Homer and His Age | Page 6

cairn and urn burial; the use of the
chariot in war; the use of bronze for weapons; a peculiar stage of
customary law; a peculiar form of semi-feudal society; a peculiar kind
of house. But again, by a change in the theory, the poets introduced
later novelties; later forms of defensive armour; later modes of burial;
later religious and speculative beliefs; a later style of house; an
advanced stage of law; modernisms in grammar and language.
The usual position of critics in this matter is stated by Helbig; and we
are to contend that the theory is contradicted by all experience of
ancient literatures, and is in itself the reverse of consistent. "The artists
of antiquity," says Helbig, with perfect truth, "had no idea of
archaeological studies.... They represented legendary scenes in
conformity with the spirit of their own age, and reproduced the arms
and implements and costume that they saw around them." [Footnote:
L'Épopée Homerique, p. 5; Homerische Epos, p. 4.]
Now a poet is an artist, like another, and he, too--no less than the vase
painter or engraver of gems--in dealing with legends of times past,
represents (in an uncritical age) the arms, utensils, costume, and the
religious, geographical, legal, social, and political ideas of his own
period. We shall later prove that this is true by examples from the early
mediaeval epic poetry of Europe.

It follows that if the Iliad is absolutely consistent and harmonious in its
picture of life, and of all the accessories of life, the Iliad is the work of
a single age, of a single stage of culture, the poet describing his own
environment. But Helbig, on the other hand, citing Wilamowitz
Moellendorff, declares that the Iliad--the work of four centuries, he
says--maintains its unity of colour by virtue of an uninterrupted
poetical tradition. [Footnote: Homerische Untersuchungen, p. 292;
Homerische Epos, p. I.] If so, the poets must have archaeologised, must
have kept asking themselves, "Is this or that detail true to the past?"
which artists in uncritical ages never do, as we have been told by
Helbig. They must have carefully pondered the surviving old Achaean
lays, which "were born when the heroes could not read, or boil flesh, or
back a steed." By carefully observing the earliest lays the late poets, in
times of changed manners, "could avoid anachronisms by the aid of
tradition, which gave them a very exact idea of the epic heroes." Such
is the opinion of Wilamowitz Moellendorff. He appears to regard the
tradition as keeping the later poets in the old way automatically, not
consciously, but this, we also learn from Helbig, did not occur. The
poets often wandered from the way. [Footnote: Helbig, Homerische
Epos, pp. 2, 3.] Thus old Mycenaean lays, if any existed, would
describe the old Mycenaean mode of burial. The Homeric poet
describes something radically different. We vainly ask for proof that in
any early national literature known to us poets have been true to the
colour and manners of the remote times in which their heroes moved,
and of which old minstrels sang. The thing is without example: of this
proofs shall be offered in abundance.
Meanwhile, the whole theory which regards the Iliad as the work of
four or five centuries rests on the postulate that poets throughout these
centuries did what such poets never do, kept true to the details of a life
remote from their own, and also did not.
For Helbig does not, after all, cleave to his opinion. On the other hand,
he says that the later poets of the Iliad did not cling to tradition. "They
allowed themselves to be influenced by their own environment: _this
influence betrays ITSELF IN THE descriptions of DETAILS_.... The
rhapsodists," (reciters, supposed to have altered the poems at will), "did

not fail to interpolate relatively recent elements into the oldest parts of
the Epic." [Footnote: Homerische Epos, p. 2.]
At this point comes in a complex inconsistency. The Tenth Book of the
Iliad, thinks Helbig--in common with almost all critics--"is one of the
most recent lays of the Iliad." But in this recent lay (say of the eighth or
seventh century) the poet describes the Thracians as on a level of
civilisation with the Achaeans, and, indeed, as even more luxurious,
wealthy, and refined in the matter of good horses, glorious armour, and
splendid chariots. But, by the time of the Persian wars, says Helbig, the
Thracians were regarded by the Greeks as rude barbarians, and their
military equipment was totally un-Greek. They did not wear helmets,
but caps of fox-skin. They had no body armour; their shields were
small round bucklers; their weapons were bows and daggers. These
customs could not, at the time of the Persian wars, be recent
innovations in Thrace. [Footnote: Herodotus, vii. 75.]
Had