The History of Greece from Its Earliest Beginnings to the Hellenistic Age. John Bagnell Bury
It almost looks as if the Achillean myth was created before the destruction of Troy; for if it had originated afterwards, the impression of the catastrophe could hardly have failed to produce an echo in the first lays.
It was, perhaps, in the eleventh century, at Smyrna or some other Aeolian town, that the nucleus of the Iliad was composed, on the basis of those older lays, by a poet whom we may call the first Homer, though it is not probable that he was the poet who truly bore that name. He sang in the Achaean, or as it came to be called the Aeolian, tongue. His poem was the Wrath of Achilles and the Death of Hector, and it forms only the smaller part of the Iliad. It was not till the ninth century that the Iliad really came into being. Then a poet of supreme genius arose, and it may be that he was the singer whose name was actually Homer. This famous name has the humble meaning of “hostage”, and we may fancy, if we care, that the poet was carried off in his youth as a hostage in some of the struggles between Aeolian and Ionian cities. He composed his poetry in rugged Chios, and he gives us a local touch when he describes the sun as rising over the sea. From him the Homerid family of the bards of Chios were sprung. He took in hand the older poem of the wrath of Achilles and expanded it into the shape and compass of the greater part of the Iliad. He is the poet who created one of the noblest episodes in the whole epic, Priam’s ransoming of Hector. Tradition made Homer the author of both the great epics, the Odyssey as well as the Iliad. This is not probable. It can hardly have been before the eighth century that the old lays of the wandering of Odysseus and the slaying of the suitors were taken in hand and wrought into a large poem. Like Achilles, Odysseus was originally a god; his wife Penelope was a goddess; and here again the legend was shaped through the influence of historical circumstances. Stories of perils and marvels in the unexplored Euxine were wafted to the Greeks of Asia long before their own seamen ventured into those waters; and these tales had supplied the material for the old poem of the Return of Odysseus.
We may suppose, then, that Homer lived at Chios in the ninth century, and was the true author of the Iliad. He did not give it the exact shape in which it was ultimately transmitted; for it received from his successors in the art additions and extensions which were not entirely to its advantage. But it was he, to all seeming, who first conceived and wrought out the idea of a mighty epic. He was no mere stringer together of ancient lays. He took the motives, he caught the spirit, of the older poems; he wove them into the fabric of his own composition; but he was himself as divinely inspired as any of the elder minstrels, and he was the father of epic poetry, in the sense in which we distinguish an epic poem with a large argument from a short lay. His work was thoroughly artificial—conscious art, as the greatest poetry always is; and it is probable that he committed the Iliad to writing. As he and his successors sang in Ionia, at the courts of Ionian princes, either he or his successors dealt freely with the dialect of the old Achaean poems. The Iliad and Odyssey were arrayed in Ionic dress, and ultimately became so identified with Ionia that the Achaean origin of the older poems was forgotten. The transformation was not, indeed, perfect, for sometimes the Ionian forms did not suit the metre and the Aeolian forms had to remain. But the change was accomplished with wonderful skill, and the old Achaean bards speak to the world, and must speak for ever, in the Ionian tongue, but constantly bewrayed by an intractable Achaean word.
To the student of literature the Homeric poems would be a more satisfactory study, if they were simple compositions which belonged entirely to the same age. But for the historian their complex character should be a distinct gain. Leaving aside later additions, each poem forms has an earlier and a later part, which are separated by an interval of many generations; and so we have two sets of documents, affording us evidence of the social progress which was made in the meantime. Yet the gain is not so great as might be expected. The old Achaean poet, doubtless, reflected faithfully the form and feature of his time; and if the Ionian poet had done likewise, we should have an exact measure of the advance which civilisation had achieved in the intervening centuries. But the Ionian poet wrought in a different fashion. He strove to live into the atmosphere of the past ages which enveloped the Achaean poems on which he worked. He did not, of his own will or purpose, reproduce the manners or environment or geography of his own day. He was, indeed, too good a poet, and not a good enough antiquarian, to trouble himself over much about discrepancies; but, so far as he knew, he sought to avoid them. Fortunately for us, however, anachronisms slipped in. Unwittingly the poet of the Odyssey allows it to escape that he lived in the iron age, for such a proverb as “the mere gleam of iron lures a man to strife” could not have arisen until iron weapons had been long in use. But though the occasional mention of iron betrays him, he is at pains to preserve the weapons and gear of the bronze age.
In one respect Homer was inevitably under the influence of the later conditions. Since the days when the Trojan legend first took shape, the political aspect of Greece had been transformed, and in an age when no historical records were kept it was impossible to avoid interpreting the geography of the older bards in relation to the geography of the ninth century. On the eastern shores of the Peloponnesus, in the plain where Mycenae had once been queen, Argos had risen to supreme power. In the north the land of the Achaeans had been conquered by the Thessalian invaders. To no one in Homer’s time could Argos and the Argives mean anything save the city and people of the Peloponnesus. The fame of the southern Argos had entirely overshadowed its northern namesake, of which the old Achaean minstrels had sung. No one spoke any longer of the Argives of Thessaly. And so, by a most natural process, the Achaeans and Argives of Agamemnon were translated to the Peloponnesus; and it was the southern Argos which was in the mind of Homer. But traces were left of the old conception. Achilles and his Achaeans are left in northern Greece; and the epithet “horse-feeding” betrays the true site of the Achaean Argos. One of the clearest signs of the transformation is this. If Agamemnon had originally belonged to the Peloponnesian Argos, Mycenae must have been his kingdom; and his kingship at golden Mycenae must have been a primary unsuppressed fact in the original woof of the legend. But he was not associated with Mycenae in the old poem; even in the expanded poem Mycenae is mentioned only incidentally. Mycenae and Orchomenus must have been well known by the fame of their wealth to the earliest minstrels; but they were names of distant places which had no more to do than Egyptian Thebes with the matter of the legend.
This geographical transformation involved consequences of the highest import for Greek history. When it came to be thought that the lords of the Peloponnesus had taken a leading part in the Trojan war, as well as the kings of northern Greece, the Trojan war began to assume the shape of a great national enterprise. All the Greeks looked back to it with pride; all desired to have some share in its glory. Consequently, a great many stories were invented in various communities for the purpose of bringing their ancestors into connexion with the Trojan expedition. And the Iliad was regarded as something of far greater significance than an Ionian poem; it was accepted as a national epic, and was, from the first, a powerful engine in promoting among the Greeks community of feeling and tendencies towards national unity. For two hundred years after its birth the Iliad went on gathering additions; and the bards were not unready to make insertions in order to satisfy the pride of the princely and noble families at whose courts they sang. Finally, the Catalogue of the Greek host was composed, formulating explicitly the Panhellenic character of the expedition against Troy.
The Odyssey, affiliated as it was to the Trojan legend, became a national epic too. And the interest awakened in Greece by the idea of the Trojan war was displayed by the composition of a series of epic poems, dealing with those events of the siege which happened both before and after the events described in the Iliad, and with the subsequent history of some of the Greek heroes. These poems were anonymous, and passed under the name of Homer. Along with the Iliad and Odyssey, they formed a chronological series which came to be known as the Epic Cycle.
SECT. 8. POLITICAL AND SOCIAL ORGANISATION OF THE EARLY GREEKS
The Homeric poems give us our earliest glimpse of the working of those political institutions which were the common heritage of most of the children, whether children by adoption or by birth, of the Aryan stock,—of Greek, Roman, and German alike. They show us the King at the head. But he does not govern wholly of his own will; he is guided by a Council of the chief men of the community whom he consults; and the decisions of the council and king deliberating together are brought before the Assembly of the whole people. Out of these three elements, King, Council, and Assembly,