We know, moreover, what Minerva thought of Penelope from another source. Minerva appears to Telemachus in a dream when he is staying with King Menelaus, and gives him to understand that his mother is on the point of marrying Eurymachus, one of the suitors (xv. 1-42). This was (so at least we are intended to suppose) a wanton falsehood on Minerva's part. Nevertheless if the matter had ended there, nothing probably would have pleased Telemachus better; for in spite of his calling the marriage "hateful," there can be no question that he would have been only too thankful to get his mother out of the house, if she would go of her own free will. Penelope says he was continually urging her to marry and go, on the score of the expense he was being put to by the protracted attentions of the suitors (xix. 530-534). Penelope indeed seems to have been such an adept at lying that it is very difficult to know when to believe her, but Telemachus says enough elsewhere to leave no doubt that, in spite of a certain decent show of reluctance, he would have been glad that his mother should go.
Unfortunately Minerva's story does not end with saying that Penelope means marrying Eurymachus; she adds that in this case she will probably steal some of Telemachus's property. She says to him:—
"You know what women are; they always want to do the best they can for the man who is married to them at the moment. They forget all about their first husband and the children that they have had by him. Go home, therefore, at once, and put everything in charge of the most respectable housekeeper you can find, until it shall please heaven to send you a wife of your own" (xv. 20-26).
This passage not only betrays a want of confidence in Penelope which is out of keeping with her ostensible antecedents, but it goes far to show that Minerva had read the Cypria, in which poem (now lost) we are told that Helen did exactly what is here represented as likely to be done by Penelope; but leaving this, surely if Penelope's antecedents had been such as the writer wishes us to accept, Telemachus would have made a very different answer to the one he actually made. He would have said, "My dear Minerva, what a word has escaped the boundary of your teeth. My mother steal my property and go off with an unprincipled scoundrel like Eurymachus? No one can know better than yourself that she is the last woman in the world to be capable of such conduct." And then he would have awoke as from a hideous dream.
What, however, happens in reality? Telemachus does indeed wake up (xv. 43) in great distress, but it is about his property, not about his mother. "Who steals my mother steals trash, but whoso filches from me my family heirlooms &c." He kicks poor Pisistratus to wake him, and says they must harness the horses and be off home at once. Pisistratus rejoins that it is pitch dark; come what may they must really wait till morning. Besides, they ought to say good bye to Menelaus, and get a present out of him; he will be sure to give them one, if Telemachus will not be in such an unreasonable hurry. Can anything show more clearly what was the inner mind both of Minerva and Telemachus about Penelope—and also what kind of ideas the audience had formed about her?
How differently, again, do Minerva and Telemachus regard the stealing. Telemachus feels it acutely and at once. Minerva takes it as a matter of course—but then the property was not hers. The authoress of the Odyssey is never severe about theft. Minerva evidently thinks it not nice of Penelope to want to marry again before it is known for certain that Ulysses is dead, but she explains that Eurymachus has been exceeding all the other suitors in the magnificence of his presents, and has lately increased them (xv. 17, 18). After all, Penelope had a right to please herself, and as long as she was going to be bonâ fide married, she might steal as much as she could, without loss of dignity or character. The writer put this view into Minerva's mouth as a reasonable one for a woman to take. So perhaps it was, but it is not a man's view.
Here I will close my case—as much of it, that is to say, as I have been able to give in the space at my disposal—for the view that the writer of the Odyssey was whitewashing Penelope. As, however, we happen to be at Lacedæmon let me say what more occurs to me in connection with the visit of Telemachus to King Menelaus that bears on the question whether the writer is a man or a woman.
When Telemachus and Nestor's son Pisistratus reached Lacedæmon at the beginning of Book iv., Menelaus was celebrating the double marriage of his son Megapenthes and of his daughter Hermione. The writer says:—
....they reached the low lying city of Lacedæmon, where they drove straight to the abode of Menelaus, [and found him in his own house feasting with his many clansmen in honour of the wedding of his son, and also that of his daughter whom he was giving in marriage to the son of that valiant warrior Achilles. He had given his consent and promised her to him while he was still at Troy, and now the gods were bringing the marriage about, so he was sending her with chariots and horses to the city of the Myrmidons over whom Achilles' son was reigning. For his only son he had found a bride from Sparta, the daughter of Alector. This son, Megapenthes, was born to him of a bondwoman, for heaven had vouchsafed Helen no more children after she had borne Hermione who was fair as golden Venus herself (iv. 1-14).]
I have enclosed part of the above quotation in brackets not because I have any doubt that the whole of it is by the same hand as the rest of the poem, but because I am convinced that the bracketed lines were interpolated by the writer after her work had been completed, or at any rate after Books iv. and xv. had assumed their present shape. The reason for the interpolation I take to be that she could not forgive herself for having said nothing about Hermione, whose non-appearance in Book xv. and in the rest of Book iv. she now attempts to explain by interpolating the passage above quoted, and thus making her quit Lacedæmon for good and all at the very beginning of this last named book. But whatever the cause of the interpolation may have been, an interpolation it certainly is, for nothing can be plainer from the rest of Book iv. than that there were no festivities going on, and that the only guests were uninvited ones—to wit Telemachus and Pisistratus.