CONCLUSIONS

[1]July 1908, pp. 75, 76.

[2]Homer and his Age, p. 250.

[3]Mr. Leaf's version, Lang, Leaf, and Myers.

[4]Iliad, vol. i. p. 256.

[5]See chapter on "Homeric Religion."

[6]Iliad, vi. 123-129.

[7]Iliad, vol. ii. p. 153.

[8]Iliad, vol. i. p. 370.

[9]Grote,History of Greece, vol. ii., 1869, pp. 179-183.

[10]Iliad, i. 409, 410.

[11]i. 240 ff.

[12]Iliad, viii. 473-475.

[13]xviii. 73-80.

[14]Iliad, ix. 380-387.

[15]The words of Zeus in Book viii. will be explained as a late insertion, to harmonise old and new. If so, why did the harmoniser leave the flagrant discrepancy uncorrected?

[16]Iliad, ix. 315-343.

[17]ix. 434 ff.

[18]ix. 345, 375. 376.

[19]ix. 6502.

[20]Iliad, ix. 323.

[21]Cf. Book ix. 650-655.

[22]Book xvi. 60-65.

[23]Grote, vol. ii. p. 179, note I on p. 180.

[24]Grote, vol. ii. pp. 179, 180.

[25]Grote, vol. ii. p. 202.

[26]Quarterly Review, July 1908, pp. 64-66.

As much of this treatise is occupied with criticism of the views of the most modern representatives of the Wolfian school, I ought, in fairness, to state my own general conclusions. I am led to suppose that theIliadis a work of one brief period, because, as has been shown, it bears all the notes of one age; and is absolutely free from the most marked traits of religion, rites, society, and superstition that characterise the preceding Aegean, and the later "Dipylon," Ionian, Archaic, and historic periods in Greek life and art.

Again, I believe that theIliadis, in the main, the work of a single poet. To that conclusion I am led partly by the unity of the thought, temper, character, andethosof both epics; partly by the perfect consistency in the drawing, throughout, of multitudes of characters, all conceived with as much delicacy as firmness. It is to me inconceivable that a number of poets should have developed, with such perfect consistency and with such finenuances, the character, for example, of Achilles, who has been called "a splendid savage!"

If our critics studied him as Shakespearian students examine Hamlet or Macbeth, it is improbable that they could think the wrath of Achilles "a second-rate subject." It does not appear to me that his wrath about "a personal slight"—the loss of Briseis, is a fit of the sulks; that Achilles, as was said of Byron in one of hisportraits, looks like "a great sulky schoolboy whom somebody has deprived of a plum-cake."

Consider what Achilles is; the son of a goddess: himself, in extreme youth, the recognised hero andnonpareilof the whole Achaean array. His one over-mastering passion is desire of renown:

"One crowded hour of glorious lifeIs worth an age without a name."

He might live long, happy, and honoured at home with the father whom he so tenderly loves and pities, but he sets forth to Ilios, knowing surely that there he must inevitably perish in the flower of his youth. He chooses to pay with his life for immortal renown. In Hades he says that he would liefer be on earth the hind of a landless man, than king over the Dead, so fast is the hold of this earth upon his heart. But he could not love his life so much

"Loved he not honour more."

Now, in the opening of theIliadhe is to lose life and the sunlight, and also to lose honour. This is no mere personal slight; loss of the honour which he is buying with his life is no unworthy cause of anger in such a hero. He complains, again and again, that Agamemnon has,on every occasion, dishonoured him. The seizure of Briseis, his special "mead of honour," is only the last straw, the culminating insult. "In like honour," he says, "are held both the coward and the brave." He has toiled most hardly of all. "Even as a bird bringeth her unfledged chickens each morsel as she winneth it, and with herself it goeth hard, even so was I wont to watch out many a sleepless night, and pass through many days of battle, warring with folk for their women's sake." There is here, in Book ix., that tenderness of reference to the devotion of the maternal instinct which characterises Achilles in his relations with his ownmother, a goddess of many sorrows, for the sake of him who has chosen his doom. To her, in the first Book, as on the death of Patroclus, he cries, in the spirit of the little child of whom he speaks so touchingly in Book xvi.: "a fond little maid that runs by her mother's side, and bids her mother take her up, snatching at her skirts, and tearfully looks at her." Homer puts such words in the mouth of none but the slayer of men, Achilles.

"Mother," he cries by the grey sea, in Book i., "seeing thou didst of a truth bear me to so brief a span of life,honour at least ought the Olympian to have granted me."

Is it not plain that "the personal slight" to Achilles—being what he is, saying, like the great Montrose in a note scribbled on his pocket Bible, "Honour is my life," is it not plain that the insult is deadly both to life and honour?

In this sense Homer understands the wrath of Achilles. He hadfondof tenderness,—he ransomed his captives, while Agamemnon slew the prisoners to whom Menelaus was giving quarter. Again, as we shall see ("The Supposed Expurgation of Homer"), it was far from unusual, in Homeric warfare, for the slayer to mutilate the slain, cutting off his head, putting it on a stake, or even carrying it home as a trophy. But Achilles did not even, as usual, despoil Eetion of his armour, "for his soul had shame of that; but he buried him in his inlaid armour, and raised a barrow over him." In contrast with his natural clemency, the wrath of Achilles for Patroclus's sake is all the more monstrous; he far transcends the customary ferocities of dishonour to the dead. Achilles says (xxi. pp. 100-105): "Until Patroclus met his day of destiny, dearer was it to my heart to spare the Trojans; and many I took alive and sold over sea." But when once his honour, his life-price, is taken from him, his wrath will be sated bynothing—not by prayers or gifts of atonement, but by the slaughter of his comrades among their ships—then, indeed, they will know his worth. It is this moral tragedy,corruptio optimi, that inspires Homer in theIliad.

Achilles is, of all the men in Homer, the most passionately affectionate. His love of Patroclus, like that of Jonathan for David, "passeth the love of women"; an affection for his elder, the playmate of his childhood, so pure and so strong that poets of historic Greece could not understand it. But when he is smitten to the heart by the loss of Patroclus his wrath again breaks, as in the ninth Book of theIliad, through all measure; and he does cruel and evil deeds, his revenge is hateful to Gods and men. This is the moral tragedy of theIliad; and that which wrecks the heart and soul of Hamlet, or that which brings to shame the honour and courage of Macbeth, does not go deeper.

Having fashioned such a character as Achilles, no poet equal to the task could leave him in the course of cruelty and shame which is his in the opening of the last Book of theIliad. No hand but that which created the Achilles of the first Book could so restore him to himself that the Achaeans might again "see the great Achilles whom they knew." Only that one genius could conceive and achieve the immortal scene wherein Priam kisses "the hands of Achilles, terrible, manslaying, that slew so many of his sons."

"Fear thou the gods, Achilles, and have compassion on me, even me, bethinking thee of thy father. Lo, I am more piteous yet than he, and have braved what none other man on earth hath braved before, to stretch forth my hand toward the face of the slayer of my sons." There follows the lament of Achilles, for the father whom he, in search of honour, "may not tend as he groweth old, since very far from my own country I am dwelling in Troyland, to vex thee and thy children."

Even here, Achilles feels that he dares hardly trusthimself, so strong is the wild beast of passion within him. So consistent, so delicate, so strong a delineation of character, I cannot conceive to be the work of more hands than one, it is the work of the hand of Homer. Throughout the whole poem every person is drawn with equal firmness, delicacy, and consistency. The study of Agamemnon is the most complex (seeHomer and his Age,pp. 50-81). The foil to Agamemnon, the good Menelaus, the kindest and most chivalrously honourable of men, always conscious of his debt to the Achaeans, always eager to dare beyond his strength, is a worthy pendant. Odysseus throughout the poem is the poet's most admired hero; the wisest and most steadfast, here as in theOdyssey. It is so with the rest, with all of them; and this with the unity ofethos, of temper, of thought on human destinies, is the great argument for the unity and single authorship of theIliadin the main. To others, probably, as to Wolf, this consistency is apparent when they read theIliad, as alone it was meant to be read or heard, "for human pleasure," without constantly dwelling on "oppositions of science falsely so called," and hunting for discrepancies which often are not discrepant.

It is not an article of my faith that there is no non-original matter in theIliad. In another book,Homer and the Epic, I mentioned the passages which, to me, seem probably alien, for one reason or another. About the authorship of the Catalogue I do not know enough to be able to form an opinion. In the dream of Agamemnon and what follows, in Book ii., I might guess that two or three lines have been omitted, though on the whole the waverings of Agamemnon are thoroughly consistent with his character, and are meant to throw into light the steadfastness of Odysseus. I think that Phoenix is not properly introduced in Book ix., but there he is a necessary character; his warning to Achilles, not to fight before receiving atonement, has an influencethroughout, backed as it is later by the counsels of Odysseus. The battles between Troy and the Ships, in Books xii.-xv., might be more lucid; but so might Napier's account of the battle of Salamanca, and Lord Roberts's of the Siege of Delhi. I understand Homer better than I do either of these military historians; but I have taken more pains to understand him. I would rather believe theAristeiaof Idomeneus to be by another hand; it is perfunctory; and the proceedings of Poseidon are perplexing, like the doings of Ares and Athene in the first fifty lines of Book v. The Gods always, by the infinite inconsistencies of mythology, cause confusion, but the text itself has an air of dislocation. The arming of Agamemnon in the opening of Book xi., seems to me non-authentic, as far as our knowledge of Homeric armature goes. The whole passage about the destruction of the Achaean wall by the Gods, in the after time, reads to me like a pedantic later explanation of the absence of traces of the works.

The meeting of Aeneas and Achilles in Book xx. would seem more suspicious than, to me, it does, if Aeneas were not, throughout, a special sort of person, the son of a goddess, and not a good Trojan, because of Priam's suspicion of "the Orleans branch." I am inclined to think that the poet knows, all through, a "saga" of Aeneas as preserving the seed of the Royal House of Troy. In Book v., and elsewhere, he is always under divine protection, that of Apollo or of Aphrodite, "only Zeus shielded thee, and other gods," says Achilles. "It is appointed for him to escape that the race of Dardanus perish not," says Poseidon in Book xx.; and were the passage solitary, I should think it all an interpolation. But the poet always, probably for traditional reasons, takes very good care of Aeneas. The last bouts in the Funeral Games seem unlike Homer.

In theOdyssey, the passages about the concealing of the arms (xvi., xix.) are dislocated, to say the least;and all the close of the poem, especially the second Nekyia, has always lain under suspicion in critical times. Sainte-Beuve would not abandon, but admired it; I only feel that, if all this be later, it has taken the place of lost earlier material, for the poem could not conceivably close till the blood feud of Odysseus and the kin of the Wooers was appeased. An Achaean like a Scandinavian audience understood the rules, and insisted that the settlement of the blood-feud must be explained.

These are the main points at which, as far as I can judge, something has gone wrong. There are others: the interchange of shields between Nestor and Thrasymedes in the opening of Book xiv. had probably some lines of explanation given to it, though, as Mr. She wan was the first to perceive, the exchange was the necessary consequence of the manoeuvres in Book x. Here Thrasymedes lent his shield to Diomede for his nightreconnaissance, Thrasymedes would then send for and use Nestor's shield, while Nestor would obtain the shield of Thrasymedes next morning from Diomede.[1]

Nothing can be more simple and natural; but the thing was so obvious as to escape attention till Mr. She wan read Homer in a Homeric spirit. No doubt there are other passages with which I am dissatisfied, but the curious may refer for them to my earlier book,Homer and the Epic.

It is not so strange that there are dislocations ill patched up, as that far more of extraneous matter, especially of Ionian matter, has not found an entry into the Epics. How the text has been so well guarded I cannot explain; Mr. Murray's theory of expurgation of certain beliefs, ways and manners, is examined in Appendix B.

As to how the Epic was evolved, I am unable to say anything precise for want of evidence. Analogy fromother early national epic poetry fails us here, because nowhere is there any early national poetry of the same scope and the same consistency. Again, in such epics as theChanson de Roland, and even inBeowulf, mythical as it is, there are actual traces of historic events. We know that, because we have chronicles and official annals corroborating parts of theChanson de Roland, or proving the historic existence of a few characters in theVolsunga Saga, andBeowulf; but in the case of the Homeric poems we have no evidence of the actual existence of any personage.

As for thechansons de geste, we know, or at least the most eminent French scholars believe, that these, or the earliest of them, are the final poetic results of actual reminiscences, recorded in lays or ballads, popular or military, of the reign of Charlemagne. But Homer is far in advance of the age of ballads on actual events in the remote past.

M. Gaston Paris says: "TheChanson de Rolandis not a work composedd'un seul jet à un moment donné, it contains elements of very different dates and different sources"—there is a basis of popular or military ballads; there are additions invented by professional poets to increase the interest. "The author of the Chanson is Legion."[2]I entirely agree, and Legion is the author ofParadise Lost, and the author ofKing Lear, orHamlet, orMacbeth. Legion is the name of the myth-makers from an age of savagery onwards; of the Greek and Roman and Celtic poets and historians, of the Christian theologians, and Anglo-Saxon minstrels and low Latin versifiers, and heavy Dutch poets, and gay Italian poets, who have contributed the ideas and material toParadise Lost. But the Epic is Milton's though Homer and Virgil are among the authors: without their lives it had not been what it is. Theformis Milton's, and the form of theIliadis Homer's.

These things are manifest. All poetry, down to a lyric like "Bonnie Dundee," has, in one sense, a multiplicity of authors. The poet selects, combines, and gives form to a mass of pre-existing materials.

InLear, Shakespeare works on aMärchenstill current in rural England. ThatMärchenhe takes in the pseudo-historic form given to it by the chroniclers. Shakespeare combines with it—for Gloucester and Edmund—a French story which he finds in Sidney'sArcadia. He has before him an earlier drama on King Lear; he selects, arranges, composes, he adds what is his own, the poetry, and the fatal conclusion; and even so the author of ourIliadtreatedhismaterials. Of all poetry, and especially of all epic poetry, the author's name is Legion. Legion supplies the materials, and examples of different methods of dealing with them, and the stock of ballad or epic formulae. The final poet makes his selections, his combinations, and fuses all into a new form.

It may be said that I mean by "Legion" something which M. Gaston Paris did not mean. But whatdidhe mean? Did he mean that a differentlaisses, or strings of verses on one assonance in theChanson de Roland, were by different poets, and were tacked together by one man, who, perhaps, made omissions and additions? If this was what M. Gaston Paris meant, I do not agree with him, nor with any one who may hold the same opinion about the evolution of ourIliad. I know perfectly well what I mean, when I say that Legion provided Homer's materials, and showed various methods of treating them.

What these materials were we cannot exactly know. There must have been much heroic poetry in hexameter verse; in Homer the form has reached perfection. The style retains some peculiarities of popular poetry, of ballads, as in stereotyped formulae descriptive of habitual actions of every kind. Like our ballads, the poet never avoids a formula, if he can find one current; if he invents a newone, he clings to it. This recurrence of formulae is no less marked inIliadviii. than in Child's four hundredEnglish and Scottish Popular Ballads, or inLa Chancun de Willame, one of the oldestchansons de geste.

Homer's chief heroes need no introduction to his audience, as Roland and Oliver, Ganelon and Naismes needed none. All his characters were familiar figures in an ancient legend of an expedition against the Northern shore of Asia. About that we have no historic knowledge, and it is rare indeed that chronicles record any "facts" given in earlychansons de geste. The rear-guard action at Roncevaux is an exception; it is a historical fact.

Homer surveyed the whole, selected some situations, invented others, combined and fused all in the furnace of his genius, just as did Milton and Shakespeare. But how Legion made theIliad, with no Homer, no one great genius, but in some incomprehensible manner of combination, I have never understood. I have never seen any description of the processes which was clear, coherent, intelligible, and corroborated by an example historically known. Theories of "redactors," "editors," literary committees, are all in the air; we cannot say, with Mrs. Quickly, "You, or any man, knows where to have them." No theory shows us "where to have" theDichter, where, or when, or in what circumstances he did whatever he is supposed to have done.

[1]Homer and his Age, pp. 276-278.

[2]Légendes du Moyen Age, pp. 46-47.

The date, purpose, and historical value of the Catalogue are matters vigorously disputed, and critics not only vary among themselves, but change their own minds, as is natural, when new facts accrue. Topographical study of the Greek mainland, and new discoveries of prehistoric sites that had been overlooked, necessarily throw new light on Homer's conception of prehistoric Greece. Thus M. Bérard appears to have found again what learned late Greek geographers had lost, the site of Nestor's city of Pylos.

Nestor, inIliad, xi. 664-762,[1]telling a long story about his early prowess, gives many topographical details. But he "is clearly ignorant of the geography of the western Peloponnesus," says a critic. Here the theory is that Nestor's story is by a late editor of the Iliad, who had read the Catalogue, picked out some places named at random, and thrown them in anywhere.[2]But M. Bérard studies the topography on the spot, and finds sites which, he thinks, coincide perfectly with the topography of Nestor, and also, with that of the journey of Telemachus, in theOdyssey, to Pylos, the home of Nestor, and on to Menelaus in Sparta. It is strong corroboration that M. Bérard's location of Pherae, where Telemachus passes the night on hisway to Sparta, and of Pylos itself, makes the topography of Homer intelligible.[3]

But we must remember that people who deem theIliada thing of rags and patches, stitched on, in this case, by some ignoramus of about 540 B.C., are eager to find discrepancies everywhere; while the learned and minute French geographer was equally anxious to find proofs of Homer's accuracy. At all events, if he is right, Nestor does not talk ignorant nonsense.

Geographical and archaeological research produce modifications of opinion, but the critical weathercock veers, less necessarily, with every wind of theory that blows from Germany. Thus Mr. Leaf, in the first edition of hisIliad(vol. i. p. 73), found nothing to prove that the Catalogue "is of late origin." "It was considered a classical work—The Doomsday Book of Greece, at a very early date.... There seems to be no valid reason for doubting that it, like the bulk of theIliadandOdyssey, was composed in Achaean times, and carried with the emigrants to the coast of Asia Minor."

Nothing new has been discovered since Mr. Leaf wrote in this orthodox fashion, nothing new has arisen except the studies of M. Bérard, which, if we accept his view, confirm the accuracy of the Catalogue. But, in 1900, Mr. Leaf abandoned his earlier position.

"The whole perspective of the Catalogue," he says, "is entirely different from that of theIliad." Heroes, as Niese remarks, appear in theIliadwho do nothing in that poem; but play their parts "in other portions of the Epic Cycle." The conclusion is that "the Catalogue originally formed an introduction to the whole cycle, and was composed for that portion of it which, as worked up into a separate poem, was called theCypria, and relates the beginning of the tale of Troy, and the mustering of the fleet at Aulis."[4]This contains much debatable matter. What the cycle was before it was "worked up into" separate poems, or whether such a nebulous cycle existed at all, we know not. I must refer the reader to Mr. Allen's essay on the whole subject, which is too condensed to be summarised in briefer space.[5]"TheCatalogue was taken by Homer from its time and place in saga to his second Book and to the Troad." I do not quite understand how a long passage in hexameters could be taken from "saga." Mr. Allen's critical remarks on prehistoric Greek topography and territorial divisions, are most valuable; and so is his account of the Dorian and other pretensions which wrought confusion in topographical designations. He has proved, I think, that the Catalogue is a very archaic document, which no later persons were interested in inventing, or would have been able to invent. Beyond that I am unable to go, and we must await the results of excavation on prehistoric sites in Greece. Our information as to theCypriacredits it with no Catalogue of the Achaean ships and men; but it is easy to reply that our accounts are wrong, that the authors spoke of aCypriamade up after the Catalogue was placed in theIliad.

[1]Leaf,Iliad, vol. i. pp. 465, 466.

[2]Leaf, Note toIliad, xi. 756;Iliad, ii. 615, 617.

[3]Bérard,Les Phéniciens et l'Odyssée, pp. 108-113.

[4]Leaf, vol. i. p. 86.

[5]Classical Quarterly, April 1909.

The argument of my book is that theIliadandOdysseyrepresent the usages and ideas of a prehistoric society. They are not the ideas and usages of proto-historic and historic Hellas, but of the Achaean invaders, or, at least, of the high-born men and women to whom Homer sang. On the other hand, Mr. Murray, if I succeed in understanding his position, holds that the ideas and usages of theIliadandOdysseyare a kind of mosaic, the result of a long process of "expurgation of Homer." If this view be correct, my whole argument, of course, is builded on the sand. Homer does not represent the ethical and religious beliefs and usages of a moment in the past.

It is therefore necessary to state, with textual citations as full as possible, Mr. Murray's presentation of his case, given, first, in hisRise of the Greek Epic, and, later, in one of the Oxford Lectures by several authors, published inAnthropology and the Classics. Mr. Murray has very kindly assisted me by explaining points in which I was unable to follow his reasoning. But these explanations prove that we start from assumptions so opposed in their nature that community in conclusions is impossible. Perhaps even mutual intelligence cannot be perfect. Thus my reading of the Epics leads me to the conviction that they were composed in an age which knew nothing of coined money; an age when cattle were the standard of values:—this or that object was worth so many cows. But in Mr. Murray's opinion this standard was preserved in the epics, after it was obsolete in practice, for reasons of stylistic convention. While I suppose our two epics to have been epics at a period very remote, when Achaean society was in its bloom;he holds that there were no epics till the Achaeans and the conquered peoples were intermingled. Earlier, there were only lays, and the silence of our epics as to coined money, for example, is a convention derived from the lays of a time when cows were the measure of value. Each of us, it seems to me, has to assume a kind of miracle. I have to think, and do think, that our epics were composed by a poet to amuse the leisure of an Achaean Court, and also that they were miraculously preserved, whether by writing or in memory, through several changeful centuries. I believe that this occurred because the poems are great harmonious structures, such as only a poet could produce; and because the many changes in society, costume, law, belief, and usage which the successive ages evolved, do not appear in the poems.

Mr. Murray, I think, has also to postulate another kind of miracle. Evolution, in some way which I do not understand, produced our epics out of a mass of floating poetical material. It appears that men are born to hold one view or the other, to believe in one or the other prodigy.

However, in the view which is not mine, stylistic conventions in the later poetry were based on a following of what was no convention in the older poetry, say as to the use of coined money or of cavalry. Now I know no other early national poetry, and no literary epics of the critical ages of Greek and Roman literature, where such convention is employed. Virgil was learned; Virgil knew Homer intimately; yet his Greeks and Trojans use iron weapons, not weapons of bronze; and the Roman buckler, not the Homeric shield.

To take another case, as soon as armorial bearings came into mediaeval Europe, the singers of thechansons de gesteintroduced them,—regardless of their absence in the earlier lays, which knew no such blazons. No convention of silence arose.

There is only one mention of writing in Homer. The Greek tragedians knew well that writing was, as far as Homer shows, very rare in the heroic age. But some of the heroes and heroines write whenever they have occasion. There is no archaistic convention. As I have shown inHomer and his Age, ancient poets and artists had, no more than Shakespeare, our modernhabit of attending to "local colour" as historically known to us by research.

Perhaps it may be urged in reply, that early mediaeval epic poets were much less conservative than early Greeks. They altered, for example, the assonantlaissesof the earlychansons, and did them into rhyme, while Greece for epic purposes never deserted the hexameter. But I can give a fair parallel to the Greek non-observance of a convention in the Irish epic cycles.

The poets of the ancient Irish cycle of Fian ought, by the theory of convention, to have made their heroes use war-chariots like the heroes of the elder saga of Cuchullin. But they follow no such convention; their heroes ride or fight on foot, because such was the nature of war in their own later time.

The same reasoning applies throughout. I cannot believe that the makers of our epics, working in the early historic age, omitted mention of cavalry, coined money, periodical games, or anything else known to them, because they found no such matter in more ancient lays concerning and composed in a previous age. We have seen that the old "non-Homeric" epics were, as their fragments prove, full of non-Homeric usages. No "stylistic convention" forbade mention of these usages.

Thus no such stylistic convention—maintained in ourIliadandOdyssey, neglected in theCypria, Aethiopis,and the rest—can be accepted. In fact, another and a special cause for many of Homer's silences has to be suggested, as we shall see. Once more it is my assumption that our epics were made in the main as we have them, for a peculiar audience, a courtly and knightly audience, known to themselves and their poet as "Achaeans." That they were of unmixed race I do not suppose; these Northern invaders, their chiefs at least, would marry the daughters of the princes of the land. But I assume that our epics were made for them,while they retained their Northern ideas; on many points very like the ideas, usages, and beliefs of the heathen Scandinavian settlers in Iceland. It is maintained by Mr. Murray that the ideas of "the conquered races" were very different, and that, as the two peoples mingled, the ideas of the conquered races re-emerged. This is manifestly true. But my view is that Achaean society, courtly society at least, had not adopted the beliefsand usages of the conquered races at the time when our epics, which ignore them, were composed. But these usages and ideas are usual in the fragments of the Cyclic epics on Trojan affairs. No stylistic convention interfered and kept them out. Mr. Murray has to discover a special cause for the presence in the "Cyclic" of much that is absent from our two epics.

The ideas of Mr. Murray, in some passages of his work, appear to be precisely the opposite of my own. In other passages we seem to be on the very point of agreement.

When we are told, in passages to be quoted, that there was in the formation of theIliad, and to a less extent in that of theOdyssey, a strong element of reform and expurgation, we ask ourselves—who, in what age, and from what motives, were the reformers and purgers ofwhatpre-existing poetic and legendary materials? Were those materials the property of the "Achaean or Northern" conquerors, or of the pre-existing "conquered races" (to use Mr. Murray's terms); or were the materials a medley derived from both sources? Were the purgers Achaean poets working on materials, at least in part the property of the conquered races? Or was the purgation mainly done by Ionians, that is, by the mixed Greek peoples settled in Asia; peoples certainly retaining many of the ideas of the conquered races which our Homer ignores? Or did "the Achaean or Northern spirit" purge away some things distasteful to that spirit, while the Ionians purged away other things? What the elements more or less purged away are supposed to be, we shall see later. In the passage to which I have referred[1]we find the following statements:—

"The epic tradition of Greece, vast and tangled in its wealth of varied beauty and ugliness, was left by the Homeric poets a much cleaner and colder thing than they found it. In the result, two influences were mainly at work. First, a general humanising of the imagination, the progress of a spirit which, as it loved beauty, hated cruelty and uncleanness. Secondly, a race prejudice. The relation of the Northern and the aboriginal elements in the Homeric poems are involved, when you come to details, in inextricable confusion, but in generalthe 'Homeric' tone of mind represents more of the Achaean or Northern spirit; the spirit of those scattered strong men who in their various settlements were leading and shaping the Aegean world. The special myths, beliefs, and rites that were characteristic of the conquered races are pruned away or ignored; the hero-worship, the oracles, the magic and witchcraft, the hocus-pocus of purification, all that savours of 'the monstrous regiment of women, the uncanny prowess of dead men, and the baleful confusion between man and God.'

Here I should absolutely agree with Mr. Murray, if I were convinced that "the Northern or Achaean spirit" of Achaean poets was dealing mainly with "the epic tradition" of præ-Achaean Greece. If they were, they would certainly "ignore or prune away" manners and beliefs which were not their own. But I have shown, I think, that between Achaean and Athenian early "Saga" a great gulf was fixed in Homeric times. The Homeric poet dealt with Achaean legend, which could not contain ghost-worship, "hocus-pocus of purification," and so on. Let me here remark that no known later Greek taste objected to themärchenhaft, the preposterous element in "Saga." Pindar and the dramatists do not reject it, I have shown, but Homer does in theIliad. Had Homer revelled in it, later Greek taste saw nothing out of keeping here; had no temptation to expurgate Pegasus, or the soul-box of Meleager, or the magical invulnerability of Achilles, or his medicinal spear, or that magical property, the Luck of Troy, the palladium, and so forth. The genius of Homer, not later expurgation, accounts for his reticence.

Next, I seem to discern that "the progress of a spirit which hated cruelty and uncleanness" refers to a period when "Achaeans" and "Pelasgians," long intermingled, were becoming what is called "Hellenic," the people of early historic Greece in the sixth century. What this Hellenic spirit might, if it could, purge away is just the ferocity which isnotpurged away; the ferocity which mutilates, and, when the deed is not executed, has threatened to mutilate foes slain in open fight; and which denies, or wishes to deny, honourable burial to the dead. On the dead "unseemly things" are wrought, with little or no rebuke from the poet, except in the case of the extreme ferocities of Achilles against Hector andthe twelve Trojan captives. Thus Agamemnon "smote Hippolochus to earth, and cut off his arms and neck with the sword, then tossed him like a ball of stone to roll through the throng"; or rather "like the trunk of a tree."[2]In the same way the minor Aias cuts off the head of Imbrios, and throws it like a football "into the scrum."[3]Hector is keen to cut off the head of Patroclus, and stick it on a stake, like the head of the great Montrose.[4]Peneleus decapitates Ilioneus, and waves the head at the Trojans.[5]

Manifestly these ferocities werede bonne guerrein the society to which Homer sang. I conceive that they were hateful to the taste of the historic Hellenic spirit. Could it have expurgated these ferocities it would have done so. But it could not. Other examples might be given. Thus Euphorbus,[6]who dealt the first wound to Patroclus, threatens to cut off and carry home the head of Menelaus. Euphorbus was avenging his brother, slain by Menelaus. Peneleus was avenging Antimachus, his friend. The ferocities are sometimes prompted by personal vengeance. Euphorbus would have kept his word, but the spear of Menelaus pierced his throat. We cannot find expurgation in failure to accomplish a purpose. Hector meant to fix the head of Patroclus on a stake, so Iris tells Achilles,[7]and to give his body to the dogs to devour. Such was warfare as known to Homer; and the intellect of later Greece, which probably abhorred such deeds, expurgated nothing.

Mr. Murray writes[8]that "no other corpse" (except Hector's) "is maltreated in the Iliad." Such treatment was quite deliberately planned by men of both armies, and was also executed in hot blood. I have given examples enough of such maltreatment.

To cruelty we return, and to refusal of burial. It seems to have been quite usual. The notable exception in clemency is Achilles; before his passion came on him he ransomed his captives, and "his soul had shame to despoil the dead Eëtion"; but he burned him in his inlaid armour, and raised a barrow over him.[9]

In the Iliad ferocity runs high, in these particulars;the historic hatred of such doings is growing but slowly. "The spirit that hated cruelty" has left the facts where it found them; there is no expurgation of them. As to the Hellenic historic spirit and its hatred of "uncleanness"—autres temps, autres moeurs! Homer has no allusions to the survival of savage vices detested by "the Northern spirit." But, granting that the waxing spirit of Hellenism expurgated atrocities committed on the dead (though they stand staring upon us in theIliad), "the Northern or Achaean spirit" is credited by Mr. Murray with "pruning away or ignoring" the characteristic rites, beliefs, and usages of the conquered races.

The earlier the period, the more drastic would be the purification. Achaeans, not yet leavened with "Pelasgian" blood and beliefs, could not celebrate what they confessedly did not practise. In their work no later expurgation could cleanse away that which their work could not contain.

Hero-worship; propitiation of the dead; purification of homicides by blood; initiatory ceremonies, mysteries, witchcraft, and so forth, these are practices with which we are familiar in savagery, in barbarism, and, by way of survival, in the rites and customs of the most highly civilised races. They exist in various degrees in different races and societies. In Northern society, as we know it in the sagas, most of these superstitions are comparatively rare. Ghosts were believed in by Gunnar and Grettir; very able-bodied ghosts they were, a kind of vampires. But they were not propitiated, they were met with the steel axe and short sword, or with muscular force in the wrestling match. Their bodies were mutilated and then burned, as in the case of the vampire Glam in the Grettir saga.

There are few, if any, traces of hero-worship in early Teutonic and Scandinavian literature. Of purification from homicide in baths or by aspersions of swine's blood I can remember no Northern example.

The original purpose of this nasty practice is, apparently, to throw the pursuing ghost of the slain man off the trail of the slayer; but the heroes of the Icelandic sagas recked not a fig for the feud of the ghost. "Soul and body, on the whole, are odds against a disembodied soul," in their opinion, hence the absence of the Greek rite of purification by blood.

The Northerners had, doubtless, their various rustic rites and revels, originally intended to promote the fertility of nature. But if they once had initiatory ceremonies and mysteries like savages, these appear to have been forgotten by the time of the heroes of the Icelandic sagas. Witchcraft was an article of belief, but was held in great disesteem. There are legends of sacrifices of kings, but these are somewhat shadowy and remote.

As a consequence, if the Teutonic and Scandinavian people had possessed a great epic poet, working in accordance with the ideas of his people as they existed at the time of the occupation of Iceland, his poem would, I conceive, be as silent as the Homeric epics about hero-worship, ghost-feeding, purification of homicides by blood, sacrifices of girls, initiatory ceremonies, and mysteries like those of Demeter and Dionysus. Of second-sight we would hear, as we do in theOdyssey.The magic would be worked by mortals, not by a fair goddess, Circe. Ravening monsters like Grendel and his mother, inBeowulf, with their refraction in the Grettir saga, and vampires like Glam, would afford sport to the heroes; whereas in theIliadwe have only the Chimaera to represent such monsters, and the Chimaera is alluded to but slightly.

Thus, as regards the whole chapter of the superstitions "characteristic of the conquered races" in Greece[10](and characteristic of the historical Hellenes and of Athens in her lustre), the supposed Scandinavian epic would be as pure as theIliad. The absence of mention of hero-worship, ghost-propitiation, divinised mortals, purification by blood, sacrifices of girls, initiations and mysteries, would be quite natural and unaffected.

The poet could not speak of beliefs and rites which were not in the manners of his people. In the same way, and for the same reason, Homer scarcely hints at anything in this chapter of superstitions and usages. Like the Scandinavians of the heroic age, his people had not these things in their manners.

As the oldest Achaean poetry must necessarily have been pure from the usages and beliefs of the conquered races, as the Achaean or Northern spirit ignored what,according to Mr. Murray, it actually persecuted,[11]we need not attribute this ignoring of such beliefs and practices to expurgation in a later age. The Ionians, as soon as we meet them in the dawn of actual history and in the "Cyclic" poems, are believers in ghosts, worshippers of heroes, and they practise purification by blood. People do not expurgate from older poetry the things consecrated by their own law and religion and celebrated in their own poems: things which could not be present, too, in the old poems of the uncontaminated Achaeans. Yet Mr. Murray appears, if I understand him, to incline to a theory that hero-worship, for example, was distasteful to the Ionian cult of the Delian Apollo, and perhaps for that reason was, in early historic times, expurgated from theIliad. But certainly, given Homeric ideas about the dead, who could not help or hinder, hero-worship did not and could not exist in Homeric society and poetry. Moreover, if the Achaean spirit did "prune away or ignore" such ghostly matters, the Delian expurgators could find nothing here to expurgate. As to blood-purification, Apollo himself was purified, and, in art, holds the purifying pig above the homicide. So purification was "Apolline," and what was Apolline was safe from Apolline expurgation.

I now collect passages on the expurgators from Mr. Murray's writings.

"The middle and later generations of the Homeric poets ... were mainly responsible for the work of expurgation."

"Homer has cut out" certain stories of human sacrifice, cannibalism, and "mutilations of the Hesiodic gods" "for their revoltingness" (p. 122).

"Homer, if we may use that name to denote the authors of the prevailing tone of theIliad" (p. 131).

So far the "expurgations" appear to have been done mainly by the Homeric poets themselves "in the middle and later generations." Yet, as to superstitions, the first uncontaminated Achaean poets must have been the purest of all.

It is admitted that the poets did not in the same way "expurgate" the "Cyclic" epics.

"If the educational use of theIliadbegan in Ionia as early as the eighth century, which is likely enough, we can hardly help supposing that it had some share in these processes of purification with which we have been dealing" (p. 133).

Here it appears that, probably by the eighth century, theIliadwas a distinct poem, recognised as such, and subject to processes of purification from which theCypria, for example, and other "Cyclic" poems escaped.

"The Epos" has "its prevailing Achaean tone," owing to "the prestige of the Achaean chiefs, the convenience of the Achaean institutions of the Saga and the Bard," and "the partial return to the migratory life" (p. 245). If, then, it is really the austerity, and freedom from low superstitions, of the conquering Achaean race that our epics represent, the "Cyclic" poems, if equally old, should be equally austere, and equally free from superstition. But they, notoriously, were full of the superstitions of the conquered races. Why did the middle generations of Homeric poems leavethemalone? Because already selected for recitation?

If the Achaean or Northern spirit, "the clean and lordly Northern spirit," made our epics so pure, what was left for the spirit of historic Greece (by no means Northern, or specially clean or lordly) to do in the way of purification?

It is plain enough that the clean and lordly Northern people became mixed with the pre-existing populations in Greece, like the Normans and the Cromwellian English settlers with the Irish. "As the population became more mixed, which was the case everywhere on the mainland, the result was that the old pre-Hellenic stratum of beliefs and emotion, re-emerged" (p. 246), for example, in worship of the dead, which is un-Homeric and un-Achaean.

Are we to suppose, then, that while the Achaeans were sinking to the pre-Hellenic level in such matters, all the superstitions of the conquered races found their way into the Homeric poems, and had to be purged out again, in Delos, or at Athens, where these superstitions were in full force? If so, the descendants of the pre-Hellenic populations inserted the superstitions into theIliadwhere they had not been previously, and then cut them out again.

It is not easy to understand how stories "far too primitive and monstrous for Homer" "had been expurgated from Homer centuries back" (p. 247), centuries before Aeschylus, who introduced Io, once the mistress of Zeus, later a cow, in hisPrometheus. If Homer or the Homeric poets were clean and lordly Achaeans, they never would have dealt at all in a story "far too primitive and monstrous for Homer," or for any one but Major Weir. It does not appear to me that this theory of expurgation, all important as it is, can be easily understood. If later Greece expurgated the Homeric ferocities to the dead, why are they left standing? If the Achaean spirit got rid of the superstitions, why need we invoke later influences, Delian, Ionian, Athenian?

Then the old questions re-arise, why were the "Cyclic" poems of the heroic times left unexpurgated; why is the Attic drama tinged with what is too monstrous for Homer, if Homer was purged a generation, or two or three, earlier than the generation of Aeschylus? To account for the expurgations, we are to consider the establishment by law of Homeric recitations at Athens (see "The Alleged Athenian Recension of Homer"). Concerning the date of this event, and everything else connected with it, all is vague. Mr. Murray writes: "The recitation was established about the end of the sixth century ... so much seems historically clear." (I wish anything were historically clear in this business!) "It matters little that, in attributing the institution of this recitation to a definite founder, our authorities waver between three almost contemporaneous names, Solon, Pisistratus, Hipparchus. Whichever it was, the main fact remains the same. General considerations tell somewhat against Solon, and in favour of the tyrants." Now, as our authorities, all late, differ totally as to the name (and so, as to the date) of the man who instituted the recitations of Homer, it is plain that they had no good authority. "The Solonian laws and constitution were promulgated in 594 B.C.," says Grote; that was at least eighty years before a date "about the end of the sixth century." The men are far from being contemporaneous. Hipparchus was murdered in 514, in thethirteenth year of the tyranny of Hipparchus, and Hippias, if anybody, not Hipparchus, should have made a law regulating Homeric recitations.

All is vague; but if Thucydides correctly says that Hipparchus was slain in consequence of a quarrel arising out of an odious non-Homeric vice; and if, as Thucydides says, Aristogeiton died "not easily," if he was tortured to death, as later authors tell, then the society of Athens was little likely to expurgate either uncleanness or cruelty, if they found such matter in Homer.

Political and personal history being so vague and dim in the sixth century, literary history cannot be in better case; practically we know nothing beyond the fact that a law regulated the recitation of Homer at the Panathenaic festival.

How these recitations and hypothetical earlier Ionian recitations contributed to the expurgation of theIliadandOdyssey, must be stated in Mr. Murray's own words. I may first observe that, in his opinion, "the body of the poem" (theIliad), "even in the latest parts, is clearly Ionian; the ultimate nucleus something else, something older and more Northern."[12]How, if this be true, the Ionians are only once named in the poems, while the Athenians are but perfunctorily mentioned, is what always puzzles me!

A long extract in which Mr. Murray gives his views must now be quoted:

"In the remains of the earliest Greek poetry we are met by a striking contrast. As Mr. Lang has told us, 'Homer presents to the anthropologist the spectacle of a society which will have nothing to do with anthropology.' By Homer, of course, Mr. Lang means theIliadand theOdyssey; and we may add to those poems a stream of heroic tradition which runs more or less clearly through most of our later literature, and whose spirit is what we call classic, Homeric, or Olympian.

"But there is also in the earliest epic tradition another stratum, of which this Olympian character does not hold. A stratum full of the remains, and at times even betraying the actuality, of those 'beastly devices of the heathen' which are dear to the heart of us anthropologists—if a mere Greek scholar may venture to class himself among even amateur anthropologists; ceremoniesof magic and purification, beast-worship, stone-xvorship, ghosts, and anthropomorphic (theriomorphic?) gods, traces of the peculiar powers of women both as 'good medicine' and as titular heads of the family, and especially a most pervading and almost ubiquitous memory of Human Sacrifice.

"This stratum is represented by Hesiod and the Rejected Epics,—I mean those products of the primitive saga-poetry which were not selected for recitation at the Panathenaea (or the unknown Ionian archetype of the Panathenaea), and which consequently fell into neglect,—by the Orphic literature, by a large element in tragedy, most richly, perhaps, by the antiquarian traditions preserved in Pausanias, and in the hostile comments of certain Christian writers, such as Clement and Eusebius.

"Now the first thing for the historian to observe about this non-Homeric stratum is this: that non-Homeric is by no means the same thing as post-Homeric. We used to be taught that it was. We used to be taught that Homer was, practically speaking, primitive: that we started from a pure epic atmosphere and then passed into an age of romantic degradation. The extant remains of the non-Homeric poems frequently show in their form, and sometimes even in their content, definite signs of presupposing theIliad, just as theIliadhere and there shows signs of presupposing them; and it is not until recently that we have been able to understand properly the nature and the method of composition of an ancient Traditional Book. I will not go into that point in detail here. Even supposing that theCypria,as a poem, could definitely be called 'later' than theIliad, it is enough to say that a later literary whole may often contain an older kernel or a more primitive mass of material, and in the case of the non-Homeric saga-poems it is fairly clear that they do so.

"Two arguments will suffice: First, the argument from analogy. Few anthropologists, with the knowledge now at our command, will regard the high, austere, knightly atmosphere of theIliadas primitive when compared with that of Hesiod. In the second place, a great proportion of our anthropological material is already to be found in prehistoric Crete. The an-iconic worship, the stones, the beasts, the pillars, and the ouranian birds; the great mother goddess of Anatolia,the human sacrifices, and the royal and divine bull. I speak under correction from those who know the Cretan finds better than I; but to me it seems that there are many bridges visible from Crete to Hesiod or Eumelus or even Pausanias; but the gulf between Crete and Homer seems, in certain places, to have no bridge.

"Thus the later literary whole contains the more primitive modes of thought, the earlier religion.

"Now this fact in itself, though it may be stated in different ways, is not much disputed among scholars. But the explanations of the fact are various. That which seems to me much the most probable is the theory of Expurgation. As Mr. Lang seems not quite to have understood what I tried to say about this in myRise of the Greek Epic, I will restate it in this way: We know that the great mass of saga-poetry began to be left on one side and neglected from about the eighth century on; and we find, to judge from our fragments, that it remained in its semi-savage state. Two poems, on the contrary, were selected at some early time for public recitation at the solemn four-yearly meeting of "all Ionians,"[13]and afterwards of "all Athenians." The poems were demonstrably still in a fluid condition; and the intellect of Greece was focussed upon them. This process lasted on through the period of that great movement which raised the shores of the Aegean from a land of semi-savages to the Hellas of Thales, of Aeschylus, and of Euripides. And we find, naturally, that amid all the colour of an ideal past, in which these two epics, like all other epics, have steeped their story, there has been a gradual but drastic rejection of all the uglier and uncleaner elements. That is a very broad statement; it omits both the evidence and the additional causes and qualifications. But it serves to explain why I treat the non-Homeric sagas as representing more faithfully the primitive pre-Hellenic habits of thought, the mere slough out of which Hellas rose."

I agree that the "non-Homeric sagas" represent more faithfully the primitive pre-Hellenic habits of thought. Homer was not concerned with pre-Hellenic habits of thought; he represents the Hellenes who "possessed Hellas, the land of fair women, and followed Achilles."

I also entirely agree that "the later literary whole" (by which I at least mean Hesiod, the "Cyclic" fragment, and much of Greek tragedy, not to speak of antiquarian learning) "contains the more primitive modes of thought, the earlier religion." But the theory that these things were once in, but were purged out of, theIliadandOdyssey,still baffles me. If they were usages peculiar to the conquered races, how could they appear in the poetry of the uncontaminated Northern or Achaean conquerors?

How, again, can we say that "the great mass of saga poetry began to be left on one side and neglected from about the eighth century"? Notoriously the "Cyclic" poems, or the legends which were given in those poems, were greatly preferred as subjects of art by the Athenian vase-painters of the sixth century, and by Polygnotus when he decorated the Lesche at Delphi. The stories, I have shown, reached the Middle Ages through Rome and through Graeco-Roman literature, and eclipsed our Homer. To them we owe the unhappyTroilus and Cressidaof Shakespeare.

We have no evidence known to me that proves the selection, "at some early time for public recitation," of "two poems," at the solemn four-yearly meeting of "All Ionians" and afterwards of "all Athenians." Mr. Verrall supposes the "Cyclic" poems, as well as our Homer, to have been recited at the Panathenaea. I know no evidence that they were, and none proving that they were not. I am unaware of any reason for which ourIliadshould have been specially selected for education in the Ionia of the eighth century, and for public recitation. The reason is the further to seek if theIliadandOdyssey, when thus selected, "were demonstrably still in a fluid condition"; indeed, while they were still in a fluid condition, I do not know how they could have been deemed so much more choiceworthy than other poems still (I presume) fluidic.

If "the intellect of Greece was focussed upon"IliadandOdysseywhile they were still fluidic, but already selected, then the expurgation was due, not to Achaean poets who ignored and pruned away the usages and beliefs of the conquered races, but toles intellectuelsof Greece, who (whatever their private opinions might be) saw hero-worship in daily practice; and if they killed any one, were purified by pigs' blood. Hesiodstood high in universal knowledge, was a consecrated authority; if he could be purged, why was he not purged? Because he was not recited? Yet he was part of education, and needed a Bowdler much more than Homer.

The practices and beliefs expurgated from Homer were not "done in a corner" in historic Greece.

So "primitive," so barbaric was the intellect of historic Greece even in the sixth century and in the age of Pericles, and later, in regard to heroic tombs, for example, that the heroic ghosts were supposed to inhabit their sepulchres in the shape of rather harmless snakes, like theIdhloziof the Zulus. "In Snake form the hero dwelt in his tomb," says Miss Harrison.[14]

Miss Harrison publishes reproductions of works of Greek art from the sixth century (when all ugly things of this kind, we are told, were drastically rejected from theOdysseyandIliad) to the fourth century. We see the dead, a male and a female ghost, receiving offerings. The artist is determined to make his meaning clear. Behind the chairs of the holy heroes is a huge snake with a man's beard. He is ahumansnake, the incarnation of the dead man's ghost. This is the belief of the Baronga of Delagoa and of the Zulus.[15]

In a vase, alecythus, of the fifth century, the worshippers surround a tumulus with a phallus-shaped pillar on top. A huge snake occupies the tumulus; he is the ghost's incarnation.[16]

Not in glens of mountainous Arcadia, or in recesses of rural chapels alone, were these things done. The theatre showed sacred tombs; each place of periodical games had its presiding hero; relics were in high request, living men, conquerors or athletes, came to be divinised; at the Eleusinia the initiates saw rites of savage origin; oracles of the dead were publicly consulted; the purification rites went on as law demanded—all publicly, all unrebuked.

Does any one suppose that priapic images like those of the Admiralty Islands were features in Homer's conception of a street in Mycenae or Ilios? These images were sacred in the Athens of Pericles, the Hermae were not like Homer's Hermes. Is it likely that, if the managers of Delian or Athenian recitations found suchthings as these in Homer, they would cut them out as too naughty to be mentioned, or for some other reason not to be mentioned, at a public festival of men and women familiar with all these things, and seeing in them nothing but good?

It seems unlikely. Moreover, if the Northern or Achaean spirit had ignored or pruned away these things, they could give no trouble to the managers of Delian or Athenian recitations.

When we come to consider examples of expurgation, we may prefer to pass by the odious vices reprobated by the code of Australian savages, but highly popular in historic Greece. They do not occur in our Homer, and I know but one allusion to them in the Icelandic sagas, and that is in a mere impossible taunt about a Bogle. But no one can say that Homer never heard of such things; we might as well say that, because nobody coughs in Homer, no Achaean ever condescended to cough. The profession of Rahab cannot have been unknown, though Homer never mentions it. In short, a high ideal tone is preserved, Homer is not Monsieur Zola; an epic is not a "naturalistic" novel.

When the Greeks did entertain a moral objection to anything, to adelphic marriage, for example: if Homer mentioned such an union, among the Phaeacians, I can easily believe that a palliative explanation might be later inserted. Thus, inOdyssey, vii. 54, Alcinous and Arete are "of the self-same parents." Later, a genealogy makes them uncle and niece. This, for what I know, may be a later palliative interpolation. But it is all one to Homer. He follows a well-knownMärchen,a tale of No Man's Land, as in his mention of the adelphic marriages of the sons and daughters of Aeolus. Adelphic unions are capital offences in savage customary law; one has no reason to suppose that the Homeric Achaeans were more lax than savages, or no less depraved by Egyptian influences than the Ptolemy and Berenice of Theocritus.[17]

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