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"A faint Homeric echo" it is not, nor a Virgilian echo, but the absolute voice of old romance, a thing that might have been chanted by "The lonely maiden of the Lake" when "Nine years she wrought it, sitting in the deeps, Upon the hidden bases of the hills." Perhaps the most exquisite adaptation of all are the lines from the Odyssey "Where falls not hail nor rain, nor any snow."
Sailors driven by storms into the western sea might have brought to Asia Minor accounts of the existence of a western land and possibly also of its whirlpools and island-mountains vomiting fire: but in the age of the Homeric poetry there was an utter want of trustworthy information respecting Sicily and Italy, even in that Greek land which was the earliest to enter into intercourse with the west; and the story-tellers and poets of the east could without fear of contradiction fill the vacant realms of the west, as those of the west in their turn filled the fabulous east, with their castles in the air.
Pope's ingenious translation of the ILIAD. He now proposed to narrate the principal incidents of that poem having thoroughly mastered the argument and fairly forgotten the words in the current vernacular of Sandy Bar. And so for the rest of that night the Homeric demigods again walked the earth.
In short, the Homeric poet undeniably treats the age of his heroes as having already, in the phrase of Thucydides, "won its way to the mythical," and therefore as indefinitely remote. It is impossible here to discuss in detail the complex problems of Mycenaean chronology.
The relative position of the sexes in Homeric Greece exhibits nothing materially different from the present day. In Armenia and Syria perhaps Christianity has done the service of extinguishing polygamy: this is creditable, though nowise miraculous. Judaism also unlearnt polygamy, and made an unbidden improvement upon Moses.
Others, again, pass their lives in counting the number of verses written by Greek and Roman poets, and are delighted with the proportions 7:13 = 14:26. Finally, one of them brings forward his solution of a question, such as the Homeric poems considered from the standpoint of prepositions, and thinks he has drawn the truth from the bottom of the well with ἀνά and κατά.
Among all the branches of knowledge which the Homeric critic should have at his command, only philology, archaeology, and anthropology can be called "sciences"; and they are not exact sciences: they are but skirmishing advances towards the true solution of problems prehistoric and "proto-historic."
What was the heavy pounding of your Homeric swordsmen, what was the creaking charge of chariots, beside this swift rush, this crash, this giddy triumph, this headlong swoop to death?
Hence it came about that that which, when worn in its entirety, is so dull and decorous, became so provocative of Homeric laughter when distributed amongst several wearers. No person with the least tincture of taste can ever weary of Dr. Newman, and no apology is therefore offered for another quotation from his pages.
I enjoyed those evenings at home, I think, the very best of all. We sat late, supper being served about midnight a plain, sensible repast that, with a man of Mr. Winthrop's means, might certainly betoken high thinking. However, the intellectual repast served to us reminded me of the feasts of the gods, or even better, in old Homeric times.
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