The World of Homer - Andrew Lang

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like the Anglo-Saxon invaders of Romanised Britain. Far more civilised and refined than these rude hordes, they could appreciate and preserve as well as burn and break—in an hour of furious sack—the treasures of the more civilised race. But these treasures they could not imitate and reproduce, apparently (they are often spoken of as the work of the god Hephaestus), and the ancient Aegean art waned and passed under new and crude influences.

      CHAPTER V

      MEN AND WOMEN

       Table of Contents

      In all modern times Homer has been admired for his noble, tender, and chivalrous sense of what is due to women; for his pictures of the perfect mother, Thetis; the perfect wife, Andromache; the perfect maiden, frank, stainless, and kind, Nausicaa; for the woman of immortal charm, Helen; while, when he does touch on the less lovable humours of women—on the nagging shrew, the light o' love, the rather bitter virgin—he selects his examples from the divine society of the Gods.

      It is an instance of the high and noble taste of the poet and his audience, that he dwells most on the best and most charming of the women in old traditions, and is manifestly reluctant to tell of any evil deed, or any cruel sorrow of a lady. Yet legend was full of women fierce and revengeful as Brynhild; such women as Medea, who slew her own children; Ino, who hated her step-children; Althaea, who, to avenge her brothers, burned the brand that was the life-token of her son, Meleager of the golden hair. There was hateful Eriphyle, bribed by the gift that drew her lord to his doom; there was hapless Epicaste, wedded to her son, the slayer of his father; there were unhappy Chloris, and unhappy Tyro, mother of Pelias and Neleus by Poseidon, and victim of a feminine revenge. But this part of the tale is Ionian or Athenian, not Homeric. In Homer a woman is not dishonoured, but more highly esteemed, because she has been loved by a god. In Attic traditions she is cruelly punished by her own kinsfolk.

      The wicked and ill-fated ladies who remind us of heroines in ancient German epos, are scarcely mentioned, or not at all in the Iliad (where they could only appear in digressions), and the poet merely touches on their fortunes when Odysseus meets them in Hades. From the guilt and the misery of the "far-renowned brides of ancient song," Homer averts his eyes. Even to Clytemnestra, though her sin cannot be hidden, he allows the bon naturel which Mary Stuart justly claimed for herself. We are reminded of the tenderness of Chaucer for the fault of Cressida, "Ne me list this sely womman chyde."

      Homer himself never blames Helen, he regards her with the affection and pity of Hector and Priam: it is the Trojan women and Penelope, her cousin, who speak frankly of Helen and the ruin which she wrought. In the Iliad she does not, "where'er she came, bring calamity"; she is penitent, she longs for home, and her lord, and her one child, the little maid Hermione. She scorns the cowardice of her lover, and, in the third Book of the Iliad, the poet plainly declares that she is. the unwilling victim of Aphrodite. In the Odyssey, wherever she appears, she brings beauty, grace, charm, and quiet, and her appointed home is in the temperate meadows of the Elysian land.

      Homer does not dwell on the passion of love; he could not do so in an epic of war, and in an epic of a man seeking to win, on the sea, "the return of his company." But each epic turns on and is motive by love; the Iliad springs from the lawless love of Paris and Helen; the Odyssey from the wedded love of Odysseus and Penelope. The Wrath of Achilles, too, arises on account of his lost love. In the instance of Paris, love has turned to the most tragic end: the passion of Helen is changed into bitter contempt and inconsolable regret.

      

      The loves of youth and maiden, the whispered oaristys "from rock and oak," are seldom the theme of Greek poetry; in the Epics they would be as out of place as in the Chanson de Roland. The loves of Troilus and Cressida were, to Chaucer, the central interest of the Trojan leaguer; no such place could they hold in Homer: he has an infinitely larger and nobler topic. Yet he who listens may hear "The awakened loves around him murmuring," in the lines that, through the din of battle, just mention some old amour of gods with mortal maidens, of mortal men with fairies of the woods and hills.

      Considering the warlike nature of the Iliad, the parts played by women, by Helen, Andromache, Hecuba, and the touches that bring forward the wifely tenderness of Theano, are almost surprising; while the whole poem is dominated by the maternal love of Thetis, that magical figure of sorrow, foreboding, and affection, without which the character of Achilles would be jejune, and bereft of occasions to display its fond of tenderness and melancholy. Of course we are told that all these women are "late," and formed no part of the original lay of the Wrath: that is to be expected of critical sagacity.

      The magnificent passages on Helen, Andromache, and Hecuba; the humorous descriptions of Hera; Athene, her divine father's darling, and of Aphrodite; the unnatural hatred of Althaea; the caprice of Anteia; the pathos of the dirges of Briseis for Patroclus, of Helen for Hector; the remorseless jealousy of the mother of Phoenix, when his father loves a mistress among her maids, all supply "the female interest" in the Iliad.

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