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

If, again, we endeavour to estimate the importance of Speech in the heroic age by the degree in which the faculty was actually cultivated, we must take the achievements of the Poet as the best indicators of the capacities of the age. The speeches which Homer has put into the mouths of his leading orators should be tolerably fair representatives of the best performances of the time. Nor is it possible that in any age there should be in a few a capacity for making such speeches, without a capacity in many for receiving, feeling, and comprehending them. Poets of modern times have composed great works, in ages that stopped their ears against them. ‘Paradise Lost’ does not represent the time of Charles the Second, nor the ‘Excursion’ the first decades of the present century. The case of the orator is entirely different. His work, from its very inception, is inextricably mixed up with practice. It is cast in the mould offered to him by the mind of his hearers. It is an influence principally received from his audience (so to speak) in vapour, which he pours back upon them in a flood. The sympathy and concurrence of his time is with his own mind joint parent of his work. He cannot follow nor frame ideals; his choice is, to be what his age will have him, what it requires in order to be moved by him, or else not to be at all. And as when we find the speeches in Homer, we know that there must have been men who could speak them, so, from the existence of units who could speak them, we know that there must have been crowds who could feel them.

The orations of the Poems.

Now if we examine those orations, we shall, I think, find not only that they contain specimens of transcendent eloquence which have never been surpassed, but likewise that they evince the most comprehensive knowledge, and the most varied and elastic use, of all the resources of the art. If we seek a specimen of invective, let us take the speeches of Achilles in the debate of the First Iliad. If it is the loftiest tone of terrible declamation that we desire, I know not where (to speak with moderation) we can find any thing that in grandeur can surpass the passage (Il. xvi. 74-9) beginning,

οὐ γὰρ Τυδειδέω Διομήδεος ἐν παλάμῃσινμαίνεται ἐγχείη, κ. τ. λ.

But if it is solemnity that is sought, nothing can, I think, excel the ναὶ μὰ τόδε σκῆπτρον. (Il. i. 233-44.)

What more admirable example of comprehensive statement, which exhausts the case, and absolutely shuts up the mouth of the adversary, than in the speech of Ulysses to Euryalus, who has reproached him with looking like a sharper? That speech consists of twenty lines: and I think any one who attempts to give a really accurate summary of it will be apt to find that his epitome, if it be at all complete, has become unawares a paraphrase. Nor is Homer less successful in showing us, how he has sounded the depths of pathos. For though the speeches of Priam to Achilles in the Twenty-fourth Iliad are spoken privately, and from man to man only, and are therefore not in the nature of oratory properly so called, they are conclusive, a fortiori, as to his knowledge of the instruments by which the human affections might be moved so much more easily, when the speaker would be assisted at once by the friendliness and by the electric sympathies of a multitude.

Repartee and Sarcasm.

All these are direct instruments of influence on the mind and actions of man. But of assaults in flank Homer is quite as great a master. He shows a peculiar genius for that which is properly called repartee; for that form of speech, which flings back upon the opponent the stroke of his own weapon, or on the supplicant the plea of his own prayer. There was one Antimachus, a Trojan, who had grown wealthy, probably by the bribes which he received from Paris in consideration of his always opposing, in the Trojan Agorè, the restoration of Helen to the Greeks. His sons are mastered by Agamemnon in the field. Aware that he had a thirst for money, they cry, ‘Quarter, Agamemnon! we are the sons of rich Antimachus: he will pay well for our lives.’ ‘If,’ replies the king, ‘you are the sons of that Antimachus, who, when Menelaus came as envoy to Troy, advised to take and slay him, here and now shall ye expiate your father’s infamy222.’ Compare with this the yet sharper turn of Ulysses on Leiodes in the Odyssey: ‘Spare me, Ulysses! I have done no ill in your halls; I stopped what ill I could; I was but Augur to the Suitors.’ Then follows the stern reply. ‘If thou dost avow that thou art Augur to the Suitors, then often in prayer must thou have augured my destruction, and desired my wife for thine own; wherefore thou shalt not escape the painsome bed of death223.’

But the weapons of sarcasm, from the lightest to the weightiest, are wielded by Homer with almost greater effect than any others. As a sample of the former, I take the speech of Phœnix when he introduces, by way of parable, the Legend of Meleager. ‘As long as Meleager fought, all was well; but when rage took possession of him – which (I would just observe) now and then bewilders other great minds also – then,’ and so onward.

But for the great master of this art, Homer has chosen Achilles. As with his invectives he grinds to powder, so with the razor edge of the most refined irony he cuts his way in a moment to the quick. When Greece, in the person of the envoy-kings, is at his feet, and he has spurned them away, he says, ‘No: I will go home: you can come and see me depart – if you think it worth your while.’

ὄψεαι, ἢν ἐθέλῃσθα, καὶ αἴ κέν τοι τὰ μεμήλῃ.

Of this passage, Il. ix. 356-64, the following translation may give a very imperfect idea224:

Of fight with Hector will I none;Tomorrow, with the rising sun,Each holy rite and office done,I load and launch my Phthian fleet;Come, if thou thinkest meet,See, if thou carest for the sight,My ships shall bound in the morning’s light,My rowers row with eager might,O’er Helle’s teeming main.And, if Poseidon give his grace,Then, with but three revolving days,I see my home again;My home of plenty, that I leftTo fight with Troy; of sense bereft!

The plenty of his house (ἔστι δέ μοι μάλα πολλὰ) is the finishing stroke of reply on Agamemnon, who had thought that his resentment, unsatisfied in feeling, could be appeased with gifts.

In the same speech occurs the piercing sarcasm225:

ἦ μοῦνοι φιλέουσ’ ἀλόχους μερόπων ἀνθρώπων

Ἀτρεῖδαι;

The Greeks had come to Troy to recover the wife of Menelaus: and while they were there, Agamemnon took for a concubine the intended wife of Achilles. Was it, he asks, the privilege of the sons of Atreus alone among mankind to love their wives? Agamemnon, too, being the chief of the two; who had laid hold on Briseis, as he had meant to keep Chryseis, in disparagement of his own marriage bed. Nor can the reader of this passage fail, I think, to be struck with the wonderful manner in which it combines a stately dignity, and an unimpeachable solidity of argument, with the fierceness of its personal onslaught.

The faculty of debate in Homer.

If the power of oratory is remarkable in Homer, so likewise is the faculty of what in England is called debate. Here the orator is a wrestler, holding his ground from moment to moment; adjusting his poise, and delivering his force, in exact proportion to the varying pressure of his antagonist. In Homer’s debates, every speech after the first is commonly a reply. It belongs not only to the subject, but to the speech that went before: it exhibits, given the question and the aims of the speaker, the exact degree of ascent or descent, of expansion or contraction, of relaxation or enhancement, which the circumstances of the case, in the state up to which they were brought by the preceding address, may require. In the Assembly of the First Book, five, nay, six, successive speeches of Achilles and Agamemnon226 bring their great contention to its climax. But the discussion with the Envoys deserves very particular notice.

The discussion of the Ninth Iliad.

Ulysses begins a skilled harangue to the offended hero with a most artful and well-masked exaggeration of the martial fury of Hector. He takes care only to present it as part of a general picture, which in other parts is true enough; but he obviously relies upon it as a mode of getting within the guard of Achilles. He next touches him upon the point, to which Priam afterwards made a yet higher appeal; the tender recollection of his father Peleus, who had warned him how much more arduous was the acquisition of self-command, than that of daring. He then recites the gifts of Agamemnon: and, encouraged perhaps by the kind greeting that, with his companions, he had received, he closes by urging that, however hateful Agamemnon may be, yet, in pity for the other Greeks, both high and low, and in anticipation of their gratitude, he ought to arm. I shall not attempt to analyse the wonderful speech of Achilles which follows, and to which some references have already been made. Suffice it to say, that it commences with an intimation to Ulysses that it will, in the opinion of the speaker, be best for all parties if he tells out his mind plainly: an indirect and courteous reproof to Ulysses for having thought to act upon him by tact and by the processes of a rhetorician. After this follows such a combination of argument, declamation, invective, and sarcasm as, within the same compass, I do not believe all the records of the world can match. But the general result of the whole is the announcement that he will return to Phthia the very next morning; together with an absolute, unconditional rejection of all gifts and proffers, until the outrage of Agamemnon is entirely wiped away227:

πρίν γ’ ἀπὸ πᾶσαν ἐμοὶ δόμεναι θυμαλγέα λώβην.

When he has concluded, all his hearers, abashed by his masculine wrath, are silent for a while. Then Phœnix, in the longest speech of the poem, pours forth his unselfish and warm, but prolix and digressive affection. This speech displays far less of rhetorical resource, than that of Ulysses. Ulysses had conceded, as it were, the right of Achilles to an unbounded resentment against Agamemnon (300): Phœnix, on the contrary, by parable, menaces him with retribution from the Erinūs, unless he shall subdue the mighty soul within him. But Achilles, touched in his better nature, gives way a little to the more ethical appeal, where he had been inflexible and invulnerable before the intellectual and rhetorical address. He now bids Phœnix come himself, and sleep in his encampment: there they can consider together, in the morning, whether to go or to stay (618). Still he announces, that nothing will induce him to quit the ships for the field (609). Next comes blunt Ajax into the palæstra; deprecates the wasting of time; is for taking back the answer, bad as it may be: Achilles has evidently made up his mind; and cares not a rush for all or any of them. ‘What,’ says the simple man-mountain, ‘the homicide of a brother or child is atoned for by a fine, and yet here is all this to-do about a girl. Aye, and a single girl; when we offer seven of the very best, and ever so much besides.’ Having thus reached the acmè of his arts, he now aims at the friendly feeling of Achilles, and in a single word bids him be placable to men whom he has admitted beneath his roof, and whom he owns for as loyal friends as the whole army could find him.

The leverage of this straightforward speech, which is only saved by kindliness from falling into rudeness, again produces an initial movement towards concession on the part of the great hero. He replies in effect to Ajax, ‘You have spoken well: I like your way of going to work: but my heart swells and boils with the shame inflicted on me before the Greeks by Agamemnon. Tell them then’ – there is now no announcement of setting sail; nay, there is no longer any need for debate in the morning whether to set sail or not – ‘tell them that I fight no more, till Hector, carrying slaughter and fire, shall reach this camp, these ships. Keen as he may be, it will then be time enough for ME to stay his onward path.’

Such is the remarkable course of this debate. But Ulysses, when they return to Agamemnon – meaning probably to bring him and all the Greeks fairly to bay – takes no notice of the partial relaxations of the iron will of Achilles, but simply reports that he has threatened to set sail. Then comes the turn of Diomed. ‘You were wrong to cringe to him. Of himself, he is arrogant enough: you have made him worse. Let him alone; he will come when he thinks proper, or when Providence wills it; and no sooner. My advice is that we sleep and eat now, and fight at dawn. I, at any rate, will be there, in the foremost of the battle.’

Function of the Assembly.

We will now proceed to consider the nature and place of the ἀγορὴ or Assembly, in the heroic age: and a view of the proceedings on several occasions will further illustrate the great and diversified oratorical resources of the Poet.

A people cannot live in its corporate capacity without intermission, and the king is the standing representative of the community. But yet the ἀγορὴ, or Assembly, is the true centre of its life and its vital motion, as the monarch is of its functional or administrative activity; and the greatest ultimate power, which the king possesses, is that of influence upon his subjects collected there, through the combined medium of their reverence for his person, and of his own powers of persuasion. In the case of the army before Troy, to the strength of these ordinary motives is added, along with a certain spirit of resentment for injury received in the person of Helen, the hope of a rich booty on the capture of the city, and the principle of pure military honour; never perhaps more powerfully drawn than in the Iliad, nor with greater freedom from extravagances, by which it is sometimes made to ride over the heads of duty and justice, its only lawful superiors.

First, it would appear to have belonged to the Assembly, not indeed to distribute the spoil, but to consent to its distribution by the chief commander, and his brother-leaders. To the former it is imputed in the Ninth Book. But in the First Book Achilles says to him in the Assembly, We the Greeks (Ἀχαιοὶ) will requite you three and four-fold, when Troy is taken228. It is probable that he here means to speak of the chiefs alone, (but only so far as the act of distribution is concerned,) because Thersites uses the very same expression (ἅς τοι Ἀχαιοὶ πρωτίστῳ δίδομεν229) in the Second Book. Therefore the division of booty was probably made on the king’s proposal, with the aid of the chiefs, but with the general knowledge and consent of the army, and in right of that consent on their part.

It must be remembered all along, that the state of political society, which Homer represents to us, is that in which the different elements of power wear their original and natural forms; neither much altered as yet by the elaborate contrivances of man, nor driven into their several extremes by the consequences of long strife, greedy appetite, and furious passions, excited by the temptations which the accumulation of property presents.

In those simple times, when the functions of government were few, and its acts, except perhaps the trial of private causes, far between, there was no formal distribution of political rights, as if they could be made the object of ambitious or contentious cupidity: but the grand social power that moved the machine was in the determinations of the ἀγορὴ, however informally declared.

Grote has observed, that in the Homeric ἀγορὴ no division of affirmative and negative voices ever takes place. It would require a volume to discuss all that this remark involves and indicates. I will however observe that the principle surely cannot be made good from history or in philosophy, that numbers prevail by an inherent right. Decision by majorities is as much an expedient, as lighting by gas. In adopting it as a rule, we are not realizing perfection, but bowing to imperfection. We follow it as best for us, not as best in itself. The only right to command, as Burke has said, resides in wisdom and virtue. In their application to human affairs, these great powers have commonly been qualified, on the one hand by tradition and prepossession, on the other hand by force. Decision by majorities has the great merit of avoiding, and that by a test perfectly definite, the last resort to violence; and of making force itself the servant instead of the master of authority. But our country still rejoices in the belief, that she does not decide all things by majorities. The first Greeks neither knew the use of this numerical dogma, nor the abuse of it. They did not employ it as an instrument, and in that they lost: but they did not worship it as an idol, and in that they greatly gained. Votes were not polled in the Olympus of Homer; yet a minority of influential gods carry the day in favour of the Greeks against the majority, and against their Head. There surely could not be a grosser error than to deny every power to be a real one, unless we are able both to measure its results in a table of statistics, and to trace at every step, with our weak and partial vision, the precise mode by which it works towards its end.

Great decisions all taken there.

We have seen, in the first place, that all the great decisions of the War were taken in the Assembly of the Greeks. And here the first reflection that arises is, how deeply this method of political action must have been engrained in their habits and ideas, when it could survive the transition from peace to war, and, notwithstanding its palpable inconveniences in a camp, form the practical rule of its proceedings under the eye of the enemy.

The force of this consideration is raised to the utmost height by the case of the Night Assembly in the Ninth Book. The Trojans, no longer confined to their walls, are lying beside a thousand watch-fires, just outside the rampart. Some important measure is absolutely demanded on the instant by the downcast condition of the less than half-beaten, but still thoroughly discouraged army. Yet not even under these circumstances would Agamemnon act individually, or with the kings alone. He sends his heralds round the camp (Il. ix. 11), to summon an Assembly noiselessly, and man by man. Can there be a more conclusive proof of the vigour, with which the popular principle entered into the idea of the Homeric polities? If it be said that such an operation could hardly be effected at night without stir, I reply that if it be so, the argument for the power and vitality of the Assembly is but strengthened: for Homer was evidently far more careful to speak in harmony with the political tone of his country than to measure out time by the hour and minute, or place by the yard, foot, and inch; as valuing not the latter methods less, but the former more.

κλήδην εἰς ἀγορὴν κικλήσκειν ἄνδρα ἕκαστον,μηδὲ βοᾶν·

The Greek army, in fact, is neither more nor less than, so to speak, the State in uniform. As the soldier of those days was simply the citizen armed, so the armament was the aggregate of armed citizens, who, in all except their arms and the handling of them, continued to be what they had been before. But when we find that in such great emergencies political ideas did not give way to military expediency, we cannot, I think, but conclude that those ideas rested on broad and deep foundations.

It further tends to show the free nature of the relation between the Assembly and the Commander-in-chief, that it might be summoned by others, as well as by him. We are told explicitly in the First Book, that Achilles called it together, as he did again in the Nineteenth for the Reconciliation. On the second of these occasions, it may have been his purpose that the reparation should be as public as had been the insult: at any rate there was a determination to make the reconciliation final, absolute, and thorough. But, at the former time, the act partook of the nature of a moral appeal from Agamemnon to the army. It illustrated, in the first place, the principle of publicity so prevalent in the Greek polities. That which Calchas had to declare, he must declare not in a ‘hole and corner,’ but on his responsibility, liable to challenge, subject to the δήμου φάτις if he told less than the truth, as well as to the resentment of the sovereign if he should venture on divulging it entire. But secondly, it shows that Achilles held the Greeks at large entitled and bound to be parties to the transaction. He meant that the Greeks should see his wrong. Perhaps he hoped that they would intercept its infliction. This at any rate is clear: he commenced the debate with measured reproofs of Agamemnon230; but afterwards he rose, with a wider scope, to a more intense and a bitterer strain231.

When he found that the monarch was determined, and when he had repressed the access of rage which tempted him to summary revenge, he began to use language not now of mere invective against Agamemnon, but of such invective as tended to set him at odds with the people. Then further on, perhaps because they did not echo back his sentiments, and become active parties to the terrible fray, he both taunts and threatens them. For he begins232, ‘Coward that thou art! Never hast thou dared to arm with the people for the fight, or with the leaders for the ambush.’ And then233. ‘Devourer of the people! over what nobodies thou rulest! or surely this would be the last of your misdeeds.’ Again, in the peroration234, ‘By this mighty oath, every man among you shall lament the absence of Achilles.’

Opposition in the Agorè.

It has often been asserted that the principle of popular opposition in debate is only represented by Thersites. But let us proceed step by step. It is at any rate clear enough that opposition by the confederate kings is at once sufficiently represented in Achilles; and that it is not represented by him alone, since in the Assembly of the Ninth Book, Diomed both strongly reprehended Agamemnon, and proposes a course diametrically the reverse of his; which course was forthwith adopted by the acclamations of the army.

The case of Thersites.

Let us now pass on to Thersites. There is no more singular picture in the Iliad, than that which he presents to us. It well deserves examination in detail.

Homer has evidently been at pains to concentrate upon this personage all that could make him odious to the hearers of his song, while nevertheless he puts into his mouth not only the cant of patriotism, but also a case that would perhaps have been popular, had he not averted the favour of the army by his insolent vulgarity.

Upon its merits, too, it was a tolerable case, but not a good one; for he was wrong in supposing Achilles placable; and again wrong in advising that the Greeks, now without Achilles, should give way before the Trojans, to whom they were still superior in war.

He is in all things the reverse of the great human ideals of Homer. As, in the pattern kings and heroes, moral, intellectual, and corporeal excellences, each in the highest degree, must be combined, so Thersites presents a corresponding complication of deformities to view. As to the first, he is the most infamous person (αἴσχιστος) in the army; and he relies for his influence, not on the sense and honour of the soldiers, but on a vein of gross buffoonery; which he displays in the only coarse allusion that is to be found in all the speeches of the poems. As to the second head, his voluble speech is as void of order as of decency235. As to the third, he is lame, bandy-legged236, hump-backed, round-shouldered, peak-headed, and lastly, (among the καρηκομόωντες,) he is bald, or indeed worse, for on his head a hair is planted here and there237. Lastly, hateful to all238, he is most of all hateful to, as well as spiteful against, the two paramount heroes of the poems, Achilles and Ulysses: an observation inserted with equal ingenuity and significance, because Homer, by inserting it, effectually cuts off any favour which Thersites might otherwise have gained with his hearers from seeming to take the side of the wronged Achilles. It is also worthy of note, as indicating how Homer felt the strength of that bond which unites together all great excellences of whatever kind. Upon a slight and exterior view, the two great characters of Achilles and Ulysses appear antagonistic, and we might expect to find their likes and dislikes running in opposite directions. But as, in the Ninth Book, Ulysses is declared by Achilles to be one of those whom he loves best among the Greeks239, so here they are united in carrying to the highest degree a common antipathy to Thersites.