The other side of the collision is the party of suitors, who assail the
House of Ulysses in property, in the son, in the wife, and finally in
Ulysses himself. They are the wrong-doers whose deeds are to be avenged
by the returning hero; their punishment will exemplify the faith in an
ethical order of the world, upon which the poem reposes as its very
foundation. They are insolent, debauched, unjust; they defy the
established right. Zeus has them in mind when he speaks of AEgisthus,
who is an example of the same sort of characters, and his fate is their
fate according to the Olympian lawgiver. They too are going to
destruction through their own folly, yet after many an admonition. Just
now Telemachus has spoken an impressive warning: "I shall invoke the
ever-living Gods, that Zeus may grant deeds requiting yours."
Still their insolence goes on; the ethical world of justice and
institutions has to be cleared of such men, if it continue to exist.
Who does not love this fealty of the old bard to the highest order of
things? The suitors are indeed blind; they have not recognized the
presence of the Goddess, yet there is a slight suspicion after she is
gone; one of the suitors asks who that stranger was. Telemachus, to
lull inquiry, gives the outer assumed form of the divine visitor, "an
ancestral guest, Mentes of Taphos;" the poet however, is careful to
add: "But he (Telemachus) knew the immortal Goddess in his mind."
The conflict with the suitors is the framework of the entire poem. The
education of Telemachus as well as the discipline of Ulysses reach
forward to this practical end--the destruction of the wrong-doers,
which is the purification of the country, and the re-establishment of
the ethical order. All training is to bring forth the heroic act. The
next Book will unfold the conflict in greater detail.
_Appendix._ The reader will have observed that, in the preceding
account of Book First, it is regarded as setting forth three unities,
that of the total Odyssey, that of the Telemachiad, and that of the
Book itself. We see them all gradually unfolding in due order under the
hand of the poet, from the largest to the least. Now the reader should
be informed that every one of these unities has been violently attacked
and proclaimed to be a sheer phantasm. Chiefly in Germany has the
assault taken place. What we have above considered as the joints in the
organism of the poem, have been cut into, pried apart, and declared to
make so many separate poems or passages, which different authors have
written. Thus the one great Homer vanishes into many little Homers, and
this is claimed to be the only true way of appreciating Homer.
The most celebrated of these dissectors is probably the German
Professor, Kirchhoff, some of whose opinions we shall cite in this
appendix. His psychological tendency is that of analysis, separation,
division; the very idea of unity seems a bugbear to him, a mighty
delusion which he must demolish or die. Specially is his wrath directed
against Book First, probably because it contains the three unities
above mentioned, all of which he assails and rends to shreds in his own
opinion.
The entire Introduction (lines 1-88) he tears from its present place
and puts it before the Fifth Book, where it serves as the prelude to
the Calypso tale. The rest of the Telemachiad is the work of another
poet. Indeed the rest of the First Book (after the Introduction) is not
by the same man who produced the Second Book. Then the Second Book is
certainly older than the First, and ought somehow to be placed before
it. The real truth is, however, that the First Book is only a
hodge-podge made out of the Second Book by an inferior poet, who took
thence fragments of sentences and of ideas and stitched them together.
In the Invocation Kirchhoff cuts out the allusion to the oxen of the
Sun (lines 6-9) as being inconsistent with his theory.
After disposing of the Introduction in this way, Kirchhoff takes up the
remaining portion of the First Book, which he tears to pieces almost
line by line. In about forty separate notes on different passages he
marks points for skepticism, having in the main one procedure: he hunts
both the Iliad and the Odyssey through, and if he finds a line or
phrase, and even a word used elsewhere, which he has observed here, he
at once is inclined to conclude that the same must have been taken
thence and put here by a foreign hand. Every reader of Homer is
familiar with his habit of repeating lines and even entire passages,
when necessary. All such repetitions Kirchhoff seizes upon as signs of
different authorship; the poet must have used the one, some redactor or
imitator the other. To be sure we ought to have a criterion by which we
can tell which is the original and which is the derived; but such a
criterion Kirchhoff fails to furnish, we must accept his judgment as
imperial and final. Once or twice, indeed, he seems to feel the
faultiness of his procedure, and tries to bolster it, but as a rule he
speaks thus: "The following verse is a formula (repetition), and
_hence_ not the property of the author." (_Die Homerische Odyssee_, p.
174.)
Now such repetitions are common in all old poetry, in the ballad, in
the folk-song, in the _Kalevala_ as well as in the Homeric poems.
Messages sent are repeated naturally when delivered; the same event
recurring, as when the boat is rowed, the banquet prepared, or the
armor put on, is described in the same language. Such is usually felt
to be a mark of epic simplicity, of the naive use of language, which
will not vary a phrase merely for the sake of variety. But Kirchhoff
and his followers will have it just the other way; the early poet never
varies or repeats, only the later poet does that. So he seeks out a
large number of passages in the rest of the Odyssey, and in the Iliad
also, which have something in common with passages of this First Book,
especially in the matter of words, and easily finds it to be a "cento,"
a mixed mass of borrowed phrases.
But who was the author of such work? Not the original Homer, but some
later matcher and patcher, imitator or redactor. It is not easy to tell
from Kirchhoff just how many persons may have had a hand in this making
of the Odyssey, as it lies before us. In his dissertations we read of a
motley multitude: original poet, continuator, interpolator, redactor,
reconstructor, imitator, author of the older part, author of the newer
part--not merely individuals, but apparently classes of men. Thus he
anatomizes old Homer with a vengeance.
_BOOK SECOND._
The general relation between the First and Second Books is to be
grasped at once. In the First Book the main fact is the Assembly in the
Upper World, together with the descent of the divine influence which
through Pallas comes to Telemachus in person, gives him courage and
stirs him to action. This action is to bring harmony into the
discordant land. In the Second Book the main fact is the Assembly in
the Lower World, together with the rise of Telemachus into a new
participation with divine influence in the form of Pallas, who sends
him forth on his journey of education. We behold, therefore, in the two
Books a sweep from above to below, then from below back to the divine
influence. Earth and Olympus are the halves of the cycle, but the Earth
is in discord and must be transformed to the harmony of Olympus.
Looking now at the Second Book by itself, we note that it falls into
two portions: the Assembly of the People, which has been called
together by Telemachus, and the communion of the youth with Pallas, who
again appears to him at his call. The first is a mundane matter, and
shows the Lower World in conflict with the divine order--the sides
being the Suitors on the one hand and the House of Ulysses on the
other. The second portion lifts the young hero into a vision of
divinity, and should lift the reader along with him. Previously Pallas
had, as it were, descended into Telemachus, but now he rises of himself
into the Goddess. Clearly he possesses a new power, that of communion
with the Gods. These two leading thoughts divide the Book into two
well-marked parts--the first including lines 1-259, the second
including the rest.