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The Iliad as heroic poetry
and thus imposes a definite lower boundary to 'heroic time'. Observance of
the boundary is meticulous in Greek, and perhaps only in Greek. A few sons
of those who fought at Troy are named, but Telemakhos is a mere appendage
of Odysseus and Orestes' sole heroic act is a tailpiece to the story of
Agamemnon. The upper limit is apt to be more untidy because it depends
on the success of the cycles in drawing ancient figures (like the greater Aias)
into their compass. 6
The theme oloi vuv (3poToi eiai applies only to physical and spiritual
strength; for material things - houses, ships, weapons - the normal assumption
is that the age of heroes was much like the singer's. In this respect the
chanson de geste and the Iliad are at opposite ends of the continuum. French
feudalism of the twelfth century, chain mail, the couched lance, and the
cavalry charge are projected onto the Carolingian age with no sense of
anachronism, for it is hard to see that there has been change where there
has been no marked discontinuity. In Greece, however, the end of the
Heroic Age coincided with the beginning of the Iron Age, a development
in technology that was not easily forgotten; so the heroes continued to use
their bronze weapons. Chariots too impressed themselves on the collective
memory, as they did too in India and Ireland. Generally, however, heroic
poetry has little use for conscious archaism unless it touches the singers'
sense of cultural or ethnic identity. Amerindians exclude reference to Europeans
in their heroic world, Siberians to Russians, and Ionian singers to
Dorian Greeks.
Where it can be verified the history of a heroic tale seems always to
have begun with the celebration of contemporary or at least recent events.
The best evidence for this is from Europe where the typology of the heroic
poem has generally been realistic and where contemporary celebration has
been recorded by historians and observed in practice. The Greek tradition
is 'European' in being realistic and attached to real places, and this is the
strongest comparative argument that some fragments of history lurk behind
it. Elsewhere, especially in Asia, a tendency to raise the hero and his exploits
to the supernatural plane has obscured whatever historical origins there
may have been.
Moreover most heroic traditions are known only from relatively late
stages in their history, when the events they purport to narrate lie beyond
verification in a distant past. The fact that something seems to be strongly
remembered is not a certificate that it happened in the way that it was told.
6 In the South Slavic tradition a discontinuity, the battle of Kosovo, marks the beginning of
a tense heroic period that lasted well into the nineteenth century. Earlier songs celebrate a
relaxed and cheerful breed of hero, like Marko Kraljevic. The reality of the Germanic Heroic
Age, the principal subject of H. M. Chadwick's masterly study The Heroic Age (Cambridge
1912), has been doubted (Hatto, Traditions 11 204).
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