Homer: The Iliad; The Odyssey. W. Lucas Collins
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to city as a wandering minstrel, singing his lays through the towns of Asia Minor, in the islands of the Archipelago, and even in the streets of Athens itself, and drawing crowds of eager listeners wherever he went by the wondrous charm of his song. This wandering life has been assumed to imply that he was an outcast and poor. The uncertainty of his birthplace, and the disputes to which it gave rise in after times, were the subject of an epigram whose pungency passed for truth—
“Seven rival towns contend for Homer dead,
Through which the living Homer begged his bread.”
But the begging is not in the original lines at all, and a wandering minstrel was no dishonoured guest, wherever he appeared, in days much later than Homer’s. Somewhere on the coast of the Levant he died and was buried, leaving behind him that name which retains its spell hardly weakened by the lapse of some twenty-seven centuries, and the two great poems which have been confessedly the main source of the epic poetry, the heroic drama, and the early romance of Europe.
Other works are ascribed to Homer’s name besides the Iliad and the Odyssey, but the authorship appears more doubtful. If we trust the opinion of Aristotle, Homer was the father of comic narrative poetry as well as of epic. The poem called ‘Margites,’ attributed to him, contained the travels and adventures of a wealthy and pedantic coxcomb: but slight fragments only of this have been preserved—enough to show that the humour was somewhat more gross than one would expect from the poet of the Odyssey, though redeemed, no doubt, by satire of a higher kind, as in the surviving line which, in describing the hero’s accomplishments, seems to anticipate the multifarious and somewhat superficial knowledge of the present day—
“Full many things he knew—and ill he knew them all.”
Admitting the personality of the poet himself, and his claim to the authorship of both Iliad and Odyssey, it is not necessary to suppose that either poem was framed originally as a whole, or recited as a whole upon every occasion. No doubt the song grew as he sung. He would probably add from time to time to the original lay. The reciter, whose audience must depend entirely upon him for their text, has an almost unlimited licence of interpolation and expansion. It may be fairly granted also that future minstrels, who sung the great poet’s lays after his death, would interweave with them here and there something of their own, more or less successful in its imitation of the original. Such explanation of the repetitions and incongruities which are to be found in the Iliad seems at least as reasonable as the supposition that its twenty-four books are the work of various hands, “stitched together”—such is one explanation of the term “rhapsody”—in after times, and having a common origin only in this, that all sung of the “wondrous Tale of Troy.”
That tale was for generations the mainspring of Greek legend and song, and the inspiration of Greek painters and sculptors. At this day, the attempt to separate the fabulous from the real, to reduce the rich colouring of romance into the severe outlines of history, is a task which even in the ablest hands seems hopeless. The legends themselves are various, and contradictory in their details. The leading characters in the story—Priam, Helen, Agamemnon, Achilles, Ulysses, Paris, Hector and Andromache—appear in as many different aspects and relations as the fancy of each poet chose. In this respect they are like the heroes of our own “Round Table” romances; like Arthur and Guinevere, Lancelot, Tristram, and Percival—common impersonations on whom all kinds of adventures are fastened, though the main characteristics of the portrait are preserved throughout. What amount of bare historical truth may or may not underlie the poetical colouring—whether there was or was not a real Greek expedition and a real siege of Troy, less “heroic” and more probable in its extent and details than the Iliad represents it—is no question to be here discussed. So far as literary interest is concerned, “the real Trojan war,” as Mr. Grote well says, “is that which is recounted by Homer.” It will be sufficient here to take the poet as our main authority, and to fill up his picture from other legendary sources; for though Homer’s version of the Great Trojan War is the earliest account which has come down to us, he drew his material from still earlier lays and legends, with which he assumes all his readers (or hearers) to be tolerably familiar; and which, again, the later poets and tragedians reproduced with many additions and variations of their own.
The preservation of poems of such great length (the Iliad alone contains between fifteen and sixteen thousand lines) in days when writing, even if invented, was in its infancy, has been the subject of much speculation. That they were publicly recited at great national festivals in all parts of Greece, is undoubted. Professional minstrels, or “rhapsodists,” as they were called, chanted certain selected portions which suited their own taste or that of their audience—often such as contained the exploits of some national hero. They followed possibly in this the example of the great bard himself; just as certain of our own popular writers have lately taken to read, to an admiring public, some favourite scenes and chapters from their own works. Lycurgus is said to have brought the collected poems from Asia to Sparta; Solon, at Athens, to have first obliged the minstrels to recite the several portions in due order, so as to preserve the continuity of the narrative. Pisistratus, the great Athenian ruler, has the reputation of having first reduced the whole into a collected shape, and of having thus far settled the “text” of Homer, employing in this work the most eminent men of letters of his day. There is a legend of a Homeric ‘Septuagint:’ of seventy learned scribes employed in the great work, as in the Greek version of the Hebrew Scriptures. From the time when the Iliad and Odyssey were reduced to writing, their popularity rather increased than waned. They were the storehouse of Greek history, genealogy, and antiquity—the models and standards of literary taste. To be unacquainted with these masterpieces, was to be wholly without culture and education: and, thanks to their continual and public recital, this want was perhaps less prevalent amongst the Greeks than amongst ourselves. The young Alcibiades, when receiving the usual education of a Greek gentleman, is said to have struck his tutor one day in a burst of righteous indignation, for having made the confession—certainly inexcusable in his vocation—that he did not possess a copy of the great poet. Alexander the Great carried always with him the copy which had been corrected by his master Aristotle, preserved in a jewelled casket taken amongst the spoils of Darius. No pains were spared in the caligraphy, or costliness in the mountings, of favourite manuscripts of the Homeric poems. They continued to be regarded with almost a superstitious reverence even during the middle ages of Christendom. Men’s future destinies were discovered, by a sort of rude divination, in verses selected at hap-hazard. Fantastic writers saw in the two poems nothing more or less than allegorical versions of Hebrew history; and grave physicians recommended as an infallible recipe for a quartan ague, the placing every night a copy of the fourth book of the Iliad under the patient’s head. Modern critical speculations have gone quite as far in another direction. In the eyes of some ingenious theorists, this siege of Troy is but “a repetition of the daily siege of the East by the solar powers that every evening are robbed of their brightest treasures in the West;”[2] and the Homeric heroes and their exploits all represent allegorically, in one form or another, the great conflict between Light and Darkness. But such questions are beyond the scope of these pages; we are content here to take the tale of Troy as the poet tells it.
The supposed date of the story may be taken as some fifteen centuries before the Christian era. The great City of Troy, or Ilium, lay on the coast of Asia Minor—its reputed site still bearing the name of the Troad, a broad well-watered champaign, with a height still recognised as the citadel towering above it. “No royal seat of the ancient world,” says a modern visitor to the spot, “could boast a grander situation than the Trojan citadel.”[3] As to its actual locality and existence, there is little ground for scepticism. The tradition of the name and place was unbroken in the early historical ages of Greece. Xerxes, king of Persia, in his expedition, is said to have visited the citadel, and to have offered there a thousand oxen to the tutelary goddess; possibly, it has been suggested, claiming to be the avenger of the Asiatic kings on their European enemies.[4] Mindarus, the Lacedæmonian admiral, seventy years later, sacrificed there also: and Alexander, when he crossed the Hellespont, not only did the same, but took from the temple some of the sacred arms which were hung there (said to be those of the heroes of the great siege), offering up his own in exchange. The founder of the city was Ilus, son of Tros, and from these mythical heroes it took its two names. But its walls were built