Et pœnas Danaûm et deserti conjugis iras
Præmetuens, Trojæ et patriæ communis Erynnis,
Abdiderat sese, atque aris invisa sedebat.
Æn. ii. 571-4.
And then, in language, the glowing magnificence of which serves to hide the very paltry character of the sentiment, Æneas proceeds to announce that he was about to slay the woman who, according to himself, had lived for ten years as a friend among his friends; when, at the right moment, his mother Venus appeared, and reminded him that on the whole he might do rather better to think about saving, if possible, his own father, wife, and boy.
Thus, in the Helen of Virgil, we have splendid personal beauty combined with an accumulation of the most profoundly odious moral features. She is lost in sensuality, a traitress alike to Greece and to Troy, willing to make miserable victims of others in the hope of purchasing her own immunity: all her deep remorse and sorrow, all her tenderness and modesty, are blotted out from her character, and the void places in the picture are filled by the detestation, with which both Greeks and Trojans regarded, as indeed they might well regard, such a monster. But let us pass on.
Achilles and Ulysses.
Among the many proofs of the vast scope of Homer’s mind, one of the most remarkable is to be found in the twin characters of his prime heroes or protagonists. It seems as if he had taken a survey of human nature in its utmost breadth and depth, and, finding that he had not the means to establish a perfect equilibrium between its highest powers when all in full development, had determined to represent them, with reference to the two great functions of intellect and passion, in two immortal figures. In each of the two, each of these elements has been represented with an extraordinary power, yet so, that the sovereignty should rest in Achilles as to the one, and in Ulysses as to the other. But the depth of emotion in Ulysses is greater than in any other male character of the poems, except Achilles; only it is withdrawn from view because so much under the mastery of his wisdom. And in like manner on the other hand, a far greater power, directed to the purpose of self-command and self-repression, is shown us in Achilles than in any other character except Ulysses; but this also is under partial eclipse, because the injustice, ingratitude, scorn, and meanness which Agamemnon concentrates in the robbery of a beloved object from him, appeal so irresistibly to the passionate side of his nature as to bring it out in overpowering proportions.
These being the leading ideas of the two characters, Homer has equipped each of them with the apparatus of a full-furnished man; and in apportioning to each his share of other qualities and accomplishments, he has made such a distribution as on the whole would give the best balance and the most satisfactory general result. Thus it is plain that the character of Achilles, covering as it did volcanic passions, was in danger of degenerating into phrensy. Homer has, therefore, assigned to him a peculiar refinement. His leisure is beguiled with song, consecrated to the achievements of ancient heroes; he has the finest tact, and is by far the greatest gentleman, of all the warriors of the poems; even personal ornaments to set off his transcendent beauty[1058] are not beneath his notice, a trait which would have been misplaced in Ulysses, ludicrous in Ajax, and which is in Paris contemptible, but which has its advantage in Achilles, because it is a simple accessory subordinate to greater matters, and because, so far as it goes, it is a weight placed in the scale opposite to that which threatens to preponderate, and to mar by the strong vein of violence the general harmony of the character.
In the same way, as Ulysses is distinguished by a never-failing presence of mind, forethought, and mastery over emotion, so the danger for him lies on the side of an undue predominance of the calculating element, which threatens to reduce him from the heroic standard to the low level of a vulgar utilitarianism. Here, as before, Homer has been ready with his remedies. He exhibits to us this great prince and statesman as bearing also a character of patriarchal simplicity, and makes him, the profoundest and most astute man of the world, represent the very childhood of the human race in his readiness to ply the sickle or to drive the plough[1059]. Above all—and this is the prime safeguard of his character—he makes Ulysses a model for Greece of steady unvarying brightness in the domestic affections. The emotion of Hector in the Sixth Iliad, and of Priam in the Twenty-fourth, are not capable of comparison with those of Ulysses, because theirs constitute the central points of the characters, and likewise are the products of great junctures of danger and affliction respectively, while his exhibit and indeed compose a settled and standing bent of his soul. He alone, of all the chieftains who were beneath the walls of Troy, is full of the near recollection of his son, his Telemachus[1060]; his desire and ambition never pass indeed beyond barren Ithaca, and his daily thought through long years of wandering and detention is to return there[1061], to see the very smoke curling upward from its chimneys, so that the charms of a goddess are a pain to him, because they keep him from Penelope[1062].