HOMER AND HIS AGE.*

THOSE who love Homer or admire' Mr. Lang will take up this volume with eagerness, only to close it with a sigh, while the critic who dreamed of finding matter for a pleasant essay discovers that he has to deal with a dispute the pleadings in which would perplex and weary even the Court of Chancery.

• For over twenty-five centuries the world, happy • in its ignorance, was allowed to enjoy Homer at its ease. Then in 1795 F. Wolf published his fatal Prolegomena, and 'ever since the subtle spirit'of'criticism has been busy beguiling men to tit of the fruit of the tree of knowledge, and to abandon the pure delights of poetry for the thorns and thistles of unpro- ductive controversy. Scholars now maintain that Homer is as mythical as "Mrs. Harris," that the Iliad is a happy com- bination of popular ballads, or that, if there was a Homer, he wrote only a short poem called " The Wrath of Achilles," to -Which interpolations and additions' were made for many centuries ; While the Odyssey has been alternately described a. the Work of a single great poet later than Homer, of "a slenderly-gifted botcher," or, finally, of a Sicilian Poetess who betrays her sex when'Nausicaa says to Alcinous : " Papa dear; I want to take all our dirty clothes to the river

and wash them because you should have 'a clean

• Homer and his Age. By Andrew Lang. London: Longman, and Co. (12s. (kl. net.]

shirt when you attend meetings-Of -the 'Connell.' NeFeTy- te catalOgue the opinions of various critics would be an immense

task, and to discuss them in- an article is impossible.' The

word" Homeric" has become as ifinapable of definition as the word ",Christian," and indeed to speak of anything as Homer's

is almost • to be guilty of intellectual heresy. - Prcifessers of

Archaeology and-Professors of Philology; experts in folk-lore, witchcraft, and ghost-worship; the painful students who- know the significance of a dropped digamma or of ae hypothetically

misused,—all these, and many other like persons, are ready to prove that nothing can be really assigned to the blind bard. The last book of the Iliad, for instance, is not only superb poetry, -but seems the perfect conclusion of a great poem. " Here," says Shelley, "Homer truly begins to be himself "; and of the preceding book Schiller observes

that the man who had read it "had not lived in vain." And yet, chiefly on "linguistic evidence," these two books are set

down as beyond question among the latest, while "subtle and omnipresent traces of successive modernisation " render more than three-fourths of the whole poem subject to the gravest suspicion. That great masterpiece, in fact, which has been for ages . the wonder of the. world, and in. which even Wolf praises the "liquid stream of narrative" and "pervading harmony of colour," is now declared, though such a pheno- menon is without parallel in literature, to be the slow growth of centuries and the composite work of many different hands.

But the larger question is not here at issue. Mr. Lang has already dealt with it in his Homer and the Epic, and the present volume, while it contains much that is to be found in its predecessor, is less general, and deals rather with problems of archaeology, the writer seeking to show that throughout the Iliad there is a consistency in regard to such details as the peculiar feudal relations of the chiefs to their over-lord, the burial of the dead, the use of bronze for weapons, or the descriptions of armour, which affords convincing proof that all parts of the poem are approximately of the same date. The burnt ashes of the dead, for instance, are regularly laid beneath a cairn or barrow, although this practice is otherwise strange to Greek habits ; iron is well known and used for implements, but want of skill in tempering it probably made it useless for _forging arms, which are universally of bronze ; while the huge shields of the warriors resemble in shape the more primitive shields of hide, but differ from them in , being overlaid with metal, and differ still more from the small round bucklers of later times. These and similar facts, it is argued, point conclusively to a single transitional period just between the Mycenaean prime (1500-1100 B.C.) and the Dorian invasion of Greece (1000 B.C.), for the plain reason that later poets could not have discovered these antiquarian details, and, even if they could, would not have troubled -to reproduce them, any more than the French writers of chansons de geste in the eleventh century troubled about describing Charlemagne as using the armour of the eighth. For all this Mr. Lang makes out a good case ; but he has himself to lament "the tedious minuteness" of investigating "alleged discrepancies " which 'are " so small

as to be almost' invisible." And, indeed, what real proof of " lateness " can be deduced from -the mention in a single

place of an arrow-head of iron? Would it not be exactly as reasonable to urge that this unique passage marks an early period when iron was just beginning to be used instead of bronze ? Or, because warriors lie down on the ground to sleep -" with their shields under their heads," what argument is this that the poet had no knowledge of the true Mycenaean shield "which might serve," says Mr.

Leaf, " for a coverlet but not for a pillow " ? The mind positively refuses- to picture men lying down, like a row

of turtles, covered with a huge framework of 'hide, while it instantly accepts the idea of a shield, no matter what its shape, being used as a head-rest. The poet who made men so use their shields was a man of sense, and, like Jacob, when he "took of the stones of that place, and put them for his pillows," knew that a bad pillow is better than • none.

Such a passage is wholly worthless • as any proof of either lateness or the reverse. But since Reichel wrote an essay on Homeric armour discussion as to the .exact shape

of a Mycenaean shield has become- a. form of • scholarly monomania. Because it " covered the whole body " it could not, say the critics, be round, and if it is called " circular " (ekvatos), this means that it was well-balanced, or oblong, or rectangular, or shaped like the figure 8. And as such a shield would make a breastplate useless, words which refer to a breastplate are held to mean nothing or to mark interpolation. If a hero "puts on his breastplate" (Ocupiacreras) for battle, it may mean that he puts on anything but his breastplate; if he is " bronze-breastplated," the line is spurious; if the Achaeans are everywhere "clad in shirts of bronze," the expression is "picturesque and may well apply to shields of bronze." Or look at this passage (II., III., 357) :— Sid ere acrraos >rjX9E cpaetris i+SptisoY hos, Ka) sa 647pcos eroAvbatSciAou ijp-bpetcpro• a' pracpb Tapul xaircipny staimrE xvraya 17x0s• b 5' ifalven Ka? &Agave Kijpa j.44A121111/.

Never were words more clear. No one can misunderstand them. The spear went through shield and breastplate ; but Menelaus, as be saw it coming," bent aside and avoided death." Mr. Leaf, however, following Reichel, says that "after a spear has passed through a breastplate there is no longer any possi- bility for the wearer to turn aside and so avoid the point," and that consequently the second line " must" be an interpolation. But there is not a word in the text about Menelaus waiting until "after the spear had passed through the breastplate." The poet merely describes a simple circumstance in language which all may understand.

Such minute and painful criticism is, indeed, of little intrinsic interest ; but we draw attention to it because it is becoming the bane of Homeric study. That the Iliad suffered much during the long centuries before it was edited by Pisistratus can hardly be doubted. Until it was definitely and habitually committed to writing nothing could save it from the wear and tear of time ; nor is it impossible that even long episodes have been inserted into it, the exact limits of which specialists may amuse themselves with determining. But, after all, even if it were produced by a Joint Stock Association of ballad-mongers, rhapsodists, diaskeuasts, and editors, even if, as Scott once suggested of the " Waverley Novels," large parts of it had been manufactured " by placing words and phrases technically suited to such subjects in a sort of framework, like that of the Sage of Laputa," none the less the Iliad remains, perhaps, the most interesting poem in the world. If it has no unity, it is at least unique. Its paternity, as Schiller said, may be disputable, but that Nature herself was its mother is stamped for ever on its very features. A schoolboy with a smattering of Greek may take it to his heart, while the greatest and wisest have found in it a supreme model of poetry. But now, with their endless discussions about word- forms, interpolations, or trumpery details of armour, critics, philologists, and archaeologists are effectually getting rid of the soul of Homer, by raising over him, in strictly Homeric fashion, a ponderous barrow composed wholly of their own works. Our interest in Achilles is now largely confined to the question whether he could run three times round Troy carrying his shield; and a modern editor, if he could be brought face to face with Helen, instead of crying out- " Was this the face that launched a thousand ships And burnt the topless towers of Ilium ?

Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss l "-

would beyond question eagerly ask to examine her brooch to see whether its pattern was of the Mycenaean or Dipylon period. Above all, to understand Homer there is need of pictures. "Fragments of a Warrior Vase," representing heroes as they might occur to a child in the first standard; the photograph of a " Gold Corselet from Myeenae "; and a rude sketch of "The Dagger of the Lion Hunters" make the feeblest minds realise what Homer means. These are the things oculis subjecta ficlelibus which Horace commends in his "Art of Poetry," and readers will find them duly reproduced in this volume, while Mr. Lang adds to them from his own stores (1) a drawing of two mediaeval chessmen; (2) a full. page sketch of an Algonquin brave; and (3) a frontispiece depicting the attack of Iroquois Indians on a stockade. Nor, apparently, are these three illustrations inserted in any spirit of refined irony. Rather they are strictly germane to Mr. Lang's unhappy theme, and have a real and serious bearing on the study of Homer as it is now, to the great detriment of classical learning, too frequently pursued by scholars.