the gods and religious belief of his country, is impossible. He was not at liberty, in those early times, to do even what Pindar sometimes did,' viz., express his disbelief in certain current legends about the gods, because they seemed unworthy, and adopt others more in harmony with his conceptions of the Divine nature. A lyrical poet, speaking in his own person in a literary and philosophical age, might assume such a position; but by an Epic poet in an early stage of society, such a critical freedom with the materials of religious tradition could not be exercised, and, we may rest assured, was never desired. The only freedom that Homer had with regard to the old Hellenic gods, was to give due prominence to those whom the proprieties of his story required to be put in the foreground, and to invest, with the greatest dignity of pictured speech, those who, in the traditional tale which he told, had already received the position of dignity which grew out of the circumstances. The bard of such a poem as the Iliad could neither take away from a prominent god any characteristic which naturally belonged to him, nor add any feature to a portrait which in the popular imagination lived already complete. In the one case his auditors would have missed what was familiar, in the other they would have resented what was strange. If Vulcan had thin shanks, like an earthly smith, he must continue to have them; Juno could not look on Jupiter but with her large, full, and deep cow-eyes; Jove must have his eagle, and Venus her girdle. Only a certain power of amplifying and enlarging and painting out in harmony with what already existed in the popular mind, so much liberty might safely belong to a popular minstrel, and no doubt was largely exercised. In this sense only can we allow the truth of the famous sentence of 1 ἔστι δ' ανδρὶ φάμεν ἐοικὸς ἀμφὶ δαιμόνων καλά -μείων γάρ αἰτία.—01. 1. Str. 2. 1 Herodotus, that "Homer and Hesiod made the gods for the Greeks." Beyond the decorative function of fancy, and the natural infection caught from a lofty imagination, we cannot believe that the gods of Greece derived anything from Homer. Afterwards, no doubt, he became the sacred conservator of the type of celestial personages whose forms he had exhibited with such skill. His works became the Greek Bible, and their author the great Greek theologian; but he was a theologian only accidentally, because he was a great Epic poet, and with the materials of the Bible which he presented to his countrymen--though scarcely with the notion that it ever would become a Bible-he had as little to do as the maid who plaits a wreath for a bride has with the flowers from which it is made. Our view of the relation of Homer to the religious tradition of his country, is therefore simply this, that his works are a true mirror of the theology and the piety of the Hellenes in his time, and that he himself had a full, honest faith in the Polytheistic creed which he represented, and was neither above nor below it in the religious platform which he personally occupied. Of course it is a difficult thing to look into a man's heart; but there is something in the sincerity of religious conviction which no hypocrite has ever been able to counterfeit; and apart from the obvious necessity of his position, there are other considerations, which may fitly be stated against those who seem inclined to believe, that however true the picture of Heathen theology given by Homer is in the main, there are yet particular passages which prove that he was far elevated above it, and 1 II. 53.—Ησίοδον γὰρ καὶ ̔Ομηρον | Ἕλλησι, καὶ τοῖσι θεοῖσι τὰς ἐπωνυμίας ἡλικίην τετρακοσίοισι ἔτεσι δοκέω μεν πρεσβυτέρους γενέσθαι, καὶ οὐ πλέοσι. οὗτοι δέ εἰσι οἱ ποιήσαντες θεογονίην δόντες καὶ τιμὰς τε καὶ τέχνας διελόντες, καὶ εἴδεα αὐτῶν σημήναντες. some, perhaps, through which we seem to see him laughing in his sleeve at the objects of the faith which in the main scope of his book he so reverentially depicts. As to those places in which he has been conceived to play the Lucian,1 I would observe in general how unnatural it is to fling a Voltaire into the position of a Tasso; and with regard to those particular passages where the Homeric mention of divine things excites in our minds a sensation of the ludicrous, it seems sufficient to remark that this sensation is seldom absent from the mind of any person firmly believing in one creed, who steadfastly contemplates the objects in which the adherent of another creed no less firmly believes. The ludicrous, according to Aristotle's well-known remark, lies on the surface; and as most people see only the outside of all foreign forms of faith, they necessarily see them in somewhat of a ludicrous light. Xenophon, Plutarch, Pausanias, and other heathen writers, no less remarkable for piety than for learning and intelligence, are constantly making assertions with reference to points of ancient religious faith, which it is impossible for us, in our strongly contrasted position, to read without a smile. But to conclude that because we laugh at the Homeric gods, in the way that an infidel may laugh, therefore Homer himself laughed at them, 1 Mure, in his Critical History of all ages to extract materials of jest the Literature of Ancient Greece, 1850 from the objects of gravest interest.' (1. 486), commenting on the "impro- This last remark is quite true; an prieties" exhibited in the conduct of ancient Greek was not like a modern the Olympian personages in Homer, Presbyterian, and could enjoy his theoremarks, The only reasonable expla- logical joke without injury to his denation or vindication of these passages vout feeling; but this is quite a differis to assume their object to be satiri- ent thing from the conscious purpose cal. They reflect partly the poet's to satirize the objects of popular faith, own disposition to banter the extrava- supposed to exist in the mind of an gance of the popular theology, partly epic minstrel belonging to the earliest the inclination of the Greek public of age of popular culture. is to display a complete want of that faculty of dramatic transposition on which all sound criticism depends. More respect, perhaps, is due to that other aspect of the discrepancy between Homer's personal creed, and that of the vulgar Hellenes, which supposes him giving expression to lofty conceptions of divine things from the elevated throne of his own genius, seriously, and without any humorous sideglance at the low vices of popular mythology. "It is true," says Clinton, in combating some of Müller's views with regard to the religion of the Dorians; "it is true that the Jupiter and Apollo of the Iliad are often described with striking attributes of divine power, but these are only the lofty conceptions of the poet's own mind." And in a similar vein the late Archdeacon Williams, who, on a more curious perusal, was surprised to find "most of the essential principles of Christianity in the Iliad," seems unable to comprehend how such a wonderful exhibition of theological wisdom should have proceeded from a heathen poet, except on the supposition that this knowledge had come to him externally by tradition from the Hebrew patriarchs. This is an old and favourite fancy of certain ill-instructed Christian advocates, borrowed from the Church Fathers, to derive everything that is good in any great heathen author from Moses, as if God had only one channel of communicating noble thoughts to mortal men, and that channel was through the Hebrews. But in what, after all, consists the superior wisdom here spoken of, which it is presumed the great poet of the Iliad could not have held in common with the mass of the ignorant heathen herd whom he addressed? Clinton specializes nothing; but Williams, in a long paraphrase of four hundred pages, has Fast. Hellen., Introd. P. xiv. 2 Homerus. By the Rev. P. Williams, A.M. London, 1842, Preface, p. vi. "2 set forth the doctrine that the Iliad is an exoteric poem, exemplifying the mode in which a great nation is signally punished for national sins.1 And substantially to the same effect, Granville Penn, in his work, published twenty years before the Archdeacon's, had remarked that "the primary and governing argument of the Iliad, co-extensive with its extent, running through all its length, and reaching to its extreme termination, is the sure and irresistible power of the divine will over the most resolute and determined will of man, exemplified in the death and burial of Hector by the instrumentality of Achilles, as the immediate preliminary to the destruction of Troy." Now, without discussing the argument of the Iliad, for which we are not yet prepared, it may be safely granted that the exhibition of divine justice in the person of Paris, the violator of the sacred rights of hospitality, is, if not the direct object, at least one of the strong under-motives of the whole moral economy of the Iliad. The Διός τ' ετελείετο Bovλn certainly included that. But what I cannot see is the necessity of calling in Christianity and Comparative Philology in full panoply to explain a matter so fundamental, so obvious, and so universally human as this. The sense of justice resides naturally in the breasts of all men who have not by some strange mishap straggled off from the ordered ranks of humanity, and sunk into the brotherhood of the brute; and the idea of divine retribution following on actions by which this principle is grossly violated, grows out of this sense as naturally as a fruit does from a flower. The moral economy of the Iliad, if it be really what Williams 1 Homerus, p. 118. 2 An Examination of the Primary Argument of the Iliad. By Granville Penn. London, 1821. 3 Academica, Oxon., Præl. xv.) on the The remarks of KEBLE (Prælectiones (Lect. xliii.) are also excellent. B |