Homer and His Age Part 2

Mr. Leaf and critics who take his general view are enabled to detect the patches and tatters of many ages by various tests, for example, by discovering discrepancies in the narrative, such as in their opinion no one sane poet could make. Other proofs of multiplex authorship are discovered by the critic's private sense of what the poem ought to be, by his instinctive knowledge of style, by detection of the poet's supposed errors in geography, by modernisms and false archaisms in words and grammar, and by the presence of many objects, especially weapons and armour, which the critic believes to have been unknown to the original minstrel.

Thus criticism can pick out the things old, fairly old, late, and quite recent, from the ma.s.s, evolved through many centuries, which is called the _Iliad_.

If the existing _ILIAD_ is a ma.s.s of "expansions," added at all sorts of dates, in any number of places, during very different stages of culture, to a single short old poem of the Mycenaean age, science needs an hypothesis which will account for the _ILIAD_ "as it stands." Everybody sees the need of the hypothesis, How was the medley of new songs by many generations of irresponsible hands codified into a plot which used to be reckoned fine? How were the manners, customs, and characters, _unus color_, preserved in a fairly coherent and uniform aspect? How was the whole Greek world, throughout which all manner of discrepant versions and incongruous lays must, by the theory, have been current, induced to accept the version which has been bequeathed to us? Why, and for what audience or what readers, did somebody, in a late age of brief lyrics and of philosophic poems, take the trouble to harmonise the body of discrepant wandering lays, and codify them in the _Iliad_?

An hypothesis which will answer all these questions is the first thing needful, and hypotheses are produced.

Believers like Mr. Leaf in the development of the _Iliad_ through the changing revolutionary centuries, between say 1200 and 600 B.C., consciously stand in need of a working hypothesis which will account, above all, for two facts: first, the relatively correct preservation of the harmony of the picture of life, of ideas political and religious, of the characters of the heroes, of the customary law (such as the bride-price in marriage), and of the details as to weapons, implements, dress, art, houses, and so forth, when these are not (according to the theory) deliberately altered by late poets.

Next, the hypothesis must explain, in Mr. Leafs own words, how a single version of the _Iliad_ came to be accepted, "where many rival versions must, from the necessity of the case, have once existed side by side."

[Footnote: _Iliad_, vol. i. p. xviii. 1900.]

Three hypotheses have, in fact, been imagined: the first suggests the preservation of the original poems in very early written texts; not, of course, in "Homer's autograph." This view Mr. Leaf, we shall see, discards. The second presents the notion of one old sacred college for the maintenance of poetic uniformity. Mr. Leaf rejects this theory, while supposing that there were schools for professional reciters.

Last, there is the old hypothesis of Wolf: "Pisistratus" (about 540 B.C.) "was the first who had the Homeric poems committed to writing, and brought into that order in which we now possess them."

This hypothesis, now more than a century old, would, if it rested on good evidence, explain how a single version of the various lays came to be accepted and received as authorised. The Greek world, by the theory, had only in various places various sets of incoherent chants _orally_ current on the Wrath of The public was everywhere a public of listeners, who heard the lays sung on rare occasions at feasts and fairs, or whenever a strolling rhapsodist took up his pitch, for a day or two, at a street corner. There was, by the theory, no reading public for the Homeric poetry. But, by the time of Pisistratus, a reading public was coming into existence. The tyrant had the poems collected, edited, arranged into a continuous narrative, primarily for the purpose of regulating the recitals at the Panathenaic festival. When once they were written, copies were made, and the rest of h.e.l.las adopted these for their public purposes.

On a small scale we have a case a.n.a.logous. The old songs of Scotland existed, with the airs, partly in human memory, partly in scattered broadsheets. The airs were good, but the words were often silly, more often they were Fescennine--"more dirt than wit." Burns rewrote the words, which were published in handsome volumes, with the old airs, or with these airs altered, and his became the authorised versions, while the ancient anonymous chants were almost entirely forgotten.

The parallel is fairly close, but there are points of difference. Burns was a great lyric poet, whereas we hear of no great epic poet in the age of Pisistratus. The old words which Burns's songs superseded were wretched doggerel; not such were the ancient Greek heroic lays. The old Scottish songs had no sacred historic character; they did not contain the history of the various towns and districts of Scotland. The heroic lays of Greece were believed, on the other hand, to be a kind of Domesday book of ancient princ.i.p.alities, and cities, and worshipped heroes. Thus it was much easier for a great poet like Burns to supersede with his songs a ma.s.s of unconsidered "sculdudery" old lays, in which no man or set of men had any interest, than for a mere editor, in the age of Pisistratus, to supersede a set of lays cherished, in one shape or another, by every State in Greece. This holds good, even if, prior to Pisistratus, there existed in Greece no written texts of Homer, and no reading public, a point which we shall show reasons for declining to concede.

The theory of the edition of Pisistratus, if it rested on valid evidence, would explain "how a single version of the poems came to be accepted," namely, because the poem was now _written_ for the first time, and oral versions fell out of memory. But it would not, of course, explain how, before Pisistratus, during four or five centuries of change, the new poets and reciters, throughout the Greek world, each adding such fresh verses as he pleased, and often introducing such modern details of life as he pleased, kept up the harmony of the Homeric picture of life, and character, and law, as far as it confessedly exists.

To take a single instance: the poems never allude to the personal armorial bearings of the heroes. They are unknown to or unnamed by Homer, but are very familiar on the shields in seventh century and sixth century vases, and AEschylus introduces them with great poetic effect in [blank s.p.a.ce]. How did late continuators, familiar with the serpents, lions, bulls' heads, crabs, doves, and so forth, on the contemporary shields, keep such picturesque and attractive details out of their new rhapsodies? In mediaeval France, we shall show, the epics (eleventh to thirteenth centuries) deal with Charlemagne and his peers of the eighth century A.D. But they provide these heroes with the armorial bearings which came in during the eleventh to twelfth century A.D. The late Homeric rhapsodists avoided such tempting anachronisms.

Wolf's theory, then, explains "how a single version came to be accepted." It was the first _WRITTEN_ version; the others died out, like the old Scots orally repeated songs, when Burns published new words to the airs. But Wolf's theory does not explain the harmony of the picture of life, the absence of post-Homeric ideas and ways of living, in the first written version, which, practically, is our own version.

In 1892 (_COMPANION TO THE Iliad_) Mr. Leaf adopted a different theory, the hypothesis of a Homeric "school" "which busied itself with the tradition of the Homeric poetry," for there must have been some central authority to preserve the text intact when it could not be preserved in writing. Were there no such body to maintain a fixed standard, the poems must have ended by varying indefinitely, according to the caprice of their various reciters. This is perfectly obvious.

Such a school could keep an eye on anachronisms and excise them; in fact, the Maori priests, in an infinitely more barbarous state of society, had such schools for the preservation of their ancient hymns in purity. The older priests "insisted on a critical and verbatim rehearsal of all the ancient lore." Proceedings were sanctioned by human sacrifices and many mystic rites. We are not told that new poems were produced and criticised; it does not appear that this was the case.

Pupils attended from three to five years, and then qualified as priests or _tohunga_ [Footnote: White, _THE Ancient HISTORY OF THE Maori, VOL._ i. pp. 8-13.]. Suppose that the Asiatic Greeks, like the Maoris and Zunis, had Poetic Colleges of a sacred kind, admitting new poets, and keeping them up to the antique standard in all respects. If this were so, the relative rarity of "anachronisms" and of modernisms in language in the Homeric poems is explained. But Mr. Leaf has now entirely and with a light heart abandoned his theory of a school, which is unsupported by evidence, he says.'

"The great problem," he writes, "for those who maintain the gradual growth of the poems by a process of crystallisation has been to understand how a single version came to be accepted, where many rival versions must, from the necessity of the case, have once existed side by side. The a.s.sumption of a school or guild of singers has been made," and Mr. Leaf, in 1892, made the a.s.sumption himself: "as some such hypothesis we are bound to make in order to explain the possibility of any theory"

(1892). [Footnote: _COMPANION TO THE Iliad, pp. 20, 21._]

But now (1900) he says, after mentioning "the a.s.sumption of a school or guild of singers," that "the rare mention of [Greek: Homeridai] in Chios gives no support to this hypothesis, which lacks any other confirmation." [Footnote: _Iliad_, vol. i. xviii. p. xix.] He therefore now adopts the Wolfian hypothesis that "an official copy of Homer was made in Athens at the time of Solon or Pisistratus," from the rhapsodies existing in the memory of reciters. [Footnote: _Iliad_, vol. i. p. xix.]

But Mr. Leaf had previously said [Footnote: _COMPANION TO THE Iliad_, p. 190.] that "the legend which connects his" (Pisistratus's) "name with the Homeric poems is itself probably only conjectural, and of late date." Now the evidence for Pisistratus which, in 1892, he thought "conjectural and of late date," seems to him a sufficient basis for an hypothesis of a Pisistratean editor of the Iliad, while the evidence for an Homeric school which appeared to him good enough for an hypothesis in 1892 is rejected as worthless, though, in each case, the evidence itself remains just what it used to be.

This is not very satisfactory, and the Pisistratean hypothesis is much less useful to a theorist than the former hypothesis of an Homeric school, for the Pisistratean hypothesis cannot explain the harmony of the characters and the details in the _Iliad_, nor the absence of such glaring anachronisms as the Cyclic poets made, nor the general "pre-Odyssean" character of the language and grammar. By the Pisistratean hypothesis there was not, what Mr. Leaf in 1892 justly deemed essential, a school "to maintain a fixed standard," throughout the changes of four centuries, and against the caprice of many generations of fresh reciters and irresponsible poets. The hypothesis of a school _was_ really that which, of the two, best explained the facts, and there is no more valid evidence for the first making and writing out of our _Iliad_ under Pisistratus than for the existence of a Homeric school.

The evidence for the _Iliad_ edited for Pisistratus is examined in a Note at the close of this chapter. Meanwhile Mr. Leaf now revives Wolf's old theory to account for the fact that somehow "a single version"

(of the Homeric poems) "came to be accepted." His present theory, if admitted, does account for the acceptation of a single version of the poems, the first standard _written_ version, but fails to explain how "the caprice of the different reciters" (as he says) did not wander into every variety of anachronism in detail and in diction, thus producing a chaos which no editor of about 540 A.D. could force into its present uniformity.

Such an editor is now postulated by Mr. Leaf. If his editor's edition, as being _written_, was accepted by Greece, then we "understand how a single version came to be accepted." But we do not understand how the editor could possibly introduce a harmony which could only have characterised his materials, as Mr. Leaf has justly remarked, if there was an Homeric school "to maintain a fixed standard." But now such harmony in the picture of life as exists in the poems is left without any explanation. We have now, by the theory, a crowd of rhapsodists, many generations of uncontrolled wandering men, who, for several centuries,

"Rave, recite, and madden through the land,"

with no written texts, and with no "fixed body to maintain a standard."

Such men would certainly not adhere strictly to a stereotyped early tradition: _that_ we cannot expect from them.

Again, no editor of about 540 B.C. could possibly bring harmony of manners, customs, and diction into such of their recitals as he took down in writing.

Let us think out the supposed editor's situation. During three centuries nine generations of strollers have worked their will on one ancient short poem, _The Wrath_ of _Achilles_. This is, in itself, an unexampled fact. Poets turn to new topics; they do not, as a rule, for centuries embroider one single situation out of the myriads which heroic legend affords. Strolling reciters are the least careful of men, each would recite in the language and grammar of his day, and introduce the newly evolved words and idioms, the new and fashionable manners, costume, and weapons of his time. When war chariots became obsolete, he would bring in cavalry; when there was no Over-Lord, he would not trouble himself to maintain correctly the character and situation of Agamemnon. He would speak of coined money, in cases of buying and selling; his European geography would often be wrong; he would not ignore the Ionian cities of Asia; most weapons would be of iron, not bronze, in his lays. Ionian religious ideas could not possibly be excluded, nor changes in customary law, civil and criminal. Yet, we think, none of these things occurs in Homer.

The editor of the theory had to correct all these anachronisms and discrepancies. What a task in an uncritical age! The editor's materials would be the lays known to such strollers as happened to be gathered, in Athens, perhaps at the Panathenaic festival. The _repertoire_ of each stroller would vary indefinitely from those of all the others. One man knew this chant, as modified or made by himself; other men knew others, equally unsatisfactory.

The editor must first have written down from recitation all the pa.s.sages that he could collect. Then he was obliged to construct a narrative sequence containing a plot, which he fashioned by a process of selection and rejection; and then he had to combine pa.s.sages, alter them, add as much as he thought fit, remove anachronisms, remove discrepancies, accidentally bring in fresh discrepancies (as always happens), weave transitional pa.s.sages, look with an antiquarian eye after the too manifest modernisms in language and manners, and so produce the [blank s.p.a.ce]. That, in the sixth century B.C., any man undertook such a task, and succeeded so well as to impose on Aristotle and all the later Greek critics, appears to be a theory that could only occur to a modern man of letters, who is thinking of the literary conditions of his own time.

The editor was doing, and doing infinitely better, what Lonnrot, in the nineteenth century, tried in vain to achieve for the Finnish _Kalewala_.

[Footnote: See Comparetti, _The Kalewala_.]

Centuries later than Pisistratus, in a critical age, Apollonius Rhodius set about writing an epic of the Homeric times. We know how entirely he failed, on all hands, to restore the manner of Homer. The editor of 540 B.C. was a more scientific man. Can any one who sets before himself the nature of the editor's task believe in him and it? To the master-less floating jellyfish of old poems and new, Mr. Leaf supposes that "but small and unimportant additions were made after the end of the eighth century or thereabouts," especially as "the creative and imaginative forces of the Ionian race turned to other forms of expression," to lyrics and to philosophic poems. But the able Pisistratean editor, after all, we find, introduced quant.i.ties of new matter into the poems--in the middle of the sixth century; that kind of industry, then, did not cease towards the end of the eighth century, as we have been told. On the other hand, as we shall learn, the editor contributed to the _Iliad_, among other things, Nestor's descriptions of his youthful adventures, for the purpose of flattering Nestor's descendant, the tyrant Pisistratus of Athens.

One hypothesis, the theory of an Homeric school--which would answer our question, "How was the harmony of the picture of life in remote ages preserved in poems composed in several succeeding ages, and in totally altered conditions of life?"--Mr. Leaf, as we know, rejects. We might suggest, again, that there were written texts handed down from an early period, and preserved in new copies from generation to generation. Mr.

Leaf states his doubt that there were any such texts. "The poems were all this time handed down orally only by tradition among the singers (_sic_), who used to wander over Greece reciting them at popular festivals. Writing was indeed known through the whole period of epic development" (some four centuries at least), "but it is in the highest degree unlikely that it was ever employed to form a standard text of the Epic or _ANY_ part of it. There can hardly have been any standard text; at best there was a continuous tradition of those parts of the poems which were especially popular, and the knowledge of which was a valuable a.s.set to the professional reciter."

Now we would not contend for the existence of any [blank s.p.a.ce] text much before 600 B.C., and I understand Mr. Leaf not to deny, now, that there may have been texts of the _ODYSSEY_ and _Iliad_ before, say, 600-540 B.C. If cities and reciters had any ancient texts, then texts existed, though not "standard" texts: and by this means the harmony of thought, character, and detail in the poems might be preserved. We do not think that it is "in the highest degree unlikely" that there were no texts. Is this one of the many points on which every savant must rely on his own sense of what is "likely"? To this essential point, the almost certain existence of written texts, we return in our conclusion.

What we have to account for is not only the relative lack of anachronisms in poems supposed to have been made through a period of at least four hundred years, but also the harmony of the _CHARACTERS_ in subtle details. Some of the characters will be dealt with later; meanwhile it is plain that Mr. Leaf, when he rejects both the idea of written texts prior to 600-540 B.C., and also the idea of a school charged with the duty of "maintaining a fixed standard," leaves a terrible task to his supposed editor of orally transmitted poems which, he says--if unpreserved by text or school--"must have ended by varying infinitely according to the caprice of their various reciters."

[Footnote: _Companion to the Iliad, p. 21._]

On that head there can be no doubt; in the supposed circ.u.mstances no harmony, no _unus_ color, could have survived in the poems till the days of the sixth century editor.

Here, then, is another difficulty in the path of the theory that the _Iliad_ is the work of four centuries. If it was, we are not enabled to understand how it came to be what it is. No editor could possibly tinker it into the whole which we possess; none could steer clear of many absurd anachronisms. These are found by critics, but it is our hope to prove that they do not exist.

NOTE

THE LEGEND OF THE MAKING OF THE "ILIAD" UNDER PISISTRATOS

It has been shown in the text that in 1892 Mr. Leaf thought the story about the making of the _Iliad_ under Pisistratus, a legend without authority, while he regarded the traditions concerning an Homeric school as sufficient basis for an hypothesis, "which we are bound to make in order to explain the possibility of any theory." In 1900 he entirely reversed his position, the school was abandoned, and the story of Pisistratus was accepted. One objection to accepting any of the various legends about the composing and writing out, for the first time, of the _Iliad_, in the sixth century, the age of Pisistratus, was the silence of Aristarchus on the subject. He discussed the authenticity of lines in the _Iliad_ which, according to the legend, were interpolated for a political purpose by Solon or Pisistratus, but, as far as his comments have reached us in the scholia, he never said a word about the tradition of Athenian interpolation. Now Aristarchus must, at least, have known the tradition of the political use of a disputed line, for Aristotle writes (_Rhetoric_, i. 15) that the Athenians, early in the sixth century, quoted _Iliad_, II. 558, to prove their right to Salamis.

Aristarchus also discussed _Iliad_, II. 553, 555, to which the Spartans appealed on the question of supreme command against Persia (Herodotus, vii. 159). Again Aristarchus said nothing, or nothing that has reached us, about Athenian interpolation. Once more, Odyssey, II. 631, was said by Hereas, a Megarian writer, to have been interpolated by Pisistratus (Plutarch.) But "the scholia that represent the teaching of Aristarchus"

never make any reference to the alleged dealings of Pisistratus with the _Iliad_. The silence of Aristarchus, however, affords no safe ground of argument to believers or disbelievers in the original edition written out by order of Pisistratus.

It can never be proved that the scholiasts did not omit what Aristarchus said, though we do not know why they should have done so; and it can never be proved that Aristarchus was ignorant of the traditions about Pisistratus, or that he thought them unworthy of notice. All is matter of conjecture on these points. Mr. Leaf's conversion to belief in the story that our _Iliad_ was practically edited and first committed to writing under Pisistratus appears to be due to the probability that Aristarchus must have known the tradition. But if he did, there is no proof that he accepted it as historically authentic. There is not, in fact, any proof even that Aristarchus must have known the tradition. He had probably read Dieuchidas of Megara, for "Wilamowitz has shown that Dieuchidas wrote in the fourth century." [Footnote: _Iliad_, vol. i.

p. xix.] But, unluckily, we do not know that Dieuchidas stated that the _Iliad_ was made and first committed to writing in the sixth century B.C. No mortal knows what Dieuchidas said: and, again, what Dieuchidas said is not evidence. He wrote as a partisan in a historical dispute.

The story about Pisistratus and his editor, the practical maker of the _Iliad_, is interwoven with a legend about an early appeal, in the beginning of the sixth century B.C., to Homer as an historical authority. The Athenians and Megarians, contending for the possession of the island of Salamis, the home of the hero Aias, are said to have laid their differences before the Spartans (_cir._ 600-580 B.C.). Each party quoted Homer as evidence. Aristotle, who, as we saw, mentions the tale (Rhetoric, i. 15), merely says that the Athenians cited _Iliad_, II. 558: "Aias led and stationed his men where the phalanxes of the Athenians were posted." Aristarchus condemned this line, not (as far as evidence goes) because there was a tradition that the Athenians had interpolated it to prove their point, but because he thought it inconsistent with _Iliad_, III. 230; IV. 251, which, if I may differ from so great a critic, it is not; these two pa.s.sages deal, not with the position of the camps, but of the men in the field on a certain occasion. But if Aristarchus had thought the tradition of Athenian interpolation of II. 558 worthy of notice, he might have mentioned it in support of his opinion. Perhaps he did. No reference to his notice has reached us. However this may be, Mr. Leaf mainly bases his faith in the Pisistratean editor (apparently, we shall see, an Asiatic Greek, residing in Athens), on a fragmentary pa.s.sage of Diogenes Laertius (third century A.D.), concerned with the tale of Homer's being cited about 600-580 B.C. as an authority for the early ownership of Salamis.

In this text Diogenes quotes Dieuchidas as saying something about Pisistratus in relation to the Homeric poems, but what Dieuchidas really said is unknown, for a part has dropped out of the text.

The text of Diogenes Laertius runs thus (Solon, i. 57): "He (Solon) decreed that the Homeric poems should be recited by rhapsodists [Greek text: ex hypobolaes]" (words of disputed sense), so that where the first reciter left off thence should begin his successor. It was rather Solon, then, than Pisistratus who brought Homer to light ([Greek text: ephotisen]), as Diogenes says in the Fifth Book of his _Megarica_.

And _the lines_ were _especially these_: "They who held Athens," &c.

(_Iliad_, II. 546-558), the pa.s.sage on which the Athenians rested in their dispute with the Megarians.

And _what_ "lines were especially these"? Mr. Leaf fills up the gap in the sense, after "Pisistratus" thus, "for it was he" (Solon) "who interpolated lines in the _Catalogue_, and not Pisistratus." He says: "The natural sense of the pa.s.sage as it stands" (in Diogenes Laertius) "is this: It was not Peisistratos, as is generally supposed, but Solon _who collected the scattered Homer_ of _his_ day, for he it was who interpolated the lines in the _Catalogue of the Ships_".... But Diogenes neither says for himself nor quotes from Dieuchidas anything about "collecting the scattered Homer of his day." That Pisistratus did so is Mr. Leafs theory, but there is not a hint about anybody collecting anything in the Greek. Ritschl, indeed, conjecturally supplying the gap in the text of Diogenes, invented the words, "Who _collected_ the Homeric poems, and inserted some things to please the Athenians." But Mr. Leaf rejects that conjecture as "clearly wrong." Then why does he adopt, as "the natural sense of the pa.s.sage," "it was not Peisistratos but Solon who _collected_ the scattered Homer of his day?" [Footnote: _Iliad_, vol. i. p. xviii.] The testimony of Dieuchidas, as far as we can see in the state of the text, "refers," as Mr. Monro says, "to the _interpolation_ that has just been mentioned, and need not extend further back." "Interpolation is a process that postulates a text in which the additional verses can be inserted," whereas, if I understand Mr. Leaf, the very first text, in his opinion, was that compiled by the editor for Pisistratus. [Footnote: Monro, Odyssey, vol. ii. pp. 400 410, especially pp. 408-409.] Mr. Leaf himself dismisses the story of the Athenian appeal to Homer for proof of their claim as "a fiction." If, so, it does not appear that ancient commentaries on a fiction are of any value as proof that Pisistratus produced the earliest edition of the _Iliad_. [Footnote: Mr. Leaf adds that, except in one disputed line (_Iliad_, II. 558) Aias "is not, in the _Iliad_, encamped next the Athenians." His proofs of this odd oversight of the fraudulent interpolator, who should have altered the line, are _Iliad_, IV. 327 ff, and XII. 681 ff. In the former pa.s.sage we find Odysseus stationed next to the Athenians. But Odysseus would have neighbours on either hand. In the second pa.s.sage we find the Athenians stationed next to the Boeotians and Ionians, but the Athenians, too, had neighbours on either side. The arrangement was, on the Achaean extreme left, Protesilaus's command (he was dead), and that of Aias; then the Boeotians and Ionians, with "the picked men of the Athenians"; and then Odysseus, on the Boeotolono-Athenian right; or so the Athenians would read the pa.s.sage.

The texts must have seemed favourable to the fraudulent Athenian interpolator denounced by the Megarians, or he would have altered them.

Mr. Leaf, however, argues that line 558 of Book II. "cannot be original, as is patent from the fact that Aias in the rest of the _Iliad_ is not encamped next the Athenians" (see IV. 327; XIII. 681). The Megarians do not seem to have seen it, or they would have cited these pa.s.sages. But why argue at all about the Megarian story if it be a fiction? Mr. Leaf takes the brief bald mention of Aias in _Iliad_, II. 558 as "a mocking cry from Athens over the conquest of the island of the Aiakidai."

But as, in this same _Catalogue_, Aias is styled "by far the best of warriors" after Achilles (II. 768), while there is no more honourable mention made of Diomede than that he had "a loud war cry" (II. 568), or of Menelaus but that he was also sonorous, and while Nestor, the ancestor of Pisistratus, receives not even that amount of praise (line 601), "the mocking cry from Athens" appears a vain imagination.]