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Agamemnon answers that Zeus is on his side, just as even the angry Naismes admits that duty to God demands obedience to Charles. There ca
In Guide Bourgogne,a poem of the twelfth century, Ogier cries, "They say that Charlemagne is the conqueror of kingdoms: they lie, it is Roland who conquers them with Oliver, Naismes of the long beard, and myself. As to Charles, he eats." Compare Achilles to Agamemnon, "Thou, heavy with wine, with dog's eyes and heart of deer, never hast thou dared to arm thee for war with the host ..." {Footnote: Iliad, I. 227, 228. Gui de Bourgogne, pp. 37-41.} It is Achilles or Roland who stakes his life in war and captures cities; it is Agamemnon or Charles who camps by the wine. Charles, in the Chanson de Saisnes, abases himself before Herapois, even more abjectly than Agamemnon in his offer of atonement to Achilles. {Footnote: Йpopйes Franзaises, Lйon Gautier, vol. iii. p. 158.} Charles is as arrogant as Agamemnon: he strikes Roland with his glove, for an uncommanded victory, and then he loses heart and weeps as copiously as the penitent Agamemnon often does when he rues his arrogance. {Footnote: Entrйe en Espagne.}
The poet of the Iliadis a great and sober artist. He does not make Agamemnon endure the lowest disgraces which the latest French epic poets heap on Charles. But we see how close is the parallel between Agamemnon and the Charles of the decadent type. Both characters are reflections of feudal jealousy of the Over-Lord; both reflect real antique historical conditions, and these were the conditions of the Achaeans in Europe, not of the Ionians in Asia.
The treatment of Agamemnon's character is harmonious throughout. It is not as if in "the original poem" Agamemnon were revered like St. Charlemagne in the Chanson de Roland, and in the "later" parts of the Iliadwere reduced to the contemptible estate of the Charles of the decadent Chanson de Geste. In the IliadAgamemnon's character is consistently presented from begi
The conditions under which the Chansonsarose were truly parallel to the conditions under which the Homeric poems arose, and the poems, French and Achaean, are also true parallels, except in genius. The French have no Homer: cared vate sacro. It follows that a Homer was necessary to the evolution of the Greek epics.
It may, perhaps, be replied to this argument that our Iliadis only a very late remaniement, like the fourteenth century Chansons de Geste, of something much earlier and nobler. But in France, in the age of remaniement, even the versification had changed from assonance to rhyme, from the decasyllabic line to the Alexandrine in the decadence, while a plentiful lack of seriousness and a love of purely fanciful adventures in fairyland take the place of the austere spirit of war. Ladies "in a coming on humour" abound, and Charles is involved with his Paladins in gauloiseriesof a Rabelaisian cast. The French language has become a new thing through and through, and ma
CHAPTER XVII
CONCLUSION
The conclusion at which we arrive is that the Iliad, as a whole, is the work of one age. That it has reached us without interpolations and lacunaeand remaniementsperhaps no person of ordinary sense will allege. But that the mass of the Epic is of one age appears to be a natural inference from the breakdown of the hypotheses which attempt to explain it as a late mosaic. We have also endeavoured to prove, quite apart from the failure of theories of expansion and compilation, that the Iliadpresents an historical unity, unity of character, unity of customary law, and unity in its archaeology. If we are right, we must have an opinion as to how the Epic was preserved.
If we had evidence for an Homeric school, we might imagine that the Epic was composed by dint of memory, and preserved, like the Sanskrit Hymns of the Rig Veda, and the Hymns of the Maoris, the Zuсis, and other peoples in the lower or middle stage of barbarism, by the exertions and teaching of schools. But religious hymns and mythical hymns—the care of a priesthood—are one thing; a great secular epic is another. Priests will not devote themselves from age to age to its conservation. It ca
We are thus driven back to the theory of early written texts, not intended to meet the wants of a reading public, but for the use of the poet himself and of those to whom he may bequeath his work. That this has been a method in which orally published epics were composed and preserved in a non-reading age we have proved in our chapter on the French Chansons de Geste. Unhappily, the argument that what was done in mediaeval France might be done in sub-Mycenaean Greece, is based on probabilities, and these are differently estimated by critics of different schools. All seems to depend on each individual's sense of what is "likely." In that case science has nothing to make in the matter. Nitzsche thought that writing might go back to the time of Homer. Mr. Monro thought it "probable enough that writing, even if known at the time of Homer, was not used for literary purposes." {Footnote: Iliad, vol. i. p. xxxv.} Sir Richard Jebb, as we saw, took a much more favourable view of the probability of early written texts. M. Salomon Reinach, arguing from the linear written clay tablets of Knossos and from a Knossian cup with writing on it in ink, thinks that there may have existed whole "Minoan" libraries—manuscripts executed on perishable materials, palm leaves, papyrus, or parchment. {Footnote: L'Anthropologie, vol. xv, pp. 292, 293.} Mr. Leaf, while admitting that "writing was known in some form through the whole period of epic development," holds that "it is in the highest degree unlikely that it was ever employed to form a standard text of the Epic or any portion of it.... At best there was a continuous tradition of those portions of the poems which were especially popular ..." {Footnote: Iliad, vol. i. pp. xvi., xvii.} Father Browne dates the employment of writing for the preservation of the Epic "from the sixth century onwards." {Footnote: Handbook of Homeric Study, p. 134.} He also says that "it is difficult to suppose that the Mycenaeans, who were certainly in contact with this form of writing" (the Cretan linear), "should not have used it much more freely than our direct evidence warrants us in asserting." He then mentions the Knossian cup "with writing inscribed on it apparently in pen and ink ... The conclusion is that ordinary writing was in use, but that the materials, probably palm leaves, have disappeared." {Footnote: Ibid., pp. 258, 259.}