Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 6.djvu/282

268 who knows Homer intimately that his evidence as to the life called Homeric is that of a sympathetic, first-hand observer. Whether Homer be one or many, there are no marks of antiquarian reconstruction about his pages.

In addition to this, Homer's poems are free from certain defects common to other such chronicles of culture. Homer occupies no distinctly partisan standpoint which would tend to obscure the picture of Homeric civilization, or to exhibit it from a restricted point of view. The Vedas and the Laws of Manu are taken up with the glorification of the Brahmans, and, to a lesser degree, of the Kchatryas, or military caste; the Zend-Avesta is in great part a system of Zoroastrian liturgies; the military and the sacerdotal alternately overweigh one another in the Hebrew Scriptures; the Eddas, the Chanson de Roland, and the Arthurian legends teem with the deeds and praises of militarism. In most cases, the chronicler of a civilization has himself belonged to a certain social caste or class, or has been vitally interested in the predominance of certain elements in the population; thus arose in records the sacerdotal or military bias, according as the priesthood dominated or was subordinated to the warrior class.

There is little such bias in the Iliad and Odyssey; less in the latter than in the former. The Homeric Greeks, though an intensely religious people, were under the blight of no priestly domination; the common man might discharge his own obligations to the gods without a mediator. Thus the condition which determines the rise of a sacerdotal class, and so of a religious bias in historical records, was absent. And the evidence in the poems themselves goes to show that priests were mostly nobles and warriors, and generally elected or chosen; never, I believe, do we find the priestly function hereditary. There is no evidence to suggest that the early Greek bard (such as was Homer himself) was a priest or connected with religion in any special way.

If there is any bias, it is military, and to be noted chiefly in the Iliad. It is true that upon the battlefield the chief alone is prominent: the common soldier, as in the Nibelungen Lied and the Russian epic songs, counts for little. Several of the books