2. Then came the great separation of Greece from the Orient, which is the fundamental fact of the Trojan War, and of which the Homeric poems are the mighty announcement to the future. Troy, an Orientalizing Hellenic city in Asia, seizes and keeps Greek Helen, who is of Europe; it tears her away from home and country, and through its deed destroys Family and State. Greek Europe restores her, must restore her, if its people be true to their institutional principles; hence their great word is restoration, first of their ideal Helen, and secondly of themselves.
So all the Greeks, in order to make the separation from the Orient and restore Helen, have to march forth to war and thus be separated themselves from home and country, till they bring back Helen to home and country. The deed done to Helen strikes every Greek man till he undoes it. The stages of this movement may be set down separately.
(a) The leaving home for Troy—Achilles, Agamemnon, Ulysses; all the heroes had their special story of departure. Ulysses had to quit a young wife, Penelope, and an infant son, Telemachus. For if Helen can be abducted, no Greek family is safe.
(b) Stay at Troy for 10 years. This is also a long training to destruction. Ulysses is an important man, but not the hero. Here lies the sphere of the Iliad.
(c) Destruction of the city and the restoration of Helen to her husband, both of which are not told in the Iliad but are given subordinately in the Odyssey. Thus is the separation from the Orient completed on its negative side, that is, as far as destruction can complete it.
3. The return to Greece of the survivors. The question is, How can they truly get back after so long a period of violence? The Odyssey has this as its theme, and will give an account of all the returns. Here, too, we observe various stages.
(a) Leaving Troy for home. This means a complete facing about and a going the other way, not only in geography, but also in conduct. The Greeks must now quit destruction and become constructive.
(b) It is no wonder that the journey home was very difficult. Quarrels arose at the start (see Nestor's account Book III., and that of Menelaus Book IV.). Many perished on the way; some were lost in a storm at sea, Agamemnon was slain on the threshold of his own palace.
(c) Those who reached home, the successful returners, were of three main kinds, represented by Nestor, by Menelaus, and by Ulysses. These were restored to home and family, and brought peace and harmony. Such is the positive outcome of the Trojan War, and the completion of its cycle.
II. But this rounding-off of the Trojan cycle is, on the other hand, a final separation from the Orient; the scission is now unfolded, explicit, quite conscious. When Ulysses comes back to Ithaca, and re-establishes Family and State, Greek life is independent, distinct, self-determined. The Hellenic world rises and fulfills its destiny in its own way; it creates the Fine Arts, Literature, Science; it is the beginning of the Occident.