Iliad, ix. 146 et seqq.
[6] Story of Burnt Njal, vol. ii p. 81.
[7] Germania, R. G. E. p. 151, note 1, citing Ham. 160, 163, 164.
[8] Odyssey, i. 278, ii. 195–197.
[9] See Pierron, "qu'il s'entendra avec le prétendant." Merry and Riddell translate, "will accept gifts of wooing for his daughter." Leaf: "get the bride-price for his daughter."
[10] R. G. E. p. 151.
[11] No society is less affluent than that of the Australian tribes. But this does not provoke preferential female infanticide. See Spencer and Gillen, Native Tribes of Central Australia, pp. 51, 52, 264; Northern Tribes, p. 608; Howitt, Native Tribes of South East Australia, pp. 749, 750.
[12] See Appendix, "The supposed Expurgation of Homer."
[13] Odyssey, xxiii. 183–204.
[14] Odyssey, xvii. 266.
[15] R. G. E. p. 153.
[16] Iliad, v. 69–71.
[17] viii. 281–284.
[18] xxiv. 247.
[19] Mr. Murray refers me, for female infanticide among Greeks, to a letter in Pap. Oxyz., 744: "Keep a male. Cast out a female child." These may have been the manners of late Egyptianised Greeks, but I am not dealing with them. See p. 40 supra under note 2.
CHAPTER VI
THE HOMERIC WORLD IN WAR
On the fringe of the horizon, in Homer's day as in our own, always hung the cloud of war. In war, men were as cruel as they have usually been. A successful siege of a city involved the slaying of its defenders, and the carrying away of the women, "to make another's bed, and draw water from another's well." Hector, when the broken oaths of the duel[1] make it certain that Troy must perish, looks for no better fortune to befall Andromache; may the earth be mounded above him before that day!
Though a truce is granted for the cremation and burial, with one common cairn, of the men who fall in a great battle,[2] it is not Achilles alone who would fain refuse burial, and rest in the House of Hades, to an enemy. Hector intends to give the body of Patroclus to the dogs of Troy, and to fix his head on the palisade above the wall.[3] The fury of Achilles, when he learns from Iris the intentions of Hector, has thus more excuse than is usually supposed. Homer himself found such deeds in the tradition; and though he regards them with horror, he cannot expurgate them. The insults lavished by Achilles on the dead Hector are ἀεικέα ἔργα, deeds of shame.[4] But the deeds of Hector would have been as shameful. The treatment of Hector was not sensational enough for the refined taste of the Athenian tragedians. Sophocles and Euripides make Achilles drag the wounded but living Hector.[5]
The tragedians here followed a tradition that was not Homer's; it may have come, Mr. Murray suggests, from the lost Cyclic poem Iliou Persis, the Sack of Ilios. The Cyclic poets of 750–650 B.C. are in all ways more superstitious and barbarous than Homer; theirs is the taste of a later age than his, and, as we shall see, they are usually followed by the Athenian tragedians. They preferred the "sensational" and the "harrowing," and did not shrink, in the Andromache, as in the Ionian Sack of Ilios, from the brutal murder of Hector's child, Astyanax. Homer's men are never child-murderers. City sackings were as cruel as those of Cromwell in Ireland, of Monk in Dundee; our own dealings with Badajoz and Ciudad Rodrigo are more recent examples, and these were towns of our allies. But Homer's men do not, like the Assyrians, torture prisoners of war; such captives were starved, tortured, and literally caged, to extract ransom, during our Hundred Years' War with France; as Cromwell's prisoners, after Dunbar, were starved in Durham Cathedral. In Homer, ransom is sometimes accepted, in the earlier days of the siege. Achilles, especially, took ransoms and was merciful. Contrast the ferocity of Agamemnon, who refuses quarter, and slays a man to whom Menelaus was giving quarter.[6] Agamemnon actually cuts off the hands and head of one foe, and throws the head into the throng! He desires that not even the male child in the womb may escape! (Iliad, vi. 56–60). There are chivalrous passages, as when Hector and Aias exchange gifts after an indecisive passage of arms, and when Diomede and Glaucus recognise their ancestral friendship; but there are plenty of cases in which victors exult with cruel humour over their fallen foes, in the spirit of Arthur in Layamon's Brut. (1200 A.D.).
The dead, except in the case of Eetion on whom Achilles had ruth, were always stripped of arms and armour, if the victors were not impeded. The hut of Idomeneus held many such Trojan spoils. There are hints of a custom of tearing the tunics, or chitons,[7] but they are vague and unimportant. No doubt the act, when performed, was intended as an insult, but it is only alluded to twice or thrice: in one case the tunic is "of bronze," answering to the current term χαλκοχίτωνες, "bronze-clad."[8] The case is obscure.
A la guerre comme à la guerre. The morals of war in Homer are not unlike those of war everywhere in the matter of "atrocities." The siege operations were very inefficient. The Achaeans were not able to invest Troy, and they never dreamed of an escalade. Without a scaling-ladder Patroclus "thrice clomb on the corner of the lofty wall," and was only thrust back by Apollo.[9] But scaling-ladders are never mentioned; a night attack is never contemplated. The famous Wooden Horse is the only hint of an approach under a wooden cover on wheels (the mediaeval "Sow"); and if it was anything of that sort, Homer did not understand its nature. The efficient fighting in the open was done by chariotry (the owners usually dismounted and fought in line or column); as in most ancient oriental countries, Scotland in Roman times, and Ireland in the Late Celtic period, perhaps as late as 300 a.d., also in early Britain. By the date of the Black Figure vases (sixth century B.C.) and in seventh century art, the painters often introduce mounted men: the "late poets" abstained from doing so, it appears, except the late unspeakable Stümper of the Doloneia, according
