Homer and His Age

in which much of them is said to have been composed. We must first ask to what manner of audiences did the poets sing, in the alleged four centuries of the evolution of the Epics. Mr. Leaf, as a ch

to the Iliad, pp. 2,8. 1892.} They are not Volkspoesie; they are not ballad

ich we heartily agree

Epic-were published f

ot express them with r

is view, a considerabl

by Court bards in the A

f noble warriors and

onian colonies of Asia.

ut for the enjoyment of

tnote: Iliad, vol. i. p

e thinks, for "a weal

ir lands," in Europea

trels, but were continu

ndering singers and re

a commercial, expansi

ote: Companion to

on this theory, the

keeping up the tone th

stocracy. It is not diff

he poems continued to b

form of society. The re

to keep up a tone some

f they were true, to t

the bounds of possibili

y have been actually su

ins can still be seen

. xv.} But, by the exp

r Iliad are now full o

, full of late retouche

ions of

ene of life was altered: the new singers and listeners dwelt on the Eastern side of the Aegean. Knights no longer, as in Europe, fought from chariots: war was conducted by infantry, for the most part, with mounted auxiliaries. With the disappearance of the war chariot the huge Mycenaean shields had vanished or were very rarely used. The early vase painters do not, to my knowledge, represent heroes as fighting from war chariots. They had lost touch with that method. Fighting men now carried relatively small round bucklers, and iron was the metal chiefly employed for swo

out into the light; commerce and pleasure and early philosophies were the chief concerns of life. Yet the poems continued to be aristocratic in manners; and, in religion and ritual, to be pure from recrudescences of savage poetry and superstition, though the Ionians "did not drop the more primitiv

quently appeared in the Cyclic poems on the Trojan war; continuations of the ILIAD, which were composed by Ionian authors at the same time as much of the ILIAD itself (by the theory) was composed. The authors of these Cyclic poems-authors contemporary with the

marks: "In certain poems which were grouping themselves around the Iliad and Odyssey, we meet data absolutely opposed to the conventional style of the Epic." He gives three or four examples of perfectly un-Homeric ideas occurring in Epics of the eighth to seventh centuries, B.C., and a large supply of such cases can be adduced. But Helbig does not ask how it happened that, if poets of these centuries had lost touch with the Epic tradition,

, and ritual? The reply will perhaps be a Cyclic poet said, "Here I am going to compose quite a new poem about the old heroes. I shall make them do and think and believe as I please, without reference to the evidence of the old poems." But, it will have to be added, the rhapsodists of 800-540 B.C., and the general editor of the latter date, thought, we are continuing an old set of lays, and we must be very careful in adhering to manners, customs, and beliefs as described by our predecessors. For instance, the old heroes had only bronze, no iron,-and then the rhapsodists forgot, and made iron a common commodity in the Iliad. Again, the rhapsodists knew that

thors of these Cyclic poems were, before and after 660 B.C., we illustrate from examples of their left hand backslidings and right hand fallings off. They introduced (1) The Apotheosis of

, and oil at will, as in fairy tales. Another Ionic non-Achaean M?rchen! They bring in ghosts of heroes dead and buried. Such ghosts, in Homer's opinion, were impossible if the dead had been cremated. All these non-Homeric absurdities, save the last, are from the Cypria, dated by Sir Richard Jebb about 776 B.C., long before the Odyssey was put into shape, namely, after 660 B. C. in his opinion. Yet the alleged late compiler of the Odyssey, in the seventh century, never wanders thus from the Homeric standard in taste. What a skilled archaeologist he must have been! The author of the Cypria knew the Iliad, {Footnote: Monro, Odyssey, vol. ii. p. 354.} but his knowledge could not keep him true to tradition. (7) In the AEthiopis (about 7

hands of one man (according to the theory), the other Ionian poets who attempted Epic were betr

poraries, the makers of late additions to the Odyssey, and the later mosaic worker who put it together, never betrayed themselves to anything like the fatal extent of anachronism exhibited by the Cycli

at the Iliad were very learned, and very careful to maintain harmony in their pictures of life and manners, except when they introduced chang

turies in mediaeval France. How could these strollers keep their modern Ionian ideas, or their primitive, recrudescent phases of belief, out of their lays, as far as they did keep them out, while the contemporary au

s. From casual strollers like the rhapsodists and chanters at festivals, we look for nothing of the sort. They might be expected to introduce great feats done by sergeants and privates, so to speak-men of the nameless {Greek: laos}, the host, the foot men-who in Homer are occasionally said to pe

lt. Yet the difficulty is insuperable. Even if we take refuge with Wilamowitz in the idea that the Cyclic and Homeric poems were at first mere protoplasm of lays of many ages, and that they were all compiled, say in the sixth century, into so many narratives, we come no nearer to explaining why the tone, taste, and ideas of two such narratives-Illiad and Odyssey-are confessedly distinct from the tone, taste, and ideas of all the others. The Cyclic poems are