The curious question now arises why the writer of the Odyssey should have avoided referring to a single Iliadic incident, while showing no unwillingness to treat more or less fully of almost all those mentioned by Proclus as dealt with in the other poems of the Trojan cycle, and also while laying the Iliad under such frequent contributions.
I remember saying to a great publisher that a certain book was obviously much indebted to a certain other book to which no reference was made. "Has the writer," said the publisher in question, "referred to other modern books on the same subject?" I answered, "Certainly." "Then," said he, "let me tell you that it is our almost unvaried experience that when a writer mentions a number of other books, and omits one which he has evidently borrowed from, the omitted book is the one which has most largely suggested his own." His words seemed to explain my difficulty about the way in which the writer of the Odyssey lets the incidents of the Iliad so severely alone. It was the poem she was trying to rival, if not to supersede. She knew it to be far the finest of the Trojan cycle; she was so familiar with it that appropriate lines from it were continually suggesting themselves to her—and what is an appropriate line good for if it is not to be appropriated? She knew she could hold her own against the other poems, but she did not feel so sure about the Iliad, and she would not cover any of the ground which it had already occupied.
Of course there is always this other explanation possible, I mean that traditions about Homer's private life may have been known to the writer of the Odyssey, which displeased her. He may have beaten his wife, or run away with somebody else's, or both, or done a hundred things which made him not exactly the kind of person whom Arete would like her daughter to countenance more than was absolutely necessary. I believe, however, that the explanation given in the preceding paragraph is the most reasonable.
And now let me explain what I consider to have been the development of the Odyssey in the hands of the poetess. I cannot think that she deliberately set herself to write an epic poem of great length. The work appears to have grown on her hands piecemeal from small beginnings, each additional effort opening the door for further development, till at last there the Odyssey was—a spontaneous growth rather than a thing done by observation. Had it come by observation, no doubt it would have been freer from the anomalies, inconsistencies, absurdities, and small slovenlinesses which are inseparable from the development of any long work, the plan of which has not been fully thought out beforehand. But surely in losing these it would have lost not a little of its charm.
From Professor Jebb's Introduction to Homer, Ed. 1888, p. 131, I see that he agrees with Kirchhoff in holding that the Odyssey contains "distinct strata of poetical material from different sources and periods," and also that the poem owes its present unity of form to one man; he continues:—
But under this unity of form there are perceptible traces of a process by which different compositions were adapted to one another.
In a note on the preceding page he tells us that Kirchhoff regards the first 87 verses of Book i. as having formed the exordium of the original Return of Ulysses.
My own conclusions, arrived at to the best of my belief before I had read a word of Professor Jebb's Introduction, agree in great part with the foregoing. I found the Odyssey to consist of two distinct poems, with widely different aims, and united into a single work, not unskilfully, but still not so skilfully as to conceal a change of scheme. The two poems are: 1. The visit of Ulysses to the Phæacians, with the story of his adventures as related by himself. 2. The story of Penelope and the suitors, with the episode of Telemachus's voyage to Pylos. Of these two, the first was written before the writer had any intention of dealing with the second, while the second in the end became more important than the first.
I cordially agree with Kirchhoff that the present exordium belongs to the earlier poem, but I would break it off at line 79, and not at 87. It is a perfect introduction to the Return of Ulysses, but it is no fit opening for the Odyssey as it stands. I had better perhaps give it more fully than I have done in my abridgement. It runs:—
Tell me, oh Muse, of that ingenious hero who travelled far and wide after he had sacked the strong citadel of Troy. He saw many cities and learned the manners of many nations; moreover, he suffered much by sea while trying to save his own life and bring his men safely home; but do what he might he could not save his men, for they perished through their own sheer folly in eating the cattle of the Sun-god Hyperion; so the god prevented them from ever getting home. Tell me too about all these things, oh daughter of Jove, from whatever source you may know them (i. 1-10).