Yet, in the scene of the Oaths (_Iliad_ iii. 278-9), certain powers are appealed to which ‘beneath the earth punish men outworn’. I do not think this a late interpolation, because the formula of the sacrifices connected with the oath is likely to be very ancient, to be pre-Homeric, and to reflect an old belief no longer popular. In these matters all contradictory notions may coexist, as when the hymn of the Euahlayi tribe of New South Wales prays Baiame to admit the soul of Erin into his paradise, Bullimah, while the myth says that Erin is now incarnate in a little bird. Many of the lowest savages believe in a future of rewards and punishments, but the doctrine of the efficacy of fire has all but driven this faith out of Homer’s ken.
Cremation is the great _crux_ of Homeric anthropology, cremation, and the consequent absence of ghost-feeding, and of hero-worship. Archaeology shows that these practices went on unbroken in Greece, and archaeology cannot show us a single example of the Homeric barrow and method of interment. Yet the method is a genuine historic method in Northern Europe of the Age of Bronze. Homer did not invent it; he mentions no other mode of disposing of the dead, but we have never found its traces in Greece. The shaft graves and tholos graves of late Minoan times have left no vestige of tradition in the Epics, and the cremation and barrow are equally absent from the view of the archaeologist. I cannot venture on any guess at an explanation. We are precluded from supposing that cremation arose in the wanderings after the Dorian invasion, for the purpose of concealing the remains of the dead from desecration by alien foes. The shaft grave might conceal them, the tumulus and pillar above only advertise their whereabouts to the ruthless foe.
It is plain that, on many points, Homer, with his austere taste, is not a very rich source for the anthropologist in search of savage survivals. In Homer no human beings work magic; a witch, like a harlot, is not to be found in the Epics. Both are familiar in the Old Testament. There is a second-sighted man, but his was a natural faculty. Homer never alludes to the humbler necessities of our animal nature; unlike Shakespeare, he never makes old Nestor cough and spit, when roused, as in the _Doloneia_, by a night alarm. Nobody coughs in Homer. He sings for an audience that has lived down the ape, though the tiger has not wholly died. He knows nothing of our instruments of torture, rack and boot and thumbscrews, which, in Scotland, outlasted the seventeenth century. Historic Greece was not very successful in expelling the beast from human nature. The poets of historical Greece were never so successful as Homer. I infer that the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_ are prehistoric, the flowers of a brief age of Achaean civilization, an age when the society of princes and ladies had a taste extraordinarily pure and noble. The poems were framed for an aristocratic, not for a popular audience, though I am perfectly ready to grant that the popular audience to which our best ballad minstrels sang also desired a tone of singular purity in the serious romantic lays. It is the nature of the highest objective art, whether in epic or ballad, to be clean: the Muses are maidens.