HOMER AND HISTORY.*
THE so-called "Homeric question" has, in these later years, come to resemble one of those Homeric battlefields where, in rather weary succession, champion after champion enters the fray and deals many deadly blows, only to be himself in due season overthrown, where- upon a fresh conflict arises over his body, while meantime the main issue seems to come little nearer to a final decision. Ever since Wolf published his Prolegomena the philologists have been at war ; they have hacked both at Homer and at one another with equal zeal, and in despite of Schiller's famous epigram-
" Immer zerreisset den Kranz des Homer, und zahlet die rater Des vollendeten ewige,n Werks !
Hat es doch eine Mutter nur, und die Ziigo der Mutter, Dehm unsterblichen Ziige, Natur "—
" unitarians " and " separatists " still refuse to be reconciled, and the old comparison of the Iliad and the Odyssey to "two great mountain peaks, rising in the distance from a sea of cloud in which their bases are wholly hidden," still remains in large measure true. It is amid this "sea of cloud" that the battle has long raged ; but of late matters have much improved, and that this is so is due to the archaeologists. As soon as Dorpfeld, in 1893, "uncovered the Mycenaean walls at Iiissarlik," there was at least something solid to go upon. Homer may be a myth, but Homer's Troy certainly is not. It is there to see, and you can no snore disbelieve in it than, spite of the Minotaur, you can to-day disbelieve in the Cretan Labyrinth. All the theories about that "transplantation of legends" (Sagenverschiebung) which makes the Trojan War a mere " reflex " of some war fought elsewhere, or about Achilles and Agamemnon being humanized gods—the Solar Myth does, we fancy, the same with Abraham—and Helen "a. presumably pre-Hellenic goddess" (this verm2alich vorgriechieche Giitlin) vanish, like other Teutonic dreams, into thin air when once they como face to face with fact. Troy was not only, as hi. Berard urges, a fortress whose lord could levy toll on merchants from the south who transhipped their goods across the " isthmus " to the Sea of Marmora, but it also, as Dr. Leaf points out, commanded the sea passage through the Dardanelles, and the command of the Dardanelles was as important a matter three thousand years ago as it is now. For Greece, as we all realize to-day, must import corn, and, as Dr. Leaf forcibly argues (pp. 58 seg.), to "lose the waterway by which she brought her vital supplies from the Euxino cornfields" was to imperil her very existence, so that, however much the story of the Trojan War may have been embellished by fancy- " incredibly prevailed towards the fabulous" is the strange phrase of Thucydides—there is none the less an inherent probability that such a war was actually waged.
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"History," therefore, and " Homer " are not terms which exclude one another. Rather fable has in the Iliad twined itself about truth, legends have clustered around facts, and mortal men have become heroes with whom gods hold intercourse. Such a development is wholly natural, and is just what happens "in the Teutonic Epos," where Olinda), a Valkyrie sent by Othin, "is just as much responsible for the death of King Melon," who fell " in a real battle, that of Fitje in 961, as Athene is for that of Hector." Remove the Olympians from Homer. and the mortals may still remain men of flesh and blood like ourselves; and it is for this basic reality of Homer's story that Dr. Leaf stoutly contends. Inn recent volume—Troy : a Study in Homeric Geography— he showed that what is known as "the Trojan Catalogue" (II. II. 816-877) so fits in with the actual geography of the Troad and with historical probability that to dismiss it as a piece of purely imaginative description is impossible. But there is another Catalogue which precedes it, that "of the ships" (IL 494-815), and this, though to-day as unknown • Homer and History. By Walter Leaf, Litt.D., Hon. D.Litt. (Oxon.). With Nam. London : Idacir.illan and Co. [1.2a. net.]
to most readers as, say, certain chapters in the Book of Numbers, was Le the Greeks an authoritative document, which could be cited in public controversy, so that Dr. Leaf turned to it to see whether here, too, he could find something of "veridical tradition." In this, however, he was disappointed, and the present volume, if it does nothing else, at least discredits the Catalogue for ever. Its very first word, BotorrCo, is an anachronism For these " Boeotians " who are thus put in the forefront and "bring to the Greek Army its largest contingent that outnumbers the entire force of Achilles by more than two to one," have practically no place in the main story of the Iliad, while Thucydides expressly states that it was only "after the Trojan War" that they moved into Boeotia from the little Thessalian town of Arno, although, apparently not to contradict the Catalogue, he adds in a parenthesis that "there was a section (cbroararaar) of them in the land before." And dke anomalies occur throughout, while, instead of the united Greece, owning "one Lord, one King," that is known to Homer, the Catalogue presents us a score or so of chieftains, seemingly of almost equal power and whose " baronies " comprise townships which no geography can bring within the natural borders of one domain. Greece, in fact, is broken up into a number of those separate States which a later age alone knew. For Greece is not a country which lends itself to union. Nature in it seems to have done her utmost to set up barriers that divide, and "from the fall of the Achaian Empire until less than a century ago it has never had a central government." It was only in 1822 that "the first National Assembly" met at Nauplia —the port of Agamemnon— and it was there, "close to the walls of Tiryns, that the first King of the Hellenes was elected some three thousand years after the last King of the Aclusians had passed away." Is it any wonder that the dull versifier of the Catalogue, a writer without imagination, should describe the Greece of his own later age, however little it corresponds with that real Greece which Homer knew and made immortal ?
For Homer's Greece is, in very truth, real It is wrapped, no doubt, in "the light that never was, on sea or land," but it is none the less something that once had substance, and it is this actual, this living Greece which Dr. Leaf brings before our eyes. He does so, however, we must add, after a fashion that somewhat confuses and disappoints. For he takes too much time about pulling down ; ho demolishes the Catalogue too tediously, whereas ho should, so to speak, have blown it up quickly and got rid of it, so as to set himself to his proper work, which is that of edifying. For what we need in this business of Homer is, above all, a master-builder, and he has all the materials, all the ability to be one. But if he is to make full use of his powers he must drop controversy and free both hands for his task, since indeed this work of reconstructing the Homeric 'world is no easy thing and allows no distracted attention. There are the old " Pelasgian " in- habitants of Greece to be dealt with first ; then there is the " Minoan " civilization down, say, to the fifteenth century; and after that, about 1400 B.C., come the Achaian warriors from the north, conquering and building castles, just as the Normans did in England, but also absorbing ths wonderful culture they found everywhere, exactly as the same Normans absorbed the Saracenic culture that met them in Sicily. There are ten thousand fragments of information to be examined, set in order, and pieced together ; but the work is worth doing, and with patience, with skill, and with a just use of that constructive imagination to which all knowledge owes so much, it is assuredly not beyond doing. For, to make at least a very small beginning, let any one first take up Ivanhoe and then the Iliad. He can match every Norman Baron with an Homeric prototype, for Norman and Achaian are as like as can be. Homer's warriors go forth to battle in armour of proof, disdainful of the common varlotry, whom they slaughter like sheep, but ever ready for a combat oi outrance with a worthy champion. Good caters they are, too, and good drinkers, lovers of "more unwatered wine," "the larger- mixing-bowl," and the "lengthy chine" (viirros atnveses) of a " five- year-old bullock," while, when the feast is over, they either discuss to-morrow's battle or listen to tho minstrel as he chants tales of love or derring-do (aia 4vlpv ip4cur). Hard men, one imagines, these, with few scruples, often " wily " like Odysseus, not more reverent of Zeus than Bois do Guilbert, say, was of the Maw, but with just as keen an eye alike for fair women and the main chance—. men who would not easily give up a Briseis or a Helen, or starve when there was anything to be plundered, but real men, who loved life, lived it to the full, and whose soul passes " indignantly " into Hades. And over them all rules Agamemnon, "Lord of many islands and of all Argos "—and " Argos " in its "commonest use" means the whole of Greece—who is not the greatest warrior, any more than some of our Norman Kings were, but whose supremacy, marked by the Royal Sceptre that Hephaistos wrought, is needful to give that unity without which is small body of military invaders cannot _hold their ground. Some of these great Barons may at times be hard to keep in hand, and Achilles be for a time as troublesome as Hotspur, but in the end they always obey; and though Agamemnon may not be a poetic personage, ho is assuredly, as reality demands, the central figure of the Trojan War, just as his palace fortress at Mycenae is, as it required to be, the very centre of Greece. Sweep the compass round it with a radius of some hundred miles, and you have determined almost exactly the boundaries of Agamemnon's kingdom. Towards Mycenae all ways converge both by land and sea, so that its occupant ensconced there, close under the "Spider Mountain" ('Apavaior 6por), could either " pounce " upos
any intruder, or gather together his hosts and go forth to wir whenever and as best it pleased him.
But we have ventured on a large theme in a rash attempt to suggest at least its general interest, and there is only space to add that Dr. Leaf has much to say about Ithaka and Aulis, about Greek religion, "The Fusion of Races," "The Achaian Epos," and other like subjects, all of which ho treats admirably. For he has such a wea:th of knowledge, such a happy and often humorous pen, that nothing he writes can ever fail at once to please and to instruct. And yet it is impossible to con- template this volume without something of a regretful sigh. For of "making many books" on Homer there is indeed "no end," and one cannot but wonder whether the poet's spirit, the immortal part of him, may not become, as it were, imprisoned, and even crushed, by their ponderous and monumental bulk—whether it may not be with him, as it is, we fear, coming to be with our English Bible, which seems, perhaps, to speak to us to-day with a less living breath than it once spoke to our forefathers, who knew nothing about the " contamination " of Genesis or "the second Isaiah," but were happy in ascribing all the Psalms to David, and found, at times, consolation even in a " Selah."
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