་་ In an interesting account of a sea-fight with the Saracens in 1190,1 Geoffrey de Vinsauf wrote: Soon the battle became general; the oars were entangled; they fought hand to hand; they grappled the ships with alternate casts, and set the decks [tabulata] on fire with the burning oil commonly called the Greek fire. This fire, with a deadly stench and livid flames, consumes flint and iron; and, unquenchable by water, can only be extinguished by sand or vinegar." In the romance of Richard Cœur de Lion, we read: Kyng Richard, oute of his galye, And fyr Gregeys into the see, And al on fyr wer the (11. 2627 ff.). The line we are discussing should be considered in its connection with that which immediately follows. In writing these two lines Chaucer seems to have recalled famous tactics that were used in English sea-battles of a somewhat earlier period than his own. 2 II. With pottes ful of lym they goon to-gider. Skeat notes: "Some carried pots full of quicklime, which they threw into the eyes of their enemies. See Notes and Queries, 5 S., X, 188. The English did this very thing, when attacking a French fleet, in the time of Henry III. Strutt (Manners and Customs, 1774, II, 11) quotes from Matthew Paris to this effect: 'Calcem quoque vivam et in pulverem subtilem reductam, in altum projicientes, vento illam ferente, Francorum oculos excaecaverunt.' Cf. Aen. viii, 694." The battle above mentioned was that in which Eustace the Monk was captured. In the romance concerning him, we read: Dont commenchièrent à ruer Ki lor faisoient le torment. 1 "Itinerarium Regis Anglorum Richardi et aliorum in Terram Hierosolymorum," in Gale, Hist. Britann., Sax., Anglo-Dan. Scriptores, II, 274. In 1194, or 1195, the King of England paid for carrying "Greek fire" ("targiis et quarellis et pilettis et igne Græco") from London to Nottingham for the use of an engineer named Urric. (See Nicolas, I, 80 ff.) The "pellets" here spoken of, and Vinsauf's description of the fire (with its "deadly stench and livid flames "), remind one of Chaucer's words in the House of Fame. Vinsauf was an author whom Chaucer knew. 2 Works of Chaucer, III, 312 f. See also Nicolas, I, 179. 8 Ed. Michel, p. 82. Hime writes: "Cameniata tells us that at the storming of Salonika in 904 the Moslems threw 'pitch and torches and quicklime' over the walls. By 'quicklime' he probably meant the earthenware hand grenades, filled with wet quicklime, described by the Emperor Leo, who then sat on the throne (886-911). The vapour of the quicklime,' he says, 'when the pots are broken, stifles and chokes the enemy and disturbs the soldiers.'' Chaucer's "pots full of lime" seem to have been more definite instruments of war than has usually been supposed. 12. And thus the longe day in fight they spende Edward III wrote in a letter to his son, the Black Prince, after Espagnolssur-Mer, that the enemy made a noble defense "all that day and the night after" (Nicolas, II, 502). Froissart says: "I cannot speak of every particular circumstance of this engagement. It lasted a considerable time; and the Spaniards gave the King of England and his fleet enough to do. However, at last, victory declared for the English. The Spaniards lost fourteen ships; the others saved themselves by flight" (II, 269). From the foregoing study it should appear that Chaucer's sea-battle is of an almost wholly mediæval sort. The methods of naval warfare that he depicts correspond in the main to those actually used by mariners of his own land when he wrote his poem; and some of the tactics that he mentions had been employed to advantage by English kings on celebrated occasions. It is likely that the poet was influenced by what he had read of sea-battles, and perhaps had Jean de Meun's Art de Chevalerie before him, but he probably gained most of his information from oral accounts of recent conflicts 2 and discussions with navy men. He did not undertake to describe any particular event, but simply to paint a vivid struggle between two fleets, which he knew would appeal to his readers the more if it seemed to them lifelike, and answered to their preconception of what such a picture should present. This procedure was fully in accord with Chaucer's practice. I have dwelt elsewhere upon the realism of the description of the tournament in the Knight's Tale.3 1 Gunpowder and Ammunition, p. 40. For the use of "wild fire" down to the siege of Paris in 1870, see pp. 50 ff. It was employed by the Flemish engineer Crab in the defense of Berwick when besieged by Edward II in 1319. Barbour says in the Bruce (Bk. xvii) : And pyk (pitch) and ter (tar) als haiff they tane, 2 Cf. Froissart's "as I was told by those who were present" (above, p. 144). 8 Chivalry in English Literature (Harvard Studies in Comparative Literature, Vol. II). Cambridge, 1912, pp. 38 ff. The sea-battle in the "Legend of Cleopatra" is another witness to the contemporaneousness of his work. Indeed, one may even go so far as to suggest that the widespread interest in naval affairs in England while Chaucer was fashioning the Legend of Good Women may have led him to include Cleopatra among the "Saints of Cupid," though she had not previously been famed as trewe in lovinge al hir lyve": it gave him an opportunity to describe one of the decisive sea-battles of the world in a way that must have stirred all his associates. The author of the Morte Arthure wrote his poem which reflects historical conditions of the reign of Edward III, in a similar spirit. ་་ THE RENDERING OF THE HOMERIC HYMNS CHARLES BURTON GULICK Since the time when Wolf expounded his theory of the composition of the Homeric poems, scholars have accepted with unusual unanimity his opinion concerning the origin and the purpose of the hymns to various deities which ancient citations and the manuscripts agree in calling "Homeric,' or "Homer's," or the "poet's." This opinion is to the effect that all the shorter hymns were composed by rhapsodes for various local celebrations and chanted as preludes to longer passages selected from the epos. Such preludes, it is said, were called рooíμa and were rendered at contests between rhapsodes, a custom which Hesiod mentions when he tells how he and Homer sang at Delos, and how at another time he went to Chalcis and won the tripod. for a hymn.2 He, however, calls his work a uvos, not a πрооíμov. Wolf's definition has proved useful, to say the least of the most fruitful book ever produced in the field of literary criticism; but the practical application of it has led to such diversity of conception, not to say misconception, among scholars who have dealt with the details of the hymns, that it may be worth while to reconsider the evidence, in order to determine more precisely the nature of this genre in Greek poetry, and whether its purpose can be regarded as uniform throughout. An invocation to a divinity was an essential preliminary to every act the Greek undertook, from a public festival to a private drinking bout, and the duty applied with peculiar force to an act so abundantly reflecting popular religious aspirations and theological conceptions as the recital of an epic. Accordingly, we find such an invocation as early as Odyssey 8, 499,3 where Demodocus, urged by Odysseus to sing of the wooden horse at Troy, 'began with the god, and voiced his lay.' And since the lays of the bard have been called oipa just before, it seemed to Wolf and others clear that рooíμov 1 F. A. Wolf, Prolegomena, pp. cvi-cvii. Baumeister, Hymni Homerici, larger edition, pp. 102 ff. Reisch, De Musicis Graecorum Certaminibus, p. 3: constat enim inter homines doctos hymnos illos ad deorum sollemnia celebranda compositos esse ita ut maiores in certaminibus musicis recitarentur, minores carminibus epicis prooemiorum loco praemitterentur. 2 Hesiod, frag. 244 Rzach; Works and Days, 650. 3 ως φάθ', ὁ δ ̓ ὁρμηθεὶς θεοῦ ἄρχετο, φαῖνε δ ̓ ἀοιδήν. Croiset (Histoire de la littérature grecque,2 I, 89) has origin and method of the epic. This eighth book of the Odyssey is, as pointed out, the locus classicus on the * Verse 481; cf. x, 347, and olμos doidîs in Hymn to Hermes, 451. The first lines of the Iliad and Odyssey, sometimes cited in illustration, stand for something different, namely, a convention due to literary instinct and not to religious practice. The invocation to the Muse (Calliope in 31, 1) occurs in nine of the hymns. is the natural designation of such an invocation. The earliest occurrence of the word lends support to this view, for Pindar1 expressly connects a προοίμιον to Zeus with a Homeric lay : ὅθενπερ καὶ Ομηρίδαι ῥαπτῶν ἐπέων τὰ πόλλ ̓ ἀοιδοὶ ἄρχονται Διὸς ἐκ προοιμίου. But the word, like so many other terms in music and literature in all languages, lost its strict etymological application soon after Pindar, as is shown by the tragedians and all the prose writers of the fifth century who employ it. With them it means 'prelude,' without any implication of something to follow. Even Thucydides is not to be excepted. In the well-known passage 2 in which he quotes the hymn to Apollo, he speaks of it, to be sure, as a πрooíμov, but in the face of contemporary usage there is no need to infer that he regarded the hymn as an introduction to an epic recital. Alcæus and Empedocles, neither of whom was a rhapsodist, wrote a προοίμιον εἰς ̓Απόλλωνα ; and the case of Socrates, occupying his hours in prison with an address to the same god, likewise called a πрooíμov, illustrates the same free use of the word. The scholiast on the Thucydidean passage understood it in this broader way. On è πрооμíov he remarks: ἐξ ὕμνου· τοὺς γὰρ ὕμνους προοίμια ἐκάλουν. In fact, in the fifth and fourth centuries the term was equated with uvos generally, whether the rhapsodic, that is hexameter, hymn is meant, or the lyric. Plato, accordingly, speaks of Tάons μоvσNS πрооíμia, proems (or introductions) to every kind of lyric poetry,' in connection with the lyre, and the proper commentary on this is a remark of a late rhetorician ®: προοίμια ἔλεγον οἱ παλαιοὶ τὰ τῶν κιθαρῳδῶν. The poolμov, properly so called, was sung with a harp accompaniment, and its singers (aoidoi) are coupled with harpists (@apioтaí) in the hymn. to the Muses and Apollo. One might be tempted to think, with Welcker 8 and Gruppe, that pooíμov was the peculiar designation of an Apollinic hymn, were it not for Pindar's Διὸς ἐκ προοιμίου just cited. There are other facts which lead to the conclusion that рooíμov was not the inevitable or stereotyped name for a hymn to Apollo or any other god. The oldest hymn-writer of all, according to Pausanias,10 was the Lycian Olen, who wrote for the divinities worshipped in Delos, and bore in fact the title of prophet of Apollo." Yet Herodotus 11 calls his song a uvos. It was undoubtedly in hexameters, which he is said to have invented. 12 More important is the disappearance of the word πрooíμov as a description of Homeric 1 Nemean Odes, 2, 1. 2 Thucydides, 3, 104. 5 Laws, 722. 8 Pausanias, 10, 8, 10. Diogenes Laertius, 8, 57. 6 Rhetores anon., Spengel, I, 427, 6, cited by Christ, Geschichte d. griech. Literatur,a p. 74. 7 Hymn 25, 3. The "lyrical" hymn — the English word shows how unsafe a guide is etymology pressed too far- —was frequently performed to a flute accompaniment, in which case the term "poaúλov (Plato, Cratylus, 417 E) might be applied to it. — Cf. also on the hymn Proclus, Chrestom., 244: ὁ κυρίως ὕμνος πρὸς κιθάραν ᾔδετο εστώτων, i.e., the performers did not dance, but stood still. 8 Der epische Cyclus, I, 328. 10 9, 27, 2. 4,35. 12 Pausanias, 10, 5, 8. 9 Griechische Culte und Mythen, p. 523. 11 |