The stranger now tests the swineherd's interest in and devotion to Laertes and Eurycleia, who are the parents of Ulysses, the old father and mother of the house. So Eumæus gives an account of his relation to them, as well as to Ktimene, sister of Ulysses; "with her I was reared, and was honored by her mother only a little less." Eumæus will soon tell how he came so young to the family of Laertes. Indeed Ulysses is moved by his narrative to ask just this question. It is to be noted that the report of the swineherd about Penelope is not so certain; "from the queen I have had no kindly word or deed, since that evil fell upon her house—the haughty Suitors." Here lies one motive why Ulysses must go to the palace and test Penelope. Thus Eumæus shows his love for the family of Ulysses, and responds deeply to the test of universal charity.
Very naturally rises the question as to the history of his life. What experience has called forth such a marvelous character? Eumæus now gives his fateful story. The Phœnician background is again employed, with its commerce in merchandise, with its stealing and selling of free, high-born people into slavery, with its navigation. The pith of the story is, a Phœnician female slave, who had been stolen and bought by the king of the country, plays false to her master, steals his child and what valuables she can carry off, and escapes on a Phœnician trading vessel after an intrigue with one of its crew. The captive woman avenged her wrong, but was struck on "the seventh day by Diana, archer-queen," for her own double guilt. Eumæus was that child, also stolen and enslaved, but he is her emphatic contrast; he has been able fully to digest his fate. The Phœnician galley came to Ithaca, "and there Laertes purchased me." The swineherd is of royal birth and retains his more than royal character; in being the humblest he can rise to the highest.
Interesting touches of the Phœnician traders are given: "Sharp fellows, having myriads of trinkets in their ship:" surely it is the ancient Semitic retailer of jewelry, going from town to town in his boat. Then note specially "the cunning man who came to my father's house, showing a golden necklace strung with amber beads;" this amber was obtained doubtless through commerce from the Baltic, by the Phœnicians, whose workmanship is also suggested. "The palace servants and my mother took the trinket into their hands, turning it over and over; they kept gazing at it haggling about the price;" the same scene can be witnessed today in our own country towns when the Jewish peddler appears in the household. In the present case, however, it was part of the scheme of stealing the child.
Eumæus says that his father ruled a city in the island of Syria. But where is this Syria? Some think it is conceived by Homer as lying in the extreme West, "where the Sun turns;" but the Sun turns anywhere. Rather is its position eastward toward Phœnicia; the Taphian pirates who stole the Sidonian woman and sold her into Syria, dwelt not far from Ithaca and preyed upon Phœnician commerce, stealing and selling in the Eastern Mediterranean. Certainly they could find little business of their kind in the West. Some vague idea of the actual land of Syria must have flashed in Homer's mind; no more definite description is possible.
It is plain, however, that the poet makes Eumæus a foreigner, not a Greek, whose birth-land lies beyond the Hellenic boundary to the East. But he is not a Phœnician, his character is different, and his people seem not to have been sea-faring. His fundamental trait is religiosity; he lives in the eternal presence of the Divine Ruler of the World. His character is that of the Old Testament; some of his utterances are strong reminders of the Psalms. We cannot help reading in him something of David and of Job; misfortune he here has had, but he retains an unshaken faith in the deity; intense wrestling he shows, but it has been with him the process of purification. He is not a Greek at all; he has a Hebrew character, not of the modern mercantile type, which resembles more the Phœnician, but of the old Hebrew strain. In those times of man-stealing, Homer could easily have met him in one of the Greek islands, a slave yet a spiritual prince, have drawn his portrait, and have heard his story substantially as here given.
Indeed we think we can trace in the swineherd's thoughts and sometimes in his expressions a marked monotheistic tendency. Undoubtedly Eumæus speaks fluently of the Greek Gods, as Diana and Apollo; especially does he mention and honor Zeus, the supreme God; still he is prone to employ the word Gods in the unitary sense of Providence, and he repeatedly uses the singular God without the article, as in the passage: "God grants some things and withholds others at his will, for he is all-powerful" (XIV. 444). And it is characteristic that he does not like Helen, for thus he says in an outburst of anti-Greek spirit: "O would that Helen and her tribe had utterly perished, for whose sake so many fell!" (XIV. 68.) Striking is his contrast herein with the Phæacians, and with their love of the Trojan conflict.
We have already stated that this entire Ithakeiad resembles the novel, giving pictures of the social life of the time, and elevating the humblest man into heroship. In like manner, this story of Eumæus might almost be called a novelette, truly an Homeric novelette interwoven into the greater totality of the novel here presented in the Ithakeiad, and finally into the entire Odyssey. It has its correspondence with the Fairy Tale of the previous portions of the poem, yet stands in sharpest contrast. Here is no supernatural world far away, but it is the present, it is human life just now, and the hero lives before us. Here are no superhuman beings, like Calypso, Circe, Polyphemus, Proteus; the environment, the coloring, the art-form are totally changed. Nor is it an heroic tale of Troy, with its order of Gods, descending and interfering in human affairs; no grand exploits of arms, no mighty mustering of glorious warriors. Not high and magnificent Achilles in all the pride of his colossal individuality, but humble Eumæus, a slave and a swineherd, has become the Homeric hero. Surely a new style, and a new world-view; yet surely Homer's, not the work of any other man.
It has been already made plain that we have passed from the Idyl, and Heroic Epos, and the Fairy Tale of the first portions of the Odyssey into the Social Romance, which takes the picture of society as its setting. Every human being can now be made a slave; man-stealing, woman-stealing, child-stealing, give the motives for the strangest turns of destiny. Already Ulysses in his fictitious tale of the previous Book has become a maker of the novelette; but Eumæus tells a true tale of his own life, it has no disguise; he knows his past, he is aware of his origin. Thus he is an example, showing how the man is still a fate-compeller in such a state of society. Though a slave externally, he can still be a king within; though struck by the hardest blow of destiny he can still remain loyal to the Divine Order and obtain its blessing.
It is interesting to note the significance of this Phœnician background, with its universal commerce. The Phœnician traded already in remote antiquity with the extremes of the Aryan race, from India in the East to Britain in the West, including the whole intervening line of Aryan migration, Persia, Greece, Italy, Gaul. The Aryan race is indeed a separative, self-repellent, distracted race, always on the move out of itself, without returning into itself. The Phœnician, on the contrary, in his farthest voyages, came back home with news and merchandise; the remotest Phœnician settlements kept up their connection with the mother country. Deep is the idea of the Return to the parent city in the Semitic consciousness for all time; the Phœnician returned anciently to Tyre and Sidon; the Arab Mahommedan returns to-day to Mecca, home of the Prophet; the Jew experts to return to Jerusalem, the holy city of his fathers. The entire Odyssey may well be supposed to show a Semitic influence, in distinction from the Iliad, for the Odyssey is the account of many returns and of the one all-embracing Return to home and country. It is, therefore, very suggestive that the Odyssey has this Phœnician background of a world-commerce, which is only possible for a city whose people, going forth, come back to it as a center. Moreover this world-commerce is a kind of unification of the ever-separating Aryan race, a bond created through the exchange of commodities. Thus the Semitic character has always shown itself as the unifier and mediator of Aryan peoples, first through an external tie of trade, which was the work of Phœnicia, and, secondly, through the far deeper spiritual tie of religion, which was the later work of Judea. The Semitic mind has always been necessary to the inherently centrifugal Aryan soul in order to bring it back to itself from its wanderings, inner and outer, and to reconcile itself with itself and with the Divine Order. The Semite has been and still is the priest to all Arya, by the deepest necessity of the spirit.
Another word we may add in this connection. The Semitic race has also separated itself, and shown three main branches—Phœnician, Hebrew, Arab—a sea-people, a land-people, and a sand-people. In all three cases, however, they have a returning and therewith a mediating character. In their wildest wanderings, on water, and in the desert, and in the soul, they have the power of getting back; and that which they do for themselves, they aid others in doing.