Page:Rise of the Greek Epic (3rd ed 1924).djvu/108

80 pre-Hellenic peoples which knew of mothers and children, but not much of husbands. Both forms of home must have acted as powerful moral influences in man's life before the time of the migrations by sea, and both equally were destroyed at that time, and their divers tiesdiversities [sic] and tendernesses battered out of existence. ‘As for this trouble about Briseis,’ says Agamemnon to the envoys, ‘tell Achilles that I will give him seven Lesbian women down, and I promise him that, when we take Troy, he can pick out twenty Trojan women—any twenty excluding Helen.’ And Briseis herself has not a proper name. The word Briseis is only an adjective derived from the town of Brisa or Brêsa in Lesbos. She is ‘the girl from Brêsa’.

So much for the respect for woman which forms a part of the tradition of both forms of home. And what of the father? It is interesting, though not strange, how keenly this question of the treatment of fathers is felt. It was the same in the early Aryan household, and throughout historical Greece. It is the same, I should imagine, in all societies except those in which people, like the rich at the present day, live on incomes derived from accumulated stores of wealth and are consequently far removed from the groundwork of human needs. In all poor or precarious societies there is an assumption that the children owe the parents a definite debt for their food and rearing. The parents fed and protected the child when he was helpless. Now that the old man cannot fight, the son must fight for him: when he cannot work, the son must support him. Yet when men are flying or fighting for their lives, when every weak hand or slow foot brings danger to the whole party, there must have been many old men left by their sons to save themselves as best they might. The conscience of the Greek Saga was stirred on the point. Not without purpose does it tell us how Aeneas in the very flames of Troy, when every delay might mean death, would not move without ‘father Anchises’, and, when Anchises‘ strength failed, faced all the dangers of flight amid armed enemies with the old man upon his back. That is what the saga calls ‘piety’! It is the other side of Hesiod’s complaint, how the men of those days, the generations that came just after the Trojan War, cursed and deserted their old parents.

For there is a passage in Hesiod which reads almost as if it