Homer and His Age | Page 9

none of these "more primitive phases of belief," none
of the recrudescent savage magic, was intruded by the late Ionian poets
into the Iliad which they continued, by the theory. Such phases of belief
were, indeed, by their time popular, and frequently appeared in the
Cyclic poems on the Trojan war; continuations of the ILIAD, which
were composed by Ionian authors at the same time as much of the
ILIAD itself (by the theory) was composed. The authors of these Cyclic
poems-- authors contemporary with the makers of much of the ILIAD--
were eminently "un-Homeric" in many respects. [Footnote: Cf. Monro,
The 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