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

Homer, full as he is of the harmonies of nature, differs in this as in so many points from most among later writers, that he does not set at nought the due proportion between the moral and the intellectual man, nor combine high gifts of mind with a mean and bad heart. He never varies from this rule; and he has been careful to pay it a marked observance in the case of Paris. No set of speeches in the Iliad are marked by greater poverty of ideas. If he cleans his arms and builds his house, which are honourable employments, they are employments immediately connected with the ostentation to which he was so much given. More than this, the Poet informs us, through the medium of Helen, that he was but ill supplied with sense, and that he was too old to mend:

τούτῳ δ’ οὔτ’ ἂρ νῦν φρένες ἔμπεδοι, οὔτ ἄρ’ ὀπίσσω

ἔσσονται1045.

The immediate transition, in the Third Book, from the field of battle, where he was disgraced, to the bed of luxury, is admirably suited to impress upon the mind, by the strong contrast, the real character of Paris. Nor let it be thought, that Homer has gratuitously forced upon us the scene between him and his reluctant wife. It was just that he should mark as a bad man him who had sinned grossly, selfishly, and fatally, alike against Greece and his own family and country. This impression would not have been consistent and thorough in all its parts, if we had been even allowed to suppose that, as a refined, affectionate, and tender husband, he made such amends to Helen as the case permitted for the wrong done her in his hot and heady youth. Such a supposition might excusably have been entertained, and it would have been supported by the very feebleness of the character of Paris and by his part in the war, had Homer been silent upon the subject. He, therefore, though with cautious hand, lifts the veil so far as to show us that in our variously compounded nature animal desire can use up and absorb the strength which ought to nerve our higher faculties, and that, as none are more cruel than the timid, so none are more brutal than the effeminate.

One hold, and one only, Paris seems to retain on human affection in any sort or form. The paternal instinct of Priam makes him shudder and retire, when he is told that Paris is about to meet Menelaus in single combat. This trait would have been of extraordinary and universal beauty, had the object of the affection been even moderately worthy: it is a remarkable proof of the debasement of Paris, and of the strong sense which Homer gives us of that debasement, that the tender father seems in a measure tainted by the very warmth and strength of his love.

SECT. VII.

The declension of the great Homeric Characters in the later Tradition 1046

Physical conditions of the Greek Theatre.

One legitimate mode of measuring the true greatness of Homer is, by observing what has become of the materials and instruments he worked with, upon their passing into other hands. Acting on this principle, let us now pass on to consider the murderous maltreatment, which the most remarkable of all the Homeric characters have had to endure in the later tradition; partly, as I have already observed, from general, and partly from special causes. On the more general influence of this kind I have already touched. Among the special causes, we should place the declension in the fundamental ideas of morals and of politics between the time of Homer and the historic age. With this we may reckon one which, though it may appear to be technical, must, in all likelihood, have been most important, namely, the physical necessities imposed by the fixed conditions of dramatic representation among the Greeks1047. Their theatres were constructed on a scale, which may be called colossal as compared with ours. Both polity and religion entered into the institution of the stage. The intense nationality of their life required a similar character in their plays, and likewise in the places where they were to be represented. Not therefore a particular company of auditors, but rather the whole public of the city, where the representation took place, was to be accommodated. In consequence, the dimensions of the buildings exceeded the usual powers of the human eye and ear; so that the figure was heightened by buskins, the countenance thrown into bolder and coarser outline by masks, and the voice endowed with a great increase of power by acoustic contrivances within the masks, as well as aided by the construction of the buildings. All this was the more strictly requisite, because the plays were acted in the open air.

Now this general exaggeration of feature beyond the standard of nature had an irresistible tendency to affect the mode in which characters were modelled for representation; to cause them to be laid out morally as well as physically in strong outline, in masses large and comparatively coarse. The fine and careful finishing of Homer required that those, who were to recite him, should retain an entire and unfettered command over the measure in which the bodily organs were to be employed. The τύνη δ’ ὠμοΐιν of Achilles to Patroclus might bear to be spoken in a voice of thunder, and would absolutely require the bard to use considerable exertion of the lungs; but the scenes of Helen with Priam in the Third Book, of Hector with Andromache in the Sixth, of Priam with Achilles in the Twenty-fourth, would admit of no such treatment; and as these passages could not themselves be rendered, so neither could anything bearing a true analogy to Homer be given, unless the actor had enjoyed full liberty to contract as well as expand his own volume of sound, or unless he had enjoyed both easy access, on any terms he pleased, to the ears of his audience, and the full benefit of that most important assistance, which the eye renders to the ear by observing the play of countenance that accompanies delivery. King Lear, King John, or Othello, could not have been represented more truly and adequately in a Greek theatre, than the Achilles, or than the Helen, of Homer. Those who have ever happened to discuss with a deaf person a critical subject, requiring circumspect and tender handling, will know how much the necessity for constant tension of the voice restrains freedom in the expression of thought, and mars its perfectness. The Greek actors lay under a somewhat similar necessity, and to their necessities of course the diction of the tragedians was, whether consciously or unconsciously, adapted.

Let it, however, be borne in mind, that when we criticize the conceptions of the Homeric characters by the later Greek writers, it need not be with the supposition that we have eyes to discern in Homer what they did not see. Their reproductions must be taken to represent not so much the free dictates of the mind and judgment of the later poets, as the conditions of representation to which they were compelled to conform, and the popular sentiments and opinions which, in the character of popular writers, they could not but take for their standard. The invention of printing has given a liberty and independence to thought, at least in conjunction with poetry and the drama, such as it could not possess while the poet, in Athens for example, could sing in no other way but one, namely, to the nation collected in a mass. The poet of modern times may write for a minority of the public, nay, for a mere handful of admirers, which is destined, yet only in after-years, to grow like the mustard-seed of the parable. But the Athenian dramatist was compelled to be the poet of the majority at the moment, and to be carried on the stream of its sympathies, however adverse its direction might be to that in which, if at liberty to choose, he would himself have moved.

Obliteration of the finer distinctions.

Accordingly, when we come to survey the literary history of those great characters which the Poet gave as a perpetual possession to the world, we find, naturally enough, that the flood of the more recent traditions has long ago come in upon the Homeric narrative, like the inundation brought by Neptune and Apollo over the wall and trench of the Greeks. Like every other deluge, in sweeping away the softer materials, which give the more refined lines to the picture, it leaves the comparatively hard and sharp ones harder and sharper than ever. Thus it is with the Homeric characters, transplanted into the later tradition. The broader distinctions of his personages one from another have been not only retained, but exaggerated: all the finer ones have disappeared. No one, deriving his ideas from Homer only, could confound Diomed with Ajax, or either with Agamemnon, or any of the three with Menelaus, or any of the four with Achilles; but when we come down to the age of the tragedians, what remains to mark them, except only for Agamemnon his office, and for Achilles his superiority in physical strength? In the Homeric poems, the strong and towering intellectual qualities even outweigh the great physical and animal forces of his chief hero: by the usual predominance in man of what is gross over what is fine, the principal and higher parts of his character are afterwards suppressed, and it becomes comparatively vulgarized. In the Ulysses of Homer, again, the intellectual element predominates in such a manner, that not even the most superficial reader can fail to perceive it. He and Helen stand out in the Iliad from among others with whom they might have been confounded; the first by virtue of his self-mastery and sagacity, the second, not only by her beauty and her fall, but by the singularly tender and ethereal shading of her character. The later tradition, laying rude hands upon the subtler distinctions thus established, has degraded these two great characters, the one into little better than a stage rogue, the other into little more than a stage voluptuary, who adds to the guilt of that character the further and coarse enormities of faithlessness, and even of bloodthirstiness.

Even so soon as in the time of the Cyclical writers the character of Helen had begun to be altered. In Homer she is the victim of Paris, carried off from her home and country, and only then yielding to his lust. In the Κύπρια ἔπη, as we have that poem reported by Proclus, she begins by receiving his gifts, that is to say, his bribes; she is an adulteress under her husband’s roof; and she joins in plundering him, in order to escape with her paramour.

It is in Euripides that we find the largest and most diversified reproduction of the old Homeric characters, and to him, therefore, among the three tragedians, we should give our chief attention. When we consider them as a whole, according to his representation of them, we find that their entire primitive and patriarchal colouring has gone. The manners are not those of any age in particular; least of all are they the manners of a very early age. And, as the entire company has lost its distinctive type, so have the members of it when taken singly. In the Troades, for example, Menelaus is simply the injured and exasperated husband; Helen is the faithless wife; and she is kept up to a certain standard of dramatic importance in the eye of the world only by another departure from the Homeric picture, for she is armed with an enormous power of argument and sophistry. By a similar appendage of ingenious disquisition, the essentially plain and matronly qualities of Hecuba have been overlaid and hidden. Achilles, in the Iphigenia, is a gallant and a generous warrior; but we have neither the grandeur of his tempestuous emotions as in Homer, nor, on the other hand, any of that peculiar refinement with which they are in so admirable a manner both blended and set in contrast. Agamemnon has lost, in Euripides, his vacillation and misgivings, and is the average and, so to speak, rounded king and warrior, instead of the mixed and particoloured, but in no sense common-place, character that Homer has made him. Though Andromache is a passionately fond mother, she has nothing whatever that identifies her as the original Andromache. Indeed, of the Homeric women, it may be said that in Euripides they have ceased to be womanly; they have in general nothing of that adjective character (if the phrase may be allowed), that ever leaning and clinging attitude, to which support from without is a moral necessity, and which so profoundly marks them all in Homer. Again, Iphigenia, Cassandra, Polyxena, who are either scarcely or not at all Homeric, have now become grand heroines, with unbounded stage-effect; but there is no stage-effect at all in Homer’s Helen, or in his Andromache. Andromache, for example, is not elaborately drawn. She is rather a product of Homer’s character and feeling, than of his art. She is simply what Tennyson in his ‘Isabel’ calls ‘the stately flower of perfect wifehood.’ In her simplicity, the true idea of her might easily have been preserved by the later literature, had the conception of woman as such remained morally the same. But the Andromache of Homer was doomed to deteriorate, on account of her purity, as his Achilles, his Ulysses, his Helen degenerated, because the flights of such high genius could not be sustained, and weaker wings drooped down to a lower level. As Hecuba was the aged matron of the Iliad, and Helen its mixed type of woman, so Andromache was the young mother and the wife. Her one only thought lay in her husband and her child; but in the Troades, wordy and diffuse, she discusses, in a most business-like manner, the question whether she shall or shall not transfer her affections to the new lord, whose property she has become. She ends, indeed, by deciding the question rightly; but it is one that the Homeric Andromache never could have entertained.

Three, however, among the Homeric characters, have been mangled by the later tradition much more cruelly than any others; they are those prime efforts of his mighty genius, Helen, Achilles, and Ulysses. The first, most probably, on account of the wonderful delicacy with which in Homer it is moulded: the others on account of their singular comprehensiveness and breadth of scope. Each of these three cases well deserves particular consideration.

Mutilation of the Helen of Homer.

In the case of Helen, the extreme tenderness of the colouring, that Homer has employed, multiplied infinitely the chances against its preservation. Among all the women of antiquity, she is by nature the most feminine, the finest in grain, though, as in many other instances, a certain slightness of texture is essentially connected with this fineness. Her natural softness is very greatly deepened by the double effect of her affliction and her repentance. A quiet and settled sadness broods over her whole image, and comes out not only when she weeps by the body of Hector, or when her husband’s presence reminds her of her offence, but even under the genial smiles and soothing words of old Priam on the wall. Vehement and agonizing passion draws deep strong lines, which, even in copies, may be easily caught and easily preserved; it is quite different with the profound though low-toned suffering, of which the passive influence, the penetrating tint, circulates as it were in every vein, and issues into view at every pore.

Helen of Euripides, Isocrates, Virgil.

Let us now consider how the character of Helen reappears in Euripides, in Isocrates, and in Virgil.

In the Agamemnon, Æschylus had designated her under the form of a pun, as ἑλέναυς ἑλεπτόλις; and these phrases, as they stand, cannot be said in any manner to force us beyond the limits of the Homeric tradition. But in the Hecuba she is cursed outright by the Chorus, and represented by Hecuba herself as having been the great agent, instead of the passive occasion and the suffering instrument, in the calamitous fall of Troy1048. In the Troades she is the shame of the country, the slayer of Priam, the willing fugitive from Sparta1049. Andromache denounces her in the fiercest manner, and gives her for her ancestors not Jupiter, but Death, Slaughter, Vengeance, Jealousy, and all the evils upon earth1050. Menelaus is furiously enraged, calls on his attendants to drag her in by her blood-guilty hair, will not give her the name of wife, will send her to Lacedæmon1051, there herself to die as a satisfaction to those whose death she has guiltily brought about. When she asks whether she may be heard in defence of herself, he answers summarily, no:

οὐκ ἐς λόγους ἐλήλυθ’, ἀλλά σε κτενῶν1052.

She then delivers a sophistical speech1053, and pleads, that she could not be guilty in yielding to a passion which even Jupiter could not resist, while she retaliates abuse on Menelaus for leaving her exposed to temptation. Quantum mutata! As respects Deiphobus, however, she declares that she only yielded to force, and that she was often detected, after the death of Paris, in endeavours to escape over the wall to the Greeks.

We have moreover an example, in the Helen painted by Euripides, of the rude manner in which characters not understood, and taken to be inconsistent by an age which had failed to understand them, were torn in pieces, and how the several fragments started anew, each for itself, on the stream of tradition. In Homer we have the touching contrast between the chastity of Helen’s mind, and the unlawful condition in which she lived. The latter, taken separately, was presumed to imply an unchaste soul; the former a lawful condition. Instead therefore of the one narrative, we have two; a shade or counterfeit of Helen plays the part of the adulteress with Paris, while the true and living Helen remains concealed in Egypt, keeping pure her husband’s bed, so that, though her name has become infamous, her body may remain untainted. This latter tradition is chiefly valuable, because it marks the mode of transition from the Homeric to the spurious representations, and the consciousness of the early poets, that they were not preserving the image drawn by Homer. No scheme, however, constructed of such flimsy materials, could live; and, naturally enough, the character of Helen the wife was forgotten, that of Helen the voluptuary was preserved.

From the vituperation and disgrace of Helen in most of the plays of Euripides, we pass to the elaborate panegyric handed down to us in the Ἐγκώμιον of Isocrates. The falsehood eulogistic is not less unsatisfying than the falsehood damnatory. For now, with the lapse of time, we find a further depression of the moral standard. We have here, in its most absolute form, the deification of beauty1054; ὃ σεμνότατον, καὶ τιμιώτατον, καὶ θειότατον τῶν ὄντων ἔστιν1055. But it is totally disjoined from purity. He does not warrant and support his eulogy upon Helen, by recurring to the true Homeric representation of her; but he boldly declares the high value of sensual enjoyment1056, commends the ambition of Paris to acquire an unrivalled possession and thereby a close affinity with the gods, and sees in the war only a proof of the immense and just estimation in which both parties held so great a treasure1057, without the smallest scruple as to the means by which it was to be acquired or held. From this picture we may pass on to the Helen of Virgil, which represents the destructive process in its last stage of exaggeration, and leaves nothing more for the spirit of havoc to devise.

In Æn. i. 650, Helen is declared to have sought Troy and unlawful nuptials, instead of having been carried off from home against her will. In Æn. vi. 513, she is represented as having made use of the religious orgies on the fatal night, to invite the Greeks into Troy; and, after first carefully removing all weapons for defence, she is said to have opened the apartment of her sleeping husband Deiphobus to Menelaus, in the hope that, by becoming accessory to a treacherous murder, she might disarm the resentment of one whom she had so deeply wronged. But even this passage has probably done less towards occupying the modern mind with the falsified idea of Helen, than one of most extraordinary scenic grandeur in the second Æneid; where Æneas relates how he saw her, the common curse of her own country and of Troy, crouching beside the altar of Vesta, amidst the lurid flames of the final conflagration, in order to escape the wrath of Menelaus.

Illa sibi infestos eversa ob Pergama TeucrosEt pœnas Danaûm et deserti conjugis irasPræmetuens, Trojæ et patriæ communis Erynnis,Abdiderat sese, atque aris invisa sedebat.Æn. ii. 571-4.

And then, in language, the glowing magnificence of which serves to hide the very paltry character of the sentiment, Æneas proceeds to announce that he was about to slay the woman who, according to himself, had lived for ten years as a friend among his friends; when, at the right moment, his mother Venus appeared, and reminded him that on the whole he might do rather better to think about saving, if possible, his own father, wife, and boy.

Thus, in the Helen of Virgil, we have splendid personal beauty combined with an accumulation of the most profoundly odious moral features. She is lost in sensuality, a traitress alike to Greece and to Troy, willing to make miserable victims of others in the hope of purchasing her own immunity: all her deep remorse and sorrow, all her tenderness and modesty, are blotted out from her character, and the void places in the picture are filled by the detestation, with which both Greeks and Trojans regarded, as indeed they might well regard, such a monster. But let us pass on.

Achilles and Ulysses.

Among the many proofs of the vast scope of Homer’s mind, one of the most remarkable is to be found in the twin characters of his prime heroes or protagonists. It seems as if he had taken a survey of human nature in its utmost breadth and depth, and, finding that he had not the means to establish a perfect equilibrium between its highest powers when all in full development, had determined to represent them, with reference to the two great functions of intellect and passion, in two immortal figures. In each of the two, each of these elements has been represented with an extraordinary power, yet so, that the sovereignty should rest in Achilles as to the one, and in Ulysses as to the other. But the depth of emotion in Ulysses is greater than in any other male character of the poems, except Achilles; only it is withdrawn from view because so much under the mastery of his wisdom. And in like manner on the other hand, a far greater power, directed to the purpose of self-command and self-repression, is shown us in Achilles than in any other character except Ulysses; but this also is under partial eclipse, because the injustice, ingratitude, scorn, and meanness which Agamemnon concentrates in the robbery of a beloved object from him, appeal so irresistibly to the passionate side of his nature as to bring it out in overpowering proportions.

These being the leading ideas of the two characters, Homer has equipped each of them with the apparatus of a full-furnished man; and in apportioning to each his share of other qualities and accomplishments, he has made such a distribution as on the whole would give the best balance and the most satisfactory general result. Thus it is plain that the character of Achilles, covering as it did volcanic passions, was in danger of degenerating into phrensy. Homer has, therefore, assigned to him a peculiar refinement. His leisure is beguiled with song, consecrated to the achievements of ancient heroes; he has the finest tact, and is by far the greatest gentleman, of all the warriors of the poems; even personal ornaments to set off his transcendent beauty1058 are not beneath his notice, a trait which would have been misplaced in Ulysses, ludicrous in Ajax, and which is in Paris contemptible, but which has its advantage in Achilles, because it is a simple accessory subordinate to greater matters, and because, so far as it goes, it is a weight placed in the scale opposite to that which threatens to preponderate, and to mar by the strong vein of violence the general harmony of the character.

In the same way, as Ulysses is distinguished by a never-failing presence of mind, forethought, and mastery over emotion, so the danger for him lies on the side of an undue predominance of the calculating element, which threatens to reduce him from the heroic standard to the low level of a vulgar utilitarianism. Here, as before, Homer has been ready with his remedies. He exhibits to us this great prince and statesman as bearing also a character of patriarchal simplicity, and makes him, the profoundest and most astute man of the world, represent the very childhood of the human race in his readiness to ply the sickle or to drive the plough1059. Above all – and this is the prime safeguard of his character – he makes Ulysses a model for Greece of steady unvarying brightness in the domestic affections. The emotion of Hector in the Sixth Iliad, and of Priam in the Twenty-fourth, are not capable of comparison with those of Ulysses, because theirs constitute the central points of the characters, and likewise are the products of great junctures of danger and affliction respectively, while his exhibit and indeed compose a settled and standing bent of his soul. He alone, of all the chieftains who were beneath the walls of Troy, is full of the near recollection of his son, his Telemachus1060; his desire and ambition never pass indeed beyond barren Ithaca, and his daily thought through long years of wandering and detention is to return there1061, to see the very smoke curling upward from its chimneys, so that the charms of a goddess are a pain to him, because they keep him from Penelope1062.