The Closing Scenes of the Iliad

THE Greeks are still our teachers and unrivaled masters. Not, indeed, in the domain of spiritual or moral truth. Here modern men grasp firmly the essential verities toward which Plato even only darkly groped. Whatever the destiny which may await the miraculous side of Christian belief, yet the consciousness of brotherhood among all mankind, and the steadfast trust in an all-wise beneficent Higher Power, are the priceless and inalienable gifts of that faith to humanity. Nor shall we ever turn to the ancient world for our models in social and political organization. The Athenian republic of Pericles, with its few thousand leisure - loving citizens, standing upon the necks of slaves, tenfold their own number, and exacting reluctant tribute from a confederacy of nominally independent cities and islands, can shed little direct light upon the infinitely larger problems which we and our children must face. But in the mastery of those creative arts which ennoble and adorn the life of men, in the harmonious development of all the physical and mental faculties, the generation of Sophocles and Pericles, of Phidias and Socrates, yet, stands out before our eyes with a beauty and a glory which mock our restless effort. We may hardly venture to set before ourselves a loftier goal of human progress than the future attainment by the citizens of the American republic, by its countless millions of men and women, to the same capacity for refined and enlightened enjoyment of all their powers that was reached in ancient Attica by a mere handful of men only, in a privileged social station. Therefore a poem — though it be of unknown age and authorship, though it have ever so little historical background — which was for many centuries the Bible of the Hellenic race, which all Greeks gladly accepted as containing the truth in regard to their own ancestors, which furnished them their loftiest ideals of heroic character and of literary art, must be eminently worthy of our attentive and careful study.

The Homeric poems cannot be used as a hand-book of early Greek history, nor as a picture of Hellenic manners and customs in the age before the Olympiads. The only element in these creations with regard to which we can speak definitely and positively is the incredible. There never really existed a race of heroes living on terms of familiar intercourse with the Olympian gods, exchanging wayside greetings in enchanted islands with Hermes, or buffets with Ares on the battle-field. The hundred clans of Hellas never set forth, united, upon a fleet as large as Xerxes’, and beleaguered a foreign city for ten years, merely to restore an unfaithful wife to her rightful lord. There was no prehistoric town in the Troad so garrisoned and provisioned as to endure a siege of any such length, nor could a host of a hundred thousand men have been supported in the open plain for even a single year. Or, to descend to lesser details, who really believes that the early Hellenes went forth to war provided with chariots like Assyrian kings ? Who supposes that a pair of youths ever rode in such a chariot from Pylos to Sparta? In the sixth book of the Iliad, two princes, diverse in race and speech, coming from widely sundered lands, meet for the first time in the contest under the walls of Troy. Within reach of each other’s spears they chat in garrulous fashion, until they accidentally discover that their grandsires had once known each other as host and guest. They then exchange armor,— the Greek securing “gold for bronze, the value of a hundred oxen for the worth of nine,” — swear eternal friendship, and agree to shun each other in the fray. Unless it be in the allusion to Hellenic craft in barter, what connection can be traced between any real or possible scene and such a poet’s dream ?

We may continue indefinitely this process of elimination, but we do not arrive at any residue which becomes historically certain, or indeed highly probable. It does not even appear that a wide-spread popular legend formed the nucleus of the tale. By its highly artificial and copious dialect (which never could have been actually spoken at any time, among any one people), by its intensely dramatic situations, by its boundless wealth of ingenious but purely poetic detail, the Iliad is stamped unmistakably as a creation of conscious art, as the final triumph of a long literary development.

The poet, himself living nearly four centuries before the Persian wars, according to Herodotos’s judicious and moderate opinion, is careful to remind us often that he sings of heroes quite diverse from the men of his own degenerate days. One of the demonstrably latest and most prosaic additions to the poem, the Catalogue of Ships, begins with a renewed invocation of the

It is quite true that the setting of the story is a real, earthly landscape, and a brief stay on the shores of the Hellespont suffices to convince a pilgrim that the classic bard had himself visited the plain, and made good use of an excellent pair of eyes. That some tradition of a real war had formed the basis of the myth has also become highly probable since the important labors and discoveries of Dr. Sehliemann. But any events which may have occurred there in the remote past seem to have come to the poet refracted so far through an atmosphere of myth that his own work is in no way based upon and limited by historic record or popular belief. The story of Achilles’ wrath is as clearly the conscious invention of a poetic mind as Dante’s descent into the infernal world.

When a Periclean dramatist represented a single occurrence in the life of such a character as Heracles or Medea, he knew that the auditors to whom he appealed were well acquainted with the entire story of the hero’s exploits. It is by no means certain that the minstrel of the Iliad, while nominally dealing with a single brief episode in the ten years’ siege, could really assume a familiarity, on the part of his courtly audience, with the whole Tale of Troy. Skillful advantage is taken of opportunities, early in the poem, to sketch in outline the essential features of the contest. The birth and destiny of Achilles, the guilt of Helen, the omens at Aulis, the duration and course of the war hitherto, are impressively recalled in the first thousand lines.

Moreover, there were composed at a very early date, but subsequent to the Iliad and Odyssey, several epics expressly intended to complete the cycle of Trojan legend by recounting the events preceding and intervening between the incidents described in the Homeric works. Though these cyclic poems are themselves lost, yet their contents arc preserved to us in quite a full summary. Their length is also approximately known from the number of books in each, such divisions being merely a convenient mechanical partition of longer manuscripts, and not older than the great Alexandrian librarians. Now, all these comparatively later poems were brief, and closely dependent on the Iliad and Odyssey. They were, in fact, chiefly occupied in elaborating scenes and events alluded to in the earlier master works. There was little indication in them of any mass of old and tenacious legend which the Iliad had failed to exhaust; and it is the prevailing belief of scholars at present that no such Trojan legend had any vigorous existence independent of the great literary epics. The story as we now have it was rather created by the imaginative ingenuity of successive poets. The Homeric picture, then, stands practically isolated. Whatever historical details it may contain, we are unable to verify or even to identify them.

The one thing which seems approximately certain about the chief author of the Iliad is that he was a Greek of western Asia Minor. The weight of evidence appeared to the ancients to point toward Smyrna as his native city, and modern students generally agree in this opinion. Yet the poems themselves give no hint of any Greek cities existing in Asia at all. On the contrary, the poet apparently assumes that his tale belongs to a period before the emigration of the Hellenes, from their peninsular home, eastward across the Ægean ; that is, before the gray dawn of Hellenic history ! It is not unlikely that the siege of holy Ilios is in truth a faroff echo of that eastward colonizing movement itself.

But the more completely the Tale of Troy eludes the grasp of historian and ethnologist, so much the loftier is the position which it assumes in its true character, as a masterpiece of imaginative poetry. The Iliad satisfies most happily the three demands which we may make upon every artistic creation. First, the plot is eminently simple and complete in itself. The subject announced in the opening line —

Sing, O goddess, the wrath of Achilles, the offspring of Peleus —

is steadily worked out to its final results. Even the death of Achilles himself and the fall of the guilty city are foreshadowed in so distinct and impressive a manner that all our reasonable curiosity is satisfied. Secondly, the warriors and matrons whom we see acting and suffering, whether they are real Greek men and women or not, are at any rate preeminently human. We do not demand that the conditions of their life shall be such as ever existed, or could have existed, on our earth. Nay, we welcome romantic and imaginative surroundings for the poet’s scenes. We only insist that within their environment the creatures of the artist shall act as real men and women would act under such circumstances. But thirdly and chiefly, Homer’s characters are heroic. They tower high above the commonplace levels of humanity. They seem not so much like ourselves as what we would wish to bePerhaps it is well to say, as frankly and plainly as possible, that this is the final and indispensable test of the artist’s right to be. We ourselves know the pettiness, the limitations, the disenchantments, of human life only too well. The preacher, the teacher, the political and social reformer, may, perhaps, accomplish some good by merciless analysis and satiric caricature of our failings. The artist is the creator of the beautiful. He must inspire and uplift us by setting before us something wrought in our likeness, indeed, but nobler than our ordinary selves.

A school of American fiction, which is perhaps the dominant one at the present day, seems inclined to discard this article from its literary creed. There are even clever and ingenious stories, apparently written for the express purpose of revealing to us the utter aimlessness and wearisomeness of all the characters introduced. Other tales, again, take up situations or plots which appear at first to contain a romantic or ennobling element, and labor successfully to the end to show us that here also the vulgar or commonplace is but masquerading behind the tawdry finery of stage heroism. Such works may indeed safely be left to die of their own avowed lack of beauty, without need of argumentative criticism; but the evil effect on the national character from this following after false lights is even more to be deplored than the waste of artistic power.

We hail as the most hopeful feature in American literature the poems and tales of those men and women who are working in exactly the opposite direction ; who lay hold of what seems to us at first glance commonplace or vulgar, and reveal even there the pathetic, the heroic, the human. Every New Englander’s heart throbs more gently and purely, whether by his own Christmas fireside on the rugged old hill farm, or in far exile among the December roses of New Zealand, because our rustic laureate has enshrined in undying verse the simple memories and uneventful scenes of Snow-Bound. They who have wandered widest in other lands and times would prize it still the highest of all privileges to watch that good gray head upon the pensive tranquil round of his Last Walk in Autumn. May there come yet many a summer before we cease to hear the voice of the sage recluse, who once seemed austere and stern, but who has grown ever gentler through a lifetime of strife with error!

But if not more effective than all direct criticism, it is certainly more agreeable to point back once more to the greatest artists of the past. Homer’s warriors, then, like Dante’s sinners, Shakespeare’s gentlemen, and Milton’s fiends, are thoroughly human, and so appeal to our sympathies; but they are also more impetuous and more fully alive, statelier and fairer, than ourselves, and therefore the world can never let them die.

It has been remarked already that while avowedly dealing with only a single episode in the last year of the famous struggle, the Iliad alludes in numerous passages to events preceding and following. Still, many details of the myth which are especially familiar to us are unmentioned by Homer, and some of them, at least, were wholly unknown to him, being due to the creative ingenuity of later poets and chroniclers. Euripides, in particular, treated various events from the Trojan cycle in more than half his extant tragedies, and in others now lost, and various incidents, apparently invented by him, became part of the accepted myth. In his Trojan Women, which depicts the downfall and sack of the town in a series of loosely connected but effective scenes, Helen, pleading for her life against Hecabè’s accusations, says to Menelaos : —

“ She first produced the author of these woes, In bearing Paris. Next, the aged king Ruined me and Troy, when he slew not the babe, The firebrand’s hateful image, Alexandros ! ”

This is the earliest allusion in Greek literature to Hecabè’s dream, before Paris’s birth, that she bore a firebrand which set her town on fire. The boy Paris was therefore exposed, as soon as born, on Mount Ida. There he was nursed at first by a bear, then bred by shepherds. While tending his flocks he is visited by the messenger - god, Hermes, who announces that the three mightiest of goddesses have left to the decision of the seeming peasant boy their contention for a golden apple, inscribed “ For the Fairest.” Not relying on their divine charms alone, each rival strives to win the umpire’s favor by bribes. The foolish Paris refuses the proffers of power and of wisdom, and decides for Aphrodite, dazzled by the promise of the loveliest woman on earth. Familiar and dear as is this tale to lovers of Tennyson’s Œnone, Lydia Maria Child’s Children of Mount Ida, and Andrew Lang’s Helen of Troy, it is alluded to in Homer’s verses only in two awkward and feeble lines, which on various and sufficient grounds are accounted a very late interpolation.1

It is indeed true that in the Homeric poems Aphrodite favors the Trojans, while Hera and Pallas are eager for the instant and utter overthrow of the doomed city. But this may be accounted for on other grounds. In many passages Aphrodite is little more than an idealization or personification of the passion of love itself. The worship of Aphrodite actually came into Greece from the Orient, and in this earliest of Hellenic poems she is not unnaturally the patron divinity of the polygamous Priam, the uxorious Paris, and their somewhat effeminate subjects. Pallas and Hera, on the other hand, are partly enraged at the guilt of Paris, and in part show a natural preference for the Grecian cities where they themselves were most highly honored.

The earliest origin of the strife apparently known to Homer is the sin of the Trojan prince, Paris, who, being kindly entertained, while upon his wanderings, by Menelaos, king of Sparta, fled with the wife of his host. But it so chanced that this lovely lady, Helen, the greatest beauty of her time, had been sought in marriage by all the chieftains of the Grecian world. Her father had bound her suitors with a solemn oath to abide by her choice among them, and to pursue with their men-at-arms any one who should hereafter steal her away from her rightful lord. So the Grecian army, a hundred thousand strong, set sail — after some ten years’ delay ! — upon twelve hundred ships, and beleaguered the city of llios, or Troy, in the Scamander’s plain.

The commander-in-chief is Agamemnon, brother of the injured Menelaos; but the bravest and stoutest warrior is the youthful Achilles. This latter hero, son of a mortal king, Peleus, by Thetis, loveliest of the sea-nymphs, had been destined, according to the prophecies, to a long and peaceful or to a brief and glorious life. Hence his father had sent him away to the island of Skyros, where he was dressed and educated as a girl among the king’s daughters. When the ban went forth summoning all the princes to the war, the crafty Odysseus (or, as we miscall him, Ulysses) tracked the youth to his retreat, and discovered his identity by a shrewd device. Among a basketful of jewels and trinkets intended for the princesses was concealed a gleaming sword. When the fairest among the young girls (for such the youthful figure seemed (approached in turn to choose, the flash of the steel caught the eye and betrayed the sex of Peleus’s child. The scene where Achilles is just drawing forth the shining blade is represented in many works of art, ancient and modern. Yet this is expressly declared by the ancient Greek scholiast on Homer to be a later form of the legend. Its earliest appearance, so far as we know, is in Sophocles’ play, The Skyrians, of which only a few fragments survive.

The Trojans are abundantly supplied with provisions, and secure behind the lofty walls of their town. Achilles sacks many of the neighboring cities, but in the division of spoil the greedy Agamemnon claims and receives always the best and largest share. The prolongation of the siege for ten years, during which the Greeks have no communication with their homes, though only one or two days’ sail distant, has been already mentioned as one of the many incredible details of the legend. Later writers explained that they farmed the fertile Trojan plain and traded on the Hellespont to support the numerous host. Few important incidents are transmitted to us, however, from the landing of the Greeks to the beginning of the Iliad, the chief events of which we will now briefly review.

The poem opens with the sack by Achilles of the town of Thebè, identified by the ancient geographers with a site in the fertile Adramyttian plain. A lovely captive maiden, Cliryseis, is assigned to Agamemnon. She is, however, the daughter of Apollo’s priest, and the god, in answer to the father’s prayers, sends upon the Greeks a deadly pestilence, which can be ended only by the release of the girl. Agamemnon unwillingly submits, but, stung by Achilles’ taunts upon his greed and oppression, the commander takes away by force Achilles’ own beloved captive, Briseis. Agamemnon thus commits almost the very crime for which he and all his host are wreaking vengeance on Priam and the Trojans. Achilles angrily retires from the field. This emboldens Hector to sally forth into the plain with his Trojan followers, and entails many disasters for the Greeks. In the next few days most of the Grecian leaders are wounded or slain, and Hector gains ground, until he sets fire to the Greek fleet. Achilles, utterly deaf heretofore to all appeals, now reluctantly permits his gentle and beloved comrade, Patroclos, to go forth and aid his companionsin-arms. Appearing in his friend’s armor, Patroclos is at first mistaken for the resistless Achilles himself, and drives the Trojans in headlong flight. He is, however, himself finally overcome and slain by Hector.

When the twenty-fourth book opens, the ten years’ struggle around Priam’s beleaguered city is drawing to a close. The feud between Achilles and Agamemnon, which had kept the most valiant of the Greeks idle in his tent, is stanched at last. Maddened by the death of his gentle friend, the son of Peleus has risen in his might. Clad in the armor wrought for him during the night, at Thetis’s tearful request, by Hephaistos himself, the divine artificer, Achilles has driven the victorious men of Troy like sheep before him, and cut down all whom he could overtake outside the gates. Last of all, though not without Apollo’s superhuman aid, he has slain, in single combat, the gallant Hector himself, who alone had ventured to tarry without the walls and meet the onset of the resistless foe. Troy is not indeed destined to fall before Achilles’ spear. That young hero’s own approaching death, though it lies outside the limits of the Iliad itself, is clearly foreshadowed within it. being prophesied by his mother, the lovely Nereid, by the divine steed of Achilles, and again by the dying Hector. The Tale of Troy has, in truth, a characteristically Greek conclusion, since the cunning of Ulysses is destined to succeed where the martial prowess of all Achaia’s princes has failed.

With the single combat between Achilles and Hector, in the twenty-second book, the original Iliad probably ended. But the poet himself, or a disciple worthy to complete the master’s work, perceived that the great epic should close amid calmer scenes, with an appeal to gentler emotions. Hence in the twenty-third book is described the mourning for Patroclos, to which a feebler hand has added a detailed account of the games — archery, foot-race, contest with chariots, etc. — celebrated, in accordance with Greek custom, by Achilles at his friend’s funeral mound; and the twenty-fourth book tells us how the savage Achilles himself is moved at last to desist from wrath and insults toward the dead, and to give up the body of Hector for burial within the doomed city. As the culminating scene of this book and of the entire Iliad, the poet has ventured to bring together the two stateliest heroes of the tale. The old King Priam, once the most prosperous monarch of Asia, now heavily burdened with years and sorrows, betakes himself to Achilles’ encampment, and begs the privilege of ransoming his son’s body, kissing imploringly the terrible hands which have bereft him of so many valiant sons.

In the following pages I have ventured to render some of the more striking scenes in this closing book of the Iliad. Occasionally a Greek custom or belief may require a passing word of explanation, but my main purpose is to illustrate from this most ancient of European epics how entirely every great poet must rely for his strongest effects upon motives which are essentially human and universal. We may repeat of Priam’s lament for his sons what Longfellow sings of David in his bereavement : —

The book begins with an allusion to the contests about Patroclos’s mound, just completed: —

But after this has been repeated for twelve successive days, the gods become angry, and debate if they shall send down the divine messenger, Hermes, to steal the body away. Instead of this, Iris is finally dispatched to summon Achilles’ mother, the sea-nymph Thetis, to the heavenly council. The gentle goddess of the rainbow instantly darts earthward, and plunges into the dark waters of the Ægean, beneath which is the abode of Thetis’s father, Nereus, the old man of the sea. The poet continues : —

蚟The goddess then, The silver-footed Thetis, answered her: —

Zeus bids Thetis go straightway to her son, and inform him of the gods’ command. He must accept a ransom, and give up Hector’s body. Thetis immediately Went darting from Olympus’ summit down to carry this message. To Achilles she says : —

Meanwhile, Iris is again sent down by Zeus, this time to the venerable King Priam, who is bidden to go to Achilles under cover of the night, carrying precious gifts, and accompanied only by one aged herald. He is assured of a safe return under the protection of Hermes. It will be noticed that in this book Hermes and Iris are both active as messengers of the gods. It was remarked by the ancients that Iris was regularly so employed in the Iliad, Hermes in the Odyssey. The appearance of the god in the last episode of the poem is therefore counted as one of many indications pointing to a somewhat later origin. Omitting the speech of Iris to Priam, we continue : —

It should perhaps be explained that, after one day’s cighting without Achilles, the Greeks, under cover of a truce, within a single day built a continuous wall, strengthened by towers and by a moat without, to protect their ships. The passage in the seventh book where this feat is described is, however, a peculiarly unsatisfactory one. There is nothing in the events of the previous day to justify this sudden terror of the Greeks. The undertaking is absurdly disproportionate to the time assigned for it, and a gross violation of the truce for burying the dead. We may venture to echo the sensible remark of Thucydides, that the invaders of course built such a rampart, if at all, at the time of their first landing. But the strongest reason, to my mind, against the genuineness of the passage is a purely æsthetic argument, which has perhaps not been brought into the discussion. If we remove the objectionable portion of the seventh book. Hector never sees his wife again after the famous parting scene. After encamping two nights, flushed with victory, in the open plain, he is slain on the third day by Achilles. As the poem now stands, the touching farewell loses more than half its pathos and poetic significance, because Hector passes the two following nights secure within the walls.

This last line is a curious and interesting one. Hecabè (or can it be even her poet ?) knows nothing of that dishonorable flight of Hector thrice about the circle of the city’s wall, against which Andrew Lang protests as a calumny, in his beautiful poem Helen of Troy.

Priam, who seems half crazed with grief and excitement, bursts forth into bitter reproaches against the Trojans who are gathered under the gateway of his house, and, calling angrily by name upon nine of his surviving sons, bids them harness mules to the wagon which shall bear these treasures toward the hostile camp on the shore. This they do, and also attach Priam’s horses to his own chariot. This has all occurred in the courtyard within the royal palace.

The beautiful adjectives applied to wine in the Iliad made a forcible impression on a later ancient, — if indeed he is not rather one of ourselves, — who was an equally good judge of the poetic art and of the gift of Dionysos: I mean the Roman Horace. He has left us his opinion on the subject in an unusually musical hexameter: —

But we are forgetting our courtesy to the Trojan queen.

(here was the great altar of Zeus, and on this very spot, not many days later, the venerable king was to meet his death, before the eyes of his wife and daughters, on the night when Troy was taken,)

A black eagle instantly appears in the sky, on the right, flying over the city. Then the two old men start forth confidently and in eager haste ; the herald driving the mule-team, and Priam following upon his chariot. The royal kinsfolk and other Trojans escort them, lamenting, but turn back at. the gates.

Under the guise of a goodly mortal youth, Hermes presents himself to the two frightened old men, just at dusk, when they have reached the river, on their way to the shore, and offers to guide them. He pretends to be an esquire of Achilles. He assures Priam that Hector’s body lies uncorrupted and unsoiled, and that his many wounds have miraculously closed. Priam, to secure the youth’s faithful guidance, offers him the precious cup which was intended for Achilles. But the god replies : —

The god seems to give us a glimpse of his divine nature, as he proudly assures the timid king that under his guidance he might pass unmolested, not merely to the hostile camp on the shore, but even far into the native land of his foes.

The divine intervention is, it will be noticed, essential to Priam’s success. Such passages as this are very different from those where Pallas appears to Achilles, or Aphrodite to Helen, remaining invisible to all others. In those scenes the divinities are little more than poetic figures for the voice of wisdom or of passion in the human heart itself. Here, on the contrary, Hermes is as real to the poet, and to his hearers, as the old king himself.

The poet has forgotten Priam, for the moment, over his description of Achilles’ abode. Such comparisons as this between the physical strength of the chieftains and of common men are very frequent in Homer. The reader will remember, for instance, how Hector, assaulting the Greek lines, poises and casts with ease a stone which, as the poet says. Three men could hardly heave into a wain, Such as are now alive.

The most curious example, however, is the venerable Nestor and his mighty punch-bowl.

Another passage for Horace — and for Holmes!

Here, as often. Ares is a mere vague personification of war.

It was for such passages as this that Plato was unwilling to admit Homer into his republic. It would perhaps hardly he just to ascribe these sentiments to the poet himself. All Achilles’ joy in life, all his faith in the fairness or the kindness of the gods, perished with Patroclos. It has been, however, very truly remarked that in the closing books of the Iliad, as a whole, we find little trace of that delight in life which we are wont to regard as a peculiarly Greek feeling.

The last line is perhaps a warning that Achilles is becoming enraged at this wild passion of grief over his fallen enemy. Hector. If such is his meaning, Priam does not realize it.

But the fierce and haughty spirit of Achilles is aroused at this urgent appeal for immediate action. We must not allow ourselves to imagine that Homer’s men are mediæval knights or Elizabethan gentlemen, by any means. There is much of the savage in them still. But Achilles, at any rate, realizes the danger and also the wickedness of any harm done to his suppliant guest.

When the body has been prepared for the bier, Achilles himself aids in laying it upon the chariot. Yet his reluctance and misgivings find utterance meanwhile in a prayer to his dead friend : —

It is interesting to remember that until Patroclos appeared to his friend in a vision after death Achilles had hardly believed in any continued existence beyond the tomb. Indeed, it is hard to resist the feeling that the hero was at times, even to the Homeric poets, as he certainly became to the later Greeks, an ideal type of the short-lived youth of man, clinging to life, shuddering at the very thought of death. Strikingly characteristic still is the apparition of his shade in Hades, described in the Odyssey among the adventures of Odysseus. Even there he resents fiercely the attempt to soften the wretchedness of life in the land of shades, and finds his only consolation in the thought that his son is a gallant warrior still, up there in the sunshine.

Achilles, returning into the cabin, takes his place, facing Priam, against the opposite wall; perhaps at a safe distance from his guest. He addresses the unhappy monarch : —

“ Thy son is freed, old man, as thou hast bid, And lies upon the bier. At dawn shalt, thou Behold and bear him hence. But now let us Take thought of supper. Even Niobe Of the fair hair took thought for food.”

The tale of the unfortunate daughter of Tantalus, which is here repeated by Achilles, need not be transcribed. More interesting for us is the allusion to a curious rock formation near Magnesia, in Asia Minor, which has been known for countless centuries as the weeping Niobe : —

“ Now on the lonely mountains, mid the rocks On Sipylos, where, so ‘t. is said, the nymphs Have their abode, who dance about the stream Of Acheloion, as a stone she stands, Enduring sorrows sent her by the gods.”

We are informed that these lines were rejected by the greatest Homeric scholar among the ancients, the librarian Aristarchos, on the ground that they were irrelevant. This very fact, however, indicates that they are at least very ancient, if not originally a part of the scene. The figure thus alluded to is a sort of high-relief against a background of natural rock. The shape is thrice the human height, and some two hundred feet from the ground. A trickling spring is said to give the impression of falling tears. Whoever composed these lines was familiar with this locality of Asia Minor, and hence the passage has been drawn into the discussion over the origin of the Homeric poems.

It was the great German scholar. Welcker, who suggested that the gradual spread of interest in the epic school of poetry might be traced in the list of places claiming to be the birthplace of Homer. The most familiar form of this list is the one mentioned by Cicero, and forming a hexameter line : —

“Smyrna, Chios, Colophon, Salamis, Rhodos, Argos, Athenæ.”

Numerous variations and substitutions were, however, current in antiquity. The superior claim of Smyrna has been already referred to, and is not weakened, certainly, by this passage. The mention of Chios is especially interesting, for the cause is probably to be found in the closing lines of the Homeric Hymn to Apollo, where the author, evidently describing himself, says, —

“Blind is the man, and in Chios abounding in crags is his dwelling.”

The so-called Homeric hymns in honor of various divinities were attributed to Homer by the general voice of antiquity, and this very poem is so mentioned and quoted by Thucydides. As to the birthplace of the singer of the Iliad it is safer to be doubtful, but we may assert unhesitatingly that he was not blind, and not identical with the composer of the hymn to the Delian god.

Achilles now kills a sheep, the meal is prepared, and Priam silently partakes of bread and meat, doubtless less from hunger than from dread of rousing the wrath of his terrible host.

The great strain upon the old king’s mind is relieved, at least in part. Though he has not yet seen Hector’s body, he knows that his mission is to be successfully accomplished. So exhausted Nature asserts herself. Doubtless, as has been said, he breaks his fast more through fear to rouse Achilles’ anger than from hunger. But, having eaten and drunk, the need of rest overcomes him, even in the house of his son’s slayer. There is something strangely pathetic in this uncomplaining reference to his fortnight-long fast and vigil, and in the overwhelming desire for sleep now, though he is still in the lion’s claws.

The beds are spread under the colonnade in the courtyard. It must not be imagined that this is scant, courtesy to a guest, nor an improbable device of the tale in order to facilitate Priam’s escape in the night. In the Odyssey, Telemachos and the son of Nestor are treated in precisely the same manner at Menelaos’s home. Achilles, moreover, explains that his guests are thus more secure from being seen by any Greeks less kindly-minded than himself. Before they part for the night, however, a most generous, we may indeed fairly say a chivalric, thought occurs to Achilles, and he asks his guest : —

The eleventh we would rear a mound for him, And on the twelfth will tight, if needs must be,”

(The last words with a despairing sigh, no doubt.)

So the exhausted king and his old herald lie down to rest under the portico ; and Achilles also sleeps, at Briseis’s side, within the cabin.

But in the night Hermes conies again, warns Priam of his danger, and leads him safely from the Greek encampment. At the ford of the Scamander Hermes vanishes, and day dawns. As the two aged men approach the town, they are descried by Cassandra, and the wailing folk meet the returning king at the gate, Hector’s wife and mother at their head, but Priam presses on to his palace.

These are supposed to have been the professional mourners still common in the East.

(that is, as captives and slaves of the victorious Greeks.)

There is a ring of fierce exultation even in the widow’s wail.

Later poets say this prophecy of Andromache concerning her son’s death was fulfilled. Lovers of Virgil will recall the scene in Epirus, seven years later, where Andromache, seeing the boy Ascanius, weeps at the resemblance to his cousin and playfellow, her lost Astyanax.

Again in Hecabè’s words we hear the fierce exultation of women fit to be the mothers and wives of a race of savage warriors.

Artemis or Apollo was thought to have slain men who died by some sudden and apparently painless death.

The next incident is a most unlookedfor yet effective one. That Hector’s mother and wife should lament him is to he expected; but what is Helen, that she should take a leading place in this closing scene ? Yet the pathos of her words fully justifies the poet’s boldness in introducing her here : —

For twenty years

It is already since I hither came. Leaving’ my fatherland; and never yetAn evil word, nor rude, I heard from thee.

If any other in the palace halls Upbraided me, thy brethren, or their wives Fair-robed, or sisters, or thy mother, —but Thy sire was ever gentle as a father To me,” —

(Hecabè evidently had not always shown the same self-control!)

Here the long story may fairly be said to end. There remains only a quiet and brief description, in thirty lines, of the ceremonies in Hector’s honor. The last line is, —

So they made ready the grave for Hector, the tamer of horses.

It may, perhaps, be used as a striking illustration of the freedom with which Pope treated his original, —such freedom as would hardly be permitted now even to a man of his genius. His version closes with the couplet,—

The first line translates Homer’s sufficiently. The second we owe wholly to Pope, and if is very un-Homeric, too. In the Iliad the shade of the dead never sleeps (whatever that may mean !). The soul, however reluctant to part with the body, must dart instantly and in eager haste down to the under-world. There it is apparently re-incarnated, as it were, in an eidolon, or dim and feeble likeness of its former body.

The present essay attains its chief object if it arouses in the reader the desire to familiarize himself—or to revive his acquaintance—with the whole of this most ancient, most popular, and most delightful monument of European literature. For that purpose the best English version is probably the translation into blank verse by the poet Bryant. The liberties taken by this translator with his author are slight and infrequent. They are, moreover, rather in the nature of dilution than of deliberate addition. Bryant is, however, always dignified, direct, and simple. The prose version by Lang, Leaf, and Myers is somewhat more literal and far more scholarly; but the attempt to give an antique color to the tale by employing the idiom of King James’s times brings with it an impression of the most un-Homeric of all qualities, — literary self - consciousness ! Of the various characteristics ascribed to Homer in Mr. Arnold’s well-known essay, the one most difficult to retain is rapidity. Our blank verse is confessedly slow. It has been remarked by some one that the battle scene in The Princess is the only English example of sustained swift movement in unrhymed iambics. The temptation to imitate the original rhythm assails almost every translator, but is, perhaps, in this case, better resisted. I have not quoted from Bryant’s version, though it would unquestionably have been to the advantage of my sketch. I have made the attempt, instead, to follow the Greek words with extreme literalness, even at some cost of metrical smoothness. In one respect, certainly, we have distinctly outgrown Bryant’s work: it is no longer necessary to miscall the divinities of the Greek pantheon by Roman names, in order that the reader may recognize them.

Almost all students acquainted with the results of recent investigation, particularly in Germany, have abandoned, however reluctantly, the belief in one Homer, who created the Iliad in its present form, as Dante composed the Commedia. On the other hand, there is hardly to be found nowadays a scholar who accepts the ballad-theory of Lachmann, who argued that our Iliad was pieced together, at a late date, from many short lays originally disconnected with each other.

It is highly probable that the subject announced in the first line was worked out in a comparatively direct manner in a sustained epic poem, the nucleus of the present one, and perhaps one third or one fourth as long, to its natural conclusion, namely, the death of Hector. Whether so named or not, this was an Achilleid, as Grote calls it. But so many episodes were subsequently inserted — some of them, perhaps, by the original poet — that the book we now read is not merely the tale of Achilles’ wrath, hut more nearly suits its actual title, the Iliad ; that is, the story of Ilios. Still, every one of these additions must have been composed expressly for the place which it occupies. Each part was fitted into the artistic whole, though they were not all shaped by the same artist s hand.

This noble twenty-fourth book, indeed. is not even an insertion, but a continuation of the story beyond the limit announced at the beginning. It is probably not from the original composer’s hand ; but we need not hesitate to declare that it lifts the whole tale to a nobler and gentler plane of feeling, and for that very reason is more likely to be the expression of the ideals of a later and more refined generat ion. In ethical tone it resembles the Odyssey rather than the older portions of the Iliad.

There may seem at first to be an inconsistency in the views here set forth ; but in fact unity of design in a great work of art does not necessarily indicate unity of authorship. There is one analogy, at least, so obvious that the thought which rises in the writer’s mind is doubtless a mere reminiscence of another’s words. A stranger wandering through a great mediæval cathedral, or let us say Westminster Abbey, might well be struck by the harmonious design which dominates all the variations in detail. On reaching the chapel of Henry the Seventh, he might very naturally exclaim : “This is in truth the soul and key to the whole structure ! This portion, surely, is from the very hand of the original artist who planned the noble building.”A similar expression might rise to the lips of a lover of literature, as he arrives at this culminating scene of the Iliad. The artistic instincts of both are right. The conclusions may be equally wrong.

It is even possible that these closing scenes enlist our modern sympathies as they did not the feelings of the Greeks, for example, in the fifth century B. C. Hector is much nearer to our hearts than is his savage foe. But Achilles and his comrade Patroclos were in all ages of Greek history the accepted type of that passionate friendship between men, which was a far mightier and nobler sentiment, to the Hellenic mind, than the wedded love of man and woman. Hector and Andromache appeal strongly to us, as they did also to the men and women of the Middle Ages. It will be remembered that Hector had an honorable place among the “Seven Worthies ” of the pagan world.

Hector is, in fact, of all the stately figures in the poem, the most pathetic, and also the most blameless. Achilles fights for glory, and afterward for revenge. Agamemnon is selfish and rapacious, Menelans not eminent for courage or strength. Even Priam shares the guilt of Paris, since, but for the old king’s infatuated devotion to his sinning son, Helen and the treasure stolen with her would long ago have been restored, liberal atonement made, and the fatal war-cloud averted from the Trojan city. Hector does not uphold Paris in the council hall. He favors restitution and expiation. But in the field he fights to the end, though hopeless of success, to defend his dear native city so long as he may.

In the closing scene, a great poetic genius brings him home, honored and loved in death above all men, to be lamented by his wife, by his mother, and last of all by Helen, herself the cause of all the misery. Even at this final touch we shall certainly not raise the objection — though the Greek audience might well have done so — that the hero of the poem is forgotten, the champion of the lost and unrighteous cause unduly exalted. Whether the ancient singer intended to suggest it or not, let us hope he would not have repelled the thought with which we can but close the Iliad : How much happier is Andromache in despairing widowhood, how much more blest is even Hector in death, than Helen, beautiful still and ever young, destined yet to disarm Menelaos’s vengeance by her loveliness, and to return to a prosperous life in Sparta, but surrounded by hate and bitterest scorn, and hearing always within her own heart the voice of self-contempt!

William Cranston Lawton.

NOTE. — Some readers may desire to pursue further the questions as to the origin and growth of epic poetry, here touched upon in passing. In an essay of this character it is of course impracticable to quote authorities or to elaborate arguments. The writer’s seniors and masters, the classical professors, will understand that no attempt has been made at originality. To younger students the compact little monograph entitled Homer, by Professor Jebb, is especially recommended. Evelyn Abbott’s new History of Greece, Vol. I., contains a clear and cautious summary of the “ Homeric questions.” Those who read German will find in the appendix to the Ameis-Hentze editions an exhaustive discussion of all questions concerning the text of the Iliad and Odyssey. Before venturing into so bewildering a labyrinth, however, some simpler and more readable book, like the rather one-sided but rapid and stimulating essay of Niese, Die Entwickelung der Homerischen Poesie, will be found helpful. Still briefer, but interesting, is the chapter devoted to Homer in Professor Christ’s new History of Greek Literature (in Müller’s Handbook). To the larger and happier class of readers who desire to appreciate the artistic unity and ethical significance of the poem, rather than to dissect it in minute detail, the beautiful and inspiring essay of Professor Denton J. Snider (Homer’s Iliad, Journal of Speculative Philosophy, April, 1883) is most earnestly commended.