Page:The New International Encyclopædia 1st ed. v. 10.djvu/195

* HOMEB. 167 HOMEB. clearly defined personalities which they present, the profusion of detail about things and per- sons and places, their literary art, poetical dic- tion, and mastery of the hexameter — all these things presuppose a long historical and literary development. But of this we know nothing ex- cept by analogy- and inference from the poems themselves. The manifestly spurious ancient 'lives' are hctions, in many cases fashioned from minor poems attributed to 'Homer.' Homer, they tell lis, was born of the nymph Critheis and the river Meles (at Smyrna), and hence called Jlelesigenes. The name 'Homer' was vari- ously derived from the Greek word for hostage, because he was a hostage in youth, or from a dialectic vord for blind, because he lost his sight. Homer, the 'Lives' continue, wandered from city to city of Asia Jlinor earning his bread by rccit ing his poetry or by 'teaching,' and immortalized by name in his poems many of those who treated him kindly. Some poems he actually gave to others who won fame by them — to Stasinus of Cyprus, e.g. he gave as his daughter's dowry the C'ljiiria, one of the so-called Cyclic Epics, of which only a few fragments remain. He died, as an oracle had foretold, through chagrin at his in- ability to read the riddle of the fishermen : "What we caught we left, wliat we caught not we bring," which referred not to fishes, but to an animal more 'familiar to man.' After his death, '"Seven cities claimed the mighty Homer dead, where liv- ing Homer begged his daily bread." All this and much more is fable. Modern scholars ask, rather: What is the origin of epic poetry in Greece? Can we detect in the Iliad traces of the ballads or shorter lays out of which we may conceive it to have been composed? Can we break up the Iliad into two chief groups of lays — the wrath of Achilles proper, and the general picture of the siege of Troy, by which this original framework was enlarged? What features of style, language, and manners mark the Odyssey as later than the Iliadt W'hat parts of the Iliad most resemble the Odyssey in these features? Can we dissect the Odyssey into a 'return of Odysseus' and a 'Telemachiad'? Was the 'stor' of Achilles' originally composed in Thessaly in the .T^olic dialect, then transferred to the scene of the struggles of early Greek colonists in Xorthwestern Asia Elinor, and final- ly Tonicized, enlarged, embellished, and chanted I'y minstrels in the halls of Ionian nobles and merchant princes on the Lydian coast? Does the Odyssey reflect the travelers' tales brought back to Ionian seaports by the first navigators of the F.uxine and the ilediterranean? What is the precise relation of the life depicted by Homer to tiie traditional legend of early Greek history on the one hand, and on the other to the appar- ently similar civilization revealed at Troy, My- een:c, and Tiryns by the spade of Schliemann, and conjecturally carried back to the third mil- lennium n.o. by recent discoveries in Crete? These questions are debated by specialists, but with little imanimity of result. Meanwhile the Iliad and the Odiissey abide. They may be stud- ied: (1) As a picture of early Greek life; (2) as literature: (3) in their historic influence. Homer is the most objective of poets. In him mind has not yet been turned back upon itself. It is a mirror of the world. If the heroes dine, the ox is consecrated to the gods, slain, cut up, roasted, carved, and sensed up in our presence. We assist at all the details of the hero's toilet, or of his arming for battle. Homer does not enumerate the parts of a ship or a bed; but he shows us Odjsseus building the craft that is to bear him away from the isle of Calypso, or the bed whose secret reveals his identity to Penelope, We watch every step in the launching of the ves- sel that bears Chryseis back to her father. We are not merely told that the ox sacrificed by Xestor has gold-tipped horns ; we see the gold- smith come with the tools of his craft to lay on the gold. In consequence, we know the life of the Homeric man more intimatelj- than that of any other primitive people — than that of the Hebrews or of our own Teutonic ancestors. This lore has been collected in three huge double vol- umes of Homeric 'Realien,' or real things, by the German Buchholz, and every history of Greece contains its chapter on early Greek life, religion, government, and manners, drawn from the same source. And this wealth of concrete detail is a striking, if not the chief, literary quality of Homeric poetry. Homer does not "beat in the void his luminous wings in vain," He does not analyze and refine. He is not dominated by any one great unifying religious or patriotic idea, like Vergil or Dante or Milton, He does not delay to moralize or reflect except in brief pregnant sentences. He flows on and on in a broad, pellu- cid stream of narrative, description, and, above all, action. ''The multitude of things in Homer is wonderful" (says Hazlitt) — "the splendor, the truth, the power, the variety." The great gods of Homer — Zeus, Apollo, Athena, Hera,Poseidon — have remained for 3000 years as ideal types for all subsequent poetry and sculpture. His per- sonages — Achilles, Hector, Nestor, Odysseus, Helen, Andromache, Penelope, Xausicaa — live for the imagination to-day as no others save those of Shakespeare's greatest tragedies. Tlie berserker battle rage and impassioned eloquence of Achilles still stir the sluggish blood like wine. The great pathetic or dramatic episodes — the parting of Hector and Andromache, the death of Sarpedon, the horses of Achilles mourning for Patroclus, Hecuba baring her bosom to her son from the walls of Troy, the dirges for Hector — are still the despair of imitators. The Odyssey is yet the most interesting story-book in the world. In short, the Homeric poems are still, as Matthew Arnold said, "the most important poeticai monu- ment existing." The most distinctive literary quality of that poetry is due to its intermediate position between the literary epic, as Paradise Lost, and the .supposedly spontaneous popular epic, as the Edda, the Kaletr<iln, or the C/ia;isoj» de Roland. It has all the simple, childlike charm of the one. all the lucidity, architectonic order, and noble diction of the other. The primi- tive feelings still preserve their freshness and force, but they appeal to us through the medium of a noble and dignified art. But though an artist, and perhaps a conscious artist, the Homeric poet is not like his successors, Apol- lonius of Rhodes, Vergil, Tasso, Milton, conscious of an inimitable model, of a long line of pred- ecessors, and of a code of critic-formed rules, Matthew Arnold's four canons of Homeric style are well known : Homer, he says, is rapid, plain, and direct in syntax and words, plain and direct in matter and ideas, and yet withal eminently noble — a master of the grand style in simplicity. There is space only to mention some minor traits: