A companion to the Iliad, for English readers

Preface

The last few years have caused some not unnatural disquietude to those who are interested in the future of classical studies in England. A serious attack, led by some of the ablest men engaged in teaching, alike in schools and universities, has been delivered upon the place which Greek now holds in the established course of English education. It appears to have failed for the present ; but none the less it has revealed the existence of a body of opinion at once powerful in reputation and influential in position ; it is likely enough that it may be repeated at no distant date with overwhelming forces.

If the success of this attack meant, as many or perhaps most now think, a total divorce of modern and ancient Hterature, it would surely be deplorable. But to believe such a divorce possible argues a weak faith in the intrinsic vitality of Greek letters. Their union with our modern thought is indissoluble, because it is based on a long historical growth, and because those who would study English hterature find themselves forced to study Greek — Greek literature at least, if not the Greek language. And it is in the recognition of this fact that the real hope for classical

Vlll PREFACE

Study lies. It is because the history of literature is a most important branch of universal history, and itself a continuous whole, that Greek literature will hold its ground. The more mankind studies its own past, the more it will see that a knowledge of Greek life and thought is imperatively needed. That such a knowledge can be adequately obtained without a thorough acquaintance with the Greek language no scholar is likely to assert. But the language after all is not the whole of philology. The scholar is tempted to underestimate the real importance of his task, which is nothing less than to reproduce the whole minds and surroundings of men of the past, so far as the materials allow him. And much of this he can do without appealing to linguistic subtleties. There have always been those who by sheer genius have been able to catch the Greek spirit even from Chapman's Homer \ it is certain that there are many more who will be able to catch it through careful teaching based on translation. For the last century has put within our reach the means of making even translations live in the illustrations with which the rediscovery of the material remains of ancient Greece has so abundantly provided us. The intangible grace and elastic Hfe t)f the original must be lost in any translation ; in a prose translation of a poet much more is lost. But that even in this all the charm does not vanish is testified by the welcome which has been given to many prose translations of Greek poets in these last few years. And with what remains of poetic spirit there is left too, in any accurate translation, the whole of the historic value of the original. It is not too much to say that in these ele-

PREFACE IX

ments we have the base of an education hardly inferior, if inferior at all, to that founded on the study of the language, at least as understood in the ordinary classical curriculum.

The Companion to the Iliad has been written in the belief that if the classics are thus taught, with their interest as an essential part of the history of the human mind for a broad base, and translation as a means of bringing them before a great public lying beyond the present range of university education, they can never lose their privilege of intellectual rank. The book is an experiment — in some respects, I think, a novel experiment. A running commentary deliberately sacrifices literary independence and literary form. The Companion is strictly a companion to another book, and cannot be read as a separate work. But it aims at an object which can be attained in no other way ; it aims at bringing to the exact place where it is needed the information required for the understanding of the original It is designed for students who really wish to learn, but can read Homer in a translation only ; I may perhaps hope that even those who have a knowledge of the language may find in it something to help them. It is true that there is in it little which will not be found in my large edition of the Iliad \ but some may be glad to have even this free from all purely linguistic and grammatical commentary.

As a preparation for the study of Homer, such as is required by those who would make the best use of the Companion^ nothing can be better than Professor Jebb's admirable Introduction to Ho7ner. There is little or nothing in this which will be unintelligible to those who do not

X PREFACE

know the language. For the discoveries at Mykenai I have freely referred throughout to Schuchhardt's work, SchliemanrCs Excavations^ in the English translation by Miss Sellers. It is a significant indication of the direction in which classical study is tending, that while the following pages were passing through the press there should have appeared no less than three new works which are exactly suited to help those who may be so far interested in Homer as to work their way through the Companion. The Pictorial Atlas to Horner^ by Dr. Engelmann and Professor W. C. F. Anderson, contains a most instructive collection of illustrations of the poems and myths . taken from Greek remains of all ages. Miss Agnes Gierke's Familiar Studies in Homer gives an attractive and accurate account of a great deal of Homeric archaeology. And those who wish for a more advanced account of the relation of the Homeric world to the finds of Mykenai cannot do better than go to the earlier portion of Professor Gardner's New Chapters in Greek History.

It will be seen that I have devoted a large portion of the commentary to the discussion of the Homeric question, and especially to the theory which in my belief gives the best account of the difficulties which exist in the Iliad. I have done this because the problem itself is one of the most important in literature, and because I think it is one which can be dealt with in a translation almost as well as in the original. It is on the broad grounds of the construction and motives of the poem, and not on any merely linguistic considerations, that a decision must be sought. A cultivated reader who

PREFACE XI

has studied other literatures is hardly less qualified than the professional scholar — in some respects he is better qualified — to pronounce a judgment on these.

The notes deal to a great extent, perhaps it may seem disproportionately, with the weaknesses which are to be found in the Iliad. But it must be remembered that for the beauties the text must in the end speak for itself. Those who cannot enjoy the Iliad without a commentary will certainly not be made to enjoy it by any number of laudatory annotations. The complete aesthetic appreciation of the Iliad is the business of the essayist, not of the commentator ; and my own feeling is that an honest recognition of difficulties and weaknesses is likely to be more helpful to the learner than indiscriminate adulation.

It is hardly necessary to say that I have taken as text for the notes the prose translation of the Iliad by Mr. Andrew Lang, Mr. Ernest Myers, and myself. For the sake of easy reference I have in most cases quoted not only the line of the Iliad^ but the page and line of the translation, where a phrase occurs. These latter references are in all cases expressed in italic numerals. A revised version of the translation has recently appeared ; but I have throughout taken pains to make the Companion equally intelligible to those who possess the earlier editions. In only one case, I think, on p. 214, will there be found a slight difference in the numbering of the lines; and where an important alteration of the text has been introduced it will in all cases, I hope, have been pginted out in the notes. The remarkable picture of a siege which forms the frontisxii PREFACE piece comes from a fragment of a silver bowl found by Schliemann at Mykenai. The picture itself has only been recently discovered by the careful removal of a thick coating of deposit. It was first published last year in the Greek Ephemeris Archaiologike^ whence the frontispiece is reproduced.

W. L.

Before the beginnings of European history there dwelt in Greece a people who called themselves .AchaiarLS. They had come probably from tl>e North, through Thrace, and had settled in Tb^'^'==^^y ^"d Boeotia^ in the Pelopgnnesos^ in the islands of the western mast, in Crete, and in a few of the neighbouring islands which lie between Crete and the coast of Asia Minor. They were a pure Greek race, and spoke a pure Greek tongue, the parent of those dialects which the Greeks themselves in after years distinguished as Aiolic. But they had not found Greece vacant when they came. It had been inhabited by a race or races whom the Greeks themselves called Pelasgians, and of whom we know httle more than the name. These Pelasgians still lived in the land as a plebeian class, to whom the invading Achaians held something of the same position as the feudal lords in early Norman times to their defeated Saxons.

The main seat of the Achaians was at the inland fortress of MyRenai, in the hills between Corinth and the Gulf of Argos. But they were divided among many petty princes, who dwelt in various strong towns, chiefly along the eastern coasts and the islands, and with few important settlements — perhaps only Pylos and Kalydon — in the west. Sparta was probably their main settlement next after Mykenai.

B

'When {Key Vame into Greece we cannot even approximately tell. But we know that in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries B.C. they had attained to great wealth, and had produced a vigorous and beautiful school of art. They were great builders, and much of their work is still, after more than 3000 years, a marvel for boldness of conception and solidity of construction. Their rule must have lasted for several centuries, but at length it fell, about 1000 B.C., before the invading Dorians, a rude tribe of Greek mountaineers who pressed southwards from the hills round Thessaly.

The period at which we become acquainted with the Achaians is that of the height of their civilisation. Such knowledge as we have of them at this time, the twelfth and thirteenth centuries B.C., we owe to the discoveries of Dr. Schliemann at Mykenai, since supplemented by excavations at other sites in Greece. But these great finds, though telling us much, leave much still to be guessed at. It is at a later period, probably less than a century before their destruction by the Dorians, that we gain a more intimate acquaintance with them through the two great poems which they have left us as their intellectual inheritance, the Iliad and the Odyssey.

These poems have often been spoken of as popular poetry, Volkspoesie^ and have even been compared to the ballad poetry of our own and other nations. It is now generally recognised that this conception is radically false. The Iliad and Odyssey are essentially and above all court poems. They were composed to., he™.-SUO^Jn,t]^^^^ splendid miaces. of a ruling aristocracy, and the commonalty Have no part or lot as actors in them. Even the slave and swineherd Eumaios, the only figure of the lower class of heroic society who takes a leading part in eithex.pp£ili*i3., described as of princelyjairth, kidnapped when a child and sold as a slave by Phenician traders. When the common sort are mentioned in the Iliad in contrast to the "kings" it is in terms of supreme disdain ; only one of them, Thersites^ is given an ktdiyid^alitv, and then only that he may be held up to ridicule and humiliation. This is the first point which must be clearly, grasped by those who would enter into the spirit of Homer : that the poems are aristocratic and courth', "^ not^^o^ular. ^

The next is, that they are not to be regarded as the outcome of a young and primitive people. Xij£X».are^jthe offspring of an advanced civilisation, the growth of centuries ; and of a civilisation which was approaching its decline and fall. It was in some respects a civilisation even more advanced than that which grew out of the ruins brought about by the invasion of the Dorians. This is clear from various traits, of which one or two may be mentioned.

First, the position of women, the keystone of the family, was as high as any that the world has yet seen ; in many ways it strikingly reminds us of the family of our own day, and was far above the status of women in classical Athens. Women were on a virtual equality with men, mixing with them freely , in domestic intercourse, and sublect to none of the disabilities which weighed so h^ayJlyu£on them in later times. In archaeological discussions on the Homeric house we hear a great deal of the " women's chambers " ; but the phrase is an incorrect "one, as incorrect as it would-be if ^ised of a»Hiiodern X^ondon, house. The women sit habitually among 4he men- in the great common hall. There are of course^U^esides the bedrooms, working chambers, and offices,^^hich are used by the domestic slaves who are, for household duties, naturally women. But there is no trace of anything resembling the gynaikonitis of later

Greece, a separate part of the house where the woman was almost a prisoner, and jv^here no man but the master of the house might penetrate. The conception of the home was, in fact, more hke that of an EngUsh than of an Attic house. . In religion, again, the Achaians held a distinctly more advanced position than did the Greeks of the classical period. The most salient point here is iliiS-alisejace-of superstition^^__ Charms and witchcraft are almost entirely absent ; we hardly hear of more than of the stopping of blood by a charm in one passage of the Odyssey} Augury is indeed practised, but it holds a quite subordinate position, and in one very famous passage of Iliad xii. it is spoken of in terms of anything but respect. Though an omen at times may encourage or alarm the observer, it never on any occasion suggests or prevents an action of any importance ; there is nothing in the least resembling the childish observance of sacrifices or birds by which not only the classical Greeks but even the sober Romans allowed the gravest decisions to be postponed or abandoned. We miss too the crowds of local deities who received in later times a higher and more earnest share of worship than the nominally supreme gods. Especially we notice the absence of all forms of the ".Chthonian " worship of the dread powers of the under-world in which superstition in later days was allowed to run riot. All these baser forms of belief which characterise the primitive stage of thought had been purged away ; and even what is left is treated with a hghtness which seems hardly to conceal failing belief. The passage of .aims, between Zeu,s and- H-em^t the end of Iliad i. may stand as a type of -ally the gods throughout are treated with scant respect, and are not even made ideals of moral virtue ; far from it. Here, again, the Achaians

1 Xix. 457, "As for the wound, they bound it up skilfully, and stayed the black blood with a song of healing. "

had gone far beyond the Greeks who succeeded them in the historic age.

So too in many of the customs which mark more particularly the primitive state later Greece is far richer than the heroic age. It is indeed remarkable, considering the early age of thd poems, that they should have afforded so little material for the .students of survivals from the first ages of culture. Relationship is virtually the same as in modern Europe ; there is hardly a trace to be found of such early institutions as . maternal descent instead of paternal, and none whatever of exogamy or other artificial restraints upon the choice of a wife. And what is still more remarkable, perhai^s, is the entire j^bsence of any tribal feeling as distinct Crom national. > The onljr- division in the Greek army of whicluve hear is the purely personal quarrel between Achilles and Agam^rpnnn • thprp is no sign of this having ever passed into a division between the Myrmidons and Argives ; and yet the preponderance of tribal feeling over national is one of the most universal signs of early civilisation. Xhat national feeling should be supremej is the mark of the last ^tep in the slow process of nation-making ; and it had been won by the Achaians. We have-only to think of Marathon and Plataea\to sse how far they were in this respect beyond the Greeks-of the fifth century.

It is clear, then, that between the time >of the Achaians and the classical age the clock^f civilisation had been set far back. The invasion of the rude Dorians had destroyed the earlier culture, and the delicate plant took long to grow up again ; and when it recovered, it was under other circumstances which materially altered its aspect. Though the Achaians were thorough Greeks, yet there is a gulf between them and the Greeks whom we best know which cannot be too clearly conceived.

COMPANION TO THE ILIAD"

How then did it come to pass that the Homeric poems are thus in many ways more modern than later Greece ? The answer is, I beHeve, to be found in the descent of the lonians. The appearance of the Ionian name is the great mark of the difference between pre-historic and historic Greece. In Homer the Greeks are a unity — the Achaians. In the historic age they are found as three sharply sundered stems — Aiolians, Dorians, and lonians. We know who the Aiolians were — they were descendants of the Achaians ; we know who the Dorians were and whence they came ; but who were these lonians who are to us the type of all that is most Greek in the world of intellect at least ?

The answer is given us by the traditions of thej lonians themselves, and there is no reason for doubting it. The lonians were the old pre-Hellenic or Pelasgian population Hellenised by the Achaians.^ Far from being ashamed of this mixture of blood, they gloried in it ; the first aim of the Ionic Athenians was to magnify their old Autochthonous descent, and to minimise the share of the Achaians in their blood. The whole aim of the Ion of Euripides is nothing but this. And in Attica at least they no doubt had good grounds for this exclusiveness. Of all Greece proper this corner seems to have been least modified by the Achaians. Hence it is that in the Ilmd Athens and the Athenians are in the background. An Achaian dynasty of Athens there certainly was ; but it is not recognised in the true Athenian tradition; Tjieseus and not the Homeric Menestheus is the Attic hero. It is true that Athens, like the rest of Greece, could not resist the temptation to seek a place in the roll of honour of Agamemnon's army ; the lonians even claimed as their own some of the noble Achaian families, who no

^ This is repeatedly asserted by Herodotos. See i. 56, 57 ; ii. 51 ; vii. 94 ; viii. 44.

doubt had, at the time of the great catastrophe of the Dorian migration, thrown in their lot with the hitherto subject population among whom they had lived, just as the Fitzgeralds and other English of the Pale became in time more Irish than the Irish themselves. A notable instance of this is to be found in the Neleid family, claiming to be the descendants of Nestor, who, in the person of Peisistratos, asserted the foremost place among the lonians and yet claimed Achaian blood from the first. But in Homer there is no trace whatever of a race difference between Nestor and the other Achaians ; the idea of making him and Odysseus lonians is, in fact, a gross anachronism. It was a deliberate invention of a later age.

We thus have an obvious explanation of the comparative modernness of the Homeric civilisation as compared with that of Athens. The Autochthonous population had preserved intact all their primitive beliefs and superstitions, while adopting the forms of the Achaian civilisation ; that is what always happerfs. But when the once dominant classes were removed to perish by an artistic but otherwise inglorious death in the Aiolian colonies of Asia Minor and elsewhere, the older people, impregnated with their genius, sprang rapidly into independent life. But they did not drop the more primitive phases of belief which had clung to them ; these rose tcrthe surface with tfee rest of that marvellous Ionic genius, and many an ancient survival was enshrined in the literature or mythology of Athens which had long passed out of all remembrance at Mykenai. Hence it i$ at Athens and in Arcadia and not in Homer that Mr. M'Lennan finds his clearest traces of maternal kinship, and Mr. Lang his few survivals of totemism on Greek soil. Wherever the Pelasgians were strongest, in Attica, in Arcadia, and in Thessaly, — for these were the three sites of traditional Pelasgianism, — there we find the most abundant evidence of primitive thought ; stone-worship in Athens and Arcadia — in Arcadia the werewolf, in Thessaly witchcraft. It was, in fact, the cropping up of an older stratum which brought to hght these remains of a hoary antiquity in a land whose former masters, so far as they are in evidence, had outlived them. This, then, is the fundamental mark of the gap between Homeric and classical Greece ; a fresh start is taken from an earlier level, and all classical Greece bears witness to the fact.

It must not of course be imagined that what I have called the modernness of the heroic age extended through the whole range of Hfe. Many departments still retained a rudimentary complexion ; in polity, in law, and in mechanical invention the Achaians were far behind the Greeks as we find them when they enter into history proper. But none the less the Achaians had reached a point in art, in religion, and in domestic relations which shows that they were an old nation, not a young one. They had accumulated wealth which enabled them to enjoy the cultured luxury which is the privilege of age; and with luxury the seeds of decay had begun to sprout. The Achaians had lost the love of war and fighting for its own sake ; the sense of honour, and the desire of plunder, were the motives which kept up the army of the Atreidai ; their ideal was the happy nation of the P}^^,ip^k,ipps^ who lived far from tumult and could give themselves to the delights of song, feast, and dance. It is impossible not to be reminded of the happy land of the Counts of Toulouse in the twelfth century, where a whole people lived in an atmosphere of luxury and song. The realm of ^Agamemnon, like the realm of Raymond, went down before the attack of the rude barbarians from the North. But, unlike Toulouse, Mykenai has left us two immortal treasures : first, the Ionian genius which thence drew life ;

and secondly, the great Epic, a monument happily more perfect and more enduring than even the Lion-gate of Mykenai itself.

Not many years ago it would have been considered absurd, and even now it may be held rash, to suppose that we have in the Iliad and the Odyssey a direct legacy from Achaian tiroes. The prevalent theory, from the days of classical Greece dowawards, has been that the two poems were not Achaian but Ionian in ,origin ; that they were composed by Ionian singers in the Ionian colonies of Asia Minor, probably in Chios or Smyrna. On this point the voice of antiquity was indeed unanimous, or at least only varied so far that some attributed them to Ionian Athens on the mainland instead of to the eastern shores of the Aegaean. ^ And we cannot afford to neglect entirely testimony such as this. If we hold it to be wrong, we must explain how the mistake arose.

And of this we can give a sufficient account. The theory was doubtless based on two facts : first, that the traditional knowledge of the poems came to classical Greece through the Asiatic lonians ; and secondly, that the language in which they, were handed-^down was a dialect which, though somewhat mixed, was in the main Ionian, such as was spoken in the islands along the coast of Asia.

Now there is no difficulty in supposing that when the sceptre of intellect passed from the worn-out Achaian race to the fresh vigour of Ionia, the latter people took over the poetical inheritance which the old Achaian families, under their new name of Aiolians, had lost the art of keeping up. The two races had been so closely connected in their ancient home that such a transfer contains nothing that need surprise us, the more so as we have seen that the most vigorous of the ancient Achaians cast in their ]pt- whli titfe^imiians and

C4L!F0HHif^ lo COMPANION TO THE " ILIAD "

were absorbed by them. And when the poems were taken over by the new singers, it followed of necessity that the dialect was changed. But the change could not be complete. Many of the words of the old Achaian dialect differed in metre from the corresponding Ionian words. Where this happened, it was necessary for the new singers either to change the old text, and modify whole lines in order to introduce words of their own, or to keep the old words as they were, in spite of their unfamiliarity. The latter course was that which they adopted, and the result was the socalled Epic dialect, which, with its prevailing Ionic colouring, contains many words which the laws of speech as well as the tradition of antiquity tell us are Aiolic. And as there is no doubt that the typical Aiolic dialect was that spoken in the northern colonies of Asia Minor which were peopled by men who claimed to be the immediate descendants of the Achaians, we have every reason to suppose that these words so strangely surviving among others of different stock are nothing but relics of the old Achaian dialect itself.

There is thus no inherent difficulty in the theory that the poems are directly deducible from the bards who sang in the palaces of the Achaian princes of Mykenai and Sparta. The Ionian singers of the new Greek world appropriated them by the right of genius, and partly transformed them ; no doubt, as we shall see, they extended them; no wonder that in after ages they succeeded in claiming the original authorship of them.

This theory then, which has been worked out in detail by Professor Fick of Gottingen, though it has led him to conclusions different from those stated above, is so far negative that it merely enables us to explain away the evidence of tradition ; it is positive in so far as it enables us to explain the mixed character of the Epic dialect, which without it is an insoluble problem. But the positive evidence on which we must chiefly rely is that of the poems themselves.

There can be no doubt that, wherever and whenever the poems were composed, they profess to be the composition of poets living in Greece proper among the princes of Achaia. Ostensibly at least they are entirely pre-Dorian. There is not one word of the great catastrophe which changed the face of Greece, nor a single hint at the new life which sprang up after the great migration, and changed the eastern Mediterranean into a Greek sea. The life depicted in the poems is that of a wealthy aristocracy living on the produce of their lands, confined to Greece proper and Crete, with a few neighbouring islands, governed by hereditary kings, and with a geographical horizon only extending to Egypt on the one side, and perhaps vaguely to Sicily on the other. But the Ionian emigrants were above all things expansive and commercial; their centres were Miletos, Ephesos, Colophon, and the other great towns of the Asian coasts ; their ships and their colonies went freely over all lands, from the recesses of the Black Sea on the one hand to Marseilles and Spain on the other. To suppose that people thus overflowing with living energy should care or be able to remove themselves entirely from their surroundings and throw themselves into a description of the past without allowing a single allusion, or, so far as we can detect, a single anachronism to escape them, is to credit them first with a power of historic imagination, and next with means of archaeological research, such as have been hardly equalled in the history of the world ; not even in our age, with all the resources of documentary study to help. For it must not be forgotten . that the world of Homer is a real world, not a world of fancy. This is evident in every line. The surroundings among which the heroes move are as vivid and real as the heroes themselves ; and they are as different as possible from the surroundings of poets composing in Ionia. It is not as if we were transported into a mere realm of fairyland, where the poet could imagine and impose upon us such scenery as he thought fit. Wherever we can test the actualities of the poem we find that they are at all events possible, and in many points they coincide in a surprising way with the results which recent discoveries have shown us.