Homer and His Age Part 17

originally exhibited Agamemnon as not in terror and despair, as it now does.

We need not throw the burden of all this work on the editor. As Mr.

Leaf elsewhere writes, in a different mind, the Tenth Book "is obviously adapted to its present place in the _Iliad_, for it a.s.sumes a moment when Achilles is absent from the field, and when the Greeks are in deep dejection from a recent defeat. These conditions are exactly fulfilled by the situation at the end of Book IX." [Footnote: _Companion_, p.

190.]

This is certainly the case. The Tenth Book could not exist without the Ninth; yet Mr. Leaf's new opinion is that it "cannot have been meant to follow on Book IX." [Footnote: _Iliad_, vol. i. p. 424.] He was better inspired when he held the precisely opposite opinion.

Dr. Adolf Kiene [Footnote: Die _Epen des Homer, Zweiter Theil,_ pp.

90-94. Hanover, 1884.] accepts Book XI. as originally composed to fill its present place in the _Iliad._ He points out the despondency of the chiefs after receiving the reply of Achilles, and supposes that even Diomede (IX. 708) only urges Agamemnon to "array before the s.h.i.+ps thy folk and hors.e.m.e.n," for defensive battle. But, encouraged by the success of the night adventure, Agamemnon next day a.s.sumes the offensive. To consider thus is perhaps to consider too curiously. But it is clear that the Achaeans have been much encouraged by the events of Book X., especially Agamemnon, whose character, as Kiene observes, is very subtly and consistently treated, and "lies near the poet's heart." This is the point which we keep urging. Agamemnon's care for Menelaus is strictly preserved in Book X.

Nitzsche (I 897) writes, "Between Book IX. and Book XI there is a gap; that gap the _Doloneia_ fills: it must have been composed to be part of the _ILIAD_." But he thinks that the _Doloneia_ has taken the place of an earlier lay which filled the gap. [Footnote: Die _Echtheit der Doloneia,_ p. 32. Programme des K. K. Staats Gymnasium zu Marburg, 1877.] That the Book is never referred to later in the _Iliad_, even if it be true, is no great argument against its authenticity. For when later references are made to Book IX., they are dismissed as clever late interpolations. If the horses of Rhesus took part, as they do not, in the sports at the funeral of Patroclus, the pa.s.sage would be called a clever interpolation: in fact, Diomede had better horses, divine horses to run. However, it is certainly remarkable that the interpolation was not made by one of the interpolators of critical theory.

Meanwhile there is, we think, a reference to Book X. in Book XIV.

[Footnote: This was pointed out to me by Mr. Shewan, to whose great knowledge of Homer I am here much indebted.]

In _Iliad_, XIV. 9-11, we read that Nestor, in his quarters with the wounded Machaon, on the day following the night of Dolon's death, hears the cry of battle and goes out to see what is happening. "He took the well-wrought s.h.i.+eld of his son, horse-taming Thrasymedes, which was lying in the hut, all glistening with bronze, but _the son had the s.h.i.+eld of his father_."

Why had Thrasymedes the s.h.i.+eld of his father? At about 3 A.M. before dawn the s.h.i.+eld of Nestor was lying beside him in his own bedroom (Book X. 76), and at the same moment his son Thrasymedes _was_ on outpost duty, and had his own s.h.i.+eld with him (Book IX. 81).

When, then, did father and son exchange s.h.i.+elds, and why? Mr. Leaf says, "It is useless to inquire why father and son had thus changed s.h.i.+elds, as the scholiasts of course do."

The scholiasts merely babble. Homer, of course, meant _something_ by this exchange of s.h.i.+elds, which occurred late in the night of Book IX.

or very early in the following day, that of Books XI-XVI.

Let us follow again the sequence of events. On the night before the day when Nestor had Thrasymedes' s.h.i.+eld and Thrasymedes had Nestor's, Thrasymedes was sent out, with s.h.i.+eld and all, in command of one of the seven companies of an advanced guard, posted between fosse and wall, in case of a camisade by the Trojans, who were encamped on the plain (IX.

81). With him in command were Meriones and five other young men less notable. They had supplies with them and whatever was needed: they cooked supper in bivouac.

In the _Doloneia_ the wakeful princes, after inspecting the advanced guard, go forward within view of the Trojan ranks and consult. With them they take Nestor's son, Thrasymedes, and Meriones (X. 196). The two young men, being on active service, are armed; the princes are not.

Diomede, having been suddenly roused out of sleep, with no intention to fight, merely threw on his dressing-gown, a lion's skin. Nestor wore a thick, double, purple dressing-gown. Odysseus had cast his s.h.i.+eld about his shoulders. It was decided that Odysseus and Diomede should enter the Trojan camp and "prove a jeopardy." Diomede had no weapon but his spear; so Thrasymedes, who is armed as we saw, lends him his bull's-hide cap, "that keeps the heads of stalwart youths," his sword (for that of Diomede "was left at the s.h.i.+ps"), and his s.h.i.+eld.

Diomede and Odysseus successfully achieve their adventure and return to the chiefs, where they talk with Nestor; and then they go to Diomede's hut and drink. The outposts remain, of course, at their stations.

Meanwhile, Thrasymedes, having lent his s.h.i.+eld to Diomede, has none of his own. Naturally, as he was to pa.s.s the night under arms, he would send to his father's quarters for the old man's s.h.i.+eld, a sword, and a helmet. He would remain at his post (his men had provisions) till the general _reveillez_ at dawn, and would then breakfast at his post and go into the fray. Nestor, therefore, missing his s.h.i.+eld, would send round to Diomede's quarters for the s.h.i.+eld of Thrasymedes, which had been lent overnight to Diomede, would take it into the fight, and would bring it back to his own hut when he carried the wounded Machaon thither out of the battle. When he arms to go out and seek for information, he picks up the s.h.i.+eld of Thrasymedes.

Nothing can be more obvious; the poet, being a man of imagination, not a professor, sees it all, and casually mentions that the son had the father's and the father had the son's s.h.i.+eld. His audience, men of the sword, see the case as clearly as the poet does: only we moderns and the scholiasts, almost as modern as ourselves, are puzzled.

It may also be argued, though we lay no stress on it, that in Book XI.

312, when Agamemnon has been wounded, we find Odysseus and Diomede alone together, without their contingents, because they have not separated since they breakfasted together, after returning from the adventure of Book X., and thus they have come rather late to the field. They find the Achaeans demoralised by the wounding of Agamemnon, and they make a stand. "What ails us," asks Odysseus, "that we forget our impetuous valour?" The pa.s.sage appears to take up the companions.h.i.+p of Odysseus and Diomede, who were left breakfasting together at the end of Book X.

and are not mentioned till we meet them again in this scene of Book XI., as if they had just come on the field.

As to the linguistic tests of lateness "there are exceptionally numerous traces of later formation," says Mr. Monro; while Fick, tout _contraire,_ writes, "clumsy Ionisms are not common, and, as a rule, occur in these parts which on older grounds show themselves to be late interpolations." "The cases of agreement" (between Fick and Mr. Monro), "are few, and the pa.s.sages thus condemned are not more numerous in the _Doloneia_ than in any average book." [Footnote: Jevons, _Journal of h.e.l.lenic Studies_, vii. p. 302.] The six examples of "a post-Homeric use of the article" do not seem so very post-Homeric to an ordinary intelligence--parallels occur in Book I.--and "Perfects in [Greek: ka]

from derivative verbs" do not destroy the impression of antiquity and unity which is left by the treatment of character; by the celebrated cap with boars' tusks, which no human being could archaeologically reconstruct in the seventh century; and by the Homeric vigour in such touches as the horses unused to dead men. As the _Iliad_ certainly pa.s.sed through centuries in which its language could not but be affected by linguistic changes, as it could not escape from _remaniements_, consciously or unconsciously introduced by reciters and copyists, the linguistic objections are not strongly felt by us. An unphilological reader of Homer notes that Duntzer thinks the _Doloneia_ "older than the oldest portion of the Odyssey," while Gemoll thinks that the author of the _Doloneia_. was familiar with the _Odyssey_. [Footnote: Duntzer, _Homer. Abhanglungen_, p. 324. Gemoll, _Hermes_, xv. 557 ff.]

Meanwhile, one thing seems plain to us: when the author of Book IX.

posted the guards under Thrasymedes, he was deliberately leading up to Book X.; while the casual remark in Book XIV. about the exchange of s.h.i.+elds between father and son, Nestor and Thrasymedes, glances back at Book X. and possibly refers to some lost and more explicit statement.

It is not always remembered that, if things could drop into the interpolations, things could also drop out of the _ILIAD,_ causing _lacunae_, during the dark backward of its early existence.

If the _Doloneia_ be "barely Homeric," as Father Browne holds, this opinion was not shared by the listeners or readers of the sixth century.

The vase painters often ill.u.s.trate the _Doloneia;_ but it does not follow that "the story was fresh" because it was "popular," as Mr.

Leaf suggests, and "was treated as public property in a different way"

(namely, in a comic way) "from the consecrated early legends" (_Iliad,_ II 424, 425). The sixth century vase painters ill.u.s.trated many pa.s.sages in Homer, not the _Doloneia_ alone. The "comic way" was the ruthless humour of two strong warriors capturing one weak coward. Much later, wild caricature was applied in vase painting to the most romantic scenes in the Odyssey, which were "consecrated" enough.

CHAPTER XIV

THE INTERPOLATIONS OF NESTOR

That several of the pa.s.sages in which Nestor speaks are very late interpolations, meant to glorify Pisistratus, himself of Nestor's line, is a critical opinion to which we have more than once alluded. The first example is in _Iliad,_ II. 530-568. This pa.s.sage "is meant at once to present Nestor as the leading counsellor of the Greek army, and to introduce the coming _Catalogue_." [Footnote: Leaf, _Iliad,_ vol. i. p.

70.] Now the _Catalogue_ "originally formed an introduction to the whole Cycle." [Footnote: Ibid., vol. i. p. 87.] But, to repeat an earlier observation, surely the whole Cycle was much later than the period of Pisistratus and his sons; that is, the compilation of the Homeric and Cyclic poems into one body of verse, named "The Cycle," is believed to have been much later.

It is objected that Nestor's advice in this pa.s.sage, "Separate thy warriors by tribes and clans" ([Greek: phyla, phraetras]), "is out of place in the last year of the war"; but this suggestion for military reorganisation may be admitted as a mere piece of poetical perspective, like Helen's description of the Achaean chiefs in Book III, or Nestor may wish to return to an obsolete system of clan regiments. The Athenians had "tribes" and "clans," political inst.i.tutions, and Nestor's advice is noted as a touch of late Attic influence; but about the nature and origin of these social divisions we know so little that it is vain to argue about them. The advice of Nestor is an appeal to the clan spirit--a very serviceable military spirit, as the Highlanders have often proved--but we have no information as to whether it existed in Achaean times. Nestor speaks as the aged Lochiel spoke to Claverhouse before Killiecrankie. Did the Athenian army of the sixth century fight in clan regiments? The device seems to belong to an earlier civilisation, whether it survived in sixth century Athens or not. It is, of course, notorious that tribes and clans are most flouris.h.i.+ng among the most backward people, though they were welded into the const.i.tution of Athens. The pa.s.sage, therefore, cannot with any certainty be dismissed as very late, for the words for "tribe" and "clan" could not be novel Athenian inventions, the inst.i.tutions designated being of prehistoric origin.

Nestor shows his tactics again in IV. 303-309, offers his "inopportune tactical lucubrations, doubtless under Athenian (Pisistratean) influence." The poet is here denied a sense of humour. That a veteran military Polonius should talk as inopportunely about tactics as Dugald Dalgetty does about the sconce of Drumsnab is an essential part of the humour of the character of Nestor. This is what Nestor's critics do not see; the inopportune nature of his tactical remarks is the point of them, just as in the case of the laird of Drumthwacket, "that should be." Scott knew little of Homer, but coincided in the Nestorian humour by mere congruity of genius. The Pisistratidze must have been humourless if they did not see that the poet smiled as he composed Nestor's speeches, glorifying old deeds of his own and old ways of fighting. He arrays his Pylians with chariots in front, footmen in the rear. In the [blank s.p.a.ce] the princely heroes dismounted to fight, the chariots following close behind them. [Footnote: _Iliad_, XI. 48-56.] In the same way during the Hundred Years' War the English knights dismounted and defeated the French chivalry till, under Jeanne d'Arc and La Hire, the French learned the lesson, and imitated the English practice. On the other hand, Egyptian wall-paintings show the Egyptian chariotry advancing in neat lines and serried squadrons. According to Nestor these had of old been the Achaean tactics, and he preferred the old way.

Nestor's advice in Book IV. is _not_ to dismount or break the line of chariots; these, he says, were the old tactics: "Even so is the far better way; thus, moreover, did men of old time lay low cities and walls." There was to be no rus.h.i.+ng of individuals from the ranks, no dismounting. Nestor's were not the tactics of the heroes--they usually dismount and do single valiances; but Nestor, commanding his local contingent, recommends the methods of the old school, [Greek: hoi pretoroi]. What can be more natural and characteristic?

The poet's meaning seems quite clear. He is not flattering Pisistratus, but, with quiet humour, offers the portrait of a vain, worthy veteran.

It is difficult to see how this point can be missed; it never was missed before Nestor's speeches seemed serviceable to the Pisistratean theory of the composition of the _ILIAD_. In his first edition Mr. Leaf regarded the interpolations as intended "to glorify Nestor" without reference to Pisistratus, whom Mr. Leaf did not then recognise as the master of a sycophantic editor. The pa.s.sages are really meant to display the old man's habit of glorifying himself and past times. Pisistratus could not feel flattered by pa.s.sages intended to exhibit his ancestor as a conceited and inopportune old babbler. I ventured in 1896 to suggest that the interpolator was trying to please Pisistratus, but this was said in a spirit of mockery.

Of all the characters in Homer that of Nestor is most familiar to the unlearned world, merely because Nestor's is a "character part," very broadly drawn.

The third interpolation of flattery to Pisistratus in the person of Nestor is found in VII. 125-160. The Achaean chiefs are loath to accept the challenge of Hector to single combat. Only Menelaus rises and arms himself, moved by the strong sense of honour which distinguishes a warrior notoriously deficient in bodily strength. Agamemnon refuses to let him fight; the other peers make no movement, and Nestor rebukes them. It is entirely in nature that he should fall back on his memory of a similar situation in his youth; when the Arcadian champion, Ereuthalion, challenged any prince of the Pylians, and when "no man plucked up heart" to meet him except Nestor himself. Had there never been any Pisistratus, any poet who created the part of a worthy and wordy veteran must have made Nestor speak just as he does speak.

Ereuthalion "was the tallest and strongest of men that I have slain!"

and Nestor, being what he is, offers copious and interesting details about the armour of Ereuthalion and about its former owners. The pa.s.sage is like those in which the Icelandic sagamen dwelt lovingly on the history of a good sword, or the Maoris on the old possessors of an ancient jade _patu_. An objection is now taken to Nestor's geography: he is said not to know the towns and burns of his own country. He speaks of the swift stream Keladon, the streams of Iarda.n.u.s, and the walls of Pheia. Pheia "is no doubt the same as Pheai" [Footnote: Monro, Note on Odyssey, XV. 297.] (Odyssey, XV. 297), "but that was a maritime town not near Arkadia. There is nothing known of a Keladon or Iarda.n.u.s anywhere near it." Now Didymus (Schol. A) "is said to have read [Greek: Phaeraes]

for [Greek: Pheias]," following Pherekydes. [Footnote: Leaf, _Iliad_, vol. i. 308.] M. Victor Berard, who has made an elaborate study of Elian topography, says that "Pheia is a cape, not a town," and adopts the reading "Phera," the [Greek: Pherae] of the journey of Telemachus, in the Odyssey. He thinks that the [Greek: Pherae] of Nestor is the Aliphera of Polybius, and believes that the topography of Nestor and of the journey of Telemachus is correct. The Keladon is now the river or burn of Saint Isidore; the Iarda.n.u.s is at the foot of Mount Kaiapha.

Keladon has obviously the same sense as the Gaelic Altgarbh, "the rough and brawling stream." Iarda.n.u.s is also a stream in Crete, and Mr. Leaf thinks it Semitic--"_Yarden_, from yarad to flow"; but the Semites did not give the _Yar_ to the _Yarrow_ nor to the Australian _Yarra Yarra_.

The country, says M. Berard, is a network of rivers, burns, and rivulets; and we cannot have any certainty, we may add, as the same river and burn names recur in many parts of the same country; [Footnote: Berard, _Les Pheniciens et L'Odyssee,_ 108-113, 1902] many of them, in England, are plainly prae-Celtic.

While the correct geography may, on this showing, be that of Homer, we cannot give up Homer's claim to Nestor's speech. As to Nestor's tale about the armour of Ereuthalion, it is manifest that the first owner of the armour of Ereuthalion, namely Are'ithous, "the Maceman," so called because he had the singularity of fighting with an iron _ca.s.se-tete,_ as Nestor explains (VII. 138-140), was a famous character in legendary history. He appears "as Prince Areithous, the Maceman," father (or grand-father?) of an Areithous slain by Hector (VII. 8-10). In Greece, it was not unusual for the grandson to bear the grandfather's name, and, if the Maceman was grand-father of Hector's victim, there is no chronological difficulty. The chronological difficulty, in any case, if Hector's victim is the son of the Maceman, is not at all beyond a poetic narrator's possibility of error in genealogy. If Nestor's speech is a late interpolation, if its late author borrowed his vivid account of the Maceman and his _ca.s.se-tete_ from the mere word "maceman" in VII. 9, he must be credited with a lively poetic imagination.

Few or none of these reminiscences of Nestor are really "inapplicable to the context." Here the context demands encouragement for heroes who shun a challenge. Nestor mentions an "applicable" and apposite instance of similar want of courage, and, as his character demands, he is the hero of his own story. His brag, or _gabe,_ about "he was the tallest and strongest of all the men I ever slew," is deliciously in keeping, and reminds us of the college don who said of the Czar, "he is the nicest emperor I ever met." The poet is sketching an innocent vanity; he is not flattering Pisistratus.

The next case is the long narrative of Nestor to the hurried Patroclus, who has been sent by Achilles to bring news of the wounded Machaon (XI.

604-702). Nestor on this occasion has useful advice to give, namely, that Achilles, if he will not fight, should send his men, under Patroclus, to turn the tide of Trojan victory. But the poet wishes to provide an interval of time and of yet more dire disaster before the return of Patroclus to Achilles. By an obvious literary artifice he makes Nestor detain the reluctant Patroclus with a long story of his own early feats of arms. It is a story of a "hot-trod," so called in Border law; the Eleians had driven a _creagh_ of cattle from the Pylians, who pursued, and Nestor killed the Eleian leader, Itymoneus. The speech is an Achaean parallel to the Border ballad of "Jamie Telfer of the Fair Dodhead," in editing which Scott has been accused of making a singular and most obvious and puzzling blunder in the topography of his own sheriffdom of the Forest. On Scott's showing the scene of the raid is in upper Ettrickdale, not, as critics aver, in upper Teviotdale; thus the narrative of the ballad would be impossible. [Footnote: In fact both sites on the two Dodburns are impossible; the fault lay with the ballad-maker, not with Scott.]

The Pisistratean editor is accused of a similar error. "No doubt he was an Asiatic Greek, completely ignorant of the Peloponnesus." [Footnote: _Iliad_. Note to XI. 756, and to the _Catalogue_, II. 615-617.] It is something to know that Pisistratus employed an editor, or that his editor employed a collaborator who was an Asiatic Greek!

Meanwhile, nothing is less secure than arguments based on the _Catalogue_. We have already shown how Mr. Leaf's opinions as to the date and historical merits of the _Catalogue_ have widely varied, while M. Berard appears to have vindicated the topography of Nestor. Of the _Catalogue_ Mr. Allen writes, "As a table, according to regions, of Agamemnon's forces it bears every mark of venerable antiquity," showing "a state of things which never recurred in later history, and which no one had any interest to invent, or even the means for inventing." He makes a vigorous defence of the _Catalogue,_ as regards the dominion of Achilles, against Mr. Leaf. [Footnote: _Cla.s.sical Review,_ May 1906, pp.

x94-201.] Into the details we need not go, but it is not questions of Homeric topography, obscure as they are, that can shake our faith in the humorous portrait of old Nestor, or make us suppose that the sympathetic mockery of the poet is the sycophantic adulation of the editor to his statesman employer, Pisistratus. If any question may be left to literary discrimination it is the authentic originality of the portrayal of Nestor.

CHAPTER XV