Fig. 10.
Fig. 10.
Fig. 11.
Fig. 11.
The troll drums of the Lapps find their analogy in those of the kindred Samojed tribes to the East, which present figures of the same class. But the pictographs on these will be found to fit on to the rock-carvings or petroglyphs of Siberia, first described by Strahlenberg, of which a specimen is given inFig. 12.[21]Similar rock carvings may be traced through a vast Finno-Ugrian or Mongolian region to the borders of China, and the Chinese characters themselves must have arisen from a branch of the same great Northern family.
This Finno-Tataric province of primitive pictography touches the Atlantic in Northern Norway. In the south of the Scandinavian Peninsula we have numerous examples of picture-writing in the shape of carving,[22]mainly belonging to the Bronze Age, either on rocks or on the slabs of sepulchral barrows. Of the latter class are the well-known examples from the Cairn of Kivik, on the east coast of Scania, and the rock-carvings extend through Southern Norway and Denmark. The most remarkable of all are probably those of Bohuslan, of which an example, in which ships figure largely, is shown inFig. 13.[23]
Fig. 12.
Fig. 12.
In our own islands there is also evidence during the Bronze Age of the practice of engraving signs and pictographic figures on rocks and the slabs of sepulchral cists and chambers. Those found in England and Scotland consist for the most part of mere geometrical figures, such as concentric circles with connecting lines, the more elaborate figures found in the Fife Caves,[24]for example, certainly belonging to the Late Celtic Period. But in Ireland, then raised, by its abundant output of gold, to the position of a Western Eldorado, the field of primitive pictography is richer. The slabs of the chambered tumuli of Sleive-na-Calligha present groups of elaborate figures;[25]but a special interest attaches to those discernible in the great chambered barrow of New Grange. As was pointed out by Mr. Coffey,[26]one of the principal figures here carved represents in a degraded form a ship with its crew analogous to those so constantly repeated in the Scandinavian group (Fig. 14). This coincidence becomes the more suggestive when we recall the existence of a whole series of finds showing a connexion between Ireland and Denmark and its neighbour-lands during the Bronze Age.
These parallels extend to Brittany. The rocks and sepulchral slabs of the old Armoric region also present, as is well known, a considerable pictographic material, dating from Neolithic and Early Metal Ages. Among recently discovered remains of this class may be mentioned a group of curious inscribed rocks near Saint-Aubin in Vendée,[27]the carvings on which seem to show some analogy with the menhirs of the Aveyron, the dolmens of the Gard, and the caves of the Marne. On these, besides conventionalized linear figures of men and animals, occur a variety of unexplained signs, some of them of a remarkably alphabetiform character.
Fig. 13.
Fig. 13.
Fig. 14.
Fig. 14.
Fig. 15.
Fig. 15.
It is among the sculptured slabs of the Morbihan dolmens that we find the immediate pendant to the ship signs of Ireland and Scandinavia. On slabs of the chambered barrow of Manné Lud, near Locmariaker, there appears—beside stone axes, hafted and unhafted, and other figures—what is evidently the same ship sign as that of New Grange, in various stages of degeneration, finally resulting in simple crescents with recurved ends (Fig. 16).[28]It is true that the associations of these Breton dolmens end with the close of the Neolithic period, but the archaeological evidence shows that this was overlapped by the Early Metal Age of Ireland.
Fig. 16.
Fig. 16.
South of the Pyrenees similar records of primitive pictography largely associated again in this case with the builders of dolmens and chambered barrows extend through a large part of the Iberian Peninsula. Some stir was recently made by the reported discovery of characters on the slabs and content of certain Portuguese dolmens of Traz-os-Montes,[29]which were supposed to constitute a kind of alphabet or syllabary. The accounts of these discoveries, however, lack scientific precision, and though many of the characters found are certainly of alphabetiform type, there can be no doubt that these, together with the rude zoomorphic figures with which they are associated, belong to a much simpler stage of graphic expression.
Fig. 17.
Fig. 17.
In the south of Spain the chain of evidence is continued by the ‘Written Stones’ of Andalusia. The signs here are often painted in red, in a rude manner, on the slabs of megalithic structures, such as the Piedra Escrita near Fuencaliente,[30](Figs. 17, 18). The signs include a variety of men and animals, symbols ofthe heavenly bodies, trees, arms, and implements, and other objects. Amongst some curious analogies that they present with the contemporary pictographs of Northern and North-Western Europe, may be noticed certain figures that resemble linear degenerations of the Ship and Crew sign (see Fig. 17).
Fig. 18.
Fig. 18.
The Andalusian pictographs find their continuation beyond the straits in another widely diffused group of ‘Written Stones’, theHadjrat Mektoubat[31]of the Arabs, extending through Algeria and Morocco into the Saharan region and along the Atlantic littoral to the Canaries.[32]
Fig. 19.
Fig. 19.
To return to the European shores of the Mediterranean, a remarkable group of prehistoric rock-carvings already known in mediaeval times as the Maraviglie, or ‘Marivels’,[33]is found near the Col di Tenda in the Maritime Alps—in the neighbourhood, that is, of a very old line of communication between Provence and the Po Valley. The earliest known groups of these figures lay at an elevation of between 7,000 and 8,000 feet about the Laghi delle Maraviglie, in the heart of Monte Bego.[34]More recently a still more extensive series has been discovered by Mr. Clarence Bicknell, cut like the others in the glaciated schist rocks and at a similar lofty elevation in the neighbouring Val di Fontanalba.[35]I have myself visited a more outlying group at Orco Feglino[36]in the Finalese, only a few miles from the Ligurian coast.
These figures, of which examples are given in Figs. 19 and 20, represent oxen, often engaged in ploughing, and men in various positions, sometimes brandishing weapons and apparently signalling, and a variety of arms, implements, and other objects. Among the weapons, the halberds and daggers are characteristic of the earlier part of the Bronze Age,[37]and it is noteworthy that the sword which characterized the later phase of that culture is entirely absent. The figures of the oxen ploughing are depicted as if seen from above—a circumstance explained by the way in which these rock terraces look down on the cultivated lands below.[38]Many of these oxen are conventionalized to such an extent that they have rather the appearance of rude figures of scorpions or beetles with tails.
The same figures are often repeatedinthe schist slopes, and we have not here such connected groups as we see, for instance, on the sculptured slabs of Scandinavia. The picture-signs of the Maraviglie had perhaps a votive intention. It seems to me that some of the figures may represent packs, and that merchants as well as warriors and tillers of the soil took part in their representations.
The records of primitive pictography extend to the Vosges and Jura, and reappear east of the Adriatic. In a fiord of the Bocche di Cattaro, not far from the site of Rhisinium, the capital of the old Illyrian kingdom, my own explorations were rewarded by the discovery of a curious group of painted signs on a rock-face above a sacred grotto, and in a somewhat inaccessible position. They consisted mainly of animals and varieties of the swastika sign. That they were of pre-Christian date may be regarded as certain, but a fuller investigation of them at my own hands was cut short byforce majeure.
Up to the present the old pictography of the lands between the Adriatic and the Black Sea and the lower Danubian basin is best illustrated by the linear incised figures found on the primitive pottery of that region. The best collection of such signs is due to the researches of Fräulein Torma, at Broos, in Transylvania. In view of the ethnic and archaeological connexions which are shown to have existed between the lower Danubian regions and the western part of Asia, it is specially interesting to note the analogies that these Transylvanian graffiti present with those noted by Schliemann on the whorls and pottery of Hissarlik (Fig. 21).[39]Both groups, moreover, belong approximately to the same epoch, marked by the transition from the Neolithic to the Early Metal Age.
Fig. 20.
Fig. 20.
Fig. 21.
Fig. 21.
That many of these signs are linearistic degenerations of animal and other figures is clear, and such figures may be reasonably considered to have an ideographic sense. But from this to investing the marks on a primitive whorl or pot with a definite phonetic value, and proceeding to read them off by the aid of the Cypriote syllabary of the Greek language as it existed some two thousand years later, can only be described as a far cry. Linearized signs of altogether alphabetic appearance belong, as already shown, to the very beginnings of human culture. In the case of the whorls, moreover, many of the linear figures are really repetitions of similar marks due to the decay of a border pattern—a phenomenon already paralleled by some of the engraved groups of the Reindeer Period. A recurring decorative fragment of this kind somewhat resembles, according to the progressive stages of its decadence, the Cypriotego,ti, orre—a circumstance productive of readings by eminent scholars[40]containing vain repetitions ofgo go,ti ti, andre re.
If we turn to Crete, the source of the developed pre-Phoenician scripts of Greece and the Aegean world, we find evidence of the same primitive stratum of linearized pictography. But the true hieroglyphic script, in which the phonetic element is apparently already present, in addition to the ideographic, displays other features which lie beyond the scope of our present theme. In the advanced linear scripts which grow out of this, and which certainly have a largely phonetic basis, we mark a regularity of arrangement and a definite setting forth of word-groups altogether different from the phenomena presented by the elemental figures of primitive pictography. The Phoenician and later Greek alphabet carries us a step further.
But the conventionalized pictography of Crete, if it does not give us the actual source of the later Phoenician letters, at least supplies the best illustration of the elements out of which it was evolved. And it will be seen, from what has been already said, that the more primitive field of pictography, out of which this conventionalized Cretan system arose, is itself only a branch of a widely diffused European family of picture-writing, of which the records can be traced from Lapland to the Straits of Gibraltar, and from the Atlantic to the Aegean, and which finds again its continuation on the African and the Asiatic side.
There seems to be a kind of hazy notion that though an elaborate system of pictography may have been current among the American Indians, for example, the alphabet, or for that matter the Cretan script, came to Greece as a kind of gift of the gods, and was taken over by a population that had no graphic means of communication. It is true thatthe earlier records of such, owing to their having been largely on perishable materials, such as bark or hides, may in many cases be irrecoverable. But we may be sure that they existed throughout the Aegean lands, as elsewhere. Nay, it was because they not only existed, but had already reached a comparatively advanced stage, that the acceptation of such a highly developed system of writing as that of the Phoenician alphabet was rendered possible. Even the forms of the letters must themselves have been largely familiar, since, as we have seen, the use of the linearized signs of the purest alphabetiform character goes back to what in many respects must be regarded as another world, and to a time, it may be, when articulate language was itself but imperfectly developed.
In B. R.’s Elizabethan translation of the two first books of Herodotus a marginal note to a startling statement about Egyptian manners begs us to ‘Observe ye Beastly Devices of ye Heathen’. Though Anthropology, as its name indicates, takes all that is human for its province, it certainly pays most attention to ‘Ye Devices’—beastly or not—of the savage or barbarian, and to their survival in civilized societies, ancient and modern. Now, as far as these primaeval devices go, Homer has wonderfully little to tell us. Though he is by far the most ancient Greek author extant, it is in all the literature which follows after him that we find most survivals of the barbarian and the savage. Even in the few fragments of the so-called Cyclic poets (800-650b.c.?), and in the sketches of the plots of the Cyclic poems which have reached us, there are survivals of barbaric customs—for example, of human sacrifice, and the belief in phantasms of the dead, even when the dead have been properly burned and buried—which do not appear in theIliadand theOdyssey. The tragedians, the lyric poets, and the rest, all allude to vices which Homer never mentions—to amours of the gods in bestial forms (in all probability a survival of Totemism in myth), to a revolting rite of sanguinary purification from the guilt of homicide, and to many other distressing vestiges of savagery and barbarism in the society of ancient Greece. We do not find these things in theIliadand theOdyssey.
It is not easily conceivable that Homer was ignorant of any of these things; probably they existed in certain strata of society in his age. But he ignores them. They are not to be mentioned to his audience. No incest or cannibalism, inIliadandOdyssey, is reported concerning ‘Atreus’ line’, though later poets do not hesitate to use the traditional materials from the fossiliferous strata of myth wherein these survivals were plentiful. Pindar knew tales of divine cannibalism, but merely referred to them as unworthy of his verse. Homer must have been familiar with the savage cosmogonic legends, almost identical with those of the Maori of New Zealand, which Hesiod does not scruple to state openly; but about such things Homer is silent.
Here I must explain that though to ‘Homer’ early historic Greece attributed the great body of ancient epic poetry, I am speaking only of theIliadandOdyssey. I wish I could keep clear of the complex ‘Homeric Question’, but this is hardly possible. Everybody knows that, since the appearance of Wolf’s famous Prolegomena to theIliad, at the end of the eighteenth century, the world has been of opposite opinions as to the origin of theIliadandOdyssey. Poets, and almost all who read the poems, as other literature is read, ‘for human pleasure,’ hold that at least the mass of these epics is by one hand, and, of course, is of one age. On the other side, the immense majority of scholars and special students who have written on the subject maintain (with endless differences in points of detail) that theIliadandOdysseyhad their beginning in a brief early ‘kernel’, and are now a mosaic of added lays and interpolations, contributed by many hands, in many places, through at least four changeful centuries of various cultures. How the poems came to have what even Wolf recognized as theirunus color, the harmony of their picture of institutions, customs, rites, costume, and belief, is variously explained. By some critics the harmony is denied. They try to pick out proofs of many various stages in institutions, customs, beliefs, arms, and armour, and so forth. As a rule these critics, however scholarly, have not been, and are not, comparative students of early literature, of anthropology, archaeology, and mythology. Their microscopic research finds but few and minute variations from the normal in such things as burial, bride-price, houses, armour, and so forth. If they studied other early poetic literature—say the Icelandic sagas and the oldest Irish romances—they would learn that minute variations in such matters of life occur in every stage of civilization; that every house, every funeral, every detail of marriage laws and other laws, is not precisely on the pattern of every other, and that mythology and ideas about the future life are especially various and even self-contradictory, at any given period. For these reasons I agree with Wolf that harmony,unus color, prevails in theIliadandOdyssey, which must therefore be the product of one age.
But to this some adverse critics reply that harmony, indeed, there may be, but that it results, first from the influence of tradition—each new poet adhered to the old formulae without conscious effort—and, next, that the later poets deliberately and learnedlyarchaized,consciously studied the descriptions, and maintained the tone of their predecessors, while at the same time they as deliberately introduced the novelties of their own time. This is their logic. Their double theory is untenable—first, because it is self-contradictory; next, because in all known early art and literature the poet or painter, treating ancient themes, dresses the past in the costume of the present with which he is familiar. To archaize is a very modern effort in art, as all early literature and every large picture-gallery prove. As for unconscious adherence to tradition, it leads to the repetition of epic formulae and standing epithets; but later poets, and uncritical ages, when they describe a more ancient life, always copy the life of their own time. We see too that late learned poets who archaized—Apollonius Rhodius, Virgil, even Quintus Smyrnaeus—while they do their best to imitate Homer, cannot keep up theunus color, but betray themselves in a myriad details: for example, Virgil arms his Greeks and Trojans with iron weapons, and Apollonius introduces the ritual purification of blood with blood, ignored by Homer.
Even in the Cyclic poems, of which only a few fragments and prose synopses remain, Helbig, and Monro, and every reader, find what Helbig calls ‘data absolutely opposed to the conventional style of the Epics’, of theIliadandOdyssey. We find hero-worship, human sacrifice, gods making love in bestial forms, conspicuous ghosts of men duly burned, and so on. Now, if we believe with Mr. Verrall that ‘Homer’, so called, was a nebulous mass of old poetry, reduced into distinct bodies, such asIliad,Odyssey,Cypria,Aethiopis,Little Iliad,Nostoi, and so on, for educational purposes, by learned Athenians, about 600-500b.c., or if we suppose, with others, that the Ionians, for educational purposes, BowdlerizedIliadandOdyssey, at an earlier date, we ask, Why wereIliadandOdysseyexpurgated; why were many ‘devices of the heathen’ cut out of them by ‘educationists’ who permitted these things to remain in the Cyclic poems? Was it because theIliadandOdysseyalone were cut out of the mass, and selected for public recitation? If so, why was the selection made, and the expurgation done, in these two cases only? And do we know that the Cyclics were not recited? If so, why not? What was the use of them? Again, why was Hesiod not Bowdlerized? Hesiod certainly entered into public knowledge no less than Homer. Finally, if the taste of the seventh and sixth centuries were so pure and austere, why were the poets of the seventh and sixth centuries so rich in matters which theIliadandOdysseyomit? In no Greek literature of any age do we find the clean austerity of Homer, for example, as regards sins against nature, the permanent blot on the civilization of historic Greece. The theory of educational expurgation in the eighth to the sixth centuries is impossible on all sides. The Cyclics and Hesiod were generally known, yet were not expurgated into harmony with the Homeric tone; the contemporary poets of these educational ages did not conform to the Homeric tone. Moreover, there is no ‘record’ evidence, with Mr. Verrall’s pardon, for all this editing by educationists. There is no inscription bearing witness to it—that, and that alone, would be ‘record’—there is only a late and shifting tradition that, aboutthe time between the ages of Solon and the Pisistratidae, something indefinite was done at Athens for ‘Homer’. For how much of ‘Homer’? For all old epic poetry, or only for theIliadandOdyssey? If for them alone, why for them alone?
I am thus constrained to suppose that theIliadand theOdyssey, on the whole, are the fruit of a single age, a peculiar age, an age prior to the earliest period of Greek life as historically known to us. If it be not so, if these epics are mosaics of life in four or five centuries of change, compiled for purposes of education by learned Athenians, it seems that they are worthless to the anthropologist and to the historical student of manners and institutions. If the poems contain scores of archaized passages, in which the poets deliberately neglect the life which they know (while at the same time in other passages they deliberately innovate), then the poems are of no anthropological value. The statements of the critics are self-contradictory, which I still think proves them to be illogical; and in speaking of Homer I shall treat him as a witness to a genuine stage of society in prehistoric Greece and Asia.
As to date, the poems quite undeniably are derived from that late stage of Mycenaean or Minoan civilization which has been revealed by the excavations of Mr. Arthur Evans in Crete, and Dr. Schliemann at Mycenae, and of many other explorers of Homeric sites. The decoration of the palaces of Alcinous and Menelaus; the art of the goldsmith, the use of chariots in war, the shape and size of the huge Homeric shield; the cuirass,zoster, andmitrêof the warriors, the weaponsof bronze described in Homer, all correspond with objects discovered or delineated in works of art of the late Minoan period in Greece and Crete. But Homeric customs of all sorts also vary much from the facts of the Minoan archaeologist. The monuments of the late Minoan Age reveal modes of burial wholly unlike the Homeric practice of cremation and interment of the bones in lofty tumuli or barrows. They prove the existence of sacrifice to the dead, which Homer ignores. They display fashions of costume quite alien to the Homeric world. They yield none of the iron tools of peaceful purpose with which Homer is perfectly familiar. They furnish abundance of stone arrowheads, which are never mentioned in the Epics.
The conclusion suggested is that Homer knew a people living on the ancient Minoan sites, and retaining much of the Minoan art, much of the military material, but advanced into a peculiar form of the Early Bronze Age; clad in quite a new fashion, practising another form of burial, entertaining other beliefs about death and the dead, but still retaining the flowing locks often represented in pictures of men in Minoan art.
The use of body armour too is in theIliadandOdysseyuniversal in regular war; from the rarity of delineation thereof in Minoan art this appears to be another innovation. Homer is quite conscious that he is singing of events gathered from legends of a time long before his day, a time with which he is in touch, which has bequeathed much to his age, but which, we see, is in some respects less advanced than and in many ways different from his own. He attributes to the old legendary heroes,however, the institutions with which he is familiar—institutions that are not those of any known period of historic Greece. They are no figments of fancy. They closely correspond, as far as form of government is concerned, with the early feudalism described in the oldest Irish epical romances, and in the Frenchchansons de gesteof the eleventh to the thirteenth centurya.d.We find an Over Lord, like the CelticArdrigh, or theBretwaldain early England, ruling over Princes (Ri), with an acknowledged sway, limited by unwritten conventions. He holds, as Mr. Freeman says of the Bretwalda, ‘an acknowledged, though probably not very well defined, supremacy.’ His rule is hereditary; the sceptre is handed down through the male line. Zeus has given him the sceptre, and he confessedly rules, like Charlemagne even in the laterchansons de geste, by right divine. He has the Zeus-given sceptre, and he has theθέμιστες, a knowledge of ‘a recognized body of principles and customs which had grown up in practice’ (Iliadix. 99).
The origin of the Over Lord, as of all kingship, may be traced to a combination of sagacity, courage, and experience in war, in an individual, and to his consequent acquirement of property and influence,plusthe survival of the prestige of the medicine man, to whom the ruling supernormal Being of the tribe is supposed to speak. A very low example is the Dieri medicine man inspired by Kutchi; an elevated example is the Homeric Minos, who converses with Zeus. Even the dream of Agamemnon is worthy of respect, says Nestor, ‘because he has seen it who boasts himself to be the best of the Achaeans’; another man’s dream might be disregarded (Iliadii. 80-83). However,Agamemnon does not lay stress on such communications; Calchas is the regular interpreter of omens and the will of the gods. A divinity doth hedge Agamemnon, though Achilles half draws his sword against him. He has the right to summon the whole host, and to exact fines for absence; he has the lion’s share of all spoils of war; he is war leader, but always consults his peers, the paladins of Charlemagne. From him much that is not easily tolerable is endured, but, if he goes too far in his arrogance, a prince or peer has the recognized right, like Achilles, to throw up his allegiance. By due gifts of atonement, of which the rules are ceremonially minute (Iliadxix. 215-75), the Over Lord may place himself within his right again, and he who refuses the atonement is recognized to be in his wrong. The whole passage about the minutiae of atonement inIliadxix delays the action, and is censured by critics as ‘late’. But it cannot be late, it could only have been composed for a noble audience keenly interested in the customary laws under which they lived, laws unknown to historic Greece. We are accustomed to similar prolixity and minuteness about points of law in the Icelandic sagas.
It has been said that Homer, an Asiatic poet of the ninth centuryb.c., lived imaginatively in, say, the thirteenth century,b.c.as Mr. William Morris imaginatively ‘lived in’ the thirteenth and fourteenth centuriesa.d.But Morris came after Sir Walter Scott, who introduced the imaginative archaeological reconstruction of past ages by poets and artists. Shakespeare did not ‘live in’ any age but his own. His Hamlet fights with the Elizabethan long rapier, not with short sword and axe. Homer, too, lives in his own sub-Minoan age, and in that alone.
The poets of this age of loose feudalism are always partial to the princes rather than to the Over Lord. The Irish romance writers much prefer the chivalrous Diarmaid, or Oscar, to Fionn, the Over Lord, and the later writers ofchansons de gestein France utterly degrade Charlemagne in favour of his paladins.
Greek, Irish, or French, the poets have a professional motive: there are many courts of princes wherein they may sing, but only one court of the Over Lord. In this partisanship Homer is relatively moderate; his Agamemnon is perhaps the most subtle of all his portraits; unsympathetic as is the Over Lord, his Zeus-given supremacy always wins for him respect. The whole picture of Over Lord and princes is a genuine historical document, a thing of a single age of culture, far behind the condition of the Ionian colonists. The princes themselves owe their position to birth, wealth, and courage. Except Aias and Odysseus, chiefs of rocky isles, all own abundance of chariots. They are surrounded by a class of gentry (the IrishFlaith) who are also fighters from chariots, and stand out above the nameless members of the host. It is they (Iliadix. 574) who promise to Meleager a demesne out of the common land. I conceive that such a τέμενος, or demesne, was much more than a κλῆρος, or ‘lot’; he was a very poor man who had no lot (Odysseyxi. 490). Probably the gentry, or γέροντες, had their gift of a τέμενος, or demesne, ratified in the popular assembly, which, I think, did no more than ratify their decisions.
The gentry held rich fields, ‘very remote from any town’ (Iliadxxiii. 832-5). Society was feudal or chivalrous, not democratic. It istrue, as Mr. Ridgeway says (J. H. S., vi. 319-39) that we do not hear of land in the lists of a man’s possessions, but of livestock, gold, iron, and chariots and arms. On the other hand, the gentry certainly held rich fields remote from the cities.
We have no clear light on Homeric land-tenure, but land was held by individuals, in firm possession, if not in property; a prince like Menelaus has whole cities to give away. If a prince lent stock to the owner of a lot, and if the owner became bankrupt, the lot, legally or illegally, would glide into the possession of the prince.
The people were free, like the lotless man who employs labourers—theirsituation is not clear—and like the artisans—smiths, carpenters, workers in gold—and the slaves, men and women, were captives in war, or persons kidnapped by pirates—though they may have been of high rank at home, like the swineherd Eumaeus. In war it was open to a man to kill a prisoner or to set him at ransom, as in the Middle Ages. The various crafts had their regular professors, though it pleased Odysseus to be a master of all of them, from ploughing to shipbuilding.
It was a very tolerable state of society; slaves were well treated; women, of course, held a position high above what was theirs in historic Greece. True, they were usually purchased with a bride-price; but the lofty level of their morality, infinitely above that of Europe in the age of chivalry, suggests that men allowed a free choice to their daughters.
No woman sells herself; there is not a harlot in Homer, common as they are in the earliest records of Israel. No doubt they existed, but thepoet eschews mention of them. Here, as everywhere, the austerity of his tone, though he is not a Puritan, makes him far from an exhaustive authority on manners and customs. To him, as Mr. Gissing well observes, the stability of the home, typified by the wedding bed of Odysseus, made fast to a pillar of a living tree, is very sacred. In camp, and in wanderings, the men live as they will; at home, as we learn from the cases of Laertes and the father of Phoenix, a good man keeps no mistress, and the wife soon gives a worse man cause to rue his laxity. All this is very unlike the morals of historic Greece. The bride-price is, indeed, a barbaric survival; but the purity of the morals of the married women proves that it was modified in practice by the benignity of fathers to ‘well-loved daughters’. The highest tender was not necessarily accepted. We hear of no amours of maids and bachelors; the girls do not sleep, like the young men and like fair Margaret of the ballad of Clerk Saunders, in bowers in the court, but in rooms of the upper story, where only a god can come unnoticed. Nausicaa is most careful not to compromise herself by being seen in the company of a stranger.
Naturally, in a society that carries arms always, the tone of courtesy, where deliberate insult is not intended, is very high, and rude speech, like that of Euryalus to Odysseus in Phaeacia, is atoned for with an apology and the gift of a sword. Except the Over Lord, no man is habitually rude.
As to warfare, as in theTain Bo Cualgne, the Irish romance based on the manners of the late Celtic period (200b.c.to 200a.d.), the gentry fight from chariots, dismounting at will, while the host, with spears, or with slings, bows and arrows, followsor exercises its artillery from the flanks. Except when the rain of arrows does execution, we hear next to nothing of the plebeian infantry. The age of hoplites was as remote as the age of cavalry, and the phalanxes are only mentioned when they are broken. The chariot age is familiar in Assyrian, Egyptian, and Minoan art, as among the Britons and Caledonians who fought with Rome. The chariot was extremely light; a man could lift a chariot and carry it away (Iliadx. 505). Probably the chariot came into use for war, as Mr. Ridgeway supposes, in an age when a pony was unequal to the weight of a man in armour; the Highlanders, with their Celtic ponies, used chariots in Roman times; never did they acquire a breed of horses fit for chargers, hence they lost the battle of Harlaw. To judge by Homer’s description of horses, the chariot survived the cause of its origin; steeds were tall and strong enough for cavalry purposes, but human conservatism retained the chariot. A speech of Nestor, inIliad, Book iv. 303-9, shows that Homer knew by tradition the Egyptian custom of charging in serried squadrons of chariotry, while in his own day the lords of chariots usually fought dismounted, and in the loosest order, or no order. Nestor naturally prefers ‘the old way’; no late poet could have made this interpolation, for, in the Greek age of cavalry, he could have known nothing of chariotry tactics. The Egyptian chariotry used the bow, while their adversaries, the Khita charioteers, fought with spears, in loose order, as in Homer—and had the worst of the fight.
The Homeric retention of the huge body-covering shield, familiar in Minoan art, was more or less of a survival of a time when archery was all-important. The shield, as among the Iroquois and in mediaeval Europe, was suspended by a belt. The same shields, among the Red Indians, and in the Middle Ages (eleventh and twelfth centuries), were, so to speak, umbrellas against a rain of arrows; as the bow became more and more despised, the historic Greeks adopted the round parrying buckler, good against spear- and sword-strokes. The body armour, as far as greaves are concerned, was an advance on Minoan practice. In Minoan art the warriors are usually naked under the huge shields; happily, one or two seals found in Crete, and a pair of greaves in Cyprus, prove that greaves, cuirass,zoster, andmitrê, the mailed kirtle of Homer, were not unknown even before the earliest age at which one could venture to place the Epic (see Note).
The use of the metals, in war, is peculiar, but not unexampled. Weapons are, when the metal is specified, always of bronze, save one arrow-head of primitive form (Iliadiv. 123), and a unique iron mace (Iliadvii. 141). Implements, including knives, which were not used in war, were of iron, as a rule, of bronze occasionally. The only battle-axementioned is of bronze (Iliadxiii. 611); axes, as implements, are usually of iron, so are the implements of the ploughman and shepherd. No man in Homer is said to be ‘smitten with the iron’, it is always ‘with the bronze’; but trees are felled ‘with the iron’ (Iliadiv. 485).
Odysseus shoots ‘through the iron’, that is, through the open work of the iron axe-heads, which were tools. This curious overlap of bronze and iron, the iron being used for implements before it is used for weapons, has no analogy, as far as I am aware, in Central and Northern Europe. But Mr. Macalister has found it perfectly exemplified in Palestine, in certain strata of the great mound of Gezer. Here all weapons are of bronze, all tools of iron (Palestine Exploration Fund, 1903, p. 190).
This state of affairs—obviously caused by military distrust of iron while ill-manufactured, when bronze was admirably tempered—is proved by Mr. Macalister to have been an actual stage in culture, ‘about the borders of the Grecian sea.’ We find no archaeological evidence for this state of things in tombs of the period of overlap of bronze and iron in Greek soil. But then we have never excavated a tumulus of the kind described by Homer, and, if we did, the tumulus (which necessarily attracts grave-robbers) is likely to have been plundered. This is unlucky; we have only the poet’s evidence, in Greece, for the uses of bronze and iron as they existed in Palestine. But I think it improbable that the poet invented this rare stage of culture. Again, if we believe, with most critics, that late poets introduced the iron, it is to me inconceivable that they could abstain, in rigorous archaism,or unconscious adherence to tradition, from occasionally making a warrior ‘smite with the iron’, or from occasional mention of an iron sword or iron-headed spear, while they did not archaize or follow tradition when they spoke of iron knives, axes, tools, and so on.
In tradition of the bronze age, the tools, no less than the weapons, must have been of bronze. Why, then, did late archaizing poets make them of iron, while they never made the weapons of anything but bronze?
The great objection to my opinion isOdysseyxvi. 294, xix. 13, the repeated line in which occurs the proverbial saying, ‘iron of himself draws a man to him.’ Here iron is synonymous with ‘weapon’, the weapons in the hall of Odysseus are to be removed, on the pretence that ‘iron’ draws a man’s hands, and may draw those of the intoxicated wooers in their cups.
I am opposed to regarding a line as ‘late’ merely because it contradicts one’s theory. The critics have no such scruples, they excise capriciously. But this line not only contradicts my theory, it contradicts the uniform unbroken tenor of both epics. It is a saying of the Iron Age, when ‘iron’ has become a synonym for ‘weapon’, as in Thucydides and Shakespeare. But everywhere else in the epics the metallic synonym for ‘weapon’ is ‘bronze’. The metallic synonym for ‘tool’ is ‘iron’. Men are ‘smitten with the bronze’, trees are ‘felled with the iron’.
I think that, in these circumstances, it is not inconsistent to doubt the line’s antiquity. If we accept it, we must suppose that one solitary late minstrel out of hundreds (on the separatist theory) letthe cat out of the bag and enabled us to be sure that an indefinite amount of the epics was composed in the full-blown Age of Iron, though all the other later poets firmly kept the secret by invariably giving to the heroes weapons of bronze. Mr. Ridgeway is against me. He writes: ‘The Homeric warrior ... has regularly, as we have seen, spear and sword of iron.’ He may see it so, but Homer saw it otherwise, and never gives a warrior an iron sword or spear (Early Age of Greece, vol. i, p. 301).
No early poet, perhaps no poet, can avoid, in religion and myth, barbaric and savage survivals, owing to the nature of the legendary materials on which his works are based. Nobody, we may almost say, invents a plot: all borrow from the huge store of world-wide primaevalMärchen, or folk-tales. In theOdyssey,Marmion, andIvanhoe, the plot rests on the return of the husband or lover from unknown wanderings, unrecognized, except inIvanhoeand theOdyssey, by the faithful swineherd. This is a plot ofMärchenall over the world. Gerland, and, recently, Mr. Crooke and others, have studied theMärchenembedded in Homer. One such story is that of the Shifty Lad in Dasent’sTales from the Norse, and the Shifty Lad is only a human representative of the shifty beast, Brer Rabbit or another, who is so common in savage folklore. Now Homer, in the character of Odysseus, merely combines the Returned Husband with the Shifty Lad. It would not be hard to show that Odysseus is really the hero of theIliad, as well as of theOdyssey, the man whom the poet admires most, andheis the real ‘stormer of the city’ of Ilios. He is the type ofsagacious, resolute, indomitable courage; the thoroughly well-balanced man, the most tenacious in war. But, in theOdyssey, the nature of the originalMärchen, as in the encounter with the Cyclops, and the necessity for preserving his disguise, when he returns to Ithaca, compel the poet to make Odysseus foolhardy and an ingenious liar. The sentiment of Homer’s audience and of Homer is with Achilles when he says that he ‘hates a lie like the gates of hell’. But the given material does not permit Odysseus to cherish this chivalrous disdain of falsehood, and Athene, the most ethical of the Olympians, applauds his craft. The materials of legend also yield the cruelty of Achilles; like a hero of the Irish epic, theTain Bo Cualgne, he drags a dead man behind his chariot; and, ‘with evil in his heart, he slays twelve Trojan prisoners with the bronze,’ at the funeral of Patroclus. This is not, to the poet’s mind, a case of human sacrifice, nor does Achilles intend the souls of the men to be thralls of Patroclus.
Homer regards Achilles as slaying the captives merely to glut his fury with revenge, ‘anger for thy slaying’ (Iliadxxiii. 23). This is the explanation which he gives to himself of an incident which he finds in his traditional materials, probably a memory of human sacrifice. Historic Greece was familiar enough with such ritual; but it is a marvel of evil to Homer; he clearly fails to understand it. He is most embarrassed by his materials in matters of religion. Unlike Hesiod he does not love to speak of what the gods did ‘in the morning of time’, things derived from a remote past of savage mythology; the incest, theamours in animal form, the cannibalism, the outrage of Cronos on his father, the swallowing of Zeus. But he cannot get rid of the ancient mythological element in the Olympians. Though the Zeus of Eumaeus is ethical, just, benignant, a truly religious conception; though Homer has almost a bitter sense of the dependence of men on the gods; though ‘all men yearn after the gods’; the Olympians, as they appear in the story, are the freakish beings of myth, capricious partisans, amorous, above all undignified. Only among the gods has married life its sad, if humorous, aspect, as in the bickerings of Zeus and Hera; only among the gods is adultery a joke. Among men it is the direst outrage of sanctity of the home. So alien to Homer is the mythology which he inherits that he finds it easiest to treat the gods humorously, save where they guard the sacredness of the oath (Iliadiii. 275), and are protectors of strangers, suppliants, and of the poor. The mythological survivals are, to Homer, inevitable, but distasteful. As to a belief in a future life, in Homer there is a prevailing idea, but it is mixed with the other ideas which, however contradictory, always exist in this mysterious matter. The prevailing idea is that the dead, if they receive their due rites of fire and interment, abide, powerless for good or evil, in a shadowysheolin the House of Hades. If they do not get their dues of fire they wander disconsolate, and may become ‘a cause of wrath’ to men, may appear to them in dreams, or in