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CHAPTER II
HYPOTHESES AS TO THE GROWTH OF THE EPICS
A theorist who believes that the Homeric poems are the growth of four changeful centuries, must present a definite working hypothesis as to how they escaped from certain influences of the late age in which much of them is said to have been composed. We must first ask to what ma
These opinions, in which we heartily agree—there never was such a
thing as a "popular" Epic—were published fourteen years ago. Mr.
Leaf, however, would not express them with regard to "our" Iliadand
Odyssey, because, in his view, a considerable part of the Iliad, as
it stands, was made, not by Court bards in the Achaean courts of Europe,
not for an audience of noble warriors and dames, but by wandering
minstrels in the later Ionian colonies of Asia. They did not chant for a
military aristocracy, but for the enjoyment of town and country folk at
popular festivals. {Footnote: Iliad, vol. i. p. xvi. 1900.} The poems
were begun, indeed, he thinks, for "a wealthy aristocracy living
on the product of their lands," in European Greece; were begun by
contemporary court minstrels, but were continued, vastly expanded, and
altered to taste by wandering singers and reciting rhapsodists, who
amused the holidays of a commercial, expansive, and bustling Ionian
democracy. {Footnote: Companion to the Iliad, p. II.}
We must suppose that, on this theory, the later poets pleased a
commercial democracy by keeping up the tone that had delighted an old
land-owning military aristocracy. It is not difficult, however, to admit
this as possible, for the poems continued to be admired in all ages of
Greece and under every form of society. The real question is, would the
modern poets be the men to keep up a tone some four or five centuries
old, and to be true, if they were true, to the details of the heroic
age? "It is not beyond the bounds of possibility that some part of the
most primitive Iliadmay have been actually sung by the court minstrel
in the palace whose ruins can still be seen in Mycenae." {Footnote:
Leaf, Iliad, vol. i. p. xv.} But, by the expansionist theory, even
the oldest parts of our Iliadare now full of what we may call quite
recent Ionian additions, full of late retouches, and full, so to speak,
of omissions of old parts.
Through four or five centuries, by the hypothesis, every singer who could find an audience was treating as much as he knew of a vast body of ancient lays exactly as he pleased, adding here, lopping there, altering everywhere. Moreover, these were centuries full of change. The ancient Achaean palaces were becoming the ruins which we still behold. The old art had faded, and then fallen under the disaster of the Dorian conquest. A new art, or a recrudescence of earlier art, very crude and barbaric, had succeeded, and was begi
There were other changes between the ages of the original minstrel and of the late successors who are said to have busied themselves in adding to, mutilating, and altering his old poem. Kings and courts had passed away; old Ionian myths and religious usages, unknown to the Homeric poets, had come out into the light; commerce and pleasure and early philosophies were the chief concerns of life. Yet the poems continued to be aristocratic in ma
Amazing to say, none of these "more primitive phases of belief," none of the recrudescent savage magic, was intruded by the late Ionian poets into the Iliad which they continued, by the theory. Such phases of belief were, indeed, by their time popular, and frequently appeared in the Cyclic poems on the Trojan war; continuations of the ILIAD, which were composed by Ionian authors at the same time as much of the ILIADitself (by the theory) was composed. The authors of these Cyclic poems—authors contemporary with the makers of much of the ILIAD— wereeminently "un-Homeric" in many respects. {Footnote: Cf. Monro, The Cyclic Poets; Odyssey, vol. ii, pp. 342-384.} They had ideas very different from those of the authors of the Iliadand ODYSSEY, as these ideas have reached us.
Helbig states this curious fact, that the Homeric poems are free from many recent or recrudescent ideas common in other Epics composed during the later centuries of the supposed four hundred years of Epic growth. {Footnote: Homerische Epos, p. 3.} Thus a signet ring was mentioned in the Ilias Puma, and there are no rings in Iliador Odyssey. But Helbig does not perceive the insuperable difficulty which here encounters his hypothesis. He remarks: "In certain poems which were grouping themselves around the Iliad andOdyssey, we meet data absolutely opposed to the conventional style of the Epic." He gives three or four examples of perfectly un-Homeric ideas occurring in Epics of the eighth to seventh centuries, B.C., and a large supply of such cases can be adduced. But Helbig does not ask how it happened that, if poets of these centuries had lost touch with the Epic tradition, and had wandered into a new region of thought, as they had, examples of their notions do not occur in the Iliadand Odyssey. By his theory these poems were being added to and altered, even in their oldest portions, at the very period when strange fresh, or old and newly revived fancies were flourishing. If so, how were the Iliadand Odyssey, unlike the Cyclic poems, kept uncontaminated, as they confessedly were, by the new romantic ideas?