“Abhorred Styx, the flood of deadly hate;
Sad Acheron, of sorrow, black and deep;
Cocytus named of lamentation loud
Heard on the rueful stream; fierce Phlegethon
Whose waves of torrent fire inflame with rage.”
These pictures are not quite in character with the Hellenic thought about the future state. But it is certain that the more gloomy images of death are preserved in connection with the rivers of Hades, with Hades itself, and all that it contains. So it is with the northern Styx, Gjöll,[16] as it is called in the Eddas. This, too, is an underground stream lying, like the Indian, on the road to the gates of death.
Thus a separation arises between the sea and the river myths. If we wish for something more cheerful than the pictures of Styx and Gjöll and Vaiterani, we must look, for the tales of an earthly paradise which sprang up when men had lost their first terror of the sea, but had not lost the beliefs to which their earliest thoughts about that sea gave birth.
Such beliefs are those which lie enshrined in the Odyssey. This poem is full of images of death, but they are not self-conscious ones, only mythical expressions first applied to the passage of the soul from life, and then made literal and physical by their transference to the unexplored western sea. What the Caspian may have been to the ancient Aryan, such was the Mediterranean to the Greek. The Ægean was his home-like water; there he might pass from island to island without losing sight of land; and he soon learnt to trust himself to its care, and to know its currents and its winds. Long before he had navigated beyond Cape Malea, all the coasts of the Ægean had become parts of his familiar world: outside this was the region of the unknown. The Iliad tells us what the early Greeks thought about the first. Myths may have mingled with the legend of the fall of Troy, but the story in Homer is essentially realistic, rationalistic even. The very powers of the immortals and their doings seem petty and limited. The Odyssey, on the other hand, is the product of the Greek imagination working in fields unturned by experience, free from any guiding impulse of knowledge; and here step in those monstrous shapes and strange adventures which differ altogether from the probable events of the Iliad. We feel at once that we are in a new world, a world not so much of supernatural beings as of magic; lands of glamour and illusion, most like the giant-land of the Norsemen; for we are getting towards the twilight regions of the earth and the borders of Hades.
Some writers have attempted to explain the Odyssey as nothing more than a myth of the sun’s course through heaven. But surely there is too much solidity about the story, too thorough an atmosphere of belief around it, to suit a tale relating such airy unrealities as those. The Greeks who first sung the ballads must have been thinking of a real journey upon this solid earth. But it is easy to see how many images and notions which had first been applied only to the sun-god would creep into such a history as that of Odysseus. Undoubtedly the sun-myth had first pointed out the home of the dead as lying in the west; and nothing is more natural than that a people whose thoughts and hopes carried them in the track of the wandering sun should, when they came to construct an epos of travel, make the imaginary journey lie the same way. They would interweave in the story such truths—or such sailors’ yarns—as Phœnician mariners or adventurous Greeks brought home from the distant waters, with many images which had been first made of the sun’s heavenly voyage, and others which had been first applied to death. Their geography would, indeed, be mythical; for they could have no accurate notions of the lands which they spoke of; but it would not be without a kernel of reality. Justin and Augustine may look upon the garden of the Hesperides or the garden of Alcinoüs as a reminiscence of Paradise; Strabo may assign them an exact position on the coast of Libya; and both may be right. The myth of the two gardens—the Hebrew and the Greek paradises—sprang up in obedience to an identical faculty of belief, and therefore the two stories are in origin the same. But each myth supported itself upon so much of reality as it could lay hold of: and it is likely enough that the famous golden apples which Hercules was sent to fetch owed their origin to the first oranges brought by Phœnician merchantmen to Greece.
Besides some such slender thread of reality, the adventures of Odysseus are built upon what men’s imagination told them might lie in the western seas. Now in reality there was only one thing which at the bottom of their hearts they believed actually did lie there—namely, death; and beyond that, the home of the departed. Therefore their stories of adventure in the Mediterranean do all, upon a minute inspection, resolve themselves into a variety of mythical ways of describing death; and upon this as a dark background the varied colours of the tale are painted. It need take away no jot of our pleasure in the brilliant picture to acknowledge this. Nay, it gather adds to it, for behind the graceful air of the poem, sung as a poem only, we hear a deeper note telling of the passionate, obstinate questionings of futurity which belonged not more to Greece three thousand years ago than they now belong to us.
Any one acquainted with the genesis of myth would at once be disposed to see in the Odyssey the combination of two different legends; for one series of adventures comes as a tale told during the course of the second. We first see our hero on the island of Calypso, the sea-nymph; and when Hermes has brought from the gods the command for his release, he is carried thence by storms to the land of the Phæaceans. There Nausicaa finds him and brings him to her father Alcinoüs, by whom he is hospitably entertained, and at last sent back to Ithaca, his home. This forms one complete legend, the simplest and probably the first, because into it is woven the account of Odysseus’ earlier adventures. In the halls of Alcinoüs the wanderer tells what happened to him before he reached the cave of Calypso, and in this narrative we follow him to the island of the Lotus-eaters, to the island of the Cyclops, thence to the house of Circe, and from there to the very borders of hell itself. And we guess that we have here got hold of a later amplified legend built up out of the earlier myth. We find just such changes as this in Norse mythology; a story told in a few lines by the elder Edda, is expanded into an elaborate history in the younger. Looking again more closely at the Odyssey, we discover that many circumstances in the expanded tale bear close resemblance to one or other of the adventures in the shorter category. Take, for instance, the life with Calypso and with Circe. Both Calypso and Circe are nymphs, enchantresses; each lives alone upon her island: with each Odysseus passes a term of years, living with her as her husband, longing all the while to return to his own wife and his own home, and yet unable to do so: from each Hermes is the deliverer. What if Calypso and Circe both repeat in reality the same myth; and what if Odysseus’ other great adventure, the voyage to the Phæaceans, have likewise its counterpart in the expanded story? The question of the real identity or difference of the two stories can only be decided when we have seen how much significance there is in the points of their apparent likeness.
Who is Calypso? Her name bespeaks her nature not ambiguously. It is from καλύπτειν, to cover or conceal. She is the shrouder, or the shrouded place, answering exactly therefore to Hel, which, as has before been said, comes from the verb helja, “to hide.” How, then, can Calypso be anything else than death, as she dwells there in her cave, by the shores of the sea? How can Odysseus’ life with her, his sleep in her cave, be anything else than an image of dying? The gods have determined that the hero shall not remain in this mortal sleep for ever; so Hermes is sent to command Calypso to let Odysseus go. Hermes is the god whose mission it is to lead souls down to the realm of Hades—the psychopomp, as in this office he is called. But sometimes he may come upon an opposite message, to restore men to life; the staff which closes the eyes of men may likewise open them when asleep. On such a task he comes—
“Wind-like beneath, the immortal golden sandals
Bare up his flight o’er the limitless earth and the sea;
And in his hand that magic wand he carried,
Wherewith the eyes of men he closes in slumber,
Or wakens from sleeping.”
He comes like the breath of morning awakening the world, to rouse our hero from the embrace of death; and the whole scene is beautifully attuned to an image of returning life. Therefore the interference of Hermes between Odysseus and Calypso is full of significance. We accordingly meet the same episode in the Circe tale. That this last is a later widening of the first story appears from many things; chiefly in this, that there is more moral in the history; for the truest myth is content to follow the actual workings of nature, without attempting to adorn a story with extraneous incident, or to convert its simplicity into the complexities of allegory. That turning the companions into swine was a punishment for luxury—that points the moral; the original Circe, we may be sure, only touched her lovers with her sleepy magic rod. It was the same wand with the “slepy yerde”[17] of Hermes, and she used it not wantonly but only because all whom she embraces must fall into the unwakeful slumber. If Circe’s name does not reveal her nature so nakedly as Calypso’s does, this is but consistent with the fact of her later creation. Nevertheless, we easily recognise by it death in one of its many types—a ravenous animal or bird, a hawk or wolf.[18]