Homer and His Age | Page 8

1892.] They
are not Volkspoesie; they are not ballads. "It is now generally
recognised that this conception is radically false."
These opinions, in which we heartily agree--there never was such a
thing as a "popular" Epic--were published fourteen years ago. Mr. Leaf,
however, would not express them with regard to "our" Iliad and
Odyssey, because, in his view, a considerable part of the Iliad, as it
stands, was made, not by Court bards in the Achaean courts of Europe,
not for an audience of noble warriors and dames, but by wandering
minstrels in the later Ionian colonies of Asia. They did not chant for a
military aristocracy, but for the enjoyment of town and country folk at
popular festivals. [Footnote: Iliad, vol. i. p. xvi. 1900.] The poems were
begun, indeed, he thinks, for "a wealthy aristocracy living on the
product of their lands," in European Greece; were begun by
contemporary court minstrels, but were continued, vastly expanded,
and altered to taste by wandering singers and reciting rhapsodists, who
amused the holidays of a commercial, expansive, and bustling Ionian
democracy. [Footnote: Companion to the Iliad, p. II.]

We must suppose that, on this theory, the later poets pleased a
commercial democracy by keeping up the tone that had delighted an
old land-owning military aristocracy. It is not difficult, however, to
admit this as possible, for the poems continued to be admired in all
ages of Greece and under every form of society. The real question is,
would the modern poets be the men to keep up a tone some four or five
centuries old, and to be true, if they were true, to the details of the
heroic age? "It is not beyond the bounds of possibility that some part of
the most primitive Iliad may have been actually sung by the court
minstrel in the palace whose ruins can still be seen in Mycenae."
[Footnote: Leaf, Iliad, vol. i. p. xv.] But, by the expansionist theory,
even the oldest parts of our Iliad are now full of what we may call quite
recent Ionian additions, full of late retouches, and full, so to speak, of
omissions of old parts.
Through four or five centuries, by the hypothesis, every singer who
could find an audience was treating as much as he knew of a vast body
of ancient lays exactly as he pleased, adding here, lopping there,
altering everywhere. Moreover, these were centuries full of change.
The ancient Achaean palaces were becoming the ruins which we still
behold. The old art had faded, and then fallen under the disaster of the
Dorian conquest. A new art, or a recrudescence of earlier art, very
crude and barbaric, had succeeded, and was beginning to acquire form
and vitality. The very scene of life was altered: the new singers and
listeners dwelt on the Eastern side of the Aegean. Knights no longer, as
in Europe, fought from chariots: war was conducted by infantry, for the
most part, with mounted auxiliaries. With the disappearance of the war
chariot the huge Mycenaean shields had vanished or were very rarely
used. The early vase painters do not, to my knowledge, represent
heroes as fighting from war chariots. They had lost touch with that
method. Fighting men now carried relatively small round bucklers, and
iron was the metal chiefly employed for swords, spears, and arrow
points. Would the new poets, in deference to tradition, abstain from
mentioning cavalry, or small bucklers, or iron swords and spears? or
would they avoid puzzling their hearers by speaking of obsolete and
unfamiliar forms of tactics and of military equipment? Would they
therefore sing of things familiar--of iron weapons, small round shields,

hoplites, and cavalry? We shall see that confused and self-contradictory
answers are given by criticism to all these questions by scholars who
hold that the Epics are not the product of one, but of many ages.
There were other changes between the ages of the original minstrel and
of the late successors who are said to have busied themselves in adding
to, mutilating, and altering his old poem. Kings and courts had passed
away; old Ionian myths and religious usages, unknown to the Homeric
poets, had come out into the light; commerce and pleasure and early
philosophies were the chief concerns of life. Yet the poems continued
to be aristocratic in manners; and, in religion and ritual, to be pure from
recrudescences of savage poetry and superstition, though the Ionians
"did not drop the more primitive phases of belief which had clung to
them; these rose to the surface with the rest of the marvellous Ionic
genius, and many an ancient survival was enshrined in the literature or
mythology of Athens which had long passed out of all remembrance at
Mycenas." [Footnote: _Companion to the Iliad_, p. 7.]
Amazing to say,