toll (Qortiell Httiuerattg Uibranj Strata, Netu $nrb WORDSWORTH COLLECTION MADE BY CYNTHIA MORGAN ST. JOHN ITHACA, N. Y. THE GIFT OF VICTOR EMANUEL CLASS OF 1919 1925 THE GREAT POETS AND THEIR THEOLOGY THE GREAT POETS AND Zhck ZheoloQy BY AUGUSTUS HOPKINS STRONG, D. D., LL. D. PRESIDENT OF THE ROCHESTER THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY AUTHOR OF "SYSTEMATIC THEOLOGY" AND "PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION' flbbtla&elpbfa AMERICAN BAPTIST PUBLICATION SOCIETY MDCCCXCIX I I V "^R S"V)V - ■ /\ 6c ' Copyright 1897 by the American Baptist Publication Society jfrom tbe Society's own ipress ytto XTo fl&s mite PREFACE The essays which follow are summer recreations. The author is well aware that he does business on small capital, and that most of the capital is borrowed. He only hopes to repay what has been lent him, with the addition of some moderate interest. It is not maintained that the poets are conscious the- ologians. In their vocation as seers, however, they have glimpses of truth in theology, as well as in philosophy and physics. From their higher point of view, indeed, they sometimes descry truths which are yet below the horizon of other thinkers. Poetical expressions of these truths are all the more valuable, because they are clothed in the language of feeling, and appeal to our sense of beauty. The author is inclined to believe that the great poets, taken together, give united and harmonious testimony to the fundamental conceptions of natural religion, if not to those of the specifically Christian scheme. This testimony is cumulative, and it follows the law of evolu- tion, by advancing from vague to clear. Even poets like Goethe, who proclaim another gospel, witness in spite of themselves to the truth as it is in Jesus. There may be question what names deserve to be counted among those of the great poets. The author at first intended to include in the list only Homer, Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, and Milton. Further study Vlll PREFACE has convinced him that Wordsworth, Goethe, Browning, and Tennyson must be admitted to the company of the immortals. Whatever judgment may be passed upon this point, he anticipates no dissent from the opinion that the study of all these poets is of the greatest advantage to theologians and preachers, as well as to the general seeker after truth. With the hope that old truths may gain new interest and brightness from an unfamiliar setting, the author submits to the public the fruits of his vacation work for the past thirteen years. It remains only to be said that the first part of the paper on Browning was printed in " The Examiner," of New York, in December, 1887; that on Milton, in "The Watchman," of Boston, in March, 1897; those on Homer, Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, Wordsworth, have appeared in "The Standard," of Chicago, at various dates from 1887 to 1897 ; those on Goethe and Tenny- son, together with the latter part of that on Browning, appear now for the first time. A. H. S. Rochester, August 1, 1897. CONTENTS HOMER THE HOMERIC QUESTION AND THE HOMERIC THE- OLOGY I-63 Characterizations of the Homeric poems 3 The critical, or disintegrating, theory 5 Reaction in favor of the unity 6 Painting in the background 8 Development of plot 10 Minor proofs of common authorship 12 Unity of the "Iliad" 13 Unity of the "Odyssey" 16 Judgment of recent investigators 16 The poems were probably written 20 Testimony of Abou Symbel 21 Antiquity of Greek letters 22 Recent evidence from Egypt 25 Were the Greeks a dull people ? 27 Composition and transmission possible without writing 28 Later feats of memory 30 The evolutionary theory 31 There was a hearing public 31 Homer had his theology 34 Undertone of monotheism 36 Zeus a magnified man 37 Relation of Zeus to fate 39 The gods are not holy 40 They instigate iniquity 41 Origin of this conception 42 Homer's doctrine of sin 44 Sin is deception 44 No deep penitence in Homer 46 X CONTENTS Yet sin is self-deception also 47 And sin deserves death 49 Homer's doctrine of atonement 5° Does it involve substitution ? 5 1 Old Testament analogues 5 2 Superiority of the Christian scheme 54 Eschatology in Homer 55 Life incomplete without the body 5° Rewards and punishments 57 The human interest predominates 59 Splendor of the Homeric poetry 6l VIRGIL THE POET OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE 65-IO3 Virgil's place in history 67 The poet a product of his time 68 His early surroundings 69 His personal traits 71 The education of the poet 72 Preeminently a literary artist 73 His relation to earlier Latin poetry 74 The greatest of imitators 75 Progress in his work 77 The "Eclogues" of Virgil 77 The " Georgics " of Virgil 79 His ideas of nature and of government 80 The"^neid" of Virgil 81 His journey to Greece and his death 82 Virgil compared with Homer 83 Artistic rather than spontaneous 85 The last half of the " ^Lneid " 85 Virgil's special merits 87 The apotheosis of Augustus 89 Virgil a precursor of modern civilization 90 Virgil's theological ideas ox The soul holds a higher place than in Homer .... 9-5 Virgil a prophet of Christianity 04 Sources of his predictions or Wide influence of Virgil's poetry g* CONTENTS XI Led to a revival of the old religion 98 Virgil as a saint and a wizard 98 Mediaeval legends about Virgil 100 Story of the salvation of Rome 101 Virgil the poet of Rome 102 DANTE DANTE AND THE DIVINE COMEDY 105 — I 5 5 A summer study of Dante 107 Dante's birth and education 108 Dante and Beatrice 109 Preparation for the " Divine Comedy " 111 Dante in exile 113 The " Divine Comedy" another " Pilgrim's Progress " . 115 Expresses Dante's philosophy of civil society . . . .117 Expresses his ideas of man's relations to God . . . . 1 19 An interpretation of all known truth 121 Dante's scheme of the universe 121 Dante's verse and its influence 124 The entrance to the hell 125 The hell of incontinence 128 The hell of bestiality 129 The hell of malice 130 Lessons of the "Inferno" 132 Sin is essentially vile and contemptible 132 Sin is self-perversion of the will 133 Penalty is not external to the sinner 134 From hell to purgatory 136 The seven capital sins 138 The seven terraces of the mount 139 Lessons of the " Purgatorio " 142 Purgatory is not so much a place as a process .... 142 Unwarrantably extends purification after death .... 143 Regards the process of purification as a penal one . . 143 The nine spheres of the ' ' Paradiso " 144 The rose of the blessed 148 Light and love constitute Dante's heaven 151 To Dante the spiritual world was the real world . . .154 Xll CONTENTS SHAKESPEARE THE UNIVERSALITY OF SHAKESPEARE . . . , 157-220 Mysterious largeness of Shakespeare 159 The function of imagination 160 True art is creative 162 Poetry an expression of the universal 163 Dramatic poetry the highest form of art 164 More of truth in poetry than in prose 167 The abnormal use of imagination 168 Universality involves impersonality 169 Shakespeare partly the product of his time 171 Nature as well as nurture 173 A youth not wild and dissolute 175 The first two periods of his productive activity . . . .178 The last two periods of his productive activity .... 181 Did Shakespeare appreciate his own genius ? .... 183 Concessions to the tastes of the vulgar 185 Meaning of the word universality 186 Character manifested 187 Character developed 191 Ethical and religious ideas 193 Neither naturalistic nor agnostic 195 Man's freedom and responsibility 197 Crime is not the mere result of ignorance 198 Personal sins and hereditary sinfulness 200 Responsibility for inborn depravity 202 Conscience predicts retribution 203 Not only in the next world, but in this 205 The only real quittance is the work of Christ .... 208 Shakespeare a witness to Christianity 209 A creator of imagery as well as of character 211 The poetic diction of Shakespeare 214 The limitations of Shakespeare 217 The greatest poet of secular humanity 217 MILTON THE POET OF THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION 221-2/7 Shakespeare and Milton 223 CONTENTS Xlll The Miltonic sublimity 224 Intense personality of Milton's poetry 226 Its austere purity 226 Its immense erudition 228 Its religious faith 229 Preparation of practical life 231 Milton's parentage and training 233 He takes part in the struggle for liberty 234 His pamphlets, their eloquence and their bitterness . 235 His fierceness of denunciation 236 His infelicitous marriage 239 His "Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce " 241 He loses his sight 242 Blindness shuts him in to the supernatural 245 Scheme of the universe in the " Paradise Lost " . . 246 Temptation and fall of our first parents 249 The "Paradise Regained" 252 Can the highest poetry be didactic ? 253 Must poetry conform to correct science ? 255 Milton's "Treatise of Christian Doctrine" 257 The Scriptures an infallible divine revelation 258 An Arminian doctrine of divine decrees 259 An Arian doctrine of the person of Christ 260 A Monistic doctrine of creation 263 A Traducian doctrine of the origin of the soul . . . 264 An orthodox doctrine of anthropology and soteriology 265 A doctrine of soul-sleeping in eschatology 266 A Baptist doctrine of the church and the ordinances . 269 A final Quaker element in his religion 270 Influence of Roger Williams upon Milton 271 What is the essence of Protestantism ? 273 Milton shows the creative power of true religion . .276 GOETHE THE POET OF PANTHEISM 279-33 1 Luther and Goethe compared 281 Goethe the literary emancipator of Germany .... 282 Cosmopolitan Frankfort, and Goethe's parents . . . 283 Attractiveness of young Goethe 285 Goethe incapable of true love 287 XIV CONTENTS Destitute of patriotism 290 Goethe's early moral attitude 290 Not short-sightedness or invincible ignorance .... 292 A wrong moral decision 293 He accepts the gospel of self-culture 294 Effect upon his philosophy 296 Effect upon his theology 298 Goethe a non-ethical evolutionist 301 Effect of pantheism upon his personal life 302 An egotistic and lonely old age 305 Effect of pantheism upon his literary work 308 Lost his power to depict reality 309 From Gothic warmth to classic coldness 31 1 The first part of "Faust" 315 Expresses truths of freedom, sin, guilt, retribution . . 316 The second part of "Faust" 318 A pantheistic substitute for the Christian redemption . 319 Concessions to Christianity only apparent 320 Goethe's God is indistinguishable from nature .... 322 Goethe the poet of a materialistic age 325 In his lyrics he most nearly forgets himself 327 Pernicious influence of his philosophy 328 In matters of faith the enslaver of his country .... 329 WORDSWORTH THE POET OF NATURE 333-372 Characterizations of Wordsworth 335 His relation to preceding thought 336 His account of his own growth . . . • • 330 Meditation upon nature 340 He sought truth more than beauty 341 The true poet must ennoble character 342 Wordsworth the poet of natural religion 343 Not inconsistent with Christianity 344 The influence of his sister Dorothy 346 Dorothy the complement of her brother 347 The influence of Coleridge 340 The breaking of their intimacy ocj The "Intimations of Immortality" 3c t CONTENTS XV Seeming recollections of the past 354 Recollections of preexistence in God 357 Imagination is creative reason 360 An organ for the recognition of truth 361 "Tintern Abbey" 363 Nature an instructor, because instinct with God . . . 364 The " Ode to Duty " 366 Conscience an eternal witness against pantheism . . . 367 Wordsworth's poetry essentially Christian 368 Final recognition of Wordsworth's claims 369 He has added a permanent element to the world's thought 371 BROWNING HIS POETRY AND HIS THEOLOGY 373-447 Browning's portrait in the Watts' Collection 373 The story of Browning's life 377 The creative element in poetry 378 The imaginative reproduction of the universe .... 380 Browning the poet, not of nature, but of man's thoughts 381 Not lyric, but dramatic 372 The structure of "The Ring and the Book" .... 385 The ideal element in poetry 387 Poetry not a mere representation of life 389 The poet must believe in freedom and immortality . . 390 In the personality, righteousness, and love of God . . 392 In a revelation of God to man 394 Browning's spirit more religious than Tennyson's . . 096 Is his poetry always serious ? 397 Is his poetry always healthful ? 398 The artistic element in poetry 400 An explanation of Browning's obscurity 402 Is the explanation sufficient? 404 Has he the art of rhythmical and musical expression ? 407 Palliations of the poet's harshness 410 The highest poetry is yet to come 412 Browning as the poet of optimism 413 Due to health, environment, philosophical influences . 414 He finds God, not only in nature, but in the soul . . . 416 XVI CONTENTS Interprets nature by man, not man by nature .... 419 Browning is a monist, but not a pantheist 422 The unifying principle is love . . . • ' 426 An optimist, because he sees God revealed in Christ . 427 The later Browning a philosopher rather than a poet . 43 1 He holds moral evil to be somehow a form of good . 434 Right and wrong are illusions to sting men to effort . 436 Love is of God, as truth and right are not 439 A sad falling off from the earlier Browning 442 Yet he sees in love a guarantee for immortality . . . 444 TENNYSON POETRY AS INTERPRETING THE DIVINE ORDER 449-524 The poet's early surroundings 451 His conception of poetry 453 The true poet is a prophet also 455 Tennyson's relation to preceding poets 458 The first period of dainty grace 459 The poet's replies to his critics 462 His personal characteristics 462 The second period of subtle thought 464 The divine order in the relation of the sexes .... 465 Illustrated in "The Princess" 467 The divine order in society and government .... 470 Illustrated in " Locksley Hall " and other poems . . 470 The divine order in the relation of man to God . . . 473 Illustrated in "In Memoriam 473 " In Memoriam " is Tennyson's " Paradise Regained " 476 The third period of broad humanity 477 Illustrated in "The Idylls of the King" 477 "The Idylls of the King" is his "Paradise Lost" . .477 Man is ruined by one sin 481 The dramas, "Harold," "Becket, " and "Queen Mary" 482 His theology influenced by English agnostic philosophy 483 Faith wrongly sundered from knowledge 484 The soul is an emanation from God 486 Yet Tennyson is no pantheist 480 The soul's personality persists after death 400 CONTENTS Had the soul a personal existence before birth ? . . . 493 The poet's conception of nature 496 The world is a shadow-world 499 Tennyson an evolutionist, but not a materialist . . . 502 Sin as sensuality, in "The Vision of Sin " 504 Sin as pride and selfishness, in "The Palace of Art " . 506 Christ recognized as divine Redeemer 5°9 God's work must be complemented by man's . . . . 512 The fourth period of growing despondency 5 I 5 Tennyson's restorationism 5 X 9 Summing up of Tennyson's theology 5 r 9 The greatest poetry must be theological 5 22 HOMER HOMER THE HOMERIC QUESTION AND THE HOMERIC THEOLOGY Homer's "Iliad" has been called "the most famous among poems." Bryant speaks of its author as "the greatest of epic poets," and says that "the common consent of the civilized world places the ' Iliad ' and the 'Odyssey' at an unapproachable height of poetical ex- cellence." Shelley declares that "as a poet, Homer must be acknowledged to excel Shakespeare in the truth, the harmony, the sustained grandeur, the satis- fying completeness of his images." Keats, ignorant of Greek, looks into Chapman's translation and describes his impressions in one of the finest of English sonnets : Then felt I like some watcher of the skies When a new planet swims into his ken ; Or like stout Cortez — when with eagle eyes He stared on the Pacific, and all his men Looked at each other with a wild surmise — Silent upon a peak in Darien. Cuique in sua arte credendum — we may trust the poets in matters pertaining to their own art. And the popular verdict bears out that of the poets. Homer is translated into every tongue that makes pretension to be civilized. The rector of the German Gymnasium 3 4 THE HOMERIC QUESTION tells his pupils that there are two things which they are expected to learn thoroughly : the first is the Bible, and the second is Homer. He speaks wisely, for these are the two great records of the early world ; Homer gives us the secular record, as the Bible gives us the sacred. Matthew Arnold has summed up for us the general characteristics of Homer's poetry. He makes them to be : first, rapidity of movement ; secondly, plainness of thought ; thirdly, simplicity of expression ; fourthly, no- bility. Ballad poetry lacks the last of these — nobility. As the writer of the article in the "Britannica" has said : " The old English balladist can stir Sir Philip Sidney's heart like a trumpet ; but Homer can do more — he can refine and transmute the raw natural man." Virgil, Dante, Milton, lack the first three of the elements of Homer's greatness — rapidity, plainness, simplicity. They seem artificial and self-conscious beside Homer. Virgil has always for his underlying motive the exalta- tion of Rome ; Dante is bent upon expounding the politi- cal and religious philosophy of his time ; even Milton, in the "Paradise Lost," is the Arian and the Puritan. But Homer seems free from subjective motive. No strong antipathy of race or of religion moves him. He is him- self absorbed, and he absorbs us, in life. Like Shakes- peare and Browning, he can say : Humani nihil a me alienum puto — everything human delights me. With wonderful ease and simplicity he depicts to us, in noble metrical form, the whole world of human action and feeling. Homer reigns by right of possession, and both the poets and the people recognize his authority. But the critics are a peculiar race, and for a century past they THE CRITICAL THEORY 5 have been suggesting serious doubts whether the " Iliad " and the "Odyssey" are by the same author; whether either one was as a whole composed by Homer ; whether in fact such a man as Homer ever lived at all. Before we attempt to form a judgment for ourselves, it may be well to have before us a brief sketch of the history of what is known as "the Homeric Question." Antiquity has often been called uncritical. Yet an- tiquity was critical enough to separate the " Iliad " and the "Odyssey" from the other so-called Homeric pro- ductions, and to recognize these two as the genuine work of Homer, while it attributed the Hymns and the Cyclic poems to other authors. There were but two exceptions to the unanimity of this judgment. About the year 225 b. c, Xeno and Hellanicus of Alexandria detached the " Iliad " from the " Odyssey," and held to a dual authorship. For this reason these two otherwise obscure Alexandrian writers were called CJwrizontes, or Separatists. They never went so far as to suggest that the " Iliad" might be a congeries of poems by different authors, or that the " Odyssey " was a composite produc- tion. That was left for the skepticism of a far later time. The close of the last century was an era of disintegra- tion, of revolt against settled beliefs and institutions. Then "a man was famous, according as he lifted up axes upon the thick trees." Wolf, in Germany, pub- lished his " Prolegomena to Homer" in 1795. He held that the Athenian tyrant Peisistratus, about the middle of the sixth century b. c, finding current in his time many separate and independent lays which had for their common subject the siege of Troy, compiled these into 6 THE HOMERIC QUESTION one poem and first committed them to writing. Wolf, however, regarded the nucleus of the " Iliad " and the nucleus of the " Odyssey " as composed by Homer, or by two Homers — to this nucleus in each case Peisistratus added other lays. Thus the long tradition of single and Homeric author- ship was broken, and one modern critic set at naught a belief which, with two unimportant exceptions, had been held semper, ubique, et ab omnibus. The breaking of the dam was followed by a flood of destructive criticism. The German Lachmann resolved the " Iliad " into sixteen distinct and clearly defined lays. Grote, in England, considered it as an Achilleid enlarged into an "Iliad" by the addition of nearly half the poem — the " Odyssey" being a later production by a different author. Still more recently, Paley has maintained the same view, and has compared the two poems to pictures of stained glass, made up by an artistic combination of handsome bits of older windows which fortune and time had shivered. We are fortunately able to set over against the names of these great critics another set of names, at least equally great, of men who, in spite of all the learning brought to bear in dismembering the Homeric poems, still defend their substantial integrity. It is the more interesting to observe that some of these defenders were at one time persuaded to adopt the views of Wolf and Lachmann. Goethe was one of these. He gave up at first the unity of the Homeric authorship ; but after- ward his juster poetical insight asserted itself and he set himself to oppose the critical theory. So it was with Nitzsch, though he continued to believe in large inter- polations and additions to the primitive poems. Mure, REACTION IN FAVOR OF THE UNITY 7 in like manner, was first a Wolfian; but after twenty years of study he reversed his judgment and became a zealous advocate of the unity. Gladstone also defends the Homeric authorship, and brings to the defense what the learned Germans so often lack — a statesmanlike common sense. The latest contribution to the discussion is the article of Monro in the last edition of the "Encyclopaedia Britannica," and this too holds to the unity of each poem, though the writer regards the " Odyssey " as composed by a differ- ent and later author than the " Iliad." So the combat- ants are as to numbers pretty evenly balanced, while genius and learning, though at one time they seemed mainly to favor the theory of disintegration, are of late more and more arraying themselves on the side of the traditional view that both poems are substantially by the same author and that this author is Homer. But it is desirable that we should look into the matter for ourselves. Let us briefly review the critical theory, and in reviewing it let us reverse the common order of discussion. I ask the reader to adjourn for a little the question whether the " Iliad " and the "Odyssey" are each a unity, and, granting this for the sake of the argument, I ask him first to consider with me whether these two are works of the same author. There is abundant evidence, as it seems to me, why this latter question should be answered in the affirmative : the " Iliad " and the " Odyssey " are by the same hand. I argue this mainly upon the ground that the two poems exhibit a similarity of structure impossible to explain in any other way, especially when we take into account the fact that this peculiar structure is found only here 8 THE HOMERIC QUESTION in all classic literature, and that it is at the same time characteristic of the highest genius. Jevons, in his admirable " History of Greek Litera- ture," has pointed out that Homer's method of "paint- ing in his background" is entirely unique yet incom- parably artistic. The test of a poet's ability is his method of putting his hearer or reader in possession of the preliminary facts needful to the understanding of the action. There are three ways of doing this. Euripi- des is an illustration of the first : one of his characters appears upon the stage and describes the situation before the play opens ; but this method forewarns the hearer or reader that the play is not reality, whereas the poet's object is so to absorb his audience that they will for the hour regard the performance not as illusion but as real life. Virgil gives us an instance of the second method : the hero of the "y£neid" relates the preceding history to Dido ; but here the speaker is too evidently talking not so much to Dido as to the reader, and so again the illusion is dispelled. The third method is that of constructing scenes necessary to the development of the plot, and yet, in the midst of the forward movement, making these very scenes explain what is behind. This is reality ; this is the highest art ; and this is the method of Homer. Observe how all that is presupposed in the action of the " Iliad " is disclosed by the plot itself. The action lasts only some forty or fifty days. But these forty or fifty days have been preceded by nine long years of siege, during which the Greeks have shut up their enemy in Troy and have occupied themselves in rava- ging the surrounding country. Some knowledge of all PAINTING IN THE BACKGROUND 9 this must be communicated, but only incidentally. The poem begins with the quarrel between Achilles and Agamemnon. It is the father of Briseis, the subject of the quarrel, from whom we learn that these chiefs are beleaguering Troy. Why, we learn from Achilles, when he says that it is for no advantage of his own, but to gain recompense for Menelaus and Agamemnon. How long the siege has continued, we learn from Agamemnon, when he tests the spirit of his men after the defection of Achilles. Just before the first engage- ment, Hector upbraids Paris with the remark : " Thou mayst see what sort of a warrior he is whose lovely wife thou hast." Paris is vanquished and flees to his mis- tress. Then first the guilty cause of the Trojan war appears in the person of Helen. In precisely similar manner does the author of the " Odyssey " paint in the background of his story. The first four books are called the Telemacheia, and they depict the state of things which precedes the action of the poem. Telemachus, the youthful son of Odysseus, is set before us as suffering continual wrong. The inso- lence of the suitors for the hand of his mother is shown by bringing in Athene, a candid judge, in the guise of a stranger. Hoping to win the mother, the suitors even plot the death of the son. Thus, at the beginning, the long distress of twenty years is unfolded before us, yet all by way of incident and as a part of the plot itself. The news about Odysseus, vague at first, becomes more definite, till it stops just where the real action of the "Odyssey" begins. When Telemachus has set sail for Pylos the preparations are complete, and we enter upon the narrative of Odysseus' wanderings and of his return. 10 THE HOMERIC QUESTION Now I submit that this similarity of structure goes far to prove the two poems the work of one author. Here are intuitive discernment of a law of literary composition and successful working in accordance with it which evince the highest genius. That two great poets should have arisen simultaneously in that early age, and that both should have constructed their poems so completely in accordance with this law of the human mind, this law of human thought, that later writers can imitate but never surpass them, this surely is a far greater demand upon our believing faculty than is the hypothesis of one author for them both. This conviction will be strengthened by considering the development of the plot in the two poems, as we have now considered the preparation for it. We must remember that the epic appeals to wonder, just as the drama does. After the situation is set before us, there must come an entanglement which rouses our curiosity. The more complex the plot, so long as it is not con- fused, the more difficult the knot, so long as its intri- cacies can be seen, so much the greater is the interest which is raised in the reader, so much more intense is his demand for the denouement, the untying, the resolu- tion of the theme. We have seen with what art the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey" propose their subjects to us — the concrete before the abstract, synthesis before analysis, the problem before the explanation. Do they also show a common genius and follow a common prin- ciple in the evolution of their respective plots ? The full answer to this question would require an elaborate statement of the argument of each. This is obviously impracticable in the present essay. I must DEVELOPMENT OF PLOT I I content myself with citing a few of the curious corre- spondences of the two poems. In the " Iliad," Achilles is absent from the end of the first book to the beginning of the eighteenth — so in the " Odyssey," Odysseus is absent most of the time. In both the " Iliad " and the "Odyssey," matters grow from bad to worse. In the " Iliad," the Greeks suffer untold woes, although they have for nine years confined the enemy within the walls of Troy. Achilles' absence now enables the Trojans to drive them behind the rampart they have been forced to build, and even to fire their ships ; then Achilles comes forth to avenge Patroclus, the tide of battle turns, and the hero carries death and dismay before him. So, in the "Odyssey," the servants and suitors grow reckless of duty and fearless of punishment — successive outrages intensifying" our indignation — until the many- wiled Odysseus, after enduring incomparable toils and dangers, appears upon the scene, proves his might by stringing his ancient bow, and from it rains upon the guilty crew the shafts of a just retribution. In both the " Iliad " and the " Odyssey," the plot leads step by step to a crisis of moral grandeur ; in both poems this climax is followed by soothing scenes which relieve the long strain upon the feelings of the reader. We claim that the poems are too much alike in this great matter of structure to have been by different authors. Imitation will not account for the similarity ; if it were so, we should have "Iliads" and "Odysseys"in plenty through the after ages. No, this secret of structure is an instinct of genius ; it works spontaneously and unconsciously in the great artist ; only in later times does philosophic analysis penetrate and name the mystery. 12 THE HOMERIC QUESTION The argument from structure is so conclusive that we can afford to leave unnoticed many other evidences of a common authorship, such as the facts that each poem begins with an invocation to the Muse, and that at least two thousand lines of the " Iliad " are found also in the "Odyssey." We need only mention some of the objec- tions to the view that one poet composed both poems. Minstrels appear in the " Odyssey," it is said, but never in the " Iliad " ; we reply that minstrels belong to the court and not to the camp. The gods, it is said, are at bitterer warfare with each other in the " Iliad " than in the "Odyssey"; yes, we answer, but in the "Iliad" there are greater strifes among men to call forth their anger. There are differences of style and spirit between the poems, but these differences are perfectly consistent with unity of authorship when we remember two things : first, that the "Odyssey" is a sequel to the "Iliad," depicting the subsequent fortunes of the heroes of Ilium, and having its scene in European Greece and the Ionian Isles, as the scene of the " Iliad " was in Asiatic Greece and the Isles of the yEgean ; secondly, that the " Iliad " is the work of the author's youth, while the "Odyssey" is the production of his later age. Hence the hero of the first is a youthful warrior, the hero of the second an older wanderer ; hence the p-eo- graphical knowledge of the second is more extended than that of the first ; hence the gods, in both poems a medley of vices and virtues, are on the whole more sober and moral in the " Odyssey " than in the " Iliad," as befits the more mature reflection of the author. The differ- ences between the two poems are not greater than those UNITY OF THE "ILIAD 1 3 between the "Paradise Lost" and the "Paradise Re- gained" of John Milton, or, to take more modern in- stances, between the earlier and the later writings of George William Curtis or Thomas Carlyle. But my learned readers are by this time fancying that I have been choosing an easy controversy with a man of straw, while the real antagonist has been unattacked and unchallenged. I proceed, therefore, to discuss the more important question whether the "Iliad" or the "Odys- sey " is in itself a unity. Was either poem the work of a single author, or are both the products of a gradual evolution, remains of a varied collection of hymns on the war of Troy and the after adventures of its heroes ? Was there one Homer who composed these great epics, or are the poems we now possess a skillful combination of many ancient heroic lays ? Is the present unity, or seeming unity, of each poem due to the genius of one great poet who struck out the plan of the whole at the first, or is it due to critical selection and careful com- pilation in subsequent ages? For the consideration of these questions I trust that what has been already said has prepared the way and has indicated the method. I would still call attention to structure, and would maintain that in the structure of each poem there are evidences of unity so marked and admirable that they point indu- bitably, not to many authors, but to one. The unity of the " Iliad " has sometimes failed to be perceived for the reason that the critic has mistaken the theme of the epic. That theme is not the fall of Troy nor the fate of Achilles ; for neither of these is described in the poem. In the first line of the first book we are forewarned against such misapprehensions, when the 14 THE HOMERIC QUESTION subject announced is Achilles' wrath. The first book, crowded with incident as it is, yet unembellished by a single simile, sets before us the cause of this wrath and the promise of Zeus to avenge the son of Thetis. It is only the death of the Trojan hero at Achilles' hands that sates this wrath, and therefore the climax of the poem is the slaying of Hector. All that follows after this is simply the letting down of the reader's excited feeling, and the poem ends with the line : " Such burial the illustrious Hector found," simply because the reader, without this knowledge, would have been left in painful anxiety. To this death of Hector, the sacrifice that appeases Achilles' wrath, the "Iliad" moves forward and onward from the very start. The reverses of the Greeks and the transient successes of Odysseus and Diomede, both and alike prepare the way for the day of reckoning when the son of Peleus comes to his own once more. And yet with this note of triumph there ever mingles a sorrowful minor strain. The hero of the Greeks was the object of sympathy as well as of admiration. An evil fate hung over him. "Whom the gods love die young." Though the death of Achilles does not form the proper subject of the poem, it is yet intimated prophetically. When, in the first book, the hero appeals to Thetis, it is with a reference to his " brief span of life." In the ninth book again he says : "My returning home is taken from me." In the eighteenth, Thetis, shedding tears, admonishes him: "Straightway, after Hector, death is appointed for thee." In the nineteenth, we hear Achilles yet again: "Well know I that it is ap- pointed me to perish here, far from my father dear and UNITY OF THE " ILIAD " I 5 mother." In the twenty-first : " Under the wall of Troy I must die by the swift arrows of Apollo." And, finally, in the twenty-second book, Hector, with his dying breath, predicts the death of his fierce enemy : " In the day when Paris and Phoebus Apollo slay thee, for all thy valor, at the Scaean gate." Here in the suc- cessive books of the "Iliad" is the gradual unfolding of a prophecy. It reminds us of the far nobler progress in the Old Testament from the protevangelium in Genesis to the clear predictions in Micah and Isaiah. It has been well said that funeral notes mark every appearance of Achilles, and that they grow in intensity with every repetition, like a motif of Wagner's. Now all this is indicative of an underlying design — a design which belonged to the first conception of the poem. It cannot be an afterthought, for it is part of the very warp and woof of the "Iliad." As each feature of a great picture must be in the artist's mind before he puts his brush to canvas, so the ideas of Achilles' wrath and of his fateful triumph must have been from the first in the mind of some composer of the "Iliad." In a true sense the whole antedates the parts, not the parts the whole. Each subsequent part presupposes the parts that have gone before and is unintelligible without them. This is markedly true of that very portion of the poem which has been often held to be a mere episode — the Doloneia, or the episode in which Odysseus and Diomede made their brilliant night foray upon the camp of the Trojans. When we remember that this follows upon Achilles' rejection of Agamemnon's embassy and offer of reconciliation, and especially when we remember that it lifts the Greeks from profound discouragement and 1 6 THE HOMERIC QUESTION prepares the way for the new onset which brings the whole story to its culmination, it will be plain to us that the development of the plot makes indispensable the Doloneia. And so with every other extended passage which the critics have sought to detach. The whole " Iliad " is an Achilleid, and it is vain to seek within the poem for any nucleus which has unity in itself and to which other short productions were added to make up the present whole. Even Wolf never dared to specify what the precise nucleus is. Try to separate any such part from the rest, and you find such a network of mu- tual reference that you are compelled to stop ; there are multitudinous connections, like bloodvessels, which pre- vent you from cutting off any single limb without de- stroying the life of the whole. If the unity of the "Iliad" is demonstrable, that of the "Odyssey" is much more so. Indeed, I do not pro- pose to enter into the detailed proof of it. I prefer to shorten my discussion by adopting as my own the con- clusion of Monro, the latest writer on the subject, when he says : " The unity of the ' Odyssey,' as a whole, is beyond the reach of existing weapons of criticism." In both poems, besides this matter of structure to which I have adverted, there is a consistent delineation of char- acter, which sets before us the greatest variety of gods and men, yet with never a slip or mistake in the way of confounding the traits of one with the traits of another — each character preserves his peculiar identity whenever and under whatever circumstances he appears. There is a composite language — the archaic Ionian is mixed with the later and less flowing speech, leaving it flexible enough for purposes of adaptation, yet like the tongue UNITY OF THE " ODYSSEY " I 7 of Chaucer marking a period of transition and incapable of reproduction at any later time. There is a dignity of style which belongs only to the work of a lofty mind ; the adjective "Homeric" has a meaning as well defined as the adjective "Miltonic." Like every one of the greatest poets, the author of the " Iliad " and of the " Odyssey " is master of all the knowledge of his time, and this conscious mastery breathes everywhere through his verse — incedit regina. I suppose it was the con- vergence of all these proofs which moved Aristotle — one of the most sagacious thinkers the world has seen — to declare that the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey" con- stitute the standard of epic unity. Consider, for a moment, what demands the opposite hypothesis makes upon our credulity. Instead of one Homer, or even of two Homers, we are to believe in many Homers, each equal to the production of a poem which may ultimately constitute a part of the " Iliad " or the "Odyssey." Are great poets, then, so plenty in human history ? The critics seem to think them thick as blackberries in August. But even the Elizabethan age has but one Shakespeare ; we may count ourselves well off if one such star of poesy rises in each five hundred years. Granting that a whole galaxy of poets rose at once, is it probable that they would all choose for their theme the war of Troy, the last year of that war, Achilles among all the chiefs, and, more narrowly still, the one incident of Achilles' wrath ? Would they all, with one accord, ignore the story of Troy's fall, and passing over the fates of all the other heroes, devote their genius to depicting only the wanderings and the return of Ulysses ? 1 8 THE HOMERIC QUESTION Or, if this is credible, can we believe that out of these independent lays a consistent whole could be constructed, with parts so nicely balanced, and with such unity of effect as to make it a paragon of art ? As well believe that the Parthenon is the work of a multitude of succes- sive builders, each beginning where the last left off, but without architect or plan : the rambling incongruities and incompleteness of some English cathedrals show the results of such a method. Or is the genius of the poems the genius of the patient bookmaker — some critical and selecting and combining Peisistratus, or servant of Peisistratus, five hundred years after the original com- position of the separate lays ? Then we have a double problem to deal with : first, why such genius should have occupied itself with work so mechanical and inglorious ; and secondly, why the composer of the nu- cleus should not have been equally competent at the first to organize his material into the finished poem. Whatever proves such genius in the separate parts, proves ability to construct the whole ; whatever proves genius in the compiler proves that compiling would never satisfy his poetical ambition. Professor Mahaffy, in his " Problems of Greek His- tory," has well said that, while the "Iliad" and "Odys- sey" are made up of many different legends, their co-ordi- nation is the work of one great poet. Even the great German critic of Homer calls the "Iliad" "the Greek Bible." Yet he denies the unity of its authorship, and would break it into its component parts. He represents the innovating and destructive tendency of the modern criticism in general. Now that the same method is ap- plied to the Hebrew Bible, and only the nucleus of the UNITY OF THE " ODYSSEY " I 9 Pentateuch is accepted as the work of Moses, we can see somewhat more clearly both the nature of the method and its results. It would rob us of every great name of literature. It would give to the late and inferior talent which can only patch together the works of others the praise that be- longs to supreme creative genius. The large design and simple elegance of the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey" are not the natural product of an artificial age like that of Peisistratus ; they belong to the mighty childhood of the race. Moses and Homer were possibly added to and supplemented as their work passed down through gen- erations following ; Ezra in the former case and Peisis- tratus in the latter had doubtless a part to play in determining what was canonical and genuine. The "Iliad" and the "Odyssey" probably supplanted other and earlier poems which ceased to be read or recited and so were lost forever. But the former supplanted the latter because the former possessed a unity and majesty in which the latter were lacking. It was a case of the survival of the fittest. Homer himself, granting that our doctrine of a single author- ship is correct, may have taken many years for the com- plete elaboration of his poems, and during those years versions of various degrees of perfection may have been set in circulation. Some such hypothesis fully accounts for ancient diversities of reading and provides abundant work for Peisistratus, while it saves the integrity of the poems. Goethe, in one of his letters to Schiller, cites different versions of his own poems to refute the theory we are considering. He had at various times amended and enlarged them, but he did not propose on that 20 THE HOMERIC QUESTION account to concede that there was a second Goethe, or many Goethes. Wolf's " Prolegomena" itself, treated in this way, would furnish evidence that the one Wolf was many Wolfs instead. "The London Spectator" sums up the argument none too forcibly when it says : " It is as impossible that a first-rate poem or work of art should be produced without a great master-mind to conceive the whole, as that a fine living bull should be developed out of beef sausages." Here we must consider a most plausible objection proposed by Paley, the latest English representative of the Wolfian theory. He denies the original unity of the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey" upon the ground that it is impossible to preserve intact so long poems un- written, and that written they could not have been. Let us take these two points in the reverse order from that in which they are stated. Both assertions are without warrant. We meet the first with the counter-assertion that the poems could have been, and probably were, written. All arguments for the unity and the internal vital connections of the poems are also arguments for the writing of them. The burden of proof rests upon those who deny that they were originally written, and the proof of such a negative as this will be found a very considerable burden. We do not choose, however, to avail ourselves of our privilege in this matter. We rather desire to state all the important facts which make against our own view, as well as those which favor it ; let the balance then be struck, and let the reader decide for himself. What was the date of Homer ? or, if any dislike to put the question in that form, when was the substance of the " Iliad " TESTIMONY OF ABOU SYMBEL 21 and of the " Odyssey" composed ? We answer, Homer lived, or the poems were composed, many years after the Trojan war. This we infer from the fact that the poet speaks of the superior size and strength of the warriors who fought before Troy, as of a generation long since passed away. If then we take 1050 b. c, the traditional date of the Trojan war, as approximately correct, we may put Homer, or the rise of the Homeric poems, at 850 b. c, or four hundred years before the time of Her- odotus. The question before us is therefore this : Is it probable that the Greek language was committed to writing and was used for literary purposes so early as 850 b. c. ? We must grant that no actual literary remains, unless it be the poems of Homer, have come down to us from that time. The earliest specimens of Greek epigraphy do not antedate the middle of the seventh century before Christ. The fragmentary inscriptions of Thera, of Crete, and of Naucratis, may be assigned to 650, 640, and 630, respectively. Those of Melos and of Abou Symbel come later still, and probably within the sixth century. As the last of these is peculiarly interesting and significant, I dwell upon it at greater length. Far up the river Nile, in modern Nubia, and at the very confines of ancient Egypt, still stand the remains of the temple of Abou Symbel. On its front is the famous row of colossal statues, seventy feet high, though each is sitting with hands upon the knees. They are awe-inspiring in their solitary grandeur. But to the archaeologist one of the most curious things about them is an inscription cut long after the statues themselves were carved out of the solid rock. That inscription is 2 2 THE HOMERIC QUESTION in Greek. It is upon the left leg of one of the gigantic figures, and below the knee. It is just such an inscrip- tion as an American Vandal will occasionally cut into a famous statue or edifice abroad. It records the names of certain Greek mercenaries in the employ of a certain Egyptian king, Psammeticus. The Greek characters are of antique style. The letter Omicron answers both for Omicron and Omega, and so we are assured that its date must be before the year 540 — for from this time inscriptions have the Omega — Omega being the last in order of the Greek alphabet, simply because it was the last — the last letter invented and added. If we can only learn the date of this Egyptian King Psammeticus, we can fix more narrowly the time of the inscription. There were unfortunately four Psammeti- cuses who might possibly be referred to. But Herod- otus mentions an expedition to Ethiopia by Psammeticus the Second, and it was probably this expedition on which the Greek mercenaries were employed. Now Psammeticus the Second reigned from 594 to 589 before Christ. Sometime before 589 b. c, therefore, this speci- men of Greek epigraphy must have been written. Of the mercenaries some were Ionians and some were Dori- ans, yet all of them used the Ionic form of the alphabet. This presupposes time for the Ionic alphabet to become generally used in Greece, and makes it certain that writing was a common art by the middle of the seventh century. The argument is far stronger than this mere state- ment of dates would seem to indicate. We have been adducing the evidence of inscriptions upon stone or metal. But these imply the long-continued previous ANTIQUITY OF GREEK LETTERS 23 existence of the easier writing upon leather or parch- ment. Archilochus, a poet of about 700 b. c, speaks of " a grievous scytale " — the scytale being the staff on which a strip of leather for writing purposes was rolled slantwise, so that the message inscribed upon the strip could not be read until the leather was rolled again upon another staff of the same size ; since only the writer and the receiver possessed staves of the proper size, the scytale answered all the ends of a message in cypher ; so we get back a hundred years earlier and still find writing among the Greeks. Hesiod dates from about 750 b. c, and Hesiod enjoins that children be not taught letters before seven years old ; and yet we are a hundred years later than the time of Homer. How can we bridge that gulf? Shall we consult Homer himself ? Shall we infer from the tablet which Homer represents Bellerophon as carrying from King Proetus to lobates, that the author of the " Iliad " at least was familiar with writing ? When we read that there were " written in the folded tablet many soul- harassing things," it seems difficult to believe that any mere signs or picture-writing can be meant. Yet this is the clearest allusion to writing in the Homeric poems, and of itself it would be far from proving that the poems themselves were written. Even though this were the case, it would be rather for the help of the composer than of the reader, and the poet would not be any more likely to tell us about the mysteries of his art than the modern extemporaneous preacher or orator is apt to speak of the elaborate writing which precedes his public efforts. We frankly confess, therefore, that we have no great 24 THE HOMERIC QUESTION amount of direct testimony to the existence of writing among the Greeks so early as 850 b. c. But there is an indirect argument from what we know of other peoples with whom the Greeks had intercourse. The Latin race was by no means so quick-witted as the Greek, yet Niebuhr tells us that there were written books under the Tarquins, that is, about 750 b. c, although the oldest Latin inscriptions are several centuries later. The most ancient Hebrew epigraphy, the inscription on the Moabite stone, does not date back farther than to two hundred years after David and seven hundred years after Moses. Yet Moses was learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians, and during the Egyptian nineteenth dynasty, which covered Moses' time, there were "houses of books," that is, there was literature enough to fill whole libraries. The recent excavations of Tel el-Amarna have brought to light a multitude of clay tablets inscribed with cunei- form characters which record the correspondence of an Egyptian with a Babylonian king. We learn from them, to quote the words of Professor Sayce, that "in the fif- teenth century before our era — a century before the Exodus — active literary intercourse was going on throughout the civilized world of Western Asia between Babylon and Egypt and the smaller states of Palestine, of Syria, of Mesopotamia, and even of Eastern Cappa- docia. This intercourse was carried on by means of the Babylonian language and the complicated Babylonian script. This implies that all over the civilized East there were libraries and schools where the Babylonian language and literature were taught and learned. Baby- lonian appears to have been as much the language of RECENT EVIDENCE FROM EGYPT 2$ diplomacy and cultivated society as French has become in modern times." But after all, the common language of Egypt was Egyptian, and this use of Babylonian in the fifteenth century b. c. may be characteristic of the period of the shepherd kings, during which the old Semitic stock got possession for a time of the wealth of the Nile valley. Mr. Petrie, in his recent excavations in the Fayum, eighty miles southwest of Cairo, has unearthed a town of the nineteenth dynasty, or of the thirteenth century b. c. On the pottery of this town Cypriote or Greek let- ters are incised. Another town of pyramid builders, be- longing to the twelfth and thirteenth dyuasties, yielded pottery marked with similar Cypriote letters. He de- clares that all the evidence points to a use of this alpha- bet before 2000 b. c. Dr. Howard Osgood, in his article entitled " The Oldest Book in the World," published in the " Bibliotheca Sacra" for October, 1888, takes us back to an earlier time, at least three thousand years before Christ, and gives the translation of a book of proverbs which might almost have formed the model for Solomon. The Proverbs of Ptah-hotep are in Egyptian. Renouf, in his " Hibbert Lectures," declares that in the fourth dy- nasty, as early as 3124 b. c, there was in Egypt "a universally diffused system of writing and a common use of papyrus." While Professor Hommel of Munich has found proofs of high civilization in Arabia as far back as 2000 b. c, the recent explorations of Professor Hil- precht of the University of Pennsylvania have brought to light at Nippur in Babylonia an inscription which he regards as earlier than 4000 b. c. 26 THE HOMERIC QUESTION Yet there are Old Testament critics who tell us that Moses, who lived about 1500 b. c, and who was edu- cated in the court of the Egyptian king, could not possi- bly have known how to write ; Solomon, who lived about 1000 b. c, could not possibly have been enough in ad- vance of his time — the time required by the hypothesis of natural evolution — to write a book of proverbs. Pro- fessor Sayce, referring to those who have formed opin- ions adverse to the historical character of the Pentateuch, says well that " the Tel el-Amarna tablets have already overthrown the primary foundation on which much of this criticism has been built " ; and Professor Hommel declares his conviction that " Arabia itself will furnish us the direct proofs that the modern destructive crit- icism of the Pentateuch is absolutely erroneous." Let us apply all this to our present subject. The age of Homer was six hundred and fifty years after the time alluded to by Professor Sayce ; eleven hundred and fifty years after the time mentioned by Professor Hommel ; twenty-two hundred and fifty years after that spoken of by Monsieur Renouf ; and thirty-one hundred and fifty years after that given us by Professor Hilprecht. The Greeks were a seafaring people, who inhabited not only the Argive peninsula with its manifold harbors, but also the islands of the ^Egean and the Adriatic ; records lately recovered seem to prove that ./Egean Greeks visited Egypt as early as three thousand years before Christ ; in the nature of things the winds and the waves must have driven Greeks over the sea to Egypt and Egyptians over the sea to Greece ; the Homeric poems themselves speak of such intercourse, besides intimating that there was a coastwise commerce by Avay of Phce- WERE THE GREEKS A DULL PEOPLE? 27 nicia; tradition declares that a certain Phoenician, Cadmus by name, long before the Trojan war introduced into Greece the use of letters ; the letters of the Greek alphabet are substantially the same with those of the Semitic languages, Alpha being only Aleph, and Beta being only Beth in disguise ; and yet, merely upon the ground that no Greek writing remains to us of demon- strably earlier date than b. c. 650, we are asked to be- lieve that at 850 b. c. the composer of the Homeric poems could not possibly have put them into writing. This, as it seems to us, is to attribute to the Greeks a physical inertia, as well as a mental incapacity to appre- hend and to appropriate, which are the precise opposites of all we know of that eager, curious, colonizing race. We find it difficult to believe that it took two thousand years for letters to come around the eastern end of the Mediterranean Sea from Egypt to Greece. We prefer to think that there was some foundation for the belief of the Greeks themselves that letters among them be- longed to the ante-Homeric age. Before the dawn of history the Egyptian Cecrops came, it was said, to Athens, and the Egyptian Danaus to Argos. The time of the driving out of the shepherd kings from Egypt corresponds quite well with these Greek traditions. And how can we explain the universal knowledge of reading and writing among the Greeks two hundred years after Homer's time, unless a very long period of instruction had gone before ? In the days of Solon, six hundred years before Christ, there were laws forbidding the erasure of public inscriptions, and the practice of ostracism prevailed — the marking of a " yes " or a " no " upon a pebble of stone. 28 THE HOMERIC QUESTION At the very time of Peisistratus, there were in ex- istence actual commentaries upon the Homeric poems. Who ever heard of written commentaries upon an un- written poem ? The idea that Peisistratus, three centu- ries after Homer, first committed these poems to writing seems to us amazingly improbable. Grant that writing in Homer's time was a mystery known only to the few ; that it was in possession, not of a reading public, but of a poetical and literary guild ; that it was used as a private help to the bard in composing and memorizing, rather than as a means of communication to others ; still the argument in favor of Homer's use of letters seems to us far to outweigh the argument against it. If the patchwork theory of the Homeric authorship takes it for granted that writing was unknown or unused among the Greeks of Homer's time, it rests upon an ut- terly unproved and an extremely improbable assumption. We do not stop here, however. Even if it could be proved that Peisistratus first secured the writing out of the Homeric poems, we should not surrender the doc- trine of their unity. Our adversaries declare that poems so long as these could never without writing be com- posed in the first place, nor afterward be transmitted intact to future generations. Here again we are com- pelled to meet each part in the declaration with a stout demurrer. The epic, as its very name intimates, is a poem narrated or recited, while the lyric is one sung to the accompaniment of the lyre. As the epic is intended for public recitation, so in manifold instances it has been composed without writing, preserved only in the mind, recited from memory, and, to mix metaphors, orally handed down to posterity. COMPOSITION POSSIBLE WITHOUT WRITING 2Q. The Old German epic entitled "Parsifal," is a poem of twenty-four thousand eight hundred and ten lines, very much longer than the "Iliad" — for the " Iliad " has only fifteen thousand six hundred and ninety-three — yet "Parsifal" was composed by Eschenbach, who could neither read nor write. The weird poems of the Icelandic Skalds were for two centuries transmitted without writing. The Greek festivals have to this day their blind singers who depend on memory alone to keep the thread of their story. Composition is quite possible without writing, as every public speaker can witness. Homer, even if he were blind when he composed his poems, might still have been quite equal to his task. And what was once mentally put into form could also have been mentally preserved. To us, who in these later days depend upon books to keep our treasures for us and use our memories so little, the retention of a whole " Iliad " or a whole " Odyssey" without break or error, seems to savor of the miraculous. Memory does little for us because we give memory so little to do. We have come to cherish a sort of mild contempt for the memorizer, and we doubt the mental grasp of the man of facts and dates. Not so in the early days. Mnemosyne was then one of the Muses. Memory was cultivated, cherished, trusted, honored. Of Alex- ander and of Caesar it was said that they knew all their soldiers by name ; the story at any rate proves that they thought such ability no disgrace to them. There were educated men in Athens who knew the whole " Iliad " and " Odyssey" by heart and could recite them straight on from any point where they were asked to begin. And such power is not entirely wanting in recent 30 THE HOMERIC QUESTION times. Macaulay could repeat, at fifty, long poems which he had never glanced at since he read them for the first and only time at fifteen. And Scaliger, that modern wonder of learning and scholarship, com- mitted the whole of Homer to memory in twelve days, and all the extant Greek poets in three months. If we only now consider that in prehistoric times this com- posing and reciting of epic poetry was a regular trade, so richly rewarding with gifts and honors those who were its masters that memory was stimulated to put forth its highest powers, we shall rid ourselves of the last vestige of doubt whether poems as long as Homer's could have been composed without writing and then handed down substantially intact for several centuries. We ought not to miss here the incidental advantage of our present study in furnishing a parallel to the oral transmission of the Gospel narratives. All competent investigators now agree that from twenty-five to thirty- five years intervened between the death of our Lord and the putting into its present written form of each of the Synoptics. And there are not wanting those who de- clare that even in that brief time the stories of Christ's life might become so altered as to be untrustworthy. But these critics are strangely forgetful of some very common facts. A sacred narrative, which has assumed stereotyped form and which passes from lip to lip, may be submitted to a constant process of verification. Just as many an aged saint who knows her Bible mentally corrects the slips in a young preacher's quotations, so the first disciples, we may believe, were evermore con- ning and correcting the oral narratives which they heard, purging them of excrescences when such appeared, and THE EVOLUTIONARY THEORY 3 I bringing them back to the standard form. A narrative upon which the church was founded and for which Christians had to answer with their lives might con- ceivably have been handed down, not simply for twenty- five or thirty-five years, but for a century, without seri- ous loss or change. The Gospel problem seems an easy one when we have once granted that the Homeric poems could have been transmitted intact for more than three hundred years. And yet we are not quite through with the objections of Paley. To all that have been mentioned he adds this last of all : Homer, he says, could not have composed poems so long as the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey," for the reason that there was no reading or hearing public to be addressed by such poems. It is the old evolu- tionary theory in a new guise. The simple must come before the complex. Early times have patience and attention only for poems that are brief and fragmentary. The complicated epic whole must be the result of the constructive and combining genius of later times. Unfortunately for this theory the facts are all against it. There was just such a public as the full-fledged "Iliad" or "Odyssey" requires. It was found in the halls of the petty kings or chieftains of early Greece. There every comer was welcome and there were many guests. The numerous retainers of the household con- stituted of themselves a sufficient audience, and the songs of the bard were the chief amusement of the evening, as athletic games and sports were the amuse- ment of the day. Minstrelsy was a recognized and honored profession. In the simple days when society has emerged from bar- 32 THE HOMERrC QUESTION barism, but has not yet taken on the conventional refine- ments of an advanced civilization, nothing so stirs the blood and rouses enthusiasm as the story of martial deeds. In " Ivanhoe," Sir Walter Scott has given us a glimpse of such entertainment in the rude halls of our Anglo-Saxon ancestry. So it was among the Greeks. Evening after evening the singer was assured of one constant audience. Instead of being compelled to tell his whole story in a single night, he was the best poet who could longest spin his tale. Provided only that part was connected with part, that there was development of plot, and all tended to a fitting climax, he might sing on for a thousand and one nights, like Queen Scheherezade. The genuine epic, then, being only a metrical kind of story-telling, naturally has its place at the beginnings of civilization. It is history and mythology and poetry and music all in one. As the incentives to its cultivation are then the greatest, and as original genius is then most free from the fetters of precedent, it is only natural that we should find in these primitive times some of the greatest masters of spontaneous song. Patriarchal monarchy and family life afford the typical field for the development of epic poetry. Lyric poetry just as naturally belongs to the later day of aristocracies, when a privileged class takes the place of the large family life we have described. Now, the one great house and gathering place is replaced by many and smaller mansions ; meetings are of the few ; we find the exclusiveness of good society ; there are other means of entertainment as well ; the song must be elegant, con- ventional, and brief. Last of all comes the time of democracy, when power THERE WAS A HEARING PUBLIC 33 has gotten into the hands of the people. Then the whole free population of a city must be amused. It is an audience that does not long hold together ; it is the time of the rhapsodists or reciters of select portions of the old songs ; the new poetry is all dramatic, suited to the entertainment in the open air of large numbers at once. This progress from epic to lyric and from lyric to dramatic poetry was a matter of actual history in Greece. When Paley tells us, then, that a reading public did not exist in Greece before the year 430 b. c, we do not simply content ourselves with denying the fact, we claim that it makes no difference to our thesis whether there was or not. There certainly was a hearing public, and precisely such a one existed in the two cen- turies after the Trojan war as might furnish the best op- portunity and incentive to the epic genius of a Homer. The reader has doubtless concluded long since that this argument is endless, and I am myself pretty nearly of his opinion. There are a score of points, all of them important and interesting, which I might have embraced in my treatment. I have confined myself to a few which can be popularly stated. The result of the investigation may well remind us of that not too learned English stu- dent, who, being required on examination to give the present state of the Homeric question, said : " The old view was that both the poems were written by Homer, but it is now concluded that they were written by another man of the same name." However learned and plausible the theories of a later putting together of ancient poetical fragments may be, they all suffer ship- wreck on this single rock — the necessity of finding in the early time of the petty kings some commanding 34 THE HOMERIC THEOLOGY genius capable of gathering the traditional material, or- ganizing it about one central theme, and determining its poetical form. This genius must have been one, not many ; and it is not credulity, but simple common sense, to take for our own the well-nigh unanimous consent of antiquity, and to call that genius by the name of Homer. II I have been treating of the Homeric Question. But I have not been Presenting Thebes and Pelops' line, Or the tale of Troy divine, entirely for its own sake. I have intended it to prepare the way for a succinct account of the Homeric The- ology. To this latter theme I now address myself. I wish I could relieve my reader's fears by assuring him that the temple to which I introduce him is, like the temple at Jerusalem, far smaller than the portico at its entrance. But I cannot so easily part company with the principles of rhetoric. The Homeric Theology is as noble a subject, and it requires as long a treatment, as the Homeric unity. This latter question, indeed, de- rives much of its importance from its connection with the former. If Homer is only a name for many bards scattered in space and time, then the Homeric theology can hardly be expected to have consistency and unity. If, on the contrary, there was one Homer, and the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey" were both his work, then from the poems of this great genius of the early world we may hope to learn something about that early world's religious doctrines and beliefs. That there was one HOMER HAD HIS THEOLOGY 35 Homer, and that he composed both of the poems which after times have ascribed to him, with the possible ex- ception of unimportant interpolations, I propose hence- forth to take for granted, and I would now ask only about his theology. It is perhaps unnecessary to say, and yet to prevent any possible misconception it may be well distinctly to declare, that I do not profess to find in Homer a charac- teristically religious poet. Homer never heard of the word "theology," nor did he ever write the "Iliad" or the "Odyssey" with the conscious aim of setting forth theological ideas. Not the epic poets, but the tragedi- ans, were the religious teachers of the Greeks. The tragic stage, upon which yEschylus produced his " Pro- metheus Bound," and Sophocles brought out his "Antigone," was the Greek pulpit, and there we are to look for appeals to conscience and threats of the gods. The Athenian archon, under whose charge these plays were represented, was clothed for the purpose with priestly dignity, and the whole office was an office of religion. The epic, on the other hand, was more nearly a means of amusement, when instruction and amusement went hand in hand. Its place was the court of the petty king, its time the hours that followed the games and the banquet. If we could conceivably have a tragedy from the time of Homer, we should doubtless have more of religion and more of theology than Homer has given us. Yet Homer had his theology, notwithstanding ; for every poet puts together in more or less complete form the facts which he has apprehended about Deity and the relations of Deity to the universe. Se moguer de la philosophie, c est vraiment philosopher — to mock at 36 THE HOMERIC THEOLOGY philosophy is to philosophize ; and even when Homer satirizes the gods he shows that he has ideas about them. Theology may popularly be defined as the doctrine of God, of man, and of their mutual relations. I propose simply to ask what are Homer's ideas about God and what are his ideas about man's relations to God. God, sin, atonement, a future life — these are the determining elements of every theological system ; if we can learn what Homer thinks of these, we shall have the substance of his theology. Perhaps the first thing that strikes the thoughtful reader of the Homeric poems is their undertone of monotheism. This may surprise some who have re- garded Homer only as a polytheistic poet, yet it is nev- ertheless true. Though there are many gods in the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey," yet they constitute a hierarchy in which Zeus is supreme. Very often we read of "the god," in the singular number, without the mention of any definite name, and in connections which seem to show that it should be translated simply " God " ; in other words, it is an expression of an in- eradicable belief that deity is one. Of this god, whose name is Zeus when any name is given him, the other gods are in some sense manifesta- tions. Some of them are his children and derive their life from him. Two of them, Athene and Apollo, are hardly more than hypostases, or personifications, of his energy ; with Zeus these two constitute an inner circle and faintly remind us of the biblical Trinity — Athene being the divine wisdom and Apollo the executor of the divine will. Here, Ares, Hephaestus, Hermes, Artemis, and Aphrodite had a second rank. Then, thirdly, come ZEUS A MAGNIFIED MAN 37 Poseidon, Hades, Dione, and Letona, and after them the whole multitude of inferior gods who preside over the forces of nature or are identified with particular rivers, winds, and groves. And yet, even of Zeus, the head of this imposing hierarchy, as well as of all the other gods, it is true that he is but a magnified man. The only absolute dis- tinction between gods and men is that of immortality. But this immortality of the gods is a physical immor- tality. They have bodies like the bodies of men, bodies dependent upon physical nutriment. Their food is ambrosia indeed, and their drink is nectar ; but they must perpetually partake of these if they would not die. So they are not self-subsistent, like the God of the Bible ; the ground of their being is in something outside of themselves. As this endless continuity of physical being is the only characteristic difference between gods and men, it is a bar that may be broken over. Odysseus would have become a god if he had accepted Calypso's invitation and had eaten of her promised ambrosia in- stead of confining himself to the food of mortals. Etymologically and symbolically, ambrosia is itself im- mortality, so that the gods feed on immortality, even as they wash themselves in beauty. Hence the oath by the Styx, the river of the world of the dead, is the only oath that irrevocably binds them ; for physical death would be the end of their godhood. The bodies of the gods are of great size. When Athene smites Ares with a stone on the plain of Troy, it is said that "seven roods he covered in his fall." They are of great voice ; the battle-cry of Ares and Poseidon is loud as the united shout of a myriad of the Greeks. They 38 THE HOMERIC THEOLOGY have their fixed abodes — Poseidon in the depths of the sea at Aegae, and Ares in the land of Thrace ; the tem- ples consecrated to them are only occasional haunts ; Hephaestus has built for the family of Zeus permanent habitations upon Mount Olympus. Though they are subject to these limitations of space, their movements are very rapid ; Hermes, it is true, tires of his long journey to Ogygia, yet one spring of the horses of Here takes them through the haze into the distance upon the open sea. Theoretically, the gods know all things and can do all things ; practically, they are ignorant of some of the matters that most concern them ; can be most egregiously deceived ; are obliged to take counsel before they know their own minds ; have their wishes thwarted by other gods and even by mortal men, as when Posei- don's son Polyphemus is blinded by Odysseus. This antithesis between the theoretical and the actual is one of the most significant things in Homer. Either as the remains of a primitive revelation handed down by tradition, or as the result of man's own religious nature which ever prompts him to " seek God, if haply he may feel after him and find him," the poet is contin- ually declaring the omniscience and omnipotence of the gods, and yet, almost in the same breath, is most incon- sistently attributing to them all the weaknesses and limitations of men. Again and again they are called "the blessed gods," and yet we read of their stains and pains, of their wounds and weeping and fear. Thetis sheds bitter tears over the fate of her son Achilles, and Zeus is sorely troubled about Here's anger, even when the nodding of his dark brow makes Olympus quake and assures. victory to the Greeks. RELATION OF ZEUS TO FATE 39 There is a similar duality in Homer's representation of Fate and of Jove's relation to it. At times Zeus and Fate are one ; the same things are ascribed to Zeus and to Fate ; Zeus is the dispenser of the Fates. But at other times Fate appears as a Will side by side with that of Zeus, and even over Zeus and all the other gods ; they must passively submit to Fate, when they are un- willing actively to employ themselves in its accomplish- ment. Zeus is the head of an Oriental council, the master of an Oriental harem : that is Homer's method of representing the manifoldness of the divine manifesta- tions. Fate is one, inevitable, binding both gods and men : that is Homer's effort to supplement polytheism with the inalienable consciousness of the unity and ab- soluteness of God. But this Fate, though it stood for the highest Homeric conception of the Godhead, never was worshiped, never could be worshiped, for it was devoid of mind and heart, and could hardly be distin- guished from blind and inexorable necessity. The idea of something done beyond that which is or- dained, something surpassing Fate, is certainly, though only rarely, found in Homer ; it seems once more to open the door that had been closed against divine and human freedom, and to relieve the sternness and arbi- trariness of Fate. But both Fate and that which is be- yond it are equally abstractions ; they have no eye to pity and no arm to save. Homer's doctrine of the God- head shows us two thing's : first, that human nature de- mands a deity free from limitations and lifted above the finite ; secondly, that human imagination is utterly un- able to construct for itself such a deity, and when it at- tempts the task succeeds only in making a huger finite 40 THE HOMERIC THEOLOGY being like itself. God created man at the first in his own image ; the heathenism of which Homer is the noblest representative can only create a god in the image of man. This becomes still plainer when we examine the poet's conceptions of God's moral attributes. There can be no exacter measure of the chasm that separates the Homeric from the biblical theology than the way in which they respectively treat God's attribute of holi- ness. The Scriptures bring this characteristic of God's nature before us more frequently than any other ; this is the fundamental attribute that conditions all others ; this it is that chiefly makes God to be God. But in Homer the gods never even once have this quality ex- pressly ascribed to them — they are constantly called blessed and immortal, but they are never once called holy. The gods have a sort of moral perception, indeed, but this is exercised only in estimating the character and acts of men. They are like some men we know of, who have a very keen conscience for other people, but very dull for themselves. The noble swineherd, Eu- mseus, tells Odysseus that " it is not froward deeds that the gods love, but they reverence justice and the right- eous acts of men." One of the wooers declares that " the gods, in the likeness of strangers from far coun- tries, put on all manner of shapes and wander through the cities, to watch the violence and the righteousness of men." When the suitors have suffered their deserts, the aged Laertes can say : " Father Zeus, verily ye gods yet bear sway on high Olympus ! " Zeus sends floods upon the people whose judges deliver unjust judgments. THE GODS INSTIGATE INIQUITY 41 The gods are displeased because Achilles pitilessly retains the body of Hector at the ships and will not take ransom for the dead. But now observe how in this last instance Homer takes back again all that he has given to the gods in the way of praise. How came this pitiless spirit into Achilles' heart ? Ajax tells us when he addresses the hero : " The gods have put within thy breast a spirit implacable and evil." And so the gods appear again and again as tempters to perjury and adultery, as in the violation of the truce which Zeus himself suggests, and in the unfaithfulness of Helen which Aphrodite in- spires. It is not enough to say that the gods permit these things — they actually bring them about by their direct and efficient causation. How devilish, it has been well remarked, is the deception which Athene in the form of Deiphobos practises upon Hector in the hour of his extremest need, when she flatters him with a brother's voice and lures him to destruction ! The truth is, that God and devil are confounded in Homer. The suitors look to the gods for help in their iniquities. The gods regard only their own honor and pleasure in the government they exercise. They are envious — Poseidon envies the Greeks their rampart, because it rivals the wall he had built for Troy, and he envies the Phseacians their prosperous voyages, because these voyages seem to make the Phaeacians instead of himself the lords of the sea. Not only crime, but hap- piness also, is punished by the Furies. The gods are revengeful. Here and Athene never cease to hate and to afflict the Trojans on account of the judgment of Paris, and Poseidon never ceases to 42 THE HOMERIC THEOLOGY pursue Odysseus even though Odysseus' only fault was this, that he had rid the earth of a monster. The gods are placable sometimes, but at other times neither a just cause nor manifold offerings can remove their anger. The Zeus of Homer is only an immortal man. The gods are only projections into space and formal embodiments of human feelings, impulses, and passions. Aphrodite is little more than a name for illicit desire ; Hermes for the disposition to falsehood. So Athene at times is but a figure for the better judgment of Odys- seus or Achilles ; Ares stands for the warlike spirit ; Apollo for presages of the future. This brief survey has been sufficient, I trust, to con- vince the reader that Homer's conception of God is that of a nature-deity, who includes in himself all the forces of the physical and moral world, whether these are good or whether they are evil. Homer's God is God, world, man, and devil, all in one. God is the sum of all hid- den causes. Different names are given to his various manifestations and appearances — and so we have the nine great Olympians and the whole retinue of minor gods besides. Personality belongs to him — but then in his aspect as Fate impersonality belongs to him also. He is moral and is the source of all law among men — but then he is immoral also, and his law is an arbitrary thing, having no fixed abode in his nature and not al- ways enforced on earth. It is a most interesting question how such a conception of the godhead could have originated. Are these " fair humanities of old religion," so called, the offspring only of a mythologizing tendency inherent in the childhood of the race ? Some writers would have us believe this. ORIGIN OF THIS CONCEPTION 43 The Greeks, they say, were natural poets. Imagination conceived of nature as alive ; each natural phenomenon, each movement of the spirit within, seemed due to a separate will ; supernatural beings were thought to find in human affairs everywhere a field for their activity ; the artistic instinct unconsciously wrought over this material ; the innocent result was the gods of Greece. Alas for the theory, Homer himself furnishes the refu- tation of it. There is enough of the divine unity, spir- ituality, and righteousness left in his representations to show that these growths were not wholly imaginative and poetic. Ever and anon we hear the deep conscious- ness of God uttering its protests against the impieties with which sense and art seek to drown its voice. This god-making was not innocent. It began in the desire of fallen humanity to rid itself of the thought of a moral God who would challenge its impurity and pun- ish its transgressions. It transformed the one holy Will into many wills, sometimes conflicting, often malig- nant, but never unalterably righteous, until at last all things, without the soul and within as well, whether evil or good, were ascribed to them. Art proceeded to clothe these creations with beauty, but it was a mere- tricious beauty, and it led to further debasement of the idea itself ; the statues of the gods became an object of idolatry. This is the genesis of heathenism. The Apostle Paul has given us the only philosophical as well as the only authoritative account of it. It is not the result of natural evolution, but of guilty degradation. It presupposes a primitive knowledge of God. The heathen are "without excuse: because that, knowing God, they glorified him not as God, neither gave thanks, 44 TH E HOMERIC THEOLOGY but became vain in their reasonings and their foolish heart was darkened. Professing themselves to be wise., they became fools, and changed the glory of the incor- ruptible God for the likeness of an image of corruptible man, and of birds, and four-footed beasts, and creeping things." And so we come naturally to examine the Homeric doctrine of sin. It is evident that with such a doctrine of God, the poet's idea of sin must equally diverge from the truth. If God is a spiritual and personal being whose will is that we be like himself in holiness, then sin will be a self-chosen unlikeness to God in character and conduct. But if God is the sum of all natural ten- dencies and forces, both good and evil, as Homer repre- sents him, then sin can at its worst be only the short- sighted following of evil impulses, the origin of which can in the last analysis be ascribed to God himself. And this is actually the prevailing conception of sin in the " Iliad " and in the " Odyssey." There is no idea in these poems more striking to the practical moralist than that contained in the word Ate. By derivation and in its practical use, it signifies a be- fooling. And this is the chief element in sin. Sin is not a matter of will, — the self-assertion of freedom in opposition to the will of God, — it is the error or mis- take of foolishness, and this foolishness is due to the gods themselves. Agamemnon, when he gives account of the fault he committed against Achilles, declares that Zeus had bound him with might in grievous blindness of soul. In the noble address in which Phoenix, the instructor of Achilles, labors to turn the hard heart of his old pupil, SIN IS DECEPTION 45 there occurs so remarkable a description of this Ate, or Sin, that I quote it entire : Therefore, Achilles, rule thy high spirit ; neither beseemeth it thee to have a ruthless heart. Nay, even the very gods can bend, and theirs withal is loftier majesty and honor and might. Their hearts by incense and reverent vows and drink-offering and burnt-offering men turn with prayer, so oft as any transgresseth and doeth sin. Moreover, prayers of penitence are daughters of great Zeus, halting and wrinkled and of eyes askance, that have their task withal to go in the steps of sin. For sin is strong and fleet of foot, wherefore she far outrunneth all prayers, and goeth before them over all the earth making men fall, and prayers fol- low behind to heal the harm. Now whosoever reverenceth Zeus' daughters when they draw near, him they greatly bless and hear his petitions ; but when one denieth them and stiffly refuseth, then depart they and make prayer unto Zeus the son of Kronos, that sin may come upon such an one, that he may fall and pay the price. Let me quote, also, the words of Agamemnon, after Achilles had renounced his wrath. He is speaking of his own fault which had roused that wrath. He says complacently : It is not I who am the cause, but Zeus and Destiny and Er- inyes, that walketh in the darkness, who put into my soul fierce madness on the day when in the assembly I, even I, bereft Achilles of his meed. What could I do ? It is God who accom- plisheth all. Eldest daughter of Zeus is Ate, who blindeth all, a power of bane ; delicate are her feet, for not upon earth she goeth, but walketh over the heads of men, making men to fall, and entangleth this one or that. Yea, even Zeus was blinded upon a time, he who they say is greatest among gods and men ; yea, even him Here, with female wile, deceived. Then, after describing how Ate deceived even Zeus himself, Agamemnon tells us how the father of gods and men awoke from his illusion : 4.6 THE HOMERIC THEOLOGY Sharp pain smote him in the depths of his soul, and straight- way he seized Ate by her bright-haired head in the anger of his soul, and swore a mighty oath that never again to Olympus and the starry heaven should Ate come, who blindeth all alike. He said, and whirling her in his hand, he flung her from the starry heaven, and quickly came she down among the works of men. Thus also I, what time great Hector of the glancing helm was slaying Argives at the sterns of our ships, could not be unmindful of Ate, who blinded me at the first. But since thus blinded was I, and Zeus bereft me of my wit, fain am I to make amends and recompense manifold for the wrong. So we read of Zeus himself falling into sin, and then in revenge leading men into it. Again we see that Zeus is both God and Satan. The result is that we have no deep confessions of sin, and no deep penitence, either in the "Iliad" or the "Odyssey." How can there be either, when the blame of sin is shifted from man to Ate or Zeus or Fate ? The later Greek tragedy shows much more of the workings of remorse than we find in Homer, yet even in the later Greek tragedy CEdipus declares that his evil deeds have been suffered, and not done. It was the terrors of a guilty conscience that first led men to turn the moral God into the unmoral gods — then they reaped the fruit of their error in a new depravation of their moral con- sciousness ; the unmoral gods became so far the authors of men's sins that the sense of guilt well-nigh disap- peared. Well-nigh disappeared, I say, but not altogether. Just as we recognized an inconsistency in Homer's repre- sentations of God, so we must recognize an inconsist- ency in his representations of sin. Through the mist of this self-excusing theory there gleam again and again YET SIN IS SELF-DECEPTION ALSO 47 the inextinguishable lights of the earlier and truer faith. Conscience now and then asserts herself. Hector, when urged by Andromache not to enter the fight, speaks of the sore shame he will feel, if, like a coward, he shrinks from the battle ; yet, when at last he ventures to under- take the combat with Achilles, he fears lest he has un- done the Trojan host by his wantonness. Not only the desire for fame, but the sense of honor, keeps from evil deeds and prompts to bravery. Self-respect is a power in the Homeric poems ; and in the assertion of the bet- ter self against the seductions of ease and pleasure, we find a remnant of fidelity to conscience. It is true that this self-respect not unfrequently be- comes exaggerated and perverted. The conscience that has no standard outside of self sometimes applauds self- seeking. Yet overweening pride and self-assertion are not only objects of dislike, but they are charged to men's account and are visited with unmistakable punishments. These are the faults of Achilles, and the fact that Zeus imbues him with pitiless revenge is not regarded as destroying his responsibility. Giving place to one's own hardihood and strength is a crime before both gods and men. Men can yield to wantonness, being the fools of their own force. Ajax might have escaped his doom at the hands of Poseidon had he not let a proud word fall in the fatal darkening of his heart, when he said that in the gods' despite he had escaped the great gulf of the sea. Here then we have a partial corrective applied by Homer himself to that very superficial and immoral conception of sin which prevails in his poems. Sin is, after all, not wholly a deception from without, a work of 48 THE HOMERIC THEOLOGY the gods in which man is simply passive. Sin is also man's own act, the expression of his selfishness. It is pride and self-will, infatuated with the conceit of inde- pendence, and despising alike the ordinances of the gods and the rights of men. While sin is deception, it is self- deception also. And so, side by side with the common disposition to excuse sin and throw the blame of it on the gods, we find an occasional word of self-reproach. In Helen, the great sinner of the Homeric story, even while she attributes her faithlessness to Fate and to Aphrodite, there ever lives a feeling of guilt and re- morse ; she calls herself a hateful wretch, a shameless bitch. And there is definite expectation of punishment for sin ; at times " a fearful looking for of judgment." The whole course of the two poems is proof that the unsophisticated moral sense of mankind demands repara- tion for wrong-doing. On the one hand, Achilles' inor- dinate anger is punished by the slaying of Patroclus, his dearest friend ; on the other hand, the sin of Paris and of his countrymen who abetted it meets its just retribu- tion in the death of Hector and the predicted fall of Troy. Through ten years of outrage and insolence at the hands of the wooers, Telemachus has no resource but his trust in the avenging righteousness of the gods. Warnings only harden these evil-doers. They have fearful premonitions of their doom, but they only banish them with laughter. The gods are represented as arranging circumstances in such a way as to bring their iniquity to a head and to occasion its most flagrant manifestation. Their sin is punished by involving them in more aggravated wickedness, until at length per- suasions and entreaties are useless, for their appointed AND SIN DESERVES DEATH 49 day of vengeance has already come. When the arrows of Odysseus strike the suitors at the very culmination of their villainy, those arrows are the very thunderbolts of Zeus. The hero proclaims himself to be the executor of the divine judgments when he says : " These hath the destiny of the gods overcome and their own cruel deeds." Sin is ill-deserving ; sin puts the sinner in antagonism to God ; sin is sure to be punished ; the infatuation of sin is itself a part of its punishment — these great truths stand fast in Homer, in spite of the easy shifts by which he commonly relieves the conscience and dims the holi- ness of God. The doctrine of Scripture is purer than Homer's, for while Scripture tells us that God hardened Pharaoh's heart, it does not fail, in close connection therewith, to tell us that Pharaoh hardened his own heart, and so to intimate that the divine operation is not immediate or causative, but only permissive and indirect, through the circumstances which God ordained and the means of enlightenment which he gave, but which Pha- raoh's evil disposition seized upon as an occasion for the manifestation of his own heart's iniquity. There are no permissive decrees in Homer, and this is the chief defect in his doctrine of sin. At the best, the responsibility for transgression is divided between man and God, and conscience has the force of her accusations partly broken. Yet even Homer teaches that sin deserves death, and that punishment is a debt due to the gods. The " Iliad" and the "Odyssey" are everlasting witnesses to the fundamental postulates of natural religion. Homer, as we have seen, recognizes that sin deserves death and that punishment is a debt due to the gods. 50 THE HOMERIC THEOLOGY Can there be remission of penalty and pardon of the guilty ? Is there any way by which man may be just with God ? Has God ever made himself known as the Helper and Saviour of sinners ? These are questions which we have still to ask our poet. The answer to them will constitute the Homeric doctrine of atone- ment. There are burnt-offerings and sin-offerings in both the "Iliad" and "Odyssey." The most striking of them all occurs in the first book of the former poem. The fatal shafts of Apollo are falling thick and fast in the Grecian camp, and men are everywhere dying under the inflic- tion. The god is angered at the insult offered to his priest and temple, by the capture of Chryseis, the priest's daughter. Reparation must be made. Odysseus is made the captain of a ship of twenty oarsmen, in which Chryseis is taken to her father, and with her an offering to the god. When they reach Apollo's temple they purify themselves and cast the defilements into the sea, and sacrifice unblemished hecatombs of bulls and goats, and the sweet savor arises to heaven eddying amidst the smoke. Then speaks Odysseus to the priest : " Chryses, Agamemnon, king of men, sent me hither to bring thy daughter, and to offer to Phoebus a holy hecatomb on the Danaans' behalf, wherewith to propitiate the king that hath now brought sorrow and lamentation on the Ar gives." So Chryses lifts up his hands and prays aloud for them : " Hearken to me, god of the silver bow, that standest over Chryse and holy Killa, and rulest Tenedos with might ; even as erst thou lieardest my prayer, and didst me honor, and mightily afflictedst the people of the Danaans, even so now fulfill DOES IT INVOLVE SUBSTITUTION ? 5 I me this my desire : remove thou from the Danaans forth- with the loathsome pestilence." Thus he speaks in prayer, and Phoebus Apollo hears him. The object of this sacrifice is expressly said to be propitiation, and propitiation is the turning away of anger. The anger of the god has been incurred by sin, and this sin has involved guilt and defilement. The de- filement is symbolically put away by the washing of Odysseus' company and by the casting into the depths of the sea of the water that has removed their stains. The guilt is atoned for by the shedding of the blood and the burning of the flesh of animals offered in sacrifice. Satisfaction is in this way rendered to the offended majesty of the god, and pardon is secured for the offenders. No one can read Homer without perceiving that this element of satisfaction to the deity enters into every sacrifice of every sort. In the sacrifices of the Bible there is another element of equal importance — that of substitution. Satisfaction by substitution makes up the full conception of the offering there. Is this element of substitution found in Homer ? Not so plainly, we grant, as it is found in later Greek poetry, where Hermes declares to Prometheus that he shall not be released until some god appear as a successor to his sufferings, one willing to go down to Hades and Tartarus for him ; not so plainly as the Latin poets declare it, when Ovid bids the gods take the heart and flesh of the victim for the heart and flesh of the offerer, and Virgil says of the sacrifice : " One head shall be given for the many." But even in the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey" there is evidence that the idea of substitution is by no means wholly absent. The 52 THE HOMERIC THEOLOGY shedding of the blood of the brute is an alternative set over against the shedding of the blood of the sinner. When Agamemnon has slain the lambs before the single combat of Paris and Menelaus, he pours forth wine with their blood before the gods, and the Achseans pray : " Zeus, most glorious, most great, and all ye im- mortal gods ! which folk soever be first to sin against the oaths, may their brains be so poured forth upon the earth even as this wine, theirs and their children's." All through the "Odyssey" there is the continual pre- monition of coming doom in the declaration that the evil deeds of the suitors are unatoned for ; the offerings which they make are devoid of any power to avert or postpone their fate ; when they die at the hands of Odysseus, they themselves pay to the gods the penalty which they fain would have escaped by sacrifice. The Old Testament shows us a system of sacrifice much more fully developed, and one which enables us to understand the offerings of the Homeric poems. In the scapegoat, we have the analogue of the defilements which Odysseus casts into the sea ; while the burning of the slain beasts is in both cases the same. The Hebrew conception of God as holy and of man as per- sonally guilty, made the bloody offering of the Old Tes- tament a recognized picture of the ill-desert of sin and of vicarious satisfaction for it ; the death of the animal took the place of the death which the offerer had incurred by his transgression and restored him to the divine favor. We are persuaded that the sacrificial language of the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey" can never be explained except by supposing that it is the relic of an age when the race had a better understanding of God and of sin. OLD TESTAMENT ANALOGUES 53 Men in Homer's time have forgotten God's holiness and have blinded themselves to the fact of their own guilt, so that at last much of the meaning of the sacrifices which they traditionally offer has dropped out ; at times they seem to be regarded as in themselves a sufficient compensation for the offense committed ; at times the sensuous gratification of the god appeases his anger. But the outward forms still remain, and, whenever con- science revives, it puts into them more or less of their old significance. Sacrifice is evermore a vivid, because a divinely appointed picture, of sin's desert of death and of the divine intention that man's guilt shall be removed by the laying of it upon another and so make perfect satisfaction to the law and justice of God. Homer re- tains the element of satisfaction to God's justice ; he only occasionally, and then vaguely, suggests substitution. Let us not blame Homer too much. Those were the times of ignorance, which God in his forbearance over- looked. Christ had not yet come. Not even the Jew was yet aware that God himself was to provide the lamb for a burnt-offering, and that all this paraphernalia of sacrifice was only a mute prophecy of the atoning work of the Son of God. To the Homeric age the gods were far away. They had mingled with men long be- fore the war of Troy, but that intercourse had ceased. There were no present communications either in the way of teaching or command. The will of the gods could be learned only by inference from the history of the past, or by the obscure leadings of natural insight. As the Scripture declares, God suffered men to walk in their ways and to demonstrate the inability of human nature, left to itself, to find the way of peace or holiness. 54 THE HOMERIC THEOLOGY Homer's doctrine of sacrifice can give no peace to a guilty conscience, for it is a merely human offering ; none can say whether the gods will accept it ; they may indeed be moved to pity and forgiveness, but then they may not ; the result is wholly arbitrary and uncertain. Hecuba offers an embroidered robe, if perchance she may induce the goddess to spare Hector, but Pallas Athene denies the prayer. Odysseus slays the ram to secure pardon for his killing of the Cyclops, but Zeus heeds not the sacrifice. These are examples of at- tempted expiation that accomplish nothing. The most Homer can assure us of is the possibility of forgiveness. The gods determine arbitrarily the limits of their anger, and humanity lives without the certainty of mercy. Let this examination of the Homeric doctrine teach us the immeasurable superiority of the Christian scheme. Here we have what natural religion and philosophy can- not give — a sure word of God, a voice from out of the darkness and the silence, declaring that there is for- giveness with him that he may be feared ; that if the wicked will forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts, and will turn unto the Lord, he will have mercy upon him, and unto our God, he will abundantly pardon. And if this assurance seem, in view of God's holiness and our sin, too great to be believed, we have made known to us the immutable foundation upon which the promise is based, the provision of grace in accord- ance with which God can be just and yet justify the be- liever in Jesus. In the Christian system there is an atoning sacrifice provided not by man but by God himself, a sacrifice of nobler name and richer blood than any offered upon ESCHATOLOGY IN HOMER 55 heathen or Jewish altars, even the sacrifice of the Son of God himself. God has come down to earth again and has joined himself to humanity in more perfect manner than ever Homer fabled of Aphrodite or of Zeus, in order that he might lift man up to heaven in more perfect manner than Homer fabled of Hercules when he married Hebe, the daughter of eternal youth. Aye, God in the person of his Son has put his own great shoulders under the burden of our guilt and has himself suffered as an atonement to his own violated holiness, in order that the sinner may be saved. Hea- thenism tells us that the gods have certain favorites whom they love, sometimes without regard to morals or to justice, but it never tells us that they love man every- where, even in his sins, and that they love him so greatly that they are willing to die, and actually die, in his be- half. Christianity alone shows us that the glory of God is in self-sacrifice, that the lifting up of the Godhead above humanity and the coming down of the Godhead into humanity are one and the same thing. Heathen- ism is the vain attempt of man, by self-moved and self- dependent works and sacrifices, to lift himself up to God. Christianity is God's coming down in mercy and grace, to do what man can never do for himself, namely, to redeem man from his sins and to lift him up to God. A few words with regard to Homer's ideas of the future life must complete our view of the Homeric the- ology. The reader will be able to anticipate the most that we can say, if he will but remember how far Homer is from recognizing the independence of the human will, and how completely he makes immortality depend upon the continued existence of the body. After the 56 THE HOMERIC THEOLOGY soul has left its earthly tenement, it wanders desolate on the shores of the other world, but being bodiless, it is destitute of full personality. Memory and hope are alike obliterated. Only when the shadowy dead drink the blood of the sacrifices to which Odysseus invites them, do they recover their recollection of the past and their ability to recognize the living. In all this we have testimony to great truths, though these truths are most dimly apprehended. That the eidolon, or shade, continues to exist after death, even although separated from the body it once inhabited, shows that Homer was no materialist after all ; at the risk of an inconsistency, he will recognize the spiritual nature of man. But this shadowy existence is hardly to be called existence — it is devoid of all that renders life desirable. When Odysseus in the house of Hades assures the shade of Achilles that the Achasans give him honor with the gods and count him a prince among the dead, the hero only answers : " Nay, speak not com- fortably to me of death, great Odysseus. Rather would I live upon the soil as the hireling of another, with a landless man who had no great livelihood, than bear sway among all the dead that are no more." And the longing for the renewal of physical life ex- plains the strange eagerness with which the ghosts crowd about Odysseus, and clamor for the draught of blood which will even momentarily reanimate their powers and give them back again the consciousness which death had taken from them. It is Homer's way of telling us that man is a two-fold being ; that an in- termediate state in which the soul is sundered from the body is an abnormal state ; that the truest life is LIFE INCOMPLETE WITHOUT THE BODY 57 impossible except in a state where soul and body are joined together. As there is only a shadow of man's being in that other world, so that world itself is but the shadow of a world. Orion drives the wild beasts over the mead of asphodel, and Minos wields a golden sceptre, giving sentence from his throne to the dead ; but both the mead of asphodel and the golden sceptre, like Orion and Minos themselves, are shadows. Yet in that under-world, on the other side of Oceanus, in the sunless West, there are those who punish men, and the heavier crimes meet their just desert. How all this is possible in a world where the bodiless soul is incapable of thought or memory, we must not too narrowly in- quire. The spirit at any rate still lives. It is regarded as in some sense freed from the limitations of sense. Invisible, its existence is somewhat like that of the gods. It can have libations made to it, and can be addressed in prayer. In the last book of the " Iliad," Achilles draws wine from a golden bowl and pours it forth upon the earth, calling meantime upon the spirit of hapless Patro- clus. In the last book of the Odyssey, Odysseus makes a drink-offering and entreats with many prayers the strengthless heads of the dead. The reader cannot fail to perceive that we have here, not in Scripture, the origin of the invocation of the saints. The divi manes became in the Roman Catholic church the canonized departed, and this very term divi was used to character- ize them. The apotheosis which lifted Leucothea and Ganymede from earth to heaven was held to have its Christian counterpart in the act by which God makes men partakers of the divine nature and causes them to sit with him upon his heavenly throne. 58 THE HOMERIC THEOLOGY Yet this idea of future reward for the righteous has very narrow and meager expression in Homer. Of Menelaus alone is it declared that he is not ordained to die, but that the deathless gods will convey him to the Elysian plain and to the world's end where life is easiest for men. No snow is there, nor yet great storm, nor any rain ; but alway ocean sendeth forth its breezes to blow cool on men. As there is no distinct statement of punishment for all the wicked, but only for the most outrageous transgressors, so there is no distinct promise of happiness for the good, but only for a few excep- tional favorites of the gods. The doctrine of future re- wards and punishments was in later times far more fully developed — only the germs of it do we find in Homer. Indeed he cannot develop it, for the one means by which, in accordance with his general system, blessed- ness could be assured to the departed has never oc- curred to him. Consciousness and happiness are de- pendent on the possession of a physical organism. True life can be ours only by joining body and soul once more together. But Homer nowhere tells us of a resurrec- tion ; he knows no way of rescue from the power of the grave ; life and immortality have not yet been brought to light by the gospel. Here is another truth which Moses knew, and the Egyptians long before him, but which became so lost out of the beliefs of the Greeks, that when Paul proclaimed Jesus and the resurrection to the men of Athens, they only mocked at him, and thought his story too silly for a hearing. And as for hope in death, Homer has nothing of this either. The golden fabric of life is shot with many a thread of sorrow. Outwardly the world is fresh and THE HUMAN INTEREST PREDOMINATES 59 young, and it rejoices in its youth, but the joy is super- ficial — listen intently and you will hear a sound of wail- ing over the instability and brevity of earthly things. Age finds death welcome, for death puts an end to pains of body and the caprice of fortune ; but, when death comes, it only ushers the soul into a cheerless region of wandering and retribution, where there are indeed bitter punishments for the wicked, but no sure rewards for the righteous. There is no rest for the weary in this pres- ent world, and there is still less rest for the weary in the world to come. How strangely incongruous with the whole tenor of the " Iliad " and the " Odyssey " would be an interpolation of that verse from John's Gospel, " I am the resurrection, and the life ; he that believeth on me, though he die, yet shall he live ; and whosoever liveth and believeth on me shall never die " ; or this from the Apocalypse, " Blessed are the dead which die in the Lord from henceforth ; yea, saith the Spirit, that they may rest from their labors ; for their works follow with them." If there is any one lesson which, more than any other, is taught us by this study of Homer, it is man's need of a special divine revelation. We see humanity blindly groping after the truth with regard to God, sin, > atonement, the future life, but utterly unable to reach it. These great poems do not teach us so much of divinity as they do of humanity. They set before us in vivid pictures the ideas of courage and endurance which make the ideal man, when once God's ideal of humanity has faded out of sight. It is this human interest which makes both the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey" great; in each there stands forth a living man ; Achilles represents 60 THE HOMERIC THEOLOGY the grandeur, as Odysseus represents the virtue, of the heroic character. In each poem the hero is made to speak out, and to act out, an inner life peculiarly his own : the fiery wrath of Achilles and the fiery love that conquers it, the patient faithfulness of Odysseus and his many devices — these, and not mere external incidents, are the subjects which the poet is intent upon develop- ing. How different from the Christian standard of humility and mercy is the warlike grandeur of Achilles! How different from the Christian standard of simplicity and truth is the wily wisdom of Odysseus ! Heathen doctrine has begotten heathen morality — the stream cannot rise higher than its fountain. Yet these natural virtues, half-barbaric as they are, have a splendid vigor in Homer's pages, and they will never cease to captivate the world. And Homer's women, with what slight touches, yet how masterly and sure, are these selected types painted upon the canvas ! I do not speak of Helen, whose imperishable beauty through all the vicissitudes of war and conquest subdues both friend and foe, even though alternate self-reproach and easy indifference reveal the shallowness of her nature. I do not speak of Nausicaa, that picture of pure girlishness, in which naivete and dignity, sagacity and modesty, innocent curiosity and womanly promise, so exquisitely blend. I speak rather of Andromache, the heroine of the " Iliad," the tender wife and mother, whose grief at Hector's loss so crushes her that she has not even one word of anger or reproach for those who slew him. And I speak of Penelope, the heroine of the "Odyssey." As Andromache is the model of passive, so Penelope is the model of active, suffering. Here is SPLENDOR OF THE HOMERIC POETRY 6 1 marital fidelity, which through the long and lonely years solaces itself indeed with weeping, yet ever weaves anew the web of hope and planning for her lord's return. In the depicting of these characters, so individual all and so distinct, Homer, more than any other poet ex- cept Shakespeare, absorbs himself ; the creator is lost in his creations ; we know much about Ajax and Ther- sites, about Circe and Eumaeus, but we know very little about Homer himself. There is a spontaneity and exuberance of imagery, moreover, an endless fertility of invention, a largeness and roundness of conception, a dewy sparkle and fresh- ness of phrase, that befit the early morning time of his- tory. How unconventional and yet how graphic, how ornate and yet how simple, how definite and yet how sublime, is the poetry of Homer ! Physical health breathes through it ; more than any other epics, these are the poems of out-of-doors. The earth, the sky, and the loud-resounding main are here. On the plain of Troy we catch the dazzling gleam of the innumerable bronze, as the serried ranks of the Greeks move for- ward to the fray. On the waters we hear the shrill west wind whistling through the cordage and singing over the wine-dark sea. By day the Achaeans fight like unto burning fire, saying that one omen is best, to fight for one's country. By night the watch-fires of the Tro- jans are countless as the stars when the air is windless and all heaven opens to the view and the shepherd's heart is glad. Apollo is made known by the dread clanging of his silver bow ; the lame Hephaestus hobbles about to dispense the nectar amid the unquenchable laughter of the blessed gods. Upon their hinges groan 62 THE HOMERIC THEOLOGY the gates of heaven whereof the Hours are the warders, to whom are committed great Heaven and Olympus, whether to throw open the thick cloud or to shut it to. The persuasive words of Odysseus are like the snow- flakes of the early winter, so softly do they fall ; there is something awe-inspiring in every word of Achilles, as when he opens his mouth to say : " Hateful ! to me as the gates of hell is he that hideth one thing in his heart and uttereth another." Is it wonderful that Xenophanes called the " Iliad " and the " Odyssey " "the primary source of all education," and that y£schy- lus called his own tragedies but " fragments from the great banquet of Homer " ? Whether for good or evil, Homer has been one of the world's chief teachers. Every later poet has formed his poetic style more or less upon Homer's model; where the influence has been unconscious, it has been none the less real. Like the Colosseum at Rome, the "Iliad" and the " Odyssey " have been a quarry, from which later builders have drawn a large part of their material. Subtract from the " yEneid," from the " Divine Com- edy," from the " Paradise Lost," what of substance or expression they indirectly or directly owe to Homer, and you would hardly recognize your Virgil or Dante or Milton. We cannot doubt that Providence ordained these poems to be a great factor in the education of mankind. Hegel makes the godlike Achilles fierce but brave, impulsive but generous, the type and incentive of Greek civilization. Who can measure the influence which Homer has exerted, not only on the literature and liberty of Greece, but on the literature and liberty of SPLENDOR OF THE HOMERIC POETRY 63 the world ! His poems have in them an inexnaustible vitality, and no device of criticism can tear from his brow "his crown of indivisible supremacy." Even now, as we look back upon the past which poetry has peopled with heroic figures, we descry far in the distance, but still towering above the rest, the form of great Achilles, and " through the music of the languid hours we hear, like Ocean on a western beach, the surge and thunder of the Odyssey." A single poet in a narrow sphere has succeeded in catching the ear of all generations, and we learn the lesson that man's influence is not measured by his small surroundings, and that this world and the drama enacted here may be the source of good to all the universe. God would seem to have given the death- blow to the whole theory of impersonal and atheistic evolution by ordaining at the very dawn of human his- tory that the greatest of epic poets should also be the first. VIRGIL VIRGIL THE POET OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE Rome had conquered the world and the victors were scrambling for the spoils. Two great civil wars natu- rally followed the earlier wars of conquest. In the first of these civil wars, Marius and Sulla measured their strength against each other. After seven years of bloodshed, Sulla entered Rome in triumph and was made dictator just eighty-one years before Christ. Then followed thirty-seven years of exhaustion and peace, broken only by Pompey's overthrow of Sulla's constitution in the year 70, and Caesar's overthrow of Pompey and the republic in 48. The second civil war began just so soon as there arose two new leaders able to continue the fight. Those leaders were Antony and Octavian, the former Caesar's legal heir, the latter Caesar's personal heir. As in the first civil war Sulla had represented the aristocratic party against Marius, so in the second civil war Octa- vian represented the popular party against Antony. The civil wars were in part a contest of principles — the principle of senatorial aristocracy on the one hand and the principle of democratic rule on the other. But they were still more a contest of ambitious men, each bent on making himself the foremost man of all this world. As Sulla defeated the plebeians only to 67 68 THE POET OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE make himself dictator, so Octavian defeated the sena- torial party only to make himself supreme. His assump- tion of the title of Augustus was the beginning of the Roman Empire, and Augustus was none the less em- peror because he clothed his power with the old forms of the republic. When, after thirteen years of anarchy and carnage, the battle of Actium in 3 1 left Caius Julius Caesar Octavianus Augustus the sole authority in the State, the world heaved a sigh of relief, and welcomed peace even at the cost of liberty. It has been said of Milton that if it had not been for the civil war in England he never would have written " Paradise Lost," with its account of rebellion in heaven and the downfall of the prince of darkness, but would have commended himself to posterity only by such poems as " Comus " and "The Nativity." It must be still more evident that the greatest of the Latin poets was the product of his time, and that both his earlier and his later work can be interpreted only in the light of contemporaneous Roman history. Virgil had his birth and his education during those thirty-seven years of comparative peace and exhaustion when the Roman world was recovering from the first, and was gathering strength for the second, of the great civil wars. Here was a lull in the noise of battle, in which a pensive and imaginative nature might nourish dreams of Arcadian happiness and rest. The results we find in the " Eclogues," and the " Georgics," which, though written after the second civil war began, and taking a plaintive tone from the sorrowful surroundings of the time, are yet a reflection and expression of the quiet and seclusion of Virgil's earlier years. After the VIRGIL A PRODUCT OF HIS TIME 69 civil war is ended, after the world is unified, after Au- gustus is enthroned, a grander spirit of confidence takes possession of the poet, and he sings in the "JEneid " the new beginning of national life, the actual reign of universal peace, and the promise of perpetual dominion, which fate and the gods have given to Rome. Freeman, the historian, dates the beginning of mod- ern times from Caesar's conquest of Gaul. Then first the Southern races were brought into contact with the lands where lay the scene and the forces of future his- tory. But we must remember that Northern Italy was Cisalpine Gaul, and that it became an integral part of Rome only after Virgil reached his manhood. Born in the center of this Northern Italy, and possibly himself of Celtic descent, or as others have suggested, connected with the Tyrolese over the mountains, he did not be- come a Roman citizen until his twentieth year. Well- nigh a century later, a certain Roman tribune in Pales- tine declared that with a great sum he attained this freedom. In Virgil's youth, from the country beyond the Po, still subject to arbitrary confiscation and parti- tion at the nod of the Roman master, and overrun with the legionaries returning from the Eastern wars, Rome and Roman privilege and Roman power must have loomed up as the greatest things on earth. All love for the place of his nativity, and all hope for its future, must have connected themselves in his mind with Rome. The modern element in Virgil's poetry is the product of these two factors — the fresh new life of Northern Italy and the all-encompassing grasp of the imperial city which had brought the whole world to its feet. But we must know something more of the poet's early JO THE POET OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE surroundings, and something more of his personal traits. The modern Lago di Garda, the greatest lake of Italy, fed by the snows of the Tyrolese Alps, sends out from its southern extremity the last and largest affluent of the Po. This river is the Mincio — " the smooth-sliding Mincius " of Virgil — as the Po was once Padus, and the lake Benacus, by name. The Mincio, not more than fifty miles long with all its windings, grows broad and sluggish as it comes down into the plains until, about twelve miles above its junction with the Po, it fairly encircles the city of Mantua, whose towers and walls rise as from an island in the midst of the swampy and reedy lagoons of the lakelike river. Mantua has until recently been one of the most for- midable fortresses in Europe. Sixty miles west from Venice, seventy southeast from Milan, eighty northwest from Florence, ninety northeast from Genoa, and one hundred and eighty northwest from Rome, the city holds a strategic position that is commanding, as both Napoleon I. and Napoleon III. well knew. Here Giulio Romano built for the Gonzagas his Palazzo del Te, with its Sala dei Giganti, or Hall of the Giants, where, by a combination of mechanical with artistic devices, as one describes it, "the rout of the Titans, still contending with artillery of uptorn rocks against the pursuit and thunder- bolts of Jove, appears to rush downward on the spec- tator." In the city of Mantua, Sordello, the precursor of Dante and the hero of Browning's mysterious story, was born and sang. And in the same city, or on the hilly slopes not far away, a greater than Sordello, the precursor of modern poetry and civilization, the poet of Rome, the most complete literary representative of virgil's personal traits 71 the Latin race, and the best-read poet of all time, was born also. It was seventy years before Christ when Virgil first saw the light. He was a shy and gentle spirit, sober and unworldly, diffident of his own powers, modest even to rusticity in his manner, melancholy, yet kindly in temper. He could never arrange his toga to please men of fashion, and he always wore shoes too large for his feet. Virgil never married ; he was accessible only to intimate friends ; he was a man of books, as Horace was a man of the world. After he had won friends and fame, and audiences in the theatre rose to salute him as they did Octavian, he yet stole along the streets in trepi- dation lest he should be recognized, and a single whisper, "There goes Virgil ! " would drive him into the next house for refuge. It is possible that his bashfulness and reserve were due in part to ill health, for though tall and dark he is said to have been a victim to chronic asthma and headache. Augustus, sitting between Virgil and Horace, who suffered from an affection of the eyes, said jocosely that he was between sighs and tears. Like many another poet, in his youth Virgil seems to have known little of youthful sports. He never bore arms, as Horace did under Brutus at Philippi. He was a man of contemplation rather than of action. Yet he inspired affection. He was the friend of Maecenas, the patron of art and Augustus' great minister ; he knew Augustus himself before Horace did, if he did not ac- tually make Horace known to Augustus. In an age when decorous vice was almost universal, Virgil by his temperance and purity gained the title of Parthenias. A sort of virgin sanctity seemed to envelope him. He 72 THE POET OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE was wrapped in loftier thoughts than the men who lived and wrought around him. It was an age of criticism and of unbelief. Heroic days were getting to be matter of jest, and religion was mostly an affair of the rabble. But Virgil saw beneath the surface. He had the poet's eye for reality. The heroic stirred him — he was a hero-worshiper. The nil admirari spirit of his time did not infect him. He saw that men live by admiration, hope, and love. So he tried to combine the later science with the primitive faith, to bring back the age to a belief in the higher powers, to inspire in a generation that was self-seeking and partisan some sense of the greatness of the State, of the duty of patriotism, of the dignity of labor, of the value of peace ; in short, he would make Rome secure by investing public virtue with religious sanctions. The father of Virgil, the well-to-do proprietor of an extensive farm, though not himself a man of education, seems to have spared no expense or pains in the educa- tion of his son, accompanying him at the age of sixteen to Cremona, as the father of Horace accompanied his son to Rome. Virgil had probably read Homer from his childhood, for Cicero tells us that Northern Italy was at this time especially noted for its study of Greek. At the age of eighteen we find him in training at Rome. His endless industry is praised by his biog- raphers. Science of all sorts attracts him. Like every great poet, he masters the learning of his time. Siron initiates him into the secrets of philosophy, to such ex- tent that at one time he vows to devote his life to ab- stract thought ; and, in many subsequent hours of des- pondency over what seems to him his ill success in his THE EDUCATION OF THE POET 73 real vocation, he regrets that he did not fulfill his early vow. Even to the end of his days his love for philos- ophy never leaves him, and both Plato and Epicurus seem to speak again in portions of his verse. But to Virgil, dirices ante omnia Muses. To poetry he early consecrates himself. He has the sense of a mission. He sets himself as deliberately to become a poet as Cicero sets himself to become an orator. The labor of years seems short, for the love he has to the Muse. Seven years he gives to the composition of his first poem ; seven years to the second ; ten years to the third ; and then he wishes to destroy this third, because, forsooth, his life is too short to furnish the three addi- tional years needed to complete it. So, revolving long his several themes and working them over and over be- fore he gives them to the public eye, he at last produces works of such incomparable artistic excellence that the world will not willingly let them die — indeed, they seem endowed with an inherent immortality. If other things are equal, poetry lives in proportion to the perfection of its artistic form. As the produc- tions of the poet are borne downward on the stream of time, those which have angularities of structure are caught and stopped upon their way — only the rounded and innately beautiful pass by all obstacles and sail on to the ocean of eternal fame. And Virgil was pre-emi- nently the artist. He, perhaps, more fully than any other of the sons of men, had the literary instinct, the discernment of form. Not so much a creator as a shaper of material, he regarded thought as a means of producing literary effects. He was a rhetorical poet, if the phrase be permissi- 74 THE POET OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE ble. But as the true rhetorician knows how to choose great themes, because only great themes will bear the richest garb, so Virgil never wastes his gifts on empty words. Beginning with lighter subjects, probably be- cause he seems to himself more equal to them, he gives the maturity of his powers to the greatest subject pos- sible to his time, — he celebrates the rise of Rome's po- litical dominion ; and, by linking her present grandeur to the heroic past, he blends patriotism and piety to- gether. And "the silent spells held in those haunted syllables " have done more than any other single in- fluence to give a humane and gracious aspect to the hard- ness and sordidness of Roman life. Latin before the Christian era would seem the language of a heartless race, and Rome would seem only incarnate power and law, if it were not for the sweetness and pathos of Virgil. In this matter of artistic form Virgil was an origi- nator. He carried the music of words to a higher per- fection than it had ever reached before. Other Latin poets had preceded him, but in their hands the strength of the language had hardly been tamed — it was sono- rous, but it was harsh ; it had majesty, but it lacked melody. Ennius, the Calabrian, was a half-Greek, and he aimed to reproduce in Latin the Homeric hexameters ; but Ennius, though he had a lofty genius, was deficient in art, and it was left to Virgil to make that verse " the noblest metre ever molded by the lips of man." En- nius died just a century before Virgil was born. He was the father of Latin poetry. His "Annals," a cu- rious mixture of history and song, unquestionably fur- nished Virgil not only with his metre, but with the THE GREATEST OF IMITATORS 75 theme of his great epic — the origin, greatness, and des- tiny of Rome. Whole lines from Ennius, indeed, are said to remain embedded in the "iEneid," and to give archaic simplicity and force to portions of Virgil's poem. Lucretius was born ioo b. c, while Virgil was born in 70. Catullus preceded Virgil only fifteen years. Both Lucretius and Catullus were in the zenith of their fame during the years when Virgil was getting his train- ing. He was profoundly influenced by both of them. Lucretius was the most original and profound thinker of the Roman race. His doctrines of the uniformity of nature and the reign of law became a part of Virgil's system of thought, while Virgil, unlike Lucretius, con- tinued to believe in a will of the gods which expressed itself in nature and molded the wills of men. From Lucretius, moreover, Virgil caught an impassioned ear- nestness, a condensation and vividness of expression, which constitute one of the most marked characteristics of his verse. Catullus furnished Virgil with an example of sweet sadness and graceful melancholy ; but the later poet im- proves upon the tender cadences and the pathetic sim- plicity of his predecessor, by adding to them dignified refinement and just bounds. To put it all in a word, Virgil has absorbed in himself and has combined into one all the great merits of the Roman poets that preceded him. If Virgil had contented himself with drinking in and reproducing the general characteristics of the earlier poets, no fault could ever have been found with him. If, like Milton, he had recalled without copying, he would have had only praise. But Virgil is the greatest j6 THE POET OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE of imitators. Whatever suits his purpose, whether in Greek or Latin verse, he appropriates without a qualm of conscience, and with an air of happy self-compla- cency. True it is that whatever he touches he adorns. When he was charged with using Homer's similes as if they were his own, he merely replied : " Only the strong can wield the club of Hercules." He has made others' work his own so perfectly that what is original with him can hardly be distinguished from what he has ap- propriated. So Moliere said boldly : " I take my prop- erty wherever I find it." Even in Shakespeare we have a somewhat similar phenomenon. Plot and incident, thought and phrase, our greatest poet often borrows with perfect unconcern. His early dramas are appar- ently only others' tragedies made over, but made over so wonderfully that even their original authors had more reason for admiration than for complaint. Virgil is no plagiarist in the ordinary sense. As Dr. Wilkinson has well said, he looked upon Homer and the elder poets, both of Greece and Rome, as a great treas- ure-house, like that of nature itself. He does not seek to conceal his indebtedness — he rather desires it to be recognized. Like the Spartans, he would have us ad- mire the art with which he steals. Just as Charles Sumner sometimes introduced into his speeches imita- tions of noble passages from Demosthenes, and was only delighted when you noticed and praised them as a proof of his scholarship and taste, so Virgil would only have felt complimented if you had pointed out how in- geniously he had made his own poems an anthology of all the poets that had gone before him. An echo, says Miss Wedgewood, may be sweeter than the sound that PROGRESS IN HIS WORK JJ awoke it, and we may be thankful that Virgil has echoed down to our time a thousand voices of the past that would otherwise be lost. We may say something more about this matter of originality, after we have considered what Virgil actually wrote. As we have already intimated, there was pro- gress in his work, corresponding to the breadth of his experience and the maturity of his powers. As we think of the " Eclogues," the " Georgics," and the " ^Eneid " succeeding one another, first the graceful pastorals, secondly the didactics of industry, thirdly the great political epic, we are reminded of Tennyson — the linked sweetness and indecisive touch of his youth- ful poems such as, "Airy, fairy Lilian," the philosophic depth and moral energy of his manlier work in " In Me- moriam," and the broad freedom and epic swing of his later " Idylls of the King." The earliest work of Virgil was naturally the " Ec- logues." He had been dispossessed of his country home by Caesar's veterans. But Pollio, the Roman gov- ernor of the district beyond the Po, had introduced him to Augustus, had interceded for him, and had secured a decree of restoration. When he went to take his es- tate however, he found that de jure ownership was one thing, and de facto ownership was another. The old soldier in possession attacked him with such passion and vigor that Virgil was forced to swim the Mincio to save his life. It is doubtful whether he ever really recovered the farm. Some say that Augustus preferred to permit his legionary to retain what he had so stoutly defended, and that Virgil was compensated in some other way, possibly by the gift of a residence in Naples. 28 THE POET OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE In the city and not in the country the " Eclogues " were probably written. Blessings brighten as they take their flight, and most poetry in praise of country life is written in the town. Shut out from his home, a thou- sand sweet illusions gather about the memory of it. The poet feels the tender grace of a day that is dead. Tityrus, who had worked the farm on shares and had enabled Virgil of old time to play the gentleman farmer while he gave his thoughts to poetry, is now exalted into an Arcadian shepherd. The tending of flocks is the only real work of life ; love-making and contests of verse and song are its solaces and delights. That such a poem could have been published in the year 37 before Christ, in the midst of the second great civil war, shows not only the idealizing powers of the true poet, but also the large fruitage of Virgil's previous years of calm. There is a naivete and a liquid flow to the " Eclogues " which witness to the rise of a new force in literature. Pollio is said to have pressed the poet to the writing of them, and Theocritus is said to have furnished the model and the inspiration. But no one who has in imagination reclined with the writer sub tegmine fagi can ever banish from his mind the delight- ful freshness of the verse, the charm of the Italian landscape which pervades it, and the impression of Vir- gil's wonderful love for nature. Nature seems actually to live and speak. She mourns for the dead Caesar, as in Greek poetry she mourned for the dead Daphnis. "In the last Eclogue," as another has said, "all the gods of Arcady come to console the poet when his faithless lady has forsaken him to follow his rival to the wars. This passage suggested the august procession of THE "GEORGICS OF VIRGIL 79 the superhuman mourners of Lycidas, which in its turn suggested to Shelley the splendid fragment of Adonais." In the "Georgics," published in 30 or 29 b. c, after the great victory of Actium had made Augustus sole ruler of the Roman world, we have a more sober and lofty poem, whose temper of chastened hope and serene endeavor, to use the phrase of Prof. Sellar, befits the time of settlement. The word " Georgics" might be translated "Field-work." It is a glorification of indus- try. The country is not now the scene of perpetual holiday, as it was in the "Eclogues." Work is to be done, and the four sorts of work give their themes to the four books, which successively treat of tillage, trees, herds, and bees. Here too, Virgil had his model, and the model was Hesiod's "Works and Days." He had his prompter also; for Maecenas, the generous patron and encourager of timid genius, urged the writing of them. There was reason enough for the advice. The long wars had been times when regular government was almost suspended. Rapine and corruption had stalked in the track of the advancing armies. There was danger that the old virtues of the republic would be buried in the republic's grave. What could arrest the decay of Roman life? Nothing but a revival of the principles which at the first had made Rome great. Industry, frugality, simplicity, love of home, and reverence for law — these must take the place of strife and luxury, of ambition and greed. With a true poet's insight and with a true patriot's hope, Virgil seems to have risen to the occasion. He clothes with a halo of imagination and invests with a tender beauty all the homeliest details of country labor and country life. The "Georgics" 80 THE POET OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE would be the greatest of didactic poems if they were meant to be a didactic poem at all. But this is a mis- taken notion ; they were never intended to answer for a book of instruction to the farmer. Their object rather was to elevate men's conceptions of the arts of peace, to dignify humble toil, to teach the love of country, to inspire reverence for nature's laws. These poems give us, more plainly than any others, Virgil's ideas about nature and about government. Na- ture to him means universal law. The same authority which in the "^Eneid" appears as Fate, appears in the "Georgics" as Nature. "Thus Nature," he says, "at first imposed these laws, these eternal ordinances, when Deucalion first cast stones in an empty world, whence the hard race of men arose." But Nature, to Virgil's mind, does not exclude intelligence, or prevent the care and purpose of the gods. Hear him once again: "In- cessant labor conquers all things"; "for gods there are"; "Jove hurls the lightning" ; "therefore venerate the gods"; "may they now save the Saviour of the State!" And so Virgil's doctrine of divine government leads to his doctrine of human government. That too has divine sanctions. Augustus, who had pacified the world and saved the State, was the very embodiment at once of the will of the gods and of eternal law. It is not necessary to regard Virgil as a mere court poet, who flatters Augustus as a matter of trade. Nor was the deification of the emperor a piece of sycophancy. Per- verse and idolatrous though it was, it was still in large part, as I shall hope to show, the blind exaggeration of a noble sentiment — the sentiment of loyalty and of THE "jENEID OF VIRGIL 8 1 reverence for divinely appointed powers. As the He- brews of old called human judges "gods," because they were appointed by God to stand in his place and admin- ister justice in his name, so the apotheosis of the Caesars and Virgil's declaration that Augustus would be exalted to heaven, as a new star filling the gap between the Virgin and the Scales, were in some degree a poetical recognition of the fact that the powers that be are ordained of God, and that his faithful representatives shall partake of God's own immortality. There is a promise in the "Georgics" which indicates the consciousness in Virgil's mind that the time was near when he could venture upon a larger task than any he had yet achieved. He declares that he will yet wed Caesar's glories to an epic strain. The "y£neid" is the fulfillment of that promise. Ten years of work he spent upon it. In the "Eclogues" he had followed in the track of Theocritus; in the "Georgics" he had imitated Hesiod; now in his last great poem he mounts higher, and aspires to produce a work like those of Homer. The "^Eneid " indeed is intended to be an " Odyssey" and an "Iliad" in one, the first six books with the wan- derings of iEneas aiming to be an "Odyssey," and the last six books, with their battles on land, aiming to be an "Iliad." The hero, however, as befits the unity of the epic, is in both halves of the story the same, the pious iEneas; and the great object of the poem is to show how the universal empire of Rome, which the gods had willed and Fate had decreed, was first established on the Italian shores. Virgil will write a poem that reflects the genius and the destiny of the Latin race ; he will dignify the history of Rome by linking it to the heroes 82 THE POET OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE of antiquity and the counsels of heaven ; he will clothe his theme with all the splendors of legend and song ; he will reproduce the Homeric poems in Italy; he will himself be the Homer of Rome. How fully this magnificent project was realized we have now to inquire. There seems every reason to be- lieve that, till within a few hours of his death, he was hopeful of accomplishing his task. In the year 19 b. c, he read to Augustus and to Octavia, the sister of Au- gustus, the second book of the poem with its account of the destruction of Troy, the fourth book with its tragic story of Dido, and the sixth book with its descrip- tion of ./Eneas' descent into the underworld. It is said that when Octavia heard the splendid eulogy upon her son, the dead Marcellus, the mother's heart within her gave way; she fainted both for grief and joy; and she revived to make the poet glad with a great gift of gold. But the "^Eneid" was not yet ready to leave the author's hands. The whole poem lacked revision; in the latter part especially there were lines still incom- plete ; Virgil counted three more years as necessary to finish his work. He set out for Athens, in order on the voyage to get the local color needed for his description of the wanderings of ^Eneas. At the capital of Greece he met Augustus. The emperor persuaded Virgil to return with him to Italy. The burning sun of Megara made him ill. He continued his voyage notwithstand- ing. At Brundisium he died, and he was buried at Naples. All the great Latin poets died young. Neither Catul- lus nor Lucretius reached middle age. Virgil, when he died, had just passed it, for he was fifty-one. He died VIRGIL COMPARED WITH HOMER 8$ despondent, because he thought his work undone. He begged that the "^Eneid," since he could not complete it, might be burned ; he called it a piece of lunacy that he ever consented to undertake so great a task; he valued the "Georgics" more highly, because they were within the compass of his powers. So Milton thought his "Paradise Regained," as respected its subject, a greater poem than his "Paradise Lost." It is well for us that Virgil's dying injunctions were not carried out. Augustus knew too well the poetical and political value of the "^Eneid" to permit it to be destroyed. Instead of burning it, he ordered it to be most carefully preserved ; he commanded that it should be neither amended, added to, nor altered, in any way ; through his influence it gained at once a circulation and fame entirely unexampled in ancient times. It remains the most complete picture of the Roman mind at its highest elevation. It is the noblest contribution to pure literature that has ever been made by the Latin race. And yet we must not rate Virgil too high. Among ancient poets he is the second, not the first. We must grant that he is not a Homer. For while Virgil has talent — prodigious talent, Homer has genius. And the difference between the two is this : Genius is spontane- ous, unconscious, free from the thought of self, working from an inner impulse that makes labor both a necessity and a delight. Talent, on the other hand, works with self-consciousness and effort. Virgil has prodigious talent. Whatever labor and skill can do, he accom- plishes. But the vivida vis, the creative power, the original insight into the heart of things, he has not, as Homer has. 84 THE POET OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE Virgil does not set before us great characters, as Homer does. Achilles and Ulysses, Homer's heroes, are creations so distinct and yet so natural, that the pas- sionate courage of the one and the wily wisdom of the other are almost historical realities to us. But it is not so with the hero of Virgil's poem. ./Eneas is more of a saint than a hero, more of a monk than a warrior. Saints are not necessarily uninteresting, but pious vEneas hardly excites in us a ripple of enthusiasm. Even his saintship is not decided, for everything seems right to him that will further his interest. If Virgil has given us any wholly original character, it is that of Dido. Her figure is lifelike and complete. The gradual rise of her fatal passion for ^Eneas, and her throwing away of life when she finds herself abandoned, have in them more of the spirit of modern romance than can be found in all classical literature besides. Non humilis mulier — there is nothing small about her grief; and nothing so becomes her in her life as the grand air with which she leaves it : My life is lived, and I have played The part that fortune gave, And now I pass, a queenly shade, Majestic to the grave. And yet it is said that Apollonius Rhodius furnished Virgil with the outline of this picture of Dido. Yes, and even Homer had his predecessors. There were brave men before Agamemnon, and there were doubt- less poets before Homer. To all men of genius it can be said: "Other men labored, and ye have entered into their labors." So the greatest literary productions of ARTISTIC RATHER THAN SPONTANEOUS 85 all the ages are inextricably intertwined with one an- other. Milton could never have written if Dante had not gone before ; Dante presupposes Virgil ; Virgil would have been impossible without Homer; Homer himself was probably the interpreter and unifier of a whole cycle of rhapsodists who glimmered like stars in the early morning of poetry before his own great epic sun had risen. Still it is true that the power to set forth great per- sonalities belongs to Homer in far larger measure than to Virgil. Homer can use his materials creatively, and out of them can fashion new forms, as Virgil cannot. The powerful invention, the dramatic instinct, the in- sight into character, which belong to the greatest poetry, are lacking in Virgil's work. The Germans distinguish between the Naturepos and the Kunstepos, between the epic poetry that is spontaneous and the epic poetry that springs from art. While Virgil gives the best specimen of the one, Homer must evermore be the noblest ex- ample of the other. The interest of the "^Eneid," unlike that of the "Odyssey" or the "Iliad," is not so much in the main story as in the episodes. The former poem is much more capable of partition. It may be doubted indeed whether Augustus and Virgil might not better have compromised matters by burning the last six books of the "^Eneid" while the first six were preserved. No revision could ever have turned those last six into an "Iliad." In spite of the fact that Dante seems most moved by the closing scenes of the poem, and in spite of the fact that the Roman and imperial element is stronger in the last half than in the first, it still is true 86 THE POET OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE that Virgil's literary fame would have been greater if that last half had not been written. This Latin Homer begins to nod when he gets half way through his task. Yet Turnus, a character of much more heroic fibre than tineas, would be lost to us if the last six books were lost, and the noblest type of Latin chivalry with him. How much we should lose if we lost the episode of Camilla, the virgin warrior, the Amazonian queen, whose onset is like the wind : Nay, she could fly o' er fields of grain Nor crush in flight the tapering wheat ; Or skim the surface of the main, Nor let the billows touch her feet. Macaulay, in his "Lays of Ancient Rome," has no more effective couplet than that in which he describes the rush of another army, that moves Like swift Camilla o' er the corn, Camilla o' er the main. And how could we part with that exquisite episode of Nisus and Euryalus, who occupy in ancient poetry the place which Damon and Pythias occupy in ancient prose ? Here one noble youth dies to save another : Love for his friend too freely shown, This was his crime, and this alone. It is the heathen confirmation of Paul's words : " For a good man some would even dare to die." But Virgil witnesses to " the rarity of this human charity," by predicting the immortality of fame which he will give it in his poem : virgil's special merits 87 Blest pair ! if aught my verse avail, No day shall make your memory fail From off the heart of time, While Capitol abides in place, The mansion of the ALnean race, And throned upon that moveless base Rome' s father sits sublime. Yet in spite of these brilliant and pathetic episodes, and the great constructive skill which Virgil has shown in weaving them into his story, the "^Eneid " has devel- oped passions rather than created persons, and in read- ing it we get no such impression of sustained and ma- jestic power, as is made upon us when we enter the charmed circle of Homer. When we have said this, however, we have said the most that can be said in disparagement of Virgil. He has merits of his own which Homer cannot equal, sim- ply because Homer was born too early in human his- tory. In all that pertains to moral earnestness, to re- finement of taste, and to human sympathy, Virgil is superior to Homer. Certain historians of Latin litera- ture complain that Virgil has always a divided mind ; his spirit belonged to the ages of faith, and yet he sought to reconcile that faith with science. Let us rather say that Virgil takes the naive and unquestioning beliefs of Homer and turns them into rational convic- tions, adds to them the knowledge of a later day, clothes them with the very perfection of literary work- manship, interprets them to the new age, and hands them down to posterity. Virgil feels the mystery of the unseen world more than Homer does ; he cannot like Homer talk sportively 05 THE POET OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE of the gods. With a deeper reverence, he has a deeper sense of justice ; he believes more in moral law ; con- science and sin are greater realities to him ; the idea of sacrifice is more fully developed ; the offerings to the gods are both propitiatory and vicarious : unum pro multis dabitur caput. Poet as he is of the Roman Empire, and believer as he is in its divine mission to embrace the world, he is notwithstanding conscious of the crimes that have marked those hideous years of foreign con- quest and of internal strife ; he fears divine judgment ; he counsels piety and a return to the ways of virtue and peace. So it is not without a meaning that his hero is the pious ^Emeas — pious, not only toward the gods, but toward his father and his race. The mission of ^Eneas is to bring the Trojan gods to Italy, and to find for them a lasting home. All this is a distinct advance on Homer. Virgil has sounded depths in the human soul that Homer knew not of. Neither courage nor adventure can for Virgil any longer give sufficient charm to character. The true man is one who identifies himself with institutions, and builds his life into the life of his time. In both the " Iliad " and the " Odyssey," the interest is chiefly per- sonal ; the author is not specially on the side of the Greeks. But, in the "vEneid," the interest is chiefly national ; Virgil is always and everywhere on the side of Rome. He makes fidelity to Rome a sort of re- ligion. He clothes the Empire with an imaginative halo that impressed men's minds for ages after. It is certain that the Roman people would never have endured the rule of such monsters of cruelty and li- cense as Tiberius, Nero, Caligula, and Domitian, if the THE APOTHEOSIS OF AUGUSTUS 89 Empire had not seemed to be the manifestation in hu- man affairs of invisible powers, and the emperor him- self to be in some sort divine. In the apotheosis of the emperors, accompanied as it was by temples and sacri- fices and worship in their honor, we have indeed a most convincing proof of man's forgetfulness of the true God and of his disposition to worship and serve the creature more than the Creator. Though the Hebrews called their judges " gods," because they were God's representatives, they never identified them with God, or called them immortal, or paid them worship. These very judges were told that they should die like men, and they were bidden to fall down in worship before Je- hovah. The very climax of heathen sacrilege and idol- atry was thought to be reached when the images of the emperor which the Roman legions carried upon their standards underneath their eagles of bronze or silver, and which every soldier of the legion was required to worship, were set up in the holy place of the temple at the final siege of Jerusalem ; that was " the abomi- nation of desolation." But Virgil lived in the times of ignorance, which God winked at, and which we ought to wink at too. The words deus and divus did not mean so much then as they mean to us. In Homer the Manes of the de- parted had been invoked in prayer ; in Virgil's time these Manes were commonly called divi, or divine. It was not so great a thing to be a god, when popular be- lief held that there were many gods, instead of one. A half-pantheistic confounding of the world with God had made it easy to regard the actual ruler of the world as divinity made visible. 90 THE POET OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE Alexander the Great had claimed not only a divine parentage, but also a divine nature, and had sent an or- der to the Republic of Greece to recognize his divinity. The answer of the Lacedemonians shows just how much meaning they attached to it. " Since Alexander desires to be a god," they said, "let him be one ! " So among the Romans, Romulus had been deified, and Julius Caesar after his death had been similarly exalted. Virgil applied all this to Augustus, even before his earthly life had ended. He invested the Roman Em- pire with divine sanctions. It is doubtful whether the existence of that Empire in form at least until 1806, when the last Roman emperor, Francis, king of Ger- many, permitted it to die, can be explained without tak- ing into account the influence of Virgil. In thus making the motives of his epic a larger justice and a larger humanity, Virgil did not depress the tone of poetry, he only enlarged its sphere. So he has been truly called a precursor of modern civilization. He is the most feminine of all the great poets ; he first ac- knowledges and does reverence to the feminine in true manhood. Courtesy, pity, love, sympathy with misfor- tune, resignation in suffering, have almost no place in the " Iliad," but they are marked traits in the principal characters of the "^Eneid." Triumph in defeat, suc- cess in apparent failure, the judging of life not by what it accomplishes but what it aims at, these ideas, of which Robert Browning is the great modern representative, are already hinted at by Virgil. Homer has a joy in battle ; he delights to chronicle the most ghastly wounds ; compassion to a fallen foe he regards as only weakness. Of Zeus he sings : VIRGIL S THEOLOGICAL IDEAS 9 1 Apart from the rest he sate, and to fill his eyes was fain, With the gleam of the brass and the fate of the slayers and them that were slain. Virgil too, out of deference to Homer, gives us more than one battle scene. But his heart is evidently not in it. Touches of pathos and of pity light up the cloud of war, and the interest lies, not so much in the bloodshed, as in the tender emotions that mitigate its ferocity. When Pallas slays the twin sons of Danaus, as a re- viewer has pointed out, Virgil thinks of their parents, who, " sore perplexed, each for the other took, nor wished the sweet uncertainty resolved." When y£neas slays Lausus, his weapon " rent the vest his mother's hand had broidered o'er with gold." Virgil has pity for the vanquished and the sorrowful. He thinks it worth his while to justify his hero's desertion of Dido by the stern compulsion of fate, and to recompense the love- lorn queen by reuniting her to her husband in the world of shades. Here, indeed, is another mark of theological progress. Homer punishes the bad in Hades, but he gives only the faintest intimations that there are rewards for the good. Virgil believes in an Elysium : Here sees he the illustrious dead Who fighting for their country bled ; Priests, who while earthly life remained Preserved that life unsoiled, unstained ; Blest bards, transparent souls and clear, Whose song was worthy Phoebus' ear ; Inventors, who by arts refined The common life of human kind, With all who grateful memory won By services to others done : 92 THE POET OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE A goodly brotherhood, bedight With coronals of virgin white. Virgil is an imitator of Homer, but Dante was almost equally an imitator of Virgil. Each improved upon his predecessor, while he drew without stint from his stores. Dante does well in the " Inferno " to take Virgil for his guide, for Virgil had mapped out the ground for him long before. He copies from Virgil the approach of night in the underworld : Another sun and stars they know, That shine like ours, but shine below. From Virgil he gets the cue for his limbo of infants : Whom portionless of life' s sweet bliss, From mother' s breast untimely torn, The black day hurried to the abyss And plunged in darkness soon as born. From Virgil he takes his hopes for those who die in youth : Towards the ferry and the shore The multitudinous phantoms pour ; Matrons and men, and heroes dead, And boys and maidens yet unwed, And youths who funeral pyres have fed Before their parents' eye, Dense as the leaves that from the treen Float down when autumn first is keen, Or as the birds that thickly massed Fly landward from the ocean vast, Driven over sea by wintry blast To seek a sunnier sky. It would almost seem as if Dante had taken from Virgil his ideas of purgatorial suffering, though in the THE SOUL HOLDS A HIGHER PLACE 93 " yEneid " purgatorial suffering prepares, not for entering into paradise, but for returning once more to the life of earth. Here in Virgil is a transmigration of souls which is found neither in Dante nor in Homer. Homer had regarded the body as more important than the soul ; without the body the soul was but phantom and shadow ; Achilles had rather be a slave on earth than the mon- arch of all the dead. But to Virgil the soul is the superior thing ; the body is its place of imprisonment and source of defilement ; only when it escapes from its earthly prison will the caged eagle soar into its native air. ^Eneas wonders that Anchises, after he had tasted the repose and the liberty of Elysium, should ever de- sire to return to earth. Evidently, Pythagoras and Plato have contributed to Virgil's theology quite as much as Homer has. Homer puts his hell far away — Ulysses has to go to the ex- tremity of the immense ocean to find it. Virgil's under- world is much more accessible- — the grottos of Lake Avernus in Southern Italy, with their sulphurous odors and volcanic aspect, furnish gateways to it. Not only in point of space, but in point of meaning, is Virgil's Hades nearer to us than Homer's. Virgil's is the Hades of philosophy, as well as of poetry. The spir- itual at last overtops the physical. All souls indeed are but forms of an anima mundi that breathes through all things. Know first, the heaven, the earth, the main, The moon' s pale orb, the starry train, Are nourished by a soul, A bright intelligence, which darts Its influence through the several parts And animates the whole. 94 THE POET OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE Thence souls of men and cattle spring, And the gay people of the wing, And those strange shapes that ocean hides Beneath the smoothness of his tides. So penal sufferings they endure For ancient crime, to make them pure : All these, when centuries ten times told The wheel of destiny have rolled, The voice divine from far and wide Calls up to Lethe's river-side, That earthward they may pass once more, Remembering not the things before, And with a blind propension yearn To fleshly bodies to return. I have for once, and only once, given a long specimen of Conington's translation. The ballad metre, though it is flowing, does not represent the stately sweetness of Virgil's hexameters; Dante's "Purgatory" is the best literary analogue to the Hades of the "y£neid." The early part of the passage I have quoted has a sound very like Lucretius, but the latter part witnesses to a doctrine of immortality and of penalty at which Lucretius scoffed. Dante learned from Virgil that a heathen might realize the depth of the abyss into which transgression brings the soul, without being able to discover the way of escape from it. And yet we should miss one of the chief as- pects of Virgil's genius if we failed to consider him in his character as a prophet of Christianity. To a certain extent Virgil did predict the way of escape, when he wrote his fourth " Eclogue." Let us remember that this was composed a whole half-century before Christ's work was accomplished, and we shall at least be struck with sources of virgil's predictions 95 its remarkable correspondence with the future facts and its equally remarkable likeness to Hebrew prophecy. The poet begins by calling on the muses of Sicily — that is, those who have inspired the genius of Theocritus — to aid him now in work higher than any he has yet attempted. A virgin is coming, and the reign of Saturn ; the earlier ages are to return. The chaste Lucina, whose emblem is the moon, is invoked in be- half of the babe soon to be borne. Pollio himself, to whom the •'Eclogue" is dedicated, shall see the opening of the glorious time now foretold. Under his guidance, if any vestiges of human wickedness remain, they shall at least cease to cause terror to the world. The coming child shall overthrow the age of iron and shall found a golden race ; he shall take on himself a divine nature ; he shall see heroes mingling familiarly with the gods ; he shall himself be one of them. Under his mild government men shall recover their ancestral virtues. The timid flocks shall no longer fear the lion. Serpents shall perish and poisonous herbs disappear. From the very cradle of the babe shall spring living flowers ; the earth everywhere shall be alike fruitful ; the soil shall not need the harrow, nor the vine the pruning-hook ; the plowman shall release the ox from the yoke. Best of all, the Fates declare that this age of peace shall endure forever. When Constantine recited a part of this " Eclogue " to the assembled fathers at the Council at Nice, it was with the view of showing that heathenism had predicted its own downfall, that the deliverer it looked forward to was nothing less than divine, and that this Desire of all nations had come. So Virgil came to be enrolled, like Balaam, among the prophets. His statue was placed among them in the cathedral of Spanish Zamora in the Middle Ages, and he was invoked as " prophet of the Gentiles," at Limoges and Rheims in France. " Sanctc Socrate, ora pro nobis" we hear at one time ; and Buddha is canonized as St. Josaphat at another. 96 THE POET OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE Whence did Virgil derive his idea of the coming de- liverer ? Lactantius and Augustine thought him the organ of a prophetic inspiration which he did not himself understand. But it is more probable that here, as else- where, Virgil was only an imitator. The Sibylline books had repeated the Greek representations of a golden age. The Jews scattered among all nations after the Exile were a proselyting race ; in every large city they had their synagogues ; the Roman world had been leavened with their hope of a Redeemer. Virgil only echoed a longing which, originally springing from Jewish prophecy and from divine inspiration, had gradually permeated every civilized nation. The hope of a deliverer did not come from heathen- ism. That was skeptical and hopeless rather. Cicero thought the course of all things to be downward. Horace mentions the idea of a golden age, only as a dream never to be realized on earth. But Virgil had the piety and the faith that could welcome truth so far above men's common thought, and could welcome it even though coming from a Jewish source. The years of conscription and slaughter through which Rome had just passed were to him a reign of terror. All that was worst in the world seemed to have been uppermost ; surely the turn of the righteous must come. This mar- velous hope settled on the new-born or expected child of Augustus and Scribonia, and Virgil expresses it in lan- guage which more than anything else in classic literature reminds us of Isaiah. Virgil's prophecy did not come precisely true, for the world's deliverer was born, not in the consulship of Pollio, as he predicted, but some forty years later. Yet his LED TO A REVIVAL OF THE OLD RELIGION 97 religious teaching had wonderful effect. The "^Eneid," published with the special sanction of Augustus, had a send-off, if I may use the term, such as no other of the world's great poems ever had. We must not push back into the Augustan age ideas of the fewness of copyists and the large price of books which belong only to the dark ages that came after. In Virgil's time there were publishing houses at Rome in which the new work of a poet could be put into cir- culation almost as quickly, though not with the same number of copies, as it can be to-day. There were great rooms filled with the desks of scribes ; from an elevated pulpit or platform the poem was dictated word for word, and if need be, letter by letter ; fifty or a hundred copies were made at once ; the scribes were slaves, and slave labor was cheap. Martial, a century after, tells us that the first book of his " Epigrams " could be bought for five denarii, or for less than a dollar. Imagine, now, the rapidity with which Virgil's "^Eneid " was multiplied, with all the prestige of imperial favor to give it a start in the race for fame. It attained at once a circulation and an influence entirely unexampled in ancient times. It was the means of bringing about a marked change in the beliefs of all classes of the Roman people. The nature of that change will be understood if we compare the times of Cicero, just before Virgil wrote, and the times of the Antonines, two hundred years after. Though Cicero had talked publicly and officially of the gods and of immortality, he was by no means sure of either. He wrote the "De Natura Deorum," yet privately and at heart he was a skeptic. In his letters 98 THE POET OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE there are no allusions to the gods. Nor does he in his letters, even when he is in greatest affliction, draw any consolations from the life to come. In " De Senectute," it is true, he finds the discomforts of old age relieved by the anticipation of speedy reunion with lost friends. Yet in another place he says : " Upon this subject I entertain no more than conjectures." When he reads Plato's argument for immortality he seems to himself convinced, but when he has laid down the book he finds that all his doubts have returned. Cicero is the type of his time, a time when Epicurus is the reigning philosopher and Lucretius is the reigning poet. But before two centuries have passed, Marcus Aurelius, the type of his time also, writes letters full of religious sentiment ; in almost every sentence he recog- nizes the gods ; the future life gives him hope. Virgil, more than any other single influence, brought about this revival of old religion ; showed how much litera- ture could do to change the course of human thought and feeling. It showed how much literature could do, but it also showed how little literature could do. It could quicken conscience ; it could inspire hope ; it could not give certainty ; it could not impart life. Neither Virgil's legal nor his prophetic utterances could do the work of the gospel, but they could and they did do something in preparing the world to accept the Christian faith. It is not wonderful that the Middle Ages came to regard Virgil both as a saint and as a wizard. Mag- is ter Virgilius came to be not only master of all hu- man science — mathematics, mechanics, architecture, and medicine — but also master of evil spirits, conjurer, VIRGIL AS A SAINT AND A WIZARD 99 necromancer, and magician. Tunison has shown that these stories are not a sort of folklore that grew up spontaneously in Italy. Naples, the city of Virgil's chief residence, has none of them. They were the fruit of conscious invention. They had an exclusively literary origin. They came from the North, not from the South. We must remember that the poems of Virgil became the school-reader of all the world. For nineteen hundred years his influence has been con- tinuous. Homer was lost to the Western world for centuries — only the bringing of Greek books from Constantinople, and the revival of Greek learning after the Crusades, brought back Homer to his place of power. But from the day that the "y£neid " was given to the public until now, no ingenuous youth has had a liberal education without being compelled to read Virgil. What Aris- totle became in logic and philosophy, Virgil always was in the more elementary training — the text-book of su- preme authority. Grammarians wrote such commentaries on his works that, if those works should themselves be lost, every line could probably be recovered from their citations. Noble ladies had their Virgil clubs, and injected mys- terious meanings into his words, even as now they some- times deal with Robert Browning. The "^Eneid" was used to conjure by, and in the time of Hadrian fortunes were told by the Sortes Virgiliance, or by seizing upon the first word that presented itself ad aperturam libri, just as the Bible is used by some superstitious people to-day. As the Latin language gradually was displaced by the popular corruptions of it, it came to be regarded IOO THE POET OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE as a mystery, both in church and school. To the vul- gar, "hoc est corpus" became "hocus-pocus." A mag- ical efficacy was attributed to learning. Friar Bacon and Dr. Faustus alike, when they dived too deeply into science, were thought to be in league with the devil. The chroniclers of the twelfth and thirteenth cen- turies had no very clear ideas of the dividing line be- tween history and fable, and they too often fed the popular appetite for the marvelous with concoctions of their own imagination. Because Virgil had risen at a bound from a modest fortune to wealth and the favor of princes, it was inferred that something more than natural agents must have been at his bidding. Because he was master of all the learning of his time, the conclusion was drawn that the spirits of evil instructed him. Italy, to those far-away mediaeval gropers, seemed a fairy-land, and classic times were the early ages of enchantment. About this period, moreover, the returning Crusaders brought back from the East the wonderful tales of Con- stantinople and Cairo and Bagdad, which, a century or two after, took form in the "Thousand and One Nights." The German, French, and English romancers wrought over the same raw material with which Moslem sheiks were entertained in the desert. The genii of the East became the demons of the West, Virgil became a classic Friar Bacon and Dr. Faustus all in one, and all the stories of magic art crystallized about him. Like Aladdin, Virgil found a demon in a cave and pressed him into his service. He imprisoned familiar spirits in bottles, like the Arabian fisherman. At Naples he had a magic garden, wherein grew all manner of plants for healing and for charming men. This STORY OF THE SALVATION OF ROME 10 1 garden was protected by an immovable atmosphere, as by a wall ; and upon a bridge of air Master Virgil could pass at will, and in a moment, whithersoever he would, even to the most distant lands. Petrarch tells us that in his time Virgil was thought to have excavated the grotto of Posilippo by his spells. There was a bronze statue which he set up to watch Vesuvius and to check its eruptions. Whenever the mountain began to groan and to threaten the town, the statue shot an arrow at it and compelled it to cease its throes, or to pour forth its ashes and lava in the opposite direction. But Virgil's chef-d 'ceuvre as a magician was the tower or palace which he constructed at Rome. As Amphion of old had, by the music of his lyre, com- pelled the very stones to build themselves into his city wall, so Virgil used his poetry with similar effect to raise an edifice for the protection of the imperial city. John Desborcke, the chronicler, gives the story as fol- lows : The emperor asked of Virgilius how that he might make Rome prosper, and have many lands under them, and know when any land would rise against them ; and Virgilius said to the emperor : "I will within short space that do." And he made, upon the Capitolium, what was the town-house, made with carved images, and of stone, and called the Salvatio Rom