Homer and His Age

CHAPTER XIV

THE INTERPOLATIONS OF NESTOR

That several of the passages in which Nestor speaks are very late interpolations, meant to glorify Pisistratus, himself of Nestor's line, is a critical opinion to which we have more than once alluded. The first example is in Iliad, II. 530-568. This passage "is meant at once to present Nestor as the leading counsellor of the Greek army, and to introduce the coming Catalogue." {Footnote: Leaf, Iliad, vol. i. p. 70.} Now the Catalogue "originally formed an introduction to the whole Cycle." {Footnote: Ibid., vol. i. p. 87.} But, to repeat an earlier observation, surely the whole Cycle was much later than the period of Pisistratus and his sons; that is, the compilation of the Homeric and Cyclic poems into one body of verse, named "The Cycle," is believed to have been much later.

It is objected that Nestor's advice in this passage, "Separate thy warriors by tribes and clans" ({Greek: phyla, phraetras}), "is out of place in the last year of the war"; but this suggestion for military reorganisation may be admitted as a mere piece of poetical perspective, like Helen's description of the Achaean chiefs in Book III, or Nestor may wish to return to an obsolete system of clan regiments. The Athenians had "tribes" and "clans," political institutions, and Nestor's advice is noted as a touch of late Attic influence; but about the nature and origin of these social divisions we know so little that it is vain to argue about them. The advice of Nestor is an appeal to the clan spirit—a very serviceable military spirit, as the Highlanders have often proved—but we have no information as to whether it existed in Achaean times. Nestor speaks as the aged Lochiel spoke to Claverhouse before Killiecrankie. Did the Athenian army of the sixth century fight in clan regiments? The device seems to belong to an earlier civilisation, whether it survived in sixth century Athens or not. It is, of course, notorious that tribes and clans are most flourishing among the most backward people, though they were welded into the constitution of Athens. The passage, therefore, cannot with any certainty be dismissed as very late, for the words for "tribe" and "clan" could not be novel Athenian inventions, the institutions designated being of prehistoric origin.

Nestor shows his tactics again in IV. 303-309, offers his "inopportune tactical lucubrations, doubtless under Athenian (Pisistratean) influence." The poet is here denied a sense of humour. That a veteran military Polonius should talk as inopportunely about tactics as Dugald Dalgetty does about the sconce of Drumsnab is an essential part of the humour of the character of Nestor. This is what Nestor's critics do not see; the inopportune nature of his tactical remarks is the point of them, just as in the case of the laird of Drumthwacket, "that should be." Scott knew little of Homer, but coincided in the Nestorian humour by mere congruity of genius. The Pisistratidze must have been humourless if they did not see that the poet smiled as he composed Nestor's speeches, glorifying old deeds of his own and old ways of fighting. He arrays his Pylians with chariots in front, footmen in the rear. In the {blank space} the princely heroes dismounted to fight, the chariots following close behind them. {Footnote: Iliad, XI. 48-56.} In the same way during the Hundred Years' War the English knights dismounted and defeated the French chivalry till, under Jeanne d'Arc and La Hire, the French learned the lesson, and imitated the English practice. On the other hand, Egyptian wall-paintings show the Egyptian chariotry advancing in neat lines and serried squadrons. According to Nestor these had of old been the Achaean tactics, and he preferred the old way. Nestor's advice in Book IV. is not to dismount or break the line of chariots; these, he says, were the old tactics: "Even so is the far better way; thus, moreover, did men of old time lay low cities and walls." There was to be no rushing of individuals from the ranks, no dismounting. Nestor's were not the tactics of the heroes—they usually dismount and do single valiances; but Nestor, commanding his local contingent, recommends the methods of the old school, {Greek: hoi pretoroi}. What can be more natural and characteristic?

The poet's meaning seems quite clear. He is not flattering Pisistratus, but, with quiet humour, offers the portrait of a vain, worthy veteran. It is difficult to see how this point can be missed; it never was missed before Nestor's speeches seemed serviceable to the Pisistratean theory of the composition of the ILIAD. In his first edition Mr. Leaf regarded the interpolations as intended "to glorify Nestor" without reference to Pisistratus, whom Mr. Leaf did not then recognise as the master of a sycophantic editor. The passages are really meant to display the old man's habit of glorifying himself and past times. Pisistratus could not feel flattered by passages intended to exhibit his ancestor as a conceited and inopportune old babbler. I ventured in 1896 to suggest that the interpolator was trying to please Pisistratus, but this was said in a spirit of mockery.

Of all the characters in Homer that of Nestor is most familiar to the unlearned world, merely because Nestor's is a "character part," very broadly drawn.

The third interpolation of flattery to Pisistratus in the person of Nestor is found in VII. 125-160. The Achaean chiefs are loath to accept the challenge of Hector to single combat. Only Menelaus rises and arms himself, moved by the strong sense of honour which distinguishes a warrior notoriously deficient in bodily strength. Agamemnon refuses to let him fight; the other peers make no movement, and Nestor rebukes them. It is entirely in nature that he should fall back on his memory of a similar situation in his youth; when the Arcadian champion, Ereuthalion, challenged any prince of the Pylians, and when "no man plucked up heart" to meet him except Nestor himself. Had there never been any Pisistratus, any poet who created the part of a worthy and wordy veteran must have made Nestor speak just as he does speak. Ereuthalion "was the tallest and strongest of men that I have slain!" and Nestor, being what he is, offers copious and interesting details about the armour of Ereuthalion and about its former owners. The passage is like those in which the Icelandic sagamen dwelt lovingly on the history of a good sword, or the Maoris on the old possessors of an ancient jade patu. An objection is now taken to Nestor's geography: he is said not to know the towns and burns of his own country. He speaks of the swift stream Keladon, the streams of Iardanus, and the walls of Pheia. Pheia "is no doubt the same as Pheai" {Footnote: Monro, Note on Odyssey, XV. 297.} (Odyssey, XV. 297), "but that was a maritime town not near Arkadia. There is nothing known of a Keladon or Iardanus anywhere near it." Now Didymus (Schol. A) "is said to have read {Greek: Phaeraes} for {Greek: Pheias}," following Pherekydes. {Footnote: Leaf, Iliad, vol. i. 308.} M. Victor Bérard, who has made an elaborate study of Elian topography, says that "Pheia is a cape, not a town," and adopts the reading "Phera," the {Greek: Pherae} of the journey of Telemachus, in the Odyssey. He thinks that the {Greek: Pherae} of Nestor is the Aliphera of Polybius, and believes that the topography of Nestor and of the journey of Telemachus is correct. The Keladon is now the river or burn of Saint Isidore; the Iardanus is at the foot of Mount Kaiapha. Keladon has obviously the same sense as the Gaelic Altgarbh, "the rough and brawling stream." Iardanus is also a stream in Crete, and Mr. Leaf thinks it Semitic—"Yarden, from yarad to flow"; but the Semites did not give the Yar to the Yarrow nor to the Australian Yarra Yarra.

The country, says M. Bérard, is a network of rivers, burns, and rivulets; and we cannot have any certainty, we may add, as the same river and burn names recur in many parts of the same country; {Footnote: Bérard, Les Phéniciens et L'Odyssée, 108-113, 1902} many of them, in England, are plainly prae-Celtic.

While the correct geography may, on this showing, be that of Homer, we cannot give up Homer's claim to Nestor's speech. As to Nestor's tale about the armour of Ereuthalion, it is manifest that the first owner of the armour of Ereuthalion, namely Are'ithous, "the Maceman," so called because he had the singularity of fighting with an iron casse-tête, as Nestor explains (VII. 138-140), was a famous character in legendary history. He appears "as Prince Areithous, the Maceman," father (or grand-father?) of an Areithous slain by Hector (VII. 8-10). In Greece, it was not unusual for the grandson to bear the grandfather's name, and, if the Maceman was grand-father of Hector's victim, there is no chronological difficulty. The chronological difficulty, in any case, if Hector's victim is the son of the Maceman, is not at all beyond a poetic narrator's possibility of error in genealogy. If Nestor's speech is a late interpolation, if its late author borrowed his vivid account of the Maceman and his casse-tête from the mere word "maceman" in VII. 9, he must be credited with a lively poetic imagination.

Few or none of these reminiscences of Nestor are really "inapplicable to the context." Here the context demands encouragement for heroes who shun a challenge. Nestor mentions an "applicable" and apposite instance of similar want of courage, and, as his character demands, he is the hero of his own story. His brag, or gabe, about "he was the tallest and strongest of all the men I ever slew," is deliciously in keeping, and reminds us of the college don who said of the Czar, "he is the nicest emperor I ever met." The poet is sketching an innocent vanity; he is not flattering Pisistratus.

The next case is the long narrative of Nestor to the hurried Patroclus, who has been sent by Achilles to bring news of the wounded Machaon (XI. 604-702). Nestor on this occasion has useful advice to give, namely, that Achilles, if he will not fight, should send his men, under Patroclus, to turn the tide of Trojan victory. But the poet wishes to provide an interval of time and of yet more dire disaster before the return of Patroclus to Achilles. By an obvious literary artifice he makes Nestor detain the reluctant Patroclus with a long story of his own early feats of arms. It is a story of a "hot-trod," so called in Border law; the Eleians had driven a creagh of cattle from the Pylians, who pursued, and Nestor killed the Eleian leader, Itymoneus. The speech is an Achaean parallel to the Border ballad of "Jamie Telfer of the Fair Dodhead," in editing which Scott has been accused of making a singular and most obvious and puzzling blunder in the topography of his own sheriffdom of the Forest. On Scott's showing the scene of the raid is in upper Ettrickdale, not, as critics aver, in upper Teviotdale; thus the narrative of the ballad would be impossible. {Footnote: In fact both sites on the two Dodburns are impossible; the fault lay with the ballad-maker, not with Scott.}

The Pisistratean editor is accused of a similar error. "No doubt he was an Asiatic Greek, completely ignorant of the Peloponnesus." {Footnote: Iliad. Note to XI. 756, and to the Catalogue, II. 615-617.} It is something to know that Pisistratus employed an editor, or that his editor employed a collaborator who was an Asiatic Greek!

Meanwhile, nothing is less secure than arguments based on the Catalogue. We have already shown how Mr. Leaf's opinions as to the date and historical merits of the Catalogue have widely varied, while M. Bérard appears to have vindicated the topography of Nestor. Of the Catalogue Mr. Allen writes, "As a table, according to regions, of Agamemnon's forces it bears every mark of venerable antiquity," showing "a state of things which never recurred in later history, and which no one had any interest to invent, or even the means for inventing." He makes a vigorous defence of the Catalogue, as regards the dominion of Achilles, against Mr. Leaf. {Footnote: Classical Review, May 1906, pp. x94-201.} Into the details we need not go, but it is not questions of Homeric topography, obscure as they are, that can shake our faith in the humorous portrait of old Nestor, or make us suppose that the sympathetic mockery of the poet is the sycophantic adulation of the editor to his statesman employer, Pisistratus. If any question may be left to literary discrimination it is the authentic originality of the portrayal of Nestor.

CHAPTER XV

THE COMPARATIVE STUDY OF EARLY EPICS

Though comparison is the method of Science, the comparative study of the national poetry of warlike aristocracies, its conditions of growth and decadence, has been much neglected by Homeric critics. Sir Richard Jebb touched on the theme, and, after devoting four pages to a sketch of Sanskrit, Finnish, Persian, and early Teutonic heroic poetry and SAGA, decided that "in our country, as in others, we fail to find any true parallel to the case of the Homeric poems. These poems must be studied in themselves, without looking for aid, in this sense, to the comparative method." {Footnote: Homer, p. 135.} Part of this conclusion seems to us rather hasty. In a brief manual Sir Richard had not space for a thorough comparative study of old heroic poetry at large. His quoted sources are: for India, Lassen; for France, Mr. Saintsbury's Short History of FRENCH LITERATURE (sixteen pages on this topic), and a work unknown to me, by "M. Paul"; for Iceland he only quoted THE Encyclopedia BRITANNICA (Mr. Edmund Gosse); for Germany, Lachmann and Bartsch; for the Finnish Kalewala, the ENCYCLOPEDIA BRITANNICA (Mr. Sime and Mr. Keltie); and for England, a PRIMER OF ENGLISH LITERATURE by Mr. Stopford Brooke.

These sources appear less than adequate, and Celtic heroic romance is entirely omitted. A much deeper and wider comparative criticism of early heroic national poetry is needed, before any one has a right to say that the study cannot aid our critical examination of the Homeric problem. Many peoples have passed through a stage of culture closely analogous to that of Achaean society as described in the Iliad and Odyssey. Every society of this kind has had its ruling military class, its ancient legends, and its minstrels who on these legends have based their songs. The similarity of human nature under similar conditions makes it certain that comparison will discover useful parallels between the poetry of societies separated in time and space but practically identical in culture. It is not much to the credit of modern criticism that a topic so rich and interesting has been, at least in England, almost entirely neglected by Homeric scholars.

Meanwhile, it is perfectly correct to say, as Sir Richard observes, that "we fail to find any true parallel to the case of the Homeric poems," for we nowhere find the legends of an heroic age handled by a very great poet—the greatest of all poets—except in the Iliad and Odyssey. But, on the other hand, the critics refuse to believe that, in the Iliad and Odyssey, we possess the heroic Achaean legends handled by one great poet. They find a composite by many hands, good and bad, and of many ages, they say; sometimes the whole composition and part of the poems are ascribed to a late littérateur. Now to that supposed state of things we do find several "true parallels," in Germany, in Finland, in Ireland. But the results of work by these many hands in many ages are anything but "a true parallel" to the results which lie before us in the Iliad and ODYSSEY. Where the processes of composite authorship throughout many AGES certainly occur, as in Germany and Ireland, there we find no true parallel to the Homeric poems. It follows that, in all probability, no such processes as the critics postulate produced the Iliad and Odyssey, for where the processes existed, beyond doubt they failed egregiously to produce the results.

Sir Richard's argument would have been logical if many efforts by many hands, in many ages, in England, Finland, Ireland, Iceland, and Germany did actually produce true parallels to the Achaean epics. They did not, and why not? Simply because these other races had no Homer. All the other necessary conditions were present, the legendary material, the heroic society, the Court minstrels, all—except the great poet. In all the countries mentioned, except Finland, there existed military aristocracies with their courts, castles, and minstrels, while the minstrels had rich material in legendary history and in myth, and Märchen, and old songs. But none of the minstrels was adequate to the production of an English, German, or Irish ILIAD or ODYSSEY, or even of a true artistic equivalent in France.

We have tried to show that the critics, rejecting a Homer, have been unable to advance any adequate hypothesis to account for the existence of the ILIAD and ODYSSEY. Now we see that, where such conditions of production as they postulate existed but where there was no great epic genius, they can find no true parallels to the Epics. Their logic thus breaks down at both ends.

It may be replied that in non-Greek lands one condition found in Greek society failed: the succession of a reading age to an age of heroic listeners. But this is not so. In France and Germany an age of readers duly began, but they did not mainly read copies of the old heroic poems. They turned to lyric poetry, as in Greece, and they recast the heroic songs into modern and popular forms in verse and prose, when they took any notice of the old heroic poems at all.

One merit of the Greek epics is a picture of "a certain phase of early civilisation," and that picture is "a naturally harmonious whole," with "unity of impression," says Sir Richard Jebb. {Footnote: Homer, p. 37.} Certainly we can find no true parallel, on an Homeric scale, to this "harmonious picture" in the epics of Germany and England or in the early literature of Ireland. Sir Richard, for England, omits notice of Beowulf; but we know that Beowulf, a long heroic poem, is a mass of anachronisms—a heathen legend in a Christian setting. The hero, that great heathen champion, has his epic filled full of Christian allusions and Christian morals, because the clerical redactor, in Christian England, could not but intrude these things into old pagan legends evolved by the continental ancestors of our race. He had no "painful anxiety," like the supposed Ionic continuators of the Achaean poems (when they are not said to have done precisely the reverse), to preserve harmony of ancient ideas. Such archaeological anxieties are purely modern.

If we take the Nibelungenlied, {Footnote: See chapter on the Nibelungenlied in Homer AND the Epic, pp. 382-404.} we find that it is a thing of many rehandlings, even in existing manuscripts. For example, the Greeks clung to the hexameter in Homer. Not so did the Germans adhere to old metres. The poem that, in the oldest MS., is written in assonances, in later MSS. is reduced to regular rhymes and is retouched in many essential respects. The matter of the Nibelungenlied is of heathen origin. We see the real state of heathen affairs in the Icelandic versions of the same tale, for the Icelanders were peculiar in preserving ancient lays; and, when these were woven into a prose saga, the archaic and heathen features were retained. Had the post-Christian prose author of the Volsunga been a great poet, we might find in his work a true parallel to the Iliad. But, though he preserves the harmony of his picture of pre-Christian princely life (save in the savage beginnings of his story), he is not a poet; so the true parallel to the Greek epic fails, noble as is the saga in many passages. In the German Nibelungenlied all is modernised; the characters are Christian, the manners are chivalrous, and Märchen older than Homer are forced into a wandering mediaeval chronicle-poem. The Germans, in short, had no early poet of genius, and therefore could not produce a true parallel to ILIAD or Odyssey. The mediaeval poets, of course, never dreamed of archaeological anxiety, as the supposed Ionian continuators are sometimes said to have done, any more than did the French and late Welsh handlers of the ancient Celtic Arthurian materials. The late German bearbeiter of the Nibelungenlied has no idea of unity of plot—enfin, Germany, having excellent and ancient legendary material for an epic, but producing no parallel to ILIAD and Odyssey, only proves how absolutely essential a Homer was to the Greek epics.

"If any inference could properly be drawn from the Edda" (the Icelandic collection of heroic lays), says Sir Richard Jebb, "it would be that short separate poems on cognate subjects can long exist as a collection without coalescing into such an artistic whole as the Iliad or the Odyssey." {Footnote: Homer, p. 33.}

It is our own argument that Sir Richard states. "Short separate poems on cognate subjects" can certainly co-exist for long anywhere, but they cannot automatically and they cannot by aid of an editor become a long epic. Nobody can stitch and vamp them into a poem like the ILIAD or Odyssey. To produce a poem like either of these a great poetic genius must arise, and fuse the ancient materials, as Hephaestus fused copper and tin, and then cast the mass into a mould of his own making. A small poet may reduce the legends and lays into a very inartistic whole, a very inharmonious whole, as in the Nibelungenlied, but a controlling poet, not a mere redactor or editor, is needed to perform even that feat.

Where a man who is not a poet undertakes to produce the coalescence, as Dr. Lönnrot (1835-1849) did in the case of the peasant, not courtly, lays of Finland, he "fails to prove that mere combining and editing can form an artistic whole out of originally distinct songs, even though concerned with closely related themes," says Sir Richard Jebb. {Footnote: Homer, p. 134-135.}

This is perfectly true; much as Lönnrot botched and vamped the Finnish lays he made no epic out of them. But, as it is true, how did the late Athenian drudge of Pisistratus succeed where Lönnrot failed? "In the dovetailing of the ODYSSEY we see the work of one mind," says Sir Richard. {Footnote: Homer, p. 129.} This mind cannot have been the property of any one but a great poet, obviously, as the Odyssey is confessedly "an artistic whole." Consequently the disintegrators of the Odyssey, when they are logical, are reduced to averring that the poem is an exceedingly inartistic whole, a whole not artistic at all. While Mr. Leaf calls it "a model of skilful construction," Wilamowitz Mollendorff denounces it as the work of "a slenderly-gifted botcher," of about 650 B.C., a century previous to Mr. Leaf's Athenian editor.

Thus we come, after all, to a crisis in which mere literary appreciation is the only test of the truth about a work of literature. The Odyssey is an admirable piece of artistic composition, or it is the very reverse. Blass, Mr. Leaf, Sir Richard Jebb, and the opinion of the ages declare that the composition is excellent. A crowd of German critics and Father Browne, S.J., hold that the composition is feeble. The criterion is the literary taste of each party to the dispute. Kirchhoff and Wilamowitz Möllendorff see a late bad patchwork, where Mr. Leaf, Sir Richard Jebb, Blass, Wolf, and the verdict of all mankind see a masterpiece of excellent construction. The world has judged: the Odyssey is a marvel of construction: therefore is not the work of a late botcher of disparate materials, but of a great early poet. Yet Sir Richard Jebb, while recognising the Odyssey as "an artistic whole" and an harmonious picture, and recognising Lönnrot's failure "to prove that mere combining and editing can form an artistic whole out of originally distinct songs, even though concerned with closely related themes," thinks that Kirchhoff has made the essence of his theory of late combination of distinct strata of poetical material from different sources and periods, in the Odyssey, "in the highest degree probable." {Footnote: Homer, p. 131.}

It is, of course, possible that Mr. Leaf, who has not edited the Odyssey, may now, in deference to his belief in the Pisistratean editor, have changed his opinion of the merits of the poem. If the Odyssey, like the Iliad, was, till about 540 B.C., a chaos of lays of all ages, variously known in various répertoires of the rhapsodists, and patched up by the Pisistratean editor, then of two things one—either Mr. Leaf abides by his enthusiastic belief in the excellency of the composition, or he does not. If he does still believe that the composition of the Odyssey is a masterpiece, then the Pisistratean editor was a great master of construction. If he now, on the other hand, agrees with Wilamowitz Möllendorff that the Odyssey is cobbler's work, then his literary opinions are unstable.

CHAPTER XVI

HOMER AND THE FRENCH MEDIAEVAL EPICS

Sir Richard Jebb remarks, with truth, that "before any definite solution of the Homeric problem could derive scientific support from such analogies" (with epics of other peoples), "it would be necessary to show that the particular conditions under which the Homeric poems appear in early Greece had been reproduced with sufficient closeness elsewhere." {Footnote: Homer, pp. 131, 132.} Now we can show that the particular conditions under which the Homeric poems confessedly arose were "reproduced with sufficient closeness elsewhere," except that no really great poet was elsewhere present.

This occurred among the Germanic aristocracy, "the Franks of France," in the eleventh, twelfth, and early thirteenth centuries of our era. The closeness of the whole parallel, allowing for the admitted absence in France of a very great and truly artistic poet, is astonishing.

We have first, in France, answering to the Achaean aristocracy, the Frankish noblesse of warriors dwelling in princely courts and strong castles, dominating an older population, owing a practically doubtful fealty to an Over-Lord, the King, passing their days in the chace, in private war, or in revolt against the Over-Lord, and, for all literary entertainment, depending on the recitations of epic poems by jongleurs, who in some cases are of gentle birth, and are the authors of the poems which they recite.

"This national poetry," says M. Gaston Paris, "was born and mainly developed among the warlike class, princes, lords, and their courts.... At first, no doubt, some of these men of the sword themselves composed and chanted lays" (like Achilles), "but soon there arose a special class of poets ... They went from court to court, from castle ... Later, when the townsfolk began to be interested in their chants, they sank a degree, and took their stand in public open places ..." {Footnote: Literature Française au Moyen Age, pp. 36, 37. 1898.}

In the Iliad we hear of no minstrels in camp: in the Odyssey a prince has a minstrel among his retainers—Demodocus, at the court of Phaeacia; Phemius, in the house of Odysseus. In Ionia, when princes had passed away, rhapsodists recited for gain in marketplaces and at fairs. The parallel with France is so far complete.

The French national epics, like those of the Achaeans, deal mainly with legends of a long past legendary age. To the French authors the greatness and the fortunes of the Emperor Charles and other heroic heads of great Houses provide a theme. The topics of song are his wars, and the prowess and the quarrels of his peers with the Emperor and among themselves. These are seen magnified through a mist of legend; Saracens are substituted for Gascon foes, and the great Charles, so nobly venerable a figure in the oldest French epic (the Chanson de Roland, circ. 1050-1070 in its earliest extant form), is more degraded, in the later epics, than Agamemnon himself. The "machinery" of the gods in Homer is replaced by the machinery of angels, but the machinery of dreams is in vogue, as in the Iliad and Odyssey. The sources are traditional and legendary.

We know that brief early lays of Charles and other heroes had existed, and they may have been familiar to the French epic poets, but they were not merely patched into the epics. The form of verse is not ballad-like, but a series of laisses of decasyllabic lines, each laisse presenting one assonance, not rhyme. As time went on, rhyme and Alexandrine lines were introduced, and the old epics were expanded, altered, condensed, remaniés, with progressive changes in taste, metre, language, manners, and ways of life.

Finally, an age of Cyclic poems began; authors took new characters, whom they attached by false genealogies to the older heroes, and they chanted the adventures of the sons of the former heroes, like the Cyclic poet who sang of the son of Odysseus by Circe. All these conditions are undeniably "true parallels" to "the conditions under which the Homeric poems appeared." The only obvious point of difference vanishes if we admit, with Sir Richard Jebb and M. Salomon Reinach, the possibility of the existence of written texts in the Greece of the early iron age.

We do not mean texts prepared for a reading public. In France such a public, demanding texts for reading, did not arise till the decadence of the epic. The oldest French texts of their epics are small volumes, each page containing some thirty lines in one column. Such volumes were carried about by the jongleurs, who chanted their own or other men's verses. They were not in the hands of readers. {Footnote: Épopées Françaises, Léon Gautier, vol. i. pp. 226-228. 1878.}

An example of an author-reciter, Jendeus de Brie (he was the maker of the first version of the Bataille Loquifer, twelfth century) is instructive. Of Jendeus de Brie it is said that "he wrote the poem, kept it very carefully, taught it to no man, made much gain out of it in Sicily where he sojourned, and left it to his son when he died." Similar statements are made in Renaus de Montauban (the existing late version is of the thirteenth century) about Huon de Villeneuve, who would not part with his poem for horses or furs, or for any price, and about other poets. {Footnote: Épopées Françaises, Léon Gautier, vol. i. p. 215, Note I.}

These early jongleurs were men of position and distinction; their theme was the gestes of princes; they were not under the ban with which the Church pursued vulgar strollers, men like the Greek rhapsodists. Pindar's story that Homer wrote the Cypria {Footnote: Pindari Opera, vol. iii. p. 654. Boeckh.} and gave the copy, as the dowry of his daughter, to Stasinus who married her, could only have arisen in Greece in circumstances exactly like those of Jendeus de Brie. Jendeus lived on his poem by reciting it, and left it to his son when he died. The story of Homer and Stasinus could only have been invented in an age when the possession of the solitary text of a poem was a source of maintenance to the poet. This condition of things could not exist, either when there were no written texts or when such texts were multiplied to serve the wants of a reading public.

Again, a poet in the fortunate position of Jendeus would not teach his Epic in a "school" of reciters unless he were extremely well paid. In later years, after his death, his poem came, through copies good or bad, into circulation.

Late, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, we hear of a "school" of jongleurs at Beauvais. In Lent they might not ply their profession, so they gathered at Beauvais, where they could learn cantilenae, new lays. {Footnote: Épopées Françaises, Léon Gautier, vol. ii. pp. 174, 175.} But by that time the epic was decadent and dying?

The audiences of the jongleurs, too, were no longer, by that time, what they had been. The rich and great, now, had library copies of the epics; not small jongleurs' copies, but folios, richly illuminated and bound, with two or three columns of matter on each page. {Footnote: Ibid., vol. i. p. 228. See, too, photographs of an illuminated, double-columned library copy in La Chancun de Willame., London, 1903.}

The age of recitations from a text in princely halls was ending or ended; the age of a reading public was begun. The earlier condition of the jongleur who was his own poet, and carefully guarded his copyright in spite of all temptations to permit the copying of his MS., is regarded by Sir Richard Jebb as quite a possible feature of early Greece. He thinks that there was "no wide circulation of writings by numerous copies for a reading public" before the end of the fifth century B.C. As Greek mercenaries could write, and write well, in the seventh to sixth centuries, I incline to think that there may then, and earlier, have been a reading public. However, long before that a man might commit his poems to writing. "Wolf allows that some men did, as early at least as 776 B.C. The verses might never be read by anybody except himself" (the author) "or those to whom he privately bequeathed them" (as Jendeus de Brie bequeathed his poem to his son), "but his end would have been gained." {Footnote: Homer, p. 113.}

Recent discoveries as to the very early date of linear non-Phoenician writing in Crete of course increase the probability of this opinion, which is corroborated by the story of the Cypria, given as a dowry with the author's daughter. Thus "the particular conditions under which the Homeric poems appeared" "been reproduced with sufficient closeness" in every respect, with surprising closeness, in the France of the eleventh to thirteenth centuries. The social conditions are the same; the legendary materials are of identical character; the method of publication by recitation is identical; the cyclic decadence occurs in both cases, the monomanie cyclique. In the Greece of Homer we have the four necessary conditions of the epic, as found by M. Léon Gautier in mediaeval France. We have:—

(1) An uncritical age confusing history by legend.

(2) We have a national milieu with religious uniformity.

(3) We have poems dealing with—

(4) We have representative heroes, the Over-Lord, and his peers or paladins. {Footnote: Épopées Françaises, Léon Gautier, vol. i. pp. 6-9}

It may be added that in Greece, as in France, some poets adapt into the adventures of their heroes world-old Märchen, as in the Odyssey, and in the cycle of the parents of Charles.

In the French, as in the Greek epics, we have such early traits of poetry as the textual repetition of speeches, and the recurring epithets, "swift-footed Achilles," "Charles of the white beard," "blameless heroes" (however blamable). Ladies, however old, are always "of the clear face." Thus the technical manners of the French and Greek epics are closely parallel; they only differ in the exquisite art of Homer, to which no approach is made by the French poets.

The French authors of epic, even more than Homer, abound in episodes much more distracting than those of the Iliad. Of blood and wounds, of course, both the French and the Greek are profuse: they were writing for men of the sword, not for modern critics. Indeed, the battle pieces of France almost translate those of Homer. The Achaean "does on his goodly corslet"; the French knight "sur ses espalles son halberc li colad." The Achaean, with his great sword, shears off an arm at the shoulder. The French knight—

"Trenchad le braz, Parmi leschine sun grant espee li passe."

The huge shield of Aias becomes cele grant targe duble in France, and the warriors boast over their slain in France, as in the Iliad. In France, as in Greece, a favourite epic theme was "The Wrath" of a hero, of Achilles, of Roland, of Ganelon, of Odysseus and Achilles wrangling at a feast to the joy of Agamemnon, "glad that the bravest of his peers were at strife." {Footnote: Odyssey, VIII. 75-7s {sic}.}

Of all the many parallels between the Greek and French epics, the most extraordinary is the coincidence between Charles with his peers and Agamemnon with his princes. The same historical conditions occurred, at an interval of more than two thousand years. Agamemnon is the Bretwalda, the Over-Lord, as Mr. Freeman used to say, of the Achaeans: he is the suzerain. Charles in the French epics holds the same position, but the French poets regard him in different lights. In the earliest epic, the Chanson de Roland, a divinity doth hedge the famous Emperor, whom Jeanne d'Arc styled "St. Charlemagne." He was, in fact, a man of thirty-seven at the date of the disaster of Roncesvaux, where Roland fell (778 A.D.). But in the tradition that has reached the poet of the chanson he is a white-bearded warrior, as vigorous as he is venerable. As he rules by advice of his council, he bids them deliberate on the proposals of the Paynim King, Marsile—to accept or refuse them. Roland, the counterpart of Achilles in all respects (Oliver is his Patroclus), is for refusing: Ganelon appears to have the rest with him when he speaks in favour of peace and return to France out of Spain. So, in the Iliad (II.), the Achaeans lend a ready ear to Agamemnon when he proposes the abandonment of the siege of Troy. Each host, French and Achaean, is heartily homesick.

Ganelon's advice prevailing, it is necessary to send an envoy to the Saracen court. It is a dangerous mission; other envoys have been sent and been murdered. The Peers, however, volunteer, beginning with the aged Naismes, the Nestor of the Franks. His offer is not accepted, nor are those of Oliver, Roland, and Turpin. Roland then proposes that Ganelon shall be sent; and hence arises the Wrath of Ganelon, which was the ruin of Roland and the peers who stood by him. The warriors attack each other in speeches of Homeric fury. Charles preserves his dignity, and Ganelon departs on his mission. He deliberately sells himself, and seals the fate of the peers whom he detests: the surprise of the rearguard under Roland, the deadly battle, and the revenge of Charles make up the rest of the poem. Not even in victory is Charles allowed repose; the trumpet again summons him to war. He is of those whom Heaven has called to endless combat—

in the words of Diomede.

Such is the picture of the imperial Charles in one of the oldest of the French epics. The heart of the poet is with the aged, but unbroken and truly imperial, figure of St. Charlemagne—wise, just, and brave, a true "shepherd of the people," regarded as the conqueror of all the known kingdoms of the world. He is, among his fierce paladins, like "the conscience of a knight among his warring members." "The greatness of Charlemagne has entered even into his name;" but as time went on and the feudal princes began the long struggle against the French king, the poets gratified their patrons by degrading the character of the Emperor. They created a second type of Charles, and it is the second type that on the whole most resembles the Agamemnon of the Iliad.

We ask why the widely ruling lord of golden Mycenae is so skilfully and persistently represented as respectable, indeed, by reason of his office, but detestable, on the whole, in character?

Returning to the decadent Charles of the French epics, we lay no stress on the story of his incest with his sister, Gilain, "whence sprang Roland." The House of Thyestes, whence Agamemnon sprang, is marked by even blacker legends. The scandal is mythical, like the same scandal about the King Arthur, who in romance is so much inferior to his knights, a reflection of feudal jealousies and hatreds. In places the reproaches hurled by the peers at Charles read like paraphrases of those which the Achaean princes cast at Agamemnon. Even Naismes, the Nestor of the French epics, cries: "It is for you that we have left our lands and fiefs, our fair wives and our children ... But, by the Apostle to whom they pray in Rome, were it not that we should be guilty before God we would go back to sweet France, and thin would be your host." {Footnote: Chevalerie Ogier, 1510-1529. Épopées Françaises, Léon Gautier, vol. iii. pp. 156-157.} In the lines quoted we seem to hear the voice of the angered Achilles: "We came not hither in our own quarrel, thou shameless one, but to please thee! But now go I back to Phthia with my ships—the better part." {Footnote: Iliad, I. 158-169.}

Agamemnon answers that Zeus is on his side, just as even the angry Naismes admits that duty to God demands obedience to Charles. There cannot be parallels more close and true than these, between poems born at a distance from each other of more than two thousand years, but born in similar historical conditions.

In Guide Bourgogne, a poem of the twelfth century, Ogier cries, "They say that Charlemagne is the conqueror of kingdoms: they lie, it is Roland who conquers them with Oliver, Naismes of the long beard, and myself. As to Charles, he eats." Compare Achilles to Agamemnon, "Thou, heavy with wine, with dog's eyes and heart of deer, never hast thou dared to arm thee for war with the host ..." {Footnote: Iliad, I. 227, 228. Gui de Bourgogne, pp. 37-41.} It is Achilles or Roland who stakes his life in war and captures cities; it is Agamemnon or Charles who camps by the wine. Charles, in the Chanson de Saisnes, abases himself before Herapois, even more abjectly than Agamemnon in his offer of atonement to Achilles. {Footnote: Épopées Françaises, Léon Gautier, vol. iii. p. 158.} Charles is as arrogant as Agamemnon: he strikes Roland with his glove, for an uncommanded victory, and then he loses heart and weeps as copiously as the penitent Agamemnon often does when he rues his arrogance. {Footnote: Entrée en Espagne.}

The poet of the Iliad is a great and sober artist. He does not make Agamemnon endure the lowest disgraces which the latest French epic poets heap on Charles. But we see how close is the parallel between Agamemnon and the Charles of the decadent type. Both characters are reflections of feudal jealousy of the Over-Lord; both reflect real antique historical conditions, and these were the conditions of the Achaeans in Europe, not of the Ionians in Asia.

The treatment of Agamemnon's character is harmonious throughout. It is not as if in "the original poem" Agamemnon were revered like St. Charlemagne in the Chanson de Roland, and in the "later" parts of the Iliad were reduced to the contemptible estate of the Charles of the decadent Chanson de Geste. In the Iliad Agamemnon's character is consistently presented from beginning to end, presented, I think, as it could only be by a great poet of the feudal Achaean society in Europe. The Ionians—"democratic to the core," says Mr. Leaf—would either have taken no interest in the figure of the Over-Lord, or would have utterly degraded him below the level of the Charles of the latest Chansons. Or the late rhapsodists, in their irresponsible lays, would have presented a wavering and worthless portrait.

The conditions under which the Chansons arose were truly parallel to the conditions under which the Homeric poems arose, and the poems, French and Achaean, are also true parallels, except in genius. The French have no Homer: cared vate sacro. It follows that a Homer was necessary to the evolution of the Greek epics.

It may, perhaps, be replied to this argument that our Iliad is only a very late remaniement, like the fourteenth century Chansons de Geste, of something much earlier and nobler. But in France, in the age of remaniement, even the versification had changed from assonance to rhyme, from the decasyllabic line to the Alexandrine in the decadence, while a plentiful lack of seriousness and a love of purely fanciful adventures in fairyland take the place of the austere spirit of war. Ladies "in a coming on humour" abound, and Charles is involved with his Paladins in gauloiseries of a Rabelaisian cast. The French language has become a new thing through and through, and manners and weapons are of a new sort; but the high seriousness of the Iliad is maintained throughout, except in the burlesque battle of the gods: the versification is the stately hexameter, linguistic alterations are present, extant, but inconspicuous. That the armour and weapons are uniform in character throughout we have tried to prove, while the state of society and of religion is certainly throughout harmonious. Our parallel, then, between the French and the Greek national epics appears as perfect as such a thing can be, surprisingly perfect, while the great point of difference in degree of art is accounted for by the existence of an Achaean poet of supreme genius. Not such, certainly, were the composers of the Cyclic poems, men contemporary with the supposed later poets of the Iliad.