“Thus he spake, and smote him with his sceptre on the midriff and the shoulders. But he hunched himself up and a big tear fell from him, and a blood-red weal rose up from his back under the golden sceptre. So he sat down and trembled, looked helpless, and wiped away a tear in his pain, and they, for all their anger, laughed sweetly at him. And thus a man would say, looking at his neighbour, ‘Lo, now! Verily Odysseus hath done a thousand good deeds both in discovering good counsel and in leading the battle, but now this is far his best deed among the Argives, in that he hath checked this word-spattering maker of mischief from his rantings. Never again, I ween, will his ambitious heart stir him up to revile kings with words of reproof.’”
Thersites is not a product of simple undeveloped monarchy; the poet who drew this portrait had seen the mob-orator in his native agora. Thersites, it has been said, is the only private in the army. He is the only man who is named without a patronymic. And yet modern research has shown that even Thersites had an ancient cultus as a demigod in Sparta. So true is it that all the figures of the epic stage are figures of tribal ancestor-worship.
That is why the real gods come so badly out of the epics. They are the only immoral people in Homer; they cheat and lie, they smack and squabble. Perhaps we do not expect much decency from Zeus or Aphrodite, but even the stately Hera herself alternates between the crafty courtesan and the scolding fish-wife. And yet Homer is the “Bible of the Greeks”! Herodotus said, and said truly, that it was Hesiod and Homer who assigned to the gods their names, distributed their honours and functions, and settled their appearance and characteristics. In after-times Homer was the universal primer of education. It is extremely probable that Homer and Hesiod selected certain deities out of a vast number for special honour as members of the Olympian family. Why in the world, then, did not Homer honour them? Various explanations have been given. The old explanation was that this is the naive expression of primitive anthropomorphism, which makes gods in the likeness of men, enlarging the human vices as well as the virtues. But no one who really studies Homer can believe in a theory which makes him simple and childlike. Homer’s ridicule of the gods is not the unsophisticated laughter of a child or a savage. It is to be noticed that it is only some of the gods who come badly out of the Homeric theology. No figure could be lovelier than that of the sea-goddess, Thetis, or more dignified than Pallas Athene, or more ethereal than Iris, the ambassadress of heaven. Professor Ridgeway’s belief that Homer was written by a bard of the old race honouring his Achæan masters might explain the mordant raillery of Northern gods like Zeus and Hera. But then Aphrodite, who is the worst treated of all, would seem to be actually the Nature-goddess of Crete, ever accompanied with doves in Cretan art. It is just the Ægean naturalism which is excluded from Homeric religion. There is nothing to connect even Iris with the rainbow. My own explanation would be that hero-worship is Homer’s main concern. So many of his heroes claim descent from Zeus by so many mothers that Zeus cannot be endowed with monogamic morality. The gods can look after themselves; it is the heroes who require the assistance of the bard. I believe, too, in Professor Gilbert Murray’s suggestion that in these passages of impiety we have the intervention of the later Ionic spirit of rationalism. As such passages are widely diffused over the Iliad we should have to place the composition of a considerable part of it so late as the eighth and seventh century before Christ. But as we have seen that the political background of Homer is in the main a scene of aristocracy, precisely such as we have in the seventh-century poet Hesiod, there is no real objection to a late dating.