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

Such was the care with which, in each of these great and wonderful characters, Homer provided against an exclusive predominance of their leading trait. But in vain. Achilles too, more slowly however than his rival, passed, with later authors, into the wild beast; Ulysses descended at a leap into the mere shopman of politics and war; and it is singular to see how, when once the basis of the character had been vulgarized, and the key to its movements lost, it came to be drawn in attitudes the most opposed to even the broadest and most undeniable of the Homeric traits.

Mutilation of the Ulysses of Homer.

There is nothing in the political character of Ulysses more remarkable, than his power of setting himself in sole action against a multitude; whether we take him in the government of his refractory crew during his wanderings; or in the body of the Horse, when a sound would have ruined the enterprize of the Greeks, so that he had to lay his strong hand over the jaws of the babbler Anticlus1063; or in the stern preliminaries to his final revenge upon the Suitors; or in his war with his rebellious subjects; or, above all, in the desperate crisis of the Second Iliad, when by his fearless courage, decision, and activity he saves the Greek army from total and shameful failure. And yet, much as the Mahometans1064 were railed at by the poets of Italy, indeed of England, in the character of image-worshippers, so Ulysses is held up to scorn in Euripides as a mere waiter upon popular favour. Thus in the Hecuba he is

ὁ ποικιλόφρων,κόπις, ἡδύλογος, δημοχαρίστης.

Now, when the most glaring and characteristic facts of the narrative of Homer can be thus boldly traversed, there is scarcely room for astonishment at any other kind of misrepresentation. As when Hecuba laments, in the Troades1065, that her lot is to be the captive of the base, faithless, malignant, all-stinging maker of mischief. Such is the standing type of Ulysses in the after-tradition. Whenever anything bad, cruel, and above all mean, is to be done, he is the ever-ready, and indeed thoroughly Satanic, instrument.

The Second Epistle of the First Book of Horace is full of interest with reference to this subject, because in it he gives us the result of his recent re-perusal of the Homeric poems at Præneste. And, accordingly, we find here a great improvement upon the Ulysses of the Greek drama. He seems to have struck Horace at this time more forcibly, or more favourably, than any other Homeric character; for, after describing in strong terms what was amiss both within and without the walls of Troy, he makes this transition1066;

Rursus, quid virtus et quid sapientia possit,Utile proposuit nobis exemplar Ulyssen.

He considers this hero as the conqueror of Troy, and notices his self-restraint and indomitable courage in adversity. Such was the advantage of an impression fresh from the Homeric text, instead of those drawn from the muddy source of the current traditions. It does not diminish but enhances the compliment, when the acute but Epicurean writer goes on to intimate, in more than half-earnest, that these virtues of Ulysses were too high for imitation, and that he himself was content rather to emulate the suitors of Penelope, and the easy life of the youths about Alcinous1067.

But if some small instalment of justice was thus done by Horace to the Homeric Ulysses, Virgil withdrew the boon, and was careful to reproduce, without mitigation or relief, the worst features of the worst form of the character. With him it is Ulysses who is chosen to play the slayer of Palamedes and the betrayer of Sinon1068, and to lead the party which, conducted by Helen, was to massacre Deiphobus in his chamber1069. On account of his fierce cruelty, even the ‘ground is cursed for his sake;’ poor Ithaca is loaded with imprecations by Æneas as he passes near it. Once he is called infelix, the greatest compliment that he anywhere receives; but his name in few cases escapes the affix of some abusive epithet, drawn alike from inhumanity or from cunning, it seems to matter little from which1070.

Of the Achilles of Homer.

The character of Achilles was more fortunate, in the handling it experienced from the Greek drama, than that of Ulysses. In the Iphigenia of Euripides, the hero of the Iliad appears as a faithful lover, and as a gallant and chivalrous warrior. At the same time, it has lost altogether the breadth of touch and largeness of scope, with which it is drawn in Homer. We miss entirely that unfathomable power of intellect, of passion, and also of bodily force, all combined in one figure, which carry the Achilles of Homer beyond every other human example in the quality of sheer grandeur, and make it touch the limits of the superhuman. There is nothing said or done by the Achilles of Euripides, nothing reported of him or assigned to him, no impression borne into a reader’s mind concerning him, which would not have been perfectly suitable to other warriors; for example, to the Diomed of Homer. He falls back into a class, and becomes a simple member of it, instead of being a creation paramount and alone; alone, like Olympus amidst the mountains of Greece; alone for ever in his sublimity, amidst the famous memories of other heroes, no less truly than he was alone in his solitary encampment during the continuance of the Wrath.

With Pindar Achilles appears in a different dress. He is here conceived without mind, as a youth marvellous in strength, hardihood, and swiftness of foot, growing up into a mighty warrior1071. The Achilles of Pindar is but as a pebble broken away from the mountain-mass of Homer.

Catullus, in his beautiful poem on the Nuptials of Peleus and Thetis, had a rare opportunity of setting forth the glories of Achilles. And he is in fact made the main subject of the nuptial song, properly so called; yet nothing of him is really celebrated by the poet1072, except his valour and his swiftness; all the rest is simple amplification and embellishment. It seems by this time to have been wholly forgotten, that the Homeric Achilles had a soul.

The discernment of Horace did not here enable him, as it had enabled him before, to escape from the popular delusions,

Scriptor honoratum si forte reponis Achillem,Impiger, iracundus, inexorabilis, acer,Jura neget sibi nata, nihil non arroget armis1073.

The character is exhibited here in a light at once feeble and misleading, for its cardinal point is made to be the supremacy of force over right. Now in Homer it is a sense that right has been deeply violated, which serves for the very groundwork out of which his exasperation rises. He does not view the question as one of meum and tuum only, or even mainly. His eye is first upon the gross wrong done, and only then upon himself as the subject of it. He resists Agamemnon’s claim1074 for a compensation at the very first, when it is urged, not against him, but against the Greeks at large1075; and he bursts out into indignant vituperation of the greedy king before Agamemnon has threatened to take Briseis, and when he has only insisted that, if the Greeks do not compensate him, he will then help himself to the prize either of Achilles or of Ajax or of Ulysses. In truth he is the assertor of the supremacy of law over will, much more than of force over law; and there is the greatest difference between pushing a sound and true principle even to gross excess, and proceeding from the outset upon a false one. The former, not the latter, is the case of the Achilles of the Iliad.

The Achilles of Statius.

The poet Statius observed, with sagacity enough, that the Achilles of Homer was but a torso; that the Iliad had only allowed him to be exhibited in one light, as it were, and at a single juncture of his career. So he resolved to profit by the ungotten mine, and to found a poem on the whole Achilles, child and man, in his rising, at his zenith, and in his setting blaze;

Nos ire per omnem(Sic amor est) heroa velis …… sed totâ juvenem deducere Trojâ1076.

We are therefore perhaps entitled to expect from him a fuller and more comprehensive grasp of the character than was usual, even although the narrative is broken off. The five books which remain of this work do not bring him so far as to the plains of Troy; but we leave him on the voyage from Scyros to Troas. They are chiefly occupied, therefore, with his residence there in the disguise of a maiden, and with the incidents of his sojourn.

Now the story of Achilles at Scyros, and of his connexion with Deidamia, harmonizes with one side of his character as it is drawn in Homer. It is evident that his personal beauty was not less graceful than manful; and he alone of the Greek chieftains is related to have worn ornaments of gold. Therefore that in the days of his boyhood he should wear the dress of maidens, and pass for one of them, is at any rate in accordance with a particular point of the Homeric tradition, though little adequate to its lofty tone as a whole. But this particular point is just what Statius contrives wholly to let drop. He shows us Achilles like the sham Anne Page, in the Merry Wives of Windsor1077, ‘as a great lubberly boy,’ neither careful nor able to give any grace to the movement of his limbs. For, in the dance, he would break the heart of any rightminded master of the ceremonies:

Nec servare vices, nec jungere brachia, curat:Tunc molles gressus, tunc aspernatur amictusPlus solito, rumpitque choros, et plurima turbat.

Nor does this writer appear at all to have apprehended the main ideas of the Homeric character. In the Iliad, the education which Achilles receives is the ordinary education of men of his rank, and his transcendent powers in after-life are due to a just, yet no more than a just, development of his extraordinary original gifts. But in Statius he is represented as having owed everything to the peculiar training of Chiron; whose semiferine life he shared, so that his diet in childhood consisted of the raw entrails of lions, and the marrow of half-dead she-wolves! His mind, indeed, was not overlooked amidst these brutalities, for he exhausts a long catalogue of acquirements; but Statius, as might be expected, completely drops out of his political education what is its one grand element in Homer, namely, the art of government over man by speech. Instead of this, Chiron the Centaur merely teaches him those abstract rules of right, by which he had himself been wont to govern Centaurs1078.

To the same age with the Achilleis of Statius belongs the Troades of Seneca. However this play may be criticized, as a study, like the others of the same author, for the closet only, and however it may betray the choice of Euripides for a model, it seems to be by some degrees better, in the conception and use of some famous Homeric characters, than any production since the time of Æschylus. The delineation of Andromache, if it has not ceased to be theatrical, is full at least of intense affection, all still centring in Hector. Ulysses, though reviled by that matron in her passionate grief, at least does the humane action of allowing her a little time to weep before the sentence of Calchas is executed upon Astyanax, and shows something too of the intellect of his antitype1079. Helen is exhibited not as vicious, but as wanting in firmness of character. She is driven by solicitation into the offence of alluring Polyxena to her immolation, under the name of a bridal with Neoptolemus; commences the performance of this false part with self-reproach, and then, challenged by Andromache, quits it and avows the truth1080.

But here we find a new form of departure from the ancient and genuine tradition. The principal motive, assigned by Seneca to the Greeks for putting Astyanax to death, is a terrified recollection of his father Hector, and a dread lest, upon attaining to manhood, he should avenge his own country against Greece. Again, Andromache, as it were, intimidates Ulysses, by invoking the shade of her husband:

Rumpe fatorum moras;Molire terras, Hector, ut Ulyssen domes!Vel umbra satis es1081.

A strange inversion of the relations drawn by Homer.

During all the time, however, in which we moved among the Greeks and among the earlier Romans, the corrupting process acted only upon each of the Homeric creations by itself, and there was no cause at work, which went to alter and pervert wholesale their collective relations to one another.

New relative position of Trojans and Greeks.

But from the period when the Æneid appeared, or at least so soon as it became the normal poem of the Roman literature, a new cause was in operation which, without mitigating in any degree the previous depraving agencies, introduced a new set of them, and began to disturb the positions of the two grand sets of characters, Greek and Trojan, relatively to one another.

Virgil had sought to give to the Cæsars the advantage of a hold upon royal antiquity by fabulous descent. He had before him the choice between Greece and Troy, which alike and alone enjoyed a world-wide honour. He could not hesitate which to select. The Greek histories were too near and too well known. Besides, the Greek dynasties generally had dwindled before they disappeared. The splendour of the Pelopids in particular had been quenched in calamity and crime, and no other of the Homeric lines had attained to greatness in political influence or historic fame. But the family of Priam had fallen gloriously in fighting for hearth and altar: it had disappeared from history in its full renown, ‘Magna mei sub terras ibat imago.’ Virgil chose too the house which was most ancient, and which traced link by link, as that of Agamemnon did not, a known and a named lineage up to Jupiter.

From this cause, both in the Æneid itself and afterwards, the Trojan characters were set upon stilts, and the Greeks were left to take their chance. Besides the loss of equilibrium, and the allowed predominance of coarser elements, which we have to lament in the Greek handling of them, we now see them pass, with the Romans, even into insignificance. The Diomed of Arpi is a person wholly unmarked; and he, like all the rest of his countrymen, is treated by Virgil simply as an instrument for obtaining enhanced effect, in the interest that he endeavours to concentrate on his Trojan characters; whereas the key to all Homer’s dispositions in the Iliad is to be found in the recollection, that he dealt with everything Trojan in the manner which was recommended and required by his Greek nationality. From this time forward, we find the palm both of valour and of wisdom clean carried over from the Greek to the Trojan side: the heroes of Homer remain, like unhewn boulders on the plain, crude, gross, and reciprocally almost indistinguishable masses of cunning or ferocity.

Virgil gave the tone in this respect, not only to the literature of ancient Rome, but to that of Christian Italy. For this reason, we may presume, among others, Orlando, the prime hero of the Italian romance, is, as I have before observed, modelled upon Hector. He is in many respects a very grand conception. Pulci, in describing his death, rises even to the sublime when he says there is

‘Un Dio, ed una Fede, ed uno Orlando.’

Which we may render in prose ‘One God, one way to God, one true type of manhood.’ Still it is remarkable that in Bojardo, as well as in Ariosto, the purer traces of the Homeric arrangement thus far at least remain, that Orlando, although he is the type of the Christian chivalry, yet, as he resembles Hector in piety and virtue, so likewise retains his likeness in this respect, that he is not the most formidable or valiant warrior of the poems. In Ariosto particularly, he is made inferior to Mandricardo, to Rodomonte, and most of all, but this for personal and prudential reasons, to Ruggiero. These three perhaps may be considered as being respectively the Ajax, the Diomed, and the Achilles of the Orlando Furioso.

And now the fancy for derivation from a Trojan stock, of which Virgil had set the fashion, was fully developed. Ariosto, at great length and in the most formal manner, establishes this lineage for his patrons, the family of Este. Others followed him. The humour passed even beyond the limits of Italy, into these then remote isles. A Trojan origin was ascribed to the English nation, and the authority of Homer, as to characters and history, was openly renounced by Dryden.

‘My faithful scene from true records shall tellHow Trojan valour did the Greek excel:Your great forefathers shall their fame regain,And Homer’s angry ghost repine in vain1082.’

In Oxford, at the revival of classical letters, the name of Trojans was assumed by those who were adverse to the new Greek studies, and who, having nothing but a name to rely on, doubtless chose the best they could.

The Imitations by Tasso.

Throughout the ‘Jerusalem’ of Tasso, we find imitations which are invested with greater interest than the remote copies commonly in circulation, because, from the large infusion of many leading arrangements, copied from Homer, into the plot of the poem, we may conclude with reason that they were in all likelihood drawn immediately from the original. Some of these personages, too, are in so far closely imitated from Homer, that Tasso has spent little or nothing of his own upon them, but has simply equipped them with as much of the Homeric idea as he thought available.

The most successful among them is Godfrey, modelled, but also perhaps improved, upon Agamemnon, who is by no means in my view one of the greater characters of the Iliad, though he has been incautiously called by Mitford ‘ambitious, active, brave, generous, and humane1083.’ Agamemnon has indeed that primary and fundamental qualification for his office, the political spirit, so to term it, and the sense of responsibility, which are so well developed in Godfrey; but it is doubtful whether he is entitled to be called either thoroughly brave, or at all generous or humane. Agamemnon’s character is admirably adapted to its place and purpose in the Iliad; in any more general view, Godfrey’s both stands higher in the moral sphere, and perhaps forms by itself a better poetic whole.

While the action of Achilles in the Iliad is apparently assigned to Rinaldo, there is room to doubt whether Tasso meant the person or character of his hero to carry corresponding marks of resemblance. In what may be called a by-place of his poem, he has made a passing attempt to reproduce both Achilles and Ulysses under the names of Argante and Alete, who appear as envoys from the Sultan of Egypt to the Frankish camp. For the benefit of the former, Tasso has translated the two lines that describe Achilles in Horace, and has added a spice of the Virgilian Mezentius:

Impaziente, inesorabil, fero,Nell’ arme infaticabil ed invitto,D’ ogni Dio sprezzatore, e chi riponeNella spada sua legge e sua ragione1084.

Accordingly, Argante proves to be the prime warrior on the Pagan side, and his character, described in these lines, is consistently carried through.

It is perhaps not to be regretted, that Tasso has left on record no other mark that Achilles was in his mind; for it is only the most debased edition of Achilles to whom Argante bears the slightest resemblance. The same is the case with Alete. Of humble origin, he rises to high honours by his powers of invention and of speech, and by the pliability of his character. Prompt in fiction, adroit in laying snares, a master of the disguised calumnies ‘che sono accuse, e pajon lodi1085,’ he evidently recalls the caricatures, which for two thousand years had circulated under the name of the Homeric Ulysses. Thus Tasso’s acquaintance with the text, whatever it may have been, did not avail to open his eyes, darkened by corrupt tradition, or to bring him nearer to the truth as regarded those sovereign creations of the genius of Homer. So sure it is, both in this and in other matters, that when long-established falsehoods have had habitual and undisturbed possession of the public mind, they form an atmosphere which we inhale long before consciousness begins. Hence the spurious colours with which we have thus been surreptitiously imbued, long survive the power, or even the act, of recurrence to the original standards. For that recurrence rarely takes place with such a concentration of the mind as is necessary in order to the double process, first, of disentangling itself from the snares of a false conception, and secondly, of building up for itself, and this too from the very ground, a true one.

Shakespeare and Chaucer.

In the Troilus and Cressida, of which Shakespeare had at least a share, we see, perhaps, one of the lowest and latest pictures of mere mediæval Homerism. The sun of the ancient criticism had set; that of the modern had not risen. It must be admitted that, in this play, although it shows the clear handiwork of Shakespeare in some splendid passages, and much of beautiful and of characteristic diction, we scarcely find one single living trait of the father of all bards preserved. Our incomparable dramatist, by no fault of his own, came in at the very end of that depraved lineage of copyists, for which progressive degeneracy is the necessary law. As is said1086, he followed Lydgate; Lydgate drew from a Guido of Messina, who in the thirteenth century founded himself on Dictys Cretensis and Dares Phrygius.

Before his time Chaucer, we may presume, had drawn from the same sources. Yet his poem of ‘Troilus and Cressida’ bears a token of the familiarity of the English mind with free institutions under the Plantagenets. The fidelity with which traditions are preserved, and also the facility with which they are revived, no doubt often depends more upon moral sympathies, than upon any cause operating simply through the intellect of man. Though dealing with un-Homeric persons, or events, or both, and copying again from copies probably very corrupt, yet Chaucer, as an Englishman accustomed to English ideas of government, brings out with much more freshness and freedom the notion of public deliberation in Troy, (nay, even the very word parliament is not wanting,) than do the poets of the literary age of Greece.

For which delibered was by ParlimentFor Antenor to yielden out Cresside,And it pronounced by the PresidentThough that Hector may full oft praid;And finally, what wight that it withsaidIt was for nought, it must ben, and should,For substaunce of the parliment it would1087.

But let us return to the so-called Shakespeare.

Thersites is converted into the modern fool. Diomed struts upon his toes, while in Homer his modesty among the Greeks is the peculiar ornament of his valour. Ajax, whom Homer has made lumpish and goodnatured, is full of haughty follies, the coxcomb of warriors; while the mere bulk which, combined with bravery and bluntness, formed his peculiar note, is made the distinctive characteristic of Achilles. It is still more grievous to find the relation of this hero to Patroclus degraded by foul insinuations, entirely foreign to the Iliad, to its author, and even to its age. Agamemnon is a mere stage king; and it can be no wonder that Nestor’s character, which requires a fine appreciation from its gently rounded construction, should have become thoroughly commonplace and vapid. The same lot befalls Ulysses, who is made to play quite a secondary part. Paris, without any mending of his moral qualities, is allowed to present a much more respectable figure: the Helen of Homer reproaches his cowardice; but here he says, ‘I would fain have armed to-day, but my Nell would not have it so1088.’ She appears as the mere adulteress; and those, who remember how she is treated in Homer, will be able to measure the declension that time and unskilled hands had wrought, when they read the speech of Diomed describing her as follows:

She’s bitter to her country: hear me, Paris!For every false drop in her bawdy veinsA Grecian’s life hath sunk: for every scrupleOf her contaminated carrion weightA Trojan hath been slain: since she could speakShe hath not given so many good words breathAs, for her, Greeks and Trojans suffered death1089.

The palm of pure heroism is now become so entirely Hector’s property, that Achilles only slays him by means of the swords of his Myrmidons, not by his own proper might; and that, too, does not happen until, wearied and disarmed, he applies to Achilles to forego his vantage1090: so that Ajax says with very great propriety indeed,

Great Hector was as good a man as he1091.

Shirley’s ‘Contention of Ajax and Ulysses,’ independently of other merits, deserves notice for a partial return towards just conception of the Homeric characters. Yet even here the claim of Ajax to the arms of Achilles is founded principally on the impeachment of Ulysses as a coward; and the reply of that chieftain rests much too exclusively on setting up his political merits and achievements, as if he were strong in no other title.