A History of Ancient Greek Literature. Gilbert Murray

and the Spear-fight (which was itself modified again) through all the relevant parts of the Odyssey.

      It is curious that in points where we can compare the myths of our poems with those expressed elsewhere in literature, and in fifth-century pottery, our poems are often, perhaps generally, the more refined and modern. In the Great Eoiai,* the married pair Alkinoês and Arêtê are undisguisedly brother and sister: our Odyssey explains elaborately that they were really only first cousins. When the shipwrecked Odysseus meets Nausicaa, he pulls a bough off a tree -- what for? To show that he is a suppliant, obviously: and so a fifth-century vase represents it. But our Odyssey makes him use the branch as a veil to conceal his nakedness! And so do the vases of the fourth century. A version of the slaying of Hector followed by Sophocles in his Niptra* made Achilles drag his enemy alive at his chariot wheels. That is the cruder, crueller version. Our poems cannot suppress the savage insult, but they have got rid of the torture. How and when did this humanising tendency come? We cannot say; but it was deliberately preferred and canonised when the poems were prepared for the sacred Athenian recitation.

This moral growth is one of the marks of the last working over of the poems. It gives us the magnificent studies of Helen and Andromache, not dumb objects of barter and plunder, as they once were, but women ready to take their places in the conception of Æschylus. It gives us the gentle and splendid chivalry of the Lycians, Sarpêdon and Glaucus. It gives us the exquisite character of the swineherd Eumæus; his eager generosity towards the stranger who can tell of Odysseus, all the time that he keeps professing his incredulity; his quaint honesty in feeding himself, his guest, and even Têlemachus, on the young inferior pork, keeping the best, as far as the suitors allow, for his master (ξ, 3, 80; π, 49); and his emotional breach of principle, accompanied with much apology and justification, when the story has entirely won him: "Bring forth the best of the hogs!" (ξ, 44). Above all, it seems to have given us the sympathetic development of Hector. The oldest poem hated Hector, and rejoiced in mangling him, though doubtless it feared him as well, and let him have a better right to his name 'Man-slayer' than he has now, when not only Achilles, but Diomêdes, Aias, Idomeneus, and even Menelaus, have successively been made more than a match for him. In that aspect Hector has lost, but he has gained more. The prevailing sympathy of the later books is with him. The two most explicit moral judgments in the poems are against Achilles for maltreating him.19 The gods keep his body whole, and rebuke his enemy's savagery. The scenes in Z, the parting with Andromache, the comforting of little Astyanax frightened at his father's plume, the calm acceptance of a battle which must be fatal, and of a cause which must be lost -- all these are in the essence of great imagination; but the absolute masterpiece, one of the greatest feats of skill in imaginative literature, is the flight of Hector in X. It is simple fear, undisguised; yet you feel that the man who flies is a brave man. The act of staying alone outside the gate is much; you can just nerve yourself to it. But the sickening dread of Achilles' distant oncoming grows as you wait, till it simply cannot be borne. The man must fly; no one can blame him; it is only one more drop in the cup of divine cruelty, which is to leave Hector dead, Troy burned, Astyanax butchered, and Andromache her enemy's slave. If the old poet went with the conqueror, and exulted in Hector's shame, there has come one after him who takes all his facts and turns them the other way; who feels how far more intense the experience of the conquered always is, and in this case how far more noble.

      The wonder is that Achilles is not spoilt for us. Somehow he remains grand to the end, and one is grieved, not alienated, by the atrocities his grief leads him to. The last touch of this particular spirit is where Achilles receives Priam in his tent. Each respects the other, each conquers his anguish in studied courtesy; but the name of Hector can scarcely be spoken, and the attendants keep the dead face hidden, lest at the sight of it Priam's rage should burst its control, "and Achilles slay him and sin against God" (Ω, 585). It is the true pathos of war: the thing seen on both sides; the unfathomable suffering for which no one in particular is to blame. Homer, because he is an 'early poet,' is sometimes supposed to be unsubtle, and even superficial. But is it not a marvel of sympathetic imagination which makes us feel with the flying Hector, the cruel Achilles, the adulterous Helen, without for an instant losing hold of the ideals of courage, mercifulness, and chastity?

      This power of entering vividly into the feelings of both parties in a conflict is perhaps the most characSeristic gift of the Greek genius; it is the spirit in which Homer, Æschylus, Herodotus, Euripides, Thucydides, find their kinship, and which enabled Athens to create the drama.

1 Esp. θ,74; μ, 70; α, 351.

2 Crusius, Philol. liv.

3 Athenæus, 347 e.

4 The others are the Achilles-trilogy (Myrmidons,*Nereides,*Phryges*), Penelope,*Soul-weighing.*

5 Phil. Unters. vii. p. 240.

6 One is tempted to add to this early evidence what Herodotus says (vii. 6) of the banishment of Onomacritus by Hipparchus; but he was banished for trafficking in false oracles, an offence of an entirely different sort from interpolating works of literature.

7 Hdt. v. 67.

8 Counting Alcibiades II. as spurious.

9 Grote, Plato, chap. vi.

10 Kirchoff, Alphabet, Ed. iv. p. 92.

11 See Cauer's answer to Wilamowitz, Grundfragen der Homerkritik, p. 69ff.

12 θ, 73 ff., 500 ff.; α, 326.

13 Cauer, Grundfragen, p. 203.

14 Thornton Romances, Camden Soc., 1844, esp. p. 289.

15 Duncker, Greece, chap. xiii.

16 The Laestrygones, especially κ, 82-86.

17 Psyche, pp. 35 f.

18 Quellen der Odyssee, 1887.

19 Ά, 24; X, 395; and Ά, 76; γ, 467.

      II

      LESSER HOMERIC POEMS; HESIOD; ORPHEUS

       Table of Contents

      THE REJECTED EPICS

      WHEN