Page:Notes and Queries - Series 11 - Volume 3.djvu/305

 n s. m. APRIL is, ion.] NOTES AND QUERIES.

299

0n

The H'orld of Homer. By Andrew Lang. With

Illustrations. (Longmans & Co.) MR. LANG has already given us ' Homer and the Epic ' (1895) and ' Homer and his Age ' (1906). He now has added a third volume as " further study appears to have made many points more clear than they were." The Higher Critics of the subject are fair game, differing among themselves to an amazing degree, and often modifying their opinions, and they meet in Mr. Lang an accom- plished controversialist and an acute maker of points. To weigh properly the evidence accu- mulated one would have to be an authority on the dress, armour, metals in use, linguistics, religion, and art of several periods but dimly known to the expert, and we imagine that not many scholars combine the qualifications above mentioned. The linguistic arguments seem to be the most novel and the most promising, but the book before us seems most thoroughgoing and successful in its discussion of the question of armour and female costume. We do not propose to follow Mr. Lang into the intricacies of matters which really belong to the specialist, and cannot be fairly weighed without an amount of study beyond the average classical student ; but we commend his book as good reading throughout, full of lively retort and ingenious parallel, e.g., the efforts of Highland genealogists are quoted ; ami ^Eneas is " a special sort of person, the son of a goddess, and not a good Trojan, because of Priam's suspicion of ' the Orleans branch.' "

We may indicate as briefly as possible Mr. Lang's main views, which the reader can compare with those of Dr. Verrall and Prof. Gilbert Murray, and others. We mention the two writers above specially as they both have taste and skill in writing, being free from the ponderous verbiage which renders scholarship wearisome.

Mr. Lang opens by referring to four Ages. The first is the ' Late Minoan '. revealed to us recently in the wonderful treasures of Crete, and showing female costume almost modern in character ; men with loin-cloths and not chitons, and an absence of fibulce or brooches ; and iron as a rare metal. The language or writing of this period ami people is not known with certainty.

The Second Age follows, that of the Homeric poems, with Greek for language, iron common with bronze ; fibulce fastening a new costume ; and cremation, not as a rule, burial with treasure attached, but burial under a cairn.

The Third Age is called " the Dipylon " from the contents of the cemetery outside the Dipylon gate at Athens, and exhibits the fully developed use of iron ; horses instead of the war-chariots of the First and Second Ages ; absence of cairns contained decadent Minoan and also rude vase paintings of. human existence; and female costume like that of the First Age in having a separate skirt and bodice.
 * iml burial preferred to burning; an art which

Finally, we come to the Fourth Age, the

i archaic age of Greece from the ninth to the seventh

centuries and the period of the Cyclic poems.

Mr. Lang proceeds to point out that to the

majority of critics the life described in the

I Homeric poems is a mosaic of all these four Ages,

or, in other words, a medley of some six centurie s

or more, a picture of fancy, not fact. Critics " find anachronisms and inconsistencies as to armour (but not costume), as to rites, as to marriage laws, as to houses, as to tactics, as to land tenure ; but the inconsistencies and ana- chronisms at most are petty, and, we are to argxie, at most represent such minute variations from the norm as occur in all societies, savage or civilised." Mr. Lang's contention is that the details of life shown in the ' Iliad ' and the ' Odyssey,' from which the later Cyclic poems vary widely, are all old and all congruous.

There are four Appendixes to the book, one of theni concerning the Pisistratean recension, which is itself fairly clear as an historical event, but in its extent a subject of dispute. The last words of the last Appendix are very much to the point. Mr. Lang has been talking of the higher criticism of Homeric Wiederholungen (why not translate this word into English ?) as repeated in certain criticisms of Scottish ballads, and ends : " In Homeric criticism, alas ! we have not the letters and manuscripts of the poet. But it is clear from the case of ' Auld Maitland ' that, in the absence of facts, our motto in conjecture should be Gang warily ! "

The riddle does not seem so insoluble as that of Junius and other historic doubts, for yearly we are getting more evidence from the archaeologists of custom and language in periods which, if not Homeric, have at least resemblances to that of Homer.

The Book of the Dead. By H. M. Tirard. (Society

for Promoting Christian Knowledge.) IT was no easy task that Mrs. Tirard undertook when she essayed to give a connected and intel- ligible account of the religion of the Ancient Egyptians so far as it may be gathered from that strange medley, the Baedeker of Amenti, com-^ monly called ' The Book of the Dead.' The task of co-ordinating its contents was one, indeed, that no Egyptian priest or philosopher ever attempted. It was always a confused labyrinth of incon* sistent beliefs, and if after all Mrs. Tirard's efforts it still remains so, the fault lies in the material rather than in the redactor. The Egyptian, when he acquired new and more rational beliefs, never- discarded any^of the ancient ideas of his ancestors ,. but was quite content to hold them all together as antinomies which it was no business of his to reconcile. Animal worship and sun-worship existed side by side in impartial observance down to the latest times, and were never fused into a homogeneous whole. Mrs. Tirard has done what she could to bring order into this chaos, not with- out some success. In the Introduction she has had the good fortune of finding a sponsor (or, to speak Egyptiace, an ushabii) for her book in such, a good authority as Prof. Naville, whose interpre- tations she generally follows.

The reader will probably be mystified by the- appearance on p. 30 of a goddess Thut, hitherto unknown in the Egyptian pantheon. The name has a thoroughly Egyptian aspect, but it is only an unfortunate misprint for Mut. The higher knowledge of a bodily resurrection claimed for Job, xix. 20, " in my flesh shall I see God '* p. 82), rests on an incorrect translation, as is well known. The numerous illustrations are to be commended for their clearness. The book will be welcomed as a popularized account of a difficult, subject.