The Historians' History of the World 04

This Homeric art is certainly in the main Hellenic. But for all that, it is only one side of the Hellenic spirit, which is not even remotely understood by those who identify it with Homer. A great danger is already threatening this form of art in the shape of conventionalism, of stereotyped beauty. It grows too easy to be a Homerides, and he who rests satisfied with such an achievement thereby renounces all aspiration to become a Homer. And the life depicted by Homer conceals beneath its brilliant surface much not only of hollowness but of evil. There is a total lack of national sentiment; there is no state; properly speaking there is no religion. These gods will vanish into thin air like vapours at the advent of a true god who wins men’s hearts to serve him. These men and women enjoy and suffer—to what end? To blossom and wither like the leaves of the woodland. What is the end of this brilliant world? The horrors of devastation for Ilium, and for the Achæans, returning home in their fleet—shipwreck.

The Ionians had just been torn from their native mountains and springs, from their ancestors and from their gods; in dire distress they had fought for and conquered new settlements on a foreign coast and among foreign races. They had been constrained to turn away from their mother-earth: the sea cannot take its place, for the earth alone is θεσμοφόρος. So it is that the legitimate heirs of the Homeric poets are the very men who shake off Homeric ideals—the Milesian merchant who traverses all seas, founds factories and cities, mingles with all nations, gathers information and wealth from all sides; the Ionian artist who abandons the excrescences of conventional style with the conventional Heroic legend, in his search for what is characteristic and individual; the subjective thinker of Ionia who seeks in his own breast the solution of the world’s enigma, and whether he discovers cosmic law there or in the contemplation of the heavens, ruthlessly thrusts away from him the fair illusions of Homer.