Homer's world is aristocratic. The poet, none the less, has his eye on the folk; on the honest poor woman who carefully weighs her wool; on the aged female thrall who is busy all night over her task of grain-grinding, and prays that the wooers who have broken her strength may now eat their latest meal. He is keenly interested in the work of artisans, such as the currier and shield maker who wrought the great shield of Aias; in the fisherman with his nets, or line and bait; in the diver for oysters; in the woodmen with their axes; in sowing and ploughing, and the relative merits of oxen and mules as plough-beasts; in the quarrel between two farmers over their boundary balk in the common field; in the lot of the hind of a landless man, the hardest lot of any; in gold-workers and spinners; shepherds, hunts-men, herdsmen; in the potter who "sitting by his wheel maketh trial of it whether it run"; in the virtues of a swineherd, a slave, who is noble by birth, like Eumaeus; in all seafaring men down to the pursers and stewards; in the laughing girls that gather in the vintage, while a boy makes sweet music, and sings the song of Linus with delicate voice; in the ploughman who has a drink of wine at the end of the furrow; in the gardener with his orchard, the watering of a plot as it is done to this day in the East; the fruit trees that Odysseus as a child was given "for his very own"; in the smith's warm forge where masterless tramps sleep at night; in the beggar men with their wallets, who crouch on the outer part of the threshold; in the old cadger who goes on the errands of the wooers; in the little girl that runs till she is weary by her mother's side, and catches at her skirt, praying to be taken up in her arms; in the children who build castles with the sea sand; in boys who, "always fond of mischief," stone the wasps' nest, and make the angry wasps a common nuisance; or cudgel the stubborn ass that is too strong for them; in all poor wayfarers who wander under the protection of Zeus; in all suppliants who, having slain a man, embrace the knees of the prince to whom they flee. All mankind are as interesting to Homer as the gallant youths at the bridal dance who wear "daggers of gold in baldrics of silver"; such bronze daggers with gilded blade-centres as were found in the tombs of Mycenae and elsewhere.
It is plain from Homeric descriptions of palaces, and of works of art, that his age had not lost touch with or memory of the Aegean culture. Whether some great Aegean or Mycenaean palaces with friezes of cyanus (dark blue glass paste), and of metals, were still in a habitable state, in Homer's days, or whether only the tradition of their glory survived—as memories of Roman buildings dwell in the early Anglo-Saxon poem on the Ruined City of the Romans in England—it is clear that plenty of Aegean artistic work in gold and other metals, cups and sword hilts, was preserved, and known to the poet. The Achaeans did not invade merely to destroy, like the Anglo-Saxon invaders of Romanised Britain. Far more civilised and refined than these rude hordes, they could appreciate and preserve as well as burn and break—in an hour of furious sack—the treasures of the more civilised race. But these treasures they could not imitate and reproduce, apparently (they are often spoken of as the work of the god Hephaestus), and the ancient Aegean art waned and passed under new and crude influences.
Much as Homer delights in works of art, and vividly as he describes them, and describes the toil of weavers, carpenters, shipwrights, ploughmen, reapers, and vintagers, he never shows us a painter at work on wall or vase, nor a mortal hand delineating, in any material, men and women; except when Helen is weaving a great purple web, and embroidering thereon, or interweaving there-with, "many battles of horse-taming Trojans and mail-clad Achaeans."[9] This art implies some knowledge of drawing and painting: from the Homeric age we have no relics of this art; but such webs might, like the Bayeux tapestry, last long, and might be imitated, and it may have been from such old Aegean fabrics or copies of them that Homer took his idea.
[1] The bard of the Macdonalds in the year of Montrose.
[2] Iliad, xviii. 497–504.
[3] ix. 632–634.
[4] Eumenides, 273.
[5] Iliad, ix. 186, 189.
[6] Odyssey, iv. 70–75.
[7] Ibid. iii. 464–469. The word for bath, ἀσαμἰνθος, is thought, like other words with the same termination, to be of the language of the Aegean race, whoever they may have been: the termination is common in place-names, and names of flowers.
[8] Kinkel, Epicorum Graecorum Fragmenta, p. 11.
[9] Iliad, iii. 125–127.
CHAPTER V
MEN AND WOMEN
In all modern times Homer has been admired for his noble, tender, and chivalrous sense of what is due to women; for his pictures of the perfect mother, Thetis; the perfect wife, Andromache; the perfect maiden, frank, stainless, and kind, Nausicaa; for the woman of immortal charm, Helen; while, when he does touch on the less lovable humours of women—on the nagging shrew, the light o' love, the rather bitter virgin—he selects his examples from the divine society of the Gods.
It is an instance of the high and noble taste of the poet and his audience, that he dwells most on the best and most charming of the women in old traditions, and is manifestly reluctant to tell of any evil deed, or any cruel sorrow of a lady. Yet legend was full of women fierce and revengeful as Brynhild; such women as Medea, who slew her own children; Ino, who hated her step-children; Althaea, who, to avenge her brothers, burned the brand that was the life-token of her son, Meleager of the golden hair. There was hateful Eriphyle, bribed by the gift that drew her lord to his doom; there was hapless Epicaste, wedded to her son, the slayer of his father; there were unhappy Chloris, and unhappy Tyro, mother of Pelias and Neleus by Poseidon, and victim of a feminine revenge. But this part of the tale is Ionian or Athenian, not Homeric. In Homer a woman is not dishonoured, but more highly esteemed, because she has been loved by a god. In Attic traditions she is cruelly punished by her own kinsfolk.
The wicked and ill-fated ladies who remind us of heroines in ancient German epos, are scarcely mentioned, or not at all in the Iliad (where they could only appear in digressions), and the poet merely touches on their fortunes when Odysseus meets them in Hades. From the guilt and the misery of the "far-renowned brides of ancient song," Homer averts his eyes. Even to Clytemnestra, though her sin cannot be hidden, he allows the bon naturel which Mary Stuart justly claimed for herself. We are reminded of the tenderness of Chaucer for the fault of Cressida, "Ne me list this sely womman chyde."
Homer himself never blames Helen, he regards her with the affection and pity of Hector and Priam: it is the Trojan women and Penelope, her cousin, who speak frankly of Helen and the ruin which she wrought. In the Iliad she does not, "where'er she came, bring calamity"; she is penitent, she longs for home, and her lord, and her one child, the little maid Hermione. She scorns the cowardice of her lover, and, in the third Book of the Iliad, the poet plainly declares that she is. the unwilling victim of Aphrodite. In the Odyssey, wherever she appears, she brings beauty, grace, charm, and quiet, and her appointed home is in the temperate meadows of the Elysian land.
Homer
