Homer and His Age

CHAPTER XIV

That several of the passages in which Nestor speaks are very late interpolations, meant to glorify Pisistratus, himself of Nestor's line, is a critical opinion to which we have more than once alluded. The first example is in Iliad, II. 530-568. This passage "is meant at once to present Nestor as the leading counsellor of the Greek army, and to introduce the coming Catalogue." {Footnote: Leaf, Iliad, vol. i. p. 70.} Now the Catalogue "originally formed an introduction to the whole Cycle." {Footnote: Ibid., vol. i. p. 87.} But, to repeat an earlier observation, surely the whole Cycle was much later than the period of Pisistratus and his sons; that is, the compilation of the Homeric and Cyclic poems into one body of verse, named "The Cycle," is believed to have been much later.

It is objected that Nestor's advice in this passage, "Separate thy warriors by tribes and clans" ({Greek: phyla, phraetras}), "is out of place in the last year of the war"; but this suggestion for military reorganisation may be admitted as a mere piece of poetical perspective, like Helen's description of the Achaean chiefs in Book III, or Nestor may wish to return to an obsolete system of clan regiments. The Athenians had "tribes" and "clans," political institutions, and Nestor's advice is noted as a touch of late Attic influence; but about the nature and origin of these social divisions we know so little that it is vain to argue about them. The advice of Nestor is an appeal to the clan spirit – a very serviceable military spirit, as the Highlanders have often proved – but we have no information as to whether it existed in Achaean times. Nestor speaks as the aged Lochiel spoke to Claverhouse before Killiecrankie. Did the Athenian army of the sixth century fight in clan regiments? The device seems to belong to an earlier civilisation, whether it survived in sixth century Athens or not. It is, of course, notorious that tribes and clans are most flourishing among the most backward people, though they were welded into the constitution of Athens. The passage, therefore, cannot with any certainty be dismissed as very late, for the words for "tribe" and "clan" could not be novel Athenian inventions, the institutions designated being of prehistoric origin.

Nestor shows his tactics again in IV. 303-309, offers his "inopportune tactical lucubrations, doubtless under Athenian (Pisistratean) influence." The poet is here denied a sense of humour. That a veteran military Polonius should talk as inopportunely about tactics as Dugald Dalgetty does about the sconce of Drumsnab is an essential part of the humour of the character of Nestor. This is what Nestor's critics do not see; the inopportune nature of his tactical remarks is the point of them, just as in the case of the laird of Drumthwacket, "that should be." Scott knew little of Homer, but coincided in the Nestorian humour by mere congruity of genius. The Pisistratidze must have been humourless if they did not see that the poet smiled as he composed Nestor's speeches, glorifying old deeds of his own and old ways of fighting. He arrays his Pylians with chariots in front, footmen in the rear. In the {blank space} the princely heroes dismounted to fight, the chariots following close behind them. {Footnote: Iliad, XI. 48-56.} In the same way during the Hundred Years' War the English knights dismounted and defeated the French chivalry till, under Jeanne d'Arc and La Hire, the French learned the lesson, and imitated the English practice. On the other hand, Egyptian wall-paintings show the Egyptian chariotry advancing in neat lines and serried squadrons. According to Nestor these had of old been the Achaean tactics, and he preferred the old way. Nestor's advice in Book IV. is not to dismount or break the line of chariots; these, he says, were the old tactics: "Even so is the far better way; thus, moreover, did men of old time lay low cities and walls." There was to be no rushing of individuals from the ranks, no dismounting. Nestor's were not the tactics of the heroes – they usually dismount and do single valiances; but Nestor, commanding his local contingent, recommends the methods of the old school, {Greek: hoi pretoroi}. What can be more natural and characteristic?

The poet's meaning seems quite clear. He is not flattering Pisistratus, but, with quiet humour, offers the portrait of a vain, worthy veteran. It is difficult to see how this point can be missed; it never was missed before Nestor's speeches seemed serviceable to the Pisistratean theory of the composition of the ILIAD. In his first edition Mr. Leaf regarded the interpolations as intended "to glorify Nestor" without reference to Pisistratus, whom Mr. Leaf did not then recognise as the master of a sycophantic editor. The passages are really meant to display the old man's habit of glorifying himself and past times. Pisistratus could not feel flattered by passages intended to exhibit his ancestor as a conceited and inopportune old babbler. I ventured in 1896 to suggest that the interpolator was trying to please Pisistratus, but this was said in a spirit of mockery.

Of all the characters in Homer that of Nestor is most familiar to the unlearned world, merely because Nestor's is a "character part," very broadly drawn.

The third interpolation of flattery to Pisistratus in the person of Nestor is found in VII. 125-160. The Achaean chiefs are loath to accept the challenge of Hector to single combat. Only Menelaus rises and arms himself, moved by the strong sense of honour which distinguishes a warrior notoriously deficient in bodily strength. Agamemnon refuses to let him fight; the other peers make no movement, and Nestor rebukes them. It is entirely in nature that he should fall back on his memory of a similar situation in his youth; when the Arcadian champion, Ereuthalion, challenged any prince of the Pylians, and when "no man plucked up heart" to meet him except Nestor himself. Had there never been any Pisistratus, any poet who created the part of a worthy and wordy veteran must have made Nestor speak just as he does speak. Ereuthalion "was the tallest and strongest of men that I have slain!" and Nestor, being what he is, offers copious and interesting details about the armour of Ereuthalion and about its former owners. The passage is like those in which the Icelandic sagamen dwelt lovingly on the history of a good sword, or the Maoris on the old possessors of an ancient jade patu. An objection is now taken to Nestor's geography: he is said not to know the towns and burns of his own country. He speaks of the swift stream Keladon, the streams of Iardanus, and the walls of Pheia. Pheia "is no doubt the same as Pheai" {Footnote: Monro, Note on Odyssey, XV. 297.} (Odyssey, XV. 297), "but that was a maritime town not near Arkadia. There is nothing known of a Keladon or Iardanus anywhere near it." Now Didymus (Schol. A) "is said to have read {Greek: Phaeraes} for {Greek: Pheias}," following Pherekydes. {Footnote: Leaf, Iliad, vol. i. 308.} M. Victor Bérard, who has made an elaborate study of Elian topography, says that "Pheia is a cape, not a town," and adopts the reading "Phera," the {Greek: Pherae} of the journey of Telemachus, in the Odyssey. He thinks that the {Greek: Pherae} of Nestor is the Aliphera of Polybius, and believes that the topography of Nestor and of the journey of Telemachus is correct. The Keladon is now the river or burn of Saint Isidore; the Iardanus is at the foot of Mount Kaiapha. Keladon has obviously the same sense as the Gaelic Altgarbh, "the rough and brawling stream." Iardanus is also a stream in Crete, and Mr. Leaf thinks it Semitic – "Yarden, from yarad to flow"; but the Semites did not give the Yar to the Yarrow nor to the Australian Yarra Yarra.

The country, says M. Bérard, is a network of rivers, burns, and rivulets; and we cannot have any certainty, we may add, as the same river and burn names recur in many parts of the same country; {Footnote: Bérard, Les Phéniciens et L'Odyssée, 108-113, 1902} many of them, in England, are plainly prae-Celtic.

While the correct geography may, on this showing, be that of Homer, we cannot give up Homer's claim to Nestor's speech. As to Nestor's tale about the armour of Ereuthalion, it is manifest that the first owner of the armour of Ereuthalion, namely Are'ithous, "the Maceman," so called because he had the singularity of fighting with an iron casse-tête, as Nestor explains (VII. 138-140), was a famous character in legendary history. He appears "as Prince Areithous, the Maceman," father (or grand-father?) of an Areithous slain by Hector (VII. 8-10). In Greece, it was not unusual for the grandson to bear the grandfather's name, and, if the Maceman was grand-father of Hector's victim, there is no chronological difficulty. The chronological difficulty, in any case, if Hector's victim is the son of the Maceman, is not at all beyond a poetic narrator's possibility of error in genealogy. If Nestor's speech is a late interpolation, if its late author borrowed his vivid account of the Maceman and his casse-tête from the mere word "maceman" in VII. 9, he must be credited with a lively poetic imagination.

Few or none of these reminiscences of Nestor are really "inapplicable to the context." Here the context demands encouragement for heroes who shun a challenge. Nestor mentions an "applicable" and apposite instance of similar want of courage, and, as his character demands, he is the hero of his own story. His brag, or gabe, about "he was the tallest and strongest of all the men I ever slew," is deliciously in keeping, and reminds us of the college don who said of the Czar, "he is the nicest emperor I ever met." The poet is sketching an innocent vanity; he is not flattering Pisistratus.

The next case is the long narrative of Nestor to the hurried Patroclus, who has been sent by Achilles to bring news of the wounded Machaon (XI. 604-702). Nestor on this occasion has useful advice to give, namely, that Achilles, if he will not fight, should send his men, under Patroclus, to turn the tide of Trojan victory. But the poet wishes to provide an interval of time and of yet more dire disaster before the return of Patroclus to Achilles. By an obvious literary artifice he makes Nestor detain the reluctant Patroclus with a long story of his own early feats of arms. It is a story of a "hot-trod," so called in Border law; the Eleians had driven a creagh of cattle from the Pylians, who pursued, and Nestor killed the Eleian leader, Itymoneus. The speech is an Achaean parallel to the Border ballad of "Jamie Telfer of the Fair Dodhead," in editing which Scott has been accused of making a singular and most obvious and puzzling blunder in the topography of his own sheriffdom of the Forest. On Scott's showing the scene of the raid is in upper Ettrickdale, not, as critics aver, in upper Teviotdale; thus the narrative of the ballad would be impossible. {Footnote: In fact both sites on the two Dodburns are impossible; the fault lay with the ballad-maker, not with Scott.}

The Pisistratean editor is accused of a similar error. "No doubt he was an Asiatic Greek, completely ignorant of the Peloponnesus." {Footnote: Iliad. Note to XI. 756, and to the Catalogue, II. 615-617.} It is something to know that Pisistratus employed an editor, or that his editor employed a collaborator who was an Asiatic Greek!

Meanwhile, nothing is less secure than arguments based on the Catalogue. We have already shown how Mr. Leaf's opinions as to the date and historical merits of the Catalogue have widely varied, while M. Bérard appears to have vindicated the topography of Nestor. Of the Catalogue Mr. Allen writes, "As a table, according to regions, of Agamemnon's forces it bears every mark of venerable antiquity," showing "a state of things which never recurred in later history, and which no one had any interest to invent, or even the means for inventing." He makes a vigorous defence of the Catalogue, as regards the dominion of Achilles, against Mr. Leaf. {Footnote: Classical Review, May 1906, pp. x94-201.} Into the details we need not go, but it is not questions of Homeric topography, obscure as they are, that can shake our faith in the humorous portrait of old Nestor, or make us suppose that the sympathetic mockery of the poet is the sycophantic adulation of the editor to his statesman employer, Pisistratus. If any question may be left to literary discrimination it is the authentic originality of the portrayal of Nestor.

CHAPTER XV

Though comparison is the method of Science, the comparative study of the national poetry of warlike aristocracies, its conditions of growth and decadence, has been much neglected by Homeric critics. Sir Richard Jebb touched on the theme, and, after devoting four pages to a sketch of Sanskrit, Finnish, Persian, and early Teutonic heroic poetry and SAGA, decided that "in our country, as in others, we fail to find any true parallel to the case of the Homeric poems. These poems must be studied in themselves, without looking for aid, in this sense, to the comparative method." {Footnote: Homer, p. 135.} Part of this conclusion seems to us rather hasty. In a brief manual Sir Richard had not space for a thorough comparative study of old heroic poetry at large. His quoted sources are: for India, Lassen; for France, Mr. Saintsbury's Short History of FRENCH LITERATURE (sixteen pages on this topic), and a work unknown to me, by "M. Paul"; for Iceland he only quoted THE Encyclopedia BRITANNICA (Mr. Edmund Gosse); for Germany, Lachmann and Bartsch; for the Finnish Kalewala, the ENCYCLOPEDIA BRITANNICA (Mr. Sime and Mr. Keltie); and for England, a PRIMER OF ENGLISH LITERATURE by Mr. Stopford Brooke.

These sources appear less than adequate, and Celtic heroic romance is entirely omitted. A much deeper and wider comparative criticism of early heroic national poetry is needed, before any one has a right to say that the study cannot aid our critical examination of the Homeric problem. Many peoples have passed through a stage of culture closely analogous to that of Achaean society as described in the Iliad and Odyssey. Every society of this kind has had its ruling military class, its ancient legends, and its minstrels who on these legends have based their songs. The similarity of human nature under similar conditions makes it certain that comparison will discover useful parallels between the poetry of societies separated in time and space but practically identical in culture. It is not much to the credit of modern criticism that a topic so rich and interesting has been, at least in England, almost entirely neglected by Homeric scholars.

Meanwhile, it is perfectly correct to say, as Sir Richard observes, that "we fail to find any true parallel to the case of the Homeric poems," for we nowhere find the legends of an heroic age handled by a very great poet – the greatest of all poets – except in the Iliad and Odyssey. But, on the other hand, the critics refuse to believe that, in the Iliad and Odyssey, we possess the heroic Achaean legends handled by one great poet. They find a composite by many hands, good and bad, and of many ages, they say; sometimes the whole composition and part of the poems are ascribed to a late littérateur. Now to that supposed state of things we do find several "true parallels," in Germany, in Finland, in Ireland. But the results of work by these many hands in many ages are anything but "a true parallel" to the results which lie before us in the Iliad and ODYSSEY. Where the processes of composite authorship throughout many AGES certainly occur, as in Germany and Ireland, there we find no true parallel to the Homeric poems. It follows that, in all probability, no such processes as the critics postulate produced the Iliad and Odyssey, for where the processes existed, beyond doubt they failed egregiously to produce the results.

Sir Richard's argument would have been logical if many efforts by many hands, in many ages, in England, Finland, Ireland, Iceland, and Germany did actually produce true parallels to the Achaean epics. They did not, and why not? Simply because these other races had no Homer. All the other necessary conditions were present, the legendary material, the heroic society, the Court minstrels, all – except the great poet. In all the countries mentioned, except Finland, there existed military aristocracies with their courts, castles, and minstrels, while the minstrels had rich material in legendary history and in myth, and Märchen, and old songs. But none of the minstrels was adequate to the production of an English, German, or Irish ILIAD or ODYSSEY, or even of a true artistic equivalent in France.

We have tried to show that the critics, rejecting a Homer, have been unable to advance any adequate hypothesis to account for the existence of the ILIAD and ODYSSEY. Now we see that, where such conditions of production as they postulate existed but where there was no great epic genius, they can find no true parallels to the Epics. Their logic thus breaks down at both ends.

It may be replied that in non-Greek lands one condition found in Greek society failed: the succession of a reading age to an age of heroic listeners. But this is not so. In France and Germany an age of readers duly began, but they did not mainly read copies of the old heroic poems. They turned to lyric poetry, as in Greece, and they recast the heroic songs into modern and popular forms in verse and prose, when they took any notice of the old heroic poems at all.

One merit of the Greek epics is a picture of "a certain phase of early civilisation," and that picture is "a naturally harmonious whole," with "unity of impression," says Sir Richard Jebb. {Footnote: Homer, p. 37.} Certainly we can find no true parallel, on an Homeric scale, to this "harmonious picture" in the epics of Germany and England or in the early literature of Ireland. Sir Richard, for England, omits notice of Beowulf; but we know that Beowulf, a long heroic poem, is a mass of anachronisms – a heathen legend in a Christian setting. The hero, that great heathen champion, has his epic filled full of Christian allusions and Christian morals, because the clerical redactor, in Christian England, could not but intrude these things into old pagan legends evolved by the continental ancestors of our race. He had no "painful anxiety," like the supposed Ionic continuators of the Achaean poems (when they are not said to have done precisely the reverse), to preserve harmony of ancient ideas. Such archaeological anxieties are purely modern.

If we take the Nibelungenlied, {Footnote: See chapter on the Nibelungenlied in Homer AND the Epic, pp. 382-404.} we find that it is a thing of many rehandlings, even in existing manuscripts. For example, the Greeks clung to the hexameter in Homer. Not so did the Germans adhere to old metres. The poem that, in the oldest MS., is written in assonances, in later MSS. is reduced to regular rhymes and is retouched in many essential respects. The matter of the Nibelungenlied is of heathen origin. We see the real state of heathen affairs in the Icelandic versions of the same tale, for the Icelanders were peculiar in preserving ancient lays; and, when these were woven into a prose saga, the archaic and heathen features were retained. Had the post-Christian prose author of the Volsunga been a great poet, we might find in his work a true parallel to the Iliad. But, though he preserves the harmony of his picture of pre-Christian princely life (save in the savage beginnings of his story), he is not a poet; so the true parallel to the Greek epic fails, noble as is the saga in many passages. In the German Nibelungenlied all is modernised; the characters are Christian, the manners are chivalrous, and Märchen older than Homer are forced into a wandering mediaeval chronicle-poem. The Germans, in short, had no early poet of genius, and therefore could not produce a true parallel to ILIAD or Odyssey. The mediaeval poets, of course, never dreamed of archaeological anxiety, as the supposed Ionian continuators are sometimes said to have done, any more than did the French and late Welsh handlers of the ancient Celtic Arthurian materials. The late German bearbeiter of the Nibelungenlied has no idea of unity of plot —enfin, Germany, having excellent and ancient legendary material for an epic, but producing no parallel to ILIAD and Odyssey, only proves how absolutely essential a Homer was to the Greek epics.