Studies on Homer and the Homeric Age, Vol. 3 of 3

Compelled, however, to set off the imposing exterior of this prince, if only for the purpose of heightening the contrast with his cowardice in action, he introduces him flourishing his pair of spears at the commencement of the Third Iliad; and what is more, when he again goes forth in his newly burnished arms at the close of the Sixth, bestows upon him one of the very noblest of his similes, that of the stall-kept horse, high fed and sleek in coat, who having broken away from his manger rushes neighing over the plain750.

It was necessary, in order to make up the true portrait of Paris, that his exterior should be thus splendid, and his movements imposing; and it was also a part of the subtle plan, by which Homer made use of words and appearances to bring up the Trojan chieftains and people to some kind of level with the Greek. Yet there is something singular in the fact that Homer, who does not, I think, repeat his similes in any other remarkable case, reproduces the whole of this splendid passage in the Fifteenth Iliad for Hector751. There is here, we may rely upon it, some peculiar meaning. Possibly he grudged the exclusive appropriation of so splendid a passage to so despicable a person. There is also another singularity in his mode of proceeding. The simile is given to Hector without addition, and the poem proceeds

ὣς Ἕκτωρ λαιψηρὰ πόδας καὶ γούνατ’ ἐνώμα.

But where he applies it to Paris, immediately after the conclusion of the noble passage he subjoins (Il. vi. 512.),

ὣς υἱὸς Πριάμοιο Πάρις κατὰ Περγάμου ἄκρηςτεύχεσι παμφαίνων, ὥστ’ ἠλέκτωρ, ἐβεβήκει.

What is the meaning of ἠλέκτωρ? It is commonly taken as equivalent to ἠλέκτωρ Ύπερίων, which means the Sun. I cannot but believe that Homer means by it to signify the cock, called in Greek ἀλέκτωρ. The ἠλέκτωρ Ύπερίων, is used as a simile for Achilles; and it would be much against the manner of Homer to use the same simile for a Trojan, and that Trojan Paris. Whereas by the strut of the cock he may mean to reduce and modify the effect of the noble figure of the stall-horse.

Beauty of the Greek chiefs and nation.

Achilles, who is not only the bravest but by far the most powerful man of the host, is also by far the most beautiful; and the very strongest terms are used to describe the impression which his appearance produced on Priam amidst the profoundest sorrow752;

θαύμαζ’ Ἀχιλῆα,ὅσσος ἔην, οἷός τε· θεοῖσι γὰρ ἄντα ἐῴκει.

It may be doubted, whether any other Poet would have ventured to combine the highest and most delicate beauty, with a strength and size approaching the superhuman. It was requisite for Achilles, as the ideal man, not only to want no great human gift, but also to have in unmatched degrees whatever gifts he possessed. The beauty of Achilles is the true counterpart to the ugliness and deformity of Thersites.

It appertains to the character of Ulysses, who comes next to Achilles, that he too should not be wanting in any thing that pertains to the excellence of human nature; while completeness and manifoldness is the specific character of his endowments, as unparalleled splendour is of those possessed by Achilles. Ulysses753, therefore, is also beautiful. Again, the office and function of Agamemnon require him to be an object capable of attracting admiration and reverence. He, accordingly, is of remarkable beauty, but of the kind of beauty that has in it most of dignity754;

καλὸν δ’ οὕτω ἐγὼν οὔπω ἴδον ὀφθαλμοῖσιν,οὐδ’ οὕτω γεραρόν.

Homer never absolutely withholds beauty from any of his Greek heroes, yet he does not always expressly state that they possessed it. This endowment is, for instance, never given to Diomed, but it is ascribed to Ajax in the Eleventh Odyssey755;

ὃς ἄριστος ἔην εἶδός τε, δέμας τε,τῶν ἄλλων Δαναῶν, μετ’ ἀμύμονα Πηλείωνα.

It is probably because Diomed equals Ajax in chivalry, and very far excels him in mental gifts, that Homer has thrown weight into the scale of Ajax by assigning to him expressly, while he is silent about Diomed, the gift of a beautiful person.

As with individuals, so does Homer deal with masses. It may be observed that he has a lower class of epithets for the Trojans than the Greeks, and never allows them the benefit of the same national designations. Individual beauty in men is confined on both sides to the higher ranks; but no Trojan, however beautiful, is ever honoured with the title of ξανθός. Again, while he never gives to the Trojans as a body any epithet which describes them as possessed of beauty, he has assigned several expressions of this order to the Greek race. Such are the epithets καρηκομόωντες and ἑλίκωπες, and the phrase εἶδος ἀγητοὶ, (Il. v. 787. viii. 228.)

Beauty of Nireus and others.

We have yet to examine how far Homer makes beauty a title to distinguished notice on behalf of those who have no other claim. The passage in the Catalogue, where Nireus is named756, is highly curious with reference to this part of the subject. It is as follows:

Νιρεὺς αὖ Σύμηθεν ἄγε τρεῖς νῆας ἐΐσας,Νιρεὺς, Ἀγλαΐης υἱὸς Χαρόποιό τ’ ἄνακτος,Νιρεὺς, ὃς κάλλιστος ἀνὴρ ὑπὸ Ἴλιον ἦλθεντῶν ἄλλων Δαναῶν, μετ’ ἀμύμονα Πηλείωνα·ἀλλ’ ἀλαπαδνὸς ἔην, παῦρος δέ οἱ εἵπετο λαός.

These five lines form the largest of the merely personal descriptions contained in the Catalogue. Yet they are given to a man, of whom we are frankly told that he was a poor creature, and that he had but a small following. Even this does not show the whole strength of the case.

1. His ships were only three: no other commander, having so few, is named at all. The next smallest number is seven: these were the vessels of Philoctetes, and they seem to be named on account of his peculiar history and great merit.

2. This is the only instance, in which the contingent supplied by a single and wholly insignificant place is named by itself.

3. This is also one among very few cases of an ordinary birth, where the mother (Aglaïe) is named as well as the father (Charopos): the others are usually cases of reputed descent from deities or heroes.

4. The names given to both parents are taken from their personal beauty. They thus enhance the title of the son; and, as we cannot well suppose them connected with history, they were probably invented by the Poet for that purpose.

5. The repetition of the name of Nireus thrice, and in each case at the beginning of the verse, the most prominent and emphatic part of it according to the genius of the Greek hexameter, is plainly intentional.

6. All this care is taken in the most ingenious manner to mark a man, who did nothing to enable Homer to name him in any other part of the Iliad.

One and one only key is to be found, which will lay open the cause of these singular provisions: it is Homer’s intense love of beauty, which made it in his eyes of itself a title to celebrity. So he determined, apparently, that the paragon of form should be immortal; and he has given effect to his determination, for no reader of the Iliad can pass by the place without remembering Nireus.

In a less marked manner, he has given a kindred emphasis to the case of Nastes, who wore golden ornaments, and therefore was presumably of strikingly handsome person. With his brother Amphimachus he commanded the Carians, and his name is mentioned thrice (but that of his brother twice only), together with the fact that he wore gold like a girl757.

There is something, as it appears to me, most tender and refined, in this mode used by Homer of fastening attention through repetition of the word, which he wishes gently but firmly to stamp upon the memory. We have another instance of it in Il. xxii. 127,

ἅτε παρθένος ἠΐθεός τε,παρθένος ἠΐθεός τ’ ὀαρίζετον ἀλλήλοιϊν.

There is yet another passage which affords a striking proof of what may be called the worship of beauty in Homer. In the Seventeenth Iliad, Euphorbus, the son of Panthoos, falls by the hand of Menelaus. Homer gives him great credit for charioteering, the use of the spear, and other accomplishments; but he performs no other feat in the poem than that of wounding in the back the disarmed, and astounded, and heaven-deserted Patroclus. At best, we must call him a very secondary personage. Though his personal comeliness was not defaced like that of Paris by cowardice or vice, still he was of the same race that in Italy has taken its name from Zerbino. Yet Homer adorns his death with a notice, perhaps more conspicuous than any which he has attached to the death of any warriors of the Iliad, with the exceptions of Hector, Sarpedon, and Patroclus. Ten of the most beautiful lines of the poem are bestowed in lamenting him, chiefly by an unsurpassed simile, which compares the youth to a tender olive shoot, the victim, when its blossoms are overcharged with moisture, of a sudden hurricane. The Poet was moved to this tenderness by the remembrance of his beauty, of his hair, like the hair of the Graces, in its tresses bound with golden and silver clasps758.

Beauty placed among the prime gifts.

Although it is true that Homer eschews with respect to beauty, as well as in other matters, the didactic mode of conveying his impressions, yet he has placed them distinctly on record in the answer of Ulysses to Euryalus. Speaking not at all of women, but of men, he places the gift of personal beauty among the prime endowments that can be received from the providence of the gods, in a rank to which only two other gifts are admitted, namely, the power of thought (νόος or φρένες), and the power of speech (ἀγορητύς). In the idea of personal beauty, conveyed under the names εἶδος, μορφὴ, and χάρις, evidently included vigour and power, for it is to his supposed incapacity for athletic exercises759, that the discourse has reference. Nor can it be said, that this full and large appreciation by Homer of the value of bodily excellence, was simply a worldly or a pagan, as opposed to a Christian, view.

It is not true, on the one hand, that when we cease to entertain sufficiently elevated views of the destiny and prerogatives of the soul, our standard for the body rises either in proportion or at all. Nor is it true, on the other, that when we think highly of the soul, we ought in consequence to think meanly of the body, which is both its tabernacle and its helpmate. In truth, a somewhat sickly cast seems to have come over our tone of thought now for some generations back, the product, perhaps, in part of careless or emasculated teaching in the highest matters, and due also in part to the overcrowding of the several functions of our life. But Homer distinctly realized to himself what we know faintly or scarce at all, though nothing is more emphatically or conspicuously taught by our religion, namely, that the body is part and parcel of the integer denominated man.

But the quality of measure ran in rare proportion through all the conceptions of the Poet. Stature was a great element of beauty in the view of the ancients for women as well as for men: and their admiration of tallness, even in women, is hardly restrained by a limit. But Homer, who frequently touches the point, has provided a limit. Among the Læstrygonians, the women are of enormous size. Two of the crew of Ulysses, sent forward to make inquiries, are introduced to the queen. They find her ‘as big as a mountain,’ and are disgusted at her760:

τὴν δὲ γυναῖκαεὗρον ὅσην τ’ ὄρεος κορυφὴν, κατὰ δ’ ἔστυγον αὐτήν.

The large humanity of Homer is also manifested, among other signs, by his sympathy with high qualities in the animal creation. There is no passage of deeper pathos in all his works, not Andromache with her child, not Priam before Achilles, than that which recounts the death of the dog Argus761. The words too are so calm and still, they seem to grow faint and fainter, each foot of the verse falls as if it were counting out the last respirations, and, in effect, we witness that last slight and scarcely fluttering breath, with which life is yielded up:

Ἄργον δ’ αὖ κατὰ Μοῖρ’ ἔλαβεν μέλανος θανάτοιο,αὐτίκ’ ἰδόντ’ Ὀδυσῆα, ἐεικοστῷ ἐνιαυτῷ.

We may also trace the same sympathy in minor forms. As, for instance, where he says Telemachus went to the Ithacan assembly not unattended762:

βῆ ῥ’ ἴμεν εἰς ἀγορὴν, παλάμῃ δ’ ἔχε χάλκεον ἔγχος,οὐκ οἶος.

We are certainly prepared to hear that some adviser, either divine or at the least human, some friend or faithful servant, was by his side: but no – it is simply that some dogs went with him:

ἅμα τῷγε κύνες πόδας ἀργοὶ ἕποντο.

There is no sign, however, that Homer attached the peculiar idea of beauty to the race of dogs in any remarkable degree. Indeed, it is only in certain breeds that the dog can be called by comparison a beautiful animal. What he always commends is their swiftness; and Homer’s ideas of beauty were nowhere more lively than in regard to motion. But we see the Poet’s feeling for form much more characteristically displayed in the case to which we shall now proceed.

Beauty in animals, especially horses.

Among other inferences which the poems raise in respect to Homer himself, it can hardly be doubted that he was a great lover of horses, and felt their beauty, partially in colour, much more in form, and in movement most of all.

This was quite in keeping with the habits of his country and his race. Both the Trojans and the Greeks appear not only to have employed horses in such uses as war, journeys, races, and agricultural labour, but to have given attention to developing the breeds and points of the animal. In his Catalogue, Homer, at the close, invokes the Muse to inform him which were the best of the horses, as well as of the heroes, on the Greek side. He constantly uses epithets both for Trojans and Greeks connected with their successful care and training of the animal: εὔιππος, εὔπωλος, ταχύπωλος, ἱππόδαμος.

He not only treasures the traditions connected with the animal, but treats them as a part of history. Accordingly, when Diomed desires Sthenelus to make sure of the horses of Æneas he carefully proceeds to state, that it is because their sires were of the race that Jupiter gave to Tros. To them Anchises, without the knowledge of their owner Laomedon, brought his own mares, and so obtained a progeny of six: of whom he kept four himself, and gave two to his son Æneas (Il. v. 265-73) that he might take them to Troy.

Nay he goes back further yet: where, except in Homer, should we find a tradition like that of the mares of Erichthonius, fetched from a time five generations before his subject? Their children had Boreas for their sire. Three thousand mothers ranged over the plains of the Troad, and made their lord the wealthiest of men. So light was their footstep, that if they skimmed the sea it touched the tips only of the curling foam; and if they raced over the cornfield, the ripe ears sustained their tread without one being broken763.

As to movement, form, and colour.

In other places Homer describes with no less of sympathetic emotion the vivid and fiery movements of the animal. The most remarkable of all is the noble simile of the stall-kept horse, whom every reader seems to see as with proud head and flowing mane, when he feels his liberty, he scours the boundless pastures.

That adaptation, or effort at adaptation, of sound to sense, which with poets in general (always excepting especially Dante and Shakespeare,) is a sign that they have applied their whole force to careful elaboration, is with Homer only a proof of a fuller and deeper flow of his sympathies: wherever we find it, we may be sure that his whole heart is in the passage. In this very simile how admirable is the transition from the fine stationary verse that describes the charger’s customary bathe,

εἰωθὼς λούεσθαι ἐϋρρεῖος ποταμοῖο,

to his rapid and easy bounding over the plain, when every dactyl marks a spring764;

ῥίμφα ἑ γοῦνα φέρει μετά τ’ ἤθεα καὶ νόμον ἵππων.

For this adaptation of metre to sense in connection with the movement of horses, we may take another example. To describe Agamemnon dealing destruction among the routed Trojans on foot, we have a line and a half of somewhat accelerated but by no means very rapid movement765;

ὣς ἄρ’ ὑπ’ Ἀτρείδῃ Ἀγαμέμνονι πῖπτε κάρηναΤρώων φευγόντων.

But when he comes to the Trojan horses in their flight, we have two lines, dactylic to the utmost extent that the metre will allow, except in one half-foot;

πολλοὶ δ’ ἐριαύχενες ἵπποικείν’ ὄχεα κροτάλιζον ἀνὰ πτολέμοιο γεφύρας,ἡνιόχους ποθέοντες ἀμύμονας.

Then, coming back to the dead charioteers, he visibly slackens again;

οἱ δ’ ἐπὶ γαίῃκείατο, γύπεσσιν πολὺ φίλτεροι ἢ ἀλόχοισιν.

To exhibit numerically the relative distribution of times in these members of the sentence, we have these three very different proportions;

In the first, 13 long syllables to 8 short.

In the second, 16 long syllables to 22 short.

In the third, 11 long syllables to 10 short.

He has imparted much of the same glowing movement to the speech, which in the Nineteenth Iliad is assigned to the Immortal horses of Achilles; though the subject includes a reference to the death of their master766. In nearly every line, throughout the passage, that relates to their own motion, the number of dactyls is at the maximum, and in the ten lines there are eighty-six short syllables to sixty long ones; a proportion, which I doubt our finding elsewhere in Homer, except it be among the similes, to which Homer seems in many cases to give a peculiarly elastic prosodial movement.

Rhesus, king of the Thracians, who arrives at Troy after the commencement of the Wrath, becomes sufficiently distinguished for the central point of interest in the Doloneia, by virtue chiefly of his horses. They are the most beautiful, says Dolon, and the largest that I have ever seen767;

λευκότεροι χιόνος, θείειν δ’ ἀνέμοισιν ὁμοῖοι.

The justice of this panegyric is corroborated by the emphatic expression of Nestor, who pronounces them, and their unparalleled excellence forms the subject of the speech of the old king, on the return of Ulysses and Diomed to the camp768.

αἰνῶς ἀκτίνεσσιν ἐοικότες ἠελίοιο·

It is not only, however, in elaborate pictures that Homer shows his feeling for horses, but also, and not less markedly, in minor touches. Does he not speak with the manifest feeling of a skilled admirer of the animal, when he describes the pair driven by Eumelus, rapid as birds, the same in shade of colour, the same in years, the same to a hair’s breadth in height across their backs769?

ποδώκεας, ὄρνιθας ὣς,ὄτριχας, οἰέτεας, σταφύλῃ ἐπὶ νῶτον ἐΐσας.

Again, we are met by the same feeling which, in a bolder flight, made the horses of Rhesus weep, when Pandarus falls headlong from the chariot of Æneas, and his arms rattle over him in death. The horses, instead of plunging or starting off, with a finer feeling tremble by the corpse770;

παρέτρεσσαν δέ οἱ ἵπποιὠκύποδες.

We may trace the same disposition, under a lighter and more amusing form, in what had already passed between Æneas and Pandarus. Pandarus had excused himself for not having brought a chariot and horses to Troy, on account of his fears about finding forage for them where such crowds were to be gathered into a small space; at the same time describing, rather boastfully, his father Lycaon’s eleven carriages with a pair for each. (Il. v. 192-203.) Æneas replies by inviting him into his chariot when he will see what Trojan horses are like. Then, he continues, do you fight, and I will drive; or, as you may choose, do you drive, and I will fight. Pandarus immediately replies, that Æneas had better by all means be the driver of his own horses.

Then again, Homer will have the utmost care taken of them; and, so to speak, he looks to it himself. When he describes them as unemployed, he specifies their food; those of Achilles during the Wrath stand771,

λωτὸν ἐρεπτόμενοι ἐλεόθρεπτόν τε σέλινον.

But those of Lycaon, which had remained at home, were772

κρῖ λευκὸν ἐρεπτόμενοι καὶ ὀλύρας.

To each he gives the appropriate provender: to the former, in an encampment, what the grassy marsh by its side afforded: to the latter, in a king’s palace, the grain, or hard food, of their proper home.

And so in the night-adventure of the Tenth Book, when Ulysses drags away the bodies of those Thracians whom Diomed has slain, it is to make a clear path for the horses of Rhesus which were to be carried off, that they may not take fright from treading on corpses773;

νεκροῖς ἀμβαίνοντες· ἀήθεσσον γὰρ ἔτ’ αὐτῶν.

Throughout the chariot-race, in the Twenty-third Book, we find them uppermost in the Poet’s mind, though the drivers, being his prime heroes, are not wholly forgotten.

Even as to colour, of which Homer’s perceptions appear to have been so vague, it may be remarked, that he employs it somewhat more freely with reference to horses, than to other objects having definite form or powers of locomotion.

But his liveliest conceptions of them are with respect to motion, form, and feelings: and I suppose there is no poem like the Iliad for characteristic touches in respect to any of the three.

Beauty in inanimate nature.

It has been much debated whether the ancients generally, and whether Homer in particular, had any distinct idea of beauty in landscape.

It may be admitted, even in respect to Homer, that his similes, to which one would naturally look for proof, less commonly refer to the eye than to other faculties. They commonly turn upon sound, motion, force, or multitude: rarely, in comparison, upon colour, or even upon form; still more rarely upon colour or form in such combinations as to constitute what we call the picturesque.

It seems to me, that we may draw the best materials of a demonstration in this case from comparing his descriptions of the form of scenery by means of the outlines of countries, with his use of other epithets which he employs to denote beauty.

The country of Lacedæmon was mountainous, and it is hence termed by Homer in the Odyssey and in the Catalogue, κοιλή. (Il. ii. 581, Od. iv. 1.)

But it is also termed by him ἐρατεινὴ (Il. iii. 239), and this, it may be observed, in a speech of Helen’s; to whom, while she was at Troy, the image of it in memory could hardly, perhaps, be agreeable from any moral association. We are, therefore, led to refer it to the physical conformation or beauty of the district.

Next, we have pretty clear proof that in Homer’s mind the epithet ἐρατεινὴ was one proper to describe beauty in the strictest sense. For he says of Helen, with regard to her daughter Hermione774:

ἐγείνατο παῖδ’ ἐρατεινὴν,Ἑρμιόνην, ἣ εἶδος ἔχε χρυσῆς Ἀφροδίτης.

‘She had a lovely (ἐρατεινὴν) daughter, endowed with the beauty of golden Aphrodite.’ And I observe but few passages in Homer, perhaps only one (Od. xxiii. 300), when ἐρατεινὸς does not naturally and properly bear this sense. A sense etymologically analogous to our own use of the word lovely, which we employ to indicate not only beauty, but a high degree of it.

It therefore appears to be clear that Homer called Lacedæmon ἐρατεινὴ, because it was shaped in mountain and valley, and because countries so formed present a beautiful appearance to the eye, as compared with countries of other forms less marked. It is applied to Emathia (Il. xiv. 225) and to Scheria (Od. vii. 79), both mountainous; to the city Ilios, (Il. v. 210), which stood on ground high and partially abrupt near the roots of Ida; and I do not find it in any place of the poems associated with flat lands.

The other instance which I shall cite seems to present the argument in a complete form, within the compass of a single line.

When describing Ithaca in the Odyssey, Telemachus says it is775,

αἰγίβοτος, καὶ μᾶλλον ἐπήρατος ἱπποβότοιο.

Here we may assume that by αἰγίβοτος, goat-feeding, he means mountainous, and even sharp and rocky; moreover consequently, in comparison, barren, so that it could not be agreeable in the sense of being profitable. On the other hand, the horse is an animal ill-suited to range among rocks; and by ἱππόβοτος Homer always means a district or country sufficiently open and plain to be suitable for feeding horses in numbers. Now, in saying that Arran is more ἐπήρατος than southern Lancashire, we should leave no doubt upon the mind of any reader as to the meaning; which must surely be that it offers more beauty to the eye. Just such a comparison does Homer make of the scenery of Ithaca as it was with what it would have been, if the island had been flat.

I ought however to notice the very forced interpretation of Damm, which is this: μᾶλλον ἐπήρατος, sc. ἐμοὶ, nam est patria mea; et ad μᾶλλον subintelligit τοῦ σοῦ Ἄργεος φίλη μοι ἔστι.