Homer and His Age Part 12

Helbig offers an apparently untenable explanation of this fact. He has proposed an interpretation of the uses of bronze and iron in the poems entirely different from that which I offer. [Footnote: _Sur la Question Mycenienne_. 1896.] Unfortunately, one can scarcely criticise his theory without entering again into the whole question of the construction of the Epics. He thinks that the origin of the poems dates from "the Mycenaean period," and that the later continuators of the poems retained the traditions of that remote age. Thus they thrice call Mycenae "golden," though, in the changed economic conditions of their own period, Mycenae could no longer be "golden"; and I presume that, if possible, the city would have issued a papyrus currency without a metallic basis. However this may be, "in the description of customs the epic poets did their best to avoid everything modern." Here we have again that unprecedented phenomenon--early poets who are archaeologically precise.

We have first to suppose that the kernel of the _Iliad_ originated in the Mycenaean age, the age of bronze. We are next to believe that this kernel was expanded into the actual Epic in later and changed times, but that the later poets adhered in their descriptions to the Mycenaean standard, avoiding "everything modern." That poets of an uncritical period, when treating of the themes of ancient legend or song, carefully avoid everything modern is an opinion not warranted by the usage of the authors of the _Chansons de Geste_, of _Beowulf_, and of the _Nibelungenlied_. These poets, we must repeat, invariably introduce in their chants concerning ancient days the customs, costume, armour, religion, and weapons of their own time. Dr. Helbig supposes that the late Greek poets, however, who added to the _Iliad_, carefully avoided doing what other poets of uncritical ages have always done. [Footnote: _La Question Mycenienne_, p. 50.]

This is his position in his text (p. 50). In his note 1 to page 50, however, he occupies the precisely contrary position. "The epic poems were chanted, as a rule, in the houses of more or less warlike chiefs.

It is, then, _a priori_ probable that the later poets took into account the _contemporary_ military state of things. Their audience would have been much perturbed (_bien cheques_) if they had heard the poet mention nothing but arms and forms of attack and defence to which they were unaccustomed." If so, when iron weapons came in the poets would subst.i.tute iron for bronze, in lays new and old, but they never do.

However, this is Helbig's opinion in his note. But in his text he says that the poets, carefully avoiding the contemporary, "the modern," make the heroes fight, not on horseback, but from chariots. Their listeners, according to his note, must have been _bien cheques_, for there came a time when _they_ were not accustomed to war chariots.

Thus the poets who, in Dr. Helbig's text, "avoid as far as possible all that is modern," in his note, on the same page, "take account of the contemporary state of things," and are as modern as possible where weapons _are_ concerned. Their audience would be sadly put out (_bien cheques_) "if they heard talk only of arms ... to which they were unaccustomed"; talk of large suspended shields, of uncorsleted heroes, and of bronze weapons. They had to endure it, whether they liked it or not, _teste_ Reichel. Dr. Helbig seems to speak correctly in his note; in his text his contradictory opinion appears to be wrong. Experience teaches us that the poets of an uncritical age--Shakespeare, for example--introduce the weapons of their own period into works dealing with remote ages. Hamlet uses the Elizabethan rapier.

In his argument on bronze and iron, unluckily, Dr. Helbig deserts the judicious opinions of his note for the opposite theory of his text.

His late poets, in the age of iron, always say that the weapons of the heroes are made of bronze. [Footnote: _Op. laud_., p. 51.] They thus, "as far as possible avoid what is modern." But, of course, warriors of the age of iron, when they heard the poet talk only of weapons of bronze, "_aurient ete bien choques_" (as Dr. Helbig truly says in his note), on hearing of nothing but "_armes auxquels ils n'etaient pas habitues,_"--arms always of bronze.

Though Dr. Helbig in his text is of the opposite opinion, I must agree entirely with the view which he states so clearly in his note. It follows that if a poet speaks invariably of weapons of bronze, he is living in an age when weapons are made of no other material. In his text, however, Dr. Helbig maintains that the poets of later ages "as far as possible avoid everything modern," and, therefore, mention none but bronze weapons. But, as he has pointed out, they do mention iron tools and implements. Why do they desert the traditional bronze? Because "it occasionally happened that a poet, when thinking of an entirely new subject, wholly emanc.i.p.ated himself from traditional forms," [Footnote: _Op. laud_., pp. 51, 52]

The examples given in proof are the offer by Achilles of a lump of iron as the prize for archery--the iron, as we saw, being destined for the manufacture of pastoral and agricultural implements, in which Dr. Helbig includes the lances of shepherds and ploughmen, though the poet never says that they were of iron. [Footnote: _Iliad_, XXIII. 826, 835; Odyssey, XIV. 531; XIII. 225.] There are also the axes through which Odysseus shoots his arrow. [Footnote: _Odyssey_, XIX. 587; XXI. 3, X, 97, 114, 127, 138; XXIV. 168, 177; cf. XXI. 61.] "The poet here treated an entirely new subject, in the development of which he had perfect liberty." So he speaks freely of iron. "But," we exclaim, "tools and implements, axes and knives, are not a perfectly new subject!" They were extremely familiar to the age of bronze, the Mycenaean age. Examples of bronze tools, arrow-heads, and implements are discovered in excavations on Mycenaean sites. There was nothing new about bronze tools and implements. Men had bronze tips to their ploughshares, bronze knives, bronze axes, bronze arrow-heads before they used iron.

Perhaps we are to understand that feats of archery, non-military contests in bowmanship, are _un sujet a fait nouveau_: a theme so very modern that a poet, in singing of it, could let himself go, and dare to speak of iron implements. But where was the novelty? All peoples who use the bow in war practise archery in time of peace. The poet, moreover, speaks of bronze tools, axes and knives, in other parts of the _Iliad_; neither tools nor bronze tools const.i.tute _un sujet tout a fait nouveau_. There was nothing new in shooting with a bow and nothing new in the existence of axes. Bows and axes were as familiar to the age of stone and to the age of bronze as to the age of iron. Dr. Helbig's explanation, therefore, explains nothing, and, unless a better explanation is offered, we return to the theory, rejected by Dr. Helbig, that implements and tools were often, not always, of iron, while weapons were of bronze in the age of the poet. Dr. Helbig rejects this opinion.

He writes: "We cannot in any way admit that, at a period when the socks of the plough, the lance points of shepherds" (which the poet never describes as of iron), "and axe-heads were of iron, warriors still used weapons of bronze." [Footnote: op. _laud._, p. 53.] But it is logically possible to admit that this was the real state of affairs, while it is logically impossible to admit that bows and tools were "new subjects"; and that late poets, when they sang of military gear, "_tenaient compte de l'armement contemporain,_" carefully avoiding the peril of bewildering their hearers by speaking of antiquated arms, and, at the same time, spoke of nothing but antiquated arms--weapons of bronze--and of war chariots, to fighting men who did not use war chariots and did use weapons of iron.

These logical contradictions beset all arguments in which it is maintained that "the late poets" are anxious archaisers, and at the same time are eagerly introducing the armour and equipment of their own age.

The critics are in the same quandary as to iron and bronze as traps them in the case of large shields, small bucklers, greaves, and corslets.

They are obliged to a.s.sign contradictory att.i.tudes to their "late poets." It does not seem possible to admit that a poet, who often describes axes as of iron in various pa.s.sages, does so in his account of a peaceful contest in bowmanship, because contests in bowmanship are _UN sujet TOUT a FAIT NOUVEAU;_ and so he feels at liberty to describe axes as of iron, while he adheres to bronze as the metal for weapons. He, or one of the Odyssean poets, had already a.s.serted (Odyssey, IX. 391) that iron _was_ the metal for adzes and axes.

Dr. Helbig's argument [Footnote: _La Question Mycenienne_, p. 54.] does not explain the facts. The bow of Eurytus and the uses to which Odysseus is to put it have been in the poet's mind all through the conduct of his plot, and there is nothing to suggest that the exploit of bowmanship is a very new lay, tacked on to the Odyssey.

After writing this chapter, I observed that my opinion had been antic.i.p.ated by S. H. Naber. [Footnote: _Quaestiones Homericae_, p.

60. Amsterdam. Van der Post, 1897.] "Quod Herodoti diserto testimonio novimus, Homeri restate ferruminatio nondum inventa erat necdum bene noverant mortales, uti opinor, _acuere_ ferrum. Hinc pauperes homines ubi possunt, ferro utuntur; sed in plerisque rebus turn domi turn militiae imprimis coguntur uti aere...."

The theory of Mr. Ridgeway as to the relative uses of iron and bronze is not, by myself, very easily to be understood. "The Homeric warrior ...

has regularly, as we have seen, spear and sword of iron." [Footnote: _Early Age of Greece_, vol. i. p. 301.] As no spear or sword of iron is ever mentioned in the _Iliad_ or Odyssey, as both weapons are always of bronze when the metal is specified, I have not "seen" that they are "regularly," or ever, of iron. In proof, Mr. Ridgeway cites the axes and knives already mentioned--which are not spears or swords, and are sometimes of bronze. He also quotes the line in the Odyssey, "Iron of itself doth attract a man." But if this line is genuine and original, it does not apply to the state of things in the _Iliad_, while it contradicts the whole Odyssey, in which swords and spears are _ALWAYS_ of bronze when their metal is mentioned. If the line reveals the true state of things, then throughout the Odyssey, if not throughout the _Iliad_, the poets when they invariably speak of bronze swords and spears invariably say what they do not mean. If they do this, how are we to know when they mean what they say, and of what value can their evidence on points of culture be reckoned? They may always be retaining traditional terms as to usages and customs in an age when these are obsolete.

If the Achaeans were, as in Mr. Ridgeway's theory, a northern people--"Celts"--who conquered with iron weapons a Pelasgian bronze-using Mycenaean people, it is not credible to me that Achaean or Pelasgian poets habitually used the traditional Pelasgian term for the metal of weapons, namely, bronze, in songs chanted before victors who had won their triumph with iron. The traditional phrase of a conquered bronze-using race could not thus survive and flourish in the poetry of an outlandish iron-using race of conquerors.

Mr. Ridgeway cites the Odyssey, wherein we are told that "Euryalus, the Phaeacian, presented to Odysseus a bronze sword, though, as we have seen" (Mr. Ridgeway has seen), "the usual material for all such weapons is iron. But the Phoeacians both belonged to the older race and lived in a remote island, and therefore swords of bronze may well have continued in use in such out-of-the-world places long after iron swords were in use everywhere else in Greece. The man who could not afford iron had to be satisfied with bronze." [Footnote: _Early Age of Greece_, p. 305.]

Here the poet is allowed to mean what he says. The Phaeacian sword is really of bronze, with silver studs, probably on the hilt (Odyssey, VIII. 401-407), which was of ivory. The "out-of-the-world" islanders could afford ivory, not iron. But when the same poet tells us that the sword which Odysseus brought from Troy was "a great silver-studded bronze sword" (Odyssey, X. 261, 262), then Mr. Ridgeway does not allow the poet to mean what he says. The poet is now using an epic formula older than the age of iron swords.

That Mr. Ridgeway adopts Helbig's theory--the poet says "bronze," by a survival of the diction of the bronze age, when he means iron--I infer from the following pa.s.sage: "_Chalkos_ is the name for the older metal, of which cutting weapons were made, and it thus lingered in many phrases of the Epic dialect; 'to smite with the _chalkos_' was equivalent to our phrase 'to smite with the steel.'" [Footnote: _Early Age of Greece_, i.

295.] But we certainly do smite with the steel, while the question is, "_DID_ Homer's men smite with the iron?" Homer says not; he does not merely use "an epic phrase" "to smite with the _CHALKOS_," but he carefully describes swords, spears, and usually arrow-heads as being of bronze (_CHALKOS_), while axes, adzes, and knives are frequently described by him as of iron.

Mr. Ridgeway has an ill.u.s.trative argument with some one, who says: "The dress and weapons of the Saxons given in the lay of _Beowulf_ fitted exactly the bronze weapons in England, for they had shields, and spears, and battle-axes, and swords." If you pointed out to him that the Saxon poem spoke of these weapons as made of iron, he would say, "I admit that it is a difficulty, but the resemblances are so many that the discrepancies may be jettisoned." [Footnote: _Ridgeway,_ i. 83, 84.]

Now, if the supposed controversialist were a Homeric critic, he would not admit any difficulty. He would say, "Yes; in _Beowulf_ the weapons are said to be of iron, but that is the work of the Christian _remanieur,_ or _bearbeiter,_ who introduced all the Christian morality into the old heathen lay, and who also, not to puzzle his iron-using audience, changed the bronze into iron weapons."

We may prove anything if we argue, now that the poets retain the tradition of obsolete things, now that they modernise as much as they please. Into this method of reasoning, after duly considering it, I am unable to come with enthusiasm, being wedded to the belief that the poets say what they mean. Were it otherwise, did they not mean what they say, their evidence would be of no value; they might be dealing throughout in terms for things which were unrepresented in their own age. To prove this possible, it would be necessary to adduce convincing and sufficient examples of early national poets who habitually use the terminology of an age long prior to their own in descriptions of objects, customs, and usages. Meanwhile, it is obvious that my whole argument has no archaeological support. We may find "Mycenaean" corslets and greaves, but they are not in cremation burials. No Homeric cairn with Homeric contents has ever been discovered; and if we did find examples of Homeric cairns, it appears, from the poems, that they would very seldom contain the arms of the dead.

Nowhere, again, do we find graves containing bronze swords and iron axes and adzes. I know nothing nearer in discoveries to my supposed age of bronze weapons and iron tools than a grave of the early iron and geometrical ornament age of Crete--a _tholos_ tomb, with a bronze spear-head and a set of iron tools, among others a double axe and a pick of iron. But these were in company with iron swords? To myself the crowning mystery is, what has become of the Homeric tumuli with their contents? One can but say that only within the last thirty years have we found, or, finding, have recognised Mycenaean burial records. As to the badness of the iron of the North for military purposes, and the probable badness of all early iron weapons, we have testimony two thousand years later than Homer and some twelve hundred years later than Polybius.

In the Eyrbyggja Saga (Morris and Maguusson, chap, xxiv.) we read that Steinthor "was girt with a sword that was cunningly wrought; the hilts were white with silver, and the grip wrapped round with the same, but the strings thereof were gilded." This was a splendid sword, described with the Homeric delight in such things; but the battle-cry arises, and then "the fair-wrought sword bit not when it smote armour, and Steinthor must _straighten it under_ his _foot._" Messrs. Morris and Maguusson add in a note: "This is a very common experience in Scandinavian weapons, and for the first time heard of at the battle of Aquae s.e.xtiae between Marius and the Teutons." [Footnote: The reference is erroneous.] "In the North weapon-smiths who knew how to forge tempered or steel-laminated weapons were, if not unknown, at least very rare." When such skill was unknown or rare in Homer's time, nothing was more natural than that bronze should hold its own, as the metal for swords and spears, after iron was commonly used for axes and ploughshares.

CHAPTER X

THE HOMERIC HOUSE

If the Homeric poems be, as we maintain, the work of a peculiar age, the Homeric house will also, in all likelihood, be peculiar. It will not be the h.e.l.lenic house of cla.s.sical times. Manifestly the dwelling of a military-prince in the heroic age would be evolved to meet his needs, which were not the needs of later h.e.l.lenic citizens. In time of peace the later Greeks are weaponless men, not surrounded by and entertaining throngs of armed retainers, like the Homeric chief. The women of later Greece, moreover, are in the background of life, dwelling in the women's chambers, behind those of the men, in seclusion. The Homeric women also, at least in the house of Odysseus, have their separate chambers, which the men seem not to enter except on invitation, though the ladies freely honour by their presence the hall of the warriors. The circ.u.mstances, however, were peculiar--Penelope being unprotected in the absence of her lord.

The whole domestic situation in the Homeric poems--the free equality of the women, the military conditions, the life of the chiefs and retainers--closely resembles, allowing for differences of climate, that of the rich landowners of early Iceland as described in the sagas. There can be no doubt that the house of the Icelandic chief was a.n.a.logous to the house of the Homeric prince. Societies remarkably similar in mode of life were accommodated in dwellings similarly arranged. Though the Icelanders owned no Over-Lord, and, indeed, left their native Scandinavia to escape the sway of Harold Fairhair, yet each wealthy and powerful chief lived in the manner of a Homeric "king." His lands and thralls, horses and cattle, occupied his attention when he did not chance to be on Viking adventure--"bearing bane to alien men." He always carried sword and spear, and often had occasion to use them.

He entertained many guests, and needed a large hall and ample sleeping accommodation for strangers and servants. His women were as free and as much respected as the ladies in Homer; and for a husband to slap a wife was to run the risk of her deadly feud. Thus, far away in the frosts of the north, the life of the chief was like that of the Homeric prince, and their houses were alike.

It is our intention to use this parallel in the discussion of the Homeric house. All Icelandic chiefs' houses in the tenth and eleventh centuries were not precisely uniform in structure and accommodation, and saga writers of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, living more comfortably than their forefathers, sometimes confuse matters by introducing the arrangements of their own into the tale of past times.

But, in any case, one Icelandic house of the tenth or eleventh century might differ from another in certain details. It is not safe, therefore, to argue that difference of detail in Homer's accounts of various houses means that the varying descriptions were composed in different ages. In the _Odyssey_ the plot demands that the poet must enter into domestic details much more freely than he ever has occasion to do in the Iliad.

He may mention upper chambers freely, for example; it will not follow that in the _Iliad_ upper chambers do not exist because they are only mentioned twice in that Epic.

It is even more important to note that in the house of Odysseus we have an unparalleled domestic situation. The lady of the house is beset by more than a hundred wooers--"sorning" on her, in the old Scots legal phrase--making it impossible for her to inhabit her own hall, and desirable to keep the women as much as possible apart from the men. Thus the Homeric house of which we know most, that of Odysseus, is a house in a most abnormal condition.

For the sake of brevity we omit the old theory that the Homeric house was practically that of historical Greece, with the men's hall approached by a door from the courtyard; while a door at the upper end of the men's hall yields direct access to the quarters where the women dwelt apart, at the rear of the men's hall.

That opinion has not survived the essay by Mr. J. L. Myres on the "Plan of the Homeric House." [Footnote: _Journal of h.e.l.lenic Studies_, vol.

XX, 128-150.] Quite apart from arguments that rest on the ground plans of palaces at Mycenae and Tiryns, Mr. Myres has proved, by an exact reading of the poet's words, that the descriptions in the _Odyssey_ cannot be made intelligible on the theory that the poet has in his mind a house of the h.e.l.lenic pattern. But in his essay he hardly touches on any Homeric house except that of Odysseus, in which the circ.u.mstances were unusual. A later critic, Ferdinand Noack, has demonstrated that we must take other Homeric houses into consideration. [Footnote: _Homerische Palaste_. Teubner. Leipzig, 1903.] The prae-Mycenaean house is, according to Mr. Myres, on the whole of the same plan as the h.e.l.lenic house of historic days; between these comes the Mycenaean and Homeric house; "so that the Mycenaean house stands out _as an intrusive phenomenon_, of comparatively late arrival _and short of duration_..."

[Footnote: Myres, _Journal_ of _h.e.l.lenic_ Studies, vol. xx. p. 149.]

Noack goes further; he draws a line between the Mycenaean houses on one hand and the houses described by Homer on the other; while he thinks that the "_late_ Homeric house," that of the closing Books of the Odyssey, is widely sundered from the Homeric house of the _Iliad_ and from the houses of Menelaus and Alcinous in earlier Books of the _Odyssey._ [Footnote: Noack, p. 73.]

In this case the Iliadic and earlier Odyssean houses are those of a single definite age, neither Mycenaean of the prime, nor h.e.l.lenic--a fact which entirely suits our argument. But it is not so certain, that the house of Odysseus is severed from the other Homeric houses by the later addition of an upper storey, as Noack supposes, and of women's quarters, and of separate sleeping chambers for the heads of the family.

The _Iliad,_ save in two pa.s.sages, and earlier Books of the _Odyssey_ may not mention upper storeys because they have no occasion, or only rare occasion, to do so; and some houses may have had upper sleeping chambers while others of the same period had not, as we shall prove from the Icelandic parallel.

Mr. Myres's idea of the Homeric house, or, at least, of the house of Odysseus, is that the women had a _meguron,_ or common hall, apart from that of the men, with other chambers. These did not lie to the direct rear of the men's hall, nor were they entered by a door that opened in the back wall of the men's hall. Penelope has a chamber, in which she sleeps and does woman's work, upstairs; her connubial chamber, unoccupied during her lord's absence, is certainly on the ground floor.

The women's rooms are severed from the men's hall by a courtyard; in the courtyard are chambers. Telemachus has his [Greek: Thalamos], or chamber, in the men's courtyard. All this appears plain from the poet's words; and Mr. Myres corroborates, by the ground plans of the palaces of Tiryns and Mycenae, a point on which Mr. Monro had doubts, as regards Tiryns, while he accepted it for Mycenae. [Footnote: Monro, Odyssey, ii.

497; _Journal of h.e.l.lenic Studies_, xx. 136.]

Noack [Footnote: Noack, p. 39.] does not, however, agree.

There appears to be no doubt that in the centre of the great halls of Tiryns and of Mycenae, as of the houses in Homer, was the hearth, with two tall pillars on each side, supporting a _louvre_ higher than the rest of the roof, and permitting some, at least, of the smoke of the fire to escape. Beside the fire were the seats of the master and mistress of the house, of the minstrel, and of honoured guests. The place of honour was not on a dais at the inmost end of the hall, like the high table in college halls. Mr. Myres holds that in the Homeric house the [Greek: prodomos], or "forehouse," was a chamber, and was not identical with the [Greek: aethousa], or portico, though he admits that the two words "are used indifferently to describe the sleeping place of a guest." [Footnote: _Journal of h.e.l.lenic Studies_, xx. 144, 155.] This was the case at Tiryns; and in the house of the father of Phoenix, in the _Iliad_, the _prodomos_, or forehouse, and the _aethousa_, or portico, are certainly separate things (Iliad, IX. 473). Noack does not accept the Tiryns evidence for the Homeric house.

On Mr. Myres's showing, the women in the house of Odysseus had distinct and separate quarters into which no man goes uninvited. Odysseus when at home has, with his wife, a separate bedroom; and in his absence Penelope sleeps upstairs, where there are several chambers for various purposes.

Granting that all this is so, how do the pictures of the house given in the final part of the _Odyssey_ compare with those in the [Blank s.p.a.ce]

and with the accounts of the dwellings of Menelaus and Alcinous in the Odyssey? Noack argues that the house of Odysseus is unlike the other Homeric houses, because in these, he reasons, the women have no separate quarters, and the lord and lady of the house sleep in the great hall, and have no other bedroom, while there are no upper chambers in the houses of the _Iliad_, except in two pa.s.sages dismissed as "late."

If all this be so, then the Homeric period, as regards houses and domestic life, belongs to an age apart, not truly Mycenaean, and still less later h.e.l.lenic.

It must be remembered that Noack regards the Odyssey as a composite and in parts very late mosaic (a view on which I have said what I think in _Homer and the Epic_). According to this theory (Kirchhoff is the exponent of a popular form thereof) the first Book of the Odyssey belongs to "the latest stratum," and is the "copy" of the general "worker-up," whether he was the editor employed by Pisistratus or a laborious amateur. This theory is opposed by Sittl, who makes his point by cutting out, as interpolations, whatever pa.s.sages do not suit his ideas, and do suit Kirchhoff's--this is the regular method of Homeric criticism. The whole cruise of Telemachus (Book IV.) is also regarded as a late addition: on this point English scholars. .h.i.therto have been of the opposite opinion. [Footnote: Cf. Monro, _Odyssey_, vol. ii.

313-317.]

The method of all parties is to regard repet.i.tions of phrases as examples of borrowing, except, of course, in the case of the earliest poet from whom the others pilfer, and in other cases of prae-Homeric surviving epic formulae. Critics then dispute as to which recurrent pa.s.sage is the earlier, deciding, of course, as may happen to suit their own general theory. In our opinion these pa.s.sages are traditional formulae, as in our own old ballads and in the _Chansons de Geste_, and Noack also takes this view every now and then. They may well be older, in many cases, than _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_; or the poet, having found his own formula, economically used it wherever similar circ.u.mstances occurred. Such pa.s.sages, so considered, are no tests of earlier composition in one place, of later composition in another.