Civilization, Homeric; Epic poetry, Greek -- History and criticism; Homer; Homer -- Criticism and interpretation
to me like a pedantic later explanation of the absence of traces of the
works.
The meeting of Aeneas and Achilles in Book xx. would seem more
suspicious than, to me, it does, if Aeneas were not, throughout, a
special sort of person, the son of a goddess, and not a good Trojan,
because of Priam's suspicion of "the Orleans branch." I am inclined
to think that the poet knows, all through, a "saga" of Aeneas as
preserving the seed of the Royal House of Troy. In Book v., and
elsewhere, he is always under divine protection, that of Apollo or of
Aphrodite, "only Zeus shielded thee, and other gods," says Achilles.
"It is appointed for him to escape that the race of Dardanus perish
not," says Poseidon in Book xx.; and were the passage solitary, I
should think it all an interpolation. But the poet always, probably for
traditional reasons, takes very good care of Aeneas. The last bouts in
the Funeral Games seem unlike Homer.
In the _Odyssey_, the passages about the concealing of the arms (xvi.,
xix.) are dislocated, to say the least; and all the close of the
poem, especially the second Nekyia, has always lain under suspicion in
critical times. Sainte-Beuve would not abandon, but admired it; I only
feel that, if all this be later, it has taken the place of lost earlier
material, for the poem could not conceivably close till the blood feud
of Odysseus and the kin of the Wooers was appeased. An Achaean like
a Scandinavian audience understood the rules, and insisted that the
settlement of the blood-feud must be explained.
These are the main points at which, as far as I can judge, something
has gone wrong. There are others: the interchange of shields between
Nestor and Thrasymedes in the opening of Book xiv. had probably some
lines of explanation given to it, though, as Mr. She wan was the
first to perceive, the exchange was the necessary consequence of the
manoeuvres in Book x. Here Thrasymedes lent his shield to Diomede for
his night _reconnaissance_, Thrasymedes would then send for and use
Nestor's shield, while Nestor would obtain the shield of Thrasymedes
next morning from Diomede.[1]
Nothing can be more simple and natural; but the thing was so obvious as
to escape attention till Mr. She wan read Homer in a Homeric spirit. No
doubt there are other passages with which I am dissatisfied, but the
curious may refer for them to my earlier book, _Homer and the Epic_.
It is not so strange that there are dislocations ill patched up, as
that far more of extraneous matter, especially of Ionian matter, has
not found an entry into the Epics. How the text has been so well
guarded I cannot explain; Mr. Murray's theory of expurgation of certain
beliefs, ways and manners, is examined in Appendix B.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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