From “Greek Literature.”

THE HOMERIC poems give us the earliest sketch of certain political principles which may be traced through every branch of the Indo-European family of nations. Homeric political life has three great elements—King, Council, and Assembly,—the germs of Monarchy, Aristocracy, Democracy. The Homeric king (Basileus) leads his people in war, he is supreme judge, and he takes the chief part in public sacrifices to the gods,—but only as the head of the family does in a private sacrifice: the king is not a priest. He rules by divine right. The gods have given to his house that sceptre which he received from his father, and which he will hand on to his son. But his power is limited in three ways. Firstly, he must obey certain customs and traditions of his people, which form a body of unwritten yet positive law (themistes), and are the basis on which public justice is administered. Secondly, he must consult his Council (Boulê) of nobles and elders. Thirdly, his proposed measures must have the sanction of his whole people in their Assembly (Agora). The commoners who make up this Assembly cannot originate or discuss measures; they can only vote Aye or No. The saucy Thersites in the “Iliad” attempts to make a blustering speech, but sits down whimpering with a red weal on his back from the staff of Odysseus. In the “Odyssey” we see the beginning of a time when the Assembly was beginning to play more than this passive part, and when, on the other hand, the king’s successor was not necessarily his son or heir, but might be one of the nobles who were now more nearly on a level with him.

  Homeric manners are the social side of Homeric politics. The public life is monarchical. The social life is patriarchal. As the king cares for his subjects, so the patriarch cares for his dependants. The intercourse of the chiefs is marked by the courtesy of a noble warrior caste, strangely mingled with brutal ferocity. Achilles is the model of Greek knighthood. His reception of King Priam is worthy of a knight. Yet even then Achilles feels the wild beast within him; he dreads lest, at some rash word, his fury should leap out, and he should slay his helpless old guest. A tie of hospitality (xenia) or hereditary friendship is held to exist between men whose fathers have entertained each other, and this claim insures a welcome. Hospitality to all wayfarers is recognized as a duty, since “strangers and beggars are sent by Zeus”; but a man who really “welcomed all comers” is named in the “Iliad” as if his virtue were memorable. Women have a higher position and more freedom than in the later historical age of Greece. Polygamy is unknown among Greeks, and there are few exceptions to the sanctity of marriage. The home life of King Alcinous and Queen Arêtê in the “Odyssey” is like a modern picture of fireside happiness, and no image of girlhood more noble or charming than Nausicaa can be found in poetry. A touch in the “Iliad” shows real feeling for the pathos of a lonely woman’s life—the mention of the “true-hearted toiler,” working all day long “to win a scanty wage for her children.”

  The amusements of a chief’s country life are hunting, farming, or gardening, playing at games, such as throwing the javelin or quoit, or, after a solid but temperate dinner, listening to the minstrel’s song. The mistress of the house weaves or embroiders among her handmaids. Queen Arêtê had made the robe which Nausicaa gave to Odysseus; and the princess helped her mother in household matters, being in sole charge of the washing. Slaves were often of gentle birth and nurture, having been taken in war or kidnaped in childhood; the latter was the case with Eumæus, the trusty swineherd of Odysseus; and we see here how intimate might be the confidence between master and old retainer. The “Iliad” gives us some bright glimpses of simple, joyous life: the patriarchal chief standing silent, glad at heart, among his reapers, while food is being made ready under the trees; the troop of vintagers bearing the baskets of grapes with dance and song from the vineyard; the bridal procession, with the marriage hymn sounding and the bridegroom’s friends dancing to flute and harp, while the women stand at their doors to see it pass; the maidens, with their fine linen robes and fair diadems, the youths with glossy tunics and golden swords slung by silver belts, dancing to the minstrel’s music, while a delighted crowd looks on.

  One test of civilization is the material of which men make their implements. Stone comes before metal. But the metal age itself has periods. In the first period, men use the metals separately, or hammer them together, but do not know how to smelt or fuse or solder them. The Homeric poems belong to the end of this first period. The next step is usually the smelting of copper with tin, so as to make bronze. The metals named come thus in Homeric order of value:—(1) gold; (2) silver; (3) tin; (4) “cyanus” (a dark metal, perhaps bronze, hardly blue steel); (5) iron; (6) copper (chalcus, certainly not “brass,” i.e., copper + zinc); (7) lead. Fine works in metal are usually of Phœnician workmanship,—as armor (cuirass, shield, helmet),—bowls and vases,—ornamental baskets,—clasps, brooches, necklaces, etc. There is no money. A fine can be paid in gold and copper; “two talents’ weight of gold” are once mentioned as a gift of honor; but oxen are the only regular measure of value. A mad bargain is to exchange armor worth 100 oxen for armor worth 9; a precious daughter is one “who brings oxen” (to her parents, in dower from her suitor). There is no certain allusion to writing; in “Iliad,” VII. 172, the heroes scratch their marks on their lots, and in VI. 172 the “signs” on the “folded tablet” need not be alphabetical. It does not necessarily follow that the poet could not write himself. In the “Odyssey” we hear of “professional men”—physicians, soothsayers, minstrels, heralds, artificers in wood and metal.

  The earth is imagined as a sort of flat oval, with the river Oceanus flowing round it. The poet of the “Iliad” knows the coasts of Asia Minor and their islands, but describes no scenery in Greece Proper, and knows the lands to east and south only from hearsay. The poet of the “Odyssey” had probably never seen Ithaca or its neighboring islands, but knew the Peloponnesus and the eastern parts of Greece Proper. Cyprus (whence “copper”) is mentioned in both poems. The Nile is “the river Egypt.” Egyptian Thebes is the type of a rich and glorious place—ranking with Orchomenus in Bœotia and (for wealth) with Delphi. Its old greatness under Rameses was long past; Memphis was the capital when these poets sang: but Thebes had been embellished by Sesonchis, founder of the twenty-second Egyptian dynasty, and the fame of his march into Syria may have reached Ionian poets of 930–900 B.C. Sidon, capital and seaport of Phœnicia, is famous for embroidery and metal work. Tyre is never named.

  The Greeks themselves, and all men till the end of the last century, were nearly unanimous in believing the “Iliad” and the “Odyssey” to be the work of one poet, Homer. Homer is named in a spurious fragment of Hesiod, but the earliest authentic mention is in the philosopher and poet Xenophanes, who flourished about 510 B.C. The name Homêrus means “fitted together,” and was the ordinary word for a hostage, i.e., a pledge agreed upon between two parties. But nothing was accurately known about his life or date. Most opinions placed Homer either in the time when the Ionian colonies in Asia Minor were founded (about 1044 B.C.), or within a century later. The philosopher Aristotle, who wrote on Homer, and the Homeric critic Aristarchus seem to have put him about 1044 B.C. The historian Herodotus (440 B.C.), differing probably from most of his own contemporaries, made Homer, along with Hesiod, live as late as 850 B.C. According to a Greek epigram, Homer was claimed as son by Smyrna, Chios, Colophon, Ithaca, Pylus, Argos, Athens. But all the best evidence connects Homer with Smyrna, an originally Æolian city which afterwards became Ionian. An ancient epithet for him is Melesigenes, “son of Meles,” the name of a stream which flowed through old Smyrna, on the border between Æolis and Ionia. This is significant when we remember that the “Iliad” is an Ionian poem on Æolian themes. The unknown author of the “Homeric” hymn to Apollo of Delos speaks of himself as a blind old man living in Chios; the Ancients thought that this hymn was by Homer, and thus the tradition of Homer’s blindness was perpetuated. The little island Ios, one of the Cyclades, claimed to have Homer’s grave. The Homeridæ, “sons of Homer,” who claimed to be descendants of the poet, lived in the Ionian island of Chios. The art of epic poetry was hereditary in their house, as poetry and music and other arts often were in Greek families.

  Both “Iliad” and “Odyssey” had their first origin on the Ionian coast of Asia Minor, and came thence to Greece Proper. The Spartans said that their lawgiver Lycurgus first brought to Greece a complete copy of the poems, which he had got from the Creophylidæ, a family of poets in Samos. Athens was of small account when the “Iliad” was first sung; the poem mentions it only once, as “a well-built town,” and the only one of Athenian warriors who is mentioned by name is quite obscure. But it was at Athens, not at Sparta, that loving care for the poems was first shown in Greece Proper. The traditions of this care refer to the sixth century B.C., and connect themselves with three names, the lawgiver Solon, the tyrant Pisistratus, and his son Hipparchus. Pisistratus, in the last period of his rule (537–527 B.C.) is said to have commissioned some learned men, of whom the poet Onomacritus was the chief, to collect the poems of Homer. It is now generally believed that an “Iliad” and an “Odyssey” already existed in writing at that time, but that the text had become much deranged, especially through the practice of reciting short passages without regard to their context. Besides these two poems, many other epic poems or fragments of the Ionian school went under Homer’s name. The great task of the commission was to collect all these “poems of Homer” into one body. From this general stock, they may have supplied what they thought wanting in the “Iliad” and “Odyssey.” Their work cannot, in any case, have been critical in a modern sense. But it can hardly be doubted that some systematic attempt to preserve “the poems of Homer” was made in the reign of Pisistratus. And one fact is certain. In the sixth century B.C. reciters of “Homeric poems” regularly competed for a prize at the greatest of Athenian festivals, the Panathenæa, held in every fourth year.

  These reciters were called Rhapsodists. “Rhapsodist” means literally “a stitcher of songs”; hence one who weaves a long, smoothly flowing chant, i.e., an epic poet, as chanting his poem in a flowing recitative. The characters of poet and reciter were always united,—first in the early minstrel; then in the hereditary poets, such as the Homeridæ; and then in the free guild of poets, the rhapsodists, to whom the name of Homeridæ was extended. But the early minstrel sang to the harp; the later “rhapsodist” merely chanted, with a branch of laurel, the symbol of poetry, in his hand. Those who tell how the people in an Indian village still hang on the lips of him who recites one of the great Indian epics help us to imagine the passionate sympathy, the tears, the rapture, with which a Greek crowd heard it told how the king of Troy knelt to Achilles in his tent by night, or how the dying hound in the courtyard of Odysseus just lived to give a feeble welcome to the wanderer whom no one else knew.

  The Homeric poems were to the Greeks more than national poems have ever been to any people. Every other people, as it has grown older, has turned away from the poetry of its youth, or has even allowed it to perish. Cicero mourns the loss of the early Roman lays; the English ballads in Percy’s collection are mere gleanings of a once great harvest; Walter Scott was only in time to save relics from the minstrelsy of the Border. But the Homeric poems were simple and strong enough to be popular early, and mature enough in art to please an age of ripe culture. Boys learned Homer by heart at school, priests quoted him touching the gods, moralists went to him for maxims, statesmen for arguments, cities for claims to territory or alliance, noble houses for the title deeds of their fame. From about 450 B.C., “civic” or “public” editions were prepared by various cities for their own use at public festivals. There was the “edition of Massilia,” “of Chios,” “of Sinôpê,” “of Argos,” “of Cyprus,” “of Crete.” “Private editions,” the work of individual revisers, were also numerous. The most famous of these was that prepared by Aristotle for his pupil Alexander,—known as the “Edition of the Casket” from the jeweled case in which Alexander is said to have carried it about with him in the East.

  The learned study of Homer at Alexandria reached its highest point in Aristarchus (156 B.C.), whose revision of the text became the standard one, and is mainly the basis of our own. The Alexandrian scholars had no text as old as Pisistratus, and knew little of what his commission had done; they used mainly the editions of the cities, especially Massilia, Chios, and Argos. The division of “Iliad” and “Odyssey” into twenty-four books each is usually ascribed to Aristarchus, but may have been as old as 350 B.C.; before the poems had been divided by “rhapsodies” or short cantos; thus our Book I. of the “Iliad” contained two cantos, “The Anger” and “The Plague.” Aristarchus founded a school of Homeric criticism which continued productive till about 200 A.D. All this work is now known only from scanty notices.

  Our oldest and best manuscript of either poem, the Venetus A of the “Iliad” is of the tenth century, and was found at Venice late in the last century, along with some scholia or commentaries which are of value as preserving remarks of Aristarchus and other Alexandrian scholars. Hitherto it had been thought that the text of Homer had come down to us from about 1000 B.C. It was now seen that our text was not older than the Alexandrian age. The first printed edition of Homer, revised by the Byzantine Demetrius Chalkondyles (1430–1510), was published at Florence in 1488; the first Aldine Edition at Venice in 1504.

  The belief that Homer composed both “Iliad” and “Odyssey” was unquestioned until about 170 B.C. a grammarian Hellanicus, and one Xenon asserted that Homer was the author of the “Iliad,” but not of the “Odyssey.” They and their followers were called the Separaters (chôrizontes), because they separated the “Iliad,” in its origin, from the “Odyssey.” As to their grounds, we only know that one of these was the style, and this implies literary study. Old Greece was uncritical, and believed strongly in one author for both poems. The mere fact that a double authorship should have been mooted shows that there were good grounds for a natural doubt. But the doubt found little acceptance. Aristarchus wrote against “the paradox of Xenon,” and the Roman Seneca, writing on “the shortness of life,” regards this as a question for which life is too short.

  Early in the last century Vico, a Neapolitan (1668–1744), in his “Principles of New Knowledge,” maintained that the names of great lawgivers and poets of the Old World are symbols; thus “Homer” is Greek Epic Poetry; “Homer’s poems” were made by a series of poets, and not written down at first; and the “Odyssey” is at least a century younger than the “Iliad.” But Vico had no proofs. These were first offered by F. A. Wolf in his “Prolegomena” (1795) or introduction to his edition of Homer. Neither the “Iliad” nor the “Odyssey,” he says, was originally made as one poem. Each has been put together from many small unwritten poems. These, by different authors, had no common plan. The “Iliad” and “Odyssey” were first framed from these, and first written down, by the Commission of Pisistratus. Wolf’s theory—as throwing light on the origin of popular poetry generally—roused enthusiasm in Germany, which was then in literary revolt from art to nature.

  The result of Homeric study since Wolf has been, not to prove any precise theory, but to gain wider assent for certain propositions which narrow the scope of the question.