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

The cardinal point was that, in the Homeric Epos, the Greeks acquired an organ of speech capable of expressing all that men could say and hear. It was a well-defined and yet highly elastic style, not by any means exclusively adapted to narrative; on the contrary they never abandoned the practice of casting instruction of all kinds into this form, which was popularised and made generally intelligible by the school from the time there were schools at all. It was also used in incantations, in monumental inscriptions, and in the fleeting jest. The most abstract philosophy, the description of the starry heavens, the dogmatic side of astrology, nay even the Psalms and the Gospel of St. John, have been clothed in Homeric garb. In like manner it is characteristic of the genius of Greece that it begins its evolution by creating such a mode of expression, and for a thousand years does not grow weary of it. The instinct for form and the adherence to a form once discovered are likewise Greek; their combination begets at first an unparalleled achievement, but for centuries long it has to drudge in the service of imitative facility and orthodox formalism.

Homer, moreover, created for the Greeks their heroic legend. The whole wealth of scattered and desultory reminiscence and tradition among the various tribes and families, combined with all that occupied the memory and imagination of man, was gathered together in one by the art of the Epic poets. Thus another and more beautiful domain was built up in the imaginations of men, from which a light fell on the present so brilliant that the present paled before it, while even as children men began to make themselves at home in that domain. Here it was that the Greeks found their common fatherland, proud and united, whilst they were still at daggers drawn with one another upon earth, and once more when they were all subject to foreign lords; to this day all those of us who have drunk a draught from Homer’s spring, feel at home in this region. Their gods the Greeks, likewise, received from Homer; not the faith by which the heart is made heavy and light, rendered contrite and redeemed, but the names and the histories, the relations and the amours of their celestial host—that is to say, their mythology.

The name itself implies how far it was from anything like divine revelation and holiness. The muse has much to say that is untrue but resembles truth. Homeric art, however, understood the secret of humanising the stories of the gods as effectually as the stories of tribes and kings. And this Homeric art took captive the fancy of the listeners, that is, the fancy of the whole nation as soon as it gave ear to the poetry of Homer. Homer gave to the Greek his gods, and all the Greek gods turned into men with the gift. He gives us a complete picture of nature too, he teaches us to see what surrounds us, and the sorrows and joys that condition our brief life under the sun. The roseate flush of dawn, the twinkling of the dog-star, the rush of the hurricane, the babble of the mountain stream, the tops of the fir trees in the highland forest, and the clumps of asphodel on untilled ground; the lions and wolves in the Asiatic mountain country, the horse and the hound, the companions of man, he sees everything, shows everything, loves everything; above all, the sea, eternal, ever new, that has become a home to the Ionian in lieu of mother-earth. In the light in which he viewed Nature and set her forth the Greeks accustomed themselves to look upon her. Not only so, but whole generations took pleasure in the reproduction of what had once been done, and turned their eyes aside from the contemplation of the Real, the infinitude whereof no Homer can exhaust.