Then follows the statement that Ulysses was with the nymph Calypso, unable to escape, and that his enemy, Neptune, had gone to the Ethiopians (i. 11-21). The gods meet in council and Jove makes a speech about the revenge taken by Orestes on Ægisthus (i. 26-43); Minerva checks him, turns the subjects on to Ulysses, and upbraids Jove with neglecting him (i. 44-62). Jove answers that he had not forgotten him, and continues:—
"Bear in mind that Neptune is still furious with Ulysses for having blinded an eye of Polyphemus, king of the Cyclopes. Polyphemus is son to Neptune by the nymph Thoösa, daughter to the sea-king Phoreys, but instead of killing him outright he torments him by preventing him from getting home. Still, let us lay our heads together and see how we can help him to return. Neptune will then be pacified, for if we are all of a mind he can hardly hold out against us unsupported" (i. 68-79).
Let us now omit the rest of Book i., Books ii. iii. and iv. and go on with line 28 of Book v., which follows after a very similar council to the one that now stands at the beginning of Book i. Continuing with line 28 of Book v. we read:—
When he had thus spoken he said to his son Mercury: "Mercury, you are our messenger, go therefore and tell Calypso we have decreed that poor Ulysses is to return home. He is to be conveyed neither by gods nor men, but after a perilous voyage of twenty days upon a raft he is to reach fertile Scheria, &c." (v. 28-34).
From this point the poem continues with only one certain, and another doubtful, reference to the suitors and Penelope, until (according to Kirchhoff) line 184 of Book xiii. I had thought that the point of juncture between the two poems was in the middle of line 187, and that the ἔγρετο in the second half of the line had perhaps been originally εὖδεν; but it must be somewhere close about this line, and I am quite ready to adopt Kirchhoff's opinion now that I have come to see why Ulysses was made to sleep so profoundly on leaving Scheria.
Till I had got hold of the explanation given on page 173, I naturally thought that the strange sleep of Ulysses had been intended to lead up to something that was to happen in Ithaca, and which had been cancelled when the scheme was enlarged and altered; for without this explanation it is pointless as the poem now stands.
I do not now think that there was ever any account of what happened to Ulysses on his waking up in Ithaca, other than what we now have, but rather that the writer was led to adopt a new scheme at the very point where it became incumbent upon her to complete an old one. For at this point she would first find herself face to face with the difficulty of knowing what to do with Ulysses in Ithaca after she had got him there.
She could not ignore the suitors altogether; their existence and Penelope's profligacy were too notorious. She could not make Ulysses and Penelope meet happily while the suitors were still in his house; and even though he killed them, he could never condone Penelope's conduct—not as an epic hero. The writer of the Odyssey had evidently thought that she could find some way out of the difficulty, but when it came to the point she discovered that she must either make Ulysses kill his wife along with the suitors, or contend that from first to last she had been pure as new fallen snow. She chose the second alternative, as she would be sure to do, and brazened it out with her audience as best she could. At line 187, therefore, of Book xiii. or thereabouts, she broke up her 'Return' camp and started on a new campaign.
To bring the two poems together she added lines xi. 115-137, in which Teiresias tells Ulysses about the suitors and his further wanderings when he shall have killed them. I suppose Teiresias' prophecy to have originally ended where Circe's does when she repeats his warning about the cattle of the Sun-god verbatim (xii. 137-140) with the line