The Iliad (Wisehouse Classics Edition). Homer

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      ²¹ A great deal of nonsense has been written to account for the word unbid, in this line. Even Plato, “Sympos.” p. 315, has found some curious meaning in what, to us, appears to need no explanation. Was there any heroic rule of etiquette which prevented one brother-king visiting another without a formal invitation?

      ²² Fresh water fowl, especially swans, were found in great numbers about the Asian Marsh, a fenny tract of country in Lydia, formed by the river Cayster, near its mouth. See Virgil, “Georgics,” vol. i. 383, sq.

      ²³ Scamander, or Scamandros, was a river of Troas, rising, according to Strabo, on the highest part of Mount Ida, in the same hill with the Granicus and the OEdipus, and falling into the sea at Sigaeum; everything tends to identify it with Mendere, as Wood, Rennell, and others maintain; the Mendere is 40 miles long, 300 feet broad, deep in the time of flood, nearly dry in the summer. Dr. Clarke successfully combats the opinion of those who make the Scamander to have arisen from the springs of Bounabarshy, and traces the source of the river to the highest mountain in the chain of Ida, now Kusdaghy; receives the Simois in its course; towards its mouth it is very muddy, and flows through marshes. Between the Scamander and Simois, Homer’s Troy is supposed to have stood: this river, according to Homer, was called Xanthus by the gods, Scamander by men. The waters of the Scamander had the singular property of giving a beautiful colour to the hair or wool of such animals as bathed in them; hence the three goddesses, Minerva, Juno, and Venus, bathed there before they appeared before Paris to obtain the golden apple: the name Xanthus, “yellow,” was given to the Scamander, from the peculiar colour of its waters, still applicable to the Mendere, the yellow colour of whose waters attracts the attention of travellers.

      ²⁴ It should be “his chest like Neptune.” The torso of Neptune, in the “Elgin Marbles,” No. 103, (vol. ii. p. 26,) is remarkable for its breadth and massiveness of development.

      ²⁵ “Say first, for heav’n hides nothing from thy view.”— “Paradise Lost,” i. 27.

      “Ma di’ tu, Musa, come i primi danni

      Mandassero a Cristiani, e di quai parti:

      Tu ‘l sai; ma di tant’ opra a noi si lunge

      Debil aura di fama appena giunge.”—“Gier. Lib.” iv. 19.

      ²⁶ “The Catalogue is, perhaps, the portion of the poem in favour of which a claim to separate authorship has been most plausibly urged. Although the example of Homer has since rendered some such formal enumeration of the forces engaged, a common practice in epic poems descriptive of great warlike adventures, still so minute a statistical detail can neither be considered as imperatively required, nor perhaps such as would, in ordinary cases, suggest itself to the mind of a poet. Yet there is scarcely any portion of the Iliad where both historical and internal evidence are more clearly in favour of a connection from the remotest period, with the remainder of the work. The composition of the Catalogue, whensoever it may have taken place, necessarily presumes its author’s acquaintance with a previously existing Iliad. It were impossible otherwise to account for the harmony observable in the recurrence of so vast a number of proper names, most of them historically unimportant, and not a few altogether fictitious: or of so many geographical and genealogical details as are condensed in these few hundred lines, and incidentally scattered over the thousands which follow: equally inexplicable were the pointed allusions occurring in this episode to events narrated in the previous and subsequent text, several of which could hardly be of traditional notoriety, but through the medium of the Iliad.”— Mure, “Language and Literature of Greece,” vol. i. p. 263.

      ²⁷ Twice Sixty: “Thucydides observes that the Boeotian vessels, which carried one hundred and twenty men each, were probably meant to be the largest in the fleet, and those of Philoctetes, carrying fifty each, the smallest. The average would be eighty-five, and Thucydides supposes the troops to have rowed and navigated themselves; and that very few, besides the chiefs, went as mere passengers or landsmen. In short, we have in the Homeric descriptions the complete picture of an Indian or African war canoe, many of which are considerably larger than the largest scale assigned to those of the Greeks. If the total number of the Greek ships be taken at twelve hundred, according to Thucydides, although in point of fact there are only eleven hundred and eighty-six in the Catalogue, the amount of the army, upon the foregoing average, will be about a hundred and two thousand men. The historian considers this a small force as representing all Greece. Bryant, comparing it with the allied army at Platae, thinks it so large as to prove the entire falsehood of the whole story; and his reasonings and calculations are, for their curiosity, well worth a careful perusal.”— Coleridge, p. 211, sq.

      ²⁸ The mention of Corinth is an anachronism, as that city was called Ephyre before its capture by the Dorians. But Velleius, vol. i. p. 3, well observes, that the poet would naturally speak of various towns and cities by the names by which they were known in his own time.

       ²⁹

      “Adam, the goodliest man of men since born,

      His sons, the fairest of her daughters Eve.’

      —“Paradise Lost,” iv. 323.

      ³⁰ AEsetes’ tomb. Monuments were often built on the sea-coast, and of a considerable height, so as to serve as watch-towers or land marks. See my notes to my prose translations of the “Odyssey,” ii. p. 21, or on Eur. “Alcest.” vol. i. p. 240.

      ³¹ Zeleia, another name for Lycia. The inhabitants were greatly devoted to the worship of Apollo. See Muller, “Dorians,” vol. i. p. 248.

32 Barbarous tongues. “Various as were the dialects of the Greeks — and these differences existed not only between the several tribes, but even between neighbouring cities — they yet acknowledged in their language that they formed but one nation were but branches of the same family. Homer has ‘men of other tongues:’ and yet Homer had no general name for the Greek nation.”— Heeren, “Ancient Greece,” Section vii. p. 107, sq. .,

Book III.

       Argument.

THE DUEL OF MENELAUS AND PARIS.

      The armies being ready to engage, a single combat is agreed upon between Menelaus and Paris (by the intervention of Hector) for the determination of the war. Iris is sent to call Helen to behold the fight. She leads her to the walls of Troy, where Priam sat with his counsellers observing the Grecian leaders on the plain below, to whom Helen gives an account of the chief of them. The kings on either part take the solemn oath for the conditions of the combat. The duel ensues; wherein Paris being overcome, he is snatched away in a cloud by Venus, and transported to his apartment. She then calls Helen from the walls, and brings the lovers together. Agamemnon, on the part of the Grecians, demands the restoration of Helen, and the performance of the articles.

      The three-and-twentieth day still continues throughout this book. The scene is sometimes in the fields before Troy, and sometimes in Troy itself.

      Thus by their leaders’ care each martial band

      Moves into ranks, and stretches o’er the land.

      With shouts the Trojans, rushing from afar,

      Proclaim СКАЧАТЬ