The goddess Athena sug-
gested to Odysseus the successful device.
gested to Odysseus the successful device.
Warner - World's Best Literature - v13 - Her to Hux
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BY THOMAS D. SEYMOUR
HE Homeric Poems are the earliest literary product of the
world which has survived to our day, and they lie at the
fountain-head of all the later literature of Europe. No liter-
ary epic poem has been composed since Homer's day without reference
to the Iliad and the Odyssey as the standard. Apollonius of Rhodes
followed and imitated Homer; Virgil imitated Homer and Apollonius;
Dante took Virgil as his master; John Milton followed in the foot-
steps of Homer, Virgil, and Dante. Plato called Homer the father
of tragedy, as well as of the epic. To the ancient Greek mind, the
Iliad and Odyssey of Homer formed a sort of Bible, to which refer-
ence was made as to an ultimate authority. Even in an age when
epic poetry was out of fashion, one of the most honored of Athenian
generals, Nicias, had his son Niceratus commit to memory all of the
two great Homeric poems, of which the shorter is a third longer
than Milton's 'Paradise Lost. ' About the same time (in the fifth cen-
tury B. C. ) audiences of twenty thousand people gathered to listen to
public recitals of these poems. A Homeric quotation was always in
order, to illustrate and clinch an argument, or to give poetic flavor to
a discussion.
When and where Homer lived, no one knows. Many stories about
him were invented and told, but all are without support.
"Seven cities claimed the mighty Homer dead,
Through which the living Homer begged his bread. ”
A guild of singers on the island of Chios (Scio) asserted themselves
to be his descendants and rightful successors, but no evidence was
offered of his family or home. Scholars no longer ask where Homer
was born, but where Greek epic poetry had its rise. The muses were
Pierian muses, and thus associated with the southern part of Mace-
donia; they dwelt with the gods on Mount Olympus, and the abode
of Achilles, the chief hero of the Iliad, was close at hand in Thessaly.
These are pretty distinct indications that the early home of Greek
poetry was near Mount Olympus. Later this art was carried by the
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HOMER
7552
Greeks to their colonies on the western shore of Asia Minor, and
there was accepted and perfected.
Homer is represented in ancient works of art as blind, but the
greater Homeric poems offer no indication of his blindness. Quite
the contrary, he seems to have taken an active part in the doings of
men. His interest in the battles which he describes is lively. His
description of wounds inflicted shows such exact acquaintance with
battles and anatomy that some German critics have been disposed to
think he must have been a sort of army surgeon.
While the Homeric poems are the earliest works of Greek litera-
ture which have come down to us, they certainly were not the earliest
poems of the Greeks. Brief lyric songs of love, grief, feasting, or
war are ordinary precursors of epic,-i. e. , of narrative lays. And
short epics must have been well known to the people before any
poet thought of composing a long epic. The growth of a poem like
the Iliad is gradual. The art of writing was known in Greece at an
early age, quite certainly by 1000 B. C. , but not until much later was
it applied to literary compositions; it was used mainly for business.
memoranda and public records until the fifth century B. C. , and
even then the Greeks could hardly be called a reading people. But
they were patient listeners. When the Greek drama was at its best,
great audiences of fifteen to twenty thousand Athenians would sit in
the open air, in March, from early in the morning until late in the
afternoon, to hear and see three or four tragedies in succession. A
century or centuries before this, audiences listened in throngs to con-
tinuous epic recitations. But in general each separate lay seems to
have contained not more than five or six hundred lines. Probably
the recitation of such a lay was followed by an intermission, and the
connection between successive lays was not made with rigid precis-
ion. The outlines of the story, and often the details, were familiar
to the hearers. When a long poem was formed by the union of
several lays or by a process of gradual development, a singer would
select on each occasion what seemed best suited to his audience.
Some parts of the Homeric poems are well adapted to be sung at
feasts, others on the return from a long journey, others at a funeral,
many others after or before a battle.
These poems were sung, we say. Perhaps intoned or chanted would
be a more exact expression. The instrumental accompaniment was
very slight, that of a cithara of four strings (and thus only four
notes), with a sounding-board formed by a tortoise shell. We can-
not assume much melody in the recitation, and probably the cithara
served chiefly to give the keynote, and to sound a few simple chords
as a prelude or interludes. The cithara was used not only by the
professional bards at the courts of kings, but also by the warriors:
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HOMER
7553
at least Achilles, while "sulking in his tent," cheered his heart by
singing of the glorious deeds of men, holding a cithara which he had
taken from the spoils of a sacked city.
Our poet was a national poet. He gives no special honor to any
part of Greece, though the little country was broken up into many
principalities. His songs might have been sung in any hamlet with-
out arousing either envy or ill-will. He is impartial, too, between
Greeks and Trojans, and excites our sympathy for the Trojan Hector
and Andromache as well as for the Achæan Achilles and Patroclus.
The Homeric poet was fortunate not only in the body of myths
which descended to him, and which formed the groundwork for his
poems, but in his further inheritance from former generations,— his
language and his verse. The language was the most graceful and
flexible which the world has ever known. The verse itself (the so-
called dactylic hexameter) would indicate that epic poetry had been
cultivated in Greece long before Homer's day. Its laws are fully
fixed, its favorite and its forbidden pauses; the places where a light
and those where a heavy movement is preferred. No verse known
to man is so well suited to a long Greek narrative poem. No other
verse has less monotony or more dignity and stateliness. It was
nobly "described and exemplified" by Coleridge's lines:-
―
"Strongly it bears us along in swelling and limitless billows;
Nothing before and nothing behind but the sky and the ocean. »
The Roman poet Virgil adopted this verse, but had a much more
ponderous language, which was not well fitted for the Greek metres.
The verse has been made familiar to us all by Clough's 'Bothie,' and
especially by Longfellow's 'Evangeline' and 'The Courtship of Miles
Standish; but the line is rather too long for most modern languages,
and has not been used for any long English poem or any great Eng-
lish translation of Homer. Matthew Arnold tried it for the last verses
of the eighth book of the Iliad, as follows:
"So shone forth, in front of Troy, by the bed of the Xanthus,
Between that and the ships, the Trojans' numerous fires.
In the plain there were kindled a thousand fires; by each one
There sat fifty men in the ruddy light of the fire;
By their chariots stood their steeds and champed the white barley,
While their masters sat by the fire and waited for morning. »
With this may be compared Tennyson's translation of the same lines
(with a few more) in English heroic verse: —
XIII-473
"As when in heaven the stars about the moon
Look beautiful, when all the winds are laid,
And every height comes out, and jutting peak,
And valley, and the immeasurable heavens
## p. 7554 (#364) ###########################################
7554
HOMER
-➖➖
Break open to their highest, and all the stars
Shine, and the shepherd gladdens in his heart:
So many a fire between the ships and stream
Of Xanthus blazed before the towers of Troy,
A thousand on the plain; and close by each
Sat fifty in the blaze of burning fire;
And champing golden grain the horses stood
Hard by their chariots waiting for the dawn. ”
The essential characteristics of Homer's poetry are enumerated
thus by Matthew Arnold: "Homer is rapid in his movement, Homer
is plain in his words and style, Homer is simple in his ideas, Homer
is noble in his manner. " Mr. Arnold goes on to say that «< Cowper
renders him ill because he is slow in his movement and elaborate in
his style; Pope renders him ill because he is artificial both in his
style and in his words; Chapman renders him ill because he is fan-
tastic in his ideas. " Each age has desired its own translation of the
Homeric poems. Chapman's, Pope's, and Cowper's translations are
now read rather as the works of those English poets than as faith-
ful renderings of the Homeric poems. But we owe to Chapman's
translation Keats's splendid sonnet, "On First Looking into Chapman's
Homer":
"Much have I traveled in the realms of gold,
And many goodly States and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That deep-browed Homer ruled as his demesne:
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold;
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He stared at the Pacific, and all his men
Looked at each other with a wild surmise-
Silent, upon a peak in Darien. »
The dramatic nature of the Homeric poems deserves remark.
About half of the verses are in speeches, although epic poetry is
narrative poetry. In long passages the verses between the speeches
have almost the quality of "stage directions," and we see with what
justice Plato and Aristotle called Homer the father of the drama.
The poet reserves for his own telling only what is necessary. The
one passage in the poems (Odyssey, vii. 112-131) which resembles
a modern description, is on this very ground strongly suspected of
not being truly Homeric. "When Homer" (says Lessing) "wishes
## p. 7555 (#365) ###########################################
HOMER
7555
to tell us how Agamemnon was dressed, he makes the king put on
every article of raiment in our presence: the soft tunic, the great
mantle, the beautiful sandals, and the sword. When he is thus fully
equipped he grasps his sceptre. We see the clothes while the poet
is describing the act of dressing. An inferior writer would have
described the clothes down to the minutest fringe, and of the action
we should have seen nothing. "
Of few epochs in any country have we clearer and more animated
pictures than Homer has painted of the early Greeks. Of no other
great nation in its childhood have we such a view. Tacitus indeed
gave a masterly sketch of the Germans, about one hundred years
after Christ: but he was an outsider at best, and seems to have drawn
largely from the accounts of others; scholars are not agreed that he
himself ever sojourned in Germany. Of the early Jews, the children
of Israel, the story is far less full than of the early Greeks. Our
poet does not claim to have lived at the time of the Trojan War, but
rather is conscious that he is in a degenerate age. Hector, Ajax, and
Æneas each do "what two men could not do, such as now live upon
the earth. " The poet never speaks as if he himself were present at
the conflicts, nor does he claim to have heard the story from others.
He appeals to the Muse for inspiration. She was present, and knows
all things; he is but her mouthpiece. Whether the customs described
in the poems were those of Homer's day, or those of an earlier age
of which the poet knew only by tradition, is a question which schol-
ars still discuss. In general his manner is distinctly that of familiar-
ity with every detail which he mentions; and his style is too naïve,
too far removed from that of studied care, for us to believe that he
was anxious to secure historical accuracy of background in painting
the picture of an earlier age. In the matters of dress, food, and
every-day life in general, he seems as free as the early illustrators
of the Bible story, who introduced mediæval Dutch, German, or Ital-
ian dress and scenery into their pictures of early events in Palestine.
But changes of custom were not frequent nor rapid in Greece a
thousand years before Christ, and the manner of life which Homer
knew was doubtless not very different from that of his heroes. In a
few matters only does he seem conscious of a change: he does not
represent his warriors as riding on horseback (except as a boy rides
bareback from pasture), or using boiled meat, or employing a trumpet
in war, yet the poet himself refers to these things as well known.
Life in the Homeric age was primitive and rude in many respects,
but still had much wealth and splendor. It is not unlike that of
the Children of Israel in the same period. The same customs seem
to have prevailed not only throughout all Greece, but even in Troy.
Nowhere does the poet indicate a difference of language or manner
## p. 7556 (#366) ###########################################
7556
HOMER
of life between the Achæans and the Trojans;-unless it is found
in the facts that King Priam of Troy is the only polygamist of the
poems, and that the Trojans are noisier (and hence, says an old com-
mentator, less civilized) as they go into battle. The tribes are ruled
by kings, or as we should style them, petty chiefs. The freedom
with which the titles king and prince are bestowed is illustrated by
the large number of princes on Ithaca in the Homeric age; an island
which at the last census (according to Baedeker) had about 12,500
inhabitants, and probably had no more in Homer's time. The lives
of princes were much like those of peasants. They built their own
ships and their own houses, and tended their herds and flocks. So
princesses went to the town spring for water, and washed the fam-
ily raiment. The unwritten constitutions of the kingdoms were very
simple: custom ruled, not law. For the most part each man was
obliged to vindicate his own rights; even murder was a personal
offense against the friends of the slain man, and these (not the
government) were bound to avenge his death. Murder and theft in
themselves were no mortal sins against the gods. Fidelity to oaths,
honor to parents, and hospitality to strangers and suppliants, were
cardinal virtues. No moral quality inhered in the terms usually trans-
lated by good, bad, blameless, excellent. The existence of the soul after
death was supposed to be as shadowy as a dream. Ghosts and dreams
behaved in exactly the same way, and the land of dreams immedi-
ately adjoined that of the dead. The dead met no judgment on "the
deeds done here in the body," but all alike followed the shadowy
likeness of their former occupations: the shade of the mighty hunter
Orion chased in Hades the shades of the wild beasts which he had
killed while on earth. Coined money was unknown; all commerce
was by way of barter. The standard of value was cattle, one woman
slave was estimated to be worth four cattle, another twenty; a
suit of bronze armor was worth nine cattle; a tripod to stand over
the fire was valued at twelve cattle. Much of the land was still
held in common for the use of the people's flocks and herds. Horses
were never put to menial toil: the plowing was done with oxen and
mules. The milk of cows was not used for food, but the milk and
milk products of goats and sheep were of great importance. The
olive berry and its oil were not yet used for the relish of food, but
olive oil (sometimes scented with roses) was used as an unguent.
The warriors were hearty eaters, but their feasts were simple; they
ate little but bread and roast meat, and they were moderate drink-
ers, enjoying wine, but always diluting it with water. The Homeric
Greeks were not bold mariners. They shrunk from the dangers of
the sea, and preferred to go a long way around rather than to trust
themselves in their craft far from a safe harbor. Their geographical
## p. 7557 (#367) ###########################################
HOMER
7557
world was limited. Even the island which the later Greeks identified
with Corfu was in fairy-land.
Both the great Homeric poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey, have to
do with the Trojan War,-the siege of Troy by the Greeks, ending
with the sack of the city, and the return to their homes of the be-
siegers with various fortunes. Troy stood on a hill of no imposing
dimensions in the northwest corner of Asia Minor, about five miles
from the Hellespont. Until within the last score of years, scholars
have been inclined to look upon this city as no more real than that
of the Liliputians, or Utopia itself, and authorities were divided as to
the site which the poet had in mind. Dr. Schliemann, however, a
German by birth but a citizen of the United States by "naturaliza-
tion," who had gained wealth in Russia and chosen Greece to be
his home,—a true cosmopolite, -in ardent admiration for Homer and
with implicit belief in the literal accuracy of the Homeric story began
in a small way excavations on the site of Hissarlik, the traditional
successor of the ancient city. There he found in several layers, one
upon another, the ruins of more cities than he knew what to do
with! But he assigned to the Homeric city the remains which indi-
cated the greatest power and wealth. In subsequent years he dug
on Homeric sites in Greece,- at Mycena and Tiryns in Argolis, — and
there too laid bare abundant evidence of wealth and culture, though
manifestly a different culture from that which he had discovered
on the banks of the Hellespont. Continued excavations at Hissarlik,
however, under the direction of Dr. Dörpfeld, the distinguished head
of the German Archæological Institute in Athens, to whom we owe a
large portion of the archæological discoveries in Greece during recent
years, brought to light what Schliemann's eyes had longed to see,—
the remains of a city of like culture, and apparently of the same
age, as the ruins of Mycena and Tiryns. Schliemann's Homeric Troy
may have flourished three thousand years before Christ. The later
Trojan city (found by Dörpfeld) and Mycenæ seem to have been in
their glory at just about the time set by tradition for the sack of
Troy, 1184 B. C. This date is not historical, but it will serve as well
as another. The assignment of these ruins to the close of the second
millennium before Christ gives plausibility to the belief that Homeric
poetry flourished as early as the ninth century B. C. The "father of
history," Herodotus, thought that Homer lived four hundred years
before him, or 850 B. C. By that time the myths are likely to have
been fully developed. Clearly the existence of the massive ruined
walls would stimulate the imagination of story-tellers and poets.
According to the story which our poet follows, Paris, one of the
sons of Priam, King of Troy, had been hospitably received as a guest
at the palace of Menelaus, son of Atreus, King of Sparta, and had
## p. 7558 (#368) ###########################################
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HOMER
violated the most sacred bond of hospitality by carrying away to his
own home Menelaus's wife Helen, the most beautiful woman of the
world. The brother of Menelaus, Agamemnon, was King of Mycenæ,
and the most powerful prince of Greece. Allies were invited from
all parts of the country. Odysseus (Ulysses) from Ithaca, one of the
Ionian islands not far from Corfu, and Nestor the oldest and wisest
in counsel of the Greeks, who had known three generations of men,
enlisted the services of the young warriors of Greece: Achilles from
Thessaly, Diomedes from Argos, Ajax from Salamis, and others. A
fleet of twelve hundred ships gathered at Aulis, on the strait north
of Athens.
The expedition against Troy thus became a great national Hellenic
undertaking. This was regarded by Herodotus as the historical be-
ginning of the conflicts between Greece and Asia, of which the cul-
mination appeared in the great expedition of Xerxes against Greece
(this too with twelve hundred, but much larger, ships) early in the
fifth century before Christ, and that of Alexander the Great from
Greece into Asia a century and a half later. The strife is not ended
indeed even yet, while Turkey holds Greeks in subjection, and Greece
is burning with desire for the possession not only of Crete but of
Constantinople.
The ships sent against Troy were not ships of war: they were for
transport only, and the warriors were their own sailors. The largest
of these ships carried one hundred and twenty men, and the total
number of fighting Greeks before Troy was reckoned at about one
hundred thousand. But in this we may see a certain amount of
poetic exaggeration. The ships might fairly be called boats, since
they had no deck except a little at bow and at stern, and their oars
were more important than their sails, though they were always glad
to avail themselves of a favoring breeze. The setting out of a small
fleet of such boats has been compared, not inaptly, with an expedi
tion of war canoes from one island against another in the South
Seas: in each case the fighting men managed the boat; and this was
not intended like our ships to be a floating dwelling, but merely a
sort of ferry-boat. Each separate voyage would be only the distance
which they could sail or row in a single day. The islands of the
Ægean formed convenient "stepping-stones" and resting-places on
their way.
Nowhere were they out of sight of land in fair weather,
such as Greece enjoys during the summer. On reaching their des
tination, the boats were drawn up on shore, and the barracks for the
camp were built by their side; so the "ships of the Achæans" became
a synonym for the "camp of the Greeks. "
Menelaus, the injured husband of Helen, accompanied by Odys-
seus, the shifty orator "of many devices," went to Troy with a formal
## p. 7559 (#369) ###########################################
HOMER
7559
demand for the return of Helen. But though some of the older Tro-
jans favored peace, the party of Paris prevailed, and the ambassadors
and their cause were treated with despite.
The war continues for ten years, and ends with the sack of the
city. The siege was not close. The ancient Greeks (like the North-
American Indians before these learned the lesson from the whites) in
general shrank from warfare by night. At evening the Greek forces
which had been fighting by the gates of Troy retired to their own
camp. Consequently the Trojans, though they were not able to culti-
vate their fields, were able to supply their city with all necessaries
and maintain unbroken relations with their friends abroad, though
the city which had been called "rich in gold and rich in bronze" was
obliged to part gradually with all its treasures in order to buy food
and to reward its allies. The Greeks, on the other hand, who had
come without stores of provisions, or other material of war except
their personal arms, naturally turned to foraging expeditions, first in
the immediate neighborhood of Troy, and then at a greater distance.
In these forays they destroyed towns and killed many of the inhab-
itants. The male captives were sent to distant islands to be sold
as slaves; the women were ransomed or kept as slaves in the camp.
Obviously, when the Greeks went forth to battle they could not with
safety have left in their camp a large body of male slaves whom they
had reduced to servitude. Their chief danger would have been in
their rear.
In the tenth year of the war, one of these female captives — the
beautiful daughter of a priest of Apollo, the fair-cheeked Chryseis―
was allotted as prize of honor to Agamemnon, the commander-in-chief
of the expedition. The Iliad opens with the visit of her father to
the Greek camp.
The action of the Iliad occupies only seven weeks:
from the visit of the old priest to the Greek camp, to the burial of
Hector. And these weeks are neither at the beginning nor at the
close of the war; yet no reader is left in ignorance of facts necessary
for an understanding of the story. Few readers feel that the poem
is in any way incomplete, though Goethe thought the sack of Troy
ought to have been included. The so-called Cyclic poets- Arctinus,
Stasinus, Lesches, and others- continued the tale, amplifying the
story and supplying details. But their poems, though the action
extended over twice as many years as that of the Iliad and Odyssey
covered weeks, yet were all together not so long as the Odyssey.
The unity of these "Cyclic" poems, according to Aristotle, was far
from being so complete as that of the Homeric poems. They had
much influence on later literature and art, suggesting themes and
scenes to painters and poets, and we regret their loss; but we cannot
suppose them to have had the grace, force, and life which attract us
## p. 7560 (#370) ###########################################
7560
HOMER
in the Iliad and the Odyssey. The preservation of these rather than
those was not wholly a matter of chance. Here too we have a
"survival of the fittest. "
According to the Cyclic poets, the queen of the Amazons, Pen-
thesilea, is slain by Achilles, who after her death bemoans her fate.
Further reinforcement for the Trojan army comes from the Ethi-
opians under the command of Memnon, the beautiful son of the
Dawn. Achilles is slain by Paris and Apollo. Paris himself falls.
Achilles's young son Neoptolemus is brought to the war; and Philo-
ctetes, who had been left behind on the island Lemnos on the voyage
to Troy (being bitten by a water-snake), is fetched and brings with
him the bow of Heracles. But even after a ten-years' siege, Troy is
not taken by storm, nor does it surrender.
The goddess Athena sug-
gested to Odysseus the successful device. Making a great hollow
wooden horse, a small company of chieftains took their places within
this hollow place of ambush, while the rest of the Greeks set fire to
their camp and sailed away. The wooden horse is drawn by the
Trojans to their citadel, as an offering to the gods. At night, when
the city is still, and the people are sleeping free from anxiety for
the first time in ten years, the Greek ships return; their chieftains
leap out of the wooden horse, open the city gates to admit their
comrades, and set fire to the town.
As the Greeks set out to return to their homes, a storm arises.
Menelaus and his newly recovered Helen are driven to Egypt; a large
part of his fleet is wrecked, and they wander for eight years before
they see Greece again. Agamemnon escapes the dangers of the
storm, but on his return is slain by his cousin Ægisthus, the para-
mour of his faithless wife Clytemnestra.
But Odysseus suffers the hardest lot; the entire Odyssey recounts
his long and eventful homeward journeying, and the recovery of his
throne and wife.
The Odyssey ends only six weeks after its action began. The
poet condenses into this brief period the action which would seem
naturally to cover many years, by putting the story of Odysseus's
wanderings and experiences from the time that he left Troy until he
reached Calypso's island, into the mouth of the hero himself. This
device was copied by Virgil, who makes his hero Eneas tell Dido of
the destruction of Troy and of his wanderings; and later by Milton
in his 'Paradise Lost,' where the archangel Raphael tells Adam of
the conflict in heaven, and Michael foretells the history of the human
race.
The story from the close of the Odyssey was continued in a
more fanciful fashion by a later poet: Odysseus being finally killed by
his own son by Circe; this son of Circe then marries Penelope, while
## p. 7561 (#371) ###########################################
HOMER
7561
Telemachus, his son by Penelope, weds Circe,— an arrangement by
which each of the young men becomes the stepfather-in-law of his
own mother! Homeric women are ageless, but the poet of Helen or
Nausicaa would hardly have invented seriously so complicated a mar-
riage connection.
Thomas D. Seymout
NOTE. -Editions and translations of Homer are far too numerous to
be enumerated here. The best edition of the entire Iliad with English
notes is that of Walter Leaf; the best of the entire Odyssey with
English notes is that of Henry Hayman. The best English prose
translation of the Iliad is that of Leaf, Lang, and Myers; the best
English prose translations of the Odyssey are those of G. H. Palmer
and of Butcher and Lang. 'Homer: An Introduction to the Iliad
and the Odyssey,' by Professor Jebb, is an excellent and convenient
small work, treating of (a) the general literary characteristics of the
poems, (b) the Homeric world, (c) Homer in antiquity, (d) the Homeric
question.
T. D. S.
CITATIONS FROM HOMER
THE
HE Iliad does not lend itself easily for dissection or citation in
brief passages. Nearly all the effective scenes are so linked to
each other and into the general plot that they only whet our
eagerness to hear the entire story told. The attempt has been made
here merely to offer fair specimens of the various metrical experi-
ments tried by a series of translators from Chapman onward.
From the Odyssey it was easier to detach an episode: and while
continuing the series of varied rhythms, we have also endeavored to
offer in English, with sufficient completeness, the fifth book, contain-
in the pleasantest among Odysseus's many adventures upon his
homeward voyages, and presenting also the eternally youthful figure
of the innocent girl-princess Nausicaa. The latter has been made the
text of a little sermon on Simplicity' by Mr. Warner in his recent
volume. See also Mr. Lawton's 'Art and Humanity in Homer,' pages
193-242. The most important translations not represented here are
Cowper's in blank verse and Way's in accentual hexameters.
## p. 7562 (#372) ###########################################
7562
HOMER
THE TROJAN ELDERS AND HELEN
From the Iliad, iii. 149-160
THESE
HESE elders sate beside the gate, where passed that wondrous
fair.
Them hoary eld had loosed from fight, but their voice was
clear and strong,
With mellow wisdom's word of might, to sway the Trojan throng;
Like the blithe cricket on the tree, that stirs the leafy bower
With tremulous floods of whirring glee, in the bright and sunny hour,
Close by the gate these elders sate, and looked down from the tower.
And when they saw the lovely Helen tread the path below,
They from their breast forth sent the winged words, and whispered
SO:
Soothly nor Trojan men nor Greeks should reap great crop of blame,
That they did suffer sorrow and teen so long for such a dame,
Who like a goddess walks-not one from mortal womb who came.
Nathless we wish her gentle speed, across the briny waters,
That she no more may mischief breed, to our blameless sons and
daughters.
Translation of John Stuart Blackie.
PARIS, HECTOR, AND HELEN
From the Iliad, vi. 332-362
THE
HEN, in reply to his brother, thus spake Alexander the godlike:
"Hector, indeed you reproach me with justice, no more than I
merit.
Therefore to you will I speak, and do you give attention and hearken.
Not out of rage at the Trojans so much, nor yet in resentment
Here in my chamber I sate, but I wished to give way to my sorrow.
Yet even now my wife, with gentle entreaty consoling,
Bade me go forth to the fray, and I too think it is better.
Victory comes unto this one in turn, and again to another.
Tarry a moment, I pray, till I don mine armor for battle;
Or do you go, and I will pursue, and I think overtake you. "
So did he speak; and to him bright-helmeted Hector replied not.
Helen, however, with gentlest accents spoke and addressed him:-
"Brother of mine,- of a wretch, of a worker of evil, a horror!
Would that the selfsame day whereon my mother had borne me,
I had been seized and swept by the furious breath of the storm-wind
Into the mountains, or else to the sea with its thundering billows.
## p. 7563 (#373) ###########################################
HOMER
7563
There had I met my doom, ere yet these deeds were accomplished!
Or, as the gods had appointed for me this destiny wretched,
Truly I wish I had been with a man more valorous wedded,
Who would have heeded the scorn of the folk and their bitter resent-
ment.
Never a steadfast spirit in this man abides, nor will it
Ever hereafter be found; and methinks his reward will be ready! -
Nay, but I pray you to enter, and here on a chair to be seated,
Brother, for on your heart most heavily laid is the burden
Wrought by my own base deeds, and the sinful madness of Paris.
Evil the destiny surely that Zeus for us twain has appointed,
Doomed to be subjects of song among men of a far generation. ”
Then unto her made answer the great bright-helmeted Hector:
“Helena, bid me not sit,-nor will you, tho' gracious, persuade me.
Eagerly yearns my spirit to fight in defense of the Trojans,
While among them there is longing already for me in my absence. "
Translation of William C. Lawton.
HECTOR TO HIS WIFE
From the Iliad, vi. 441-455
"I
TOO have thought of all this, dear wife, but I fear the reproaches
Both of the Trojan youths and the long-robed maidens of Troja,
If like a cowardly churl I should keep me aloof from the combat:
Nor would my spirit permit; for well I have learnt to be valiant,
Fighting aye 'mong the first of the Trojans marshaled in battle,
Striving to keep the renown of my sire and my own unattainted.
Well, too well, do I know,- both my mind and my spirit agreeing,—
That there will be a day when sacred Troja shall perish.
Priam will perish too, and the people of Priam, the spear-armed.
Still, I have not such care for the Trojans doomed to destruction,
No, nor for Hecuba's self, nor for Priam, the monarch, my father,
Nor for my brothers' fate, who though they be many and valiant,
All in the dust may lie low by the hostile spears of Achaia,
As for thee, when some youth of the brazen-mailèd Achæans
Weeping shall bear thee away, and bereave thee for ever of freedom.
Translation of E. C. Hawtrey.
## p. 7564 (#374) ###########################################
7564
HOMER
―
FATHER AND SON
From the Iliad, vi. 466-497
TH
HUS having spoke, the illustrious chief of Troy
Stretched his fond arms to clasp the lovely boy.
The babe clung crying to his nurse's breast,
Scared at the dazzling helm and nodding crest.
With sacred pleasure each fond parent smiled,
And Hector hasted to relieve his child;
The glittering terrors from his brows unbound,
And placed the beaming helmet on the ground;
Then kissed the child, and lifting high in air,
Thus to the gods preferred a father's prayer:-
"O thou whose glory fills the ethereal throne,
And all ye deathless powers, protect my son!
Grant him, like me, to purchase just renown,
To guard the Trojans, to defend the crown,
Against his country's foes the war to wage,
And rise the Hector of the future age!
So when, triumphant from successful toils,
Of heroes slain he bears the reeking spoils,
Whole hosts may hail him with deserved acclaim,
And say, 'This chief transcends his father's fame;'
While pleased amidst the general shouts of Troy,
His mother's conscious heart o'erflows with joy. "
He spoke, and fondly gazing on her charms,
Restored the pleasing burden to her arms;
Soft on her fragrant breast the babe she laid,
Hushed to repose, and with a smile surveyed.
The troubled pleasure soon chastised by fear,
She mingled with the smile a tender tear.
The softened chief with kind compassion viewed,
And dried the falling drops, and thus pursued:-
"Andromache! my soul's far better part!
Why with untimely sorrows heaves thy heart?
No hostile hand can antedate my doom,
Till fate condemns me to the silent tomb.
Fixed is the term to all the race of earth;
And such the hard condition of our birth,
No force can then resist, no flight can save;
All sink alike, the fearful and the brave.
No more - but hasten to thy tasks at home,
There guide the spindle and direct the loom :
## p. 7565 (#375) ###########################################
HOMER
7565
Me glory summons to the martial scene,—
The field of combat is the sphere for men;
Where heroes war, the foremost place I claim,
The first in danger as the first in fame. "
Thus having said, the glorious chief resumes
His towery helmet, black with shading plumes.
His princess parts with a prophetic sigh;
Unwilling parts, and oft reverts her eye,
That streamed at every look; then moving slow,
Sought her own palace and indulged er woe.
Pope's Translation.
ACHILLES REFUSES TO AID THE GREEKS
From the Iliad, ix. 307-347
WHO
HOм answered thus Achilles, swift of foot:-
"Heaven-born Ulysses, sage in council, son
Of great Laertes, I must frankly speak
My mind at once, my fixed resolve declare:
That from henceforth I may not by the Greeks,
By this man and by that, be importuned.
Him as the gates of hell my soul abhors,
Whose outward words his inmost thoughts conceal.
Hear then what seems to me the wisest course.
On me nor Agamemnon, Atreus's son,
Nor others shall prevail, since naught is gained
By toil unceasing in the battle-field.
Who nobly fight, but share with those who skulk;
Like honors gain the coward and the brave;
Alike the idlers and the active die:
And naught it profits me, though day by day
In constant toil I set my life at stake;
But as a bird, though ill she fare herself,
Brings to her callow brood the food she takes,
So I through many a sleepless night have lain,
And many a bloody day have labored through,
Engaged in battle on your wives' behalf.
Twelve cities have I taken with my ships:
Eleven more by land on Trojan soil.
From all of these abundant stores of wealth
I took, and all to Agamemnon gave;
He, safe on board his ships, my spoils received,
A few divided, but the most retained.
## p. 7566 (#376) ###########################################
7566
HOMER
To other chiefs and kings he meted out
Their sev'ral portions, and they hold them still;
From me, from me alone of all the Greeks,
He bore away, and keeps, my cherished wife.
But say then, why do Greeks with Trojans fight?
Why hath Atrides brought this mighty host
To Troy, if not in fair-haired Helen's cause?
Of mortals are there none that love their wives,
Save Atreus's sons alone? or do not all,
Who boast the praise of sense and virtue, love
And cherish each his own? as her I loved
Ev'n from my soul, though captive of my spear.
Now, since he once hath robbed me, and deceived,
Let him not seek my aid; I know him now,
And am not to be won; let him devise,
With thee, Ulysses, and the other kings,
How best from hostile fires to save his ships. "
Translation of Edward, Earl of Derby.
HECTOR PURSUED BY ACHILLES AROUND TROY
From the Iliad, xxii. 136-185
ECTOR beheld and trembled: naught he dared
Η
To wait, but left the gates, and shuddering flew.
Achilleus with swift feet behind him fared.
As mountain hawk, most fleet of feathered crew,
A trembling dove doth easily pursue;
Swerving she flutters; he, intent to seize,
With savage scream close hounds her through the blue;-
So keenly he swept onward; Hector flees
Beneath his own Troy wall, and plies his limber knees.
All past the watch-tower and the fig-tree tall
Along the chariot road at speed they fare,
Still swerving outward from the city's wall;
Then reach the two fair-flowing streamlets, where
Scamander's twofold source breaks forth to air.
One flows in a warm tide, and steam doth go
Up from it, as a blazing fire were there;
But the other runs in summer's midmost glow
Cold as the frozen hail, or ice, or chilly snow.
Thereby great troughs and meet for washing stand,
Beautiful, stony, where their robes of pride
## p. 7567 (#377) ###########################################
HOMER
7567
Troy's wives and daughters washed, ere to the land
The foeman came, in happy peaceful tide.
Flying and following, these they ran beside,
He good that flies, he better that pursues;
For no fat victim 'twas, nor bullock's hide,
Such meed as men for conquering runners choose,
But Hector's life the prize they ran to win or lose.
Look how prize-bearing horses, hard of hoof,
Circle about the goal with eager bound,
And a great guerdon stands, not far aloof,
Tripod or woman, at the funeral mound
Of some dead chief; so thrice they circled round
King Priam's town, their swift feet winged for flight:
While all the gods Olympus's summit crowned,
Looking from high to see the wondrous sight;
And thus the almighty Sire their counsel did invite:
"Alas! I see a loved one with mine eyes
Chased round the city: and my heart doth bleed
For Hector, for that many an ox's thighs
He burnt, where Ida overlooks the mead,
Or in the topmost tower; now with fell speed
Achilleus hunts him round King Priam's town.
But come, ye gods, take counsel and arede,
Or shall we save him now, or strike him down
Under Achilleus's spear, despite his fair renown. "
To him stern-eyed Athene answered so:
"Dread Thunderer in dark cloud, what words are these?
What, a mere mortal, fated long ago,
Wouldst thou set free from death's severe decrees?
Do it; but us gods thy doing shall not please. "
And cloud-compelling Zeus in turn rejoined:
"Take heart, dear child, and set thy soul at ease;
I meant it not, but would to thee be kind:
Now do it, nor delay, whate'er is in thy mind. "
Translation of John Conington.
-:
## p. 7568 (#378) ###########################################
7568
HOMER
HECTOR'S FUNERAL RITES
Close of the Iliad-xxiv. 777-804
THE
HESE words made even the commons mourn, to whom the king
said: "Friends,
Now fetch wood for our funeral fire, nor fear the foe intends
Ambush, or any violence: Achilles gave his word,
At my dismission, that twelve days he would keep sheathed his
sword,
And all men's else. " Thus oxen, mules, in chariots straight they put,
Went forth, and an unmeasured pile of sylvan matter cut,
Nine days employed in carriage, but when the tenth morn shined
On wretched mortals, then they brought the fit-to-be-divined
Forth to be burned. Troy swum in tears. Upon the pile's most
height
They laid the person, and gave fire. All day it burned, all night.
But when the eleventh morn let on earth her rosy fingers shine,
The people flocked about the pile, and first with blackish wine
Quenched all the flames. His brothers then, and friends, the snowy
bones
Gathered into an urn of gold, still pouring on their moans.
Then wrapt they in soft purple veils the rich urn, digged a pit,
Graved it, rammed up the grave with stones, and quickly built to it
A sepulchre. But while that work and all the funeral rites
Were in performance, guards were held at all parts, days and nights,
For fear of false surprise before they had imposed the crown
To these solemnities. The tomb advanced once, all the town
In Jove-nursed Priam's court partook a passing sumptuous feast:
And so horse-taming Hector's rites gave up his soul to rest.
Translation of George Chapman.
THE EPISODE OF NAUSICAA
FROM THE ODYSSEY
I. — Book vi. , 1–84.
Translation of George H. Palmer. Copyright 1884, by G.
H. Palmer. Reprinted by permission of Houghton, Mifflin & Co. , pub-
lishers, Boston.
HUS long-tried royal Odysseus slumbered here, heavy with
sleep and toil; but Athene went to the land and town of
the Phæacians. This people once in ancient times lived in
the open highlands, near that rude folk the Cyclops, who often.
## p. 7569 (#379) ###########################################
HOMER
7569
plundered them, being in strength more powerful than they.
Moving them thence, godlike Nausithous, their leader, established
them at Scheria, far from toiling men. He ran a wall around
the town, built houses there, made temples for the gods, and laid
out farms; but Nausithous had met his doom and gone to the
house of Hades, and Alcinous now was reigning, trained in wis-
dom by the gods. To this man's dwelling came the goddess,
clear-eyed Athene, planning a safe return for brave Odysseus.
She hastened to a chamber, richly wrought, in which a maid
was sleeping, of form and beauty like the immortals, Nausicaa,
daughter of generous Alcinous. Near by, two damsels, dowered
with beauty by the Graces, slept by the threshold, one on either
hand. The shining doors were shut; but Athene, like a breath
of air, moved to the maid's couch, stood by her head, and thus
addressed her,-taking the likeness of the daughter of Dymas,
the famous seaman, a maiden just Nausicaa's age, dear to her
heart. Taking her guise, thus spoke clear-eyed Athene:—
"Nausicaa, how did your mother bear a child so heedless?
Your gay clothes lie uncared for, though the wedding-time is
near, when you must wear fine clothes yourself and furnish them
to those that may attend you. From things like these a good
repute arises, and father and honored mother are made glad.
Then let us go a-washing at the dawn of day, and I will go to
help, that you may soon be ready; for really not much longer
will you be a maid. Already you have for suitors the chief
ones of the land throughout Phæacia, where you too were born.
Come, then, beg your good father early in the morning to har-
ness the mules and cart, so as to carry the men's clothes, gowns,
and bright-hued rugs. Yes, and for you yourself it is more
decent so than setting forth on foot: the pools are far from the
town. "
Saying this, clear-eyed Athene passed away, off to Olympus,
where they say the dwelling of the gods stands fast forever.
Never with winds is it disturbed, nor by the rain made wet, nor
does the snow come near; but everywhere the upper air spreads
cloudless, and a bright radiance plays over all: and there the
blessed gods are happy all their days. Thither now came the
clear-eyed one, when she had spoken with the maid.
Soon bright-throned morning came, and waked fair-robed Nau-
sicaa. She marveled at the dream, and hastened through the house
to tell it to her parents, her dear father and her mother. She
XIII-474
## p. 7570 (#380) ###########################################
HOMER
7570
found them still indoors: her mother sat by the hearth among
the waiting-women, spinning sea-purple yarn; she met her father
at the door, just going forth to join the famous princes at the
council, to which the high Phæacians summoned him. So, stand-
ing close beside him, she said to her dear father:—
"Papa dear, could you not have the wagon harnessed for me,
-the high one, with good wheels,- to take my nice clothes to
the river to be washed, which now are lying dirty? Surely for
you yourself it is but proper, when you are with the first men
holding councils, that you should wear clean clothing. Five good
sons too are here at home,-two married, and three merry young
men still, and they are always wanting to go to the dance
wearing fresh clothes. And this is all a trouble on my mind. "
Such were her words, for she was shy of naming the glad
marriage to her father; but he understood it all, and answered
thus:
―
"I do not grudge the mules, my child, nor anything beside.
Go! Quickly shall the servant harness the wagon for you,—the
high one, with good wheels, fitted with rack above. "
Saying this he called to the servants, who gave heed. Out
in the court they made the easy mule cart ready; they brought
the mules, and yoked them to the wagon. The maid took from
her room her pretty clothing, and stowed it in the polished
wagon; her mother put in a chest, food the maid liked, of every
kind, put dainties in, and poured some wine into a goatskin
bottle, the maid, meanwhile, had got into the wagon,—and
gave her in a golden flask some liquid oil, that she might bathe
and anoint herself, she and the waiting-women. Nausicaa took
the whip and the bright reins, and cracked the whip to start.
There was a clatter of the mules, and steadily they pulled, drawing
the clothing and the maid,-yet not alone; beside her went the
waiting-women too.
C
II. — Book vi. , 85-197. Translation of Butcher and Lang
NOW WHEN they were come to the beautiful stream of the
river, where truly were the unfailing cisterns, and bright water
welled up free from beneath, and flowed past, enough to wash
the foulest garments clean, there the girls unharnessed the mules.
from under the chariot, and turning them loose they drove them
along the banks of the eddying river to graze on the sweet
clover. Then they took the garments from the wain, in their
## p. 7571 (#381) ###########################################
HOMER
7571
hands, and bore them to the black water, and briskly trod them
down in the trenches, in busy rivalry. Now when they had
washed and cleansed all the stains, they spread all out in order
along the shore of the deep, even where the sea, in beating on
the coast, washed the pebbles clean. Then having bathed and
anointed them well with olive oil, they took their midday meal
on the river's banks, waiting till the clothes should dry in the
brightness of the sun. Anon, when they were satisfied with.
food, the maidens and the princess, they fell to playing at ball,
casting away their tires, and among them Nausicaa of the white
arms began the song. And even as Artemis the archer moveth
down the mountain, either along the ridges of lofty Taygetus
or Erymanthus, taking her pastime in the chase of boars and
swift deer, and with her the wild wood-nymphs disport them, the
daughters of Zeus, lord of the ægis, and Leto is glad at heart,
while high over all she rears her head and brows, and easily may
she be known, but all are fair; even so the girl unwed out-
shone her maiden company.
But when now she was about going homewards, after yoking
the mules and folding up the goodly raiment, then gray-eyed
Athene turned to other thoughts, that so Odysseus might awake,
and see the lovely maiden who should be his guide to the city
of the Phæacian men. So then the princess threw the ball at
one of her company; she missed the girl, and cast the ball into
the deep eddying current, whereat they all raised a piercing cry.
Then the goodly Odysseus awoke and sat up, pondering in his
heart and spirit:-
"Woe is me! to what men's land am I come now? say, are
they froward and wild, and. unjust, or are they hospitable and
of God-fearing mind? How shrill a cry of maidens rings round
me, of the nymphs that hold the steep hill-tops, and the river
springs, and the grassy water meadows. It must be, methinks,
that I am
near men of human speech.
BY THOMAS D. SEYMOUR
HE Homeric Poems are the earliest literary product of the
world which has survived to our day, and they lie at the
fountain-head of all the later literature of Europe. No liter-
ary epic poem has been composed since Homer's day without reference
to the Iliad and the Odyssey as the standard. Apollonius of Rhodes
followed and imitated Homer; Virgil imitated Homer and Apollonius;
Dante took Virgil as his master; John Milton followed in the foot-
steps of Homer, Virgil, and Dante. Plato called Homer the father
of tragedy, as well as of the epic. To the ancient Greek mind, the
Iliad and Odyssey of Homer formed a sort of Bible, to which refer-
ence was made as to an ultimate authority. Even in an age when
epic poetry was out of fashion, one of the most honored of Athenian
generals, Nicias, had his son Niceratus commit to memory all of the
two great Homeric poems, of which the shorter is a third longer
than Milton's 'Paradise Lost. ' About the same time (in the fifth cen-
tury B. C. ) audiences of twenty thousand people gathered to listen to
public recitals of these poems. A Homeric quotation was always in
order, to illustrate and clinch an argument, or to give poetic flavor to
a discussion.
When and where Homer lived, no one knows. Many stories about
him were invented and told, but all are without support.
"Seven cities claimed the mighty Homer dead,
Through which the living Homer begged his bread. ”
A guild of singers on the island of Chios (Scio) asserted themselves
to be his descendants and rightful successors, but no evidence was
offered of his family or home. Scholars no longer ask where Homer
was born, but where Greek epic poetry had its rise. The muses were
Pierian muses, and thus associated with the southern part of Mace-
donia; they dwelt with the gods on Mount Olympus, and the abode
of Achilles, the chief hero of the Iliad, was close at hand in Thessaly.
These are pretty distinct indications that the early home of Greek
poetry was near Mount Olympus. Later this art was carried by the
## p. 7552 (#362) ###########################################
HOMER
7552
Greeks to their colonies on the western shore of Asia Minor, and
there was accepted and perfected.
Homer is represented in ancient works of art as blind, but the
greater Homeric poems offer no indication of his blindness. Quite
the contrary, he seems to have taken an active part in the doings of
men. His interest in the battles which he describes is lively. His
description of wounds inflicted shows such exact acquaintance with
battles and anatomy that some German critics have been disposed to
think he must have been a sort of army surgeon.
While the Homeric poems are the earliest works of Greek litera-
ture which have come down to us, they certainly were not the earliest
poems of the Greeks. Brief lyric songs of love, grief, feasting, or
war are ordinary precursors of epic,-i. e. , of narrative lays. And
short epics must have been well known to the people before any
poet thought of composing a long epic. The growth of a poem like
the Iliad is gradual. The art of writing was known in Greece at an
early age, quite certainly by 1000 B. C. , but not until much later was
it applied to literary compositions; it was used mainly for business.
memoranda and public records until the fifth century B. C. , and
even then the Greeks could hardly be called a reading people. But
they were patient listeners. When the Greek drama was at its best,
great audiences of fifteen to twenty thousand Athenians would sit in
the open air, in March, from early in the morning until late in the
afternoon, to hear and see three or four tragedies in succession. A
century or centuries before this, audiences listened in throngs to con-
tinuous epic recitations. But in general each separate lay seems to
have contained not more than five or six hundred lines. Probably
the recitation of such a lay was followed by an intermission, and the
connection between successive lays was not made with rigid precis-
ion. The outlines of the story, and often the details, were familiar
to the hearers. When a long poem was formed by the union of
several lays or by a process of gradual development, a singer would
select on each occasion what seemed best suited to his audience.
Some parts of the Homeric poems are well adapted to be sung at
feasts, others on the return from a long journey, others at a funeral,
many others after or before a battle.
These poems were sung, we say. Perhaps intoned or chanted would
be a more exact expression. The instrumental accompaniment was
very slight, that of a cithara of four strings (and thus only four
notes), with a sounding-board formed by a tortoise shell. We can-
not assume much melody in the recitation, and probably the cithara
served chiefly to give the keynote, and to sound a few simple chords
as a prelude or interludes. The cithara was used not only by the
professional bards at the courts of kings, but also by the warriors:
## p. 7553 (#363) ###########################################
HOMER
7553
at least Achilles, while "sulking in his tent," cheered his heart by
singing of the glorious deeds of men, holding a cithara which he had
taken from the spoils of a sacked city.
Our poet was a national poet. He gives no special honor to any
part of Greece, though the little country was broken up into many
principalities. His songs might have been sung in any hamlet with-
out arousing either envy or ill-will. He is impartial, too, between
Greeks and Trojans, and excites our sympathy for the Trojan Hector
and Andromache as well as for the Achæan Achilles and Patroclus.
The Homeric poet was fortunate not only in the body of myths
which descended to him, and which formed the groundwork for his
poems, but in his further inheritance from former generations,— his
language and his verse. The language was the most graceful and
flexible which the world has ever known. The verse itself (the so-
called dactylic hexameter) would indicate that epic poetry had been
cultivated in Greece long before Homer's day. Its laws are fully
fixed, its favorite and its forbidden pauses; the places where a light
and those where a heavy movement is preferred. No verse known
to man is so well suited to a long Greek narrative poem. No other
verse has less monotony or more dignity and stateliness. It was
nobly "described and exemplified" by Coleridge's lines:-
―
"Strongly it bears us along in swelling and limitless billows;
Nothing before and nothing behind but the sky and the ocean. »
The Roman poet Virgil adopted this verse, but had a much more
ponderous language, which was not well fitted for the Greek metres.
The verse has been made familiar to us all by Clough's 'Bothie,' and
especially by Longfellow's 'Evangeline' and 'The Courtship of Miles
Standish; but the line is rather too long for most modern languages,
and has not been used for any long English poem or any great Eng-
lish translation of Homer. Matthew Arnold tried it for the last verses
of the eighth book of the Iliad, as follows:
"So shone forth, in front of Troy, by the bed of the Xanthus,
Between that and the ships, the Trojans' numerous fires.
In the plain there were kindled a thousand fires; by each one
There sat fifty men in the ruddy light of the fire;
By their chariots stood their steeds and champed the white barley,
While their masters sat by the fire and waited for morning. »
With this may be compared Tennyson's translation of the same lines
(with a few more) in English heroic verse: —
XIII-473
"As when in heaven the stars about the moon
Look beautiful, when all the winds are laid,
And every height comes out, and jutting peak,
And valley, and the immeasurable heavens
## p. 7554 (#364) ###########################################
7554
HOMER
-➖➖
Break open to their highest, and all the stars
Shine, and the shepherd gladdens in his heart:
So many a fire between the ships and stream
Of Xanthus blazed before the towers of Troy,
A thousand on the plain; and close by each
Sat fifty in the blaze of burning fire;
And champing golden grain the horses stood
Hard by their chariots waiting for the dawn. ”
The essential characteristics of Homer's poetry are enumerated
thus by Matthew Arnold: "Homer is rapid in his movement, Homer
is plain in his words and style, Homer is simple in his ideas, Homer
is noble in his manner. " Mr. Arnold goes on to say that «< Cowper
renders him ill because he is slow in his movement and elaborate in
his style; Pope renders him ill because he is artificial both in his
style and in his words; Chapman renders him ill because he is fan-
tastic in his ideas. " Each age has desired its own translation of the
Homeric poems. Chapman's, Pope's, and Cowper's translations are
now read rather as the works of those English poets than as faith-
ful renderings of the Homeric poems. But we owe to Chapman's
translation Keats's splendid sonnet, "On First Looking into Chapman's
Homer":
"Much have I traveled in the realms of gold,
And many goodly States and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That deep-browed Homer ruled as his demesne:
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold;
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He stared at the Pacific, and all his men
Looked at each other with a wild surmise-
Silent, upon a peak in Darien. »
The dramatic nature of the Homeric poems deserves remark.
About half of the verses are in speeches, although epic poetry is
narrative poetry. In long passages the verses between the speeches
have almost the quality of "stage directions," and we see with what
justice Plato and Aristotle called Homer the father of the drama.
The poet reserves for his own telling only what is necessary. The
one passage in the poems (Odyssey, vii. 112-131) which resembles
a modern description, is on this very ground strongly suspected of
not being truly Homeric. "When Homer" (says Lessing) "wishes
## p. 7555 (#365) ###########################################
HOMER
7555
to tell us how Agamemnon was dressed, he makes the king put on
every article of raiment in our presence: the soft tunic, the great
mantle, the beautiful sandals, and the sword. When he is thus fully
equipped he grasps his sceptre. We see the clothes while the poet
is describing the act of dressing. An inferior writer would have
described the clothes down to the minutest fringe, and of the action
we should have seen nothing. "
Of few epochs in any country have we clearer and more animated
pictures than Homer has painted of the early Greeks. Of no other
great nation in its childhood have we such a view. Tacitus indeed
gave a masterly sketch of the Germans, about one hundred years
after Christ: but he was an outsider at best, and seems to have drawn
largely from the accounts of others; scholars are not agreed that he
himself ever sojourned in Germany. Of the early Jews, the children
of Israel, the story is far less full than of the early Greeks. Our
poet does not claim to have lived at the time of the Trojan War, but
rather is conscious that he is in a degenerate age. Hector, Ajax, and
Æneas each do "what two men could not do, such as now live upon
the earth. " The poet never speaks as if he himself were present at
the conflicts, nor does he claim to have heard the story from others.
He appeals to the Muse for inspiration. She was present, and knows
all things; he is but her mouthpiece. Whether the customs described
in the poems were those of Homer's day, or those of an earlier age
of which the poet knew only by tradition, is a question which schol-
ars still discuss. In general his manner is distinctly that of familiar-
ity with every detail which he mentions; and his style is too naïve,
too far removed from that of studied care, for us to believe that he
was anxious to secure historical accuracy of background in painting
the picture of an earlier age. In the matters of dress, food, and
every-day life in general, he seems as free as the early illustrators
of the Bible story, who introduced mediæval Dutch, German, or Ital-
ian dress and scenery into their pictures of early events in Palestine.
But changes of custom were not frequent nor rapid in Greece a
thousand years before Christ, and the manner of life which Homer
knew was doubtless not very different from that of his heroes. In a
few matters only does he seem conscious of a change: he does not
represent his warriors as riding on horseback (except as a boy rides
bareback from pasture), or using boiled meat, or employing a trumpet
in war, yet the poet himself refers to these things as well known.
Life in the Homeric age was primitive and rude in many respects,
but still had much wealth and splendor. It is not unlike that of
the Children of Israel in the same period. The same customs seem
to have prevailed not only throughout all Greece, but even in Troy.
Nowhere does the poet indicate a difference of language or manner
## p. 7556 (#366) ###########################################
7556
HOMER
of life between the Achæans and the Trojans;-unless it is found
in the facts that King Priam of Troy is the only polygamist of the
poems, and that the Trojans are noisier (and hence, says an old com-
mentator, less civilized) as they go into battle. The tribes are ruled
by kings, or as we should style them, petty chiefs. The freedom
with which the titles king and prince are bestowed is illustrated by
the large number of princes on Ithaca in the Homeric age; an island
which at the last census (according to Baedeker) had about 12,500
inhabitants, and probably had no more in Homer's time. The lives
of princes were much like those of peasants. They built their own
ships and their own houses, and tended their herds and flocks. So
princesses went to the town spring for water, and washed the fam-
ily raiment. The unwritten constitutions of the kingdoms were very
simple: custom ruled, not law. For the most part each man was
obliged to vindicate his own rights; even murder was a personal
offense against the friends of the slain man, and these (not the
government) were bound to avenge his death. Murder and theft in
themselves were no mortal sins against the gods. Fidelity to oaths,
honor to parents, and hospitality to strangers and suppliants, were
cardinal virtues. No moral quality inhered in the terms usually trans-
lated by good, bad, blameless, excellent. The existence of the soul after
death was supposed to be as shadowy as a dream. Ghosts and dreams
behaved in exactly the same way, and the land of dreams immedi-
ately adjoined that of the dead. The dead met no judgment on "the
deeds done here in the body," but all alike followed the shadowy
likeness of their former occupations: the shade of the mighty hunter
Orion chased in Hades the shades of the wild beasts which he had
killed while on earth. Coined money was unknown; all commerce
was by way of barter. The standard of value was cattle, one woman
slave was estimated to be worth four cattle, another twenty; a
suit of bronze armor was worth nine cattle; a tripod to stand over
the fire was valued at twelve cattle. Much of the land was still
held in common for the use of the people's flocks and herds. Horses
were never put to menial toil: the plowing was done with oxen and
mules. The milk of cows was not used for food, but the milk and
milk products of goats and sheep were of great importance. The
olive berry and its oil were not yet used for the relish of food, but
olive oil (sometimes scented with roses) was used as an unguent.
The warriors were hearty eaters, but their feasts were simple; they
ate little but bread and roast meat, and they were moderate drink-
ers, enjoying wine, but always diluting it with water. The Homeric
Greeks were not bold mariners. They shrunk from the dangers of
the sea, and preferred to go a long way around rather than to trust
themselves in their craft far from a safe harbor. Their geographical
## p. 7557 (#367) ###########################################
HOMER
7557
world was limited. Even the island which the later Greeks identified
with Corfu was in fairy-land.
Both the great Homeric poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey, have to
do with the Trojan War,-the siege of Troy by the Greeks, ending
with the sack of the city, and the return to their homes of the be-
siegers with various fortunes. Troy stood on a hill of no imposing
dimensions in the northwest corner of Asia Minor, about five miles
from the Hellespont. Until within the last score of years, scholars
have been inclined to look upon this city as no more real than that
of the Liliputians, or Utopia itself, and authorities were divided as to
the site which the poet had in mind. Dr. Schliemann, however, a
German by birth but a citizen of the United States by "naturaliza-
tion," who had gained wealth in Russia and chosen Greece to be
his home,—a true cosmopolite, -in ardent admiration for Homer and
with implicit belief in the literal accuracy of the Homeric story began
in a small way excavations on the site of Hissarlik, the traditional
successor of the ancient city. There he found in several layers, one
upon another, the ruins of more cities than he knew what to do
with! But he assigned to the Homeric city the remains which indi-
cated the greatest power and wealth. In subsequent years he dug
on Homeric sites in Greece,- at Mycena and Tiryns in Argolis, — and
there too laid bare abundant evidence of wealth and culture, though
manifestly a different culture from that which he had discovered
on the banks of the Hellespont. Continued excavations at Hissarlik,
however, under the direction of Dr. Dörpfeld, the distinguished head
of the German Archæological Institute in Athens, to whom we owe a
large portion of the archæological discoveries in Greece during recent
years, brought to light what Schliemann's eyes had longed to see,—
the remains of a city of like culture, and apparently of the same
age, as the ruins of Mycena and Tiryns. Schliemann's Homeric Troy
may have flourished three thousand years before Christ. The later
Trojan city (found by Dörpfeld) and Mycenæ seem to have been in
their glory at just about the time set by tradition for the sack of
Troy, 1184 B. C. This date is not historical, but it will serve as well
as another. The assignment of these ruins to the close of the second
millennium before Christ gives plausibility to the belief that Homeric
poetry flourished as early as the ninth century B. C. The "father of
history," Herodotus, thought that Homer lived four hundred years
before him, or 850 B. C. By that time the myths are likely to have
been fully developed. Clearly the existence of the massive ruined
walls would stimulate the imagination of story-tellers and poets.
According to the story which our poet follows, Paris, one of the
sons of Priam, King of Troy, had been hospitably received as a guest
at the palace of Menelaus, son of Atreus, King of Sparta, and had
## p. 7558 (#368) ###########################################
7558
HOMER
violated the most sacred bond of hospitality by carrying away to his
own home Menelaus's wife Helen, the most beautiful woman of the
world. The brother of Menelaus, Agamemnon, was King of Mycenæ,
and the most powerful prince of Greece. Allies were invited from
all parts of the country. Odysseus (Ulysses) from Ithaca, one of the
Ionian islands not far from Corfu, and Nestor the oldest and wisest
in counsel of the Greeks, who had known three generations of men,
enlisted the services of the young warriors of Greece: Achilles from
Thessaly, Diomedes from Argos, Ajax from Salamis, and others. A
fleet of twelve hundred ships gathered at Aulis, on the strait north
of Athens.
The expedition against Troy thus became a great national Hellenic
undertaking. This was regarded by Herodotus as the historical be-
ginning of the conflicts between Greece and Asia, of which the cul-
mination appeared in the great expedition of Xerxes against Greece
(this too with twelve hundred, but much larger, ships) early in the
fifth century before Christ, and that of Alexander the Great from
Greece into Asia a century and a half later. The strife is not ended
indeed even yet, while Turkey holds Greeks in subjection, and Greece
is burning with desire for the possession not only of Crete but of
Constantinople.
The ships sent against Troy were not ships of war: they were for
transport only, and the warriors were their own sailors. The largest
of these ships carried one hundred and twenty men, and the total
number of fighting Greeks before Troy was reckoned at about one
hundred thousand. But in this we may see a certain amount of
poetic exaggeration. The ships might fairly be called boats, since
they had no deck except a little at bow and at stern, and their oars
were more important than their sails, though they were always glad
to avail themselves of a favoring breeze. The setting out of a small
fleet of such boats has been compared, not inaptly, with an expedi
tion of war canoes from one island against another in the South
Seas: in each case the fighting men managed the boat; and this was
not intended like our ships to be a floating dwelling, but merely a
sort of ferry-boat. Each separate voyage would be only the distance
which they could sail or row in a single day. The islands of the
Ægean formed convenient "stepping-stones" and resting-places on
their way.
Nowhere were they out of sight of land in fair weather,
such as Greece enjoys during the summer. On reaching their des
tination, the boats were drawn up on shore, and the barracks for the
camp were built by their side; so the "ships of the Achæans" became
a synonym for the "camp of the Greeks. "
Menelaus, the injured husband of Helen, accompanied by Odys-
seus, the shifty orator "of many devices," went to Troy with a formal
## p. 7559 (#369) ###########################################
HOMER
7559
demand for the return of Helen. But though some of the older Tro-
jans favored peace, the party of Paris prevailed, and the ambassadors
and their cause were treated with despite.
The war continues for ten years, and ends with the sack of the
city. The siege was not close. The ancient Greeks (like the North-
American Indians before these learned the lesson from the whites) in
general shrank from warfare by night. At evening the Greek forces
which had been fighting by the gates of Troy retired to their own
camp. Consequently the Trojans, though they were not able to culti-
vate their fields, were able to supply their city with all necessaries
and maintain unbroken relations with their friends abroad, though
the city which had been called "rich in gold and rich in bronze" was
obliged to part gradually with all its treasures in order to buy food
and to reward its allies. The Greeks, on the other hand, who had
come without stores of provisions, or other material of war except
their personal arms, naturally turned to foraging expeditions, first in
the immediate neighborhood of Troy, and then at a greater distance.
In these forays they destroyed towns and killed many of the inhab-
itants. The male captives were sent to distant islands to be sold
as slaves; the women were ransomed or kept as slaves in the camp.
Obviously, when the Greeks went forth to battle they could not with
safety have left in their camp a large body of male slaves whom they
had reduced to servitude. Their chief danger would have been in
their rear.
In the tenth year of the war, one of these female captives — the
beautiful daughter of a priest of Apollo, the fair-cheeked Chryseis―
was allotted as prize of honor to Agamemnon, the commander-in-chief
of the expedition. The Iliad opens with the visit of her father to
the Greek camp.
The action of the Iliad occupies only seven weeks:
from the visit of the old priest to the Greek camp, to the burial of
Hector. And these weeks are neither at the beginning nor at the
close of the war; yet no reader is left in ignorance of facts necessary
for an understanding of the story. Few readers feel that the poem
is in any way incomplete, though Goethe thought the sack of Troy
ought to have been included. The so-called Cyclic poets- Arctinus,
Stasinus, Lesches, and others- continued the tale, amplifying the
story and supplying details. But their poems, though the action
extended over twice as many years as that of the Iliad and Odyssey
covered weeks, yet were all together not so long as the Odyssey.
The unity of these "Cyclic" poems, according to Aristotle, was far
from being so complete as that of the Homeric poems. They had
much influence on later literature and art, suggesting themes and
scenes to painters and poets, and we regret their loss; but we cannot
suppose them to have had the grace, force, and life which attract us
## p. 7560 (#370) ###########################################
7560
HOMER
in the Iliad and the Odyssey. The preservation of these rather than
those was not wholly a matter of chance. Here too we have a
"survival of the fittest. "
According to the Cyclic poets, the queen of the Amazons, Pen-
thesilea, is slain by Achilles, who after her death bemoans her fate.
Further reinforcement for the Trojan army comes from the Ethi-
opians under the command of Memnon, the beautiful son of the
Dawn. Achilles is slain by Paris and Apollo. Paris himself falls.
Achilles's young son Neoptolemus is brought to the war; and Philo-
ctetes, who had been left behind on the island Lemnos on the voyage
to Troy (being bitten by a water-snake), is fetched and brings with
him the bow of Heracles. But even after a ten-years' siege, Troy is
not taken by storm, nor does it surrender.
The goddess Athena sug-
gested to Odysseus the successful device. Making a great hollow
wooden horse, a small company of chieftains took their places within
this hollow place of ambush, while the rest of the Greeks set fire to
their camp and sailed away. The wooden horse is drawn by the
Trojans to their citadel, as an offering to the gods. At night, when
the city is still, and the people are sleeping free from anxiety for
the first time in ten years, the Greek ships return; their chieftains
leap out of the wooden horse, open the city gates to admit their
comrades, and set fire to the town.
As the Greeks set out to return to their homes, a storm arises.
Menelaus and his newly recovered Helen are driven to Egypt; a large
part of his fleet is wrecked, and they wander for eight years before
they see Greece again. Agamemnon escapes the dangers of the
storm, but on his return is slain by his cousin Ægisthus, the para-
mour of his faithless wife Clytemnestra.
But Odysseus suffers the hardest lot; the entire Odyssey recounts
his long and eventful homeward journeying, and the recovery of his
throne and wife.
The Odyssey ends only six weeks after its action began. The
poet condenses into this brief period the action which would seem
naturally to cover many years, by putting the story of Odysseus's
wanderings and experiences from the time that he left Troy until he
reached Calypso's island, into the mouth of the hero himself. This
device was copied by Virgil, who makes his hero Eneas tell Dido of
the destruction of Troy and of his wanderings; and later by Milton
in his 'Paradise Lost,' where the archangel Raphael tells Adam of
the conflict in heaven, and Michael foretells the history of the human
race.
The story from the close of the Odyssey was continued in a
more fanciful fashion by a later poet: Odysseus being finally killed by
his own son by Circe; this son of Circe then marries Penelope, while
## p. 7561 (#371) ###########################################
HOMER
7561
Telemachus, his son by Penelope, weds Circe,— an arrangement by
which each of the young men becomes the stepfather-in-law of his
own mother! Homeric women are ageless, but the poet of Helen or
Nausicaa would hardly have invented seriously so complicated a mar-
riage connection.
Thomas D. Seymout
NOTE. -Editions and translations of Homer are far too numerous to
be enumerated here. The best edition of the entire Iliad with English
notes is that of Walter Leaf; the best of the entire Odyssey with
English notes is that of Henry Hayman. The best English prose
translation of the Iliad is that of Leaf, Lang, and Myers; the best
English prose translations of the Odyssey are those of G. H. Palmer
and of Butcher and Lang. 'Homer: An Introduction to the Iliad
and the Odyssey,' by Professor Jebb, is an excellent and convenient
small work, treating of (a) the general literary characteristics of the
poems, (b) the Homeric world, (c) Homer in antiquity, (d) the Homeric
question.
T. D. S.
CITATIONS FROM HOMER
THE
HE Iliad does not lend itself easily for dissection or citation in
brief passages. Nearly all the effective scenes are so linked to
each other and into the general plot that they only whet our
eagerness to hear the entire story told. The attempt has been made
here merely to offer fair specimens of the various metrical experi-
ments tried by a series of translators from Chapman onward.
From the Odyssey it was easier to detach an episode: and while
continuing the series of varied rhythms, we have also endeavored to
offer in English, with sufficient completeness, the fifth book, contain-
in the pleasantest among Odysseus's many adventures upon his
homeward voyages, and presenting also the eternally youthful figure
of the innocent girl-princess Nausicaa. The latter has been made the
text of a little sermon on Simplicity' by Mr. Warner in his recent
volume. See also Mr. Lawton's 'Art and Humanity in Homer,' pages
193-242. The most important translations not represented here are
Cowper's in blank verse and Way's in accentual hexameters.
## p. 7562 (#372) ###########################################
7562
HOMER
THE TROJAN ELDERS AND HELEN
From the Iliad, iii. 149-160
THESE
HESE elders sate beside the gate, where passed that wondrous
fair.
Them hoary eld had loosed from fight, but their voice was
clear and strong,
With mellow wisdom's word of might, to sway the Trojan throng;
Like the blithe cricket on the tree, that stirs the leafy bower
With tremulous floods of whirring glee, in the bright and sunny hour,
Close by the gate these elders sate, and looked down from the tower.
And when they saw the lovely Helen tread the path below,
They from their breast forth sent the winged words, and whispered
SO:
Soothly nor Trojan men nor Greeks should reap great crop of blame,
That they did suffer sorrow and teen so long for such a dame,
Who like a goddess walks-not one from mortal womb who came.
Nathless we wish her gentle speed, across the briny waters,
That she no more may mischief breed, to our blameless sons and
daughters.
Translation of John Stuart Blackie.
PARIS, HECTOR, AND HELEN
From the Iliad, vi. 332-362
THE
HEN, in reply to his brother, thus spake Alexander the godlike:
"Hector, indeed you reproach me with justice, no more than I
merit.
Therefore to you will I speak, and do you give attention and hearken.
Not out of rage at the Trojans so much, nor yet in resentment
Here in my chamber I sate, but I wished to give way to my sorrow.
Yet even now my wife, with gentle entreaty consoling,
Bade me go forth to the fray, and I too think it is better.
Victory comes unto this one in turn, and again to another.
Tarry a moment, I pray, till I don mine armor for battle;
Or do you go, and I will pursue, and I think overtake you. "
So did he speak; and to him bright-helmeted Hector replied not.
Helen, however, with gentlest accents spoke and addressed him:-
"Brother of mine,- of a wretch, of a worker of evil, a horror!
Would that the selfsame day whereon my mother had borne me,
I had been seized and swept by the furious breath of the storm-wind
Into the mountains, or else to the sea with its thundering billows.
## p. 7563 (#373) ###########################################
HOMER
7563
There had I met my doom, ere yet these deeds were accomplished!
Or, as the gods had appointed for me this destiny wretched,
Truly I wish I had been with a man more valorous wedded,
Who would have heeded the scorn of the folk and their bitter resent-
ment.
Never a steadfast spirit in this man abides, nor will it
Ever hereafter be found; and methinks his reward will be ready! -
Nay, but I pray you to enter, and here on a chair to be seated,
Brother, for on your heart most heavily laid is the burden
Wrought by my own base deeds, and the sinful madness of Paris.
Evil the destiny surely that Zeus for us twain has appointed,
Doomed to be subjects of song among men of a far generation. ”
Then unto her made answer the great bright-helmeted Hector:
“Helena, bid me not sit,-nor will you, tho' gracious, persuade me.
Eagerly yearns my spirit to fight in defense of the Trojans,
While among them there is longing already for me in my absence. "
Translation of William C. Lawton.
HECTOR TO HIS WIFE
From the Iliad, vi. 441-455
"I
TOO have thought of all this, dear wife, but I fear the reproaches
Both of the Trojan youths and the long-robed maidens of Troja,
If like a cowardly churl I should keep me aloof from the combat:
Nor would my spirit permit; for well I have learnt to be valiant,
Fighting aye 'mong the first of the Trojans marshaled in battle,
Striving to keep the renown of my sire and my own unattainted.
Well, too well, do I know,- both my mind and my spirit agreeing,—
That there will be a day when sacred Troja shall perish.
Priam will perish too, and the people of Priam, the spear-armed.
Still, I have not such care for the Trojans doomed to destruction,
No, nor for Hecuba's self, nor for Priam, the monarch, my father,
Nor for my brothers' fate, who though they be many and valiant,
All in the dust may lie low by the hostile spears of Achaia,
As for thee, when some youth of the brazen-mailèd Achæans
Weeping shall bear thee away, and bereave thee for ever of freedom.
Translation of E. C. Hawtrey.
## p. 7564 (#374) ###########################################
7564
HOMER
―
FATHER AND SON
From the Iliad, vi. 466-497
TH
HUS having spoke, the illustrious chief of Troy
Stretched his fond arms to clasp the lovely boy.
The babe clung crying to his nurse's breast,
Scared at the dazzling helm and nodding crest.
With sacred pleasure each fond parent smiled,
And Hector hasted to relieve his child;
The glittering terrors from his brows unbound,
And placed the beaming helmet on the ground;
Then kissed the child, and lifting high in air,
Thus to the gods preferred a father's prayer:-
"O thou whose glory fills the ethereal throne,
And all ye deathless powers, protect my son!
Grant him, like me, to purchase just renown,
To guard the Trojans, to defend the crown,
Against his country's foes the war to wage,
And rise the Hector of the future age!
So when, triumphant from successful toils,
Of heroes slain he bears the reeking spoils,
Whole hosts may hail him with deserved acclaim,
And say, 'This chief transcends his father's fame;'
While pleased amidst the general shouts of Troy,
His mother's conscious heart o'erflows with joy. "
He spoke, and fondly gazing on her charms,
Restored the pleasing burden to her arms;
Soft on her fragrant breast the babe she laid,
Hushed to repose, and with a smile surveyed.
The troubled pleasure soon chastised by fear,
She mingled with the smile a tender tear.
The softened chief with kind compassion viewed,
And dried the falling drops, and thus pursued:-
"Andromache! my soul's far better part!
Why with untimely sorrows heaves thy heart?
No hostile hand can antedate my doom,
Till fate condemns me to the silent tomb.
Fixed is the term to all the race of earth;
And such the hard condition of our birth,
No force can then resist, no flight can save;
All sink alike, the fearful and the brave.
No more - but hasten to thy tasks at home,
There guide the spindle and direct the loom :
## p. 7565 (#375) ###########################################
HOMER
7565
Me glory summons to the martial scene,—
The field of combat is the sphere for men;
Where heroes war, the foremost place I claim,
The first in danger as the first in fame. "
Thus having said, the glorious chief resumes
His towery helmet, black with shading plumes.
His princess parts with a prophetic sigh;
Unwilling parts, and oft reverts her eye,
That streamed at every look; then moving slow,
Sought her own palace and indulged er woe.
Pope's Translation.
ACHILLES REFUSES TO AID THE GREEKS
From the Iliad, ix. 307-347
WHO
HOм answered thus Achilles, swift of foot:-
"Heaven-born Ulysses, sage in council, son
Of great Laertes, I must frankly speak
My mind at once, my fixed resolve declare:
That from henceforth I may not by the Greeks,
By this man and by that, be importuned.
Him as the gates of hell my soul abhors,
Whose outward words his inmost thoughts conceal.
Hear then what seems to me the wisest course.
On me nor Agamemnon, Atreus's son,
Nor others shall prevail, since naught is gained
By toil unceasing in the battle-field.
Who nobly fight, but share with those who skulk;
Like honors gain the coward and the brave;
Alike the idlers and the active die:
And naught it profits me, though day by day
In constant toil I set my life at stake;
But as a bird, though ill she fare herself,
Brings to her callow brood the food she takes,
So I through many a sleepless night have lain,
And many a bloody day have labored through,
Engaged in battle on your wives' behalf.
Twelve cities have I taken with my ships:
Eleven more by land on Trojan soil.
From all of these abundant stores of wealth
I took, and all to Agamemnon gave;
He, safe on board his ships, my spoils received,
A few divided, but the most retained.
## p. 7566 (#376) ###########################################
7566
HOMER
To other chiefs and kings he meted out
Their sev'ral portions, and they hold them still;
From me, from me alone of all the Greeks,
He bore away, and keeps, my cherished wife.
But say then, why do Greeks with Trojans fight?
Why hath Atrides brought this mighty host
To Troy, if not in fair-haired Helen's cause?
Of mortals are there none that love their wives,
Save Atreus's sons alone? or do not all,
Who boast the praise of sense and virtue, love
And cherish each his own? as her I loved
Ev'n from my soul, though captive of my spear.
Now, since he once hath robbed me, and deceived,
Let him not seek my aid; I know him now,
And am not to be won; let him devise,
With thee, Ulysses, and the other kings,
How best from hostile fires to save his ships. "
Translation of Edward, Earl of Derby.
HECTOR PURSUED BY ACHILLES AROUND TROY
From the Iliad, xxii. 136-185
ECTOR beheld and trembled: naught he dared
Η
To wait, but left the gates, and shuddering flew.
Achilleus with swift feet behind him fared.
As mountain hawk, most fleet of feathered crew,
A trembling dove doth easily pursue;
Swerving she flutters; he, intent to seize,
With savage scream close hounds her through the blue;-
So keenly he swept onward; Hector flees
Beneath his own Troy wall, and plies his limber knees.
All past the watch-tower and the fig-tree tall
Along the chariot road at speed they fare,
Still swerving outward from the city's wall;
Then reach the two fair-flowing streamlets, where
Scamander's twofold source breaks forth to air.
One flows in a warm tide, and steam doth go
Up from it, as a blazing fire were there;
But the other runs in summer's midmost glow
Cold as the frozen hail, or ice, or chilly snow.
Thereby great troughs and meet for washing stand,
Beautiful, stony, where their robes of pride
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Troy's wives and daughters washed, ere to the land
The foeman came, in happy peaceful tide.
Flying and following, these they ran beside,
He good that flies, he better that pursues;
For no fat victim 'twas, nor bullock's hide,
Such meed as men for conquering runners choose,
But Hector's life the prize they ran to win or lose.
Look how prize-bearing horses, hard of hoof,
Circle about the goal with eager bound,
And a great guerdon stands, not far aloof,
Tripod or woman, at the funeral mound
Of some dead chief; so thrice they circled round
King Priam's town, their swift feet winged for flight:
While all the gods Olympus's summit crowned,
Looking from high to see the wondrous sight;
And thus the almighty Sire their counsel did invite:
"Alas! I see a loved one with mine eyes
Chased round the city: and my heart doth bleed
For Hector, for that many an ox's thighs
He burnt, where Ida overlooks the mead,
Or in the topmost tower; now with fell speed
Achilleus hunts him round King Priam's town.
But come, ye gods, take counsel and arede,
Or shall we save him now, or strike him down
Under Achilleus's spear, despite his fair renown. "
To him stern-eyed Athene answered so:
"Dread Thunderer in dark cloud, what words are these?
What, a mere mortal, fated long ago,
Wouldst thou set free from death's severe decrees?
Do it; but us gods thy doing shall not please. "
And cloud-compelling Zeus in turn rejoined:
"Take heart, dear child, and set thy soul at ease;
I meant it not, but would to thee be kind:
Now do it, nor delay, whate'er is in thy mind. "
Translation of John Conington.
-:
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HECTOR'S FUNERAL RITES
Close of the Iliad-xxiv. 777-804
THE
HESE words made even the commons mourn, to whom the king
said: "Friends,
Now fetch wood for our funeral fire, nor fear the foe intends
Ambush, or any violence: Achilles gave his word,
At my dismission, that twelve days he would keep sheathed his
sword,
And all men's else. " Thus oxen, mules, in chariots straight they put,
Went forth, and an unmeasured pile of sylvan matter cut,
Nine days employed in carriage, but when the tenth morn shined
On wretched mortals, then they brought the fit-to-be-divined
Forth to be burned. Troy swum in tears. Upon the pile's most
height
They laid the person, and gave fire. All day it burned, all night.
But when the eleventh morn let on earth her rosy fingers shine,
The people flocked about the pile, and first with blackish wine
Quenched all the flames. His brothers then, and friends, the snowy
bones
Gathered into an urn of gold, still pouring on their moans.
Then wrapt they in soft purple veils the rich urn, digged a pit,
Graved it, rammed up the grave with stones, and quickly built to it
A sepulchre. But while that work and all the funeral rites
Were in performance, guards were held at all parts, days and nights,
For fear of false surprise before they had imposed the crown
To these solemnities. The tomb advanced once, all the town
In Jove-nursed Priam's court partook a passing sumptuous feast:
And so horse-taming Hector's rites gave up his soul to rest.
Translation of George Chapman.
THE EPISODE OF NAUSICAA
FROM THE ODYSSEY
I. — Book vi. , 1–84.
Translation of George H. Palmer. Copyright 1884, by G.
H. Palmer. Reprinted by permission of Houghton, Mifflin & Co. , pub-
lishers, Boston.
HUS long-tried royal Odysseus slumbered here, heavy with
sleep and toil; but Athene went to the land and town of
the Phæacians. This people once in ancient times lived in
the open highlands, near that rude folk the Cyclops, who often.
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plundered them, being in strength more powerful than they.
Moving them thence, godlike Nausithous, their leader, established
them at Scheria, far from toiling men. He ran a wall around
the town, built houses there, made temples for the gods, and laid
out farms; but Nausithous had met his doom and gone to the
house of Hades, and Alcinous now was reigning, trained in wis-
dom by the gods. To this man's dwelling came the goddess,
clear-eyed Athene, planning a safe return for brave Odysseus.
She hastened to a chamber, richly wrought, in which a maid
was sleeping, of form and beauty like the immortals, Nausicaa,
daughter of generous Alcinous. Near by, two damsels, dowered
with beauty by the Graces, slept by the threshold, one on either
hand. The shining doors were shut; but Athene, like a breath
of air, moved to the maid's couch, stood by her head, and thus
addressed her,-taking the likeness of the daughter of Dymas,
the famous seaman, a maiden just Nausicaa's age, dear to her
heart. Taking her guise, thus spoke clear-eyed Athene:—
"Nausicaa, how did your mother bear a child so heedless?
Your gay clothes lie uncared for, though the wedding-time is
near, when you must wear fine clothes yourself and furnish them
to those that may attend you. From things like these a good
repute arises, and father and honored mother are made glad.
Then let us go a-washing at the dawn of day, and I will go to
help, that you may soon be ready; for really not much longer
will you be a maid. Already you have for suitors the chief
ones of the land throughout Phæacia, where you too were born.
Come, then, beg your good father early in the morning to har-
ness the mules and cart, so as to carry the men's clothes, gowns,
and bright-hued rugs. Yes, and for you yourself it is more
decent so than setting forth on foot: the pools are far from the
town. "
Saying this, clear-eyed Athene passed away, off to Olympus,
where they say the dwelling of the gods stands fast forever.
Never with winds is it disturbed, nor by the rain made wet, nor
does the snow come near; but everywhere the upper air spreads
cloudless, and a bright radiance plays over all: and there the
blessed gods are happy all their days. Thither now came the
clear-eyed one, when she had spoken with the maid.
Soon bright-throned morning came, and waked fair-robed Nau-
sicaa. She marveled at the dream, and hastened through the house
to tell it to her parents, her dear father and her mother. She
XIII-474
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found them still indoors: her mother sat by the hearth among
the waiting-women, spinning sea-purple yarn; she met her father
at the door, just going forth to join the famous princes at the
council, to which the high Phæacians summoned him. So, stand-
ing close beside him, she said to her dear father:—
"Papa dear, could you not have the wagon harnessed for me,
-the high one, with good wheels,- to take my nice clothes to
the river to be washed, which now are lying dirty? Surely for
you yourself it is but proper, when you are with the first men
holding councils, that you should wear clean clothing. Five good
sons too are here at home,-two married, and three merry young
men still, and they are always wanting to go to the dance
wearing fresh clothes. And this is all a trouble on my mind. "
Such were her words, for she was shy of naming the glad
marriage to her father; but he understood it all, and answered
thus:
―
"I do not grudge the mules, my child, nor anything beside.
Go! Quickly shall the servant harness the wagon for you,—the
high one, with good wheels, fitted with rack above. "
Saying this he called to the servants, who gave heed. Out
in the court they made the easy mule cart ready; they brought
the mules, and yoked them to the wagon. The maid took from
her room her pretty clothing, and stowed it in the polished
wagon; her mother put in a chest, food the maid liked, of every
kind, put dainties in, and poured some wine into a goatskin
bottle, the maid, meanwhile, had got into the wagon,—and
gave her in a golden flask some liquid oil, that she might bathe
and anoint herself, she and the waiting-women. Nausicaa took
the whip and the bright reins, and cracked the whip to start.
There was a clatter of the mules, and steadily they pulled, drawing
the clothing and the maid,-yet not alone; beside her went the
waiting-women too.
C
II. — Book vi. , 85-197. Translation of Butcher and Lang
NOW WHEN they were come to the beautiful stream of the
river, where truly were the unfailing cisterns, and bright water
welled up free from beneath, and flowed past, enough to wash
the foulest garments clean, there the girls unharnessed the mules.
from under the chariot, and turning them loose they drove them
along the banks of the eddying river to graze on the sweet
clover. Then they took the garments from the wain, in their
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hands, and bore them to the black water, and briskly trod them
down in the trenches, in busy rivalry. Now when they had
washed and cleansed all the stains, they spread all out in order
along the shore of the deep, even where the sea, in beating on
the coast, washed the pebbles clean. Then having bathed and
anointed them well with olive oil, they took their midday meal
on the river's banks, waiting till the clothes should dry in the
brightness of the sun. Anon, when they were satisfied with.
food, the maidens and the princess, they fell to playing at ball,
casting away their tires, and among them Nausicaa of the white
arms began the song. And even as Artemis the archer moveth
down the mountain, either along the ridges of lofty Taygetus
or Erymanthus, taking her pastime in the chase of boars and
swift deer, and with her the wild wood-nymphs disport them, the
daughters of Zeus, lord of the ægis, and Leto is glad at heart,
while high over all she rears her head and brows, and easily may
she be known, but all are fair; even so the girl unwed out-
shone her maiden company.
But when now she was about going homewards, after yoking
the mules and folding up the goodly raiment, then gray-eyed
Athene turned to other thoughts, that so Odysseus might awake,
and see the lovely maiden who should be his guide to the city
of the Phæacian men. So then the princess threw the ball at
one of her company; she missed the girl, and cast the ball into
the deep eddying current, whereat they all raised a piercing cry.
Then the goodly Odysseus awoke and sat up, pondering in his
heart and spirit:-
"Woe is me! to what men's land am I come now? say, are
they froward and wild, and. unjust, or are they hospitable and
of God-fearing mind? How shrill a cry of maidens rings round
me, of the nymphs that hold the steep hill-tops, and the river
springs, and the grassy water meadows. It must be, methinks,
that I am
near men of human speech.
