Homer and His Age | Page 9

Cyclic Poets; Odyssey, vol. ii, pp. 342-384.] They had ideas very different from those of the authors of the Iliad and ODYSSEY, as these ideas have reached us.
Helbig states this curious fact, that the Homeric poems are free from many recent or recrudescent ideas common in other Epics composed during the later centuries of the supposed four hundred years of Epic growth. [Footnote: Homerische Epos, p. 3.] Thus a signet ring was mentioned in the Ilias Puma, and there are no rings in Iliad or Odyssey. But Helbig does not perceive the insuperable difficulty which here encounters his hypothesis. He remarks: "In certain poems which were grouping themselves around the Iliad and Odyssey, we meet data absolutely opposed to the conventional style of the Epic." He gives three or four examples of perfectly un-Homeric ideas occurring in Epics of the eighth to seventh centuries, B.C., and a large supply of such cases can be adduced. But Helbig does not ask how it happened that, if poets of these centuries had lost touch with the Epic tradition, and had wandered into a new region of thought, as they had, examples of their notions do not occur in the Iliad and Odyssey. By his theory these poems were being added to and altered, even in their oldest portions, at the very period when strange fresh, or old and newly revived fancies were flourishing. If so, how were the Iliad and Odyssey, unlike the Cyclic poems, kept uncontaminated, as they confessedly were, by the new romantic ideas?
Here is the real difficulty. Cyclic poets of the eighth and seventh centuries had certainly lost touch with the Epic tradition; their poems make that an admitted fact. Yet poets of the eighth to seventh centuries were, by the theory, busily adding to and altering the ancient lays of the Iliad. How did they abstain from the new or revived ideas, and from the new genre of romance? Are we to believe that one set of late Ionian poets--they who added to and altered the Iliad--were true to tradition, while another contemporary set of Ionian poets, the Cyclics--authors of new Epics on Homeric themes--are known to have quite lost touch with the Homeric taste, religion, and ritual? The reply will perhaps be a Cyclic poet said, "Here I am going to compose quite a new poem about the old heroes. I shall make them do and think and believe as I please, without reference to the evidence of the old poems." But, it will have to be added, the rhapsodists of 800-540 B.C., and the general editor of the latter date, thought, we are continuing an old set of lays, and we must be very careful in adhering to manners, customs, and beliefs as described by our predecessors. For instance, the old heroes had only bronze, no iron,--and then the rhapsodists forgot, and made iron a common commodity in the Iliad. Again, the rhapsodists knew that the ancient heroes had no corslets--the old lays, we learn, never spoke of corslets--but they made them wear corslets of much splendour. [Footnote: The reader must remember that the view of the late poets as careful adherents of tradition in usages and ideas only obtains sometimes; at others the critics declare that archaeological precision is not preserved, and that the Ionic continuators introduced, for example, the military gear of their own period into a poem which represents much older weapons and equipments.] This theory does not help us. In an uncritical age poets could not discern that their genre of romance and religion was alien from that of Homer.
To return to the puzzle about the careful and precise continuators of the Iliad, as contrasted with their heedless contemporaries, the authors of the Cyclic poems. How "non-Homeric" the authors of these Cyclic poems were, before and after 660 B.C., we illustrate from examples of their left hand backslidings and right hand fallings off. They introduced (1) The Apotheosis of the Dioscuri, who in Homer (Iliad, III. 243) are merely dead men (Cypria). (2) Story of Iphigenia Cypria. (3) Story of Palamedes, who is killed when angling by Odysseus and Diomede (Cypria).
Homer's heroes never fish, except in stress of dire necessity, in the Odyssey, and Homer's own Diomede and Odysseus would never stoop to assassinate a companion when engaged in the contemplative man's recreation. We here see the heroes in late degraded form as on the Attic stage. (4) The Cyclics introduce Helen as daughter of Nemesis, and describe the flight of Nemesis from Zeus in various animal forms, a M?rchen of a sort not popular with Homer; an Ionic M?rchen, Mr. Leaf would say. There is nothing like this in the Iliad and Odyssey. (5) They call the son of Achilles, not Neoptolemus, as Homer does, but Pyrrhus. (6) They represent the