SECT. VIII. The Morals of the Homeric Age. (continued 2)

Points of superiority in the former.

Let us then consider the notes of moral superiority which the Heroic age of Greece presents to us.

Human sacrifices were not then offered upon bloody altars to the gods. Not even the direst extremity of suffering suggested the thought of cannibalism as an alternative of escape from death[903]. Wailing infants were not then exposed to avoid the burden of their nurture. The grey hairs of parents were treated with reverence and care; and if their weakness brought down insult upon them, it stung the souls of their children, even after death. To age in general a deep and hearty reverence was paid by the young. Woman, the grand refining element of society, had not then been put down in the estimation of any man, far less of the wisest men, to the level of persons degraded by the habits of captivity, and was not held to be a ζῶον ἔμψυχον. Slavery itself was mild and almost genial. It implied the law of labour, and possibly, in ordinary cases, a prohibition to rise in life: but of positive oppression, and of suffering in connection with it, or of any penal system directed to its maintenance, we have no trace whatever. Marriage was the honourable and single tie between man and his helpmate[904]. Connections with very near relations were regarded with horror; the wife was the representative, the intelligent companion and friend, of her husband; adultery was held in aversion, a crime rarer then than in most after-periods: and the sacred bond between husband and wife was not liable to be broken by the poor invention of divorce.

Organized unchastity had not then become a kind of devil’s law for society. The very name and nature of unnatural lusts appear to have been unknown in Greece, centuries after Sodom had been smitten for its crimes. The detestable invention, which set gladiators to kill one another for the amusement of enraptured spectators, was reserved for times more vain of their philosophy and their artificial culture. The rights of the poor were acknowledged in the form of an unlimited obligation to relieve them, under pain of the divine displeasure: and no stranger or suppliant could be repelled from the door of any one, who regarded either the fear of God or the fear of man.

As respects the gods, the remains of ancient piety still in some degree checked the activity of the critical faculty, and the reverence for the Power that disposes events and hates the wicked was not yet derided by speculation, nor wholly buried beneath fable and corruption. True, sacrifice was regarded as the indispensable and effective basis of religion: but in general, as between Greek and Greek, those who were most careful of virtue were also most regular in their offerings. Men were believers in prayer: they thought that, if in need they humbly betook themselves to supplication, they would be heard and helped. In short, they kept their hold upon a higher power, which we see to have been real, because they resorted to it at those times when human nature eschews illusion, and cries out for reality. Ulysses, in affliction or in need, addresses himself to the gods: even Ægisthus, when alarmed, begins to think much of them: but Cicero or Quintilian, when the arrow of grief has touched them to the quick, seek for comfort in philosophical calculations on the great woe and little weal of life.

Yet, even while all this was so, there lay in the accumulating mythology the thickly scattered seeds of destruction, both for belief and for duty. How could marriage continue single, pure, or permanent, in the face of the promiscuous lusts of Jupiter? Why should not helpless infants be exposed, when Juno, disgusted with the form of Vulcan, threw him down into the sea? Why should not man make a joyous spectacle of blood and wounds, when they were already beheld with amusement by the highest of the gods? The examples of rebellion, of discord, of luxury and selfish ease, were all of them ready to forward the process of corruption among men; and this armoury of curses was prepared too in the very quarter, where his eye should behold nothing but what is august and pure.

Again. In all descriptions of tender feelings the Greeks of the Homeric age are much nearer than those of later times to the standard of truth and nature.

The heroes of Homer weep freely; but, says the Agamemnon of Euripides[905], while he complains of the restriction, weeping is the recognised privilege of humble life only;

And Aristotle thought, as is thought now, that weeping was unfit for men. The wise man, he conceives[906], cannot incite others to mourn with him, διὰ τὸ μηδ’ αὐτὸς εἶναι θρηνητικός: but women, and woman-like men, γύναια καὶ οἱ τοιοῦτοι ἄνδρες, are glad of such companionship in sorrow.

There are indeed three most important points of the Homeric poems, in which it would appear that the Greek character greatly hardened, and greatly sank, as the nation advanced in its career. One of them is the principle of sympathy. Another is that of placability, which Homer has very powerfully exhibited in Achilles. The third is that of humility, of which we have an example in Helen, in the Helen of Troy and the Helen of Sparta, such as heathenism nowhere else, I believe, presents to us.

It has thus appeared that if we take the state of morality as it appears among mankind in the poems of Homer, and compare it with that of Greece in its highest civilization, we find before us two grand differences. Those offences against the moral law, which constitute crimes of violence, were more justly appreciated at the later period; but as to those which constitute, in the language of Christianity, the lusts of the mind and of the flesh, a great preference is due to the former.

We are naturally led to inquire, Whence these two movements in opposite directions? That mankind should either lose ground or gain it, in morality as a whole, is far less startling at first sight, than that, at one and the same time, with respect to one great portion of the moral law there should be progress, and with respect to another, retrogression.

In reality, however, this was the condition of man: retrogression as to his spiritual life, but advance and development, up to a certain point, with regard to the intellectual and the social career. Sins of the flesh lay chiefly between God and the individual conscience: the social results did not palpably and immediately reach beyond the persons immediately concerned. But crimes of violence struck directly at the fabric of society by destroying security of person and property; and robbed mankind, especially the ruling part of mankind, of the immense advantages and enjoyments which they reaped from civilized life. Thus, the moral sense was quick, and even grew quicker with the lapse of time, when it was fed and prompted by such motives of self-interest as lay within its appreciation, like those which the desire to enjoy the commodities of life supplied. But it languished and all but died, when its business was to maintain those virtues which involve severe self-denial, and of which the reward never can be fully appreciated except by those who are so favoured as to practise them in the highest degree.

Nor must we overlook some special bearings of the institution of slavery upon this question. As it grew and was consolidated, it of course entailed an increased necessity for laws to defend life and goods against violence. But as regarded the other class of offences, its influence was all in the sense of more and more relaxation. For beauty and defencelessness, when they were combined in slaves, at once wrought up attraction to the uttermost, and removed all obstacles to enjoyment. While at the same time the partial indulgence, which at all periods has commonly attended such commerce between slaves and their masters, operated as a safety valve to let off the political dangers of that system: so that, on the one hand, slavery was a feeder to lust, and, on the other, lust was a buttress to slavery.

That it was not on moral grounds that in the later times of Greece life and property were better defended than in the former, we may partly judge from finding that, though it is in the nature of all society that a nation should rather incline to gild the days of its forefathers with ornaments beyond the truth, the later Greek traditions crammed the heroic age with a mass of crimes of which Homer knows nothing. He sets Minos and Rhadamanthus before us as characters positively good: Thyestes and others are at worst neutral in character: but all these, according to the later tradition, were either accessory to, or contaminated with, the most horrible enormities.

Notes in the Poems of commencing decline.

It seems, indeed, as if Homer had himself lived to note the signs of moral degeneracy. In part, we may perhaps say, it is inseparably associated with that deterioration in the character and idea of government, which begins to be traceable in the Odyssey. But in that poem he has given us another indication of it, unlike any thing in the Iliad, where he never contrasts the present unfavourably with the past, except as to mere corporal strength. For he makes Minerva as Mentor deliver to Telemachus the sentiment, that among sons a small number only are equal to their fathers[907], a very few indeed excelling them, but the greater part falling short of them. In later times, we have come to associate threnodies of this kind with the notion that they are complaints of course, formulæ taken up and reiterated successively from generation to generation. It may or may not be just thus to view them: but whether it be just or not for later times, I think that we ought not so to limit the force of the idea when it meets us in the age of Homer: the world was then young, and human society had not so learned its ‘ancient saws or modern instances,’ as to separate them from the truths of experience and of observation. The greatest ornament of the poems of Hesiod, the series of the Ages declining from gold to iron, probably expresses the actual state of the facts, as it seems to move on the same line with the narrative of the early Scriptures: and Homer’s lamentation on degeneracy in all likelihood may belong to a real portion of the same descending process.