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

τῷ δ’ ἤδη δύο μὲν γενεαὶ μερόπων ἀνθρώπωνἐφθίαθ’, οἵ οἱ πρόσθεν ἅμα τράφεν ἠδ’ ἐγένοντοἐν Πύλῳ ἠγαθέῃ, μετὰ δὲ τριτάτοισιν ἄνασσεν.

I take the word γενεὴ to mean here, ‘the term of thirty years,’ but with the necessary qualification of ‘or thereabouts;’ and for the following reasons:

Nestor is represented in the Iliad as the oldest of the Greek chieftains of the first order. Yet Ulysses825 was elderly, ὠμογέρων. Idomeneus, again, was older than Ulysses, as is plain from the more marked manner in which his advance in years is described. He is μεσαιπόλιος826, and not fully ablebodied, as appears from his somewhat limited share in military operations; but Nestor is evidently older than Idomeneus, as he always addresses the whole body with the authority that belongs to the most extended experience, and as he never takes an active part, either in battle or in the games. We must, accordingly, suppose Nestor to be represented as at this time an old man of seventy, or from that to seventy-five.

Now the passage implies that he was in the third γενεὴ, and in the midst, i. e. not at either extremity, of it: the words are μετὰ τριτάτοισιν. No lower number than thirty years will place Nestor fairly among, or in the midst of, the third generation from his birth. If, for example, we take five and twenty years as the term, he would have been not so much among the third as on the eve of arriving within the fourth generation. But neither can we assign to γενεὴ any meaning, which shall make it sensibly exceed thirty years. For as we may say with confidence that the Nestor of the Iliad is over seventy, so, on the other hand, we may fairly compute that he is under eighty; inasmuch as, though he takes no part in exertions actually athletic, he spares himself nothing else. He is found by Agamemnon, when the commander in chief goes his rounds, on the field and at the head of his division: he is wakeful for the night council, and he goes about awaking others827. Retaining so large a share of bodily activity, he is still not represented as possessed of strength in such a degree as to border upon the marvellous; he is simply, in regard to corporal qualities, what would now be called a remarkably fine old gentleman. But if instead of thirty we were to take forty years, then, in order to have well entered into the third term he must have been already much beyond eighty, indeed, probably beyond ninety, in the Iliad, and above an hundred in the Odyssey; an age, which, as he retains in that poem all his mental powers, we may be quite sure Homer did not mean to assign to him. If, then, γενεὴ meant any term of years, it must, in all likelihood, have been somewhere about thirty years.

Homer has been careful, in the case of Nestor, to mark, by an appropriate change of expressions, the difference between his age in the two poems respectively. In the Iliad he is exercising the kingly office among the third generation since his birth. In the Odyssey he is said to have exhausted the three terms828;

τρὶς γὰρ δή μίν φασιν ἀνάξασθαι γενε’ ἀνδρῶν.

That lucidity and accuracy in Homer’s expressions, to which we are so often beholden, may stand us yet further in good stead. Two γενεαὶ had passed, not of men at large, but of the men οἵ οἱ πρόσθεν ἅμα τράφεν ἠδ’ ἐγένοντο, of those who were bred and born with him, of his contemporaries. Now this proves that by γενεὴ Homer does not mean the full duration of human life, but that average interval between the successions of men, which general experience places at about thirty years. For if Homer had meant by γενεὴ the whole time required for the dying out of a generation, Nestor could not have outlived two generations of contemporaries. In this sense, his contemporaries were manifestly not two generations, but one, or little more. But if the Poet meant the usual interval at which child succeeds to, or rather follows upon, father, the expression is clear; for the meaning is, that he had seen two of these terms of years, or successions, pass over those who were born at the same time with himself. And in fact this sense of the term γενεὴ is much closer to its etymology than any other. We may, then, on the whole, pretty safely assume it to be a term of years, having the number thirty, so to speak, for its pivot. And thus the three decades of the war become yet more inadmissible as historical expressions, because they are under the strongest suspicion of being poetically employed in order to make up the γενεὴ, so far at least as they and it can be considered to approximate to an actual number at all.

In full conformity with this reasoning, it has been shown by Mure, that the events of the third decade, with their times, instead of ten years only, make up eight years and seven months829: and he proceeds in the same direction with the foregoing argument so far, at least, as to observe, that the decades and their arrangement are conceived ‘in a mixed spirit of hyperbole and method,’ which commonly marks the genius of heroic romance830.

That, however, which enables me with great confidence at once to urge Homer’s historical authority, and yet to decline recognising him as a chronologist at all, is the fact, that he nowhere founds his history at all in chronology, or in the numbering of events by years, more than he numbers distances by miles, but that he arranges the succession of occurrences by the γενεαὶ or succession of human generations. On these generations we must look as the real time-keeping organism of his works: and the time with its elastic periods, although indeterminate in its details, is kept by him most accurately and effectually as a whole; so that his generations, which are dispersedly recorded in various parts of the poems, always tally when they meet. This is not the place for the proof of the assertion: I only refer to it, because it may help to dispel the illusion apt to possess the mind with respect to Homer’s decades. We, with our definite numerical ideas, may naturally consider that if an author of our own day had said a war lasted in preparation, action, and return, each ten years, and if it was afterwards found perhaps to have lasted (say) only for ten years altogether or little more, such an author would have proved himself unworthy of belief: he would have broken faith with us. But Homer does not break faith with us in using numbers poetically; they belong to his pictorial and not to his historical apparatus, and in connection with this pictorial apparatus it is that he constantly employs them. I doubt if there is any exception to be made to the broad assertion, that, unless in the single case of the war, with the preceding and following decades, Homer never applies number to narrative. And yet the poems are full of independent narratives. Of all these, very few indeed are left unfixed in date; and in every case the date, when found, is found, of course with a certain margin, by means of the order of generations.

Difficulties of the literal interpretation.

Now this view of Homer’s mode of chronology will serve, I think, to explain some difficulties that have heretofore led to much of needless perplexity. If I am right, it will follow that we must not adopt these decades as a guide to determine arithmetically the order of events, because Homer has never conceived them arithmetically, but has conceived them rather as we conceive millions or billions. Hence they are more justly to be viewed as a drapery thrown loosely over his action, than as a rigid framework into which it must at all costs be made to fit. Let us apply this to various cases; and among them to those of Telemachus and Neoptolemus respectively. Ulysses left Telemachus a mere child, νέον γεγαῶτ’ ἐνὶ οἴκῳ831. He comes back and finds him not a full man, for if he had been a full man, he would have been guilty of a rooted cowardice beyond excuse, which there is no sign that Homer meant to impute to him; but yet he was approaching manhood. Still he is contemptuously called νέος παῖς832 by Antinous. Upon the whole, the case of Telemachus would perhaps, according to the analogy of the poems, best fall in with an absence of not more than fifteen years, though it does not absolutely exclude nineteen. Here there may be a slight, yet there is not a glaring, discrepancy. But in another case, that of the number of the days for which Telemachus was absent, Mure has shown how little Homer cares to follow the lapse of time, in a case where it does not essentially touch the general order of the poem, with the precision that he observes in everything that he treats historically833. I cannot treat this as a difficulty with respect to the question of authorship, or admit it to be one: it is his childlike and indeterminate but poetical habit of handling numbers for effect, just as a painter handles colour. On the other hand, in the case of Argus, on whom dark death laid hold834,

αὐτίκ’ ἰδόντ’ Ὀδυσῆα ἐεικοστῷ ἐνιαυτῷ,

he precisely coincides with his own decades. Yet I believe he does this not from any sense of the necessity of such coincidence, but because in that incomparable passage he had the extreme old age of a dog to represent, and to this the expression of the twentieth year was suited. When, however, we come to the case of Neoptolemus, we find this to be one extremely difficult of adjustment for any critic, who would insist upon a merely numerical precision in Homer. We must indeed dismiss from our minds the tales about the concealment of a beardless Achilles at Scyros, under a female disguise; from which he was extracted by the art of Ulysses. Of these stories Homer knows nothing; though it seems probable that the grace and beauty of the great warrior, as he stands in Homer, may have been connected with, or may have suggested, them. But what the Poet does represent is, that Achilles went to Troy when without experience in war, that he was put under a certain tutelage of Phœnix his original teacher, and now one of his lieutenants, that Patroclus as his senior was desired by Peleus to give him good advice, and that he is called νήπιος835. Yet his son Neoptolemus succeeds him in command before the close of the war, and attains to very high distinction. It is yet more needful to be observed, that his distinction is in council, as well as in the field836. The age of Achilles is, indeed, presumably somewhat raised by the fact, that Phœnix seems to represent himself as a good deal younger than Peleus, who, he says, treated him as a father might have done837. And again, Achilles is never represented as a young man in the Iliad, while Diomed is so represented. Still there is a decided incompatibility in the statements as to Achilles and his son, if we suppose that Homer carried in his mind the effect of his three decades, as determining precisely the growth of Neoptolemus in years and strength; for Neoptolemus is more advanced at the end of the war, than his illustrious father had been at its beginning. Mure has been at the pains838 to arrange all these matters which depend on the decades chronologically, without, I think, removing the impression that mere chronology is considerably strained by them, and that if strictly judged, the narrative is, to all appearance, chargeable with some few years of maladjustment. It seems to me more near the truth to consider the three decades, together making up a γενεὴ, as a distribution of time which the Poet adopted for its symmetry and grandeur, since it represented the war as absorbing an age or generation of men: but not to hold him bound to adjust the relations of all the events he narrates with reference to a minute regularity of progression, which he seems not to have taken into account, and which his hearers were probably quite incapable of appreciating. If we wish to test his historical credit, we may try him by his own scheme of chronology, namely, his genealogies. His legends embrace some seven generations. The same characters are produced and reproduced in many of them; but they are nowhere presented in such a way as to be inconsistent with their order of succession according to the ordinary laws of human nature.

Uses of the proposed interpretation.

The application of these considerations to the poems will assist in explaining difficulties, which it has been thought worth while by learned men to raise.

For instance; while we take the three decades of years historically, we are perplexed by such questions as, How it came about that the Greeks839 never had been mustered till nine years had passed. Secondly, how it was that the Trojans had never until then seen them in such force840; whereas we know that multitudes of the Greek army had died841; and there is no sign that any such communication with their native country took place during the course of the war, as might have sufficed to replenish their ranks. Thirdly, why the Trojans had remained so closely shut within the walls, and yet at the same time the Greeks had so seldom come near them, that Priam should not have learnt to know Agamemnon and his compeers by sight during so long a period; and this although Achilles may probably have been absent, for considerable intervals, on his predatory expeditions. Fourthly, how it came about that the great number of allies speaking various tongues, who had gathered round Priam to assist him, should, like the Greek army, not have been marshalled at an earlier time.

But if we suppose the term of ten years to be in the main a figurative expression for conveying the idea of effort lengthened in duration, as well as extraordinary in intensity, difficulties like these, which at the worst are perhaps not very serious, either wholly vanish, or are reduced to insignificant proportions. We are then at liberty to suppose that, without at all departing from the general truth of history, Homer felt himself authorized to compress, to expand, or to group the events of the war, in such a manner as he thought best for the concentration of interest, and for the production of adequate poetical and national effect.

SECT. IV.

Homer’s Perceptions and Use of Colour

The subject of the Homeric numbers has been discussed at considerable length, on account of its connection with important questions of history. That of colours may, even on its own merits, deserve a careful examination. This inquiry will resemble, however, the former discussion in the appearance of paradox, which the argument may seem to present. Next to the idea of number, there is none perhaps more definite to the modern mind generally, as well as in particular to the English mind, than that of colour. That our own country has some special aptitude in this respect, we may judge from the comparatively advantageous position, which the British painters have always held as colourists among other contemporary schools. Nothing seems more readily understood and retained by very young children among us, than the distinctions between the principal colours. In regard to one point, the case of numbers is here reversed. There the idea becomes indefinite as we ascend in the scale, here it is as we descend. Colour becomes doubtful as it becomes faint, more and more clear as it is accumulated and heightened. But the facility with which we discriminate colour in all its marked forms, is probably the result of traditional aptitude, since we seem to find, as we go far backward in human history, that the faculty is less and less mature.

I am conscious that the subject, which is now before us, in reality deserves a scientific investigation, which I am not capable of affording to it: and also that we are, as yet, far from being able to render the language of the ancients for colour into our own with the confidence, which we can feel in almost every other department of interpretation. My endeavours will be limited, firstly, to a collection of ‘realien,’ or facts of the poems, in the case of Colour: and, secondly, to pointing out what appears to be the basis of the ideas and perceptions of Homer respecting it, and the relation of that basis to the ideas of the later Greeks.

Among the signs of the immaturity which I have mentioned, the following are found in the poems of Homer:

I. The paucity of his colours.

II. The use of the same word to denote not only different hues or tints of the same colour, but colours which, according to us, are essentially different.

III. The description of the same object under epithets of colour fundamentally disagreeing one from the other.

IV. The vast predominance of the most crude and elemental forms of colour, black and white, over every other, and the decided tendency to treat other colours as simply intermediate modes between these extremes.

V. The slight use of colour in Homer, as compared with other elements of beauty, for the purpose of poetic effect, and its absence in certain cases where we might confidently expect to find it.

Each of these topics will deserve a distinct notice.

Homeric adjectives of Colour.

I. First, then, with respect to the paucity of his colours. We find, I think, scarcely more than the following words which can with certainty be described as adjectives of colour properly so called:

1. λευκός.

2. μέλας.

3. ξανθός.

4. ἐρυθρός.

5. πορφύρεος.

6. κυάνεος.

7. φοίνιξ.

8. πόλιος.

There are other words which are taken from objects that have colour, and to most of which I shall hereafter refer: but which can hardly, in consistency with the whole evidence from the text of Homer, be classed as adjectives of definite colour.

Now we must at once be struck with the poverty of the list which has just been given, upon comparing it with our own list of primary colours, which has been determined for us by Nature, and which is as follows:

1. Red.

2. Orange.

3. Yellow.

4. Green.

5. Blue.

6. Indigo.

7. Violet.

To these we are to add —

8. White, the compound of all colours;

9. Black, the negative or absence of them all.

Out of these nine, three at least stand unrepresented. For πόλιος can mean none of them: and φοίνιξ can do no more than double either πορφύρεος, or ξανθὸς, or ἐρυθρός. The most favourable presumptions would perhaps arrange the Homeric list as follows:

1. λευκὸς, white.

2. μέλας, black.

3. ξανθὸς, yellow.

4. ἐρυθρὸς, red.

5. πορφύρεος, violet.

6. κυάνεος, indigo.

And thus orange, green, and blue would remain without any corresponding terms. But, in truth, when we examine further into Homer’s mode of employing his adjectives of colour in detail, we shall perceive that he is by no means so rich as this classification would allow.

The other words which will presently be considered, but which have very slight claims indeed to be treated as adjectives of definite colour, are as follows:

1. χλωρός.

2. αἰθαλόεις.

3. ῥοδόεις.

4. ἰόεις.

5. οἴνοψ.

6. μιλτοπάρηος.

7. αἴθων.

8. ἀργός.

9. αἴολος.

10. γλαυκός.

11. χάροπος.

12. σιγαλόεις.

13. μαρμάρεος.

Along with each of these adjectives, which are the chief though not quite the only ones of their class in Homer, I shall take the cognate words, such as verbs or compounds, which may belong to them.

Applications of them.

II. Let us now review the particular applications which Homer has made of these words respectively. Among them, however, it will not be necessary to include λευκὸς and μέλας, because those epithets indicate ideas which have at all times been used, to a considerable extent, by way of approximation only.

1. ξανθὸς is applied by Homer to the following objects:

a. horses, ἵππων ξανθὰ κάρηνα, Il. ix. 407.

b. hair of men, ξανθὸς Μενέλαος, passim: Achilles, Il. i. 197.

c. hair of women, ξανθὴ Ἀγαμήδη, Il. xi. 739; Δημήτηρ, Il. v. 500.

2. ἐρυθρὸς is evidently the same word with the Latin ruber, and with our own ‘ruddy,’ as well as probably the German roth.

It is used by Homer for a. Copper in Il. ix. 365.

b. Nectar, Il. xix. 38.

c. Wine, Od. v. 93.

d. Blood: in ἐρυθαίνω, Il. x. 484.

3. πορφύρεος again is the Latin purpura, and our ‘purple,’ as well as our ‘porphyry.’ In the uses of this word we shall find for the first time a startling amount of obvious discrepancy: and it will require to be considered in the proper place, whether this discrepancy is to be referred to a bold exercise of the Poet’s art, or to an undeveloped knowledge and a consequently defective standard of colour.

The word πορφύρεος is employed as follows for objects of sense:

a. Blood, Il. xvii. 361.

b. Dark cloud, ibid. 551.

c. Wave of a river when disturbed, Il. xxi. 326.

d. Wave of the sea, Il. i. 482; and the disturbed sea, Il. xvi. 391.

e. The ball with which the Phæacian dancers played, Od. viii. 373.

f. Garments, as Il. viii. 221; Od. iv. 115.

g. Carpets, as Od. xxi. 151; Il. xxiv. 645.

h. The rainbow, Il. xvii. 547.

i. Metaphorically it is applied to Death, Il. v. 83: and, as it would appear, to bloody death only.

Further, the verb πορφύρω is applied a. to the sea darkening, Il. xiv. 16.

b. to the mind brooding, Il. xx. 551.

Again, the compound ἁλιπόρφυρος is applied a. to wool, Od. vi. 53.

b. to garments woven of it, Od. xiii. 108.

In this epithet we have the additional idea of the sea introduced; and it literally means ‘sea-purple.’ But I postpone any remark with respect to Homer’s particular intention in the use of the word, until we come to the epithets derived from ἴον, a violet.

Three forms of colour at least seem to be comprehended under this group of words;

1. The redness of blood.

2. The purple proper, as of the sea in Il. i. 482. To this also probably belongs the rainbow, of whose seven colours three may be said to belong to the family of blue: and which is termed blue by Shakespeare.

3. The grey and leaden colour of a dark cloud when about to burst in storm, and of a river when disturbed.

We shall hereafter see reason to suppose that the word may also and often mean what is tawny or brown.

Of κύανος and κυάνεος.

4. The word κυάνεος is very important in this inquiry; and unfortunately it is not less obscure.

It at once throws us back on the prior question, what was κύανος? But this question remains almost wholly undetermined842; so that we must follow, as well as we can, the Homeric applications of the word itself, together with its adjective and its compounds. These are very numerous. First we have the substantive κύανος introduced in three places: in each of which it evidently belongs to a combination of colours as well as of substances.

a. Once it is κύανος simply. The interior wall of the hall of Alcinous is covered with sheets of copper843; and round the top is a θριγκὸς or fringe of κύανος. Od. vii. 87.

b. Twice it is μέλας κύανος. On the breast-plate of Agamemnon there are twenty stripes or layers of tin, twelve of gold, and ten μέλανος κυάνοιο. Il. xi. 24, Also;

c. Upon his shield there were ten rounds of copper; and then, apparently on the face of the shield within these, twenty white bosses (ὄμφαλοι λευκοὶ) made of tin, if such be the meaning of κασσίτερος: in the centre of all, there was one boss μέλανος κυάνοιο. Il. xi. 35.

Passing now to κυάνεος, we come next to three passages where it may be questioned whether they describe colour only, or substance only, or both.

d. Upon the breastplate of Agamemnon, which has ten layers of black κύανος, there are on either side three κυάνεοι δράκοντες (Il. xi. 26). These are compared to the rainbow, which, as we have already seen, is described elsewhere as πορφυρεή.

e. On the silver-plated belt of Agamemnon there is a κυάνεος δράκων. Il. xi. 38, 9.

f. Around the golden vineyard on the shield of Achilles, with its silver stakes, there is a fence of κασσίτερος and a trench (κάπετος) described as κυανέη. Il. xviii. 564.

The other applications at once appear to have reference to colour only.

g. To the eyebrows of Jupiter and Juno. Il. i. 528. xv. 102. xvii. 209.

h. To a dark cloud of vapour; but not to a storm-cloud. Il. xxiii. 188. v. 345. xx. 418.

i. To the hair of Hector, Il. xxii. 402; and to the beard of Ulysses, when he is restored to beauty by Minerva. Od. xvi. 176. With this we may compare the hyacinthine hair of Ulysses in Od. vi. 231.