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- Herausgeber: Musaicum Books
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
Yale Classics (Vol. 1) is a monumental anthology that gathers the seminal works of ancient Greek literature, encapsulating a diversity of styles from the epic narratives of Homer to the lyrical verses of Sappho. This collection traverses the profound depths of epic, drama, philosophy, and rhetoric, offering a panoramic view of the classical foundations that have shaped Western literary traditions. Notable for its inclusion of both widely celebrated pieces and lesser-known gems, the anthology provides a formidable exploration of themes like heroism, destiny, love, and political identity, woven through varied artistic expressions and intellectual reflections. The contributors to this volume are pillars of classical scholarship, ranging from poets to philosophers and historians. Figures like Plato, Aristotle, and Herodotus have laid the cornerstone for Western intellectual thought, each bringing unique perspectives that have informed centuries of scholarship and debate. This volume not only reflects on the historical and cultural contexts of ancient Greece but also highlights how these diverse voices collectively weave a richer tapestry of understanding of the era's ethos and its profound influence on subsequent cultural and literary movements. Yale Classics (Vol. 1) invites readers into a dialogue with the ancients through its meticulous selection of works. For students and aficionados of literature and philosophy alike, this collection offers a unique opportunity to engage with the fundamental texts that continue to influence modern thought and culture. Readers will benefit from the breadth of insights and the scholarly discourse that this volume encapsulates, making it an essential addition to any literary collection and a tool for both education and personal enlightenment. 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: 2022
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Yale Classics (Vol. 1)
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Table of Contents
Introduction
The unifying thread of Yale Classics (Vol. 1) is the Greek pursuit of understanding human action within a world of necessity, community, and song. From Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey and the Homeric Hymns to Epictetus’ Enchiridion, the collection traces evolving answers to questions of justice, leadership, love, and self-mastery. It gathers epic, didactic instruction, lyric intensity, drama, history, philosophy, rhetoric, Hellenistic invention, and moral biography, allowing each to reveal a different facet of shared concerns. Read together, these works show how narrative, argument, and performance continually test the nature of excellence, the bounds of law, and the fragile balance between fate and deliberation.
In the earliest strata, Homer presents communal memory in expansive narrative, while the Homeric Hymns give the gods presence through ritual address. Hesiod’s Works and Days and Theogony place labor, justice, and ordering beside mythic genealogy, forming a didactic counterpoint to heroic action. Greek Lyric Poetry shifts scale to the voice and the chorus, moving among invective and praise, love and counsel, civic song and celebration. Archilochus, Alcaeus, Sappho, Alcman, Anacreon, Theognis of Megara, Simonides of Ceos, Bacchylides, and Pindar exemplify this range. Together they redirect attention from immortal patterns to mortal measure, testing how song situates the self within city, kin, and cult.
Tragedy and comedy deepen this dialogue by staging dilemmas where private bonds and public obligations collide. Aeschylus’ Oresteia guides attention from retribution to civic adjudication; Sophocles’ Ajax, Antigone, and Oedipus at Colonus probe steadfastness, defiance, and endurance; Euripides’ Medea, Hippolytus, and Bacchae unsettle certainties about reason, desire, and devotion. Aristophanes’ Frogs, Birds, and Lysistrata answer with laughter that exposes pretension, reimagines order, and dramatizes civic imagination. The accompanying Life and Work pieces frame these dramatists within practice and reputation. Across these plays, chorus and actor, ritual and debate, the stage becomes a testing ground for law, persuasion, and responsibility.
History enters as inquiry and caution. Herodotus’ Histories, introduced by The Life and Work of Herodotus, assembles travel, ethnography, and conflict into patterns of cause and marvel. Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War, with The Life and Work of Thucydides, concentrates on decision, necessity, and the pressures of power. Their narratives converse with tragedy and comedy by dramatizing speeches, public deliberation, and the unforeseen effects of policy. Where drama tests ethics through mythic frames, history tracks consequences across cities and alliances. Read together, they map how collective memory becomes a guide to judgment, and how judgment reshapes the telling of events.
Philosophy and rhetoric contest and refine the language of value. Plato’s Republic, Apology of Socrates, Symposium, and Phaedo explore knowledge, justice, friendship, and mortality through dialogue that questions civic norms. Aristotle’s Poetics, Politics, and Nicomachean Ethics analyze art, constitutions, and character, offering conceptual tools that reflect upon the poetry and public life elsewhere in the volume. Lysias’ Orations and the Philippics of Demosthenes display persuasion under pressure, articulating law, urgency, and collective resolve. Together these works show argument as action, the city as a school for reasoning, and speech as the medium through which ideals contend with necessity.
The Hellenistic poets respond by reshaping tradition with learned precision and new scales. Apollonius’ Argonautica revisits epic with reflective pace and crafted design. Callimachus’ Hymns condense vast mythic inheritances into polished invocations, while Theocritus’ Idylls cultivate pastoral perspective and miniature drama. Their art converses with Homer and Pindar by affirming memory yet privileging selectivity, intimacy, and surprise. As form tightens and allusion thickens, the poets reveal how inheritance can be renewed through choice, how myth can inhabit quieter scenes, and how literary self-consciousness becomes a principle of creation rather than a retreat from the ambitions of earlier song.
Moral reflection and collective biography gather the strands into lived counsel. Plutarch’s Rise and Fall of Greek Supremacy and Lives of Theseus, Solon, Themistocles, Aristides, Cimon, Pericles, Nicias, Alcibiades, Phocion, and Demosthenes examine character, fortune, and leadership across the polis. Epictetus’ Enchiridion distills self-command into portable practice. Their presence clarifies the whole: narrative teaches possibilities, argument sets aims, speech moves publics, and conduct completes the circle. For contemporary readers, these works illuminate enduring pressures of community and desire, war and deliberation, ritual and law. They model attentiveness to language, courage in judgment, and the capacity to remake tradition responsibly.
Historical Context
Socio-Political Landscape
Epic and didactic voices emerge from a world of aristocratic households, gift exchange, and nascent city-states. In Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, quarrels among chiefs, oaths, and assemblies reflect a heroic order negotiating limits on power. The Homeric Hymns present itinerant cult propaganda for gods and sanctuaries embedded in inter-polis networks. Hesiod’s Works and Days speaks for the smallholding farmer contesting corrupt magistrates, while Theogony maps cosmic authority as genealogy. Early lyric mirrors civic flux: Archilochus’ mercenary candor, Alcaeus’ stasis on Lesbos, Sappho’s elite circle, and Theognis’ aristocratic anxieties register tyrannies, colonization, and the struggle to formalize justice.
Fifth-century Athens anchors many works, its democracy forged against Persian invasion and sustained by imperial tribute. Aeschylus’ Oresteia dramatizes the shift from vendetta to civic adjudication and reflects debates over the Areopagus and jury power. Sophocles probes obligations to city and divine law amid expanding citizenship and empire. Euripides, writing through the Peloponnesian War, exposes strain within household and polis. Aristophanes lampoons demagogues, jury-pay politics, and peace movements while staging fantasies of civic renewal. Herodotus weighs tyranny, oligarchy, and democracy through comparative inquiry; Thucydides analyzes realpolitik, plague, and faction. Lysias’ courtroom orations and Demosthenes’ Philippics document endangered sovereignty.
After the Macedonian conquests reshaped the Greek world, artistic and political life shifted toward courts and federations. Apollonius’ Argonautica recasts epic as learned voyage under royal patronage, while Callimachus’ Hymns and Theocritus’ Idylls refine small-scale poetics for cosmopolitan audiences in Alexandria and Syracuse. Aristotle’s Politics, born from polis observation, already catalogs constitutions for an age negotiating mixed regimes. In Roman imperial settings, Plutarch’s Lives assess statesmanship and moral exemplarity across Greek careers entwined with empire. Epictetus, teaching under emperors, relocates freedom to prohairesis, counseling civic engagement without servility. Across these transformations, the city remains reference point, even as sovereignty disperses.
Intellectual & Aesthetic Currents
Archaic hexameter poetry fuses performance, memory, and theology. Homer’s compositional art shapes expansive narrative through formula, simile, and ring-structure, while the Odyssey experiments with embedded tales and recognition. The Homeric Hymns craft epiphanic biographies for gods, aligning ritual with local claims. Hesiod’s Theogony synthesizes mythic cosmogony into a juridical order anchored in Zeus; Works and Days reframes wisdom as seasonal labor, justice, and practical piety. These works establish paradigms of kleos, reciprocity, and divine providence that later authors interrogate. Their diction, meter, and gnomic texture provide the shared linguistic and ethical reservoir for lyric, drama, and philosophy.
Lyric poetry diversifies voice, meter, and occasion. Alcman’s choral pieces calibrate communal order; Alcaeus tests political invective; Sappho fashions intimate song as civic education; Anacreon models symposium grace; Simonides and Bacchylides refine commemorative craft; Pindar elevates victory ode into a theology of excellence. Attic tragedy fuses myth with civic scrutiny: Aeschylus’ choral architecture and symbolism, Sophocles’ character-centered dramaturgy, and Euripides’ skeptical agon sharpen ethical debate. Old Comedy, in Aristophanes, mobilizes parody, obscene exuberance, and public critique. Rhetoric becomes civic technology in Lysias’ plain style and Demosthenes’ energetic amplification, while Aristotle’s Poetics theorizes plot, recognition, and catharsis.
Greek inquiry widens from story to system. Herodotus’ Histories interlace travel lore, logoi, and causal explanation to model tolerant curiosity. Thucydides retools narrative as analysis through speeches, strategic case studies, and an austere style claiming utility. Plato’s dialogues fashion philosophical theater: the Apology articulates civic philosophy; Symposium stages eros as ascent; Phaedo maps soulcraft; Republic builds a grammar of justice. Aristotle’s Ethics elaborates habituation and the mean; his Politics probes citizenship and the mixed constitution. Hellenistic poetics turn erudite: Callimachus prizes fineness, Apollonius refines epic technique, Theocritus invents pastoral. Epictetus distills Stoic discipline into practicable maxims.
Legacy & Reassessment Across Time
The anthology stages its own debate over tradition. Aristophanes’ Frogs judges Aeschylus and Euripides before a comic demos, modeling literary criticism as civic ritual. Aristotle’s Poetics retrospectively systematizes tragic norms partly from Aeschylean, Sophoclean, and Euripidean practice. Hellenistic poets negotiate Homer: Apollonius’ Argonautica tests episodic elegance against monumental scale; Callimachus advocates slender perfection; Theocritus translates heroism into pastoral wit. Plato interrogates Homer’s authority while composing prose myths that rival him; the Phaedo and Republic recast afterlife and justice. Plutarch’s Lives reread politics through ethics, measuring leaders such as Themistocles, Pericles, Nicias, and Alcibiades as moral exempla.
Subsequent scholarship has continually reframed these works. The Homeric Question debates authorship, oral composition, and the coherence of Iliad and Odyssey. Hesiod’s chronology and the integrity of Works and Days’ gnomic sections remain contested. Fragmentary transmission shapes views of Archilochus, Alcaeus, Sappho, and others, while Pindaric performance contexts are reconstructed from scant evidence. Tragic staging, trilogic coherence, and the function of satyr play prompt reconstructions of Aeschylus’ practice. Thucydides’ speeches are scrutinized as literary constructs. Plato’s doctrinal unity and the compositional order of dialogues are disputed. Aristotle’s catharsis and plot theory, and Apollonius’ episodic design, spur continuing debate.
Synopsis (Selection)
Homer (Introduction; Iliad; Odyssey; Homeric Hymns)
From a war epic of wrath and honor to a homecoming tale of endurance and craft—framed by hymns of divine praise—these poems blend heroic scale with human poignancy and ritual piety, exploring fate, glory, hospitality, and cunning.
They establish moral and narrative templates that lyric personalizes, tragedy interrogates, history reframes, and philosophy reevaluates across the volume.
Hesiod (Introduction; Works and Days; Theogony)
Hesiod couples a genealogy of gods with counsel for just, laboring life, speaking in a sober, proverbial tone about order, toil, and right measure.
His worldview contrasts Homeric glory and seeds questions about justice and cosmic hierarchy that reappear in tragedy, history, and ethical philosophy.
Greek Lyric Poetry (Archilochus; Alcaeus; Sappho; Alcman; Anacreon; Theognis of Megara; Simonides of Ceos; Bacchylides; Pindar)
From Archilochus’s bite and Alcaeus’s civic song to Sappho’s eros, Simonides’s memory, Bacchylides’s polish, and Pindar’s victory odes, these compressed poems fuse private feeling with public ritual in crafted, musical speech.
Their intimate intensity and choral spectacle foreshadow tragedy and comedy, sharpen rhetorical ethos, and temper epic grandeur with personal measure.
Aeschylus (The Life and Work of Aeschylus; The Oresteia (Aeschylus); Agamemnon; The Choephori (The Libation-Bearers); Eumenides)
Aeschylus stages the passage from vendetta to civic justice within a cursed house, fusing ritual awe, prophetic imagery, and communal stakes to ask how law supersedes blood.
His cosmic-legal imagination anchors later debates in Sophocles and Euripides and resonates with the political evolution charted by Herodotus, Thucydides, and Plato.
Sophocles (The Life and Work of Sophocles; The Tragedies of Sophocles; Ajax; Antigone; Oedipus at Colonus)
Sophocles centers steadfast individuals facing ambiguous decrees and fate—soldiers, citizens, and exiles tested by duty, piety, and the limits of knowledge—in austere, lucid drama.
His ethical poise refines Aeschylean grandeur and anticipates Aristotelian analyses of character, while conversing with Euripidean psychological critique.
Euripides (The Life and Work of Euripides; The Tragedies of Euripides; Medea; Hippolytus; Bacchae)
Euripides probes desire, reputation, and fraught divine-human encounters, dramatizing domestic crises and ecstatic mysteries with skeptical, psychological sharpness.
His unsettling portraits challenge civic ideals and heroic codes from Homer and Aeschylus, aligning with Socratic inquiry and complicating later moral counsel.
Aristophanes (The Life and Work of Aristophanes; The Comedies of Aristophanes; Frogs; Birds; Lysistrata)
Aristophanes turns war, culture, and gender politics into exuberant satire, inventing fantastical schemes and choruses to test civic folly and hope.
His comic critique mirrors and mocks the gravity of tragedy and philosophy, counterpointing Thucydidean severity and Demosthenic urgency.
Herodotus (The Life and Work of Herodotus; The Histories)
Herodotus recounts the rise of Persia and Greek resistance through inquiry into causes, customs, and character, weaving travel, marvel, and moral reflection.
His expansive curiosity complements Homeric breadth and provides narrative backdrop and foil to Thucydides’ austere analytics and Plutarch’s moral portraits.
Thucydides (The Life and Work of Thucydides; History of the Peloponnesian War)
Thucydides anatomizes the Peloponnesian War with rigorous attention to power, speeches, and the corrosions of civil strife, seeking durable insight over pathos.
His lucid austerity counters Herodotean storytelling and informs the political and ethical arguments of Plato, Aristotle, and the orators.
Plato (The Life and Work of Plato; Republic; The Apology of Socrates (Plato); Symposium (Plato); Phaedo (Plato))
Plato stages philosophical drama to test justice, knowledge, love, and the soul—imagining an ideal city, defending a way of questioning, celebrating eros, and contemplating mortality.
His dialectic reinterprets Homeric virtue, scrutinizes rhetorical display, and frames debates that Aristotle systematizes and later moralists domesticate.
Aristotle (The Life and Work of Aristotle; Poetics; Politics; Nicomachean Ethics)
Aristotle builds systematic accounts of art, polity, and character, parsing tragic form, constitutional variety, and the cultivation of virtue through habituation.
He theorizes practices seen in drama and history, converses critically with Plato, and supplies criteria by which the volume’s poets, statesmen, and sages are weighed.
Lysias (The Orations of Lysias)
Lysias’s forensic speeches exemplify clear, plausible advocacy that reveals everyday motives and civic norms through crisp narrative and ethos.
Their unadorned persuasion contrasts with Platonic suspicion of rhetoric and complements Thucydidean realism and Demosthenes’ exhortatory force.
Demosthenes (The Philippics (Demosthenes))
The Philippics marshal strategy and moral appeal to rally Athens against encroaching hegemony, pressing themes of freedom, resolve, and civic duty.
They channel the tragic sense of looming loss from the historians into action, while illustrating the power—and limits—of public speech explored by philosophers.
Apollonius (Argonautica (Apollonius))
Apollonius recasts epic as learned romance, following the Argonauts through peril and passion with psychological nuance and intertextual finesse.
His Hellenistic poise converses with Homeric models and aligns with Callimachus and Theocritus in privileging artistry, measure, and inwardness.
Callimachus (Hymns of Callimachus)
Callimachus crafts miniature epics to the gods, polished with allusive wit and a programmatic preference for refinement over bulk.
These hymns counter epic amplitude with Alexandrian finesse, pairing with Apollonius and offering a lens back onto the Homeric Hymns.
Theocritus (The Idylls of Theocritus)
Theocritus conjures pastoral and urban mimes where song, rivalry, and desire unfold in stylized landscapes and lively scenes.
His bucolic mode softens heroic scale into intimate performance, resonating with lyric’s personal timbre and rebalancing martial and political gravitas.
Plutarch (The Life and Work of Plutarch; The Rise and Fall of Greek Supremasy (Plutarch); Theseus; Solon; Themistocles; Aristides; Cimon; Pericles; Nicias; Alcibiades; Phocion; Demosthenes)
Plutarch’s essays and Lives trace Greek ascendancy and character through exemplary figures, reading public fortune through private virtue and vice.
His moral portraits connect the events of Herodotus and Thucydides to the ethical frameworks of Plato and Aristotle, while reflecting on the oratorical stakes seen in Demosthenes.
Epictetus (The Enchiridion)
The Enchiridion distills Stoic practice into portable counsel on what lies within our power, urging disciplined assent, resilience, and duty.
It offers a steadying ethic after the conflicts, passions, and civic upheavals depicted elsewhere, translating philosophical doctrine into lived guidance.
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.”
