Homer and His Age

CHAPTER X

THE HOMERIC HOUSE

If the Homeric poems be, as we maintain, the work of a peculiar age, the Homeric house will also, in all likelihood, be peculiar. It will not be the Hellenic house of classical times. Manifestly the dwelling of a military-prince in the heroic age would be evolved to meet his needs, which were not the needs of later Hellenic citizens. In time of peace the later Greeks are weaponless men, not surrounded by and entertaining throngs of armed retainers, like the Homeric chief. The women of later Greece, moreover, are in the background of life, dwelling in the women's chambers, behind those of the men, in seclusion. The Homeric women also, at least in the house of Odysseus, have their separate chambers, which the men seem not to enter except on invitation, though the ladies freely honour by their presence the hall of the warriors. The circumstances, however, were peculiar—Penelope being unprotected in the absence of her lord.

The whole domestic situation in the Homeric poems—the free equality of the women, the military conditions, the life of the chiefs and retainers—closely resembles, allowing for differences of climate, that of the rich landowners of early Iceland as described in the sagas. There can be no doubt that the house of the Icelandic chief was analogous to the house of the Homeric prince. Societies remarkably similar in mode of life were accommodated in dwellings similarly arranged. Though the Icelanders owned no Over-Lord, and, indeed, left their native Scandinavia to escape the sway of Harold Fairhair, yet each wealthy and powerful chief lived in the manner of a Homeric "king." His lands and thralls, horses and cattle, occupied his attention when he did not chance to be on Viking adventure—"bearing bane to alien men." He always carried sword and spear, and often had occasion to use them. He entertained many guests, and needed a large hall and ample sleeping accommodation for strangers and servants. His women were as free and as much respected as the ladies in Homer; and for a husband to slap a wife was to run the risk of her deadly feud. Thus, far away in the frosts of the north, the life of the chief was like that of the Homeric prince, and their houses were alike.

It is our intention to use this parallel in the discussion of the Homeric house. All Icelandic chiefs' houses in the tenth and eleventh centuries were not precisely uniform in structure and accommodation, and saga writers of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, living more comfortably than their forefathers, sometimes confuse matters by introducing the arrangements of their own into the tale of past times. But, in any case, one Icelandic house of the tenth or eleventh century might differ from another in certain details. It is not safe, therefore, to argue that difference of detail in Homer's accounts of various houses means that the varying descriptions were composed in different ages. In the Odyssey the plot demands that the poet must enter into domestic details much more freely than he ever has occasion to do in the Iliad. He may mention upper chambers freely, for example; it will not follow that in the Iliad upper chambers do not exist because they are only mentioned twice in that Epic.

It is even more important to note that in the house of Odysseus we have an unparalleled domestic situation. The lady of the house is beset by more than a hundred wooers—"sorning" on her, in the old Scots legal phrase—making it impossible for her to inhabit her own hall, and desirable to keep the women as much as possible apart from the men. Thus the Homeric house of which we know most, that of Odysseus, is a house in a most abnormal condition.

For the sake of brevity we omit the old theory that the Homeric house was practically that of historical Greece, with the men's hall approached by a door from the courtyard; while a door at the upper end of the men's hall yields direct access to the quarters where the women dwelt apart, at the rear of the men's hall.

That opinion has not survived the essay by Mr. J. L. Myres on the "Plan of the Homeric House." {Footnote: Journal of Hellenic Studies, vol. XX, 128-150.} Quite apart from arguments that rest on the ground plans of palaces at Mycenae and Tiryns, Mr. Myres has proved, by an exact reading of the poet's words, that the descriptions in the Odyssey cannot be made intelligible on the theory that the poet has in his mind a house of the Hellenic pattern. But in his essay he hardly touches on any Homeric house except that of Odysseus, in which the circumstances were unusual. A later critic, Ferdinand Noack, has demonstrated that we must take other Homeric houses into consideration. {Footnote: Homerische Paläste. Teubner. Leipzig, 1903.} The prae-Mycenaean house is, according to Mr. Myres, on the whole of the same plan as the Hellenic house of historic days; between these comes the Mycenaean and Homeric house; "so that the Mycenaean house stands out as an intrusive phenomenon, of comparatively late arrival and short of duration..." {Footnote: Myres, Journal of Hellenic Studies, vol. xx. p. 149.} Noack goes further; he draws a line between the Mycenaean houses on one hand and the houses described by Homer on the other; while he thinks that the "late Homeric house," that of the closing Books of the Odyssey, is widely sundered from the Homeric house of the Iliad and from the houses of Menelaus and Alcinous in earlier Books of the Odyssey. {Footnote: Noack, p. 73.}

In this case the Iliadic and earlier Odyssean houses are those of a single definite age, neither Mycenaean of the prime, nor Hellenic—a fact which entirely suits our argument. But it is not so certain, that the house of Odysseus is severed from the other Homeric houses by the later addition of an upper storey, as Noack supposes, and of women's quarters, and of separate sleeping chambers for the heads of the family.

The Iliad, save in two passages, and earlier Books of the Odyssey may not mention upper storeys because they have no occasion, or only rare occasion, to do so; and some houses may have had upper sleeping chambers while others of the same period had not, as we shall prove from the Icelandic parallel.

Mr. Myres's idea of the Homeric house, or, at least, of the house of Odysseus, is that the women had a meguron, or common hall, apart from that of the men, with other chambers. These did not lie to the direct rear of the men's hall, nor were they entered by a door that opened in the back wall of the men's hall. Penelope has a chamber, in which she sleeps and does woman's work, upstairs; her connubial chamber, unoccupied during her lord's absence, is certainly on the ground floor. The women's rooms are severed from the men's hall by a courtyard; in the courtyard are chambers. Telemachus has his {Greek: Thalamos}, or chamber, in the men's courtyard. All this appears plain from the poet's words; and Mr. Myres corroborates, by the ground plans of the palaces of Tiryns and Mycenae, a point on which Mr. Monro had doubts, as regards Tiryns, while he accepted it for Mycenae. {Footnote: Monro, Odyssey, ii. 497; Journal of Hellenic Studies, xx. 136.}

Noack {Footnote: Noack, p. 39.} does not, however, agree.

There appears to be no doubt that in the centre of the great halls of Tiryns and of Mycenae, as of the houses in Homer, was the hearth, with two tall pillars on each side, supporting a louvre higher than the rest of the roof, and permitting some, at least, of the smoke of the fire to escape. Beside the fire were the seats of the master and mistress of the house, of the minstrel, and of honoured guests. The place of honour was not on a dais at the inmost end of the hall, like the high table in college halls. Mr. Myres holds that in the Homeric house the {Greek: prodomos}, or "forehouse," was a chamber, and was not identical with the {Greek: aethousa}, or portico, though he admits that the two words "are used indifferently to describe the sleeping place of a guest." {Footnote: Journal of Hellenic Studies, xx. 144, 155.} This was the case at Tiryns; and in the house of the father of Phoenix, in the Iliad, the prodomos, or forehouse, and the aethousa, or portico, are certainly separate things (Iliad, IX. 473). Noack does not accept the Tiryns evidence for the Homeric house.

On Mr. Myres's showing, the women in the house of Odysseus had distinct and separate quarters into which no man goes uninvited. Odysseus when at home has, with his wife, a separate bedroom; and in his absence Penelope sleeps upstairs, where there are several chambers for various purposes.

Granting that all this is so, how do the pictures of the house given in the final part of the Odyssey compare with those in the {Blank space} and with the accounts of the dwellings of Menelaus and Alcinous in the Odyssey? Noack argues that the house of Odysseus is unlike the other Homeric houses, because in these, he reasons, the women have no separate quarters, and the lord and lady of the house sleep in the great hall, and have no other bedroom, while there are no upper chambers in the houses of the Iliad, except in two passages dismissed as "late."

If all this be so, then the Homeric period, as regards houses and domestic life, belongs to an age apart, not truly Mycenaean, and still less later Hellenic.

It must be remembered that Noack regards the Odyssey as a composite and in parts very late mosaic (a view on which I have said what I think in Homer and the Epic). According to this theory (Kirchhoff is the exponent of a popular form thereof) the first Book of the Odyssey belongs to "the latest stratum," and is the "copy" of the general "worker-up," whether he was the editor employed by Pisistratus or a laborious amateur. This theory is opposed by Sittl, who makes his point by cutting out, as interpolations, whatever passages do not suit his ideas, and do suit Kirchhoff's—this is the regular method of Homeric criticism. The whole cruise of Telemachus (Book IV.) is also regarded as a late addition: on this point English scholars hitherto have been of the opposite opinion. {Footnote: Cf. Monro, Odyssey, vol. ii. 313-317.}

The method of all parties is to regard repetitions of phrases as examples of borrowing, except, of course, in the case of the earliest poet from whom the others pilfer, and in other cases of prae-Homeric surviving epic formulae. Critics then dispute as to which recurrent passage is the earlier, deciding, of course, as may happen to suit their own general theory. In our opinion these passages are traditional formulae, as in our own old ballads and in the Chansons de Geste, and Noack also takes this view every now and then. They may well be older, in many cases, than Iliad and Odyssey; or the poet, having found his own formula, economically used it wherever similar circumstances occurred. Such passages, so considered, are no tests of earlier composition in one place, of later composition in another.

We now look into Noack's theory of the Homeric house. Where do the lord and lady sleep? Not, he says, as Odysseus and Penelope do (when Odysseus is at home), in a separate chamber (thalamos) on the ground floor, nor, like Gunnar and Halgerda (Njal's Saga), in an upper chamber. They sleep mucho domou; that is, not in a separate recess in the house, but in a recess of the great hall or megaron. Thus, in the hall of Alcinous, the whole space runs from the threshold to the muchos, the innermost part (Odyssey, VII. 87-96). In the hall of Odysseus, the Wooers retreat to the muchos, "the innermost part of the hall" (Odyssey, XXII. 270). "The muchos, in Homer, never denotes a separate chamber." {Footnote: Noack, p. 45. Cf. Monro, Note to Odyssey, XXII. 270.}

In Odyssey, XI. 373, Alcinous says it is not yet time to sleep ev megaro, "in the hall." Alcinous and Arete, his wife, sleep "in the recess of the lofty domos," that is, in the recess of the hall, not of "the house" (Odyssey, VII. 346). The same words are used of Helen and Menelaus (Odyssey, IV. 304). But when Menelaus goes forth next morning, he goes ek thalamoio, "out of his chamber" (Odyssey, IV. 310). But this, says Noack, is a mere borrowing of Odyssey, II 2-5, where the same words are used of Telemachus, leaving his chamber, which undeniably was a separate chamber in the court: Eurycleia lighted him thither at night (Odyssey, I. 428). In Odyssey, IV. 121, Helen enters the hall "from her fragrant, lofty chamber," so she had a chamber, not in the hall. But, says Noack, this verse "is not original." The late poet of Odyssey, IV. has cribbed it from the early poet who composed Odyssey, XIX. 53. In that passage Penelope "comes from her chamber, like Artemis or golden Aphrodite." Penelope had a chamber—being "a lone lorn woman," who could not sleep in a hall where the Wooers sat up late drinking—and the latest poet transfers this chamber to Helen. But however late and larcenous he may have been, the poet of IV. 121 certainly did not crib the words of the poet of XIX. 53, for he says, "Helen came out of her fragrant, high-roofed chamber." The hall was not precisely "fragrant"! However, Noack supposes that the late poet of Book IV. let Helen have a chamber apart, to lead up to the striking scene of her entry to the hall where her guests are sitting. May Helen not even have a boudoir? In Odyssey, IV. 263, Helen speaks remorsefully of having abandoned her "chamber," and husband, and child, with Paris; but the late poet says this, according to Noack, because he finds that he is in for a chamber, so to speak, at all events, as a result of his having previously cribbed the word "chamber" from Odyssey, XIX. 53. Otherwise, we presume Helen would have said that she regretted having left "the recess of the lofty hall" where she really did sleep. {Footnote: Noack, pp. 47-48}

The merit of this method of arguing may be left to the judgment of the reader, who will remark that wedded pairs are not described as leaving the hall when they go to bed; they sleep in "a recess of the lofty house," the innermost part. Is this the same as the "recess of the hall" or is it an innermost part of the house? Who can be certain?

The bridal chamber, built so cunningly, with the trunk of a tree for the support of the bed, by Odysseus (odyssey, XXIII. 177-204), is, according to Noack, an exception, a solitary freak of Odysseus. But we may reply that the thalamos, the separate chamber, is no freak; the freak, by knowledge of which Odysseus proves his identity, is the use of the tree in the construction of the bed. {blank space} was highly original.

That separate chambers are needed for grown-up children, BECAUSE the parents sleep in the hall, is no strong argument. If the parents had a separate chamber, the young people, unless they slept in the hall, would still need their own. The girls, of course, could not sleep in the hall; and, in the absence of both Penelope and Odysseus from the hall, ever since Telemachus was a baby, Telemachus could have slept there. But it will be replied that the Wooers did not beset the hall, and Penelope did not retire to a separate chamber, till Telemachus was a big boy of sixteen. Noack argues that he had a separate chamber, though the hall was free, tradition. {Footnote: Noack, p. 49.}

Where does Noack think that, in a normal Homeric house, the girls of the family slept? They could not sleep in the hall, and on the two occasions when the Iliad has to mention the chambers of the young ladies they are "upper chambers," as is natural. But as Noack wants to prove the house of Odysseus, with its upper chambers, to be a late peculiar house, he, of course, expunges the two mentions of girls' upper chambers in the Odyssey. The process is simple and easy.

We find (Iliad, XVII. 36) that a son, wedding in his father's and mother's life-time, has a thalamos built for him, and a muchos in the THALAMOS, where he leaves his wife when he goes to war. This dwelling of grown-up married children, as in the case of the sons of Priam, has a thalamos, or doma, and a courtyard—is a house, in fact (Iliad, VI. 3 16). Here we seem to distinguish the bed-chamber from the doma, which is the hall. Noack objects that when Odysseus fumigates his house, after slaying the Wooers, he thus treats the megaron, AND the doma, AND the courtyard. Therefore, Noack argues, the megaron, or hall, is one thing; the doma is another. Mr. Monro writes, "doma usually means megaron," and he supposes a slip from another reading, thalamon for megaron, which is not satisfactory. But if doma here be not equivalent to megaron, what room can it possibly be? Who was killed in another place? what place therefore needed purification except the hall and courtyard? No other places needed purifying; there is therefore clearly a defect in the lines which cannot be used in the argument.

Noack, in any case, maintains that Paris has but one place to live in by day and to sleep in by night—his {Greek: talamos}. There he sleeps, eats, and polishes his weapons and armour. There Hector finds him looking to his gear; Helen and the maids are all there (Iliad, VI. 321-323). Is this quite certain? Are Helen and the maids in the {Greek: talamos}, where Paris is polishing his corslet and looking to his bow, or in an adjacent room? If not in another room, why, when Hector is in the room talking to Paris, does Helen ask him to "come in"? (Iliad, VI. 354). He is in, is there another room whence she can hear him?

The minuteness of these inquiries is tedious!

In Iliad, III. 125, Iris finds Helen "in the hall" weaving. She summons her to come to Priam on the gate. Helen dresses in outdoor costume, and goes forth "from the chamber," {Greek: talamos} (III. 141-142). Are hall and chamber the same room, or did not Helen dress "in the chamber"? In the same Book (III. 174) she repents having left the {Greek: talamos} of Menelaus, not his hall: the passage is not a repetition in words of her speech in the Odyssey.

The gods, of course, are lodged like men. When we find that Zeus has really a separate sleeping chamber, built by Hephaestus, as Odysseus has (Iliad, XIV. 166-167), we are told that this is a late interpolation. Mr. Leaf, who has a high opinion of this scene, "the Beguiling of Zeus," places it in the "second expansions"; he finds no "late Odyssean" elements in the language. In Iliad, I. 608-611, Zeus "departed to his couch"; he seems not to have stayed and slept in the hall.

Here a quaint problem occurs. Of all late things in the Odyssey the latest is said to be the song of Demodocus about the loves of Ares and Aphrodite in the house of Hephaestus. {Footnote: Odyssey, VIII. 266-300.} We shall show that this opinion is far from certainly correct. Hephaestus sets a snare round the bed in his {Greek: talamos} and catches the guilty lovers. Now, was his {Greek: talamos} or bedroom, also his dining-room? If so, the author of the song, though so "late," knows what Noack knows, and what the poets who assign sleeping chambers to wedded folks do not know, namely, that neither married gods nor married men have separate bedrooms. This is plain, for he makes Hephaestus stand at the front door of his house, and shout to the gods to come and see the sinful lovers. {Footnote: Ibid., VI. 304-305} They all come and look on from the front door (Odyssey, VII. 325), which leads into the {Greek: megaron}, the hall. If the lovers are in bed in the hall, then hall and bedroom are all one, and the terribly late poet who made this lay knows it, though the late poets of the Odyssey and Iliad do not.

It would appear that the author of the lay is not "late," as we shall prove in another case.

Noack, then, will not allow man or god to have a separate wedding chamber, nor women, before the late parts of the Odyssey, to have separate quarters, except in the house of Odysseus. Women's chambers do not exist in the Homeric house. {Footnote: Noack, p. 50.} If so, how remote is the true Homeric house from the house of historical Greece!

As for upper chambers, those of the daughter of the house (Iliad, II. 514; XVI. 184), both passages are "late," as we saw (Noack, p.{blank space}). In the Odyssey Penelope both sleeps and works at the shroud in an upper chamber. But the whole arrangement of upper chambers as women's apartments is as late, says Noack, as the time of the poets and "redactors" (whoever they may have been) of the Odyssey, XXI., XXII., XXIII. {Footnote: Noack, p. 68.} At the earliest these Books are said to be of the eighth century B.C. Here the late poets have their innings at last, and do modernise the Homeric house.

To prove the absence of upper rooms in the Iliad we have to abolish II. 514, where Astyoche meets her divine lover in her upper chamber, and XVI. 184, where Polymêlê celebrates her amour with Hermes "in the upper chambers." The places where these two passages occur, Catalogue (Book II.) and the Catalogue of the Myrmidons (Book XVI.) are, indeed, both called "late," but the author of the latter knows the early law of bride-price, which is supposed to be unknown to the authors of "late" passages in the Odyssey (XVI. 190).

Stated briefly, such are the ideas of Noack. They leave us, at least, with permission to hold that the whole of the Epics, except Books XXI., XXII., and XXIII. of the Odyssey, bear, as regards the house, the marks of a distinct peculiar age, coming between the period of Mycenae and Tiryns on one hand and the eighth century B.C. on the other.

This is the point for which we have contended, and this suits our argument very well, though we are sorry to see that Odyssey, Books XXI., XXII., and XXIII., are no older than the eighth century B.C. But we have not been quite convinced that Helen had not her separate chamber, that Zeus had not his separate chamber, and that the upper chambers of the daughters of the house in the Iliad are "late." Where, if not in upper chambers, did the young princesses repose? Again, the marked separation of the women in the house of Odysseus may be the result of Penelope's care in unusual circumstances, though she certainly would not build a separate hall for them. There are over a hundred handsome young scoundrels in her house all day long and deep into the night; she would, vainly, do her best to keep her girls apart.

It stands to reason that young girls of princely families would have bedrooms in the house, not in the courtyard-bedrooms out of the way of enterprising young men. What safer place could be found for them than in upper chambers, as in the Iliad? But, if their lovers were gods, we know that none "can see a god coming or going against his will." The arrangements of houses may and do vary in different cases in the same age.

As examples we turn to the parallel afforded by the Icelandic sagas and their pictures of houses of the eleventh century B.C. The present author long ago pointed out the parallel of the houses in the sagas and in Homer. {Footnote: The House. Butcher and Lang. Translation of the Odyssey.} He took his facts from Dasent's translation of the Njal Saga (1861, vol. i. pp. xcviii., ciii., with diagrams). As far as he is aware, no critic looked into the matter till Mr. Monro (1901), being apparently unacquainted with Dasent's researches, found similar lore in works by Dr. Valtyr Gudmundsson {Footnote: Monro, Odyssey, vol. ii. pp. 491-495; cf. Gudmundsson, Der Islandske Bottg i Fristats Tiden, 1894; cf. Dasent, Oxford Essays, 1858.} The roof of the hall is supported by four rows of columns, the two inner rows are taller, and between them is the hearth, with seats of honour for the chief guests and the lord. The fire was in a kind of trench down the hall; and in very cold weather, we learn from Dasent, long fires could be lit through the extent of the hall. The chief had a raised seat; the guests sat on benches. The high seats were at the centre; not till later times on the dais, as in a college hall. The tables were relatively small, and, as in Homer, could be removed after a meal. The part of the hall with the dais in later days was partitioned off as a stofa or parlour. In early times cooking was done in the hall.

Dr. Gudmundsson, if I understand him, varies from Dasent in some respects. I quote an abstract of his statement.

"About the year 1000 houses generally consisted of, at least, four rooms; often a fifth was added, the so-called bath-room. The oldest form for houses was that of one long line or row of separate rooms united by wooden or clay corridors or partitions, and each covered with a roof. Later, this was considered unpractical, and they began building some of the houses or rooms behind the others, which facilitated the access from one to another, and diminished the number of outer doors and corridors."

"Towards the latter part of the tenth century the skaal was used as common sleeping-room for the whole family, including servants and serfs; it was fitted up in the same way as the hall. Like this, it was divided in three naves by rows of wooden pillars; the middle floor was lower than that of the two side naves. In these were placed the so-called saet or bed-places, not running the whole length of the {blank space} from gable to gable, but sideways, filling about a third part. Each saet was enclosed by broad, strong planks joined into the pillars, but not nailed on, so they might easily be taken out. These planks, called SATTESTOKKE, could also be turned sideways and used as benches during the day; they were often beautifully carved, and consequently highly valued."

"When settling abroad the people took away with them these planks, and put them up in their new home as a symbol of domestic happiness. The saet was occupied by the servants of the farm as sleeping-rooms; generally it was screened by hangings and low panels, which partitioned it off like huge separate boxes, used as beds."

"All beds were filled with hay or straw; servants and serfs slept on this without any bedclothes, sometimes a sleeping-bag was used, or they covered themselves with deerskins or a mantle. The family had bed-clothes, but only in very wealthy houses were they also provided for the servants. Moveable beds were extremely rare, but are sometimes mentioned. Generally two people slept in each bed."

"In the further end of the skaal, facing the door, opened out one or several small bedrooms, destined for the husband with wife and children, besides other members of the family, including guests of a higher standing. These small dormitories were separated by partitions of planks into bedrooms with one or several beds, and shut away from the outer SKAAL either by a sliding-door in the wall or by an ordinary door shutting with a hasp. Sometimes only a hanging covered the opening."

"In some farms were found underground passages, leading from the master's bedside to an outside house, or even as far as a wood or another sheltered place in the neighbourhood, to enable the inhabitants to save themselves during a night attack. For the same reason each man had his arms suspended over his bed."

"Ildhus or fire-house was the kitchen, often used besides as a sleeping-room when the farms were very small. This was quite abolished after the year 1000."

"Buret was the provision house."

"The bathroom was heated from a stone oven; the stones were heated red-hot and cold water thrown upon them, which developed a quantity of vapour. As the heat and the steam mounted, the people—men and women—crawled up to a shelf under the roof and remained there as in a Turkish bath."

"In large and wealthy houses there was also a women's room, with a fireplace built low down in the middle, as in the hall, where the women used to sit with their handiwork all day. The men were allowed to come in and talk to them, also beggar-women and other vagabonds, who brought them the news from other places. Towards evening and for meals all assembled together in the hall."

On this showing, people did not sleep in cabins partitioned off the dining-hall, but in the skaale; and two similar and similarly situated rooms, one the common dining-hall, the other the common sleeping-hall, have been confused by writers on the sagas. {Footnote: Gudmundsson, p, 14, Note I.} Can there be a similar confusion in the uses of megaron, doma, and domos?

In the Eyrbyggja Saga we have descriptions of the "fire-hall," skáli or eldhús. "The fire-hall was the common sleeping-room in Icelandic homesteads." Guests and strangers slept there; not in the portico, as in Homer. "Here were the lock-beds." There were butteries; one of these was reached by a ladder. The walls were panelled. {Footnote: The Ere Dwellers, p. 145.} Thorgunna had a "berth," apparently partitioned off, in the hall. {Footnote: Ibid., 137-140.} As in Homer the hall was entered from the courtyard, in which were separate rooms for stores and other purposes. In the courtyard also, in the houses of Gunnar of Lithend and Gisli at Hawkdale, and doubtless in other cases, were the dyngfur, or ladies' chambers, their "bowers" (Thalamos, like that of Telemachus in the courtyard), where they sat spinning and gossiping. The dyngja was originally called búr, our "bower"; the ballads say "in bower and hall." In the ballad of MARGARET, her parents are said to put her in the way of deadly sin by building her a bower, apparently separate from the main building; she would have been safer in an upper chamber, though, even there, not safe—at least, if a god wooed her! It does not appear that all houses had these chambers for ladies apart from the main building. You did not enter the main hall in Iceland from the court directly in front, but by the "man's door" at the west side, whence you walked through the porch or outer hall (prodomos, aithonsa), in the centre of which, to the right, were the doors of the hall. The women entered by the women's door, at the eastern extremity.

In Njal's house, too, there was an upper chamber, wherein the foes of Njal threw fire. {Footnote:Ibid., ii. 173.} But Njal and Bergthora, his wife, when all hope was ended, went into their own bride-chamber in the separate aisle of the hall "and gave over their souls into God's hand." Under a hide they lay; and when men raised up the hide, after the fire had done its work, "they were unburnt under it. All praised God for that, and thought it was a GREAT token." In this house was a weaving room for the women. {Footnote:Ibid, ii. 195.}

It thus appears that Icelandic houses of the heroic age, as regards structural arrangements, were practically identical with the house of Odysseus, allowing for a separate sleeping-hall, while the differences between that and other Homeric houses may be no more than the differences between various Icelandic dwellings. The parents might sleep in bedchambers off the hall or in upper chambers. Ladies might have bowers in the courtyard or might have none. The {Greek: laurae}—each passage outside the hall—yielded sleeping rooms for servants; and there were store-rooms behind the passage at the top end of the hall, as well as separate chambers for stores in the courtyard. Mr. Leaf judiciously reconstructs the Homeric house in its "public rooms," of which we hear most, while he leaves the residential portion with "details and limits probably very variable." {Footnote: Iliad, vol. i. pp. 586-589, with diagram based on the palace of Tiryns.}

Given variability, which is natural and to be expected, and given the absence of detail about the "residential portion" of other houses than that of Odysseus in the poems, it does not seem to us that this house is conspicuously "late," still less that it is the house of historical Greece. Manifestly, in all respects it more resembles the houses of Njal and Gunnar of Lithend in the heroic age of Iceland.

In the house, as in the uses of iron and bronze, the weapons, armour, relations of the sexes, customary laws, and everything else, Homer gives us an harmonious picture of a single and peculiar age. We find no stronger mark of change than in the Odyssean house, if that be changed, which we show reason to doubt.

CHAPTER XI

NOTES OF CHANGE IN THE "ODYSSEY"

If the Homeric descriptions of details of life contain anachronisms, points of detail inserted in later progressive ages, these must be peculiarly conspicuous in the Odyssey. Longinus regarded it as the work of Homer's advanced life, the sunset of his genius, and nobody denies that it assumes the existence of the Iliad and is posterior to that epic. In the Odyssey, then, we are to look, if anywhere, for indications of a changed society. That the language of the Odyssey, and of four Books of the Iliad (IX., X., XXIII., XXIV.), exhibits signs of change is a critical commonplace, but the language is matter for a separate discussion; we are here concerned with the ideas, manners, customary laws, weapons, implements, and so forth of the Epics.

Taking as a text Mr. Monro's essay, The Relation of the Odyssey to the Iliad, {Footnote: Monro, Odyssey, vol. ii. pp. 324, seqq.} we examine the notes of difference which he finds between the twin Epics. As to the passages in which he discovers "borrowing or close imitation of passages" in the Iliad by the poet of the Odyssey, we shall not dwell on the matter, because we know so little about the laws regulating the repetition of epic formulae. It is tempting, indeed, to criticise Mr. Monro's list of twenty-four Odyssean "borrowings," and we might arrive at some curious results. For example, we could show that the Klôthes, the spinning women who "spae" the fate of each new-born child, are not later, but, as less abstract, are if anything earlier than "the simple Aisa of the Iliad." {Footnote: Odyssey, VII. 197; Iliad, xx. 127.} But our proof would require an excursion into the beliefs of savage and barbaric peoples who have their Klôthes, spae-women attending each birth, but who are not known to have developed the idea of Aisa or Fate.

We might also urge that "to send a spear through the back of a stag" is not, as Mr. Monro thought, "an improbable feat," and that a man wounded to death as Leiocritus was wounded, would not, as Mr. Monro argued, fall backwards. He supposes that the poet of the Odyssey borrowed the forward fall from a passage in the Iliad, where the fall is in keeping. But, to make good our proof, it might be necessary to spear a human being in the same way as Leiocritus was speared. {Footnote: Monro, odyssey, vol. ii. pp. 239, 230.}

The repetitions of the Epic, at all events, are not the result of the weakness of a poet who had to steal his expressions like a schoolboy. They have some other cause than the indolence or inefficiency of a cento—making undergraduate. Indeed, a poet who used the many terms in the Odyssey which do not occur in the Iliad was not constrained to borrow from any predecessor.

It is needless to dwell on the Odyssean novelties in vocabulary, which were naturally employed by a poet who had to sing of peace, not of war, and whose epic, as Aristotle says, is "ethical," not military. The poet's rich vocabulary is appropriate to his novel subject, that is all.

Coming to Religion (I) we find Mr. Leaf assigning to his original Achilleis—"the kernel"—the very same religious ideas as Mr. Monro takes to be marks of "lateness" and of advance when he finds them in the Odyssey!

In the original oldest part of the Iliad, says Mr. Leaf, "the gods show themselves just so much as to let us know what are the powers which control mankind from heaven.... Their interference is such as becomes the rulers of the world, not partisans in the battle." {Footnote: Leaf, Iliad, vol. ii. pp. xii., xiii.} It is the later poets of the Iliad, in Mr. Leaf's view, who introduce the meddlesome, undignified, and extremely unsportsmanlike gods. The original early poet of the Iliad had the nobler religious conceptions.

In that case—the Odyssey being later than the original kernel of the Iliad—the Odyssey ought to give us gods as undignified and unworthy as those exhibited by the later continuators of the Iliad.

But the reverse is the case. The gods behave fairly well in Book XXIV. of the Iliad, which, we are to believe, is the latest, or nearly the latest, portion. They are all wroth with the abominable behaviour of Achilles to dead Hector (XXIV. 134). They console and protect Priam. As for the Odyssey, Mr. Monro finds that in this late Epic the gods are just what Mr. Leaf proclaims them to have been in his old original kernel. "There is now an Olympian concert that carries on something like a moral government of the world. It is very different in the Iliad...." {Footnote: Monro, Odyssey, ii. 335.}

But it was not very different; it was just the same, in Mr. Leaf's genuine old original germ of the Iliad. In fact, the gods are "very much like you and me." When their ichor is up, they misbehave as we do when our blood is up, during the fury of war. When Hector is dead and when the war is over, the gods give play to their higher nature, as men do. There is no difference of religious conception to sever the Odyssey from the later but not from the original parts of the Iliad. It is all an affair of the circumstances in each case.

The Odyssey is calmer, more reflective, more religious than the Iliad, being a poem of peace. The Iliad, a poem of war, is more mythological than the Odyssey: the gods in the Iliad are excited, like the men, by the great war and behave accordingly. That neither gods nor men show any real sense of the moral weakness of Agamemnon or Achilles, or of the moral superiority of Hector, is an unacceptable statement. {Footnote: Monro, Odyssey, vol. ii. p. 336.} Even Achilles and Agamemnon are judged by men and by the poet according to their own standard of ethics and of customary law. There is really no doubt on this point. Too much (2) is made of the supposed different views of Olympus—a mountain in Thessaly in the Iliad; a snowless, windless, supra-mundane place in Odyssey, V. 41-47. {Footnote: Ibid., ii. 396.} Of the Odyssean passage Mr. Merry justly says, "the actual description is not irreconcilable with the general Homeric picture of Olympus." It is "an idealised mountain," and conceptions of it vary, with the variations which are essential to and inseparable from all mythological ideas. As Mr. Leaf says, {Footnote: Note to Iliad, V. 750.} "heaven, ouranos and Olympus, if not identical, are at least closely connected." In V. 753, the poet "regarded the summit of Olympus as a half-way stage between heaven and earth," thus "departing from the oldest Homeric tradition, which made the earthly mountain Olympus, and not any aerial region, the dwelling of the gods." But precisely the same confusion of mythical ideas occurs among a people so backward as the Australian south-eastern tribes, whose All Father is now seated on a hill-top and now "above the sky." In ILIAD, VIII. 25, 26, the poet is again said to have "entirely lost the real Epic conception of Olympus as a mountain in Thessaly," and to "follow the later conception, which removed it from earth to heaven." In Iliad, XI. 184, "from heaven" means "from the summit of Olympus, which, though Homer does not identify it with oupavos, still, as a mountain, reached into heaven" (Leaf). The poet of Iliad, XI. 184, says plainly that Zeus descended "from heaven" to Mount Ida. In fact, all that is said of Olympus, of heaven, of the home of the gods, is poetical, is mythical, and so is necessarily subject to the variations of conception inseparable from mythology. This is certain if there be any certainty in mythological science, and here no hard and fast line can be drawn between ODYSSEY and Iliad.

(3) The next point of difference is that, "we hear no more of Iris as the messenger of Zeus;" in the Odyssey, "the agent of the will of Zeus is now Hermes, as in the Twenty-fourth Book of the Iliad," a late "Odyssean" Book. But what does that matter, seeing that ILIAD, Book VIII, is declared to be one of the latest additions; yet in Book VIII. Iris, not Hermes, is the messenger (VIII. 409-425). If in late times Hermes, not Iris, is the messenger, why, in a very "late" Book (VIII.) is Iris the messenger, not Hermes? Iliad, Book XXIII., is also a late "Odyssean" Book, but here Iris goes on her messages (XXIII. 199) moved merely by the prayers of Achilles. In the late Odyssean Book (XXIV.) of the Iliad, Iris runs on messages from Zeus both to Priam and to Achilles. If Iris, in "Odyssean" times, had resigned office and been succeeded by Hermes, why did Achilles pray, not to Hermes, but to Iris? There is nothing in the argument about Hermes and Iris. There is nothing in the facts but the variability of mythical and poetical conceptions. Moreover, the conception of Iris as the messenger certainly existed through the age of the Odyssey, and later. In the Odyssey the beggar man is called "Irus," a male Iris, because he carries messages; and Iris does her usual duty as messenger in the Homeric Hymns, as well as in the so-called late Odyssean Books of the Iliad. The poet of the Odyssey knew all about Iris; there had arisen no change of belief; he merely employed Hermes as messenger, not of the one god, but of the divine Assembly.

(4) Another difference is that in the Iliad the wife of Hephaestus is one of the Graces; in the Odyssey she is Aphrodite. {Footnote: Monro, Odyssey, vol. ii. p. 336.} This is one of the inconsistencies which are the essence of mythology. Mr. Leaf points out that when Hephaestus is about exercising his craft, in making arms for Achilles, Charis "is made wife of Hephaestus by a more transparent allegory than we find elsewhere in Homer," whereas, when Aphrodite appears in a comic song by Demodocus (Odyssey, VIII. 266-366), "that passage is later and un-Homeric." {Footnote: Leaf, Iliad, vol. ii. p. 246.}

Of this we do not accept the doctrine that the lay is un-Homeric. The difference comes to no more than that; the accustomed discrepancy of mythology, of story-telling about the gods. But as to the lay of Demodocus being un-Homeric and late, the poet at least knows the regular Homeric practice of the bride-price, and its return by the bride's father to the husband of an adulterous wife (Odyssey, VIII. 318, 319). The poet of this lay, which Mr. Merry defends as Homeric, was intimately familiar with Homeric customary law. Now, according to Paul Cauer, as we shall see, other "Odyssean" poets were living in an age of changed law, later than that of the author of the lay of Demodocus. All these so-called differences between Iliad and Odyssey do not point to the fact that the Odyssey belongs to a late and changed period of culture, of belief and customs. There is nothing in the evidence to prove that contention.

There (5) are two references to local oracles in the Odyssey, that of Dodona (XIV. 327; XIX. 296) and that of Pytho (VIII. 80). This is the old name of Delphi. Pytho occurs in Iliad, IX. 404, as a very rich temple of Apollo—the oracle is not named, but the oracle brought in the treasures. Achilles (XVI. 233) prays to Pelasgian Zeus of Dodona, whose priests were thickly tabued, but says nothing of the oracle of Dodona. Neither when in leaguer round Troy, nor when wandering in fairy lands forlorn, had the Achaeans or Odysseus much to do with the local oracles of Greece; perhaps not, in Homer's time, so important as they were later, and little indeed is said about them in either Epic.

(6) "The geographical knowledge shown in the Odyssey goes beyond that of the Iliad ... especially in regard to Egypt and Sicily." But a poet of a widely wandering hero of Western Greece has naturally more occasion than the poet of a fixed army in Asia to show geographical knowledge. Egyptian Thebes is named, in ILIAD, IX., as a city very rich, especially in chariots; while in the ODYSSEY the poet has occasion to show more knowledge of the way to Egypt and of Viking descents from Crete on the coast (Odyssey, III. 300; IV. 351; XIV. 257; XVII. 426). Archaeology shows that the Mycenaean age was in close commercial relation with Egypt, and that the Mycenaean civilisation extended to most Mediterranean lands and islands, and to Italy and Sicily. {Footnote: Ridgeway, Early Age of Greece, i. 69.} There is nothing suspicious, as "late," in the mention of Sicily by Odysseus in Ithaca (Odyssey, XX. 383; XXIV. 307). In the same way, if the poet of a western poem does not dilate on the Troad and the people of Asia Minor as the poet of the ILIAD does, that is simply because the scene of the ILIAD is in Asia and the scene of the Odyssey is in the west, when it is not in No Man's land. From the same cause the poet of sea-faring has more occasion to speak of the Phoenicians, great sea-farers, than the poet of the Trojan leaguer.

(7) We know so little about land tenure in Homeric times—and, indeed, early land tenure is a subject so complex and obscure that it is not easy to prove advance towards separate property in the Odyssey—beyond what was the rule in the time of the ILIAD. In the Making of the Arms (XVIII. 541-549) we find many men ploughing a field, and this may have been a common field. But in what sense? Many ploughs were at work at once on a Scottish runrig field, and each farmer had his own strip on several common fields, but each farmer held by rent, or by rent and services, from the laird. These common fields were not common property. In XII. 422 we have "a common field," and men measuring a strip and quarrelling about the marking-stones, across the "baulk," but it does not follow that they are owners; they may be tenants. Such quarrels were common in Scotland when the runrig system of common fields, each man with his strip, prevailed. {Footnote: Grey Graham, Social Life in Scotland in the Eighteenth Century, i. 157.}

A man had a {Greek: klaeros} or lot (ILIAD, XV. 448), but what was a "lot"? At first, probably, a share in land periodically shifted-& partage noir of the Russian peasants. Kings and men who deserve public gratitude receive a {Greek: temenos} a piece of public land, as Bellerophon did from the Lycians (VI. 194). In the case of Melager such an estate is offered to him, but by whom? Not by the people at large, but by the {Greek: gerontes} (IX. 574).

Who are the {Greek: gerontes}? They are not ordinary men of the people; they are, in fact, the gentry. In an age so advanced from tribal conditions as is the Homeric time—far advanced beyond ancient tribal Scotland or Ireland—we conceive that, as in these countries during the tribal period, the {Greek: gerontes} (in Celtic, the Flaith) held in POSSESSION, if not in accordance with the letter of the law, as property, much more land than a single "lot." The Irish tribal freeman had a right to a "lot," redistributed by rotation. Wealth consisted of cattle; and a bogire, a man of many kine, let them out to tenants. Such a rich man, a flatha, would, in accordance with human nature, use his influence with kineless dependents to acquire in possession several lots, avoid the partition, and keep the lots in possession though not legally in property. Such men were the Irish flaith, gentry under the RI, or king, his {Greek: gerontes}, each with his ciniod, or near kinsmen, to back his cause.

"Flaith seems clearly to mean land-owners," or squires, says Sir James Ramsay. {Footnote: Foundations of England, i. 16, Note 4.} If land, contrary to the tribal ideal, came into private hands in early Ireland, we can hardly suppose that, in the more advanced and settled Homeric society, no man but the king held land equivalent in extent to a number of "lots." The {Greek: gerontes}, the gentry, the chariot-owning warriors, of whom there are hundreds not of kingly rank in Homer (as in Ireland there were many flaith to one Ri) probably, in an informal but tight grip, held considerable lands. When we note their position in the Iliad, high above the nameless host, can we imagine that they did not hold more land than the simple, perhaps periodically shifting, "lot"? There were "lotless" men (Odyssey, XL 490), lotless freemen, and what had become of their lots? Had they not fallen into the hands of the {Greek: gerontes} or the flaith?

Mr. Ridgeway in a very able essay {Footnote: Journal of Hellenic Studies, vi. 319-339.} holds different opinions. He points out that among a man's possessions, in the Iliad, we hear only of personal property and live stock. It is in one passage only in the Odyssey (XIV. 211) that we meet with men holding several lots of land; but they, we remark, occur in Cretean isle, as we know, of very advanced civilisation from of old.

Mr. Ridgeway also asks whether the lotless men may not be "outsiders," such as are attached to certain villages of Central and Southern India; {Footnote: Maine, Village Communities, P. 127.} or they may answer to the Fuidhir, or "broken men," of early Ireland, fugitives from one to another tribe. They would be "settled on the waste lands of a community." If so, they would not be lotless; they would have new lots. {Footnote: Journal of Hellenic Studies, vi. 322, 323.}

Laertes, though a king, is supposed to have won his farm by his own labours from the waste (Odyssey, XXIV. 207). Mr. Monro says, "the land having thus been won from the wastes (the {Greek: gae aklaeros te kai aktitos} of H., Ven. 123), was a {Greek: temenos} or separate possession of Laertes." The passage is in the rejected conclusion of the Odyssey; and if any man might go and squat in the waste, any man might have a lot, or better than one lot. In Iliad, XXIII. 832-835, Achilles says that his offered prize of iron will be useful to a man "whose rich fields are very remote from any town," Teucer and Meriones compete for the prize: probably they had such rich remote fields, not each a mere lot in a common field. These remote fields they are supposed to hold in perpetuity, apart from the temenos, which, in Mr. Ridgeway's opinion, reverted, on the death of each holder, to the community, save where kingship was hereditary. Now, if {Greek: klaeros} had come to mean "a lot of land," as we say "a building lot," obviously men like Teucer and Meriones had many lots, rich fields, which at death might sometimes pass to their heirs. Thus there was separate landed property in the Iliad; but the passage is denounced, though not by Mr. Ridgeway, as "late."

The absence of enclosures ({Greek: herkos arouraes}) proves nothing about absence of several property in land. In Scotland the laird's lands were unenclosed till deep in the eighteenth century.

My own case for land in private possession, in Homeric times, rests mainly on human nature in such an advanced society. Such possession as I plead for is in accordance with human nature, in a society so distinguished by degrees of wealth as is the Homeric.

Unless we are able to suppose that all the gentry of the Iliad held no "rich fields remote from towns," each having but one rotatory lot apiece, there is no difference in Iliadic and Odyssean land tenure, though we get clearer lights on it in the Odyssey.

The position of the man of several lots may have been indefensible, if the ideal of tribal law were ever made real, but wealth in growing societies universally tends to override such law. Mr. Keller {Footnote: Homeric Society, p. 192. 1902.} justly warns us against the attempt "to apply universally certain fixed rules of property development. The passages in Homer upon which opinions diverge most are isolated ones, occurring in similes and fragmentary descriptions. Under such conditions the formulation of theories or the attempt rigorously to classify can be little more than an intellectual exercise."

We have not the materials for a scientific knowledge of Homeric real property; and, with all our materials in Irish law books, how hard it is for us to understand the early state of such affairs in Ireland! But does any one seriously suppose that the knightly class of the Iliad, the chariot-driving gentlemen, held no more land—legally or by permitted custom—than the two Homeric swains who vituperate each other across a baulk about the right to a few feet of a strip of a runrig field? Whosoever can believe that may also believe that the practice of adding "lot" to "lot" began in the period between the finished composition of the Iliad (or of the parts of it which allude to land tenure) and the beginning of the Odyssey (or of the parts of it which refer to land tenure). The inference is that, though the fact is not explicitly stated in the Iliad, there were men who held more "lots" than one in Iliadic times as well as in the Odyssean times, when, in a solitary passage of the Odyssey, we do hear of such men in Crete. But whosoever has pored over early European land tenures knows how dim our knowledge is, and will not rush to employ his lore in discriminating between the date of the Iliad and the date of the Odyssey.

Not much proof of change in institutions between Iliadic and Odyssean times can be extracted from two passages about the ethna, or bride-price of Penelope. The rule in both Iliad and Odyssey is that the wooer gives a bride-price to the father of the bride, ethna. This was the rule known even to that painfully late and un-Homeric poet who made the Song of Demodocus about the loves of Ares and Aphrodite. In that song the injured husband, Hephaestus, claims back the bride-price which he had paid to the father of his wife, Zeus. {Footnote: Odyssey, VIII. 318.} This is the accepted custom throughout the Odyssey (VI. 159; XVI. 77; XX. 335; XXI. 162; XV. 17, &c.). So far there is no change of manners, no introduction of the later practice, a dowry given with the bride, in place of a bride-price given to the father by the bridegroom. But Penelope was neither maid, wife, nor widow; her husband's fate, alive or dead, was uncertain, and her son was so anxious to get her out of the house that he says he offered gifts with her (XX. 342). In the same way, to buy back the goodwill of Achilles, Agamemnon offers to give him his daughter without bride-price, and to add great gifts (Iliad, IX. l47)—the term for the gifts is {Greek: mailia}. People, of course, could make their own bargain; take as much for their daughter as they could get, or let the gifts go from husband to bride, and then return to the husband's home with her (as in Germany in the time of Tacitus, Germania, 18), or do that, and throw in more gifts. But in Odyssey, II. 53, Telemachus says that the Wooers shrink from going to the house of Penelope's father, Icarius, who would endow (?) his daughter ({Greek: eednoosaito}) And again (Odyssey, I. 277; II. 196), her father's folk will furnish a bridal feast, and "array the {Greek: heedna}, many, such as should accompany a dear daughter." Some critics think that the gifts here are dowry, a later institution than bride-price; others, that the father of the dear daughter merely chose to be generous, and returned the bride-price, or its equivalent, in whole or part. {Footnote: Merry, Odyssey, vol. i. p. 50. Note to Book I 277.} If the former view be correct, these passages in Odyssey, I., II. are later than the exceedingly "late" song of Demodocus. If the latter theory be correct the father is merely showing goodwill, and doing as the Germans did when they were in a stage of culture much earlier than the Homeric.

The position of Penelope is very unstable and legally perplexing. Has her father her marriage? has her son her marriage? is she not perhaps still a married woman with a living husband? Telemachus would give much to have her off his hands, but he refuses to send her to her father's house, where the old man might be ready enough to return the bride-price to her new husband, and get rid of her with honour. For if Telemachus sends his mother away against her will he will have to pay a heavy fine to her father, and to thole his mother's curse, and lose his character among men (odyssey, II. 130-138). The Icelanders of the saga period gave dowries with their daughters. But when Njal wanted Hildigunna for his foster-son, Hauskuld, he offered to give {Greek: hedna}. "I will lay down as much money as will seem fitting to thy niece and thyself," he says to Flosi, "if thou wilt think of making this match." {Footnote: Story of Burnt Njal, ii. p. 81.}

Circumstances alter cases, and we must be hard pressed to discover signs of change of manners in the Odyssey as compared with the Iliad if we have to rely on a solitary mention of "men of many lots" in Crete, and on the perplexed proposals for the second marriage of Penelope. {Footnote: For the alleged "alteration of old customs" see Cauer, Grundfragen der Homerkritik, pp. 193-194.} We must not be told that the many other supposed signs of change, Iris, Olympus, and the rest, have "cumulative weight." If we have disposed of each individual supposed note of change in beliefs and manners in its turn, then these proofs have, in each case, no individual weight and, cumulatively, are not more ponderous than a feather.