Homer's Odyssey / A Commentary

by Denton Jaques Snider

Nor can we pass over the answer of Telemachus, which he makes at this point to his mother. It may be called a little Homeric treatise on poetry. "Mother, let the poet sing as his spirit moves him;" he is not to be constrained, but must give the great fact; "poets are not to blame but Zeus," for the sad return of the Greeks; "men applaud the song which is newest," novelty being already sought for in the literature of Homer's time. But the son's harsh reproof of the mother, with which his speech closes, bidding her look after her own affairs, the loom and distaff and servants, is probably an interpolation. Such is the judgment of Aristarchus, the greatest ancient commentator on Homer; such is also the judgment of Professor Nitzsch, the greatest modern commentator on the Odyssey.

II.

The other side of the collision is the party of suitors, who assail the House of Ulysses in property, in the son, in the wife, and finally in Ulysses himself. They are the wrong-doers whose deeds are to be avenged by the returning hero; their punishment will exemplify the faith in an ethical order of the world, upon which the poem reposes as its very foundation. They are insolent, debauched, unjust; they defy the established right. Zeus has them in mind when he speaks of Ægisthus, who is an example of the same sort of characters, and his fate is their fate according to the Olympian lawgiver. They too are going to destruction through their own folly, yet after many an admonition. Just now Telemachus has spoken an impressive warning: "I shall invoke the ever-living Gods, that Zeus may grant deeds requiting yours."

Still their insolence goes on; the ethical world of justice and institutions has to be cleared of such men, if it continue to exist. Who does not love this fealty of the old bard to the highest order of things? The suitors are indeed blind; they have not recognized the presence of the Goddess, yet there is a slight suspicion after she is gone; one of the suitors asks who that stranger was. Telemachus, to lull inquiry, gives the outer assumed form of the divine visitor, "an ancestral guest, Mentes of Taphos;" the poet however, is careful to add: "But he (Telemachus) knew the immortal Goddess in his mind."

The conflict with the suitors is the framework of the entire poem. The education of Telemachus as well as the discipline of Ulysses reach forward to this practical end—the destruction of the wrong-doers, which is the purification of the country, and the re-establishment of the ethical order. All training is to bring forth the heroic act. The next Book will unfold the conflict in greater detail.

Appendix. The reader will have observed that, in the preceding account of Book First, it is regarded as setting forth three unities, that of the total Odyssey, that of the Telemachiad, and that of the Book itself. We see them all gradually unfolding in due order under the hand of the poet, from the largest to the least. Now the reader should be informed that every one of these unities has been violently attacked and proclaimed to be a sheer phantasm. Chiefly in Germany has the assault taken place. What we have above considered as the joints in the organism of the poem, have been cut into, pried apart, and declared to make so many separate poems or passages, which different authors have written. Thus the one great Homer vanishes into many little Homers, and this is claimed to be the only true way of appreciating Homer.

The most celebrated of these dissectors is probably the German Professor, Kirchhoff, some of whose opinions we shall cite in this appendix. His psychological tendency is that of analysis, separation, division; the very idea of unity seems a bugbear to him, a mighty delusion which he must demolish or die. Specially is his wrath directed against Book First, probably because it contains the three unities above mentioned, all of which he assails and rends to shreds in his own opinion.

The entire Introduction (lines 1-88) he tears from its present place and puts it before the Fifth Book, where it serves as the prelude to the Calypso tale. The rest of the Telemachiad is the work of another poet. Indeed the rest of the First Book (after the Introduction) is not by the same man who produced the Second Book. Then the Second Book is certainly older than the First, and ought somehow to be placed before it. The real truth is, however, that the First Book is only a hodge-podge made out of the Second Book by an inferior poet, who took thence fragments of sentences and of ideas and stitched them together. In the Invocation Kirchhoff cuts out the allusion to the oxen of the Sun (lines 6-9) as being inconsistent with his theory.

After disposing of the Introduction in this way, Kirchhoff takes up the remaining portion of the First Book, which he tears to pieces almost line by line. In about forty separate notes on different passages he marks points for skepticism, having in the main one procedure: he hunts both the Iliad and the Odyssey through, and if he finds a line or phrase, and even a word used elsewhere, which he has observed here, he at once is inclined to conclude that the same must have been taken thence and put here by a foreign hand. Every reader of Homer is familiar with his habit of repeating lines and even entire passages, when necessary. All such repetitions Kirchhoff seizes upon as signs of different authorship; the poet must have used the one, some redactor or imitator the other. To be sure we ought to have a criterion by which we can tell which is the original and which is the derived; but such a criterion Kirchhoff fails to furnish, we must accept his judgment as imperial and final. Once or twice, indeed, he seems to feel the faultiness of his procedure, and tries to bolster it, but as a rule he speaks thus: "The following verse is a formula (repetition), and hence not the property of the author." (Die Homerische Odyssee, p. 174.)

Now such repetitions are common in all old poetry, in the ballad, in the folk-song, in the Kalevala as well as in the Homeric poems. Messages sent are repeated naturally when delivered; the same event recurring, as when the boat is rowed, the banquet prepared, or the armor put on, is described in the same language. Such is usually felt to be a mark of epic simplicity, of the naive use of language, which will not vary a phrase merely for the sake of variety. But Kirchhoff and his followers will have it just the other way; the early poet never varies or repeats, only the later poet does that. So he seeks out a large number of passages in the rest of the Odyssey, and in the Iliad also, which have something in common with passages of this First Book, especially in the matter of words, and easily finds it to be a "cento," a mixed mass of borrowed phrases.