the resemblance which these homeric poems bear, in many remarkable features, to the romances of medi?val chivalry, has been long ago remarked, and has already been incidentally noticed in these pages. the peculiar caste of kings and chiefs—or kings and knights, as they are called in the arthurian and carlovingian tales—before whom the unfortunate “churls” tremble and fly like sheep, is a feature common to both. “then were they afraid when they saw a knight”—is the pregnant sentence which, in mallory’s ‘king arthur,’ reveals a whole volume of social history; for the knight, in the particular instance, was but riding quietly along, and there ought to have been no reason why the “churls” should dread the sight of a professed redresser of grievances. but even so ulysses condescends to use no argument to this class but the active use of his staff; and achilles dreads above all things dying “the death of a churl” drowned in a brook. it is only the noble, the priest, and the divine bard who emerge into the light of romance. the lives and feelings of the mere{v.ii-126} toilers for bread are held unworthy of the minstrel’s celebration. just as in the early romances of christendom we do not get much lower in the social scale than the knight and the lady, the bishop and the wizard, so in these homeric lays—even in the more domestic odyssey, unless we make eum?us the exception—the tale still clings to the atmosphere of courts and palaces, and ignores almost entirely, unless for the purpose of drawing out a simile or illustration, the life-drama of the great mass of human kind. in both these cycles of fiction we find represented a state of things—whether we call it the “heroic age” or the “age of chivalry”—which could hardly have existed in actual life; and in both the phase of civilisation, and the magnificence of the properties and the scenery, seem far beyond what the narrators could have themselves seen and known.
the character of the hero must not be judged by modern canons of morality. with all the honest purpose and steadfast heart which we willingly concede to him, we cannot but feel there is a shiftiness in his proceedings from first to last which scarcely savours of true heroism. we need not call him, as thersites does in shakespeare, “that dog-fox ulysses,” nor even go quite so far as to look upon him as what a modern translator terms him, “the scapin of epic poetry;” but we see in him the embodiment of prudence, versatility, and expediency, rather than of the nobler and less selfish virtues. ulysses, both in the iliad and in the odyssey, is the diplomatist of his age; and it is neither his fault nor homer’s that the diplomacy of that date was less refined, and less skilful in veiling its coarser features.{v.ii-127} even in much later times, dissimulation has been held an indispensable quality in rulers;[45] and an english philosopher tells us plainly that “the intriguing spirit, the overreaching manner, and the over-refinement of art and policy, are naturally incident to the experienced and thorough politician.”[46] at the same time, it must be remembered that ulysses employs deceit only where it was recognised and allowed by the moral code of the age—against his enemies; he is never for a moment otherwise than true to his friends. nay, while the kings and leaders in the iliad are too fairly open to the reproach of holding cheap the lives and the interests of the meaner multitude who followed them, ulysses is, throughout his long wanderings, the sole protecting providence, so far as their wilfulness will allow him, of his followers as well as of himself.
the tale of his wanderings has been a rich mine of wealth for poets and romancers, painters and sculptors, from the dim date of the age which we call homer’s down to our own. in this wonderful poem, be its authorship what it may, lie the germs of thousands of the volumes which fill our modern libraries. not that all their authors are either wilful plagiarists or even conscious imitators; but because the greek poet, first of all whose thoughts have been preserved to us in writing, touched, in their deepest as well as their lightest tones, those chords of human action and passion which find an echo in all hearts and in all ages.
first, that is to say, of all whose utterances we re{v.ii-128}gard as merely human. there are, indeed, other recorded utterances to which the song of homer, unlike as it is, has yet wonderful points of resemblance. for the student of scripture, the prince of heathen poets possesses a special interest. it is quite unnecessary to insist upon the actual connection which some enthusiastic champions of sacred literature have either traced or fancied between the lays of the greek bard and the inspired records of the chosen people. whether the hebrew chronicles, in any form, could have reached the eye or ear of the poet in his many wanderings is, to say the least, extremely doubtful. but homer bears an independent witness to the truth and accuracy of the sacred narrative, so far as its imagery and diction are to be taken into account, which is very remarkable and valuable. allowing for the difference in the local scenery, the reader of the iliad may well fancy at times that he is following the night-march of abraham, the conquests of joshua, or the wars of the kings; while in the odyssey the same domestic interiors, the same primitive family life, the same simple patriarchal relations between the king or chief of the tribe and his people, remind us in every page of the fresh and living pictures of the book of genesis. fresh and living the portraits still are, in both cases, after the lapse of so many centuries, because in both the writers drew faithfully from what was before their eyes, without any straining after effect—without any betrayal of that self-consciousness which spoils many an author’s best work, by forcing his own individuality upon the reader instead of that of the scenes and persons whom he repre{v.ii-129}sents. to trace the many points of resemblance between these two great poems and the sacred records as fully as they might be traced would require a volume in itself. it may be enough in these pages shortly to point out some few of the many instances in which homer will be found one of the most interesting, because assuredly one of the most unconscious, commentators on the bible.
the homeric kings, like those of israel and judah, lead the battle in their chariots: priam sits “in the gate,” like david or solomon: ulysses, when he would assert his royalty, stands by a pillar, as stood joash and josiah. their riches consist chiefly in “sheep and oxen, men-servants and maid-servants.” when ulysses, in the iliad, finds diomed sleeping outside his tent,—“and his comrades lay sleeping around him, and under their heads they had their shields, and their spears were fixed in the ground by the butt-end”[47]—we have the picture, almost word for word, of saul’s night-bivouac when he was surprised by david: “and behold, saul lay sleeping within the trench, and his spear stuck in the ground at his bolster, and the people lay round about him.” ulysses and diomed think it not beneath their dignity, as kings or chiefs, to act what we should consider the part of a spy, like gideon in the camp of the midianites. lycurgus the thracian slays with an ox-goad, like shamgar in the book of judges. the very cruelties of warfare are the same—the insults too frequently{v.ii-130} offered to the dead body of an enemy, “the children dashed against the stones”—the miserable sight which priam foresees in the fall of his city, as isaiah in the prophetic burden of babylon.[48]
the outward tokens of grief are wholly eastern. achilles, in the iliad, when he hears of the death of his friend patroclus—laertes, in the odyssey, when he believes his son’s return hopeless—throw dust upon their heads, like joshua and the elders of israel when they hear of the disaster at ai. king priam tears his hair and beard in his vain appeal to hector at the sc?an gates, as ezra does, when he hears of the trespasses of the jewish princes.[49] penelope sits “on the threshold” to weep, just as moses “heard the people weeping, every man in the door of his tent.” “call for the mourning women,” says the prophet jeremiah,[50] “that they may come; and let them make haste, and take up a wailing for us.” so when the trojan king bears off his dead son at last to his own palace, the professional mourners are immediately sent for—“the bards, to begin the lament.”[51] as moses carries forth the bones of joseph into canaan, and david gathers carefully those of saul and jonathan from the men of jabesh-gilead, so nestor charges the greeks, when they have almost determined to quit troy in despair, to carry the bones of their slain comrades home to their native land. sarpedon’s body is borne to his native lycia, there to be honoured “with a mound and with a column”—as jacob set up a pillar for his dead{v.ii-131} rachel on the road by bethlehem. the philistines, after the battle of gilboa, bestow the armour of saul in the house of their goddess ashtaroth: the sword of goliath is laid up as a trophy with the priest ahimelech, “wrapped in a cloth behind the ephod;”[52] even so does hector vow to hang up the armour of menelaus in the temple of apollo in troy.
the more peaceful images have the same remarkable likeness. the fountain in the island of ithaca, faced with stone, the work of the forefathers of the nation, ithacus and neritus, recalls that “well of the oath”—beer-sheba—which abraham dug, or that by which the woman of samaria sat, known as “the well of our father jacob.” the stone which the goddess minerva upheaves to hurl against mars, which “men of old had set to be a boundary of the land”—the two white stones,[53] of unknown date and history even in the poet’s own day, of which he doubts whether they be sepulchral or boundary, which achilles made the turning-point for the chariot-race,—these cannot fail to remind us of the stones bohan and ebenezer, and of the warning in the proverbs—“remove not the ancient landmark, which thy fathers have set up.” the women grinding at the mill, the oxen treading out the corn, the measure by cubit, the changes of raiment, the reverence due to the stranger and to the poor,—the dowry given by the bridegroom, as by way of purchase, not received with the bride,—all these are as familiar to us in the books of moses as in the{v.ii-132} poems of homer. the very figures of speech are the same. the passionate apostrophe of moses and isaiah—“hear, o heavens, and give ear, o earth”—is used by juno in the iliad, and by calypso in the odyssey.[54] “day” is commonly employed as an equivalent for fate or judgment; “the half of one’s kingdom” is held to be a right royal gift; “the gates of hell” are the culmination of evil. telemachus swears “by the woes of his father,” as jacob does “by the fear of his father isaac;” and the curse pronounced on ph?nix by his father—“that never grandchild of his begetting might sit upon his knees”[55]—recalls the sacred text in which we are told that “the children of machir, the son of manasseh, were brought up on joseph’s knees.”
many and various have been the theories of interpretation which have been employed, by more or less ingenious writers, to develop what they have considered the inner meaning of the poet’s tale. such speculations began at a very early date in literary history. they were current among greek philosophers in the days of socrates, but he himself would not admit them. it is impossible, and would be wearisome even if it were possible, to discuss them all. but one especially must be mentioned, not wholly modern, but which has won much favour of late in the world of scholars,—that in both poems we have certain truths of physical and astronomical science represented under an allegorical form, imported into greek fable from eastern sources. this theory is, to say the least, so inter{v.ii-133}esting and ingenious, that without presuming here to discuss its truth, it claims a brief mention. it may be fairest to put it in the words of one of its most enthusiastic advocates. so far as it applies to the odyssey, it stands thus:—
“the sun [ulysses] leaves his bride the twilight [penelope] in the sky, where he sinks beneath the sea, to journey in silence and darkness to the scene of the great fight with the powers of darkness [the siege of troy]. the ten weary years of the war are the weary hours of the night.... the victory is won: but the sun still longs to see again the beautiful bride from whom he parted yester-eve. dangers may await him, but they cannot arrest his steps: things lovely may lavish their beauty upon him, but they cannot make him forget her.... but he cannot reach his home until another series of ten long years have come to an end—the sun cannot see the twilight until another day is done.”[56]
so, in the iliad, as has been already noticed, paris and the trojans represent the powers of darkness, “who steal away the beautiful twilight [helen] from the western sky;” while achilles is the sun, who puts to rout these forces of the night.[57]
in contrast, though not necessarily in contradiction, to this physical allegory, stands the moral interpretation, a favourite one with some of the medi?val stu{v.ii-134}dents of homer, which sees in the odyssey nothing less than the pilgrimage of human life—beset with dangers and seductions on every side, yet blessed with divine guidance, and reaching its goal at last, through suffering and not without loss. every point in the wanderings of the hero has been thus made to teach its parable, more or less successfully. the different adventures have each had their special application: circe represents the especially sensual appetites; the lotus-eating is indolence; the sirens the temptations of the ear; the forbidden oxen of the sun the “flesh-pots of egypt”—the sin of gluttony. it is at least well worthy of remark how, throughout the whole narrative, the false rest is brought into contrast with the true. not in the placid indolence of the lotus-eaters, not in the luxurious halls of circe or in the grotto of calypso, nor even in the joyous society of the ph?acians, but only in the far-off home, the seat of the higher and better affections, is the pilgrim’s real resting-place. the key-note of this didactic interpretation, which has an undoubted beauty and pathos of its own, making the old greek poet, like the mosaic law, a schoolmaster to christian doctrine, has been well touched by a modern writer:—
“o beautiful and strange epitome
of this our life, while through the tale we trace
homeless ulysses on the land and sea!
from childhood to old age it is the face
of heaven-lost, yearning man: from place to place
whether he wander forth abroad, or knows
no change but of home-nature and of grace,{v.ii-135}
still is he as one seeking for repose—
a man of many thoughts, a man of many woes.”[58]
some of the early religious commentators pushed such interpretations to extravagance; they dealt with homer as the extreme patristic school of theology dealt with the old testament: they so busied themselves in seeking for mystical interpretations in every verse, that they held the plain and literal meaning of the text as of almost secondary importance. it was said of one french scholar—d’aurat—a man of some learning, that he spent his life in trying to find all the bible in homer. such men saw paradise disguised in the gardens of alcinous; the temptation of the chaste bellerophon was but a pagan version of the story of joseph; the fall of troy evidently prefigured, to their fancy, the destruction of jerusalem. some went even further, and turned this tempting weapon of allegory against their religious opponents: thus doctor jacobus hugo saw the lutheran heretics prefigured in the lotus-eaters of the odyssey, and thought that the reckless antinous was a type of martin luther himself. those who are content to take homer as he is, the poet of all ages, without seeking to set him up either as a prophet or as a moral philosopher, may take comfort from, the brief criticism of lord bacon upon all over-curious interpretation—“i do rather think the fable was first, and the exposition devised after.” the most ingenious theories as to the hidden{v.ii-136} meaning of the song are at best but the mists which the homerists have thrown round their deity—
“the moony vapour rolling round the king.”
he moves among them all, a dim mysterious figure, but hardly less than divine.
