natural sentiment, as between parents and children, was profoundly ingrained in the morality of the heroic age. The feeling of Achilles for Peleus, of Odysseus for his father Laertes and his mother Anticlea, exhibits an affection alike deep and tender. Those who die young, like Simoisius by the hand of Ajax, die before they have had time to repay to their parents their threptra, the pains and care of rearing them. Phoenix, in the height of wrath with his father, and in a country where homicide was thought a calamity far more than a crime, is restrained from offering him any violence, lest he should be branded, among the Achaians, with the stamp of Parricide. All this was reciprocated on the side of parents: even in Troy, as we may judge from the conduct and words of Hector, of Andromache, of Priam. While the father of Odysseus pined on earth for his return, his mother died of a broken heart for his absence. And the Shade of Achilles in the Underworld only craves to know whether Peleus is still held in honor; and a momentary streak of light and joy gilds his dreary and gloomy existence, when he learns that his son Neoptolemus has proved himself worthy of his sire, and has attained to fame in The very selfish nature of Agamemnon does not prevent his feeling a watchful anxiety for his brother Menelaus. Where human interests spread and ramify by this tenacity of domestic affections, there the generations of men are firmly knit together; concern for the future becomes a spring of noble action; affection for the past engenders an emulation of its greatness; and as it is in history that these sentiments find their means of subsistence, the primitive poet of such a country scarcely can but be an historian.

war.

We do not find, indeed, that relationships are traced in Homer by name beyond the degree of first cousins. But that the tie of blood was much more widely recognized, we may judge from the passage in the Second Iliad, which shows that the divisions of the army were subdivided into tribes and clans. Guestship likewise descended through generations: Diomed and Glaucus exchange arms, and agree to avoid one another in fight, because their grandfathers had been xenoi.

The intensity of the Poet's admiration for beautiful form is exhibited alike with reference to men, women, and animals. Achilles, his greatest warrior, is also his most beautiful man: Ajax, the second soldier, has also the second place in beauty, according to Odysseus. Nireus, his rival for that place, is

commemorated for his beauty, though in other respects he is declared to have been an insignificant personage. Odysseus, elderly, if not old, is carried into rapture by the beauty of Nausicaa. Not Helen alone, but his principal women in general, short of positive old age (for Penelope is included), are beautiful. He felt intensely, as appears from many passages, the beauty of the horse. But this admiring sentiment towards all beauty of form appears to have been an entirely pure one. His only licentious episode, that of the Net of Hephæstus, he draws from an Eastern mythology. He recounts it as sung before men only, not women; and not in Greece, but in Scheria, to an audience of Phoenician extraction and associations. It is in Troy that the gloating eyes of the old men follow Helen as she walks. The only Greeks to whom the like is imputed are the dissolute and hateful Suitors of the Odyssey. The proceedings of Here in the Fourteenth Iliad are strictly subordinated to policy. They are scarcely decent; and a single sentiment of Thetis may be criticised. But the observations I would offer are, first that all the questionable incidents of sentiments are in the sphere of the mythology, which in several important respects tended to corrupt, and not to elevate, mankind. Secondly, how trifling an item do they contribute to the great Encyclopedia of human life, which is presented to us in the Poems. Thirdly, even among the great writers of the Christian ages, how few will abide the application of a rigid test in this respect so well as Homer. And lastly, let us observe the thorough rectitude of purpose which governs the Poems: where Artemis, the severely pure, is commonly represented as an object of veneration, but Aphrodite is as commonly represented in such a manner as to attract aversion or contempt, and when, among human characters, no licentious act is ever so exhibited as to confuse or pervert the sense of right and wrong. The Poet's treatment on Paris on earth, whom he has made his only contemptible prince or warrior, is in strict keeping with his treatment of Aphrodite among Immortals.

With regard to anything which is unbecoming in the human person, the delicacy of Homer is uniform and perhaps unrivaled. In the case of women, there is not a single allusion to it. In the case of men, the only allusions we find are grave and admirably handled. When Odysseus threatens to strip Thersites, it is only to make him an object of general and unmitigated

disgust. When Priam foretells the mangling of his own naked corpse by animals, the insult to natural decency thus anticipated serves only to express the intense agony of his mind. The scene in which Odysseus emerges from the sea on the coast of Scheria, is perhaps among the most careful, and yet the most simple and unaffected, exhibitions of true modesty in all literature. And the mode in which all this is presented to us suggests that it forms a true picture of the general manners of the nation at the time. That this delicacy long subsisted in Greece, we learn from Thucydides. The morality of the Homeric period is that of the childhood of a race: the morality of the classic times belongs to its manhood. On the side of the latter, it may be urged that two causes in particular tend to raise its level. With regular forms of political and civil organization, there grows up in written law a public testimonial on behalf, in the main, of truth, honesty, and justice. For, while private conduct represents the human mind under the bias of every temptation, the law, as a general rule, speaks that which our perceptions would affirm were there no such bias. But further, with law and order comes the clearer idea and fuller enjoyment of the fruits of labor; and for the sake of security each man adopts, and in general acts upon, a recognition of the rights of property. These are powerful agencies for good in a great department of morals. Besides these, with a more imposing beauty, but probably with less of practical efficacy, the speculative intellect of man goes to work, and establishes abstract theories of virtue, vice, and their consequences, which by their comprehensiveness and method put out of countenance the indeterminate ethics of remote antiquity. All this is to be laid in one scale. But the other would, I think, predominate, if it were only from the single consideration that the creed of the Homeric age brought both the sense and the dread of the divine justice to bear in restraint of vice and passion. And upon the whole, after the survey which has been taken, it would in my opinion be somewhat rash to assert that either the duties of men to the deity, or the larger claims of man upon man, were better understood in the age of Pericles or Alexander, of Sylla or Augustus, than in the age of Homer. Perhaps the following sketch of Greek life in the heroic age may not be far wide of the truth.

The youth of high birth, not then so widely as now separated from the low, is educated under tutors in reverence of his

parents, and in desire to emulate their fame; he shares in manly and in graceful sports; acquires the use of arms; hardens himself in the pursuit, then of all others the most indispensable, the hunting down of wild beasts; gains the knowledge of medicine, probably also of the lyre. Sometimes, with manysided intelligence, he even sets himself to learn how to build his own house or ship, or how to drive the plow firm and straight down the furrow, as well as to reap the standing corn.

And, when scarcely a man, he bears arms for his country or his tribe, takes part in its government, learns by direct instruction and by practice how to rule mankind through the use of reasoning and persuasive power in political assemblies, attends and assists in sacrifices to the gods. For, all this time, he has been in kindly and free relations, not only with his parents, his family, his equals of his own age, but with the attendants, although they are but serfs, who have known him from infancy on his father's domain.

He is indeed mistaught with reference to the use of the strong hand. Human life is cheap; so cheap that even a mild and gentle youth may be betrayed, upon a casual quarrel over some childish game with his friend, into taking it away. And even so throughout his life, should some occasion come that stirs up his passions from their depths, a wild beast, as it were, awakes within him, and he loses his humanity for the time, until reason has reëstablished her control. Short, however, of such a desperate crisis, though he could not for the world rob his friend or his neighbor, yet he might be not unwilling to triumph over him to his cost, for the sake of some exercise of signal ingenuity; while, from a hostile tribe or a foreign shore, or from the individual who has become his enemy, he will acquire by main force what he can, nor will he scruple to inflict on him by stratagem even deadly injury. He must, however, give liberally to those who are in need; to the wayfarer, to the poor, to the suppliant who begs from him shelter and protection. On the other hand, should his own goods be wasted, the liberal and open-handed contributions of his neighbors will not be wanting to replace them.

His early youth is not solicited into vice by finding sensual excess in vogue, or the opportunities of it glaring in his eye and sounding in his ear. Gluttony is hardly known; drunkenness is marked only by its degrading character, and by the evil consequences that flow so straight from it; and it is abhorred.

VOL. II. -7

But he loves the genial use of meals, and rejoices in the hour when the guests, gathered in his father's hall, enjoy a liberal hospitality, and the wine mantles in the cup. For then they listen to the strains of the minstrel, who celebrates before them the newest and the dearest of the heroic tales that stir their blood, and rouse their manly resolution to be worthy, in their turn, of their country and their country's heroes. He joins the dance in the festivals of religion; the maiden's hand upon his wrist, and the gilded knife gleaming from his belt, as they course from point to point, or wheel in round on round. That maiden, some Nausicaa, or some Hermione of a neighboring district, in due time he weds, amidst the rejoicings of their families, and brings her home to cherish her, "from the flower to the ripeness of the grape," with respect, fidelity, and love.

Whether as a governor or as governed, politics bring him, in ordinary circumstances, no great share of trouble. Government is a machine, of which the wheels move easily enough; for they are well oiled by simplicity of usages, ideas, and desires; by unity of interest; by respect for authority, and for those in whose hands it is reposed; by love of the common country, the common altar, the common festivals and games, to which already there is large resort. In peace he settles the disputes of his people, in war he lends them the precious example of heroic daring. He consults them, and advises with them, on all grave affairs; and his wakeful care for their interests is rewarded by the ample domains which are set apart for the prince by the people. Finally, he closes his eyes, delivering over the scepter to his son, and leaving much peace and happiness around him.

Such was, probably, the state of society amidst the concluding phase of which Homer's youth, at least, was passed. But a dark and deep social revolution seems to have followed the Trojan war; we have its workings already become visible in the Odyssey. Scarcely could even Odysseus cope with it, contracted though it was for him within the narrow bounds of Ithaca. On the mainland, the bands of the elder society are soon wholly broken. The Pelopid, Neleid, Enid houses are a wreck disorganization invites the entry of new forces to control it; the Dorian lances bristle on the Etolian beach, and the primitive Greece, the patriarchal Greece, the Greece of Homer, is no more.