Temperance in the heroic age 447

Self-control in the heroic age 448

Absence of the vice of cruelty 450

Savage ideas occasionally expressed 451

These not unfamiliar to later Greece 453

Wrath in Ulysses 454

Wrath in Achilles 455

Domestic affections in the heroic age 456

Relationships close, not wide 459

Purity in the heroic age 460

Lay of the Net of Vulcan 461

Direct evidence of comparative purity 465

Treatment of the human form 466

Treatment of various characters 467

Outline of Greek life in the heroic age 468

Its morality, and that of later Greece 471

Points of its superiority 472

Inferior as to crimes of violence 475

Some effects of slavery 476

Signs of degeneracy before Homer’s death 477

SECT. IX.

Woman in the heroic age.

The place of Woman generally, and in heroic Greece 479

Its comparative elevation 480

1. State of the law and custom of marriage 481

Marriage was uniformly single 483

2. Conceived in a spirit of freedom 483

Its place in the career of life 485

Mode of contraction 486

3. Perpetuity of the tie of marriage 487

Adultery 488

Desertion 489

4. Greek ideas of incest 489

5. Fidelity in married life 492

Treatment of spurious children 494

Case of Briseis 495

Mode of contracting marriage 496

Concubinage of Greek chieftains in Troas 497

Dignity of conjugal and feminine manners 499

Social position of the wife 500

Force of conjugal attachments 502

Woman characters of Homer 503

The province of Woman well defined 505

Argument from the position of the goddesses 506

Women admitted to sovereignty 507

And to the service of the gods 509

Their household employments 511

Their service about the bath 512

Explanation of the presumed difficulty 515

Proof from the case of Ulysses in Scheria 517

Subsequent declension of Woman 518

SECT. X.

The Office of the Homeric Poems in relation to that of the early Books of Holy Scripture.

Points of literary resemblance 521

Providential functions of Greece and Rome 523

Of the Early records of Holy Scripture 524

The Sacred Books are not mere literary works 525

Providential use of the Homeric poems 527

They complete the code of primitive instruction 529

Human history had no visible centre up to the Advent 531

Nor for some time after it 532

A purpose served by the whole design 533

OLYMPUS,

OR

THE RELIGION OF THE HOMERIC AGE.

SECT. I.

On the Mixed Character of the Supernatural System, or Theo-Mythology, of Homer.

Though the poems of Homer are replete, perhaps beyond any others, with refined and often latent adaptations, yet it may be observed in general of the modes of representation used by him, that they are preeminently the reverse of systematic. Institutions or characters, which are in themselves consistent, probably gain by this method of proceeding, provided the execution be not unworthy of the design. For it secures their exhibition in more, and more varied, points of view, than can possibly be covered by the more didactic process. But the possession of this advantage depends upon the fact, that there is in them a harmony, which is their base, and which we have only to discover. Whereas, if that harmony be wanting, if in lieu of it there be a groundwork of fundamental discrepancy, then the conditions of effect are wholly changed. The multiplied variety of view becomes a multiplication of incongruity; each new aspect offers a new problem: and the more masterly the hand of the artist, the more arduous becomes the attempt to comprehend and present in their mutual bearings the pictures he has drawn, and the suggestions he has conveyed.

Thus it has been with that which, following German example, I have denominated the Theo-mythology of Homer. By that term it seems not improper to designate a mixture of theology and mythology, as these two words are commonly understood. Theology I suppose to mean, a system dealing with the knowledge of God and the unseen world: mythology, a system conversant with the inventions of man concerning them. In the Homeric poems I find both of these largely displayed: but with this difference, that the first was in visible decline, the second in such rapid and prolific development, that, while Homer is undoubtedly a witness to older fable, which had already in his time become settled tradition, he is also in this department himself evidently and largely a Maker and Inventor, and the material of the Greek mythology comes out of his hands far more fully moulded, and far more diversified, than it entered them.

Of the fact that the Homeric religion does not present a consistent and homogeneous whole, we have abundant evidence in the difficulties with which, so soon as the literary age of Greece began, expositors found themselves incumbered; and which drove them sometimes upon allegory as a resource, sometimes, as in the case of Plato, upon censure and repudiation[1].

[1] Döllinger Heid. u. Jud. v. 1. p. 254.

~_Extended relations of God to man._~

I know not whether it has been owing to our somewhat narrow jealousies concerning the function of Holy Scripture, or to our want of faith in the extended Providence of God, and His manifestations in the world, or to the real incongruity in the evidence at our command, or to any other cause, but the fact, at least, seems to me beyond doubt, that our modes of dealing with the Homeric poems in this cardinal respect have been eminently unsatisfactory. Those who have found in Homer the elements of religious truth, have resorted to the far-fetched and very extravagant supposition, that he had learned them from the contemporary Hebrews, or from the law of Moses. The more common and popular opinion[2] has perhaps been one, which has put all such elements almost or altogether out of view; one which has treated the Immortals in Homer as so many impersonations of the powers of nature, or else magnified men, and their social life as in substance no more than as a reflection of his picture of heroic life, only gilded with embellishments, and enlarged in scale, in proportion to the superior elevation of its sphere. Few, comparatively, have been inclined to recognise in the Homeric poems the vestiges of a real traditional knowledge, derived from the epoch when the covenant of God with man, and the promise of a Messiah, had not yet fallen within the contracted forms of Judaism for shelter, but entered more or less into the common consciousness, and formed a part of the patrimony of the human race[3].

[2] See Heyne ad Il. i. 603; Terpstra, Antiquitas Homerica, i. 3. And so late as the Cambridge Essays 1856. p. 149.

[3] See ‘Homerus, pt. i.’ by Archdeacon Williams: ‘Primitive Tradition,’ 1843, by the same; Edinb. Rev. N^o. 155, art. Homerus, and the reference, p. 50, to Cesarotti’s Ragionamento Storico-Critico.

But surely there is nothing improbable in the supposition, that in the poems of Homer such vestiges may be found. Every recorded form of society bears some traces of those by which it has been preceded: and in that highly primitive form, which Homer has been the instrument of embalming for all posterity, the law of general reason obliges us to search for elements and vestiges belonging to one more primitive still. And, if we are to inquire in the Iliad and the Odyssey for what belongs to antecedent manners and ideas, on what ground can it be pronounced improbable, that no part of these earlier traditions should be old enough to carry upon them the mark of belonging to the religion, which the Book of Genesis represents as brought by our first parents from Paradise, and as delivered by them to their immediate descendants in general? The Hebrew Chronology, considered in connection with the probable date of Homer, would even render it difficult or irrational to proceed upon any other supposition: nor if, as by the Septuagint or otherwise, a larger period is allowed for the growth of our race, will the state of this case be materially altered. For the facts must remain, that the form of society exhibited by Homer was itself in many points essentially patriarchal, that it contains, in matter not religious, such, for instance, as the episode of the Cyclops, clear traces of a yet earlier condition yet more significant of a relation to that name, and that there is no broadly marked period of human experience, or form of manners, which we can place between the great trunk of human history in Holy Scripture, and this famed Homeric branch, which of all literary treasures appears to be its eldest born. Standing next to the patriarchal histories of Holy Scripture, why should it not bear, how can it not bear, traces of the religion under which the patriarchs lived?