II.

We now have reached the second portion of the Book, which is the

fulfillment of the prophecies of the first portion; moreover we see how

the forewarnings are heeded. Ulysses and his companions enter their

vessel and start once more upon the sea, leaving the island of Circe,

who sends them a favorable wind. We note also that Ulysses always

repeats the warning to his companions, and tells to what they are

coming next; they are to share in his knowledge. Three times he does

this, just before each incident, and thus prepares them, though he does

not tell everything. The experience with the Bag of Winds has taught

him much; his companions through ignorance of its nature opened it and

the fatality followed. So he received the penalty of not sharing his

knowledge with his fellows; now he avoids that mistake, for his conduct

at present shows that he regards his failure to impart his information

as a mistake. He was the cause of the ignorance of his companions,

which was brought home to him by their deed. Now he tells them, still

he will not be able to save them; the fault is theirs when they

transgress, and they will receive the penalty.

1. In accord with the plan already foretold, the ship approaches the

island of the Sirens, Ulysses fills the ears of his men with wax and

enjoys the song, being tied firmly to the mast. It is evident that he

cannot control himself from within, he wishes to be loosed, but is only

fastened the more tightly by his deafened associates. Foreseeing his

own weakness he guards against it, yet brings out the more strongly his

lack of self-mastery. He gives up his freedom in order not to perish

through enjoyment. Herein we find suggestive hints concerning the

natural man; he must be governed from without, till he become

self-governable. Truly this is the first stage both in the individual

and in history, and Ulysses is the typical personality representing

both.

The song of the Sirens is given, which we did not hear in the previous

prophetic portion. We may note in it touches of flattery, of

enticement, of boundless promises, even of wisdom for the wise man.

Then that favorite theme, the Trojan War, they claim to know, "and all

that has ever happened upon the foodful earth." Such are the gorgeous

promises to the man thirsty for knowledge; but mark in their meadow the

bones and decaying bodies of dead men. Evidently their sweet song,

promising all, lures only to destroy. Their power, however, lasts but

for the moment, while the senses are tingled; when the fit is over,

Ulysses is set free and he makes no attempt to return to them. Indeed

another problem is upon him; he sees "a great wave and mist," to which

is added a loud sound of rushing waters. Again he exhorts his

companions and tells them all that he dares about the approaching

dangers.

2. Now we are to witness a practical dealing with the Double

Alternative, which was theoretically set forth in the previous portion.

But the first Alternative, those bi-valvular rocks called Plangctae,

which clasped the sea-faring man between their valves and crushed him

to death, is wholly avoided, is not even mentioned in the present

passage, though it is possibly implied in one place. At any rate the

grand stress is laid upon the second Alternative, Scylla and Charybdis,

between which the ship is to pass.

Here again Ulysses shows his limitation. In spite of Circe's warning,

he puts on armor, takes two spears, and goes on deck, like a Homeric

hero, to fight Scylla. He tries to solve his problem externally, as he

did in the case of the Sirens. In vain; he could not see his foe

anywhere, and his eyes grew weary, peering about at the mist-like

rocks.

Not thus was Scylla to be met, a monster not of mortal mould, hardly

attainable by the senses. Still she was present somehow, and made

herself valid. The whirling waters roared and seethed, all were intent

upon the maelstrom, Charybdis, the other side; "we looked at her,

fearing destruction," and destruction came just from the direction in

which they were not looking. Scylla, watched, remains invisible;

unwatched, she appears and snaps up six companions; external weapons

can effect nothing against her. Still Ulysses gets through, scotched

somewhat; he has failed to see both sides at one and the same time;

mind, intelligence alone can rise out of the particular thing of the

senses, and grasp the two things in opposition. As we read the story

here, it suggests the man, the life-faring man, who is so drawn to one

part that he neglects the counterpart, which has equal validity and

soon makes itself felt by the penalty. Not the Alternative, then,

Scylla _or_ Charybdis, but the combined Scylla _and_ Charybdis is the

word of mastery. The two kept in separation destroy, the two held in

unity are conquerable. Under all difference of Nature lies the

Thought's oneness, which is the true synthesis of every Scylla and

Charybdis. Such is the experience of Ulysses now; the Sirens, the

creatures of the senses, may be thwarted by a species of external

force; but not the present monsters can be so treated. The dualism

exists doubtless, and we can be caught in it, but the function of mind

is to overspan it, and so transform all difference, discord, diabolism

into unity, harmony, deity.

Thus Ulysses disobeys Circe's command not to attempt to fight Scylla

with weapons; the reason of her injunction becomes plain. Not a

sensuous thing to be slain is Scylla, in spite of her animal figure;

the poet hints that she is to be encountered by mind, which must here

see both sides at once and so assert its supremacy over both. To be

intent upon the one and disregard the other--that is the grand human

danger. Hence the thought of Scylla and Charybdis has passed into the

literature of the world, nay into the proverbs of the people, to

express the peril of one-sidedness, as well as the inherent dualism in

all conduct. Moreover the golden mean is suggested, that principle of

action so familiar in later Greek philosophy. Deeper than this golden

mean, however, runs the idea here; the dialectic of existence, the

twofoldness which must be made one, the higher synthesis over all

analysis are dimly intimated in the marvelous tale.

3. Having escaped through the two rocks, Ulysses and his companions

come to "the flawless island of the Sun," the all-seeing luminary of

Heaven. It is the total light beholding the totality. Is it not

manifest that we have passed out of dualism into unity, out of strife

into harmony? The island is represented as pastoral, peaceful, idyllic,

with its herds reposing in sunlight; certainly a decided contrast to

the noise and struggle in the region of Scylla and Charybdis. Or we may

give the matter a psychological turn and say: Such is the transition

from the Understanding with its finitude to Reason with its

universality, to the all-seeing light within. Ulysses, having

transcended the limit he showed in his last experience, has gone

forward to the clear sunlit realm which illumines all limitations.

But just at this point danger arises. On the island are pasturing herds

of oxen and sheep sacred to the Sun, things of light consecrated to

light. The temptation will be to use them for the gratification of

appetite, perhaps under some strong stress. Already both Tiresias and

Circe have given the warning, which Ulysses now repeats to his

companions and even exacts an oath from them not to harm the holy

flocks. But hunger pinches, Ulysses again goes to sleep at the wrong

moment, and the oxen of the Sun are slain by his men. It is true that

the test is a hard one, death by starvation is impending, and they

yield, not only violating their oaths but their light. Then they

defiantly repeated their deed, "for six whole days they feasted,

selecting the best of the Sun's oxen." When Ulysses awoke, he chid them

sternly, but did not, or could not, stop them. The result was, they

perished.

Already we have touched upon the physical basis which underlies this

tale. The symbolism we may consider somewhat more closely. The sin

against light on the part of the companions is double: they knew better

because they had been forewarned, they were not ignorant as when they

opened the Bag of Winds. Secondly, they destroyed objects sacred to the

grand luminary, they assailed the very source of light. Ulysses has

shared in the act also, he too must take his part of the penalty. He is

saved, for he forbade the wrong, yet he went to sleep at the critical

moment. To be sure the companions were hungry; but that is just the

test; if they had had plenty to eat, there would have been no real

trial of their fidelity to principle.

The ancient poet, throwing deepest glances into the soul and into the

world, beholds the supreme negative act of man, and seeks to clothe it

in a symbol. Mind turns against mind, when the man does what he knows

is wrong, and the destructive side is doubly re-inforced when he

assails light itself, and knowledge slays knowledge. When a person who

knows affirms in word and deed that his knowing is a lie, his light

puts out a light, he destroys the Oxen of the Sun. What then? It is no

wonder that the great luminary threatens "to go down to Hades and there

shine among the dead," unless the full penalty is exacted for such a

deed. In fact, he is already extinguished mentally for these men, and

Zeus, voicing the world-order, can only hurry them off into darkness.

Very wonderful is the thought lurking in the symbolism of the old seer:

intellectual negation, skepticism, denial, culminating in the negative

deed, will at last drive the Sun himself out of Heaven and send him

below into the Underworld. It is highly probable, however, that the

negative man will be sent down there first, as is done in the present

case.

After slaying the Oxen of the Sun and repeating the offense many times,

Ulysses and his companions must again meet life, and accordingly they

set sail upon the sea, bound for home and country. But such men have

not in them the elements of the Return. Storms arise, winds blow, the

helmsman is killed by the falling mast, and the ship is struck by

lightning. The destructive powers of nature seem to concentrate upon

these destroyers; such is the decree of Zeus, carrying out his promise

to the Sun; verily the Supreme God could not well do otherwise. Ulysses

alone barely saves himself upon a fragment of the mast and keel;

manifestly there is a difference between him and his companions, who

disobeyed his order. The text says that "the companions feasted for six

days," it would seem that he did not; still he is involved in their

calamity, though not fully in their guilt. Here is, then, a distinction

of importance, since upon it is based the saving of Ulysses, who is yet

to have a career.

While Ulysses may not have personally participated in the guilty deed,

he was not active against it, he did not apparently seem to restrain

the repetitions of it, he was paralyzed in energy. It was his will

which was defective, not his intellect; he did not commit the offense,

but he did not stop it, and try to conciliate the wrath of the Gods by

sacrifices, by what we now call repentance. Hence, while he does not

perish, he is still unfinished, incomplete, with a limit to be removed.

A training of the Will is to be gone through next, till it be able to

do what Reason commands. A new discipline therefore is in store for the

Hero after the loss of his ship and his companions.

What will this discipline be? To a degree his entire career must be

worked over again from the beginning. Upon his fragment of wood he

floats back to Scylla and Charybdis; he falls into the old dualism in

one of its phases, for he cannot stay upon the Island of the Sun, the

place of unity and rest and light. Indeed have we not just seen him in

the fierce conflict between knowing and doing, which he has not been

able to unify in the last adventure? So he drops back between the

grinding mill-stones of two opposites; one of these opposites, the

maelstrom Charybdis, is sucking him in, but he clutches the branches of

a large fig-tree overhanging the whirlpool, and holds fast till his

mast and keel return to the surface of the water, upon which he

escapes.

One cannot help feeling that the poet in this description has a

conscious meaning underneath, it is more or less allegorical. The will

of Ulysses was paralyzed in the Island of the Sun, he is helplessly

carried forward on the sea, till the yawning gulf of Charybdis

(Despair) threatens to swallow him, when he puts forth a mighty effort

of will, represented in his clinging to the branches of the fig tree,

which extends Hope to him, and thus he rescues himself. Now he rows his

raft "with both his hands," it is indeed time to exert anew his

volition. Charybdis could not take him, on account of a saving germ in

him still; she has to let him pass. Whither?

Naturally the next station rearward is that of the Sirens, and this in

a general way is what Ulysses reaches in his relapse. He comes to the

realm of the senses, for the fact is that this was the source of the

great trouble in the Island of the Sun. The companions, pressed by

appetite and the needs of the body, yielded up their conviction, their

intelligence; they had not reached that strength of the spirit which

prefers the death of the body to a surrender of the soul. Ulysses at

last acquiesced, the problem was too great for him and so he also is

cast out of the Island of the Sun back into the region of the senses.

But it is a new region of the senses, not that of the Sirens, not that

of Circe, both of which he has transcended by an effort of will-power;

it is the realm of Calypso, the Concealer, which has been reached

through the collapse of the will after the sin against light. There is

unquestionably an affinity between Circe, the Sirens, and Calypso, yet

there is also such a difference between them that the poet has assigned

to them distinct domains, It is plain, too, that Ulysses in his present

paralysis will remain long with Calypso, not at once will he recover

his power after such a negation. He is hidden, as it were, in her Dark

Island Ogygia after that undoing of light; he passes from the sun-world

of Reason to its opposite. Calypso, therefore, is reached through the

grand Relapse, not through the progressive movement, which we have seen

him going through hitherto.

Still Ulysses has in him the germ of betterment, of salvation. He longs

to reach home and country, to return to his institutional world; that

spark of aspiration has a saving power; it will not be extinguished

even in the sensuous delights of Calypso's bower.

_Observations._ In looking back at the Twelfth Book and thinking it

over as a Whole, the reader will always feel that he has not fully

sounded its depths. It has not exercised so great an influence upon

mankind as the Eleventh Book, but it is probably profounder. It lures

specially the thinker and the psychologist, it seems not only to set

forth thought but the thought of thought. Very difficult is the poetic

problem in such a case, the imaginative form really is driven to its

utmost limit in order to express the content.

I. The first thing to be fully grasped and thoroughly studied is the

structure of the Book. For structure is the primordial fact of any

work, and especially of any great work, structure has always its own

meaning and far-reaching suggestiveness, and it points directly to what

the Book signifies, being its inner vital organism. In the Twelfth Book

we shall ponder a little the three essential facts of its structure.

(1) There is the twofold division of the Book, while the other Books of

Fableland have distinctly a threefold division. Herewith is coupled the

duplication of its content; the second part repeats what is contained

in the first part; or the first part tells in advance what is to be

done in the second part. Thus the structure images dualism: Thought and

Action, Word and Deed, Idea and Reality, Prophecy and Fulfillment. Yet

it also hints the oneness in the dualism.

(2) The next point in structure is the threefold subdivision of each of

the two parts. That is, now the structural principle falls back into

that of the preceding Books of Fableland. Each part has its three main

adventures with their respective environments and shapes, quite as each

Book hitherto has had. What does this suggest to the reader--this

duplication of the threefold form of the Book?

(3) Finally comes the very peculiar structure of the second adventure,

which we have above called the Double Alternative. The dualism of the

Book we may say, is now doubled, and transformed into the middle one of

the three grand trials or exploits which the Hero has to pass through.

The monster Scylla is here to be noted, with its six necks and heads,

three on each side of the body, wherein again the triple is duplicated,

though the body is certainly one. It was this monster which did most

harm to Ulysses, snapping up six of his companions in the passage.

Such are the main points in the structure of the present Book,

assuredly as great a marvel as anything recorded in the same, when it

is once fully beheld. That it is intimately connected with the thought

of the Book, is indeed the very form and mould thereof, is felt by

every careful reader. But what is this thought? Here the difference

begins, and the conflict of opinion ranges over and into fields diverse

and far apart.

II. It may be said that the interpretations suggested by these three

adventures--with the Sirens, with Scylla and Charybdis, and with the

Oxen of the Sun--belong to two extremes; those of Nature and of Mind.

Readers and commentators of different character and training will

differ; one set will lean to the physical view, the other to the

spiritual. It is our opinion that both views can find justification in

the poem. We may first look at the physical interpretation.

All these monsters have been supposed to represent perils of

navigation, especially in the Italian seas, which were frequented by

the early Greek navigator. They have also been located geographically,

to be sure in a variety of places. The Sirens dwelt on three dangerous

rocks near the island of Capraea, according to ancient authorities; or

they were found on the promontory between Paestum and Elea, or even down

at Cape Pelorum in Sicily. Why should they not be indeed everywhere!

Then they have been supposed to personify the secret dangers of a calm

sea, and their song is the music of splashing waters. Undoubtedly a

physical substrate must be granted in the case of the Sirens, and in

the Mythus generally; still they are truly everywhere, not only in the

Italian Sea, but also in the sea of life, and they appear not only to

the professional sailor but to every human navigator. Are literal rocks

passed by putting wax into the ears of the crew and by tying the

captain to the mast? Surely some other peril is suggested.

In the second adventure, the Plangctae (the Claspers, not the Wanderers,

as some translations give it), have been located at the Lipari Islands

in the Sicilian Sea, where there is strong volcanic action. The

well-known Symplegades of the Argonautic expedition which were placed

at the entrance of the Euxine, were probably patterned after this

Homeric conception, and transferred to the North-east. The two terrors,

Scylla and Charybdis, lie in the straits of Messina, according to the

accepted view, the former on the Italian side, the latter on the

Sicilian. A town named Scilla still exists in those regions, and an

eddy in the straits of Messina is still called Charilla (from Charybdis

doubtless.) Etymologically Scylla means a bitch, Charybdis is allied

with Chaos (from a Greek word meaning to yawn). Later legend gave to

Scylla a great variety of forms, which were reproduced in art and

poetry. One story represents her as having been a beautiful maiden who

was loved by Glaucus, and who was turned into her present monstrous

shape by Circe through jealousy, for the enchantress loved Glaucus too.

The sucking-in of the waters by Charybdis, and her disgorging of them

has been connected with the ebb and flow of the tides. It may also be

added that the Plangctae (in the sense of wandering or floating islands)

have been supposed to refer to icebergs, some report of which may have

reached the Homeric world through the Phoenician sailor, who must

have passed outside of the straits of Gibraltar, into the Atlantic.

III. Such are some of the physical explanations which this Book has

suggested; we may now consider it in relation to certain mental

phenomena. Already we have unfolded the ethical meaning which

especially lies in these shapes, and the Hero's struggle with them. But

they have another and deeper suggestion; they adumbrate the nature of

mind itself and the process of thinking; both in form and content the

whole Book strangely points to psychology, as if the poet, having

created these wonders of Fableland, were going to create his own

creative act and present it in an image.

(1) The division of the Book into the two parts already alluded to in

which each is what the other is, in which there are both separation and

identity, calls up the fundamental fact of self-consciousness, which is

often expressed in the formula Ego=Ego. Mind, Ego, separates itself

into two sides, yet each side is the whole and recognizes the other

side as itself. This act is the condition of knowing of every kind,

which always differentiates then identifies. One step more: Circe in

her prophecy gave the pure form of the idea, then came its realization,

so that there is suggested the primordial distinction of the mind into

Intellect and Will, or the Thought and the Deed. Thus we see in this

division of the Twelfth Book the exact characteristic of

subject-object, and there is still further suggested the distinction

between Thinking and Willing.

(2) Passing to the threefold subdivision of each of the two parts, we

observe that it also calls up psychological distinctions. Three stages

of the knowing mind, Senses, Understanding, Reason, may be found here,

not very definitely given, still distinctly implied. The Sirens

represent the Sensuous, especially in its moral aspect; the Plangctae

with Scylla and Charybdis set forth a vivid image of the divisions and

conflicts of the finite Understanding; the Oxen of the Sun point to the

central light, that of Reason, which, when destroyed in any way,

constitutes the chief human calamity.

Another curious psychological hint may be noted in the text of Homer.

The Sirens, the first or implicit stage, are sometimes spoken of in the

dual and sometimes in the plural; Homer would seem to imply that they

are two in number, yet they always act and sing as one. That is, the

dualism or separation is as yet implicit; but in the second stage (that

of Scylla and Charybdis) it will become explicit with decided emphasis.

Later legend made the Sirens three in number, and gave them names, and

otherwise distinguished them; but this is not Homeric and indeed has

lost the Homeric consciousness.

(3) The fact that the previous Books of Fableland have a threefold

division only, while this threefold division is duplicated in the

Twelfth Book, has also its psychological bearing in connection with the

foregoing views. In the first case, the poet was not aware of his

process, he yielded to the poetic act immediately; but in the second

case, he is conscious, he knows his own process and prefigures it; he

holds it up before himself in advance, just as Circe holds up before

Ulysses his future career. Ulysses also must know in advance, hitherto

he has simply followed instinct and chance, whithersoever they led. In

like manner, the poet now shows himself knowing what he will do; his

threefold organic movement, hitherto more or less implicit and

unconscious, has become explicit and conscious, and can be prophesied.

He himself thus is an example of the Ego which both casts before and

forecasts itself, in other words is self-duplicated.

(4) Here, however, we must note a distinction. In all four Books of

Fableland, Ulysses is the poet himself in a sense, he is singing his

own adventures to the Court of Phaeacia, he is well aware of what he has

passed through and to what he has come.

He is not a Demodocus chanting heroic strains of the Trojan Past; he is

Ulysses telling his own spiritual experiences after the taking of Troy.

It has been already unfolded (p. 246-7) that he was in a negative,

alienated condition; he had fallen out with and was separated from his

Hellenic world, whereof this Fableland is the record. But he arrives at

Phaeacia, an harmonious institutional realm, then he becomes fully

conscious of his negative condition and projects it out of himself in

these Tales or Songs. So all Fableland shows this consciousness in the

man; but the Twelfth Book shows him conscious not only of his negative

state, but of his mental process, conscious of his consciousness, we

may say; he is not only Thought, but is Thought thinking Thought, or at

least imaging the same; that is, Thought has itself as its own object

or content. So much we are inclined to find hinted in this duplication

of the movement in the Twelfth Book.

At this point we hear the cry of dissent: You make Homer too

introspective, you make him a self-introverted, self-torturing

nineteenth century man, whereas he is the most unreflective,

unconscious of poets. Very natural is such a protest, my good reader;

this sort of thing may be carried too far, and become fantastic. Still

it is a great mistake to think that Homer never takes a glance at his

own mind and its workings. He must have looked within in order to see

his world; where else was it to be found in any such completeness? He

has built it, and he must have taken some interest in the architect and

in his processes. Homer himself is a greater wonder than any wonder he

has created, and he probably knew it.

It is by no means the purpose to affirm in the preceding remarks that

Homer intended to make an allegorical psychology. He simply had a mind,

and the essence of mind is to be able to look at mind. So Homer saw

himself and his own process, and set it forth in an imaginative form.

Very similar is the plan of Shakespeare in the _Tempest_. Prospero is

the poet, not only as poet, but the poet making his drama in the drama.

There is also a significant duplication both of structure and

character: Prospero is at one time magician, that is, poet, and

commands the elements and the spirits, especially Ariel; at another

time he assumes his ordinary relations as parent and as king, and is as

limited as other mortals. Shakespeare made many dramas, then he saw

himself making dramas, then he put into a drama himself making dramas.

That is, he in the end (Tempest is usually held to be the last of

Shakespeare's plays) took up his own poetic process into a poem, and

thus completed the arch of his great career.

So much for the psychological aspect of these Books of Fableland. It

must be stated again that abstract terms, so necessary for an exact

science of mind, had not been elaborated to any extent in Homer's day.

Reflective language is a later product of Greek spirit. Still the

philosopher is anticipated and prophesied in the poet, and it certainly

cannot be amiss to trace vague premonitions and promises of the coming

Plato and Aristotle in the old poet. Homer has in him the germ of the

whole Greek world, and for that matter, much of the modern world also;

the best commentary upon him is the 2500 years since his time.

IV. The slaying of the Oxen of the Sun has also its searching

suggestiveness, and is found in one form or other in the World's

greatest Books. Mind destroying mind may be shown as light

extinguishing its own luminary; some such hint lies in the symbolism

both of the act and its punishment. It is indeed the culminating point

of negation--spirit denying spirit. This is the real sin against the

Holy Spirit, unpardonable because repentance, all possibility of pardon

is denied by the doer of the deed. As I understand him, this is the

essence of the sin of Dante against Beatrice, with which she reproaches

him in the last part of the Purgatorio. Suggestions of the same kind of

guilt may be found in the characters of Shakespeare's Hamlet and

Banquo, in whose cases the violation brings on a tragic fate; indeed

every true tragedy has some touches of the light-denying or

light-defying deed and its penalty. Above all rises in this respect the

Faust of Goethe, the theme of which is explicitly intelligence denying

intelligence, whereby the human mind becomes utterly negative, begets

the Devil, and enters into compact with him for a life of indulgence.

While such a state lasts, repentance is impossible.

Some such intimation ancient Homer must have had, and shadowed it forth

in this strange symbolic deed. Ulysses having disregarded all he had

learned by his long and bitter experience, leaving unheeded the

warnings and prophecies of the Supersensible and the Sensible World

(Tiresias and Circe), drops back into the sphere of Calypso, and has to

serve the senses seven years till will and aspiration lift him again.

Such a servitude was not uncommon in Greek legend, Hercules is the very

embodiment thereof; even a God, Apollo, Light itself, has to serve

Admetus, a mortal, in expiation of undivine guilt.

An important element of structure is to be noted at this point: the

poem bifurcates and the reader has to move in two directions. If he

wishes to follow the development of Ulysses, (which is indispensable)

he must return with the latter to Calypso's Island and trace him

through his three grand experiences--Oyggia, Phaeacia, and Fableland.

But if the reader wishes to continue in the action of the poem, he must

now pass out of Fableland to Ithaca in the company of the Hero. (For

this double movement of the Ulyssiad, see pp. 121-8.)

But before Fableland is left behind, its full sweep may be called up

once more: from the Upperworld of Earth (Ninth and Tenth Books, both

belong together in a general survey), which shows the negation of Greek

ethical life and its conflicts, we pass to the Underworld of Hades,

which on the one hand is the negation of all Greek sensible existence,

and on the other hand is the revelation of the supersensible (soul,

idea, world-justice); thence we come back to the Upperworld in which

the idea, obtained beyond, is seen struggling with the reality in

various negative phases--Ulysses, knowing in advance, is shown in his

attempt to realize his knowledge in the deed. Such then, is this grand

threefold sweep of Fableland.

One more retrospect: let us glance back at the whole Twelve Books, this

first half of the Odyssey, composed of the Telemachiad and the

Ulyssiad. Both are parts of one whole; father and son acquire each his

special discipline for the coming deed. Both are brought to a

recognition of the Divine Order, the son mainly through tradition, the

father mainly through experience. Both reach beyond the sensible into

the supersensible or ideal realm; Telemachus hears the story of

Proteus, which teaches the essence in all appearance; Ulysses descends

to Hades and there communes with pure mind without its terrestrial

incumbrance, in the case of Tiresias and others. Such is the internal

preparation; now they are to do the deed. The idea they possess, the

next is to make it real.

Accordingly the action of the poem, with Ulysses as its center, moves

next to Ithaca, the realm in which the idea is to be realized:

wherewith we enter upon a new grand division of the poem.

(The reader who wishes to study the parallelism between this Twelfth

Book and Prospero can consult the author's Commentary on Shakespeare,

where it treats of the _Tempest_. In fact, the entire play, which is

also a kind of Fairy Tale, has many correspondences with Homer's

Fableland.)

_ITHAKEIAD._

Such is the designation which we have concluded to give to the last

twelve Books of the Odyssey, inasmuch as a name is needed for this

portion corresponding to the Telemachiad and the Ulyssiad. The scene is

laid wholly in Ithaca, the characters of the poem are all brought

together, and the main conflict takes place. It is the country which is

to be cleansed of violence and guilt; that Divine Order which father

and son have learned about, each in his own way, they must now make

real in the world, especially in their own land. Manifestly Ithaca

represents the realm of wrong, of hostility to the social system of

man; the Suitors defy Law, Family, State, Gods.

But Ulysses, before he can reform his country, has had to reform

himself. When he attacked the Ciconians, he was as negative to

institutional order as the Suitors themselves; he was not the man to

destroy them at that time, he was too like them to undo their work.

Hence the long discipline in Fableland, which has been fully explained

in the preceding comments; hence too he had to see Phaeacia, the ideal

institutional life realized in Family and State, as well as in Industry

and the Fine Arts. Let the reader note that he passes, not from

Fableland, but from Phaeacia, to Ithaca; having that Phaeacian Idea in

his soul, he can transform his own country. Thus he will truly save his

companions, namely, the people, whom before he lost in Fableland.

Telemachus also in his training has seen much and brought back an ideal

with him. He has heard the wise man Nestor and witnessed the religious

life of Hellas in its highest manifestation. Pylos, Nestor's kingdom,

is almost a Greek theocracy; the Gods appear visible at the feasts and

hold communion with the people. Likewise at Sparta Telemachus saw a

realm of peace and concord, in striking contrast with his own Ithaca;

but chiefly he heard the Marvelous Tale of Proteus, after which he was

eager to return home at once. Thus he too has had his experience of a

social order, as well as his ideal instruction. Previous to his journey

he had shown a tendency to despair, and to a denial of the Gods on

account of the disorders of the Suitors in his house. Unquestionably he

comes back to Ithaca with renewed courage and aspiration, and with an

ideal in his soul, which makes him a meet companion for his father.

The third character is the swineherd Eumaeus who is the great addition

in this portion of the Odyssey. He too has had his discipline, which is

to be recounted here; he has been stolen as a child and sold into

slavery; still the most terrible calamities to himself and his master

and to the House of Ulysses, have not shaken his fealty to the Gods.

Thus in common with Telemachus and Ulysses he has faith in the Divine

Order, and can cooperate with them in realizing the same in Ithaca.

Very different has been his discipline from that of the other two, both

of whom became negative and had to be sent away from home for training,

but Eumaeus has remained in his hut and never swerved in his fidelity to

his sovereigns above and below, though he does not understand the

providential reason for so much wrong and suffering.

To these three men we are to add the woman, Penelope, who has her part,

perhaps the most difficult in this difficult business. She cannot

resort to violence, she must use her feminine weapon, tact, with a

degree of skill which makes her an example for all time. Indeed not a

few of her sex declare that she has overdone the matter, and that her

acts are morally questionable. But there can be no doubt that it is the

part of tact to find fault with tact, and that woman will always decry

woman's skill in artifice, without refraining from its employment

altogether; indeed just that is a part of the artifice.

For this and similar reasons the moral bearings of this portion of the

Odyssey have always aroused discussion. In general, the question comes

up: What constitutes a lie? Is the disguise of Ulysses justifiable? Is

the subtlety of Penelope morally reprehensible? The old dispute as to

conduct rises in full intensity: Does the end justify the means? Two

parties are sure to appear with views just opposite; the one excuses,

the other condemns, often with no little asperity. The Odyssey has been

denounced even as an immoral Book and both its hero and heroine have

been subjected to a burning ordeal of literary damnation.

The poet has, however, his wrongful set, the Suitors, about whose

character there is no disagreement. They are the negation of that

Divine Order which is to be restored by those who believe in it--the

three men who come together at the hut of the swineherd, and who have

been trained by the time and circumstances just to this end. Ulysses

has had to pass through his negative period and overcome the same

within; now he is prepared to meet the Suitors and to destroy them

without the negative recoil which came upon him after destroying the

city of Troy. He can do a necessary deed of violence without becoming

violent and destructive himself; he will not now re-enact the Ciconian

affair.

Let us look into the inner movement of the matter here indicated. The

slaughter of the Suitors by Ulysses was undoubtedly a negative act, yet

the Suitors also were negative in conduct, wholly so; thus violence is

met and undone by violence, or negation negates negation. What is the

outcome? Manifestly a double result is possible: if a negative cancels

a negative, there may remain still negation, or there may be a positive

result. Ulysses has passed through the first of these stages by his

discipline already recorded, after which he is master of the negative;

the destruction of the Suitors will not now make him destructive, as

did the destruction of Troy. It will be seen, therefore, that the poem

has a positive outcome; after some trouble, Ulysses will renovate the

country, will restore Family and State, in fine the whole Order which

had been upset by the Suitors.

With the transition from Fableland occurs a marked change in the style

of the poem. In the previous portions we have already noted the

Marvelous Tale of Fairyland, the Heroic Tale of Troy, the Idyllic

Epopee of the Present, the latter especially in Phaeacia. But in these

last twelve Books we read a story of actual social life, a story which

almost strikes into the domain of the modern Novel. Still fabulous

adventures will be interwoven--now more in the form of the

novelette--with Phoenician and Egyptian backgrounds. Also a tone of

humanity, even of sentiment, makes itself felt in various places. A new

situation brings with it a new style, yet Homeric still. Hereafter

these points will be more fully noticed.

We have already indicated the fact (p. 19) that Pallas starts to

organize the Odyssey in Book First. Two portions she designates, the

Telemachiad and the Ulyssiad, which really belong together, showing the

spiritual palingenesis, or internal renovation of son and father ere

they proceed to the renovation of their country. Such in general are

the first twelve Books, showing the two masters of destiny, the two

positive men with their idea; the second twelve Books show them

realizing their idea, and doing the great deed for which they have been

prepared.

This second half of the Odyssey falls into two divisions. The first is

located at the hut of the swineherd and brings the three men together,

whose general character has been already indicated; they have been

trained by life to a living realization of the Divine Order. This

division consists of four Books (XIII-XVI). The second division

transfers the scene from country to town, from hut to palace. Ulysses

in disguise will witness personally the full course of the wrong of the

suitors, against his property, his family, his state, and against the

Gods. Then he becomes the minister of the world-justice which he has

already seen in Hades. Finally he harmonizes the distracted

institutional life of his country and the poem ends. This second

division embraces the last eight Books, and has its own special stages

in its movement.

_Survey of Books Thirteenth to Sixteenth._ In this portion we are to

witness the leading transition of the poem, that of Ulysses and

Telemachus to Ithaca, the transition from the long and elaborate

preparation for the act to the act itself, which is the supreme one of

man, that of asserting and realizing the Divine Order. In these four

Books is the gathering of the chosen forces into one spot and into one

purpose--which forces have been hitherto separately developed; here it

is that we behold the practical preliminary movement for destroying the

Suitors. Hence arises the feeling which most readers express on a

sympathetic perusal, that these four Books of the Ithakeiad, which is

the name already given to the present division of the Odyssey, have

enough in common to cause them to be grouped together in an organic

survey of the poem. They have, first of all, unity of locality--the hut

of the swineherd--to which, round which, and from which their incidents

move. To be sure there is a glance at the enemy, the Suitors, who are

at a different point; but even this glance serves to emphasize the

setting common to these four Books, which is the abode of Eumaeus. Very

humble it is, but it stands in every way as the contrast to the palace.

This unity of place naturally suggests unity of action as to what is

going on in that place. All the forces in opposition to the Suitors are

secretly gathering there and organizing. It is the center of attraction

which is drawing out of the universe every atom of congenial energy for

punishing the transgressors. It has brought Ulysses from Phaeacia,

Telemachus from Sparta, and possesses already the faithful Eumaeus in

its own right. This is the fortress, and these are the three men who

make the attacking army. They are now getting themselves together. All

three have passed through a grand discipline just for the present end,

which is to be the great deed of deliverance.

Moreover the place has a character of its own, a peculiar atmosphere in

sympathy with its purpose. Its strength we feel, its adamantine

fidelity to the House of Ulysses. It is a secluded spot in contrast to

the palace; its occupant is a slave in contrast to the kings who are

suitors; his business is to be the companion of swine in contrast to

the regal entertainment at court. The highest and the humblest of the

social order are here placed side by side; with what result? The

unswerving rock of loyalty is the hut and the heart of the swineherd;

upon it as the foundation the shattered institutional world of Ithaca

is to be rebuilt. The lowest class of society is, after all, the basis

of the edifice; if it remain sound, then the superstructure can be

erected again after the fiery purification. But if it be utterly

rotten, what then? Such, however, is not the case in Ithaca, as long as

there exists a man like the swineherd. From his rock, then, and, still

more, from his spirit, is to issue the energy which is to transform

that perverted land of Ithaca.

Still, here too Ulysses is the pivot, the central character; the hero

both in thought and action, for whom Eumaeus furnishes a spatial and

spiritual environment. The hut of the swineherd is but a phase, one

landing-place in the career of Ulysses. An idyllic spot and forever

beautiful; who but Homer has ever gotten so much poetry out of a

pig-sty? We witness the transfiguration of what is the very lowest of

human existence into what is the very highest, veritably the Godlike on

earth.

Ulysses, however, has to remain in disguise even to his most faithful

servant; not out of distrust we must think, but out of prudence.

Knowing his master, the swineherd would be a different person in the

presence of the Suitors; he has an open, sincere, transparent heart,

and he would probably let the secret be seen which lay therein. The

gift of disguise he possesses not, as Ulysses has clearly observed in

his conversation; in this respect he is the contrast to the Hero

himself. But Telemachus will get the secret, for he has craft, is the

true son of his father; has he not just shown the paternal trait in

cunningly thwarting the Suitors who are lying in wait for him, by the

help of Pallas, of course?

In these four Books, accordingly, we behold one stage of the great

preparation for the deed which is the culmination of the poem. Not now

the disciplinary, but the practical preparation it is, when one is

ready and resolved internally, and is seeking the method and means.

Both Ulysses and Telemachus have had their training; now it must pass

into action.

We behold, first, Ulysses making the transition from Phaeacia to Ithaca,

and thence to the fortress of loyalty, from which the movement is to be

made. Secondly we see all the instruments getting together, and being

prepared for the work, particularly the three heroes of the attack.

Finally we observe Ulysses inquiring and learning all about the

situation in Ithaca; he obtains everything that information at second

hand can give. But hearsay is not enough; he must see at first hand.

Thus we pass to the palace, and out of the first series of four Books,

which we are next to consider separately.

_BOOK THIRTEENTH._

In general, we have in this Book the grand transition from Phaeacia to

Ithaca, in both of its phases, physical and spiritual. The sea is

crossed from land to land in a ship; the idyllic realm is left behind,

and the real world with its terrible problem is encountered. Phaeacia

was quite without conflict. Ithaca is just in the condition of conflict

and discord. Phaeacia, moreover, was a land of looking back at the past,

of reminiscence and retrospection; Ithaca is the land of looking

directly into the face of the future, with the deed to follow at once;

it is the field for action and not contemplation. Not only spatially,

but also in thought we must regard this transition.

Ulysses has both these worlds in him; he is the man of thought and the

man of action. Hitherto in his career the stress has been upon the

former; henceforth it is to be upon the latter. In this Book, which is

the overture marking the change in the key-note of the poem, we have

three distinct facts brought out prominently and through them we can

grasp the general structure. There is, first, the departure of Ulysses

from Phaeacia and arrival at Ithaca; secondly, when this is finished,

there is the glance backward, on the part of the poet, to the

miraculous voyage and to Phaeacia itself, in which glance Neptune plays

an important part; thirdly, there is the glance forward, which occupies

most of the Book, taking in Ithaca and the future, in which glance

Pallas, the Goddess of foresight, gives the chief direction, and

Ulysses is her mortal counterpart. This is, accordingly, to a large

extent a Book of divine suggestion; two deities appear, the Upper World

plays into the Lower World, yet in very different manners. The God of

the Sea seems to be an obstructionist, a reactionary, with look turned

behind, an old divinity of Nature; while Pallas always has her look

turned forward, and is furthering the great deed of purification, is

wholly a divinity of Spirit. These three phases of the Book we shall

note more fully.

I. We have a glimpse of the court at Phaeacia; Ulysses has ended the

long account of his experience, the time of action has arrived. The

formal yet hearty farewell is described; the gifts of the host are

given, and the guest is sent on his way. Nor must we forget the bard

Demodocus, still singing at the banquet, but the theme of his song is

not now mentioned; evidently it was some tale of Troy, as before, and

this stage of song has been far transcended by Ulysses. Very eager the

Hero was to start; "often he turned his head toward the all-shining

Sun" to see how far away the hour still remained. He wishes to listen

to no more lays of the Past, sweet though they be, nor does he desire

to tell any tales himself.

Moreover we hear the great longing of his heart: "May I, returning,

find at home my blameless wife!" In like manner he wishes domestic joy

to the king, as this whole Phaeacian world partakes more of the Family

than of the State. Of course, he cannot leave without going to the

heart and center of the Family, namely, Arete, wife, mother, and even

judge of the people. So we hear from the lips of Ulysses a final

salutation to her in her threefold character, "Within thy household

rejoice in thy children, thy people and thy husband the king." She

looks to the domestic part on the ship for Ulysses; she sends servants

bearing bread, wine and garments for the passage. Nausicaa we feel to

be present in the last interview, but not a word from her or from the

departing guest to her; self-suppression is indeed the law for both,

for is not Penelope the grand end of this voyage?

The ship of the Phaeacians in which the passage is made is a miraculous

one, and yet prophetic; it is gifted with thought and flies more fleet

than a falcon, swiftest of birds. Again the mythical account prefigures

the reality, and this little marvelous story of the sea hints, yes,

calls for the speed of modern navigation. It is not a matter to be

understood; Ulysses, the wise man, knows nothing about it, he is sunk

in sleep while making the passage. But the wise man is to come to

knowledge hereafter.

He has arrived in Ithaca, and entered a safe port; he, still deep in

slumber, is laid on the shore with all his goods and gifts, when the

mariners turn back. At this point we have an interesting description of

the surroundings, wherein we may observe the poet's employment of

nature as a setting for the returned Ulysses. There is the secure haven

shutting off the winds and waves of the sea; at the end of the haven

stands the olive tree, product of culture, and hinting the civilized

world, which Ulysses now enters; it was a tree sacred to Pallas in

later Greek legend, and, doubtless, in Homer's time also. Next came the

cave of the Nymphs called Naiads, with its curious shapes of stone, the

work of the Nymphs to the old Greek eye, but named stalagmites and

stalactites in modern speech. Two are the entrances, one for Gods and

one for men; both human and divine visitors come thither, it is indeed

a point of meeting for the two influences, which is its essential

suggestion. Ulysses, lying with his goods beneath the olive tree and

near the cave, is under divine protection, which here Nature herself is

made to declare. This scenery is not introduced for its own sake, but

for the divinity in it, whereof another example is to follow in the

case of Neptune.

There have been repeated attempts to identify the locality described by

the poet with the present geography of Ithaca. Travelers have imagined

that they have found the haven and cave, notably this was the case with

Sir William Gell; but the more common view now is that they were

mistaken. Homer from his knowledge of Greece, which has everywhere

harbors, caves and olive-trees, constructed an ideal landscape for his

own purpose, quite as every poet does. He may or may not have seen

Ithaca; in either case, the poetic result is the same.

II. The physical transition from Phaeacia to Ithaca is accomplished;

while Ulysses is asleep, the poet casts a glance backward at the

marvelous ship and at the marvelous land which has just been left

behind. Both are henceforth to be forever closed to the real world and

its intercourse; the realm of fable is shut off from Ithaca, and from

the rest of this poem.

The matter is presented in the form of a conflict between the Phaeacians

and Neptune, between the sea-faring people and the sea; clearly it is

one of the many struggles between Man and Nature which the Greek Mythus

is always portraying, because these struggles were the ever-present

fact in Greek life. The God has been circumvented by the speed of the

navigators; Ulysses without suffering, without a storm, has reached

Ithaca. "No more honor for me from mortals or Gods," cries Neptune, "if

I can be thus defied?" He makes his appeal to the Highest God, and we

hear the decision: "Turn the ship to a stone and hide the city with a

mountain." The first is accomplished in view of the Phaeacians; the

second is possibly prevented by their speedy sacrifices to Neptune, and

the new decree of the ruler, which forbids their giving further escort

over the sea to strangers. At any rate Phaeacia is shut off from the

world, and has not been heard of since; there have been no more

transitions thence since that of Ulysses. The marvelous ship and the

marvelous city vanish forever by a divine act, even by the will of

Zeus. Yet, on the other hand, they eternally remain, crystallized in

these verses of Homer, more lasting than the rock of Neptune.

Why this interference from above? Wherein is the escort by the

Phaeacians a violation of the divine order as voiced by the Supreme God?

Note that Ulysses has escaped, which is the will of Zeus; note, too,

that the Phaeacians are punished for helping him escape, which is also

the will of Zeus. The sailors bring the wanderer to his home without

trouble, but they are smitten by the God while returning.

For the primal suggestion of the legend, may we not say that the sea,

that enormous force of Nature with many reserved energies in its vast

bosom, though bestrid and subdued by a ship, at times breaks loose and

destroys, in spite of skillful navigation and perfect machinery? Still

to-day the sea has a residue of the uncontrollable, and probably will

have for some ages to come. Neptune has not ceased from his wrath

against the man of thought, who tries to straddle and ride him, and

Zeus still supports at times the Sea-god's appeal for honor, when his

prerogative is violated. Yet not always by any means, for Zeus belongs

to the true Olympians, deities of intelligence, who once put down the

old Gods of Nature.

Still Nature has its right, nay, its law with the penalty. The poet

looks upon the sea as a great deity demanding sacrifice and honor.

Furthermore, for every conquest made over it, there is the

counterstroke, the resistance, which is the vengeance of the God. Thus

says Zeus: "If any man, trusting in his own strength, refuses to give

unto thee honor, always vengeance is thine afterwards."

We have already noticed the creed of the poet to be that every action

has its penalty; the deed, even the good deed, is the fruit of a

conflict and puts down something which has its might, aye its right,

which is soon to make itself felt in counteraction. _Es raecht sich

alles auf Erden_, sings our last world-poet in full harmony with his

eldest brother.

It is not surprising that Alcinous at this point remembers an "ancient

God-spoken oracle," which had uttered in advance the wrath of Neptune

and the present penalty. In like manner, Polyphemus, in his crisis,

remembered a similar oracle. It is indeed the deep suggestion of Nature

which the sages have heard in all times. The poet takes his thought and

works it into a mythical shape, in which, however, we are to see not

merely the story but the insight into the world order.

Ulysses now leaves the sea, after having been chiefly in a struggle

with it for years, ever since he sailed from Troy. It was the element

in his way, the environment always hostile to him; Neptune was the

deity who was angry and made him suffer. Still the God of the sea could

not prevent his Return, such was the will of Zeus. Thus we cast a

glance back at the Phaeacians who vanish, and at Neptune who also

vanishes.

The poem henceforth quits the sea, after marking the fate of the

sea-faring people of Phaeacia. That great mysterious body of water, with

its uncertainties of wind and wave, with its hidden rocks and magic

islands, is now to drop out of the horizen of the Odyssey. It is the

great sea-poem of the Greeks, yes of the world; the sea is the setting

of its adventurous, marvelous, illimitable portion. It comes out the

sea, with its realm of wonders; henceforth it is a land poem in the

clear finite world. Ulysses the Hero must turn his face away from the

briny element; not without significance is that command given him that

he must go till he find a people who take an oar for a winnowing-fan

ere he can reach peace. So the fairy-ship ceased to run, but the

steam-ship has taken its place in these Ithacan waters. Still the

poetic atmosphere of the Odyssey, in spite of steam, hovers over the

islands of western Greece to-day; the traveler in the harbor of Corfu,

will look up at the city from the deck of his vessel and call back the

image of Phaeacia, and if he listens to the speech of the Greek sailors,

he will find words still in use which were employed by old Homer,

possibly were heard by the poet in this very harbor.

III. Next comes the most important and longest portion of the Book,

turning the glance forward to Ithaca and the future, also to the great

deed of the poem. A new deity appears when Neptune vanishes, not a

hostile power of Nature but a helpful spirit of Intelligence--it is the

Goddess of Wisdom, Pallas. This divine transition from the one God to

the other is the real inner fact, while the physical transition is but

the outer setting and suggestion.

Accordingly, the theme now is the man and the deity, Ulysses and Pallas

in their interrelation. We are to have a complete account of the human

unfolding into a vision of the divine. The movement is from a complete

separation of the twain, to mutual recognition, and then to

co-operation. Pallas has had little to do with Ulysses during his great

sea-journey, and since he left Troy. That long wandering on the water

was without her, lay not at all in her domain, which is that of clear

self-conscious Intelligence. That misty Fableland is the realm of other

divinities, though she appeared in Phaeacia.

The question, therefore, is at present: How shall this man come into

the knowledge of the Goddess? How shall he know the truth of the

reality about him in his new situation, how understand this world of

wisdom? The sides are two: the man and the deity, and they must become

one in spirit. The supreme thing, therefore, is that Ulysses hear the

voice of Pallas, and develop into unity with her; indeed that may be

held to be the supreme thing in Religion and Philosophy: to hear the

voice of God. Even in the business of daily life the first object is to

find out the word of Pallas.

Such is the dualism in the world, which must be harmonized; but in the

individual also there is another dualism which has to be harmonized.

Ulysses is mortal, finite, given over to doubt, passion, caprice, is

the unwise man, subjective; but he is also the wise man, has an

infinite nature which is just the mastery of all his weakness; he has

always the possibility of wisdom, and will come to it by a little

discipline. He will rise out of his subjective self into the objective

God. This is just the process which the poet is now going to portray;

the Hero overwhelmed in his new situation and with his new problem, is

to ascend into communion with Pallas, is to behold wisdom in person and

hear her voice, and then is to advance to the deed. This process we may

look at in four different stages, as they unfold on the lines laid down

by the poet.

1. First we have quite a full picture of Ulysses before he reaches the

recognition of the Divine, and of his gradual climbing-up to that

point. At the start he is asleep, is not even conscious of the external

world about him, he has indeed entered a new realm, yet old. As long as

the Phaeacian spell is upon him, he can do nought but slumber. Then he

wakes, he sees but does not recognize his own country. He doubts, he

blames the Phaeacians wrongfully, in his distrust of them he counts over

his treasures. He is now the unwise, capricious man; he has no

perception of Pallas; not only the land is in disguise to him, he is in

disguise to himself, to his better self.

Yet the poet is careful to mark the providential purpose just in this

disguise. The Goddess threw a mist over things, that he might not know

them, or make himself known till all was in readiness for the

destruction of the Suitors, till she had told him what he had to do.

Still it is his own act or state that he cannot at first hear the voice

of the Goddess.

The next step is that he recognizes the country, it is described to him

and named by Pallas. But she is in disguise now; she has appeared, but

not in her true form; she is not yet wisdom, but simply identifies the

land, telling him: "This is Ithaca." Thus he recognizes the external

landscape, but not the Goddess, who is as yet but a simple shepherd

describing things.

Now what will he do? He also will disguise himself to the shepherd,

because he does not recognize who it is. He makes up a fable to account

for his presence and for his goods. Both are now in disguise, the man

and deity, to each other. They are doing the same thing, they are one,

with that thin veil of concealment between them.

Then comes the mutual recognition. She tears away the veil, laughs at

his artifice, and calls out her own designation: Pallas Athena. She had

previously named Ithaca, which brings the recognition of the outer

world; now she names herself, which brings the recognition of the

divine world. Thus Ulysses has rapidly passed from sleep through a

series of non-cognizant states, till he beholds the Goddess.

2. Both the deity and mortal have now reached the stage of mutual

recognition, and thrown off their mutual disguise, which was a false

relation, though it often exists. Does not the man at times conceal

himself to the God, by self-deception, self-excuse, by lying to his

higher nature? In such case is not the God also hidden, in fact

compelled to assume a mask? Thus the poet brings before us the

wonderful interplay between the human and divine, till they fully

recognize each other.

At once Pallas changes, she assumes a new form, the outward plastic

shape corresponding to her Godhood in the Greek conception, that of "a

woman beautiful and stately." Nor must we forget that Ulysses has also

changed, the two transformations run parallel, in the spirit of the man

and in the form of the Goddess. This unity of character also is stated

by Pallas; "both of us are skilled in wiles; thou art the best of

mortals in counsel and in words; I am famed among the Gods for wisdom

and cunning." Hence her argument runs, let us throw off disguise to

each other, for we have a great work before us.

It is also to be noted by the reader that each, the man and the

Goddess, ascribes to the other the credit of skill and forethought,

specially the credit of coming to Ithaca in disguise to discover the

true situation. Says Pallas: "Another man would have rushed to see wife

and children in his house, but thou wilt first test thy wife." Here the

Goddess gives the thought to the man. Says Ulysses: "Surely I would

have perished in my own palace, like Agamemnon, if thou, O Goddess,

hadst not told me everything aright." Here the man gives the thought to

the Goddess. This is not a contradiction, both are correct, and the

insight is to see that both are one, and saying the same thing at

bottom. The deity must be in the man, as well as in the world; and the

man must hear the deity speaking the truth of the world ere he attain

unto wisdom.

Even the mist which hung over the landscape at first, has now

completely vanished; Ulysses recognizes all the local details--the

haven, the olive-tree, the grot of the Nymphs, and the mountain; all

the Ithacan objects of Nature come back fully. But chiefly he

recognizes the Goddess, whereupon both can pass to the great matter in

hand--the deed.

3. This deed has been often mentioned before--the purification of

Ithaca, chiefly by the slaughter of the Suitors, "the shameless set,

who usurp thy house and woo thy wife." Sitting on the roots of the

sacred olive, the two, the man and the deity, plan destruction to the

guilty. Verily those double elements, the human and the divine, must

co-operate if the great action be performed. The eternal principle of

right, the moral order of the world, must unite with the free agency of

the individual in bringing about the regeneration of the land. Thus

after their complete recognition and harmony, which takes place out of

separation, Ulysses and Pallas look forward to the impending deed,

which is their unity realized and standing forth as a fact in the

world.

4. Finally we have the manner of doing the deed, the plan is laid

before us. Pallas tells Ulysses that he must again assume his disguise,

both in the hut of the swineherd and in the palace at Ithaca. She does

not propose to do his work for him; on the contrary it must be his own

spontaneous energy. In fact, Pallas is in him making this suggestion,

yet outside of him, too, speaking the voice of the situation.

The scheme shows the structure of these four Books (XIII-XVI),

organized of course by Pallas. Ulysses is to go to the swineherd who is

loyal, and will give shelter. Telemachus is to be brought to the same

place by Pallas, not externally, as we shall see, but through the free

act of Telemachus himself. Thus the three chosen men are gathered

together in their unsuspected fortress. Two things we must note in

regard to these movements: they are wholly voluntary on part of the

persons making them, yet they belong in the Divine Order, and thus are

the work of the deity. Free-Will and Providence do not trammel each

other, but harmoniously co-operate to the same end. So carefully and

completely is this thought elaborated that we may consider it

fundamental in the creed of the poet.

In such manner the weak, finite Ulysses is brought into communion with

the immortal Goddess. Yet he, the poor frail mortal, drops for a moment

even here. When Pallas speaks of Telemachus having gone to Sparta, to

learn about his father, Ulysses petulantly asks: "Why did not you, who

know all things, tell that to him" without the peril of such a journey?

The answer of Pallas is clear; I sent him in order that he might be a

man among men, and have the good fame of his action. Telemachus, too,

must be a free man; that is the education of Pallas. The Goddess will

help him only when he helps himself. Divinity is not to sap human

volition, but to enforce it; she would unmake Telemachus, if she

allowed him to stay at home and do nothing, tied to his mother's apron

strings.

And here we cannot help noting an observation on Homer's poetry. It

must be in the reader ere he can see it in the book. Unless he be ready

for its spirit, it will not appear, certainly it will not speak. There

must be a rise into the vision of Homeric poetry on the part of the

reader, as there is a rise into the vision of the Goddess on the part

of Ulysses. The two sides, the human and the divine, or the Terrestrial

and the Olympian, must meet and commune; thus the reader, too, in

perusing Homer, must become heroic and behold the Gods.

_BOOK FOURTEENTH._

The Book begins with another transition in place; Ulysses passes from

the sea-shore, with its haven, grot, and olive-tree up into the

mountain, to the hut of Eumaeus. We have quite a full description of the

latter's abode; there is a lodge surrounded by a court and a wall;

within this inclosure are the sties, and the droves of swine over which

he is the keeper, with four assistants. Nor must we omit the fierce

dogs, savage as wild beasts. Such is the new environment which Ulysses

enters, and which has at its center a human being who gives character

to this little world. Again we catch a clear quick glimpse of the Greek

landscape in one of its phases.

The spiritual transition is, however, the main thing. Ulysses passes

from Pallas, the deity of pure wisdom, to Eumaeus, the humblest of

mortals in his vocation. Yet this poor man too has the divine in him,

and manifests it in a supreme degree, not, however, in the form of

reflective wisdom, but in the form of piety, of an immediate faith in

the Gods. Still this faith has its sore trial. Such is the contrast

between the two men. Ulysses has brought with him the Goddess of

Wisdom, whose words he has heard, and with whom he has held communion.

Hardly does Eumaeus know Pallas, he has not the internal gift of seeing

her in her own shape. Thus both these men share in the divine, but in

very different ways.

From this difference in the two men spring both the character and the

matter of the Book. It is a play, a disguise; a play between Wisdom and

Faith, in which the former must be in disguise to the latter, yet both

have the same substance at bottom. For Faith is Faith because it cannot

take the form of Intelligence, yet may have in its simple immediate

form all the content of Intelligence.

Eumaeus has an open single-hearted piety; he cannot play a disguise, he

hates it for he has been deceived by it when assumed by lying fablers.

For this reason he is not intrusted with the secret of his master's

return till the last moment, he would have to dissemble, to violate his

own nature, and then perhaps he would not have succeeded in his

attempt. So Ulysses with a true regard for his man withholds the great

secret, and has to play under cover in order to get the needful

information.

Accordingly the present Book has a decided tinge of comedy. There is,

on the one hand, the disguise, external and internal--in garments and

in identity; on the other hand, there is the error which takes one

person for another, and produces the comic situation. Thus the Book is

prophetic of a great branch of Literature, and may be considered as a

starting-point of Greek Comedy, yes, as one of the origins of

Shakespeare. To be sure, it is not mere fun or amusement; it is the

Comedy of Providence, who often is in disguise bringing his blessing.

Eumaeus in his piety has just that which he thinks he has not; his

loyalty has brought to him just that which he most desired; his mistake

is in reality no mistake, but a mere appearance which will vanish in

the end.

It is true that this sport of comic disguise began in the previous Book

with Pallas. But can the mortal hide himself from the deity, specially

from the deity of wisdom? Hence the Goddess tears away the mask with a

smile, and there follows the recognition. But at present it is the

mortal who is the victim of disguise, by virtue of his limitations.

Still the mortal, when he cannot see, can believe, and so transcend

these same limitations. Thus it is with Eumaeus, his mistake is a comic

nullity.

In the hut of the swineherd, there is no domestic life, the woman is

absent. This condition is specially ascribed to the present state of

things in Ithaca. Eumaeus, though he be a slave, could have a household,

"a dwelling and ground and wife," if his old master were at home. Even

now he has his own servant, bought with his own wealth. Slavery was not

a hard condition in the house of Ulysses; it was domestic in the best

sense probably. Indeed the slaves were often of as high birth as their

masters, who in turn might be slaves in the next fluctuation of war.

Eumaeus himself was of kingly blood, and he retains his regal character

in his servitude.

Ulysses has now reached the fortress which is to be the rallying-point

of his army of three heroes, and from which he is to issue to the work

of the time. But that is hereafter. In the present Book, we have his

play with Eumaeus, his disguise, which assumes three main attitudes.

First, he is passive, chiefly asking and listening; thus he gets out of

Eumaeus what information he wishes; then he plays an active part in his

disguise, telling his own history under the mask of fiction; finally he

assumes an open disguise, that is, he tells of one of his artifices at

Troy, and then states his present object in telling it. The simple

Eumaeus, however, does not suspect him in all these transformations.

Still we may notice in the swineherd a strong feeling of oneness with

the stranger, an unconscious presentiment of who he is.

I. The approach of Ulysses to the lodge of Eumaeus is an experience

which one may have in the mountains of Greece to-day. We can find the

same general outline of a hut with its surrounding fence and court, in

which domestic animals are penned, particularly during the night. Then

there is that same welcome from the dogs, which issue forth in a pack

with an unearthly howling, growling and barking at the approaching

stranger, till somebody appear and pelt them with stones. Often must

the wandering Homer have had such a greeting! The hospitable swineherd,

Eumaeus, the poet must have met with in his travels; the whole scene and

character are drawn directly from real life. A similar reception we

have had in a remote pastoral lodge, dogs included. But the modern

pedestrian will hardly employ the ruse of Ulysses, that of sitting down

on the ground and letting his staff drop out of his hand. He will use

his weapon and grasp for a stone everywhere present on the Greek soil,

though the fight be unequal. Still the sentence of Pliny (_Nat. Hist._

VIII. 61) deserves always to be cited in this connection: _impetus

eorum (canum) et soevitia mitigatur ab homine considente humi_; as if

dogs in the height of their rage might be touched with the plea of

piety.

The character of the swineherd straightway shows itself by his conduct

toward this poor hungry stranger, a vagabond in appearance. To be sure,

hospitality was and is a common virtue in Greece; but Eumaeus saw at

once in the wretched looking man his master "wandering among people of

a strange tongue, needing food." Therefore come, old man, and satisfy

yourself with bread and wine. Such is the strong fellow-feeling warming

the hearth of that humble lodge. Misfortune has not soured the

swineherd, but he has extracted from it his greatest blessing--an

universal charity. This is not a momentary emotion, but has risen to a

religious principle: "All strangers and the poor are of Zeus;" such is

the vital word of his creed. He is a slave and has not much to share;

"our giving is small but dear to us;" very dear indeed, a mite only,

but it is as good as a world. Well may we call him, with the poet, in

the best sense of the title: "the divine swineherd." We should note too

that the poet addresses Eumaeus in the second person singular, with a

tone of loving familiarity very seldom employed elsewhere in his two

poems. Was there some intimate personal relation figured in this

character which we still seem to feel afar off there in antiquity?

At any rate the picture of the swineherd has the most modern touch to

be found in Homer. It shows the feeling of humanity developed quite to

its supreme fullness; it has modern sentiment, nay, it borders at times

upon modern sentimentality. It recalls the recent novel, which takes

its hero from the lowest class and garnishes him with regal virtues.

Strange old Homer, prophetic again! He seems to have anticipated the

art-forms of all the ages, and to have laid down the lines on which the

literary spirit must move forever. Otherwise, indeed, it could not be;

he has in him the germs of future development; the last novel is

contained in the first, which is the tale of Eumaeus.

In the character of the swineherd, the central point is his loyalty,

adamantine as the rock of his humble home. It is loyalty in a double

sense: to his divine and to his human master, to God and to man, Zeus

and Ulysses. The same trait it is, in a terrestrial and a celestial

manifestation. Both sides of this loyalty are just now under the sorest

trial; there is every temptation to fall away from God and man and

become wholly disloyal. Many have yielded but he will not; in his

solitary abode he keeps piety and patriotism aflame with the breath of

his spirit. Hence he furnishes the rock on which the new order can be

built; without this loyalty in the humble class, no restoration would

be possible, even with the presence of Ulysses.

First we may notice that he is loyal to his human master though he

believes that the latter is dead and cannot return. Still he does not

pass over to the side of the Suitors, who are doing that master and his

house the great wrong. Secondly, the swineherd is loyal to Zeus and the

Divine Order of the World. Hear him: "The Gods love not deeds of

violence; they honor justice and the rightful works of men." Such is

his faith; still this faith is passing through the ordeal of fire: why

should the Gods, being good, keep the good Ulysses away from his

Return? The simple swineherd cannot fathom the ways of Providence,

still he believes in that Providence; he is divinely loyal. His

allegiance does not depend upon prosperity, not even upon insight. Zeus

may rule the world as he pleases, I shall still have faith: "Though he

slay me, I shall believe in him."

Now we may turn for a moment to Ulysses. He is a passive learner from

the swineherd, calling forth information by subtle inquiry; much,

indeed, has he learned from the humble, pious man. First, he has seen a

shadow of his own doubt, and how it may be dispelled. Then he has

discovered loyalty in this representative of the people, who must still

possess it in their hearts, though suppressed in the present, untoward

time. Also he hears again of the Suitors and their guilty deeds, viewed

with a loyal eye. Finally he plays the prophet to Eumaeus and foretells

the return of Ulysses. This is the height of his disguise, wherein he

rises to the humor of Providence, who has brought to the swineherd the

realization of his strongest wish without his knowing it. His prayers

have come to pass, could he but see. Herein Ulysses suggests the part

of Providence in disguise, bringing the fulfillment of his own

prophecy.

II. It is now the turn of Ulysses to give some account of himself in

answer to the swineherd's pressing questions. He tells a famous story,

a fiction of his own life, yet it has in its disguise the truth of his

career. The outer setting is changed, but the main facts are the same.

Still there is enough difference to prevent it from being a repetition.

It is the Odyssey told over again with new incidents, and variations

upon an old theme. We behold here the conscious storyteller, clothing

the events of life in the garb of a marvelous adventure. Ulysses had in

mind his own experience in this account, and he adapts it to the time

and place.

The main points of its contact with himself we may note. First, there

is the pre-Trojan period, a time of roving and marauding, which is true

of that age in general, and may have some touch of Ulysses in

particular. Second is the Trojan war, the epoch of heroic conflict to

which all had to go, so strong was the public sentiment. Third comes

the post-Trojan epoch, with the wanton attack on the AEgyptians, very

much like the attack upon the Ciconians in the Ninth Book. From these

attacks in both cases the grand calamity results, which causes the long

wandering. The Phoenician episode, however, has no counterpart in the

career of Ulysses. Fourth is the storm at sea, with the clinging to the

mast, and the landing upon the coast of the Thesprotians, all of which

is a transcript of the experience of Ulysses in getting to Phaeacia from

Calypso's isle. Fifth is the arrival at Ithaca, which shows the actual

fact, with changed circumstances. Thus we may say that the true Ulysses

in disguise tells the true story of his life in disguise. This gift is

what makes him the poet.

Indeed we are compelled to think that Homer here suggests his own

poetic procedure. What he narrates is his own experience, in the form

of art. His poetry is and must be his own life, though in disguise.

Goethe has said something similar: All that I have written is what I

have experienced, but not quite as I experienced it. In this story we

may hear in an undertone the old Greek poet telling one of his secrets

of composition.

Moreover, it is a tale of providential escapes; thrice has the

so-called Cretan been saved specially, in AEgypt, from the

Phoenicians, from the Thesprotians. Thus the story aims to encourage

Eumaeus, and to answer his doubt; it affirms the return of Ulysses, and

tells even the manner thereof; it is a story of Providence appealing to

the swineherd's faith. On this line, too, it touches the ethical

content of the Odyssey, as the latter was sung to the whole Greek

world.

Looking at the external circumstances of the story we note that it

takes them from the social life of the time. There is universal

slavery, with its accompaniment, man-stealing; the pirate and the

free-booter are still on the seas and furnish incidents of adventure,

yet commerce has also begun; the perils of navigation turn the voyage

into a series of miraculous escapes. It is a time of dawn in which many

distinctions, now clear, have not yet been made.

We may also see the lines, though they be faint, of the movement of the

world's culture in this story. Crete, on the borderland between East

and West, is the home of the daring Greek adventurer who attacks Troy

on the one hand and AEgypt on the other. From Crete we pass backwards to

Phoenicia, as well as to the land of the Nile, and we catch a glimpse

of the current of Oriental influence flowing upon Greece. Already we

have seen the spiritual gift of Egypt to the Greek mind shadowed forth

in the story of Menelaus in the Fourth Book. In these latter Books of

the Odyssey the Phoenician intercourse with Hellas is more strongly

emphasized, with glances into their art, their trade, their navigation.

All this Phoenician development the Greek looks at in a wondering way

as if miraculous; he is reaching out for it also. To be sure the

Phoenician has a bad name, as a shrewd, even dishonest trader. Still

he is the middleman between nations, and a necessity.

Thus it appears that the Greeks have lost their Aryan connection, and

have become the heirs of a Semitic civilization. Homer does not seem to

know his Indo-European kinship, but he does connect Hellas with

Phoenicia and Egypt in many a spiritual tie. These ties take, for the

most part, a mythical form, still they must have been a great fact,

else they could not have influenced the mythology of the Greek race. So

the present tale through the fiction of the myth-maker, hints the chief

social fact of the time.

The fiction in the previous Book, which Ulysses began to tell to

Pallas, also started in Crete, looked back at the Trojan war, and

connected with Idomeneus, the great hero of Cretan legend in the affair

of Troy. The Phoenican trader in his ship comes in there too. But

that tale is cut short by the Goddess, who knows the disguise. In the

present case, however, the swineherd makes no such discovery. The next

Book will also have its corresponding tale.

Ulysses has thus told all about himself to the swineherd, has even

hinted in one place his disguise. He speaks of Ulysses having gone to

Dodona to consult the sacred oracle "whether he should return to Ithaca

openly or secretly, after so long an absence." He runs along the very

edge of discovering himself. But the swineherd will not believe; "the

Gods all hate my master" is still his view. Already a lying AEtolian had

deceived him with a similar tale, which also introduced Idomeneus and

the Cretans. Ulysses has before himself a new picture of doubt, and its

blindness; quite a lesson it must have been to the skeptical man.

The story, in its deepest suggestion, hints the manner of providential

working, as seen by the old bard. Eumaeus has already had his prayers

for the return of his master fulfilled, though he does not know it, and

believes that they never will be fulfilled. Still he never gives up his

divine loyalty and turns atheist. By his charity and piety he has

helped, indeed has brought about the return of Ulysses unwittingly. The

man, if he follow the law, is always helping, though he may not see

that he is, may even think that he is not. This ethical order of the

world underlies the tale, and is what the ancient listener must have

felt so that Homer's poems became a bible to him. Providence in

disguise is its title, here represented by the Hero in disguise.

III. The supper and its preparation are quite fully described; it is

the second meal of pork in this Book. This we may pass over, to note

the stratagem of Ulysses to obtain a cloak from the swineherd. The

stranger tells his stratagem once upon a time at Troy for the same

purpose; whereat the swineherd takes the hint and says: "Thou shalt not

lack for a garment or anything else which is befitting a suppliant."

Thus Ulysses obtained his cloak, and slept warm by the hearth.

But the other hint the swineherd did not take, the hint of the

disguise. He sees the artifice of his guest to obtain the cloak, but

never thinks in his own mind: This is Ulyssess himself, the man of

wiles trying to get the cloak again tonight. Yet Ulysses has gone far

toward telling him just that. The swineherd cannot suspect, it is

foreign to his nature; this is just his beauty of character and its

limitation.

But Ulysses has to disguise in order to do his work. He is in his own

land, on his own territory, yet he dares not appear as he is. This is

not his fault. His whole object is to get rid of this necessity of

disguise, so that he may be himself. The time will not permit candor,

hence his call is to correct the time. Violence is met by disguise, as

it always is; fraud destroys itself; the negation negates itself. Such

is the process which we are now beholding.

_BOOK FIFTEENTH._

In contrast with the previous Book, the present Book has not so much

disguise; Ulysses falls somewhat into the background, and several

undisguised characters came forward. Still there are points in common,

the most striking of which is the tale of Eumaeus, the correspondence of

which with the tale of Ulysses in the Fourteenth Book impresses itself

upon every careful reader.

But the main fact of the present Book is the bringing together of the

various threads for the grand final enterprise, which is the punishment

of the guilty Suitors. Ulysses and Eumaeus are already on hand; to them

now Telemachus is to be added, who comes from Sparta, whither he had

gone for the completion of his education. Thus the present Book goes

back and connects with the Fourth Book in which we left Telemachus.

Still further, the Ithakeiad is linked into and continues the

Telemachiad (the first four Books), inasmuch as we now see the purpose

of that famous journey of the son to the courts of Nestor and Menelaus.

It was the training for a deed, a great deed which required knowledge,

skill, and resolution, and which was to show the youth to be the son of

his father.

Such is another organic link which binds the whole Odyssey together.

The two threads, separately developed hitherto, are now united and

interwoven with a third, that of Eumaeus. Telemachus has seen two Trojan

heroes and heard their varied history, he has learned about his father

whom he is prepared in spirit to support. So the son has his Return

also, a small one, yet important, be returns to Ithaca after the

experience at Pylos and Sparta and is joined to the great Return of his

father.

But just here with these evident marks of unity in the poem, occurs a

slip in chronology which has given the most solid comfort to those who

wish to break up the Odyssey and assign its parts to different authors.

In the Fourth Book (l. 594) Telemachus proposes to set out at once for

home, he will not be detained even by the charm of Menelaus and Helen.

That was the 6th day of the poem, whereas we find him here leaving

Sparta on 36th day of the poem, according to the usual reckoning. Two

inferences have been drawn from this discrepancy, if it be a

discrepancy. The Wolfian School cries out in chorus: two different

poets for the two different passages; it would have been impossible for

old Homer singing without any written copy thus to forget himself,

whatever a modern author might do with the manuscript or printed page

before him. The other set of opinions will run just in the opposite

direction: the connection between the Fourth and the Fifteenth Books is

perfect, as far as thought, narrative, and incident are concerned; the

ancient listener and even the modern reader could pay no attention to

the intricate points of chronology in the poem, especially when these

points lay more than ten Books or 5,000 lines apart from each other.

There is no real sign of discrepant authorship, therefore, but rather a

new indication of unity.

The general theme of the Book is, accordingly, the Return of

Telemachus, and his uniting with his father and the swineherd, who are

still further characterized in their relation. The structure of the

Book falls easily into three portions: first is the separation of

Telemachus from Menelaus and Helen till his departure on the ship;

second is the end to which he is moving just now, the hut of Eumaeus,

where are Ulysses and the swineherd, the latter of whom tells his tale

of discipline and is seen to be a hero too in his sphere; the third

part is the coming of Telemachus.

I. In the departure of Telemachus from Sparta, we witness the divine

and human elements again in co-operation. The former is represented by

Pallas who came down to Sparta to "remind the son of Ulysses of his

Return(_nostos_)." She appears to him in the night as he lies awake

full of care; he is ready to see her plan and so she appears on the

spot and tells it, not in the form of a dream. In the first place, he

is to hasten home in order to save his substance, which is threatened

with new loss through the possible marriage of Penelope with one of the

suitors, Eurymachus. The son (through the mouth of Pallas) here shows

some bitter feeling toward his mother, whose mind be manifestly does

not understand; she is altogether too subtle for her own boy, who has

not seen through her disguises. In the second place Pallas warns him

against the ambush of the Suitors, which was no doubt his own forecast

of the situation. In the third place, the Goddess sends him to the hut

of the faithful swineherd, whose character he must have already known.

In this speech of Pallas we feel everywhere the subjective element; she

is certainly the voice of Telemachus, yet also the voice of the

situation; the divine and human side easily come together, with a

stronger tinge of the human than is usual in Homer. Still we must not

forget that Pallas, Goddess of Intelligence, suggests the processes of

mind more directly than any other deity. Thus we again see that Pallas

is the organizer of the poem; she brings its threads together through

her foresight; she sends Telemachus where he unites with Ulysses and

Eumaeus.

The separation from Menelaus and Helen is told in the style of lofty

hospitality. Menelaus brings as his present a wine-bowl wrought by

divine skill, "the work of Vulcan," which was given him by the king of

the Sidonians--another glance back to Phoenicia and its art. Helen

gives a garment of her own making, which thou shalt preserve as "a

keepsake of Helen" till the day of thy marriage, "when thy bride shall

wear it." A most beautiful motive, worthy indeed of Helen and of

Helen's art; Telemachus is to transfer to his bride, and to her alone,

his "keepsake of Helen," his memory of her, his ideal gotten during

this journey. Finally Helen appears as prophetess and foretells the

total destruction of the Suitors at the hands of returning Ulysses.

Such is the last appearance of Helen to Telemachus, giving strong

encouragement, suggesting in her two acts a new outlook for the youth

both upon Family and State. No wonder his words to her rise into

adoration: "Zeus so ordering, there at home I shall pray unto thee as

unto a God."

Telemachus in his return will not pass through Pylos lest he be delayed

by the importunate hospitality of good old Nestor. And indeed what can

he gain thereby? He has already seen and heard the Pylian sage. So he

sends the latter's son home while he himself goes aboard his ship. But

just before he sets sail, there comes "a stranger, a seer, a fugitive,

having slain a man." Theoclymenus it is, of the prophetic race of

Melampus, the history of which is here given. The victim of a fateful

deed now beseeches Telemachus for protection and receives it; the

prophet hereafter will give his forewarnings to the Suitors. Yet he

could not save himself from his own fate in spite of his foresight; so

all the seers of the family of Melampus have a strain of fatality in

them; they foreknow, but cannot master their destiny.

II. The scene shifts (l. 301) to the hut of the swineherd, which is the

present destination of Telemachus. The reader beholds a further

unfolding of the character of Eumaeus, in fact this portion of the Book

might be called his discipline or preparation to take part in the

impending enterprise.

Ulysses still further tests the charity and humanity of the swineherd

by offering to go to town in order to beg for his bread among the

Suitors, as well as to do their menial tasks. Whereat Eumaeus earnestly

seeks to dissuade him, reminding him of the insolence of those men and

of their elegant servants in livery, and assuring him that "no one here

is annoyed at thy presence, neither I nor the others." Well may Ulysses

respond to such a manifestation of charity. "May thou be as dear to

Zeus, the Father, as thou art to me!"

The stranger now tests the swineherd's interest in and devotion to

Laertes and Eurycleia, who are the parents of Ulysses, the old father

and mother of the house. So Eumaeus gives an account of his relation to

them, as well as to Ktimene, sister of Ulysses; "with her I was reared,

and was honored by her mother only a little less." Eumaeus will soon

tell how he came so young to the family of Laertes. Indeed Ulysses is

moved by his narrative to ask just this question. It is to be noted

that the report of the swineherd about Penelope is not so certain;

"from the queen I have had no kindly word or deed, since that evil fell

upon her house--the haughty Suitors." Here lies one motive why Ulysses

must go to the palace and test Penelope. Thus Eumaeus shows his love for

the family of Ulysses, and responds deeply to the test of universal

charity.

Very naturally rises the question as to the history of his life. What

experience has called forth such a marvelous character? Eumaeus now

gives his fateful story. The Phoenician background is again employed,

with its commerce in merchandise, with its stealing and selling of

free, high-born people into slavery, with its navigation. The pith of

the story is, a Phoenician female slave, who had been stolen and

bought by the king of the country, plays false to her master, steals

his child and what valuables she can carry off, and escapes on a

Phoenician trading vessel after an intrigue with one of its crew. The

captive woman avenged her wrong, but was struck on "the seventh day by

Diana, archer-queen," for her own double guilt. Eumaeus was that child,

also stolen and enslaved, but he is her emphatic contrast; he has been

able fully to digest his fate. The Phoenician galley came to Ithaca,

"and there Laertes purchased me." The swineherd is of royal birth and

retains his more than royal character; in being the humblest he can

rise to the highest.

Interesting touches of the Phoenician traders are given: "Sharp

fellows, having myriads of trinkets in their ship:" surely it is the

ancient Semitic retailer of jewelry, going from town to town in his

boat. Then note specially "the cunning man who came to my father's

house, showing a golden necklace strung with amber beads;" this amber

was obtained doubtless through commerce from the Baltic, by the

Phoenicians, whose workmanship is also suggested. "The palace

servants and my mother took the trinket into their hands, turning it

over and over; they kept gazing at it haggling about the price;" the

same scene can be witnessed today in our own country towns when the

Jewish peddler appears in the household. In the present case, however,

it was part of the scheme of stealing the child.

Eumaeus says that his father ruled a city in the island of Syria. But

where is this Syria? Some think it is conceived by Homer as lying in

the extreme West, "where the Sun turns;" but the Sun turns anywhere.

Rather is its position eastward toward Phoenicia; the Taphian pirates

who stole the Sidonian woman and sold her into Syria, dwelt not far

from Ithaca and preyed upon Phoenician commerce, stealing and selling

in the Eastern Mediterranean. Certainly they could find little business

of their kind in the West. Some vague idea of the actual land of Syria

must have flashed in Homer's mind; no more definite description is

possible.

It is plain, however, that the poet makes Eumaeus a foreigner, not a

Greek, whose birth-land lies beyond the Hellenic boundary to the East.

But he is not a Phoenician, his character is different, and his

people seem not to have been sea-faring. His fundamental trait is

religiosity; he lives in the eternal presence of the Divine Ruler of

the World. His character is that of the Old Testament; some of his

utterances are strong reminders of the Psalms. We cannot help reading

in him something of David and of Job; misfortune he here has had, but

he retains an unshaken faith in the deity; intense wrestling he shows,

but it has been with him the process of purification. He is not a Greek

at all; he has a Hebrew character, not of the modern mercantile type,

which resembles more the Phoenician, but of the old Hebrew strain. In

those times of man-stealing, Homer could easily have met him in one of

the Greek islands, a slave yet a spiritual prince, have drawn his

portrait, and have heard his story substantially as here given.

Indeed we think we can trace in the swineherd's thoughts and sometimes

in his expressions a marked monotheistic tendency. Undoubtedly Eumaeus

speaks fluently of the Greek Gods, as Diana and Apollo; especially does

he mention and honor Zeus, the supreme God; still he is prone to employ

the word Gods in the unitary sense of Providence, and he repeatedly

uses the singular _God_ without the article, as in the passage: "God

grants some things and withholds others at his will, for he is

all-powerful" (XIV. 444). And it is characteristic that he does not

like Helen, for thus he says in an outburst of anti-Greek spirit: "O

would that Helen and her tribe had utterly perished, for whose sake so

many fell!" (XIV. 68.) Striking is his contrast herein with the

Phaeacians, and with their love of the Trojan conflict.

We have already stated that this entire Ithakeiad resembles the novel,

giving pictures of the social life of the time, and elevating the

humblest man into heroship. In like manner, this story of Eumaeus might

almost be called a novelette, truly an Homeric novelette interwoven

into the greater totality of the novel here presented in the Ithakeiad,

and finally into the entire Odyssey. It has its correspondence with the

Fairy Tale of the previous portions of the poem, yet stands in sharpest

contrast. Here is no supernatural world far away, but it is the

present, it is human life just now, and the hero lives before us. Here

are no superhuman beings, like Calypso, Circe, Polyphemus, Proteus; the

environment, the coloring, the art-form are totally changed. Nor is it

an heroic tale of Troy, with its order of Gods, descending and

interfering in human affairs; no grand exploits of arms, no mighty

mustering of glorious warriors. Not high and magnificent Achilles in

all the pride of his colossal individuality, but humble Eumaeus, a slave

and a swineherd, has become the Homeric hero. Surely a new style, and a

new world-view; yet surely Homer's, not the work of any other man.

It has been already made plain that we have passed from the Idyl, and

Heroic Epos, and the Fairy Tale of the first portions of the Odyssey

into the Social Romance, which takes the picture of society as its

setting. Every human being can now be made a slave; man-stealing,

woman-stealing, child-stealing, give the motives for the strangest

turns of destiny. Already Ulysses in his fictitious tale of the

previous Book has become a maker of the novelette; but Eumaeus tells a

true tale of his own life, it has no disguise; he knows his past, he is

aware of his origin. Thus he is an example, showing how the man is

still a fate-compeller in such a state of society. Though a slave

externally, he can still be a king within; though struck by the hardest

blow of destiny he can still remain loyal to the Divine Order and

obtain its blessing.

It is interesting to note the significance of this Phoenician

background, with its universal commerce. The Phoenician traded

already in remote antiquity with the extremes of the Aryan race, from

India in the East to Britain in the West, including the whole

intervening line of Aryan migration, Persia, Greece, Italy, Gaul. The

Aryan race is indeed a separative, self-repellent, distracted race,

always on the move out of itself, without returning into itself. The

Phoenician, on the contrary, in his farthest voyages, came back home

with news and merchandise; the remotest Phoenician settlements kept

up their connection with the mother country. Deep is the idea of the

Return to the parent city in the Semitic consciousness for all time;

the Phoenician returned anciently to Tyre and Sidon; the Arab

Mahommedan returns to-day to Mecca, home of the Prophet; the Jew

experts to return to Jerusalem, the holy city of his fathers. The

entire Odyssey may well be supposed to show a Semitic influence, in

distinction from the Iliad, for the Odyssey is the account of many

returns and of the one all-embracing Return to home and country. It is,

therefore, very suggestive that the Odyssey has this Phoenician

background of a world-commerce, which is only possible for a city whose

people, going forth, come back to it as a center. Moreover this

world-commerce is a kind of unification of the ever-separating Aryan

race, a bond created through the exchange of commodities. Thus the

Semitic character has always shown itself as the unifier and mediator

of Aryan peoples, first through an external tie of trade, which was the

work of Phoenicia, and, secondly, through the far deeper spiritual

tie of religion, which was the later work of Judea. The Semitic mind

has always been necessary to the inherently centrifugal Aryan soul in

order to bring it back to itself from its wanderings, inner and outer,

and to reconcile itself with itself and with the Divine Order. The

Semite has been and still is the priest to all Arya, by the deepest

necessity of the spirit.

Another word we may add in this connection. The Semitic race has also

separated itself, and shown three main branches--Phoenician, Hebrew,

Arab--a sea-people, a land-people, and a sand-people. In all three

cases, however, they have a returning and therewith a mediating

character. In their wildest wanderings, on water, and in the desert,

and in the soul, they have the power of getting back; and that which

they do for themselves, they aid others in doing.

So much by way of tracing the universal relations of this poem with its

Phoenician background of commerce as well as with its Semitic

character of Eumaeus. For, somehow, we cannot help seeing in this latter

certain traits of the old Hebrew.

III. The last part of the Book returns to Telemachus and his ship; he

has escaped the men in ambush, and has reached the Ithacan shore at a

distance from the palace; he sends the vessel to the town while he goes

to the hut of the swineherd in accord with the plan of the Goddess.

But he has on his hands the seer Theoclymenus, whom he first thinks of

sending to one of the Suitors; but when the seer utters a favorable

prophecy, Telemachus sends him to one of his own friends for

entertainment. A curious touch of policy; it was well to have the

prophet in a friendly house, where he might be ready for service; even

prophetic vision can be colored by personal attachments.

_BOOK SIXTEENTH._

This Book connects directly with the preceding Book, and brings about

not only the external meeting and recognition of father and son, but

their spiritual fusion in a common thought and purpose. The scene is

still laid in the swineherd's hut, but the swineherd himself must be

eliminated at this point. The question rises, Why does the poet hold it

so necessary to keep the matter secret from Eumaeus? The care which

Homer takes with this object in view, is noteworthy. Evidently the

swineherd was not ready to participate, or would endanger the scheme.

Yet of his fidelity there could be no question.

We have already stated our opinion on this subject. Various external

reasons may be suggested but the real reason lay in the character of

Eumaeus. He was too sincere, open-hearted, transparent for those wily

Greeks; he might let out the great secret in pure simplicity of mind;

he is their contrast just herein, he is not a Greek. The situation

demanded disguise, dissimulation, possibly downright lying; Eumaeus was

not the man for that. Such is his greatest honor, yet such is also his

limit; if Ulysses and Telemachus were such as he, they would have all

died nobly in their cause, but the Suitors would have triumphed, and

the institutional world of Ithaca would have gone to the dogs. At least

its rescue could not have taken place through them. Such is the moral

contradiction which now rises, and will continue to rise more and more

distinctly to view throughout the rest of the poem.

There are the two strands in the Book which are the main ones of the

poem, that of the father and son, and that of the Suitors. Both are

here put together and contrasted with new incidents, which are leading

inevitably to the grand culmination. These two strands we shall now

briefly follow out in order. There is also a third portion, the return

of Eumaeus from the palace to the hut, which portion is short and

unimportant.