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

Homer was better versed in the art of wedding words to thought, than such an interpretation supposes. For, according to it, the thought of Homer was this; ‘Though you rule over broad and open Argos, my mountainous Ithaca is dearer to me, because it is my country.’ So that he has left out the point of the sentence, without the faintest trace to guide his reader. The idea of the sentence, which is prolonged through many verses, turns entirely on the difference between an open and a steep rocky country as such, and not in the least on native attachments. And Telemachus, who is lauding the richness and fertility of Argos, and apologizing for the barrenness of Ithaca, not ungracefully, in passing, throws in, by way of compensation, the element of beauty, as one possessed by Ithaca, and as one which it must miss if it were flat.

Indeed, we here trace the usual refinement of Homer in this, that Telemachus does not say, True, your Argos is rich, but my Ithaca is picturesque: but, after commending the fertility of broad Argos, he says, ‘In Ithaca we have no broad runs776, and nothing like a meadow: it will feed nothing but goats, yet it is more picturesque than if it, a little speck of that kind, were flat and open.’

The word ἐπήρατος is less frequently used in Homer than ἐρατεινός; but we have it in six places besides this. There is only one of them where it is capable of meaning dear, in connection with the idea of country777. In another it means enjoyable or splendid, being applied to the banquet778. In the other places it is applied to a town on the Shield, a cavern in Ithaca (twice), and the garments put upon Venus in Cyprus; and in those four places it can only mean fair or beautiful.

We are not, then, justified in limiting Homer’s sense of natural beauty to what was associated with utility779. On the contrary, it appears plainly to extend to beauty proper, and even to that kind of beauty in nature which we of the present day most love.

I have dealt thus far with the most doubtful part of the question, and have ventured to dissent from Mr. Ruskin, whose authority I admit, and of whose superior insight, as well as of his extraordinary powers of expression, I am fully conscious.

Germ of feeling for the picturesque.

Mr. Ruskin thinks780 that ‘Homer has no trace of feeling for what we call the picturesque’; that Telemachus apologizes for the scenery of Ithaca; and that rocks are never loved but as caves. I think that the expressions I have produced from the text show that these propositions cannot be sustained. At the same time I admit that the feeling with Homer is one in the bud only: as, indeed, until within a very few generations, it has lain undeveloped among ourselves. Homer may have been the father of this sentiment for his nation, as he was of so much besides. But the plant did not grow up kindly among those who followed him.

I assent entirely, on the other hand, to what Mr. Ruskin has said respecting his sense of orderly beauty in common nature. The garden of Alcinous is truly Dutch in its quadrangular conceptions; but it is plain that the Poet means us to regard it as truly beautiful781. Symmetry, serenity, regularity, adopted from the forms of living beauty which were before him, enter largely into Homer’s conceptions of one form, at least, of inanimate beauty.

The scenery of the cave of Calypso782 is less restrained in its cast, than is the garden in Scheria; but even here Homer introduces four fountains, which compose a regular figure, and are evidently meant to supply an element of form which was required by the fashionable standard.

Another element of landscape, as we understand it, is, that the natural objects which it represents should be in rather extensive combination; and our established traditions would also require that the view of them should be modified by the rendering of the atmosphere, especially with reference to the scale of distances.

It is very difficult to find instances of extended landscape in Homer. But I think that we have at least one, in the famed simile, where he compares the Trojan watchfires on the plain to the calm night, which by the light of moon and stars exhibits a breadth of prospect to the rejoicing shepherd’s eye. Here are certainly tranquillity and order; but with them we seem also to have both extent and atmosphere; to which even bold and even broken outline must be added by those who, like myself, are not prepared to surrender to the destroying ὄβελος the line783

ἔκ τ’ ἔφανεν πᾶσαι σκοπιαὶ, καὶ πρώονες ἄκροι.

Upon the whole, considering Homer’s early date, and the very late development among the moderns of a taste for scenery of the picturesque and romantic order, I do not know that we are entitled even at first sight to challenge him as inferior to any modern of analogous date in this province. Yet we may fairly pronounce that he is inferior to himself; that is to say, he appears to have a sense of beauty, in the region of inanimate nature, certainly less keen in proportion than that, with which he looked upon the animated creation.

What is deficient in him with respect to landscape may however, in all likelihood, be more justly referred to positive than to negative causes.

Causes adverse to a more developed feeling.

It may be questioned whether the disposition to appreciate still nature, especially in large and elaborated combinations, may not in part depend upon conditions that were not to be found in the age of Homer. I should say, if the expression may be allowed, that we of this generation take landscape medicinally. Human life grows with the course of ages; and, especially in our age, it has grown to be excited and hurried. But nature has a reacting tendency towards repose; and, even in the case of the grosser stimulants, it seems to be their soothing power which most helps to recommend them. Besides the fact, however, that we have wants which the Greeks had not, this subject may be regarded in a broader view.

The mind of Homer and the mind of his age were not addicted even to contemplation, far less to introspection. Of ideas properly subjective there are very few indeed to be found in the poems. We have one such furnished by the passage where he equates thought to a wing, in a simile for the swift ships of the Phæacians,

ὡσεὶ πτέρον ἠὲ νόημα.

And another, the most remarkable that he supplies, when in more detail he uses the motion of a thought for an illustration of the rapid flight of Juno784.

Even when it became speculative, the Greek mind did not give a subjective turn to its speculations. It was probably Christianity which, by the stimulus it applied to the general conscience, first gave mankind the introspective habit on a large scale; and mixed causes may often render the tendency excessive and morbid. But the tendency of the heroic age, standing at its maximum in Homer, was to pour life outward, nay almost to force it into every thing. The fountain from within overflowed; and its surplus went to make inanimate nature breathe. The profuse and easy fertility of Homer in simile surely of itself demonstrates a wonderful observation and appreciation of nature; but, as has been remarked, these similes are very rarely indeed still similes. They delight in sound, in multitude, above all in motion. The automatic chairs of Vulcan, the living theatre of the Shield of Achilles, that oldest mirror of our world, the bounding armour of the same hero, what are all these but the proofs of that redundant energy of life, whose first resistless impulse it was to carry the vital fire of Prometheus into every object that it encountered, and which, not yet having felt the palsying touch of exhaustion, lay under no necessity of curative provisions for repose? Therefore, while admitting the defect of Homer with respect to colour, and admitting also that landscape (if we are to understand by it the elaborate combination of natural objects reaching over considerable distances) is a great addition to the enjoyment and wealth of mankind, I think the capital explanation of the question raised is to be found, not in the want of any space, or of any faculty, in the mind of Homer, but in the fact that the space and the faculties were all occupied with more active and vivifying functions; that the beautiful forms in nature, which we see as beautiful forms only, were to him the hem of the garments, as it were, of that life with which all nature teemed. Accordingly, the general rule of the poems is, that where we should be passive, he is active; that which we think it much to contemplate with satisfaction, he is ever at work, with a bolder energy and a keener pleasure, to vivify. We deal with external nature, as it were unrifled; he saw in it only the residue which remained to it, after it had at every point thrown off its cream in supernatural formations. His uplifting and vitalizing process is everywhere at work. Animate nature is raised even to divinity; and inanimate nature is borne upward into life.

If, then, Homer sees less in the mere sensible forms of natural objects than we do, it probably is in a great degree because the genius of his people and his own genius had taught him to invest them with a soul, which drew up into itself the best of their attractions. Mr. Ruskin most justly tells us, with reference to the sea, that he cuts off from the material object the sense of something living, and fashions it into a great abstract image of a sea-power785. Yet it is not, I think, quite true, that the Poet leaves in the watery mass no element of life. On the contrary, I should say the key to his whole treatment of external nature is to be found in this one proposition: wheresoever we look for figure, he looks for life. His waves (as well as his fire) when they are stirred786, shout, in the very word (ἰάχειν) that he gives to the Assembly of Achæans: when they break in foam, they put on the plume of the warrior’s helmet787 (κορύσσεσθαι): when their lord drives over them, they open wide for joy788: and when he strides upon the field of battle, they, too, boil upon the shore, in an irrepressible sympathy with his effort and emotion789.

SECT. III.

Homer’s perceptions and use of Number

While the faculties of Homer were in many respects both intense and refined in their action, beyond all ordinary, perhaps we might say beyond all modern, examples, there were other points in which they bear the marks of having been less developed than is now common even among the mass of many civilized nations. In the power of abstraction and distinct introspective contemplation, it is not improbable that he was inferior to the generality of educated men in the present day. In some other lower faculties, he is probably excelled by the majority of the population of this country, nay even by many of the children in its schools. I venture to specify, as examples of the last-named proposition, the faculties of number, and of colour. It may be true of one or both of these, that a certain indistinctness in the perception of them is incidental everywhere to the early stages of society. But yet it is surprising to find it where, as with Homer, it accompanies a remarkable quickness and maturity not only of great mental powers, but of certain other perceptions more akin to number and colour, such as those of motion, of sound, and of form. But let us proceed to examine, in the first place, the former of these two subjects.

It may be observed at the outset, that probably none of us are aware to how great an extent our aptitudes with respect to these matters are traditionary, and dependent therefore not upon ourselves, but upon the acquisitions made by the human race before our birth, and upon the degree in which those acquisitions have circulated, and have been as it were filtered through and through the community, so as to take their place among the elementary ideas, impressions, and habits of the population. For such parts of human knowledge, as have attained to this position, are usually gained by each successive generation through the medium of that insensible training, which begins from the very earliest infancy, and which precedes by a great interval all the systematic, and even all the conscious, processes of education. Nor am I for one prepared by any means to deny that there may be an actual ‘traducianism’ in the case: on the contrary, in full consistency with the teaching of experience, we may believe that the acquired aptitudes of one generation may become, in a greater or a less degree, the inherited and inborn aptitudes of another.

We must, therefore, reckon upon finding a set of marked differences in the relative degrees of advancement among different human faculties in different stages of society, which shall be simply referable to the source now pointed out, and distinct altogether from such variations as are referable to other causes. It is not difficult to admit this to be true in general: but the question, whether in the case before us it applies to number and colour, can of course only be decided by an examination of the Homeric text.

Yet, before we enter upon this examination, let us endeavour to throw some further light upon the general aspect of the proposition, which has just been laid down.

Of all visible things, colour is to our English eye the most striking. Of all ideas, as conceived by the English mind, number appears to be the most rigidly definite, so that we adopt it as a standard for reducing all other things to definiteness; as when we say that this field or this house is five, ten, or twenty times as large as that. Our merchants, and even our schoolchildren, are good calculators. So that there is a sense of something strikingly paradoxical, to us in particular, when we speak of Homer as having had only indeterminate ideas of these subjects.

Conceptions of Number not always definite.

There are however two practical instances, which may be cited to illustrate the position, that number is not a thing to be as matter of course definitely conceived in the mind. One of these is the case of very young children. To them the very lowest numbers are soon intelligible, but all beyond the lowest are not so, and only present a vague sense of multitude, that cannot be severed into its component parts. The distinctive mark of a clear arithmetical conception is, that the mind at one and the same time embraces the two ideas, first of the aggregate, secondly of each one of the units which make it up. This double operation of the brain becomes more arduous, as we ascend higher in the scale. I have heard a child, put to count beads or something of the sort, reckon them thus: ‘One, two, three, four, a hundred.’ The first words express his ideas, the last one his despair. Up to four, his mind could contain the joint ideas of unity and of severalty, but not beyond; so he then passed to an expression wholly general, and meant to express a sense like that of the word multitude.

But though the transition from number definitely conceived to number without bounds is like launching into a sea, yet the conception of multitude itself is in one sense susceptible of degree. We may have the idea of a limited, or of an unbounded, multitude. The essential distinction of the first is, that it might possibly be counted; the notion of the second is, that it is wholly beyond the power of numeration to overtake. Probably even the child, to whom the word ‘hundred’ expressed an indefinite idea, would have been faintly sensible of a difference in degree between ‘hundred’ and ‘million,’ and would have known that the latter expressed something larger than the former. The circumscribing outline of the idea apprehended is loose, but still there is such an outline. The clearness of the double conception is indeed effaced; the whole only, and not the whole together with each part, is contemplated by the mind; but still there is a certain clouded sense of a real difference in magnitude, as between one such whole and another.

And this leads me to the second of the two illustrations, to which reference has been made. That loss of definiteness in the conception of number, which the child in our day suffers before he has counted over his fingers, the grown man suffers also, though at a point commonly much higher in the scale. What point that may be, depends very much upon the particular habits and aptitudes of the individual. A student in a library of a thousand volumes, an officer before his regiment of a thousand men upon parade, may have a pretty clear idea of the units as well as of the totals; but when we come to a thousand times a thousand, or a thousand times a million, all view of the units, for most men, probably for every man, is lost: the million for the grown man is in a great degree like the hundred for the child. The numerical term has now become essentially a symbol; not only as every word is by its essence a symbol in reference to the idea it immediately denotes; but, in a further sense, it is a symbol of a symbol, for that idea which it denotes, is itself symbolical: it is a conventional representation of a certain vast number of units, far too great to be individually contemplated and apprehended. As we rise higher still from millions, say for example, into the class of billions, the vagueness increases. The million is now become a sort of new unit, and the relation of two millions to one million, is thus pretty clearly apprehended as being double; but this too becomes obscured as we mount, and even (for example) the relation of quantity between ten billions of wheat-corns, and an hundred billions of the same, is far less determinately conveyed to the mind, than the relation between ten wheat-corns and one. At this high level, the nouns of number approximate to the indefinite character of the class of algebraic symbols called known quantities.

In proportion as our conception of numbers is definite, the idea of them, instead of being suited for an address to the imagination, remains unsuited for poetic handling, and thrives within the sphere of the understanding only. But when we pass beyond the scale of determinate into that of practically indeterminate amounts, then the use of numbers becomes highly poetical. I would quote, as a very noble example of this use of number, a verse in the Revelations of St. John. ‘And I beheld, and I heard the voice of many angels round about the throne, and the beasts and the elders: and the number of them was ten thousand times ten thousand, and thousands of thousands790.’ As a proof of the power of this fine passage, I would observe, that the descent from ten thousand times ten thousand to thousands of thousands, though it is in fact numerically very great, has none of the chilling effect of anticlimax, because these numbers are not arithmetically conceived, and the last member of the sentence is simply, so to speak, the trail of light which the former draws behind it.

Now we must keep clearly before our minds the idea, that this poetical and figurative use of number among the Greeks at least preceded what I may call its calculative use. We shall find in Homer nothing that can strictly be called calculation. He repeatedly gives us what may be termed the factors of a sum in multiplication; but he never even partially combines them, even as they are combined for example in Cowper’s ballad,

John Gilpin’s spouse said to her dear,Though wedded we have beenThese twice ten tedious years, yet weNo holiday have seen.

Reference has been made to the convenience which we find in using number as a measure of quantity, and as a means of comparing things of every species in their own kind. But we never meet with this use of it in Homer. He has not even the words necessary to enable him to say, ‘This house is five times as large as that.’ If he had the idea to express, he would say, Five houses, each as large as that, would hardly be equal to this. The word τρὶς may be called an adverb of multiplication; but it is never used for these comparisons. Indeed, Damm observes, that in a large majority of instances it signifies an indefinite number, not a precise one. Τετράκις is found only once, and in a sense wholly indeterminate: the passage is791 τρισμάκαρες Δαναοὶ καὶ τετράκις. Πεντάκις does not even exist. Ajax lifts a stone, not ‘twice as large as a mortal of to-day could raise’, but so large that it would require two such mortals to raise it. All Homer’s numerical expressions are in the most elementary forms; such forms, as are without composition, and refuse all further analysis.

Greek estimate of the discovery of Number.

His use of number appears to have been confined to simple addition: and it is probable that all the higher numbers which we find in the poems, were figurative and most vaguely conceived. If we are able to make good the proof of these propositions from the Homeric text, we shall then be well able to understand the manner in which Numeration, or the science of number, is spoken of by the Greeks of the historic age as a marvellous invention. It appears in Æschylus, as among the very greatest of the discoveries of Prometheus792:

καὶ μὴν ἀριθμὸν, ἔξοχον σοφισμάτων,ἐξεῦρον αὐτοῖς·

he goes on to add,

γραμμάτων τε συνθέσεις.

So that the use of numbers by rule was to the Greek mind as much a discovery as the letters of the alphabet, and is even described here as a greater one: much as in later times men have viewed the use of logarithms, or of the method of fluxions or the calculus. In full conformity with this are the superlative terms, in which Plato speaks of number. Number, in fact, seems to be exhibited in great part of the Greek philosophy, as if it had actually been the guide of the human mind in its progress towards realizing all the great and cardinal ideas of order, measure, proportion, and relation.

Up to what point human intelligence, in the time of Homer, was able to push the process of simple addition, we do not precisely know. It is not, however, hastily to be assumed that, in any one of his faculties, Homer was behind his age; and it is safer to believe that the poems, even in these points, represent it advantageously. Now, in one place at least, we have a primitive account of a process of addition. The passage is in the Fourth Odyssey, where Menelaus relates, how Proteus counted upon his fingers the number of his seals793. That it was a certain particular number is obvious, because when four of them had been killed by Eidothee, their skins were put upon Menelaus and his three comrades, and the four Greeks were then counted into the herd, so that the word ἀριθμὸς here evidently means a definite total. This addition by Proteus, however, was not addition in the proper arithmetical sense, and would be more properly called enumeration: it was probably effected simply by adding each unit singly, in succession, to the others, with the aid of the fingers, (proved through the word πεμπάσσεται,) but not by the aid of any scale or combination of units, either decimal or quinal. In the word δεκὰς we have, indeed, the first step towards a decimal scale; but we have not even that in the case of the number five, there being no πεντὰς or πεμπτάς. The meaning of πεμπάσσεται evidently is, not that he arranged the numeration in fives, but that, by means of the fingers of one hand, employed upon those of the other, he assisted the process of simple enumeration.

Highest numerals of the poems.

Homer’s highest numeral is μύριοι. He describes the Myrmidons as being μύριοι794, though, if we assume a mean strength of about eighty-five for their crews, the force would but little have exceeded four thousand: and at the maximum of one hundred and twenty for each ship, it would only come to six thousand. Again, Homer uses the expression μύρια ᾔδη, to denote a person of instructed and accomplished mind795.

Next to the μύρια, the highest numerals employed in the poems are those contained in the passage where the Poet says that the howl of Mars, on being wounded by Diomed, was as loud as the shout of an army of nine thousand or ten thousand men796:

ὅσσον τ’ ἐννεάχιλοι ἐπίαχον ἢ δεκάχιλοιἀνέρες ἐν πολέμῳ.

But it is clear that the expressions are purely poetical and figurative. For he never comes near the use of such high numbers elsewhere; and yet it obviously lay in his path to use these, and higher numbers still, when he was describing the strength of the Greek and Trojan armies.

The highest Homeric number, after those which have been named, is found in the three thousand horses of Erichthonius. This we must also consider poetical, because it is so far beyond the ordinary range of the poems, and in some degree likewise because of the obvious unlikelihood of his having possessed that particular number of mares797.