The poet's meaning seems quite clear. He is not flattering Pisistratus, but, with quiet humour, offers the portrait of a vain, worthy veteran. It is difficult to see how this point can be missed; it never was missed before Nestor's speeches seemed serviceable to the Pisistratean theory of the composition of the ILIAD. In his first edition Mr. Leaf regarded the interpolations as intended "to glorify Nestor" without reference to Pisistratus, whom Mr. Leaf did not then recognise as the master of a sycophantic editor. The passages are really meant to display the old man's habit of glorifying himself and past times. Pisistratus could not feel flattered by passages intended to exhibit his ancestor as a conceited and inopportune old babbler. I ventured in 1896 to suggest that the interpolator was trying to please Pisistratus, but this was said in a spirit of mockery.
Of all the characters in Homer that of Nestor is most familiar to the unlearned world, merely because Nestor's is a "character part," very broadly drawn.
The third interpolation of flattery to Pisistratus in the person of Nestor is found in VII. 125-160. The Achaean chiefs are loath to accept the challenge of Hector to single combat. Only Menelaus rises and arms himself, moved by the strong sense of honour which distinguishes a warrior notoriously deficient in bodily strength. Agamemnon refuses to let him fight; the other peers make no movement, and Nestor rebukes them. It is entirely in nature that he should fall back on his memory of a similar situation in his youth; when the Arcadian champion, Ereuthalion, challenged any prince of the Pylians, and when "no man plucked up heart" to meet him except Nestor himself. Had there never been any Pisistratus, any poet who created the part of a worthy and wordy veteran must have made Nestor speak just as he does speak. Ereuthalion "was the tallest and strongest of men that I have slain!" and Nestor, being what he is, offers copious and interesting details about the armour of Ereuthalion and about its former owners. The passage is like those in which the Icelandic sagamen dwelt lovingly on the history of a good sword, or the Maoris on the old possessors of an ancient jade patu. An objection is now taken to Nestor's geography: he is said not to know the towns and burns of his own country. He speaks of the swift stream Keladon, the streams of Iardanus, and the walls of Pheia. Pheia "is no doubt the same as Pheai" {Footnote: Monro, Note on Odyssey, XV. 297.} (Odyssey, XV. 297), "but that was a maritime town not near Arkadia. There is nothing known of a Keladon or Iardanus anywhere near it." Now Didymus (Schol. A) "is said to have read {Greek: Phaeraes} for {Greek: Pheias}," following Pherekydes. {Footnote: Leaf, Iliad, vol. i. 308.} M. Victor Bйrard, who has made an elaborate study of Elian topography, says that "Pheia is a cape, not a town," and adopts the reading "Phera," the {Greek: Pherae} of the journey of Telemachus, in the Odyssey. He thinks that the {Greek: Pherae} of Nestor is the Aliphera of Polybius, and believes that the topography of Nestor and of the journey of Telemachus is correct. The Keladon is now the river or burn of Saint Isidore; the Iardanus is at the foot of Mount Kaiapha. Keladon has obviously the same sense as the Gaelic Altgarbh, "the rough and brawling stream." Iardanus is also a stream in Crete, and Mr. Leaf thinks it Semitic—" Yarden, from yarad to flow"; but the Semites did not give the Yarto the Yarrownor to the Australian Yarra Yarra.
The country, says M. Bйrard, is a network of rivers, burns, and rivulets; and we cannot have any certainty, we may add, as the same river and burn names recur in many parts of the same country; {Footnote: Bйrard, Les Phйniciens et L'Odyssйe,108-113, 1902} many of them, in England, are plainly prae-Celtic.
While the correct geography may, on this showing, be that of Homer, we cannot give up Homer's claim to Nestor's speech. As to Nestor's tale about the armour of Ereuthalion, it is manifest that the first owner of the armour of Ereuthalion, namely Are'ithous, "the Maceman," so called because he had the singularity of fighting with an iron casse-tкte,as Nestor explains (VII. 138-140), was a famous character in legendary history. He appears "as Prince Areithous, the Maceman," father (or grand-father?) of an Areithous slain by Hector (VII. 8-10). In Greece, it was not unusual for the grandson to bear the grandfather's name, and, if the Maceman was grand-father of Hector's victim, there is no chronological difficulty. The chronological difficulty, in any case, if Hector's victim is the son of the Maceman, is not at all beyond a poetic narrator's possibility of error in genealogy. If Nestor's speech is a late interpolation, if its late author borrowed his vivid account of the Maceman and his casse-tкtefrom the mere word "maceman" in VII. 9, he must be credited with a lively poetic imagination.
Few or none of these reminiscences of Nestor are really "inapplicable to the context." Here the context demands encouragement for heroes who shun a challenge. Nestor mentions an "applicable" and apposite instance of similar want of courage, and, as his character demands, he is the hero of his own story. His brag, or gabe,about "he was the tallest and strongest of all the men I ever slew," is deliciously in keeping, and reminds us of the college don who said of the Czar, "he is the nicest emperor I ever met." The poet is sketching an innocent vanity; he is not flattering Pisistratus.
The next case is the long narrative of Nestor to the hurried Patroclus, who has been sent by Achilles to bring news of the wounded Machaon (XI. 604-702). Nestor on this occasion has useful advice to give, namely, that Achilles, if he will not fight, should send his men, under Patroclus, to turn the tide of Trojan victory. But the poet wishes to provide an interval of time and of yet more dire disaster before the return of Patroclus to Achilles. By an obvious literary artifice he makes Nestor detain the reluctant Patroclus with a long story of his own early feats of arms. It is a story of a "hot-trod," so called in Border law; the Eleians had driven a creaghof cattle from the Pylians, who pursued, and Nestor killed the Eleian leader, Itymoneus. The speech is an Achaean parallel to the Border ballad of "Jamie Telfer of the Fair Dodhead," in editing which Scott has been accused of making a singular and most obvious and puzzling blunder in the topography of his own sheriffdom of the Forest. On Scott's showing the scene of the raid is in upper Ettrickdale, not, as critics aver, in upper Teviotdale; thus the narrative of the ballad would be impossible. {Footnote: In fact both sites on the two Dodburns are impossible; the fault lay with the ballad-maker, not with Scott.}