The Iliad

[36] The best description of this monument will be found in Vaux’s “Antiquities of the British Museum,” p. 198 sq. The monument itself (Towneley Sculptures, No. 123) is well known.

[37] Coleridge, Classic Poets, p. 276.

[38] Preface to her Homer.

[39] Hesiod. Opp. et Dier. Lib. I. vers. 155, &c.

[40] The following argument of the Iliad, corrected in a few particulars, is translated from Bitaubé, and is, perhaps, the neatest summary that has ever been drawn up:—“A hero, injured by his general, and animated with a noble resentment, retires to his tent; and for a season withdraws himself and his troops from the war. During this interval, victory abandons the army, which for nine years has been occupied in a great enterprise, upon the successful termination of which the honour of their country depends. The general, at length opening his eyes to the fault which he had committed, deputes the principal officers of his army to the incensed hero, with commission to make compensation for the injury, and to tender magnificent presents. The hero, according to the proud obstinacy of his character, persists in his animosity; the army is again defeated, and is on the verge of entire destruction. This inexorable man has a friend; this friend weeps before him, and asks for the hero’s arms, and for permission to go to the war in his stead. The eloquence of friendship prevails more than the intercession of the ambassadors or the gifts of the general. He lends his armour to his friend, but commands him not to engage with the chief of the enemy’s army, because he reserves to himself the honour of that combat, and because he also fears for his friend’s life. The prohibition is forgotten; the friend listens to nothing but his courage; his corpse is brought back to the hero, and the hero’s arms become the prize of the conqueror.

Then the hero, given up to the most lively despair, prepares to fight; he receives from a divinity new armour, is reconciled with his general and, thirsting for glory and revenge, enacts prodigies of valour, recovers the victory, slays the enemy’s chief, honours his friend with superb funeral rites, and exercises a cruel vengeance on the body of his destroyer; but finally appeased by the tears and prayers of the father of the slain warrior, restores to the old man the corpse of his son, which he buries with due solemnities.’—Coleridge, p. 177, sqq.

[41] Vultures: Pope is more accurate than the poet he translates, for Homer writes “a prey to dogs and to all kinds of birds. But all kinds of birds are not carnivorous.

[42]i.e. during the whole time of their striving the will of Jove was being gradually accomplished.

[43] Compare Milton’s “Paradise Lost” i. 6

[44]Latona’s son: i.e. Apollo.

[45]King of men: Agamemnon.

[46]Brother kings: Menelaus and Agamemnon.

[47]Smintheus an epithet taken from sminthos, the Phrygian name for a mouse, was applied to Apollo for having put an end to a plague of mice which had harassed that territory. Strabo, however, says, that when the Teucri were migrating from Crete, they were told by an oracle to settle in that place, where they should not be attacked by the original inhabitants of the land, and that, having halted for the night, a number of field-mice came and gnawed away the leathern straps of their baggage, and thongs of their armour. In fulfilment of the oracle, they settled on the spot, and raised a temple to Sminthean Apollo. Grote, “History of Greece,” i. p. 68, remarks that the “worship of Sminthean Apollo, in various parts of the Troad and its neighboring territory, dates before the earliest period of Æolian colonization.”

[48]Cilla, a town of Troas near Thebe, so called from Cillus, a sister of Hippodamia, slain by Œnomaus.

[49] A mistake. It should be,

for the custom of decorating temples with garlands was of later date.

[50]Bent was his bow “The Apollo of Homer, it must be borne in mind, is a different character from the deity of the same name in the later classical pantheon. Throughout both poems, all deaths from unforeseen or invisible causes, the ravages of pestilence, the fate of the young child or promising adult, cut off in the germ of infancy or flower of youth, of the old man dropping peacefully into the grave, or of the reckless sinner suddenly checked in his career of crime, are ascribed to the arrows of Apollo or Diana. The oracular functions of the god rose naturally out of the above fundamental attributes, for who could more appropriately impart to mortals what little foreknowledge Fate permitted of her decrees than the agent of her most awful dispensations? The close union of the arts of prophecy and song explains his additional office of god of music, while the arrows with which he and his sister were armed, symbols of sudden death in every age, no less naturally procured him that of god of archery. Of any connection between Apollo and the Sun, whatever may have existed in the more esoteric doctrine of the Greek sanctuaries, there is no trace in either Iliad or Odyssey.”—Mure, “History of Greek Literature,” vol. i. p. 478, sq.

[51] It has frequently been observed, that most pestilences begin with animals, and that Homer had this fact in mind.

[52]Convened to council. The public assembly in the heroic times is well characterized by Grote, vol. ii. p 92. “It is an assembly for talk. Communication and discussion to a certain extent by the chiefs in person, of the people as listeners and sympathizers—often for eloquence, and sometimes for quarrel—but here its ostensible purposes end.”

[53] Old Jacob Duport, whose “Gnomologia Homerica” is full of curious and useful things, quotes several passages of the ancients, in which reference is made to these words of Homer, in maintenance of the belief that dreams had a divine origin and an import in which men were interested.

[54] Rather, “bright-eyed.” See the German critics quoted by Arnold.

[55] The prize given to Ajax was Tecmessa, while Ulysses received Laodice, the daughter of Cycnus.

[56] The Myrmidons dwelt on the southern borders of Thessaly, and took their origin from Myrmido, son of Jupiter and Eurymedusa. It is fancifully supposed that the name was derived from myrmaex, an ant, “because they imitated the diligence of the ants, and like them were indefatigable, continually employed in cultivating the earth; the change from ants to men is founded merely on the equivocation of their name, which resembles that of the ant: they bore a further resemblance to these little animals, in that instead of inhabiting towns or villages, at first they commonly resided in the open fields, having no other retreats but dens and the cavities of trees, until Ithacus brought them together, and settled them in more secure and comfortable habitations.”—Anthon’s “Lempriere.”

[57] Eustathius, after Heraclides Ponticus and others, allegorizes this apparition, as if the appearance of Minerva to Achilles, unseen by the rest, was intended to point out the sudden recollection that he would gain nothing by intemperate wrath, and that it were best to restrain his anger, and only gratify it by withdrawing his services. The same idea is rather cleverly worked out by Apuleius, “De Deo Socratis.”

[58] Compare Milton, “Paradise Lost,” bk. ii:

So Proverbs v. 3, “For the lips of a strange woman drop as an honey-comb.”

[59] Salt water was chiefly used in lustrations, from its being supposed to possess certain fiery particles. Hence, if sea-water could not be obtained, salt was thrown into the fresh water to be used for the lustration. Menander, in Clem. Alex. vii. p.713, hydati perriranai, embalon alas, phakois.

[60] The persons of heralds were held inviolable, and they were at liberty to travel whither they would without fear of molestation. Pollux, Onom. viii. p. 159. The office was generally given to old men, and they were believed to be under the especial protection of Jove and Mercury.

[61] His mother, Thetis, the daughter of Nereus and Doris, who was courted by Neptune and Jupiter. When, however, it was known that the son to whom she would give birth must prove greater than his father, it was determined to wed her to a mortal, and Peleus, with great difficulty, succeeded in obtaining her hand, as she eluded him by assuming various forms. Her children were all destroyed by fire through her attempts to see whether they were immortal, and Achilles would have shared the same fate had not his father rescued him. She afterwards rendered him invulnerable by plunging him into the waters of the Styx, with the exception of that part of the heel by which she held him. Hygin. Fab. 54

[62] Thebé was a city of Mysia, north of Adramyttium.

[63] That is, defrauds me of the prize allotted me by their votes.

[64] Quintus Calaber goes still further in his account of the service rendered to Jove by Thetis:

[65]To Fates averse. Of the gloomy destiny reigning throughout the Homeric poems, and from which even the gods are not exempt, Schlegel well observes, “This power extends also to the world of gods— for the Grecian gods are mere powers of nature—and although immeasurably higher than mortal man, yet, compared with infinitude, they are on an equal footing with himself.”—‘Lectures on the Drama’ v. p. 67.

[66] It has been observed that the annual procession of the sacred ship so often represented on Egyptian monuments, and the return of the deity from Ethiopia after some days’ absence, serves to show the Ethiopian origin of Thebes, and of the worship of Jupiter Ammon. “I think,” says Heeren, after quoting a passage from Diodorus about the holy ship, “that this procession is represented in one of the great sculptured reliefs on the temple of Karnak. The sacred ship of Ammon is on the shore with its whole equipment, and is towed along by another boat. It is therefore on its voyage. This must have been one of the most celebrated festivals, since, even according to the interpretation of antiquity, Homer alludes to it when he speaks of Jupiter’s visit to the Ethiopians, and his twelve days’ absence.”—Long, “Egyptian Antiquities” vol. 1 p. 96. Eustathius, vol. 1 p. 98, sq. (ed. Basil) gives this interpretation, and likewise an allegorical one, which we will spare the reader.

[67]Atoned, i.e. reconciled. This is the proper and most natural meaning of the word, as may be seen from Taylor’s remarks in Calmet’s Dictionary, p.110, of my edition.

[68] That is, drawing back their necks while they cut their throats. “If the sacrifice was in honour of the celestial gods, the throat was bent upwards towards heaven; but if made to the heroes, or infernal deities, it was killed with its throat toward the ground.”— “Elgin Marbles,” vol i. p.81.