Homer and Hesiod: The Foundations of Ancient Greek Literature. Homer

in antiquity the Æolic letter.' Now there are 3354 places in the poems which insist on the restoration of this Vau -- i.e. the lines will not scan without it; 617 places, on the other hand, where in ancient Æolic it ought to stand, but is metrically inadmissible. That is, through the great mass of the poems the habit and tradition of the Æolic pronunciation is preserved; in a small part the Ionic asserts itself.

      These facts have been the subject of hot controversy; but the only effective way to minimise their importance is to argue that we have no remains of Æolic of the seventh century, and that the apparent Æolisms may be merely 'old Greek' forms dating from a period before the scattered townships on the coast of Asia massed themselves into groups under the names of Iônes and Aioleis -- an historical hypothesis which leads to difficulties.

It is not disputed that the 'Æolic' element is the older. Philology and history testify to it, and weight must be allowed to the curious fact, that to turn the poems into Æolic produces the rhymes and assonances characteristic of primitive poetry in numbers far too large to be the result of accident. And it holds as a general rule that when the Æolic and Ionic forms are metrically indifferent -- i.e. when the line scans equally well with either -- the Ionic is put; when they are not indifferent, then in the oldest parts of the poems the æolic stands and the Ionic cannot, in the later parts the Ionic stands and the æolic cannot. And further, where the two dialects denote the same thing by entirely different words, the æolic word tends to stand in its native form; e.g. λα + ̑ος, 'people,' keeps its a, because the Ionic word was δημος. For a 'temple' the Ionic νημος stands everywhere, but that is just because temples are a late development; the oldest worship was at altars in the open air.13

There are many exceptions to these rules. Dr. Fick of Göttingen, who has translated all the 'older parts' of Homer back to a supposed original Æolic, leaving what will not transcribe as either late or spurious, has found himself obliged to be inconsistent in his method; when Fιδέσθαι occurs without a F he sometimes counts it as evidence of lateness, sometimes alters it into íκέσΘαι. In the same way a contraction like νικωντεσ may represent an Æolic νíκανς from νίκαμὶ, or may be a staring Atticism. When we see further that, besides the Ionisms which refuse to move, there are numbers of Æolisms which need never have been kept for any reason of metre, the conclusion is that the Ionising of the poems is not the result of a deliberate act on the part of a particular Ionic bard -- Fick gives it boldly to Kynæthus of Chios -- but part of that gradual semi-conscious modernising and re-forming to which all saga-poetry is subject. The same process can be traced in the various dialectic versions of the Nibelungenlied and the Chanson de Roland. A good instance of it occurs in the English ballad of Sir Degrevant, where the hero 'Agravain' has not only had a D put before his name, but sometimes rhymes with 'retenaunce' or 'chaunce' and sometimes with 'recreaunt' or 'avaunt.' It comes from an AngloNorman original, in which the Sieur d'Agrivauns formed his accusative d'Agrivaunt.14

      THE SUBJECT-MATTER OF HOMER

      The evidence of language is incomplete without some consideration of the matter of the poems. What nationality, for instance, would naturally be interested in the subject of the Iliad? The scene is in the Troad, on Æolic ground. The hero is Achilles, from Æolic Thessaly. The chief king is Agamemnon, ancestor of the kings of Æolic Kymê. Other heroes come from Northern and Central Greece, from Crete and from Lycia. The Ionians are represented only by Nestor, a hero of the second rank, who is not necessary to the plot.

      This evidence goes to discredit the Ionian origin of the main thread of the Iliad; but does not the same line of argument, if pursued further, suggest something still more strange -- viz., a Peloponnesian origin? Agamemnon is king of Argos and Mycenæ; Menelaos is king of Sparta; Diomêdes, by some little confusion, of Argos also; Nestor, of Pylos in Messenia. The answer to this difficulty throws a most striking light on the history of the poems. All these heroes have been dragged down to the Peloponnese from homes in Northern Greece.

      Diomêdes, first, has no room in Argos; apart from the difficulty with Agamemnon, he is not in the genealogy, and has to inherit through his mother. A slight study of the local worships shows what he is, an idealised Ætolian. He is the founder of cities 1 in Italy; the constant companion of Odysseus, who represents the North - West islands. He is the son of Tydeus, who ate his enemy's head, and the kinsman of Agrios ('Savage') and the 'sons of Agrios' -- the mere lion-hero of the ferocious tribes of the North-West.

      Agamemnon himself comes from the plain of Thessaly. He is king of Argos; only in a few late passages, of Mycenæ. Aristarchus long ago pointed out that 'Pelasgian Argos' in Homer means the plain of Thessaly. But 'horse-rearing Argos' must be the same, for Argos of the Peloponnese was without cavalry even in historical times. And a careful treatment of the word 'Argos' shows its gradual expansion in the poems from the plain of Thessaly to Greece in general, and then its second localisation in the Peloponnese. Agamemnon is the rich king of the plain of Thessaly; that is why he is from the outset connected with Achilles, the poor but valiant chief from the seaward mountains; that is why he chooses Aulis as the place for assembling his fleet.

      Aias in the late tradition is the hero of Salamis; but in the poems he has really no fixed home. He is the hero of the seven-fold shield, whose father is 'Shield-strap' (Telamon), and his son, 'Broad-buckler' (Eurysakes); if he has connections, we must look for them in the neigbbourhood of his brother the Locrian, and his father's brother, Phôkos, who, although he was knocked on the head by the sea-shore, and had a mother called 'Sea-sand,' was perhaps originally as much a Phokian as a 'seal'. So far we get a general conception of an original stage of the story in which the chiefs were all from Northern Greece. Where was the fighting?

Achilles and Agamemnon must be original; so must Hector and Ilion; so, above all, must Alexander-Paris and Helenê. But need Ilion be in Troia on the site of Hissarlik? It is worth observing that the scenery of the similes in the oldest parts of the poems is Thessalian, and not Asiatic; that Hector ('Upholder') is not connected in local legend with the historical Troy -- its heroes are Æneas and one Dares;15 that this Æneas, though afterwards identified with a hero at Hissarlik, seems to be in origin the tribal hero of the Æneânes in South Thessaly, just as Teukros ('Hitter'), the archer, gets in later tradition mixed up with Ilion, and the Ilionmen become Teukroi? Of course it is ultimately a myth that we have to deal with. The original battle for Helen was doubtless a strife of light and darkness in the sky, just as the Niblungs were cloud-men and Sigurd a sungod, before they were brought down to Worms and Burgundy. But it looks as if the Helen-feud had its first earthly localisation, not in Troy, but on the southern frontier of those Thessalian bards who sang of it.

      When Dr. Schliemann made his first dazzling discoveries at Mycenæ and Hissarlik, he believed that he had identified the corpse of Agamemnon and recovered the actual cup from which Nestor drank, the pigeons still intact upon the handles. We all smile at this now; but it remains a difficult task to see the real relation which subsists between the civilisation described in the Homeric poems, and the great castles and walls, the graves and armour and pottery, which have now been unearthed at so many different sites in Greece.

      Of the nine successive cities at Hissarlik, the sixth from the bottom corresponds closely with the civilisation of Mycenæ, a civilisation similar in many respects to that implied in the earliest parts of the Iliad. The Homeric house can be illustrated by the castle of Tiryns; the "cornice of blue kyanos," a mystery before, is explained by the blue glass-like fragments found at Mycenae. The exhumed graves and the earliest parts of Homer agree in having weapons of bronze and ornaments of iron; they agree substantially in their armour and their works of art, the inlaid daggers and shields, the lion-hunts and bull-hunts by men in chariots, and in the ostensible ignorance of writing.

      On the other hand, the similarity only holds good for the earliest strata of the poems, and not fully even for them. Mycenae buried her dead; the men of the epos burnt theirs -- a practice