CHAPTER V.HOMERIC ZOOLOGY.

Theestablishment of a clear distinction between men and beasts might seem a slight effort of defining intellect, yet it has not been quite easily made. In children the instinct of assimilation long survives the experience of difference. A little boy of six, asked by the present writer what profession he thought of adopting, replied with alacrity that he ‘would like to be a bird,’ and it was only on being reminded of the diet of grubs associated with that state of life, that he began to waver as to its desirability. The same incapacity for drawing a boundary-line between the realm of their own imperfect consciousness and the mysterious encompassing region of animal life, is visible in the grown-up children of the wilds. Hence the zoological speculations of primitive man inevitably take the form of a sort of projection of human faculties into animal natures. Now human faculties, released from the control of actuality, spontaneously expand. In a vague and vaporous way, they transcendthe low level of hard fact, and become pleasantly diffused in the ‘ampler ether’ of the unknown. Beasts thus transfigured are incapable, it may be said, of simple rationality. The powers transferred to them grow like Jack’s Beanstalk, beyond the range of sight.

Universal folk-lore, in all its tangled ramifications, bears witness to the truth of this remark. Tutelary animals, of the Puss in Boots type, abound and expatiate there. They are all-contriving and infallible. Their favour leads to fortune and power. They hold the clue to the labyrinth of human destinies. Through their protection the oppressed are rescued, the ragged are clothed in golden raiments, the outwardly despicable win princely honours, and have their names inscribed in the ‘Almanach de Gotha’ of fairy-land. No wonder that such beneficent potentates, albeit feathered or furry, should have been claimed as ancestors and hereditary protectors by human beings full of untutored yearnings for the unattainable. To our ideas, indeed, there seems little comfort or credit to be got out of counting kinship with a beaver, a bear, or an opossum; but things looked differently when the world was young; nor has it yet everywhere grown old. In Australia, black bipeds still own themselves the cousins and clients of kangaroos. American Indians pay homage to ‘manitous’ personally, as well as to ‘totems’ tribally associated with them; and twilight tales are perhapsto this hour whispered in Ireland, about a certain ‘Master of the Rats,’ whose hostility it is eminently undesirable though lamentably easy to incur.

Even among Greeks and Romans of the classical age, to say nothing of Aztecs and Alemanni, belief lurked in the preternatural wisdom of certain animals. Their formal worship, most fully elaborated in Egypt, but diffused over ‘Tellus’ orbed ground,’ sprang from the same stock of ideas. To a remarkable extent, the Greeks were exempt from its degrading associations. Their partial survival on Greek soil, as in the veneration at Phigaleia, of the horse-headed Demeter, represented, without doubt, an under-current of aboriginal tradition, reaching back to the Pelasgic fore-time.

Now it might have been anticipated that the earliest literature would have been the most deeply permeated by these primitive reminiscences. But this is very far from being the case. Their influence is scarcely perceptible in the two great epics of Troy and Ithaca; and indeed the modes of thought from which they originated were completely alien to the ethical sentiments pervading those marvellous first-fruits of Greek genius. Neither poem includes the smallest remnant of zoolatry. The Homeric divinities are absolutely anthropomorphic. They are men and women, exempt from the limitations, unscathed by the ills of humanity, and radiant with the infinite sunshine of immortal happiness. Of infra-human relationships they exhibit no trace. They are far lessconcerned with the animal kingdom than they grew to be in classical times. Typical beasts or birds have not yet become attached to them. The eagle, though once in the Iliad called the ‘swift messenger’ of Zeus, is altogether detached from his throne and his thunder-bolt; Heré has not developed her preference for the peacock—a bird introduced much later from the East; Athene is without the companionship of her owl; no doves flutter about the fair head of the ‘golden Aphrodite’; Artemis needs no dogs to bring down her game. The Olympian menagerie, in short, has not been constituted. On the ‘many-folded’ mountain of the gods, no beasts are maintained save the half-dozen horses strictly necessary for the purposes of divine locomotion.

Very significant, too, is Homer’s ignorance of the semi-bestial, semi-divine beings who figure in subsequent Greek mythology. ‘Great Pan’ has no place in his verse; Satyrs and Tritons are equally unrecognised by him; his Nereids are ‘silver-footed sea-nymphs,’ with no fishy tendencies.

Mixed natures of any kind seem, in truth, to have been little to his taste. Even if he could have apprehended the symbolical meanings underlying them in dim Oriental imaginations, he could scarcely have reconciled himself to the sacrifice of beauty which they involved. Men, horses, bulls, lions, were all separately admirable in his eyes; but to blend, he felt instinctively, was not to heighten their perfections.Thus, the hybrid nature of the Centaurs, if present to his mind, was left undefined as something ‘abominable, inutterable.’ The Harpies, realised by Hesiod as half-human fowls, remained with him barely personified tornadoes. Neither Pegasus nor the Minotaur, neither the bird-women of Stymphalis, nor the Griffons of the Rhipæan mountains, found mention in his song, and he admitted—and that in a family-legend—but one true specimen of the dragon-kind in the ‘Chimæra dire’ slain by Bellerophon. The monstrosity of Scylla is left purposely vague. She is a fancy-compound defying classification. She lived, too, in the outer world of the Odyssey, where ‘things strange and rare’ flourished in quiet disregard of laws binding elsewhere.

In the same region of wonderland occur the oxen of the Sun—the only sacred animals recognised by our poet. They had their pasturing-ground in the island of Thrinakie, whither Helios retired to divert himself with their frolics after each hard day of steady Mediterranean shining; and so keen was his indignation at their slaughter by the famished comrades of Odysseus, that a cosmical strike would have ensued but for the promise of Zeus to inflict condign punishment upon the delinquents. From the shipwreck by which this promise was fulfilled, Odysseus, alone exempt from guilt in the matter, was the solitary survivor.

The Homeric treatment of animals, compared withthe extravagances prevalent in other primitive literature, is eminently sane and rational. Not through indifference to their perfections. A peculiar intensity of sympathy with brute-nature is, on the contrary, one of the distinguishing characteristics of the Homeric poems. But that sympathy is based upon the appreciation of real, not upon the transference of imaginary qualities. Beasts are, on the whole, kept strictly in their proper places. The only genuine example of their sublimation into higher ones is afforded by the horses of Achilles, and this during a transport of epic excitement. Otherwise, the fabulous element admitted concerning animals—and it is just in their regard that fable commonly runs riot—is surprisingly small.

In its room, we find such a wealth of acute and accurate observation, as no poet, before or since, has had the capacity to accumulate, or the power to employ for purposes of illustration. It is unmistakably private property. Details appropriated at second-hand could never have fitted in so aptly with the needs of imaginative creation. Moreover, the conventional types of animal character were of later establishment. There was at that early time no recognised common stock of popular or proverbial wisdom on the subject to draw upon. The lion had not yet been raised to regal dignity; the fox was undistinguished for craft, as the goose for folly. Beasts and birds had their careers in literature before them.Their reputations were still to make. They carried about with them no formal certificates of character. The poet was accordingly unfettered in his dealings with them by preconceived notions; whence the delightful freshness of Homer’s zoological vignettes. The dew of morning, so to speak, is upon them. They are limned direct from his own vivid impressions of pastoral, maritime, and hunting scenes.

As to the locality of those scenes, some hints, but scarcely more than hints, can be derived. For in the course of nearly three thousand years, the circumstances of animal distribution have been affected by changes too considerable and too indeterminate to admit of confident argument from the state of things now to the state of things then; while the notices of the poet, incidental by their very nature, are of the utmost value for what they tell, but warrant only very hesitating inferences from what they leave untold. Thus, it does not follow that because Homer nowhere mentions the cuckoo, he was therefore unfamiliar with its note, which, from Hesiod’s time until now, has not failed to proclaim the advent of spring among the olive-groves of Bœotia, and must have been heard no less by Paris or Anchises than by the modern archæological traveller, along the oak-clad and willow-fringed valley of Scamander. Nor is the faintest presumption of a divided authorship supplied by the fact that the nightingale sings in the Odyssey, but not in the Iliad. Nevertheless, analogous considerationsshould not be altogether neglected in Homeric criticism. They may possibly help towards the answering of questions both of time and place: of time, through allusions to domesticated animals; of place, by a comparison of the known range of wild species with the fauna of the two great epics. And, first, as regards domesticated animals.

The list of these is a short one. The Greeks and Trojans of the Iliad commanded the services of the horse in battle, of oxen and mules for draught; dogs were their faithful allies in hunting and cattle driving, and they kept flocks of sheep and goats. The ass appears only once, and then indirectly, on the scene, when the lethargic obstinacy of his behaviour serves to heighten the effect of Ajax’s stubbornness in fight. Thus:

And as when a lazy ass going past a field hath the better of the boys with him, an ass that hath had many a cudgel broken about his sides, and he fareth into the deep crop, and wasteth it, while the boys smite him with their cudgels, and feeble is the force of them, but yet with might and main they drive him forth when he hath had his fill of fodder; even so did the high-hearted Trojans and allies, called from many lands, smite great Aias, son of Telamon, with darts on the centre of his shield, and ever followed after him.[136]

136.Iliad, xi. 557-64.

The creature’s ‘little ways’ were then already notorious, although all mention of him or them is omitted from the Odyssey, as well as from the Hesiodic poems. His existence is indeed implied by theparentage of the mule. But mules were brought to the Troadready-madefrom Paphlagonia.[137]It was not until later that they were systematically bred by the Greeks.

137.Hehn and Stallybrass,Wanderings of Plants and Animals, pp. 110, 460.

The Semitic origin of the word ‘ass’ rightly indicates the introduction of the species into Europe from Semitic Western Asia. As to the date of its arrival, all that can be told is that it was subsequent to the beginning of the bronze epoch. The pile-dwellers of Switzerland and North Italy were unacquainted with an animal fundamentally Oriental in its habitudes. Its reluctance, for instance, to cross the smallest streamlet attests the physical tradition of a desert home; and the white ass of Bagdad represents to this day, the fullest capabilities of the race.[138]Yet neither the ass nor the camel was included in the primitive Aryan fauna. For they could not have been known, still less domesticated, without being named, and the only widespread appellations borne by them are derived from Semitic sources. Evidently the loan of the words accompanied the transmission of the species. It is very difficult, in the face of this circumstance—as Dr. Schrader has pertinently observed[139]—to locate the Aryan cradle-land anywhere to the east of the Bosphorus.

138.Houghton,Trans. Society of Biblical Archæology, vol. v. p. 49.

139.Thier- und Pflanzen-Geographie, p. 17.

Dr. Virchow was struck, on his visit to the Troad, in 1879, with the similarity of the actual condition of the country to that described in the Iliad.[140]The inhabitants seem, in fact, during the long interval, to have halted in a transition-stage between pastoral and agricultural life, by far the larger proportion of the land supplying pasturage for ubiquitous multitudes of sheep, oxen, goats, horses, and asses. The sheep, however, belong to a variety assuredly of post-Homeric introduction, since the massive tails hampering their movements could not well have escaped characterisation in some emphatic Homeric epithet.

140.Beiträge zur Landeskunde der Troas; Berlin.Abhandlungen, 1879, p. 59.

Both short and long-horned cattle, all of a dark-brown colour, may now be seen grazing over the plain round Hissarlik, the latter probably resembling more closely than the former those with which Homer was acquainted. The oxen alike of the Iliad and Odyssey are ‘wine-coloured,’ ‘straight-horned,’ ‘broad-browed,’ and ‘sinuous-footed’; it was above all through the shuffle of their gait, indicated by the last adjective, and due to the peculiar structure of the hip-joint in the whole species, that the poet distinctively visualised them. ‘Lowing kine,’ and ‘bellowing bulls’ are occasionally heard of, chiefly—it is curious to remark—in later, or suspected portions of the Iliad. Sheep and goats, on the other hand, are often described as ‘bleating,’ and the criesof birds are called up at opportune moments; but Homer’s horses neither whinny nor neigh; his pigs refrain from grunting; his jackals do not howl; the tremendous roar of the lion nowhere resounds through his forests. Homeric wild beasts are, indeed, save in the vaguely-indicated case of one indeterminate specimen,[141]wholly dumb.

141.Iliad, x. 184.

Singularly enough, a peculiar sensitiveness to sound is displayed in the description of the Shield of Achilles. Yet plastic art is essentially silent. Even the perpetuated cry of the Laocoön detracts somewhat from the inherent serenity of marble. The metal-wrought creations of Hephæstus, however, not only live and move, but make themselves audible to a degree uncommon elsewhere in the poems. Thus, in one scene, or compartment, alowingherd issues to the pasturing-grounds, where two lions seize from their midst, and devour, aloudly-bellowingbull, while ninebarking, though frightened dogs are, by the herdsmen, vainly urged to a rescue. In the vintage-episode of the same series, delight in melodious beauty is almost as apparent as in the so-called ‘Homeric’ hymn to Hermes. The ‘Linus-song,’ ‘sweet even as desire,’ sung to the youthful grape-gatherers, sounds through the ages scarcely less sweet than

The liquid voiceOf pipes, that filled the clear air thrillingly,

The liquid voice

Of pipes, that filled the clear air thrillingly,

when the Muses gathered round Apollo long ago in the ethereal halls of Olympus.

Among the animals now variously serviceable to man by the shores of the Hellespont, are the camel, the buffalo, and the cat, none of them known, even by name, to the primitive Achæans. The household cat, as is well known, remained, during a millennium or two, exclusively Egyptian; then all at once, perhaps owing to the exigency created by the migration westward of the rat, spread with great rapidity in the first centuries of the Christian era, over the civilised world. Saint Gregory Nazianzen set the first recorded European example of attachment to a cat. His pet was kept at Constantinople about the year 360A.D.[142]No archæological vestiges of the species, accordingly, have been found in Asia Minor. Cats haunt the ruins of Hissarlik, but in no case lie buried beneath them.

142.Houghton,Trans. Society Biblical Archæology, vol. v. p. 63.

The bones mixed up among the prehistoricdébrisbelong chiefly, as might have been expected, to sheep, goats, and oxen, those of swine, dogs, and horses being relatively scarce.[143]Hares and deer are also represented, and of birds, mainly the goose, with scanty traces of the swan and of a small falcon. These remains are of different epochs, yet all without exception belong to animals mentioned in the Iliad, whether as wild or tame. The Homeric conditionof the pig and goose respectively presents some points of interest.

143.Virchow,loc. cit.p. 63.

The pig was not one of the animals primitively domesticated in the East. The absence of Vedic or Avestan mention of swine-culture makes it practically certain that the species was known only in a wild state to the early Aryan colonists of Iran and India. Nor had any more intimate acquaintance with it been developed in Babylonia; although the Swiss pile-dwellers, at first similarly behindhand, advanced, before the stone age had terminated, to pig-keeping.[144]Dr. Schrader, indeed, bases upon the occurrence only in European languages of the word porcus, the conjecture that the subjugation of the ‘full-acorned boar’ was first accomplished in Europe;[145]and if this were so, the operations of swine-herding would naturally come in for a larger share of notice in the Odyssey, as the more European of the two poems, than in the Iliad. And in fact, the swineherd of Odysseus is an important personage, and plays a leading part in the drama of his return—pigs, moreover, figuring extensively among the agricultural riches of Ithaca, while there is no sign that any were possessed by Priam or Anchises. Alone among the Greeks of the Iliad, Achilles is stated to have placed before his guests a ‘chine of well-fed hog’; and the very few Iliadic allusions to fatted swine are all inimmediate connexion with the same hero. If this be a result of chance, it is a somewhat grotesque one.

144.Rütimeyer,Die Fauna der Pfahlbauten, pp. 120-21.

145.Prehistoric Antiquities of the Aryans, p. 261.

The porcine proclivities of modern Greeks are especially strong. Christian and Mahometan habitations were, in the days of Turkish domination, easily distinguished by the sty-accommodation attached to the former; while in certain villages of the Morea and the Cyclades, the pigs no longer occupied a merely subordinate position, and odours not Sabæan, wafted far on the breeze, announced to the still distant traveller the nature of the harbourage in store for him.[146]

146.Gell,A Journey in the Morea, p. 63.

The most antique of domesticated birds is the goose, and Homer was acquainted with no other. Penelope kept a flock of twenty,[147]mainly, it would seem, for purposes of diversion, since the loss of them through the devastations of an eagle is treated from a purely sentimental point of view. They were fed on wheat, the ‘height of good living,’ in Homeric back-premises. The court-yard, too, of the palace of Menelaus sheltered a cackling flock,[148]the progenitors of which Helen might have brought with her from Egypt, where geese were prehistorically reared for the table. That the bird occursonlytame in the Odyssey, andonlywild in the Iliad, constitutes a distinction between the poems which can scarcely be without real significance. The species employed, inthe Second Iliad, to illustrate, by the tumult of their alighting on the marshy banks of the Cayster, the clangorous march-past of the Achæan forces, has been identified asAnser cinereus, numerous specimens of which fly south, in severe winters, from the valley of the Danube to Greece and Asia Minor.

147.Odyssey, xix. 536.

148.Ib.xv. 161.

The familiar cocks and hens of our poultry-yards are, in the West, post-Homeric. Their native home is in India; but through human agency they were early transported to Iran, where the cock, as the bird that first greets the light, acquired in the eyes of Zoroastrian devotees, a pre-eminently sacred character. His introduction into Greece was a result of the expansion westward of the Persian empire. No cocks are met with on Egyptian monuments; the Old Testament leaves them unnoticed; and the earliest mention of them in Greek literature is by Theognis of Megara, in the middle of the sixth centuryB.C.[149]Pigeons, on the other hand, are quite at home in Homeric verse. They are of two kinds. One is the rock-pigeon, called from its slate-coloured plumagepeleia(πελόs = dusky), and described as finding shelter in rocky clefts, and evading pursuit by a rapid, undulating flight.[150]Its frequent recurrence in similes can surprise no traveller who has observed the extreme abundance ofColumba liviaall round the coasts of the Ægean.[151]The second Homericspecies ofColumbais the ring-dove, once referred to as the habitual victim of the hawk. Tame pigeons are ignored, and were, indeed, first seen in Greece after the wreck of the Persian fleet at Mount Athos in 492B.C.[152]Yet dove-culture was practised as far back as the oldest records lead us in Egypt and Persia. The dove was marked out as a ‘death-bird’ by our earliest Aryan ancestors, and figures in the Vedas as a messenger of Yama. But Homer, unconcerned, as usual, with animal symbolism, makes no account, if he had ever heard, of its sinister associations.

149.Hehn and Stallybrass,Wanderings of Plants and Animals, pp. 241-43.

150.Buchholz,Realien, Bd. i. Abth. ii. p. 120.

151.Lindermayer,Die Vögel Griechenlands, p. 120.

152.Hehn and Stallybrass,op. cit.p. 257.

Among Homeric wild animals, the first place incontestably belongs to the lion, and the Iliad, in especial, gives extraordinary prominence to the king of beasts. In savage grandeur he stalks, as it were, through the varied scenery of its similitudes, indomitable, fiercely-despoiling, contemptuous of lesser brute-forces. His impressive qualities receive no gratuitous enhancement; he rouses no myth-making fancies; there is no fabulous ‘quality of mercy’ about him, nor of magnanimity, nor of forbearance; he is simply a ‘gaunt and sanguine beast,’ a vivid embodiment of the energy of untamed and unsparing nature.

He is not brought immediately upon the scene of action; the Homeric poems nowhere provide for him a local habitation; it is only in the comparatively late Hymn to Aphrodite that a place is specifically assigned to him among the feral products ofMount Ida. His portraiture, nevertheless, in the similes of the Iliad is too minute and faithful to leave any shadow of doubt of its being based upon intimate personal acquaintance. The poet must have witnessed with his own eyes the change from majestic indifference to bellicose frenzy described in the following passage; he must have caught the greenish glare of the oblique feline eyes, noted the preparatory tail-lashings, and mentally photographed the crouching attitude, and the yawn of deadly significance, that preceded the fierce beast’s spring.

And on the other side, the son of Peleus rushed to meet him, like a lion, a ravaging lion whom men desire to slay, a whole tribe assembled; and first he goeth his way unheeding, but when some warrior-youth hath smitten him with a spear, then he gathereth himself open-mouthed, and foam cometh forth about his teeth, and his stout spirit groaneth in his heart, and with his tail he scourgeth either side his ribs and flanks and goadeth himself on to fight, and glaring is borne straight on them by his passion to try whether he shall slay some man of them, or whether himself shall perish in the forefront of the throng.[153]

153.Iliad, xx. 164-73.

Take, again, the picture of the lioness defending her young, while

Within her the storm of her might doth rise,And the down-drawn skin of her brows over-gloometh the fire of her eyes.[154]

Within her the storm of her might doth rise,

And the down-drawn skin of her brows over-gloometh the fire of her eyes.[154]

Or this other, exemplifying, like the ‘hungry people’ simile in ‘Locksley Hall,’ the ‘imperious’ beast’s dread of fire:

And as when hounds and countryfolk drive a tawny lion from the mid-fold of the kine, and suffer him not to carry away the fattest of the herd, all night they watch, and he in great desire for the flesh maketh his onset; but takes nothing thereby, for thick the darts fly from strong hands against him, and the burning brands, and these he dreads for all his fury, and in the dawn he departeth with vexed heart.[155]

154.Way’sIliad, xvii. 135-36. The feminine pronouns are here introduced to avoid incongruity. The Homeric vocabulary did not include a word equivalent to ‘lioness.’

155.Iliad, xx. 164-75.

Scenes of leonine ravage among cattle are frequently presented. As here:

And as when in the pride of his strength a lion mountain-rearedHath snatched from the pasturing kine a heifer, the best of the herd,And, gripping her neck with his strong teeth, bone from bone hath he snapped,And he rendeth her inwards and gorgeth her blood by his red tongue lapped,And around him gather the dogs and the shepherd-folk, and stillCry long and loud from afar, howbeit they have no willTo face him in fight, for that pale dismay doth the hearts of them fill.[156]

And as when in the pride of his strength a lion mountain-reared

Hath snatched from the pasturing kine a heifer, the best of the herd,

And, gripping her neck with his strong teeth, bone from bone hath he snapped,

And he rendeth her inwards and gorgeth her blood by his red tongue lapped,

And around him gather the dogs and the shepherd-folk, and still

Cry long and loud from afar, howbeit they have no will

To face him in fight, for that pale dismay doth the hearts of them fill.[156]

We seem, in reading these lines—and there are many more like them—to be confronted with a vivified Assyrian or Lycian bas-relief. In the antique sculptures of the valley of the Xanthus, above all, the incident of the slaying of an ox by a lion is of such constant recurrence[157]as almost to suggest, in confirmationof a conjecture by Mr. Gladstone,[158]a similarity of origin between them and the corresponding passages of the Iliad. The lion, indeed, occupies throughout the epic a position which can now with difficulty be conceived as having been assigned to him on the strength of European experience alone. Still, it must not be forgotten that the facts of the matter have radically changed within the last three thousand years.

156.Way’sIliad, xvii. 61-67.

157.Fellows’Travels in Asia Minor, p. 348, ed. 1852.

158.Studies in Homer, vol. i. p. 183.

In prehistoric times, the lion ranged all over Europe, from the Severn to the Hellespont; for theFelis spelæusof Britain[159]was specifically identical with the grateful clients of Androclus and Sir Iwain, no less than with the more savage than sagacious beasts now haunting the Upper Nile valley, and the marshes of Guzerat and Mesopotamia.

159.Boyd Dawkins and Sanford,Pleistocene Mammalia, p. 171.

Already, however, at the early epoch of the pile-built villages by the lake of Constance, he had disappeared from Western Europe; yet he lingered long in Greece. Of his presence in the Peloponnesus only legendary traces remain, although he figures largely in Mycenæan art; but in Thrace he can lay claim to an historically attested existence. Herodotus[160]recounts with wonder how the baggage-camels of Xerxes’ army were attacked by lions on the march from Acanthus to Therma; and he defines the region hauntedby them as bounded towards the east by the River Nestus, on the west by the Achelous. Some Chalcidicean coins, too, are stamped with the favourite oriental device of a lion killing an ox; and Xenophonpossibly—for his expressions are dubious—includes the lion among the wild fauna of Thrace. The statements, on the other hand, of Polybius and Dio Chrysostom leave no doubt that he had finally retreated from our continent before the beginning of the Christian era.[161]

160.Lib. vii. caps. 125, 126.

161.Sir G. C. Lewis,Notes and Queries, vol. viii. ser. ii. p. 242.

A Thessalian Homer might, then, quite conceivably, have beheld an occasional predatory lion descending the arbutus-clad slopes of Pelion or Olympus; yet the continual allusions to leonine manners and customs pervading the Iliad show an habitual acquaintance with the animal which is certainly somewhat surprising. It corresponds, nevertheless, quite closely with the perpetual recurrence of his form in the plastic representations of Mycenæ.

The comparatively few Odyssean references to this animal can scarcely be said to bear the stamp of visual directness unmistakably belonging to those dispersed broadcast through the earlier epic. Yet it would probably be a mistake to suppose them derived at second-hand. Without, then, denying that the author of the Odyssey had actually ‘met the ravin lion when he roared,’ we may express some wonder that he, like his predecessor of the Iliad, left unrecorded the auditory part of the resulting brain-impression. For the voiceof the lion is assuredly the most imposing sound of which animated nature seems capable. Casual allusions to it in the Hymn to Aphrodite and in the (nominally) Hesiodic ‘Shield of Hercules,’ are, nevertheless, perhaps the earliest extant in Greek literature.

The bear figures in the Iliad and Odyssey solely as a constellation, except that a couple of verses interpolated into the latter accord him a place among the embossed decorations of the belt of Hercules. The living animal, however, is still reported to lurk in the ‘clov’n ravines’ of ‘many-fountain’d Ida,’ and, according to a local tradition, was only banished from the Thessalian Olympus through the agency of Saint Dionysius.[162]The panther or leopard, on the contrary, although contemporaneously with the cave-lion an inmate of Britain, disappeared from Europe at a dim and remote epoch, while plentifully met with in Caria and Pamphylia during Cicero’s governorship of Cilicia. Even in the present century, indeed, leopardskins formed part of the recognised tribute of the Pasha of the Dardanelles. The life-like scene, then, in which the animal emerges to view in the Iliad, bears a decidedly Asiatic character. Mr. Conington’s version of the lines runs as follows:

As panther springs from a deep thicket’s shadeTo meet the hunter, and her heart no fearNor terror knows, though barking loud she hear,For though with weapon’s thrust or javelin’s throwHe wound her first, yet e’en about the spearWrithing, her valour doth she not forego,Till for offence she close, or in the shock lie low.[163]

As panther springs from a deep thicket’s shade

To meet the hunter, and her heart no fear

Nor terror knows, though barking loud she hear,

For though with weapon’s thrust or javelin’s throw

He wound her first, yet e’en about the spear

Writhing, her valour doth she not forego,

Till for offence she close, or in the shock lie low.[163]

162.Tozer,Researches in the Highlands of Turkey, vol. ii. p. 64.

163.Iliad, xxi. 573-78.

Thoroughly Oriental, too, is the vision conjured up in the Third Iliad of Paris challenging

To mortal combat all the chiefs of Greece,[164]

armed with a bow and sword, poising ‘two brass-tipped javelins,’ a panther skin flung round his magnificent form. Elate with the consciousness of strength and beauty, unsuspicious of the betrayal in store for him by his own weak and volatile spirit, thegaietta pelleof the fierce beast might have encouraged, as it did in Dante, a cheerful forecast of the issue; yet illusorily in each case. In the Odyssey, the panther is only mentioned as one of the forms assumed by Proteus.

164.Iliad, iii. 20 (Lord Derby’s trans.).

The Homeric wild boar is of quite Erymanthian powers and proportions; with more valour than discretion, he does not shrink from encountering the lion himself—

Being ireful, on the lion he will venture;

and the laying-low of a single specimen is reckoned no inadequate result of a forest-campaign by dogs and men. Such an heroic brute, worthy to have been the emissary of enraged Artemis, succumbed, no longer ago than in 1850, to the joint efforts, duringseveral toilsome days, of a band of thirty hunters.[165]The ‘chafed boar’ in the Iliad either carries everything before him, as Ajax scattered the Trojans fighting round the body of Patroclus; or he dies, tracked to his lair, if die he must, fearlessly facing his foes, incarnating rage with bristles erected, blazing eyes, and gnashing tusks. Nor was the upshot for him inevitably fatal. Idomeneus of Crete, we are told, awaiting the onset (which proved but partially effective) of Æneas and Deiphobus,

Stood at bay, like a boar on the hills that trusteth to his strength, and abides the great assailing throng of men, in a lonely place, and he bristles up his back, and his eyes shine with fire, while he whets his tusks, and is right eager to keep at bay both men and hounds.[166]

165.Erhard,Fauna der Cycladen, p. 26.

166.Iliad, xiii. 471-75.

The boar is a solitary animal. Like Hal o’ the Wynd, he fights for his own right hand; and he was accordingly appropriated by Homer to image the valour of individual chiefs, while the rank and file figure as wolves and jackals, hunting in packs, pinched with hunger, bloodthirsty and desperately eager, but formidable only collectively. Jackals still abound in the Troad and throughout the Cyclades, and their hideous wails and barkings enhance the desolation of the Nauplian and Negropontine swamps.[167]Neither have wolves disappeared from those regions;and the old dread of the animal which was at once the symbol of darkness and of light, survives obscurely to this day in the vampire-superstitions of Eastern Europe. The closeness of the connexion between vampires and were-wolves is shown by a comparison of the modern Greek wordvrykolaka, vampire, with the Zend and Sanskritvehrka, a wolf.[168]Nor were the Greeks of classical times exempt from the persuasion that men and wolves might temporarily, or even permanently, exchange semblances. Many stories of the kind were related in Arcadia in connexion with the worship of the Lycæan Zeus; and Pausanias, while critically sceptical as regards some of these, was not too advanced a thinker to accept, as fully credible, the penal transformation of Lycaon, son of Pelasgus.[169]Such notions belonged, however, to a rustic mythology of which Homer took small cognisance. His thoughts travelled of themselves out from the sylvan gloom of primeval haunts into the open sunshine of unadulterated nature.

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