αὐτόματος δέ οἱ ἦλθε βοὴν ἀγαθὸς Μενέλαος,
on remembering this I observed that it would be less trouble to make Menelaus come home on the very day of Ægisthus' funeral feast than to alter αὐτόματος in any other way which would leave the rest of the line available. I should be ashamed of the writer of the Odyssey for having done this, unless I believed it to be merely due to unconscious cerebration. That the Odyssean and Iliadic lines are taken the one from the other will approve itself to the instincts of any one who is accustomed to deal with literary questions at all, and it is not conceivable that Menelaus should, in the Iliad, have been made to come uninvited because in the Odyssey he happened to come back on the very day when Orestes was holding Ægisthus' funeral feast; the Iliadic context explains why Menelaus came uninvited—it was because he knew that Agamemnon was too busy to invite him. I infer, therefore, that the writer of the Odyssey again shows herself familiar with a part of Il. II.
I can see no sufficient reason for even questioning that the catalogues of the Achæan and Trojan forces in the second Book of the Iliad were part of the Iliad as it left Homer's hands. They are wanted so as to explain who the people are of whom we are to hear in the body of the poem; their position, is perfectly natural; the Achæan catalogue is prepared in Nestor's speech (II. 360-368); Homer almost tells us that he has had assistance in compiling it, for he invokes the Muse, as he does more than once in later Books, and declares that he knows nothing of his own knowledge, but depends entirely upon what has been told him[1]; the lines quoted or alluded to in the Odyssey are far too marked to allow of our doubting that the writer knew both catalogues familiarly; I cannot within my limits give them, but would call the reader's attention to Il. II. 488, cf. Od. iv. 240; to the considering Sparta and Lacedæmon as two places (Il. II. 580, 581) which the writer of the Odyssey does (iv. 10), though she has abundantly shown that she knew them to be but one; to Il. II. 600, cf. Od. iii. 386; to the end of line 614, θαλάσσια ἔργα μεμήλειν, cf. Od. v. 67, θαλάσσια ἔργα μέμηλειν; to 670, cf. Od. ii. 12; to 673, 674, cf. Od. xi. 469, 470; to Il. II. 706, αὐτοκασγνητος μεγαθύμον Πρωτεσιλάου, which must surely be parent of the line αὐτοκασιγνήτου ὀλοόφρονος Αἰήταο, Od. X. 137; to Il. II. 707, ὁπλότερος γένεῇ ὁ δ᾿ ἅμα πρότερος καὶ ἀρείων, cf. Od. xix. 184, where the same line occurs; to Il. II. 721, ἀλλ᾿ ὁ μὲν ἐν νήσῳ κεῖτο κρατέρ᾿ ἄλγεα πάσχων, cf. Od. v. 13, where the same line occurs, but with κεῖται instead of κεȋτο to suit the context; cf. also Od. v. 395, where we find πατρός, ὃς ἐν νούσῳ κῆται, κρατέρ᾿ ἄλγεα πάσχων, a line which shows how completely the writer of the Odyssey was saturated with the Iliad; to Il. II. 755, Στυγὸς ὕδατός ἐστιν ἀπορρώξ, cf. Od. x. 514, where the same words end the line; to Il. II. 774, δίσκοισιν τέρποντο καὶ αἰγανέῃσιν ἱέντες, cf. Od. iv. 626, and xvii. 168, where the same line occurs; to Il. II. 776, where the horses of the Myrmidons are spoken of as λωτὸν ἐρεπτόμενοι, cf. Od. ix. 97, where the same words are used for Ulysses' men when with the Lotus-eaters; to Il. II. 873, νήπιος, οὐδέ τί οἱ τό γ' ἐπήρκεσε λυγρὸν ὄλεθρον, cf. Od. iv. 292, ἄλγιον, οὐ γάρ οἵ τι τά γ' ἤρκεσε λυγρὸν ὄλεθρον.
None of the passages above quoted or referred to are to be found anywhere else in the Iliad, so that if from the Iliad at all, they are from the catalogues. But having already shown, as I believe, that the writer of the Odyssey knew lines 76, 77, 78, 184, 216, 217, and 408 of Book II., and accepting the rest of the Book as written by Homer, with or without assistance, I shall not argue further in support of my contention that the whole of Book II. was known to, and occasionally borrowed from, by the writer of the Odyssey.
Perhaps the prettiest example of unconscious cerebration in the Odyssey is to be found in the opening line of Od. iii, which runs ἠέλιος δ' ἀνόρουσε λιπὼν περικαλλέα λίμνην, which is taken from Il. v. 20, Ιδαῖος δ' ἀνόρουσε λιπὼν περικαλλέα δίφρον· One is at a loss to conceive how a writer so apparently facile should drift thus on to an Iliadic line of such different signification except as the result of saturation. It is inconceivable that she should have cast about for a line to say that the sun was rising, and thought that Idæus jumping off his chariot would do. She again has this line in her mind when in Book xxii. 95 she writes Τηλέμαχος δ' ἀπόρουσε λιπὼν δολιχόσκιον ἔγχος.
The same kind of unconscious celebration evidenced by the lines last referred to leads her sometimes to repeat lines of her own in a strange way, without probably being at all aware of it. As for example:—
βασιλῆες.....εἰσὶ καὶ ἄλλοι
πολλοὶ ἐν ἀμφιάλῳ Ἰθάκῃ νέοι ἠδὲ παλαιοί,
(i. 394, 395).
This passage in the following Book becomes:—
εἰσὶ δὲ νῆες
πολλαὶ ἐν ἀμφιάλῳ Ἰθάκῃ νέαι ἠδὲ παλαιαί·
(ii. 292, 293).