[4]. From Messrs Lang, Leaf, and Myers’s translation of the Iliad (Macmillan and Co. Ltd.). 1909 Edition.
[5]. From Professor Gilbert Murray’s translation of the Troades (George Allen and Co. Ltd.).
[6]. From E. Fairfax Taylor’s translation of the Æneid (Everyman’s Library).
Homer: Penelope
We come now to the Odyssey, the second Homeric epic; and to its heroine, wise Penelope.
Nominally, we have left the Iliad behind by a space of several years. Troy had fallen, and the Greeks were homeward bound, fewer in number and sadder at heart than when the fleet had sailed ten years before. Some few of them reached home in safety. But for the most part, the return voyages were only accomplished with tremendous hardship and peril; and many who had escaped death at Troy found it at the hands of Poseidon, earth-shaking sea-god. Of proud Agamemnon, and the fate that awaited him in his palace at Mycenæ, we shall hear presently. We are concerned now with the wanderings of Odysseus, and how he won home at last to the faithful love of Penelope.
But after all, the connexion between the Iliad and the Odyssey is only nominal. The links between them, although they seem strong and real at first, do not in any sense unite the two poems. It is true that there is the imaginary relation of time; that the Odyssey relates the subsequent adventures of one of the heroes who actually fought at the siege of Troy; and, more important still, that it shows him to possess upon the whole the same qualities which he possessed in the Iliad. But when that is said, there remains the fact of a contrast between the poems which almost persuades us that in the Odyssey we are in a different world. This contrast is best seen in the antithesis between the two heroes of the poems; and indeed between the two great heroines too. In the Iliad, Achilles stands for physical beauty and strength, young enthusiasm and ardent courage. When Odysseus appears there, as he sometimes does, he is overshone by the splendour of Achilles. Although he is the brain of the enterprise, he is in quite a secondary place to the physical magnificence of the younger hero. When we come to the later poem, however, we find that intelligence has risen to the higher plane. Odysseus is now the hero—not, like Achilles, an ideal of bodily strength and beauty: not a man of wrath, flaming over the battlefield in vengeance for his friend: not merely a warrior, product of a warlike age. Odysseus is by no means lacking in courage; and he has not outgrown the need for war. But he has many other qualities besides, and his fighting is usually prompted by necessity.
It is significant that the character of Achilles is developed in conflict with the war-god, Ares; while Odysseus is whelmed in a ‘sea of troubles,’ literally heaped upon him by Poseidon. Struggling constantly against the rage of the elements, Odysseus becomes alert and cautious, patient and painstaking and resourceful: a great constructive energy, as contrasted with the destroying fury of Achilles. The poet’s epithet for Odysseus is ‘subtle’ as that for Achilles had been ‘swift’; and the emphasis is always laid upon his qualities of brain and nerve. He is not a very imposing figure, and has little physical beauty. When his friends would praise him, it is gifts of mind rather than of body to which they refer. He is ‘the just one’ who does no injury ‘as is the way of princes’; the kindly ruler, who is ‘like a father’ to help his people; the faithful husband who can flatter and cajole his goddess-gaoler, in desperate anxiety to be home with his dear wife; the loyal comrade who will risk the enchantments of Circe rather than forsake his men without an effort; the gracious master whose servants ‘mourn and pine’ because of his long absence. And all the way through the poem, in passages which are too numerous to quote, there is a running tribute to his wisdom. Zeus himself, with other gods and goddesses; kings and queens; nymphs, naiads and enchantresses; swineherds and domestic servants; soldiers and sailors; strangers and homefolk; friends and enemies, all add their word to the eulogium of his wit.
Now Penelope, who is the perfect mate for such a man as this, is for that very reason contrasted with Helen as strongly as her husband is contrasted with the hero of the Iliad. It is not merely that her personality is totally unlike Helen’s, although that is true. The contrast is rooted in something deeper—in the whole conception of the poet, the manner of life out of which the poem came, the theme of which it treats. In the Iliad we are quite literally moving amongst demi-gods. Helen, reputed daughter of Tyndareus, is really the child of Zeus; and Achilles has the nereid Thetis for his mother. Something of their divine origin clings to them, making them awful and magnificent. In all that they do and are they are greater than mere human folk. They move majestically, and they are not to be approached too nearly, or judged by the common standard, or compared with the ordinary race of men. Troy itself, to which their names cling, was a city built by gods.