C.D. Warner, et al., comp. The Library of the World’s Best Literature.
An Anthology in Thirty Volumes. 1917.

Critical and Biographical Introduction by Thomas Day Seymour (1848–1907)

By Homer (fl. 850 B.C.)

THE HOMERIC POEMS are the earliest literary product of the world which has survived to our day, and they lie at the fountain-head of all the later literature of Europe. No literary epic poem has been composed since Homer’s day without reference to the Iliad and the Odyssey as the standard. Apollonius of Rhodes followed and imitated Homer; Virgil imitated Homer and Apollonius; Dante took Virgil as his master; John Milton followed in the footsteps of Homer, Virgil, and Dante. Plato called Homer the father of tragedy, as well as of the epic. To the ancient Greek mind, the Iliad and Odyssey of Homer formed a sort of Bible, to which reference was made as to an ultimate authority. Even in an age when epic poetry was out of fashion, one of the most honored of Athenian generals, Nicias, had his son Niceratus commit to memory all of the two great Homeric poems, of which the shorter is a third longer than Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost.’ About the same time (in the fifth century B.C.) audiences of twenty thousand people gathered to listen to public recitals of these poems. A Homeric quotation was always in order, to illustrate and clinch an argument, or to give poetic flavor to a discussion.

When and where Homer lived, no one knows. Many stories about him were invented and told, but all are without support.

A guild of singers on the island of Chios (Scio) asserted themselves to be his descendants and rightful successors, but no evidence was offered of his family or home. Scholars no longer ask where Homer was born, but where Greek epic poetry had its rise. The muses were Pierian muses, and thus associated with the southern part of Macedonia; they dwelt with the gods on Mount Olympus, and the abode of Achilles, the chief hero of the Iliad, was close at hand in Thessaly. These are pretty distinct indications that the early home of Greek poetry was near Mount Olympus. Later this art was carried by the Greeks to their colonies on the western shore of Asia Minor, and there was accepted and perfected.

Homer is represented in ancient works of art as blind, but the greater Homeric poems offer no indication of his blindness. Quite the contrary, he seems to have taken an active part in the doings of men. His interest in the battles which he describes is lively. His description of wounds inflicted shows such exact acquaintance with battles and anatomy that some German critics have been disposed to think he must have been a sort of army surgeon.

While the Homeric poems are the earliest works of Greek literature which have come down to us, they certainly were not the earliest poems of the Greeks. Brief lyric songs of love, grief, feasting, or war are ordinary precursors of epic,—i.e., of narrative lays. And short epics must have been well known to the people before any poet thought of composing a long epic. The growth of a poem like the Iliad is gradual. The art of writing was known in Greece at an early age, quite certainly by 1000 B.C., but not until much later was it applied to literary compositions; it was used mainly for business memoranda and public records until the fifth century B.C., and even then the Greeks could hardly be called a reading people. But they were patient listeners. When the Greek drama was at its best, great audiences of fifteen to twenty thousand Athenians would sit in the open air, in March, from early in the morning until late in the afternoon, to hear and see three or four tragedies in succession. A century or centuries before this, audiences listened in throngs to continuous epic recitations. But in general each separate lay seems to have contained not more than five or six hundred lines. Probably the recitation of such a lay was followed by an intermission, and the connection between successive lays was not made with rigid precision. The outlines of the story, and often the details, were familiar to the hearers. When a long poem was formed by the union of several lays or by a process of gradual development, a singer would select on each occasion what seemed best suited to his audience. Some parts of the Homeric poems are well adapted to be sung at feasts, others on the return from a long journey, others at a funeral, many others after or before a battle.

These poems were sung, we say. Perhaps intoned or chanted would be a more exact expression. The instrumental accompaniment was very slight,—that of a cithara of four strings (and thus only four notes), with a sounding-board formed by a tortoise shell. We cannot assume much melody in the recitation, and probably the cithara served chiefly to give the keynote, and to sound a few simple chords as a prelude or interludes. The cithara was used not only by the professional bards at the courts of kings, but also by the warriors: at least Achilles, while “sulking in his tent,” cheered his heart by singing of the glorious deeds of men, holding a cithara which he had taken from the spoils of a sacked city.

Our poet was a national poet. He gives no special honor to any part of Greece, though the little country was broken up into many principalities. His songs might have been sung in any hamlet without arousing either envy or ill-will. He is impartial, too, between Greeks and Trojans, and excites our sympathy for the Trojan Hector and Andromache as well as for the Achæan Achilles and Patroclus.

The Homeric poet was fortunate not only in the body of myths which descended to him, and which formed the groundwork for his poems, but in his further inheritance from former generations,—his language and his verse. The language was the most graceful and flexible which the world has ever known. The verse itself (the so-called dactylic hexameter) would indicate that epic poetry had been cultivated in Greece long before Homer’s day. Its laws are fully fixed,—its favorite and its forbidden pauses; the places where a light and those where a heavy movement is preferred. No verse known to man is so well suited to a long Greek narrative poem. No other verse has less monotony or more dignity and stateliness. It was nobly “described and exemplified” by Coleridge’s lines:—

The Roman poet Virgil adopted this verse, but had a much more ponderous language, which was not well fitted for the Greek metres. The verse has been made familiar to us all by Clough’s ‘Bothie,’ and especially by Longfellow’s ‘Evangeline’ and ‘The Courtship of Miles Standish’; but the line is rather too long for most modern languages, and has not been used for any long English poem or any great English translation of Homer. Matthew Arnold tried it for the last verses of the eighth book of the Iliad, as follows:—With this may be compared Tennyson’s translation of the same lines (with a few more) in English heroic verse:—

The essential characteristics of Homer’s poetry are enumerated thus by Matthew Arnold: “Homer is rapid in his movement, Homer is plain in his words and style, Homer is simple in his ideas, Homer is noble in his manner.” Mr. Arnold goes on to say that “Cowper renders him ill because he is slow in his movement and elaborate in his style; Pope renders him ill because he is artificial both in his style and in his words; Chapman renders him ill because he is fantastic in his ideas.” Each age has desired its own translation of the Homeric poems. Chapman’s, Pope’s, and Cowper’s translations are now read rather as the works of those English poets than as faithful renderings of the Homeric poems. But we owe to Chapman’s translation Keats’s splendid sonnet, “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer”:—

The dramatic nature of the Homeric poems deserves remark. About half of the verses are in speeches, although epic poetry is narrative poetry. In long passages the verses between the speeches have almost the quality of “stage directions,” and we see with what justice Plato and Aristotle called Homer the father of the drama. The poet reserves for his own telling only what is necessary. The one passage in the poems (Odyssey, vii. 112–131) which resembles a modern description, is on this very ground strongly suspected of not being truly Homeric. “When Homer” (says Lessing) “wishes to tell us how Agamemnon was dressed, he makes the king put on every article of raiment in our presence: the soft tunic, the great mantle, the beautiful sandals, and the sword. When he is thus fully equipped he grasps his sceptre. We see the clothes while the poet is describing the act of dressing. An inferior writer would have described the clothes down to the minutest fringe, and of the action we should have seen nothing.”

Of few epochs in any country have we clearer and more animated pictures than Homer has painted of the early Greeks. Of no other great nation in its childhood have we such a view. Tacitus indeed gave a masterly sketch of the Germans, about one hundred years after Christ: but he was an outsider at best, and seems to have drawn largely from the accounts of others; scholars are not agreed that he himself ever sojourned in Germany. Of the early Jews, the children of Israel, the story is far less full than of the early Greeks. Our poet does not claim to have lived at the time of the Trojan War, but rather is conscious that he is in a degenerate age. Hector, Ajax, and Æneas each do “what two men could not do, such as now live upon the earth.” The poet never speaks as if he himself were present at the conflicts, nor does he claim to have heard the story from others. He appeals to the Muse for inspiration. She was present, and knows all things; he is but her mouthpiece. Whether the customs described in the poems were those of Homer’s day, or those of an earlier age of which the poet knew only by tradition, is a question which scholars still discuss. In general his manner is distinctly that of familiarity with every detail which he mentions; and his style is too naïve, too far removed from that of studied care, for us to believe that he was anxious to secure historical accuracy of background in painting the picture of an earlier age. In the matters of dress, food, and everyday life in general, he seems as free as the early illustrators of the Bible story, who introduced mediæval Dutch, German, or Italian dress and scenery into their pictures of early events in Palestine. But changes of custom were not frequent nor rapid in Greece a thousand years before Christ, and the manner of life which Homer knew was doubtless not very different from that of his heroes. In a few matters only does he seem conscious of a change: he does not represent his warriors as riding on horseback (except as a boy rides bareback from pasture), or using boiled meat, or employing a trumpet in war, yet the poet himself refers to these things as well known.

Life in the Homeric age was primitive and rude in many respects, but still had much wealth and splendor. It is not unlike that of the Children of Israel in the same period. The same customs seem to have prevailed not only throughout all Greece, but even in Troy. Nowhere does the poet indicate a difference of language or manner of life between the Achæans and the Trojans;—unless it is found in the facts that King Priam of Troy is the only polygamist of the poems, and that the Trojans are noisier (and hence, says an old commentator, less civilized) as they go into battle. The tribes are ruled by kings, or as we should style them, petty chiefs. The freedom with which the titles king and prince are bestowed is illustrated by the large number of princes on Ithaca in the Homeric age; an island which at the last census (according to Baedeker) had about 12,500 inhabitants, and probably had no more in Homer’s time. The lives of princes were much like those of peasants. They built their own ships and their own houses, and tended their herds and flocks. So princesses went to the town spring for water, and washed the family raiment. The unwritten constitutions of the kingdoms were very simple: custom ruled, not law. For the most part each man was obliged to vindicate his own rights; even murder was a personal offense against the friends of the slain man, and these (not the government) were bound to avenge his death. Murder and theft in themselves were no mortal sins against the gods. Fidelity to oaths, honor to parents, and hospitality to strangers and suppliants, were cardinal virtues. No moral quality inhered in the terms usually translated by good, bad, blameless, excellent. The existence of the soul after death was supposed to be as shadowy as a dream. Ghosts and dreams behaved in exactly the same way, and the land of dreams immediately adjoined that of the dead. The dead met no judgment on “the deeds done here in the body,” but all alike followed the shadowy likeness of their former occupations: the shade of the mighty hunter Orion chased in Hades the shades of the wild beasts which he had killed while on earth. Coined money was unknown; all commerce was by way of barter. The standard of value was cattle, one woman slave was estimated to be worth four cattle, another twenty; a suit of bronze armor was worth nine cattle; a tripod to stand over the fire was valued at twelve cattle. Much of the land was still held in common for the use of the people’s flocks and herds. Horses were never put to menial toil: the plowing was done with oxen and mules. The milk of cows was not used for food, but the milk and milk products of goats and sheep were of great importance. The olive berry and its oil were not yet used for the relish of food, but olive oil (sometimes scented with roses) was used as an unguent. The warriors were hearty eaters, but their feasts were simple; they ate little but bread and roast meat, and they were moderate drinkers, enjoying wine, but always diluting it with water. The Homeric Greeks were not bold mariners. They shrunk from the dangers of the sea, and preferred to go a long way around rather than to trust themselves in their craft far from a safe harbor. Their geographical world was limited. Even the island which the later Greeks identified with Corfu was in fairy-land.

Both the great Homeric poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey, have to do with the Trojan War,—the siege of Troy by the Greeks, ending with the sack of the city, and the return to their homes of the besiegers with various fortunes. Troy stood on a hill of no imposing dimensions in the northwest corner of Asia Minor, about five miles from the Hellespont. Until within the last score of years, scholars have been inclined to look upon this city as no more real than that of the Liliputians, or Utopia itself, and authorities were divided as to the site which the poet had in mind. Dr. Schliemann, however, a German by birth but a citizen of the United States by “naturalization,” who had gained wealth in Russia and chosen Greece to be his home,—a true cosmopolite,—in ardent admiration for Homer and with implicit belief in the literal accuracy of the Homeric story began in a small way excavations on the site of Hissarlik, the traditional successor of the ancient city. There he found in several layers, one upon another, the ruins of more cities than he knew what to do with! But he assigned to the Homeric city the remains which indicated the greatest power and wealth. In subsequent years he dug on Homeric sites in Greece,—at Mycenæ and Tiryns in Argolis,—and there too laid bare abundant evidence of wealth and culture, though manifestly a different culture from that which he had discovered on the banks of the Hellespont. Continued excavations at Hissarlik, however, under the direction of Dr. Dörpfeld, the distinguished head of the German Archæological Institute in Athens, to whom we owe a large portion of the archæological discoveries in Greece during recent years, brought to light what Schliemann’s eyes had longed to see,—the remains of a city of like culture, and apparently of the same age, as the ruins of Mycenæ and Tiryns. Schliemann’s Homeric Troy may have flourished three thousand years before Christ. The later Trojan city (found by Dörpfeld) and Mycenæ seem to have been in their glory at just about the time set by tradition for the sack of Troy, 1184 B.C. This date is not historical, but it will serve as well as another. The assignment of these ruins to the close of the second millennium before Christ gives plausibility to the belief that Homeric poetry flourished as early as the ninth century B.C. The “father of history,” Herodotus, thought that Homer lived four hundred years before him, or 850 B.C. By that time the myths are likely to have been fully developed. Clearly the existence of the massive ruined walls would stimulate the imagination of story-tellers and poets.

According to the story which our poet follows, Paris, one of the sons of Priam, King of Troy, had been hospitably received as a guest at the palace of Menelaus, son of Atreus, King of Sparta, and had violated the most sacred bond of hospitality by carrying away to his own home Menelaus’s wife Helen, the most beautiful woman of the world. The brother of Menelaus, Agamemnon, was King of Mycenæ, and the most powerful prince of Greece. Allies were invited from all parts of the country. Odysseus (Ulysses) from Ithaca, one of the Ionian islands not far from Corfu, and Nestor the oldest and wisest in counsel of the Greeks, who had known three generations of men, enlisted the services of the young warriors of Greece: Achilles from Thessaly, Diomedes from Argos, Ajax from Salamis, and others. A fleet of twelve hundred ships gathered at Aulis, on the strait north of Athens.

The expedition against Troy thus became a great national Hellenic undertaking. This was regarded by Herodotus as the historical beginning of the conflicts between Greece and Asia, of which the culmination appeared in the great expedition of Xerxes against Greece (this too with twelve hundred, but much larger, ships) early in the fifth century before Christ, and that of Alexander the Great from Greece into Asia a century and a half later. The strife is not ended indeed even yet, while Turkey holds Greeks in subjection, and Greece is burning with desire for the possession not only of Crete but of Constantinople.

The ships sent against Troy were not ships of war; they were for transport only, and the warriors were their own sailors. The largest of these ships carried one hundred and twenty men, and the total number of fighting Greeks before Troy was reckoned at about one hundred thousand. But in this we may see a certain amount of poetic exaggeration. The ships might fairly be called boats, since they had no deck except a little at bow and at stern, and their oars were more important than their sails, though they were always glad to avail themselves of a favoring breeze. The setting out of a small fleet of such boats has been compared, not inaptly, with an expedition of war canoes from one island against another in the South Seas: in each case the fighting men managed the boat; and this was not intended like our ships to be a floating dwelling, but merely a sort of ferry-boat. Each separate voyage would be only the distance which they could sail or row in a single day. The islands of the Ægean formed convenient “stepping-stones” and resting-places on their way. Nowhere were they out of sight of land in fair weather, such as Greece enjoys during the summer. On reaching their destination, the boats were drawn up on shore, and the barracks for the camp were built by their side; so the “ships of the Achæans” became a synonym for the “camp of the Greeks.”

Menelaus, the injured husband of Helen, accompanied by Odysseus, the shifty orator “of many devices,” went to Troy with a formal demand for the return of Helen. But though some of the older Trojans favored peace, the party of Paris prevailed, and the ambassadors and their cause were treated with despite.

The war continues for ten years, and ends with the sack of the city. The siege was not close. The ancient Greeks (like the North-American Indians before these learned the lesson from the whites) in general shrank from warfare by night. At evening the Greek forces which had been fighting by the gates of Troy retired to their own camp. Consequently the Trojans, though they were not able to cultivate their fields, were able to supply their city with all necessaries and maintain unbroken relations with their friends abroad, though the city which had been called “rich in gold and rich in bronze” was obliged to part gradually with all its treasures in order to buy food and to reward its allies. The Greeks, on the other hand, who had come without stores of provisions, or other material of war except their personal arms, naturally turned to foraging expeditions, first in the immediate neighborhood of Troy, and then at a greater distance. In these forays they destroyed towns and killed many of the inhabitants. The male captives were sent to distant islands to be sold as slaves; the women were ransomed or kept as slaves in the camp. Obviously, when the Greeks went forth to battle they could not with safety have left in their camp a large body of male slaves whom they had reduced to servitude. Their chief danger would have been in their rear.

In the tenth year of the war, one of these female captives—the beautiful daughter of a priest of Apollo, the fair-cheeked Chryseis—was allotted as prize of honor to Agamemnon, the commander-in-chief of the expedition. The Iliad opens with the visit of her father to the Greek camp. The action of the Iliad occupies only seven weeks: from the visit of the old priest to the Greek camp, to the burial of Hector. And these weeks are neither at the beginning nor at the close of the war; yet no reader is left in ignorance of facts necessary for an understanding of the story. Few readers feel that the poem is in any way incomplete, though Goethe thought the sack of Troy ought to have been included. The so-called Cyclic poets—Arctinus, Stasinus, Lesches, and others—continued the tale, amplifying the story and supplying details. But their poems, though the action extended over twice as many years as that of the Iliad and Odyssey covered weeks, yet were all together not so long as the Odyssey. The unity of these a “Cyclic” poems, according to Aristotle, was far from being so complete as that of the Homeric poems. They had much influence on later literature and art, suggesting themes and scenes to painters and poets, and we regret their loss; but we cannot suppose them to have had the grace, force, and life which attract us in the Iliad and the Odyssey. The preservation of these rather than those was not wholly a matter of chance. Here too we have a “survival of the fittest.”

According to the Cyclic poets, the queen of the Amazons, Penthesilea, is slain by Achilles, who after her death bemoans her fate. Further reinforcement for the Trojan army comes from the Æthiopians under the command of Memnon, the beautiful son of the Dawn. Achilles is slain by Paris and Apollo. Paris himself falls. Achilles’s young son Neoptolemus is brought to the war; and Philoctetes, who had been left behind on the island Lemnos on the voyage to Troy (being bitten by a water-snake), is fetched and brings with him the bow of Heracles. But even after a ten-years’ siege, Troy is not taken by storm, nor does it surrender. The goddess Athena suggested to Odysseus the successful device. Making a great hollow wooden horse, a small company of chieftains took their places within this hollow place of ambush, while the rest of the Greeks set fire to their camp and sailed away. The wooden horse is drawn by the Trojans to their citadel, as an offering to the gods. At night, when the city is still, and the people are sleeping free from anxiety for the first time in ten years, the Greek ships return; their chieftains leap out of the wooden horse, open the city gates to admit their comrades, and set fire to the town.

As the Greeks set out to return to their homes, a storm arises. Menelaus and his newly recovered Helen are driven to Egypt; a large part of his fleet is wrecked, and they wander for eight years before they see Greece again. Agamemnon escapes the dangers of the storm, but on his return is slain by his cousin Ægisthus, the paramour of his faithless wife Clytæmnestra.

But Odysseus suffers the hardest lot; the entire Odyssey recounts his long and eventful homeward journeying, and the recovery of his throne and wife.

The Odyssey ends only six weeks after its action began. The poet condenses into this brief period the action which would seem naturally to cover many years, by putting the story of Odysseus’s wanderings and experiences from the time that he left Troy until he reached Calypso’s island, into the mouth of the hero himself. This device was copied by Virgil, who makes his hero Æneas tell Dido of the destruction of Troy and of his wanderings; and later by Milton in his ‘Paradise Lost,’ where the archangel Raphael tells Adam of the conflict in heaven, and Michael foretells the history of the human race.

The story from the close of the Odyssey was continued in a more fanciful fashion by a later poet: Odysseus being finally killed by his own son by Circe; this son of Circe then marries Penelope, while Telemachus, his son by Penelope, weds Circe,—an arrangement by which each of the young men becomes the stepfather-in-law of his own mother! Homeric women are ageless, but the poet of Helen or Nausicaa would hardly have invented seriously so complicated a marriage connection.

NOTE.—Editions and translations of Homer are far too numerous to be recorded here. The best editions of the entire Iliad with English notes are those of Walter Leaf (1900–1902) and D. B. Monro and T. W. Allen (1902–1912); the best of the entire Odyssey with English notes are those of Henry Hayman and of W. W. Merry and James Riddell (1886–1901). The best English prose translation of the Iliad is that of Lang, Leaf, and Myers; there is a prose rendering by Samuel Butler of both the Iliad and the Odyssey. Of the Odyssey alone the best English translations are those of G. H. Palmer, of Butcher and Lang, and of John William Mackail; there is also a line for line translation in the metre of the original by H. B. Cotterill (1911). All these are recent versions; there are older but no less famous verse translations by Chapman, Pope, Cowper, Lord Derby, Way, and Bryant. Examples of the successive attempts to render Homer in different periods of English literature are given in our selections.

Of books about Homer perhaps the most useful is still Professor R. C. Jebb’s ‘Homer: An Introduction to the Iliad and the Odyssey’ (1892), an excellent and convenient little book treating (a) the general literary characteristics of the poems, (b) the Homeric World, (c) Homer in antiquity, (d) the Homeric question. The following more recent works may also be consulted with advantage:—Andrew Lang, ‘Homer and the Epic’ (1893), ‘Homer and his Age’ (1906), ‘The World of Homer’ (1910); Henry Browne, ‘Handbook of Homeric Study’ (1905); T. D. Seymour, ‘Life in the Homeric Age’ (1908); H. M. Chadwick, ‘The Heroic Age’ (1912); James Alexander Ker Thomson, ‘Studies in the Odyssey’ (1914); Walter Leaf, ‘A Companion to the Iliad for English Readers’ and ‘Homer and History’ (1915).

THE ILIAD does not lend itself easily for dissection or citation in brief passages. Nearly all the effective scenes are so linked to each other and into the general plot that they only whet our eagerness to hear the entire story told. The attempt has been made here merely to offer fair specimens of the various metrical experiments tried by a series of translators from Chapman onward.

From the Odyssey it was easier to detach an episode: and while continuing the series of varied rhythms, we have also endeavored to offer in English, with sufficient completeness, the fifth book, containing the pleasantest among Odysseus’s many adventures upon his homeward voyages, and presenting also the eternally youthful figure of the innocent girl-princess Nausicaa. The latter has been made the text of a little sermon on ‘Simplicity’ by Mr. Warner in his recent volume. See also Mr. Lawton’s ‘Art and Humanity in Homer,’ pages 193–242. The most important translations not represented here are Cowper’s in blank verse and Way’s in accentual hexameters.

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