A biographic outline of Homer as he reveals himself in his works

Front matter

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THE LIFE OF HOMER

Part First. Page

Introduction 7

1. The Old Trojan War 12

2. To-day's Trojan War 24

3. Homeric Backgrounds 32

4. Homer's Mythus of Troy 49

5. Homer's Other Mythical Sieges 63

6. Homer's Historicity 69

7. Homer's Biography 81

I. The Achillean Homer 88

1. The Hero as National 92

2. The Hero as Ethical 103

3. The Hero's Teacher-Phcenix Ill

4. Homer's Religiosity 118 vi HOMER'S LIFELINES

Page

5. Homer's Zeus 125

6. Homer in Smyrna 136

II. The Ulyssean Homer 156

1. The Homeric Return 161

2. Homer's Three Poets 167

3. The Homeric Fate-Compeller 177

4. Homer's Life of Ulysses 188

III. The Chian Homer 207

Part Second. HOMER IN CHIOS

An epopee in ten songs, which accepts Chios as Homer's birthplace, whither the poet returns when an old man and founds a school of his singers known as the Homerids.

See page 219, etc., for title and contents.

Homer's Life-Lines

Introduction

Why Homer now, after more than twenty-five centuries? Are we not sated with the real bloodshed of history, without adding to it that of poetry ? Need we go back to Homer's old Troy for more war when we have had enough of it at our door? If the fighting and the gore were the only or the main result, then Homer's book might well be closed for all time. But there is something else which endures in Homer and keeps him more alive to-day than ever before. To find and to appropriate that eternal element of him will demand a new reading of his work in the light of present time.

And let us start with our prime proposition : the Trojan War as told by Homer was a World-War. Indeed the first World- War we may well deem it,

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and the longest-lasting, for it is still going on to-day in the same place, with essentially the same battle-line and the same combatants (Greek and Oriental) fighting for the same ultimate principle, whose clash now involves directly and indirectly the two opposite hemispheres of our globe. Thus Homer appears the earliest and remains still the best recorder of that deepest, mightiest, ever-recurring conflict between Eastern and Western civilisation, which just at present is passing into a wholly new stage of its evolution.

Here let it be noted that in the foregoing fact lies the fundamental reason of Homer's supreme worth as a poet,* and of his undying renown. He has seized upon the largest, most immortal theme in the World's History, and handled it in the worthiest and loftiest way. Still not his verse, not his language, not his descriptions, nor yet his purely literary excellence however great, are the main matter for his right appreciation; it is his subject in all its grandeur and universality which we are to grasp and to assimilate. And that is what vitally connects him with us here and now, with the present and also the future.

Not many months ago to-day's reader found in his morning paper an item of news somewhat after the following purport:

The Greek army led by King Constant ine, has moved from the European side across the Egean, and has taken position on the battle-line against the Oriental foe arrayed along the coast and inland

INTRODUCTION

IX of Asia Minor. In quite the same terms that ancient Trojan expedition, headed by King Agamemnon, might have been heralded, not by the printed page but by swift-footed messengers, not around the globe but over little Hellas. Still further, we learn that the headquarters of this last expedition, from which the assault is to proceed, will be located at Smyrna, distant not so very many miles from the plain of Troy — the scene of the battles of the Iliad, which now are evidently to be fought over again, not in the old but in the modern way. Will this new Trojan War evoke and inspire another Homer as its singer? The first one has told the story for once and forever — so for us too, here and iibw, if we read him aright.

Nor should we forget in this connection that Smyrna has become intimately intergrown with the name and fame of Homer. An ancient tradition has handed down that he was born in this old Greek city; more likely is the statement that he passed an important creative portion of his life there, and experienced in person on the spot the grand perennial conflict between Greek and Oriental, which gives the basic impulse, and content for his whole work. Quite probable it becomes, though not directly documented, that the poet composed his Iliad at Smyrna a century or two after the Trojan War, for this city, with its ever-present outlook upon Troy, must have been the very heart of the enormously prolific Trojan legend, from which the poet drew both material and

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inspiration. Thus he lived in and partook of the early creative upgush of the great Tale of Troy, seemingly the most persistent and influential utterance of its kind yet recorded in literature.

At this point an explanatory gloss may be set down. Just these historic events occurring to-day on the borderland between Europe and Asia, are not only the latest but the best interpretation of Homer in his true and ultimate meaning. What lay primordially in his spirit and its song, doubtless unconscious and embryonic, we may now behold bursting into light more clearly than ever before. History has become our final instructor in Homer as it is in so much else, waking him up into a new consciousness, which is also expressive of our own age. The Wolfian theory, which slashed the old poet asunder and in some cases anatomized his living body into quivering gobbets, has run its course, and will soon be put into the large Homeric museum of dead caprices and learned curiosities. The search now perceptibly drives in the other direction: it will find the pervasive psychological unity which winds through and indeed vivifies both the poet's work and himself in his work.

Of course the by far largest part of the writings about Homer (apart from textual and grammatical exegesis) is known under the label of literary criticism, which for the most part deals with the poet's beauties of expression, with his vivid story-telling art, and with his many-sided skill in characterisation. Now the belletristic charm (as It may be

INTRODUCTION xi termed) of Homer is certainly not to be neglected; we may well agree that the poet is not the poet unless he not merely employs but is enraptured with the beautiful form. Still when this form has given us its highest, and our poetic intoxication has sobered down toward reason, we begin to ask what was it all about anyhow? Practically the usual answer runs sneering: only an old borderfeud between two half civilized little peoples far off yonder in Turkey. Thus the What is contemptible, but t?ie How is the world's poetic miracle.

Now this complete diversity or ratiier abyss between the poet's theme and his achievement, or in general between poetic form and content, the present essay of ours is going to counter as best it can, deeming the same an absurdity or indeed an impossibility. Matthew Arnold has written what is probably the best known and most highly i)rized dissertation on the ancient Greek poet in our language. And yet he, the literary exquisite, never intimates, indeed it seems not to enter his head to tell us, what is the real matter at issue which produced the conflict, whose explosion quite 3000 years ago called forth such an unparalleled and enduring outburst of poetry, with mountains of commentary following down the ages ever since. To be sure, Arnold claims that he is merely giving some advice *'0n translating Homer" into English, still he branches off and dilates upon what may be specially called the literary aspect of the poet, which excursions constitute the chief value of his treatise xii HOMER'S LIFE-LINES

for most readers. And yet the striking fact remains that he does not even think of dropping us a sentence about the genetic content or idea of the greatest poetry in the world, whose worth he is celebrating.

But there looms up before us to-day far more than ever in the past, the historic purport of the Homeric poems. Indeed it may be said that to see aright their place in the World's Literature, we at present must get some conception of their place in the World's History, even if their special events be mainly mythical. For Mythology and History, no longer opposed as hitherto, have now come together with mutual co-operant harmony m Homer.

Here we may touch upon a point which is to be elaborated more fully later on: the universal purport of the poems of Homer is historical, yea world-historical, but their i)articular occurrences are or may be in the main mythical ; fabulous may be their outer incidents, but their inner creative substance is the enduring reality of all Time. Mythology and History in Homer are not enemies, as so many of his exi)ositors think, but both have their place in his work and contribute to his total achievement.

I. The Old Trojan War

Ten years it lasted, that old Trojan War, as the story runs, which also adds ten years for the preparation, and ten years for the return of the victors.

THE OLD TROJAN WAR xiii

Thus three general stages of it are suggested, of which Homer may be said to record only the second and third, with not a few incidental allusions to the first stage strown along • the pathway of his narrative. But why did he not compose a separate poem on this first stage, telling us how the great war came about, and thus constructing at the start a grand epical trilogy? The heroic singer, however, springs into the immediate action {in medias res) ; he has left it to the later bardlings,. most of whom have perished, to trick out his massive central achievement with the already much-frayed fringes of the so-called Epic Cycle.

Undoubtedly that ancient contention on the plain of Troy seems insignificant at the first look. In fact the compass of the whole Trojan War was very limited, being confined to a few tribes and small nations scattered around the Egean on both sides, European and Asiatic. Yet it was the prophetic germ of the new order then arising, verily of the new world-consciousness. More than any other event it heralds the birth of Europe, and evokes its first, and still, from some highest viewpoints, its most beautiful literary expression.

The conflict between the two forces now starting definitely to grapple with each other for untold ages throughout the planet, concentrated itself primordially in the Trojan plain, upon which rose up imperious the citadel of Troy dominating the coast-line up and down the Egean, as we may see by the number and localities of Troy's auxiliaries.

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Now to capture that ever-threatening citadel was the objective point of the Greek army, we may say, of the Greek soul.

On the other hand this Greek army, which had sailed across the dividing sea, built a counter fortress, having drawn up their ships along the Trojan shore, and protected them seemingly by a sort of temporary earth-work with ditch and gates. For these vessels had to be preserved as a means for carrying their combatants back to Europe, when the great deed was finished. Such, then, were the two fortified strongholds frowning at and defiant of each other, as they lay only a few miles apart (variously reported at from three to seven miles). The one we may designate as the ship-wall, already vanished in Homer's time (as he declares), and the other as the city-wall, built of stone and hence still existent to-day though in ruins, which have recently been uncovered to new universal fame. It should be added that the ship-wall had two lines not far apart — one being composed of the sterns of the vessels drawn ashore at the water's edge, the other being thrown up as an earth-work some rods further landward.

Now between these two ramparts facing each other with hostile challenge lay Troy 's famous plain — the arena which had the unique destiny of beholding the race's typical characters unfold themselves in deed and in word, and on which the World's History, at least of our European stock, had its first embryonic birth-struggle. Hence it

THE OLD TROJAN WAR xv

has become a most significant landmark of time, and to this day the Trojan conflict is the most worthily and eternally told of all the supreme crises of the ages. For its voice to and through futurity has been, is, and will continue to be, Greek Homer. Startling possibly, and to some readers certainly extravagant, will appear the assertion that the ever-recurring series of individual duels on Troy's plain constitute a World- War, and not a longdrawn line of prize-fights. What then constitutes a World- War? Not the manner of the combat or the implements employed, not the numbers engaged or the extent of space over which the battle rages: on the contrary, it is the eternal principle at stake, it is the immortal value of the deed, however confined its territory. Now let it be in confirmation asserted again that the Trojan War is going on to-day within essentially the same bound- ^ aries it had thirty centuries ago, having essentially the same stake as then, with essentially the same antagonists, the Greek still on this side and the Oriental still on the other.

We hope our alert reader has felt prompted to demand: point out to us the passage in Homer where he says that he sings of the conflict between Orient and Occident. Let it be acknowledged from the start that no such direct statement is to be found in his poems. He and his age were not yet conscious of the vast future significance of their deed. In fact, time has been evolving its meaning ever since then, and is not done yet with it by any xvi HOMER'8 LIFE-LINES

means. But that which Homer the poet purposely and knowingly takes as his theme is the personal career of the two Heroes, Achilles and Ulysses. He first seizes and sets forth the individual man in the grand human discipline and development. Hence he sings an Achillead (called the Iliad), and an Ulyssead (called the Odyssey), each of them being the record of a great personal experience, whose frame-work is the Trojan War. Indeed the Greek Muse, whom he invokes, could only inspire him with the song of individuality, for just that is what Greece signifies to civilisation and to herself.

Still those two heroic individuals, Achilles and Ulysses, made eternal by the poet, have their deeper even if unconscious being in that Trojan time and its conflict. The underlying pre-supposition of both of Homer's poems, and the genetic substrate of all his characters, must be sought in the spiritual collision between the two opposite sides of the Egean, between the Asiatic and Greek. To be sure, this collision has not yet pushed up to the surface, though ever-present underneath and active germinally; it has not yet become historic and conscious, as we find it in the next great Greek book after Homer, namely the History of Herodotus, whose proclaimed theme is just the war between Hellas and the Orient, as represented by tl^e Persian. n.

Let it first be grasped, then, that this conflict between Greeks and Trojans has arisen in one and the same stock or folk, namely the Hellenic That

THE OLD TROJAN WAR xvii

is, the Greeks and the Trojans are two branches of the one Hellenic people. They talk the same language, have the same customs, worship the same Gods. Homer himself intimates, to be sure mythically, their common origin. It would seem that an early offshoot of the Hellenic race divided from the main branch somewhere in Northern Greece, crossed the Egean to Asia, and there settled in the Troad, where they built Troy. Such is the earliest legendary glimmer of the separation of the Hellenes (so they still to-day call themselves in their totality) into their two opposing tendencies, the one turning eastward, the other keeping westward. In the course of generations this spatial separation becomes spiritual, with fierce struggle for the mastery of the future Hellenic heritage. Hence we may characterize the two antagonistic sides, though of one blood, thus : The Greeks are Hellenes with face turned toward the West and Europe, the Trojans are Hellenes with face turned toward the East and Asia.

The main point now to be emphasized is that the conflict between Orient and Occident, which will hereafter expand to such enormous proportions, and will keep on expanding till to-day it quite embraces the whole earth, is as yet only very local and germinal in Homer. Still it is yeasting through all his writ, even if the poet is hardly aware of what is working most deeply in himself. So it comes that he has spoken the truly creative word, which also unfolds more deeply its meaning along with the ages.

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The next question which naturally comes up in this connection, inquires: How does Homer express the cause or ground of the aforesaid conflict ? Not in abstract terms, but in concrete, imaginative form; he individualizes it after his wont, representing it in and through a person, yea a woman. Here enters the story of Greek Helen, whose abduction by Trojan Paris, not only starts but keeps up the war of the Greeks for her restoration. What has that to do with the conflict between Orient and Occident ? So much we can say now with the poet : an Oriental Prince has come to Greece, has taken away the most beautiful Greek woman from family and country (thus defying Greek social institutions) and refuses to give her up on demand, in which refusal he is supported by his own city of Troy and its ruler Priam, and finally by Troy's allied peoples. Oriental or Orientalizing.

From Homer's time to this day there has been one long struggle to find and to express the meaning of Helen. She has begotten thousands of poems in every style, thousands of essays and prelections of all sorts — a vast literature ranging from sympathetic admiration to bitterest invective. Rather the most prolific woman that ever existed, she may be acclaimed, excepting mother Eve. Wonderful too has been her metamorphosis down time; she seems to have the power of taking a new shape for every succeeding age. Only yesterday I read the verse of a living Romaic bard, who sang that the Greeks again were launching their ships in a new

THE OLD TROJAN WAR xix

expedition across the Egean to Troy for the restoration of their stolen Helen — still a captive of the Oriental man, not now the Trojan, or the Persian, or the Arabian, but the Turk, last bulwark of her barbarous abduction.

But turning back from this latest epiphany of Helen to her first appearance in the affair of Troy, we continue eagerly to interrogate: What does she stand for to those earliest Greeks, and to their and her singer. Homer ? That she represents something deep within their mind and heart, aye the very deepest, is indicated by the long yet persistent labors and sacrifices which they undergo for her sake. We have to think her their principle, their essence, however we may formulate it ; her soul must be their soul, and her story their story in its completed round of ravishment, exile, and restoration. The fight for her possession is the fight of the Greeks for their distinctive existence, for the Hellenic spirit we may say. Indeed the affair goes much deeper, as we now can see who look back over the tract of the centuries. It is hence the contest for the future inheritance of the race's culture, inasmuch as the problem therein propounded may be taken to run thus: Which of these two contestants, Greek or Asiatic, is to be the bearer of civilisation to that new European world now being born? The Greek claimed it and won it both in legend and history, valiantly asserting his ancient leadership both at Troy and Marathon.

The Trojans, then, belonged to the Hellenic race,

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HOMER'S LIFE-LINES in which the aforesaid primal bifurcation was taking place eastward and westward. One of the most significant facts about Troy is that within the city itself there existed the two parties, whom we may call the Orientalizers and the Hellenizers. It is generally recognized that a cardinal test of the difference between the Asiatic and the European civilizations lies in their different attitude toward man's basic institution, the Family with its heart, the woman. The Orient was and still is polygamous, Europe monogamous. Of this fundamental social diversity in the World's History, which brought with its rise a long epochal conflict, Hellas was the early protagonist. And the story of Helen has in it a decided strain of monogamy, since she, the wife of the one and herself the one only, is to be restored to her Greek husband by a ten years ' war if need be, out of her hapless estrangement in Troy, whose ruler is portrayed by the poet as a colossal polygamist, though not quite equal in this respect to Solomon, our biblical exemplar of wisdom and polygamy. Priam had fifty sons, according to the Homeric tally, when the Greeks arrived before his city walls; his chief wife Hecuba had borne him nineteen, so that thirty one must be assigned to other women. In addition to these sons, the poet gives him a relatively small output of twelve daughters with their husbands. It is true that Homer does not mention so directly any other polygamist in Troy except Priam ; but is not this one case of the ruler emphatic enough to show the dominant trend ?

THE OLD TROJAN WAR

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Some too good commentators have held that Priam was the only one of his sort in the city, and the grand exception there ; rather should we infer that the poet took the sovereign as the most telling incarnation and significant symbol of the prevalent practice and spirit of his people.

Still just in that same city of Troy, and also in that same household of the king, we hear the clashing protest. Hector, Priam's best and bravest son, urges the restoration of Helen, in whose abduction lay the original sin against monogamy which caused the war, and which will, as he foretells with prophetic fervor, bring about Troy's downfall. But the other side, that of Paris, being upheld by his father the monarch, and by some secret bribery it seems, is too strong for even heroic Hector, though he has the support of his brother Antenor in vindicating the same view. Moreover the relation between Hector and his spouse Andromache shows the purest domestic devotion between the one man and the one wife, and cannot be conceived as tainted with his own father's polygamy. Hence we have to say that Hector, in his deepest conviction, represents the Greek world inside of Troy, and thus fights for a cause in which he does not believe — and just that is his tragedy, his world-historical fate, in spite of his personal nobility of character.

But our main point at present is the fact that the original dualism between Orient and Occident now starts within the Hellenic race itself, and is to fight xxii HOMER'S LIFE-LINES

out its earliest recorded round on the plain of Troy, very circumscribed and indeed embryonic when compared to that same now mightily developed conflict, which belts more than half the globe to-day. Thus ancient Priam recalls the modern Turk with his harem and its diversified offspring. Also the political order of Troy has its similarity to the Oriental absolutism ; Priam is the paternalistic autocrat as ruler, not unlike the Sultan. But to these domestic and political differences is in our time added a new and intenser antagonism, the religious. The old Greeks and Trojans had no fight over any diversity of God-consciousness; both sides had the same Olympian system, though its divinities might and did divide among themselves concerning the fate of Troy. That is, the primordial dualism of the Hellenic race had entered Olympus itself, and cleft it into two opposing parties of Gods, who will battle with each other above, as do the Greeks and Trojans below at Troy. Thus the grand Hellenic bifurcation sunders their one religion for a time into warring halves, whose opposition we shall find penetrating for a time even their supreme God, Zeus Himself.

But at present the religious element has become paramount in the furious fanatical, sanguinary strife between two world-faiths, the Christian now specially represented by the Greek, and the Mahommedan now specially represented by the Turk. Still along with these two Faiths and their respective protagonists are involved many other

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Faiths and Unfaiths of every sort ; for instance all multi-religious and multi-racial India is seething, and as Pan-Asiatic seems just now to be uniting and arraying itself upon the old Trojan battle-line against the Greeks and Europe. Moreover alongside and often underneath the religious question is violently fermenting the political protest, which is proclaiming to the Occident: ''Hands off from the government of our Orient. ' ' And into this political opposition has become intergrown the loud economic dissent which now is crying out: ''No more of your Europe-made fabrics — up with our old national industries!" And the hostility extends to a reaction against Western education which has been subtly inoculating the countries of the East. Thus the three great secular institutions of man in their Occidental form, the political, the economic, and the educative, are to be expelled from the Orient in the grand revival of its new religious spirit. For the creative genius of the Orient has been and probably still is religious ; all the great world-religions of to-day arose and developed in Asia; our own Christian religion, we must not forget, is Asiatic in its origin and in its early expansion and organisation, and has its strong Oriental reactions to-day, even in our America.

But let us return from these far-away glimpses of the Trojan War's present expansion to its minute original starting-point, little Troy with its supreme singer Homer. Often enough have we said that his ultimate theme lav in the conflict between xxiv HOMER'S LIFE-LINES

Orient and Occident, just opening on the Trojan plain and as yet limited to the one Hellenic stock. Thus that primordial Trojan War was really a kind of Civil War, the incipient struggle of the whole Hellenic folk within itself to settle its future destiny, namely the coming civilisation of Europe.

Also we have laid down the proposition more than once that the old conflict of Troy is going on to-day, has indeed started up quite recently with a fresh energy of blood-letting and rancour. Whereof a brief survey would seem to be in place for the more complete comprehension of our poet.

IL

To-day's Trojan War.

The best explication of Homer in his truly universal sense is the present struggle between Greek and Turk along the western coast of Asia Minor. The arena is still the same territory as formerly, being at and around Troy; the principle fought about persists in general the same. Orient versus Occident; the Greek military campaign from European Hellas across the Egean to meet the foe is quite the same now as then in direction and in spirit. Internally and universally it is the same war a^ sung by Homer ; externally and in particulars it is very different. Gunpowder, electricity, the steam-car have taken the place of the horse-

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chariot, the speer-hurler, and the archer; but the original elemental First Cause of the strife continues the same, though expanded from atomic into continental proportions. To use a Platonic expression, colossal in magnitude and in mutation has been the Appearance, but the creative Idea indwelling it has not changed, but seems just now more furiously active in combativeness and more unreconciled in temper than ever before. Indeed the reconciliation of Orient and Occident remains the future largest, most desperate task of the World's History. Homer, when truly heard, first struck its key-note.

But our present object is to take cognizance of to-day's Trojan War, as we shall call it passingly, for the purpose of stressing our analogy. In recent Greek newspapers we find it named the modern Ten Year's War, as it has lasted practically from the Balkan outbreak (1912) till now (1922). In such wise the Greek mind still couples the two great events of its history — the overture and the finale some thirty centuries apart — and thus still acts and thinks in the framework built by old Homer. So we shall proceed also.

In 1917 Greece changed from her neutral, if not secretly hostile, attitude toward the Allies, and entered the World- War through Venizelos, her greatest statesman since Pericles, who may be acclaimed the hero of the modern conflict of Hellas with her Oriental foe, now the Turk. But in order to accomplish his supreme national end, which was xxvi HOMER'8 LIFE-LINES

to rescue and to unite the whole dispersed Hellenic family, he had to oust the antagonistic titular king of Greece, Constantine, who was not a Greek by birth or education, being born of a Danish father and a Eussian mother, and being educated as a German soldier in his higher training. Moreover he was married to a German Princess, who did not forget her brother, the Kaiser, and Berlin, when she was installed in her Greek palace at Athens. But is it not strange? For now we see again in the Grecian camp the hero and the king, or ability and authority, clashing in bitter strife and opposition, re-enacting Achilles and Agamemnon in the fateful quarrel of the First Book of the Iliad. But the result in the present case was that the hero overmatched the king, who had to flee from Hellas, and betake himself along with his queen as an exile to Switzerland.