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Homer and His Age

A >> Andrew Lang >> Homer and His Age




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

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

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

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

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

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

"_Buret_ was the provision house."

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

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

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

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

Guests did not sleep, as in Homer, in the _prodomos_, or the
portico--the climate did not permit it--but in one or other hall.
The hall was wainscotted; the walls were hung with shields and
weapons, like the hall of Odysseus. The heads of the family
usually slept in the aisles, in chambers entered through the
wainscot of the hall. Such a chamber might be called
_muchos_; it was private from the hall though under the same
roof. It appears not improbable that some Homeric halls had
sleeping places of this kind; such a _muchos_ in Iceland
seems to have had windows. [Footnote: Story of Burnt _Njal_,
i. 242.]

Gunnar himself, however, slept with his wife, Halegerda, in an
upper chamber; his mother, who lived with him, also had a room
upstairs.

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

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

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

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




CHAPTER XI


NOTES OF CHANGE IN THE "ODYSSEY"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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