Homeric Poems

HOMERIC POEMS.

See Homer, Il. vii. 452 seq., xx. 215 seq., xxi. 446 seq.; Apollodorus 6, 4, iii. 12 ; Diodorus iv. 75, v. 48 Tzetzes, Schol. on Lycophron, 29, 72, 1302 ; Conon, Narrat. 21 ; Dionysius Halicarn., Antiq. Rom. i. 68 seq. The Iliad deals with a period of 51 days in the tenth year of the war: the Odyssey with the wanderings and homecoming of an Achaean leader, Odysseus. For the wooden horse see Homer, Od. iv. 271 seq.; Virgil, Aen. ii. 13 seq.

The Historical Background of the Trojan

War.—The "Tale of Troy," with legends of heroes who "fought in the war," was popular already when the Odyssey (see HOMER) was com posed; wherein, besides other allusions, minstrels sing lays about it, and the Sirens boast that they "know it all." From the 7th century B.C., at least, it supplied subjects to vase painters and other craftsmen, and in the 5th, to the sculptors of the Aegina pediments (see GREEK SCULPTURE), and to Athenian dramatists. (See DRAMA: Greek.) Herodotus and Thucydides, like ancient writers generally, accepted the Trojan war as historical, though they criticized epic statements in detail, and Herodotus noted discrepancy between the Cypria and the Iliad. Ephorus, and afterwards Strabo, marshalled geographical learning as com mentary on the Achaean and Trojan "catalogues" in Il. ii. ; the scholars of Alexandria elucidated Homeric antiquities, those of Pergamum their topographical and historical background; Deme trius of Scepsis in the Troad, misdoubted, on geological grounds, the reputed site of Troy. Traditional genealogies, collated by Hecataeus (q.v.) and others, enabled Eratosthenes (q.v.) to date the "Fall of Troy" to 1194 B.C., in the third generation before the "coming of the Dorians" and in the second after Laomedon's foundation. Homeric references to Egypt (where Thebes, not Memphis, is the capital) and to Phoenicia (where Sidon is known, but not Tyre) supply a historical 'background for the war, not later than the i 2th century; but the names of Egyptian kings Thuoris) in epic and classical tradition, are not identified: Pliny (36.64) alludes to a Rameses "in whose time Troy fell." Egyptian references, however, to repeated sea-raids into the Levant, between 123o and 1190 B.C., depict a situation closely resembling Homeric descriptions; and the Aquaiusha (Akhay washa), Danauna, Tikkara (Tzakarai) and probably other par ticipants in these raids may be safely recognized as Achaeans, Danaans, and Teucrians in Greek tradition. Hittite documents confirm the existence of an oversea regime called Akkhayawa, aggressive against south-west Asia Minor, one of whose leaders, Attarissyas, active in Caria and north Syria about 1230, was a contemporary, if not namesake, of Atreus, father of Agamemnon. Consequently, igth century doubts as to the historical content of epic tradition, and attempts to discover "solar" and other mythological allegories in the personages and events of the war, are being superseded by recognition of a social and political regime historically assignable to the 13-12th centuries, of which the following are turning-points: (I) The establishment of the Trojans, with other Thraco-Phrygian peoples, in north-west Asia Minor before 126o B.C. fully justifying the defensive alliance between the Hittite king and Rameses II. in 1271 B.C. (2) The consolidation of a dominion, of which the "sixth city" at Hissarlik was an important centre; the geographical range of Priam's vas sals, from the Axius river to the Xanthus, and the memory of a great fight "on the Sangarius river" far inland, are instructive.

(3) The overthrow of Hittite dominion by this new regime, about 1200 B.C., followed by the land-and-sea-raids of 1197-94 as far as south Palestine, where they were stopped by Rameses III.

(4) The 'counterparts, west of the Aegean, of the dynasty Lao medon-Priam-Hector, are the "divine born" kingships (Pelops Atreus-Agamemnon, Aeacus-Peleus-Achilles, and the like) estab lished by adventurers of unknown antecedents, and foreign names, from Ithaca and Aetolia to Crete and Rhodes, and as far north as Thessaly; their distribution closely covering that of the "Late Mycenaean" settlements, which are surely dated archaeologically to these generations, in Egypt, Cyprus and Palestine. (5)

Whether the destruction of the "sixth city" resulted from an attack of this "Achaean" confederacy of the south-west Aegean on the Hellespontine citadel of its Thraco-Phrygian cousins, or directly from those Danubian representatives of the "Lausitz" culture which characterizes the "seventh city," and is recogniz able as a disturbing factor in Macedonia also, later in the i2th century, cannot at present be determined; nor the value of the synchronism between the attack on Troy and the great sea-and land-raids towards Egypt, of which the tale of Tithonus and Memnon may preserve echoes. (6) Traditions of the establish ment of settlements, eventually Greek, round the margins of the Late Mycenaean world, are so numerous, and coherent both with Homeric and with archaeological evidence, that they may be ac cepted as an essentially historical counterpart of the situation described in the Odyssey; which, however, was transformed as profoundly by the "coming of the Dorians" as the Mycenaean world had been by the irruption of the "divine born" adventurers five generations before. Between those two crises lies the "Heroic Age" of the Aegean; of its central episodes one is the struggle between Argos and Thebes, ended by the tragic fall of the Cad meian dynasty; the other is the Trojan war, as disastrous to the victors as to the conquered. (J. L. My.) The Mediaeval Legend of Troy.—The mediaeval Roman de Troie, exercised greater influence in its day and for centuries after its appearance than any other work of the same class. Just as the chansons de geste of the ioth century were the direct an cestors of the prose romances which afterwards spread through out Europe, so, even before Heliodorus and Achilles Tatius, there were quasi-histories, which reproduced in prose, with more or less exactness, the narratives of epic poetry. The `11ixoticos of Flavius Philostratus (fl. 3rd century A.D.) is a discourse on 26 heroes of the war. A fictitious journal (Ephemeris), professing to give the chief incidents of the siege, and said to have been written by Dictys of Crete, a follower of Idomeneus, is mentioned by Suidas, and was largely used by John Malalas and other Byzantine chroniclers. This was abridged in Latin prose, prob ably in the 4th century, under the title of Dictys Cretensis de belle Trojan libri VI. It is prefaced by an introductory letter from a certain L. Septimius to Q. Aradius Rufinus, in which it is stated that the diary of Dictys had been found in his tomb at Knossos in Crete, written in the Greek language, but in Phoeni cian characters. The narrative begins with the rape of Helen, and includes the adventures of the Greek princes on the return voy age. With Dictys is always associated Dares, a pseudo-historian of more recent date. Old Greek writers mention an account of the destruction of the city earlier than the Homeric poems, and in the time of Aelian (2nd century A.D.) this Iliad of Dares, priest of Hephaestus at Troy, was believed to be still in existence. Nothing has since been heard of it ; but an unknown Latin writer, living between 400 and 600, took advantage of the tradition to compile Daretis Phrygii de excidio Trojae historic, which begins with the voyage of the Argo. It is in prose and professes to be translated from an old Greek manuscript. Of the two works that of Dares is the later, and is inferior to Dictys. The matter-of-fact form of narration recalls the poem of Quintus Smyrnaeus. In both com pilations the gods and everything supernatural are suppressed; even the heroes are degraded. The permanent success, however, of the two works distinguishes them among apocryphal writings, and through them the Troy legend was diffused throughout west ern Europe. The Byzantine writers, from the 7th to the 12th century, exalted Dictys as a first-class authority, with whom Homer was only to be contrasted as an inventor of fables. West ern people preferred Dares, because his history was shorter, and because, favouring the Trojans, he flattered the vanity of those who believed that people to have been their ancestors. Many mss. of both writers were contained in old libraries; and they were translated into nearly every language and turned into verse.