TELEMACHUS GOES IN QUEST OF HIS FATHER.
Hitherto, and throughout the first four books of the poem, Telemachus,
and not Ulysses, is the hero of the tale. The voyagers soon reach the
rocky shores of Pylos,[29] the stronghold of the old “horse-tamer,”
Nestor. He has survived the long campaign in which so many of his
younger comrades fell, and is now sitting, surrounded by his sons, at a
great public banquet held in honour of the Sea-god. Telemachus, with a
natural modesty not unbecoming his youth, is at first reluctant to
accost and question a chieftain so full of years and renown, and his
attendant guardian has to reassure him by the promise that “heaven will
put words into his mouth.” There is no need of question yet, however,
either on the side of hosts or guests. Pisistratus, the youngest son of
Nestor, upon whom the duties of “guest-master” naturally fall, welcomes
the travellers with the invariable courtesy accorded by the laws of
Homeric society to all strangers as their right, bids them take a seat
at the banquet, and proffers the wine-cup--to the supposed Mentor
first, as the elder. He only requests of them, before they drink, to
join their hosts in their public supplication to Neptune; for he will
not do them the injustice to suppose prayer can be unknown or
distasteful to them, be they who they may--“All men have need of
prayer.” When the prayer has been duly made by both for a blessing on
their hosts and for their own safe return, and when they have eaten and
drunk to their hearts’ content, then, and not till then, Nestor inquires
their errand. The form in which the old chief put his question is as
strongly characteristic of a primitive civilisation as the open
hospitality which has preceded it. He asks the voyagers, in so many
words, whether they are pirates?--not for a moment implying that such an
occupation would be to their discredit. The freebooters of the sea in
the Homeric times were dangerous enough, but not disreputable. It was an
iron age, when every man’s hand was more or less against his neighbour,
and the guest of to-day might be an enemy to-morrow. Nestor’s downright
question may help a modern reader to understand the waste of Ulysses’
substance in his absence by the lawless spirits of Ithaca. It was only
so long as “the strong man armed kept his palace” in person that his
goods were in peace. Telemachus, in reply, declares his name and errand,
and implores the old chieftain, in remembrance of the days when he and
Ulysses fought side by side at Troy, to give him, if he can, some
tidings of his father.
“Answered him Nestor, the Gerenian knight:
‘Friend, thou remind’st me of exceeding pain,
Which we, the Achaians of unconquered might,
There, and in ships along the clouded main,
Led by Achilleus to the spoil, did drain,
With those our fightings round the fortress high
Of Priam king. There all our best were slain--
There the brave Aias and Achilleus lie;
Patroclus there, whose wisdom matched the gods on high.
“‘There too Antilochus my son doth sleep,
Who in his strength was all so void of blame--
Swift runner, and staunch warrior.’”
Nestor shows the same love of story-telling which marks his character in
the Iliad. Modern critics who are inclined to accuse the old chief of
garrulity should remember that, in an age in which there were no daily
newspapers with their “special correspondents,” a good memory and a
fluent tongue were very desirable qualifications of old age. The old
campaigner in his retirement was the historian of his own times. Unless
he told his story often and at length amongst the men of a younger
generation when they met at the banquet, all memory of the gallant deeds
of old would be lost, and even the professional bard would have lacked
the data on which to build his lay. Many a Nestor must have been
ready--in season and out of season--to
“Shoulder his crutch, and show how fields were won,”
before any Homer could have sung of the Trojan war. Even now, we are
ready to listen readily to the veteran’s reminiscences of a past
generation, whether in war or peace, who has a retentive memory and a
pleasant style--only he now commonly tells his story in print.
Nestor proceeds to tell his guests how the gods, after Troy was taken,
had stirred up strife between the brother-kings Agamemnon and Menelaus;
and how, in consequence, the fleet had divided, Menelaus with one
division sailing straight for home, while the rest had waited with
Agamemnon in the hope of appeasing the wrath of heaven. Ulysses, who had
at first set sail with Menelaus, had turned back and rejoined his
leader. Of his subsequent fate Nestor knows nothing; but he bids the
young man take courage. He has heard of the troubles that beset him at
home; but if Minerva vouchsafes to the son the love and favour which (as
was known to all the Greeks) she bore to his father, all will go well
with him yet. Neither Nestor nor Telemachus are aware (though the reader
is) that the Wisdom which had made Ulysses a great name was even now
guiding the steps of his son. One thing yet the youth longs to hear from
the lips of his father’s ancient friend--the terrible story of
Agamemnon’s death by the hands of his wife and her paramour, and the
vengeance taken by his son Orestes. It is a tale which he has heard as
yet but darkly, but has dwelt upon in his heart ever since the goddess,
at her visit under the shape of Mentes, made such significant reference
to the story. Nestor tells it now at length--the bloody legend which,
variously shaped, became the theme of the poet and the dramatist from
generation to generation of Greek literature. In Homer’s version we miss
some of the horrors which later writers wove into the tale; and it is
not unlikely that, in the simpler form in which it is here given, we
have the main facts of an actual domestic tragedy. During Agamemnon’s
long absence in the Trojan war, his queen Clytemnestra, sister of
Helen, had been seduced from her marriage faith by her husband’s cousin
Ægisthus. In vain had the household bard, faithful to the trust
committed to him by his lord in his absence, counselled and warned his
lady against the peril; and Ægisthus at last, hopeless of his object so
long as she had these honest eyes upon her, had caused him to be carried
to a desert island to perish with hunger. So she fell, and Ægisthus
ruled palace and kingdom. At last Agamemnon returned from the weary
siege, and, landing on the shore of his kingdom, knelt down and kissed
the soil in a transport of joyful tears. It is probably with no
conscious imitation, but merely from the correspondence of the poet’s
mind, that Shakespeare attributes the very same expression of feeling to
his Richard II.:--
“I weep for joy
To stand upon my kingdom once again.
Dear earth, I do salute thee with my hand,
Though rebels wound thee with their horses’ hoofs:
As a long-parted mother with her child
Plays fondly with her tears, and smiles in meeting,
So weeping, smiling, greet I thee, my earth,
And do thee favour with my royal hands.”
Agamemnon meets with as tragical a reception from the usurper of his
rights as did Richard Plantagenet:--
“Many the warm tears from his eyelids shed,
When through the mist of his long-hoped delight
He saw the lovely land before him spread.
Him from high watch-tower marked the watchman wight
Set by Ægisthus to watch day and night,
Two talents of pure gold his promised hire.
Twelve months he watched, lest the Avenger light
Unheeded, and remember his old fire;
Then to his lord made haste to show the tidings dire.
“Forthwith Ægisthus, shaping a dark snare,
Score of his bravest chose, and ambush set,
And bade rich banquets close at hand prepare.
Then he with horses and with chariots met
The king, and welcomed him with fair words, yet
With fraud at heart, and to the feast him led;
There, like a stalled ox, smote him while he fed.”
For seven years the adulterer and usurper reigned in security at Mycenæ.
But meanwhile the boy Orestes, stolen away from the guilty court by his
elder sister, was growing up to manhood, the destined avenger of blood,
at Athens. In the seventh year he came back in disguise to his father’s
house, slew Ægisthus, and recovered his inheritance. There was a darker
shadow still thrown over Agamemnon’s death by later poets, which finds
no place in Homer. The tragic interest in the dramas of Æschylus and
Sophocles, which are founded on this story, lies in their representing
Clytemnestra herself as the murderess of her husband, and Orestes, as
his father’s avenger, not hesitating to become the executioner of his
mother as well as of her paramour.
Nestor has finished his story, and the travellers offer to return to
their vessel and continue their quest; but the old chieftain will not
hear of it. That night, at least, they must remain as his guests--on the
morrow he will send them on to the court of Menelaus at Sparta, where
they may chance to learn the latest tidings of Ulysses. Telemachus’s
guardian bids him accept the invitation, then suddenly spreads wings,
and takes to flight in the likeness of a sea-eagle; and both Nestor and
Telemachus recognise at last that, in the shape of Mentor, the goddess
of wisdom has been so long his guide. A sacrifice is forthwith offered
in her honour--a heifer, with horns overlaid with gold; a public banquet
is held as before, and then, according to promise, Telemachus is sped on
his journey. A pair of swift and strong-limbed horses--the old chief
knew what a good horse was, and charged his sons specially to take the
best in his stalls--are harnessed for the journey, and good provision of
corn and wine, “such as was fit for princes,” stored in the chariot.
Pisistratus himself mounts beside his new friend as driver. Their first
day’s stage is Pheræ, where they are hospitably entertained by Nestor’s
friend, Diocles; and, after driving all the following day, they reach
the palace gates of Menelaus, in Sparta, when the sun has set upon the
yellow harvest fields, “and all the ways are dim.”
At Sparta, too, as at Pylos, the city is holding high festival on the
evening of their arrival. A double marriage is being celebrated in the
halls of Menelaus. Hermione, his sole child by Helen, is leaving her
parents to become the bride of Neoptolemus (otherwise known as Pyrrhus,
the “red-haired”), son of the great Achilles; and at the same time the
young Megapenthes, Menelaus’s son by a slave wife, is to be married in
his father’s house. There is music and dancing in the halls when the
travellers arrive; but Menelaus, like Nestor, will ask no questions of
the strangers until the bath, and food, and wine in plenty, have
refreshed them, and their horses have good barley-meal and rye set
before them in the mangers. The magnificence of Menelaus’s palace, as
described by the poet, is a very remarkable feature in the tale. It
reads far more like a scene from the ‘Arabian Nights’ than a lay of
early Greece. The lofty roofs fling back a flashing light as the
travellers enter, “like as the splendour of the sun or moon.” Gold,
silver, bronze, ivory, and electrum, combine their brilliancy in the
decorations. The guests wash in lavers of silver, and the water is
poured from golden ewers. Telemachus is struck with wonder at the sight,
and can compare it to nothing earthly.
“Such and so glorious to celestial eyne
Haply may gleam the Olympian halls divine!”
The palaces of Sparta, as seen in Homer’s vision, contrast remarkably
with the estimate formed of them by the Greek historian of a later age.
Thucydides speaks of the city as having no public buildings of any
magnificence, such as would impress a stranger with an idea of its real
power, but wearing rather the appearance of a collection of villages. It
is difficult to conceive that the actual Sparta of a much earlier age
could have contained anything at all corresponding to this Homeric ideal
of splendour; and the question arises, whether we have here an
indistinct record of an earlier and extinct civilisation, or whether the
poet drew an imaginary description from his own recollections of the
gorgeous barbaric splendour of some city in the further East, which he
had visited in his travels. If this be nothing more than a poet’s
exaggerated and idealised view of an actual state of higher
civilisation, which once really existed in the old Greek kingdoms, and
disappeared under the Dorian Heraclids, it is a singular record of a
backward step in a nation’s history; and the Homeric poems become
especially valuable as preserving the memorials of a state of society
which would otherwise have passed altogether into oblivion. There is
less difficulty in believing the possible existence of an
ante-historical civilisation which afterwards became extinct, if we
remember the splendours of Solomon’s court, as to which the widespread
traditions of the East only corroborate the records of Scripture, and
all which passed away almost entirely with its founder. It is remarkable
that in the ancient Welsh poem, ‘Y Gododin,’ by Aneurin Owen, of which
the supposed date is A.D. 570, there are very similar properties and
scenery: knights in “armour of gold” and “purple plumes,” mounted on
“thick-maned chargers,” with “golden spurs,” who must--if ever they rode
the Cambrian mountains--have been a very different race from the wild
Welsh who held Edward Longshanks at bay. Are we to look upon this as
merely the common language of all poets? and, if so, how comes it to be
common to all? Were the Welsh who fought in the half-mythical battle of
Cattraeth as far superior, in the scale of civilisation, to their
successors who fell at Conway, as the Spartans under Menelaus (if
Homer’s picture of them is to be trusted) were to the Spartans under
Leonidas? or was there some remote original, Oriental or other, whence
this ornate military imagery passed into the poetry of such very
different nations?
So, too, when Helen--now restored to her place in Menelaus’s
household--comes forth to greet the strangers, her whole surroundings
are rather those of an Eastern sultana than of any princess of Spartan
race.
“Forth from her fragrant chamber Helen passed
Like gold-bowed Dian: and Adraste came
The bearer of her throne’s majestic frame;
Her carpet’s fine-wrought fleece Alcippe bore,
Phylo her basket bright with silver ore,
Gift of the wife of Polybus, who swayed
When Thebes, the Egyptian Thebes, scant wealth displayed.
His wife Alcandra, from her treasured store,
A golden spindle to fair Helen bore,
And a bright silver basket, on whose round
A rim of burnished gold was closely bound.”--(Sotheby.)
These elaborate preparations for her “work”--which is some delicate
fabric of wool tinged with the costly purple dye--have little in common
with the household loom of Penelope. Here, as in the Iliad, refinement
and elegance of taste are the distinctive characteristics of Helen; and
they help to explain, though they in no way excuse, the fascination
exercised over her by Paris, the accomplished musician and brilliant
converser, rich in all the graces which Venus, for her own evil
purposes, had bestowed on her favourite. Helen is still, as in the
Iliad, emphatically “the lady;” the lady of rank and fashion, as things
were in that day, with all the fashionable faults, and all the
fashionable good qualities: selfish, and luxurious, gracious and
fascinating. Her transgressions, and the seemingly lenient view which
the poet takes of them, have been discussed sufficiently in the Iliad.
They are all now condoned. She has recovered from her miserable
infatuation; and if we are inclined to despise Menelaus for his easy
temper as a husband, we must remember the mediæval legends of Arthur and
Guinevere, to whom Helen bears, in many points of character, a strong
resemblance. The readiness which Arthur shows to have accepted at any
time the repentance of his queen is almost repulsive to modern feeling,
but was evidently not so to the taste of the age in which those legends
were popular; nor is it at all clear that such forgiveness is less
consonant with the purest code of morality than the stern implacability
towards such offences which the laws of modern society would enjoin.
Menelaus has forgiven Helen, even as Arthur--though not Mr Tennyson’s
Arthur--would have forgiven Guinevere. But she has not forgiven herself,
and this is a strong redeeming point in her character; “shameless” is
still the uncompromising epithet which she applies to herself, as in the
Iliad, even in the presence of her husband and his guests.
They, too, have been wanderers since the fall of Troy, like the lost
Ulysses. The king tells his own story before he interrogates his
guest:--
“Hardly I came at last, in the eighth year,
Home with my ships from my long wanderings.
Far as to Cyprus in my woe severe,
Phœnice, Egypt, did the waves me bear.
Sidon and Ethiopia I have seen,
Even to Erembus roamed, and Libya, where
The lambs are full-horned from their birth, I ween,
And in the rolling year the fruitful flocks thrice yean.”
He has grown rich in his travels, and would be happy, but for the
thought of his brother Agamemnon’s miserable end. Another grief, too,
lies very close to his heart--the uncertainty which still shrouds the
fate of his good comrade Ulysses.
“His was the fate to suffer grievous woe,
And mine to mourn without forgetfulness,
While onward and still on the seasons flow,
And he yet absent, and I comfortless.
Whether he live or die we cannot guess.
Him haply old Laertes doth lament,
And sage Penelope, in sore distress,
And to Telemachus the hours are spent
In sadness, whom he left new-born when first he went.”
The son is touched at the reminiscence, and drops a quiet tear, while
for a moment he covers his eyes with his robe. It is at this juncture
that Helen enters the hall. Her quick thought seizes the truth at once;
as she had detected the father through his disguise of rags when he came
as a spy into Troy, so now she recognises the son at once by his strong
personal resemblance. Then Menelaus, too, sees the likeness, and
connects it with the youth’s late emotion. Young Pisistratus at once
tells him who his friend is, and on what errand they are travelling
together. Warm is the greeting which the King of Sparta bestows on the
son of his old friend. There shall be no more lamentation for this
night; all painful subjects shall be at least postponed until the
morrow. But still, as the feast goes on, the talk is of Ulysses. Helen
has learnt, too, in her wanderings, some of the secrets of Egyptian
pharmacy. She has mixed in the wine a potent Eastern drug, which raises
the soul above all care and sorrow--
“Which so cures heartache and the inward stings,
That men forget all sorrow wherein they pine.
He who hath tasted of the draught divine
Weeps not that day, although his mother die
Or father, or cut off before his eyen
Brother or child beloved fall miserably,
Hewn by the pitiless sword, he sitting silent by.”
The “Nepenthes” of Helen has obtained a wide poetical celebrity. Some
allegorical interpreters of the poem would have us understand that it is
the charms of conversation which have this miraculous power to make men
forget their grief. Without at all questioning their efficacy, it may be
safely assumed that the poet had in his mind something more material.
The drug has been supposed to be opium; but the effects ascribed to the
Arabian “haschich”--a preparation of hemp--correspond very closely with
those said to be produced by Helen’s potion. Sir Henry Halford thought
it might more probably be the “hyoscyamus,” which he says is still used
at Constantinople and in the Morea under the name of “_Nebensch_.”[30]
Not till the next morning does Telemachus discuss with Menelaus the
object of his journey. What little the Spartan king can tell him of the
fate of his father is so far reassuring, that there is good hope he is
yet alive. But he is--or was--detained in an enchanted island. There the
goddess Calypso holds him an unwilling captive, and forces her love upon
him. He longs sore for his home in Ithaca; but the spells of the
enchantress are too strong. So much has Menelaus learnt, during his own
wanderings, while wind-bound at Pharos in Egypt, from Proteus, “the old
man of the sea”--
“Who knows all secret things in ocean pent.”
The knowledge had to be forced from him by stratagem. Proteus was in the
habit of coming up out of the sea at mid-day to sleep under the shadow
of the rocks, with his flock of seals about him. Instructed by his
daughter Eidothea--who had taken pity on the wanderers--Menelaus and
some of his comrades had disguised themselves in seal-skins[31] (though
much disturbed, as he confesses, by the “very ancient and fish-like
smell”), and had seized the ancient sea-god as he lay asleep on the
shore. Proteus, like the genie in the Arabian tale, changed himself
rapidly into all manner of terrible forms; but Menelaus held him fast
until he was obliged to resume his own, when, confessing himself
vanquished by the mortal, the god proceeded in recompense to answer his
questions as to his own fate, and that of his companion chiefs, the
wanderers on their way home from Troy. The transformations of Proteus
have much exercised the ingenuity of the allegorists. The pliancy of
such principles of interpretation becomes amusingly evident, when one
authority explains to us that here are symbolised the wiles of
sophistry--another, that it is the inscrutability of truth, ever
escaping from the seeker’s grasp; while others, again, see in Proteus
the versatility of nature, the various ideals of philosophers, or the
changes of the atmosphere. From such source had the king learnt the
terrible end of his brother Agamemnon, and the ignoble captivity of
Ulysses; but for himself, the favourite of heaven, a special exemption
has been decreed from the common lot of mortality. It is thus that
Proteus reads the fates for the husband of Helen:--
“Thee to Elysian fields, earth’s farthest end,
Where Rhadamanthus dwells, the gods shall send;
Where mortals easiest pass the careless hour;
No lingering winters there, nor snow, nor shower,
But ocean ever, to refresh mankind,
Breathes the shrill spirit of the western wind.”
The grand lines of Homer are thus grandly rendered by Abraham Moore.
Homer repeats the description of the Elysian fields, the abode of the
blest, in a subsequent passage of the poem, which has been translated
almost word for word--yet as only a poet could translate it--by the
Roman Lucretius. Mr Tennyson has the same great original before him when
he makes his King Arthur see, in his dying thought,
“The island-valley of Avilion,
Where falls not hail nor rain nor any snow,
Nor ever wind blows loudly; but it lies
Deep-meadowed, happy, fair with orchard lawns,
And bowery hollows crowned with summer sea.”
The calm sweet music of these lines has charmed many a reader who never
knew that the strain had held all Greece enchanted two thousand years
ago. It has been scarcely possible to add anything to the quiet beauty
of the original Greek, but the English poet has at least shown exquisite
skill in the setting of the jewel. But Homer has always been held as
common property by later poets. Milton’s classical taste had previously
adopted some of the imagery; the “Spirit” in the ‘Masque of Comus’
speaks of the happy climes which are his proper abode:--
“There eternal summer dwells,
And west winds, with musky wing,
About the cedarn alleys fling
Nard and cassia’s balmy smells.”
Gladly would Menelaus have kept the son of his old comrade with him
longer as a guest, but Telemachus is impatient to rejoin his galley,
which waits for him at Pylos. His host reluctantly dismisses him, not
without parting gifts; but the gift which the king would have had him
take--a chariot and yoke of three swift horses--the island-prince will
not accept. Ithaca has no room for horse-coursing, and he loves his
rocky home all the better.
“With me no steeds to Ithaca shall sail.
Such leave I here--thy grace, thy rightful vaunt,
Lord of a level land, where never fail
Lotus, and rye, and wheat, and galingale:
No room hath Ithaca to course, no mead--
Goat-haunted, dearer than horse-feeding vale.”
There is much consternation in the palace of Ulysses when the absence of
Telemachus is at last discovered. Antinous and his fellow-revellers are
struck with astonishment at the bold step he has suddenly taken, and
with alarm at the possible result. Antinous will man a vessel at once,
and waylay him in the straits on his return. The revelation of this plot
to Penelope by Medon, the herald, one of the few faithful retainers of
Ulysses’ house, makes her for the first time aware of her son’s
departure; for old Eurycleia has kept her darling’s secret safe even
from his mother. In an agony of grief she sits down amidst her
sympathising maidens, and bewails herself as “twice bereaved,” of son
and husband. She lifts her prayer to Minerva, and the goddess hears.
When Penelope has wept herself to sleep, there stands at the head of her
couch what seems the form of her sister Iphthimè, and assures her of her
son’s safety: he has a guardian about his path “such as many a hero
would pray to have.” Even in her dream, Penelope is half conscious of
the dignity of her visitor; and, true wife that she is, she prays the
vision to tell her something of her absent husband. But such revelation,
the figure tells her, is no part of its mission, and so vanishes into
thin air. The sleeper awakes--it is a dream indeed; but it has left a
lightness and elasticity of spirit which the queen accepts as an augury
of good to come.