UC-NRLF $B 13 725 EXCHANGE 7 if 2- y F 2-Z8 Elements of Unity in the Homeric Poems BY EDWARD FARQUHAR, Ph.D. Presented before the Columbian University as Thesis for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Reprinted from The Conservative Review of June and September, 1900 THE NEALE PUBLISHING COMPANY 431 Eleventh Street, N. W. Washington, D. C. , * * • M ■ ' % ELEMENTS OF UNITY IN THE HOMERIC POEMS By Edward Farquhar, Ph.D. Professor of History in the Corcoran Scientific School, Columbian University PART I. The reader who is more impressed with the sense of unity than of diversity in the composition of the Iliad, suffers a peculiar difficulty in debate with an opponent. It is not precisely that he is liable to the reproach of being a "poet" instead of a "professor," with consequent derogation from his standing as a judge in poetic matters; or a mere conservative unready for new truth : every student of Homer living has begun his study long since the Lay theory was familiar, inso- much that a reviewer lately appointed the centennial of Wolf's publication, 1895, as the date after which no writer of credit would contend for the unity; no unreasonable prog- nostic, if the other theory be essentially reasonable. The difficulty is rather, that certain conditions of the question throw such a reader's ideas and expressions into forms which by a sort of optical illusion seem to resemble those of con- tempt. What could be more repugnant to the proper feel- ing of one true scholar discussing with another? Yet the unpleasant result is often quite apparent. The grounds of the illusion seem to be of this kind: Contempt is the atti- tude of a mind which feels its position to be larger, broader, higher, as regarding one that appears to- be smaller, nar- rower, lower. The contemplation of a great object as a whole, with connection of parts in the form of unity, natu- rally fills the mind with impressions as of something ampler and more elevated than contemplation of the parts in frac- tion, without such unity. To the person occupying the for- mer point of view, one occupying the latter must inevitably 251772 j BfipentSfpf 4 Unity in the Homeric Poems seem to be thinking on a smaller scale, and ignoring the greater realities of the case in favor of the less. Things equal to the same thing being equal to each other, the ex- pression given to such distinctions on the part of the union- ist must, however involuntarily, assume a guise as of scorn; while a corresponding sentiment of derision will naturally arise on the other part, in view of an imaginary unity and sublimity construed against the facts; a proper attitude of mind if according to the evidence; very much as the claims of religion must be regarded by agnosticism. Which party has the facts at better command, and the more controlling ones, is the question. It gains nothing, except for the inter- ests of contention, to call appreciations of the larger reali- ties "instinct." so to discredit them as something unreason- ing and blindly emotional. We have only to do with actual perception of actual things. The amount of arbitrary "in- stinct" has not perhaps been rated, as between the unionists and separationists. The former need hardly fear the bal- ance. It is a particular triumph of the latest notable Eng- lish work on the subject, Mr. Lang's "Homer and the Epic," that it so successfully overcomes this natural disposition; and they of the other side may well adapt the wondering expression of a controversialist some ages since, that his ad- versary had "answered him more as a gentleman than as a theologian." A tendency of criticism has developed within the past cen- tury, quite befitting the era ushered in by Critical Philoso- phy and French Revolution, under which everything must be re-examined, and new basis found, or true basis cleared, for any faith that may remain. One direction of this ten- dency is to assume the tradition of the world as presumptive rather against than in favor of anything received, and so to question any great authorship wherever possible; then to seek throughout the works for evidences of discrepancy, which in proportion to the greatness of the work, that is its compass and richness, are sure to be found. It should be hastily protested that there is no intention of comparing the leading disintegrationists of the Iliad, personally, with such lilcmciits of Unity in the Homeric Poems 5 writers as some of those, for instance, who have lately had their hours of notoriety in connection with Shakespeare. They appear to he genuine scholars, widely acquainted with their subject and collateral ones, and as far as possible from the type of quack or ignoramus. But the peculiar feature is the compulsory reminder of the others' methods by theirs. In each case, there is first the assumption that the accredited author did not write the works, and thereupon a vast con- struction of probabilities supposing he did not, with none supposing that he did. In each there is ''fabulous diligence," exhaustive scrutiny of separate passages and particulars, with want of eye for larger facts and relations; in each a lack of apparent understanding what poetry is for. There is labo- rious reconstruction of past epochs as they are different and opposite from conditions of humanity ordinarily known, not as they resemble and partake of them : yet withal a curious insensibility to actual phases of human condition in other times. In the application of such methods, it is obvious, as just remarked, that the greater the work the easier will be the task. The fuller the genius, the more boundless the variety of production, the more incomparable and trans- cendent the creative faculty, hence the higher and more sov- ereign the individuality, the more readily must that produc- tion lend itself to such dismemberment, and the more certain will the process be to run its course, once the favorable time come on. What that course is likely to* be in our present case, we may see conclusively summed up in Goethe, chief epitome of these ages. He yields to- the tide awhile, then rights himself once for all above it, scorning nothing, reject- ing no contribution, only weighing and perceiving. If genius of this superlative character bears any relation to its fulness of times, there could be no occasion in the history of man, where it would be more entitled to appear than in the forming age of Greece. The achievement of the world thus far, the incomparable race and the epoch of that race, afford a setting for such a genius, marvelously analogous to the era as to the character of Shakespeare. In largest and profoundest relations, this is probably the greatest analogy 6 Elements of Unity in the Homeric Poems in literature. On a sufficient acquaintance, the very name of Shakespeare seems to carry with it solution of nearly all the problems as to unity of the Iliad, and all as to that of Iliad and Odyssey. All such instances as may follow will be merely specimens. It may be very probable that the language had been essentially the same longer, and the amount of litera- ture in his own kind larger, with the Greek than the Eng- lishman; but some other outlooks would not have been so broad. This analogy may curiously extend into the most important accessories of literature : Homer lived at a time when writing was in some degree of use, yet his work im- plies no relation with that art; Shakespeare at a time when printing was in use, yet his work — as dramatist, the subject of the analogy — bears no relation with that art, unless to avoid it. A book is lately out in England 1 treating of Shakespeare as the Homer of that land, in which the Plays are divided up very much as the Lays have been. This is a work which, not having seen, 1 rejoiced in, and wondered if its scope had been rightly apprehended. If it were simply a parody of methods applied to Homer, it might command a success which otherwise it need not hope. It is no* easy to see what of force there is in the one treatment which will not fairly transfer itself to the other. What is the nature of that individual genius, which, per- ceived throughout the Iliad, bears so irresistibly on the reader's mind the impression of its unity? since if no per- sonal Homer was ever known, we have then the most over- whelming attestation to that effect of unity, in the fact that from unknown antiquity one was always assumed." As with other highest or deepest things, it is much easier to describe by attributes than in essence. "Fire" may be the favorite characteristic assigned to the Iliad; but to isolate that attri- bute as if it contained or indicated all, is indeed to "speak 1 White's "Our English"Homer," i8g;>. -To meet this primeval testimony, a curious evidence of the effect in question comes forthwith in the past year. In Marchant's "Greek Anthology," there are extracts irom the various poets, among the rest from all the extant Dramatists, whose works assuredly were conscious unities; but none from Homer: on the ground that it is "idle to attempt to exhibit the great epics in selections." If Lachmannism or any form of lay theory were even approximately true, what a model opportunity for disengaging the true unit. Elements of Unity in the Homeric Poems 7 as boys." The dactyl-burst and spondee-march so like throughout this poem, so unlike anything else in literature except its softened echo in the Odyssey, has this element forever at hand, as the prophet has that of heaven; but it is only one of the modes. Arnold's "grand style," or "noble- ness of manner," is correct and definite, but it only describes an effect rather than expresses a personality; and this defi- ciency, masked under the grace of that master's style, ex- poses us to such a stroke of reasoning as that in the Athe- naeum's review of "Homer and the Epic" : several grand- style poets were known to> be writing at the same time, whom nobody could confound, therefore the Iliad, which nobody could separate except with scissors, was written by several. 1 Neither fire nor grandeur is Homer, only in him; though it may be said that grandeur being only in him, so much the grander he, as extending so far and wide beyond it. That the pathos of the Iliad should so wonderfully supplement its fire, is remarked in the book just mentioned: that the one is a necessary supplement to the other in the psychol- ogy of highest dramatic genius, appears to be only sug- gested there. They are action and reaction, in such a mind. Many a vivid talker will bring exciting events before the hearer's fancy with a graphic effect not far unlike that of Homer. Many a bright damsel, With living phrase and enchanting mimicry, can personate the various figures of a striking situation, till they breathe and move as quick as Shakespeare, for anything in the listener's immediate realization of the scene. What is the difference between such a dramatist and Shakespeare? This gay reciter prac- tices an adroit selection, giving only sharp external contrasts 1 There is something ghastly in the mode of apprehension and argumentation of this last unnamed writer. Shelley is quoted as saying that Homer is not himself till the latter part of the Iliad; hence the earliest parts are by somebody else. It would be a very natural ex- pression, in a mood, that Dante is not all himself till the last cantos of Inferno; therefore, Francesca and Farinata would be by another hand. Yet one little point, a point indeed in respect of dimension, I think is successfully made: I do not suppose Achilles, in his coun- sel to Patroclus, was thinking of Phoenix and Meleager; I doubt if he even listened to the interminable "yarn" of the evening before, in his turbid state of mind. I think, however, there is an implication of the Embassy, besides many others, in XVI 196, and context, where all the other Myrmidon leaders are introduced in full, with outfit of antecedents or at least genealogy, Phoenix alone being mentioned but by name; which would hardly be if he were not already a familiar acquaintance, and that has been only through the ninth book. But there is little need to hunt for such mention in the rush and crisis of the six- teenth book, where it does not belong, when it is so woven into the proceedings of the eighteenth and nineteenth, where it does. 8 Elements of Unity in the Homeric Poems and jutting outcomes; we see what the characters did, but nothing of what they are, or would do: especially in that latter kind of imagery, the effect is secured by very mutila- tion : the condition of success and source of the delicious fun being that a grotesque fraction or caricature rather than a whole existence is presented to us. In a Shakespeare, the persons are integral, and the tragic or comic relations of such persons are eventual; we have an image of a world, deepening and involving like a world, our enjoyments in it enduring and multiplying instead of evaporating. All the make-up and experience of the character seems present to the writer, so that many a passage of most ordinary expres- sion in itself, like Stephano's "Prythee do not turn me about, my stomach is not constant," after his seafaring, it is felt to be most pre-eminently Shakespearean, and impossible to others, as embodying this realization of his creatures in total instead of at mere prominent points. It is thus that small things form adequate parts of great things. Now of all who have written in epic form, or perhaps in any form, except Shakes- peare only, this fulness of impersonation is found in none other as in Homer. It is this that leaves the effect of other lays, other tales, other battles, so shadowy beside the Iliad. Not by lack of spirit; that may abound; but spirit in default of body is shade. It is not the Greek genius in comparison with another; there were plenty of bright Greeks, but with- out this attribute; there were none that had it in such meas- ure, not even the imperial dramatists. It is this which solves most of the difficulties that have torn the minds and the texts of separatists, as far as regards all manner of human situations. What possible trouble is to be found, for instance, with the rjirta etheij] of the six- teenth book, v. 72-3, as compared with the embassy of the ninth, if the reader will but realize Achilles? All he means is, "Things would have been very different if Agamemnon had known how to behave himself to me"; Achilles was mad with Agamemnon then, and he is mad now; and pre- cisely as Agamemnon's gifts and all his works were zx®P a then, he does not find them 7?7rm now — they had no power Elements of Unity in the Homeric Poems 9 to take away the reproach (IX 378-87); the expressions fit in his moods as if they had been framed tog-ether. It is strange, by the way, if it has not been seen that the "now will the Greeks come about my knees" of the eleventh book, suits better as it stands with the retrospect of the Embassy than without it, at least till the eighth book be dis- missed along with the ninth; for if after the overwhelming and unprecedented defeat of the eighth there had been no supplication, it were less likely in the slow retirement of the eleventh, and the mere wounding of Machaon, which was all Achilles witnessed. All was now in the way to happen, however, exactly as he predicted would happen in the ninth, or in the first, for that matter, and his words express to the very life the exultation of fulfilment. Does the different shade of feeling and view of facts when he is talking to Patroclus in the sixteenth conflict with those of his talk to the representatives of Agamemnon in the ninth? It must be a dramatic imagination indeed that stumbles here. A lesson might have been taken from the little old Platonic dialogue of Hippias the Less, where the sophist who has been so ready to reel off the characters of Achilles and Ulysses like thread from a drum, becomes so sorely tangled over these very contradictions and complexities; but not Socrates. So the high and bounding spirit of the opening eleventh better fits in sequence of the tenth than of the eighth or ninth; the tenth indeed may be guessed to have been introduced after the main composition of the poem, for such a purpose. But is it possible that the Exordium is commonly spared? In the cause of disintegration and interpolation, that would seem to be the first fatal step. The "Iliad of w 7 oes," which it is the burden of those seven lines to draw out in illimitable vista; the immense perspective and procession of disaster, all to be fulfilled in a part of one day's fighting; a few heroes flesh-wounded, and one, a companion only, killed. These solemn lines would hold no proportion at all with the deci- mated remnant of the Myvis ; the whole tide of fluctuation, the enlargement of the days and hours, and the fulness of io Elements of Unity in the Homeric Poems occurrence from the fourth book to the eighteenth, are re- quired to account for them. The first line should be left standing, single; then the sixth and seventh ones could be somehow joined upon it. The other four, obviously inter- polated. The proem stands or falls with the poem. There are many points of view in which the Iliad can only yield its sense as a conscious whole. Thus we are informed from the first, and it is specifically reaffirmed at the last, that the purpose of Zeus is to do special honor to Achilles. This is accomplished through a period of disaster and repair for which the whole Iliad is required, not a selection. It is often insisted that this purpose disappears, that we tire of the Trojan defeats during the absence of Achilles. But there are no defeats at all of the Trojan army. This has been mostly unused to venture on open battle, we are told, against Achilles. Now there are two full days of fighting; the first drawn, which is therefore a relative success for the Trojans, the second a crushing defeat of the Greeks. On the third they are going the same way, and are already pushed to the edge of destruction. It is only that the other Greek heroes need their day. Naturally, as these books, III-N, are the filling of a designed space rather than the de- signed filling of a space, there is less regular progression, wider amplitude, and an enlarging of each hero as he comes to full life, in these. Homer can no more be the laureate of a mere individual than Shakespeare. Perhaps nothing has more detracted from Homer in the general estimation than the notion that Achilles is his model hero. Achilles is often and partially in unfavorable contrast with men, always and wholly with the 'God; and the special moral of the Iliad might seem to be the lesson of his Satanic pride and self- centering, the sacrifice of public good to private passion, as clear a sin in the eyes of Homer as of a Christian Saint. Herein is the vital necessity of the ninth book, as one of the main foci of the poem, so well pointed out by Mr. Lang. Grote thinks that this book upsets the fundamental scheme of the Iliad, that scheme being ''a series of disasters to the Greeks," etc., which conception would seem a fundamental error on the part of the eminent historian. It is not for- Elements of Unity in the Homeric Poems n gotten, it is everywhere enforced, that the God thinks not as the man thinks; the chasm of this interval is what the genius of Homer fills. A vast deal must go counter and relationless to the mere file of the design on which the will of the man and of the deity are one. The grandeur of effect in the total Iliad far above all "grand style" in particular, dwells in this divinity of grasp; the true mastery, which knows all the motive and transcends it all. And the end is with the beginning; Aio? 8' ereXeiero BovXr). Achilles never could have foreseen, and we can but appreciate the amazing correlation of force by which the "wrath" can come to no end by the death of Patroclus and the discharge of hostility to Agamemnon, but now blazes first into reactive impre- cation upon wrath itself (XVIII 107-10), and then rushes to a new course in line with the more general will of Zeus, who makes the wrath to praise him. A course which works to its fitted end in the twenty-fourth book, and can have neither more nor less than that career. Once more it is the fulness, not the mere activity, which marks the great and individual master. Then the means by which that purpose is carried out, the grouping of events and personages involved, bear telling witness of unity, at least when we lay down the microscope for the field glass, which would seem the more proper im- plement for the scene of Homer. The various Achaian heroes, who must have their meed of glory, shine through the earlier books; and are one after another withdrawn, leav- ing none ascendant but the inexpugnable Ajax, whose stolid fortitude, powerfully as it comes to win upon the reader through the whole progress to its culmination at the end of the seventeenth book, is like a foil to Achilles, not as the splendor of Diomede or the wisdom of Ulysses. Yet even he is silently and judiciously withheld in the last battle, as in sheer valor his rivalry would be too close. Here is one of the true feats of the Iliad, one of the things most in keeping with profound and precious experience; where a character uninteresting at first, endears itself at last, to the depths, by unchangeable dog-like fidelity of simple strength. But this 12 Elements of l T nity in the Homeric Poems most vital effect is impossible, without the length of the epic. It is perfectly true that different hands may address them- selves to the development of the same character, as did the dramatists; but such work is not cumulative, rather competi- tive. There is something like a progressive effect perhaps in our feeling toward Moses of the Pentateuch, or Yudish- thira of the Mahabharata, nearing the close of those works which are doubtless of many hands; but this is the result of seeing these heroes through vast spaces of time and history, quite another thing than the few days enlarged by miracle to an ccon, of Homer's Ajax. The whole treatment of Hector is in admirable keeping, as pointed out by Gladstone with clear discrimination in his "Slicing" of that champion (19th Century, Vol. 4, and else- where to the same effect). All through the career of this affecting hero, we feel the impression of a sovereign nature, but whom all the fates are against; the actual of him hope- lessly dislocated from the ideal, and a prey to infirmities. Not less so is the general drift of the god-machinery, cha- otic as that element may usually seem. We understand from v. 34 that Zeus discouraged the gods taking part in the strug- gle, somewhat as the Pope did promiscuous discussions on free-will or the like in the Church, and in the beginning of VIII this comes out in a rigid and stinging prohibition. There is much champing at the bit, but on the whole the rule is in force, till for a glory to the reappearing figure of Achilles all bars are lowered, and "to 't they go like light- ning" in the twentieth; all this imperatively needs the poem as a whole for its working effect. That there should be a forlorn insufficiency in this effect at last; that the strife of the gods should degenerate from the sublime prelude of symbol at the opening of the twentieth to the burlesque literalism of the twenty-first, this we may ascribe to weakness of human nature itself rather than of Homer. The greatest are almost as liable as the smallest to fall short where they would by preconceived intent put forth their utmost strength. There seems to be absolutely none but Dante in whom culmination of topic is unfailingly culmination of treatment. Every one Elements of Unity in the Homeric Poems 13 must have noticed the strange discrepancy between the ma- jesty which clothes the outward of the gods as a garment — the nod of Zeus, the stride of Neptune, the clanking quiver of Apollo, the league-wide bound of the horses, the glooms and glories that attend the apparitions — and the pettiness of motive within. The one expresses, in a shadow, his sense of the divine; and of such is the true will that presides over the human world. The very contrast o hold the scales in upright- ness, Professor Mahaffy, though his treatment of the subject on the whole be rather faltering, may be taken as a fair ex- ample. He has written a History of Classical Greek Litera- ture, which may be the best of its particular kind and pur- pose in English; while for taste, we may observe with pleas- ure his appreciation of Bacchylides, against divers Germans, when as yet there were such scant materials for the judg- ment. All the better for such quality, he seems to illustrate what happens to the intellect when it gets upon the track, though with but one foot as it were, of Homeric disintegra- tion. The discrepancy hunted in Homer is liable to be found in itself. Far be it from us to deny all contradictions in the Iliad, or to explain all away, or to care much about the matter; but where they are picked out and set forth as here, for a thing to conclude from, they invite a little atten- tion. He doubts if "any parallel could be found, among great writers, to the narrative from VII 313, to VIII 252, during which at least two days and nights elapse, and a series of in- consistent events are crowded together, while the dead are being buried." What this means or refers to, let any one dis- cern who can. "Both Hermann and Lachmann have brought out the details." Can we not read the Iliad for ourselves? So doing, we will find no inconsistent events in this place; a crowd of events indeed on one of the three days, which would be rather tight for history, but is perfectly germane to< poetry; we can but recall with a sigh the benevolent wish of a reviewer as to our author, that he had "studied the Greek authors a little more and the German critics a little less." Of the old- time stumble over the Wall, a word later. Then lightly fol- lows the random fling, recited and reiterated, that "the same 1 8 • Elements of Unity in the Homeric Poems heroes are killed two or three times over." Does a historian assume that such a statement will never be called to account? It is not a safe assumption. There is not one identified person in the Iliad killed more than once. The same name may recur among the slain, which means no more with Homer than it would with us. But no one individualized, by patronymic, locality, association, or in any way, dies a second time. One, as noticed long of old, who is killed in the fifth book, appears as living in the thirteenth; which might be a slip of the author, or a misplacement of the texts — for no one is likely to con- tend that the Iliad was progressively composed from end to end exactly as we have it, but much arrangement and disar- rangement would be likely, especially in a portion of the poem which otherwise bears marks of much confusion, and a book, the only one of the twenty-four, which leaves us at the end with no perceptible advance on the beginning, in progress of the story or incident of importance. 1 ''The first view of the Greek chiefs by Priam, in the tenth year of the war," is no- where stated to be the first; but the new-modeled army fur- nishes a peculiarly appropriate occasion for the spectacle, as largely a novelty; of this also a further word in its place. For the misgiving of Diomede as to a god in the form of Glaucus, whereas he had been fighting gods the same day; with utter oblivion of the express provisions under which he had done that fighting, see the full and conclusive treatment in Lang, under Book V. "Ajax never once alludes to his suc- cess in the single combat," possibly because he had won no success, to what he was used, though he certainly had the advantage; "but it was the common habit of Homer's heroes to boast of such things." Ah, for a little nearer acquaintance ! Homer's characters are worth it, and Ajax is one of the great- est, so disguised in his plainness. All is merged in "common habit." Is it noticed that Ajax, throughout the Iliad, who 1 This derangement would be the more possible, as there happens to be a prevalence of Menelaus and Antilochus in both passages. In reality the nearest approach to twice kill- ing is in the case of Schedius: killed in the fifteenth book, and in the seventeenth; in each case "leader of the Phocians"— compare Catalogue, II 517. But different fathers are given and presumably the two are kinsmen, among whom the same name is likely to occur. If we count the number of names that belong to both Greek and Trojan, however, we will not trouble ourselves by the mere fact of recurrence. « Elements of Unity in the Homeric Poems 19 does more single-handed execution probably than any other, never in a single instance boasts of any? — a few words in XIV., to which he is goaded in mere retort, hardly making an exception, and perhaps, by error, even these belonging really to the other Ajax, whom they fit much better. If he boast at all, it is only in behalf of the Greeks. No speech of his ever reaches twenty lines; and his words are apt to be least heroic when he is most so. When the cloud of war is bursting on him in XVII., he tells Menelaus that now he is not so much concerned about the carcass of Patroclus, which is go^ ing to the dogs, as about his own head, lest it get hurt, "and about thine," he manages to add; but the teeth of the croco- dile will yield their prey, before he be forced from that life- less charge. Mahaffy cannot away with Diomede ignoring the "much finer horses" of Rhesus for those of Aeneas, in the Games; yet the former, splendid and untried, were of mortal stock so far as appears, the others of immortal, and expressly declared to surpass all under the sun for swiftness. — The final count, of Zeus forgetting his promise for Achilles, as it stands is simply in wild contradiction with the facts of the Iliad; as already shown. A tendency of heroic fable seems to have been much over- looked in treatment of the Iliad : that by which the origin of familiar customs or inventions is referred to some particular occasion of the heroic time. There would be less puzzling why the wall, etc., should not be built till the tenth year of the war, with the apprehension, that this was expressly in- tended as the first appearance among the Greeks of such for- tifications, applied to a camp. 1 So with all the mathemati- cal and literary institutions unhomerically ascribed to Pala- mecles; so with the organization by tribes, in the second book, which throws the Greek army into a new aspect, and gives occasion to that review by Priam in the third, as of a fresh object, such as the promiscuous mellays of the nine years did not so well admit. Compare the new impression of their oncoming thus arrayed, on the scout just before, II 800, etc. 1 IX 552. has been taken as evidencing such a wall in earlier days; but it seems better understood of the town than the camp. 2o Elements of Unity in the Homeric Poems This tendency in itself has little to do with the unity ques- tion; but the way it is worked in the Iliad has a good deal; the poem is nucleated about it in large degree, and the desir- able national emphasis added to the brief period of its action. Indeed, this idea of the new-model seems to be one of the master keys of the Iliad, so far as regards what may be called its public aspect; for it has a public or general and a private or personal aspect, as may be distinguished in nearly all the g full-grown plays of Shakespeare. These of course in each case are bound together, by the genius which constitutes the world-poet. The beginnings of great wars repeat the man- ners of previous wars; their progress brings on the new man- ner and era, under the high stimulus of the work. The ques- tion why the new thing was not done before, is as relevant as why the world was not created before. The Grecian army, floundering loosely on in old methods through the nine years, at last has fallen into peril of disruption and chaos by the quarrel of the chiefs. This drives the counsellors to their trumps; and the most experienced of them bethinks at last what an improvement would arise from better organization, by tribal zeal and emulation; which is strangely overpassed by Lang as "an apparently idle counsel." It is developed in few words; but the heroes are to stand out thenceforth as they had not before (II 365-6), and all the sequel hangs upon it. 1 Note the close connection of this new order with Book I, in the speeches of Nestor and Agamemnon; the fresh confidence, of now carrying everything with a rush; the re- lentless purpose of Zeus (419-20), immovably adhering to the resolution he is so often charged with forgetting; then the glorious blaze of similes, unequaled in the Iliad or in litera- ture, which Mahaffy thinks a tedious conglomeration of vari- ants — where each has its act, the fire for the ardor of the regenerated host, the birds for their mass of sound and mo- tion, the insects for their myriad number, last and crown- ingly the parted herds for their new array. This affords the precise and peculiar space for the Catalogue; which Bunbury 1 Note the tumultuous behavior of the army at its first appearance, II 95, etc., "almost no better than so many Trojans"; its ordered silence afterward, III 8, IV 429-31- Elements of Unity in the Homeric Poems 21 of the excellent ''Ancient Geography" concludes must be at least very ancient, on account of its "close agreement with subsequent notices in the Iliad," and which Mahaffy takes up as "inconsistent in many details with the subsequent books," most especially it would appear in Ajax Telamon being "strangely underrated"; the Catalogue, whose business cer- tainly is not in general to distribute merit, going twice out of the way (528-9, 768), to bear most exalted tributes to this hero; there was an ancient tradition, that the passage where he is introduced in his proper order, was mutilated. The panorama of III, and the marshaled onset of IV, now in- tense in their contrast with the unmodeled Trojans, carry on the scheme. When after a day of heavy surging to and fro, parted at night on unexpectedly equal terms according to the design of Zeus, the Greeks now finding what their strug- gle is still to be, again put forth their quickened faculty, with new model of camp as before of army; wall and trench, with their towers and pales, are then devised. Again the account is brief, as if these were not exactly matters for minstrelsy; but there seems no reason to doubt of its pregnant relation with the whole. Matter against unity is found in the quiescence of the whole Achilles interest, between the quarrel and the reappearance. In exactly this relation are some of the finest evidences of unity. The child can feel how Achilles is enhanced by the long withdrawal — long in art, by the drawing out of the few days — and thence the rise above all the other heroes, who have been raised so high; but a subtle touch is the ever-recur- ring mention, on one occasion of reference or another, now by actors and now by author, of the absent hero. Not one of the books as we have them, from the second on, fails of such a mention — only the little third, shortest of those within that period, not expressing his name, but making him more conspicuous by his absence, among the marshaled chiefs. The reader in his chair may wonder why he is not missed in that review; but those in immediate sense of a huge exciting movement, especially a tremendous approach, are otherwise affected. What is there, occupies them; what is wanting, 22 Elements of Unity in the Homeric Poems may occur afterward. Helen missing her own brothers is an- other matter. Certainly the absence is not accidental, and it would not exist if the scene did not belong in this place. Was there a great poet for the Iliad, or not? None seem to deny that the work is great; and throughout it there is a particular manner of greatness, as individual as the serene harmony of Sophocles or the ocean-roll of Aeschylus. That is, if we may attempt to specify, the primary conception and presentation of subject always on the scale of greatness, thence descending into particulars, with the atmosphere of greatness fresh about them. The wrath is first presented in all its pomp of consequence, in its relation to greatest things; then follows the story of it, through whose pettiness of chafe and greed the beams of this high interest shoot, as from a sky. The battle, always mightiest goal of general human interest, is adjourned and enhanced to the fourth book, with an art which would be miraculous if it were accidental — especially is the third book a study in connection of design — and when at last it bursts, the cumulation of effect is beyond all parallel. Details are caught up in it, and follow as they may. So with each new ushering-in; the appearance of each fresh hero in the struggle, the going forth of Patroclus, the reappearance of Achilles, the final combat with Hector, his burial; each is in- troduced by its largest bearings, and this effect is used to penetrate and leaven a whole, of which indeed the parts would be often tedious. An art of recurrence to these mainsprings is very noticeable. , What is the origin of that whole? A reasonable conjec- ture of "how the Iliad came to exist," may seem to arise of itself. Perhaps the leading thing that strikes the reader as he begins to arrive at Homer for himself, and leave behind the terms in which his second-hand knowledge has been cast — the "oldest," the "simplest," the "primitive," etc., as of some first attempt at poetry — the chief discovery he makes on his own account is likely to be, that Homer is a culmination, not a beginning. The metrical development, the habituation of phrase, the cultured metaphors, the whole organism of ex- pression, the thought when at last the thought comes ade- Elements of Unity in the Homeric Poems 23 quately out, the assumption of the hearer's acquaintance with so much that has gone before, attest undoubtably a body of literature preceding; a gradual evolution of song, the con- summation of which alone remains to us: a disjected mass, the raw material of Homer, the character and conditions of which may very fairly answer to the conceptions of the sepa- ratists. The only question is, whether such material reached the shape of such a whole through the genius of a supreme poet which would precisely fit the result, or through fortui- tous concourse and agglomeration, ages long, among a peo- ple bright indeed, but not one of them a supreme genius. When this kind of production has reached its fulness, one is likely to arise who embodies all its "form and pressure" in himself. From the very completeness of his faculty, he might naturally be imagined as not finding his special task at once; but looking wistfully on success already achieved, "desiring this man's art, and that man's scope," and doubting, like Chaucer, if he had not come to the autumn and aftermath of poesy, the main harvest being past. After some such empty- ing season, all at once perhaps, in one of those moments which do not belong to time but eternity, the conception comes, of a work which should embody whole relations; a full mirror of man's estate, with its interactions and progressions, in focal intensity, on an adequate scene. In that instant, the Epic is born in the world; as perhaps at another such, ideal sculpture was, in the mind of Phidias. Before that, no such thing, except in crude abortion; after that, a possession for- ever. All the distinctiveness of the Iliad flows from such a spring. All its problems here find their solution : the effect of unity with the flaws of that unity, the possibility of such differ- ent views, with the eternal freshness of the effect and the prob- lem, rise from this condition, that we have here the Epic in its act of nascency — the not-being and the being of it, both at one in that synthetic becoming. The vision that can see both will naturally not defer to that which can see only one. The actual discrepancies, the flaws of unity or consistency, are as apparent to the unionist as the separatist; more important matters are apparent to the former which seem hidden from 24 Elements of Unity in the Homeric Poems the latter. Analogies from later classics are neglected by separatists, presumably on the ground that literary individu- alities are specialized and known in these more advanced con- ditions; 1 but the essential point of our present view is that we come upon Literature first arriving at a transcendent indi- viduality, with all the conditions, of that peculiar moment. Analogies extend both ways equally, and equal field is offered to all. We thus approach the significant result, that Person- ality, not the absence of it, is the more comprehensive prin- ciple. The monstrosity would be, if an order of work, thus arising for the first time in the world, should present the practiced literary conformity of an Aeneid, a Lusiad, or a Paradise Lost; though heathen gods are tumbled together with Christian in one ; and Venus appears as evening and as morning star the same night in the other, without rupture of the poem. It is reasonably certain that the Iliad would not be a studied plot from beginning to end beforehand, as on models already existing; new parts would grow on the main stem, as by re- currence of the original creative impulse; these would not perfectly evolve from the first conception, but would coalesce with it. Assuredly it is not to be presumed that such would arise in the order of final arrang-ement; but incalculably, at lawless intervals of time, with discrepancies of style and fact accordingly; arranged, if ever completely arranged by the author, somewhat as supposed to have been done by the anonymous genius of Greek literature. The very idea of the Wrath itself, when seen in all its "moments." reaching to its term in the burial of Hector, might well be the birth of the Epic; but the act of birth could not end there; in the very 1 A spacious oversight appears, in regard to the fact just traced, that the Homeric poems express a maturity, not an origin; whence they come with exact propriety into such com- parisons. By this oversight we get able archaeology, the taste of the age, but not criticism. Renan, in perhaps the last of his works (Israel, livre 7, chap. 9), has a curious observation on our theme. He gives thanks that the Hebrews were such poor compilers, so that pre- cious documents descend to us from remote antiquity unchanged, and all come forth to view with a little washing and unplastering. The Greeks were so full of taste and ele- gance that their literary antiquities became speedily unrecognizable. Their Iliad and Odyssey were in like manner assemblages of earlier materials; but, geniuses even in com- pilation, their work was done so cleverly that the junctures hardly ever appear. It does not occur to the fine-fingering essayist that he is giving a perfect description of a great master's work, of Shakespeare's, Vergil's, Goethe's, on his materials, and no description at all of anything that was ever known to be done without one. The Renanese translated into plain, will read, The wonderful Greeks have made an Iliad and Odyssey which give every indication of being single works. Elements of Unity in the Homeric Poems 25 necessity of a full action, to the measure of the "myriad wOes" and the proportion of the whole, many a story, episode and reminiscence must appear; and these would not move stead- ily to one end like a Macbeth, but would hang about that cen- tral stem in delightful tantalizing richness, ever provoking, and never satisfying- curiosity as to the consciousness of con- struction on the author's part. The "expansions" of the orig- inal fable, such a favorite of modern conjecture, are probable enough, but by far most probable as expansions in the teem- ing brain of the author. He might often be perplexed to his fill in adjusting them. The long congested hours of the crisis day from XI to XVIII, 1 with the pouring torrent of their matter, the rich increase of event and character in the abeyance period from III to X, seem to witness never-ending jets in this after-birth of inspiration. These excrescent mem- bers are essential in the largest consideration of the whole, incidental and free-living in themselves, enchanting us with their own vital breath, with their want, not of skill, but of the ripened fruits of skill. The abundance of resource requiring prodigality of manifestation, takes effect in a profusion of utterance, often running toward garrulity. All the memory of Nestor is present with him; how brief is all the talk of Nestor, relatively! By the same delight in life and relation as warrior after warrior, though but once appearing, yet is introduced to us by his family antecedents, so every aspect of the tale is enriched with belongings. Over and above all that can be said of each thing itself, similes and figures must abound, meeting every suggestion from it; favorite subjects of illustration constantly recurring, yet with how little mere iteration in these. He would surely give us a catalogue of ships and heroes, for the sheer enjoyment of it, whatever diffi- culties we may find with the one we have. This redundance of power would no more save the whole from inconsistencies than Shakespeare from anachronisms; it would be rather the condition of them. But many of the incidental mentions that 1 Note that with all the preternatural lengthening of the day, its whole extent is dis- posed of in a few lines, without particular action; the forenoon, XI 84. etc., the afternoon, XVI 777, etc. Strong evidence of later crowding in— by the author infinitely rather than by any other. Even so, of all days, it sets prematurely, XVIII 239-40. 26 Elements of Unity in the Homeric Poems have been most questioned seem particularly well to lit the place of Homer. The Amazons of later authorities took part in the Trojan war; in Homer they are pushed further back, known to the ancestry of a hero or to the youth of an old man. For so it is with all avnaveipai ; they belong not to present conditions, but to remote, in time or place or stage. The appearance of Dionysus in the sixth book and elsewhere, scarcely distinguishable as a god except by statement of the fact, and at forlorn disadvantage in competition with a mortal, rudimentary in his deity as the Vishnu of the Vedas, bears just such a relation with the mighty inspirer of Aeschylus and self-avenger of Euripides as the lapse of time and period of development would require. Interpolation, except of narrow special passages, or where mere variation of memory and supply of its lapse might pass into that, would much more naturally belong to the antece- dents than the consequences of the work. A good deal already written might be used, as in the historical plays of Shakespeare, and divers faults of structure might result. But the whole being once fairly completed, not in a day or at one point of view, but with many fresh holds taken and many new throes of invention, the time for material change by the author or another would rapidly pass by. This may be one of the chief points on which the pyramid of separatist criti- cism has been standing — no doubt the cause of its extraor- dinary instability and tendency to lean in every possible direc- tion — needing to be reversed. The alien portions of Homeric work should be referred much rather to preceding than to subsequent growth. "Very few passages of the Iliad," says Grote, "are completely separable"; but it might be very pos- sible that some of variant rhythm or ruder structure were earlier pieces adopted, Shakespeare fashion, into the grand whole. The Catalogue might have been warmed and nour- ished up from some old set of mnemonic verses; the Nekyia of the 24th Odyssey might have been based on some older legend of the suitors; while such lines as 106-8, and many another passage of the episode, could hardly have been from any other hand than that of the Master. ELEMENTS OF UNITY IN THE HOMERIC POEMS By Edward Farquhar, Ph.D. Professor of History in the Corcoran Scientific School, Columbian University PART II The Linguistic armory of the separatists is a bugbear which should not unnerve the student, who may readily con- cede to these experts immense superiority in the niceties of Greek philology, but who merely reads his Homer as he does his Tennyson, and a good deal nearer than much of his Browning. There is simply no power in man to pronounce with authority that the minute or considerable grammatical discrepancies in the Iliad as we have it prove differences of time in its fundamental origin. Suppose for a moment that such tests were applied to the text of Chaucer ! where at any rate the art of writing was in vogue at the time of composi- tion. There is no other extensive body of literature dating at or near the Homeric times, from which we could get the parallax of linguistic change. What we do 'know is that we have here to do with a language teeming with variety, growth and flexibility; with a brilliant people wnose capac- ities at that point we cannot measure; with a type of genius always distinguished for miraculous resources of vocabulary; with an era, when the transmission of literature was beset with conditions and liabilities of its own, of which we have now no accurate reckoning. These are matters sure to take effect on the grammatical form of the text, as to some indefi- nite degree upon the text itself. It is said in "Homer and the Epic," that the ancients quote Homer about as we have him; substantially they do; but have they not been compelled to do so by force of editing? In the oration of Aeschines against Timarchus, for one example among a number, we are appalled to find, in a peculiarly striking passage of the Iliad quoted, not only variations assignable to lapse of mem- 4 Elements of Unity in the Homeric Poems ory, but two or three lines to which we were strangers. There is much evidence that the text of Homer underwent a good deal of fluctuation in its minutiae, before the final fixture. Points made on such minutiae are for the most part as if conclusions should be drawn in regard to Shakespeare from distinctions of "then" or "than," of "more" or "moe," of "sovereigntie" or "sovrantee," "would rather be" or ''had rather to be," found in a text; distinctions with which the author has really nothing to do that we can assign to him, and which but float on the surface of a text. Nor can any differences of this sort between the Iliad and the Odyssey be very conclusive, especially as the two would probably have different fortunes for a time in different parts of Greece. But in view of some very authoritative pronouncements, it may be well to examine the nature of this field a little more closely. Happy is the man in his own condition, though at times an occasion of sadness to his neighbors, who has got hold of a new Key to Knowledge. The warmth of his clasp on the implement is apt to render it entirely pliable, and the readiness with which it will then apply to almost any lock, supersedes all question as to the actual response of the door. Such a key, in certain hands, is Comparative Philology; and an example of its use, at rather high pressure, on Homeric literature, may be found in an appendix by Prof. Sayce, on Epic Language, to the work of Mahaffy already cited. It would not' be easy to instance or conceive a writing, in which a more imperious mastership were assumed, with a more spontaneous downfall of its main conclusions, as to anything concerning the subject "especially" treated; or with more astonishing misstatement of the facts. We are told at the outset that "In determining the age and character of the Iliad and Odyssey the most certain and important evi- dence is the language of the poems. Here conjectures and probabilities have to make way for solid facts. If we know the age and locality of a particular word or grammatical form, we know also the limit of time to be assigned to the passage in which it occurs, as well as the geographical hori- zon of the author." The reader, if not dazed by erudition so unheard of and unimagined, naturally may inquire, How is Elements of Unity in the Homeric Poems 5 it possible to know this of words and forms of such a period as the Homeric? "Thanks to Comparative Philology' is the answer, "and the discovery and accurate study of numer- ous inscriptions during the last quarter of a century, the history of the Greek language and its dialects is now fairly well known." Conceive the quick Hellenic peoples, shoot- ing forth at their early period into every variety of tribe and city, of form and dialect, through centuries of which we have no dated record whatever, held thus down to lines of speech which no power could lay on that of our own time. For it soon appears, that not one of these inscriptions can be dated with any certainty back of 600 B.C.; the Homeric poetry "in its present form possibly may be a century earlier" (though latest conviction is that "our present Homeric text is not older than the age of Pericles"). For the older ele- ment, "we have only the poems themselves," together with Latin, Sanskrit, and the like auxiliaries, which tongues of themselves could hardly tell us anything definite about Homer, but as Comparative Philology — spelt with capitals, and becoming a sort of person — like an inspiring Egeria, may tell us whatever we need to know; while Positive Greek is often left in distress. "A form like atccov instead of the older apeicwv, could not have come into existence until all recollection of the digamma had disappeared." How easy it may be at some future time to determine, that such a form as plow could not have come into existence until all recollection of the old plough had disappeared; when we shall have only inscriptions and a poem or two for our in- formation, instead of a confused illimitable mass of literature showing that the two forms went side by side through so many centuries. But not even so can we conclude anything about Homer's aicwv ; the ictus never seems to fall on the first syllable, that is, never where any metric test between the two forms can appear, and in some of the most careful editing only ae/cow is printed. Passing lightly over such potent "facts" as that for proof of the relative antiquity of Iliad and Odyssey, alternative forms of a certain aorist occur fifty-eight times to forty-two in the one and fifty-four to fifty- three in the other; that eivoaifyvWos is found twice in the Iliad, and once in the Odyssey, where the reader instantly 6 Elements of Unity in the Homeric Poems recalls another occurrence (XI, 319,) in a most famous pas- sage, the earliest mention of piling Ossa and Pelion; that about ninety of a form "are met with in Homer, as against only ten in Hesiod," we having more than nine times as much of Homer as of Hesiod; — we arrive at length in sight of matters interesting to the question of Homeric unity. "We know that the last line of the Iliad is but the protasis of which the first line of the Aethiopis formed the apodosis." Such is the force of Comparative Philology, or something, that we can find here little but a deliberate attempt to mis- lead the reader. What "we know" about Arctinus is, that the ancients said he was a disciple of Homer, 1 that he took up the tale of Troy where the Iliad left it off, and that for a Cycle of epic the last line of the Iliad was altered to fit the first of the Aethiopis. The impression studiously conveyed that all the epic material was an indiscriminate mass, from which lengths were sawed off at desire, is pure falsification of that tradition, whatever the tradition may be worth; but it is all we have. At the end is a philological comparison of Iliad and Odys- sey, consisting for the most part — after premiss that "a merely superficial reading will convince most people that the Odyssey is much more artificial and of a more modern age," which indeed in the case before us such a reading appears to have done — of a list of words, importing different usage in the two poems. First it is stated that the Iliad has about 130 words, the Odyssey about 120, not found in the other, an astonishingly small number, for the length and variety of the works. Then follows a set of "abstract nouns," found only in the Odyssey, with implication that none such are in the Iliad; which can only prompt the question, what "abstract" is supposed to mean; while by comparing Od. X. 526 and XL 34 it may be seen that cv^n, one of the abstrac- tions, is used synonymously with e^^X^ of both poems. Next a series of words with "different significations" in the respective poems. These instances are largely so many un- truths, where they are not merely inept, being sometimes both; although several of the more glaring errors have dis- Not with entire unanimity. Elements of Unity in the Homeric Poems 7 appeared from the last edition. As to what remains: Two of them are refuted by two successive lines, Od. Ill 136, 7 — where curiously enough the Odyssey resumes for a moment the scene of the Iliad, an indication certainly, if we sought in such places, of single authorship — epis and /caXeco ; epi? here is "strife," not exactly "battle-strife," but still less "riv- alry." u Aai(f)p(t)v and oXoocfrpcov are baleful in the Iliad, crafty in the Odyssey." Aatypcov is not "baleful" in the Iliad, or "crafty" in the Odyssey; it is only an adjective of distinction in both, applied nearly without distinction, as to Priam, and the peaceful herald Idaeus. OXoocfrpcov is too sel- dom used for any accurate determination of meaning; a vital element in such determination, quite overlooked throughout this comparison. The Odyssey is called "more democratic" for the application of fiovXyfopos to the agora instead of the prince; which Odyssean agora is adduced by Grote to show that the status in the two poems was precisely the same, that is not democratic at all; and fiovXTjcfropos is ap- plied to princes in the Odyssey, XIII. 12. In the Iliad, we are told, "/fXe/