νῦν δ’ αὖ καὶ πολὺ μεῖζον ὃ δὴ τάχα οἶκον ἅπανταπάγχυ διαρραίσει, βίοτον δ’ ἀπὸ πάμπαν ὀλέσσει.And the gist of his complaint against the Suitors was, not their urging Penelope to marry, but their living upon him while prosecuting the suit[875]. But then this is a father, whom he has never known or consciously seen. The Shade of Achilles in the nether world is anxious upon one subject: it is that he may know if old Peleus is still held in honour. In another he is also deeply interested; it is the valour of his son: and the gloom of his chill existence is brightened into an exulting joy, when he learns that Neoptolemus is great in fight[876]. The mother of Ulysses died neither of disease nor of old age, but of a broken heart for the absence of her son[877]. But the most signal proof of the power of the instinct is in its hold upon the self-centred character of Agamemnon, which, as a general rule, leaves no room in his thoughts for anything, except policy alone, that lies beyond the range of his personal propensities and especially his appetite for wealth. But when the gallant Menelaus, ashamed of the silence of his countrymen, accepts the challenge of Hector[878], Agamemnon seizes him by the hand, and beseeches him not to run so terrible a hazard. And again, in theΔολώνεια, when Diomed has to select a companion, Agamemnon, in dread lest his choice should fall on Menelaus, desires him to take not the man of highest rank, but the most valiant and effective companion for an enterprise of so critical a kind. His motive was apprehension for the safety of his brother[879]:ὣς ἔφατ’, ἔδδεισεν δὲ περὶ ξανθῷ Μενελάῳ.The war too is full of the most pleasing instances of attachment between brothers; Ajax and Teucer, Glaucus and Sarpedon, and many other instances less illustrious, might be quoted. It is the sad end of Polydorus which at the last works up Hector into the most daring heroism; and again in the Odyssey, the advantage is set forth of having brothers, who defend a man while he is living, and avenge him when he is dead[880].And hence it is that, even though Greeks were hot of head and ready of hand, we find no instance where, in consequence of a broil, one member of a family inflicts violence or death upon another of the samehousehold. The horrible idea of parricide, and the execration with which public opinion would brand such a crime, restrain Phœnix at the very height of his passion from laying hands upon his father[881]:ὡς μὴ πατροφόνος μετ’ Ἀχαιοῖσιν καλεοίμην.Directly that we pass beyond the household and its affections intertwined by habit, the aspect of the case alters. Out of six instances of unpremeditated homicide in Homer, three[882]are committed upon relations by blood or by affinity, though not very near ones. Medon, the bastard of Oileus, kills a relation of the lawful wife. Tlepolemus the son of Hercules kills his grand-uncle Licymnius. Epeigeus of Budeum kills his cousin.Relationships close, not wide.This marked line of distinction, between the homicides of crime and the homicides of misfortune, illustrates another point in the structure of Greek society. Relationships do not appear to have been reckoned by them as subsisting beyond a rather narrow range. We cannot trace any defined idea of kin more remote than the first cousin. The lexicographers treat the termἀνέψιοςas capable of a wider sense; but the only individuals named asἀνέψιοιby Homer, whose relationships we can follow, are first cousins: namely, Caletor son of Clytius, and Dolops son of Lampus, both first cousins of Hector[883]. There are also persons named in the poems, whose consanguinity we can trace, while it is nowhere noticed by the Poet: for instance, Eumelus is first cousin, once removed, to Nestor. Priam and Anchises are second cousins: Æneas and Hector third. These relationships are never referred to. Thus then society is not arranged in clans, but in tribes, unitedby the general sense of a common name, a common abode, a common history, a common religion, and a remote sense of a common tribal stock, without any sense of personal affinity in each individual case. Again, it is curious to observe that the xenial relation was not less vivacious than that of blood. The tie of blood subsists in the second generation from the common ancestor; and Diomed and Glaucus similarly own one another asξεῖνοι, because two generations before Œneus had entertained Bellerophon[884].Purity in the heroic age.The elevated and free social position of womankind in the Homeric times of itself implies a great purity of ideas respecting them. This subject, however, will receive a separate discussion.There is a passage of Athenæus which conveys to us a tradition of no ordinary beauty, and effectually severs for us ideas and objects which only a corrupt bias has associated. He tells us that Zeno of Citium[885], whatever the practice of the Stoic leader may have been, conceived ofἜρως, the God of Love, as a deity of friendship, liberty, concord, and public happiness, and of nothing else. So likewise his antecessors in philosophy taught that this deity was as a being perfectly pure:σεμνόν τινα καὶ παντὸς αἰσχροῦ κεχωρισμένον. This idea took refuge in the VenusΟὐρανία, the opposite one in theΠάνδημος, or promiscuous[886]. In the later ages of Greece, the distinction of these two characters one from the other feebly lived on: but there was no subjective basis for the separate existence of the former, and it was practically eclipsed, if not absorbed. The true severance of the ideas probably was effected before the time of Homer; and they were lodged inseparate impersonations. The effective form of the Celestial Venus is to be sought most probably in Diana, though it was natural for Plato and the philosophers to keep alive the memory of the distinction by way of apology for the popular religion. The traces of this unstained conception were in later times only to be found in the sphere of art, and were even there not always visible: but in the Homeric poems, and probably in the Homeric period, this purity of admiring sentiment towards beautiful form appears to have been a living reality.Our inquiry on this subject must have reference partly to the Poet, and partly to his period and nation. I will first deal with the points which have a bearing upon the age as well as the bard: and will thereafter subjoin what appears to touch Homer only.Lay of the Net of Vulcan.Let us commence, then, by considering that one and only case, in the whole compass of twenty-eight thousand lines, which might lead to an opposite conclusion: the case of the second Lay of Demodocus, or the adultery of Mars and Venus[887].Of course it is impossible to justify this single passage upon its own merits: but there are many circumstances that ought to be borne in mind by those who wish to form an accurate judgment upon it in its connection with the morals either of the Poet himself, or of the age to which he belonged.Of these the most important, in my view, is the tendency which the Pagan religion already powerfully showed to become itself the positive corrupter of morality, or, to speak perhaps more accurately, to afford the medium, through which the forces of evil and the downward inclination would principally act for the purpose of depraving it. Even in Homer’s time, the existingmythology contained ample warrant for the scene of indulgence here laid bare; and we see the remaining modesty and delicacy of mankind feebly resisting the torrent of passion, which ought to have been counteracted, but which, on the contrary, was principally swollen and impelled, by the agency of the acknowledged religion of the country.It was impossible for Homer to be altogether above the operation of influences so closely allied with an origin believed to be celestial: nor could it be easy for the popular Poet wholly to disregard the tastes of his hearers: the Poet, whose strains swept over the whole height and depth of life and nature, both human and divine, could not absolutely shut out from his encyclopædic survey so marked a characteristic of Olympian habits. He has not omitted to mark as peculiar, in more ways than one, the licence he has assumed. The lay is sung in an assembly attended by men only: and it purports also to describe a scene, from which the goddesses intentionally kept away. The amusement of the deities present is not universal: Neptune, the senior one among them, does not laugh[888], but takes the matter gravely, and desires to put an end to the scandal, by promising to make to the injured husband a pecuniary reparation[889]. He evidently appears to act under an impulse of offended dignity at least, though not of modesty. Again, the Poet endeavours to give a ridiculous air, not only a laughable one, to the whole proceeding, through theextreme mortification of the guilty persons; who, when released, are made to disappear in real dismay and discomfiture[890]. In this point he altogether differs, undoubtedly, from the generality of the writers of licentious pieces, as materially as he does in the simplicity of his details; and that supposition of a partially moral aim on which some have ventured, is not so extravagant as to deserve total and absolute rejection.It has been common to employ, in vindication of Homer, the supposition that the passage is spurious. There is something rather more marked in the personal agency of the Sun than the poems elsewhere present; and undoubtedly Apollo is made to assume a tone wholly singular, and unsupported by what is told of him in the rest of the poems. These are arguments, so far as they go, against it. But I do not venture to adopt this alluring expedient: for the general character of the colouring, diction, and incidents, appears to be Homeric enough. And again, if licentiousness was to come in, this was exactly the way for its entrance, because it was after a banquet; because it was among men exclusively, and not in the presence of women; because of the connection with mythology; and because the tale is thoroughly in keeping with the mythological character of the personages chiefly concerned.The direct reference however of the evil to the influence of a perverted religion can be supported by distinct evidence from other parts of the poems. In the Iliad there appear to be but two passages, which can fairly be termed indelicate. One is the account of the proceeding of Juno, with the accompanying speech of Jupiter, in the Fourteenth Book[891]. This relation belongs strictly to the mythology of the poem, and itis evidently handled in an historical manner; for Jupiter’s details, at least as it seems to me, are introduced for the purpose of fixing ancient national legends, as much as the stories of Nestor and Phœnix. The other passage is that, which in a few words contains the sensual advice given by Thetis, as a mother, to her son Achilles in his grief, by way of comfort;ἀγαθὸν δὲ γυναικί περ ἐν φιλότητιμίσγεσθ’[892].This precisely exemplifies the relation of which I speak. The deity teaches the debased lesson: the human hero passes by the recommendation in silence. Homer would have put no such language as this into the mouth of one of his matrons.When we come to pass sentence upon Homer, we must remember that, since in the Odyssey he represents the comic as well as the serious side of life, he ought in justice to be first compared with his successors. And here we not only shall find he gains by the comparison with Aristophanes or with Horace, but that he gains yet much more when tried by the standard of the other great school of poets which followed him in associating heroic subjects with wit and with amusement, namely, the poets of the Italian romance. There is hardly, perhaps, one of that whole school of Christian writers, who has not descended to licentiousness of far more malignant type. Nor let it be supposed that the Æneid shows in this respect any superiority in Virgil or in his hearers. As to Virgil, and as to his poems, if we take the whole of them into view, I am afraid that whatever the veil of words may do, the case was in reality bad enough: as to the hearers of the Æneid, wemust remember that they were not a people, but a court: we must compare his Roman auditors with the hearers of Homer, not as to that particular only of their public amusements, but as to the whole; that is, we must compare the Homeric poems not with the Æneid alone, but with the Æneid and the Floralia. In Homer’s time, men had not learned to screen their vices behind walls which also serve to fortify them. And it still remains more than doubtful whether the appetite of Homeric Greece would have endured the garbage on which Christian Florence was content to feed, during its carnivals, in the period of its most famous civilization.Evidence of comparative purity.From this scene let us turn to consider the evidence for asserting the comparative purity of Homer’s age, and the peculiar purity of his mind.2. We find in Homer no trace whatever of the existence of those unnatural vices, which appear to have deeply tainted the lives of many of the most eminent Greeks of later days[893]; which drew down the blasting sentence of St. Paul[894]; which in early times had been visited on the Cities of the plain; and which, it is no less strange than horrible to think, have left their mark upon more than one period or portion even of the literature of Christendom, in a manner and degree such as must excite scarcely less of surprise than shame.The seizure of Ganymedes became in later times the basis of a tradition of this kind: but there is not a trace of it in Homer. The intense love and admiration of beauty to which his pages bear constant witness is wholly disconnected from animal passions, and in its simplicity and earnestness is, for its combined purity and strength, really nearer the feeling of some of theearly Italian painters, and of Dante, than any thing else I can recall.This is the more remarkable when we bear in mind what had already, and long before his time, happened in the East, and is recorded for us in the Book of Genesis.Homer most rarely alludes to what is unbecoming in the human form: in the case of woman not once, and in the case of men only where he has a legitimate and sufficient purpose. Thus when Ulysses[895]threatens to strip Thersites to the skin in the event of his repeating his turbulence and insolence, it is plainly with an honest view to inflict upon him the last extremity of shame, and to make him an object of general and wholly unmixed disgust. Again, when Priam refers to the likelihood that his own body may be stripped naked, and then mangled by animals after his death, every one feels that the insult to natural decency, which he anticipates, contributes only to enhance the agony of his feelings. And the scene in the Odyssey, where Ulysses emerges from the sea upon the coast of Scheria, will always be regarded as one of the most careful, and yet most simple and unaffected, examples of true modesty contained in the whole circle of literature. Now these appear to be, not peculiarities, but samples of the general manners. We should look in vain for the proofs of an equal truth and fineness of perception among the Hebrews or among their forefathers, unless it be among a very few individuals, who, under a direct teaching from above, became select examples of virtue.Many other indications in the poems converge uponthe same point. The horror with which incest was regarded is one. The deep grief and humility stamped on the character of Helen is a second. The manner in which the chastity of Bellerophon is held up to admiration, and followed by reward, is a third[896]. The high-toned living widowhood of Penelope is of itself conclusive on the point before us.Homer’s subject in the Iliad was one, which tempted and almost forced him into indecency, where he had to refer to the original crime of Paris or to describe his private life. The manner in which he has handled it is deserving of all praise. He treats as an evil gift the original promise and temptation to Paris. The scene in the end of the Third Book was necessary in order to complete the view of the character of that bad prince: and it could not have been drawn in a manner less calculated to seduce the mind, whether by the management of its details, or by the sentiments of loathing which it raises against the principal actor.Undoubtedly we must, as regards the whole morality of the poems, ascribe much to the praise of Homer personally: yet it is plain that he represented his age in no small degree. First, because, as a popular and famous minstrel, he could not have been in sharp or general contrast with the feeling of his contemporaries. Secondly, because we perceive remains of this seriousness and purity in the older Greek writers junior to Homer. Thirdly, because we find from Thucydides that, at the time when the original Olympian games were instituted, it was still the custom carefully to avoid the exposure of the human form, and that a different practice was introduced afterwards by theLacedæmonians, probably without evil intention, and for gymnastic ends alone (Thuc. i. 6).And now, if we contemplate the belief, ideas, and institutions of the heroic period, as they would work upon an individual, we shall, perhaps, find that they fully justify the outline with which this section began. We may, indeed, see in the Homeric pictures of that age much to condemn or to deplore; but we may also be led to believe that if, through God’s mercy, there have been happier, there also have been less happy forms, for human destiny to be cast in.Life of the high-born Greek.The youth of high birth, not then so widely as now separated from the low, is educated under tutors in reverence for his parents, and in desire to emulate their fame: he shares in manly and in graceful sports, acquires the use of arms, hardens himself in the pursuit, then, of all others the most indispensable, the hunting down of wild beasts, gains the knowledge of medicine, probably also of the lyre. Sometimes, with many-sided intelligence, he even sets himself to learn how to build his own house or ship, or how to drive the plough firm and straight down the furrow, as well as to reap the standing corn[897]. And when scarcely a man, he bears arms for his country or his tribe, takes part in its government, learns by direct instruction and by practice how to rule mankind through the use of reasoning and persuasive power in political assemblies, attends and assists in sacrifices to the gods. For all this time he has been in kindly and free relations, not only with his parents, his family, his equals of his own age, but with the attendants, although they are but serfs, who have known him from infancy on his father’s domain.He is indeed mistaught with reference to the use of the strong hand. Human life is cheap; so cheap that even a mild and gentle youth may be betrayed, upon a casual quarrel over some childish game with his friend, into taking it away. And even so throughout his life, should some occasion come that stirs up his passions from their depths, a wild beast, as it were, awakes within him, and he loses his humanity for the time until reason has re-established her control. Short, however, of such a desperate crisis, though he could not for the world rob his friend or his neighbour, yet he might be not unwilling to triumph over him to his cost, for the sake of some exercise of signal ingenuity: while, from a hostile tribe or a foreign shore, or from the individual who has become his enemy, he will acquire by main force what he can, nor will he scruple to inflict on him by stratagem even deadly injury[898]. He must, however, give liberally to those who are in need; to the wayfarer, the poor, the suppliant who begs from him shelter and protection. On the other hand, should his own goods be wasted, the liberal and open-handed contributions of his neighbours will not be wanting to replace them.His early youth is not solicited into vice by finding sensual excess in vogue, or the opportunities of it staring in his eye and sounding in his ear. Gluttony is hardly known; drunkenness is marked only by its degrading character and the evil consequences that flow so straight from it, and is abhorred. But he loves the genial use of meals, and rejoices in the hour when the guests, gathered in his father’s hall, enjoy a liberal hospitality, and the wine mantles in the cup[899]. For then they listen to the strains of the minstrel, whocelebrates before them the newest and the dearest of the heroic tales that stir their blood, and rouse their manly resolution to be worthy, in their turn, of their country and their country’s heroes. He joins the dance in the festivals of religion; the maiden’s hand upon his wrist, and the gilded knife glancing from his belt, as they course from point to point, or wheel in round on round[900]. That maiden, some Nausicaa or some Hermione of a neighbouring district, in due time he weds, amidst the rejoicings of their families, and brings her home to cherish her, ‘from the flower to the ripeness of the grape,’ with respect, fidelity, and love.Whether as a governor or as governed, politics bring him, in ordinary circumstances, no great share of trouble. Government is a machine, of which the wheels move easily; for they are well oiled by simplicity of usages, ideas, and desires; by unity of interest; by respect for authority, and for those in whose hands it is reposed; by love of the common country, the common altar, the common festivals and games, to which already there is large resort. In peace he settles the disputes of his people, in war he lends them the precious example of heroic daring. He consults them, and advises with them, on all grave affairs; and his wakeful care for their interests is rewarded by the ample domains which are set apart for the prince by the people[901]. Finally, he closes his eyes, delivering over the sceptre to his son, and leaving much peace and happiness around him[902].Such was, probably, the state of society amidst the concluding phase of which Homer’s youth, at least, was passed. But a dark and deep social revolution seemsto have followed the Trojan war: we have its workings already become visible in the Odyssey. Scarcely could even Ulysses cope with it, contracted though it was for him within the narrow bounds of Ithaca. On the mainland, the bands of the elder society are soon wholly broken. The Pelopid, Neleid, Œneid houses are a wreck: disorganization invites the entry of new forces to control it: the Dorian lances bristle on the Ætolian beach, and the primitive Greece, the patriarchal Greece, the Greece of Homer, is no more.Ethics of earlier and later Paganism.When we take a general survey of the practical morality of the Heroic age, and compare it with that of later times, we must at once be struck with the great superiority of the former, in all that most nearly touches the moral being of man. The mere police of society, indeed, improves with the advance of civilization. The law of determinate rights to property, which we rather dangerously call the law ofmeumandtuum, whereas it is but a limited part of that great ordinance, comes to be better understood in later times, and better defended by penal sanctions. A clearer ideal, as well as actual, distinction, is gradually established between force and civil right. But who will venture to say that the duties of man to the Deity, or the larger claims of man upon man, were better understood in the age of Pericles or Alexander, of Sylla or of Augustus, than in the days of Homer?It is to be expected that, when the elements of wealth are for the most part such as nature offers, when man has hardly left the mark of his hand upon the earth, when little has been appropriated, and that little indeterminately, then the description of right which is least understood should also be least respected; namely, the law which withdraws things from original communityof use into individual dominion. To this day we dispute, what was the pristine foundation of the law of property. Why do we not perceive that this is equivalent to an admission, that in the first periods of political society, the whole idea of property must of necessity have been more or less vague? And consequently, that even plunder in primitive times is a different thing from plunder in later times, not only as to public estimation, but as to the moral colour of the act, and that it should be judged accordingly?Points of superiority in the former.Let us then consider the notes of moral superiority which the Heroic age of Greece presents to us.Human sacrifices were not then offered upon bloody altars to the gods. Not even the direst extremity of suffering suggested the thought of cannibalism as an alternative of escape from death[903]. Wailing infants were not then exposed to avoid the burden of their nurture. The grey hairs of parents were treated with reverence and care; and if their weakness brought down insult upon them, it stung the souls of their children, even after death. To age in general a deep and hearty reverence was paid by the young. Woman, the grand refining element of society, had not then been put down in the estimation of any man, far less of the wisest men, to the level of persons degraded by the habits of captivity, and was not held to be aζῶον ἔμψυχον. Slavery itself was mild and almost genial. It implied the law of labour, and possibly, in ordinary cases, a prohibition to rise in life: but of positive oppression, and of suffering in connection with it, or of any penal system directed to its maintenance, we have no trace whatever. Marriage was the honourable andsingle tie between man and his helpmate[904]. Connections with very near relations were regarded with horror; the wife was the representative, the intelligent companion and friend, of her husband; adultery was held in aversion, a crime rarer then than in most after-periods: and the sacred bond between husband and wife was not liable to be broken by the poor invention of divorce.Organized unchastity had not then become a kind of devil’s law for society. The very name and nature of unnatural lusts appear to have been unknown in Greece, centuries after Sodom had been smitten for its crimes. The detestable invention, which set gladiators to kill one another for the amusement of enraptured spectators, was reserved for times more vain of their philosophy and their artificial culture. The rights of the poor were acknowledged in the form of an unlimited obligation to relieve them, under pain of the divine displeasure: and no stranger or suppliant could be repelled from the door of any one, who regarded either the fear of God or the fear of man.As respects the gods, the remains of ancient piety still in some degree checked the activity of the critical faculty, and the reverence for the Power that disposes events and hates the wicked was not yet derided by speculation, nor wholly buried beneath fable and corruption. True, sacrifice was regarded as the indispensable and effective basis of religion: but in general, as between Greek and Greek, those who were most careful of virtue were also most regular in their offerings. Men were believers in prayer: they thought that, if in need they humbly betook themselves to supplication, they would be heard and helped. In short, they kept their hold upon a higher power, which wesee to have been real, because they resorted to it at those times when human nature eschews illusion, and cries out for reality. Ulysses, in affliction or in need, addresses himself to the gods: even Ægisthus, when alarmed, begins to think much of them: but Cicero or Quintilian, when the arrow of grief has touched them to the quick, seek for comfort in philosophical calculations on the great woe and little weal of life.Yet, even while all this was so, there lay in the accumulating mythology the thickly scattered seeds of destruction, both for belief and for duty. How could marriage continue single, pure, or permanent, in the face of the promiscuous lusts of Jupiter? Why should not helpless infants be exposed, when Juno, disgusted with the form of Vulcan, threw him down into the sea? Why should not man make a joyous spectacle of blood and wounds, when they were already beheld with amusement by the highest of the gods? The examples of rebellion, of discord, of luxury and selfish ease, were all of them ready to forward the process of corruption among men; and this armoury of curses was prepared too in the very quarter, where his eye should behold nothing but what is august and pure.Again. In all descriptions of tender feelings the Greeks of the Homeric age are much nearer than those of later times to the standard of truth and nature.The heroes of Homer weep freely; but, says the Agamemnon of Euripides[905], while he complains of the restriction, weeping is the recognised privilege of humble life only;ἡ δυσγένεια τ’ ὡς ἔχει τι χρήσιμον·καὶ γὰρ δακρύσαι ῥᾳδίως αὐτοῖς ἔχειἔγω γὰρ ἐκβαλεῖν μὲν αἰδοῦμαι δάκρυ.And Aristotle thought, as is thought now, that weeping was unfit for men. The wise man, he conceives[906], cannot incite others to mourn with him,διὰ τὸ μηδ’ αὐτὸς εἶναι θρηνητικός: but women, and woman-like men,γύναια καὶ οἱ τοιοῦτοι ἄνδρες, are glad of such companionship in sorrow.There are indeed three most important points of the Homeric poems, in which it would appear that the Greek character greatly hardened, and greatly sank, as the nation advanced in its career. One of them is the principle of sympathy. Another is that of placability, which Homer has very powerfully exhibited in Achilles. The third is that of humility, of which we have an example in Helen, in the Helen of Troy and the Helen of Sparta, such as heathenism nowhere else, I believe, presents to us.It has thus appeared that if we take the state of morality as it appears among mankind in the poems of Homer, and compare it with that of Greece in its highest civilization, we find before us two grand differences. Those offences against the moral law, which constitute crimes of violence, were more justly appreciated at the later period; but as to those which constitute, in the language of Christianity, the lusts of the mind and of the flesh, a great preference is due to the former.We are naturally led to inquire, Whence these two movements in opposite directions? That mankind should either lose ground or gain it, in morality as a whole, is far less startling at first sight, than that, at one and the same time, with respect to one great portion of the moral law there should be progress, and with respect to another, retrogression.In reality, however, this was the condition of man: retrogression as to his spiritual life, but advance and development, up to a certain point, with regard to the intellectual and the social career. Sins of the flesh lay chiefly between God and the individual conscience: the social results did not palpably and immediately reach beyond the persons immediately concerned. But crimes of violence struck directly at the fabric of society by destroying security of person and property; and robbed mankind, especially the ruling part of mankind, of the immense advantages and enjoyments which they reaped from civilized life. Thus, the moral sense was quick, and even grew quicker with the lapse of time, when it was fed and prompted by such motives of self-interest as lay within its appreciation, like those which the desire to enjoy the commodities of life supplied. But it languished and all but died, when its business was to maintain those virtues which involve severe self-denial, and of which the reward never can be fully appreciated except by those who are so favoured as to practise them in the highest degree.Nor must we overlook some special bearings of the institution of slavery upon this question. As it grew and was consolidated, it of course entailed an increased necessity for laws to defend life and goods against violence. But as regarded the other class of offences, its influence was all in the sense of more and more relaxation. For beauty and defencelessness, when they were combined in slaves, at once wrought up attraction to the uttermost, and removed all obstacles to enjoyment. While at the same time the partial indulgence, which at all periods has commonly attended such commerce between slaves and their masters, operated as a safety valve to let off the political dangersof that system: so that, on the one hand, slavery was a feeder to lust, and, on the other, lust was a buttress to slavery.That it was not on moral grounds that in the later times of Greece life and property were better defended than in the former, we may partly judge from finding that, though it is in the nature of all society that a nation should rather incline to gild the days of its forefathers with ornaments beyond the truth, the later Greek traditions crammed the heroic age with a mass of crimes of which Homer knows nothing. He sets Minos and Rhadamanthus before us as characters positively good: Thyestes and others are at worst neutral in character: but all these, according to the later tradition, were either accessory to, or contaminated with, the most horrible enormities.Notes in the Poems of commencing decline.It seems, indeed, as if Homer had himself lived to note the signs of moral degeneracy. In part, we may perhaps say, it is inseparably associated with that deterioration in the character and idea of government, which begins to be traceable in the Odyssey. But in that poem he has given us another indication of it, unlike any thing in the Iliad, where he never contrasts the present unfavourably with the past, except as to mere corporal strength. For he makes Minerva as Mentor deliver to Telemachus the sentiment, that among sons a small number only are equal to their fathers[907], a very few indeed excelling them, but the greater part falling short of them. In later times, we have come to associate threnodies of this kind with the notion that they are complaints of course, formulæ taken up and reiterated successively from generation to generation. It may or may not be just thus to viewthem: but whether it be just or not for later times, I think that we ought not so to limit the force of the idea when it meets us in the age of Homer: the world was then young, and human society had not so learned its ‘ancient saws or modern instances,’ as to separate them from the truths of experience and of observation. The greatest ornament of the poems of Hesiod, the series of the Ages declining from gold to iron, probably expresses the actual state of the facts, as it seems to move on the same line with the narrative of the early Scriptures: and Homer’s lamentation on degeneracy in all likelihood may belong to a real portion of the same descending process.
νῦν δ’ αὖ καὶ πολὺ μεῖζον ὃ δὴ τάχα οἶκον ἅπανταπάγχυ διαρραίσει, βίοτον δ’ ἀπὸ πάμπαν ὀλέσσει.
νῦν δ’ αὖ καὶ πολὺ μεῖζον ὃ δὴ τάχα οἶκον ἅπανταπάγχυ διαρραίσει, βίοτον δ’ ἀπὸ πάμπαν ὀλέσσει.
νῦν δ’ αὖ καὶ πολὺ μεῖζον ὃ δὴ τάχα οἶκον ἅπανταπάγχυ διαρραίσει, βίοτον δ’ ἀπὸ πάμπαν ὀλέσσει.
νῦν δ’ αὖ καὶ πολὺ μεῖζον ὃ δὴ τάχα οἶκον ἅπαντα
πάγχυ διαρραίσει, βίοτον δ’ ἀπὸ πάμπαν ὀλέσσει.
And the gist of his complaint against the Suitors was, not their urging Penelope to marry, but their living upon him while prosecuting the suit[875]. But then this is a father, whom he has never known or consciously seen. The Shade of Achilles in the nether world is anxious upon one subject: it is that he may know if old Peleus is still held in honour. In another he is also deeply interested; it is the valour of his son: and the gloom of his chill existence is brightened into an exulting joy, when he learns that Neoptolemus is great in fight[876]. The mother of Ulysses died neither of disease nor of old age, but of a broken heart for the absence of her son[877]. But the most signal proof of the power of the instinct is in its hold upon the self-centred character of Agamemnon, which, as a general rule, leaves no room in his thoughts for anything, except policy alone, that lies beyond the range of his personal propensities and especially his appetite for wealth. But when the gallant Menelaus, ashamed of the silence of his countrymen, accepts the challenge of Hector[878], Agamemnon seizes him by the hand, and beseeches him not to run so terrible a hazard. And again, in theΔολώνεια, when Diomed has to select a companion, Agamemnon, in dread lest his choice should fall on Menelaus, desires him to take not the man of highest rank, but the most valiant and effective companion for an enterprise of so critical a kind. His motive was apprehension for the safety of his brother[879]:
ὣς ἔφατ’, ἔδδεισεν δὲ περὶ ξανθῷ Μενελάῳ.
ὣς ἔφατ’, ἔδδεισεν δὲ περὶ ξανθῷ Μενελάῳ.
ὣς ἔφατ’, ἔδδεισεν δὲ περὶ ξανθῷ Μενελάῳ.
ὣς ἔφατ’, ἔδδεισεν δὲ περὶ ξανθῷ Μενελάῳ.
The war too is full of the most pleasing instances of attachment between brothers; Ajax and Teucer, Glaucus and Sarpedon, and many other instances less illustrious, might be quoted. It is the sad end of Polydorus which at the last works up Hector into the most daring heroism; and again in the Odyssey, the advantage is set forth of having brothers, who defend a man while he is living, and avenge him when he is dead[880].
And hence it is that, even though Greeks were hot of head and ready of hand, we find no instance where, in consequence of a broil, one member of a family inflicts violence or death upon another of the samehousehold. The horrible idea of parricide, and the execration with which public opinion would brand such a crime, restrain Phœnix at the very height of his passion from laying hands upon his father[881]:
ὡς μὴ πατροφόνος μετ’ Ἀχαιοῖσιν καλεοίμην.
ὡς μὴ πατροφόνος μετ’ Ἀχαιοῖσιν καλεοίμην.
ὡς μὴ πατροφόνος μετ’ Ἀχαιοῖσιν καλεοίμην.
ὡς μὴ πατροφόνος μετ’ Ἀχαιοῖσιν καλεοίμην.
Directly that we pass beyond the household and its affections intertwined by habit, the aspect of the case alters. Out of six instances of unpremeditated homicide in Homer, three[882]are committed upon relations by blood or by affinity, though not very near ones. Medon, the bastard of Oileus, kills a relation of the lawful wife. Tlepolemus the son of Hercules kills his grand-uncle Licymnius. Epeigeus of Budeum kills his cousin.
Relationships close, not wide.
This marked line of distinction, between the homicides of crime and the homicides of misfortune, illustrates another point in the structure of Greek society. Relationships do not appear to have been reckoned by them as subsisting beyond a rather narrow range. We cannot trace any defined idea of kin more remote than the first cousin. The lexicographers treat the termἀνέψιοςas capable of a wider sense; but the only individuals named asἀνέψιοιby Homer, whose relationships we can follow, are first cousins: namely, Caletor son of Clytius, and Dolops son of Lampus, both first cousins of Hector[883]. There are also persons named in the poems, whose consanguinity we can trace, while it is nowhere noticed by the Poet: for instance, Eumelus is first cousin, once removed, to Nestor. Priam and Anchises are second cousins: Æneas and Hector third. These relationships are never referred to. Thus then society is not arranged in clans, but in tribes, unitedby the general sense of a common name, a common abode, a common history, a common religion, and a remote sense of a common tribal stock, without any sense of personal affinity in each individual case. Again, it is curious to observe that the xenial relation was not less vivacious than that of blood. The tie of blood subsists in the second generation from the common ancestor; and Diomed and Glaucus similarly own one another asξεῖνοι, because two generations before Œneus had entertained Bellerophon[884].
Purity in the heroic age.
The elevated and free social position of womankind in the Homeric times of itself implies a great purity of ideas respecting them. This subject, however, will receive a separate discussion.
There is a passage of Athenæus which conveys to us a tradition of no ordinary beauty, and effectually severs for us ideas and objects which only a corrupt bias has associated. He tells us that Zeno of Citium[885], whatever the practice of the Stoic leader may have been, conceived ofἜρως, the God of Love, as a deity of friendship, liberty, concord, and public happiness, and of nothing else. So likewise his antecessors in philosophy taught that this deity was as a being perfectly pure:σεμνόν τινα καὶ παντὸς αἰσχροῦ κεχωρισμένον. This idea took refuge in the VenusΟὐρανία, the opposite one in theΠάνδημος, or promiscuous[886]. In the later ages of Greece, the distinction of these two characters one from the other feebly lived on: but there was no subjective basis for the separate existence of the former, and it was practically eclipsed, if not absorbed. The true severance of the ideas probably was effected before the time of Homer; and they were lodged inseparate impersonations. The effective form of the Celestial Venus is to be sought most probably in Diana, though it was natural for Plato and the philosophers to keep alive the memory of the distinction by way of apology for the popular religion. The traces of this unstained conception were in later times only to be found in the sphere of art, and were even there not always visible: but in the Homeric poems, and probably in the Homeric period, this purity of admiring sentiment towards beautiful form appears to have been a living reality.
Our inquiry on this subject must have reference partly to the Poet, and partly to his period and nation. I will first deal with the points which have a bearing upon the age as well as the bard: and will thereafter subjoin what appears to touch Homer only.
Lay of the Net of Vulcan.
Let us commence, then, by considering that one and only case, in the whole compass of twenty-eight thousand lines, which might lead to an opposite conclusion: the case of the second Lay of Demodocus, or the adultery of Mars and Venus[887].
Of course it is impossible to justify this single passage upon its own merits: but there are many circumstances that ought to be borne in mind by those who wish to form an accurate judgment upon it in its connection with the morals either of the Poet himself, or of the age to which he belonged.
Of these the most important, in my view, is the tendency which the Pagan religion already powerfully showed to become itself the positive corrupter of morality, or, to speak perhaps more accurately, to afford the medium, through which the forces of evil and the downward inclination would principally act for the purpose of depraving it. Even in Homer’s time, the existingmythology contained ample warrant for the scene of indulgence here laid bare; and we see the remaining modesty and delicacy of mankind feebly resisting the torrent of passion, which ought to have been counteracted, but which, on the contrary, was principally swollen and impelled, by the agency of the acknowledged religion of the country.
It was impossible for Homer to be altogether above the operation of influences so closely allied with an origin believed to be celestial: nor could it be easy for the popular Poet wholly to disregard the tastes of his hearers: the Poet, whose strains swept over the whole height and depth of life and nature, both human and divine, could not absolutely shut out from his encyclopædic survey so marked a characteristic of Olympian habits. He has not omitted to mark as peculiar, in more ways than one, the licence he has assumed. The lay is sung in an assembly attended by men only: and it purports also to describe a scene, from which the goddesses intentionally kept away. The amusement of the deities present is not universal: Neptune, the senior one among them, does not laugh[888], but takes the matter gravely, and desires to put an end to the scandal, by promising to make to the injured husband a pecuniary reparation[889]. He evidently appears to act under an impulse of offended dignity at least, though not of modesty. Again, the Poet endeavours to give a ridiculous air, not only a laughable one, to the whole proceeding, through theextreme mortification of the guilty persons; who, when released, are made to disappear in real dismay and discomfiture[890]. In this point he altogether differs, undoubtedly, from the generality of the writers of licentious pieces, as materially as he does in the simplicity of his details; and that supposition of a partially moral aim on which some have ventured, is not so extravagant as to deserve total and absolute rejection.
It has been common to employ, in vindication of Homer, the supposition that the passage is spurious. There is something rather more marked in the personal agency of the Sun than the poems elsewhere present; and undoubtedly Apollo is made to assume a tone wholly singular, and unsupported by what is told of him in the rest of the poems. These are arguments, so far as they go, against it. But I do not venture to adopt this alluring expedient: for the general character of the colouring, diction, and incidents, appears to be Homeric enough. And again, if licentiousness was to come in, this was exactly the way for its entrance, because it was after a banquet; because it was among men exclusively, and not in the presence of women; because of the connection with mythology; and because the tale is thoroughly in keeping with the mythological character of the personages chiefly concerned.
The direct reference however of the evil to the influence of a perverted religion can be supported by distinct evidence from other parts of the poems. In the Iliad there appear to be but two passages, which can fairly be termed indelicate. One is the account of the proceeding of Juno, with the accompanying speech of Jupiter, in the Fourteenth Book[891]. This relation belongs strictly to the mythology of the poem, and itis evidently handled in an historical manner; for Jupiter’s details, at least as it seems to me, are introduced for the purpose of fixing ancient national legends, as much as the stories of Nestor and Phœnix. The other passage is that, which in a few words contains the sensual advice given by Thetis, as a mother, to her son Achilles in his grief, by way of comfort;
ἀγαθὸν δὲ γυναικί περ ἐν φιλότητιμίσγεσθ’[892].
ἀγαθὸν δὲ γυναικί περ ἐν φιλότητιμίσγεσθ’[892].
ἀγαθὸν δὲ γυναικί περ ἐν φιλότητιμίσγεσθ’[892].
ἀγαθὸν δὲ γυναικί περ ἐν φιλότητι
μίσγεσθ’[892].
This precisely exemplifies the relation of which I speak. The deity teaches the debased lesson: the human hero passes by the recommendation in silence. Homer would have put no such language as this into the mouth of one of his matrons.
When we come to pass sentence upon Homer, we must remember that, since in the Odyssey he represents the comic as well as the serious side of life, he ought in justice to be first compared with his successors. And here we not only shall find he gains by the comparison with Aristophanes or with Horace, but that he gains yet much more when tried by the standard of the other great school of poets which followed him in associating heroic subjects with wit and with amusement, namely, the poets of the Italian romance. There is hardly, perhaps, one of that whole school of Christian writers, who has not descended to licentiousness of far more malignant type. Nor let it be supposed that the Æneid shows in this respect any superiority in Virgil or in his hearers. As to Virgil, and as to his poems, if we take the whole of them into view, I am afraid that whatever the veil of words may do, the case was in reality bad enough: as to the hearers of the Æneid, wemust remember that they were not a people, but a court: we must compare his Roman auditors with the hearers of Homer, not as to that particular only of their public amusements, but as to the whole; that is, we must compare the Homeric poems not with the Æneid alone, but with the Æneid and the Floralia. In Homer’s time, men had not learned to screen their vices behind walls which also serve to fortify them. And it still remains more than doubtful whether the appetite of Homeric Greece would have endured the garbage on which Christian Florence was content to feed, during its carnivals, in the period of its most famous civilization.
Evidence of comparative purity.
From this scene let us turn to consider the evidence for asserting the comparative purity of Homer’s age, and the peculiar purity of his mind.
2. We find in Homer no trace whatever of the existence of those unnatural vices, which appear to have deeply tainted the lives of many of the most eminent Greeks of later days[893]; which drew down the blasting sentence of St. Paul[894]; which in early times had been visited on the Cities of the plain; and which, it is no less strange than horrible to think, have left their mark upon more than one period or portion even of the literature of Christendom, in a manner and degree such as must excite scarcely less of surprise than shame.
The seizure of Ganymedes became in later times the basis of a tradition of this kind: but there is not a trace of it in Homer. The intense love and admiration of beauty to which his pages bear constant witness is wholly disconnected from animal passions, and in its simplicity and earnestness is, for its combined purity and strength, really nearer the feeling of some of theearly Italian painters, and of Dante, than any thing else I can recall.
This is the more remarkable when we bear in mind what had already, and long before his time, happened in the East, and is recorded for us in the Book of Genesis.
Homer most rarely alludes to what is unbecoming in the human form: in the case of woman not once, and in the case of men only where he has a legitimate and sufficient purpose. Thus when Ulysses[895]threatens to strip Thersites to the skin in the event of his repeating his turbulence and insolence, it is plainly with an honest view to inflict upon him the last extremity of shame, and to make him an object of general and wholly unmixed disgust. Again, when Priam refers to the likelihood that his own body may be stripped naked, and then mangled by animals after his death, every one feels that the insult to natural decency, which he anticipates, contributes only to enhance the agony of his feelings. And the scene in the Odyssey, where Ulysses emerges from the sea upon the coast of Scheria, will always be regarded as one of the most careful, and yet most simple and unaffected, examples of true modesty contained in the whole circle of literature. Now these appear to be, not peculiarities, but samples of the general manners. We should look in vain for the proofs of an equal truth and fineness of perception among the Hebrews or among their forefathers, unless it be among a very few individuals, who, under a direct teaching from above, became select examples of virtue.
Many other indications in the poems converge uponthe same point. The horror with which incest was regarded is one. The deep grief and humility stamped on the character of Helen is a second. The manner in which the chastity of Bellerophon is held up to admiration, and followed by reward, is a third[896]. The high-toned living widowhood of Penelope is of itself conclusive on the point before us.
Homer’s subject in the Iliad was one, which tempted and almost forced him into indecency, where he had to refer to the original crime of Paris or to describe his private life. The manner in which he has handled it is deserving of all praise. He treats as an evil gift the original promise and temptation to Paris. The scene in the end of the Third Book was necessary in order to complete the view of the character of that bad prince: and it could not have been drawn in a manner less calculated to seduce the mind, whether by the management of its details, or by the sentiments of loathing which it raises against the principal actor.
Undoubtedly we must, as regards the whole morality of the poems, ascribe much to the praise of Homer personally: yet it is plain that he represented his age in no small degree. First, because, as a popular and famous minstrel, he could not have been in sharp or general contrast with the feeling of his contemporaries. Secondly, because we perceive remains of this seriousness and purity in the older Greek writers junior to Homer. Thirdly, because we find from Thucydides that, at the time when the original Olympian games were instituted, it was still the custom carefully to avoid the exposure of the human form, and that a different practice was introduced afterwards by theLacedæmonians, probably without evil intention, and for gymnastic ends alone (Thuc. i. 6).
And now, if we contemplate the belief, ideas, and institutions of the heroic period, as they would work upon an individual, we shall, perhaps, find that they fully justify the outline with which this section began. We may, indeed, see in the Homeric pictures of that age much to condemn or to deplore; but we may also be led to believe that if, through God’s mercy, there have been happier, there also have been less happy forms, for human destiny to be cast in.
Life of the high-born Greek.
The youth of high birth, not then so widely as now separated from the low, is educated under tutors in reverence for his parents, and in desire to emulate their fame: he shares in manly and in graceful sports, acquires the use of arms, hardens himself in the pursuit, then, of all others the most indispensable, the hunting down of wild beasts, gains the knowledge of medicine, probably also of the lyre. Sometimes, with many-sided intelligence, he even sets himself to learn how to build his own house or ship, or how to drive the plough firm and straight down the furrow, as well as to reap the standing corn[897]. And when scarcely a man, he bears arms for his country or his tribe, takes part in its government, learns by direct instruction and by practice how to rule mankind through the use of reasoning and persuasive power in political assemblies, attends and assists in sacrifices to the gods. For all this time he has been in kindly and free relations, not only with his parents, his family, his equals of his own age, but with the attendants, although they are but serfs, who have known him from infancy on his father’s domain.
He is indeed mistaught with reference to the use of the strong hand. Human life is cheap; so cheap that even a mild and gentle youth may be betrayed, upon a casual quarrel over some childish game with his friend, into taking it away. And even so throughout his life, should some occasion come that stirs up his passions from their depths, a wild beast, as it were, awakes within him, and he loses his humanity for the time until reason has re-established her control. Short, however, of such a desperate crisis, though he could not for the world rob his friend or his neighbour, yet he might be not unwilling to triumph over him to his cost, for the sake of some exercise of signal ingenuity: while, from a hostile tribe or a foreign shore, or from the individual who has become his enemy, he will acquire by main force what he can, nor will he scruple to inflict on him by stratagem even deadly injury[898]. He must, however, give liberally to those who are in need; to the wayfarer, the poor, the suppliant who begs from him shelter and protection. On the other hand, should his own goods be wasted, the liberal and open-handed contributions of his neighbours will not be wanting to replace them.
His early youth is not solicited into vice by finding sensual excess in vogue, or the opportunities of it staring in his eye and sounding in his ear. Gluttony is hardly known; drunkenness is marked only by its degrading character and the evil consequences that flow so straight from it, and is abhorred. But he loves the genial use of meals, and rejoices in the hour when the guests, gathered in his father’s hall, enjoy a liberal hospitality, and the wine mantles in the cup[899]. For then they listen to the strains of the minstrel, whocelebrates before them the newest and the dearest of the heroic tales that stir their blood, and rouse their manly resolution to be worthy, in their turn, of their country and their country’s heroes. He joins the dance in the festivals of religion; the maiden’s hand upon his wrist, and the gilded knife glancing from his belt, as they course from point to point, or wheel in round on round[900]. That maiden, some Nausicaa or some Hermione of a neighbouring district, in due time he weds, amidst the rejoicings of their families, and brings her home to cherish her, ‘from the flower to the ripeness of the grape,’ with respect, fidelity, and love.
Whether as a governor or as governed, politics bring him, in ordinary circumstances, no great share of trouble. Government is a machine, of which the wheels move easily; for they are well oiled by simplicity of usages, ideas, and desires; by unity of interest; by respect for authority, and for those in whose hands it is reposed; by love of the common country, the common altar, the common festivals and games, to which already there is large resort. In peace he settles the disputes of his people, in war he lends them the precious example of heroic daring. He consults them, and advises with them, on all grave affairs; and his wakeful care for their interests is rewarded by the ample domains which are set apart for the prince by the people[901]. Finally, he closes his eyes, delivering over the sceptre to his son, and leaving much peace and happiness around him[902].
Such was, probably, the state of society amidst the concluding phase of which Homer’s youth, at least, was passed. But a dark and deep social revolution seemsto have followed the Trojan war: we have its workings already become visible in the Odyssey. Scarcely could even Ulysses cope with it, contracted though it was for him within the narrow bounds of Ithaca. On the mainland, the bands of the elder society are soon wholly broken. The Pelopid, Neleid, Œneid houses are a wreck: disorganization invites the entry of new forces to control it: the Dorian lances bristle on the Ætolian beach, and the primitive Greece, the patriarchal Greece, the Greece of Homer, is no more.
Ethics of earlier and later Paganism.
When we take a general survey of the practical morality of the Heroic age, and compare it with that of later times, we must at once be struck with the great superiority of the former, in all that most nearly touches the moral being of man. The mere police of society, indeed, improves with the advance of civilization. The law of determinate rights to property, which we rather dangerously call the law ofmeumandtuum, whereas it is but a limited part of that great ordinance, comes to be better understood in later times, and better defended by penal sanctions. A clearer ideal, as well as actual, distinction, is gradually established between force and civil right. But who will venture to say that the duties of man to the Deity, or the larger claims of man upon man, were better understood in the age of Pericles or Alexander, of Sylla or of Augustus, than in the days of Homer?
It is to be expected that, when the elements of wealth are for the most part such as nature offers, when man has hardly left the mark of his hand upon the earth, when little has been appropriated, and that little indeterminately, then the description of right which is least understood should also be least respected; namely, the law which withdraws things from original communityof use into individual dominion. To this day we dispute, what was the pristine foundation of the law of property. Why do we not perceive that this is equivalent to an admission, that in the first periods of political society, the whole idea of property must of necessity have been more or less vague? And consequently, that even plunder in primitive times is a different thing from plunder in later times, not only as to public estimation, but as to the moral colour of the act, and that it should be judged accordingly?
Points of superiority in the former.
Let us then consider the notes of moral superiority which the Heroic age of Greece presents to us.
Human sacrifices were not then offered upon bloody altars to the gods. Not even the direst extremity of suffering suggested the thought of cannibalism as an alternative of escape from death[903]. Wailing infants were not then exposed to avoid the burden of their nurture. The grey hairs of parents were treated with reverence and care; and if their weakness brought down insult upon them, it stung the souls of their children, even after death. To age in general a deep and hearty reverence was paid by the young. Woman, the grand refining element of society, had not then been put down in the estimation of any man, far less of the wisest men, to the level of persons degraded by the habits of captivity, and was not held to be aζῶον ἔμψυχον. Slavery itself was mild and almost genial. It implied the law of labour, and possibly, in ordinary cases, a prohibition to rise in life: but of positive oppression, and of suffering in connection with it, or of any penal system directed to its maintenance, we have no trace whatever. Marriage was the honourable andsingle tie between man and his helpmate[904]. Connections with very near relations were regarded with horror; the wife was the representative, the intelligent companion and friend, of her husband; adultery was held in aversion, a crime rarer then than in most after-periods: and the sacred bond between husband and wife was not liable to be broken by the poor invention of divorce.
Organized unchastity had not then become a kind of devil’s law for society. The very name and nature of unnatural lusts appear to have been unknown in Greece, centuries after Sodom had been smitten for its crimes. The detestable invention, which set gladiators to kill one another for the amusement of enraptured spectators, was reserved for times more vain of their philosophy and their artificial culture. The rights of the poor were acknowledged in the form of an unlimited obligation to relieve them, under pain of the divine displeasure: and no stranger or suppliant could be repelled from the door of any one, who regarded either the fear of God or the fear of man.
As respects the gods, the remains of ancient piety still in some degree checked the activity of the critical faculty, and the reverence for the Power that disposes events and hates the wicked was not yet derided by speculation, nor wholly buried beneath fable and corruption. True, sacrifice was regarded as the indispensable and effective basis of religion: but in general, as between Greek and Greek, those who were most careful of virtue were also most regular in their offerings. Men were believers in prayer: they thought that, if in need they humbly betook themselves to supplication, they would be heard and helped. In short, they kept their hold upon a higher power, which wesee to have been real, because they resorted to it at those times when human nature eschews illusion, and cries out for reality. Ulysses, in affliction or in need, addresses himself to the gods: even Ægisthus, when alarmed, begins to think much of them: but Cicero or Quintilian, when the arrow of grief has touched them to the quick, seek for comfort in philosophical calculations on the great woe and little weal of life.
Yet, even while all this was so, there lay in the accumulating mythology the thickly scattered seeds of destruction, both for belief and for duty. How could marriage continue single, pure, or permanent, in the face of the promiscuous lusts of Jupiter? Why should not helpless infants be exposed, when Juno, disgusted with the form of Vulcan, threw him down into the sea? Why should not man make a joyous spectacle of blood and wounds, when they were already beheld with amusement by the highest of the gods? The examples of rebellion, of discord, of luxury and selfish ease, were all of them ready to forward the process of corruption among men; and this armoury of curses was prepared too in the very quarter, where his eye should behold nothing but what is august and pure.
Again. In all descriptions of tender feelings the Greeks of the Homeric age are much nearer than those of later times to the standard of truth and nature.
The heroes of Homer weep freely; but, says the Agamemnon of Euripides[905], while he complains of the restriction, weeping is the recognised privilege of humble life only;
ἡ δυσγένεια τ’ ὡς ἔχει τι χρήσιμον·καὶ γὰρ δακρύσαι ῥᾳδίως αὐτοῖς ἔχειἔγω γὰρ ἐκβαλεῖν μὲν αἰδοῦμαι δάκρυ.
ἡ δυσγένεια τ’ ὡς ἔχει τι χρήσιμον·καὶ γὰρ δακρύσαι ῥᾳδίως αὐτοῖς ἔχειἔγω γὰρ ἐκβαλεῖν μὲν αἰδοῦμαι δάκρυ.
ἡ δυσγένεια τ’ ὡς ἔχει τι χρήσιμον·καὶ γὰρ δακρύσαι ῥᾳδίως αὐτοῖς ἔχειἔγω γὰρ ἐκβαλεῖν μὲν αἰδοῦμαι δάκρυ.
ἡ δυσγένεια τ’ ὡς ἔχει τι χρήσιμον·
καὶ γὰρ δακρύσαι ῥᾳδίως αὐτοῖς ἔχει
ἔγω γὰρ ἐκβαλεῖν μὲν αἰδοῦμαι δάκρυ.
And Aristotle thought, as is thought now, that weeping was unfit for men. The wise man, he conceives[906], cannot incite others to mourn with him,διὰ τὸ μηδ’ αὐτὸς εἶναι θρηνητικός: but women, and woman-like men,γύναια καὶ οἱ τοιοῦτοι ἄνδρες, are glad of such companionship in sorrow.
There are indeed three most important points of the Homeric poems, in which it would appear that the Greek character greatly hardened, and greatly sank, as the nation advanced in its career. One of them is the principle of sympathy. Another is that of placability, which Homer has very powerfully exhibited in Achilles. The third is that of humility, of which we have an example in Helen, in the Helen of Troy and the Helen of Sparta, such as heathenism nowhere else, I believe, presents to us.
It has thus appeared that if we take the state of morality as it appears among mankind in the poems of Homer, and compare it with that of Greece in its highest civilization, we find before us two grand differences. Those offences against the moral law, which constitute crimes of violence, were more justly appreciated at the later period; but as to those which constitute, in the language of Christianity, the lusts of the mind and of the flesh, a great preference is due to the former.
We are naturally led to inquire, Whence these two movements in opposite directions? That mankind should either lose ground or gain it, in morality as a whole, is far less startling at first sight, than that, at one and the same time, with respect to one great portion of the moral law there should be progress, and with respect to another, retrogression.
In reality, however, this was the condition of man: retrogression as to his spiritual life, but advance and development, up to a certain point, with regard to the intellectual and the social career. Sins of the flesh lay chiefly between God and the individual conscience: the social results did not palpably and immediately reach beyond the persons immediately concerned. But crimes of violence struck directly at the fabric of society by destroying security of person and property; and robbed mankind, especially the ruling part of mankind, of the immense advantages and enjoyments which they reaped from civilized life. Thus, the moral sense was quick, and even grew quicker with the lapse of time, when it was fed and prompted by such motives of self-interest as lay within its appreciation, like those which the desire to enjoy the commodities of life supplied. But it languished and all but died, when its business was to maintain those virtues which involve severe self-denial, and of which the reward never can be fully appreciated except by those who are so favoured as to practise them in the highest degree.
Nor must we overlook some special bearings of the institution of slavery upon this question. As it grew and was consolidated, it of course entailed an increased necessity for laws to defend life and goods against violence. But as regarded the other class of offences, its influence was all in the sense of more and more relaxation. For beauty and defencelessness, when they were combined in slaves, at once wrought up attraction to the uttermost, and removed all obstacles to enjoyment. While at the same time the partial indulgence, which at all periods has commonly attended such commerce between slaves and their masters, operated as a safety valve to let off the political dangersof that system: so that, on the one hand, slavery was a feeder to lust, and, on the other, lust was a buttress to slavery.
That it was not on moral grounds that in the later times of Greece life and property were better defended than in the former, we may partly judge from finding that, though it is in the nature of all society that a nation should rather incline to gild the days of its forefathers with ornaments beyond the truth, the later Greek traditions crammed the heroic age with a mass of crimes of which Homer knows nothing. He sets Minos and Rhadamanthus before us as characters positively good: Thyestes and others are at worst neutral in character: but all these, according to the later tradition, were either accessory to, or contaminated with, the most horrible enormities.
Notes in the Poems of commencing decline.
It seems, indeed, as if Homer had himself lived to note the signs of moral degeneracy. In part, we may perhaps say, it is inseparably associated with that deterioration in the character and idea of government, which begins to be traceable in the Odyssey. But in that poem he has given us another indication of it, unlike any thing in the Iliad, where he never contrasts the present unfavourably with the past, except as to mere corporal strength. For he makes Minerva as Mentor deliver to Telemachus the sentiment, that among sons a small number only are equal to their fathers[907], a very few indeed excelling them, but the greater part falling short of them. In later times, we have come to associate threnodies of this kind with the notion that they are complaints of course, formulæ taken up and reiterated successively from generation to generation. It may or may not be just thus to viewthem: but whether it be just or not for later times, I think that we ought not so to limit the force of the idea when it meets us in the age of Homer: the world was then young, and human society had not so learned its ‘ancient saws or modern instances,’ as to separate them from the truths of experience and of observation. The greatest ornament of the poems of Hesiod, the series of the Ages declining from gold to iron, probably expresses the actual state of the facts, as it seems to move on the same line with the narrative of the early Scriptures: and Homer’s lamentation on degeneracy in all likelihood may belong to a real portion of the same descending process.