uniformly prevails in the poems, with a trace of such variations in custom as actually occur, when circumstances or affection demand it, in every stage of human society. The bridal customs are not pedantically stereotyped in Homer, but variations in accordance with circumstances do not prove lateness or earliness, any more than such female names as Alphesiboea, Phereboea, Polyboea, and others, indicating that a daughter, on her marriage, will bring many kine into her family, "express the excuse which the parents made to themselves for venturing to rear the useless female child."[10]
Not even in Australian black society are girls more apt than male babies to be killed as bouches inutiles, they are far too valuable to their brothers or maternal uncles, being exchanged for other men's sisters or nieces as brides. The cattle-owning barbaric societies of Africa are not addicted to female infanticide, much less could Homeric society be with its wealth and its tenderness of heart. In Greek non-Homeric legend how often do we hear of a baby-girl being exposed? It is the boys who suffer, in the hope of defeating some prophecy. Homeric society is infinitely remote from that in which girls were too expensive and useless to keep.[11]
Homer is the last author in whom we can hopefully look for survivals of savagery, or of cruel and filthy superstitions. In the Epics there is not a harlot, common as they are in the ancient Hebrew books. It is not to be supposed that the ancient profession was unknown, but all such things are ignored in deference to a taste more pure than that of early Ionian society and of historic Greece from first to last. The tone of taste and morals is, in short, Achaean, like the poet himself;[12] Shakespeare, in Troilus and Cressida, makes Patroclus mimic Nestor; he
"coughs and spits,
And with a palsy fumbling in his gorget,
Shakes in and out the rivet,"
in "a night-alarm." Shakespeare has read of the night-alarm in Iliad, Book x., but not there did he find, nowhere in Homer could he find "the faint defects of age" made matter of merriment. In Homer nobody coughs!
The Homeric idea of the family is symbolised in the wedding bed which Odysseus fashioned with his own hands, making it fast to the trunk of a living tree that it might never be moved.[13] and adorning it with inlay of gold, silver and ivory. According to many critics, of whom Wolf is the earliest, the final books of the Odyssey are later than the rest, and the idea of a separate chamber for husband and wife is late. Other critics, when they find mentions of such a separate chamber (δάλαμος) in other parts of the Epic, explain them as late interpolations. They appear once again to forget that in no civilised society is there absolute uniformity of detail in all the arrangements of domestic life. An interesting example may be found in Scott's description of the hall and house of Cedric the Saxon—the hall floored with "earth mixed with lime, trodden into a hard substance, such as is often employed in flooring our modern barns," the rafters "encrusted with a black varnish of soot" (the melathron), the walls "hung with implements of war," "the low irregular building," are like the house of Odysseus. There were "buildings after building."[14] Contrasted with these arrangements were the castles of the Normans, "tall, turreted, and castellated buildings."
"In the Iliad and Odyssey the houses are normally one-room halls. The master and mistress live in the megaron in the daytime and sleep there at night … grown-up sons and daughters have separate 'halls' or thalamoi built for them close by."[15]
On this showing, Odysseus had chosen to adopt a different arrangement, it does not quite follow that the account of his house is late; it would be hard to prove that thalamos (chamber) and megaron (hall) are identical, we hear of no outside thalamos, like that of Telemachus, occupied by a girl, and the whole topic demands very minute criticism. But the question of Aegean and Achaean architecture is at present the subject of controversy among architectural specialists.
The happiness of wedded life has never been more nobly praised than by Homer in the famous speech of Odysseus to Alcinous. Adultery is laughed at only among the gods. Moreover, we never hear of lightness of behaviour in girls, except when a God is the wooer, and that is reckoned an honour, the woman is sought for in marriage by mortals. In Ionian tradition, as has been said, on the other hand, the girls beloved by gods are severely punished, like Tyro.
Fidelity is not expected from men when absent at a long siege, or lost in unknown lands, like Odysseus, who does not scruple to tell Penelope about Circe and Calypso. At home the fidelity of husbands depends on the characters of the pair. Laertes is fond of a fair handmaid, but dreads the wrath of his wife, as the father of Phoenix, in a similar case, found that he had good reason to do. The bastards of whom we hear are probably sons of the captives of the spear, brought home as Agamemnon unadvisedly brought Cassandra. Theano, wife of Antenor, "nurtured his bastard, like her own children, to do her husband pleasure."[16] Teucer also, a bastard, was brought up by his father in his own house.[17] There was one law for the men, another for the women, and Dr. Johnson approved of this moral system in England.
The domestic relations are very pleasingly portrayed in the Iliad. Homer, to be sure, knows that family life is not always monotonously peaceful and affectionate. In the long speech of Phoenix (Book ix.) we see a son, Meleager, who has a feud with his maternal uncles and is under his mother's curse. This family feud, in which the wife and mother takes sides with her own kin against her husband or sons, is a common motive in the oldest Teutonic Epics, and even in the historic traditions of the Camerons.
But it is among the Olympians that Homer finds his blustering, teasing yet placable husband and father, Zeus; his shrewish wife, Hera; his rather spiteful daughter, Athene; and his lady of pleasure, Aphrodite, whose intrigues are a jest. The affection of Zeus for his daughter, none the less, is happily displayed, while among men the fraternal affection of Agamemnon for Menelaus is his most agreeable trait. Parents and children, except in the woeful adventure of Phoenix, are always on the best of terms, as in the households of Odysseus, Nestor, and Alcinous; and the petulance of Priam towards his sons, after the death of Hector, is excused by his age and intolerable sufferings. "With his staff he chased forth the men, and they went before the old man in his haste."[18]
In short, though wives were bought with the bride-price, it seems probable that the affectionate Homeric fathers allowed more latitude of choice to their daughters than has, in many periods, been permitted by ourselves in England, and no literature in the world displays a happier domestic life, a life more gentle, true, and loving than the old Epics of the mail-clad Achaeans.[19]
[1] Beowulf, 611–628, 1162–1174, 1215–1231.
[2] Odyssey, i. 36–43.
[3] Odyssey, viii. 317–320.
[4] Iliad, xxii. 51, ix. 146–158.
