Homer and His Age

We find (Iliad, XVII. 36) that a son, wedding in his father's and mother's life-time, has a thalamos built for him, and a muchos in the THALAMOS, where he leaves his wife when he goes to war. This dwelling of grown-up married children, as in the case of the sons of Priam, has a thalamos, or doma, and a courtyard – is a house, in fact (Iliad, VI. 3 16). Here we seem to distinguish the bed-chamber from the doma, which is the hall. Noack objects that when Odysseus fumigates his house, after slaying the Wooers, he thus treats the megaron, AND the doma, AND the courtyard. Therefore, Noack argues, the megaron, or hall, is one thing; the doma is another. Mr. Monro writes, "doma usually means megaron," and he supposes a slip from another reading, thalamon for megaron, which is not satisfactory. But if doma here be not equivalent to megaron, what room can it possibly be? Who was killed in another place? what place therefore needed purification except the hall and courtyard? No other places needed purifying; there is therefore clearly a defect in the lines which cannot be used in the argument.

Noack, in any case, maintains that Paris has but one place to live in by day and to sleep in by night – his {Greek: talamos}. There he sleeps, eats, and polishes his weapons and armour. There Hector finds him looking to his gear; Helen and the maids are all there (Iliad, VI. 321-323). Is this quite certain? Are Helen and the maids in the {Greek: talamos}, where Paris is polishing his corslet and looking to his bow, or in an adjacent room? If not in another room, why, when Hector is in the room talking to Paris, does Helen ask him to "come in"? (Iliad, VI. 354). He is in, is there another room whence she can hear him?

The minuteness of these inquiries is tedious!

In Iliad, III. 125, Iris finds Helen "in the hall" weaving. She summons her to come to Priam on the gate. Helen dresses in outdoor costume, and goes forth "from the chamber," {Greek: talamos} (III. 141-142). Are hall and chamber the same room, or did not Helen dress "in the chamber"? In the same Book (III. 174) she repents having left the {Greek: talamos} of Menelaus, not his hall: the passage is not a repetition in words of her speech in the Odyssey.

The gods, of course, are lodged like men. When we find that Zeus has really a separate sleeping chamber, built by Hephaestus, as Odysseus has (Iliad, XIV. 166-167), we are told that this is a late interpolation. Mr. Leaf, who has a high opinion of this scene, "the Beguiling of Zeus," places it in the "second expansions"; he finds no "late Odyssean" elements in the language. In Iliad, I. 608-611, Zeus "departed to his couch"; he seems not to have stayed and slept in the hall.

Here a quaint problem occurs. Of all late things in the Odyssey the latest is said to be the song of Demodocus about the loves of Ares and Aphrodite in the house of Hephaestus. {Footnote: Odyssey, VIII. 266-300.} We shall show that this opinion is far from certainly correct. Hephaestus sets a snare round the bed in his {Greek: talamos} and catches the guilty lovers. Now, was his {Greek: talamos} or bedroom, also his dining-room? If so, the author of the song, though so "late," knows what Noack knows, and what the poets who assign sleeping chambers to wedded folks do not know, namely, that neither married gods nor married men have separate bedrooms. This is plain, for he makes Hephaestus stand at the front door of his house, and shout to the gods to come and see the sinful lovers. {Footnote: Ibid., VI. 304-305} They all come and look on from the front door (Odyssey, VII. 325), which leads into the {Greek: megaron}, the hall. If the lovers are in bed in the hall, then hall and bedroom are all one, and the terribly late poet who made this lay knows it, though the late poets of the Odyssey and Iliad do not.

It would appear that the author of the lay is not "late," as we shall prove in another case.

Noack, then, will not allow man or god to have a separate wedding chamber, nor women, before the late parts of the Odyssey, to have separate quarters, except in the house of Odysseus. Women's chambers do not exist in the Homeric house. {Footnote: Noack, p. 50.} If so, how remote is the true Homeric house from the house of historical Greece!

As for upper chambers, those of the daughter of the house (Iliad, II. 514; XVI. 184), both passages are "late," as we saw (Noack, p.{blank space}). In the Odyssey Penelope both sleeps and works at the shroud in an upper chamber. But the whole arrangement of upper chambers as women's apartments is as late, says Noack, as the time of the poets and "redactors" (whoever they may have been) of the Odyssey, XXI., XXII., XXIII. {Footnote: Noack, p. 68.} At the earliest these Books are said to be of the eighth century B.C. Here the late poets have their innings at last, and do modernise the Homeric house.

To prove the absence of upper rooms in the Iliad we have to abolish II. 514, where Astyoche meets her divine lover in her upper chamber, and XVI. 184, where Polymêlê celebrates her amour with Hermes "in the upper chambers." The places where these two passages occur, Catalogue (Book II.) and the Catalogue of the Myrmidons (Book XVI.) are, indeed, both called "late," but the author of the latter knows the early law of bride-price, which is supposed to be unknown to the authors of "late" passages in the Odyssey (XVI. 190).

Stated briefly, such are the ideas of Noack. They leave us, at least, with permission to hold that the whole of the Epics, except Books XXI., XXII., and XXIII. of the Odyssey, bear, as regards the house, the marks of a distinct peculiar age, coming between the period of Mycenae and Tiryns on one hand and the eighth century B.C. on the other.

This is the point for which we have contended, and this suits our argument very well, though we are sorry to see that Odyssey, Books XXI., XXII., and XXIII., are no older than the eighth century B.C. But we have not been quite convinced that Helen had not her separate chamber, that Zeus had not his separate chamber, and that the upper chambers of the daughters of the house in the Iliad are "late." Where, if not in upper chambers, did the young princesses repose? Again, the marked separation of the women in the house of Odysseus may be the result of Penelope's care in unusual circumstances, though she certainly would not build a separate hall for them. There are over a hundred handsome young scoundrels in her house all day long and deep into the night; she would, vainly, do her best to keep her girls apart.

It stands to reason that young girls of princely families would have bedrooms in the house, not in the courtyard-bedrooms out of the way of enterprising young men. What safer place could be found for them than in upper chambers, as in the Iliad? But, if their lovers were gods, we know that none "can see a god coming or going against his will." The arrangements of houses may and do vary in different cases in the same age.

As examples we turn to the parallel afforded by the Icelandic sagas and their pictures of houses of the eleventh century B.C. The present author long ago pointed out the parallel of the houses in the sagas and in Homer. {Footnote: The House. Butcher and Lang. Translation of the Odyssey.} He took his facts from Dasent's translation of the Njal Saga (1861, vol. i. pp. xcviii., ciii., with diagrams). As far as he is aware, no critic looked into the matter till Mr. Monro (1901), being apparently unacquainted with Dasent's researches, found similar lore in works by Dr. Valtyr Gudmundsson {Footnote: Monro, Odyssey, vol. ii. pp. 491-495; cf. Gudmundsson, Der Islandske Bottg i Fristats Tiden, 1894; cf. Dasent, Oxford Essays, 1858.} The roof of the hall is supported by four rows of columns, the two inner rows are taller, and between them is the hearth, with seats of honour for the chief guests and the lord. The fire was in a kind of trench down the hall; and in very cold weather, we learn from Dasent, long fires could be lit through the extent of the hall. The chief had a raised seat; the guests sat on benches. The high seats were at the centre; not till later times on the dais, as in a college hall. The tables were relatively small, and, as in Homer, could be removed after a meal. The part of the hall with the dais in later days was partitioned off as a stofa or parlour. In early times cooking was done in the hall.

Dr. Gudmundsson, if I understand him, varies from Dasent in some respects. I quote an abstract of his statement.

"About the year 1000 houses generally consisted of, at least, four rooms; often a fifth was added, the so-called bath-room. The oldest form for houses was that of one long line or row of separate rooms united by wooden or clay corridors or partitions, and each covered with a roof. Later, this was considered unpractical, and they began building some of the houses or rooms behind the others, which facilitated the access from one to another, and diminished the number of outer doors and corridors."

"Towards the latter part of the tenth century the skaal was used as common sleeping-room for the whole family, including servants and serfs; it was fitted up in the same way as the hall. Like this, it was divided in three naves by rows of wooden pillars; the middle floor was lower than that of the two side naves. In these were placed the so-called saet or bed-places, not running the whole length of the {blank space} from gable to gable, but sideways, filling about a third part. Each saet was enclosed by broad, strong planks joined into the pillars, but not nailed on, so they might easily be taken out. These planks, called SATTESTOKKE, could also be turned sideways and used as benches during the day; they were often beautifully carved, and consequently highly valued."

"When settling abroad the people took away with them these planks, and put them up in their new home as a symbol of domestic happiness. The saet was occupied by the servants of the farm as sleeping-rooms; generally it was screened by hangings and low panels, which partitioned it off like huge separate boxes, used as beds."

"All beds were filled with hay or straw; servants and serfs slept on this without any bedclothes, sometimes a sleeping-bag was used, or they covered themselves with deerskins or a mantle. The family had bed-clothes, but only in very wealthy houses were they also provided for the servants. Moveable beds were extremely rare, but are sometimes mentioned. Generally two people slept in each bed."

"In the further end of the skaal, facing the door, opened out one or several small bedrooms, destined for the husband with wife and children, besides other members of the family, including guests of a higher standing. These small dormitories were separated by partitions of planks into bedrooms with one or several beds, and shut away from the outer SKAAL either by a sliding-door in the wall or by an ordinary door shutting with a hasp. Sometimes only a hanging covered the opening."

"In some farms were found underground passages, leading from the master's bedside to an outside house, or even as far as a wood or another sheltered place in the neighbourhood, to enable the inhabitants to save themselves during a night attack. For the same reason each man had his arms suspended over his bed."

"Ildhus or fire-house was the kitchen, often used besides as a sleeping-room when the farms were very small. This was quite abolished after the year 1000."

"Buret was the provision house."

"The bathroom was heated from a stone oven; the stones were heated red-hot and cold water thrown upon them, which developed a quantity of vapour. As the heat and the steam mounted, the people – men and women – crawled up to a shelf under the roof and remained there as in a Turkish bath."

"In large and wealthy houses there was also a women's room, with a fireplace built low down in the middle, as in the hall, where the women used to sit with their handiwork all day. The men were allowed to come in and talk to them, also beggar-women and other vagabonds, who brought them the news from other places. Towards evening and for meals all assembled together in the hall."

On this showing, people did not sleep in cabins partitioned off the dining-hall, but in the skaale; and two similar and similarly situated rooms, one the common dining-hall, the other the common sleeping-hall, have been confused by writers on the sagas. {Footnote: Gudmundsson, p, 14, Note I.} Can there be a similar confusion in the uses of megaron, doma, and domos?

In the Eyrbyggja Saga we have descriptions of the "fire-hall," skáli or eldhús. "The fire-hall was the common sleeping-room in Icelandic homesteads." Guests and strangers slept there; not in the portico, as in Homer. "Here were the lock-beds." There were butteries; one of these was reached by a ladder. The walls were panelled. {Footnote: The Ere Dwellers, p. 145.} Thorgunna had a "berth," apparently partitioned off, in the hall. {Footnote: Ibid., 137-140.} As in Homer the hall was entered from the courtyard, in which were separate rooms for stores and other purposes. In the courtyard also, in the houses of Gunnar of Lithend and Gisli at Hawkdale, and doubtless in other cases, were the dyngfur, or ladies' chambers, their "bowers" (Thalamos, like that of Telemachus in the courtyard), where they sat spinning and gossiping. The dyngja was originally called búr, our "bower"; the ballads say "in bower and hall." In the ballad of MARGARET, her parents are said to put her in the way of deadly sin by building her a bower, apparently separate from the main building; she would have been safer in an upper chamber, though, even there, not safe – at least, if a god wooed her! It does not appear that all houses had these chambers for ladies apart from the main building. You did not enter the main hall in Iceland from the court directly in front, but by the "man's door" at the west side, whence you walked through the porch or outer hall (prodomos, aithonsa), in the centre of which, to the right, were the doors of the hall. The women entered by the women's door, at the eastern extremity.

Guests did not sleep, as in Homer, in the prodomos, or the portico – the climate did not permit it – but in one or other hall. The hall was wainscotted; the walls were hung with shields and weapons, like the hall of Odysseus. The heads of the family usually slept in the aisles, in chambers entered through the wainscot of the hall. Such a chamber might be called muchos; it was private from the hall though under the same roof. It appears not improbable that some Homeric halls had sleeping places of this kind; such a muchos in Iceland seems to have had windows. {Footnote: Story of Burnt Njal, i. 242.} Gunnar himself, however, slept with his wife, Halegerda, in an upper chamber; his mother, who lived with him, also had a room upstairs.

In Njal's house, too, there was an upper chamber, wherein the foes of Njal threw fire. {Footnote:Ibid., ii. 173.} But Njal and Bergthora, his wife, when all hope was ended, went into their own bride-chamber in the separate aisle of the hall "and gave over their souls into God's hand." Under a hide they lay; and when men raised up the hide, after the fire had done its work, "they were unburnt under it. All praised God for that, and thought it was a GREAT token." In this house was a weaving room for the women. {Footnote:Ibid, ii. 195.}

It thus appears that Icelandic houses of the heroic age, as regards structural arrangements, were practically identical with the house of Odysseus, allowing for a separate sleeping-hall, while the differences between that and other Homeric houses may be no more than the differences between various Icelandic dwellings. The parents might sleep in bedchambers off the hall or in upper chambers. Ladies might have bowers in the courtyard or might have none. The {Greek: laurae} – each passage outside the hall – yielded sleeping rooms for servants; and there were store-rooms behind the passage at the top end of the hall, as well as separate chambers for stores in the courtyard. Mr. Leaf judiciously reconstructs the Homeric house in its "public rooms," of which we hear most, while he leaves the residential portion with "details and limits probably very variable." {Footnote: Iliad, vol. i. pp. 586-589, with diagram based on the palace of Tiryns.}

Given variability, which is natural and to be expected, and given the absence of detail about the "residential portion" of other houses than that of Odysseus in the poems, it does not seem to us that this house is conspicuously "late," still less that it is the house of historical Greece. Manifestly, in all respects it more resembles the houses of Njal and Gunnar of Lithend in the heroic age of Iceland.

In the house, as in the uses of iron and bronze, the weapons, armour, relations of the sexes, customary laws, and everything else, Homer gives us an harmonious picture of a single and peculiar age. We find no stronger mark of change than in the Odyssean house, if that be changed, which we show reason to doubt.

CHAPTER XI

NOTES OF CHANGE IN THE "ODYSSEY"

If the Homeric descriptions of details of life contain anachronisms, points of detail inserted in later progressive ages, these must be peculiarly conspicuous in the Odyssey. Longinus regarded it as the work of Homer's advanced life, the sunset of his genius, and nobody denies that it assumes the existence of the Iliad and is posterior to that epic. In the Odyssey, then, we are to look, if anywhere, for indications of a changed society. That the language of the Odyssey, and of four Books of the Iliad (IX., X., XXIII., XXIV.), exhibits signs of change is a critical commonplace, but the language is matter for a separate discussion; we are here concerned with the ideas, manners, customary laws, weapons, implements, and so forth of the Epics.

Taking as a text Mr. Monro's essay, The Relation of the Odyssey to the Iliad, {Footnote: Monro, Odyssey, vol. ii. pp. 324, seqq.} we examine the notes of difference which he finds between the twin Epics. As to the passages in which he discovers "borrowing or close imitation of passages" in the Iliad by the poet of the Odyssey, we shall not dwell on the matter, because we know so little about the laws regulating the repetition of epic formulae. It is tempting, indeed, to criticise Mr. Monro's list of twenty-four Odyssean "borrowings," and we might arrive at some curious results. For example, we could show that the Klôthes, the spinning women who "spae" the fate of each new-born child, are not later, but, as less abstract, are if anything earlier than "the simple Aisa of the Iliad." {Footnote: Odyssey, VII. 197; Iliad, xx. 127.} But our proof would require an excursion into the beliefs of savage and barbaric peoples who have their Klôthes, spae-women attending each birth, but who are not known to have developed the idea of Aisa or Fate.

We might also urge that "to send a spear through the back of a stag" is not, as Mr. Monro thought, "an improbable feat," and that a man wounded to death as Leiocritus was wounded, would not, as Mr. Monro argued, fall backwards. He supposes that the poet of the Odyssey borrowed the forward fall from a passage in the Iliad, where the fall is in keeping. But, to make good our proof, it might be necessary to spear a human being in the same way as Leiocritus was speared. {Footnote: Monro, odyssey, vol. ii. pp. 239, 230.}

The repetitions of the Epic, at all events, are not the result of the weakness of a poet who had to steal his expressions like a schoolboy. They have some other cause than the indolence or inefficiency of a cento– making undergraduate. Indeed, a poet who used the many terms in the Odyssey which do not occur in the Iliad was not constrained to borrow from any predecessor.

It is needless to dwell on the Odyssean novelties in vocabulary, which were naturally employed by a poet who had to sing of peace, not of war, and whose epic, as Aristotle says, is "ethical," not military. The poet's rich vocabulary is appropriate to his novel subject, that is all.

Coming to Religion (I) we find Mr. Leaf assigning to his original Achilleis– "the kernel" – the very same religious ideas as Mr. Monro takes to be marks of "lateness" and of advance when he finds them in the Odyssey!

In the original oldest part of the Iliad, says Mr. Leaf, "the gods show themselves just so much as to let us know what are the powers which control mankind from heaven… Their interference is such as becomes the rulers of the world, not partisans in the battle." {Footnote: Leaf, Iliad, vol. ii. pp. xii., xiii.} It is the later poets of the Iliad, in Mr. Leaf's view, who introduce the meddlesome, undignified, and extremely unsportsmanlike gods. The original early poet of the Iliad had the nobler religious conceptions.

In that case – the Odyssey being later than the original kernel of the Iliad – the Odyssey ought to give us gods as undignified and unworthy as those exhibited by the later continuators of the Iliad.

But the reverse is the case. The gods behave fairly well in Book XXIV. of the Iliad, which, we are to believe, is the latest, or nearly the latest, portion. They are all wroth with the abominable behaviour of Achilles to dead Hector (XXIV. 134). They console and protect Priam. As for the Odyssey, Mr. Monro finds that in this late Epic the gods are just what Mr. Leaf proclaims them to have been in his old original kernel. "There is now an Olympian concert that carries on something like a moral government of the world. It is very different in the Iliad…" {Footnote: Monro, Odyssey, ii. 335.}

But it was not very different; it was just the same, in Mr. Leaf's genuine old original germ of the Iliad. In fact, the gods are "very much like you and me." When their ichor is up, they misbehave as we do when our blood is up, during the fury of war. When Hector is dead and when the war is over, the gods give play to their higher nature, as men do. There is no difference of religious conception to sever the Odyssey from the later but not from the original parts of the Iliad. It is all an affair of the circumstances in each case.

The Odyssey is calmer, more reflective, more religious than the Iliad, being a poem of peace. The Iliad, a poem of war, is more mythological than the Odyssey: the gods in the Iliad are excited, like the men, by the great war and behave accordingly. That neither gods nor men show any real sense of the moral weakness of Agamemnon or Achilles, or of the moral superiority of Hector, is an unacceptable statement. {Footnote: Monro, Odyssey, vol. ii. p. 336.} Even Achilles and Agamemnon are judged by men and by the poet according to their own standard of ethics and of customary law. There is really no doubt on this point. Too much (2) is made of the supposed different views of Olympus – a mountain in Thessaly in the Iliad; a snowless, windless, supra-mundane place in Odyssey, V. 41-47. {Footnote: Ibid., ii. 396.} Of the Odyssean passage Mr. Merry justly says, "the actual description is not irreconcilable with the general Homeric picture of Olympus." It is "an idealised mountain," and conceptions of it vary, with the variations which are essential to and inseparable from all mythological ideas. As Mr. Leaf says, {Footnote: Note to Iliad, V. 750.} "heaven, ouranos and Olympus, if not identical, are at least closely connected." In V. 753, the poet "regarded the summit of Olympus as a half-way stage between heaven and earth," thus "departing from the oldest Homeric tradition, which made the earthly mountain Olympus, and not any aerial region, the dwelling of the gods." But precisely the same confusion of mythical ideas occurs among a people so backward as the Australian south-eastern tribes, whose All Father is now seated on a hill-top and now "above the sky." In ILIAD, VIII. 25, 26, the poet is again said to have "entirely lost the real Epic conception of Olympus as a mountain in Thessaly," and to "follow the later conception, which removed it from earth to heaven." In Iliad, XI. 184, "from heaven" means "from the summit of Olympus, which, though Homer does not identify it with oupavos, still, as a mountain, reached into heaven" (Leaf). The poet of Iliad, XI. 184, says plainly that Zeus descended "from heaven" to Mount Ida. In fact, all that is said of Olympus, of heaven, of the home of the gods, is poetical, is mythical, and so is necessarily subject to the variations of conception inseparable from mythology. This is certain if there be any certainty in mythological science, and here no hard and fast line can be drawn between ODYSSEY and Iliad.