Studies on Homer and the Homeric Age, Vol. 3 of 3 / I. Agorè: Polities of the Homeric Age. II. Ilios: Trojans and Greeks Compared. III. Thalassa: The Outer Geography. IV. Aoidos: Some Points of the Poetry of Homer.

The reason for considering this number as having a pretty definite sense in the Poet’s mind (quite a different matter, let it be borne in mind, from the question whether the circumstance is meant to be taken as historical) is, that it stands in evident association with the number of days, as it was probably then reckoned, in the year. It seems plain that he meant to describe the whole circle of the year, where he says, that for each of the days and nights which Jupiter has given, or, in his own words[800],

the greedy Suitors are not contented with the slaughter of one animal, or even of two. Eumæus then gives an account of the wealth of Ulysses in live stock, both within the isle and on the mainland, from whence the animals were supplied: and adds, that from the Ithacan store a goatherd took down daily a fat goat, while he himself as often sent down a fat hog. I have dwelt thus particularly on the detail of this case, because it may fairly be inferred from the correspondence between the number of the hogs and the days of the year, that for once, at all events, the Poet intended to speak, though somewhat at random, yet in a degree arithmetically, and that of so high a number as 360.

There are other cases of lower numbers in different parts of the poems, where it may be argued, with varying measures of probability, that Homer had a similar intention.

The word ἑκατομβὴ, without doubt, affords a striking proof of vagueness in the ideas of the heroic age with respect to number: and this vagueness extends, yet apparently in varying degrees, to the adjective ἑκατομβοῖος. I have elsewhere[801] referred to adjectives of this formation as indicative of the fact, that for those generations of mankind oxen may be said to have constituted a measure of value; and this fact certainly involves an aim at numerical exactitude. It seems, indeed, on general grounds far from improbable, that the business of exchange may have been the original guide of our race into the art, and thus into the science, of arithmetic.

In the description of the Shield of Minerva, which had an hundred golden drops or tassels, we are told that each of them was ἑκατομβοῖος, or worth an hundred oxen. This use of the word must be regarded as strongly charged with figure. Minerva was arming to mingle among men upon the plain of Troy[802], and it is not likely, therefore, that the Poet would represent her in dimensions utterly inordinate. He judiciously reserves this license of exaggeration without bounds for scenes where he is beyond the sphere of relations properly human, as for example, the Theomachy and the Under-world. Now we may venture to take the Homeric value of an ox before Troy at half an ounce of gold. In the prizes of the wrestling match, where a tripod was worth twelve oxen, a highly skilled woman (πολλὰ δ’ ἐπίστατο ἔργα) was worth four[803]. Two ounces of gold would be a low price for such a person in almost any age. According to this computation, each drop on the Ægis of Minerva would weigh fifty ounces: the whole would weigh above 300 lbs. avoirdupois, and if we were to assume the purely ornamental fringe in a work of this kind to weigh one tenth part of the whole, the Ægis itself would weigh nearly a ton and a half. Primâ facie, this is susceptible of explanation in either of two ways: the one, that the numbers are used poetically and not arithmetically; the other, that of sheer intentional exaggeration in bulk. The rules of the Poet, as they are elsewhere applied, oblige us to reject the latter solution, and consequently throw us back upon the former.

Again, we are told that, when Diomed obtained the exchange of arms from Glaucus, he gave a suit of copper, and obtained in return a suit of gilt[804];

Here there seems to be a mixture of the metaphorical and the arithmetical use. For, on the one hand, it is singular that he should have chosen numbers which require the aid of a fraction to express their relation to one another. He could certainly not have meant to say that the values of the two suits were precisely as 100:9, or as 11⅑:1. And yet, on the one hand, he could scarcely use the term ἐννεαβοῖα, except with reference to the known and usual value of a suit of armour, while the ἑκατομβοῖα, from its use in other places, must be suspected of having no more than a merely indeterminate force.

With this fractional relation of 100:9, may be compared the arrangement at the feast in Pylos, where each division of five hundred persons was supplied with nine oxen. These numbers, however, are probably less vague than in some other cases: for the provision stated, though large, is not beyond what a rude plenty might suggest on a great public occasion.

Again, Lycaon, when captured for the second time by Achilles, reminds that hero of what he had fetched or been worth to him on the former occasion[805]: ἑκατόμβοιον δέ τοι ἦλφον. Here we have a decisive proof of the figurative use of number. Had the young prince been ransomed by Priam, a great price, no doubt, would have been given. But Achilles sold him into Lemnos, ἄνευθεν ἄγων πατρός τε φίλων τε: and to the Lemnians he could hardly have value but as a labourer, although indeed it chanced that he was afterwards redeemed, by a ξεῖνος of Priam[806], at a high price. We cannot, then, suppose that he had brought any such return as would be represented by a full hundred of oxen.

The evidence thus far, I think, tends powerfully to support the hypothesis, that there is an amount of vagueness in Homer’s general use of numbers, unless indeed as to very low ones, which cannot be explained otherwise than as metaphorical or purely poetical: and that his mind never had before it any of those processes, simple as they are to all who are familiar with them, of multiplication, subtraction, or division.

I admit it to be possible, that his manner of treating number may have been owing to his determination to be intelligible, and to the state of the faculties of his hearers, as much as, or even more than, his own. But to me the supposition of the infant condition even of his faculties with respect to number, though at first sight startling, approves itself on reflection as one thoroughly in conformity with analogy and nature. Indeed the experience of life may convince us that to this hour we should be mistaken, if we supposed arithmetical conceptions to be uniform in different minds; that the relations of number are faintly and imperfectly apprehended, except by either practised or else peculiarly gifted persons; and that, in short, there is nothing more mysterious than arithmetic to those who do not understand it. As one illustration of this opinion, I will cite the difficulty which most educated persons, when studying history, certainly feel in mastering its chronology; while to those who are apt at figures it is not only acquired with ease, but it even serves as the nexus and support of the whole chain of events.

There were several occasions, upon which it would have been most natural and appropriate for Homer to use the faculty of multiplication; yet on no one of these has he used it. He constantly supplies us with the materials of a sum, but never once performs the process.

The first example in the Iliad is supplied by that passage of the unhappy speech of Agamemnon to the Assembly in the Second Book, which causes the fever-fit of home-sickness. He compares the strength of the Greek army with that of the Trojans; and he only effects the purpose by this feeble but elaborate contrivance. ‘Should the Greeks and Trojans agree to be numbered respectively, and should the Trojans properly so called be placed one by one, but the Greeks in tens, and every Trojan made cupbearer to a Greek ten, many of our tens would be without a cupbearer[807].’ In the first place, the fact that he calls this ascertaining of comparative force numbering ἀριθμηθημέναι is remarkable; for it would not have shown the numbers of either army; nor even the difference, by which the Greeks exceeded a tenfold ratio to the Trojans; but simply, by leaving an unexhausted residue, the fact that they were more, whether by much or by little, than ten times as many as the besieged. Secondly, it seems plain that, if Homer had known what was meant by multiplication, he would have used the process in this instance, in lieu of the elaborate (yet poetical) circumlocution which he has adopted; and would have said the Greeks were ten times, or fifteen times, or twenty times, as many as the inhabitants of Troy.

After this, Ulysses reminds the Assembly of the apparition of the dragon they had seen at Aulis. The phrase χθιζά τε καὶ πρώιζα, which he employs, may grammatically either belong to the epoch of the gathering at Aulis, or to the time of the plague, which had carried off a part of the force a fortnight or three weeks before. In whichever connection of the two we place it, it affords an instance of extreme indefiniteness in the use of two adverbs which are at once expressive of time and of number; for on one supposition he must use them to express whole years, and on the other they must mean near a fortnight, and therefore a certain number of days.

The next case is remarkable. It is that of the Catalogue.

The resolution, which introduces it, was not a resolution to number the host; but simply to make a careful division and distribution of the men under their leaders, with a view to a more effective responsibility, both of officers and men[808]. But when the Poet comes to enumerate the divisions, it is evidently a great object with him to make known the relative forces, and thus the relative prominence and power, of the different States of Greece. Yet nothing can be more imperfect than the manner in which the enumerating portion of his task is executed. In the first place, we trace again the old habit of the loose and figurative use of numbers. For Homer could hardly mean us to take literally all the numbers of ships, which he has stated in the Catalogue: since, in every case where they come up to or exceed twenty, they run in complete decades without odd numbers; subject to the single exception of the twenty-two ships of Gouneus. Podalirius and Machaon have thirty, the Phocians forty, Achilles fifty, Menelaus sixty, Diomed eighty, Nestor ninety, Agamemnon an hundred: the only full multiple of ten omitted being the utterly intractable ἑβδομήκοντα. But again, he gives us no effectual clue to the numbers of the crews. Each of the fifty ships of the Bœotians had one hundred and twenty men, and each of the seven ships of Philoctetes had fifty[809]. Thus he supplies us with the two factors of the sum, which would find the number of men, in each of these two cases; but in neither case does he perform the sum; and such is the uniform practice throughout the poems. For the Greek force generally, he has not even given us the factors. It has indeed been conjectured, that fifty may have been the smallest ship’s company, and one hundred and twenty the largest: but this is mere conjecture; and even if it be well founded, still we do not know whether the generality of the ships were about the mean, or nearer one or the other of the extremes. Again, it would appear probable from the Odyssey, that these numbers, of fifty and one hundred and twenty, are exclusive at least of pilots and commanders, if not also of the stewards[810] and the minor officers[811]; for the number mentioned by Alcinous[812] is fifty-two; and although he says that all were to sit down to row, the texts when compared cannot but suggest, that the number fifty was an usual complement of oars, and that the two were the captain and pilot respectively[813].

Plainly, there must have been very great inequalities in the crews of the Greek armament; or Homer could not have said, after giving Agamemnon an hundred ships, that he had by far the largest force of all the chiefs[814];

For Diomed and Idomeneus have each eighty ships, and Nestor has ninety, so that their numbers would come very near Agamemnon’s, unless their ships were smaller. But to sum up this discussion. It is evident that, if only we suppose the Greeks of Homer’s time to have had a definite and well developed sense of number, the mention by Homer of the amount of force in the Trojan expedition would have been a fact of the highest national interest and importance. Yet he has left us nothing, which can be said even definitely to approximate to a record of it, though the enumeration of the Catalogue appears almost to force the subject upon him. The fair inferences seem to be, that he did not understand the calculative use of numbers at all, or beyond some very limited range; and that, even within that range, he for the most part employed them poetically and ornamentally; they were decorative and effective, like epithets to his song, but they were not statistical; as expressions of force they were no more than (as it were) tentative, and that but very rudely.

I am further confirmed in the belief of Homer’s indeterminate conception of number, from the strange result to which the contrary opinion would lead. He tells us of the Trojan bivouac[815];

In this case he has given us again the factors of a sum in multiplication, though not the product. Did he mean them to be taken literally? If he did, then it is indeed strange that, although he says nothing whatever on the subject of number in the Trojan Catalogue, yet he has here supplied us with all the particulars necessary for estimating the Trojan force, while as to the Greek army, we remain unable to say whether it amounted to fifty thousand, or to half, or to twice or thrice that number. But it is quite plain from the total absence of specified numbers in the Trojan Catalogue, that he had no desire, as indeed he had no occasion, to give an accurate account of the Trojan force. On the other hand it appears, from the details of the Greek Catalogue, that he did wish to describe the amount of the force on that side, as far as he could conceive or convey it. If all this be so, then nothing can show more clearly than the thousand Trojan watch-fires, with their fifty men at each, Homer’s figurative manner of employing numerical aggregations. If however we admit the figurative use, we at once find everything harmonious. He describes the Trojans by the method of bold enhancement, at a juncture of the poem where it is his purpose to make them terrible to the Greek imagination.

The instance of Proteus in the Odyssey has already been referred to: but one more marked is afforded by the description that Eumæus gives of the herds and flocks of Ulysses. This, again, is one of the instances where the spirit and gist of the passage almost required that a total should be stated. For the object is to give a telling account. The wealth of this prince, says the Poet, was boundless; none of the heroes, whether of Ithaca or of the fertile continent, had so much; no, nor had any twenty of them. Then he mentions how many herds of cattle, goats, and swine, and flocks of sheep there were, but gives no numbers of any of the herds, nor any total: though, shortly before, the poem had mentioned the three hundred and sixty fat hogs under the care of Eumæus, and had also given us the sows in the usual manner, stating that there were twelve sties with fifty in each; but not specifying anywhere the total of six hundred which these figures yield when multiplied together[816].

Again, then the result of all these passages, as well as of more which might be quoted, is, I think, to show that Homer’s conceptions of number, and his use of number, especially when beyond a very low limit, were so indeterminate, that they may not improperly be called figurative.

In support and in illustration of this belief with respect to Homer, I would once more refer to the curious fragment ascribed to Hesiod respecting the age of the Nymphs with beauteous locks, which begins,

In the Etymol. Magn. 13. 36, the reading is γερώντων; and Ausonius, following this authority in his Eighteenth Idyll, makes the γενεὴ no less than 96 years. But the sense of γενεὴ is fixed by Homer’s account of Nestor, and otherwise, in such a way as greatly to favour the reading ἡβώντων. The word therefore means the term between birth and the prime of life, which may well be taken at thirty years. Then comes a table as follows.

And if the γενεὴ be 30 years, the age of the Nymphs = 30 × 9720 = 291,600 years. But the point most remarkable for us is, that while Hesiod, if Hesiod it be, supplies us with the whole of the first factors after the γενεὴ, for this long sum, he does not actually perform one single multiplication; nor does he even define the γενεὴ, which is the first and most vital element of all.

He has thus given us at once a very pretty poetical invention for expressing approximately the age of Nymphs, who are Jove-born indeed, yet are not immortal, and a remarkable proof of the indefiniteness of numerical conceptions, and of total unacquaintance with the rules of arithmetic[817].

One consequence of the proposition I have advanced with respect to Homer is, to destroy altogether a supposed discrepancy between the Iliad and the Odyssey, which has often been paraded as a reason, among others, for assigning them to different authors. It is truly alleged that, in the Catalogue[818], Crete is called ἑκατόμπολις; and that in the Nineteenth Odyssey[819] we are told of it,

Each of these words appears to be interpreted as strictly, as it would be if caught by an auditor in the accounts of some delinquent Joint-Stock Company; and thus, forsooth, a diversity of authors for the two poems is to be made good. Now it is not a little odd, if both these poets looked at the subject with the eye of statisticians, that while each found a different number of cities in Crete, yet each found an even, and more or less a round number. But why is ἑκατόμπολις to be more strictly interpreted than ἑκατομβή? And again, if we are to construe ἐννήκοντα statistically, what are we to do with the very word that precedes it, namely, ἀπειρέσιοι? The simple fact of the juxtaposition of that word with the ἐννήκοντα πόληες should surely have sufficed to show, that the whole manner of speech was (what we now call) poetical. So regarding it, I venture even to say that the effect of a comparison with the epithet in the Catalogue is to establish, not a discrepancy in point of fact, but rather a similarity in the measure of figurative conception and expression: so that in consequence, as far as it is worth any thing, it rather tends to prove the identity, than the diversity, of authorship between the two poems.

A second consequence, which must be drawn from the foregoing conclusions, is this; that we shall do wrong to search the poems of Homer for any scheme of chronology. The minute enumerations of the Mosaic books have perhaps given the tone to our ordinary historical inquiries: but, at least with respect to Homer, it must appear an erroneous course to use his numerical statements as literal, when they are applied to time, after we have had so much evidence of their generally ornamental and figurative character.

When Homer has occasion to define distance, he does not attempt to do it by a fixed measure, but by reference always to human or other action: it is as far as a man can throw a spear, (δουρὸς ἐρώη); or as far as a man’s cry can be heard (ὅσον τε γέγωνε βόησας); or as far, when we come to larger spaces, as we can sail within a certain time; if I make a good passage, says Achilles[820], I may get to Phthia on the third day: and again, we hear of the distance that a ship can perform within the day[821]. The horses of the gods in Homer clear, at each bound, a space as large as the eye can cover along the surface of the sea. As he comes to speak of points more remote and less known, he becomes greatly more vague, and says of Egypt, that even the birds do not get back from it within the year[822]: without doubt drawing his idea from those birds which periodically migrate.

As with spaces, so with times. The year indeed by its revolution forms itself into a natural whole, and is thus in a manner self-defined. So the waxing and waning moon defines the month. But even with these well marked terms Homer deals loosely; for the birth of infants is promised to take place after the revolution of a year from the time of conception[823].

I do not remember that he ever mentions a very high number of days or of years, but his use of both days and years, when it does not embrace terms defined by custom, has the marks of being highly poetical. Take for instance the principal and almost only statements of the poem, that can claim to be called chronological. They are those which represent the period of the siege as a decade of years, preceded by a decade of preparation, and followed by a third decade for the vicissitudes of the Return. Here are three terms of years, all found in a Poet, who does not elsewhere deal in terms of years at all. Of history, or what purports to be such, Homer has given us a great deal, and he has placed it in the exactest and clearest order. But in no one instance, out of all his prior history, does he found himself on any numerical definitions of time. Moreover, these three terms of years are all exactly equal, which heightens the unlikelihood of their being historical. Lastly, the three terms are just of the number of years required to make up what was, according to all appearances, the Homeric term of a γενεὴ, or generation of men.

The passage, on which the proof of this last assertion must principally be founded, is that in the First Book[824], which describes the age of Nestor;

I take the word γενεὴ to mean here, ‘the term of thirty years,’ but with the necessary qualification of ‘or thereabouts;’ and for the following reasons:

Nestor is represented in the Iliad as the oldest of the Greek chieftains of the first order. Yet Ulysses[825] was elderly, ὠμογέρων. Idomeneus, again, was older than Ulysses, as is plain from the more marked manner in which his advance in years is described. He is μεσαιπόλιος[826], and not fully ablebodied, as appears from his somewhat limited share in military operations; but Nestor is evidently older than Idomeneus, as he always addresses the whole body with the authority that belongs to the most extended experience, and as he never takes an active part, either in battle or in the games. We must, accordingly, suppose Nestor to be represented as at this time an old man of seventy, or from that to seventy-five.

Now the passage implies that he was in the third γενεὴ, and in the midst, i. e. not at either extremity, of it: the words are μετὰ τριτάτοισιν. No lower number than thirty years will place Nestor fairly among, or in the midst of, the third generation from his birth. If, for example, we take five and twenty years as the term, he would have been not so much among the third as on the eve of arriving within the fourth generation. But neither can we assign to γενεὴ any meaning, which shall make it sensibly exceed thirty years. For as we may say with confidence that the Nestor of the Iliad is over seventy, so, on the other hand, we may fairly compute that he is under eighty; inasmuch as, though he takes no part in exertions actually athletic, he spares himself nothing else. He is found by Agamemnon, when the commander in chief goes his rounds, on the field and at the head of his division: he is wakeful for the night council, and he goes about awaking others[827]. Retaining so large a share of bodily activity, he is still not represented as possessed of strength in such a degree as to border upon the marvellous; he is simply, in regard to corporal qualities, what would now be called a remarkably fine old gentleman. But if instead of thirty we were to take forty years, then, in order to have well entered into the third term he must have been already much beyond eighty, indeed, probably beyond ninety, in the Iliad, and above an hundred in the Odyssey; an age, which, as he retains in that poem all his mental powers, we may be quite sure Homer did not mean to assign to him. If, then, γενεὴ meant any term of years, it must, in all likelihood, have been somewhere about thirty years.

Homer has been careful, in the case of Nestor, to mark, by an appropriate change of expressions, the difference between his age in the two poems respectively. In the Iliad he is exercising the kingly office among the third generation since his birth. In the Odyssey he is said to have exhausted the three terms[828];

That lucidity and accuracy in Homer’s expressions, to which we are so often beholden, may stand us yet further in good stead. Two γενεαὶ had passed, not of men at large, but of the men οἵ οἱ πρόσθεν ἅμα τράφεν ἠδ’ ἐγένοντο, of those who were bred and born with him, of his contemporaries. Now this proves that by γενεὴ Homer does not mean the full duration of human life, but that average interval between the successions of men, which general experience places at about thirty years. For if Homer had meant by γενεὴ the whole time required for the dying out of a generation, Nestor could not have outlived two generations of contemporaries. In this sense, his contemporaries were manifestly not two generations, but one, or little more. But if the Poet meant the usual interval at which child succeeds to, or rather follows upon, father, the expression is clear; for the meaning is, that he had seen two of these terms of years, or successions, pass over those who were born at the same time with himself. And in fact this sense of the term γενεὴ is much closer to its etymology than any other. We may, then, on the whole, pretty safely assume it to be a term of years, having the number thirty, so to speak, for its pivot. And thus the three decades of the war become yet more inadmissible as historical expressions, because they are under the strongest suspicion of being poetically employed in order to make up the γενεὴ, so far at least as they and it can be considered to approximate to an actual number at all.

In full conformity with this reasoning, it has been shown by Mure, that the events of the third decade, with their times, instead of ten years only, make up eight years and seven months[829]: and he proceeds in the same direction with the foregoing argument so far, at least, as to observe, that the decades and their arrangement are conceived ‘in a mixed spirit of hyperbole and method,’ which commonly marks the genius of heroic romance[830].

That, however, which enables me with great confidence at once to urge Homer’s historical authority, and yet to decline recognising him as a chronologist at all, is the fact, that he nowhere founds his history at all in chronology, or in the numbering of events by years, more than he numbers distances by miles, but that he arranges the succession of occurrences by the γενεαὶ or succession of human generations. On these generations we must look as the real time-keeping organism of his works: and the time with its elastic periods, although indeterminate in its details, is kept by him most accurately and effectually as a whole; so that his generations, which are dispersedly recorded in various parts of the poems, always tally when they meet. This is not the place for the proof of the assertion: I only refer to it, because it may help to dispel the illusion apt to possess the mind with respect to Homer’s decades. We, with our definite numerical ideas, may naturally consider that if an author of our own day had said a war lasted in preparation, action, and return, each ten years, and if it was afterwards found perhaps to have lasted (say) only for ten years altogether or little more, such an author would have proved himself unworthy of belief: he would have broken faith with us. But Homer does not break faith with us in using numbers poetically; they belong to his pictorial and not to his historical apparatus, and in connection with this pictorial apparatus it is that he constantly employs them. I doubt if there is any exception to be made to the broad assertion, that, unless in the single case of the war, with the preceding and following decades, Homer never applies number to narrative. And yet the poems are full of independent narratives. Of all these, very few indeed are left unfixed in date; and in every case the date, when found, is found, of course with a certain margin, by means of the order of generations.

Now this view of Homer’s mode of chronology will serve, I think, to explain some difficulties that have heretofore led to much of needless perplexity. If I am right, it will follow that we must not adopt these decades as a guide to determine arithmetically the order of events, because Homer has never conceived them arithmetically, but has conceived them rather as we conceive millions or billions. Hence they are more justly to be viewed as a drapery thrown loosely over his action, than as a rigid framework into which it must at all costs be made to fit. Let us apply this to various cases; and among them to those of Telemachus and Neoptolemus respectively. Ulysses left Telemachus a mere child, νέον γεγαῶτ’ ἐνὶ οἴκῳ[831]. He comes back and finds him not a full man, for if he had been a full man, he would have been guilty of a rooted cowardice beyond excuse, which there is no sign that Homer meant to impute to him; but yet he was approaching manhood. Still he is contemptuously called νέος παῖς[832] by Antinous. Upon the whole, the case of Telemachus would perhaps, according to the analogy of the poems, best fall in with an absence of not more than fifteen years, though it does not absolutely exclude nineteen. Here there may be a slight, yet there is not a glaring, discrepancy. But in another case, that of the number of the days for which Telemachus was absent, Mure has shown how little Homer cares to follow the lapse of time, in a case where it does not essentially touch the general order of the poem, with the precision that he observes in everything that he treats historically[833]. I cannot treat this as a difficulty with respect to the question of authorship, or admit it to be one: it is his childlike and indeterminate but poetical habit of handling numbers for effect, just as a painter handles colour. On the other hand, in the case of Argus, on whom dark death laid hold[834],

he precisely coincides with his own decades. Yet I believe he does this not from any sense of the necessity of such coincidence, but because in that incomparable passage he had the extreme old age of a dog to represent, and to this the expression of the twentieth year was suited. When, however, we come to the case of Neoptolemus, we find this to be one extremely difficult of adjustment for any critic, who would insist upon a merely numerical precision in Homer. We must indeed dismiss from our minds the tales about the concealment of a beardless Achilles at Scyros, under a female disguise; from which he was extracted by the art of Ulysses. Of these stories Homer knows nothing; though it seems probable that the grace and beauty of the great warrior, as he stands in Homer, may have been connected with, or may have suggested, them. But what the Poet does represent is, that Achilles went to Troy when without experience in war, that he was put under a certain tutelage of Phœnix his original teacher, and now one of his lieutenants, that Patroclus as his senior was desired by Peleus to give him good advice, and that he is called νήπιος[835]. Yet his son Neoptolemus succeeds him in command before the close of the war, and attains to very high distinction. It is yet more needful to be observed, that his distinction is in council, as well as in the field[836]. The age of Achilles is, indeed, presumably somewhat raised by the fact, that Phœnix seems to represent himself as a good deal younger than Peleus, who, he says, treated him as a father might have done[837]. And again, Achilles is never represented as a young man in the Iliad, while Diomed is so represented. Still there is a decided incompatibility in the statements as to Achilles and his son, if we suppose that Homer carried in his mind the effect of his three decades, as determining precisely the growth of Neoptolemus in years and strength; for Neoptolemus is more advanced at the end of the war, than his illustrious father had been at its beginning. Mure has been at the pains[838] to arrange all these matters which depend on the decades chronologically, without, I think, removing the impression that mere chronology is considerably strained by them, and that if strictly judged, the narrative is, to all appearance, chargeable with some few years of maladjustment. It seems to me more near the truth to consider the three decades, together making up a γενεὴ, as a distribution of time which the Poet adopted for its symmetry and grandeur, since it represented the war as absorbing an age or generation of men: but not to hold him bound to adjust the relations of all the events he narrates with reference to a minute regularity of progression, which he seems not to have taken into account, and which his hearers were probably quite incapable of appreciating. If we wish to test his historical credit, we may try him by his own scheme of chronology, namely, his genealogies. His legends embrace some seven generations. The same characters are produced and reproduced in many of them; but they are nowhere presented in such a way as to be inconsistent with their order of succession according to the ordinary laws of human nature.

The application of these considerations to the poems will assist in explaining difficulties, which it has been thought worth while by learned men to raise.

For instance; while we take the three decades of years historically, we are perplexed by such questions as, How it came about that the Greeks[839] never had been mustered till nine years had passed. Secondly, how it was that the Trojans had never until then seen them in such force[840]; whereas we know that multitudes of the Greek army had died[841]; and there is no sign that any such communication with their native country took place during the course of the war, as might have sufficed to replenish their ranks. Thirdly, why the Trojans had remained so closely shut within the walls, and yet at the same time the Greeks had so seldom come near them, that Priam should not have learnt to know Agamemnon and his compeers by sight during so long a period; and this although Achilles may probably have been absent, for considerable intervals, on his predatory expeditions. Fourthly, how it came about that the great number of allies speaking various tongues, who had gathered round Priam to assist him, should, like the Greek army, not have been marshalled at an earlier time.

But if we suppose the term of ten years to be in the main a figurative expression for conveying the idea of effort lengthened in duration, as well as extraordinary in intensity, difficulties like these, which at the worst are perhaps not very serious, either wholly vanish, or are reduced to insignificant proportions. We are then at liberty to suppose that, without at all departing from the general truth of history, Homer felt himself authorized to compress, to expand, or to group the events of the war, in such a manner as he thought best for the concentration of interest, and for the production of adequate poetical and national effect.

SECT. IV.
Homer’s Perceptions and Use of Colour.

The subject of the Homeric numbers has been discussed at considerable length, on account of its connection with important questions of history. That of colours may, even on its own merits, deserve a careful examination. This inquiry will resemble, however, the former discussion in the appearance of paradox, which the argument may seem to present. Next to the idea of number, there is none perhaps more definite to the modern mind generally, as well as in particular to the English mind, than that of colour. That our own country has some special aptitude in this respect, we may judge from the comparatively advantageous position, which the British painters have always held as colourists among other contemporary schools. Nothing seems more readily understood and retained by very young children among us, than the distinctions between the principal colours. In regard to one point, the case of numbers is here reversed. There the idea becomes indefinite as we ascend in the scale, here it is as we descend. Colour becomes doubtful as it becomes faint, more and more clear as it is accumulated and heightened. But the facility with which we discriminate colour in all its marked forms, is probably the result of traditional aptitude, since we seem to find, as we go far backward in human history, that the faculty is less and less mature.

I am conscious that the subject, which is now before us, in reality deserves a scientific investigation, which I am not capable of affording to it: and also that we are, as yet, far from being able to render the language of the ancients for colour into our own with the confidence, which we can feel in almost every other department of interpretation. My endeavours will be limited, firstly, to a collection of ‘realien,’ or facts of the poems, in the case of Colour: and, secondly, to pointing out what appears to be the basis of the ideas and perceptions of Homer respecting it, and the relation of that basis to the ideas of the later Greeks.

Among the signs of the immaturity which I have mentioned, the following are found in the poems of Homer:

I. The paucity of his colours.

II. The use of the same word to denote not only different hues or tints of the same colour, but colours which, according to us, are essentially different.

III. The description of the same object under epithets of colour fundamentally disagreeing one from the other.

IV. The vast predominance of the most crude and elemental forms of colour, black and white, over every other, and the decided tendency to treat other colours as simply intermediate modes between these extremes.

V. The slight use of colour in Homer, as compared with other elements of beauty, for the purpose of poetic effect, and its absence in certain cases where we might confidently expect to find it.

Each of these topics will deserve a distinct notice.