The venerable Nestor speaks to the same effect; and Agamemnon himself closes the debate with a call to immediate battle. It is a right royal speech, far more worthy of a true “king of men” than his former philippics—moderate in his allusion to Achilles, spirited in his appeal to his warriors.

He remembers, too, like a wise general, that a battle may be lost by fighting on an empty stomach. So the oxen and the fatlings are slain, the choice pieces of the thighs and the fat are offered in sacrifice to the gods, and then the whole army feasts their fill. Agamemnon holds a select banquet of six of the chief leaders—King Idomeneus of Crete, Nestor, Ajax the Greater and the Less, and Ulysses, “wise in council as Zeus.” One guest comes uninvited—his brother Menelaus. He is no dinner-loving intruder; he comes, as the poet simply tells us, “because he knew in his heart how many were his brother’s cares and anxieties,”—he might be of some use or support to him. Throughout the whole of the poem, the mutual affection borne by these two brothers is very remarkable, and unlike any type of the same relationship which exists in fiction. It is never put forward or specially dwelt upon, but comes out simply and naturally in every particular of their intercourse.

A king and priest, like Abraham at Bethel, Agamemnon stands by his burnt-offering, and lifts his prayer for victory to Jupiter, “most glorious and most great, who dwells in the clouds and thick darkness.” But no favourable omen comes from heaven. The god, whether or no he accepts the offering, gives no sign. Nevertheless—we may suppose with a certain wilfulness which is part of his character—Agamemnon proceeds to set the battle in array; and the second book of the Iliad closes with the long muster-roll of the Greek clans under their respective kings or chiefs on the one side, and of the Trojans and their allies on the other, which in our introduction has already been partly anticipated.[14] The long list of chiefs, with their genealogies and birthplaces, and the strength of their several contingents, was evidently composed with a view to recitation: and whatever may be its value as an authentic record, we can understand the interest with which a Greek audience would listen to a muster-roll which was to them what the Roll of Battle Abbey was to the descendants of the Normans in England. If here and there, upon occasion, the wandering minstrel inserted in the text the name and lineage of some provincial hero on his own responsibility, the popular applause would assuredly be none the less.

CHAPTER II.

THE DUEL OF PARIS AND MENELAUS.

But while the hostile forces yet await the signal for the battle, Paris springs forth alone from the Trojan ranks. “Godlike” he is in his beauty, and with the leve of personal adornment which befits his character, he wears a spotted leopard’s hide upon his shoulders. Tennyson’s portrait of him, though in a different scene, is thoroughly Homeric—

Advancing with long strides in the space between the armies, he challenges the leaders of the Greeks, one and all, to meet him singly in mortal combat. Menelaus hears the boast. “Like a hungry lion springing on his prey,” he leaps full-armed from his chariot, exulting in the thought that now at last his personal vengeance shall be gratified. But conscience makes a coward of Paris. He starts back—“as a man that sees a serpent in his path”—the godlike visage grows pale, the knees tremble, and the Trojan champion draws back under the shelter of his friends from the gallant hero whom he has so bitterly wronged. The Roman historian Livy—a poet in prose—had surely this passage in his mind when he described Sextus Tarquinius, the dishonourer of Lucretia, quailing, as no Roman of his blood and rank would otherwise have quailed, when young Valerius dashes out from the Roman lines to engage him. The moral teaching of the heathen poet on such points is far higher than that of the medieval romancers with whom he has so many points in common. Sir Tristram of Lyonnois has no such scruples of conscience in meeting King Mark. Lancelot, indeed, will not fight with Arthur; but the very nobility of character with which the unknown author of that striking impersonation has endowed him is in itself the highest of all wrongs against morality, in that it steals the reader’s sympathies for the wrong-doer instead of for the injured husband. Shakespeare, as is his wont, strikes the higher key. It is the consciousness of guilt which makes Macbeth half quail before Macduff—

Paris withdraws into the Trojan ranks, and there encounters Hector. As has been already said, the poet assumes at the outset, on the part of his audience, at least such knowledge of his dramatis personæ as to make a formal introduction unnecessary. Hector is the noblest of all the sons of Priam, the shield and bulwark of his countrymen throughout the long years of the war. Achilles is the hero of the Iliad, and to him Homer assigns the palm of strength and valour; but, as is not seldom the case in fiction, the author has painted the rival hero so well that our sympathies are at least as frequently found on his side. We almost share Juno’s feelings against the Trojans when they are represented by Paris; but when Hector comes into the field, our hearts half go over to the enemy. His character will be touched upon more fully hereafter: for the present, it must discover itself in the course of the story. He throws himself in the way of Paris in his cowardly retreat; and in spite of the fraternal feeling which is so remarkably strong amongst Homer’s heroes,—in Hector and his brothers almost as much as in Agamemnon and Menelaus,—shame and disgust at his present poltroonery now mingle themselves with a righteous hatred of the selfish lust which has plunged his country into a bloody war—

Paris has the grace to admit the justice of his brother’s rebuke. Hector, he confesses, is far the better soldier; only he pleads, with a self-complacency which he never loses, that grace of person, and a smooth tongue, and a taste for music, are nothing less than the gifts of the gods—that, in fact, it is not his fault that he is so irresistible. He ends, however, with an offer which is far more to Hector’s mind. Let open lists be pitched in sight of both armies, and he will engage Menelaus in single combat; Helen and her wealth shall be the prize of victory.

It is a proposal at which Hector’s heart rejoices. He checks at once the advancing line of the Trojans, and steps out himself to the front. The Greeks bend their bows at him, but Agamemnon understands his motions, and bids them hold their hands. It is a fair challenge which the Trojan prince comes to make on behalf of Paris. Menelaus accepts it, in a few plain and gallant words—he is no orator:—

A truce is agreed upon, to abide the result of this appeal of battle. A messenger from Olympus—Iris, goddess of the Rainbow—comes to warn Helen of the impending duel. And this introduces one of the most beautiful passages in the whole Iliad, to modern taste. Its sentiment and pathos are perfectly level and quiet; but as a natural and life-like yet highly-wrought portrait of a scene in what we may call the social drama, it stands almost without equal or parallel in classical literature.

Helen—the fatal cause of the war, the object of such violent passions and such bitter taunts—is sitting pensively in the palace of her royal father-in-law, writing her own miserable story. She is writing it—not in a three-volumed novel, as a lady who had a private history, more or less creditable, would write it now, but—in a golden tapestry, in which more laborious form it was in those days not unfrequent to write sensational biographies. Iris urges her to be present at the show. The whole reads like the tale of some medieval tournament, except that Helen herself is the prize of victory as well as the Queen of Beauty. Attended by her maidens, she goes down to the place where the aged Priam, like the kings of the Old Testament history, “sits in the gate” surrounded by the elders of his city. It is the “Scæan,” or “left-hand” gate, which opens towards the camp of the enemy, and commands a view of their lines. We have had no word as yet of the marvellous beauty of Helen. There is no attempt to describe it throughout the whole of the poem. But here, in a few masterly touches, introduced in the simplest and most natural manner, Homer does more than describe it, when he tells us its effects. The old men break off their talk as the beautiful stranger draws near. They had seen her often enough before; the fatal face and form must have been well known in the streets and palaces of Troy, however retired a life Helen might well have thought it becoming in her unhappy position to lead. But the fair vision comes upon their eyes with a new and ever-increasing enchantment. They say each to the other as they look upon her, “It is no blame to Greeks or Trojans to fight for such a woman—she is worth all the ten years of war; still, let her embark and go home, lest we and our children suffer more for her.” Even the earliest critics, when the finer shades of criticism were little understood, were forcibly struck with the art of the poet in selecting his witnesses for the defence. The Roman Quintilian had said nearly all that modern taste has since confirmed. He bids the reader mark who gives this testimony to Helen’s charms. Not the infatuated Paris, who has set his own honour and his country’s welfare at nought for the sake of an unlawful passion; not some young Trojan, who might naturally be ready to vow “the world well lost” for such a woman; nor yet any of the vulgar crowd, easily impressed, and always extravagant in its praise or blame; but these grave and reverend seniors, men of cold passions and calm judgment, fathers whose sons were fighting and falling for this woman’s sake, and even Priam himself, whose very crown and kingdom she had brought in deadly peril. He receives her, as she draws near, with gentle courtesy. Plainly, in his estimation, her unhappy position does not involve necessarily shame or disgrace. This opens one of the difficult questions of the moral doctrine of the Iliad, which can only be understood by bearing in mind the supernatural machinery of the poem. To the modern reader, the character of Helen, and the light in which she is regarded alike by Greeks and Trojans, present an anomaly in morals which is highly unsatisfactory. It is not as if Homer, like the worst writers of the Italian school, set marriage vows at nought, and made a jest of unchastity. Far otherwise; the heathen bard on such points took an infinitely higher tone than many so-called Christian poets. The difficulty lies in the fact that throughout the poem, while the crime is reprobated, the criminal meets with forbearance, and even sympathy. Our first natural impulse with regard to Helen is to look upon her much in the light in which she herself, in one of her bitter confessions, says she is looked upon by the mass of the Trojans:—

But this feeling, we must remember, arose much more from her being the cause of all the miseries of the siege, than from her having left her Greek husband. Priam and Hector—who have certainly not a lower morality, and a higher nobility and unselfishness, than the mass of their countrymen—show no such feeling against her; on the contrary, they treat her with scrupulous delicacy and consideration. So also the leaders of the Greek forces betray no consciousness that they are fighting, after all, for a worthless woman; rather, she is a prize to be reclaimed, and Menelaus himself is ready from the first to receive her back again. How is this? Some have understood the poet to represent her abduction from her home to have been forcible—that she was carried off by Paris entirely against her will; but even allowing this (which is not consistent with many passages in the poem), it would not excuse or palliate her voluntary acceptance of such a degraded position throughout the subsequent story. The real explanation is given in a few words by Priam in the scene before us.

In Homer’s sight, as in Priam’s, she is the victim of Venus. She is “the victim of passion,” only in a more literal and personal sense than we use the expression. Love, lawful or unlawful, was a divine—that is, a supernatural—force, to the mind of the poet. The spells of Venus are irresistible: that fatal gift of beauty is the right by which the goddess takes possession of her, and leads her captive at her evil will. Helen herself feels her own degradation far more deeply, in fact, than any one else seems to feel it; no one uses any expressions about her half so bitter as those which she applies to herself; “shameless,” “bringer of sorrow,” “whose name shall be a by-word and a reproach,” are the terms she uses—

We must judge Homer’s characters with reference to the light of his religious creed—if creed it were—or at least with reference to the supernatural element employed in the Iliad. We shall be safe, then, in seeing Helen through Homer’s eyes. We separate her unconsciously, as he does, from her fault. Look upon that as the poet does, as she does herself, as Priam and Hector and Menelaus do, as her fate, her misfortune, the weird that she has been doomed to dree,—and then, what a graceful womanly character remains! Gentle and daughterlike to the aged Priam, humble and tearful in the presence of her noble and generous brother-in-law Hector, as disdainful as she dares to be to her ignoble lord and lover,—tender, respectful, regretful, towards the gallant husband she has deserted.

So she comes in all her grace and beauty, and takes her seat by the old King’s side upon the watch-tower, looking out upon the camp of the Greeks. He bids her tell him the names of such of the kings and chiefs as she can recognise. One there is who seems indeed a “king of men,” by the grace of nature. There are taller warriors in the host; but none of such majestic mien and right royal bearing. It is, indeed, Agamemnon the son of Atreus, as Helen informs him,—

Another chief attracts Priam’s attention, as he strides along in front of the lines. Less in stature than Agamemnon, he is broader in the chest and shoulders. Helen knows him well. It is Ulysses, son of Laertes, “the man of many wiles;” nursed among the rugged cliffs of his island kingdom of Ithaca, but already a traveller well versed in the ways of men, the stratagems of war, and the counsels of princes. He is recognised, too, now that Helen names him, by some of the Trojan elders; for he, it must be remembered (and Homer assumes that we know it), had accompanied Menelaus in the embassy to demand Helen’s restitution. Old Antenor, now sitting by Priam’s side, well remembers the remarkable stranger, whom he had lodged and entertained as a public guest. The picture he draws of him is one of the most graphic and individual of all Homer’s characters.

A third hero catches the eye of the Trojan king, as{58} well he may—a leader like Saul, “taller by the head and shoulders than the rest of the people”—and he asks Helen to name him also. This is Ajax of Crete, son of Telamon, a giant chieftain, “the bulwark of the Greeks,” represented here in the Iliad as easy-tempered and somewhat heavy, as it is the wont of giants to be, degraded by medieval and modern poets into a mere bulk without brains. “Mars’ idiot,” Shakespeare calls him, “who has not so much wit as would stop the eye of Helen’s needle.” Shirley, in his ‘Ajax and Ulysses,’ carries out the same popular notion:—

By the side of Ajax Helen also marks King Idomeneus of Crete, a frequent guest in the palace of Menelaus in happier times; for the court of Sparta, as will be seen hereafter in the Odyssey, was in these heroic days a centre of civilisation and refinement. Two chiefs Helen’s anxious eyes vainly try to discern amongst the crowd of her countrymen,—

Helen’s self-reproachful surmises have not reached the truth. The “Great Twin Brethren,” who had once already (so the ancient legend said) rescued their beautiful sister in her girlhood from the hands of Theseus, who had been amongst the mighty hunters of the Calydonian boar, and had formed part of the adventurous crew of the Argo, had finished their mortal warfare years before in a raid in Messenia; but to reappear as demigods in Greek and Roman legend,—the spirit horsemen who rallied the Roman line in the great fight with the Latins at the Lake Regillus, the “shining stars” who lighted the sailors on the stormy Adriatic, and gave their names to the ship in which St Paul was cast away.

This picturesque dialogue between Priam and his fascinating guest is interrupted far too soon for the reader’s complete enjoyment—somewhat too abruptly, indeed, for its perfection. One would like to have heard Helen’s estimate of the other leaders of the Greeks; of Diomed, of the lesser Ajax, of Nestor, of Mnestheus the Athenian; and it is hardly possible not to fancy that the scene has been left by the poet incomplete, or that some portion has been lost past recovery. The tragedian Æschylus, who was full of the true Homeric spirit, carried out the idea to what seems its natural completion in a remarkable scene of ‘The Seven Chiefs against Thebes,’ to which we may hope to introduce our readers more fully hereafter. Euripides, in his ‘Phœnissæ,’ adopts the very same machinery; and Tasso has also imitated the scene in his ‘Jerusalem Delivered,’[16] where he brings Erminia on the walls, pointing out to King Aladine the persons of the most renowned of the besieging knights.

The interruption is as little satisfactory to Priam as to the reader. A herald summons the king of Troy to a conference in the mid-space between the city walls and the enemy’s leaguer, in order to ratify the armistice, while Paris and Menelaus decide their quarrel in single combat. The old man mounts his chariot, “shuddering,” as foreboding the defeat and death of his son. Agamemnon and Ulysses on the one side, Priam and Antenor on the other, duly slay the sacrificial lambs, and make joint appeal to Jupiter, the Avenger of oaths, pouring the red wine upon the earth with solemn imprecation, that so may flow forth the heart’s blood of him who on either part shall break the truce. And the god listens as before, but does not accept the appeal. Priam withdraws, for he cannot bear to be a spectator of his son’s peril. Hector and Ulysses, precisely in the fashion of the marshals in the tournaments of chivalry, measure out the lists; the rest of the Greeks lie down on the ground beside their horses and chariots, while the lots are cast which shall first throw the spear. The chance falls to Paris. He throws, and strikes full and fair in the centre of Menelaus’ round shield. But the seasoned bull’s hide turns the point, and it does not penetrate. Next comes the turn of Menelaus. Paris has ventured no appeal to heaven; but the Greek king lifts his voice in prayer to Jupiter for vengeance on the traitor who has so abused his hospitality, before he poises his long lance carefully and hurls it at his enemy. Right through shield, breastplate, and linen vest goes the good Greek weapon; but Paris leans back to avoid it, and it only grazes him. Menelaus rushes forward, sword in hand, and smites a downright blow on Paris’ crest. But the Trojan helmet proves of better quality than the shield, and the Greek blade flies in shivers. Maddened by his double failure, he rushes on his enemy, and seizing him by the horse-hair crest, drags him off by main strength towards the ranks of the Greeks. But in this extremity the goddess of love comes to the rescue of her favourite. At her touch the tough bullhide strap of Paris’ head-piece, which was all but choking him, breaks, and leaves the empty helmet in the hands of Menelaus. He hurls it amongst his comrades in disappointment and disgust, and rushes once more in pursuit of Paris. But Venus has wrapt him in a mist, and carried him off; and while the son of Atreus rushes like a baffled lion up and down the lists in quest of him, while even the Trojans are aiding in the search, and no man among them would have hidden him—for “they all hated him like black death”—he is safely laid by the goddess in Helen’s chamber. The scene in which she receives him is, like all the rest of her story, a beautiful contradiction. Her first greeting is bitter enough. Either her heart has been indeed with Menelaus in the fight—or at least she would have had her present husband come back from the field, dead or alive, in some more honourable fashion—

Brave words! but still, as of old, the fatal spells of Venus are upon her, and Paris’ misadventure in the lists is all too soon condoned.

CHAPTER III.

THE BROKEN TRUCE.

The Greeks claim the victory—reasonably, since the Trojan champion has fled the lists; but again the intrigues of the court of Olympus interfere to interrupt the course of mortal justice. The gods of Homer are not the gods of Epicurus’ creed, who, as our English poet sings, “lie beside their nectar, careless of mankind.” They are anything but careless, so far as the affairs of mortals are concerned; but their interference is regulated by the most selfish motives. Men are the puppets whom they make to dance for their gratification—the counters with which they play their Olympian game, and try to defeat and checkmate each other. Even the respect which they pay to the mortal who is regular in the matter of offering sacrifices is entirely selfish—it seems to be merely the sensual appetite for fat roasts and rich savours. They are commonly influenced by jealousy, pique, revenge, or favouritism; and where they do punish the wrongdoer, it is far more often from a sense of lèse-majesté—a slight offered to some cause which is under their special protection—than from any moral indignation at wrong itself. When the scene opens in the fourth book of the poem, it seems to pass at once from serious melodrama to broad comedy; and but that these dwellers in Olympus really rule the fortunes of the tale, it would be scarcely possible not to believe that the poet so intended it.

We are introduced again, then, to Olympus; and, as before, to a quarrel among the Immortals. It is Jove this time who is the aggressor. He has seen the result of the combat, and taunts Juno with the double patronage extended to the Greeks by herself and Minerva—which, after all, has failed—while Venus, more active and energetic, has rescued her favourite. However, he awards the victory to Menelaus; and suggests, as a solution to all disputes and difficulties, that now Helen should be given up, the Greeks go home, and so the fate of Troy be averted. At the thought of her enemy thus escaping, the queen of the gods cannot contain her rage. Jupiter gives way. He loves Troy much, but domestic peace and quietness more. He warns his queen, however, that if he now consents to give up Troy to her insatiable revenge, she shall not stand in his way hereafter, in case some community of mortals who may be her especial favourites shall incur his royal displeasure. And Juno, with that utter indifference to human suffering, or human justice, which characterises the deities of Olympus, makes answer in these words:—

In furtherance of this strange compact, Minerva is once more sent down to the plains of Troy. Her mission now is to incite the Trojans to break the truce by some overt act, and thus not only renew the war, but put themselves plainly in the wrong. Clothing herself in the human shape of the son of old Antenor, she mingles in the Trojan ranks, and addresses herself to the cunning bowman Pandarus. His character in the Iliad has nothing in common with the “Sir Pandarus of Troy,” whose name, as the base uncle of Cressida, has passed into an unwholesome by-word, and whom Lydgate, Chaucer, and, lastly, Shakespeare, borrowed from the medieval romancers. Here he is but an archer of known skill, somewhat given to display, with his bow of polished ibex-horns tipped with gold, and vain of his reputation, whom the goddess easily tempts to end the long war at once by a timely shot, and win immortal renown by taking off Menelaus. With a brief prayer and a vow of a hecatomb to Apollo, the god of the bow—who is supposed to be as ready as the rest of the immortals to abet an act of treachery on such conditions—Pandarus ensconces himself behind the shields of his comrades, and choosing out his arrow with the same care which we read of in the great exploits of more modern bowmen, he discharges it point-blank at the unsuspecting Menelaus. The shaft flies true enough, but Minerva is at hand to avert the actual peril from the Greek hero: she turns the arrow aside—

It is a pretty simile; but the result is not so entirely harmless. The arrow strikes in the belt, and so meets the double resistance of belt and corslet. It draws blood, nevertheless, in a stream; and both Menelaus and Agamemnon at first fear that the wound is mortal;—

Two points are remarkable in this passage: first, the tenderness which Agamemnon shows towards his younger brother, even to the point of self-reproach at having allowed him to fight Paris at all, though in a quarrel which was so thoroughly his own. His expressions of grief and remorse at the thought of going home to Greece without him (which run to considerable length), though somewhat tinged with selfishness, inasmuch as he feels his own honour at stake, are much more like the feeling of a parent than of an elder brother. Again, the picture of Menelaus “shuddering” at his own wound—so sensitive to the dread of death that he apparently all but faints, until he is reassured by finding that the barb of the arrow has not really penetrated—is utterly inconsistent with our English notions of a hero. We have to bear in mind, here and elsewhere, that these Greek heroes, of whatever race we are to suppose them to be, are of an entirely different temperament to us cold and self-restrained northerns. They are highly sensitive to bodily pain, very much given to groans and tears, and very much afraid of death for themselves, however indifferent to human life in the case of others. Death, to these sensuous Greeks, was an object of dread and aversion, chiefly because it implied to their minds something like annihilation. However vivid in some passages of their poets is the description of those happy Elysian fields where the souls of heroes dwelt, the popular belief gave to the disembodied spirit but a shadowy and colourless existence.

The wound is soon stanched by the aid of the skilful leech Machaon, son of Æsculapius (and therefore grandson of Apollo “the Healer”), but who is a warrior and chieftain as well as the rest, though he has placed his skill at the service of Agamemnon. The King of Men himself, as soon as his brother’s hurt is tended, rushes along the lines, rousing chiefs and clansmen to avenge the treachery of the enemy. Idomeneus of Crete, Ajax the Greater and the Less, Mnestheus of Athens, Ulysses, Diomed—to all in turn he makes his passionate appeal; to some, in language which they are inclined to resent, as implying that they were disinclined for the combat. Diomed and Sthenelus he even reminds of the brave deeds of their fathers Tydeus and Capaneus in the great siege of Thebes, and stings them with the taunt, that the sons will never win the like renown. Diomed hears in silence; but the son of Capaneus inherits, with all the bravery, something of the insolence of the chief who swore that “with or without the gods” he would burn Thebes: he answers the great king in words which have yet a certain nobility in their self-assertion—

All the leaders of the Greeks eagerly marshal their forces at the King’s call. Nestor’s experienced counsel orders the line of battle—so well, that subsequent commanders were fain to take a lesson from it.

CHAPTER IV.

THE FIRST DAY’S BATTLE.

Then begins one of those remarkable descriptions of a series of single combats between warriors of note on either side, in which Homer delights and excels. It must be confessed that they are somewhat wearisome to a modern reader; although, as has been well observed, the details of attack and defence, wounds and death, are varied in a fashion which shows that the artist was thoroughly master of his work; and it is even said that in the physical results assigned to each particular wound he has shown no mean knowledge of anatomy. Still, the continuous catalogue of ghastly wounds and dying agonies is uncongenial with our more refined sympathies. But it was quite in harmony with the tastes of ruder days. We find the same apparent repetition of single combats in the medieval romances—notably in Mallory’s King Arthur; and they were probably not the least popular portions of the tale. Even a stronger parallel case might be found in the description of a prize-fight in the columns of sporting newspapers, not so many years ago, when each particular blow and its results, up to “Round 102,” were graphically described in language quite as figurative, if not so poetic, as Homer’s; and found, we must suppose, a sufficient circle of readers to whom it was not only intelligible but highly interesting. The poet who recites—as we must suppose Homer to have done—must above everything else excite and interest his audience: his lay must be rich in incident; and to an audience who were all more or less warlike, no incidents could be so exciting as the details of battle. There is much savageness in Homer’s combats; but savageness is to the taste of men whose only means of excitement is through their grosser senses, and a love of the horrible in fact or fiction is by no means extinct even in our own day.

Young Antilochus, the son of Nestor’s old age, draws the first blood in the battle. He kills Echepolus.