ANCIENT CLASSICS FOR ENGLISH READERS

EDITED BY THE REV. W. LUCAS COLLINS, M.A. HOMER ——— THE ILIAD—THE ODYSSEY By REV. W. LUCAS COLLINS, M.A. WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS EDINBURGH AND LONDON

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The subjects in this Series may be had separately, in cloth, price 2s. 6d.; or two volumes bound in one, in leather back and marbled sides and edges, arranged as follows:—

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HOMER ——— T H E I L I A D

BY THE REV. W. LUCAS COLLINS, M.A. AUTHOR OF ‘ETONIANA,’ ‘THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS,’ ETC. WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS EDINBURGH AND LONDON MDCCCLXXI

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ADVERTISEMENT.

It is proposed to give, in these little volumes, some such introduction to the great writers of Greece and Rome as may open to those who have not received a classical education—or in whose case it has been incomplete and fragmentary—a fair acquaintance with the contents of their writings, and the leading features of their style.

The constant allusions in our own literature, and even in our daily press, to the works of the ancient classical authors, and the familiarity with the whole dramatis personæ of ancient history and fable which modern writers on all subjects assume on the part of their readers, make such an acquaintance almost necessary for those who care not only to read but to understand.

Even in the case of readers who have gone through the regular classical course in their day, this acquaintance, if honest confession were made, would be found very imperfect. It is said, of{v.i-vi} course, that “every English gentleman reads Horace;” but this is one of those general assertions which rest upon very loose ground. An ordinary observer of the habits of the class might find himself somewhat at a loss for instances.

In the case of ladies, and of the large body of general readers who have received either no classical education, or a very imperfect one, probably less is now known of Homer, Virgil, or Horace, than in the days when Pope’s, Dryden’s, and Francis’s translations were first published, and took their place for the time on every literary table.

There appears a strong probability that the study of Greek and Latin, which has so long been our exclusive idea of a “liberal” education, will hereafter be confined within a narrower circle. Yet some knowledge of the ancient classics must continue to be the key to much of our best English literature. If, as some educational reformers suggest, a systematic course of English reading be substituted for Latin and Greek in our “middle-class” schools, such a training will necessarily involve the careful study of the masters of English thought and style, and more especially of those earlier authors whose taste was formed very much upon the old classical models, and whose writings are full of allusions to their characters and imagery.{v.i-vii}

It may be said that we have translations of all the best and most popular of the classical authors, and that many of these are admirable in their execution. This is quite true. The Iliad, the Odyssey, the Æneid, Horace, and some of the Greek Dramatists, have lately found translators who, in point of taste and general accuracy, leave little to be desired. But the results of their work will be best enjoyed and valued by those whose acquaintance with the originals enables them to appreciate not only the positive beauty of the English version, but its relative merit as conveying the spirit and sense of the Greek or Latin author. Even the best translation (especially of the classical poets) may fail to have a continuous interest for the merely modern reader, unless he has some previous familiarity with the argument of the work, the personages introduced, and the characteristics of the age in which the scene and action lie.

The aim of the present series will be to explain, sufficiently for general readers, who these great writers were, and what they wrote; to give, wherever possible, some connected outline of the story which they tell, or the facts which they record, checked by the results of modern investigations; to present some of their most striking passages in approved English translations, and to{v.i-viii} illustrate them generally from modern writers; to serve, in short, as a popular retrospect of the chief literature of Greece and Rome. The attempt appeals, as will be seen, to a circle outside that of classical scholarship; though possibly some who have all legal claim to rank as scholars, but who now stand rather on the “retired list” of that service, may in these pages meet some old acquaintances whom they have almost forgotten. If, in any case, they find our re-introduction unsatisfactory, none would advise them more heartily than we do to renew the old personal intercourse for themselves.{v.i-ix}

CONTENTS.

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It has been thought desirable in these pages to use the Latin names of the Homeric deities, as more familiar to English ears. As, however, most modern translators have followed Homer’s Greek nomenclature, it may be convenient here to give both.

The passages marked (D.) are from Lord Derby’s translation; (W.) from Mr Worsley’s; and (P.) Pope’s.{v.i-1}

INTRODUCTION.

It is quite unnecessary here to discuss the question, on which the learned are very far from being agreed, whether Homer—the “Prince of Poets”—had any real existence; whether he was really the author of the two great poems which bear his name, or whether they are the collected works of various hands, dovetailed into each other by some clever editor of ancient times. Homer will still retain his personality for the uncritical reader, however a sceptical criticism may question it. The blind old bard, wandering from land to land, singing his lays of the old heroic times to a throng of admiring listeners, must always continue to be the familiar notion of the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Such was the universal creed of the world of readers until a comparatively recent date; and the speculations of modern scholars, in this as in other cases, have been much more successful in shaking the popular belief than in replacing it by any constructive theory of their own which is nearly so credible. “Homer” is quite as likely to have been

really Homer, as a mere name under whose shadow{v.i-2} the poems of various unknown writers have been grouped.

There is extant a Life of the poet, said to have been composed by the Greek historian Herodotus, quoted as such by early writers, and possibly, after all, quite as trustworthy as the destructive conjectures of those critics who would allow him no life at all. There we are told that his birth, like that of so many heroes of antiquity, was illegitimate; that he was the son of Critheis, who had been betrayed by her guardian; that he was born near Smyrna, on the banks of the river Meles, and was thence called “Melesigenes.” His mother is said afterwards to have married a schoolmaster named Phemius, by whom the boy was adopted, and in due course succeeded to his new father’s occupation. But the future bard soon grew weary of such confinement. He set out to see the world; visiting in turn Egypt, Italy, Spain, the islands of the Mediterranean, and gathering material for at least one of his great works, the adventures of the hero Odysseus (Ulysses), known to us as the Odyssey. In the course of his travels he became blind, and thence was

called “Homeros”—“the blind man”—such at least is one of the interpretations of his name.[1] In that state returning to his native town of Smyrna, he, like his great English successor, Milton, composed his two great poems. One of the few passages in which any personal allusion to himself has been traced, or fancied, in Homer’s verse, is a scene in the Odyssey,{v.i-3} where the blind harper Demodocus is introduced as singing his lays in the halls of King Alcinous:—

So, in the same poem, the only other bard who appears is also blind—Phemius, who is compelled to exercise his art for the diversion of the dissolute suitors of Penelope. The fact of blindness is in itself by no means incompatible with the notion of Homer’s having constructed and recited even two such long poems as the Iliad and the Odyssey. The blind have very frequently remarkable memories, together with a ready ear and passionate love for music.

For the rest of his life, Homer is said to have roamed from city to city as a wandering minstrel, singing his lays through the towns of Asia Minor, in the islands of the Archipelago, and even in the streets of Athens itself, and drawing crowds of eager listeners wherever he went by the wondrous charm of his song. This wandering life has been assumed to imply that he was an outcast and poor. The uncertainty of his birthplace, and the disputes to which it gave rise in after times, were the subject of an epigram whose pungency passed for truth—

But the begging is not in the original lines at all, and a wandering minstrel was no dishonoured guest, wherever he appeared, in days much later than Homer’s. Somewhere on the coast of the Levant he{v.i-4} died and was buried, leaving behind him that name which retains its spell hardly weakened by the lapse of some twenty-seven centuries, and the two great poems which have been confessedly the main source of the epic poetry, the heroic drama, and the early romance of Europe.

Other works are ascribed to Homer’s name besides the Iliad and the Odyssey, but the authorship appears more doubtful. If we trust the opinion of Aristotle, Homer was the father of comic narrative poetry as well as of epic. The poem called ‘Margites,’ attributed to him, contained the travels and adventures of a wealthy and pedantic coxcomb: but slight fragments only of this have been preserved—enough to show that the humour was somewhat more gross than one would expect from the poet of the Odyssey, though redeemed, no doubt, by satire of a higher kind, as in the surviving line which, in describing the hero’s accomplishments, seems to anticipate the multifarious and somewhat superficial knowledge of the present day—

Admitting the personality of the poet himself, and his claim to the authorship of both Iliad and Odyssey, it is not necessary to suppose that either poem was framed originally as a whole, or recited as a whole upon every occasion. No doubt the song grew as he sung. He would probably add from time to time to the original lay. The reciter, whose audience must depend entirely upon him for their text, has an almost unlimited licence of interpolation and expansion. It may be fairly granted also that future minstrels, who{v.i-5} sung the great poet’s lays after his death, would interweave with them here and there something of their own, more or less successful in its imitation of the original. Such explanation of the repetitions and incongruities which are to be found in the Iliad seems at least as reasonable as the supposition that its twenty-four books are the work of various hands, “stitched together”—such is one explanation of the term “rhapsody”—in after times, and having a common origin only in this, that all sung of the “wondrous Tale of Troy.”

That tale was for generations the mainspring of Greek legend and song, and the inspiration of Greek painters and sculptors. At this day, the attempt to separate the fabulous from the real, to reduce the rich colouring of romance into the severe outlines of history, is a task which even in the ablest hands seems hopeless. The legends themselves are various, and contradictory in their details. The leading characters in the story—Priam, Helen, Agamemnon, Achilles, Ulysses, Paris, Hector and Andromache—appear in as many different aspects and relations as the fancy of each poet chose. In this respect they are like the heroes of our own “Round Table” romances; like Arthur and Guinevere, Lancelot, Tristram, and Percival—common impersonations on whom all kinds of adventures are fastened, though the main characteristics of the portrait are preserved throughout. What amount of bare historical truth may or may not underlie the poetical colouring—whether there was or was not a real Greek expedition and a real siege of Troy, less “heroic” and more

probable in its extent and details than the Iliad represents it—is no question to be here discussed. So far as liter{v.i-6}ary interest is concerned, “the real Trojan war,” as Mr Grote well says, “is that which is recounted by Homer.” It will be sufficient here to take the poet as our main authority, and to fill up his picture from other legendary sources; for though Homer’s version of the Great Trojan War is the earliest account which has come down to us, he drew his material from still earlier lays and legends, with which he assumes all his readers (or hearers) to be tolerably familiar; and which, again, the later poets and tragedians reproduced with many additions and variations of their own.

The preservation of poems of such great length (the Iliad alone contains between fifteen and sixteen thousand lines) in days when writing, even if invented, was in its infancy, has been the subject of much speculation. That they were publicly recited at great national festivals in all parts of Greece, is undoubted. Professional minstrels, or “rhapsodists,” as they were called, chanted certain selected portions which suited their own taste or that of their audience—often such as contained the exploits of some national hero. They followed possibly in this the example of the great bard himself; just as certain of our own popular writers have lately taken to read, to an admiring public, some favourite scenes and chapters from their own works. Lycurgus is said to have brought the collected poems from Asia to Sparta; Solon, at Athens, to have first obliged the minstrels to recite the several portions in due order, so as to preserve the continuity of the narrative. Pisistratus, the great Athenian ruler, has the reputation of having

first reduced the whole into a collected shape, and of having thus far settled the “text” of Homer, employing in this work the most eminent{v.i-7} men of letters of his day. There is a legend of a Homeric ‘Septuagint:’ of seventy learned scribes employed in the great work, as in the Greek version of the Hebrew Scriptures. From the time when the Iliad and Odyssey were reduced to writing, their popularity rather increased than waned. They were the storehouse of Greek history, genealogy, and antiquity—the models and standards of literary taste. To be unacquainted with these masterpieces, was to be wholly without culture and education: and, thanks to their continual and public recital, this want was perhaps less prevalent amongst the Greeks than amongst ourselves. The young Alcibiades, when receiving the usual education of a Greek gentleman, is said to have struck his tutor one day in a burst of righteous indignation, for having made the confession—certainly inexcusable in his vocation—that he did not possess a copy of the great

poet. Alexander the Great carried always with him the copy which had been corrected by his master Aristotle, preserved in a jewelled casket taken amongst the spoils of Darius. No pains were spared in the caligraphy, or costliness in the mountings, of favourite manuscripts of the Homeric poems. They continued to be regarded with almost a superstitious reverence even during the middle ages of Christendom. Men’s future destinies were discovered, by a sort of rude divination, in verses selected at hap-hazard. Fantastic writers saw in the two poems nothing more or less than allegorical versions of Hebrew history; and grave physicians recommended as an infallible recipe for a quartan ague, the placing every night a copy of the fourth book of the Iliad under the patient’s head. Modern critical speculations have gone quite as far in{v.i-8} another direction. In the eyes of some ingenious theorists, this siege of Troy is but “a repetition of the daily siege of the East by the solar powers that every evening are robbed of their brightest

treasures in the West;”[2] and the Homeric heroes and their exploits all represent allegorically, in one form or another, the great conflict between Light and Darkness. But such questions are beyond the scope of these pages; we are content here to take the tale of Troy as the poet tells it.

The supposed date of the story may be taken as some fifteen centuries before the Christian era. The great City of Troy, or Ilium, lay on the coast of Asia Minor—its reputed site still bearing the name of the Troad, a broad well-watered champaign, with a height still recognised as the citadel towering above it. “No royal seat of the ancient world,” says a modern visitor to the spot, “could boast a grander situation than the Trojan citadel.”[3] As to its actual locality and existence, there is little ground for scepticism. The tradition of the name and place was unbroken in the early historical ages of Greece. Xerxes, king of Persia, in his expedition, is said to have visited the citadel, and to have offered there a thousand oxen to the tutelary goddess; possibly, it has been suggested, claiming to be the avenger of the Asiatic kings on their European enemies.[4] Mindarus, the Lacedæmonian admiral, seventy years later, sacrificed there also: and Alexander, when he crossed the Hellespont, not only did the same, but took from the temple some of the

sacred arms which{v.i-9} were hung there (said to be those of the heroes of the great siege), offering up his own in exchange. The founder of the city was Ilus, son of Tros, and from these mythical heroes it took its two names. But its walls were built by the grandson, Laomedon. He employed some remarkable workmen. In one of the most striking and suggestive fables of the Greek mythology, certain of the gods are represented as being condemned by Zeus (or Jupiter) to a period of servitude upon earth. Poseidon (Neptune) and Apollo were under this condemnation, and undertook, for certain rewards, to help Laomedon in his fortifications. But when the work was finished, the ungrateful king repudiated his bargain. As a punishment, a sea-monster is sent to ravage his dominions, who can only be appeased by the sacrifice of a maiden of noble blood. The lot falls upon the king’s own daughter, Hesione. It is the original version of St George and the Dragon. Laomedon offers his daughter, and certain horses of immortal breed (which he seems to count

even a more valuable prize), to the champion who will deliver her and slay the monster. Hercules comes to the rescue; but a second time Laomedon breaks his word. He substitutes mortal horses, and refuses his daughter. Hercules attacks the city, kills Laomedon, and carries off the princess Hesione, whom he gives to his comrade Telamon. From this union are born two heroes, Ajax and his brother Teucer, whom we shall meet in the second and great Siege of Troy, which forms the subject of Homer’s Iliad.

This double perjury of Laomedon’s is one supposed cause of the wrath of Heaven resting on the town and its people. Yet Apollo, forgetful, it would seem, of{v.i-10} his former unworthy treatment, and only remembering with affection the walls which he had helped to build, is represented as taking part with the Trojans in the great struggle, in which the deities of Olympus are bitterly divided amongst themselves.

But Homer’s Tale of Troy says nothing of Laomedon and his broken faith. His poem is built upon a later legend. This legend embraces in the whole a period of thirty years, divided exactly, in a manner very convenient for both poet and reader, into complete decades; ten years of preparation for the siege, ten occupied in the siege itself (with which alone the Iliad has to do), and ten consumed in the weary wanderings and final return home of the surviving Greek heroes who had taken part in the expedition.