THE TALE CONTINUED--THE VISIT TO THE SHADES.
The eleventh book of the poem, in which Ulysses goes down to the Shades
to consult the Dead, has been considered by some good authorities as a
later interpolation into the tale. The solemn grandeur of the whole
episode is remarked as out of character with the light and easy
narrative into which it has been woven. Be this as it may, the passage
has a strong interest in itself. It is the solitary glimpse which we
have of the poet’s creed as to the state of disembodied spirits. It is
at least not in contradiction to the views which are disclosed--scantily
enough--by the author of the Iliad, though here we find them
considerably more developed. It is a gloomy picture at the best; and we
almost cease to wonder at the shrinking from death which is so often
displayed by the Homeric heroes, when we find their future state
represented as something almost worse, to an active mind, than
annihilation.
“Never the Sun that giveth light to men
Looks down upon them with his golden eye,
Or when he climbs the starry arch, or when
Slope toward the earth he wheels adown the sky;
But sad night weighs upon them wearily.”
They reached the spot, says Ulysses, described to him at parting by
Circe, where the dark rivers Acheron and Cocytus mix at the entrance
into Hades. The incantations which she had carefully enjoined were duly
made; a black ram and ewe were offered to the powers of darkness, and
their blood poured into the trench which he had dug--“a cubit every
way.”
“Forthwith from Erebus a phantom crowd
Loomed forth, the shadowy people of the dead,--
Old men, with load of earthly anguish bowed,
Brides in their bloom cut off, and youths unwed,
Virgins whose tender eyelids then first shed
True sorrow, men with gory arms renowned,
Pierced by the sharp sword on the death-plain red.
All these flock darkling with a hideous sound,
Lured by the scent of blood, the open trench around.”
But he had been charged by Circe not to allow the ghastly crew to slake
their thirst, until he had evoked the shade of Tiresias, the blind
prophet of Thebes, who retained his art and his honours even in these
regions of the dead. So he kept them off with his sword,--not suffering
even the phantom of his dead mother Anticleia, who came among the rest,
to taste, until the great prophet appeared, leaning on his golden staff.
“To the bloody brink
He stooped, and with his shadowy lips made shrink
The sacrificial pool that darkling lay
Beneath him.”
From the lips of Tiresias Ulysses has learnt the future which awaits
him. On the coast of Sicily he should find pasturing the herds and
flocks of the Sun: if he and his comrades left them uninjured, they
should soon see again their native Ithaca; if they laid sacrilegious
hands on them, he alone should escape, and reach home after long
suffering.
The shade of his mother has been sitting meanwhile in gloomy silence,
eyeing the coveted blood. Not until she had drank of it might she open
her lips to speak, or have power to recognise her son. To his eager
inquiries as to her own fate and that of his father Laertes she made
answer that she herself had died of grief, and that the old man was
wearing out a joyless life in bitter anxiety.
“Therewith she ended, and a deep unrest
Urged me to clasp the spirit of the dead,
And fold a phantom to my yearning breast.
Thrice I essayed, with eager hands out-spread
Thrice like a shadow or a dream she fled,
And my hands closed on unsubstantial air.”
As they talked together, there swept forth out of the gloom a crowd of
female shapes--the mothers of the mighty men of old. There came Tyro,
beloved by the sea-god Neptune, from whom sprang Neleus, father of
Nestor: next followed Antiope, who bore to Jupiter Amphion and Zethus,
who built the seven-gated Thebes; Iphimedeia, mother of the giants Otus
and Ephialtes, who strove to take heaven itself by storm; Alcmena, Leda,
Ariadne, and a crowd of the heroines of Greek romance, who had found the
loves of the gods more or less disastrous in their earthly lot, and who
were reaping, in the gloomy immortality which the poet assigns them,
such consolation as they might from knowing themselves the mothers of
heroes.
Here Ulysses would have ended his tale, and for a while a charmed
silence falls upon his Phæacian audience. But the king would hear more.
Did he see, in the realms of the dead, no one of those renowned
champions who had fought with him at Troy?
Yes--if his host cares to listen, Ulysses can tell him a sad tale of
some of his old comrades. He saw the great Agamemnon there, and heard
from his lips the treachery of the adulterous Clytemnestra. Antilochus
and Patroclus, too, he had recognised, and Ajax; but the latter,
retaining in the world below the animosities of earthly life, had stood
far aloof, and sullenly refused to speak a word in answer to his
successful rival. The only one who reveals anything of the secrets of
his prison-house is Achilles. He asks of his adventurous visitor what
has prompted him to risk this intrusion into the gloomy dwelling, where
the dead live indeed, but without thought or purpose, mere shadows of
what they were. And when Ulysses attempts to comfort him with the
thought of the deathless glory which surrounds his name, the
hopelessness of his answer sets forth, in the darkest colours, that
gloomy view of human destiny which breaks out from time to time in the
creed of the poet, and which belongs to the character of his favourite
hero. Whether the Odyssey did or did not come from the same hand as the
Iliad, at least Achilles is the same in both. In the former poem we
find him indulging in all the mournful irony of the Hebrew Preacher, in
his perplexed thought before he was led to “the conclusion of the whole
matter”--complaining, like him, that “one event happeneth to all,” and
that “the wise man dieth as the fool;” that he, the bravest and most
beautiful of living heroes, would have to meet the same lot as his
victim Lycaon; so here, in the Odyssey, he adopts the text that “a
living dog is better than a dead lion:”--
“Rather would I, in the sun’s warmth divine,
Serve some poor churl who drags his days in grief,
Than the whole lordship of the dead were mine.”
Such was the immortality to which Paganism condemned even its best and
bravest.
One touching inquiry both Agamemnon and Achilles put to their visitor
from the upper world. How fare their sons? Where is Orestes?--asks the
great king. Did Neoptolemus, in the later days of the war, prove himself
worthy of his father?--inquires Achilles. When he has been assured of
this, the shade of the mighty hero, well satisfied,
“Passed striding through the fields of asphodel.”
There is no distinct principle of reward or punishment discernible in
the regions of the dead, as seen by Ulysses. Indeed, anything like
happiness in this shadowy future seems incompatible with the feelings
put into the mouth of Achilles. Orion, the mighty hunter, appears to
enjoy something like the Red Indian’s paradise--pursuing, in those
shadowy fields, the phantoms of the wild creatures which he slew on
earth; but, with this exception, there is no hint of pleasurable
interest or occupation for the mighty dead. Punishments there are for
notorious offenders against the majesty of the gods:--
“There also Tantalus in anguish stood,
Plunged in the stream of a translucent lake;
And to his chin welled ever the cold flood.
But when he rushed, in fierce desire to break
His torment, not one drop could he partake.
For as the old man stooping seems to meet
That water with his fiery lips, and slake
The frenzy of wild thirst, around his feet,
Leaving the dark earth dry, the shuddering waves retreat.
“Also the thick-leaved arches overhead
Fruit of all savour in profusion flung,
And in his clasp rich clusters seemed to shed.
There citrons waved, with shining fruitage hung,
Pears and pomegranates, olive ever young,
And the sweet-mellowing fig: but whensoe’er
The old man, fain to cool his burning tongue,
Clutched with his fingers at the branches fair,
Came a strong wind and whirled them skyward through the air.”
“And I saw Sisyphus in travail strong
Shove with both hands a mighty sphere of stone:
With feet and sinewy wrists he, labouring long,
Just pushed the vast globe up, with many a groan;
But when he thought the huge mass to have thrown
Clean o’er the summit, the enormous weight
Back to the nether plain rolled tumbling down.
He, straining, the great toil resumed, while sweat
Bathed each laborious limb, and his brow smoked with heat.”
Both these are examples of punishment inflicted in the Shades below, not
for an evil life, but for personal offences against the sovereign of the
gods. Tantalus had been admitted as a guest to the banquet of the
immortals, and had stolen their nectar and ambrosia to give to his
fellow-men. Sisyphus had been, it is true, a notorious robber on earth,
but the penalty assigned him was for the higher crime of betraying an
amour of Jupiter’s which had come to his knowledge. The stone of
Sisyphus has been commonly taken as an illustration of labour spent in
vain; but a modern English poet has found in it a beautiful illustration
of the indestructibility of hope. In one of Lord Lytton’s ‘Tales of
Miletus,’ when Orpheus visits the Shades in search of his lost wife--
“He heard, tho’ in the midst of Erebus,
Song sweet as his Muse-mother made his own;
It broke forth from a solitary ghost,
Who, up a vaporous hill,
“Heaved a huge stone that came rebounding back,
And still the ghost upheaved it and still sang.
In the brief pause from toil while towards the height
Reluctant rolled the stone,
“The Thracian asked in wonder, ‘Who art thou,
Voiced like Heaven’s lark amidst the night of Hell?’
‘My name on earth was Sisyphus,’ replied
The phantom. ‘In the Shades
“I keep mine earthly wit; I have duped the Three.[38]
They gave me work for torture; work is joy.
Slaves work in chains, and to the clank they sing.’
Said Orpheus, ‘Slaves still hope!’
“‘And could I strain to heave up the huge stone
Did I not hope that it would reach the height?
There penance ends, and dawn Elysian fields.’
‘But if it never reach?’
“The Thracian sighed, as looming through the mist
The stone came whirling back. ‘Fool,’ said the ghost,
‘Then mine, at worst, is everlasting hope.’
Again uprose the stone.”
Ulysses confesses that he did not see all he might have seen; for, when
the pale ghosts in their ten thousands crowded round him with wild
cries, the hero lost courage, fled back to his ship, and bade his
comrades loose their cables, and put out at once to sea.
They passed the island where the twin sisters, the Sirens, lay couched
in flowers, luring all passing mariners to their destruction by the
fascination of their song. Forewarned by Circe, the chief had stopped
the ears of all his crew with melted wax, and had made them bind him to
the mast, giving them strict charge on no account to release him,
however he might entreat or threaten--for he himself, true to his
passion for adventure, would fain listen to these dangerous
enchantresses. So, as they drifted close along the shore, the Sirens
lifted their voices and sang as follows--every word of Mr Worsley’s
translation is Homer’s, except the single phrase in brackets:--
“Hither, Odysseus, great Achaian name,
Turn thy swift keel, and listen to our lay;
Since never pilgrim to these regions came
In black ship [on the azure waves astray],
But heard our sweet voice ere he sailed away,
And in his joy passed on, with ampler mind.
We know what labours were in ancient day
Wrought in wide Troia, as the gods assigned;
We know from land to land all toils of all mankind.”
But the deaf crew rowed on, and not until the sound of the strain had
died away in the distance did they unbind their captain, in spite of his
angry protests. They pass the strait that divides Sicily from
Italy, where on either hand lurked the monsters Scylla and
Charybdis--impersonations, it may be, of rocks and whirlpools--but which
they escaped, with the loss of six out of the crew, by help of Circe’s
warnings and directions. But that our own Spenser’s ‘Faery Queen’ is
perhaps even less known to the majority of English readers than the
Odyssey of Homer (by grace of popular translations), it might be
needless to remind them how the whole of Sir Guyon’s voyage on the “Idle
Lake” is nothing more or less than a reproduction of this portion of
Ulysses’ adventures.[39] The five mermaidens, who entrap unwary
travellers with their melody, address the knight as he floats by in a
strain which is the echo of the Sirens’--
“O thou fayre son of gentle Fäery,
That art in mightie arms most magnifyde
Above all knights that ever batteill tryde,
O turn thy rudder hitherwarde awhile:
Here may thy storme-bett vessell safely ryde:
This is the port of rest from troublous toyle,
The worldes sweet Inn from pain and wearisome turmoyle.”
The enchantress Acrasia, with her transformed lovers--the “seeming
beasts who are men in deed”--is but a copy from Circe; while the “Gulf
of Greediness” yawning on one side of the Lake--
“That deep engorgeth all this worldës prey”--
and on the other side the “Rock of Vile Reproach,” whose fatal magnetic
power draws in all who try to shun the whirlpool opposite, are the
Scylla and Charybdis of Homer.
At length the voyagers reached the shore where the oxen of the Sun were
pastured. In vain did Ulysses, remembering the prophecy of Tiresias, bid
them steer on and leave the land unvisited. Eurylochus, his lieutenant,
broke out at last into something like mutiny. He had some show of
reason, when he complained of his chief, almost in the words of Sir
Dinadan to Sir Tristram in the ‘Morte d’Arthur,’ that he was tired of
such mad company, and would no longer follow a man to whose iron frame
the toils and dangers which wore out ordinary mortals were a mere
disport. Seeing that the rest backed Eurylochus in his proposal to land
and rest, Ulysses was fain to give way, after exacting a vow that at
least none of them should lay sacrilegious hands upon the sacred herds,
since they had store of corn and wine, the parting gifts of Circe, on
board their vessel. But stress of weather detained them in the anchorage
a whole month, until corn and wine were exhausted, and they had to snare
birds and catch fish--a kind of food which a Greek seaman especially
despised--to keep them from starving. Then at last, while their chief
had withdrawn to a quiet spot, and fallen asleep wearied with long
prayer, Eurylochus persuaded the rest to break their vow, and slay the
choicest of the oxen. Terrible prodigies followed the unhallowed meal;
the skins of the slain animals moved and crawled after their slayers,
and the meat, while roasting on the spits, uttered fearful cries and
groans. One of the old allegorical interpreters has drawn from this
incident a moral which, however fanciful, is not without a certain
beauty and appositeness of illustration--the sins of the wicked, he
says, dog their steps, and cry aloud against them. When next they put to
sea, Jupiter raised winds and waves to punish them; for the Sun had
threatened that, if such insult went unavenged, he would light the
heavens no more, but go down and shine in Hades. Their ship was riven by
a thunderbolt, and Ulysses alone, sole survivor of all his crew, after
once more narrowly escaping the whirlpool of Charybdis, after floating
nine days upon the broken mast, was cast ashore on the island of
Calypso, and there detained until his release by the intercession of
Minerva, as has been told, which had ended in this second shipwreck on
the coast of his present entertainers.