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PARTISAN REVIEW
family; like Eumaios, she is closely connected with their fate, she
loves them and shares their interests and feelings. But she has no
life of her own, no feelings of her own; she has only the life and
feelings of her master. Eumaios too, though he still remembers that he
was born a freeman and indeed of a noble house (he was stolen as a
boy), has, not only in fact but also in his own feeling, no life of his
own any longer, he is entirely involved in the life of his masters. Yet
these two characters are the only ones whom Homer brings to life
who do not belong to the ruling class. Thus we become conscious of
the fact that in the Homeric poems life is enacted only among the
ruling class---others appear only in the role of servants to that class.
The ruling class is still so strongly patriarchal, and still itself so in–
volved in the daily activities of domestic life, that one is sometimes
likely to forget their rank. But they are unmistakably a sort of feudal
aristocracy, whose men divide their lives between war, hunting,
marketplace councils, and feasting, while the women supervise the
maids in the house.
As
a social picture, this world is completely stable;
wars take place only between different groups of the ruling class;
nothing ever pushes up from below. In the early stories of the Old
Testament the patriarchal condition is dominant too, but since the
people involved are individual nomadic or half-nomadic tribal leaders,
the social picture gives a much less stable impression; class-distinctions
are not felt. As soon as the people completely emerges- that is, after
the withdrawal from Egypt-its activity is always discernible, it is
often in ferment, it frequently intervenes in events not only as a
whole but also in separate groups and through the medium of separate
individuals who come forward; the origins of prophecy seem to lie
in the irrepressible politico-religious spontaneity of the people. We
receive the impression that the movements emerging from the depths
of the people of Israel-Judah must have been of a wholly different
nature from those of even the later ancient democracies, of a dif–
ferent nature and far more elemental.
With the more profound historicity and the more profound
social activity of the Old Testament text, there is connected yet an–
other important distinction: namely, that a different conception of
elevated style and of the sublime is to be found here than in Homer.
Homer, of course, is not afraid to let the realism of daily life enter into
the sublime and tragic; our episode of the scar is an example, we see
