Note 300 — Chapter XXI · GRECIAN EPIC.—HOMERIC POEMS. (continued 2)

The remarks of O. Müller on the Iliad (in his History of Greek Literature) are highly deserving of perusal: with much of them I agree, but there is also much which seems to me unfounded. The range of combination, and the far-fetched narrative stratagem which he ascribes to the primitive author, are in my view inadmissible (chap. v. § 5-11):—

“The internal connection of the Iliad (he observes, § 6) rests upon the union of certain parts; and neither the interesting introduction, describing the defeat of the Greeks up to the burning of the ship of Protesilaus, nor the turn of affairs brought about by the death of Patroclus, nor the final pacification of the anger of Achilles, could be spared from the Iliad, when the fruitful seed of such a poem had once been sown in the soul of Homer, and had begun to develop its growth. But the plan of the Iliad is certainly very much extended beyond what was actually necessary; and in particular, the preparatory part, consisting of the attempts on the part of the other heroes to compensate for the absence of Achilles, has, it must be owned, been drawn out to a disproportionate length, so that the suspicion that there were later insertions of importance applies with greater probability to the first than to the last books.... A design manifested itself at an early period to make this poem complete in itself, so that all the subjects, descriptions, and actions, which could alone give interest to a poem on the entire war, might find a place within the limits of its composition. For this purpose, it is not improbable that many lays of earlier bards, who had sung single adventures of the Trojan war, were laid under contribution, and the finest parts of them incorporated in the new poem.”

These remarks of O. Müller intimate what is (in my judgment) the right view, inasmuch as they recognize an extension of the plan of the poem beyond its original limit, manifested by insertions in the first half; and it is to be observed that, in his enumeration of those parts, the union of which is necessary to the internal connection of the Iliad, nothing is mentioned except what is comprised in books i. viii. xi. to xxii. or xxiv. But his description of “the preparatory part,” as “the attempts of the other heroes to compensate for the absence of Achilles,” is noway borne out by the poet himself. From the second to the seventh book, Achilles is scarcely alluded to; moreover, the Greeks do perfectly well without him. This portion of the poem displays, not “the insufficiency of all the other heroes without Achilles,” as Müller had observed in the preceding section, but the perfect sufficiency of the Greeks under Diomêdês, Agamemnôn, etc. to make head against Troy; it is only in the eighth book that their insufficiency begins to be manifested, and only in the eleventh book that it is consummated by the wounds of the three great heroes. Diomêdês is, in fact, exalted to a pitch of glory in regard to contests with the gods, which even Achilles himself never obtains afterwards, and Helenus the Trojan puts him above Achilles (vi. 99) in terrific prowess. Achilles is mentioned two or three times as absent, and Agamemnôn, in his speech to the Grecian agora, regrets the quarrel (ii. 377), but we never hear any such exhortation as, “Let us do our best to make up for the absence of Achilles,”—not even in the Epipôlêsis of Agamemnôn, where it would most naturally be found. “Attempts to compensate for the absence of Achilles” must, therefore, be treated as the idea of the critic, not of the poet.

Though O. Müller has glanced at the distinction between the two parts of the poem (an original part, having chief reference to Achilles and the Greeks; and a superinduced part, having reference to the entire war), he has not conceived it clearly, nor carried it out consistently. If we are to distinguish these two points of view at all, we ought to draw the lines at the end of the first book and at the beginning of the eighth, thus regarding the intermediate six books as belonging to the picture of the entire war (or the Iliad as distinguished from the Achillêis): the point of view of the Achillêis, dropped at the end of the first book, is resumed at the beginning of the eighth. The natural fitting together of these two parts is noticed in the comment of Heyne, ad viii. 1: “Cæterum nunc Jupiter aperte solvit Thetidi promissa, dum reddit causam Trojanorum bello superiorem, ut Achillis desiderium Achivos, et pœnitentia injuriæ ei illatæ Agamemnonem incessat (cf. i. 5). Nam quæ adhuc narrata sunt, partim continebantur in fortunâ belli utrinque tentatâ ... partim valebant ad narrationem variandam,” etc. The first and the eighth books belong to one and the same point of view, while all the intermediate books belong to the other. But O. Müller seeks to prove that a portion of these intermediate books belongs to one common point of view with the first and eighth, though he admits that they have been enlarged by insertions. Here I think he is mistaken. Strike out anything which can be reasonably allowed for enlargement in the books between the first and eighth, and the same difficulty will still remain in respect to the remainder; for all the incidents between those two points are brought out in a spirit altogether indifferent to Achilles or his anger. The Zeus of the fourth book, as contrasted with Zeus in the first or eighth, marks the difference; and this description of Zeus is absolutely indispensable as the connecting link between book iii. on the one side and books iv. and v. on the other. Moreover, the attempt of O. Müller, to force upon the larger portion of what is between the first and eighth books the point of view of the Achillêis, is never successful: the poet does not exhibit in those books “insufficient efforts of other heroes to compensate for the absence of Achilles,” but a general and highly interesting picture of the Trojan war, with prominent reference to the original ground of quarrel. In this picture, the duel between Paris and Menelaus forms naturally the foremost item,—but how far-fetched is the reasoning whereby O. Müller brings that striking recital within the scheme of the Achillêis! “The Greeks and Trojans are for the first time struck by an idea, which might have occurred in the previous nine years, if the Greeks, when assisted by Achilles, had not, from confidence in their superior strength, considered every compromise as unworthy of them,—namely, to decide the war by a single combat between the authors of it.” Here the causality of Achilles is dragged in by main force, and unsupported either by any actual statement in the poem or by any reasonable presumption; for it is the Trojans who propose the single combat, and we are not told that they had ever proposed it before, though they would have had stronger reasons for proposing it during the presence of Achilles than during his absence.

O. Müller himself remarks (§ 7), “that from the second to the seventh book Zeus appears as it were to have forgotten his resolution and his promise to Thetis.” In other words, the poet, during this part of the poem, drops the point of view of the Achillêis to take up that of the more comprehensive Iliad: the Achillêis reappears in book viii,—again disappears in book x,—and is resumed from book xi. to the end of the poem.