Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 12.djvu/130

118 118 HOMER poem has Lachmann succeeded in disengaging from the existing Iliad t It must be admitted that when tried by this test his &quot; lays &quot; generally fail. The &quot; quarrel of the chiefs,&quot; the &quot; muster of the army,&quot; the &quot;duel of Paris and Menelaus,&quot; &c., are excellent beginnings, but have no satis fying conclusion. And the reason is not far to seek. The Iliad is not a history, nor is it a series of incidents in the history, of the siege. It turns entirely upon a single incident, occupying a few days only. The several episodes of the poem are not so many distinct stories, each with an interest of its own. They are only parts of a single main event. Consequently the type of epic poem which would be produced by an aggregation of shorter lays is not the type which we have in the Iliad. Rather the Iliad is itself a single lay which has grown with the growth of poetical art to the dimensions of an epic. But the original nucleus and parts of the incidents may be the work of a single great poet, and yet other episodes may be of different authorship, wrought into the structure of the poem in later times. Various theories have been based on this supposition. Grote in particular held that the original poem, which he called the Achilleis, did not include books ii.-vii., ix., x., xxiii., xxiv. Such a view may be defended somewhat as follows. Of the books which relate the events during the absence of Achilles from the Greek ranks (ii.-xv.), the last five are directly related to the main action. They describe the successive steps by which the Greeks are driven back, first from the plain to the rampart, then to their ships. More over three of the chief heroes, Agamemnon, Diomede, and Ulysses are wounded, and this circumstance, as Lachmann himself admitted, is steadily kept in mind throughout. It is otherwise with the earlier books (especially ii.-vii.). The chief incidents in that part of the poem the panic rush to the ships, the duels of Paris and Menelaus, and of Hector and Ajax, the Aristeia of Diomede stand in no relation to the mainspring of the poem, the promise made by Zeus to Thetis. It is true that in the thirteenth and fourteenth books the purpose of Zeus is thwarted for a time by other gods ; but in books ii.-vii. it is not so much thwarted as ignored. Further, the events follow without sufficient connexion. The truce of the third book is broken by Pandarus, and Agamemnon passes along the Greek ranks with words of encouragement, but without a hint of the treachery just committed. The Aristeia of Diomede ends in the middle of the sixth book ; he is uppermost in all thoughts down to ver. 311, but from this point, in the meet ings of Hector with Helen and Andromache, and again in the seventh book when Hector challenges the Greek chiefs, his prowess is forgotten. Once more, some of the incidents seem to belong properly to the beginning of the war. The joy of Menelaus on seeing Paris, Priam s ignorance of the Greek leaders, the speeches of Agamemnon in his review of the ranks (in book iv.), the building of the wall all these are in place after the Greek landing, but hardly in the ninth year of the siege. On the other hand, it may be said, the second book opens with a direct reference to the events of the first, and the mention of Achilles in the speech of Thersites (ii. 239 f.) is sufficient to keep the main course of events in view. The Catalogue is connected with its place in the poem by the lines about Achilles (686-694). Vhen Diomede is at the height of his Aristeia Helenus says (//. vi. 99), &quot;We did not so fear even Achilles.&quot; And when in the third book Priam asks Helen about the Greek captains, or when in the seventh book nine champions come forward to contend with Hector, the want of the greatest hero of all is sufficiently felt. If these passages do not belong to the period of the wrath of Achilles, how are we to account for his conspicuous absence ? Further, the w.nt of smoothness and unity which is visible in this part of the Iliad may be due to other causes than difference of date or authorship. A national poet such as the author of the Iliad cannot always choose or arrange his matter at his own will. He is bound by the traditions of his art, and by the feelings and expectations of his hearers. The poet who brought the exploits of Diomede into the Iliad doubtless had his reasons fordoing so, which were equally strong whether he was the poet of the Achilleis or a later Homerid or rhapsodist. And if some of the incidents (those of the third book in particular) seem to belong to the beginning of the war, it must be considered that poetically, and to the hearers of the Iliad, the war opens in the third book, and the incidents are of the kind that is required in such a place. The truce makes a pause which heightens the interest of the impending battle ; the duel and the scene on the walls are effective in bringing some of the leading characters on the stage, and in making us acquainted with the previous history. The story of Paris and Helen especially, and the general position of affairs in Troy, is put before us in a singularly vivid manner. The book in short forms so good a prologite to the action of the war that we can hardly be wrong in attributing it to the genius which devised the rest of the Iliad. The case against the remaining books is of a different kind. The ninth and tenth seem like two independent pictures of the night before the great battle of xi.-xvii. Either is enough to fill the space in Homer s canvas ; and the suspicion arises (as when two Platonic dialogues bear the same name) that if either had been genuine, the other would not have come into existence. If one of the two is to be rejected it must be the tenth, which is certainly the less Homeric. It relates a picturesque adventure, conceived in a vein more approaching that of comedy than any other part of the Iliad. Moreover, the language in several places exhibits traces of post-Homeric date. The ninth book, on the other hand, was rejected by Grote, chiefly on the grounds that the embassy to Achilles ought to have put an end to the quarrel, and that it is ignored in later passages, especially in the speeches of Achilles (xi. 609 ; xvi. 72, 85). His argument, however, rests on an assumption which we are apt to bring with us to the reading of the Iliad, but which is not borne out by its language, viz., that there was some definite atonement demanded by Achilles, or due to him according to the custom and sentiment of the time. But in the Iliad the whole stress is laid on the anger of Achilles, which can only be satisfied by the defeat and extreme peril of the Greeks. 1 He is influenced by his own feeling, and by nothing else, Accordingly, in the ninth book, when they are still protected by the rampart (see 348 f.), he rejects gifts and fair words alike; in the six teenth he is moved by the tears and entreaties of Patroclus, and the sight of the Greek ships on fire ; in the nineteenth his anger is quenched in grief. But he makes no condi tions, either in rejecting the offers of the embassy or in returning to the Greek army. And this conduct is the re sult, not only of his fierce and inexorable character, but also (as the silence of Homer shows) of the want of any gene ral rules or principles, any code of morality or of honour, which would have required him to act in a different way. Finally, Grote objected to the two last books that they prolong the action of the Iliad beyond the exigencies of a coherent scheme. Of the two, the twenty-third could more easily be spared. In language, and perhaps in style and manner, it is akin to the tenth ; while the twenty-fourth is in the pathetic vein of the ninth, and like it serves to bring out new aspects of the character of Achilles. 1 On this point see a paper by Professor Packard in the Trans, qf the American Philological Association, 1876.