Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 9, 1898.djvu/137

Rh voice in the matter is a later idea which was interwoven in the primitive Saga to add dignity to the heroine, or because in the process of evolution, some liberty of choice was actually allowed to the widow within the prescribed limits of her husband's kin. By the time of Euripides, at any rate, the feeling seems to have been opposed to second marriage of the widow, and necessarily against any compulsion on her to choose a particular man. And this is quite consistent with the manner of the poet of the Odyssey, who, as in the case of Nausikaa, Arete of Phaeacia, and the women heroines of the Nekuia or Descent into the Underworld, is habitually given to exalt the female sex.

At the same time too much stress must not be laid on facts like these, because indications are not wanting in Homer of what we may call pseudo-archaism. Thus the Homeric Achaians are represented as unacquainted with writing; they do not ride horses; they do not eat boiled meat. When we consider the character of Achaian culture as represented by the excavations of Dr. Schliemann at Mycenæ or Tiryns, and the indications which the epics present of a high standard of artistic taste, it is most improbable that the Greeks of the ninth or tenth century should have not attained to the knowledge of writing, horsemanship, and the finer culinary arts. It is perhaps more likely that the poet, to give an air of antiquity to his work, deliberately represented their civilisation as in some respects more archaic than it really was. As Dr. Percy Gardner remarks, such advances in culture were probably kept out of the epics on the same principle that a writer of pastoral idylls in our day would avoid mention of the telegraph or the telephone.

We have thus in the Odyssey in its present form a certain stratification of marriage law and other social custom which