editors standardized Homer and lyric; later scholia conserved Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Herodotus, and Thucydides for classrooms and theatres. As empires changed, so did readings: Demosthenes’ Philippics modeled resistance; Plato and Aristotle informed civic constitutions and ethical education; Plutarch shaped leadership paradigms. Modern revivals of the Oresteia, Lysistrata, Bacchae, and Antigone reframed civic trauma, gender, and war. Victorian translators often sanitized Sappho and comic obscenity, narrowing affective range. Professionalized philology produced authoritative editions and lexica, while national curricula leveraged Greek exempla to justify competing visions of citizenship.
Twentieth- and twenty-first-century scholarship diversified approaches. The Homeric question interrogated composition and transmission; environmentalists revisited Works and Days; gender studies re-read Sappho, Medea, and Hippolytus; disability perspectives explored tragic bodies; post-colonial critics reassessed Herodotus, Theocritus, and the Hellenistic court poets. Debates over democracy’s limits reanimated Thucydides and Aristophanes; virtue ethics reengaged Aristotle and Epictetus. Film, opera, and festival circuits multiplied adaptations, while digital archives and open access broadened preservation beyond print. With ancient texts long in the public domain, new translations proliferated, foregrounding voice and performance. Ongoing arguments over canonicity, slavery, and empire continue to reshape interpretation.
Synopsis (Selection)
Introductions (Homer; Hesiod)
Concise essays situating each poet in historical context, outlining authorship debates, themes, and influence to frame the epics and didactic poems that follow.
Iliad
An epic of the Trojan War centered on Achilles’ wrath, tracing clashes of honor, fate, and divine will as Greek and Trojan heroes contend around Troy.
Odyssey
Odysseus journeys home from Troy through trials set by gods and monsters while his household in Ithaca struggles under predatory suitors.
Homeric Hymns
Hymnic narratives praising the gods—such as Demeter, Apollo, Hermes, and Aphrodite—that recount divine origins, powers, and the establishment of cult rites.
Works and Days (Hesiod)
A didactic poem addressing a quarrel with the poet’s brother, blending farm counsel and myth to advocate for justice, hard work, and moderation.
Theogony (Hesiod)
A cosmogony and genealogy of the gods that charts primordial beginnings, divine successions, and Zeus’s consolidation of cosmic order.
Greek Lyric Poetry (Archilochus; Alcaeus; Sappho; Alcman; Anacreon; Theognis; Simonides; Bacchylides; Pindar)
An anthology of monodic and choral songs spanning love, wine, invective, politics, war, and victory praise, from intimate fragments to formal odes.
The Oresteia (Aeschylus)
A tragic trilogy following the House of Atreus from Agamemnon’s murder through Orestes’ revenge to a public reckoning that redirects blood-feud into civic justice.
The Tragedies of Sophocles (Ajax; Antigone; Oedipus at Colonus)
Ajax probes wounded honor and reputation after a slight in war; Antigone pits divine burial duty against the city’s law; Oedipus at Colonus follows the aged king’s quest for sanctuary and a final, sanctified resting place.
The Tragedies of Euripides (Medea; Hippolytus; Bacchae)
Medea depicts a betrayed wife’s calculated revenge; Hippolytus tests chastity, desire, and slander within a royal household; the Bacchae shows Dionysus punishing impiety as ecstatic worship unravels civic order.
The Comedies of Aristophanes (Frogs; Birds; Lysistrata)
Frogs sends Dionysus to Hades to retrieve a poet and judge tragedy; Birds imagines a sky-city that satirizes Athenian politics; Lysistrata has women mount a sex strike to force an end to war.
Life and Work Essays (Aeschylus; Sophocles; Euripides; Aristophanes; Herodotus; Thucydides; Plato; Aristotle; Plutarch)
Biographical and critical surveys outlining each author’s career, context, major works, and enduring influence, providing orientation for the selections included.
The Histories (Herodotus)
An inquiry into the causes and course of the Greco-Persian conflicts, interweaving battle narratives with ethnography, marvels, and reflections on fortune and power.
History of the Peloponnesian War (Thucydides)
A rigorous, analytical account of the Athenian–Spartan war, using speeches and case studies—plague, stasis, strategy—to probe power politics and human behavior.
Republic (Plato)
A dialogue on justice and the ideal city that advances the theory of forms, the education of guardians, and the case for philosopher-kings.
The Apology of Socrates (Plato)
Socrates’ defense speech against charges of impiety and corrupting the youth, explaining his mission of questioning and his stance toward life and death.
Symposium (Plato)
Banquet speeches explore the nature of love, culminating in a vision of ascent from physical desire to contemplation of Beauty itself.
Phaedo (Plato)
An account of Socrates’ final hours presenting arguments for the soul’s immortality and the philosopher’s calm acceptance of death.
Poetics (Aristotle)
A foundational treatise on mimesis with emphasis on tragedy, analyzing plot, character, diction, and catharsis as components of effective poetic art.
Politics (Aristotle)
An empirical and normative study of constitutions, citizenship, and civic virtue, evaluating regime types and conditions for stable, flourishing polities.
Nicomachean Ethics (Aristotle)
A philosophical account of human flourishing (eudaimonia), virtue as a cultivated mean, and the roles of practical wisdom and friendship in the good life.
The Orations of Lysias
Forensic speeches exemplifying clear Attic style and Athenian legal practice, arguing cases on homicide, property, and civic conduct.
The Philippics (Demosthenes)
Orations urging resistance to Philip II of Macedon, blending policy proposals with urgent appeals to civic duty and vigilance.
Argonautica (Apollonius)
A Hellenistic epic recounting Jason’s quest for the Golden Fleece, highlighting divine interventions and the psychologically nuanced love of Jason and Medea.
Hymns of Callimachus
Erudite, compact hymns to the gods that rework myth into etiological narratives with Alexandrian polish.
The Idylls of Theocritus
Pastoral vignettes and urban mimes featuring shepherds’ songs, rustic rivalries, and unrequited love, inaugurating the bucolic tradition.
The Rise and Fall of Greek Supremasy (Plutarch)
A moral-historical survey of Greece’s ascent to and decline from hegemony, attributing outcomes to the character and choices of leaders and cities.
Plutarch’s Lives (Theseus; Solon; Themistocles; Aristides; Cimon; Pericles; Nicias; Alcibiades; Phocion; Demosthenes)
Biographical portraits tracing the virtues, vices, and pivotal actions of Athenian leaders from the mythic founder Theseus through statesmen and generals to the orator Demosthenes.
The Enchiridion (Epictetus)
A concise Stoic handbook of practical maxims on controlling judgments, accepting what is not in our power, and living in accordance with reason and nature.
Yale Classics (Vol. 1)
Homer
Introduction
The epos, as we know it, falls into three main divisions according to author and subject-matter. It is a vehicle for the heroic saga, written by ' Homêros'; for useful information in general, especially catalogues and genealogies, written by ' Hêsiodos'; and thirdly, for religious revelation, issuing originally from the mouths of such figures as 'Orpheus,' 'Musæus,' and the 'Bakides.' This last has disappeared, leaving but scanty traces, and the poems of ' Homer and Hesiod' constitute our earliest literary monuments.
All verse embodiments of the saga are necessarily less old than the saga itself. And more than that, it is clear that our Iliad, Odyssey, Erga, and Theogony are not the first, "nor the second, nor yet the twelfth," of such embodiments. These ostensibly primitive poems show a length and complexity of composition which can only be the result of many generations of artistic effort. They speak a language out of all relation to common speech, full of forgotten meanings and echoes of past states of society; a poet's language, demonstrably built up and conditioned at every turn by the needs of the hexameter metre. There must therefore have been hexameter poems before our Iliad. Further, the hexameter itself is a high and complex development many stages removed from the simple metres in which the sagas seem once to have had shape in Greece as well as in India, Germany, and Scandinavia. But if we need proof of the comparative lateness of our earliest records, we can find it in ' Homer' himself, when he refers to the wealth of poetry that was in the world before him, and the general feeling that by his day most great themes have been outworn.1
The personalities of the supposed authors of the various epics or styles of epos are utterly beyond our reach. There is for the most part something fantastic or mythical in them. Orpheus, for instance, as a sagafigure, is of Greek creation; as a name, he is one of the 'Ribhus,' or heroic artificers, of the Vedas, the first men who were made immortal. Another early bard, 'Linos,' is the very perfection of shadowiness. The Greek settler or exile on Semitic coasts who listened to the strange oriental dirges and caught the often-recurring wail 'Ai-lenû' ('Woe to us'), took the words as Greek, aι
The books of the Iliad are denoted by the capital letters of the Greek alphabet, those of the Odyssey by the small letters ('Woe for Linos'), and made his imaginary Linos into an unhappy poet or a murdered prince. Homer's ancestors, when they are not gods and rivers, tend to bear names like 'Memory-son' and 'Sweet-deviser'; his minor connections -- the figures among whom the lesser epics were apt to be divided -- have names which are sometimes transparent, sometimes utterly obscure, but which generally agree in not being Greek names of any normal type. The name of his son-in-law, 'Creophŷlus,' suggests a comic reference to the 'Fleshpot-tribe' of bards with their 'perquisites.' A poet who is much quoted for the saga-subjects painted on the 'Leschê' or 'Conversation Hall' at Delphi, is called variously 'Leschês,' 'Lescheôs,' and 'Leschaios'; another who sang of sea-faring, has a name 'Arctinos,' derived, as no other Greek name is, from the Pole-star. The author of the Têlegoneia,* which ended the Odysseus-saga in a burst of happy marriages (see p. 48 ), is suitably named 'Eugamon' or 'Eugammon.'2
As for 'Homêros' himself, the word means 'hostage': it cannot be a full Greek name, though it might be an abbreviated 'pet name,' e.g for 'Homêrodochos' ('hostage-taker'), if there were any Greek names at all compounded from this word. As it is, the fact we must start from is the existence of 'Homêridæ,' both as minstrels in general and as a clan. 'Homêros' must by all analogy be a primeval ancestor, invented to give them a family unity, as 'Dôros,' 'Iôn,' and 'Hellên' were invented; as even the League of the 'Amphictyones' or 'Dwellers-round [Thermopylæ]' had to provide themselves with a common ancestor called 'Amphictyôn' or 'Dweller-round.' That explains 'Homêros,' but still leaves 'Homêridæ' unexplained. It may be what it professes to be, a patronymic (' Homer-sons'). It is easy to imagine a state of society in which the Sons of the Hostages, not trusted to fight, would be used as bards. But it may equally well be some compound meaning 'fitters together,' with the termination modified into patronymic form when the minstrels began to be a guild and to feel the need of a common ancestor.
It is true that we have many traditional 'lives' of the prehistoric poets, and an account of a 'contest' between Homer and Hesiod, our version being copied from one composed about 400 B.C. by the sophist Alkidamas, who, in his turn, was adapting some already existing romance. And in the poems themselves we have what purport to be personal reminiscences. Hesiod mentions his own name in the preface to the Theogony. In the Erga (l. 633 ff.), he tells how his father emigrated from Kymê to Ascra. The Homeric Hymn to Apollo ends in an appeal from the poet to the maidens who form his audience, to remember him, and "when any stranger asks who is the sweetest of singers and who delights them most, to answer with one voice: 'Tis a blind man; he dwells in craggy Chios; his songs shall be the fairest for evermore." Unfortunately, these are only cases of personation. The rhapsode who recited those verses first did not mean that he was a blind Chian, and his songs the fairest for evermore; he only meant that the poem he recited was the work of that blind Homer whose songs were as a matter of fact the best. Indeed, both this passage and the preface to the Theogony are demonstrably later additions, and the reminiscence in the Erga must stand or fall with them. The real bards of early Greece were all nameless and impersonal; and we know definitely the point at which the individual author begins to dare to obtrude himself -- the age of the lyrists and the Ionian researchers. These passages are not evidence of what Hesiod and Homer said of themselves; they are evidence of what the tradition of the sixth century fabled about them.
Can we see the origin of this tradition? Only dimly. There is certainly some historical truth in it. The lives and references, while varying in all else, approach unanimity in making Homer a native of Ionia. They concentrate themselves on two places, Smyrna and Chios; in each of these an Æolian population had been overlaid by an Ionian, and in Chios there was a special clan called 'Homêridæ.' We shall see that if by the 'birth of Homer' we mean the growth of the Homeric poems, the tradition here is true. It is true also when it brings Hesiod and his father over from Asiatic Kymê to Bæotia, in the sense that the Hesiodic poetry is essentially the Homeric form brought to bear on native Bœotian material.
Thus Homer is a Chian or Smyrnaean for historical reasons; but why is he blind? Partly, perhaps, we have here some vague memory of a primitive time when the able-bodied men were all warriors; the lame but strong men, smiths and weapon-makers; and the blind men, good for nothing else, mere singers. More essentially, it is the Saga herself at work. She loved to make her great poets and prophets blind, and then she was haunted by their blindness. Homer was her Demodocus, "whom the Muse greatly loved, and gave him both good and evil; she took away his eyes and gave him sweet minstrelsy." (θ, 63, 4). It is pure romance -- the romance which creates the noble bust of Homer in the Naples Museum; the romance which one feels in Callimachus's wonderful story of the Bathing of Pallas, where it is Teiresias, the prophet, not the poet, who loses his earthly sight. Other traits in the tradition have a similar origin -- the contempt poured on the unknown beggar-man at the Marriage Feast till he rises and sings; the curse of ingloriousness he lays on the Kymeans who rejected him; the one epic (Cypria*) not up to his own standard, with which he dowered his daughter and made her a great heiress.
THE HOMERIC POEMS
If we try to find what poems were definitely regarded as the work of Homer at the beginning of our tradition, the answer must be -- all that were 'Homeric' or 'heroic'; in other words, all that express in epos the two main groups of legend, centred round Troy and Thebes respectively. The earliest mention of Homer is by the poet Callinus (ca. 660 B.C.), who refers to the Thebais* as his work; the next is probably by Semonides of Amorgos (same date), who cites as the words of 'a man of Chios' a proverbial phrase which occurs in our Iliad, "As the passing of leaves is, so is the passing of men." It is possible that he referred to some particular Chian, and that the verse in our Iliad is merely a floating proverb assimilated by the epos; but the probability is that he is quoting our passage. Simonides of Keos ( 556-468 B.C.), a good century later, speaks of " Homer and Stesichorus telling how Meleagros conquered all youths in spear-throwing across the wild Anauros." This is not in our Iliad or Odyssey, and we cannot trace the poem in which it comes. Pindar, a little later, mentions Homer several times. He blames him for exalting Odysseus -- a reference to the Odyssey -but pardons him because he has told "straightly by rod and plummet the whole prowess of Aias"; especially, it would seem, his rescue of the body of Achilles, which was described in two lost epics, the Little Iliad* and the Æthiopis.* He bids us "remember Homer's word: A good messenger brings honour to any dealing" -- a word, as it chances, which our Horner never speaks; and he mentions the "Homêridæ, singers of stitched lays."
If Æschylus ever called his plays3 "slices from the great banquets of Homer," the banquets he referred to must have been far richer than those to which we have admission. In all his ninety plays it is hard to find more than seven which take their subjects from our Homer, including the Agamemnon and Choëphoroi,4 and it would need some spleen to make a critic describe these two as 'slices' from the Odyssey. What Æschylus meant by ' Homer'was the heroic saga as a whole. It is the same with Sophocles, who is called 'most Homeric,' and is said by Athenæus (p. 277 ) to "rejoice in the epic cycle and make whole dramas out of it." That is, he treated those epic myths which Athenaeus only knew in the prose 'cycles' or handbooks compiled by one Dionysius in the second century B.C., and by Apollodôrus in the first. To Xenophanes ( sixth century) ' Homer and Hesiod' mean all the epic tradition, sagas and theogonies alike, just as they do to Herodotus when he says (ii. 53), that they two "made the Greek religion, and distributed to the gods their titles and honours and crafts, and described what they were like." There Herodotus uses the conventional language; but he has already a standard of criticism which is inconsistent with it. For he conceives Homer definitely as the author of the Iliad and Odyssey. He doubts if the Lay of the Afterborn* be his, and is sure (ii. 117) that the Cypria* cannot be, because it contradicts the Iliad. This is the first trace of the tendency that ultimately prevailed. Thucydides explicitly recognises the Iliad, the Hymn to Apollo, and the Odyssey as Homer's. Aristotle gives him nothing but the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the humorous epic Margîtes.* Plato's quotations do not go beyond the Iliad and the Odyssey; and it is these two poems alone which were accepted as Homer's by the great Alexandrian scholar Aristarchus (ca. 160 B.C.), and which have remained ' Homeric' ever since.
How was it that these two were originally selected as being ' Homer' in some special degree? And how was it that, in spite of the essential dissimilarities between them, they continued to hold the field together as his authentic work when so many other epics had been gradually taken from him? It is the more surprising when we reflect that the differences and inconsistencies between them had already been pointed out in Alexandrian times by the 'Chorizontes' or 'Separators,' Xenon and Hellanicus.
ILIAD AND ODYSSEY: THE PANATHENAIC RECITATION
A tradition comes to our aid which has been differently interpreted by various critics -- the story of the recension by Pisistratus, tyrant of Athens, in the middle of the sixth century. Late writers speak much of this recension. "Vox totius antiquitatis" is the authority Wolf claims for it. It is mentioned in varying terms by Cicero, Pausanias, Ælian, Josephus; it is referred to as a well-known fact in a late epigram purporting to be written for a statue of "Pisistratus, great in counsel, who collected Homer, formerly sung in fragments." Cicero's account is that Pisistratus "arranged in their present order the books of Homer, previously confused." The Byzantine Tzetzes -- the name is only a phonetic way of spelling Cæcius -- makes the tradition ludicrous by various mistakes and additions; his soberest version says that Pisistratus performed this task "by the help of the industry of four famous and learned men -- Concylus, Onomacritus of Athens, Zopyrus of Heraclea, and Orpheus of Crotona." Unfortunately, the learned Concylus is also called Epiconcylus, and represents almost certainly the 'Epic Cycle,' ἐπτκν κύκλου, misread as a proper name! And the whole commission has a fabulous air, and smacks of the age of the Ptolemies rather than the sixth century. Also it is remarkable that in our fairly ample records about the Alexandrian critics, especially Aristarchus, there is no explicit reference to Pisistratus as an editor.
It used to be maintained that this silence of the Alexandrians proved conclusively that the story was not in existence in their time. It has now been traced, in a less developed form, as far back as the fourth century B.C. It was always known that a certain Dieuchidas of Megara had accused Pisistratus of interpolating lines in Homer to the advantage of Athens -- a charge which, true or false, implies that the accused had some special opportunities.
It was left for Wilamowitz to show that Dieuchidas was a writer much earlier than the Alexandrians, and to explain his motive.5 It is part of that general literary revenge which Megara took upon fallen Athens in the fourth century. "Athens had not invented comedy; it was Megara. Nor tragedy either; it was Sikyon. Athens had only falsified and interpolated!" Whether Dieuchidas accepted the Pisistratus recension as a fact generally believed, or whether he suggested it as an hypothesis, is not clear. It appears, however, that he could not find any un-Attic texts to prove his point by. When he wished to suggest the true reading he had to use his own ingenuity. It was he who invented a supposed original form for the interpolated passage in B, 671; and perhaps he who imagined the existence of a Spartan edition of Homer by Lycurgus, an uncontaminated text copied out honestly by good Dorians!
The theory, then, that Pisistratus had somehow 'interpolated Homer' was current before Alexandrian times. Why does Aristarchus not mention it? We cannot clearly say. It is possible that he took the fact for granted, as the epigram does. It is certain, at any rate, that Aristarchus rejected on some ground or other most of the lines which modern scholars describe as 'Athenian interpolations'; and that ground cannot have been a merely internal one, since he held the peculiar belief that Homer himself was an Athenian. Lastly, it is a curious fact that Cicero's statement about the recension by Pisisstratus seems to be derived from a member of the Pergamene school, whose founder, Crates, stood almost alone in successfully resisting and opposing the authority of Aristarchus. It is quite possible that the latter tended to belittle a method of explanation which was in particular favour with a rival school.
Dieuchidas, then, knows of Pisistratus having done to the poems something which gave an opportunity for interpolation. But most Megarian writers, according to Plutarch (Solon, 10), say it was Solon who made the interpolations; and a widespread tradition credits Solon with a special law about the recitation of ' Homer' at the Festival of the Panathenæa. This law, again, is attributed to Hipparchus in the pseudo-Platonic dialogue which bears his name -- a work not later than the third century. Lycurgus the orator ascribes it simply to 'our ancestors,' and that is where we must leave it. When a law was once passed at Athens, it tended to become at once the property of Solon, the great 'Nomothetês.' If Pisistratus and Hipparchus dispute this particular law, it is partly because there are rumours of dishonest dealings attached to the story, partly because the tyrants were always associated with the Panathenæa.
But what was the law? It seems clear that the recitation of Homer formed part of the festal observances, and probable that there was a competition. Again, we know that the poems were to be recited in a particular way. But was it 'by suggestion' -- at any verse given? That is almost incredible. Or was it 'one beginning where the last left off'? Or, as Diogenes Laertius airily decides, did the law perhaps say εξ υποβολης, and mean εξ υποληψεως?6
Our evidence then amounts in the first place to this: that there was a practice in Athens, dating at latest from early in the fifth century, by which the Homeric poems were recited publicly in a prescribed order; and that the origin of the practice was ascribed to a definite public enactment. We find further, that in all non-Athenian literature down to Pindar, ' Homer' seems to be taken as the author of a much larger number of poems than we possess -- probably of all the Trojan and Theban epics -- whereas in Attic literature from the fifth century onwards he is especially the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey, the other poems being first treated as of doubtful authorship, afterwards ignored. When we add that in the usage of all the authors who speak of this Panathenaic recitation, ' Homer' means simply, and as a matter of course, the Iliad and the Odyssey, the conclusion inevitably suggests itself that it was these two poems alone which were selected for the recitation, and that it was the recitation which gave them their unique position of eminence as the 'true' Homer.
Why were they selected? One can see something, but not much. To begin with, a general comparison of the style of the rejected epics with that of our two poems suggests that the latter are far more elaborately 'worked up' than their brethren. They have more unity; they are less like mere lays; they have more dramatic tension and rhetorical ornament. One poem only can perhaps be compared with them, the first which is quoted as ' Homer's' in literature, the Thebais:* but the glory of Thebes was of all subjects the one which could least be publicly blazoned by Athenians; Athens would reject such a thing even more unhesitatingly than Sikyon rejected the ' Homer' which praised Argos.7
We get thus one cardinal point in the history of the poems; it remains to trace their development both before and after. To take the later history first, our own traditional explanation of Homer is derived from the Alexandrian scholars of the third and second centuries B.C., Zenodotus of Ephesus (born 325 ?), Aristophanes of Byzantium (born 257 ?), and Aristarchus of Samothrace (born 215); especially from this last, the greatest authority on early poetry known to antiquity. Our information about him is mostly derived from an epitome of the works of four later scholars: Didymus On the Aristarchean Recension; Aristonîcus On the Signs in the Iliad and Odyssey -i.e. the critical signs used by Aristarchus; Herodian On the Prosody and Accentuation of the Iliad, and Nicanor On Homeric Punctuation. The two first named were of the Augustan age; the epitome was made in the third century A.D.; the MS. in which it is preserved is the famous Venetus A of the tenth century, containing the Iliad but not the Odyssey.
We can thus tell a good deal about the condition of Homer in the second century B.C., and can hope to establish with few errors a text 'according to Aristarchus,' a text which would approximately satisfy the best literary authority at the best period of Greek criticism. But we must go much further, unless we are to be very unworthy followers of Aristarchus and indifferent to the cause of science in literature. In the first place, if our comments come from Aristarchus, where does our received text come from? Demonstrably not from him, but from the received text or vulgate of his day, in correction of which he issued his two editions, and on which neither he nor any one else has ultimately been able to exercise a really commanding influence. Not that he made violent changes; on the contrary, he seldom or never 'emended' by mere conjecture, and, though he marked many lines as spurious, he did not omit them. The greatest divergences which we find between Aristarchus and the vulgate are not so great as those between the quartos and the folios of Hamlet.
Yet we can see that he had before him a good many recensions which differed both from the vulgate and from one another. He mentions in especial three classes of such MSS. -- those of individuals, showing the recension or notes of poets like Antimachus and Rhiânus, or of scholars like Zenodotus; those of cities, coming from Marseilles, Chios, Argos, Sinôpe, and in general from all places except Athens, the city of the vulgate; and, lastly, what he calls the 'vulgar' or 'popular' or 'more careless' texts, among which we may safely reckon 'that of the many verses'.
The quotations from Homer in pre-Alexandrian writers enable us to appreciate both the extent and the limits of this variation. They show us first that even in Athens the vulgate had not established itself firmly before the year 300 B.C. Æschines the orator, a man of much culture, not only asserts that the phrase φημη δ'ες στρατον ηλθε occurs 'several times in the Iliad,' whereas in our texts it does not occur at all; but quotes verbally passages from Θ and ψ with whole lines quite different. And the third-century papyri bear the same testimony, notably the fragment of Λ in the Flinders-Petrie collection published in 1891 by Prof. Mahaffy, and the longer piece from the same book published by M. Nicole in the Revue de Philologie, 1894. The former of these, for instance, contains the beginnings or endings of thirty-eight lines of Λ between 502 and 537. It omits one of our lines; contains four strange lines; and has two others in a different shape from that in our texts: a serious amount of divergence in such a small space. On the other hand, the variations seem to be merely verbal, and the same applies to the rest of the papyrus evidence. There is no variation in matter in any fourth-century text.
The summing up of this evidence gives us the last two stages of the Homeric poems. The canonical statements of fact and the order of the incidents were fixed by a gradual process of which the cardinal point is the institution of the Panathenaic recitations; the wording of the text line by line was gradually stereotyped by continued processes of school repetition and private reading and literary study, culminating in the minute professional criticism of Zenodotus and his successors at the Alexandrian library.
If we go further back, it is impossible not to be struck by the phenomenon, that while the Homeric quotations in most fourth and fifth century writers, even in Aristotle, for instance, differ considerably from our text, Plato's quotations8 agree with it almost word for word. One cannot but combine with this the conclusion drawn by Grote in another context, that Demetrius of Phalêrum, when summoned by Ptolemy I. to the foundation of the library at Alexandria, made use of the books bequeathed by Plato to the Academy.9
This analysis brings us again to the Panathenaic recitation. We have seen that its effects were to establish the Iliad and the Odyssey as ' Homer' par excellence; to fix a certain order of incidents in them; and, of course, to make them a public and sacred possession of Athens.
Let us try to see further into it. When was it instituted? Was there really a law at all, or only a gradual process which the tradition, as its habit is, has made into one definite act?
As for the date, the establishment of the custom is sure not to be earlier than the last person to whom it is ascribed; that is, it took place not before, but probably after, the reign of Hipparchus. Now, to make the works of the great Ionian poet an integral part of the most solemn religious celebration of Athens, is a thing which can only have taken place in a period of active fraternising with Ionia. That movement begins for Athens with the Ionian revolt; before 500 B.C. she had been ashamed of her supposed kinsmen; even Cleisthenes had abolished the Ionian tribe names. The year 499 opens the great Pan-Ionic period of Athenian policy, in which Athens accepts the position of metropolis and protectress of Ionia, absorbs Ionian culture, and rises to the intellectual hegemony of Greece. Learning and letters must have fled from Miletus at the turn of the sixth century B.C., as they fled from Constantinople in the fifteenth A.D., and Athens was their natural refuge. We shall see later the various great men and movements that travelled at this time from Asia to Athens. One typical fact is the adoption of the Ionian alphabet at Athens for private and literary use.
The native Athenian alphabet was an archaic and awkward thing, possessing neither double consonants nor adequate vowel-distinctions. The Ionian was, roughly, that which we now use. It was not officially adopted in Athens till 404 -- the public documents liked to preserve their archaic majesty -- but it was in private use there during the Persian Wars;10 that is, it came over at the time when Athens accepted and asserted her position as the metropolis of Ionia, and adopted the Ionian poetry as a part of her sacred possessions. But a curious difficulty suggests itself. Homer in Ionia was of course already written in Ionic. Our tradition, however, backed by many explicit statements of the Alexandrians and by considerations of textual criticism,11 expressly insists that the old texts of Homer were in the old Attic alphabet. If Homer came into the Panathenæa at the very same time as the new Ionian alphabet came to Athens, how was it that the people rewrote him from the better script into the worse? The answer is not hard to find; and it is also the answer to another question, which we could not solve before. Copies of Homer were written in official Attic, because the recitation at the Panathenæa was an official ceremony, prescribed by a legal enactment.
There was then a definite law, a symptom of the general Ionising movement of the first quarter of the fifth century. Can we see more closely what it effected?
It prescribed a certain order, and it started a tendency towards an official text. It is clear that adherence to the words of the text was not compulsory, though adherence to the 'story' was. It seems almost certain that the order so imposed was not a new and arbitrary invention. It must have been already known and approved at Athens; though, of course, it may have been only one of various orders current in the different Homeric centres of Ionia, and was probably not rigid and absolute anywhere. At any rate one thing is clear -- this law was among the main events which ultimately took the epos for good out of the hands of the rhapsodes.
We know that the epos' in Ionia was in the possession of 'Homèridai' or 'rhapsôdoi'; and we have reason to suppose that these were organised in guilds or schools. We know roughly how a rhapsode set to work. He would choose his 'bit' from whatever legend it might be, as the bards do in the Odyssey.12 He would have some lines of introduction -- so much Pindar tells us, and the Homeric hymns or preludes show us what he meant -- and probably some lines of finish. He would, if an ordinary human being, introduce bright patches and episodes to make his lay as attractive as others. He would object to a fixed text, and utterly abhor the subordination of parts to whole.
Now, our poems are full of traces of the rhapsode; they are developments from the recited saga, and where they fail in unity or consistency the recited saga is mostly to blame. For instance in E, the superhuman exploits of Diomêdes throw Achilles into the shade and upset the plot of the Iliad. But what did that matter to a rhapsode who wanted a good declamation, and addressed an audience interested in Diomêdes? The Doloneia (K), placed where it is, is impossible; it makes a night of such portentous length that Odysseus well deserves his three suppers. In a detached recitation it would be admirable. To take a different case, there is a passage describing a clear night, "when all the high peaks stand out, and the jutting promontories and glens; and above the sky the infinite heaven breaks open." This occurs in H, where the Trojan watch-fires are likened to the stars; it occurs also in II, where the Greeks' despair is rolled back like a cloud leaving the night clear. Commentators discuss in which place it is genuine. Surely, anywhere and everywhere. Such lovely lines, once heard, were a temptation to any rhapsode, and likely to recur wherever a good chance offered. The same explanation applies to the multiplied similes of B, 455 ff. They are not meant to be taken all together; they are alternatives for the reciter to choose from.
And even where there is no flaw in the composition, the formulæ for connection between "the incidents -"Thus then did they fight," "Thus then did they pray" -and the openings of new subjects with phrases like "Thus rose Dawn from her bed," and the like, suggest a new rhapsode beginning his lay in the middle of an epic whole, the parts before and after being loosely taken as known to the audience.
Nevertheless, the striking fact about our Homeric poems is not that they show some marks of the rhapsode's treatment, but that they do not show more. They are, as they stand, not suited for the rhapsode. They are too long to recite as wholes, except on some grand and unique occasion like that which the law specially contemplated; too highly organised to split up easily into detachable lengths. It is not likely that the law reduced them to their present state at one blow. All it insisted on was to have the 'true history' in its proper sequence. If it permitted rhapsodes at all, it had to allow them a certain freedom in their choice of ornament. It did not insist on adherence to a fixed wording.
The whole history of the text in the fourth century illustrates this arrangement, and the fact essentially is, that the poems as we have them, organic and indivisible, are adapted to the demands of a reading public. There was no reading public either in Athens or in Ionia by 470. Anaximander wrote his words of wisdom for a few laborious students to learn by heart; Xenophanes appealed simply to the ear; it was not till forty years later that Herodotus turned his recitations into book form for educated persons to read to themselves, and Euripides began to collect a library.
This helps us to some idea of the Ionian epos as it lived and grew before its transplanting. It was recited, not read; the incidents of the Iliad and the Odyssey were mostly in their present order, and doubtless the poems roughly of their present compass, though we may be sure there were Iliads without K, and Odysseys ending, where Aristarchus ended his, at ψ 296, omitting the last book and a half. Much more important, the Iliad did not necessarily stop at the mere funeral of Hector. We know of a version which ran on from our last line -- "So dealt they with the burying of Hector; but there came the Amazon, daughter of Ares, greathearted slayer of men" -- and which told of the love of Achilles for the Amazon princess, and his slaying of her, and probably also of his well-earned death. The death of Achilles is, as Goethe felt it to be, the real finish that our Iliad wants. When the enchanted steed, Xanthus, and the dying Hector prophesy it, we feel that their words must come true or the story lose its meaning. And if it was any of the finer 'Sons of Homer' who told of that last death-grapple where it was no longer Kebrionês nor Patroclus, but Achilles himself, who lay "under the blind dust-storm, the mighty limbs flung mightily, and the riding of war forgotten," the world must owe a grudge to those patriotic organisers who could not bear to leave the Trojan dogs with the best of it.
Of course in this Ionic Homer there were no 'Athenian interpolations,' no passages like the praise of Menestheus, the claim to Salamis, the mentions of Theseus, Procris, Phzedra, Ariadne, or the account of the Athenians in N, under the name of 'long-robed Ionians,' acting as a regiment of heavy infantry. Above all, the language, though far from pure, was at least very different from our vulgate text; it was free from Atticisms.
1 Esp. θ,74; μ, 70; α, 351.
2 Crusius, Philol. liv.
3 Athenæus, 347 e.
4 The others are the Achilles-trilogy (Myrmidons,*Nereides,*Phryges*), Penelope,*Soul-weighing.*
5Phil. Unters. vii. p. 240.
6 One is tempted to add to this early evidence what Herodotus says (vii. 6) of the banishment of Onomacritus by Hipparchus; but he was banished for trafficking in false oracles, an offence of an entirely different sort from interpolating works of literature.
7 Hdt. v. 67.
8 Counting Alcibiades II. as spurious.
9 Grote, Plato, chap. vi.
10 Kirchoff, Alphabet, Ed. iv. p. 92.
11 See Cauer's answer to Wilamowitz, Grundfragen der Homerkritik, p. 69ff.
12 θ, 73 ff., 500 ff.; α, 326.
Iliad
BOOK I
Sing, O goddess, the anger of Achilles son of Peleus, that brought countless ills upon the Achaeans. Many a brave soul did it send hurrying down to Hades, and many a hero did it yield a prey to dogs and vultures, for so were the counsels of Jove fulfilled from the day on which the son of Atreus, king of men, and great Achilles, first fell out with one another.
And which of the gods was it that set them on to quarrel? It was the son of Jove and Leto; for he was angry with the king and sent a pestilence upon the host to plague the people, because the son of Atreus had dishonoured Chryses his priest. Now Chryses had come to the ships of the Achaeans to free his daughter, and had brought with him a great ransom: moreover he bore in his hand the sceptre of Apollo wreathed with a suppliant’s wreath and he besought the Achaeans, but most of all the two sons of Atreus, who were their chiefs.
“Sons of Atreus,” he cried, “and all other Achaeans, may the gods who dwell in Olympus grant you to sack the city of Priam, and to reach your homes in safety; but free my daughter, and accept a ransom for her, in reverence to Apollo, son of Jove.”
On this the rest of the Achaeans with one voice were for respecting the priest and taking the ransom that he offered; but not so Agamemnon, who spoke fiercely to him and sent him roughly away. “Old man,” said he, “let me not find you tarrying about our ships, nor yet coming hereafter. Your sceptre of the god and your wreath shall profit you nothing. I will not free her. She shall grow old in my house at Argos far from her own home, busying herself with her loom and visiting my couch; so go, and do not provoke me or it shall be the worse for you.”
The old man feared him and obeyed. Not a word he spoke, but went by the shore of the sounding sea and prayed apart to King Apollo whom lovely Leto had borne. “Hear me,” he cried, “O god of the silver bow, that protectest Chryse and holy Cilla and rulest Tenedos with thy might, hear me oh thou of Sminthe. If I have ever decked your temple with garlands, or burned your thigh-bones in fat of bulls or goats, grant my prayer, and let your arrows avenge these my tears upon the Danaans.”
Thus did he pray, and Apollo heard his prayer. He came down furious from the summits of Olympus, with his bow and his quiver upon his shoulder, and the arrows rattled on his back with the rage that trembled within him. He sat himself down away from the ships with a face as dark as night, and his silver bow rang death as he shot his arrow in the midst of them. First he smote their mules and their hounds, but presently he aimed his shafts at the people themselves, and all day long the pyres of the dead were burning.
For nine whole days he shot his arrows among the people, but upon the tenth day Achilles called them in assembly — moved thereto by Juno, who saw the Achaeans in their death-throes and had compassion upon them. Then, when they were got together, he rose and spoke among them.
“Son of Atreus,” said he, “I deem that we should now turn roving home if we would escape destruction, for we are being cut down by war and pestilence at once. Let us ask some priest or prophet, or some reader of dreams (for dreams, too, are of Jove) who can tell us why Phoebus Apollo is so angry, and say whether it is for some vow that we have broken, or hecatomb that we have not offered, and whether he will accept the savour of lambs and goats without blemish, so as to take away the plague from us.”
With these words he sat down, and Calchas son of Thestor, wisest of augurs, who knew things past present and to come, rose to speak. He it was who had guided the Achaeans with their fleet to Ilius, through the prophesyings with which Phoebus Apollo had inspired him. With all sincerity and goodwill he addressed them thus:—
“Achilles, loved of heaven, you bid me tell you about the anger of King Apollo, I will therefore do so; but consider first and swear that you will stand by me heartily in word and deed, for I know that I shall offend one who rules the Argives with might, to whom all the Achaeans are in subjection. A plain man cannot stand against the anger of a king, who if he swallow his displeasure now, will yet nurse revenge till he has wreaked it. Consider, therefore, whether or no you will protect me.”
And Achilles answered, “Fear not, but speak as it is borne in upon you from heaven, for by Apollo, Calchas, to whom you pray, and whose oracles you reveal to us, not a Danaan at our ships shall lay his hand upon you, while I yet live to look upon the face of the earth — no, not though you name Agamemnon himself, who is by far the foremost of the Achaeans.”
Thereon the seer spoke boldly. “The god,” he said, “is angry neither about vow nor hecatomb, but for his priest’s sake, whom Agamemnon has dishonoured, in that he would not free his daughter nor take a ransom for her; therefore has he sent these evils upon us, and will yet send others. He will not deliver the Danaans from this pestilence till Agamemnon has restored the girl without fee or ransom to her father, and has sent a holy hecatomb to Chryse. Thus we may perhaps appease him.”
With these words he sat down, and Agamemnon rose in anger. His heart was black with rage, and his eyes flashed fire as he scowled on Calchas and said, “Seer of evil, you never yet prophesied smooth things concerning me, but have ever loved to foretell that which was evil. You have brought me neither comfort nor performance; and now you come seeing among Danaans, and saying that Apollo has plagued us because I would not take a ransom for this girl, the daughter of Chryses. I have set my heart on keeping her in my own house, for I love her better even than my own wife Clytemnestra, whose peer she is alike in form and feature, in understanding and accomplishments. Still I will give her up if I must, for I would have the people live, not die; but you must find me a prize instead, or I alone among the Argives shall be without one. This is not well; for you behold, all of you, that my prize is to go elsewhither.”
And Achilles answered, “Most noble son of Atreus, covetous beyond all mankind, how shall the Achaeans find you another prize? We have no common store from which to take one. Those we took from the cities have been awarded; we cannot disallow the awards that have been made already. Give this girl, therefore, to the god, and if ever Jove grants us to sack the city of Troy we will requite you three and fourfold.”
Then Agamemnon said, “Achilles, valiant though you be, you shall not thus outwit me. You shall not overreach and you shall not persuade me. Are you to keep your own prize, while I sit tamely under my loss and give up the girl at your bidding? Let the Achaeans find me a prize in fair exchange to my liking, or I will come and take your own, or that of Ajax or of Ulysses; and he to whomsoever I may come shall rue my coming. But of this we will take thought hereafter; for the present, let us draw a ship into the sea, and find a crew for her expressly; let us put a hecatomb on board, and let us send Chryseis also; further, let some chief man among us be in command, either Ajax, or Idomeneus, or yourself, son of Peleus, mighty warrior that you are, that we may offer sacrifice and appease the the anger of the god.”
