Studies on Homer and the Homeric Age, Vol. 3 of 3
TekstThree, however, among the Homeric characters, have been mangled by the later tradition much more cruelly than any others; they are those prime efforts of his mighty genius, Helen, Achilles, and Ulysses. The first, most probably, on account of the wonderful delicacy with which in Homer it is moulded: the others on account of their singular comprehensiveness and breadth of scope. Each of these three cases well deserves particular consideration.
Mutilation of the Helen of Homer.
In the case of Helen, the extreme tenderness of the colouring, that Homer has employed, multiplied infinitely the chances against its preservation. Among all the women of antiquity, she is by nature the most feminine, the finest in grain, though, as in many other instances, a certain slightness of texture is essentially connected with this fineness. Her natural softness is very greatly deepened by the double effect of her affliction and her repentance. A quiet and settled sadness broods over her whole image, and comes out not only when she weeps by the body of Hector, or when her husband’s presence reminds her of her offence, but even under the genial smiles and soothing words of old Priam on the wall. Vehement and agonizing passion draws deep strong lines, which, even in copies, may be easily caught and easily preserved; it is quite different with the profound though low-toned suffering, of which the passive influence, the penetrating tint, circulates as it were in every vein, and issues into view at every pore.
Helen of Euripides, Isocrates, Virgil.
Let us now consider how the character of Helen reappears in Euripides, in Isocrates, and in Virgil.
In the Agamemnon, Æschylus had designated her under the form of a pun, as ἑλέναυς ἑλεπτόλις; and these phrases, as they stand, cannot be said in any manner to force us beyond the limits of the Homeric tradition. But in the Hecuba she is cursed outright by the Chorus, and represented by Hecuba herself as having been the great agent, instead of the passive occasion and the suffering instrument, in the calamitous fall of Troy1048. In the Troades she is the shame of the country, the slayer of Priam, the willing fugitive from Sparta1049. Andromache denounces her in the fiercest manner, and gives her for her ancestors not Jupiter, but Death, Slaughter, Vengeance, Jealousy, and all the evils upon earth1050. Menelaus is furiously enraged, calls on his attendants to drag her in by her blood-guilty hair, will not give her the name of wife, will send her to Lacedæmon1051, there herself to die as a satisfaction to those whose death she has guiltily brought about. When she asks whether she may be heard in defence of herself, he answers summarily, no:
οὐκ ἐς λόγους ἐλήλυθ’, ἀλλά σε κτενῶν1052.
She then delivers a sophistical speech1053, and pleads, that she could not be guilty in yielding to a passion which even Jupiter could not resist, while she retaliates abuse on Menelaus for leaving her exposed to temptation. Quantum mutata! As respects Deiphobus, however, she declares that she only yielded to force, and that she was often detected, after the death of Paris, in endeavours to escape over the wall to the Greeks.
We have moreover an example, in the Helen painted by Euripides, of the rude manner in which characters not understood, and taken to be inconsistent by an age which had failed to understand them, were torn in pieces, and how the several fragments started anew, each for itself, on the stream of tradition. In Homer we have the touching contrast between the chastity of Helen’s mind, and the unlawful condition in which she lived. The latter, taken separately, was presumed to imply an unchaste soul; the former a lawful condition. Instead therefore of the one narrative, we have two; a shade or counterfeit of Helen plays the part of the adulteress with Paris, while the true and living Helen remains concealed in Egypt, keeping pure her husband’s bed, so that, though her name has become infamous, her body may remain untainted. This latter tradition is chiefly valuable, because it marks the mode of transition from the Homeric to the spurious representations, and the consciousness of the early poets, that they were not preserving the image drawn by Homer. No scheme, however, constructed of such flimsy materials, could live; and, naturally enough, the character of Helen the wife was forgotten, that of Helen the voluptuary was preserved.
From the vituperation and disgrace of Helen in most of the plays of Euripides, we pass to the elaborate panegyric handed down to us in the Ἐγκώμιον of Isocrates. The falsehood eulogistic is not less unsatisfying than the falsehood damnatory. For now, with the lapse of time, we find a further depression of the moral standard. We have here, in its most absolute form, the deification of beauty1054; ὃ σεμνότατον, καὶ τιμιώτατον, καὶ θειότατον τῶν ὄντων ἔστιν1055. But it is totally disjoined from purity. He does not warrant and support his eulogy upon Helen, by recurring to the true Homeric representation of her; but he boldly declares the high value of sensual enjoyment1056, commends the ambition of Paris to acquire an unrivalled possession and thereby a close affinity with the gods, and sees in the war only a proof of the immense and just estimation in which both parties held so great a treasure1057, without the smallest scruple as to the means by which it was to be acquired or held. From this picture we may pass on to the Helen of Virgil, which represents the destructive process in its last stage of exaggeration, and leaves nothing more for the spirit of havoc to devise.
In Æn. i. 650, Helen is declared to have sought Troy and unlawful nuptials, instead of having been carried off from home against her will. In Æn. vi. 513, she is represented as having made use of the religious orgies on the fatal night, to invite the Greeks into Troy; and, after first carefully removing all weapons for defence, she is said to have opened the apartment of her sleeping husband Deiphobus to Menelaus, in the hope that, by becoming accessory to a treacherous murder, she might disarm the resentment of one whom she had so deeply wronged. But even this passage has probably done less towards occupying the modern mind with the falsified idea of Helen, than one of most extraordinary scenic grandeur in the second Æneid; where Æneas relates how he saw her, the common curse of her own country and of Troy, crouching beside the altar of Vesta, amidst the lurid flames of the final conflagration, in order to escape the wrath of Menelaus.
Illa sibi infestos eversa ob Pergama Teucros
Et pœnas Danaûm et deserti conjugis iras
Præmetuens, Trojæ et patriæ communis Erynnis,
Abdiderat sese, atque aris invisa sedebat.
Æn. ii. 571-4.
And then, in language, the glowing magnificence of which serves to hide the very paltry character of the sentiment, Æneas proceeds to announce that he was about to slay the woman who, according to himself, had lived for ten years as a friend among his friends; when, at the right moment, his mother Venus appeared, and reminded him that on the whole he might do rather better to think about saving, if possible, his own father, wife, and boy.
Thus, in the Helen of Virgil, we have splendid personal beauty combined with an accumulation of the most profoundly odious moral features. She is lost in sensuality, a traitress alike to Greece and to Troy, willing to make miserable victims of others in the hope of purchasing her own immunity: all her deep remorse and sorrow, all her tenderness and modesty, are blotted out from her character, and the void places in the picture are filled by the detestation, with which both Greeks and Trojans regarded, as indeed they might well regard, such a monster. But let us pass on.
Achilles and Ulysses.
Among the many proofs of the vast scope of Homer’s mind, one of the most remarkable is to be found in the twin characters of his prime heroes or protagonists. It seems as if he had taken a survey of human nature in its utmost breadth and depth, and, finding that he had not the means to establish a perfect equilibrium between its highest powers when all in full development, had determined to represent them, with reference to the two great functions of intellect and passion, in two immortal figures. In each of the two, each of these elements has been represented with an extraordinary power, yet so, that the sovereignty should rest in Achilles as to the one, and in Ulysses as to the other. But the depth of emotion in Ulysses is greater than in any other male character of the poems, except Achilles; only it is withdrawn from view because so much under the mastery of his wisdom. And in like manner on the other hand, a far greater power, directed to the purpose of self-command and self-repression, is shown us in Achilles than in any other character except Ulysses; but this also is under partial eclipse, because the injustice, ingratitude, scorn, and meanness which Agamemnon concentrates in the robbery of a beloved object from him, appeal so irresistibly to the passionate side of his nature as to bring it out in overpowering proportions.
These being the leading ideas of the two characters, Homer has equipped each of them with the apparatus of a full-furnished man; and in apportioning to each his share of other qualities and accomplishments, he has made such a distribution as on the whole would give the best balance and the most satisfactory general result. Thus it is plain that the character of Achilles, covering as it did volcanic passions, was in danger of degenerating into phrensy. Homer has, therefore, assigned to him a peculiar refinement. His leisure is beguiled with song, consecrated to the achievements of ancient heroes; he has the finest tact, and is by far the greatest gentleman, of all the warriors of the poems; even personal ornaments to set off his transcendent beauty1058 are not beneath his notice, a trait which would have been misplaced in Ulysses, ludicrous in Ajax, and which is in Paris contemptible, but which has its advantage in Achilles, because it is a simple accessory subordinate to greater matters, and because, so far as it goes, it is a weight placed in the scale opposite to that which threatens to preponderate, and to mar by the strong vein of violence the general harmony of the character.
In the same way, as Ulysses is distinguished by a never-failing presence of mind, forethought, and mastery over emotion, so the danger for him lies on the side of an undue predominance of the calculating element, which threatens to reduce him from the heroic standard to the low level of a vulgar utilitarianism. Here, as before, Homer has been ready with his remedies. He exhibits to us this great prince and statesman as bearing also a character of patriarchal simplicity, and makes him, the profoundest and most astute man of the world, represent the very childhood of the human race in his readiness to ply the sickle or to drive the plough1059. Above all – and this is the prime safeguard of his character – he makes Ulysses a model for Greece of steady unvarying brightness in the domestic affections. The emotion of Hector in the Sixth Iliad, and of Priam in the Twenty-fourth, are not capable of comparison with those of Ulysses, because theirs constitute the central points of the characters, and likewise are the products of great junctures of danger and affliction respectively, while his exhibit and indeed compose a settled and standing bent of his soul. He alone, of all the chieftains who were beneath the walls of Troy, is full of the near recollection of his son, his Telemachus1060; his desire and ambition never pass indeed beyond barren Ithaca, and his daily thought through long years of wandering and detention is to return there1061, to see the very smoke curling upward from its chimneys, so that the charms of a goddess are a pain to him, because they keep him from Penelope1062.
Such was the care with which, in each of these great and wonderful characters, Homer provided against an exclusive predominance of their leading trait. But in vain. Achilles too, more slowly however than his rival, passed, with later authors, into the wild beast; Ulysses descended at a leap into the mere shopman of politics and war; and it is singular to see how, when once the basis of the character had been vulgarized, and the key to its movements lost, it came to be drawn in attitudes the most opposed to even the broadest and most undeniable of the Homeric traits.
Mutilation of the Ulysses of Homer.
There is nothing in the political character of Ulysses more remarkable, than his power of setting himself in sole action against a multitude; whether we take him in the government of his refractory crew during his wanderings; or in the body of the Horse, when a sound would have ruined the enterprize of the Greeks, so that he had to lay his strong hand over the jaws of the babbler Anticlus1063; or in the stern preliminaries to his final revenge upon the Suitors; or in his war with his rebellious subjects; or, above all, in the desperate crisis of the Second Iliad, when by his fearless courage, decision, and activity he saves the Greek army from total and shameful failure. And yet, much as the Mahometans1064 were railed at by the poets of Italy, indeed of England, in the character of image-worshippers, so Ulysses is held up to scorn in Euripides as a mere waiter upon popular favour. Thus in the Hecuba he is
ὁ ποικιλόφρων,
κόπις, ἡδύλογος, δημοχαρίστης.
Now, when the most glaring and characteristic facts of the narrative of Homer can be thus boldly traversed, there is scarcely room for astonishment at any other kind of misrepresentation. As when Hecuba laments, in the Troades1065, that her lot is to be the captive of the base, faithless, malignant, all-stinging maker of mischief. Such is the standing type of Ulysses in the after-tradition. Whenever anything bad, cruel, and above all mean, is to be done, he is the ever-ready, and indeed thoroughly Satanic, instrument.
The Second Epistle of the First Book of Horace is full of interest with reference to this subject, because in it he gives us the result of his recent re-perusal of the Homeric poems at Præneste. And, accordingly, we find here a great improvement upon the Ulysses of the Greek drama. He seems to have struck Horace at this time more forcibly, or more favourably, than any other Homeric character; for, after describing in strong terms what was amiss both within and without the walls of Troy, he makes this transition1066;
Rursus, quid virtus et quid sapientia possit,
Utile proposuit nobis exemplar Ulyssen.
He considers this hero as the conqueror of Troy, and notices his self-restraint and indomitable courage in adversity. Such was the advantage of an impression fresh from the Homeric text, instead of those drawn from the muddy source of the current traditions. It does not diminish but enhances the compliment, when the acute but Epicurean writer goes on to intimate, in more than half-earnest, that these virtues of Ulysses were too high for imitation, and that he himself was content rather to emulate the suitors of Penelope, and the easy life of the youths about Alcinous1067.
But if some small instalment of justice was thus done by Horace to the Homeric Ulysses, Virgil withdrew the boon, and was careful to reproduce, without mitigation or relief, the worst features of the worst form of the character. With him it is Ulysses who is chosen to play the slayer of Palamedes and the betrayer of Sinon1068, and to lead the party which, conducted by Helen, was to massacre Deiphobus in his chamber1069. On account of his fierce cruelty, even the ‘ground is cursed for his sake;’ poor Ithaca is loaded with imprecations by Æneas as he passes near it. Once he is called infelix, the greatest compliment that he anywhere receives; but his name in few cases escapes the affix of some abusive epithet, drawn alike from inhumanity or from cunning, it seems to matter little from which1070.
Of the Achilles of Homer.
The character of Achilles was more fortunate, in the handling it experienced from the Greek drama, than that of Ulysses. In the Iphigenia of Euripides, the hero of the Iliad appears as a faithful lover, and as a gallant and chivalrous warrior. At the same time, it has lost altogether the breadth of touch and largeness of scope, with which it is drawn in Homer. We miss entirely that unfathomable power of intellect, of passion, and also of bodily force, all combined in one figure, which carry the Achilles of Homer beyond every other human example in the quality of sheer grandeur, and make it touch the limits of the superhuman. There is nothing said or done by the Achilles of Euripides, nothing reported of him or assigned to him, no impression borne into a reader’s mind concerning him, which would not have been perfectly suitable to other warriors; for example, to the Diomed of Homer. He falls back into a class, and becomes a simple member of it, instead of being a creation paramount and alone; alone, like Olympus amidst the mountains of Greece; alone for ever in his sublimity, amidst the famous memories of other heroes, no less truly than he was alone in his solitary encampment during the continuance of the Wrath.
With Pindar Achilles appears in a different dress. He is here conceived without mind, as a youth marvellous in strength, hardihood, and swiftness of foot, growing up into a mighty warrior1071. The Achilles of Pindar is but as a pebble broken away from the mountain-mass of Homer.
Catullus, in his beautiful poem on the Nuptials of Peleus and Thetis, had a rare opportunity of setting forth the glories of Achilles. And he is in fact made the main subject of the nuptial song, properly so called; yet nothing of him is really celebrated by the poet1072, except his valour and his swiftness; all the rest is simple amplification and embellishment. It seems by this time to have been wholly forgotten, that the Homeric Achilles had a soul.
The discernment of Horace did not here enable him, as it had enabled him before, to escape from the popular delusions,
Scriptor honoratum si forte reponis Achillem,
Impiger, iracundus, inexorabilis, acer,
Jura neget sibi nata, nihil non arroget armis1073.
The character is exhibited here in a light at once feeble and misleading, for its cardinal point is made to be the supremacy of force over right. Now in Homer it is a sense that right has been deeply violated, which serves for the very groundwork out of which his exasperation rises. He does not view the question as one of meum and tuum only, or even mainly. His eye is first upon the gross wrong done, and only then upon himself as the subject of it. He resists Agamemnon’s claim1074 for a compensation at the very first, when it is urged, not against him, but against the Greeks at large1075; and he bursts out into indignant vituperation of the greedy king before Agamemnon has threatened to take Briseis, and when he has only insisted that, if the Greeks do not compensate him, he will then help himself to the prize either of Achilles or of Ajax or of Ulysses. In truth he is the assertor of the supremacy of law over will, much more than of force over law; and there is the greatest difference between pushing a sound and true principle even to gross excess, and proceeding from the outset upon a false one. The former, not the latter, is the case of the Achilles of the Iliad.
The Achilles of Statius.
The poet Statius observed, with sagacity enough, that the Achilles of Homer was but a torso; that the Iliad had only allowed him to be exhibited in one light, as it were, and at a single juncture of his career. So he resolved to profit by the ungotten mine, and to found a poem on the whole Achilles, child and man, in his rising, at his zenith, and in his setting blaze;
Nos ire per omnem
(Sic amor est) heroa velis …
… sed totâ juvenem deducere Trojâ1076.
We are therefore perhaps entitled to expect from him a fuller and more comprehensive grasp of the character than was usual, even although the narrative is broken off. The five books which remain of this work do not bring him so far as to the plains of Troy; but we leave him on the voyage from Scyros to Troas. They are chiefly occupied, therefore, with his residence there in the disguise of a maiden, and with the incidents of his sojourn.
Now the story of Achilles at Scyros, and of his connexion with Deidamia, harmonizes with one side of his character as it is drawn in Homer. It is evident that his personal beauty was not less graceful than manful; and he alone of the Greek chieftains is related to have worn ornaments of gold. Therefore that in the days of his boyhood he should wear the dress of maidens, and pass for one of them, is at any rate in accordance with a particular point of the Homeric tradition, though little adequate to its lofty tone as a whole. But this particular point is just what Statius contrives wholly to let drop. He shows us Achilles like the sham Anne Page, in the Merry Wives of Windsor1077, ‘as a great lubberly boy,’ neither careful nor able to give any grace to the movement of his limbs. For, in the dance, he would break the heart of any rightminded master of the ceremonies:
Nec servare vices, nec jungere brachia, curat:
Tunc molles gressus, tunc aspernatur amictus
Plus solito, rumpitque choros, et plurima turbat.
Nor does this writer appear at all to have apprehended the main ideas of the Homeric character. In the Iliad, the education which Achilles receives is the ordinary education of men of his rank, and his transcendent powers in after-life are due to a just, yet no more than a just, development of his extraordinary original gifts. But in Statius he is represented as having owed everything to the peculiar training of Chiron; whose semiferine life he shared, so that his diet in childhood consisted of the raw entrails of lions, and the marrow of half-dead she-wolves! His mind, indeed, was not overlooked amidst these brutalities, for he exhausts a long catalogue of acquirements; but Statius, as might be expected, completely drops out of his political education what is its one grand element in Homer, namely, the art of government over man by speech. Instead of this, Chiron the Centaur merely teaches him those abstract rules of right, by which he had himself been wont to govern Centaurs1078.
To the same age with the Achilleis of Statius belongs the Troades of Seneca. However this play may be criticized, as a study, like the others of the same author, for the closet only, and however it may betray the choice of Euripides for a model, it seems to be by some degrees better, in the conception and use of some famous Homeric characters, than any production since the time of Æschylus. The delineation of Andromache, if it has not ceased to be theatrical, is full at least of intense affection, all still centring in Hector. Ulysses, though reviled by that matron in her passionate grief, at least does the humane action of allowing her a little time to weep before the sentence of Calchas is executed upon Astyanax, and shows something too of the intellect of his antitype1079. Helen is exhibited not as vicious, but as wanting in firmness of character. She is driven by solicitation into the offence of alluring Polyxena to her immolation, under the name of a bridal with Neoptolemus; commences the performance of this false part with self-reproach, and then, challenged by Andromache, quits it and avows the truth1080.
But here we find a new form of departure from the ancient and genuine tradition. The principal motive, assigned by Seneca to the Greeks for putting Astyanax to death, is a terrified recollection of his father Hector, and a dread lest, upon attaining to manhood, he should avenge his own country against Greece. Again, Andromache, as it were, intimidates Ulysses, by invoking the shade of her husband:
Rumpe fatorum moras;
Molire terras, Hector, ut Ulyssen domes!
Vel umbra satis es1081.
A strange inversion of the relations drawn by Homer.
During all the time, however, in which we moved among the Greeks and among the earlier Romans, the corrupting process acted only upon each of the Homeric creations by itself, and there was no cause at work, which went to alter and pervert wholesale their collective relations to one another.
New relative position of Trojans and Greeks.
But from the period when the Æneid appeared, or at least so soon as it became the normal poem of the Roman literature, a new cause was in operation which, without mitigating in any degree the previous depraving agencies, introduced a new set of them, and began to disturb the positions of the two grand sets of characters, Greek and Trojan, relatively to one another.
Virgil had sought to give to the Cæsars the advantage of a hold upon royal antiquity by fabulous descent. He had before him the choice between Greece and Troy, which alike and alone enjoyed a world-wide honour. He could not hesitate which to select. The Greek histories were too near and too well known. Besides, the Greek dynasties generally had dwindled before they disappeared. The splendour of the Pelopids in particular had been quenched in calamity and crime, and no other of the Homeric lines had attained to greatness in political influence or historic fame. But the family of Priam had fallen gloriously in fighting for hearth and altar: it had disappeared from history in its full renown, ‘Magna mei sub terras ibat imago.’ Virgil chose too the house which was most ancient, and which traced link by link, as that of Agamemnon did not, a known and a named lineage up to Jupiter.
From this cause, both in the Æneid itself and afterwards, the Trojan characters were set upon stilts, and the Greeks were left to take their chance. Besides the loss of equilibrium, and the allowed predominance of coarser elements, which we have to lament in the Greek handling of them, we now see them pass, with the Romans, even into insignificance. The Diomed of Arpi is a person wholly unmarked; and he, like all the rest of his countrymen, is treated by Virgil simply as an instrument for obtaining enhanced effect, in the interest that he endeavours to concentrate on his Trojan characters; whereas the key to all Homer’s dispositions in the Iliad is to be found in the recollection, that he dealt with everything Trojan in the manner which was recommended and required by his Greek nationality. From this time forward, we find the palm both of valour and of wisdom clean carried over from the Greek to the Trojan side: the heroes of Homer remain, like unhewn boulders on the plain, crude, gross, and reciprocally almost indistinguishable masses of cunning or ferocity.
Virgil gave the tone in this respect, not only to the literature of ancient Rome, but to that of Christian Italy. For this reason, we may presume, among others, Orlando, the prime hero of the Italian romance, is, as I have before observed, modelled upon Hector. He is in many respects a very grand conception. Pulci, in describing his death, rises even to the sublime when he says there is
‘Un Dio, ed una Fede, ed uno Orlando.’
Which we may render in prose ‘One God, one way to God, one true type of manhood.’ Still it is remarkable that in Bojardo, as well as in Ariosto, the purer traces of the Homeric arrangement thus far at least remain, that Orlando, although he is the type of the Christian chivalry, yet, as he resembles Hector in piety and virtue, so likewise retains his likeness in this respect, that he is not the most formidable or valiant warrior of the poems. In Ariosto particularly, he is made inferior to Mandricardo, to Rodomonte, and most of all, but this for personal and prudential reasons, to Ruggiero. These three perhaps may be considered as being respectively the Ajax, the Diomed, and the Achilles of the Orlando Furioso.
And now the fancy for derivation from a Trojan stock, of which Virgil had set the fashion, was fully developed. Ariosto, at great length and in the most formal manner, establishes this lineage for his patrons, the family of Este. Others followed him. The humour passed even beyond the limits of Italy, into these then remote isles. A Trojan origin was ascribed to the English nation, and the authority of Homer, as to characters and history, was openly renounced by Dryden.
‘My faithful scene from true records shall tell
How Trojan valour did the Greek excel:
Your great forefathers shall their fame regain,
And Homer’s angry ghost repine in vain1082.’
In Oxford, at the revival of classical letters, the name of Trojans was assumed by those who were adverse to the new Greek studies, and who, having nothing but a name to rely on, doubtless chose the best they could.
The Imitations by Tasso.
Throughout the ‘Jerusalem’ of Tasso, we find imitations which are invested with greater interest than the remote copies commonly in circulation, because, from the large infusion of many leading arrangements, copied from Homer, into the plot of the poem, we may conclude with reason that they were in all likelihood drawn immediately from the original. Some of these personages, too, are in so far closely imitated from Homer, that Tasso has spent little or nothing of his own upon them, but has simply equipped them with as much of the Homeric idea as he thought available.
The most successful among them is Godfrey, modelled, but also perhaps improved, upon Agamemnon, who is by no means in my view one of the greater characters of the Iliad, though he has been incautiously called by Mitford ‘ambitious, active, brave, generous, and humane1083.’ Agamemnon has indeed that primary and fundamental qualification for his office, the political spirit, so to term it, and the sense of responsibility, which are so well developed in Godfrey; but it is doubtful whether he is entitled to be called either thoroughly brave, or at all generous or humane. Agamemnon’s character is admirably adapted to its place and purpose in the Iliad; in any more general view, Godfrey’s both stands higher in the moral sphere, and perhaps forms by itself a better poetic whole.