But if some small instalment of justice was thus done by Horace to the Homeric Ulysses, Virgil withdrew the boon, and was careful to reproduce, without mitigation or relief, the worst features of the worst form of the character. With him it is Ulysses who is chosen to play the slayer of Palamedes and the betrayer of Sinon[1068], and to lead the party which, conducted by Helen, was to massacre Deiphobus in his chamber[1069]. On account of his fierce cruelty, even the ‘ground is cursed for his sake;’ poor Ithaca is loaded with imprecations by Æneas as he passes near it. Once he is called infelix, the greatest compliment that he anywhere receives; but his name in few cases escapes the affix of some abusive epithet, drawn alike from inhumanity or from cunning, it seems to matter little from which[1070].
Of the Achilles of Homer.
The character of Achilles was more fortunate, in the handling it experienced from the Greek drama, than that of Ulysses. In the Iphigenia of Euripides, the hero of the Iliad appears as a faithful lover, and as a gallant and chivalrous warrior. At the same time, it has lost altogether the breadth of touch and largeness of scope, with which it is drawn in Homer. We miss entirely that unfathomable power of intellect, of passion, and also of bodily force, all combined in one figure, which carry the Achilles of Homer beyond every other human example in the quality of sheer grandeur, and make it touch the limits of the superhuman. There is nothing said or done by the Achilles of Euripides, nothing reported of him or assigned to him, no impression borne into a reader’s mind concerning him, which would not have been perfectly suitable to other warriors; for example, to the Diomed of Homer. He falls back into a class, and becomes a simple member of it, instead of being a creation paramount and alone; alone, like Olympus amidst the mountains of Greece; alone for ever in his sublimity, amidst the famous memories of other heroes, no less truly than he was alone in his solitary encampment during the continuance of the Wrath.
With Pindar Achilles appears in a different dress. He is here conceived without mind, as a youth marvellous in strength, hardihood, and swiftness of foot, growing up into a mighty warrior[1071]. The Achilles of Pindar is but as a pebble broken away from the mountain-mass of Homer.
Catullus, in his beautiful poem on the Nuptials of Peleus and Thetis, had a rare opportunity of setting forth the glories of Achilles. And he is in fact made the main subject of the nuptial song, properly so called; yet nothing of him is really celebrated by the poet[1072], except his valour and his swiftness; all the rest is simple amplification and embellishment. It seems by this time to have been wholly forgotten, that the Homeric Achilles had a soul.
The discernment of Horace did not here enable him, as it had enabled him before, to escape from the popular delusions,
Scriptor honoratum si forte reponis Achillem,
Impiger, iracundus, inexorabilis, acer,
Jura neget sibi nata, nihil non arroget armis[1073].