civilized state. Its chivalry at the best and brightest was not chaste; no point of honour forbade flight in battle. Odysseus prides himself on the wide reputation he had obtained by his versatile cunning (Od. ix. 19). Εἶμ' Οδυσσεὺς Λαερτιάδης ὅς πᾶσι δόλοισιν *Ανθρώποισι μέλω καὶ μεν κλέος ουρανον ἵκει. Homicide might be either avenged, or compromised by payment, at the will of the relations of the deceased. Whether alphabetical characters are implied in the Iliad is a dis- Piracy. puted question. The profession of the freebooter was not discreditable; he who asked his guest if he was a pirate, violated no courtesy by the question: no affront was intended on the one part, and no indignation excited on the other. Hospitality was a general Hospitality. virtue required by the exigencies, and cultivated by the good feeling, of the age its attentions were as delicate and refined' as its parting gifts were liberal." He who sought protection from his enemies took his seat as a suppliant on the hearth: no time was unseasonable-not even the day of a wedding festivity-for the arrival and reception of strangers; and it is not till they have enjoyed the bath and the banquet, that their name and their destination are asked. In the Homeric poems feasts are described with a frequency and minuteness, more tolerable in the original than in any less sonorous and dignified language; but as illustrations of ancient manners they are curious. The part which princes and princesses take in preparing them indicates a period of simplicity; some occupations, indeed, of these noble ladies, such as feeding the horses of their lords, bathing their guests, and carrying linen to the river to be washed,10 may offend the Freedom of delicacy of modern days: still females at this time seem to have mixed more freely, and yet more modestly, in the business and the amusements of social life, than they did when Greece was more polished and refined." The practice of divorce, so common at Athens in later times, was unknown to the Greeks of the Heroic age. The usual employments of married women are to educate their children, distribute tasks to their maid-servants, provide for the table, and "guide the house." Occasionally their ears and eyes were gladdened by the tidings and the toys of a Phoenician merchant: even as Minna and Brenda rejoiced in the arrival of Bryce Snailsfoot, when he visited Burgh Westra with his pedlar-wares.is Penelope appears among the 1 Od. xix. 91.-Conf. Thuc. i. 5. 3 Od. i. 123; vi. 289; Il. vi. 15; Od. vi. 310. Od. viii. 207; Il. ix. 193; xxiv. 582 et seq. 2 Od. iii. 73. 5 Od. xxiv. 273. Seven talents of gold, a cup of solid silver, twelve close vests, as many coats, robes, and pieces of tapestry, together with four beautiful See also Od. viii, 424. On the hospitality of the middle ages, see some curious particulars in Robertson's Charles the Fifth, sect. 1, note 29. women. 12 Od. xv. 415: μύρὶ ἄγοντες ἀθύρματα νηΐ μιλάινῃ. 13 Pirate, c. xviii. female society. Convivial meetings. Bards. Farm service. Slavery. suitors with authority dignified and mild. Helen does not retire when strangers are introduced to Menelaus, and Hector' himself pays a deferential regard to the opinion of the sex collectively. The passion of love in Homer's heroes is, indeed, far removed from that purity. sentiment, and individuality, which was the pride and the virtue of the knights of chivalry: but it contained many of the elements which constitute the happiness of domestic life; and is immeasurably better than the same passion in a later age, when its root was planted in intense selfishness, its growth distorted by an absurd policy, and wher its fruit was, what might be naturally expected, sensuality, gross, odious, and universal. In connection with the subject of convivial meetings, Homer fails not to make honourable mention of his brother-bards. It has been thought his praise of Phemius may have been prompted by gratitude for his early instructions. However this may be, the music of the lyre was often put into requisition; he who instructed and warned his hearers as the guardian of morality, or who charmed their hours of ease by tales of love and war, held an honourable place at the courts of kings. Demodocus, among the vain and opulent Phæacians, has his silver-studded throne,3 his separate table, and his own attendant: he sung the strife between the bravest and the most crafty of the chieftains, who met before the walls of Troy; and roused his hearers to the imitation at least of warlike deeds,-athletic exercises at home: these trials of dexterity with the javelin, the bow, and the quoit, together with hunting, dancing, and perhaps hawking, being the ordinary recreations of Grecian life. Such then were the domestic establishments, and such were some of the domestic customs among the higher classes of society: as we descend in the scale, the description is less pleasing; when Peleus gave Phoenix a tract of land, the inhabitants passed with it as part of the present. Alcinous proposes to his council to be liberal towards Odysseus in parting gifts, and he adds, we will repay ourselves by a tax on the people. Laertes bought Eurycleia when very young for twenty oxen; Eurymachus proposes to hire Odysseus as a farm servant to plant and cut hedges; for this service he was to be clothed and fed.' Slavery existed universally, Egypt, the Greek Islands, Cyprus, and Sicily being its chief emporia. Servitude of some kind must always prevail, because the idle, the extravagant, and the vicious will squander what they possess, and must then earn a subsistence by their labour; but slavery is a state of things which, by the voluptuousness, cruelty, and pride which it engenders, has a tendency to entail on one party as 1 Il. vi. 442; Od. ii. 101; xix. 146; xxi. 323. Mirtos agxos, sufficient pay, Od. xviii. 356. 3 Od. viii. 65. Od. xiii. 15. Od. xvii. 448; xx. 383; II. xxiv. 752; Od. xv. 482. Conf. Thuc, i. 8. much of moral mischief, as it does of personal suffering and degradation on the other. It arose, however, out of the habits of the times; for piracy being sanctioned as a profession, and war so frequent, those who were carried off from one country as prisoners, were naturally sold in another as slaves. Still they were, by this system, at least saved from death. It was moreover slavery in a mitigated form, with less than usual of its jealousy, distance, and suspicion: fidelity by degrees assumed the warmth of attachment;' captives identified themselves with the interests or honour of the family they had entered, and mourned the death or misfortunes of him to whom destiny had assigned them. Sometimes indeed a bloody superstition demanded them as a sacrifice to the manes of some departed friend; and in case of delinquency at home, they seem to have met with very summary justice. Odysseus, on his return to his palace, hangs twelve of them like thrushes in a springe-it is the poet's own comparison; and the chieftain apparently feels as little scruple as the agriculturist, in ridding himself, by this simple process, of so many noxious animals. 1 Il. xviii. 28; xix. 282; Soph. Ajax, 491; Od. xiv. 144; vii. 12. Il. xxiii. 175; xviii. 336. Od. xxii. 465, and xviii. 84. age. SECTION II. RELIGIOUS CEREMONIES OF THE HOMERIC AGE. Religion of IN transferring our attention from the domestic customs of the early the Homeric Greeks to their religion, we must still content ourselves with the same guide. Herodotus could ascend in his researches no higher than to Homer and to Hesiod: accordingly he' ascribes to these poets the structure of Grecian theogony; or that arrangement of attributes, forms, and occupations, which it assigns to its deities respectively. Some few traces, indeed, the historian himself gives us of a still earlier religion, which prevailed among the Pelasgi. Different names for different deities did not enter into their forms of worship, their sacrifices, or their prayers; and though this fact will not prove the system not to have been polytheistic, it is a sign of its having degene rated less from the truth and simplicity of an original revelation. Change from The change from theism to idolatry is easily explained: the mind of man is, in a certain sense, constitutionally religious; and yet, being unable to rise by unassisted reason to the abstract idea of one perfect supreme Being, or to retain the notion firmly, even if it should have been conceived, deities were naturally invented, which were personifications of all that is great and good in man. The circumstance, moreover, that poets were the first teachers of religion, would originate Poets the first and perpetuate this error: they who viewed with the eye of taste and teachers of genius the various beauties of the physical world would soon people the mountain and the grove, the glen and the river, with imaginary beings. Pretensions to inspiration would frequently be made, and readily acknowledged; the vulgar being unable to refuse a religious Theism to idolatry. Grecian religion. 1 Lib. ii. 53. * Lib. ii. 52. 3 See Wordsworth's Excursion, lib. iv.: "the lively Grecian." system, which the superiority of their instructors imposed on their judgment, or unwilling to destroy an illusion which had so many charms for their imagination. Perhaps the poets were partly deceived by their own fancy; or if not, from the mere love of truth, they would not have sacrificed machinery so useful to them, both as authors and as courtiers. Its instrumentality made their fictions more pleasing; and their flattery was more acceptable when they could trace to a deity the genealogy of their patron, or promise hereafter a participation in divine honours to the friendship and the virtues of private life, or to him whose abilities were a public benefit. Egypt was to the early Greeks what the later Greeks were to the Its origin rest of the civilized world-the source of their religion, their philo- Egyptian. sophy, and their legislation: accordingly, a considerable portion of the Homeric theology is of Egyptian parentage. There are circumstances in the geographical situation of that country which will account for her early progress in the exact sciences: a clear sky, even without a wide horizon, facilitated the observation of the heavenly bodies, whose rising and setting marked the seasons of tillage and navigation; while the science of geometry was indispensable to a people, the landmarks of whose property were effaced by the annual inundations of the Nile. Improvement in manufactures was advanced by the opportunities of inland navigation. The powers of the mind excited by natural phænomena, their causes and their consequences, soon passed from the study of physics to philosophy and legislation. Those, who in other countries were stimulated to the pursuit of knowledge by active curiosity, or the consciousness of superior talents, went to Egypt as the place where this curiosity could be most fully gratified, and these talents most successfully exercised. Here Thales and Pythagoras sought that wisdom which they were to transmit along the lines of the Ionic and Italic schools: and here too it is probable Homer was an eye-witness of many things which he adapted to his religious and mythological system. A tradition to this effect is mentioned by Diodorus Siculus: the Infernal rivers and Elysian fields had their real prototypes in the neighbourhood of Memphis, where the lives of the dead were subjected to an actual scrutiny, corresponding with the inquiry and the sentence of the fabled Minos. But Character of if the Egyptian theology was partly borrowed by Homer, in his hands Homer's it was greatly improved. Those deities which were only personifications of the various powers of nature became moral agents; and instead of being represented under images of disgusting deformity, they become models of human beauty, grace, and majesty. Scattering from his pictured urn, Thoughts that breathe, and words that burn, he inspired the statuary, as well as the poet of succeeding ages: the skill of Phidias embodied in marble the awful dignity of that Zeus, 1 Smith's Wealth of Nations, i. 27. 2 Lib. i. deities. |