The merit of this method of arguing may be left to the judgment of the reader, who will remark that wedded pairs are not described as leaving the hall when they go to bed; they sleep in "a recess of the lofty house," the innermost part. Is this the same as the "recess of the hall" or is it an innermost part of the house?Who can be certain?
The bridal chamber, built so cunningly, with the trunk of a tree for the support of the bed, by Odysseus (odyssey, XXIII. 177-204), is, according to Noack, an exception, a solitary freak of Odysseus. But we may reply that the thalamos, the separate chamber, is no freak; the freak, by knowledge of which Odysseus proves his identity, is the use of the tree in the construction of the bed. {blank space} was highly original.
That separate chambers are needed for grown-up children, BECAUSEthe parents sleep in the hall, is no strong argument. If the parents had a separate chamber, the young people, unless they slept in the hall, would still need their own. The girls, of course, could not sleep in the hall; and, in the absence of both Penelope and Odysseus from the hall, ever since Telemachus was a baby, Telemachus could have slept there. But it will be replied that the Wooers did not beset the hall, and Penelope did not retire to a separate chamber, till Telemachus was a big boy of sixteen. Noack argues that he had a separate chamber, though the hall was free, tradition. {Footnote: Noack, p. 49.}
Where does Noack think that, in a normal Homeric house, the girls of the family slept? Theycould not sleep in the hall, and on the two occasions when the Iliadhas to mention the chambers of the young ladies they are "upper chambers," as is natural. But as Noack wants to prove the house of Odysseus, with its upper chambers, to be a late peculiar house, he, of course, expunges the two mentions of girls' upper chambers in the Odyssey. The process is simple and easy.
We find ( Iliad, XVII. 36) that a son, wedding in his father's and mother's life-time, has a thalamosbuilt for him, and a muchosin the THALAMOS, where he leaves his wife when he goes to war. This dwelling of grown-up married children, as in the case of the sons of Priam, has a thalamos, or doma, and a courtyard—is a house, in fact ( Iliad, VI. 3 16). Here we seem to distinguish the bed-chamber from the doma, which is the hall. Noack objects that when Odysseus fumigates his house, after slaying the Wooers, he thus treats the megaron, ANDthe doma, ANDthe courtyard. Therefore, Noack argues, the megaron, or hall, is one thing; the domais another. Mr. Monro writes, " domausually means megaron," and he supposes a slip from another reading, thalamonfor megaron, which is not satisfactory. But if domahere be not equivalent to megaron, what room can it possibly be? Who was killed in another place? what place therefore needed purification except the hall and courtyard? No other places needed purifying; there is therefore clearly a defect in the lines which cannot be used in the argument.
Noack, in any case, maintains that Paris has but one place to live in by day and to sleep in by night—his {Greek: talamos}. There he sleeps, eats, and polishes his weapons and armour. There Hector finds him looking to his gear; Helen and the maids are all there ( Iliad,VI. 321-323). Is this quite certain? Are Helen and the maids in the {Greek: talamos}, where Paris is polishing his corslet and looking to his bow, or in an adjacent room? If not in another room, why, when Hector is in the room talking to Paris, does Helen ask him to "come in"? ( Iliad,VI. 354). He is in, is there another room whence she can hear him?
The minuteness of these inquiries is tedious!
In Iliad,III. 125, Iris finds Helen "in the hall" weaving. She summons her to come to Priam on the gate. Helen dresses in outdoor costume, and goes forth "from the chamber," {Greek: talamos} (III. 141-142). Are hall and chamber the same room, or did not Helen dress "in the chamber"? In the same Book (III. 174) she repents having left the {Greek: talamos} of Menelaus, not his halclass="underline" the passage is not a repetition in words of her speech in the Odyssey.
The gods, of course, are lodged like men. When we find that Zeus has really a separate sleeping chamber, built by Hephaestus, as Odysseus has ( Iliad,XIV. 166-167), we are told that this is a late interpolation. Mr. Leaf, who has a high opinion of this scene, "the Beguiling of Zeus," places it in the "second expansions"; he finds no "late Odyssean" elements in the language. In Iliad,I. 608-611, Zeus "departed to his couch"; he seems not to have stayed and slept in the hall.
Here a quaint problem occurs. Of all late things in the Odyssey the latest is said to be the song of Demodocus about the loves of Ares and Aphrodite in the house of Hephaestus. {Footnote: Odyssey, VIII. 266-300.} We shall show that this opinion is far from certainly correct. Hephaestus sets a snare round the bed in his {Greek: talamos} and catches the guilty lovers. Now, was his {Greek: talamos} or bedroom, also his dining-room? If so, the author of the song, though so "late," knows what Noack knows, and what the poets who assign sleeping chambers to wedded folks do not know, namely, that neither married gods nor married men have separate bedrooms. This is plain, for he makes Hephaestus stand at the front door of his house, and shout to the gods to come and see the sinful lovers. {Footnote: Ibid., VI. 304-305} They all come and look on from the front door( Odyssey, VII. 325), which leads into the {Greek: megaron}, the hall. If the lovers are in bed in the hall, then hall and bedroom are all one, and the terribly late poet who made this lay knows it, though the late poets of the Odysseyand Iliaddo not.
It would appear that the author of the lay is not "late," as we shall prove in another case.
Noack, then, will not allow man or god to have a separate wedding chamber, nor women, before the late parts of the Odyssey, to have separate quarters, except in the house of Odysseus. Women's chambers do not exist in the Homeric house. {Footnote: Noack, p. 50.} If so, how remote is the true Homeric house from the house of historical Greece!
As for upper chambers, those of the daughter of the house ( Iliad,II. 514; XVI. 184), both passages are "late," as we saw (Noack, p.{blank space}). In the OdysseyPenelope both sleeps and works at the shroud in an upper chamber. But the whole arrangement of upper chambers as women's apartments is as late, says Noack, as the time of the poets and "redactors" (whoever they may have been) of the Odyssey, XXI., XXII., XXIII. {Footnote: Noack, p. 68.} At the earliest these Books are said to be of the eighth century B.C. Here the late poets have their innings at last, and do modernise the Homeric house.
To prove the absence of upper rooms in the Iliadwe have to abolish II. 514, where Astyoche meets her divine lover in her upper chamber, and XVI. 184, where Polymкlк celebrates her amour with Hermes "in the upper chambers." The places where these two passages occur, Catalogue(Book II.) and the Catalogueof the Myrmidons(Book XVI.) are, indeed, both called "late," but the author of the latter knows the early law of bride-price, which is supposed to be unknown to the authors of "late" passages in the Odyssey (XVI. 190).