THE DAY OF RETRIBUTION.
The morrow is a festival of Apollo. It is kept by the riotous crew in
the halls of Ulysses with more than their usual revelry. The disguised
hero himself, feeding at a small table apart by command of Telemachus,
is still subject to their insults. But portents are not wanting of their
impending doom. In the midst of the feast Minerva casts them into fits
of ghastly laughter; the meat which they are eating drips with gore; and
the seer Theoclymenus--a refugee under the protection of Telemachus--who
has been of late their unwilling companion, sees each man’s head
enveloped in a misty darkness, and the whole court and vestibule
thronged with ghostly shapes. He cries out in affright, and tells them
what sight he sees; but they only answer him with mockery, and threaten
to drive him forth as one who has lost his wits. After warning them of
the fate which he foresees awaiting them, he quits the company. They
turn upon Telemachus, and taunt him with his sorry choice of guests:
first yon lazy disreputable vagabond, and now this prating would-be
soothsayer. The young man makes no reply, but watches his father
anxiously; and Ulysses still bides his time.
The queen meanwhile has bethought her of a new device, to put off yet
awhile the evil day in which she must at length make her choice amongst
her importunate lovers. She unlocks an inner chamber where the treasures
of the house are stored, and draws from its case Ulysses’ bow, the gift
of his dead friend Iphitus, which he had not taken with him to Troy.
Before she carries it down, she lays it fondly on her knees, and weeps
as she thinks of its absent master. One cunning feat she remembers which
her hero was wont to perform--to drive an arrow straight through the
hollow rings of twelve axe-heads set up in a line. Whichsoever of her
suitors can bend the strong bow, and send a shaft right through the
whole row of twelve, like the lost Ulysses, that man she will follow,
however reluctantly, as her future lord. She has more than a lingering
hope, we may be sure, that one and all will fail in a trial so
manifestly difficult. They would refuse the ordeal, but for Antinous.
Confident in his own powers, he hopes to succeed--he knows the rest will
fail. They, out of shame, accept the test. Telemachus himself fixes the
weapons firmly in the earth in a true and even line, a task in itself of
no small difficulty, but which he performs with such skill as to win the
admiration of the whole party. He claims the right to make trial first
himself, in the hope to prove himself his father’s true son. Thrice he
draws the bow-string, but not yet to its right extent. As he is making a
fourth attempt, sanguine of success, he meets a look from his father
which checks his hand. Ulysses foresees that should his son succeed
where the others fail, and so claim what they are really seeking, the
royal power of Ithaca, the whole band might suddenly unite against him,
and so frustrate his present scheme of vengeance. Reluctantly, at his
father’s sign, the youth lays down the bow, and professes to lament the
weakness of his degenerate hand. One after another the rival princes in
turn strive to bend it, but in vain; even Antinous and Eurymachus,
notably the best among them, fail to move the string, though the bow is
warmed by the fire and rubbed well with melted fat to make it more
pliable. Antinous finds plausible excuse for the failure--they have
profaned the festival of Apollo by this contest; it shall be renewed
under better auspices on the morrow. Then the seeming beggar (who
meanwhile has made himself known as their true lord to Eumæus and
another faithful retainer, the herdsman Philœtius) makes request that he
may try his hand upon this wondrous bow. Loud and coarse is the abuse
which Antinous and his fellows shower upon him for his audacity; but
Telemachus exerts the authority in his mother’s house which his
uninvited guests seem never quite to make up their minds to dispute when
it is firmly claimed, and the weapon is given into the hands of its true
owner. He handles it gently and lovingly, turning it over and over to
see whether it has in any way suffered by time or decay, and brings
notes from the tight-strained bow-string, “shrill and sweet as the voice
of the swallow.” At last he fits an arrow to the notch, and, not
deigning even to rise from his seat to make the effort, draws it to its
full stretch, and sends the shaft right through the whole line of
axe-heads. It is the immediate prelude to the bloody tragedy which
follows--
“‘Behold, the mark is hit,
Hit without labour! the old strength cleaves fast
Upon me, and my bones are stourly knit--
Not as the suitors mock me in their scornful wit.
“‘Now is it time their evening meal to set
Before the Achaians, ere the sun go down.
And other entertainment shall come yet,
Dance and the song, which are the banquet’s crown.’
He spake, and with his eyebrows curved the frown.
Seizing his sword and spear Telemachus came,
Son of Odysseus, chief of high renown,
And, helmeted with brass like fiery flame,
Stood by his father’s throne and waited the dire aim.
“Stript of his rags then leapt the godlike king
On the great threshold, in his hand the bow
And quiver, filled with arrows of mortal sting.
These with a rattle he rained down below,
Loose at his feet, and spake among them so:
‘See, at the last our matchless bout is o’er!
Now for another mark, that I may know
If I can hit what none hath hit before,
And if Apollo hear me in the prayer I pour!’”
The philosopher Plato, who did not spare the poet occasionally, in his
criticisms, speaks of this passage as worthy of all admiration. We have
here the primitive type, since worked out into countless shapes, of the
“situations” and “discoveries” which abound in modern romance and drama.
Ulysses aims the first arrow at Antinous. It pierces him in the throat
as he is raising a goblet to his lips, and he falls backward in the
agonies of death, spilling the untasted wine upon the floor; thus giving
occasion (so says Greek tradition) to that which has now become a common
English proverb--“There’s many a slip ’twixt the cup and the lip.”[42]
His comrades stand aghast for a moment, not certain whether the shot be
deliberate or merely accidental. Ulysses sets them at rest on that point
by declaring himself and his purpose. They look round the hall for the
arms which usually hang upon the walls, but these have been secretly
removed during the previous night by Ulysses and his son. Eurymachus,
who has more plausible rhetoric at his command than the others, now
endeavours to make terms. Antinous, he confesses, has well deserved his
fate--he had plotted against the life of Telemachus; but for himself and
the rest, now that the king has come to his own again, they will submit
themselves, and pay such fine as shall amply satisfy him for the
despoiling of his goods. Ulysses scornfully rejects all such compromise.
Then, at Eurymachus’ call, the boldest of the party draw their knives
and make a rush upon him. But a second arrow from the terrible bow
strikes Eurymachus through the breast before he reaches him; Amphinomus
falls by the spear of Telemachus as soon as he gets within range; and
while the father, backed by his two retainers, holds the rest at
bay--rather, we must suppose, by the terror of his presence than the
actual use of his bow--the son rushes off to find arms for the little
party. Ulysses plies his arrows till they are exhausted, and then the
four together continue the unequal combat with the spears now brought
by Telemachus. The details of the work of retribution, like some of the
long slaughter-lists in the Iliad, sufficiently interesting to an
audience for whom war was the great game of human life, are scarcely so
to modern and more fastidious readers. The hero, like all heroes of
romance, performs deeds which in a mere prosaic view would appear
impossibilities. Suffice it to say, that with the Goddess of Wisdom as
an ally (who appears once more under the form of Mentor), the combat
ends in the slaughter of the whole band of intruders, even though they
are partially supplied with arms by the treacherous goatherd, who brings
them from the armoury which Telemachus has carelessly left open. A graze
upon the wrist of Telemachus, and a slight flesh-wound where the spear
of one of the enemy “wrote on the shoulder” of the good swineherd
Eumæus, are the only hurts received by their party in the combat. The
vengeance of the hero is implacable; otherwise it were not heroic, in
the Homeric sense. Not content with the utter extermination of the men
who have usurped his palace, harassed his wife, and insulted his son, he
hangs up also their guilty paramours among the women-servants, who have
joined them in defiling his household gods; first, however, making them
swill and scour clean the blood-stained hall which has been the scene of
the slaughter. The traitorous goatherd Melanthius is by the same stern
orders miserably lopped of ears, and nose, and limbs, before death
releases him. We find the same pitiless cruelty towards his enemies in
the hero of the Odyssey as in the hero of the Iliad. Yet the poet would
teach us that the vengeance of Ulysses is but the instrument of the
divine justice. Like Moses or Joshua, he is but the passionless executor
of the wrath of heaven; while, still to continue the parallel, the
merciless character of the retribution takes its colour from the
ferocity of the age. When the aged Eurycleia, who as yet alone of the
women of the household knows the secret of his return, comes down and
sees the floor strewn with the bloody corpses, she is about to raise a
shout of triumph. But the king checks her:--
“Nurse, with a mute heart this my vengeance hail!
Not holy is it o’er the slain to boast.
These Heaven and their own crimes have brought to bale;
Since of all strangers, from earth’s every coast,
No man was honoured of this godless host,
Nor good nor evil, whosoe’er they knew--
And with their souls they pay the fatal cost.”