CHAPTER XXXIX (b) - THE HOMERIC POEMS AS HISTORY

Summary

INTRODUCTION

The survival of some twenty-eight thousand lines of poetry almost contemporary with his period of study, and concerning one of its chief events, is a gift of which the historian can hardly complain. The Iliad and Odyssey provide a more graphic and more detailed account of life around the end of the Bronze Age than exists for any other period in Greece until the late fifth century B.C. There emerges from them a wonderful if rather indistinct picture of what it was like to be an Achaean nobleman on campaign, or traversing dangerous seas, or at home in his palace. They give a generous if blurred taste of a distant heroic age, its beliefs, customs and limitations. Yet the picture is indistinct, the taste blurred, and the historian must ruthlessly resist their vague and merely aesthetic blandishments. Not that the indistinct picture is entirely without historical value: in itself, indeed, it may contain more of history, in one real sense of the word, than bare archaeological facts devoid of human mediation and direct human reference. Nevertheless those bare facts are necessary as a framework, and without enough of them the literary and humane picture often becomes horribly misleading. Now some literary pictures contain, clearly visible, their own factual framework, and that at first sight may seem to be the case with the Homeric poems. Yet the truth is that they turn out on inspection to be fickle and treacherous in this respect. In the present context, therefore, it is more necessary to assess with unsentimental accuracy the nature of the Iliad and Odyssey as evidence than to expound their beauty or the detailed structure of their plot.