Problems in Greek history Part 4

[Sidenote: expounded by Professor Max Muller,]

[Sidenote: founded on very wide learning,]

It is not necessary for me here to expound more fully this celebrated theory, seeing that it has acquired great popularity in England from the brilliant statement of it by Professor Max Muller in his early _Lectures on the Science of Language_. It was a learned theory, requiring a knowledge of the various languages as well as the various mythologies of the Indians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, and even other branches of the great Indo-European family. It required, too, a knowledge of that wonderful new science, the science of comparative etymology, by which two names as diverse as possible could be shown to be really akin. The ordinary reader was surprised at the scientific legerdemain by which _Helen_ was identified with _Sarama_, and was disposed to accept a great deal from men who claimed to have made such astonishing discoveries.

[Sidenote: long since shown inadequate,]

[Sidenote: because it implies sentimental savages,]

[Sidenote: which is contrary to our experience.]

-- 20. It is now very long since I first declared myself against this theory[39:1], not as false, but as wholly inadequate to explain the great wealth and variety of the Greek legends. On that occasion I argued the case at length, and showed more especially that the mental condition presupposed in the primitive Indo-Europeans by this theory was not provable, and was, moreover, contradicted by everything which we know of the psychological condition of any such people. The theory implies such a daily joy and a nightly terror, when the sun rose and set, as coloured the whole language of the primitive race, and gave them one topic which wholly occupied their imaginations. Seeing that men must have existed for a long time before they invented legends, perhaps even before they used language, such fresh and ever-recurring astonishment would be indeed a marvellous persistence of childish simplicity[39:2]. Moreover, what we do know of savage men shows us that surprise and wonder imply a good deal of intellectual development, and that the primitive savage does not wonder at, but ignores, those phenomena which interest higher men.

[Sidenote: K. O. Muller's contribution.]

It is a much more reasonable view to discard the changes of the day, and adopt those of the year, as having suggested early myths of the death of beautiful youths, and the lamentation of those that loved them. I do not know a more masterly treatment of this cause for early myths, such as the death of Adonis, of Linus, of Maneros (in Egypt), than the opening of K. O. Muller's _History of Greek Literature_. It is a book now fifty years old, and our knowledge has so much advanced that Muller's views are in many points antiquated, as I have shown in re-writing the history of the same great subject[40:1]. But nothing could antiquate the genius of K. O. Muller, or the grace with which he shows that the plaintive lays of shepherd and of vine-dresser express the poignant regrets excited by the burning up of green and bloom in the fierce heats of a semi-tropical summer. We now know that Nature provides this rest for her vegetation in meridional climates; but the sleep of plants in the drought of torrid sunshine seems to men far less natural than their rest in the long nights and under the white pall of a northern winter, and thus were suggested myths of violence and cruelty.

[Sidenote: The transference of myths.]

[Sidenote: Old anecdotes doing fresh duty.]

-- 21. These things, however, account for only a small fraction of the great volume of Greek legend. It is indeed true that the same story will be renewed, the same ideas repeated, by succeeding generations. There is such a principle as the _spontaneous transference of myths_, similar to the constant recurrence of the same old stories in our modern society under new scenery and with new characters. If, for example, a man of odd ways and ridiculous habits haunts any society for a long time, and becomes what is called 'a character,' a number of anecdotes cl.u.s.ter about his name, which are told to ill.u.s.trate his peculiarities. Any old person who hears these stories will be certain to recognize some of them as much older than the character in question, and as having been told about some other oddity long pa.s.sed away; and we may predict with confidence that by and by they will be fitted on again to some new person who is a suitable subject for them. But what would be thought of the logic which inferred that the story must be false from the beginning because it wanders down the lapse of time, making itself a new home in each epoch, or that the person to whom it is fitted must be unreal because he is the hero of a tale which does not originally belong to him? Yet I could show that this has been the very att.i.tude a.s.sumed by some of the comparative philologers.

[Sidenote: Example from the Trojan legend,]

[Sidenote: but not therefore false.]

-- 22. I will take an instance which the reader will naturally expect to find discussed in this Essay--the legend of the siege of Troy. It may be quite true that old names and old metaphors about the sun or the summer lie hidden in the names of the heroes. It is to me certain that older stories were taken from their place and fitted on to the newer and more celebrated circ.u.mstances of this famous War. But all this I take to be not inconsistent with fact, but even to imply as a necessity that there must really have been such a war, which excited the minds of all the Greeks of a certain date, and so formed the obvious nucleus for all the poetical adventures which clung around it.

[Sidenote: The contribution of Dr. Schliemann.]

[Sidenote: History not an exact science.]

The brilliant researches of Dr. Schliemann have demonstrated that the locus of the legend was not chosen at random, but that Troy, or Iliom, was in the first place the site of a prehistoric settlement; in the next, that it was conquered and burned, and re-settled again and again.

There existed, moreover, a venerable shrine in the obscure historic town, to which the Locrians, at an early date, sent donations of virgins to atone for the outrage of their mythical ancestor, the lesser Ajax of the _Iliad_. These facts show that here, as elsewhere, the legend formed itself about a historic site, and with some nucleus of historic fact,--how much will probably for ever remain a subject of dispute[42:1]. If history were an exact science, in which strict demonstration were required at every step, this conclusion might warrant our pursuing Grote's course and rejecting the whole legend as imaginary.

But history is really a science of probabilities, in which this perhaps is the greatest charm, that it leaves large room to the imagination in framing hypotheses to supply a rational explanation of results which come before us full-grown, without their beginnings being recorded.

I am not concerned here with the problem of the origin of the Homeric poems. Those who desire a summary of modern research in this great field, and care to know what conclusions I have adopted, may consult my _Greek Literature_, in which the English reader for the first time found a full conspectus of this great controversy[43:1]. What now comes before us is to estimate the amount of historical truth which can be extracted from our so-called Homer.

[Sidenote: Historical value of the Homeric poems.]

It is certain that there was a great struggle round the very site given in the poems. It was alleged to be a struggle of many Greek chiefs, at a time when Mycenae was the richest capital, against the wealth and discipline of the princes about the Troad, of whom the chief of Ilion was the head. This, too, is remarkable, that in spite of the superior wealth and larger population of Asia Minor, the superiority of the Greek peninsula over this greater and richer land is plainly a.s.serted. The whole course of known history has verified the broad fact taught by the legend. Greece has always been the poorer sister, and the superior, of Asia Minor.

[Sidenote: Mycenae preserved in legend only.]

That Mycenae was really the most powerful city in the Greece of some early period, is another fact which n.o.body would ever have suspected but for the teaching of the legend. Even Dr. Schliemann's new demonstration of its truth, by the display of wealth and of high art which he found in the royal tombs, would never have been attempted had he not been guided by the consistent a.s.sertions of the _Iliad_. For the ma.s.sive remains of the fortifications, and the tombs, proved no guides to the historical Greeks, who knew Argos only as the head of that province, and early forgot the splendour of Mycenae so far as it was not kept alive in their epic Bible.

[Sidenote: General teaching of the epic poems.]

-- 23. Quite apart from such particular facts, which teach us that the statements of Greek legend are never to be despised, there are large general conclusions which most of us think warranted by the Homeric poems. We may infer the political ideas prevalent when they were composed; the relative importance of king, n.o.bles, and commons; the usages of peace and war; the life of men in its social side; the position of women and of slaves; the religious notions of the day; and such other questions as must be answered if we desire to obtain a living picture of the people. Every recent history of Greece has a chapter on the Homeric poems from this point of view--none of them fuller or better than the chapters of Grote.

[Sidenote: Social Life in Greece.]

[Sidenote: Alleged artificiality of the poems.]

What I had to say on this subject was set down in the opening chapters of my _Social Life in Greece_, from which some stray critics have indeed expressed their dissent, without undertaking to probe and refute my arguments. Until that is done, the sketch there given of the aristocratic society described in the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_ claims to be just, and it is unnecessary to defend it here. Perhaps, however, recent inquiry may have led some students to imagine that I have attached too much credit to the Homeric pictures of life, seeing that they are now often a.s.serted to be artificial, and constructed by the poets to represent an age and a society different from their own.

[Sidenote: Examples from the Iliad,]

[Sidenote: not corroborated by recent discoveries.]

We cannot verify what these poets describe by anything which we know in historical Greece, without making very large allowances. The games, for example, described in the twenty-third book of the _Iliad_, are totally distinct in character from the Olympic games,--the oldest historical contests of the same kind known to us. The monarchy of Agamemnon and of Menelaus is totally different from that of Sparta, which survived into the light of history; and even the poets themselves constantly tell you that they speak of men not such as the men of their own day, but greater, stronger, and happier. On the other hand, when we seek for support from the very ancient remains found at Mycenae, Tiryns, and Troy in recent years, we find no clear corroboration, and must admit that the arms, the dress, and probably the life of the great men whose splendour we have unearthed do not correspond to the descriptions of the same things in Homer. This has been the subject of a special book by W.

Helbig[46:1], and the general result at which he arrives is merely negative. The civilization found by Dr. Schliemann is apparently not that of Homer. Is the latter then purely imaginary, neither prehistoric nor historic? Is the life described as artificial as the language?

[Sidenote: Fick's account of the Homeric dialect.]

-- 24. For now we are a.s.sured, by the researches of Fick, that the apparent jumble of dialects in the poems cannot possibly be any original language which embraced all the dialects, far less a judicious selection from each due to the genius of the poet, but rather the incongruous result of the adaptation of an older form (aeolic) to the wants of a newer and different (Ionic) public. This rehandling of great poems to make them intelligible is an almost universal phenomenon, and now affords us the first reasonable theory for the extraordinary facts presented by Homer's language. Of course there are later poems, and possibly later pa.s.sages in the old poems, where this artificial dialect was deliberately imitated by men who found it already achieved, and merely accepted it as the received epic language. But these pa.s.sages are insignificant. The body of the poems seems to have been rehandled for the practical purpose of making them intelligible, just as Dryden rehandled Chaucer.

[Sidenote: Difficulties in the theory.]

In this theory of Fick, which he has defended with extraordinary acuteness and learning, we have the greatest advance made in our day as regards the language of Homer. Of course it has not yet been accepted by the world of scholars[47:1]. I myself think Fick's weak point is his close adherence to the dissection of the _Iliad_ into three successive layers by A. Kirchhoff, and his attempt to show that the parts severed from the older as accretions by Kirchhoff are also exactly the parts which were composed in the later (Ionic) dialect, and which therefore do not show the traces of older forms elsewhere to be found. Fick may be right even here; but I am not persuaded by his arguments[47:2].

[Sidenote: a.n.a.logies in its favour.]

But when the conservatives retorted that in presupposing a rehandling of the dialect, and an imperfect translation into newer forms, he was a.s.suming a fact unique in literature,--certainly in Greek literature,--he smote them 'hip and thigh' by showing parallel cases, not only in mediaeval poetry, but in the collateral Greek lyric poetry.

He showed that old epigrams, for example, had been altered to make them intelligible, while an occasional form for which no _metrical_ equivalent could be found was allowed to remain[48:1].

[Sidenote: Its application to the present argument.]

-- 25. I have delayed over this important and novel theory not unduly, because its adoption affects the question of the artificiality of the poems. If, as was thought formerly, the poets were distinctly composing in an artificial dialect, into which they foisted forms from various dialects for the purpose of appearing learned in archaic language, we might fairly suspect such a pedantic school of playing tricks with manners and customs, and of omitting or accentuating as they fancied, in order to make an archaic picture according to their lights. And this is in fact what they are accused of having done by the most recent English historian of Greece[48:2].

[Sidenote: Ill.u.s.tration from English poetry.]

But on the new theory, we have before us merely verbal changes, perhaps made with all care to preserve the original work in the parts which are old and genuine. It is as if some Englishman were to make one of Burns's Scotch poems, which are so difficult to ordinary people, accessible by turning the hard words into their English equivalents, leaving here and there those which could not be removed without destroying rythm or metre. The new version would doubtless sacrifice the flavour of the rude original, but could in no deeper sense be called an artificial composition, and would probably preserve in its mongrel jargon all the facts set down by the poet.

[Sidenote: The use of stock epithets.]

There is another point alleged for the artificiality of the Homeric poems which has not any greater weight. It is the use of epithets and of forms evidently determined by the convenience of the metre. In all poetry of all ages metre is a shackle,--perhaps modern rime is more tyrannous than the quant.i.ties of the hexameter. Yet these shackles, if they mar the efforts of the poetaster, only serve to bring out into clearer light the excellence of the true poet. And the longer the Homeric poems are read, the more firmly are all good critics persuaded of their supreme excellence.

[Sidenote: High excellence incompatible with artificiality.]

[Sidenote: The Homeric poems therefore mainly natural;]