I will now touch briefly on the principal passages, over and above large general considerations and the details to which I have already called attention, which seem to me to suggest a woman's hand rather than a man's. I shall omit countless more doubtful instances, many of which the reader will have noted, or easily discover.
At the very outset of the poem (i. 13) the writer represents Ulysses as longing to get back to his wife. He had stayed a whole year with Circe, and but for the remonstrances of his men would have stayed no one can say how much longer. He had stayed seven years with Calypso, and seems to have remained on excellent terms with her until the exigencies of the poem made it necessary to send him back to Ithaca. Surely a man of his sagacity might have subtracted Calypso's axe and auger, cut down the trees at the far end of the island, and made his raft years ago without her finding out anything about it; for she can hardly have wanted either axe or auger very often.
As for the provisions, if Ulysses was not capable of accumulating a private hoard, his cunning has been much overrated. If he had seriously wanted to get back to Penelope his little cunning that is put in evidence would have been exercised in this direction. I am convinced, therefore, that though the authoress chooses to pretend that Ulysses was dying to get back to Penelope, she knew perfectly well that he was in no great hurry to do so; she was not, however, going to admit anything so derogatory to the sanctity of married life, or at any rate to the power which a wife has over her husband.
An older woman might have been at less pains to conceal the fact that Penelope's hold on Ulysses was in reality very slight, but the writer of the Odyssey is nothing if she is not young, self-willed, and unmarried. No matron would set herself down to write the Odyssey at all. She would have too much sense, and too little daring. She would have gained too much—and lost too greatly in the gaining. The poem is such a tour de force as none but a high-spirited, headstrong girl who had been accustomed to have her own way would have attempted, much less carried to such a brilliantly successful conclusion; I cannot, therefore, conceive the writer as older than the original of the frontispiece at the beginning of this book—if indeed she was so old.
The very beautiful lines in which the old nurse Euryclea lights Telemachus to bed, and folds up his clothes for him (i. 428-442), suggest a woman's hand rather than a man's. So also does the emphasising Laertes' respect for his wife's feelings (i. 430-433). This jealousy for a wife's rights suggests a writer who was bent on purifying her age, and upholding a higher ideal as regards the relations between husband and wife than a man in the Homeric age would be likely to insist on.