Homer and His Age | Page 3

that later poets should adhere, or even try to adhere, to
the minute details of law, custom, opinion, dress, weapons, houses, and
so on, as presented in earlier lays or sagas on the same set of subjects.
Even less are poets in uncritical times inclined to "archaise," either by
attempting to draw fancy pictures of the manners of the past, or by
making researches in graves, or among old votive offerings in temples,
for the purpose of "preserving local colour." The idea of such
archaising is peculiar to modern times. To take an instance much to the
point, Virgil was a learned poet, famous for his antiquarian erudition,
and professedly imitating and borrowing from Homer. Now, had Virgil
worked as a man of to-day would work on a poem of Trojan times, he
would have represented his heroes as using weapons of bronze.
[Footnote: Looking back at my own poem, Helen of Troy (1883), I find
that when the metal of a weapon is mentioned the metal is bronze.] No
such idea of archaising occurred to the learned Virgil. It is "the iron"
that pierces the head of Remulus (Aeneid, IX. 633); it is "the iron" that
waxes warm in the breast of Antiphates (IX. 701). Virgil's men, again,
do not wear the great Homeric shield, suspended by a baldric: AEneas
holds up his buckler (clipeus), borne "on his left arm" (X. 26 i). Homer,
familiar with no buckler worn on the left arm, has no such description.

When the hostile ranks are to be broken, in the Aeneid it is "with the
iron" (X. 372), and so throughout.
The most erudite ancient poet, in a critical age of iron, does not
archaise in our modern fashion. He does not follow his model, Homer,
in his descriptions of shields, swords, and spears. But, according to
most Homeric critics, the later continuators of the Greek Epics, about
800-540 B.C., are men living in an age of iron weapons, and of round
bucklers worn on the left arm. Yet, unlike Virgil, they always give their
heroes arms of bronze, and, unlike Virgil (as we shall see), they do not
introduce the buckler worn on the left arm. They adhere
conscientiously to the use of the vast Mycenaean shield, in their time
obsolete. Yet, by the theory, in many other respects they innovate at
will, introducing corslets and greaves, said to be unknown to the
beginners of the Greek Epics, just as Virgil innovates in bucklers and
iron weapons. All this theory seems inconsistent, and no ancient poet,
not even Virgil, is an archaiser of the modern sort.
All attempts to prove that the Homeric poems are the work of several
centuries appear to rest on a double hypothesis: first, that the later
contributors to the ILIAD kept a steady eye on the traditions of the
remote Achaean age of bronze; next, that they innovated as much as
they pleased.
Poets of an uncritical age do not archaise. This rule is overlooked by
the critics who represent the Homeric poems as a complex of the work
of many singers in many ages. For example, Professor Percy Gardner,
in his very interesting _New chapters in Greek History_ (1892), carries
neglect of the rule so far as to suppose that the late Homeric poets,
being aware that the ancient heroes could not ride, or write, or eat
boiled meat, consciously and purposefully represented them as doing
none of these things. This they did "on the same principle on which a
writer of pastoral idylls in our own day would avoid the mention of the
telegraph or telephone." [Footnote: Op. cit., p. 142.] "A writer of our
own day,"--there is the pervading fallacy! It is only writers of the last
century who practise this archaeological refinement. The authors of
Beowulf and the Nibelungenlied, of the Chansons de Geste and of the

Arthurian romances, always describe their antique heroes and the
details of their life in conformity with the customs, costume, and
armour of their own much later ages.
But Mr. Leaf, to take another instance, remarks as to the lack of the
metal lead in the Epics, that it is mentioned in similes only, as though
the poet were aware the metal was unknown in the heroic age.
[Footnote: Iliad, Note on, xi. 237.] Here the poet is assumed to be a
careful but ill-informed archaeologist, who wishes to give an accurate
representation of the past. Lead, in fact, was perfectly familiar to the
Mycenaean prime. [Footnote: Tsountas and Manatt, p. 73.] The critical
usage of supposing that the ancients were like the most recent
moderns--in their archaeological preoccupations--is a survival of the
uncritical habit which invariably beset old poets and artists. Ancient
poets, of the uncritical ages, never worked "on the same principle as a
writer in