At the same time, in spite of the use she makes of Homer, I think she was angry with him, and perhaps jealous; on which head I will say more in my next Chapter. Possibly the way he laughs at women and teases them, not because he dislikes them, but because he enjoys playing with them, irritates her; she was not disposed to play on such a serious subject. We have seen how she retorts on him for having made a tripod worth three times as much as a good serviceable woman of all work. His utter contempt, again, for the gods, which he is at no pains to conceal, would be offensive to a writer who never permits herself to go beyond the occasional mild irreverence of the Vicar's daughter. Therefore, she treats Homer, as its seems to me, not without a certain hardness; and this is the only serious fault I have to find with her.
For example, she takes the concluding lines of Hector's farewell to Andromache, a passage which one would have thought she would have shrunk from turning to common uses, and puts it into the mouth of Telemachus when he is simply telling his mother to take herself off. She does this in i. 356-359 and again in xxi. 350-353. This is not as it should be. Nor yet again is her taking the water that was heated to wash the blood from the body of poor Patroclus (Il. XVIII. 344 &c.) and using it for Ulysses' bath (Od. viii. 434-437). Surely the disrespect here is deeper than any that can be found in Homer towards the gods.
But, whatever the spirit may have been in which the writer of the Odyssey has treated the Iliad, I cannot doubt that that she knew this poem exceedingly well in the shape in which we have it, and this is the point which I have thought it worth while to endeavour to substantiate at such length in the foregoing Chapter.
[1] ἡυεῖς δέ κλέος οἷον ἀκούομεν, οὐδέ τι ἴδμεν, Il. II. 486.
[CHAPTER XV.]
THE ODYSSEY IN ITS RELATION TO THE OTHER POEMS OF THE TROJAN CYCLE, AND ITS DEVELOPMENT IN THE HANDS OF THE AUTHORESS.