Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 15.djvu/656

 642 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

gator counts for anything in his results, certainly it is a stimu- lating change to deal now and then with documents whose beauty of form and general aesthetic and human interest tempt one to press a little farther after it is time to stop, to reread, or even to do a little memorizing.

But, to dismiss this aspect of the subject, and to take up in orthodox style the matter of profitableness of materials, it may be said that the Homeric data are, in their way, unique. Here are a quantity and a quality of information concerning a fairly definable epoch of the far past which it would be hard to match. Few masses of legendary material are so large, and still fewer afford any approach to the consecutiveness and consistency here manifested. And the quality also is particularly high because of the complete unconsciousness with which such information is given, and the remarkable absence of sacerdotal or other bias on the part of the recounting agency. Where in other legendary ma- terial the priest or the flatterer of the great is in constant evi- dence — where the sociologist gets meager pickings out of fulsome adorations of the gods or equally fulsome adulations of men — in Homer appears a panorama, in some respects altogether modern in its objectiveness, of the humble as well as the exalted life of the day. And a rare distinction of Homer is that in his portrayal of his time we see how the contact of two unequally advanced civilizations looks from "below." Apparently, also, the two tales, probably because of their national and partially holy character, have been subjected to relatively little tampering. For all these reasons, and others which are implicit in them, or are of minor importance, the Homeric material is of great sig- nificance to the social scientist. Nor does it detract from these contentions to realize that, but for the existence of the Iliad and Odyssey, we should be left considerably more in the dark respecting those significant earlier phases of the* very civilization of which we of the western world are the direct heirs. ^

Further — and to this aspect of the case I wish to give some- what more of attention — this entire mass of material is removed

^ Certain of these ideas and considerations weire developed by the author in an essay entitled "Sociology and Homer," in the American Journal of Sociology for July, 1903.