Homer and His Age Part 19

It may be added that in Greece, as in France, some poets adapt into the adventures of their heroes world-old _Marchen_, as in the Odyssey, and in the cycle of the parents of Charles.

In the French, as in the Greek epics, we have such early traits of poetry as the textual repet.i.tion of speeches, and the recurring epithets, "swift-footed Achilles," "Charles of the white beard,"

"blameless heroes" (however blamable). Ladies, however old, are always "of the clear face." Thus the technical manners of the French and Greek epics are closely parallel; they only differ in the exquisite art of Homer, to which no approach is made by the French poets.

The French authors of epic, even more than Homer, abound in episodes much more distracting than those of the _Iliad_. Of blood and wounds, of course, both the French and the Greek are profuse: they were writing for men of the sword, not for modern critics. Indeed, the battle pieces of France almost translate those of Homer. The Achaean "does on his goodly corslet"; the French knight "_sur ses espalles son halberc li colad_."

The Achaean, with his great sword, shears off an arm at the shoulder.

The French knight--

"_Trenchad le braz, Parmi leschine sun grant espee li pa.s.se_."

The huge shield of Aias becomes _cele grant targe duble_ in France, and the warriors boast over their slain in France, as in the _Iliad_. In France, as in Greece, a favourite epic theme was "The Wrath" of a hero, of Achilles, of Roland, of Ganelon, of Odysseus and Achilles wrangling at a feast to the joy of Agamemnon, "glad that the bravest of his peers were at strife." [Footnote: Odyssey, VIII. 75-7s [sic].]

Of all the many parallels between the Greek and French epics, the most extraordinary is the coincidence between Charles with his peers and Agamemnon with his princes. The same historical conditions occurred, at an interval of more than two thousand years. Agamemnon is the Bretwalda, the Over-Lord, as Mr. Freeman used to say, of the Achaeans: he is the suzerain. Charles in the French epics holds the same position, but the French poets regard him in different lights. In the earliest epic, the _Chanson_ de Roland, a divinity doth hedge the famous Emperor, whom Jeanne d'Arc styled "St. Charlemagne." He was, in fact, a man of thirty-seven at the date of the disaster of Roncesvaux, where Roland fell (778 A.D.). But in the tradition that has reached the poet of the _chanson_ he is a white-bearded warrior, as vigorous as he is venerable.

As he rules by advice of his council, he bids them deliberate on the proposals of the Paynim King, Marsile--to accept or refuse them. Roland, the counterpart of Achilles in all respects (Oliver is his Patroclus), is for refusing: Ganelon appears to have the rest with him when he speaks in favour of peace and return to France out of Spain. So, in the _Iliad_ (II.), the Achaeans lend a ready ear to Agamemnon when he proposes the abandonment of the siege of Troy. Each host, French and Achaean, is heartily homesick.

Ganelon's advice prevailing, it is necessary to send an envoy to the Saracen court. It is a dangerous mission; other envoys have been sent and been murdered. The Peers, however, volunteer, beginning with the aged Naismes, the Nestor of the Franks. His offer is not accepted, nor are those of Oliver, Roland, and Turpin. Roland then proposes that Ganelon shall be sent; and hence arises the Wrath of Ganelon, which was the ruin of Roland and the peers who stood by him. The warriors attack each other in speeches of Homeric fury. Charles preserves his dignity, and Ganelon departs on his mission. He deliberately sells himself, and seals the fate of the peers whom he detests: the surprise of the rearguard under Roland, the deadly battle, and the revenge of Charles make up the rest of the poem. Not even in victory is Charles allowed repose; the trumpet again summons him to war. He is of those whom Heaven has called to endless combat--

"Their whole lives long to be winding Skeins of grievous wars, till every soul of them perish,"

in the words of Diomede.

Such is the picture of the imperial Charles in one of the oldest of the French epics. The heart of the poet is with the aged, but unbroken and truly imperial, figure of St. Charlemagne--wise, just, and brave, a true "shepherd of the people," regarded as the conqueror of all the known kingdoms of the world. He is, among his fierce paladins, like "the conscience of a knight among his warring members." "The greatness of Charlemagne has entered even into his name;" but as time went on and the feudal princes began the long struggle against the French king, the poets gratified their patrons by degrading the character of the Emperor.

They created a second type of Charles, and it is the second type that on the whole most resembles the Agamemnon of the _Iliad._

We ask why the widely ruling lord of golden Mycenae is so skilfully and persistently represented as respectable, indeed, by reason of his office, but detestable, on the whole, in character?

The answer is that just as the second type of Charles is the result of feudal jealousies of the king, so the character of Agamemnon reflects the princely hatreds of what we may call the feudal age of Greece. The masterly portrait of Agamemnon could only have been designed to win the sympathies of feudal listeners, princes with an Over-Lord whom they cannot repudiate, for whose office they have a traditional reverence, but whose power they submit to with no good will, and whose person and character some of them can barely tolerate.

[blank s.p.a.ce] _an historical unity._ The poem deals with what may be called a feudal society, and the att.i.tudes of the Achaean Bretwalda and of his peers are, from beginning to end of the _Iliad_ and in every Book of it, those of the peers and king in the later _Chansons de Geste_.

Returning to the decadent Charles of the French epics, we lay no stress on the story of his incest with his sister, Gilain, "whence sprang Roland." The House of Thyestes, whence Agamemnon sprang, is marked by even blacker legends. The scandal is mythical, like the same scandal about the King Arthur, who in romance is so much inferior to his knights, a reflection of feudal jealousies and hatreds. In places the reproaches hurled by the peers at Charles read like paraphrases of those which the Achaean princes cast at Agamemnon. Even Naismes, the Nestor of the French epics, cries: "It is for you that we have left our lands and fiefs, our fair wives and our children ... But, by the Apostle to whom they pray in Rome, were it not that we should be guilty before G.o.d we would go back to sweet France, and thin would be your host." [Footnote: _Chevalerie Ogier_, 1510-1529. _epopees Francaises_, Leon Gautier, vol.

iii. pp. 156-157.] In the lines quoted we seem to hear the voice of the angered Achilles: "We came not hither in our own quarrel, thou shameless one, but to please thee! But now go I back to Phthia with my ships--the better part." [Footnote: _Iliad_, I. 158-169.]

Agamemnon answers that Zeus is on his side, just as even the angry Naismes admits that duty to G.o.d demands obedience to Charles. There cannot be parallels more close and true than these, between poems born at a distance from each other of more than two thousand years, but born in similar historical conditions.

In Guide _Bourgogne,_ a poem of the twelfth century, Ogier cries, "They say that Charlemagne is the conqueror of kingdoms: they lie, it is Roland who conquers them with Oliver, Naismes of the long beard, and myself. As to Charles, he eats." Compare Achilles to Agamemnon, "Thou, heavy with wine, with dog's eyes and heart of deer, never hast thou dared to arm thee for war with the host ..." [Footnote: _Iliad_, I. 227, 228. _Gui de Bourgogne_, pp. 37-41.] It is Achilles or Roland who stakes his life in war and captures cities; it is Agamemnon or Charles who camps by the wine. Charles, in the _Chanson de Saisnes_, abases himself before Herapois, even more abjectly than Agamemnon in his offer of atonement to Achilles. [Footnote: _epopees Francaises_, Leon Gautier, vol. iii. p. 158.] Charles is as arrogant as Agamemnon: he strikes Roland with his glove, for an uncommanded victory, and then he loses heart and weeps as copiously as the penitent Agamemnon often does when he rues his arrogance. [Footnote: _Entree en Espagne_.]

The poet of the _Iliad_ is a great and sober artist. He does not make Agamemnon endure the lowest disgraces which the latest French epic poets heap on Charles. But we see how close is the parallel between Agamemnon and the Charles of the decadent type. Both characters are reflections of feudal jealousy of the Over-Lord; both reflect real antique historical conditions, and these were the conditions of the Achaeans in Europe, not of the Ionians in Asia.

The treatment of Agamemnon's character is harmonious throughout. It is not as if in "the original poem" Agamemnon were revered like St.

Charlemagne in the _Chanson de Roland_, and in the "later" parts of the _Iliad_ were reduced to the contemptible estate of the Charles of the decadent _Chanson de Geste_. In the _Iliad_ Agamemnon's character is consistently presented from beginning to end, presented, I think, as it could only be by a great poet of the feudal Achaean society in Europe.

The Ionians--"democratic to the core," says Mr. Leaf--would either have taken no interest in the figure of the Over-Lord, or would have utterly degraded him below the level of the Charles of the latest _Chansons_. Or the late rhapsodists, in their irresponsible lays, would have presented a wavering and worthless portrait.

The conditions under which the _Chansons_ arose were truly parallel to the conditions under which the Homeric poems arose, and the poems, French and Achaean, are also true parallels, except in genius. The French have no Homer: _cared vate sacro_. It follows that a Homer was necessary to the evolution of the Greek epics.

It may, perhaps, be replied to this argument that our _Iliad_ is only a very late _remaniement_, like the fourteenth century _Chansons de Geste_, of something much earlier and n.o.bler. But in France, in the age of _remaniement_, even the versification had changed from a.s.sonance to rhyme, from the decasyllabic line to the Alexandrine in the decadence, while a plentiful lack of seriousness and a love of purely fanciful adventures in fairyland take the place of the austere spirit of war.

Ladies "in a coming on humour" abound, and Charles is involved with his Paladins in _gauloiseries_ of a Rabelaisian cast. The French language has become a new thing through and through, and manners and weapons are of a new sort; but the high seriousness of the _Iliad_ is maintained throughout, except in the burlesque battle of the G.o.ds: the versification is the stately hexameter, linguistic alterations are present, extant, but inconspicuous. That the armour and weapons are uniform in character throughout we have tried to prove, while the state of society and of religion is certainly throughout harmonious. Our parallel, then, between the French and the Greek national epics appears as perfect as such a thing can be, surprisingly perfect, while the great point of difference in degree of art is accounted for by the existence of an Achaean poet of supreme genius. Not such, certainly, were the composers of the Cyclic poems, men contemporary with the supposed later poets of the _Iliad_.

CHAPTER XVII

CONCLUSION

The conclusion at which we arrive is that the _Iliad_, as a whole, is the work of one age. That it has reached us without interpolations and _lacunae_ and _remaniements_ perhaps no person of ordinary sense will allege. But that the ma.s.s of the Epic is of one age appears to be a natural inference from the breakdown of the hypotheses which attempt to explain it as a late mosaic. We have also endeavoured to prove, quite apart from the failure of theories of expansion and compilation, that the _Iliad_ presents an historical unity, unity of character, unity of customary law, and unity in its archaeology. If we are right, we must have an opinion as to how the Epic was preserved.

If we had evidence for an Homeric school, we might imagine that the Epic was composed by dint of memory, and preserved, like the Sanskrit Hymns of the Rig Veda, and the Hymns of the Maoris, the Zunis, and other peoples in the lower or middle stage of barbarism, by the exertions and teaching of schools. But religious hymns and mythical hymns--the care of a priesthood--are one thing; a great secular epic is another. Priests will not devote themselves from age to age to its conservation. It cannot be conserved, with its unity of tone and character, and, on the whole, even of language, by generations of paid strollers, who recite new lays of their own, as well as any old lays that they may remember, which they alter at pleasure.

We are thus driven back to the theory of early written texts, not intended to meet the wants of a reading public, but for the use of the poet himself and of those to whom he may bequeath his work. That this has been a method in which orally published epics were composed and preserved in a non-reading age we have proved in our chapter on the French Chansons _de Geste_. Unhappily, the argument that what was done in mediaeval France might be done in sub-Mycenaean Greece, is based on probabilities, and these are differently estimated by critics of different schools. All seems to depend on each individual's sense of what is "likely." In that case science has nothing to make in the matter. Nitzsche thought that writing might go back to the time of Homer. Mr. Monro thought it "probable enough that writing, even if known at the time of Homer, was not used for literary purposes." [Footnote: _Iliad_, vol. i. p. x.x.xv.] Sir Richard Jebb, as we saw, took a much more favourable view of the probability of early written texts. M. Salomon Reinach, arguing from the linear written clay tablets of Knossos and from a Knossian cup with writing on it in ink, thinks that there may have existed whole "Minoan" libraries--ma.n.u.scripts executed on perishable materials, palm leaves, papyrus, or parchment. [Footnote: _L'Anthropologie_, vol. xv, pp. 292, 293.] Mr. Leaf, while admitting that "writing was known in some form through the whole period of epic development," holds that "it is in the highest degree unlikely that it was ever employed to form a standard text of the Epic or any portion of it.... At best there was a continuous tradition of those portions of the poems which were especially popular ..." [Footnote: _Iliad_, vol. i.

pp. xvi., xvii.] Father Browne dates the employment of writing for the preservation of the Epic "from the sixth century onwards." [Footnote: _Handbook of Homeric Study_, p. 134.] He also says that "it is difficult to suppose that the Mycenaeans, who were certainly in contact with this form of writing" (the Cretan linear), "should not have used it much more freely than our direct evidence warrants us in a.s.serting." He then mentions the Knossian cup "with writing inscribed on it apparently in pen and ink ... The conclusion is that ordinary writing was in use, but that the materials, probably palm leaves, have disappeared." [Footnote: _Ibid_., pp. 258, 259.]

Why it should be unlikely that a people confessedly familiar with writing used it for the preservation of literature, when we know that even the Red Indians preserve their songs by means of pictographs, while West African tribes use incised characters, is certainly not obvious.

Many sorts of prae-Phoenician writing were current during the Mycenaean age in Asia, Egypt, a.s.syria, and in Cyprus. As these other peoples used writing of their own sort for literary purposes, it is not easy to see why the Cretans, for example, should not have done the same thing.

Indeed, Father Browne supposes that the Mycenaeans used "ordinary writing," and used it freely. Nevertheless, the Epic was not written, he says, till the sixth century B.C. Cauer, indeed, remarks that "the Finnish epic" existed unwritten till Lbnnrot, its Pisistratus, first collected it from oral recitation. [Footnote: _Grundfragen der Homerkritik_, p. 94.] But there is not, and never was, any "Finnish epic." There were cosmogonic songs, as among the Maoris and Zunis--songs of the beginnings of things; there were magical songs, songs of weddings, a song based on the same popular tale that underlies the legend of the Argonauts. There were songs of the Culture Hero, songs of burial and feast, and of labour. Lonnrot collected these, and tried by interpolations to make an epic out of them; but the point, as Comparetti has proved, is that he failed. There is no Finnish epic, only a ma.s.s of _Volkslieder._ Cauer's other argument, that the German popular tales, Grimm's tales, were unwritten till 1812, is as remote from the point at issue. Nothing can be less like an epic than a volume of _Marchen._

As usual we are driven back upon a literary judgment. Is the _Iliad_ a patchwork of metrical _Marchen_ or is it an epic n.o.bly constructed? If it is the former, writing was not needed; if it is the latter, in the absence of Homeric guilds or colleges, only writing can account for its preservation.

It is impossible to argue against a critic's subjective sense of what is likely. Possibly that sense is born of the feeling that the Cretan linear script, for example, or the Cyprian syllabary, looks very odd and outlandish. The critic's imagination boggles at the idea of an epic written in such scripts. In that case his is not the scientific imagination; he is checked merely by the unfamiliar. Or his sense of unlikelihood may be a subconscious survival of Wolf's opinion, formed by him at a time when the existence of the many scripts of the old world was unknown.

Our own sense of probability leads us to the conclusion that, in an age when people could write, people wrote down the Epic. If they applied their art to literature, then the preservation of the Epic is explained.

Written first in a prae-Phoenician script, it continued to be written in the Greek adaptation of the Phoenician alphabet. There was not yet, probably, a reading public, but there were a few clerkly men.

That the Cretans, at least, could write long before the age of Homer, Mr. Arthur Evans has demonstrated by his discoveries. Prom my remote undergraduate days I was of the opinion which he has proved to be correct, starting, like him, from what I knew about savage pictographs.

[Footnote: Cretan _Pictographs_ and _Prae-Phoenician_ Script. London, 1905. Annual of British _School_ of Athens, 1900-1901, p. 10. Journal of _h.e.l.lenic Studies,_ 1897, pp. 327-395.]

M. Reinach and Mr. Evans have pointed out that in this matter tradition joins hands with discovery. Diodorus Siculus, speaking of the Cretan Zeus and probably on Cretan authority, says: "As to those who hold that the Syrians invented letters, from whom the Phoenicians received them and handed them on to the Greeks, ... and that for this reason the Greeks call letters 'Phoenician,' some reply that the Phoenicians did not [blank s.p.a.ce] letters, but merely modified (transposed 3) the forms of the letters, and that most men use this form of script, and thus letters came to be styled 'Phoenician.'" [Footnote: Diodorus Siculus, v.

74. _L'Anthropologie,_ vol. xi. pp. 497-502.] In fact, the alphabet is a collection of signs of palaeolithic antiquity and of vast diffusion.

[Footnote: Origins of the Alphabet. A. L. Fortnightly Review, 1904, pp.

634-645]

Thus the use of writing for the conservation of the Epic cannot seem to me to be unlikely, but rather probable; and here one must leave the question, as the subjective element plays so great a part in every man's sense of what is likely or unlikely. That writing cannot have been used for this literary purpose, that the thing is impossible, n.o.body will now a.s.sert.

My supposition is, then, that the text of the Epic existed in AEgean script till Greece adapted to her own tongue the "Phoenician letters,"

which I think she did not later than the ninth to eighth centuries; "at the beginning of the ninth century," says Professor Bury. [Footnote: _History of Greece_, vol. i. p. 78. 1902.] This may seem an audaciously early date, but when we find vases of the eighth to seventh centuries bearing inscriptions, we may infer that a knowledge of reading and writing was reasonably common. When such a humble cla.s.s of hirelings or slaves as the pot-painters can sign their work, expecting their signatures to be read, reading and writing must be very common accomplishments among the more fortunate cla.s.ses.

If Mr. Gardner is right in dating a number of incised inscriptions on early pottery at Naucratis before the middle of the seventh century, we reach the same conclusion. In fact, if these inscriptions be of a century earlier than the Abu Simbel inscriptions, of date 590 B.C., we reach 690 B.C. Wherefore, as writing does not become common in a moment, it must have existed in the eighth century B.C. We are not dealing here with a special learned cla.s.s, but with ordinary persons who could write.

[Footnote: _The Early Ionic Alphabet: Journal of h.e.l.lenic Studies_, vol.

vii. pp. 220-239. Roberts, _Introduction to Greek Epigraphy_, pp. 31, 151, 159, 164, 165-167]

Interesting for our purpose is the verse incised on a Dipylon vase, found at Athens in 1880. It is of an ordinary cream-jug shape, with a neck, a handle, a spout, and a round belly. On the neck, within a zigzag "geometrical" pattern, is a doe, feeding, and a tall water-fowl. On the shoulder is scratched with a point, in very antique Attic characters running from right to left, [Greek: os nun orchaeston panton hatalotata pais ei, tou tode]. "This is the jug of him who is the most delicately sportive of all dancers of our time." The jug is attributed to the eighth century. [Footnote: Walters, _History of Ancient Pottery_, vol.

ii. p, 243; Kretschmer, _Griechischen Vasen inschriften_, p. 110, 1894, of the seventh century. H. von Rohden, _Denkmaler_, iii. pp. 1945, 1946: "Probably dating from the seventh century." Roberts, op. cit., vol. i.

p. 74, "at least as far back as the seventh century," p. 75.]

Taking the vase, with Mr. Walters, as of the eighth century, I do not suppose that the amateur who gave it to a dancer and scratched the hexameter was of a later generation than the jug itself. The vase may have cost him sixpence: he would give his friend a _new_ vase; it is improbable that old jugs were sold at curiosity shops in these days, and given by amateurs to artists. The inscription proves that, in the eighth to seventh centuries, at a time of very archaic characters (the Alpha is lying down on its side, the aspirate is an oblong with closed ends and a stroke across the middle, and the Iota is curved at each end), people could write with ease, and would put verse into writing. The general accomplishment of reading is taken for granted.

Reading is also taken for granted by the Gortyn (Cretan) inscription of twelve columns long, _boustro-phedon_ (running alternately from left to right, and from right to left). In this inscribed code of laws, incised on stone, money is not mentioned in the more ancient part, but fines and prices are calculated in "chalders" and "bolls" ([Greek: lebaetes] and [Greek: tripodes]), as in Scotland when coin was scarce indeed. Whether the law contemplated the value of the vessels themselves, or, as in Scotland, of their contents in grain, I know not. The later inscriptions deal with coined money. If coin came in about 650 B.C., the older parts of the inscription may easily be of 700 B.C.