III. LITERATURE

Literature, like religion, divided and united Greece. The poets sang in their local dialects, and often of their native scenes; but all Hellas listened to the more eloquent voices, and stirred them now and then to broader themes. Time and prejudice have destroyed too much of this early poetry to let us feel its wealth and scope, its reputed vigor of utterance and finish of form; but as we move through the isles or cities of sixth-century Greece our wonder rises at the abundance and excellence of Greek literature before the Periclean age. The lyric poetry reflected an aristocratic society in which feeling, thought, and morals were free so long as they observed the amenities of breeding; this style of urbane and polished verse tended to disappear under the democracy. It had a rich variety of structure and meter, but seldom shackled itself with rhyme; poetry meant to the Greeks, feeling imaginatively and rhythmically expressed.*

While the lyric singers tuned their lyres to love and war, the wandering bards, in great men’s halls, recited in epic measures the heroic deeds of the race. Guilds of “rhapsodes”† built up through generations a cycle of lays centering around the sieges of Thebes and Troy and the homing of the warriors. Song was socialized among these minstrels; each stitched his story together from earlier fragments, and none pretended to have composed a whole sequence of these tales. In Chios a clan of such rhapsodes called themselves Homeridae, and claimed descent from a poet Homer who, they said, was the author of the epics that they recited throughout eastern Greece.¹¹ Perhaps this blind bard was but an eponym, the imaginary ancestor of a tribe or group, like Hellen, Dorus, or Ion.¹² The Greeks of the sixth century attributed to Homer not only the Iliad and the Odysseybut all the other epics then existing. The Homeric poems are the oldest epics known to us; but their very excellence, as well as their many references to earlier bards, suggest that the surviving epics stand at the end of a long line of development from simple lays to lengthy “stitched” songs. Insixth-century Athens—possibly under Solon,¹³ probably under Peisistratus—a governmental commission selected or collated the Iliadand the Odyssey from the epic literature of the preceding centuries, assigned them to Homer, and edited—perhaps wove—them into substantially their present shape.¹⁴

It is one of the miracles of literature that poems so complex in origin achieved in the end so artistic a result. It is quite true that both in language and in structure the Iliad falls considerably this side of perfection: that Aeolian and Ionic forms are mingled as if by some polyglot Smyrnan, and that the meter requires now one dialect and now the other; that the plot is marred by inconsistencies, changes of plan and emphasis, and contradictions of character; that the same heroes are killed two or three times over in the course of the tale; that the original theme—the wrath of Achilles and its results—is interrupted and obscured by a hundred episodes apparently taken from other lays and sewn into the epic at every seam. Nevertheless, in its larger aspects the story is one, the language is powerful and vivid, the poem is all in all “the greatest that ever sounded on the lips of men.”¹⁵ Such an epic could have been begun only in the active and exuberant youth of the Greeks, and could have been completed only in their artistic maturity. Its characters are nearly all warriors or their women; even the philosophers, like Nestor, put up an enviably good fight. These individuals are intimately and sympathetically conceived; and perhaps the finest thing in all Greek literature is the unbiased manner in which we are made to feel now with Hector and now with Achilles. In his tent Achilles is a thoroughly unheroic and unlikable figure, complaining to his mother that his luck does not befit his semidivinity, and that Agamemnon has stolen his plum, the unhappy Briseis; letting the Greeks die by the thousands while he eats and pouts and sleeps in his ship or his tent; sending Patroclus unaided to death, and then rending the air with unmanly lamentations. When finally he goes into battle he is not stirred by patriotism but mad with grief over the loss of his friend. In his rage he loses all decency, and sinks to savage cruelty with both Lycaon and Hector. In truth he is an undeveloped mind, unsettled and uncontrolled, and overshadowed with prophecies of death. “Nay, friend,” he says to the fallen Lycaon, who sues for mercy, “die like another! What wouldst thou vainly weeping? Patroclus died, who was far better than thou. Look upon me! Am I not beautiful and tall, and sprung of a good father, and a goddess the mother that bare me? Yet, lo, Death is over me, and the mighty hand of Doom. There cometh a dawn of day, a noon or an evening, and a hand that I know not shall lay me dead.”¹⁶ So he stabs the unresisting Lycaon through the neck, flings the body into the river, and makes one of those grandiose speeches that adorn the slaughter in the Iliad, and laid the foundation for oratory among the Greeks. Half of Hellas worshiped Achilles for centuries as a god;¹⁷ we accept him, and forgive him, as a child. At the worst he is one of the supreme creations of the poetic mind.

What carries us along through the Iliad when we do not have to study or translate it is not merely these characterizations, so numerous and diverse, nor merely the flow and turmoil of the tale, but the rushing splendor of the verse. It must be admitted that Homer repeats as well as nods; it is part of his plan to recall as in refrain certain epithetis and lines; so he sings with fond repetition, of Emos d’erigeneia phane rhododactylos Eos—“when appeared the morning’s daughter, rosy-fingered Dawn.”¹⁸ But if these are flaws they are lost in the brilliance of the language, and the wealth of similes that now and then, amid the shock of war, calm us with the quiet beauty of peaceful fields. “As when flies in swarming myriads haunt the herdsman’s stalls in spring time, when new milk has filled the pails—in such vast multitudes mustered the long-haired Greeks upon the plain.”¹⁹ Or

As when, among

The deep dells of an arid mountain-side,

A great fire burns its way, and the thick wood

Before it is consumed, and shifting winds

Hither and thither sweep the flames—so ranged

Achilles in his fury through the field

From side to side, and everywhere o’ertook

His victims, and the earth ran dark with blood.²⁰

The Odyssey is so different from all this that from the outset one suspects its separate authorship. Even some of the Alexandrian scholars suggested this, and all the critical authority of Aristarchus was required to hush the dispute.²¹ The Odyssey agrees with theIliad in certain standard phrases—“owl-eyed Athena,” “long-haired Greeks,” “wine-dark sea,” “rosy-fingered Dawn”—which may have been taken from the same hoard and poetical tradition into which the authors of the Iliad had dipped their pens. But theOdyssey contains an array of words apparently brought into use after the Iliad was composed.²² In the second epic we hear frequently of iron, where the earlier one spoke of bronze; we hear of writing, of private property in land, of freedmen and emancipation—none of which are mentioned in the Iliad; the very gods and their functions are different.²³The meter is the same dactylic hexameter, as in all the Greek epics; but the style and spirit and substance are so far from the Iliad that if one author wrote both poems he was a paragon of complexity and a master of all moods. The new poet is more literary and philosophical, less violent and warlike, than the old; more self-conscious and meditative, leisurely and civilized; so gentle, indeed, that Bentley thought the Odyssey had been composed for the special benefit of women.²⁴

Whether here too we have poets rather than a poet is harder to say than in the case of the Iliad. There are signs of suture, but the stitching seems more skillful than in the older epic; the plot, though devious, turns out in the end to be remarkably consistent, worthy almost of contemporary fictioneers. From the beginning the conclusion is foreshadowed, every episode advances it, and its coming binds all the books into a whole. Probably the epic was built upon pre-existing lays, as in the case of the Iliad; but the work of unification is far more complete. We may conclude with a high degree of diffidence that the Odyssey is a century younger than the Iliad, and is predominantly the work of one man.

The characters are less vigorously and vividly conceived than in the Iliad. Penelope is shadowy, and never quite emerges from behind her loom except in the end, when a moment of doubt, perhaps of regret, flits through her mind at the return of her master. Helen is clearer, and unique; here the launcher of a thousand ships and the cause of ten thousand deaths is still “a goddess among women,” maturely lovely in her middle age, gentler and quieter than before, but as proud as ever, and taking gracefully for granted all the attentions that hedge in a queen.²⁵ Nausicaa is a pretty essay in the male understanding of women; we hardly expected so delicate and romantic a picture from a Greek. Telemachus is uncertainly drawn, infected with hesitation as by some Hamlet touch; but Odysseus is the most complete and complex portrait in Greek poetry. All in all, theOdyssey is a fascinating novel in engaging verse, full of tender sentiment and adventurous surprise; more interesting, to an unwarlike and aging soul, than the majestic and bloody Iliad.

These poems—sole survivors of a long succession of epics—became the most precious element in the literary heritage of Greece. “Homer” was the staple of Greek education, the repository of Greek myth, the source of a thousand dramas, the foundation of moral training, and—strangest of all—the very Bible of orthodox theology. It was Homer and Hesiod, said Herodotus (probably with some hyperbole), who gave definite and human form to the Olympians, and order to the hierarchy of heaven.²⁶ There is much that is magnificent in Homer’s gods, and we come to like them fortheir failings; but scholars have long since detected in the poets who pictured them a rollicking skepticism hardly befitting a national Bible. These deities quarrel like relatives, fornicate like fleas, and share with mankind what seemed to Alexander the stigmata of mortality—the need for love and sleep; they do everything human but hunger and die. Not one of them could bear comparison with Odysseus in intelligence, with Hector in heroism, with Andromache in tenderness, or with Nestor in dignity. Only a poet of the sixth century, versed in Ionian doubt, could have made such farcelings of the gods.²⁷ It is one of the humors of history that these epics, in which the Olympians have essentially the function of comic relief, were reverenced throughout Hellas as props of respectable morality and belief. Eventually the anomaly proved explosive; the humor destroyed the belief, and the moral development of men rebelled against the superseded morals of the gods.