Chapter 12

In wood or wilderness, forest or den,

he met with no bogey-animals. For him neither beast nor bird had any mysterious significance. He attributed to encounters with particular species no influence, malefic or beneficial, upon human destiny. Of themselves, they had, in his view, no concern withit, although ordinary animal instincts might, under certain conditions, be so directed as to be expressive to man of the will of the gods. In the Homeric scheme, birds and serpents exclusively are so employed, without, however, any departure from the order of nature. Thus, by night near the sedgy Simoeis, a heron,Ardea nycticorax, disturbed by the approach of Odysseus and Diomed, assured them, by casually flapping its way eastward, that their expedition had the sanction of their guardian-goddess.[170]The choice of the bird was plainly dictated by zoological considerations alone; it had certainly no such recondite motive as that suggested by Ælian,[171]who, with almost grotesque ingenuity, argued that the owl, as the fowl of Athene’s special predilection, could only have been deprived of the privilege of acting as her instrument on the occasion through Homer’s consciousness of its reputation as a bird of sinister augury—

Ignavus bubo, dirum mortalibus omen—

the truth being that both kinds of association—the mythological and the superstitious—were equally remote from the poet’s mind.

167.Von der Mühle,Beiträge zur Ornithologie Griechenlands, p. 123; Buchholz,Homerische Realien, Bd. i. Abth. ii. p. 202.

168.Tozer,Researches, vol. ii. p. 82.

169.Descriptio Græciæ, lib. vi. cap. 8; viii. cap. ii.

170.Iliad, x. 274.

171.De Naturâ Animalium, lib. x. fr. 37.

Similarly, the portent of

An eagle and a serpent wreathed in fight

appeared such only by virtue of the critical nature of the conjuncture at which it was displayed. Hector, relying upon what he took to be a promise of divinehelp, aimed at nothing less than the capture, in the rout of battle, of the Greek camp, and the conflagration of the Greek ships. But every step in advance brought him nearer to the tent where the irate epical hero lay inert, but ready to spring into action at the last extremity; and it was fully recognised that the arming of Achilles meant far more than the mere loss of the fruits of victory. The balance of events, then, if the proposedcoup de mainwere persevered with, hung upon a knife-edge of destiny; and pale fear might well invade the eager, yet hesitating Trojan host when, just as the foremost warriors were about to breach the Greek rampart, an eagle flying westward—that is, towards the side of darkness and death—let fall among their ranks a coiling and blood-stained snake.[172]

And adown the blasts of the wind he darted with one wild scream;Then shuddered the Trojans, beholding the serpent’s writhing gleamIn the midst of them lying, the portent of Zeus the Ægis-lord,And to Hector the valiant Polydamas spoke with a bodeful word.[173]

And adown the blasts of the wind he darted with one wild scream;

Then shuddered the Trojans, beholding the serpent’s writhing gleam

In the midst of them lying, the portent of Zeus the Ægis-lord,

And to Hector the valiant Polydamas spoke with a bodeful word.[173]

His vaticinations were defied. The Trojan leader met them with the memorable protest:

But thou, thou wouldst have us obey the long-winged fowl of the air!Go to, unto these have I not respect, and nought do I careWhether to rightward they go to the sun and the dayspring sky,Or whether to leftward away to the shadow-gloomed west they fly.But for us, let us hearken the counsel of Zeus most high, and obey,Who over the deathling race and the deathless beareth sway.One omen of all is best, that we fight for our fatherland!

But thou, thou wouldst have us obey the long-winged fowl of the air!

Go to, unto these have I not respect, and nought do I care

Whether to rightward they go to the sun and the dayspring sky,

Or whether to leftward away to the shadow-gloomed west they fly.

But for us, let us hearken the counsel of Zeus most high, and obey,

Who over the deathling race and the deathless beareth sway.

One omen of all is best, that we fight for our fatherland!

172.Shelley has adopted and developed the incident in the opening stanzas of theRevolt of Islam.

173.Iliad, xii. 207-10 (Way’s trans.).

Magnificent, but, in the actual case, mistaken. The shabby counsel of Polydamas really carried with it the safety of Troy.

The eagle is virtually the Homeric king of birds. He is in the Iliad ‘the most perfect,’ as well as ‘the strongest and swiftest of flying things’; his appearances in both poems, often expressly ordained by Zeus, are always momentous, and are, accordingly, eagerly watched and solicitously interpreted; moreover, they never deceive; to disregard the warning they convey is to rush spontaneously to destruction. It is only, however, in the Twenty-fourth Iliad, usually regarded as subsequent, in point of composition, to the cantos embodying the primitive legend of the ‘Wrath of Achilles,’ that the eagle begins to be marked out as the special envoy of Zeus. Later, the companionship became so close as to justify Æschylus in implying that the bird was in lieu of a dog to the ‘father of gods and men.’ The position, on the other hand, assigned, in one passage of the Odyssey, to the hawk as the ‘swift messenger’ of Apollo, was not maintained. The Hellenic Phœbus eventually disclaimed all relationship with the hawk-headed Horusof the Nile Valley. The rapidity, however, of the hawk’s flight, and his agility in the pursuit of his prey, furnish our poet, again and again, with terms of comparison. Here is an example, taken from the description of the deadly duel outside the Scæan gate.

As when a falcon, bird of swiftest flight,From some high mountain top on tim’rous doveSwoops fiercely down; she, from beneath, in fear,Evades the stroke; he, dashing through the brake,Shrill-shrieking, pounces on his destin’d prey;So, wing’d with desp’rate hate, Achilles flew,So Hector, flying from his keen pursuit,Beneath the walls his active sinews plied.[174]

As when a falcon, bird of swiftest flight,

From some high mountain top on tim’rous dove

Swoops fiercely down; she, from beneath, in fear,

Evades the stroke; he, dashing through the brake,

Shrill-shrieking, pounces on his destin’d prey;

So, wing’d with desp’rate hate, Achilles flew,

So Hector, flying from his keen pursuit,

Beneath the walls his active sinews plied.[174]

174.Iliad, xxii. 139-44 (Lord Derby’s trans.).

In popular Russian parlance, too, ‘the hurricane in the field, and the luminous hawk in the sky,’ are the favourite metaphors of swiftness.[175]Only that Homer’s falcon has no direct relations with light; and of those indirectly traceable in the one phrase connecting him with Apollo, the poet himself was certainly not cognisant.

175.Gubernatis,Zoological Mythology, vol. ii. p. 193.

Vultures always lurk behind the scenes, as it were, of the Homeric battle-stage. The abandonment to their abhorrent offices of the bodies of the slain formed one of the chief terrors of death in the field, and presented a much-dreaded means of enhancing the penalties of defeat. The carrion-feeding birds perpetually on the watch to descend from the clouds upon the blood-stained plain of Ilium, are clearly ‘griffon-vultures,’Vultur fulvus; but the ‘bearded vulture,’Gypaëtus barbatus, theLämmergeierof the Germans, which, like the eagle, pursues live prey, occasionally lends, in a figure, the swoop and impetus of its flight to vivify some incident of extermination.[176]Both species occur in modern Greece.[177]

176.Odyssey, xxii. 302;Iliad, xvi. 428, xvii. 460.

177.Buchholz,Realien, Bd. i. Abth. ii. p. 134.

One of the few bits of primitive folk-lore enshrined in the Iliad relates to the wars of the cranes and pygmies. The passage is curious in many ways. It contains the first notice of bird-migrations, implies the constancy with which the ‘annual voyage’ of the ‘prudent crane’ was steered during three thousand years,[178]and records the dim wonder early excited by the sight and sound of that

Aery caravan, high over seasFlying, and over lands with mutual wingEasing their flight.

Aery caravan, high over seas

Flying, and over lands with mutual wing

Easing their flight.

178.Koerner,Die Homerische Thierwelt, pp. 62-65.

In the Iliadic lines, the clamour of the Trojan advance, in contrast to the determined silence of their opponents, is somewhat disdainfully accentuated:

When afar through the heaven cometh pealing before them the cry of the cranes,As they flee from the wintertide storms and the measureless deluging rains.Onward with screaming they fly to the streams of the ocean-flood,Bringing down on the folk of the Pigmies battle and murder and blood.[179]

When afar through the heaven cometh pealing before them the cry of the cranes,

As they flee from the wintertide storms and the measureless deluging rains.

Onward with screaming they fly to the streams of the ocean-flood,

Bringing down on the folk of the Pigmies battle and murder and blood.[179]

179.Way’sIliad, iii. 3-7.

The simile is felicitously plagiarised by Virgil in his

Quales sub nubibus atrisStrymoniæ dant signa grues, atque æthera tranantCum sonitu, fugiuntque Notos clamore secundo,[180]

Quales sub nubibus atris

Strymoniæ dant signa grues, atque æthera tranant

Cum sonitu, fugiuntque Notos clamore secundo,[180]

but with the omission of the pygmy-element, probably as too childish for the mature taste of his Roman audience. Its origin may perhaps be sought in obscure rumours concerning the stunted races encountered by modern travellers in Central Africa. The association of ideas, however, by which they were connected in a hostile sense with ‘fowls o’ the air’ is of trackless antiquity. It partially survives in the notion, current in Finland, that birds of passage spend their winters in dwarf-land, ‘a dweller among birds’ meaning, in polite Finnish phrase, a dwarf; and bird-footed mannikins have a well-marked place in German folk-stories;[181]but the root from which these withered leaves of fable once derived vitality has long ago perished. Aristotle described the ‘small infantry warr’d on by cranes’ as cave-dwellers near the sources of the Nile;[182]Pliny turned them into a kind of pantomime-cavalry, mounted on rams and goats, locating them among the Himalayas, and conjuring up a fantastic vision of their periodical descents to the seacoast, to destroy the eggs and young of their winged enemies, against whom they could no otherwise hopeto make head.[183]For such disinterested ravage as was committed on their behalf by Herzog Ernst, a mediæval knight-errant smitten with compassion for the miserable straits to which they were reduced by the secular feud imposed upon them, could scarcely be of more than millennial recurrence.[184]

180.Æneid, x. 264-66.

181.Grimm and Stallybrass,Teutonic Mythology, pp. 1420, 1450.

182.De Animal. Hist.lib. vii. cap. ii.; lib. iii. cap. xii.

183.Hist. Nat.lib. vii. cap. 2.

184.Zeitschrift für Deutsches Alterthum, Bd. vii. p. 232.

The Homeric wild swan isCycnus musicus, great numbers of which yearly exchange the frozen marshes of the North for the ‘silver lakes and rivers’ of Greece and Asia Minor. But the swan of the Epics sings no ‘sad dirge of her certain ending.’ Unmelodiously exultant, she flutters with the rest of the fluttering denizens of the Lydian water-meadows, in a scene full of animation.

And as the many tribes of feathered birds, wild geese or cranes or long-necked swans, on the Asian mead by Kaÿstros’ stream, fly hither and thither joying in their plumage, and with loud cries settle ever onwards, and the mead resounds; even so poured forth the many tribes of warriors from ships and huts into the Scamandrian plain.[185]

Nor do the

Smaller birds with songSolace the woods

Smaller birds with song

Solace the woods

of Homeric landscapes; once only, the ‘solemn nightingale’ is permitted, in the story of the waiting of Penelope, ‘to pour her soft lays.’ ‘Even as when the daughter of Pandareus,’ the Ithacan queentells the disguised Odysseus, ‘the brown bright nightingale, sings sweet in the first season of the spring, from her place in the thick leafage of the trees; and with many a turn and thrill she pours forth her full-voiced music bewailing her child, dear Itylus, whom on a time she slew with the sword unwitting, Itylus the son of Zethus the prince; even as her song, my troubled soul sways to and fro.’[186]

185.Iliad, ii. 459-63.

186.Odyssey, xix. 518-24.

Intense appreciation of the sentiment of sound is here unmistakable; yet elsewhere in the Homeric poems we hear of the sharp cry of the swallow, of the screams of contending vultures, the piercing shriek of the eagle, the wild pæan of the hawk, the clamorous vociferations of his terrified victims, but nothing of the tender notes of thrush, lark, or linnet, though deliciously audible throughout Greece

In spring time, when the sun with Taurus rides.

Even in the island of Calypso, where delights are imaginable at will, the poplars and cypresses house only such harsh-voiced birds as owls, hawks, and cormorants—perhaps in order to leave the uncontested palm for sweet singing to the nymph herself. The power of song does not, indeed, appear to be, in Homer’s view, ‘an excellent thing in woman.’ It is not included among the gifts of Athene, or even among the graces of Aphrodite. None of his noble or admirable heroines possess it. It is reserved, as partof a baleful dower of fascination, for enchantresses who lure men to oblivion or ruin—for Calypso, Circe, and the Sirens.

The Odyssey being essentially a sea-story, the prevalence in its fauna of marine species is not surprising. Seals frequently present themselves; coots and cormorants, laughing gulls and sea-mews, dive and play amid the surges that beat upon its magic shores; ospreys call and cry; a cuttle-fish is limned to the life; Scylla has been supposed to represent a magnified and monstrous cephalopod. Dolphins are common to the Iliad and Odyssey, and frequent the Ægean nowadays as of old.[187]Their mythical associations in post-Homeric literature are, indeed, forgotten; but the direction in which they travel, collected into shoals, helps the fishermen of Syra and Melos to a rude forecast of the set of impending winds.

187.Erhard,Fauna der Cycladen, p. 27.

The only significant zoological novelty, then, in the Odyssey may be said to lie in its recognition of the goose as a domesticated bird. The prominence given by it to swine-keeping, only incidentally mentioned in the Iliad, is also noteworthy. A dissimilarity, on the other hand, in the ethical sentiment towards animals displayed in the two poems—above all, as regards the horse and dog—cannot fail to strike a dispassionate reader; but this has been sufficiently dwelt upon in a separate chapter. Theremark need only here be added that the conception of the dog Argos seems no less thoroughly European than that of the horses of Rhesus is Asiatic. Both, it is true, may have had a local origin on the same side of the Hellespont, but, from the point of view of moral geography, they undoubtedly belong to different continents.

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