The critical judgments that have been passed upon Homer would filly entire libraries. Horace assigns him a place as a moral teacher above Chrysippus and Crantor, the leaders of the two most famous schools of philosophy. Porphyry, in later times, composed a treatise on the philo sophy of Homer. On the other hand, Pythagoras has con demned him to Tartarus, for having imparted false notions of the Divinity, and Plato banished him from his ideal re. public. Yet, amidst the abstracted and elevated ideas of the latter philosopher, it is easy to perceive the most forced and sophistical reasons in his motives for condemning the poets, and he even redeems our opinion of his taste by the manner in which he ordains this banishment to be put in force. Plato, it should be recollected, admits in nature only two existences, the original idea, and the being which is the resemblance of or copy of that idea. By the original idea he understands God, or the Divine thought, and by the other existences all the forms which God created con formably to his own conceptions. All objects being then only copies of this first model, the arts which imitate them produce only copies of copies, which can serve for no good purpose. If then, sAys Plato, (speaking of his own ideal republic, which can hardly be called even the copy of a copy,) a poet should present himself amongst us who knows how to express every thing in nature by imitation, we should testify our veneration for him as for a sacred person, who deserves to be admired and cherished ; but we should tell him that our political economy did not ad mit of such persons among us, and we should send him to another city, after having sprinkled him with perfumes, and crowned his head with flowers. It must be owned, that even the vanity of a poet could hardly be offended with such a sentence. When Plato comes to speak of Homer himself, it is with the deepest reverence for his genius. He owns that the respect and love which he has felt since his infancy for his writings almost arrests his tongue from condemning him, and that he considers him as the maker of all poets who have succeeded him, par ticularly those of the drama. After this apology, he de monstrates at great length that the gods of the Iliad are calculated to give us unworthy notions of divinity, a fact which, philosophically considered, it is not very difficult to prove. To exculpate Homer from this heavy charge, both his ancient and modern admirers have recourse to allegory ; and in this system of explaining the Iliad, have mixed a vast deal of absurdity with a very small portion of truth. It is true that there was allegory and emblem both in ancient religion and philosophy ; and some of the fictions of Homer carry their allegorical meaning in their appearance. But to see nothing in the whole Iliad but moral abstractions personified, is an idea as intolerable to common sense as to poetical feeling. Such a forced ex planation of the Iliad would after all leave the poem quite as immoral as it is in its plain interpretation. Suppose we take Jupiter for the power of God, Destiny for his will, Juno for his justice, Venus for his mercy, and Minerva for his wisdom, we shall still find the theology of Homer as defective as if we take things as they are in the Iliad ; that is, if we understand his deities to be influenced by the passions of men. Homer painted the gods just as the vulgar belief represented them. It was impossible for him to have done otherwise, for he could not create a new religion ; but if we could suppose it possible for him to have surpassed the limits of human intelligence, and to have anticipated the higher notions of Plato respecting the divinity, it would not have been his interest as a poet to have refined his mythology into the pure theism of tho philosopher. The moment that he had ceased to con sider the inhabitants of Olympus as impassioned beings, there was an end to all our interest in their actions. Di vinity, in its true attributes, is not a subject for romantic fable.
The touch-stone of more recent refinement in send »lent and manners has been applied with the same ab surdity to his heroes, as the standard of pure theology has been to his divinities. In the times which he described, the power of a man's body constituted the greater part of his estimation in society. He who could support the heaviest load of armour, and who could give and take the hardest blows, was a formidable man or a hero. When this su periority was once recognised, it established his rank in exact comparison with others ; and hence it is so common in Homer's heroic descriptions to hear a warrior of ac knowledged bravery confess that another is superior to him. At present the equality of arms and the principle of honour would make a man ashamed of such a confes sion. But in Homer, JEneas says without shame to Achil
les, " I know that thou art more valiant than me," which is, in other words, " I know that thou art stronger." /Eneas adds, " but, however, if some god protects me, I shall be able to conquer." And this is a general principle, which to a certain extent may be said to constitute all the morality of the Iliad, namely, that power, success, and wisdom, all come from the gods. When Agamemnon ex cuses his outrage upon Achilles, he says that some god had disturbed his reason. It is the protection of this or that divinity that gives the Greek and Trojan heroes each a triumph in his turn ; it is the gods who spread conster nation among the armies, or inspire them for the combat ; but we must not regard this intervention of the deities as diminishing the glory of the successive warriors. We see clearly that Homer does not lessen their importance on that account. On the contrary, the epic spirit of the piece is heightened by this machinery ; because it is clearly perceived, that the heroes thus favoured of heaven, rise in the opinion of their associates and adversaries on that ac count. Achilles excepted, there is not a hero of the Iliad who does not at some time or other retire before another. What distinguishes the bravest, such as Ajax and Dio mede, is, that they fight as they retreat. And it may be pbservcd, to the glory of Homer, that, in spite of this di vine intervention, which we might expect to confound all distinctions of human bravery, he still preserves the dis tinctive character of greatness in his heroes, even when yielding to supernal influence.
It is a singular trait in the Iliad, that the sullen rest of its hero Achilles should form the main-spring of the ac tion. Ills absence appears to be the cause of the disasters ,of his countrymen, which prolong the contest. This, so far from being a defect in the plan of the action, is an artifice which carries internal evidence of the whole plan being the invention of one great mind ; all the prowess of the successive agents that arc described, ministers to the ultimate triumph of him by whom Ilector is to fall. In the fire and spirit of this ancient hero, Homer has not cer tainly left what it would be absurd to seek for in ancient poetry, a model of pure morality ; but he has consum mated the picture of all that must have commanded the respect of warlike and barbarous times, and has in fact pourtrayed a being that would, under different circum stances, in all ages predominate over the rest of his spe cies, by his pride and energy. It may be necessary to notice the vulgar tradition of his being invulnerable all over but in the heel ; but Homer does not debase the courage of his hero by such a fable : nor is his character of stern pride unrelieved by circumstances that touch us with an interest in his fate. His youth, his beauty, his maternal descent from a goddess, the certain prediction that, while he could find no conqueror, he was one day to perish in the Trojan war, prepare us for the part of no vulgar hero.
To enter on a minute criticism of the Iliad would fat exceed our limits. The most superficial readers arc pro bably acquainted with the hackneyed objections that have been made to its prolixity of speeches and military de tails; to the minuteness and surgical description of wounds; the ferocity of its manners, and the abusive epithets which the heroes exchange when they quarrel. The French criticism of La Moue and Perrault has gone even so far as to blame the simplicity of its manners, and to throw contempt on Achilles for cooking his own dinner. The majority of those objections are frivolous. It is true that the primitive abundance of expletives, and the Greek loquacity of Homer, may at times be excessive ; but the dramatic air which the constant dialogue gives to the Iliad, would be ill exchanged for the conciseness of mere nar rative. The diversity of Homer's battles, as an eminent critic has observed, shews all invention next to boundless ; the technical terms of the wounds that are described ap pear technical to us, only because the language of science is derived from Greek ; and the fastidious taste that is offended with the bold simplicity of ancient manners, would with equal propriety find fault with Salvador Rosa for not having adorned his mountain scenery with terraces and gravel-walks. Achilles cooking his dinner is certainly a considerably more poetical personage than Louis the XIV. would have been, if La Moue had made him the hero of an Epopee, treading on a velvet carpet, and commanding the meitre d'hotel to prepare his fricasees.