Homer and His Age

n 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 cham

ey are not Volkspoesie; they are not ballads. “It is now ge

n the Achaean courts of Europe, not for an audience of noble warriors and dames, but by wandering minstrels in the later Ionian colonies of Asia. They did not chant for a military aristocracy, but for the enjoyment of town and country folk at popular festivals. 18 The poems were begun, indeed, he thinks, for “a

ry form of society. The real question is, would the modern poets be the men to keep up a tone some four or five centuries old, and to be true, if they were true, to the details of the heroic age? “It is not beyond the bounds of possibility that some part of the most primitive Iliad may have been a

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

ts, had come 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

time popular, and frequently 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 thes

ems 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 unHomeric 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 had wa

n poets, the Cyclics — authors of new Epics on Homeric themes — are known to have quite lost touch with the Homeric taste, religion, 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

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

uce corn, wine, 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, 25 but his knowledge could not keep him true to tradition. (7) In the AEthiopis (about 776 B.C.) men a

B.C., from the hands of one man (according to the theory), the other Ionian po

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

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

indeed, nobody seems to find difficult. 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 disti