In B. R.’s Elizabethan translation of the two first books of Herodotus a marginal note to a startling statement about Egyptian manners begs us to ‘Observe ye Beastly Devices of ye Heathen’. Though Anthropology, as its name indicates, takes all that is human for its province, it certainly pays most attention to ‘Ye Devices’—beastly or not—of the savage or barbarian, and to their survival in civilized societies, ancient and modern. Now, as far as these primaeval devices go, Homer has wonderfully little to tell us. Though he is by far the most ancient Greek author extant, it is in all the literature which follows after him that we find most survivals of the barbarian and the savage. Even in the few fragments of the so-called Cyclic poets (800-650 b.c.?), and in the sketches of the plots of the Cyclic poems which have reached us, there are survivals of barbaric customs—for example, of human sacrifice, and the belief in phantasms of the dead, even when the dead have been properly burned and buried—which do not appear in the Iliad and the Odyssey. The tragedians, the lyric poets, and the rest, all allude to vices which Homer never mentions—to amours of the gods in bestial forms (in all probability a survival of Totemism in myth), to a revolting rite of sanguinary purification from the guilt of homicide, and to many other distressing vestiges of savagery and barbarism in the society of ancient Greece. We do not find these things in the Iliad and the Odyssey.

It is not easily conceivable that Homer was ignorant of any of these things; probably they existed in certain strata of society in his age. But he ignores them. They are not to be mentioned to his audience. No incest or cannibalism, in Iliad and Odyssey, is reported concerning ‘Atreus’ line’, though later poets do not hesitate to use the traditional materials from the fossiliferous strata of myth wherein these survivals were plentiful. Pindar knew tales of divine cannibalism, but merely referred to them as unworthy of his verse. Homer must have been familiar with the savage cosmogonic legends, almost identical with those of the Maori of New Zealand, which Hesiod does not scruple to state openly; but about such things Homer is silent.

Here I must explain that though to ‘Homer’ early historic Greece attributed the great body of ancient epic poetry, I am speaking only of the Iliad and Odyssey. I wish I could keep clear of the complex ‘Homeric Question’, but this is hardly possible. Everybody knows that, since the appearance of Wolf’s famous Prolegomena to the Iliad, at the end of the eighteenth century, the world has been of opposite opinions as to the origin of the Iliad and Odyssey. Poets, and almost all who read the poems, as other literature is read, ‘for human pleasure,’ hold that at least the mass of these epics is by one hand, and, of course, is of one age. On the other side, the immense majority of scholars and special students who have written on the subject maintain (with endless differences in points of detail) that the Iliad and Odyssey had their beginning in a brief early ‘kernel’, and are now a mosaic of added lays and interpolations, contributed by many hands, in many places, through at least four changeful centuries of various cultures. How the poems came to have what even Wolf recognized as their unus color, the harmony of their picture of institutions, customs, rites, costume, and belief, is variously explained. By some critics the harmony is denied. They try to pick out proofs of many various stages in institutions, customs, beliefs, arms, and armour, and so forth. As a rule these critics, however scholarly, have not been, and are not, comparative students of early literature, of anthropology, archaeology, and mythology. Their microscopic research finds but few and minute variations from the normal in such things as burial, bride-price, houses, armour, and so forth. If they studied other early poetic literature—say the Icelandic sagas and the oldest Irish romances—they would learn that minute variations in such matters of life occur in every stage of civilization; that every house, every funeral, every detail of marriage laws and other laws, is not precisely on the pattern of every other, and that mythology and ideas about the future life are especially various and even self-contradictory, at any given period. For these reasons I agree with Wolf that harmony, unus color, prevails in the Iliad and Odyssey, which must therefore be the product of one age.

But to this some adverse critics reply that harmony, indeed, there may be, but that it results, first from the influence of tradition—each new poet adhered to the old formulae without conscious effort—and, next, that the later poets deliberately and learnedly archaized, consciously studied the descriptions, and maintained the tone of their predecessors, while at the same time they as deliberately introduced the novelties of their own time. This is their logic. Their double theory is untenable—first, because it is self-contradictory; next, because in all known early art and literature the poet or painter, treating ancient themes, dresses the past in the costume of the present with which he is familiar. To archaize is a very modern effort in art, as all early literature and every large picture-gallery prove. As for unconscious adherence to tradition, it leads to the repetition of epic formulae and standing epithets; but later poets, and uncritical ages, when they describe a more ancient life, always copy the life of their own time. We see too that late learned poets who archaized—Apollonius Rhodius, Virgil, even Quintus Smyrnaeus—while they do their best to imitate Homer, cannot keep up the unus color, but betray themselves in a myriad details: for example, Virgil arms his Greeks and Trojans with iron weapons, and Apollonius introduces the ritual purification of blood with blood, ignored by Homer.

Even in the Cyclic poems, of which only a few fragments and prose synopses remain, Helbig, and Monro, and every reader, find what Helbig calls ‘data absolutely opposed to the conventional style of the Epics’, of the Iliad and Odyssey. We find hero-worship, human sacrifice, gods making love in bestial forms, conspicuous ghosts of men duly burned, and so on. Now, if we believe with Mr. Verrall that ‘Homer’, so called, was a nebulous mass of old poetry, reduced into distinct bodies, such as Iliad, Odyssey, Cypria, Aethiopis, Little Iliad, Nostoi, and so on, for educational purposes, by learned Athenians, about 600-500 b.c., or if we suppose, with others, that the Ionians, for educational purposes, Bowdlerized Iliad and Odyssey, at an earlier date, we ask, Why were Iliad and Odyssey expurgated; why were many ‘devices of the heathen’ cut out of them by ‘educationists’ who permitted these things to remain in the Cyclic poems? Was it because the Iliad and Odyssey alone were cut out of the mass, and selected for public recitation? If so, why was the selection made, and the expurgation done, in these two cases only? And do we know that the Cyclics were not recited? If so, why not? What was the use of them? Again, why was Hesiod not Bowdlerized? Hesiod certainly entered into public knowledge no less than Homer. Finally, if the taste of the seventh and sixth centuries were so pure and austere, why were the poets of the seventh and sixth centuries so rich in matters which the Iliad and Odyssey omit? In no Greek literature of any age do we find the clean austerity of Homer, for example, as regards sins against nature, the permanent blot on the civilization of historic Greece. The theory of educational expurgation in the eighth to the sixth centuries is impossible on all sides. The Cyclics and Hesiod were generally known, yet were not expurgated into harmony with the Homeric tone; the contemporary poets of these educational ages did not conform to the Homeric tone. Moreover, there is no ‘record’ evidence, with Mr. Verrall’s pardon, for all this editing by educationists. There is no inscription bearing witness to it—that, and that alone, would be ‘record’—there is only a late and shifting tradition that, about the time between the ages of Solon and the Pisistratidae, something indefinite was done at Athens for ‘Homer’. For how much of ‘Homer’? For all old epic poetry, or only for the Iliad and Odyssey? If for them alone, why for them alone?

I am thus constrained to suppose that the Iliad and the Odyssey, on the whole, are the fruit of a single age, a peculiar age, an age prior to the earliest period of Greek life as historically known to us. If it be not so, if these epics are mosaics of life in four or five centuries of change, compiled for purposes of education by learned Athenians, it seems that they are worthless to the anthropologist and to the historical student of manners and institutions. If the poems contain scores of archaized passages, in which the poets deliberately neglect the life which they know (while at the same time in other passages they deliberately innovate), then the poems are of no anthropological value. The statements of the critics are self-contradictory, which I still think proves them to be illogical; and in speaking of Homer I shall treat him as a witness to a genuine stage of society in prehistoric Greece and Asia.

As to date, the poems quite undeniably are derived from that late stage of Mycenaean or Minoan civilization which has been revealed by the excavations of Mr. Arthur Evans in Crete, and Dr. Schliemann at Mycenae, and of many other explorers of Homeric sites. The decoration of the palaces of Alcinous and Menelaus; the art of the goldsmith, the use of chariots in war, the shape and size of the huge Homeric shield; the cuirass, zoster, and mitrÊ of the warriors, the weapons of bronze described in Homer, all correspond with objects discovered or delineated in works of art of the late Minoan period in Greece and Crete. But Homeric customs of all sorts also vary much from the facts of the Minoan archaeologist. The monuments of the late Minoan Age reveal modes of burial wholly unlike the Homeric practice of cremation and interment of the bones in lofty tumuli or barrows. They prove the existence of sacrifice to the dead, which Homer ignores. They display fashions of costume quite alien to the Homeric world. They yield none of the iron tools of peaceful purpose with which Homer is perfectly familiar. They furnish abundance of stone arrowheads, which are never mentioned in the Epics.

The conclusion suggested is that Homer knew a people living on the ancient Minoan sites, and retaining much of the Minoan art, much of the military material, but advanced into a peculiar form of the Early Bronze Age; clad in quite a new fashion, practising another form of burial, entertaining other beliefs about death and the dead, but still retaining the flowing locks often represented in pictures of men in Minoan art.

The use of body armour too is in the Iliad and Odyssey universal in regular war; from the rarity of delineation thereof in Minoan art this appears to be another innovation. Homer is quite conscious that he is singing of events gathered from legends of a time long before his day, a time with which he is in touch, which has bequeathed much to his age, but which, we see, is in some respects less advanced than and in many ways different from his own. He attributes to the old legendary heroes, however, the institutions with which he is familiar—institutions that are not those of any known period of historic Greece. They are no figments of fancy. They closely correspond, as far as form of government is concerned, with the early feudalism described in the oldest Irish epical romances, and in the French chansons de geste of the eleventh to the thirteenth century a.d. We find an Over Lord, like the Celtic Ardrigh, or the Bretwalda in early England, ruling over Princes (Ri), with an acknowledged sway, limited by unwritten conventions. He holds, as Mr. Freeman says of the Bretwalda, ‘an acknowledged, though probably not very well defined, supremacy.’ His rule is hereditary; the sceptre is handed down through the male line. Zeus has given him the sceptre, and he confessedly rules, like Charlemagne even in the later chansons de geste, by right divine. He has the Zeus-given sceptre, and he has the ???ste?, a knowledge of ‘a recognized body of principles and customs which had grown up in practice’ (Iliad ix. 99).

The origin of the Over Lord, as of all kingship, may be traced to a combination of sagacity, courage, and experience in war, in an individual, and to his consequent acquirement of property and influence, plus the survival of the prestige of the medicine man, to whom the ruling supernormal Being of the tribe is supposed to speak. A very low example is the Dieri medicine man inspired by Kutchi; an elevated example is the Homeric Minos, who converses with Zeus. Even the dream of Agamemnon is worthy of respect, says Nestor, ‘because he has seen it who boasts himself to be the best of the Achaeans’; another man’s dream might be disregarded (Iliad ii. 80-83). However, Agamemnon does not lay stress on such communications; Calchas is the regular interpreter of omens and the will of the gods. A divinity doth hedge Agamemnon, though Achilles half draws his sword against him. He has the right to summon the whole host, and to exact fines for absence; he has the lion’s share of all spoils of war; he is war leader, but always consults his peers, the paladins of Charlemagne. From him much that is not easily tolerable is endured, but, if he goes too far in his arrogance, a prince or peer has the recognized right, like Achilles, to throw up his allegiance. By due gifts of atonement, of which the rules are ceremonially minute (Iliad xix. 215-75), the Over Lord may place himself within his right again, and he who refuses the atonement is recognized to be in his wrong. The whole passage about the minutiae of atonement in Iliad xix delays the action, and is censured by critics as ‘late’. But it cannot be late, it could only have been composed for a noble audience keenly interested in the customary laws under which they lived, laws unknown to historic Greece. We are accustomed to similar prolixity and minuteness about points of law in the Icelandic sagas.

It has been said that Homer, an Asiatic poet of the ninth century b.c., lived imaginatively in, say, the thirteenth century, b.c. as Mr. William Morris imaginatively ‘lived in’ the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries a.d. But Morris came after Sir Walter Scott, who introduced the imaginative archaeological reconstruction of past ages by poets and artists. Shakespeare did not ‘live in’ any age but his own. His Hamlet fights with the Elizabethan long rapier, not with short sword and axe. Homer, too, lives in his own sub-Minoan age, and in that alone.

The poets of this age of loose feudalism are always partial to the princes rather than to the Over Lord. The Irish romance writers much prefer the chivalrous Diarmaid, or Oscar, to Fionn, the Over Lord, and the later writers of chansons de geste in France utterly degrade Charlemagne in favour of his paladins.

Greek, Irish, or French, the poets have a professional motive: there are many courts of princes wherein they may sing, but only one court of the Over Lord. In this partisanship Homer is relatively moderate; his Agamemnon is perhaps the most subtle of all his portraits; unsympathetic as is the Over Lord, his Zeus-given supremacy always wins for him respect. The whole picture of Over Lord and princes is a genuine historical document, a thing of a single age of culture, far behind the condition of the Ionian colonists. The princes themselves owe their position to birth, wealth, and courage. Except Aias and Odysseus, chiefs of rocky isles, all own abundance of chariots. They are surrounded by a class of gentry (the Irish Flaith) who are also fighters from chariots, and stand out above the nameless members of the host. It is they (Iliad ix. 574) who promise to Meleager a demesne out of the common land. I conceive that such a t?e???, or demesne, was much more than a ??????, or ‘lot’; he was a very poor man who had no lot (Odyssey xi. 490). Probably the gentry, or ?????te?, had their gift of a t?e???, or demesne, ratified in the popular assembly, which, I think, did no more than ratify their decisions.

The gentry held rich fields, ‘very remote from any town’ (Iliad xxiii. 832-5). Society was feudal or chivalrous, not democratic. It is true, as Mr. Ridgeway says (J. H. S., vi. 319-39) that we do not hear of land in the lists of a man’s possessions, but of livestock, gold, iron, and chariots and arms. On the other hand, the gentry certainly held rich fields remote from the cities.

We have no clear light on Homeric land-tenure, but land was held by individuals, in firm possession, if not in property; a prince like Menelaus has whole cities to give away. If a prince lent stock to the owner of a lot, and if the owner became bankrupt, the lot, legally or illegally, would glide into the possession of the prince.

The people were free, like the lotless man who employs labourers—their situation is not clear—and like the artisans—smiths, carpenters, workers in gold—and the slaves, men and women, were captives in war, or persons kidnapped by pirates—though they may have been of high rank at home, like the swineherd Eumaeus. In war it was open to a man to kill a prisoner or to set him at ransom, as in the Middle Ages. The various crafts had their regular professors, though it pleased Odysseus to be a master of all of them, from ploughing to shipbuilding.

It was a very tolerable state of society; slaves were well treated; women, of course, held a position high above what was theirs in historic Greece. True, they were usually purchased with a bride-price; but the lofty level of their morality, infinitely above that of Europe in the age of chivalry, suggests that men allowed a free choice to their daughters.

No woman sells herself; there is not a harlot in Homer, common as they are in the earliest records of Israel. No doubt they existed, but the poet eschews mention of them. Here, as everywhere, the austerity of his tone, though he is not a Puritan, makes him far from an exhaustive authority on manners and customs. To him, as Mr. Gissing well observes, the stability of the home, typified by the wedding bed of Odysseus, made fast to a pillar of a living tree, is very sacred. In camp, and in wanderings, the men live as they will; at home, as we learn from the cases of Laertes and the father of Phoenix, a good man keeps no mistress, and the wife soon gives a worse man cause to rue his laxity. All this is very unlike the morals of historic Greece. The bride-price is, indeed, a barbaric survival; but the purity of the morals of the married women proves that it was modified in practice by the benignity of fathers to ‘well-loved daughters’. The highest tender was not necessarily accepted. We hear of no amours of maids and bachelors; the girls do not sleep, like the young men and like fair Margaret of the ballad of Clerk Saunders, in bowers in the court, but in rooms of the upper story, where only a god can come unnoticed. Nausicaa is most careful not to compromise herself by being seen in the company of a stranger.

Naturally, in a society that carries arms always, the tone of courtesy, where deliberate insult is not intended, is very high, and rude speech, like that of Euryalus to Odysseus in Phaeacia, is atoned for with an apology and the gift of a sword. Except the Over Lord, no man is habitually rude.

As to warfare, as in the Tain Bo Cualgne, the Irish romance based on the manners of the late Celtic period (200 b.c. to 200 a.d.), the gentry fight from chariots, dismounting at will, while the host, with spears, or with slings, bows and arrows, follows or exercises its artillery from the flanks. Except when the rain of arrows does execution, we hear next to nothing of the plebeian infantry. The age of hoplites was as remote as the age of cavalry, and the phalanxes are only mentioned when they are broken. The chariot age is familiar in Assyrian, Egyptian, and Minoan art, as among the Britons and Caledonians who fought with Rome. The chariot was extremely light; a man could lift a chariot and carry it away (Iliad x. 505). Probably the chariot came into use for war, as Mr. Ridgeway supposes, in an age when a pony was unequal to the weight of a man in armour; the Highlanders, with their Celtic ponies, used chariots in Roman times; never did they acquire a breed of horses fit for chargers, hence they lost the battle of Harlaw. To judge by Homer’s description of horses, the chariot survived the cause of its origin; steeds were tall and strong enough for cavalry purposes, but human conservatism retained the chariot. A speech of Nestor, in Iliad, Book iv. 303-9, shows that Homer knew by tradition the Egyptian custom of charging in serried squadrons of chariotry, while in his own day the lords of chariots usually fought dismounted, and in the loosest order, or no order. Nestor naturally prefers ‘the old way’; no late poet could have made this interpolation, for, in the Greek age of cavalry, he could have known nothing of chariotry tactics. The Egyptian chariotry used the bow, while their adversaries, the Khita charioteers, fought with spears, in loose order, as in Homer—and had the worst of the fight.

The Homeric retention of the huge body-covering shield, familiar in Minoan art, was more or less of a survival of a time when archery was all-important. The shield, as among the Iroquois and in mediaeval Europe, was suspended by a belt. The same shields, among the Red Indians, and in the Middle Ages (eleventh and twelfth centuries), were, so to speak, umbrellas against a rain of arrows; as the bow became more and more despised, the historic Greeks adopted the round parrying buckler, good against spear- and sword-strokes. The body armour, as far as greaves are concerned, was an advance on Minoan practice. In Minoan art the warriors are usually naked under the huge shields; happily, one or two seals found in Crete, and a pair of greaves in Cyprus, prove that greaves, cuirass, zoster, and mitrÊ, the mailed kirtle of Homer, were not unknown even before the earliest age at which one could venture to place the Epic (see Note).

The use of the metals, in war, is peculiar, but not unexampled. Weapons are, when the metal is specified, always of bronze, save one arrow-head of primitive form (Iliad iv. 123), and a unique iron mace (Iliad vii. 141). Implements, including knives, which were not used in war, were of iron, as a rule, of bronze occasionally. The only battle-axe mentioned is of bronze (Iliad xiii. 611); axes, as implements, are usually of iron, so are the implements of the ploughman and shepherd. No man in Homer is said to be ‘smitten with the iron’, it is always ‘with the bronze’; but trees are felled ‘with the iron’ (Iliad iv. 485).

Odysseus shoots ‘through the iron’, that is, through the open work of the iron axe-heads, which were tools. This curious overlap of bronze and iron, the iron being used for implements before it is used for weapons, has no analogy, as far as I am aware, in Central and Northern Europe. But Mr. Macalister has found it perfectly exemplified in Palestine, in certain strata of the great mound of Gezer. Here all weapons are of bronze, all tools of iron (Palestine Exploration Fund, 1903, p. 190).

This state of affairs—obviously caused by military distrust of iron while ill-manufactured, when bronze was admirably tempered—is proved by Mr. Macalister to have been an actual stage in culture, ‘about the borders of the Grecian sea.’ We find no archaeological evidence for this state of things in tombs of the period of overlap of bronze and iron in Greek soil. But then we have never excavated a tumulus of the kind described by Homer, and, if we did, the tumulus (which necessarily attracts grave-robbers) is likely to have been plundered. This is unlucky; we have only the poet’s evidence, in Greece, for the uses of bronze and iron as they existed in Palestine. But I think it improbable that the poet invented this rare stage of culture. Again, if we believe, with most critics, that late poets introduced the iron, it is to me inconceivable that they could abstain, in rigorous archaism, or unconscious adherence to tradition, from occasionally making a warrior ‘smite with the iron’, or from occasional mention of an iron sword or iron-headed spear, while they did not archaize or follow tradition when they spoke of iron knives, axes, tools, and so on.

In tradition of the bronze age, the tools, no less than the weapons, must have been of bronze. Why, then, did late archaizing poets make them of iron, while they never made the weapons of anything but bronze?

The great objection to my opinion is Odyssey xvi. 294, xix. 13, the repeated line in which occurs the proverbial saying, ‘iron of himself draws a man to him.’ Here iron is synonymous with ‘weapon’, the weapons in the hall of Odysseus are to be removed, on the pretence that ‘iron’ draws a man’s hands, and may draw those of the intoxicated wooers in their cups.

I am opposed to regarding a line as ‘late’ merely because it contradicts one’s theory. The critics have no such scruples, they excise capriciously. But this line not only contradicts my theory, it contradicts the uniform unbroken tenor of both epics. It is a saying of the Iron Age, when ‘iron’ has become a synonym for ‘weapon’, as in Thucydides and Shakespeare. But everywhere else in the epics the metallic synonym for ‘weapon’ is ‘bronze’. The metallic synonym for ‘tool’ is ‘iron’. Men are ‘smitten with the bronze’, trees are ‘felled with the iron’.

I think that, in these circumstances, it is not inconsistent to doubt the line’s antiquity. If we accept it, we must suppose that one solitary late minstrel out of hundreds (on the separatist theory) let the cat out of the bag and enabled us to be sure that an indefinite amount of the epics was composed in the full-blown Age of Iron, though all the other later poets firmly kept the secret by invariably giving to the heroes weapons of bronze. Mr. Ridgeway is against me. He writes: ‘The Homeric warrior ... has regularly, as we have seen, spear and sword of iron.’ He may see it so, but Homer saw it otherwise, and never gives a warrior an iron sword or spear (Early Age of Greece, vol. i, p. 301).

No early poet, perhaps no poet, can avoid, in religion and myth, barbaric and savage survivals, owing to the nature of the legendary materials on which his works are based. Nobody, we may almost say, invents a plot: all borrow from the huge store of world-wide primaeval MÄrchen, or folk-tales. In the Odyssey, Marmion, and Ivanhoe, the plot rests on the return of the husband or lover from unknown wanderings, unrecognized, except in Ivanhoe and the Odyssey, by the faithful swineherd. This is a plot of MÄrchen all over the world. Gerland, and, recently, Mr. Crooke and others, have studied the MÄrchen embedded in Homer. One such story is that of the Shifty Lad in Dasent’s Tales from the Norse, and the Shifty Lad is only a human representative of the shifty beast, Brer Rabbit or another, who is so common in savage folklore. Now Homer, in the character of Odysseus, merely combines the Returned Husband with the Shifty Lad. It would not be hard to show that Odysseus is really the hero of the Iliad, as well as of the Odyssey, the man whom the poet admires most, and he is the real ‘stormer of the city’ of Ilios. He is the type of sagacious, resolute, indomitable courage; the thoroughly well-balanced man, the most tenacious in war. But, in the Odyssey, the nature of the original MÄrchen, as in the encounter with the Cyclops, and the necessity for preserving his disguise, when he returns to Ithaca, compel the poet to make Odysseus foolhardy and an ingenious liar. The sentiment of Homer’s audience and of Homer is with Achilles when he says that he ‘hates a lie like the gates of hell’. But the given material does not permit Odysseus to cherish this chivalrous disdain of falsehood, and Athene, the most ethical of the Olympians, applauds his craft. The materials of legend also yield the cruelty of Achilles; like a hero of the Irish epic, the Tain Bo Cualgne, he drags a dead man behind his chariot; and, ‘with evil in his heart, he slays twelve Trojan prisoners with the bronze,’ at the funeral of Patroclus. This is not, to the poet’s mind, a case of human sacrifice, nor does Achilles intend the souls of the men to be thralls of Patroclus.

Homer regards Achilles as slaying the captives merely to glut his fury with revenge, ‘anger for thy slaying’ (Iliad xxiii. 23). This is the explanation which he gives to himself of an incident which he finds in his traditional materials, probably a memory of human sacrifice. Historic Greece was familiar enough with such ritual; but it is a marvel of evil to Homer; he clearly fails to understand it. He is most embarrassed by his materials in matters of religion. Unlike Hesiod he does not love to speak of what the gods did ‘in the morning of time’, things derived from a remote past of savage mythology; the incest, the amours in animal form, the cannibalism, the outrage of Cronos on his father, the swallowing of Zeus. But he cannot get rid of the ancient mythological element in the Olympians. Though the Zeus of Eumaeus is ethical, just, benignant, a truly religious conception; though Homer has almost a bitter sense of the dependence of men on the gods; though ‘all men yearn after the gods’; the Olympians, as they appear in the story, are the freakish beings of myth, capricious partisans, amorous, above all undignified. Only among the gods has married life its sad, if humorous, aspect, as in the bickerings of Zeus and Hera; only among the gods is adultery a joke. Among men it is the direst outrage of sanctity of the home. So alien to Homer is the mythology which he inherits that he finds it easiest to treat the gods humorously, save where they guard the sacredness of the oath (Iliad iii. 275), and are protectors of strangers, suppliants, and of the poor. The mythological survivals are, to Homer, inevitable, but distasteful. As to a belief in a future life, in Homer there is a prevailing idea, but it is mixed with the other ideas which, however contradictory, always exist in this mysterious matter. The prevailing idea is that the dead, if they receive their due rites of fire and interment, abide, powerless for good or evil, in a shadowy sheol in the House of Hades. If they do not get their dues of fire they wander disconsolate, and may become ‘a cause of wrath’ to men, may appear to them in dreams, or in

In the House of Hades is neither reward nor punishment (if we take Odyssey xi. 570-600 for a late interpolation), but mere lack of vigour and of the sun. Only the prophet Tiresias, like Samuel in Sheol, ‘keeps his wits’ and his faculty of precognition.

Yet, in the scene of the Oaths (Iliad iii. 278-9), certain powers are appealed to which ‘beneath the earth punish men outworn’. I do not think this a late interpolation, because the formula of the sacrifices connected with the oath is likely to be very ancient, to be pre-Homeric, and to reflect an old belief no longer popular. In these matters all contradictory notions may coexist, as when the hymn of the Euahlayi tribe of New South Wales prays Baiame to admit the soul of Erin into his paradise, Bullimah, while the myth says that Erin is now incarnate in a little bird. Many of the lowest savages believe in a future of rewards and punishments, but the doctrine of the efficacy of fire has all but driven this faith out of Homer’s ken.

Cremation is the great crux of Homeric anthropology, cremation, and the consequent absence of ghost-feeding, and of hero-worship. Archaeology shows that these practices went on unbroken in Greece, and archaeology cannot show us a single example of the Homeric barrow and method of interment. Yet the method is a genuine historic method in Northern Europe of the Age of Bronze. Homer did not invent it; he mentions no other mode of disposing of the dead, but we have never found its traces in Greece. The shaft graves and tholos graves of late Minoan times have left no vestige of tradition in the Epics, and the cremation and barrow are equally absent from the view of the archaeologist. I cannot venture on any guess at an explanation. We are precluded from supposing that cremation arose in the wanderings after the Dorian invasion, for the purpose of concealing the remains of the dead from desecration by alien foes. The shaft grave might conceal them, the tumulus and pillar above only advertise their whereabouts to the ruthless foe.

It is plain that, on many points, Homer, with his austere taste, is not a very rich source for the anthropologist in search of savage survivals. In Homer no human beings work magic; a witch, like a harlot, is not to be found in the Epics. Both are familiar in the Old Testament. There is a second-sighted man, but his was a natural faculty. Homer never alludes to the humbler necessities of our animal nature; unlike Shakespeare, he never makes old Nestor cough and spit, when roused, as in the Doloneia, by a night alarm. Nobody coughs in Homer. He sings for an audience that has lived down the ape, though the tiger has not wholly died. He knows nothing of our instruments of torture, rack and boot and thumbscrews, which, in Scotland, outlasted the seventeenth century. Historic Greece was not very successful in expelling the beast from human nature. The poets of historical Greece were never so successful as Homer. I infer that the Iliad and the Odyssey are prehistoric, the flowers of a brief age of Achaean civilization, an age when the society of princes and ladies had a taste extraordinarily pure and noble. The poems were framed for an aristocratic, not for a popular audience, though I am perfectly ready to grant that the popular audience to which our best ballad minstrels sang also desired a tone of singular purity in the serious romantic lays. It is the nature of the highest objective art, whether in epic or ballad, to be clean: the Muses are maidens.

NOTES

Page 47. The reference to Mr. Verrall refers to his article on Homer in The Quarterly Review, July, 1908. I myself suppose that some editorial work was done for the Iliad and Odyssey at Athens, before the Persian war. There is plenty of smoke in literary tradition, and ‘where there is smoke there is fire’. But the smoke-wreaths are vague and multiform as the misty ghosts in Ossian, and I cannot, with Mr. Verrall, regard the words of a fourth-century orator.

Page 48. Lycurgus is not ‘record’. By ‘record evidence’ for Greece I understand inscriptions, nothing more and nothing less.

Page 59. Odyssey xvi. 294, xix. 13, for

a friend suggests

This emendation I leave at the mercy of the learned.