IV. AOIDOS. (continued 5)

Probably a main reason why Hector has become the groundwork of the modern Orlando is, that no one of the Homeric heroes exhibits a combination of qualities supplying so appropriate a basis for the character of a Christian hero; a tone so sensibly approximating to that of the gospel. Partly because of those acts of piety towards the Immortals, which can hardly receive in the case of Hector any but a favourable construction, and which drew down the all but unanimous compassion of the Olympian assembly on his remains; but partly also, and yet more, in that mild, just, and tender estimate of character, which not only secured his constant gentleness of demeanour towards Helen, but made him her protector against the acrimony of others, and rendered him considerate and kind even to Paris[999], so soon as he saw him disposed at length to be personally active in the mortal struggle he had brought upon his country. There is, perhaps, no virtue more especially Christian, than the temper which thus equitably and gently makes allowances for human weakness, particularly if it be weakness by the effects of which we ourselves have suffered.

The employment, however, of Hector for the purposes of Christian poetry has certainly had the effect of perverting for us the true Homeric tradition. But, in order to understand this, we must throw aside the Hector of our proverbs or our plays, travel back to the Iliad, and set out anew from the starting-point of its great author. We must there be content to take him not as a pure effort of imagination aimed at the production of an ideal man, but as a part of the poem of Homer, subordinated like every other part of it to its main purpose, as well as to the general laws of historical consistency. In modelling the several heroes, he made the exigencies of his Hector yield to the exigencies of his Achilles, who could have no real competitor. Nor, with the fine characteristic sense he has everywhere shown of the national differences between Greek and Trojan, could he build up his Hector on the same foundations with his Greek heroes, or give him that strength and tenacity of tissue which belongs to the European and Achæan character. He could not equip him with either the dauntless chivalry in battle, or the profound unswerving sagacity in council, which were reserved for the kings of his own race, and for those most nearly allied to them. He has imparted to the character of the chief Trojan hero, no less than to that of the Trojan people at large, a decided Asiatic tinge, which modifies their community of colour with the properly European races. In such characters, instinct and sentiment take oftentimes the place of inquiry and reflection, and impulse does the work of conviction: the ideas of right, order, consistency, moral dignity and self-respect, are less clearly, less symmetrically, conceived. Though in particular cases, such as that of Hector, the deficiency may be made up by a liberal and full development of the most affectionate emotions, we feel, in comparing it with the Greeks, that we are dealing with a more contracted type of manhood: as if morally, no less than locally, we had gone back with Homer one full stage nearer to the cradle of our race, and had arrested and fixed the human character at the very point where it is neither child nor man.

Inequality of his character.

The character of Hector, as it has been here interpreted, does not give that satisfaction to the mind, which thorough clearness and oneness would impart. His intellectual qualities and his affections are not on the same scale; his martial character jars even with itself. Yet perhaps in these very circumstances we may upon consideration find but fresh reason to admire the skill of Homer, and that rarely erring instinct which forbade him to forget his whole in running after his details.

His first object seems to have been to give the fullest and boldest prominence to the colossal shape, moral as well as physical, of Achilles, and therefore to tone down whatever could diminish its effect. And here the point of danger evidently lay in Agamemnon; the chief of the army was too likely to be the chief of the poem. Accordingly he has broken the unity of that character, and has chequered it with weakness in various forms. But this was not all: he had to keep the Greeks before the Trojans, as well as Achilles before the Greeks; not only that he might consult his popularity, but that he might indulge the genial vein of his poesy, and follow the impulses of his patriotism, in maintaining high above all question their intellectual and martial superiority. Had this, however, been all, his task would have been easy; he would then have had only to depress their opponents in all the properties that attract admiration. But if he had simply done this, if he had cut off the interest and sympathies of his readers from the Trojans by general disparagement, he would have deprived Greek valour of its choicest crown. It is a noble necessity of war that, even in the interest of countrymen, we cannot do injustice to adversaries, without feeling the offence recoil on our own heads.

Thus it was impossible for Homer to make his Trojan hero at once great and consistent; and if he has made Hector unequal, it was to avoid making him mean. By chequering his martial daring with boastfulness, and with occasional weakness of purpose, he has effectually provided against any interference, from this quarter, to the prejudice of those chieftains whose praises he was to sing in the courts and throngs of Greece. Thus he has left the field quite clear for expatiating on their military virtues; and if, for sufficient reasons, he has departed from his rule in the case of Agamemnon, who receives his compensation in superiority of rank and power, all his other Greek characters, bearing forward parts in the poem, are constructed in faultless conformity to the idea, or modification of an idea, which he had selected for the basis of each. There is not a flaw in the picture of Achilles, Diomed, Ajax, Nestor, Menelaus, or Ulysses. Not that all these are of a type equally elevated, or alike wonderful; but that there is no one thing in any of them which does not manifestly conform to its type, and no one thing consequently which jars with any other. Having thus given to his countrymen a clear and marked ascendancy in what then at least were the only great and governing elements of human society, the strong mind, and the strong hand, he does his best for the Trojans with what remained, that is to say, with the softer affections of domestic life, adding only so much of the martial element as was needful to make them no discreditable adversaries for his countrymen. Thus, consistently with all his poetic objects, he has been enabled to present us, to say nothing of the highly respectable character of Hecuba, with the three unsurpassed pictures of Priam, of Andromache, and perhaps even most, of Hector.

The character of Helen.

II. Let us now pass on to a production never surpassed by the mind or hand of man.

The character of Argeian Helen occupies a large place in Grecian history, and is of extreme importance to the entire structure of the Iliad. On behalf of the first of these propositions, we call as witnesses her temple at Sparta, and the Encomium of Isocrates. As to the second, the reason is expressed in some of Homer’s noblest oratory:

Was she a vicious woman and a seductress, or was she more nearly a victim and a penitent? Do the laws of poetical verisimilitude and beauty, as they were understood by Homer, allow us to suppose that he intended to represent his countrymen, of whom he has presented to us so lofty a conception, as agitating the world, forsaking home, pouring forth their blood, and throwing their country into certain confusion, for the sake of a vile and worthless character? Certainly there were periods, when in the Greek mind the worship of beauty was so thoroughly dissociated from all which beauty ought to typify, that an Iliad so constructed might have been approved. But these were periods long after Homer’s flesh had mouldered in the grave.

The present inquiry has nothing to do with the opinion that Helen was, or that she was not, an historical personage. For my own part, I know of no reason except discrepancies of mere traditional chronology for disbelieving her existence. These seem to arise entirely from the practice of putting on a par with Homer tales of very inferior authority to his. But even apart from this, considering what, under ordinary circumstances, the chronology of pre-historic times is likely to be, and how many more chances there are for the preservation of great events in outline, than for a careful adjustment of their relative times, I cannot but think that difficulties arising from other legends as to Helen, and bearing simply upon time, form a very insufficient reason for the wholesale rejection of belief in her existence. Even if, however, she never existed at all, it still is not one whit the less reasonably to be presumed, that Homer in fictions concerning her would be governed here and elsewhere by all the laws, including the moral laws, of his art.

Neither is it now the question, whether Helen was the model of an heroic character. That is probably inconsistent, for the earliest times of Greece, with her adulterous relation to Paris and afterwards to Deiphobus. But there is a vast space between a faultless and a worthless woman. The idea of Helen represented by the later tradition, from the Greek tragedians downwards, is strictly the latter idea: and this representation has naturally occupied the popular mind, which is deprived of the power of access to the remote Homeric picture. Now it seems to be plain that, if this representation be substantially true, it is a great reproach to the bard of the Iliad as a bard, and stamps him as one, who has done his best to poison morality at its fountain-head. For there can be no question, that he has made his Helen highly attractive, and that he intends her to possess our sympathies. Is it then true, or is it false? Let us proceed to examine the evidence.

In the Iliad we meet more than once with the line,

and expositors, in order to avoid ascribing to Helen any personal wrongs, or the representation of her as rather a sufferer than an offender, have resorted to a forced construction of the passage, and have interpreted the words as referring to the expedition undertaken, and the griefs suffered, on account of Helen[1002].

Homer’s intention with respect to it.

Unless this forced construction be the one intended by Homer, the popular conception of her must at once explode. According to the direct and natural construction, the Greeks made war to avenge the wrong she had suffered, and the groans which that wrong had drawn from her. And it is to be observed that this line[1003] is put into the mouth of Menelaus, whom it is very natural to represent as most eager to avenge the wrongs of his wife, but somewhat far-fetched to represent as thinking of revenge for the trouble of the expedition he had so keenly promoted. The line, in fact, unless justifiably strained by these expositors, is conclusive in support of the belief that the only evil which can justly be imputed to the Homeric Helen simply amounts to this, that she was not a woman of perfect virtue backed by absolute and indomitable heroism. Pope has rather rudely approximated towards rectifying the prevalent impression in a note[1004], where he observes that in all she says of herself ‘there is scarce a word that is not big with repentance and good nature.’

Before examining the direct evidence with respect to the Homeric Helen, let us advert to some which is indirect. And in the first place it may be observed, that Menelaus never expresses the slightest resentment against her, or appears to have considered her as having in any manner injured him. Next, Priam, whose character is evidently intended to attract a good deal of our sympathy and respect, treated her as a daughter:

Nor was this a mere figure; for in the Third Book he addresses her as φίλον τέκος[1006], and makes her sit down by his side. In conformity with this picture, her sister-in-law Laodice addresses her as νύμφα φίλη[1007]. Priam goes on to acquit her of all responsibility in his eyes with regard to the war:

And that this was not meant to cover Paris, we may learn from the many passages, which show us how the general sentiment of Troy detested him. Had Helen been of the character which is commonly imputed to her, such an absolution as this would probably not have been ascribed to Priam; while most certainly it would not have been recorded to the honour of Hector that he always restrained those, who were disposed to taunt her on account of the woes she had brought upon Troy[1008].

She describes herself indeed as the object of general horror in Troy (πάντες δέ με πεφρίκασιν[1009]). But these words do no more than state the impression, at a moment of agony, on her own humbled and self-mistrusting mind: while, even had they given a faithful picture of the manner in which she was regarded by the Trojans, still they might well be explained with reference to the woes of which she had been at least the occasion, and the sentiment they describe might as naturally have been felt, even had she been the lawfully obtained wife of Paris.

There are two other passages, which may seem at first sight to betoken a state of mind adverse to her among the Greeks. But the explanation of them is simply this, that the cause of woe is naturally enough denounced on account of the misfortunes it has entailed, irrespective of the question whether or in what degree it may be a guilty cause[1010]. Thus Achilles calls Helen ῥιγεδάνη, ‘that horrible Helen;’ but it is only when her abduction has produced to him the bitter and harrowing affliction of the death of Patroclus. When he mentions her in the magnificent speech of the Ninth Book to the envoys, she is Ἑλένη ἠΰκομος, ‘the fair-haired Helen.’ Now, if she had been vile, the course of his argument must have constrained him then to state it. For he was reasoning thus: May I not resent the loss of Briseis, who was dear to me (θυμαρής[1011]), when the sons of Atreus have made their loss of Helen the cause of the war? Had Helen been worthless, it would have added greatly to the stringency of his argument to have drawn the contrast in that particular, between the woman whom Agamemnon had taken away, and the woman that he was seeking, by means of the convulsive struggle of a nation, to recover.

The other passage is in Od. xxiii., where Penelope, after the recognition of her husband, speaks of Helen in these words:—

But even in this only passage where the act of Helen is so described, several points are to be observed. First, it is referred to a preternatural influence, which is not the manner of this Poet in cases at least of deep and deliberate crime; secondly, no epithet of infamy is applied to her; thirdly, we must observe the drift of the speaker. Penelope is excusing herself to Ulysses, for her own extreme caution and reserve in admitting his identity. Therefore she is naturally led to enhance the dreadful nature of the occurrence where a wife gives herself over into the power of any man, other than one known to be her husband; and this, whether the act be voluntary or involuntary. Accordingly she refers to the act of Helen rather than to the agent, and treats it as horrible; but avoids charging it as wilful.

Homer’s Epithets for Helen.

On the other hand, we may observe that the general tenour of the epithets bestowed upon Helen leans on the whole towards the laudatory sense.

She is

εὐπατέρεια, the high-born; Il. vi. 292; Od. xxii. 227; most probably agreeing in sense with the next phrase.

Διὸς ἐκγεγαυῖα, the child of Jupiter; Il. iii. 199; et alibi.

κούρη Διὸς, the daughter of Jupiter; Il. iii. 426.

δῖα γυναικῶν, the excellent, or flower of women; Il. iii. 171, 228; and Od. iv. 305; xv. 106.

καλλιπάρῃος, of the beautiful cheeks; Od. xv. 123.

καλλίκομος; Od. xv. 58; ἠΰκομος; Il. iii. 329, et alibi, the fair-haired.

λευκώλενος, the white-armed; Il. iii. 121; Od. xxii. 227.

τανύπεπλος, the well-rounded; Il. iii. 228; et alibi.

And lastly, Ἀργείη, the Argive; Il. ii. 161; and in no less than twelve other places.

No one of these appellations carries the smallest taint or censure. The epithet δῖα in all probability applies to her personal beauty and majesty, as we find it used of Paris and of Clytemnestra. It would appear, however, that the use of the term Argive or Argeian, in many passages where it is not required for mere description, has a special force. For Homer never exhibits that which is simply Greek in any other than an honourable light; and in calling Helen Argeian, he certainly expresses something of general sympathy towards her. No other person, except only Juno, is called Argeian. Plainly the effect of his epithets for her as a whole is quite out of harmony with the ideas, which the later tradition has attached to her name. A yet more marked indication in her favour, than any of them taken singly will supply, may be derived from his likening her, in the palace of Menelaus, to Diana:

He certainly would not have associated by this comparison one, of whom he meant us to think ill, with the chaste and even severe majesty of his ever-pure Diana (Ἄρτεμις ἁγνή).

So much with regard to the designations applied to Helen in the Iliad and Odyssey. Next, with regard to her demeanour. It is admitted to be, so far as the matter of chastity is concerned, without any fault other than the inevitable one of her position. Besides other qualities that will be noticed presently, she appears in the light of a refined and feeling, a blameless and even matronly person; a character, which, as we shall see, her abduction by Paris from Menelaus did not disentitle her to bear.

We must beware of applying unconditionally, to women placed under conditions widely different, ideas so specifically Christian as those that belong to the absolute sanctity of the marriage tie. We must rather look for the moral aspect of the case in the opinions of the period, and in the particular circumstances which attended the rupture of the bond in the given instance, than assume it from the naked fact that there was a rupture.

The case of Bathsheba.

It may seem not unfair to compare the case of Helen with the somewhat similar case of Bathsheba among the Jews. If on the one hand we are bound to bear in mind the inferior station of the latter personage, on the other it is to be remembered that the Greeks were further removed from the light of Divine Revelation. Now we are not accustomed to look upon the character of Bathsheba as infamous, though she lived with King David as one among his wives, while Uriah, her former husband, who had been robbed of her, was sent to certain death on her account; and this, so far as we are informed, without awakening in her any peculiar emotions of sympathy, sorrow, reluctance, or remorse. And this, as I take it, mainly for two reasons—first, that we have no signs of any passion, and in particular of any antecedent passion, for the offending king on her part; secondly, that she does not appear to have been otherwise than passively a party to the abduction.

It is in the capacity of wife, and only wife, to Paris that Helen appears to us in the Iliad: where she herself speaks of Menelaus as her πρότερος πόσις[1014].

Now the presumed reasons for not regarding the character of Bathsheba as infamous apply with nearly equal force to Helen. Indeed the character of Helen in one point stands higher in Homer than that of Bathsheba in the Old Testament, because she lived with Paris as a recognised and only wife, and because of her gentleness, and especially of her repentance. Of these as to Bathsheba, we know nothing; but such pleas as tell for her tell in the main also for Helen. We have no indication, either in the Iliad or in the Odyssey, of her having at any time felt either passion or affection towards the worthless Paris. Above all, as it will be attempted to prove, the language of the poems not only does not sustain the idea that she willingly left the house of her husband Menelaus, but it shows something which closely approaches to the direct contrary.

But there is no method of measuring so accurately the view and intention of Homer as to the impression we were meant to receive of Helen, as by comparing the language he applies to her with the widely different terms in which he describes the conduct of Clytemnestra, in conjunction with Ægisthus, during the absence of Agamemnon:

In speaking of her own abduction, Helen indeed uses the word ἤγαγε[1016]. And again in her sharp expostulation with Aphrodite, she says, ‘What, will you take me (ἄξεις) to some other Phrygian or Mæonian city, where you may have a favourite[1017]?’ Now this by no means implies her having acted freely; the word ἄγειν is that commonly applied to the carrying off captives from a conquered city, as φέρειν is to the removal of inanimate objects. Undoubtedly in one of her passages of self-reproach she says[1018]:

But, in the first place, it is neither here nor anywhere else said that her flight was voluntary; and on the other hand, without doubt, it is not to be pretended that she had resisted with the spirit of a martyr. The real question is as to the first and fatal act of quitting her husband, whether it was premeditated, and whether it was of her free choice. Now both branches of this question appear to be conclusively decided by the word ἁρπάξας in the following passage[1019], spoken by Paris:

And the rest of the passage corroborates the evidence, by showing that she was free from any act of guilt at the time when the voyage was commenced. The representation of Menelaus himself, in the Thirteenth Iliad, accords with the speech of Paris. He charges that Prince and his abettors not with having corrupted his wife, but with having carried her off,

Again, in the only place where Helen refers jointly to her own share and to that of Paris in the matter[1021], she distinguishes their respective parts, saying to Hector, ‘You have had to toil on account of me, shameless that I am, and Ἀλεξάνδρου ἑνεκ’ ἄτης, on account of the sin of Paris.’

Picture of Helen in Il. iii.

Let us now follow the character of Helen, as it is exhibited in life and motion before us by the Poet. In the Third Book, when Paris is about to encounter Menelaus, Iris, in the form of her sister-in-law Laodice, announces the fact to Helen, and lets her know that her own fate is suspended on the issue, which will decide whether she is to be the wife of Paris or of Menelaus. Laodice finds her busied in embroidery, which is to represent the War of Greeks and Trojans. The expression, νύμφα φίλη, with which the disguised goddess addresses her, is a sign that she was held in respect, and that when she speaks[1022] in the last Book of the taunts and skits of which she was the object, we must understand her to use the natural exaggeration of impassioned grief. At the call of the seeming Laodice, moved apparently by tenderness towards her former husband[1023], Helen goes forth, clad in a robe of simple white[1024]. On her reaching the walls Priam calls her to his side, that she may tell him the name of a kingly warrior, who proves to be Agamemnon. In doing this, he gently acquits her of all responsibility for the war. She answers in a speech of uncommon grace, ‘that she dreads while she reveres and loves him: would that she had miserably died rather than leave her family, her nuptial bed, her infant, and her friends. But this could not be; so that she ever pined away in tears.’ She designates herself here and elsewhere[1025] as κύων, and also as κύνωπις, brazen-faced or shameless; but yet she appears at all times to have retained the fond recollection of her home and friends[1026], and to have lived in grave and sorrowful retirement. Everywhere she seems not only not to avoid, but to search for, the opportunity of bitter self-accusation. Thus, when she has pointed out the Greek chieftains whom she knew personally, she proceeds, ‘but I do not see my brothers, Castor and Polydeuces: perhaps they came not from Greece; perhaps, though here, yet on account of my infamy and reproach, they will not appear in fight[1027].’

Paris, after his defeat, is removed by Aphrodite from the field: Menelaus remains as victor. But Helen still tarries upon the wall, evidently hoping that the hour of her restoration had now at last arrived. The goddess Venus then appears to her, disguised in the form of an aged servant; and endeavours to attract her by a glowing description of Paris, in his beauty and his splendid garments. By this address Helen was alarmed[1028]: and her alarm almost became stupefaction, when she perceived the features of the deity. But a strong reaction followed: so that she made a bitter and stinging reply. Gentle on all other occasions, she is here sharp and sarcastic. She[1029] reproaches Venus with having come to prevent Menelaus from taking her home in right of his victory; then bids her assume to herself the odious character she sought to force on one who had too long borne it, and utterly refuses to go. Venus hereupon intimidates her, by a threat of making her hateful alike to Greek and Trojan, and so bringing her to miserable destruction. She then obeys, covering her face in shame and indignation; and when placed by the goddess in front of Paris in their chamber, she sharply reproaches him; but the real delicacy of her character is maintained in this, that she does it ὄσσε πάλιν κλίνασα, with averted and downcast eyes. In what follows, she is but the reluctant instrument of a passion, which Homer seems to have described in this place, contrary to his wont, with the distinct purpose of raising indignation to the highest pitch, and covering Paris with a contempt and shame proportioned to the crime he had committed, and to the miseries of which by crime he had been the cause.

Upon the whole, this delineation of Helen in the Third Book may well be taken as one of the most masterly parts of the Iliad. The extreme fineness and delicacy of its shading mark it as an immortal work of genius, and the gentleness of Helen towards Priam, with her severity to herself, and her sternness both to the corrupter, and to the goddess that aided and inspired him, form a moral picture of the most striking truth and beauty. Indeed, if the question be asked, where does Paganism come nearest to the penitential tone and the profound self-abasement that belong to Christianity, we might find it difficult to point out an instance of approximation so striking as is, here and elsewhere, the Helen of Homer.

In Il. vi. Il. xxiv. Od. iv.

In three other places of the poems, Helen is put prominently forward.

In the Sixth Book, before Hector repairs to the field, he goes to the palace of Paris to summon him forth. He finds the effeminate prince handling uselessly his arms, while Helen is superintending the beautiful works of her women[1030]. By and by it appears that, sensible of the shame of her husband’s cowardice, though without interest in his fame, she has been persuading him to go forth and fight; and she takes the opportunity of Hector’s presence to offer him a chair that he may rest from his fatigues; to revile herself as, next to her husband, the cause of them; and, while grieving that she had outlived her infancy, to lament also that, if she was to live at all, she had not been united to one less impervious to the sentiment of honour.

Again, Homer has thought her not unworthy of the third place, with Andromache and Hecuba, as mourners over the mighty Hector, in the deeply touching description of the return of his remains to Troy[1031]. The tenour of this speech is kept in the exactest harmony with what has gone before.

We now bid adieu to the Helen of Homer in her sorrow and shame among the Trojans. But the Poet presents her to us again in prosperity and domestic peace, as the Queen of Menelaus; who, though not the heir of the high throne of Agamemnon, yet held a station in Greece, after the Return, of highly elevated influence. This is a picture, which it would not have been in accordance with the usual course of Homer to set before us, had his mind attached to Helen the character given to her by the later tradition; for where does he represent to us the wicked in prosperity, without bringing down on them subsequently the vengeance of heaven? But on the Helen of the Odyssey he has left no note of sorrow, except the most moving and appropriate of all, namely this, that the gods gave her no child after Hermione, the daughter of her early youth[1032].

From her stately chamber she comes forth into the hall, after the feast. She is attended by three maidens, who bear respectively the first her seat, the second its covering, the third her work-basket and distaff. She remarks on the likeness of Telemachus to Ulysses, and humbly recollects to confess, that she herself has been the cause of the sufferings of the Greeks. The allusions then made to Ulysses cause her, with the rest, to weep tenderly; and when her husband with his friends resumes the banquet, she infuses into their wine the soothing drug, supposed to have been opium, which she had obtained from Egypt, to make them forgetful of their sorrows. Then she begins to tell tales in honour of Ulysses: and how, when in his beggar’s dress he escaped scatheless from Troy, and left many of the Trojans slaughtered behind him, she alone, amidst the wailings of the women, was full of joy, for her heart had been yearning towards her home.

There is indeed a trait that deserves notice in the speech of Menelaus, which has been lately mentioned. Helen came down to detect, if possible, the Greeks concealed within the Horse: therefore, to act in the interest of the Trojans. Now if, on the one hand, she looked back on her country and her first husband with many yearnings, yet it was not to be wondered at that as a woman, nowhere pretending to the character of a heroine, she should be so far pliable to the wishes or subject to the compulsion of the Trojans—especially when we remember her love and reverence for their head, and for Hector, who had but lately died in their defence—as to make this effort to defeat the stratagem of the besiegers. But Menelaus, in referring to the incident, carefully spares Helen’s feelings by another of those strokes of exceeding tact and refinement for which Homer’s writings are so remarkable, both generally, and as to the chivalrous character of this hero in particular. ‘Thither,’ he says, that is to the Horse, ‘thou camest; and no doubt,’ he adds, ‘it was the influence of some celestial being, favourable to Troy, that prompted thee;’ thus preventing by anticipation the sting that his words might carry:

Her marriage to Deiphobus.

Tradition has assigned Deiphobus to Helen, as a husband after the death of Paris. This tradition is supported, though not expressly, yet sufficiently, by the Odyssey; for, says Menelaus, when the Greeks had constructed the Horse, and when Helen was brought down to detect those who were within it, by imitating the voices of their wives respectively, it is added,

And by the further passage in Od. vii. 517, which represents Ulysses as repairing straight from the Horse to the house of Deiphobus, in company with Menelaus.

Presuming therefore that this tale was well founded, it may be remarked, that the selection of Deiphobus, as the person who should take Helen to wife, was probably founded on his superior merit[1035]. It was under his image, that Minerva came upon the field to inveigle Hector into facing Achilles: and Hector then described him as the one whom he loved by far the best amidst his full brothers, the children of Priam and of Hecuba. This therefore thoroughly accords with the idea, that Helen was held in respect. Nor let it be thought strange, that she was not permitted to remain single. The idea of single life for women, outside their fathers’ home, seems to have been wholly unknown among the Greeks of Homer. When marriageable, they married; when their country was overcome, they became, as of course, the appendages of the couch of the captor. Penelope herself never dreamt of urging that, when once the return of Ulysses was out of the question, she could have any other option than to make choice among the Suitors whose wife she would become. Telemachus contemplates her immediate restoration to her father’s home when he, her son, should assume the full prerogatives of manhood.

The whole Homeric evidence, then, appears to show that, from the moment of her removal, neither the usages of society, nor the ideas of religion or the moral code, could allow Helen to remain in the single state. But it may be said this seems to prove too much on her behalf; namely, that both the abduction and the subsequent life were against her will. It is, however, entirely in keeping with the testimony of the poems, to suppose that her whole offence lay in having permitted at the first, perhaps half unconsciously, the attentions of a flatterer, who became at once a paramour and a tyrant to his victim. In order to comprehend the heroic age, it is indispensable that we should recollect that the responsibilities of women were contracted in proportion to her strength; and that the heroism of endurance, in which she has since excelled, is a Christian product.

That element of weakness and lightness in a character otherwise beautiful, which the incident of the Horse betrays, was probably at once the source and the measure of her offending in reference to the cause of war. It was a mind of relaxed fibre, and vacillated under pressure. Less than this we cannot suppose, and there is no occasion to suppose more. The respect felt, within certain limits, for women in the heroic age, and so powerfully proved by the Odyssey, may perhaps be adverse to the supposition that Paris carried her away without some degree of previous encouragement. I confine myself to ‘perhaps,’ because it is nowhere indicated in the poems, and we can at most have only a presumption to this effect. On the other hand, it seems certain that what she expiated in life-long sadness was, at any rate, no more than the first step in the ways of folly, the thoughtless error of short-sighted vanity, which the state of manners did not permit her subsequently to redeem. Repent she might: but to return was beyond her power.

On the whole, it may be said with confidence that the Helen of the Homeric poems has been conceived, by an author himself of peculiar delicacy, with great truth of nature, and with no intention to deprive her of a share in the sympathies of his hearers; that he has made her a woman, not cast in the mould of martyrs, nor elevated in moral ideas to a capacity of comprehension and of endurance above her age, but yet endowed with much tenderness of feeling, with the highest grace and refinement, and with a deep and peculiar sense of shame for having done wrong. Probably her appreciation of virtue and of honour, though beneath that of the highest matronly characters, may have been in no way inferior to that of society at large in her own time, and superior to the standard of many following epochs; nay superior also to that which has prevailed, at least locally, even at some periods of the Christian era: as, for example, when Ariosto wrote the remarkable passage—

General estimate of the Homeric Helen.

The degradation of Helen by the later tradition will be treated of hereafter. Meantime it will be seen how much on this subject I have the misfortune to differ from Mure, who has been usually so great a benefactor to the students of Homer. With him ‘Helen is the female counterpart of Paris[1037].’ Paris and Helen are respectively ‘the man of fashion and the woman of pleasure of the heroic age.’ ‘Both are unprincipled votaries of sensual enjoyment; both self-willed and petulant, but not devoid of amiable and generous feeling.’ He finds indeed in her a ‘tenderness of heart and kindly disposition;’ and says that ‘traces of better principle seem also to lurk under the general levity of her habits.’ This petulance, this general levity, I do not find; but rather the notes of a fatal fall, continually and deeply felt under the general grace and beauty of her character. What Mure calls her ‘petulant argument with her patron goddess,’ we take to be the noble and indignant reaction of a soul under the yoke of conscious slavery, and still quick to the throb of virtue. Indeed I derive some comfort from the closing words of his criticism, in which, after expressing his pity and condemnation, he says that still ‘we are constrained to love and admire.’ In the whole circle of the classical literature, as far as it is known to us, there is, I repeat, nothing that approaches so nearly to what Christian theology would term a sense of sin, as the humble demeanour, and the self-denouncing, self-stabbing language of the Argeian Helen.

The character of Paris.

III. The character of Paris is as worthy, as any other in the poems, of the powerful hand and just judgment of Homer. It is neither on the one hand slightly, nor on the other too elaborately, drawn; the touches are just such and so many, as his poetic purpose seemed on the one hand to demand, and on the other to admit. Paris is not indeed the gentleman, but he is the fine gentleman, and the pattern voluptuary, of the heroic ages; and all his successors in these capacities may well be wished joy of their illustrious prototype. The redeeming, or at least relieving point in his character, is one which would condemn any personage of higher intellectual or moral pretensions; it is a total want of earnestness, the unbroken sway of levity and of indifference to all serious and manly considerations. He completely fulfils the idea of the poco-curante, except as to the display of his personal beauty, the enjoyment of luxury, and the resort to sensuality as the best refuge from pain and care. He is not a monster, for he is neither savage nor revengeful; but still further is he from being one of Homer’s heroes, for he has neither honour, courage, eloquence, thought, nor prudence. That he bears the reproaches of Hector without irritation, is due to that same moral apathy, and that narrowness of intelligence, which makes him insensible to those of his wife. No man can seriously resent what he does not really feel. He is wholly destitute even of the delicacy and refinement which soften many of the features of vice; and the sensuality he shows in the Third Book[1038] partakes largely of the brutal character which marks the lusts of Jupiter. No wise, no generous word, ever passes from his lips. On one subject only he is determined enough; it is, that he will not give up the woman whom he well knows to be without attachment to him[1039], and whom he keeps not as the object of his affections, but merely as the instrument of his pleasures. One solicitude only he cherishes; it is to decorate his person, to exhibit his beauty, to brighten with care the arms that he would fain parade, but has not the courage to employ against the warriors of Greece.

There are other greater achievements in the Iliad, but none finer, or more deserving our commendation, than the manner in which Homer has handled the difficult character of Paris. It was quite necessary to raise him to a certain point of importance; had he been simply contemptible, his place in the early stages of the Trojan tale, and the prolongation of the War on his account, would have involved a too violent departure from the laws of poetical credibility. This importance Homer, whether from imagination or from history, has supplied; in part by his very high position. Even if I were wrong in the opinion that the Poet meant to represent him as the eldest son, or the eldest living son, of Priam, it would still at least be plain that he is more eminent and conspicuous than any other member of the royal house after Hector; while he is so much less worthy than Deiphobus, for example, that no one, I think, could doubt that his distinction is due to his being senior to that respectable prince and warrior, and to the rest of his brothers. Further, the Poet has raised him to the very highest elevation in two particulars; one the gift of archery, the other the endowment of corporeal grace and beauty. But neither of these involves one particle of courage, or of any other virtue; for the archer of Homer’s time was not like the British bowman, who stood with his comrades in the line, and discharged the function in war which has since fallen to musketry; he was a mere sharpshooter, always having the most deliberate opportunity of aim at the enemy, and always himself out of danger. No archer is ever hit in the Iliad; but Pandarus, so skilled in the bow, is slain, and Paris is disgraced, when they respectively venture to assume the spear. Again, the Poet has contrived that the accomplishments of Paris, though in themselves unsurpassed, shall attract towards him no share, great or small, of our regard. This prince really does more, than even Hector does, to stay the torrent of the Grecian war; for in the Eleventh Book, from behind a pillar, he wounds Diomed, who had fought with the Immortals, Eurypylus, who had also been one of the nine accepters of Hector’s challenge, and Machaon, one of the two surgeons. Thus Homer[1040] has been able to make him most useful in battle, most lovely to the eye, and yet alike detestable and detested.

This aim he attains, not by that tame method of description which he so much eschews, but by the turn he gives to narrative, and by the colour he imparts to it in one or a few words.

Paris, though effeminate and apathetic, is not gentle, either to his wife or his enemies; and, when he has wounded Diomed, he wishes the shot had been a fatal one. The reply of Diomed cuts deeper than any arrow when he addresses him as,

Again, the Poet tells us, as if by accident, that when, after the battle with Menelaus, he could not be found, it was not because the Trojans were unwilling to give him up, for they hated him with the hatred, which they felt to dark Death[1042]. And again we learn, how he uses bribery to keep his ground in the Assembly; how he refuses to recognise even his own military inferiority, but lamely accounts for the success of Menelaus by saying that all men have their turn[1043]; and how he causes shame to his own countrymen and exultation to the Greeks, when they contrast the pretensions of his splendid appearance with his miserable performances in the field[1044].

Homer, full as he is of the harmonies of nature, differs in this as in so many points from most among later writers, that he does not set at nought the due proportion between the moral and the intellectual man, nor combine high gifts of mind with a mean and bad heart. He never varies from this rule; and he has been careful to pay it a marked observance in the case of Paris. No set of speeches in the Iliad are marked by greater poverty of ideas. If he cleans his arms and builds his house, which are honourable employments, they are employments immediately connected with the ostentation to which he was so much given. More than this, the Poet informs us, through the medium of Helen, that he was but ill supplied with sense, and that he was too old to mend:

The immediate transition, in the Third Book, from the field of battle, where he was disgraced, to the bed of luxury, is admirably suited to impress upon the mind, by the strong contrast, the real character of Paris. Nor let it be thought, that Homer has gratuitously forced upon us the scene between him and his reluctant wife. It was just that he should mark as a bad man him who had sinned grossly, selfishly, and fatally, alike against Greece and his own family and country. This impression would not have been consistent and thorough in all its parts, if we had been even allowed to suppose that, as a refined, affectionate, and tender husband, he made such amends to Helen as the case permitted for the wrong done her in his hot and heady youth. Such a supposition might excusably have been entertained, and it would have been supported by the very feebleness of the character of Paris and by his part in the war, had Homer been silent upon the subject. He, therefore, though with cautious hand, lifts the veil so far as to show us that in our variously compounded nature animal desire can use up and absorb the strength which ought to nerve our higher faculties, and that, as none are more cruel than the timid, so none are more brutal than the effeminate.

One hold, and one only, Paris seems to retain on human affection in any sort or form. The paternal instinct of Priam makes him shudder and retire, when he is told that Paris is about to meet Menelaus in single combat. This trait would have been of extraordinary and universal beauty, had the object of the affection been even moderately worthy: it is a remarkable proof of the debasement of Paris, and of the strong sense which Homer gives us of that debasement, that the tender father seems in a measure tainted by the very warmth and strength of his love.

SECT. VII. The declension of the great Homeric Characters in the later Tradition[1046].

Physical conditions of the Greek Theatre.

One legitimate mode of measuring the true greatness of Homer is, by observing what has become of the materials and instruments he worked with, upon their passing into other hands. Acting on this principle, let us now pass on to consider the murderous maltreatment, which the most remarkable of all the Homeric characters have had to endure in the later tradition; partly, as I have already observed, from general, and partly from special causes. On the more general influence of this kind I have already touched. Among the special causes, we should place the declension in the fundamental ideas of morals and of politics between the time of Homer and the historic age. With this we may reckon one which, though it may appear to be technical, must, in all likelihood, have been most important, namely, the physical necessities imposed by the fixed conditions of dramatic representation among the Greeks[1047]. Their theatres were constructed on a scale, which may be called colossal as compared with ours. Both polity and religion entered into the institution of the stage. The intense nationality of their life required a similar character in their plays, and likewise in the places where they were to be represented. Not therefore a particular company of auditors, but rather the whole public of the city, where the representation took place, was to be accommodated. In consequence, the dimensions of the buildings exceeded the usual powers of the human eye and ear; so that the figure was heightened by buskins, the countenance thrown into bolder and coarser outline by masks, and the voice endowed with a great increase of power by acoustic contrivances within the masks, as well as aided by the construction of the buildings. All this was the more strictly requisite, because the plays were acted in the open air.

Now this general exaggeration of feature beyond the standard of nature had an irresistible tendency to affect the mode in which characters were modelled for representation; to cause them to be laid out morally as well as physically in strong outline, in masses large and comparatively coarse. The fine and careful finishing of Homer required that those, who were to recite him, should retain an entire and unfettered command over the measure in which the bodily organs were to be employed. The τύνη δ’ ὠμοΐιν of Achilles to Patroclus might bear to be spoken in a voice of thunder, and would absolutely require the bard to use considerable exertion of the lungs; but the scenes of Helen with Priam in the Third Book, of Hector with Andromache in the Sixth, of Priam with Achilles in the Twenty-fourth, would admit of no such treatment; and as these passages could not themselves be rendered, so neither could anything bearing a true analogy to Homer be given, unless the actor had enjoyed full liberty to contract as well as expand his own volume of sound, or unless he had enjoyed both easy access, on any terms he pleased, to the ears of his audience, and the full benefit of that most important assistance, which the eye renders to the ear by observing the play of countenance that accompanies delivery. King Lear, King John, or Othello, could not have been represented more truly and adequately in a Greek theatre, than the Achilles, or than the Helen, of Homer. Those who have ever happened to discuss with a deaf person a critical subject, requiring circumspect and tender handling, will know how much the necessity for constant tension of the voice restrains freedom in the expression of thought, and mars its perfectness. The Greek actors lay under a somewhat similar necessity, and to their necessities of course the diction of the tragedians was, whether consciously or unconsciously, adapted.

Let it, however, be borne in mind, that when we criticize the conceptions of the Homeric characters by the later Greek writers, it need not be with the supposition that we have eyes to discern in Homer what they did not see. Their reproductions must be taken to represent not so much the free dictates of the mind and judgment of the later poets, as the conditions of representation to which they were compelled to conform, and the popular sentiments and opinions which, in the character of popular writers, they could not but take for their standard. The invention of printing has given a liberty and independence to thought, at least in conjunction with poetry and the drama, such as it could not possess while the poet, in Athens for example, could sing in no other way but one, namely, to the nation collected in a mass. The poet of modern times may write for a minority of the public, nay, for a mere handful of admirers, which is destined, yet only in after-years, to grow like the mustard-seed of the parable. But the Athenian dramatist was compelled to be the poet of the majority at the moment, and to be carried on the stream of its sympathies, however adverse its direction might be to that in which, if at liberty to choose, he would himself have moved.

Obliteration of the finer distinctions.

Accordingly, when we come to survey the literary history of those great characters which the Poet gave as a perpetual possession to the world, we find, naturally enough, that the flood of the more recent traditions has long ago come in upon the Homeric narrative, like the inundation brought by Neptune and Apollo over the wall and trench of the Greeks. Like every other deluge, in sweeping away the softer materials, which give the more refined lines to the picture, it leaves the comparatively hard and sharp ones harder and sharper than ever. Thus it is with the Homeric characters, transplanted into the later tradition. The broader distinctions of his personages one from another have been not only retained, but exaggerated: all the finer ones have disappeared. No one, deriving his ideas from Homer only, could confound Diomed with Ajax, or either with Agamemnon, or any of the three with Menelaus, or any of the four with Achilles; but when we come down to the age of the tragedians, what remains to mark them, except only for Agamemnon his office, and for Achilles his superiority in physical strength? In the Homeric poems, the strong and towering intellectual qualities even outweigh the great physical and animal forces of his chief hero: by the usual predominance in man of what is gross over what is fine, the principal and higher parts of his character are afterwards suppressed, and it becomes comparatively vulgarized. In the Ulysses of Homer, again, the intellectual element predominates in such a manner, that not even the most superficial reader can fail to perceive it. He and Helen stand out in the Iliad from among others with whom they might have been confounded; the first by virtue of his self-mastery and sagacity, the second, not only by her beauty and her fall, but by the singularly tender and ethereal shading of her character. The later tradition, laying rude hands upon the subtler distinctions thus established, has degraded these two great characters, the one into little better than a stage rogue, the other into little more than a stage voluptuary, who adds to the guilt of that character the further and coarse enormities of faithlessness, and even of bloodthirstiness.

Even so soon as in the time of the Cyclical writers the character of Helen had begun to be altered. In Homer she is the victim of Paris, carried off from her home and country, and only then yielding to his lust. In the Κύπρια ἔπη, as we have that poem reported by Proclus, she begins by receiving his gifts, that is to say, his bribes; she is an adulteress under her husband’s roof; and she joins in plundering him, in order to escape with her paramour.

It is in Euripides that we find the largest and most diversified reproduction of the old Homeric characters, and to him, therefore, among the three tragedians, we should give our chief attention. When we consider them as a whole, according to his representation of them, we find that their entire primitive and patriarchal colouring has gone. The manners are not those of any age in particular; least of all are they the manners of a very early age. And, as the entire company has lost its distinctive type, so have the members of it when taken singly. In the Troades, for example, Menelaus is simply the injured and exasperated husband; Helen is the faithless wife; and she is kept up to a certain standard of dramatic importance in the eye of the world only by another departure from the Homeric picture, for she is armed with an enormous power of argument and sophistry. By a similar appendage of ingenious disquisition, the essentially plain and matronly qualities of Hecuba have been overlaid and hidden. Achilles, in the Iphigenia, is a gallant and a generous warrior; but we have neither the grandeur of his tempestuous emotions as in Homer, nor, on the other hand, any of that peculiar refinement with which they are in so admirable a manner both blended and set in contrast. Agamemnon has lost, in Euripides, his vacillation and misgivings, and is the average and, so to speak, rounded king and warrior, instead of the mixed and particoloured, but in no sense common-place, character that Homer has made him. Though Andromache is a passionately fond mother, she has nothing whatever that identifies her as the original Andromache. Indeed, of the Homeric women, it may be said that in Euripides they have ceased to be womanly; they have in general nothing of that adjective character (if the phrase may be allowed), that ever leaning and clinging attitude, to which support from without is a moral necessity, and which so profoundly marks them all in Homer. Again, Iphigenia, Cassandra, Polyxena, who are either scarcely or not at all Homeric, have now become grand heroines, with unbounded stage-effect; but there is no stage-effect at all in Homer’s Helen, or in his Andromache. Andromache, for example, is not elaborately drawn. She is rather a product of Homer’s character and feeling, than of his art. She is simply what Tennyson in his ‘Isabel’ calls ‘the stately flower of perfect wifehood.’ In her simplicity, the true idea of her might easily have been preserved by the later literature, had the conception of woman as such remained morally the same. But the Andromache of Homer was doomed to deteriorate, on account of her purity, as his Achilles, his Ulysses, his Helen degenerated, because the flights of such high genius could not be sustained, and weaker wings drooped down to a lower level. As Hecuba was the aged matron of the Iliad, and Helen its mixed type of woman, so Andromache was the young mother and the wife. Her one only thought lay in her husband and her child; but in the Troades, wordy and diffuse, she discusses, in a most business-like manner, the question whether she shall or shall not transfer her affections to the new lord, whose property she has become. She ends, indeed, by deciding the question rightly; but it is one that the Homeric Andromache never could have entertained.

Three, however, among the Homeric characters, have been mangled by the later tradition much more cruelly than any others; they are those prime efforts of his mighty genius, Helen, Achilles, and Ulysses. The first, most probably, on account of the wonderful delicacy with which in Homer it is moulded: the others on account of their singular comprehensiveness and breadth of scope. Each of these three cases well deserves particular consideration.

Mutilation of the Helen of Homer.

In the case of Helen, the extreme tenderness of the colouring, that Homer has employed, multiplied infinitely the chances against its preservation. Among all the women of antiquity, she is by nature the most feminine, the finest in grain, though, as in many other instances, a certain slightness of texture is essentially connected with this fineness. Her natural softness is very greatly deepened by the double effect of her affliction and her repentance. A quiet and settled sadness broods over her whole image, and comes out not only when she weeps by the body of Hector, or when her husband’s presence reminds her of her offence, but even under the genial smiles and soothing words of old Priam on the wall. Vehement and agonizing passion draws deep strong lines, which, even in copies, may be easily caught and easily preserved; it is quite different with the profound though low-toned suffering, of which the passive influence, the penetrating tint, circulates as it were in every vein, and issues into view at every pore.

Helen of Euripides, Isocrates, Virgil.

Let us now consider how the character of Helen reappears in Euripides, in Isocrates, and in Virgil.

In the Agamemnon, Æschylus had designated her under the form of a pun, as ἑλέναυς ἑλεπτόλις; and these phrases, as they stand, cannot be said in any manner to force us beyond the limits of the Homeric tradition. But in the Hecuba she is cursed outright by the Chorus, and represented by Hecuba herself as having been the great agent, instead of the passive occasion and the suffering instrument, in the calamitous fall of Troy[1048]. In the Troades she is the shame of the country, the slayer of Priam, the willing fugitive from Sparta[1049]. Andromache denounces her in the fiercest manner, and gives her for her ancestors not Jupiter, but Death, Slaughter, Vengeance, Jealousy, and all the evils upon earth[1050]. Menelaus is furiously enraged, calls on his attendants to drag her in by her blood-guilty hair, will not give her the name of wife, will send her to Lacedæmon[1051], there herself to die as a satisfaction to those whose death she has guiltily brought about. When she asks whether she may be heard in defence of herself, he answers summarily, no:

She then delivers a sophistical speech[1053], and pleads, that she could not be guilty in yielding to a passion which even Jupiter could not resist, while she retaliates abuse on Menelaus for leaving her exposed to temptation. Quantum mutata! As respects Deiphobus, however, she declares that she only yielded to force, and that she was often detected, after the death of Paris, in endeavours to escape over the wall to the Greeks.

We have moreover an example, in the Helen painted by Euripides, of the rude manner in which characters not understood, and taken to be inconsistent by an age which had failed to understand them, were torn in pieces, and how the several fragments started anew, each for itself, on the stream of tradition. In Homer we have the touching contrast between the chastity of Helen’s mind, and the unlawful condition in which she lived. The latter, taken separately, was presumed to imply an unchaste soul; the former a lawful condition. Instead therefore of the one narrative, we have two; a shade or counterfeit of Helen plays the part of the adulteress with Paris, while the true and living Helen remains concealed in Egypt, keeping pure her husband’s bed, so that, though her name has become infamous, her body may remain untainted. This latter tradition is chiefly valuable, because it marks the mode of transition from the Homeric to the spurious representations, and the consciousness of the early poets, that they were not preserving the image drawn by Homer. No scheme, however, constructed of such flimsy materials, could live; and, naturally enough, the character of Helen the wife was forgotten, that of Helen the voluptuary was preserved.

From the vituperation and disgrace of Helen in most of the plays of Euripides, we pass to the elaborate panegyric handed down to us in the Ἐγκώμιον of Isocrates. The falsehood eulogistic is not less unsatisfying than the falsehood damnatory. For now, with the lapse of time, we find a further depression of the moral standard. We have here, in its most absolute form, the deification of beauty[1054]; ὃ σεμνότατον, καὶ τιμιώτατον, καὶ θειότατον τῶν ὄντων ἔστιν[1055]. But it is totally disjoined from purity. He does not warrant and support his eulogy upon Helen, by recurring to the true Homeric representation of her; but he boldly declares the high value of sensual enjoyment[1056], commends the ambition of Paris to acquire an unrivalled possession and thereby a close affinity with the gods, and sees in the war only a proof of the immense and just estimation in which both parties held so great a treasure[1057], without the smallest scruple as to the means by which it was to be acquired or held. From this picture we may pass on to the Helen of Virgil, which represents the destructive process in its last stage of exaggeration, and leaves nothing more for the spirit of havoc to devise.

In Æn. i. 650, Helen is declared to have sought Troy and unlawful nuptials, instead of having been carried off from home against her will. In Æn. vi. 513, she is represented as having made use of the religious orgies on the fatal night, to invite the Greeks into Troy; and, after first carefully removing all weapons for defence, she is said to have opened the apartment of her sleeping husband Deiphobus to Menelaus, in the hope that, by becoming accessory to a treacherous murder, she might disarm the resentment of one whom she had so deeply wronged. But even this passage has probably done less towards occupying the modern mind with the falsified idea of Helen, than one of most extraordinary scenic grandeur in the second Æneid; where Æneas relates how he saw her, the common curse of her own country and of Troy, crouching beside the altar of Vesta, amidst the lurid flames of the final conflagration, in order to escape the wrath of Menelaus.

And then, in language, the glowing magnificence of which serves to hide the very paltry character of the sentiment, Æneas proceeds to announce that he was about to slay the woman who, according to himself, had lived for ten years as a friend among his friends; when, at the right moment, his mother Venus appeared, and reminded him that on the whole he might do rather better to think about saving, if possible, his own father, wife, and boy.

Thus, in the Helen of Virgil, we have splendid personal beauty combined with an accumulation of the most profoundly odious moral features. She is lost in sensuality, a traitress alike to Greece and to Troy, willing to make miserable victims of others in the hope of purchasing her own immunity: all her deep remorse and sorrow, all her tenderness and modesty, are blotted out from her character, and the void places in the picture are filled by the detestation, with which both Greeks and Trojans regarded, as indeed they might well regard, such a monster. But let us pass on.

Achilles and Ulysses.

Among the many proofs of the vast scope of Homer’s mind, one of the most remarkable is to be found in the twin characters of his prime heroes or protagonists. It seems as if he had taken a survey of human nature in its utmost breadth and depth, and, finding that he had not the means to establish a perfect equilibrium between its highest powers when all in full development, had determined to represent them, with reference to the two great functions of intellect and passion, in two immortal figures. In each of the two, each of these elements has been represented with an extraordinary power, yet so, that the sovereignty should rest in Achilles as to the one, and in Ulysses as to the other. But the depth of emotion in Ulysses is greater than in any other male character of the poems, except Achilles; only it is withdrawn from view because so much under the mastery of his wisdom. And in like manner on the other hand, a far greater power, directed to the purpose of self-command and self-repression, is shown us in Achilles than in any other character except Ulysses; but this also is under partial eclipse, because the injustice, ingratitude, scorn, and meanness which Agamemnon concentrates in the robbery of a beloved object from him, appeal so irresistibly to the passionate side of his nature as to bring it out in overpowering proportions.

These being the leading ideas of the two characters, Homer has equipped each of them with the apparatus of a full-furnished man; and in apportioning to each his share of other qualities and accomplishments, he has made such a distribution as on the whole would give the best balance and the most satisfactory general result. Thus it is plain that the character of Achilles, covering as it did volcanic passions, was in danger of degenerating into phrensy. Homer has, therefore, assigned to him a peculiar refinement. His leisure is beguiled with song, consecrated to the achievements of ancient heroes; he has the finest tact, and is by far the greatest gentleman, of all the warriors of the poems; even personal ornaments to set off his transcendent beauty[1058] are not beneath his notice, a trait which would have been misplaced in Ulysses, ludicrous in Ajax, and which is in Paris contemptible, but which has its advantage in Achilles, because it is a simple accessory subordinate to greater matters, and because, so far as it goes, it is a weight placed in the scale opposite to that which threatens to preponderate, and to mar by the strong vein of violence the general harmony of the character.

In the same way, as Ulysses is distinguished by a never-failing presence of mind, forethought, and mastery over emotion, so the danger for him lies on the side of an undue predominance of the calculating element, which threatens to reduce him from the heroic standard to the low level of a vulgar utilitarianism. Here, as before, Homer has been ready with his remedies. He exhibits to us this great prince and statesman as bearing also a character of patriarchal simplicity, and makes him, the profoundest and most astute man of the world, represent the very childhood of the human race in his readiness to ply the sickle or to drive the plough[1059]. Above all—and this is the prime safeguard of his character—he makes Ulysses a model for Greece of steady unvarying brightness in the domestic affections. The emotion of Hector in the Sixth Iliad, and of Priam in the Twenty-fourth, are not capable of comparison with those of Ulysses, because theirs constitute the central points of the characters, and likewise are the products of great junctures of danger and affliction respectively, while his exhibit and indeed compose a settled and standing bent of his soul. He alone, of all the chieftains who were beneath the walls of Troy, is full of the near recollection of his son, his Telemachus[1060]; his desire and ambition never pass indeed beyond barren Ithaca, and his daily thought through long years of wandering and detention is to return there[1061], to see the very smoke curling upward from its chimneys, so that the charms of a goddess are a pain to him, because they keep him from Penelope[1062].

Such was the care with which, in each of these great and wonderful characters, Homer provided against an exclusive predominance of their leading trait. But in vain. Achilles too, more slowly however than his rival, passed, with later authors, into the wild beast; Ulysses descended at a leap into the mere shopman of politics and war; and it is singular to see how, when once the basis of the character had been vulgarized, and the key to its movements lost, it came to be drawn in attitudes the most opposed to even the broadest and most undeniable of the Homeric traits.

Mutilation of the Ulysses of Homer.

There is nothing in the political character of Ulysses more remarkable, than his power of setting himself in sole action against a multitude; whether we take him in the government of his refractory crew during his wanderings; or in the body of the Horse, when a sound would have ruined the enterprize of the Greeks, so that he had to lay his strong hand over the jaws of the babbler Anticlus[1063]; or in the stern preliminaries to his final revenge upon the Suitors; or in his war with his rebellious subjects; or, above all, in the desperate crisis of the Second Iliad, when by his fearless courage, decision, and activity he saves the Greek army from total and shameful failure. And yet, much as the Mahometans[1064] were railed at by the poets of Italy, indeed of England, in the character of image-worshippers, so Ulysses is held up to scorn in Euripides as a mere waiter upon popular favour. Thus in the Hecuba he is

Now, when the most glaring and characteristic facts of the narrative of Homer can be thus boldly traversed, there is scarcely room for astonishment at any other kind of misrepresentation. As when Hecuba laments, in the Troades[1065], that her lot is to be the captive of the base, faithless, malignant, all-stinging maker of mischief. Such is the standing type of Ulysses in the after-tradition. Whenever anything bad, cruel, and above all mean, is to be done, he is the ever-ready, and indeed thoroughly Satanic, instrument.

The Second Epistle of the First Book of Horace is full of interest with reference to this subject, because in it he gives us the result of his recent re-perusal of the Homeric poems at Præneste. And, accordingly, we find here a great improvement upon the Ulysses of the Greek drama. He seems to have struck Horace at this time more forcibly, or more favourably, than any other Homeric character; for, after describing in strong terms what was amiss both within and without the walls of Troy, he makes this transition[1066];

He considers this hero as the conqueror of Troy, and notices his self-restraint and indomitable courage in adversity. Such was the advantage of an impression fresh from the Homeric text, instead of those drawn from the muddy source of the current traditions. It does not diminish but enhances the compliment, when the acute but Epicurean writer goes on to intimate, in more than half-earnest, that these virtues of Ulysses were too high for imitation, and that he himself was content rather to emulate the suitors of Penelope, and the easy life of the youths about Alcinous[1067].

But if some small instalment of justice was thus done by Horace to the Homeric Ulysses, Virgil withdrew the boon, and was careful to reproduce, without mitigation or relief, the worst features of the worst form of the character. With him it is Ulysses who is chosen to play the slayer of Palamedes and the betrayer of Sinon[1068], and to lead the party which, conducted by Helen, was to massacre Deiphobus in his chamber[1069]. On account of his fierce cruelty, even the ‘ground is cursed for his sake;’ poor Ithaca is loaded with imprecations by Æneas as he passes near it. Once he is called infelix, the greatest compliment that he anywhere receives; but his name in few cases escapes the affix of some abusive epithet, drawn alike from inhumanity or from cunning, it seems to matter little from which[1070].

Of the Achilles of Homer.

The character of Achilles was more fortunate, in the handling it experienced from the Greek drama, than that of Ulysses. In the Iphigenia of Euripides, the hero of the Iliad appears as a faithful lover, and as a gallant and chivalrous warrior. At the same time, it has lost altogether the breadth of touch and largeness of scope, with which it is drawn in Homer. We miss entirely that unfathomable power of intellect, of passion, and also of bodily force, all combined in one figure, which carry the Achilles of Homer beyond every other human example in the quality of sheer grandeur, and make it touch the limits of the superhuman. There is nothing said or done by the Achilles of Euripides, nothing reported of him or assigned to him, no impression borne into a reader’s mind concerning him, which would not have been perfectly suitable to other warriors; for example, to the Diomed of Homer. He falls back into a class, and becomes a simple member of it, instead of being a creation paramount and alone; alone, like Olympus amidst the mountains of Greece; alone for ever in his sublimity, amidst the famous memories of other heroes, no less truly than he was alone in his solitary encampment during the continuance of the Wrath.

With Pindar Achilles appears in a different dress. He is here conceived without mind, as a youth marvellous in strength, hardihood, and swiftness of foot, growing up into a mighty warrior[1071]. The Achilles of Pindar is but as a pebble broken away from the mountain-mass of Homer.

Catullus, in his beautiful poem on the Nuptials of Peleus and Thetis, had a rare opportunity of setting forth the glories of Achilles. And he is in fact made the main subject of the nuptial song, properly so called; yet nothing of him is really celebrated by the poet[1072], except his valour and his swiftness; all the rest is simple amplification and embellishment. It seems by this time to have been wholly forgotten, that the Homeric Achilles had a soul.

The discernment of Horace did not here enable him, as it had enabled him before, to escape from the popular delusions,

The character is exhibited here in a light at once feeble and misleading, for its cardinal point is made to be the supremacy of force over right. Now in Homer it is a sense that right has been deeply violated, which serves for the very groundwork out of which his exasperation rises. He does not view the question as one of meum and tuum only, or even mainly. His eye is first upon the gross wrong done, and only then upon himself as the subject of it. He resists Agamemnon’s claim[1074] for a compensation at the very first, when it is urged, not against him, but against the Greeks at large[1075]; and he bursts out into indignant vituperation of the greedy king before Agamemnon has threatened to take Briseis, and when he has only insisted that, if the Greeks do not compensate him, he will then help himself to the prize either of Achilles or of Ajax or of Ulysses. In truth he is the assertor of the supremacy of law over will, much more than of force over law; and there is the greatest difference between pushing a sound and true principle even to gross excess, and proceeding from the outset upon a false one. The former, not the latter, is the case of the Achilles of the Iliad.

The Achilles of Statius.

The poet Statius observed, with sagacity enough, that the Achilles of Homer was but a torso; that the Iliad had only allowed him to be exhibited in one light, as it were, and at a single juncture of his career. So he resolved to profit by the ungotten mine, and to found a poem on the whole Achilles, child and man, in his rising, at his zenith, and in his setting blaze;

We are therefore perhaps entitled to expect from him a fuller and more comprehensive grasp of the character than was usual, even although the narrative is broken off. The five books which remain of this work do not bring him so far as to the plains of Troy; but we leave him on the voyage from Scyros to Troas. They are chiefly occupied, therefore, with his residence there in the disguise of a maiden, and with the incidents of his sojourn.

Now the story of Achilles at Scyros, and of his connexion with Deidamia, harmonizes with one side of his character as it is drawn in Homer. It is evident that his personal beauty was not less graceful than manful; and he alone of the Greek chieftains is related to have worn ornaments of gold. Therefore that in the days of his boyhood he should wear the dress of maidens, and pass for one of them, is at any rate in accordance with a particular point of the Homeric tradition, though little adequate to its lofty tone as a whole. But this particular point is just what Statius contrives wholly to let drop. He shows us Achilles like the sham Anne Page, in the Merry Wives of Windsor[1077], ‘as a great lubberly boy,’ neither careful nor able to give any grace to the movement of his limbs. For, in the dance, he would break the heart of any rightminded master of the ceremonies:

Nor does this writer appear at all to have apprehended the main ideas of the Homeric character. In the Iliad, the education which Achilles receives is the ordinary education of men of his rank, and his transcendent powers in after-life are due to a just, yet no more than a just, development of his extraordinary original gifts. But in Statius he is represented as having owed everything to the peculiar training of Chiron; whose semiferine life he shared, so that his diet in childhood consisted of the raw entrails of lions, and the marrow of half-dead she-wolves! His mind, indeed, was not overlooked amidst these brutalities, for he exhausts a long catalogue of acquirements; but Statius, as might be expected, completely drops out of his political education what is its one grand element in Homer, namely, the art of government over man by speech. Instead of this, Chiron the Centaur merely teaches him those abstract rules of right, by which he had himself been wont to govern Centaurs[1078].

To the same age with the Achilleis of Statius belongs the Troades of Seneca. However this play may be criticized, as a study, like the others of the same author, for the closet only, and however it may betray the choice of Euripides for a model, it seems to be by some degrees better, in the conception and use of some famous Homeric characters, than any production since the time of Æschylus. The delineation of Andromache, if it has not ceased to be theatrical, is full at least of intense affection, all still centring in Hector. Ulysses, though reviled by that matron in her passionate grief, at least does the humane action of allowing her a little time to weep before the sentence of Calchas is executed upon Astyanax, and shows something too of the intellect of his antitype[1079]. Helen is exhibited not as vicious, but as wanting in firmness of character. She is driven by solicitation into the offence of alluring Polyxena to her immolation, under the name of a bridal with Neoptolemus; commences the performance of this false part with self-reproach, and then, challenged by Andromache, quits it and avows the truth[1080].

But here we find a new form of departure from the ancient and genuine tradition. The principal motive, assigned by Seneca to the Greeks for putting Astyanax to death, is a terrified recollection of his father Hector, and a dread lest, upon attaining to manhood, he should avenge his own country against Greece. Again, Andromache, as it were, intimidates Ulysses, by invoking the shade of her husband:

A strange inversion of the relations drawn by Homer.

During all the time, however, in which we moved among the Greeks and among the earlier Romans, the corrupting process acted only upon each of the Homeric creations by itself, and there was no cause at work, which went to alter and pervert wholesale their collective relations to one another.

New relative position of Trojans and Greeks.

But from the period when the Æneid appeared, or at least so soon as it became the normal poem of the Roman literature, a new cause was in operation which, without mitigating in any degree the previous depraving agencies, introduced a new set of them, and began to disturb the positions of the two grand sets of characters, Greek and Trojan, relatively to one another.

Virgil had sought to give to the Cæsars the advantage of a hold upon royal antiquity by fabulous descent. He had before him the choice between Greece and Troy, which alike and alone enjoyed a world-wide honour. He could not hesitate which to select. The Greek histories were too near and too well known. Besides, the Greek dynasties generally had dwindled before they disappeared. The splendour of the Pelopids in particular had been quenched in calamity and crime, and no other of the Homeric lines had attained to greatness in political influence or historic fame. But the family of Priam had fallen gloriously in fighting for hearth and altar: it had disappeared from history in its full renown, ‘Magna mei sub terras ibat imago.’ Virgil chose too the house which was most ancient, and which traced link by link, as that of Agamemnon did not, a known and a named lineage up to Jupiter.

From this cause, both in the Æneid itself and afterwards, the Trojan characters were set upon stilts, and the Greeks were left to take their chance. Besides the loss of equilibrium, and the allowed predominance of coarser elements, which we have to lament in the Greek handling of them, we now see them pass, with the Romans, even into insignificance. The Diomed of Arpi is a person wholly unmarked; and he, like all the rest of his countrymen, is treated by Virgil simply as an instrument for obtaining enhanced effect, in the interest that he endeavours to concentrate on his Trojan characters; whereas the key to all Homer’s dispositions in the Iliad is to be found in the recollection, that he dealt with everything Trojan in the manner which was recommended and required by his Greek nationality. From this time forward, we find the palm both of valour and of wisdom clean carried over from the Greek to the Trojan side: the heroes of Homer remain, like unhewn boulders on the plain, crude, gross, and reciprocally almost indistinguishable masses of cunning or ferocity.

Virgil gave the tone in this respect, not only to the literature of ancient Rome, but to that of Christian Italy. For this reason, we may presume, among others, Orlando, the prime hero of the Italian romance, is, as I have before observed, modelled upon Hector. He is in many respects a very grand conception. Pulci, in describing his death, rises even to the sublime when he says there is

Which we may render in prose ‘One God, one way to God, one true type of manhood.’ Still it is remarkable that in Bojardo, as well as in Ariosto, the purer traces of the Homeric arrangement thus far at least remain, that Orlando, although he is the type of the Christian chivalry, yet, as he resembles Hector in piety and virtue, so likewise retains his likeness in this respect, that he is not the most formidable or valiant warrior of the poems. In Ariosto particularly, he is made inferior to Mandricardo, to Rodomonte, and most of all, but this for personal and prudential reasons, to Ruggiero. These three perhaps may be considered as being respectively the Ajax, the Diomed, and the Achilles of the Orlando Furioso.

And now the fancy for derivation from a Trojan stock, of which Virgil had set the fashion, was fully developed. Ariosto, at great length and in the most formal manner, establishes this lineage for his patrons, the family of Este. Others followed him. The humour passed even beyond the limits of Italy, into these then remote isles. A Trojan origin was ascribed to the English nation, and the authority of Homer, as to characters and history, was openly renounced by Dryden.

In Oxford, at the revival of classical letters, the name of Trojans was assumed by those who were adverse to the new Greek studies, and who, having nothing but a name to rely on, doubtless chose the best they could.

The Imitations by Tasso.

Throughout the ‘Jerusalem’ of Tasso, we find imitations which are invested with greater interest than the remote copies commonly in circulation, because, from the large infusion of many leading arrangements, copied from Homer, into the plot of the poem, we may conclude with reason that they were in all likelihood drawn immediately from the original. Some of these personages, too, are in so far closely imitated from Homer, that Tasso has spent little or nothing of his own upon them, but has simply equipped them with as much of the Homeric idea as he thought available.

The most successful among them is Godfrey, modelled, but also perhaps improved, upon Agamemnon, who is by no means in my view one of the greater characters of the Iliad, though he has been incautiously called by Mitford ‘ambitious, active, brave, generous, and humane[1083].’ Agamemnon has indeed that primary and fundamental qualification for his office, the political spirit, so to term it, and the sense of responsibility, which are so well developed in Godfrey; but it is doubtful whether he is entitled to be called either thoroughly brave, or at all generous or humane. Agamemnon’s character is admirably adapted to its place and purpose in the Iliad; in any more general view, Godfrey’s both stands higher in the moral sphere, and perhaps forms by itself a better poetic whole.

While the action of Achilles in the Iliad is apparently assigned to Rinaldo, there is room to doubt whether Tasso meant the person or character of his hero to carry corresponding marks of resemblance. In what may be called a by-place of his poem, he has made a passing attempt to reproduce both Achilles and Ulysses under the names of Argante and Alete, who appear as envoys from the Sultan of Egypt to the Frankish camp. For the benefit of the former, Tasso has translated the two lines that describe Achilles in Horace, and has added a spice of the Virgilian Mezentius:

Accordingly, Argante proves to be the prime warrior on the Pagan side, and his character, described in these lines, is consistently carried through.

It is perhaps not to be regretted, that Tasso has left on record no other mark that Achilles was in his mind; for it is only the most debased edition of Achilles to whom Argante bears the slightest resemblance. The same is the case with Alete. Of humble origin, he rises to high honours by his powers of invention and of speech, and by the pliability of his character. Prompt in fiction, adroit in laying snares, a master of the disguised calumnies ‘che sono accuse, e pajon lodi[1085],’ he evidently recalls the caricatures, which for two thousand years had circulated under the name of the Homeric Ulysses. Thus Tasso’s acquaintance with the text, whatever it may have been, did not avail to open his eyes, darkened by corrupt tradition, or to bring him nearer to the truth as regarded those sovereign creations of the genius of Homer. So sure it is, both in this and in other matters, that when long-established falsehoods have had habitual and undisturbed possession of the public mind, they form an atmosphere which we inhale long before consciousness begins. Hence the spurious colours with which we have thus been surreptitiously imbued, long survive the power, or even the act, of recurrence to the original standards. For that recurrence rarely takes place with such a concentration of the mind as is necessary in order to the double process, first, of disentangling itself from the snares of a false conception, and secondly, of building up for itself, and this too from the very ground, a true one.

Shakespeare and Chaucer.

In the Troilus and Cressida, of which Shakespeare had at least a share, we see, perhaps, one of the lowest and latest pictures of mere mediæval Homerism. The sun of the ancient criticism had set; that of the modern had not risen. It must be admitted that, in this play, although it shows the clear handiwork of Shakespeare in some splendid passages, and much of beautiful and of characteristic diction, we scarcely find one single living trait of the father of all bards preserved. Our incomparable dramatist, by no fault of his own, came in at the very end of that depraved lineage of copyists, for which progressive degeneracy is the necessary law. As is said[1086], he followed Lydgate; Lydgate drew from a Guido of Messina, who in the thirteenth century founded himself on Dictys Cretensis and Dares Phrygius.

Before his time Chaucer, we may presume, had drawn from the same sources. Yet his poem of ‘Troilus and Cressida’ bears a token of the familiarity of the English mind with free institutions under the Plantagenets. The fidelity with which traditions are preserved, and also the facility with which they are revived, no doubt often depends more upon moral sympathies, than upon any cause operating simply through the intellect of man. Though dealing with un-Homeric persons, or events, or both, and copying again from copies probably very corrupt, yet Chaucer, as an Englishman accustomed to English ideas of government, brings out with much more freshness and freedom the notion of public deliberation in Troy, (nay, even the very word parliament is not wanting,) than do the poets of the literary age of Greece.

But let us return to the so-called Shakespeare.

Thersites is converted into the modern fool. Diomed struts upon his toes, while in Homer his modesty among the Greeks is the peculiar ornament of his valour. Ajax, whom Homer has made lumpish and goodnatured, is full of haughty follies, the coxcomb of warriors; while the mere bulk which, combined with bravery and bluntness, formed his peculiar note, is made the distinctive characteristic of Achilles. It is still more grievous to find the relation of this hero to Patroclus degraded by foul insinuations, entirely foreign to the Iliad, to its author, and even to its age. Agamemnon is a mere stage king; and it can be no wonder that Nestor’s character, which requires a fine appreciation from its gently rounded construction, should have become thoroughly commonplace and vapid. The same lot befalls Ulysses, who is made to play quite a secondary part. Paris, without any mending of his moral qualities, is allowed to present a much more respectable figure: the Helen of Homer reproaches his cowardice; but here he says, ‘I would fain have armed to-day, but my Nell would not have it so[1088].’ She appears as the mere adulteress; and those, who remember how she is treated in Homer, will be able to measure the declension that time and unskilled hands had wrought, when they read the speech of Diomed describing her as follows: