Outgoes the mark, and drowns his father’s name:
That at these words his mother may rejoice,
And add her suffrage to the public voice.’But in this scene of great pathos and grandeur is the human reality of the small child’s
fear of the nodding plume of Hector’s helmet, which causes laughter amidst the tears
and makes the moment of parting one of tender intimacy, so that heroism is given a
fully human context. This simple and direct portrayal of human nature is unhampered
by any distracting notion of false grandeur either in human behaviour or in artistic
expression. Homer’s comprehensiveness can include the familiar touch, can descend
to particular details of common human experience and can tolerate the intrusion of
the comic. Discussion of these passages may serve to suggest that Homer’s style has
an unaffected beauty that is entirely without rhetorical extravagance or ornamental
excess, and that the beauty of it springs from the delicate sense of decorum and
propriety with which the artist’s language is in perfect harmony with what he seeks
to express.
Beauty without ornamental excess and a perfect harmony of content and form
wherein the artist’s expression is controlled by a restraining vision of what is truly
natural – these are the hallmarks of classic art, miraculously perfect like the goddess
of beauty herself at the moment of birth, in the poetic genius of archaic Greece.
Hesiod
A different poetic voice from early archaic Greece is that of Hesiod emanating from
the small rural village of Ascra in Boeotia in the central Greek mainland about the time
now thought to be the date of the composition of the Homeric poems some time in
the eighth century. He writes in the hexameter and uses formulae in the Homeric
manner, so that his poems have a similar relation to the oral tradition. His Theogony
(mentioned in Chapter 3) transmits early stories of the gods and is an important
supplement to Homer for early Greek myth. Unlike Homer, he includes personal
details about his life and circumstances, telling us in his Works and Daysthat his father
had migrated from Cyme in Asian Minor to Boeotia in search of a new life. In this work,
the poet is found in the role of teacher, addressing his brother Perses who evidently
needs to be taken seriously to task. Much of the poem has to do with the good works
necessary for agricultural success and the identification of the most propitious days
when they may be done. This is the world of arable farming rather than the pastoral
world of Homer. By way of introduction, the poet puts Perses in the right frame of
mind with a series of gloom-laden mythological excursuses, including the tale of
Pandora who was sent by Zeus as a punishment after Prometheus, a friend to man,
32 THE GREEKS