The first of the two great poems commonly ascribed to Homer is
called the Iliad--a title which we may be sure was not given it by
the author. It professes to treat of a quarrel between Agamemnon
and Achilles that broke out while the Greeks were besieging the city
of Troy, and it does, indeed, deal largely with the consequences of
this quarrel; whether, however, the ostensible subject did not
conceal another that was nearer the poet's heart--I mean the last
days, death, and burial of Hector--is a point that I cannot
determine. Nor yet can I determine how much of the Iliad as we now
have it is by Homer, and how much by a later writer or writers.
This is a very vexed question, but I myself believe the Iliad to be
entirely by a single poet.
The second poem commonly ascribed to the same author is called the
Odyssey. It deals with the adventures of Ulysses during his ten
years of wandering after Troy had fallen. These two works have of
late years been believed to be by different authors. The Iliad is
now generally held to be the older work by some one or two hundred
years.
The leading ideas of the Iliad are love, war, and plunder, though
this last is less insisted on than the other two. The key-note is
struck with a woman's charms, and a quarrel among men for their
possession. It is a woman who is at the bottom of the Trojan war
itself. Woman throughout the Iliad is a being to be loved, teased,
laughed at, and if necessary carried off. We are told in one place
of a fine bronze cauldron for heating water which was worth twenty
oxen, whereas a few lines lower down a good serviceable maid-of-all-
work is valued at four oxen. I think there is a spice of malicious
humour in this valuation, and am confirmed in this opinion by noting
that though woman in the Iliad is on one occasion depicted as a wife
so faithful and affectionate that nothing more perfect can be found
either in real life or fiction, yet as a general rule she is drawn
as teasing, scolding, thwarting, contradicting, and hoodwinking the
sex that has the effrontery to deem itself her lord and master.
Whether or no this view may have arisen from any domestic
difficulties between Homer and his wife is a point which again I
find it impossible to determine.
We cannot refrain from contemplating such possibilities. If we are
to be at home with Homer there must be no sitting on the edge of
one's chair dazzled by the splendour of his reputation. He was
after all only a literary man, and those who occupy themselves with
letters must approach him as a very honoured member of their own
fraternity, but still as one who must have felt, thought, and acted
much as themselves. He struck oil, while we for the most part
succeed in boring only; still we are his literary brethren, and if
we would read his lines intelligently we must also read between
them. That one so shrewd, and yet a dreamer of such dreams as have
been vouchsafed to few indeed besides himself--that one so genially
sceptical, and so given to looking into the heart of a matter,
should have been in such perfect harmony with his surroundings as to
think himself in the best of all possible worlds--this is not
believable. The world is always more or less out of joint to the
poet--generally more so; and unfortunately he always thinks it more
or less his business to set it right--generally more so. We are all
of us more or less poets--generally, indeed, less so; still we feel
and think, and to think at all is to be out of harmony with much
that we think about. We may be sure, then, that Homer had his full
share of troubles, and also that traces of these abound up and down
his work if we could only identify them, for everything that
everyone does is in some measure a portrait of himself; but here
comes the difficulty--not to read between the lines, not to try and
detect the hidden features of the writer--this is to be a dull,
unsympathetic, incurious reader; and on the other hand to try and
read between them is to be in danger of running after every Will o'
the Wisp that conceit may raise for our delusion.
I believe it will help you better to understand the broad humour of
the Iliad, which we shall presently reach, if you will allow me to
say a little more about the general characteristics of the poem.
Over and above the love and war that are his main themes, there is
another which the author never loses sight of--I mean distrust and
dislike of the ideas of his time as regards the gods and omens. No
poet ever made gods in his own image more defiantly than the author
of the Iliad. In the likeness of man created he them, and the only
excuse for him is that he obviously desired his readers not to take
them seriously. This at least is the impression he leaves upon his
reader, and when so great a man as Homer leaves an impression it
must be presumed that he does so intentionally. It may be almost
said that he has made the gods take the worse, not the better, side
of man's nature upon them, and to be in all respects as we
ourselves--yet without virtue. It should be noted, however, that
the gods on the Trojan side are treated far more leniently than
those who help the Greeks.
The chief gods on the Grecian side are Juno, Minerva, and Neptune.
Juno, as you will shortly see, is a scolding wife, who in spite of
all Jove's bluster wears the breeches, or tries exceedingly hard to
do so. Minerva is an angry termagant--mean, mischief-making, and
vindictive. She begins by pulling Achilles' hair, and later on she
knocks the helmet from off the head of Mars. She hates Venus, and
tells the Grecian hero Diomede that he had better not wound any of
the other gods, but that he is to hit Venus if he can, which he
presently does 'because he sees that she is feeble and not like
Minerva or Bellona.' Neptune is a bitter hater.
Apollo, Mars, Venus, Diana, and Jove, so far as his wife will let
him, are on the Trojan side. These, as I have said, meet with
better, though still somewhat contemptuous, treatment at the poet's
hand. Jove, however, is being mocked and laughed at from first to
last, and if one moral can be drawn from the Iliad more clearly than
another, it is that he is only to be trusted to a very limited
extent. Homer's position, in fact, as regards divine interference
is the very opposite of David's. David writes, "Put not your trust
in princes nor in any child of man; there is no sure help but from
the Lord." With Homer it is, "Put not your trust in Jove neither in
any omen from heaven; there is but one good omen--to fight for one's
country. Fortune favours the brave; heaven helps those who help
themselves."
The god who comes off best is Vulcan, the lame, hobbling, old
blacksmith, who is the laughing-stock of all the others, and whose
exquisitely graceful skilful workmanship forms such an effective
contrast to the uncouth exterior of the workman. Him, as a man of
genius and an artist, and furthermore as a somewhat despised artist,
Homer treats, if with playfulness, still with respect, in spite of
the fact that circumstances have thrown him more on the side of the
Greeks than of the Trojans, with whom I understand Homer's
sympathies mainly to lie.
The poet either dislikes music or is at best insensible to it.
Great poets very commonly are so. Achilles, indeed, does on one
occasion sing to his own accompaniment on the lyre, but we are not
told that it was any pleasure to hear him, and Patroclus, who was in
the tent at the time, was not enjoying it; he was only waiting for
Achilles to leave off. But though not fond of music, Homer has a
very keen sense of the beauties of nature, and is constantly
referring both in and out of season to all manner of homely
incidents that are as familiar to us as to himself. Sparks in the
train of a shooting-star; a cloud of dust upon a high road;
foresters going out to cut wood in a forest; the shrill cry of the
cicale; children making walls of sand on the sea-shore, or teasing
wasps when they have found a wasps' nest; a poor but very honest
woman who gains a pittance for her children by selling wool, and
weighs it very carefully; a child clinging to its mother's dress and
crying to be taken up and carried--none of these things escape him.
Neither in the Iliad nor the Odyssey do we ever receive so much as a
hint as to the time of year at which any of the events described are
happening; but on one occasion the author of the Iliad really has
told us that it was a very fine day, and this not from a business
point of view, but out of pure regard to the weather for its own
sake.
With one more observation I will conclude my preliminary remarks
about the Iliad. I cannot find its author within the four corners
of the work itself. I believe the writer of the Odyssey to appear
in the poem as a prominent and very fascinating character whom we
shall presently meet, but there is no one in the Iliad on whom I can
put my finger with even a passing idea that he may be the author.
Still, if under some severe penalty I were compelled to find him, I
should say it was just possible that he might consider his own lot
to have been more or less like that which he forecasts for Astyanax,
the infant son of Hector. At any rate his intimate acquaintance
with the topography of Troy, which is now well ascertained, and
still more his obvious attempt to excuse the non-existence of a
great wall which, according to his story, ought to be there and
which he knew had never existed, so that no trace could remain,
while there were abundant traces of all the other features he
describes--these facts convince me that he was in all probability a
native of the Troad, or country round Troy. His plausibly concealed
Trojan sympathies, and more particularly the aggravated exaggeration
with which the flight of Hector is described, suggest to me, coming
as they do from an astute and humorous writer, that he may have been
a Trojan, at any rate by the mother's side, made captive, enslaved,
compelled to sing the glories of his captors, and determined so to
overdo them that if his masters cannot see through the irony others
sooner or later shall. This, however, is highly speculative, and
there are other views that are perhaps more true, but which I cannot
now consider.
I will now ask you to form your own opinions as to whether Homer is
or is not a shrewd and humorous writer.
Achilles, whose quarrel with Agamemnon is the ostensible subject of
the poem, is son to a marine goddess named Thetis, who had rendered
Jove an important service at a time when he was in great
difficulties. Achilles, therefore, begs his mother Thetis to go up
to Jove and ask him to let the Trojans discomfit the Greeks for a
time, so that Agamemnon may find he cannot get on without Achilles'
help, and may thus be brought to reason.
Thetis tells her son that for the moment there is nothing to be
done, inasmuch as the gods are all of them away from home. They are
gone to pay a visit to Oceanus in Central Africa, and will not be
back for another ten or twelve days; she will see what can be done,
however, as soon as ever they return. This in due course she does,
going up to Olympus and laying hold of Jove by the knee and by the
chin. I may say in passing that it is still a common Italian form
of salutation to catch people by the chin. Twice during the last
summer I have been so seized in token of affectionate greeting, once
by a lady and once by a gentleman.
Thetis tells her tale to Jove, and concludes by saying that he is to
say straight out 'yes' or 'no' whether he will do what she asks. Of
course he can please himself, but she should like to know how she
stands.
"It will be a plaguy business," answers Jove, "for me to offend Juno
and put up with all the bitter tongue she will give me. As it is,
she is always nagging at me and saying I help the Trojans, still, go
away now at once before she finds out that you have been here, and
leave the rest to me. See, I nod my head to you, and this is the
most solemn form of covenant into which I can enter. I never go
back upon it, nor shilly-shally with anybody when I have once nodded
my head." Which, by the way, amounts to an admission that he does
shilly-shally sometimes.
Then he frowns and nods, shaking the hair on his immortal head till
Olympus rocks again. Thetis goes off under the sea and Jove returns
to his own palace. All the other gods stand up when they see him
coming, for they do not dare to remain sitting while he passes, but
Juno knows he has been hatching mischief against the Greeks with
Thetis, so she attacks him in the following words:
"You traitorous scoundrel," she exclaims, "which of the gods have
you been taking into your counsel now? You are always trying to
settle matters behind my back, and never tell me, if you can help
it, a single word about your designs."
"'Juno,' replied the father of gods and men, 'you must not expect to
be told everything that I am thinking about: you are my wife, it is
true, but you might not be able always to understand my meaning; in
so far as it is proper for you to know of my intentions you are the
first person to whom I communicate them either among the gods or
among mankind, but there are certain points which I reserve entirely
for myself, and the less you try to pry into these, or meddle with
them, the better for you.'"
"'Dread son of Saturn,' answered Juno, 'what in the world are you
talking about? I meddle and pry? No one, I am sure, can have his
own way in everything more absolutely than you have. Still I have a
strong misgiving that the old merman's daughter Thetis has been
talking you over. I saw her hugging your knees this very self-same
morning, and I suspect you have been promising her to kill any
number of people down at the Grecian ships, in order to gratify
Achilles.'"
"'Wife,' replied Jove, 'I can do nothing but you suspect me. You
will not do yourself any good, for the more you go on like that the
more I dislike you, and it may fare badly with you. If I mean to
have it so, I mean to have it so, you had better therefore sit still
and hold your tongue as I tell you, for if I once begin to lay my
hands about you, there is not a god in heaven who will be of the
smallest use to you.'
"When Juno heard this she thought it better to submit, so she sat
down without a word, but all the gods throughout Jove's mansion were
very much perturbed. Presently the cunning workman Vulcan tried to
pacify his mother Juno, and said, 'It will never do for you two to
go on quarrelling and setting heaven in an uproar about a pack of
mortals. The thing will not bear talking about. If such counsels
are to prevail a god will not be able to get his dinner in peace.
Let me then advise my mother (and I am sure it is her own opinion)
to make her peace with my dear father, lest he should scold her
still further, and spoil our banquet; for if he does wish to turn us
all out there can be no question about his being perfectly able to
do so. Say something civil to him, therefore, and then perhaps he
will not hurt us.'
"As he spoke he took a large cup of nectar and put it into his
mother's hands, saying, 'Bear it, my dear mother, and make the best
of it. I love you dearly and should be very sorry to see you get a
thrashing. I should not be able to help you, for my father Jove is
not a safe person to differ from. You know once before when I was
trying to help you he caught me by the foot and chucked me from the
heavenly threshold. I was all day long falling from morn to eve,
but at sunset I came to ground on the island of Lemnos, and there
was very little life left in me, till the Sintians came and tended
me.'
"On this Juno smiled, and with a laugh took the cup from her son's
hand. Then Vulcan went about among all other gods drawing nectar
for them from his goblet, and they laughed immoderately as they saw
him bustling about the heavenly mansion."
Then presently the gods go home to bed, each one in his own house
that Vulcan had cunningly built for him or her. Finally Jove
himself went to the bed which he generally occupied; and Jove his
wife went with him.
There is another quarrel between Jove and Juno at the beginning of
the fourth book.
The gods are sitting on the golden floor of Jove's palace and
drinking one another's health in the nectar with which Hebe from
time to time supplies them. Jove begins to tease Juno, and to
provoke her with some sarcastic remarks that are pointed at her
though not addressed to her directly.
"'Menelaus,' he exclaimed, 'has two good friends among the
goddesses, Juno and Minerva, but they only sit still and look on,
while Venus on the other hand takes much better care of Paris, and
defends him when he is in danger. She has only just this moment
been rescuing him when he made sure he was at death's door, for the
victory really did lie with Menelaus. We must think what we are to
do about all this. Shall we renew strife between the combatants or
shall we make them friends again? I think the best plan would be
for the City of Priam to remain unpillaged, but for Menelaus to have
his wife Helen sent back to him.'
"Minerva and Juno groaned in spirit when they heard this. They were
sitting side by side, and thinking what mischief they could do to
the Trojans. Minerva for her part said not one word, but sat
scowling at her father, for she was in a furious passion with him,
but Juno could not contain herself, so she said--
"'What, pray, son of Saturn, is all this about? Is my trouble then
to go for nothing, and all the pains that I have taken, to say
nothing of my horses, and the way we have sweated and toiled to get
the people together against Priam and his children? You can do as
you please, but you must not expect all of us to agree with you.'
"And Jove answered, 'Wife, what harm have Priam and Priam's children
done you that you rage so furiously against them, and want to sack
their city? Will nothing do for you but you must eat Priam with his
sons and all the Trojans into the bargain? Have it your own way
then, for I will not quarrel with you--only remember what I tell
you: if at any time I want to sack a city that belongs to any
friend of yours, it will be no use your trying to hinder me, you
will have to let me do it, for I only yield to you now with the
greatest reluctance. If there was one city under the sun which I
respected more than another it was Troy with its king and people.
My altars there have never been without the savour of fat or of
burnt sacrifice and all my dues were paid.'
"'My own favourite cities,' answered Juno, 'are Argos, Sparta, and
Mycenae. Sack them whenever you may be displeased with them. I
shall not make the smallest protest against your doing so. It would
be no use if I did, for you are much stronger than I am, only I will
not submit to seeing my own work wasted. I am a goddess of the same
race as yourself. I am Saturn's eldest daughter and am not only
nearly related to you in blood, but I am wife to yourself, and you
are king over the gods. Let it be a case, then, of give and take
between us, and the other gods will follow our lead. Tell Minerva,
therefore, to go down at once and set the Greeks and Trojans by the
ears again, and let her so manage it that the Trojans shall break
their oaths and be the aggressors.'"
This is the very thing to suit Minerva, so she goes at once and
persuades the Trojans to break their oath.
In a later book we are told that Jove has positively forbidden the
gods to interfere further in the struggle. Juno therefore
determines to hoodwink him. First she bolted herself inside her own
room on the top of Mount Ida and had a thorough good wash. Then she
scented herself, brushed her golden hair, put on her very best dress
and all her jewels. When she had done this, she went to Venus and
besought her for the loan of her charms.
"'You must not be angry with me, Venus,' she began, 'for being on
the Grecian side while you are yourself on the Trojan; but you know
every one falls in love with you at once, and I want you to lend me
some of your attractions. I have to pay a visit at the world's end
to Oceanus and Mother Tethys. They took me in and were very good to
me when Jove turned Saturn out of heaven and shut him up under the
sea. They have been quarrelling this long time past and will not
speak to one another. So I must go and see them, for if I can only
make them friends again I am sure that they will be grateful to me
for ever afterwards.'"
Venus thought this reasonable, so she took off her girdle and lent
it to Juno, an act by the way which argues more good nature than
prudence on her part. Then Juno goes down to Thrace, and in search
of Sleep the brother of Death. She finds him and shakes hands with
him. Then she tells him she is going up to Olympus to make love to
Jove, and that while she is occupying his attention Sleep is to send
him off into a deep slumber.
Sleep says he dares not do it. He would lull any of the other gods,
but Juno must remember that she had got him into a great scrape once
before in this way, and Jove hurled the gods about all over the
palace, and would have made an end of him once for all, if he had
not fled under the protection of Night, whom Jove did not venture to
offend.
Juno bribes him, however, with a promise that if he will consent she
will marry him to the youngest of the Graces, Pasithea. On this he
yields; the pair then go up to the top of Mount Ida, and Sleep gets
into a high pine tree just in front of Jove.
As soon as Jove sees Juno, armed as she for the moment was with all
the attractions of Venus, he falls desperately in love with her, and
says she is the only goddess he ever really loved. True, there had
been the wife of Ixion and Danae, and Europa and Semele, and
Alcmena, and Latona, not to mention herself in days gone by, but he
never loved any of these as he now loved her, in spite of his having
been married to her for so many years. What then does she want?
Juno tells him the same rigmarole about Oceanus and Mother Tethys
that she had told Venus, and when she has done Jove tries to embrace
her.
"What," exclaims Juno, "kiss me in such a public place as the top of
Mount Ida! Impossible! I could never show my face in Olympus
again, but I have a private room of my own and"--"What nonsense, my
love!" exclaims the sire of gods and men as he catches her in his
arms. On this Sleep sends him into a deep slumber, and Juno then
sends Sleep to bid Neptune go off to help the Greeks at once.
When Jove awakes and finds the trick that has been played upon him,
he is very angry and blusters a good deal as usual, but somehow or
another it turns out that he has got to stand it and make the best
of it.
In an earlier book he has said that he is not surprised at anything
Juno may do, for she always has crossed him and always will; but he
cannot put up with such disobedience from his own daughter Minerva.
Somehow or another, however, here too as usual it turns out that he
has got to stand it. "And then," Minerva exclaims in yet another
place (VIII. 373), "I suppose he will be calling me his grey-eyed
darling again, presently."
Towards the end of the poem the gods have a set-to among themselves.
Minerva sends Mars sprawling, Venus comes to his assistance, but
Minerva knocks her down and leaves her. Neptune challenges Apollo,
but Apollo says it is not proper for a god to fight his own uncle,
and declines the contest. His sister Diana taunts him with
cowardice, so Juno grips her by the wrist and boxes her ears till
she writhes again. Latona, the mother of Apollo and Diana, then
challenges Mercury, but Mercury says that he is not going to fight
with any of Jove's wives, so if she chooses to say she has beaten
him she is welcome to do so. Then Latona picks up poor Diana's bow
and arrows that have fallen from her during her encounter with Juno,
and Diana meanwhile flies up to the knees of her father Jove,
sobbing and sighing till her ambrosial robe trembles all around her.
"Jove drew her towards him, and smiling pleasantly exclaimed, 'My
dear child, which of the heavenly beings has been wicked enough to
behave in this way to you, as though you had been doing something
naughty?'
"'Your wife, Juno,' answered Diana, 'has been ill-treating me; all
our quarrels always begin with her.'"
* * * * *
The above extracts must suffice as examples of the kind of divine
comedy in which Homer brings the gods and goddesses upon the scene.
Among mortals the humour, what there is of it, is confined mainly to
the grim taunts which the heroes fling at one another when they are
fighting, and more especially to crowing over a fallen foe. The
most subtle passage is the one in which Briseis, the captive woman
about whom Achilles and Agamemnon have quarrelled, is restored by
Agamemnon to Achilles. Briseis on her return to the tent of
Achilles finds that while she has been with Agamemnon, Patroclus has
been killed by Hector, and his dead body is now lying in state. She
flings herself upon the corpse and exclaims--
"How one misfortune does keep falling upon me after another! I saw
the man to whom my father and mother had married me killed before my
eyes, and my three own dear brothers perished along with him; but
you, Patroclus, even when Achilles was sacking our city and killing
my husband, told me that I was not to cry; for you said that
Achilles himself should marry me, and take me back with him to
Phthia, where we should have a wedding feast among the Myrmidons.
You were always kind to me, and I should never cease to grieve for
you."
This may of course be seriously intended, but Homer was an acute
writer, and if we had met with such a passage in Thackeray we should
have taken him to mean that so long as a woman can get a new
husband, she does not much care about losing the old one--a
sentiment which I hope no one will imagine that I for one moment
endorse or approve of, and which I can only explain as a piece of
sarcasm aimed possibly at Mrs. Homer.
* * * * *
And now let us turn to the Odyssey, a work which I myself think of
as the Iliad's better half or wife. Here we have a poem of more
varied interest, instinct with not less genius, and on the whole I
should say, if less robust, nevertheless of still greater
fascination--one, moreover, the irony of which is pointed neither at
gods nor woman, but with one single and perhaps intercalated
exception, at man. Gods and women may sometimes do wrong things,
but, except as regards the intrigue between Mars and Venus just
referred to, they are never laughed at. The scepticism of the Iliad
is that of Hume or Gibbon; that of the Odyssey (if any) is like the
occasional mild irreverence of the Vicar's daughter. When Jove says
he will do a thing, there is no uncertainty about his doing it.
Juno hardly appears at all, and when she does she never quarrels
with her husband. Minerva has more to do than any of the other gods
or goddesses, but she has nothing in common with the Minerva whom we
have already seen in the Iliad. In the Odyssey she is the fairy
god-mother who seems to have no object in life but to protect
Ulysses and Telemachus, and keep them straight at any touch and turn
of difficulty. If she has any other function, it is to be patroness
of the arts and of all intellectual development. The Minerva of the
Odyssey may indeed sit on a rafter like a swallow and hold up her
aegis to strike panic into the suitors while Ulysses kills them; but
she is a perfect lady, and would no more knock Mars and Venus down
one after the other than she would stand on her head. She is, in
fact, a distinct person in all respects from the Minerva of the
Iliad. Of the remaining gods Neptune, as the persecutor of the
hero, comes worst off; but even he is treated as though he were a
very important person.
In the Odyssey the gods no longer live in houses and sleep in four-
post bedsteads, but the conception of their abode, like that of
their existence altogether, is far more spiritual. Nobody knows
exactly where they live, but they say it is in Olympus, where there
is neither rain nor hail nor snow, and the wind never beats roughly;
but it abides in everlasting sunshine, and in great peacefulness of
light wherein the blessed gods are illumined for ever and ever. It
is hardly possible to conceive anything more different from the
Olympus of the Iliad.
Another very material point of difference between the Iliad and the
Odyssey lies in the fact that the Homer of the Iliad always knows
what he is talking about, while the supposed Homer of the Odyssey
often makes mistakes that betray an almost incredible ignorance of
detail. Thus the giant Polyphemus drives in his ewes home from
their pasture, and milks them. The lambs of course have not been
running with them; they have been left in the yards, so they have
had nothing to eat. When he has milked the ewes, the giant lets
each one of them have her lamb--to get, I suppose, what strippings
it can, and beyond this what milk the ewe may yield during the
night. In the morning, however, Polyphemus milks the ewes again.
Hence it is plain either that he expected his lambs to thrive on one
pull per diem at a milked ewe, and to be kind enough not to suck
their mothers, though left with them all night through, or else that
the writer of the Odyssey had very hazy notions about the relations
between lambs and ewes, and of the ordinary methods of procedure on
an upland dairy-farm.
In nautical matters the same inexperience is betrayed. The writer
knows all about the corn and wine that must be put on board; the
store-room in which these are kept and the getting of them are
described inimitably, but there the knowledge ends; the other things
put on board are "the things that are generally taken on board
ships." So on a voyage we are told that the sailors do whatever is
wanted doing, but we have no details. There is a shipwreck, which
does duty more than once without the alteration of a word. I have
seen such a shipwreck at Drury Lane. Anyone, moreover, who reads
any authentic account of actual adventures will perceive at once
that those of the Odyssey are the creation of one who has had no
history. Ulysses has to make a raft; he makes it about as broad as
they generally make a good big ship, but we do not seem to have been
at the pains to measure a good big ship.
I will add no more however on this head. The leading
characteristics of the Iliad, as we saw, were love, war, and
plunder. The leading idea of the Odyssey is the infatuation of man,
and the key-note is struck in the opening paragraph, where we are
told how the sailors of Ulysses must needs, in spite of every
warning, kill and eat the cattle of the sun-god, and perished
accordingly.
A few lines lower down the same note is struck with even greater
emphasis. The gods have met in council, and Jove happens at the
moment to be thinking of AEgisthus, who had met his death at the
hand of Agamemnon's son Orestes, in spite of the solemn warning that
Jove had sent him through the mouth of Mercury. It does not seem
necessary for Jove to turn his attention to Clytemnestra, the
partner of AEgisthus's guilt. Of this lady we are presently told
that she was naturally of an excellent disposition, and would never
have gone wrong but for the loss of the protector in whose charge
Agamemnon had left her. When she was left alone without an adviser--
well, if a base designing man took to flattering and misleading
her--what else could be expected? The infatuation of man, with its
corollary, the superior excellence of woman, is the leading theme;
next to this come art, religion, and, I am almost ashamed to add,
money. There is no love-business in the Odyssey except the return
of a bald elderly married man to his elderly wife and grown-up son
after an absence of twenty years, and furious at having been robbed
of so much money in the meantime. But this can hardly be called
love-business; it is at the utmost domesticity. There is a charming
young princess, Nausicaa, but though she affects a passing
tenderness for the elderly hero of her creation as soon as Minerva
has curled his bald old hair for him and tittivated him up all over,
she makes it abundantly plain that she will not look at a single one
of her actual flesh and blood admirers. There is a leading young
gentleman, Telemachus, who is nothing if he is not [Greek], or
canny, well-principled, and discreet; he has an amiable and most
sensible young male friend who says that he does not like crying at
meal times--he will cry in the forenoon on an empty stomach as much
as anyone pleases, but he cannot attend properly to his dinner and
cry at the same time. Well, there is no lady provided either for
this nice young man or for Telemachus. They are left high and dry
as bachelors. Two goddesses indeed, Circe and Calypso, do one after
the other take possession of Ulysses, but the way in which he
accepts a situation which after all was none of his seeking, and
which it is plain he does not care two straws about, is, I believe,
dictated solely by a desire to exhibit the easy infidelity of
Ulysses himself in contrast with the unswerving constancy and
fidelity of his wife Penelope. Throughout the Odyssey the men do
not really care for women, nor the women for men; they have to
pretend to do so now and again, but it is a got-up thing, and the
general attitude of the sexes towards one another is very much that
of Helen, who says that her husband Menelaus is really not deficient
in person or understanding: or again of Penelope herself, who, on
being asked by Ulysses on his return what she thought of him, said
that she did not think very much of him nor very little of him; in
fact, she did not think much about him one way or the other. True,
later on she relents and becomes more effusive; in fact, when she
and Ulysses sat up talking in bed and Ulysses told her the story of
his adventures, she never went to sleep once. Ulysses never had to
nudge her with his elbow and say, "Come, wake up, Penelope, you are
not listening"; but, in spite of the devotion exhibited here, the
love-business in the Odyssey is artificial and described by one who
had never felt it, whereas in the Iliad it is spontaneous and
obviously genuine, as by one who knows all about it perfectly well.
The love-business in fact of the Odyssey is turned on as we turn on
the gas--when we cannot get on without it, but not otherwise.
A fascinating brilliant girl, who naturally adopts for her patroness
the blue-stocking Minerva; a man-hatress, as clever girls so often
are, and determined to pay the author of the Iliad out for his
treatment of her sex by insisting on its superior moral, not to say
intellectual, capacity, and on the self-sufficient imbecility of man
unless he has a woman always at his elbow to keep him tolerably
straight and in his proper place--this, and not the musty fusty old
bust we see in libraries, is the kind of person who I believe wrote
the Odyssey. Of course in reality the work must be written by a
man, because they say so at Oxford and Cambridge, and they know
everything down in Oxford and Cambridge; but I venture to say that
if the Odyssey were to appear anonymously for the first time now,
and to be sent round to the papers for review, there is not even a
professional critic who would not see that it is a woman's writing
and not a man's. But letting this pass, I can hardly doubt, for
reasons which I gave in yesterday's Athenaeum, and for others that I
cannot now insist upon, that the poem was written by a native of
Trapani on the coast of Sicily, near Marsala. Fancy what the
position of a young, ardent, brilliant woman must have been in a
small Sicilian sea-port, say some eight or nine hundred years before
the birth of Christ. It makes one shudder to think of it. Night
after night she hears the dreary blind old bard Demodocus drawl out
his interminable recitals taken from our present Iliad, or from some
other of the many poems now lost that dealt with the adventures of
the Greeks before Troy or on their homeward journey. Man and his
doings! always the same old story, and woman always to be treated
either as a toy or as a beast of burden, or at any rate as an
incubus. Why not sing of woman also as she is when she is
unattached and free from the trammels and persecutions of this
tiresome tyrant, this insufferably self-conceited bore and booby,
man?
"I wish, my dear," exclaims her mother Arete, after one of these
little outbreaks, "that you would do it yourself. I am sure you
could do it beautifully if you would only give your mind to it."
"Very well, mother," she replies, "and I will bring in all about you
and father, and how I go out for a washing-day with the maids,"--and
she kept her word, as I will presently show you.
I should tell you that Ulysses, having got away from the goddess
Calypso, with whom he had been living for some seven or eight years
on a lonely and very distant island in mid-ocean, is shipwrecked on
the coast of Phaeacia, the chief town of which is Scheria. After
swimming some forty-eight hours in the water he effects a landing at
the mouth of a stream, and, not having a rag of clothes on his back,
covers himself up under a heap of dried leaves and goes to sleep. I
will now translate from the Odyssey itself.
"So here Ulysses slept, worn out with labour and sorrow; but Minerva
went off to the chief town of the Phaeacians, a people who used to
live in Hypereia near the wicked Cyclopes. Now the Cyclopes were
stronger than they and plundered them, so Nausithous settled them in
Scheria far from those who would loot them. He ran a wall round
about the city, built houses and temples, and allotted the lands
among his people; but he was gathered to his fathers, and the good
king Alcinous was now reigning. To his palace then Minerva hastened
that she might help Ulysses to get home.
"She went straight to the painted bedroom of Nausicaa, who was
daughter to King Alcinous, and lovely as a goddess. Near her there
slept two maids-in-waiting, both very pretty, one on either side of
the doorway, which was closed with a beautifully made door. She
took the form of the famous Captain Dumas's daughter, who was a
bosom friend of Nausicaa and just her own age; then coming into the
room like a breath of wind she stood near the head of the bed and
said--
"'Nausicaa, what could your mother have been about to have such a
lazy daughter? Here are your clothes all lying in disorder, yet you
are going to be married almost directly, and should not only be
well-dressed yourself, but should see that those about you look
clean and tidy also. This is the way to make people speak well of
you, and it will please your father and mother, so suppose we make
to-morrow a washing day, and begin the first thing in the morning.
I will come and help you, for all the best young men among your own
people are courting you, and you are not going to remain a maid much
longer. Ask your father, then, to have a horse and cart ready for
us at daybreak to take the linen and baskets, and you can ride too,
which will be much pleasanter for you than walking, for the washing
ground is a long way out of the town.'
"When she had thus spoken Minerva went back to Olympus. By and by
morning came, and as soon as Nausicaa woke she began thinking about
her dream. She went to the other end of the house to tell her
father and mother all about it, and found them in their own room.
Her mother was sitting by the fireside spinning with her maids-in-
waiting all around her, and she happened to catch her father just as
he was going out to attend a meeting of the Town Council which the
Phaeacian aldermen had convened. So she stopped him and said,
'Papa, dear, could you manage to let me have a good big waggon? I
want to take all our dirty clothes to the river and wash them. You
are the chief man here, so you ought to have a clean shirt on when
you attend meetings of the Council. Moreover, you have five sons at
home, two of them married and the other three are good-looking young
bachelors; you know they always like to have clean linen when they
go out to a dance, and I have been thinking about all this.'"
You will observe that though Nausicaa dreams that she is going to be
married shortly, and that all the best young men of Scheria are in
love with her, she does not dream that she has fallen in love with
any one of them in particular, and that thus every preparation is
made for her getting married except the selection of the bridegroom.
You will also note that Nausicaa has to keep her father up to
putting a clean shirt on when he ought to have one, whereas her
young brothers appear to keep herself up to having a clean shirt
ready for them when they want one. These little touches are so
lifelike and so feminine that they suggest drawing from life by a
female member of Alcinous's own family who knew his character from
behind the scenes.
I would also say before proceeding further that in some parts of
France and Germany it is still the custom to have but one or at most
two great washing days in the year. Each household is provided with
an enormous quantity of linen, which when dirty is just soaked and
rinsed, and then put aside till the great washing day of the year.
This is why Nausicaa wants a waggon, and has to go so far afield.
If it was only a few collars and a pocket-handkerchief or two she
could no doubt have found water enough near at hand. The big spring
or autumn wash, however, is evidently intended.
Returning now to the Odyssey, when he had heard what Nausicaa wanted
Alcinous said:
"'You shall have the mules, my love, and whatever else you have a
mind for, so be off with you.'
"Then he told the servants, and they got the waggon out and
harnessed the mules, while the princess brought the clothes down
from the linen room and placed them on the waggon. Her mother got
ready a nice basket of provisions with all sorts of good things, and
a goatskin full of wine. The princess now got into the waggon, and
her mother gave her a golden cruse of oil that she and her maids
might anoint themselves.
"Then Nausicaa took the whip and reins and gave the mules a touch
which sent them off at a good pace. They pulled without nagging,
and carried not only Nausicaa and her wash of clothes, but the women
also who were with her.
"When they got to the river they went to the washing pools, through
which even in summer there ran enough pure water to wash any
quantity of linen, no matter how dirty. Here they unharnessed the
mules and turned them out to feed in the sweet juicy grass that grew
by the river-side. They got the clothes out of the waggon, brought
them to the water, and vied with one another in treading upon them
and banging them about to get the dirt out of them. When they had
got them quite clean, they laid them out by the seaside where the
waves had raised a high beach of shingle, and set about washing and
anointing themselves with olive oil. Then they got their dinner by
the side of the river, and waited for the sun to finish drying the
clothes. By and by, after dinner, they took off their head-dresses
and began to play at ball, and Nausicaa sang to them."
I think you will agree with me that there is no haziness--no milking
of ewes that have had a lamb with them all night--here. The writer
is at home and on her own ground.
"When they had done folding the clothes and were putting the mules
to the waggon before starting home again, Minerva thought it was
time Ulysses should wake up and see the handsome girl who was to
take him to the city of the Phaeacians. So the princess threw a
ball at one of the maids, which missed the maid and fell into the
water. On this they all shouted, and the noise they made woke up
Ulysses, who sat up in his bed of leaves and wondered where in the
world he could have got to.
"Then he crept from under the bush beneath which he had slept, broke
off a thick bough so as to cover his nakedness, and advanced towards
Nausicaa and her maids; these last all ran away, but Nausicaa stood
her ground, for Minerva had put courage into her heart, so she kept
quite still, and Ulysses could not make up his mind whether it would
be better to go up to her, throw himself at her feet, and embrace
her knees as a suppliant--[in which case, of course, he would have
to drop the bough] or whether it would be better for him to make an
apology to her at a reasonable distance, and ask her to be good
enough to give him some clothes and show him the way to the town.
On the whole he thought it would be better to keep at arm's length,
in case the princess should take offence at his coming too near
her."
Let me say in passing that this is one of many passages which have
led me to conclude that the Odyssey is written by a woman. A girl,
such as Nausicaa describes herself, young, unmarried, unattached,
and hence, after all, knowing little of what men feel on these
matters, having by a cruel freak of inspiration got her hero into
such an awkward predicament, might conceivably imagine that he would
argue as she represents him, but no man, except such a woman's
tailor as could never have written such a masterpiece as the
Odyssey, would ever get his hero into such an undignified scrape at
all, much less represent him as arguing as Ulysses does. I suppose
Minerva was so busy making Nausicaa brave that she had no time to
put a little sense into Ulysses' head, and remind him that he was
nothing if not full of sagacity and resource. To return--
Ulysses now begins with the most judicious apology that his unaided
imagination can suggest. "I beg your ladyship's pardon," he
exclaims, "but are you goddess or are you a mortal woman? If you
are a goddess and live in heaven, there can be no doubt but you are
Jove's daughter Diana, for your face and figure are exactly like
hers," and so on in a long speech which I need not further quote
from.
"Stranger," replied Nausicaa, as soon as the speech was ended, "you
seem to be a very sensible well-disposed person. There is no
accounting for luck; Jove gives good or ill to every man, just as he
chooses, so you must take your lot, and make the best of it." She
then tells him she will give him clothes and everything else that a
foreigner in distress can reasonably expect. She calls back her
maids, scolds them for running away, and tells them to take Ulysses
and wash him in the river after giving him something to eat and
drink. So the maids give him the little gold cruse of oil and tell
him to go and wash himself, and as they seem to have completely
recovered from their alarm, Ulysses is compelled to say, "Young
ladies, please stand a little on one side, that I may wash the brine
from off my shoulders and anoint myself with oil; for it is long
enough since my skin has had a drop of oil upon it. I cannot wash
as long as you keep standing there. I have no clothes on, and it
makes me very uncomfortable."
So they stood aside and went and told Nausicaa. Meanwhile (I am
translating closely), "Minerva made him look taller and stronger
than before; she gave him some more hair on the top of his head, and
made it flow down in curls most beautifully; in fact she glorified
him about the head and shoulders as a cunning workman who has
studied under Vulcan or Minerva enriches a fine piece of plate by
gilding it."
Again I argue that I am reading a description of as it were a
prehistoric Mr. Knightley by a not less prehistoric Jane Austen--
with this difference that I believe Nausicaa is quietly laughing at
her hero and sees through him, whereas Jane Austen takes Mr.
Knightley seriously.
"Hush, my pretty maids," exclaimed Nausicaa as soon as she saw
Ulysses coming back with his hair curled, "hush, for I want to say
something. I believe the gods in heaven have sent this man here.
There is something very remarkable about him. When I first saw him
I thought him quite plain and commonplace, and now I consider him
one of the handsomest men I ever saw in my life. I should like my
future husband [who, it is plain, then, is not yet decided upon] to
be just such another as he is, if he would only stay here, and not
want to go away. However, give him something to eat and drink."
Nausicaa now says they must be starting homeward; so she tells
Ulysses that she will drive on first herself, but that he is to
follow after her with the maids. She does not want to be seen
coming into the town with him; and then follows another passage
which clearly shows that for all the talk she has made about getting
married she has no present intention of changing her name.
"'I am afraid,' she says, 'of the gossip and scandal which may be
set on foot about me behind my back, for there are some very ill-
natured people in the town, and some low fellow, if he met us, might
say, 'Who is this fine-looking stranger who is going about with
Nausicaa? Where did she pick him up? I suppose she is going to
marry him, or perhaps he is some shipwrecked sailor from foreign
parts; or has some god come down from heaven in answer to her
prayers, and she is going to live with him? It would be a good
thing if she would take herself off and find a husband somewhere
else, for she will not look at one of the many excellent young
Phaeacians who are in love with her'; and I could not complain, for
I should myself think ill of any girl whom I saw going about with
men unknown to her father and mother, and without having been
married to him in the face of all the world.'"
This passage could never have been written by the local bard, who
was in great measure dependent on Nausicaa's family; he would never
speak thus of his patron's daughter; either the passage is
Nausicaa's apology for herself, written by herself, or it is pure
invention, and this last, considering the close adherence to the
actual topography of Trapani on the Sicilian Coast, and a great deal
else that I cannot lay before you here, appears to me improbable.
Nausicaa then gives Ulysses directions by which he can find her
father's house. "When you have got past the courtyard," she says,
"go straight through the main hall, till you come to my mother's
room. You will find her sitting by the fire and spinning her purple
wool by firelight. She will make a lovely picture as she leans back
against a column with her maids ranged behind her. Facing her
stands my father's seat in which he sits and topes like an immortal
god. Never mind him, but go up to my mother and lay your hands upon
her knees, if you would be forwarded on your homeward voyage." From
which I conclude that Arete ruled Alcinous, and Nausicaa ruled
Arete.
Ulysses follows his instructions aided by Minerva, who makes him
invisible as he passes through the town and through the crowds of
Phaeacian guests who are feasting in the king's palace. When he has
reached the queen, the cloak of thick darkness falls off, and he is
revealed to all present, kneeling at the feet of Queen Arete, to
whom he makes his appeal. It has already been made apparent in a
passage extolling her virtue at some length, but which I have not
been able to quote, that Queen Arete is, in the eyes of the writer,
a much more important person than her husband Alcinous.
Every one, of course, is very much surprised at seeing Ulysses, but
after a little discussion, from which it appears that the writer
considers Alcinous to be a person who requires a good deal of
keeping straight in other matters besides clean linen, it is settled
that Ulysses shall be feted on the following day and then escorted
home. Ulysses now has supper and remains with Alcinous and Arete
after the other guests are gone away for the night. So the three
sit by the fire while the servants take away the things, and Arete
is the first to speak. She has been uneasy for some time about
Ulysses' clothes, which she recognized as her own make, and at last
she says, "Stranger, there is a question or two that I should like
to put to you myself. Who in the world are you? And who gave you
those clothes? Did you not say you had come here from beyond the
seas?"
Ulysses explains matters, but still withholds his name, nevertheless
Alcinous (who seems to have shared in the general opinion that it
was high time his daughter got married, and that, provided she
married somebody, it did not much matter who the bridegroom might
be) exclaimed, "By Father Jove, Minerva, and Apollo, now that I see
what kind of a person you are and how exactly our opinions coincide
upon every subject, I should so like it if you would stay with us
always, marry Nausicaa, and become my son-in-law." Ulysses turns
the conversation immediately, and meanwhile Queen Arete told her
maids to put a bed in the corridor, and make it with red blankets,
and it was to have at least one counterpane. They were also to put
a woollen nightgown for Ulysses. "The maids took a torch, and made
the bed as fast as they could: when they had done so they came up
to Ulysses and said, 'This way, sir, if you please, your room is
quite ready'; and Ulysses was very glad to hear them say so."
On the following day Alcinous holds a meeting of the Phaeacians and
proposes that Ulysses should have a ship got ready to take him home
at once: this being settled he invites all the leading people, and
the fifty-two sailors who are to man Ulysses' ship, to come up to
his own house, and he will give them a banquet--for which he kills a
dozen sheep, eight pigs, and two oxen. Immediately after gorging
themselves at the banquet they have a series of athletic
competitions, and from this I gather the poem to have been written
by one who saw nothing very odd in letting people compete in sports
requiring very violent exercise immediately after a heavy meal.
Such a course may have been usual in those days, but certainly is
not generally adopted in our own.
At the games Alcinous makes himself as ridiculous as he always does,
and Ulysses behaves much as the hero of the preceding afternoon
might be expected to do--but on his praising the Phaeacians towards
the close of the proceedings Alcinous says he is a person of such
singular judgment that they really must all of them make him a very
handsome present. "Twelve of you," he exclaims, "are magistrates,
and there is myself--that makes thirteen; suppose we give him each
one of us a clean cloak, a tunic, and a talent of gold,"--which in
those days was worth about two hundred and fifty pounds.
This is unanimously agreed to, and in the evening, towards sundown,
the presents began to make their appearance at the palace of King
Alcinous, and the king's sons, perhaps prudently as you will
presently see, place them in the keeping of their mother Arete.
When the presents have all arrived, Alcinous says to Arete, "Wife,
go and fetch the best chest we have, and put a clean cloak and a
tunic in it. In the meantime Ulysses will take a bath."
Arete orders the maids to heat a bath, brings the chest, packs up
the raiment and gold which the Phaeacians have brought, and adds a
cloak and a good tunic as King Alcinous's own contribution.
Yes, but where--and that is what we are never told--is the 250
pounds which he ought to have contributed as well as the cloak and
tunic? And where is the beautiful gold goblet which he had also
promised?
"See to the fastening yourself," says Queen Arete to Ulysses, "for
fear anyone should rob you while you are asleep in the ship."
Ulysses, we may be sure, was well aware that Alcinous's 250 pounds
was not in the box, nor yet the goblet, but he took the hint at once
and made the chest fast without the delay of a moment, with a bond
which the cunning goddess Circe had taught him.
He does not seem to have thought his chance of getting the 250
pounds and the goblet, and having to unpack his box again, was so
great as his chance of having his box tampered with before he got it
away, if he neglected to double-lock it at once and put the key in
his pocket. He has always a keen eye to money; indeed the whole
Odyssey turns on what is substantially a money quarrel, so this time
without the prompting of Minerva he does one of the very few
sensible things which he does, on his own account, throughout the
whole poem.
Supper is now served, and when it is over, Ulysses, pressed by
Alcinous, announces his name and begins the story of his adventures.
It is with profound regret that I find myself unable to quote any of
the fascinating episodes with which his narrative abounds, but I
have said I was going to lecture on the humour of Homer--that is to
say of the Iliad and the Odyssey--and must not be diverted from my
subject. I cannot, however, resist the account which Ulysses gives
of his meeting with his mother in Hades, the place of departed
spirits, which he has visited by the advice of Circe. His mother
comes up to him and asks him how he managed to get into Hades, being
still alive. I will translate freely, but quite closely, from
Ulysses' own words, as spoken to the Phaeacians.
"And I said, 'Mother, I had to come here to consult the ghost of the
old Theban prophet Teiresias, I have never yet been near Greece, nor
set foot on my native land, and have had nothing but one long run of
ill luck from the day I set out with Agamemnon to fight at Troy.
But tell me how you came here yourself? Did you have a long and
painful illness or did heaven vouchsafe you a gentle easy passage to
eternity? Tell me also about my father and my son? Is my property
still in their hands, or has someone else got hold of it who thinks
that I shall not return to claim it? How, again, is my wife
conducting herself? Does she live with her son and make a home for
him, or has she married again?'
"My mother answered, 'Your wife is still mistress of your house, but
she is in very great straits and spends the greater part of her time
in tears. No one has actually taken possession of your property,
and Telemachus still holds it. He has to accept a great many
invitations, and gives much the sort of entertainments in return
that may be expected from one in his position. Your father remains
in the old place, and never goes near the town; he is very badly
off, and has neither bed nor bedding, nor a stick of furniture of
any kind. In winter he sleeps on the floor in front of the fire
with the men, and his clothes are in a shocking state, but in
summer, when the warm weather comes on again, he sleeps out in the
vineyard on a bed of vine leaves. He takes on very much about your
not having returned, and suffers more and more as he grows older:
as for me I died of nothing whatever in the world but grief about
yourself. There was not a thing the matter with me, but my
prolonged anxiety on your account was too much for me, and in the
end it just wore me out.'"
In the course of time Ulysses comes to a pause in his narrative and
Queen Arete makes a little speech.
"'What do you think,' she said to the Phaeacians, 'of such a guest
as this? Did you ever see anyone at once so good-looking and so
clever? It is true, indeed, that his visit is paid more
particularly to myself, but you all participate in the honour
conferred upon us by a visitor of such distinction. Do not be in a
hurry to send him off, nor stingy in the presents you make to one in
so great need; for you are all of you very well off.'"
You will note that the queen does not say "_we_ are all of _us_ very
well off."
"Then the hero Echeneus, who was the oldest man among them, added a
few words of his own. 'My friends,' he said, 'there cannot be two
opinions about the graciousness and sagacity of the remarks that
have just fallen from Her Majesty; nevertheless it is with His
Majesty King Alcinous that the decision must ultimately rest.'
"'The thing shall be done,' exclaimed Alcinous, 'if I am still king
over the Phaeacians. As for our guest, I know he is anxious to
resume his journey, still we must persuade him if we can to stay
with us until to-morrow, by which time I shall be able to get
together the balance of the sum which I mean to press on his
acceptance.'"
So here we have it straight out that the monarch knew he had only
contributed the coat and waistcoat, and did not know exactly how he
was to lay his hands on the 250 pounds. What with piracy--for we
have been told of at least one case in which Alcinous had looted a
town and stolen his housemaid Eurymedusa--what with insufficient
changes of linen, toping like an immortal god, swaggering at large,
and open-handed hospitality, it is plain and by no means surprising
that Alcinous is out at elbows; nor can there be a better example of
the difference between the occasional broad comedy of the Iliad and
the delicate but very bitter satire of the Odyssey than the way in
which the fact that Alcinous is in money difficulties is allowed to
steal upon us, as contrasted with the obvious humour of the quarrels
between Jove and Juno. At any rate we can hardly wonder at Ulysses
having felt that to a monarch of such mixed character the unfastened
box might prove a temptation greater than he could resist. To
return, however, to the story--
"If it please your Majesty," said he, in answer to King Alcinous, "I
should be delighted to stay here for another twelve months, and to
accept from your hands the vast treasures and the escort which you
are go generous as to promise me. I should obviously gain by doing
so, for I should return fuller-handed to my own people and should
thus be both more respected and more loved by my acquaintance.
Still to receive such presents--"
The king perceived his embarrassment, and at once relieved him. "No
one," he exclaimed, "who looks at you can for one moment take you
for a charlatan or a swindler. I know there are many of these
unscrupulous persons going about just now with such plausible
stories that it is very hard to disbelieve them; there is, however,
a finish about your style which convinces me of your good
disposition," and so on for more than I have space to quote; after
which Ulysses again proceeds with his adventures.
When he had finished them Alcinous insists that the leading
Phaeacians should each one of them give Ulysses a still further
present of a large kitchen copper and a three-legged stand to set it
on, "but," he continues, "as the expense of all these presents is
really too heavy for the purse of any private individual, I shall
charge the whole of them on the rates": literally, "We will repay
ourselves by getting it in from among the people, for this is too
heavy a present for the purse of a private individual." And what
this can mean except charging it on the rates I do not know.
Of course everyone else sends up his tripod and his cauldron, but we
hear nothing about any, either tripod or cauldron, from King
Alcinous. He is very fussy next morning stowing them under the
ship's benches, but his time and trouble seem to be the extent of
his contribution. It is hardly necessary to say that Ulysses had to
go away without the 250 pounds, and that we never hear of the
promised goblet being presented. Still he had done pretty well.
I have not quoted anything like all the absurd remarks made by
Alcinous, nor shown you nearly as completely as I could do if I had
more time how obviously the writer is quietly laughing at him in her
sleeve. She understands his little ways as she understands those of
Menelaus, who tells Telemachus and Pisistratus that if they like he
will take them a personally conducted tour round the Peloponnese,
and that they can make a good thing out of it, for everyone will
give them something--fancy Helen or Queen Arete making such a
proposal as this. They are never laughed at, but then they are
women, whereas Alcinous and Menelaus are men, and this makes all the
difference.
And now in conclusion let me point out the irony of literature in
connection with this astonishing work. Here is a poem in which the
hero and heroine have already been married many years before it
begins: it is marked by a total absence of love-business in such
sense as we understand it: its interest centres mainly in the fact
of a bald elderly gentleman, whose little remaining hair is red,
being eaten out of house and home during his absence by a number of
young men who are courting the supposed widow--a widow who, if she
be fair and fat, can hardly also be less than forty. Can any
subject seem more hopeless? Moreover, this subject so initially
faulty is treated with a carelessness in respect of consistency,
ignorance of commonly known details, and disregard of ordinary
canons, that can hardly be surpassed, and yet I cannot think that in
the whole range of literature there is a work which can be
decisively placed above it. I am afraid you will hardly accept
this; I do not see how you can be expected to do so, for in the
first place there is no even tolerable prose translation, and in the
second, the Odyssey, like the Iliad, has been a school book for over
two thousand five hundred years, and what more cruel revenge than
this can dullness take on genius? The Iliad and Odyssey have been
used as text-books for education during at least two thousand five
hundred years, and yet it is only during the last forty or fifty
that people have begun to see that they are by different authors.
There was, indeed, so I learn from Colonel Mure's valuable work, a
band of scholars some few hundreds of years before the birth of
Christ, who refused to see the Iliad and Odyssey as by the same
author, but they were snubbed and snuffed out, and for more than two
thousand years were considered to have been finally refuted. Can
there be any more scathing satire upon the value of literary
criticism? It would seem as though Minerva had shed the same thick
darkness over both the poems as she shed over Ulysses, so that they
might go in and out among the dons of Oxford and Cambridge from
generation to generation, and none should see them. If I am right,
as I believe I am, in holding the Odyssey to have been written by a
young woman, was ever sleeping beauty more effectually concealed
behind a more impenetrable hedge of dulness?--and she will have to
sleep a good many years yet before anyone wakes her effectually.
But what else can one expect from people, not one of whom has been
at the very slight exertion of noting a few of the writer's main
topographical indications, and then looking for them in an Admiralty
chart or two? Can any step be more obvious and easy--indeed, it is
so simple that I am ashamed of myself for not having taken it forty
years ago. Students of the Odyssey for the most part are so
engrossed with the force of the zeugma, and of the enclitic particle
[Greek]; they take so much more interest in the digamma and in the
AEolic dialect, than they do in the living spirit that sits behind
all these things and alone gives them their importance, that,
naturally enough, not caring about the personality, it remains and
always must remain invisible to them.
If I have helped to make it any less invisible to yourselves, let me
ask you to pardon the somewhat querulous tone of my concluding
remarks.