Homer and His Age | Page 4

human figures drawn in geometrical forms, lines, and triangles, was quite unlike that of the Achaean age in many ways, for example, in mode of burial and in the use of iron for weapons. Mr. H. R. Hall, in his learned book, _The Oldest Civilisation of Greece_ (1901), supposes the culture described in the Homeric poems to be contemporary in Asia with that of this Dipylon period in Greece. [Footnote: Op. cit., pp. 49, 222.] He says, "The Homeric culture is evidently the culture of the poet's own days; there is no attempt to archaise here...." They do not archaise as to the details of life, but "the Homeric poets consciously and consistently archaised, in regard to the political conditions of continental Greece," in the Achaean times. They give "in all probability a pretty accurate description" of the loose feudalism of Mycenaean Greece. [Footnote: Op. cit., pp. 223, 225.]
We shall later show that this Homeric picture of a past political and social condition of Greece is of vivid and delicate accuracy, that it is drawn from the life, not constructed out of historical materials. Mr. Hall explains the fact by "the conscious and consistent" archaeological precision of the Asiatic poets of the ninth century. Now to any one who knows early national poetry, early uncritical art of any kind, this theory seems not easily tenable. The difficulty of the theory is increased, if we suppose that the Achaeans were the recent conquerors of the Mycenaeans. Whether we regard the Achaeans as "Celts," with Mr. Ridgeway, victors over an Aryan people, the Pelasgic Mycenaeans; or whether, with Mr. Hall, we think that the Achaeans were the Aryan conquerors of a non-Aryan people, the makers of the Mycenaean civilisation; in the stress of a conquest, followed at no long interval by an expulsion at the hands of Dorian invaders, there would be little thought of archaising among Achaean poets. [Footnote: Mr. Hall informs me that he no longer holds the opinion that the poets archaised.]
A distinction has been made, it is true, between the poet and other artists in this respect. Monsieur Perrot says, "The vase- painter reproduces what he sees; while the epic poets endeavoured to represent a distant past. If Homer gives swords of bronze to his heroes of times gone by, it is because he knows that such were the weapons of these heroes of long ago. In arming them with bronze he makes use, in his way, of what we call "local colour...." Thus the Homeric poet is a more conscientious historian than Virgil!" [Footnote: La Gr��te de l'Epop��e, Perrot et Chipiez, p. 230.]
Now we contend that old uncritical poets no more sought for antique "local colour" than any other artists did. M. Perrot himself says with truth, "the CHANSON DE ROLAND, and all the Gestes of the same cycle explain for us the Iliad and the Odyssey." [Footnote: op. cit., p. 5.] But the poet of the CHANSON DE ROLAND accoutres his heroes of old time in the costume and armour of his own age, and the later poets of the same cycle introduce the innovations of their time; they do not hunt for "local colour" in the CHANSON DE ROLAND. The very words "local colour" are a modern phrase for an idea that never occurred to the artists of ancient uncritical ages. The Homeric poets, like the painters of the Dipylon period, describe the details of life as they see them with their own eyes. Such poets and artists never have the fear of "anachronisms" before them. This, indeed, is plain to the critics themselves, for they, detect anachronisms as to land tenure, burial, the construction of houses, marriage customs, weapons, and armour in the Iliad and Odyssey. These supposed anachronisms we examine later: if they really exist they show that the poets were indifferent to local colour and archaeological precision, or were incapable of attaining to archaeological accuracy. In fact, such artistic revival of the past in its habit as it lived is a purely modern ideal.
We are to show, then, that the Epics, being, as wholes, free from such inevitable modifications in the picture of changing details of life as uncritical authors always introduce, are the work of the one age which they represent. This is the reverse of what has long been, and still is, the current theory of Homeric criticism, according to which the Homeric poems are, and bear manifest marks of being, a mosaic of the poetry of several ages of change.
Till Wolf published his Prolegomena to [blank space] (1795) there was little opposition to the old belief that the ILIAD and Odyssey were, allowing for interpolations, the work of one, or at most of two, poets. After the appearance of Wolfs celebrated book, Homeric critics have maintained, generally speaking, that