William Gladstone - Studies on Homer and the Homeric Age, Vol. 3 of 3

Since the Sections which relate to Ethnology passed through the Press, the First Volume of Mr. Rawlinson’s Herodotus has appeared. Earlier possession of this important Publication would have emboldened me to proceed a step further in the attempt to specify the probable or possible form of the original Ethnic relation between the Pelasgians and the Hellenes of the Greek Peninsula, but designating the latter as pure Arian, and the former as Arian, with a residue or mixture of Turanian elements.

It has also been since the ‘Olympus’ was printed, that I have become acquainted with Welcker’s recent and unfinished ‘ Griechische Götterlehre ,’ (Göttingen, 1857.) I could have wished to refer to it at various points, and especially to avail myself of the clearer view, which the learned Author has given, of the position of Κρόνος.

Founding himself in part on the exclusive appropriation by Homer of the term Κρονίδης to Jupiter, he enables us to see how Jupiter may have inherited the sole use of the title as being ‘the Ancient of days;’ and how Κρόνος was a formation in the Mythology wholly secondary and posterior to his reputed son. (Welcker, sectt. 27, 8. pp. 140-7.)

Another recent book, M. Alfred Maury’s Histoire des Religions de la Grèce Antique , undertakes the useful task of unfolding largely the relations of the Greek religion to the East. But the division of it which deals with Homer specifically is neither complete nor accurate, and affords a new illustration of the proposition which I chiefly desire to establish, namely, that Homer ought to be treated as a separate and independent centre of study.

11, Carlton House Terrace, London,

March 15, 1858.

It is complained, and perhaps not without foundation, that the study of the ancient historians does not supply the youth of England with good political models: that, if we adjust our sympathies and antipathies according to the division of parties and classes offered to our view in Rome, Athens, or Sparta, they will not be cast in an English mould, but will come out in the cruder forms of oligarchic or democratic prejudice. Now I do not wait to inquire how far these defects may be supplied by the political philosophers, and in particular by the admirable treatise of Aristotle. And it certainly is true, that in general they present to us a state of political ideas and morals greatly deranged: the choice lies between evil on this side in one form, and on that side in another form: the characters, who can be recommended as examples, are commonly in a minority or in exile. Nor do I ask how far we ought to be content, having an admirable range, so to speak, of anatomical models in our hands, to lay aside the idea of attaching our sympathies to what we see. I would rather incite the objector to examine and judge whether we may not find an admirable school of polity, and see its fundamental ideas exhibited under the truest and largest forms, in a quarter where perhaps it would be the least expected, namely, in the writings of Homer.

As respects religion, arts, and manners, the Greeks of the heroic age may be compared with other societies in the infancy of man. But as respects political science in its essential rudiments, and as respects the application of those principles by way of art to the government of mankind, we may say with almost literal truth that they are the fathers of it; and Homer invites those who study him to come and view it in its cradle, where the infant carries every lineament in miniature, that we can reasonably desire to see developed in manhood.

Strong development of political ideas.

I cannot but deprecate the association established, perhaps unintentionally, by Grote, where, throwing Homer as he does into hotch-pot, so to speak, with the ‘legendary age,’ he expresses himself in his Preface 1 1 Page xvii. , as follows. ‘It must be confessed that the sentimental attributes of the Greek mind – its religious and poetical vein – here appear in disproportionate relief, as compared with its more vigorous and masculine capacities – with those powers of acting, organizing, judging, and speculating, which will be revealed in the forthcoming volumes.’ If the sentimental attribute is to be contra-distinguished from the powers, I will not say of speculating, but of acting, organizing, and judging, then I know of nothing less sentimental in the after-history of Greece than the characters of Achilles and Ulysses, than the relations of the Greek chiefs to one another and to their people, than the strength and simplicity which laid in those early times the foundation-stones of the Greek national character and institutions, and made them in the social order the just counterparts of the material structures that are now ascribed to the Pelasgians; simple indeed in their elements, but so durable and massive in their combination, as to be the marvel of all time. The influences derived from these sources were of such vitality and depth, that they secured to an insignificant country a predominating power for centuries, made one little point of the West an effective bulwark against the East, and caused Greece to throw out, to the right and left, so many branches each greater than the trunk. Even when the sun of her glory had set, there was yet left behind an immortal spark of the ancient vitality, which, enduring through all vicissitudes, kindled into a blaze after two thousand years; and we of this day have seen a Greek nation, founded anew by its own energies, become a centre of desire and hope at least to Eastern Christendom. The English are not ashamed to own their political forefathers in the forests of the Northward European Continent; and the later statesmen with the lawgivers of Greece were in their day glad, and with reason glad, to trace the bold outline and solid rudiments of their own and their country’s greatness in the poems of Homer. Nothing in those poems offers itself, to me at least, as more remarkable, than the deep carving of the political characters; and what is still more, the intense political spirit which pervades them. I will venture one step farther, and say that, of all the countries of the civilized world, there is no one of which the inhabitants ought to find that spirit so intelligible and accessible as the English: because it is a spirit, that still largely lives and breathes in our own institutions, and, if I mistake not, even in the peculiarities of those institutions. There we find the great cardinal ideas, which lie at the very foundation of all enlightened government: and then we find, too, the men formed under the influence of such ideas; as one among ourselves, who has drunk into their spirit, tells us;

And again,

It was surely a healthful sign of the working of freedom, that in that early age, despite the prevalence of piracy, even that idea of political justice and public right, which is the germ of the law of nations, was not unknown to the Greeks. It would appear that war could not be made without an appropriate cause, and that the offer of redress made it the duty of the injured to come to terms. Hence the offer of Paris in the Third Iliad is at once readily accepted: and hence, even after the breach of the Pact, arises Agamemnon’s fear, at the moment when he anticipates the death of Menelaus, that by that event the claim to the restoration of Helen will be practically disposed of, and the Greeks will have to return home without reparation for a wrong, of which the corpus , as it were, will have disappeared 3 3 Il. iv. 160-82. .