The Historians' History of the World 04 [Greece to the Roman Conquest]

THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE HELLENIC SPIRIT

Written Specially for the Present Work

By DR. ULRICH von WILAMOWITZ-MÖLLENDORFF

Professor of Classical Philology in the University of Berlin, etc.

Homer stands at the beginning of Greek history; nothing before him, nothing beside him, a great gulf fixed between him and everything after; yet there is nothing Greek on which his light or shadow does not fall. Homer is a world in himself, and what a world he is! In the eyes of many, even to this day, he stands for the sum total of the Greek spirit; in the eyes of some, for the whole body of poetry. What the two epics set before us is so complete, so individual, that in spite of all concessions in detail, the oneness of the poem and of the author is constantly obtruding itself upon our notice anew. Homer is so little antiquated that he seems to be of no age; we place him in a sunnier morning-time of mankind, that is all; but to range him in the sequence of history, to conceive of him as under conditions of time and place seems like profanation; this, like so much else, he has in common with the Old Testament. And yet to classify him thus is the first necessity of real comprehension. The Greeks themselves have not done much to help us. About the time of Socrates a school of æsthetic criticism restricted the sacred name of the poet Homer, certainly not without some show of reason, to the Iliad and the Odyssey; and thus these poems have come down to us, but the price we pay is the loss of all others of equally Homeric origin; and hence Homer stands more than ever alone. The last word of the philology of antiquity was that Homer ought to be explained only by himself. Modern philology seemed on the way to the same conclusion.

By the discoveries of the last generation the ban of this isolation has been broken. Only by wilful blindness can the Ilium of Homer be dissociated from the Ilium restored to light on Hissarlik, though the remains of the latter go far back beyond the time of Homer and Priam. Not the age of the Homeric poets alone, but the age of the Homeric heroes rises up before us from these strongholds and tombs. The links that bind it to the older civilisation of Asia and of Egypt lie revealed, positive chronological data already enable us to determine the certainty of this or that. From these actual remains we begin to gain some conception of the history and the peoples whose poetic reflection shines for us in the Iliad and the Odyssey.

On the shores of the Ægean Sea, in the second half of the second thousand years before Christ, there existed a sumptuous civilisation which had received impulses from the East and from the South, but in which we nevertheless recognise the spirit of the Greece immortalised in the Homeric poems; and in the Asiatic home of Homer the connecting threads do not break off short as we trace them back. In the mother-country, on the other hand, other savage Greek tribes, whom we name after the Dorians, forced their way in; they destroyed the ancient superior civilisation, reduced some of its representatives to slavery, and drove the rest over into Asia. There was another immigration into Asia, this time of the Phrygio-Thracian tribes, the ancestors of the Armenians; such of the earlier population as were not reduced to slavery being driven south. These tribes we are wont to call after the Carians. There was a time when they reached out towards Europe, and in a few islands they continued for centuries to struggle against the Hellenising influence to which in the long run they completely succumbed. But as the study of this long and important period is still in its infancy, our main object should still be the collection of material; it will be one of the principal tasks of the next generation to sift and elaborate what has been accumulated. At the present time it is more important than any amount of detail for us to understand what is the historic background both for the subject-matter of the Homeric epics and for the practice of this form of poetry and the existence of the poets who used it.

The Homeric poems are a legacy from the first great period of Greek history. We may approximately fix the year 800 B.C. as their latest possible date. The subject-matter of the Epos, the Heroic legend, is the deposit of historical reminiscences of that earlier time. It was wholly fit that men should see in the epic heroes the founders of their own nation and of their own civilisation; but in point of fact it was through Homer that the Greek nation first acquired consciousness of itself, of its individuality and of the common blood in its veins. Not in the time of the heroes alone, but in that of the poets of the Epos, the Greeks had no national unity and less than no national feeling, and the same holds good of their civilisation. The tales which Homer tells are laid to a great extent in Argos, Thebes, and Sparta; all the heroes come from the country which we call Hellas and distinguish from Asia as their mother-country. Nearly all the Homeric gods have their homes there likewise. But now gods and heroes, like Agamemnon’s Achæan host, are taken across to the northwestern angle of Asia. Achilles has conquered Lesbos; the descendants of Agamemnon rule in Mytilene and Cyme. Cyme, Smyrna, and Chios are the reputed birth-places of Homer. Here, where later the Æolian dialect comes into collision with the mightier Ionian, was perfected the artificial dialect of the epic,—a dialect spoken in this form at no time and in no place,—and the heroic verse that was at no time and in no place a really popular form, and was first imported into Lesbos itself by the Ionian Epos. Here, side by side with the ruling class which claimed descent from the Homeric gods and heroes, was evolved a class of professional bards, and amongst them arose the gifted poets whose names have been forgotten in the fame of the one and only Homer. Let us hope that the real Homer was worthy of this pre-eminence. By these Homerides the Epos, first sung to the lute, and then recited, was carried farther and farther among the islands and along the coast. The subject-matter awakened interest everywhere; being, as it were, national history, the form won for itself an ever widening circle of appreciation. Gradually in the mother-country there were found native bards who learned from wandering rhapsodists the art of making poetry in the Homeric style, that is to say, of using a foreign language and a foreign art-form, but to express new matter, which was nevertheless invariably linked in some fashion with the world of Homeric heroes. Accordingly, the production of epic poems, ever based upon Homeric legend, was maintained in the mother-country for centuries after it had died out in Ionia, continuing into the sixth century. It is through these circles, in the main, that Homer has been preserved.