(_cf_. _Il_. II. 76-77 and _Od_. ii. 224, 225, and 228), and will go
on to the striking case of Ulysses' servant Eurybates. In _Od_. xix.
218, 219 Penelope has asked Ulysses (who is disguised so that she does
not recognise him) for details as to the followers Ulysses had with
him on his way to Troy, and Ulysses answers that he had a servant
named Eurybates who was hunched in the shoulders (xix. 247). Turning
to _Il_. II. 184 we find that Ulysses had a servant from Ithaca named
Eurybates, but he does not seem to have been hunched in the shoulders;
on reading further, however, we immediately come to Thersites, "whose
shoulders were hunched over his chest" (_Il_. II. 217, 218). Am I too
hasty in concluding that the writer of the _Odyssey_, wanting an
additional detail for Penelope's greater assurance, and not finding one
in the _Iliad_, took the hunchiness off the back of the next man to
him and set it on to the back of Eurybates? I do not say that no other
hypothesis can be framed in order to support a different conclusion,
but I think the one given above will best commend itself to common
sense; and the most natural inference from it is that the writer of the
_Odyssey_ knew at any rate part of _Il_. II. much as we have it now.
I often wondered why Menelaus should have been made to return on the
self-same day as that on which Orestes was holding the funeral feast
of Ægisthus and Clytemnestra; the Greek which tells us that he did so
runs:--
αὐτῆμαρ δέ οἱ ἦλθε βοὴν ἀγαθὸς Μενέλαος (_Od_. iii. 311).
I did not find the explanation till I remembered that in _Iliad_ II.
408, when Agamemnon has been inviting the Achæan chieftains to a
banquet, he did not ask Menelaus, for Menelaus came of his own accord:--
αὐτόματος δέ οἱ ἦλθε βοὴν ἀγαθὸς Μενέλαος,
on remembering this I observed that it would be less trouble to make
Menelaus come home on the very day of Ægisthus' funeral feast than to
alter αὐτόματος in any other way which would leave the rest of the
line available. I should be ashamed of the writer of the _Odyssey_ for
having done this, unless I believed it to be merely due to unconscious
cerebration. That the Odyssean and Iliadic lines are taken the one
from the other will approve itself to the instincts of any one who
is accustomed to deal with literary questions at all, and it is not
conceivable that Menelaus should, in the _Iliad_, have been made to
come uninvited because in the _Odyssey_ he happened to come back on the
very day when Orestes was holding Ægisthus' funeral feast; the Iliadic
context explains why Menelaus came uninvited--it was because he knew
that Agamemnon was too busy to invite him. I infer, therefore, that the
writer of the _Odyssey_ again shows herself familiar with a part of
_Il_. II.
I can see no sufficient reason for even questioning that the catalogues
of the Achæan and Trojan forces in the second Book of the _Iliad_
were part of the _Iliad_ as it left Homer's hands. They are wanted
so as to explain who the people are of whom we are to hear in the
body of the poem; their position, is perfectly natural; the Achæan
catalogue is prepared in Nestor's speech (II. 360-368); Homer almost
tells us that he has had assistance in compiling it, for he invokes
the Muse, as he does more than once in later Books, and declares that
he knows nothing of his own knowledge, but depends entirely upon what
has been told him[1]; the lines quoted or alluded to in the _Odyssey_
are far too marked to allow of our doubting that the writer knew
both catalogues familiarly; I cannot within my limits give them, but
would call the reader's attention to _Il_. II. 488, _cf_. _Od_. iv.
240; to the considering Sparta and Lacedæmon as two places (_Il_. II.
580, 581) which the writer of the _Odyssey_ does (iv. 10), though
she has abundantly shown that she knew them to be but one; to _Il_.
II. 600, _cf_. _Od_. iii. 386; to the end of line 614, θαλάσσια ἔργα
μεμήλειν, _cf_. _Od_. v. 67, θαλάσσια ἔργα μέμηλειν; to 670, _cf_.
_Od_. ii. 12; to 673, 674, _cf_. _Od_. xi. 469, 470; to _Il_. II. 706,
αὐτοκασγνητος μεγαθύμον Πρωτεσιλάου, which must surely be parent of the
line αὐτοκασιγνήτου ὀλοόφρονος Αἰήταο, _Od_. X. 137; to _Il_. II. 707,
ὁπλότερος γένεῇ ὁ δ᾿ ἅμα πρότερος καὶ ἀρείων, _cf_. _Od_. xix. 184,
where the same line occurs; to _Il_. II. 721, ἀλλ᾿ ὁ μὲν ἐν νήσῳ κεῖτο
κρατέρ᾿ ἄλγεα πάσχων, _cf_. _Od_. v. 13, where the same line occurs,
but with κεῖται instead of κεῖτο to suit the context; _cf_. also
_Od_. v. 395, where we find πατρός, ὃς ἐν νούσῳ κῆται, κρατέρ᾿ ἄλγεα
πάσχων, a line which shows how completely the writer of the _Odyssey_
was saturated with the _Iliad_; to _Il_. II. 755, Στυγὸς ὕδατός ἐστιν
ἀπορρώξ, _cf_. _Od_. x. 514, where the same words end the line; to
_Il_. II. 774, δίσκοισιν τέρποντο καὶ αἰγανέῃσιν ἱέντες, _cf_. _Od_.
iv. 626, and xvii. 168, where the same line occurs; to _Il_. II. 776,
where the horses of the Myrmidons are spoken of as λωτὸν ἐρεπτόμενοι,
_cf_. _Od_. ix. 97, where the same words are used for Ulysses' men
when with the Lotus-eaters; to _Il_. II. 873, νήπιος, οὐδέ τί οἱ τό γ'
ἐπήρκεσε λυγρὸν ὄλεθρον, _cf_. _Od_. iv. 292, ἄλγιον, οὐ γάρ οἵ τι τά
γ' ἤρκεσε λυγρὸν ὄλεθρον.
None of the passages above quoted or referred to are to be found
anywhere else in the _Iliad_, so that if from the _Iliad_ at all, they
are from the catalogues. But having already shown, as I believe, that
the writer of the _Odyssey_ knew lines 76, 77, 78, 184, 216, 217,
and 408 of Book II., and accepting the rest of the Book as written
by Homer, with or without assistance, I shall not argue further in
support of my contention that the whole of Book II. was known to, and
occasionally borrowed from, by the writer of the _Odyssey_.
Perhaps the prettiest example of unconscious cerebration in the
_Odyssey_ is to be found in the opening line of _Od_. iii, which runs
ἠέλιος δ' ἀνόρουσε λιπὼν περικαλλέα λίμνην, which is taken from _Il_.
v. 20, Ιδαῖος δ' ἀνόρουσε λιπὼν περικαλλέα δίφρον· One is at a loss to
conceive how a writer so apparently facile should drift thus on to an
Iliadic line of such different signification except as the result of
saturation. It is inconceivable that she should have cast about for a
line to say that the sun was rising, and thought that Idæus jumping off
his chariot would do. She again has this line in her mind when in Book
xxii. 95 she writes Τηλέμαχος δ' ἀπόρουσε λιπὼν δολιχόσκιον ἔγχος.
The same kind of unconscious celebration evidenced by the lines last
referred to leads her sometimes to repeat lines of her own in a strange
way, without probably being at all aware of it. As for example:--
βασιλῆες.....εἰσὶ καὶ ἄλλοι
πολλοὶ ἐν ἀμφιάλῳ Ἰθάκῃ νέοι ἠδὲ παλαιοί,
(i. 394, 395).
This passage in the following Book becomes:--
εἰσὶ δὲ νῆες
πολλαὶ ἐν ἀμφιάλῳ Ἰθάκῃ νέαι ἠδὲ παλαιαί·
(ii. 292, 293).
Another similar case is that of the famous line about Sisyphus' stone
bounding down hill in a string of dactyls, _Od_. xi. 598, it runs:--
αὖτις ἔπειτα πέδονδε κυλίνδετο λᾶας ἀναιδής.
"The cruel stone came bounding down again on to the plain." I believe
this to be nothing but an unconscious adaptation from the one dactylic
line that I can remember in the _Iliad_, I mean:--
ἀμφοτέρω δὲ τένοντε καὶ ἴστέα λᾶας ἀναιδὴς
ἄχρις ἀπηλοίησεν.
_Il_. IV 521, 522.
"The cruel stone shattered the bones of the neck, tendons and all."
Granted (which is very doubtful) that there may be an accommodation of
sound to sense in the Odyssean line, I contend that the suggestion came
from the Iliadic line.
I would gladly go through the whole _Iliad_ calling attention to the
use the writer of the _Odyssey_ has made of it, but to do this would
require hardly less than a book to itself. I will therefore ask the
reader to accept my statement that no one Book in the _Iliad_ shows
any marked difference from the others as regards the use that has
been made of it, and will limit myself to those Books that have been
most generally declared to be later additions--I mean Book X. and
Book XVIII.--for I consider that I have already sufficiently shown
the writer of the _Odyssey_ to have known Books I., XXIV., and the
Catalogues in Book II. It may be well, however, to include Book XI.
in my examination, for this is one of the most undoubted, and it will
be interesting to note that the writer of the _Odyssey_ has both the
most doubted and undoubted Books equally at her fingers' ends. I shall
only call attention to passages that do not occur more than once in the
_Iliad_, and will omit the very numerous ones that may be considered as
common form.
In _Il_. X. 141, 142 we find:--
τίφθ' οὔτω;.....
Νύκτα δι' ἀμβροσίην, and in _Od_. ix. 403, 404.
τίπτε τόσον.....
Νύκτα δι' ἀμβροσίην.
In _Il_. X. 142, ὅτι δὴ χρείω τόσον ἴκει; _Il_. _Od_. ii. 28, τίνα
χρειὼ τόσον ἵκει.
_Il_. X. 158 begins with the words λὰξ ποδὶ κίνησας. So also does _Od_.
XV. 45.
_Il_. X. 214 has, ὅσσοι γὰρ νήεσσιν ἐπικρατέουσιν ἄριστοι, this line is
found _Od_. i. 245, xvi. 122, xix. 130, but with νήσοισιν instead of
νήεσσιν.
_Il_. X. 220 ends with ὀτρύνει κραδίη καὶ θυμὸς ἀγήνωρ, so also does
_Od_. xviii. 61.
_Il_. X. 221 has ἀνδρῶν δυσμενέων δῦναι στράτον ἐγγὺς ἐόντων; _cf Od_.
iv. 246, ἀνδρῶν δυσμενέων κατέδυ πόλιν εὐρυάγυιαν·
_Il_. X. 243, 244 have, πῶς ἂν ἔπειτ' Ὀδυσῆος ἐγὼ θείοιο λαθοίμην, οὗ
περὶ μὲν.....
In _Od_. i. 65, 66 we find the same words only with ὅς instead of οὗ.
This is a very convincing case, for the ἔπειτα, which is quite natural
in the Iliadic line, is felt to be rather out of place in the Odyssean
one, and makes it plain that the Odyssean passage was taken from the
Iliadic, not _vice versâ_.
_Il_. X. 255 ends with μενοπτόλεμος Θρασυμήδης, so also does _Od_. iii.
442.
_Il_. X. 278, 279,.....ἥ τέ μοι αἰεὶ
ἐν πάντεσσι πόνοισι παρίστασαι.....
_cf_. _Od_. xiii. 300, 301,.....ἥ τέ τοι αἰεὶ
ἐν πάντεσσι πόνοισι παρίσταμαι.....
_Il_. X 292-295, σοὶ δ᾿ αὖ ἐγὼ ῥέξω βοȗν ἦνιν εὐρυμέτωπον
ἀδμήτην, ἣν οὐ πω ὑπὸ ζυγὸν ἤγαγεν ἀνήρ.
τήν τοι ἐγὼ ῥέξω χρυσὸν κέρασιν περιχεύας.
ὧς ἔφαν εὐχόμενοι, τῶν δ᾿ ἔκλυε Παλλὰς Ἀθήνη.
The first three of these four lines is repeated verbatim in _Od_. iii.
382-384. In _Od_. 385 the fourth line becomes ὧς ἔφατ᾿ εὐχόμενος τοȗ δ'
ἔκλυε Παλλὰς Ἀθήνη.
_Il_. X. 351.....ὅσσον τ' ἐπὶ οὖρα πέλονται ἡμιόνων, _cf_. _Od_. viii.
124 ἕσσον τ' ἐν νείῳ οὖρον πέλει ἡμιόνοιιν.
_Il_. X. 400, τὸν δ' ἐπιμειδήσας προσέφη πολύμητις Ὀδύσσευς, this line
occurs _Od_. xxii. 371.
_Il_. X. 429 ends with δῖοί τε Πελασγοί, so also does _Od_. xix. 177.
_Il_. X. 457, φθεγγομένου δ' ἄρα τοῦ γε κάρη κονίῃσιν ἐμίχθη, this line
is found _Od_. xxii. 329.
_Il_. X. 534, ψεύσομαι ἦ ἒτυμον ἐρέω κέλεται δέ με θυμός. In _Od_. iv.
140 this line is found.
_Il_. X. 556, ῥεῖα θεός γ' ἐθέλων καί κ.τ.λ. _Cf_. _Od_. iii. 231.
_Il_. X. 576 ἔς ῥ ἀσαμίνθους βάντες εὐξέστας λούσαντο. See _Od_. iv.
48, xvii. 87.
Here, then, are seventeen apparent quotations from Book X., omitting
any claim on lines which, though they are found in the _Odyssey_, are
also found in other Books of the _Iliad_, from which, and not from
Book X., it may be alleged that the writer of the _Odyssey_ took them.
This makes the writer of the _Odyssey_ to have taken about one line
in every 33 of the 579 lines of which Book X. consists. Disciples of
Wolf--no two of whom, however, are of the same opinion, so it is hard
to say who they are--must either meet my theory that the _Odyssey_ is
all written at one place, by one hand, and in the eleventh century
B.C., with stronger weapons than during the last six years they
have shown any signs of possessing, or they must fall back on some
Laputan-manner-of-making-books theory, which they will be able to
devise better than I can.
I do not forget that the opponents of the genuineness of _Il_. X. may
contend that the passages above given were taken from the _Odyssey_,
but this contention should not be urged in respect of Book X. more than
in respect of the other Books, which are all of them equally replete
with passages that are found in the _Odyssey_, and in the case given
above of _Il_. X. 243, 244 and _Od_. i. 65, 66, it is not easy to doubt
that the Iliadic passage is the original, and the Odyssean the copy.
I will now deal with the undoubted Book XI., omitting as in the case
of Book X. all lines that occur in other Books, unless I call special
attention to them.
The first two lines of Book XI. are identical with the first two of
Book V. of the _Odyssey_, but _Il_. XI. 2 occurs also in _Il_. XIX. 2.
_Il_. XI. 42, 43, ἵππουριν· δεινὸν δὲ λόφος καθύπερθεν ἔνευεν,
εἵλετο δ' ἄλκιμα δοῦρε δύω, κεκορυθμένα χαλκῷ.
These two lines are found _Od_. xxii. 124, 125, but the first of them
occurs three or four times elsewhere in the _Iliad_.
_Il_. XI. 181, ἀλλ' ὅτε δὴ τάχ' ἔμελλεν ὑπὸ πτόλιν αἰπύ τε
τεῖχος
ἵξεσθαι τότε δὴ.....
_cf_. _Od_. iv. 514, 515, ἀλλ' ὅτε δὴ τάχ' ἔμελλεν Μαλείαων ὄρος αἰπύ
ἵξεσθαι τότε δὴ.....
_Il_. xi. 201, προέηκε τεῒν τάδε μυθήσασθαι, _cf_. _Od_. iv. 829, where
the same words occur.
_Il_. XI. 253, ἀντικρὺς δὲ δίεδχε φαεκνοῦ δουρὸς ἀκωκή. _cf_. _Od_.
xix. 453, where the same line occurs but with διῆλθε for δίεσχε.
_Il_. XI. 531, ὧς ἄρα φωνήσας ἵμασεν καλλίτριχας ἵππους _cf_. _Od_. xv.
215, where the same line occurs but with ἔλασεν instead of ἵμασεν.
_Il_. XI. 624-639. The mess which Hecamedé cooked for Patroclus and
Machaon was surely present to the mind of the writer of the _Odyssey_
when she was telling about the mess which Circe cooked for Ulysses'
men, _Od_. X. 234, 235.
_Il_. XI. 668, 669.....οὐ γὰρ ἐμὴ ἲς
ἔσθ', οἵη πάρος ἔσκεν ἐνὶ γναμπτοῖσι μέλεσσιν
_cf_. _Od_. xi. 393, 394, ἀλλ᾿ οὐγάρ οἱ ἔτ᾿ ἦν ἲς ἔμπεδος οὐδέ τι κῖκυς
οἵη περ πάρος ἔσκεν ἐνὶ γναμπτοῖσι μέλεσσιν.
_Il_. XI. 678, 679.....ἀγέλας, τόσα πώεα οἰῶν
τόσσα συῶν συβόσια, τόσ' αἰπόλια πλατέ' αἰγῶν.
These lines occur _Od_. xiv. 100, 101 but with ἀγέλαι instead of ἀγέλας.
_Il_. XI. 742, τὸν μὲν ἐγὼ προσιόντα βάλον χαλκήρεϊ δουρί. This line is
found _Od_. xiii. 267 but with κατιόντα for προσιόντα.
_Il_. XI. 777, στῆμεν ἐνὶ προθύροιστι ταφὼν δ' ἀvόρουσεν Ἀχιλλεύς, _cf_.
_Od_. xvi. 12, ἔστη ἐνὶ προθύροιστι ταφὼν δ' ἀvόρουσε συβώτης.
Here we have only eleven well-marked passages common to both poems, in
spite of the fact that Book XI. is nearly 300 lines longer than Book
X., but I am precluded from referring to any passages that occur also
in any other Book of the _Iliad_. Running my eye over the underlined
lines in my copy of the _Iliad_, I do not find much, though I admit
that there is some, difference between their frequency in Book XI.,
and in the other Books. Furthermore I own to finding Book XI. perhaps
the least interesting and the most perfunctorily written in all the
_Iliad_, and can well believe that the writer of the _Odyssey_ borrowed
from it less because she was of the same opinion, but however this may
be, the number of common passages above collected is ample to establish
the fact that the writer of the _Odyssey_ had Book XI. in her mind as
well as Book X.
I will now go on to examine the passages in _Il_. XVIII. which the
writer of the _Odyssey_ has wholly or in part adopted. They are:--
_Il_. XVIII. 22-24, ὦς φάτο τὸν δ' ἄχεος νεφέλη ἐκάλυψε μέλαινα
ἀμφοτέρῃσι δὲ χερσὶν ἑλὼν κόνιν αἰθαλόεσσαν
χεύατο κὰκ κεφαλῆς χαρίεν δ' ᾔσχυνε πρόσωπον.
These lines are found _Od_. xxiv. 315-317 except that as they refer to
an old man, instead of, as in the _Iliad_, to a young one, χαρίεν δ'
ᾔσχυνε πρόσωπον has become πολιῆς ἀδινὰ στεναχίζων. The first of the
three lines occurs also in _Il_. XVII. 591.
_Il_. XVIII. 108, καὶ χόλος ὅς τ' ἐφέηκε πολύφρονά περ χαλεπῆναι, _cf_.
_Od_. xiv. 464, ἠλεός, ὅς τ' ἐφέηκε πολύφρονά περ μάλ' ἀεῖσαι.
_Il_. XVIII. 250, Πανθοΐδης· ὁ γὰρ οἶος ὅρα πρόσσω καὶ ὀπίσσω, _cf_
_Od_. xxiv. 452, where however Πανθοΐδης becomes Μαστορίδης.
_Il_. XVIII. 344-349,
ἀμφί πυρί στῆσαι τρίποδα μέγαν ὄφρα τάχιστα
Πάτροκλον λούσειαν ἄπο βρότον αἱματόεντα.
οἱ δὲ λοετροχόον τρίποδ' ἵστασαν ἐν πυρὶ κηλέῳ,
ἐν δ' ἄρ' ὔδωρ ἐχέαν, ὑπὸ δὲ ξύλα δαῖον ἑλόντες·
γάστρην μὲν τρίποδος πῦρ ἄμφεπε, θέρμετο δ' ὔδωρ
αὖτὰρ ἐπεὶ δὴ ζέσσεν ὕδωρ ἐνὶ ἤνοπι χαλκῷ,
_cf_. _Od_. viii. 434-437, ὄφρα τάχιστα becomes ὄττι τάχιστα.
_Il_. XVIII. 345 is omitted. In the following line οί becomes αί, and
in the one after this ἑλόντες becomes ἑλοῦσαι·
The last line of the Iliadic passage is not given in _Od_. viii, but
appears without alteration in _Od_. x. 360.
_Il_. XVIII. 363, ὅς περ θνητός τ' ἐστὶ καὶ οὐ τόσα μήδεα οἶδεν. This
line occurs _Od_. xx. 46.
_Il_. XVIII. 385-387,
τίπτε Θέτι τανύπεπλε, ἱκάνεις ἡμέτερoν δῶ
αἰδοίη τε φίλη τε; πάρος γε μὲν οὔ τι θαμίζεις.
ἀλλ' ἕπεο προτέρω ἵνα τοι πὰρ ξείνια θείω·
_Il_. XVIII. 424-427,
τίπτε Θέτι τανύπεπλε, ἱκάνεις ἡμέτερὸν δῶ
αἰδοίη τε φίλη τε; πάρος γε μὲν οὔ τι θαμίζεις·
αὔδα ὅ τι φρονέεις· τελέσαι δέ με θυμὸς ἄνωγεν
εἰ δύναμαι τελέσαι γε καὶ εἰ τετελεσμένον ἐστίν.
The _Odyssey_ (v. 87-91) has both these passages combined as follows:--
Τίπτε μοι, Ἐρμεία χρυσόρραπι, εἰλήλουθας
αἰδοῖός, τε φίλος τε; πάρος γε μὲν οὔ τι θαμίζεις
αὔδα ὁ τι φρονέεις· τελέσαι δέ με θυμὸς ἄνωγεν
εἰ δύναμαι τελέσαι γε καὶ εἰ τετελεσμένον ἐστίν.
ἀλλ' ἕπεο προτέρω, ἵνα τοι πὰρ ξείνια θείω.
_Il_. XVIII. 389, 390.....ἐπὶ θρόνου ἀργυροήλου
καλοῦ δαιδαλέου· ὑπὸ δὲ θρῆνυς ποσὶν ἦεν·
These lines will be found _Od_. x. 314, 315.
_Il_. XVIII. 431, ὅσσ' ἐμοὶ ἐκ πασέων Κρονίδης Ζεὺς ἄλγε' ἔδωκεν·
_cf_. _Od_. iv. 722, 723.....πέρι γάρ μοι Ὀλύμπιος ἄλγε' ἔδωκεν
ἐκ πασέων,
_Il_. XVIII. 457, τούνεκα νῦν τὰ σὰ γούναθ' ἱκάνομαι αἴ κ'
ἐθέλησθα.
This line occurs _Od_. iii. 92 and _Od_. iv. 322.
_Il_. XVIII. 463, θάρσει, μή τοι ταῦτα μετὰ φρεσὶσῇσι μελόντων.
This line occurs _Od_. xiii. 362, xvi. 436, and xxiv. 357.
_Il_. XVIII. 486-489 Πληιάδας θ'.....
ἄρκτον θ', ἣν καὶ ἄμαξαν ἐπίκλησιν καλέουσιν,
ἥ τ' αὐτοῦ στρέφεται καί τ' Ωρίωνα δοκεύει
οἴη δ' ἄμμορος ἐστι λοετρῶν Ὠκέανοιο·
These lines occur _Od_. v. 272-275.
_Il_. XVIII. 533, 534, στησάμενοι δ' ἐμάχοντο μάχην ποταμοῖο
παρ' ὄχθας
βάλλον δ' ἀλλήλους χαλκήρεσιν ἐγχείῃσιν·
These lines are found _Od_. ix. 54, 55 with παρὰ νηυσὶ θοῆσιν instead
of ποταμοῖο παρ' ὄχθας.
_Il_. XVIII. 604-606,
τερπόμενοι· μετὰ δέ σφιν ἐμέλπετο Θεῖος ἀοιδὸς
φορμίζων· δοίω δὲ κυβερνιστῆρε κατ' αὐτοὺς
μολπῆς ἐξάρχοντος ἐδίνευον κατὰ μέσον.
These lines occur _Od_. iv. 17-19.
To meet the possible objection that _Il_. XVIII. was written later than
the _Odyssey_, and might therefore have borrowed from it, I will quote
the context of line 108 as well as the line itself. The passage runs
(XVIII. 107-110):--
ὦς ἔρις ἔκ τε θεῶν ἔκ τ' ἀνθρώπων άπόλοιτο
καὶ χόλος ὅς τ' ἐφέηκε πολύφρονά περ χαλεπῆναι,
ὅς τε πολὺ γλυκίων μέλιτος καταλειβόμενοιο
ἀνδρῶν ἐν στήθεσσιν ἀέξεται ἠύτε καπνός.
The context of the Odyssean line which I suppose to be derived from
this noble passage is as follows (xiv. 462-465):--
κέκλυθι νῦν Ἐύμαιε, καὶ ἄλλοι πάντες εταῖροι·
εὐξάμενός τι ἔπος ἐρέω· οἶνος γὰρ ἀνώγει
ἠλεός, ὅς τ' ἐφέηκε πολύφρονά περ μάλ' ἀεῖσαι
καὶ θ' ἁπαλόν γελάσαι, καί τ' ὀρχήσαθαι ἀνῆκεν,
Which is the most likely--that the magnificent Iliadic lines were
developed from _Od_. xiv. 464, or that this line is an unconscious
adaptation from _Il_. XVIII. 108? For that the two lines are father and
son will hardly be disputed.
Which again commends itself best--that the writer of _Il_. XVIII. took
the heating of Ulysses' bath water to heat water for Patroclus, or that
the writer of the _Odyssey_ omitted the line about Patroclus, and used
the rest of the passage to heat water for Ulysses' bath?
As regards the two salutations to Thetis (_Il_. XVIII. 385-387, and
424-427), is it more likely that the writer of _Il_. XVIII. made two
bites of the Odyssean cherry of v. 87-91, or that the writer of the
_Odyssey_, wanting but a single salutation, combined the two Iliadic
ones as in the passage above given?
Lastly, is the list of constellations which Vulcan put on to the shield
of Achilles more likely to have been amplified from _Od_. v. 272-275,
or these last-named lines to have been taken, with such modification as
was necessary, from _Il_. XVIII. 486-489? Whatever may be the date of
the _Odyssey_, I cannot doubt that _Il_. XVIII. must be dated earlier;
and yet there is no Book of the _Iliad_ about which our eminent
Homeric scholars are more full of small complaints, or more unanimous
in regarding as an interpolation. If there is one part of the _Iliad_
rather than another in which Homer shows himself unapproachable, it is
in his description of the shield of Achilles.
I will again assure the reader that all the Books of the _Iliad_ seem
drawn from with the same freedom as that shown in those which I have
now dealt with in detail, and also that I can find no part of the
_Odyssey_ which borrows any less freely from the _Iliad_ than the rest
of the poem; here and there difference of subject leads the writer to
go three or four pages without a single Iliadic cento, but this is
rare. One or two, or even sometimes three or four, Iliadic passages in
a page is nearer the average, but of these some will be what may be
called common form.
Their frequency raises no suggestion of plagiarism any more than the
Biblical quotations in _Pilgrim's Progress_ would do if the references
were cut out. They are so built into the context as to be structural,
not ornamental; and to preclude the idea of their having been added by
copyists or editors. They seem to be the spontaneous outcome of the
fullness of the writer's knowledge of the _Iliad_. It is also evident
that she is not making a resumé of other people's works; she is telling
the story _de novo_ from the point of view of herself, her home, her
countrymen, and the whole island of Sicily. Other peoples and places
may be tolerated, but they raise no enthusiasm in her mind.
Nevertheless, a certain similarity of style and feeling between the
_Odyssey_ and all the poems of the Epic cycle is certain to have
existed, and indeed can be proved to have existed from the fragments
of the lost poems that still remain. In all art, whether literary,
pictorial, musical, or architectural, a certain character will be
common to a certain age and country. Every age has its stock subjects
for artistic treatment; the reason for this is that it is convenient
for the reader, spectator, or listener, to be familiar with the main
outlines of the story. Written literature is freer in this respect
than painting or sculpture, for it can explain and prepare the reader
better for what is coming. Literature which, though written, is
intended mainly for recitation before an audience few of whom can
read, exists only on condition of its appealing instantly to the
understanding, and will, therefore, deal only with what the hearer is
supposed already to know in outline. The writer may take any part of
the stock national subjects that he or she likes, and within reasonable
limits may treat it according to his or her fancy, but it must hitch on
to the old familiar story, and hence will arise a certain similarity of
style between all poems of the same class that belong to the same age,
language, and people. This holds just as good for the medieval Italian
painters as it does for the Epic cycle. They offer us a similarity in
dissimilarity and a dissimilarity in similarity.
When we remember, however, that the style of the _Odyssey_ must not
only perforce gravitate towards that of all the other then existing
epic poems, but also that the writer's mind is as strongly leavened
with the mind of Homer, let alone the other Cyclic poets, as we have
seen it to be, it is not surprising that the veneer of virility thus
given to a woman's work should have concealed the less patent, but far
more conclusive, evidence that the writer was not of the same sex as
the man, or men, from whom she was borrowing.
At the same time, in spite of the use she makes of Homer, I think she
was angry with him, and perhaps jealous; on which head I will say more
in my next Chapter. Possibly the way he laughs at women and teases
them, not because he dislikes them, but because he enjoys playing with
them, irritates her; she was not disposed to play on such a serious
subject. We have seen how she retorts on him for having made a tripod
worth three times as much as a good serviceable woman of all work.
His utter contempt, again, for the gods, which he is at no pains to
conceal, would be offensive to a writer who never permits herself to
go beyond the occasional mild irreverence of the Vicar's daughter.
Therefore, she treats Homer, as its seems to me, not without a certain
hardness; and this is the only serious fault I have to find with her.
For example, she takes the concluding lines of Hector's farewell to
Andromache, a passage which one would have thought she would have
shrunk from turning to common uses, and puts it into the mouth of
Telemachus when he is simply telling his mother to take herself off.
She does this in i. 356-359 and again in xxi. 350-353. This is not as
it should be. Nor yet again is her taking the water that was heated
to wash the blood from the body of poor Patroclus (_Il_. XVIII. 344
&c.) and using it for Ulysses' bath (_Od_. viii. 434-437). Surely the
disrespect here is deeper than any that can be found in Homer towards
the gods.
But, whatever the spirit may have been in which the writer of the
_Odyssey_ has treated the _Iliad_, I cannot doubt that that she knew
this poem exceedingly well in the shape in which we have it, and this
is the point which I have thought it worth while to endeavour to
substantiate at such length in the foregoing Chapter.
[1] ἡυεῖς δέ κλέος οἷον ἀκούομεν, οὐδέ τι ἴδμεν, _Il_. II. 486.
CHAPTER XV.
THE ODYSSEY IN ITS RELATION TO THE OTHER POEMS OF THE TROJAN CYCLE,
AND ITS DEVELOPMENT IN THE HANDS OF THE AUTHORESS.
The writer of the _Odyssey_ appears to have known most of those lost
poems of the Epic cycle--eight in number--that relate to Troy, but as
all we know about them is from the summaries given in the fragment of
Proclus, and from a few lines here and there quoted in later authors,
we can have no irrefragable certainty that she had the poems before
her even when she alludes to incidents mentioned by Proclus as being
dealt with in any given one of them. Nevertheless, passages in _Od_. i.
and iii. make it probable that she knew the _Nosti_ or the Return of
the Achæans from Troy, and we may suppose that Nestor's long speeches
(_Od_. iii. 102-200 and 253-328) are derived mainly from this source,
for they contain particulars that correspond closely with the epitome
of the _Nosti_ given by Proclus.
We can thus explain the correctness of the topography of the Ægæan sea
that is manifested in Nestor's speeches, but no where else in the poem
beyond a bare knowledge of the existence of Apollo's shrine in Delos
(_Od_. vi. 162) and an occasional mention of Crete. I see Professor
Jebb says that the _Odyssey_ "shows a familiar knowledge of Delos;"[1]
but there is no warrant for this assertion from anything in the poem.
The writer of the _Odyssey_ seems, in Book iv., to have also known the
_Cypria_, which dealt with the events that led up to the Trojan war.
Book xxiv. of the _Odyssey_ (35-97) suggests a knowledge of the
_Æthiopis_. So also does the mention of Memnon (_Od_. xi. 522).
Knowledge of the _Little Iliad_ may be suspected from _Od_. iv.
271-283, where Helen seems to be now married to Deiphobus, and from
xi. 543-562; as also from xi. 508, 509, where Ulysses says that he
took Neoptolemus to Scyrus. Ulysses entering Troy as a spy (_Od_.
iv. 242-256) is also given by Proclus as one of the incidents in the
_Little Iliad_. I do not see, therefore, that there can be much doubt
about the writer of the _Odyssey_ having been acquainted with the
_Little Iliad_, a poem which was apparently of no great length, being
only in four Books.
From the two Books of the _Sack of Troy_ we get the account of the
council held by the Trojans over the wooden horse (_Od_. viii. 492-517).
We have seen how familiar the authoress of the _Odyssey_ was with
the _Iliad_; there only remains, therefore, one of the eight Trojan
poems which she does not appear to have known--I mean the _Telegony_,
which is generally, and one would say correctly, placed later than the
_Odyssey_; but even though it were earlier we may be sure that the
writer of the _Odyssey_ would have ignored it, for it will hardly bear
her out in the character she has given of Penelope.
In passing I may say that though Homer (meaning, of course, the writer
of the _Iliad_) occasionally says things that suggest the Cypria, there
is not a line that even suggests knowledge of a single one of the
incidents given by Proclus as forming the subjects of the other Books
of the Trojan cycle; the inference, therefore, would seem to be that
none of them, except possibly, though very uncertainly, the Cypria, had
appeared before he wrote. Nevertheless we cannot be sure that this was
so.
The curious question now arises why the writer of the _Odyssey_ should
have avoided referring to a single Iliadic incident, while showing no
unwillingness to treat more or less fully of almost all those mentioned
by Proclus as dealt with in the other poems of the Trojan cycle, and
also while laying the _Iliad_ under such frequent contributions.
I remember saying to a great publisher that a certain book was
obviously much indebted to a certain other book to which no reference
was made. "Has the writer," said the publisher in question, "referred
to other modern books on the same subject?" I answered, "Certainly."
"Then," said he, "let me tell you that it is our almost unvaried
experience that when a writer mentions a number of other books, and
omits one which he has evidently borrowed from, the omitted book is
the one which has most largely suggested his own." His words seemed
to explain my difficulty about the way in which the writer of the
_Odyssey_ lets the incidents of the _Iliad_ so severely alone. It was
the poem she was trying to rival, if not to supersede. She knew it to
be far the finest of the Trojan cycle; she was so familiar with it
that appropriate lines from it were continually suggesting themselves
to her--and what is an appropriate line good for if it is not to be
appropriated? She knew she could hold her own against the other poems,
but she did not feel so sure about the _Iliad_, and she would not cover
any of the ground which it had already occupied.
Of course there is always this other explanation possible, I mean that
traditions about Homer's private life may have been known to the writer
of the _Odyssey_, which displeased her. He may have beaten his wife,
or run away with somebody else's, or both, or done a hundred things
which made him not exactly the kind of person whom Arete would like her
daughter to countenance more than was absolutely necessary. I believe,
however, that the explanation given in the preceding paragraph is the
most reasonable.
And now let me explain what I consider to have been the development
of the _Odyssey_ in the hands of the poetess. I cannot think that
she deliberately set herself to write an epic poem of great length.
The work appears to have grown on her hands piecemeal from small
beginnings, each additional effort opening the door for further
development, till at last there the _Odyssey_ was--a spontaneous growth
rather than a thing done by observation. Had it come by observation,
no doubt it would have been freer from the anomalies, inconsistencies,
absurdities, and small slovenlinesses which are inseparable from the
development of any long work, the plan of which has not been fully
thought out beforehand. But surely in losing these it would have lost
not a little of its charm.
From Professor Jebb's _Introduction to Homer_, Ed. 1888, p. 131, I see
that he agrees with Kirchhoff in holding that the _Odyssey_ contains
"distinct strata of poetical material from different sources and
periods," and also that the poem owes its present unity of form to one
man; he continues:--
But under this unity of form there are perceptible traces
of a process by which different compositions were adapted
to one another.
In a note on the preceding page he tells us that Kirchhoff regards
the first 87 verses of Book i. as having formed the exordium of the
original Return of Ulysses.
My own conclusions, arrived at to the best of my belief before I had
read a word of Professor Jebb's _Introduction_, agree in great part
with the foregoing. I found the _Odyssey_ to consist of two distinct
poems, with widely different aims, and united into a single work, not
unskilfully, but still not so skilfully as to conceal a change of
scheme. The two poems are: 1. The visit of Ulysses to the Phæacians,
with the story of his adventures as related by himself. 2. The story
of Penelope and the suitors, with the episode of Telemachus's voyage
to Pylos. Of these two, the first was written before the writer had
any intention of dealing with the second, while the second in the end
became more important than the first.
I cordially agree with Kirchhoff that the present exordium belongs to
the earlier poem, but I would break it off at line 79, and not at 87.
It is a perfect introduction to the Return of Ulysses, but it is no fit
opening for the _Odyssey_ as it stands. I had better perhaps give it
more fully than I have done in my abridgement. It runs:--
Tell me, oh Muse, of that ingenious hero who travelled far
and wide after he had sacked the strong citadel of Troy. He
saw many cities and learned the manners of many nations;
moreover, he suffered much by sea while trying to save his
own life and bring his men safely home; but do what he
might he could not save his men, for they perished through
their own sheer folly in eating the cattle of the Sun-god
Hyperion; so the god prevented them from ever getting home.
Tell me too about all these things, oh daughter of Jove,
from whatever source you may know them (i. 1-10).
Then follows the statement that Ulysses was with the nymph Calypso,
unable to escape, and that his enemy, Neptune, had gone to the
Ethiopians (i. 11-21). The gods meet in council and Jove makes a speech
about the revenge taken by Orestes on Ægisthus (i. 26-43); Minerva
checks him, turns the subjects on to Ulysses, and upbraids Jove with
neglecting him (i. 44-62). Jove answers that he had not forgotten him,
and continues:--
"Bear in mind that Neptune is still furious with Ulysses
for having blinded an eye of Polyphemus, king of the
Cyclopes. Polyphemus is son to Neptune by the nymph Thoösa,
daughter to the sea-king Phoreys, but instead of killing
him outright he torments him by preventing him from getting
home. Still, let us lay our heads together and see how we
can help him to return. Neptune will then be pacified, for
if we are all of a mind he can hardly hold out against us
unsupported" (i. 68-79).
Let us now omit the rest of Book i., Books ii. iii. and iv. and go on
with line 28 of Book v., which follows after a very similar council to
the one that now stands at the beginning of Book i. Continuing with
line 28 of Book v. we read:--
When he had thus spoken he said to his son Mercury:
"Mercury, you are our messenger, go therefore and tell
Calypso we have decreed that poor Ulysses is to return
home. He is to be conveyed neither by gods nor men, but
after a perilous voyage of twenty days upon a raft he is to
reach fertile Scheria, &c." (v. 28-34).
From this point the poem continues with only one certain, and another
doubtful, reference to the suitors and Penelope, until (according to
Kirchhoff) line 184 of Book xiii. I had thought that the point of
juncture between the two poems was in the middle of line 187, and that
the ἔγρετο in the second half of the line had perhaps been originally
εὖδεν; but it must be somewhere close about this line, and I am quite
ready to adopt Kirchhoff's opinion now that I have come to see why
Ulysses was made to sleep so profoundly on leaving Scheria.
Till I had got hold of the explanation given on page 173, I naturally
thought that the strange sleep of Ulysses had been intended to lead up
to something that was to happen in Ithaca, and which had been cancelled
when the scheme was enlarged and altered; for without this explanation
it is pointless as the poem now stands.
I do not now think that there was ever any account of what happened to
Ulysses on his waking up in Ithaca, other than what we now have, but
rather that the writer was led to adopt a new scheme at the very point
where it became incumbent upon her to complete an old one. For at this
point she would first find herself face to face with the difficulty of
knowing what to do with Ulysses in Ithaca after she had got him there.
She could not ignore the suitors altogether; their existence and
Penelope's profligacy were too notorious. She could not make Ulysses
and Penelope meet happily while the suitors were still in his house;
and even though he killed them, he could never condone Penelope's
conduct--not as an epic hero. The writer of the _Odyssey_ had evidently
thought that she could find some way out of the difficulty, but when it
came to the point she discovered that she must either make Ulysses kill
his wife along with the suitors, or contend that from first to last she
had been pure as new fallen snow. She chose the second alternative, as
she would be sure to do, and brazened it out with her audience as best
she could. At line 187, therefore, of Book xiii. or thereabouts, she
broke up her 'Return' camp and started on a new campaign.
To bring the two poems together she added lines xi. 115-137, in which
Teiresias tells Ulysses about the suitors and his further wanderings
when he shall have killed them. I suppose Teiresias' prophecy to have
originally ended where Circe's does when she repeats his warning about
the cattle of the Sun-god verbatim (xii. 137-140) with the line
ὀψὲ κακῶς νεῖαι ὸλέσας ἄπο πάντας ἑταίρους·
The first line of the addition to Teiresias' original prophecy (xi.
115) is also found with a slight variant in ix. 535, but it merely
states that Ulysses will find trouble in his house, without mentioning
what the trouble is to be.
With the two exceptions above noted, there is not only nothing in
the original poem (_i.e_., Book i. 1-79 and v. 28--xiii. 187 or
thereabouts) to indicate any intention of dealing with the suitors, but
there are omissions which make it plain that no such intention existed.
In the poem the Muse is only asked to sing the Return of Ulysses. In
the speech of Jove at the council of the gods (i. 32-43), he is not
thinking about the suitors, as he would assuredly do if the writer
had as yet meant to introduce them. In repeated speeches of the gods,
and especially in Book v. which is Book i. of the original poem (see
lines 36-42, 288, 289, and 345),[2] it seems that Ulysses' most serious
troubles were to end when he had reached Scheria. So again Calypso (v.
206-208) tries to deter him from leaving her by saying that he little
knows what he will have to go through before he gets home again, but
she does not enforce her argument by adding that when he had got to
Ithaca the worst was yet to come. I have already dealt with the silence
of Ulysses' mother in Hades.
Noting, therefore, that omission is a more telling indication of scheme
than lines which, when a new subject is being grafted on to an old one,
are certain to be inserted where necessary in order to unify the work,
I have no hesitation in believing that Books i. 1-79 and v. 28--xiii.
187 or thereabouts, formed as much as the authoress ever wrote of the
original poem; I have the less hesitation in adopting this conclusion
because, though I believe that I came to it independently as any one
must do who studies the _Odyssey_ with due attention, I find myself
in substantial agreement with Kirchhoff in spite of much difference
of detail, for I cannot admit that the two poems are by two or more
separate people.
The introduction of lines xi. 115-137 and of line ix. 535, with a
writing of a new Council of the gods at the beginning of Book v. to
take the place of the one that was removed to Book i. 1-79, were the
only things that were done to give even a semblance of unity to the
old scheme and the new, and to conceal the fact that the Muse after
being asked to sing of one subject spends two thirds of her time in
singing a very different one, with a climax for which no one had asked
her. For, roughly, the Return occupies eight Books and Penelope and the
suitors sixteen.
That lines xi. 115-137 were non-existent when Book xiii. was being
written is demonstrated by the fact of Ulysses' saying to the Phæacians
that he hoped he should find his wife living with her friends in peace
(xiii. 42, 43). He could not have said this if Teiresias had already
told him that his house would be full of enemies who were eating up his
estate, and whom he would have to kill. He could hardly forget such a
prophecy after having found Teiresias quite correct about the cattle of
the Sun-god. Indeed he tells Penelope about his visit to Hades and his
interview with Teiresias (xxiii. 323), so it is plain he remembered it.
It is plain, again (from xiii. 382 &c.), that Ulysses was then learning
from Minerva about the suitors for the first time--which could not be
if Teiresias' prophecy had been already written.
It is surprising; seeing what a little further modification would have
put everything quite straight, that the writer should have been content
to leave passages here and there which she must have known would betray
the want of homogeneity in her work, but we should be very thankful to
her for not having tidied it up with greater care. We learn far more
about her than we should do if she had made her work go more perfectly
upon all fours, and it is herself that we value even more than her
poem. She evidently preferred cobbling to cancelling, and small wonder,
for if, as was very probably the case, the work was traced with a
sharply pointed style of hardened bronze, or even steel,[3] on plates
of lead, alteration would not be so easy as it is with us. Besides,
we all cobble rather than cancel if we can. It is quite possible, but
I need hardly say that it is not more than a mere possibility, that
the abruptness of the interpolation in Book iv. lines 621-624, may be
due simply to its having been possible to introduce four lines without
cutting the MS. about very badly, when a longer passage would have
necessitated a more radical interference with it.
We look, then, for the inception of the poem in Books i. 1-79 and
v. 28-xiii. 187 or thereabouts, or more roughly in Books v.-xii.
inclusive. These Books, though they contain no discrepancies among
themselves except the twenty lines added to the prophecy of Teiresias
above referred to are not homogeneous in scope, though they are so
in style and treatment. They split themselves into two groups of
four, _i.e_., v.-viii. and ix.-xii. The first group is written to
bring Ulysses to Scheria and to exhibit the Phæacians and the writer
herself--the interest in Ulysses being subordinate; the second is
written to describe a periplus of Sicily.
Books ix.-xii. appear to have been written before Books v.-viii. We
may gather this from the total absence of Minerva. It is inconceivable
that having introduced the Goddess so freely in Books v.-viii. the
writer should allow her to drop out from the story when there was such
abundant scope for her interference. These Books are certainly by
the same hand as the rest of the poem. They show the same amount of
Iliadic influence; nowhere does a woman's hand appear more plainly;
nowhere is Sicily, and more particularly Trapani, more in evidence,
direct or indirect. It is from the beginning of Book ix. that we get
our conviction that the Ionian islands were drawn from the Ægadean, and
the voyages of Ulysses, as I have already shown, begin effectively with
Mt. Eryx and end with Trapani. We may, therefore, dismiss all idea that
Books ix.-xii. are by another writer.
Not only is the absence of Minerva inexplicable except by supposing
that at the time these Books were written it was no part of the
writer's scheme to make her such a _dea ex machinâ_ as she becomes
later, but the writer shows herself aware that the absence of the
goddess in Books ix.--xii. requires apology, and makes Ulysses upbraid
her for having neglected him from the time he left Troy till she took
him into the city of the Phæacians (xiii. 314-323). The goddess excuses
herself by saying she had known all the time that he would get home
quite safely, and had kept away because she did not want to quarrel
with her uncle Neptune--an excuse which we also find at the end of Book
vi., in which Book she has, nevertheless, been beautifying Ulysses and
making herself otherwise useful to him. I suppose Neptune did not mind
how much his niece helped Ulysses, provided she did not let him see her.
I know how my own books, especially the earlier ones, got cut about,
rearranged, altered in scheme, and cobbled to hide alteration, so that
I never fairly knew what my scheme was till the book was three-quarters
done, and I credit young writers generally with a like tentativeness.
I have now, I believe, shown sufficient cause for thinking that Books
ix.-xii., _i.e_., the voyage of Ulysses round Sicily, were the part of
the _Odyssey_ that was written first. I am further confirmed in this
opinion by finding Ulysses fasten his box with a knot that Circe had
taught him (viii. 448)--as though the writer knew all about Circe,
though the audience, of course, could not yet do so. A knowledge of
Book ix., moreover, is shown in Book ii. 19, a passage which does not
appear in my abridgement. Here we learn how Antiphus had been eaten by
Polyphemus; Book ix. is also presupposed in i. 68, which tells of the
blinding of the Cyclops by Ulysses.
We may also confidently say that Books v.--viii. were written before
i.-iv. and xiii.-xxiv. (roughly), but what the vicissitudes of Books
v.-viii. were, and whether or no they drew upon earlier girlish
sketches--as without one shred of evidence in support of my opinion I
nevertheless incline to think--these are points which it would be a
waste of time to even attempt to determine.
It is in Books v.-viii., and especially in the three last of these
books, that the writer is most in her element. Few will differ from
Col. Mure, who says of Scheria:--
There can be little doubt from the distinctive peculiarities with which
the poet has invested its inhabitants, and the precision and force
displayed in his portrait of their character, that the episode was
intended as a satire on the habits of some real people with whom he was
familiar.
(_Language and Literature of Ancient Greece_, Vol. I., p. 404).
Speaking on the same page of the obviously humorous spirit in which the
Phæacian episode is conceived, Col. Mure says:---
This episode is, perhaps, the most brilliant specimen of
the poet's combined talent for the delineation of character
and for satirical humour. While there is no portion of his
works a right understanding of which is so indispensable
to a full estimate of his genius, there is none, perhaps,
which has been so little understood. Appeal may be made to
the tenor of the most esteemed commentaries, still more,
perhaps, to the text of the most popular translations,
where the gay sarcastic tone of description and dialogue
which seasons the whole adventure, is replaced by the
tragic solemnity of the gravest scones of the _Iliad_.
People find what they bring. Is it possible that eminent Homeric
scholars have found so much seriousness in the more humorous parts of
the _Odyssey_ because they brought it there? To the serious all things
are serious. Coleridge, so I learn from the notes at the end of Mr.
Gollancz's _Temple Shakespeare_, saw no burlesque in the speeches of
the players which are introduced into _Hamlet_. He says:--
The fancy that a burlesque was intended sinks below
criticism; the lines, as epic narrative, are superb.
As Mr. Gollancz has given no reference, so neither can I. Mr. Gollancz
continues that if Coleridge had read Act II. Scene i. of _Dido_ and
_Æneas_--a play left unfinished by Marlowe--he would have changed his
mind, but I do not believe he would.
At the same time I take it that the writer was one half laughing and
the other half serious, and would sometimes have been hard put to it to
know whether she was more in the one vein than in the other. So those
who know the cantata _Narcissus_, advertised at the end of this volume,
will admit that there are people who are fully aware that there is no
music in this world so great as Handel's, but who will still try to
write music in the style of Handel, and when they have done it, hardly
know whether they have been more in jest or earnest, though while doing
it they fully believed that they were only writing, so far as in them
lay, the kind of music which Handel would have written for such words
had he lived a hundred years or so later than he did.
We may note, without, however, being able to deduce anything from it as
regards the dates at which the various parts of the poem were composed,
that in the first four Books of the _Odyssey_ the season appears to be
summer rather than winter. In all the other Books (of course excluding
those in which Ulysses tells his story) the season is unquestionably
winter, or very early spring. It is noticeable also that snow, which
appears so repeatedly in the _Iliad_, and of which Homer evidently
felt the beauty very strongly, does not appear, and is hardly even
mentioned, in the _Odyssey_. I should perhaps tell some readers that
winter is long and severe in the Troad, while on the West coast of
Sicily snow is almost unknown, and the winter is even milder than that
of Algiers.
I ought also perhaps hardly to pass over the fact that amber, which
is never mentioned in the _Iliad_, appears three times in the
_Odyssey_.[4] This may be mere accident, nevertheless Sicily was an
amber-producing country, and indeed still is so; a large collection
of Sicilian amber exists in the museum of Castrogiovanni, the ancient
Enna, and I have been assured on good authority, but have not verified
my informant's statement, that some fine specimens may be seen in the
South Kensington Museum. Speaking of Sicilian amber the _Encyclopedia
Britannica_ says:--
The most beautiful specimens are, perhaps, those which are
found at Catania. They often possess a beautiful play of
purple not to be observed in the product of other places.
I cannot make out whether the first four Books were written before
the last twelve or after; probably they were written first, but there
is something to be said also on the other side. I will not attempt
to settle this point, and will only add that when we hear in mind how
both the two main divisions of the _Odyssey_--the Phæacian episode with
the Return of Ulysses, and the story of Penelope and the suitors, show
unmistakeable signs of having been written at one place, by woman,
by woman who is evidently still very young, and that not a trace of
difference in versification, style, or idiom can be found between
the two divisions, the only conclusion we should come to is that the
poem was written by one and the same woman from the first page to the
last. I think we may also conclude in the absence of all evidence to
the contrary--for assuredly none exists that deserves the name of
evidence--that we have the poem to all intents and purposes in the
shape which it had assumed in the hands of the authoress.
[1] _Introduction to Homer_, Macmillan, 1888, p. 172.
[2] None of these three passages will be found in my abridgement.
[3] _Cf_. _Od_. ix. 391-393.
[4] iv. 73, xv. 460, xviii. 296.
CHAPTER XVI.
CONCLUSION.
Before I quit my subject, I should perhaps answer a question which
the reader has probably long since asked himself. I mean, how it is
conceivable that considerations so obvious as those urged in the
foregoing Chapters should have been overlooked by so many capable
students for so many hundreds of years, if there were any truth in
them. For they lie all of them upon the surface; they are a mere
washing in the Jordan and being clean; they require nothing but that a
person should read the _Odyssey_ as he would any other book, noting the
physical characters described in the Scherian and Ithacan scenes, and
looking for them on some West coast of the Mediterranean to the West of
Greece.
The answer is that the considerations which I have urged have been
overlooked because, for very obvious reasons, it never occurred to any
one to look for them. "Do you suppose, then," more than one eminent
scholar has said to me directly or indirectly, "that no one has ever
read the _Odyssey_ except yourself?" I suppose nothing of the kind,
and know that it was only possible for the truth when once lost (as it
soon would be on the establishment of the Phœnicians at Drepanum) to be
rediscovered, when people had become convinced that the _Odyssey_ was
not written by the writer of the _Iliad_. This idea has not yet been
generally accepted for more than a hundred years,[1] if so long, but
until it was seized and held firmly, no one was likely to suspect that
the _Odyssey_ could have come from Sicily, much less that it could have
been written by a woman, for there is not one line in the _Iliad_ which
even hints at the existence of Sicily, or makes the reader suspect the
author to have been a woman, while there are any number of passages
which seem absolutely prohibitive of any other opinion than that the
writer was a man, and a very strong one.
Stolberg in the last century, and Colonel Mure in this, had the key
in the lock when they visited Trapani, each of them with the full
conviction that the Cyclops incident, and the hunting the goats, should
be placed on Mt. Eryx and the island of Favognana--but they did not
turn it. Professor Freeman, Schliemann, and Sir H. Layard, all of them
visited Trapani and its immediate neighbourhood either as students or
excavators, and failed to see that there was as splendid a prize to be
unburied there without pick and shovel, outlay, or trouble of any kind,
as those of Nineveh, Mycene, and Hissarlik--and why? Because they were
still hampered by the long association of the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_ as
the work of the same person. Knowing that the _Iliad_ could hardly have
been written elsewhere than in the Northern half of the West coast of
Asia Minor, it would never occur to them to look for the _Odyssey_ in
a spot so remote as Trapani. They probably held it to be the work of
some prehistoric Herodotus, who would go on from scene to scene without
staying longer than he could help in any one place, instead of feeling
sure, as I believe they should have done, that it was the work of one
who was little likely to have travelled more than a very few miles from
her own home. Moreover, Admiralty charts are things of comparatively
recent date, and I do not think any one would have been likely to have
run the _Odyssey_ to ground without their help.
But however this may be, I do not doubt that the habit of ascribing
the _Odyssey_ to Homer has been the main reason of the failure to
see the obvious in connection with it. Surely it is time our eminent
Iliadic and Odyssean scholars left off misleading themselves and other
people by including the _Odyssey_ in their "Introductions" to the work
of "Homer." It was permissible to do this till within recent years;
anything else, indeed, would have been pedantic, but what would have
been pedantic a hundred years ago, is slovenly and unscholarly now.
Turning from her commentators to the authoress herself, I am tempted to
wonder whether she would be more pleased or angry could she know that
she had been so long mistaken for a man--and that man Homer. It would
afford her an excellent opportunity for laughing at the dullness of
man. Angry, however, as she would no doubt be, she could hardly at the
same time help being flattered, and would perhaps console herself by
reflecting that poets as great as she was are bound to pay the penalty
of greatness in being misunderstood.
Horace tells us that mediocrity in a poet is forbidden alike by gods,
men, and publishers, but, whether forbidden or no, there are a good
many mediocre poets who are doing fairly well. So far as I can see,
indeed, gods, men, and more particularly publishers, will tolerate
nothing in a poet except mediocrity, and if a true poet by some rare
accident slips in among the others, it is because gods and publisher's
readers did not find him out until it was too late to stop him. Horace
must have known perfectly well that he was talking nonsense.
And after all it is well that things are as they are; for the mediocre
poet, though he may hang about for many years, does in the end die, or
at any rate become such a mere literary Struldbrug as to give plain
people no trouble, whereas the true poet will possess himself of us,
and live on in us whether we will or no, and unless the numbers of
such people were severely kept in check they would clog the wheels of
the world. Half a dozen first-class poets in prose or verse are as
many as the world can carry in any comfort; twenty Shakspeares, twenty
Homers, twenty Nausicaas would make literature impossible, yet we may
be sure that every country in every century could yield two or three
first-class writers, if genius were to be known at once and fostered by
those who alone know how to foster it. Genius is an offence; like all
other offences it must needs come, but woe to that man or woman through
whom it comes, for he or she must pass through the Scylla and Charybdis
of being either torn in pieces on the one hand, or so misunderstood on
the other as to make the slipping through with life in virtue of such
misrepresentation more mortifying than death itself.
Do what we may we cannot help it. Dead mind like dead body must, after
a decent interval, be buried out of our sight if living mind is to
have fair play, and it might perhaps not be a bad thing if our great
educational establishments had more of the crematorium and less of
the catacomb about them than they have at present. Our notions of
intellectual sanitation are deplorably imperfect, and unless the living
become more jealous of letting dead mind remain unconsumed in their
system, a fit of intellectual gout must ere long supervene, which, if
not fatal, will still be excruciatingly painful. Since, therefore,
there are such insuperable difficulties in the way of eliminating
geniuses when we have once absorbed them, and since also, do what we
may, we can no more detect the one genius who may be born among a
multitude of good average children, than Herod could detect the King
of the Jews among the babes of Bethlehem, we have no course but to do
much as Herod did, and lay violent hands upon all young people till
we have reduced every single one of them to such mediocrity as may
be trusted to take itself off sooner or later. To this end we have
established schools and schoolmen; nor is it easy to see how we could
more effectually foster that self-sufficiency which does so much
towards helping us through the world, and yet repress any exuberance of
originality or independence of thought which may be prejudicial to its
possessor during his own life, and burdensome to posterity when he is
dead and gone.
Obviously wise, however, and necessary as our present system is, we
nevertheless grumble at it. We would have any number of first-class
geniuses in art literature and music, and yet have plenty of elbow room
for ourselves. Our children too; they cannot show too many signs of
genius, but at the same time we blame them if they do not get on in the
world and make money as genius next to never does. Like the authoress
of the _Odyssey_ we are always wanting to have things both ways; we
would have others be forgotten, and yet not be forgotten ourselves;
when we have shuffled off this mortal coil, we would fain shuffle on
another that shall be at once less coil and less mortal, in the good
thoughts of coming generations, but if this desire is so universal as
to be called natural, it is one which the best and sanest of us will
fight against rather than encourage; such people will do their work
as well and cheerfully as they can, and make room for others with as
little fuss as possible when they have had their day.
If, however, any man resents the common course of nature and sets
himself to looking upon himself and cursing his fate that he was not
born to be of the number of them that enter into life eternal even in
this world, let him console himself by reflecting that until he is long
dead, there is no certain knowing whether he is in life or no, and also
that though he prove to be an immortal after all, he cannot escape the
treatment which he is the more sure to meet with according as he is the
more immortal--let alone the untold misery which his works will inflict
upon young people.
If ever a great classic could have been deterred from writing by a
knowledge of how posterity would treat her, the writer of the _Odyssey_
should have been so, for never has poem more easy to understand failed
more completely of being understood. If she was as lovely as I should
like to think her, was ever sleeping beauty hidden behind a more
impenetrable hedge of scholasticism? How could it be otherwise? The
_Odyssey_, like the _Iliad_, has been a school book for nearly 3,000
years, and what more cruel revenge could dullness take on genius? What
has the erudition of the last 2,500 years done for the _Iliad_ and the
_Odyssey_ but to emend the letter in small things and to obscure the
spirit in great ones?
There was indeed, as I said in my opening Chapter, a band of scholars
a century or two before the birth of Christ who refused to see the
_Iliad_ and _Odyssey_ as the work of the same person, but erudition
snubbed them and snuffed them out so effectually that for some 2,000
years they were held to have been finally refuted. Can there be any
more scathing satire on the value of scholastic criticism? It seems as
though Minerva had shed the same darkness over both the poems that she
shed over Ulysses, that they might go in and out among eminent Homeric
scholars from generation to generation, and none should see them.
The world does indeed know little of its greatest men and women, and
bitterly has it been reproached for its want of penetration, but there
are always two sides, and it should be remembered that its greatest
men and women commonly know very little of the world in its more
conventional aspects. They are continually flying in the face of all
that we expect of greatness, and they never tell us what they are; they
do not even think that they are great; if they do we may be sure that
they are mistaken; how then can we be expected to appreciate people
correctly till we have had plenty of time to think them over?
And when we have thought them over, how little have our canons of
criticism to do with the verdict which we in the end arrive at. Look at
the _Odyssey_. Here is a poem in which the hero and heroine have been
already married many years before it opens; from the first page to the
last there is no young couple in love with one another, there is in
fact nothing amatory in the poem, for though the suitors are supposed
to be madly in love with Penelope, they never say or do anything that
carries conviction as to their being so. We accept the fact, as we do
the sagacity of Ulysses, because we are told it, not because we see it.
The interest of the poem ostensibly turns mainly on the revenge taken
by a bald middle-aged gentleman, whose little remaining hair is red, on
a number of young men who have been eating him out of house and home,
while courting his supposed widow.
Moreover, this subject, so initially faulty, is treated with a
carelessness in respect of consistency and plausibility, an ignorance
of commonly known details, and a disregard of ordinary canons which
it would not be easy to surpass, and yet, such is the irony of art
that it is not too much to say that there is only one poem which can
be decisively placed above it. If the _Odyssey_ enforces one artistic
truth more than another, it is that living permanent work in literature
(and the same holds good for art and music) can only be done by those
who are either above, or below, conscious reference to any rules or
canons whatsoever--and in spite of Shakespeare, Handel, and Rembrandt,
I should say that on the whole it is more blessed to be below than
above. For after all it is not the outward and visible signs of what
we read, see, or hear, in any work, that bring us to its feet in
prostration of gratitude and affection; what really stirs us is the
communion with the still living mind of the man or woman to whom we owe
it, and the conviction that that mind is as we would have our own to
be. All else is mere clothes and grammar.
As regards the mind of the writer of the _Odyssey_ there is nothing in
her work which impresses me more profoundly than the undercurrent of
melancholy which I feel throughout it. I do not mean that the writer
was always, or indeed generally, unhappy; she was often, at any rate
let us hope so, supremely happy; nevertheless there is throughout
her work a sense as though the world for all its joyousness was
nevertheless out of joint--an inarticulate indefinable half pathos,
half baffled fury, which even when lost sight of for a time soon
re-asserts itself. If the _Odyssey_ was not written without laughter,
so neither was it without tears. Now that I know the writer to have
been a woman, I am ashamed of myself for not having been guided to my
conclusion by the exquisitely subtle sense of weakness as well as of
strength that pervades the poem, rather than by the considerations that
actually guided me.
The only approach to argument which I have seen brought forward to
show that the _Odyssey_ must have been written by a man, consists in
maintaining that no woman could have written the scene in which Ulysses
kills the suitors. I cannot see this; to me it seems rather that no
man could have brought himself to disregard probability with so little
compunction; moreover a woman can kill a man on paper as well as a
man can, and with the exception of the delightful episode in which
Ulysses spares the lives of Phemius and Medon, the scene, I confess,
appears to me to be the most mechanical and least satisfactory in the
whole poem. The real obstacle to a general belief that the _Odyssey_
was written by a woman is not anything that can be found in the poem,
but lies, as I have already said, in the long prevalence of an opinion
that it was written by the same person as the _Iliad_ was. The age and
respectability of this opinion, even though we have at length discarded
it, will not allow us to go beyond ascribing the _Odyssey_ to another
man--we cannot jump all at once to the view that it was not by a man at
all. A certain invincible scholasticism prevents us from being able to
see what we should see at once if we would only read the poem slowly
and without considering anything that critics have said concerning it.
This, however, is not an easy thing to do. I know very well that I
should never have succeeded in doing it if I had not passed some
five-and-thirty rebellious years during which I never gave the
_Odyssey_ so much as a thought. The poem is so august: it is hallowed
by the veneration of so many ages; it is like my frontispiece, so
mysterious, so imperfect, and yet so divinely beyond all perfection;
it has been so long associated with the epic poem which stands
supreme--for if the _Odyssey_ be the Monte Rosa of literature, the
_Iliad_ must, I suppose, for ever remain as the Mont Blanc; who can
lightly vivisect a work of such ineffable prestige as though it were an
overlooked _parvenu_ book picked up for a few pence at a second hand
book stall? Lightly, no, but inexorably, yes, if its natural health and
beauty are to be restored by doing so.
One of our most accomplished living scholars chided with me in this
sense a year or two ago. He said I was ruthless. "I confess," he said,
"I do not give much heed to the details on which you lay so much
stress: I read the poem not to theorise about it, but to revel in its
amazing beauty."
It would shock me to think that I had done anything to impair the sense
of that beauty which I trust I share in even measure with himself, but
surely if the _Odyssey_ has charmed us as a man's work, its charm and
wonder are infinitely increased when we see it as a woman's. Still
more must it charm us when we find the writer to be an old friend,
and see no inconsiderable part of her work as a reflection of her own
surroundings.
Have we, then, a right in sober seriousness so to find her? I have
shown that in the earliest known ages of Greek literature poetesses
abounded, and gained a high reputation. I have shown that by universal
consent the domestic and female interest in the _Odyssey_ predominates
greatly over the male. I have shown that it was all written in one
place, and if so--even were there no further reasons for thinking
so--presumably by one hand: I have shown that the writer was extremely
jealous for the honour of woman, so much so as to be daunted by no
impossibilities when trying to get rid of a story that she held to be
an insult to her sex. These things being so, is it too much to ask the
reader to believe that the poem was not written, as Bentley held, by
a man for women, but for both men and women, by one who was herself a
woman?
And now as I take leave of the reader, I would say that if when I began
this work I was oppressed with a sense of the hopelessness of getting
Homeric scholars to take it seriously and consider it, I am even more
oppressed and dismayed when I turn over its pages and see how certain
they are to displease many whom I would far rather conciliate than
offend. What can it matter to me where the _Odyssey_ was written, or
whether it was written by a man or a woman? From the bottom of my heart
I can say truly that I do not care about the way in which these points
are decided, but I do care, and very greatly, about knowing which way
they are decided by sensible people who have considered what I have
urged in this book. I believe I have settled both points sufficiently,
but come what may I know that my case in respect of them is amply
strong enough to justify me in having stated it. And so I leave it.
[1] I see that my grandfather, Dr. Butler, of Shrewsbury, accepts it in
his _Antient Geography_, published in 1813, but I do not know where he
got it from.
INDEX.
Nothing will be Indexed which can be found readily by referring
to the Table of Contents.
ACITREZZA, the island of
Æolian-Ionic dialect of the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_
Æolus, his island did not move about
Agamemnon, killed in a covered cloister
Alcinous, and Arete, their family history
proposes that Ulysses should stay and marry Nausicaa
promises to give Ulysses a gold cup, but never gives it,
nor yet his talent of gold
tells the Phæacians of Neptune's threat
Alcinous, Ulysses, Menelaus and Nestor, all drawn from
the same person
Amber, Sicilian
Amphinomus, Ulysses rebukes
Anticlea, tradition that she hanged herself
in Hades, on the situation
Antinous, never really wanted to marry Penelope
his death throes and the good meat that was spoiled
Argenteria, the, near Trapani
Argus, Ulysses and
Aristarchus, made most use of the Marseilles
edition of _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_
Armour, removal of the
Art, only interesting in so far as it reveals an artist
the canons of, it is better to be below than above
Arthurian legends, the, and Tennyson
Asinelli, the islet
_Athenœum_, the author's two letters to the
Atreus, treasury of
Antolycus, an accomplished thief and perjurer
Axe, Calypso's, had a handle
Axes, the, why did not the suitors snatch them up?
BALACLAVA, said to resemble Trapani
Bayeux tapestry
Bear, the great; Ulysses told to steer by the
Bentley, saying the _Odyssey_ was written for women
not perceiving that the _Odyssey_ is of later date
than the _Iliad_
Biaggini, the late E.
Blind, how commentators came to think that Homer was
Brigands, modern, and Cyclopes
Brooch, the, of Ulysses
Bunyan
Butcher and Lang, Messrs., their translation of the _Odyssey_
Buttmann, on the Wandering Cliffs
CALYPSO kept no man-servant
her sailing directions to Ulysses
Catalogues, the Iliadic known to the writer of
the _Odyssey_
Cave, forms of the word, much more common in _Odyssey_
than _Iliad_
Caves, the two near the place where Ulysses landed in Ithaca
Cave-dwellers near Trapani
Cefalù, megalithic remains at
called Portazza
relays of fresh milk at
Charybdis and the Galofaro
Chorizontes, the
Circe, kept no man-servant
as good a prophet as Teiresias
her house and Eumæus's pig-farm
Clergyman, doctor, carpenter, bard
Clytemnestra, naturally of a good disposition
Coleridge saw no burlesque in the speeches
of the players in _Hamlet_
Collesano, Byzantine (?) remains at
Conturràno and his development since the _Odyssey_
Corfu, anciently called Drepane and then Scheria
Cyclopes, and Læstrygonians, one race
the, had two eyes
still near neighbours of the Phæacians
and modern Brigands, as per Mr. Stigand's report
in the _Times_
Cyclops means round-faced as μήλωψ, apple-faced
Parmenides called the moon Cyclops
DANTE, the people whom he meets in another world
_è un falso idolo_
Darknesses, the two most notable of the _Odyssey_
Defoe, sends Robinson Crusoe a man, not a woman
Didyme, and the island of the Sirens
Disc, Ulysses throws a
Dobree and Φωκέων
Doerpfeld, Dr., and the Iliadic wall
Dolius, and Ulysses, in the house of Laertes
Door, bedroom at Trapani fastened in the Odyssean manner
Drepane and Drepanum
Dulichium, the most important of the Odyssean islands
ELPENOR, and Ulysses in Hades; his strange fall
Elymi, Thucydides on the
Epic cycle, the Trojan books of the, known
to the writer of the _Odyssey_
Eryx the Sican city on the top of, not abandoned
Eteoneus, only a char-butler
Ethiopians, the, known as stretching all across Africa
Eubœa, assumed by Alcinous to be more
distant from Scheria than Ithaca
Eumæus, a male writer would have killed him
a native of Syracuse
perhaps a Greek
Eurybates, why hunched in the shoulders
Euryclea, becomes Eurynome
the price paid for her, a rejoinder to the _Iliad_
and Eurynome the same person
Eurymachus, his death throes, and the
good meat that was spoiled
Eurymedon, his overthrow
Eurynome, _see_ Euryclea
Ewes, and lambs, the present practice in Sicily
FAVOGNANA, derived from Favonius
why Ulysses was not allowed to see
Fielding, his journey to the next world; on Homer
Fifths and Octaves, consecutive, forbidden
Four main lines of the argument
Freeman, Prof., his map of the West coast of Sicily
visited Trapani
GEESE, Penelope's dream about the
Genius, an offence, &c.
to be stamped out while young
Giacalone-Patti, Prof.,
Gladstone, the Right Hon. W. E., his
canons as regards the text of _Iliad_ and
_Odyssey_, viii.; the "systematic and
comprehensive" study of Homer still
young; contrasts the _Iliad_ and
_Odyssey_; on Clytemnestra
on the time when Homer wrote
Grammerton and Shrewsbury
Greatheart, Mr.
_Grotta del Toro_, the
HADES, the writer's attitude towards women, in
Harbour, Rheithron, used five times in the _Odyssey_
of Trapani, boatmen plying for hire
Hawk, tearing its prey, while still on the wing
Helen, coming down to dinner at the house of Menelaus
mixes Nepenthe in the wine
outside the wooden house
her penitence for the wrong that Venus had done her
her present of a bridal dress to Telemachus
Heraclidæ, return of, undateable
Hermione, her marriage found more interesting than that of
Megapenthes; her marriage interpolated
Hesiod, records a time when iron was not known
Homer, his infinite subtlety
the authoress of the _Odyssey_ was angry with him
why the writer of the _Odyssey_ let him so severely alone
protest against "Introductions to Homer," which include the _Odyssey_
Horace, and _mediocribus esse poetis_
Horse the Trojan, story of the, shows that the Greeks did not know how
Troy fell
Hotel, man no use in a
House of Ulysses, the
Hypereia, near the Cyclopes
probable remains of its wall
not completely abandoned
IACENSES, the
Iakin, the coin, and the British Museum catalogue
of Sicilian coins
Ιακὀς, means Ionian
_Iliad_, catalogues of the; date of
the, refers to no event known to have been later than B.C. 1100
Ingroia, Cav. Prof. of Calatafimi
Invention, not the authoress's strong point
Ionian Settlements on East Sicilian shores
Irus, and Iris
Ismarus, and its wine
Italia, and Œnotria
Ithaca, drawn from Trapani and its neighbourhood
drawn from the island of Marettimo as well as from Trapani
"all highest up in the sea," sketch of
JEBB, Prof, the 1892 edition of his _Introduction to Homer_
his _Introduction to Homer_; his quotation from Bentley
on Bentley's not seeing that the _Odyssey_ was of later date
than the _Iliad_
on the house of Ulysses
and the date of the _Odyssey_
mentioned
Jews, their prayers, for men and for women
Jones, H. Festing, vii.; his, and the author's, joint oratorio Ulysses
mentioned
KIRCHHOF, on the first 87 lines of _Od_. i.
LAERTES, why he left off calling on Penelope and coming to town
not poor
Læstrygonians, derivation of the word, and _lastricare_
and Cyclopes one race; their relays of fresh milk
Lambs, living on two pulls a day at a milked ewe
and ewes--the present practice
Lang, Mr. Andrew, on the house of Ulysses
Latin names, the use of for Greek gods and heroes defended
Layard, Sir H., visited Trapani
List of points necessary for the identification of Scheria
Lubbock, Sir John, his hundred books
Lucian, the most ungallant of all
MAGISTRATE, a hungry, Ulysses compared to
Malconsiglio, legends concerning
Malta, not Calypso's island
Man, and woman, never fully understand one another
can caricature each other, but not draw
Marettimo, the island, had a wall all round it
Marseilles, the civic edition of _Iliad_ and
_Odyssey_ used most largely by Aristarchus
_Mediocribus esse poetis_, &c.
Megalithieism, the two kinds of
Megapenthes, only married because his sister was
Melanthius and the store-room
Menelaus, Ulysses. Alcinous, and Nestor, all from the same person
the collapse of his splendour in Book xv.
he used to sell wine; his frank _bourgeoisie_
his fussiness; why made to come back on the day of Ægisthus's
funeral feast
Mentor, his name coined from Nestor's
Milk rarely to be had fresh except in the
morning in Sicily and S. Italy
Milking ewes, what Sicilian shepherds now do
Minerva, not an easy person to recognise, and had deserted Ulysses
for a long time
Ulysses upbraids her for not telling Telemachus about his return
her opinion of Penelope
her singular arrangements for Telemachus
Ulysses remonstrates with her
sending Telemachus a West wind to take him from Ithaca to Pylos
her total absence in Books ix.-xii. apologised for
Mixing-bowl, the, in an angle of the cloisters
Phemius lays his lyre down near the, and near the approach
to the trap-door
Motya
Mure, Colonel, on the Phæacian episode; visited Trapani
NARCISSUS, a cantata by H. Festing Jones, Esq., and the author
Nausicaa, her dream, and going to the wash
her meeting with Ulysses
the ill-natured gossip of her fellow townspeople
her farewell to Ulysses
the most probable authoress
Nepenthe, the order in which its virtues are recorded
Neptune, turns the Phæacian ship into stone
Nestor, Alcinous, Menelaus, and Ulysses,
all drawn from the same person
OCCASIONAL notes, to show that the writer is a woman
Octaves consecutive
_Odyssey_, the examples of feminine mistakes
refers to nothing of later date than B.C. 1100
ὀρσοθύρα, the, 17, 92; the way towards was in the corner
of the cloister, near the mixing-bowl
Œnotria, and Italia
Olympia, apparently unknown to the writer
Orsi, Dr., mentioned
and pre-Corinthian cemeteries near Syracuse
Ortygia, and Syra
PAGOTO, Signor Giuseppe
Pantellaria, rightly placed as regards Scheria
still a prison-island
Parmenides, calls the moon Cyclops
Penelope, her web; gets presents out of the suitors
scandalous [ver] of her conduct in ancient writers
versions she protests too much
did she ever try snubbing or boring
Minerva's opinion of her
and the upset bath
gloating over the luxury of woe
not a satisfactory guardian of the estate
tells her story to Ulysses before Ulysses tells his to her
Perseus, does not rescue Andromeda
Phæacian women, their skill in weaving, and general intelligence
Phæacians, the, making drink offerings to Mercury (covert satire)
Ulysses' farewell to the, 108; a thin disguise for Phocæans
used 50-oared vessels like the Phocæans
Phemius, begs for mercy
Phocæa; and Phocæans
Phocæa, an Ionian city surrounded by Æolians
Phocæans, the, used 50-oared vessels; and Phocians
Phœnician quarrymen's marks on walls of Eryx
Phœnicians, the, distrusted, but not much known about Phœnicia
Piacus
Pic-nic, a, to Polyphemus's cave
Pisistratus, accompanies Telemachus to Sparta
does not like crying during dinner; gets no present
Platt, Mr. Arthur, on the house of Ulysses
Poetesses, early Greek, abundant
Policeman, identifying prisoner
Polyphemus, and his cave, drawn from life
his system of milking; his cave still called _la grotta di
Polifemo_; the rocks he threw, Asinelli and Formiche
had two eyes; and Conturràno
Portazza, and Telepylus
QUARRY, called Dacinoi
RAFT, Ulysses'
Raven rock, the
Rheithron, the harbour, used five times in _Odyssey_
Rudder, the poetess's ideas about a
"Ruler," a two foot, betraying a writer as a woman
SALT works of S. Cusumano
Sappho, and other early Greek poetesses
Sardinian smile, a
Scheria, means Jutland; and Drepane,
ancient names of Corfu
Schliemann, visited Trapani
Seals, the intolerable smell of
or Phocæ, malicious allusion to Phocæans
Segesta, later than the _Odyssey_
Selborne, Lord, his reminiscences
Servants, like being told to eat and drink
Shelley, on the sweetness of the _Odyssey_
Shield of Achilles, the, its genuineness defended
Shipwreck, and loss of Ulysses' ship
Shirt, a clean, Alcinous' and his sons' views concerning
Shrewsbury, and Grammerton
Sicels, in the _Odyssey_
Σικανίης, not corrupted into, Σικλίης
Sirens, the, and Didyme
Sleep, the, of Ulysses
Smyth, Admiral, on the Æolian islands and on Charybdis
Snow, frequent in the _Iliad_, but hardly
ever named in the _Odyssey_
Spadaro, Prof., of Marettimo
Sugameli, Signor
Suitors, the, how many from each island
they are also the people who were sponging on Alcinous
they cannot be perfect lovers and perfect spongers at
the same time; their version of Penelope's conduct
Sun, turnings of the
Sun-god, the, leaving his sheep and cattle in charge of two nymphs
Swallow, Ulysses bowstring sings like a
Minerva flies out to the rafters like a
Syracuse, pre-Corinthian
TARRAGONA, the walls of
Taygetus range, still roadless
Tedesco, Signor, of Marettimo
Telegony, the, and the _Odyssey_
Telemachus, lectured by Minerva; and by Penelope
the two great evils that have fallen on his house
only twelve years old when Ulysses went to Hades
his alarm about his property
did not tip Eteoneus
Telepylus, a fictitious name
Temesa, copper mines of; its people did not speak Greek
Tennyson, and the Arthurian legends
Theoclymenus sees the doom that overhangs the suitors and leaves
the house, 86; his presence in the poem, strange
Thersites, and Eurybates
Tholus, the
Thucydides, and "Phocians of those from Troy"
on the Cyclopes and Læstrygonians; substantially in
accord with the writer of the _Odyssey_; biassed in
favour of the Corfu Drepane rather than the Sicilian Drepanum
Tiresias, his prophecy, and warning about the cattle of
the Sun
_Toro, grotta del_
Trapdoor, the; the way towards was in the corner of the
cloisters near the mixing bowl
Trapani, what any rival site has got to show before claiming much
consideration
Trapani and Ægadean islands from Mt. Eryx, sketch of
Troy, date of its real or supposed fall
"ULYSSES," H. Festing Jones's and S. Butler's oratorio
Ulysses, fastens his chest with a knot that Circe had taught him
his deep sleep; upbraids Minerva for not telling
Telemachus about his impending return; and Argus
rebukes Amphinomus; rebukes Eurymachus
he and Telemachus remove the armour
his brooch; having his feet washed by Euryclea
compared to a paunch cooking before a fire
his bedroom, surmise that the maids were hanged all round it
interview with Laertes in the garden
eating with Dolius
his farewell speeches to the Phæacians, and to Queen Arete
his main grievance a money one; he, Alcinous, Menelaus and
Nestor, all drawn from the same person; always thankless
why not allowed to see either Favognana or the Scherian coast
house of, and that of Alcinous
Unconscious, examples of
Ustica, as the island of Æolus
VAULTED room, the
Virgil, and Æneas in Hades; gives the Cyclopes only one eye
and Drepanum
WALL, the Iliadic, date of
Wandering cliffs, the
Wolf, his theory baseless and mischievous
Woman and man, never fully understand one another
can caricature each other, but not draw
Women, single, will not have a man in the house if they can help it
in Hades, the writer's attitude towards
treatment of the guilty, in the house of Ulysses
World, its greatest men know little of the
YORK, the Duke of, and his marriage
Young people, apt to be thoughtless
ZIMMERN, Miss Helen
Zummari, la Caletta dei