The Odyssey has been pronounced, by a high classical authority, to be emphatically a lady’s book. “The Iliad,” says the great Bentley, “Homer made for men, and the Odyssey for the other sex.” This opinion somewhat contradicts the criticism of an older and greater master—Aristotle—who defines the Odyssey as being “ethic and complex,” while the Iliad is “pathetic and simple.” Yet it was perhaps some such notion of the fitness of things which made Fénélon’s adaptation of Homer’s story, ‘The Adventures of Telemachus in search of Ulysses,’ so popular a French text-book in ladies’ schools a century ago. It is certain, also, that the allusions in our modern literature, and the subjects of modern pictures, are drawn from the Odyssey even more frequently than from the Iliad, although the former has never been so generally read in our schools and colleges. Circe and the Sirens, Scylla and Charybdis, have pointed more morals than any incidents in the Siege of Troy. Turner’s pictures of Nausicaa and her Maidens, the Gardens of Alcinous, the Cyclops addressed by Ulysses, the Song of the Sirens—all amongst our national heirlooms of art—assume a fair acquaintance with the later Homeric fable on the part of the public for whom they were painted. The secret of this greater popularity may lie in the fact, that while the adventures in the Odyssey have more of the romantic and the imaginative, the heroes are less heroic—have more of the common human type about them—than those of the Iliad. The colossal figure of Achilles in his wrath does not affect us so nearly as the wandering voyager with his strange adventures, his hairbreadth escapes, and his not over-scrupulous devices.
To our English sympathies the Odyssey appeals strongly for another reason—it is a tale of voyage and discovery. “It is,” as Dean Alford says, “of all poems a poem of the sea.” In the Iliad the poet never missed an opportunity of letting us know that—whoever he was and wherever he was born—he knew the sea well, and had a seaman’s tastes. But there his tale confined him chiefly to the plain before Troy, and such opportunities presented themselves but rarely. In the Odyssey we roam from sea to sea throughout the narrative, and the restless hero seems never so much at home as when he is on shipboard. It is not without reason that the most ancient works of art which bear the figure of Ulysses represent him not as a warrior but as a sailor.
The Tale of Troy, as has been already said, embraces in its whole range three decades of years. It is with the last ten that the Odyssey has to do; and as in the Iliad, though the siege itself had consumed ten years, it is with the last year only that the poet deals; so in this second great poem also, the main action occupies no more than the last six weeks of the third and concluding decade.
Between the Iliad and the Odyssey there is an interval of events, not related in either poem, but which a Greek audience of the poet’s own day would readily supply for themselves out of a store of current legend quite familiar to their minds, and embodied in more than one ancient poem now lost to us.[26] Troy, after the long siege, had fallen at last; but not to Achilles. For him the dying prophecy of Hector had been soon fulfilled, and an arrow from the bow of Paris had stretched him in death, like his noble enemy, “before the Scæan gates.” It was his son Neoptolemus, “the red-haired,” to whom the oracles pointed as the destined captor of the city. Ulysses went back to Greece to fetch him, and even handed over to the young hero, on his arrival, the armour of his father—his own much-valued prize. In that armour Neoptolemus led the Greeks to the storm and sack of the city by night, while the Trojans were either asleep or holding deep carousal.
It has been conjectured by some that, under the name of Ulysses, the poet has but described, with more or less of that licence to which he had a double claim as poet and as traveller, his own wanderings and adventures by land and sea. It has been argued, in a treatise of some ingenuity,[27] that the poet, whoever he was, was himself a native of the island in which he places the home of his hero. There is certainly one passage which reads very much like the circumstantial and loving description which a poet would give of his sea-girt birthplace, with every nook of which he would have been familiar from his childhood. It occurs in the scene where Ulysses is at last landed on the coast of Ithaca, which he is slow to recognise until his divine guide points out to him the different localities within sight:—
“This is the port of sea-king Phorcys old,
And this the olive at the haven’s brow.
Yonder the deep dark lovely cave behold,
Shrine of the Naïad-nymphs! These shades enfold
The stone-roofed bower, wherein thou oft hast stood,
While to the Nymphs thy frequent vows uprolled,
Steam of choice hecatombs and offerings good.
Neritus hill stands there, high-crowned with waving wood.”[28]
As conjecture only all such theories must remain; but it may at least be safely believed that the author had himself visited some of the strange lands which he describes, with whatever amount of fabulous ornament he may have enriched his tale, and it has a certain interest for the reader to entertain the possibility of a personal narrative thus underlying the romance.
THE ODYSSEY.
CHAPTER I.
PENELOPE AND HER SUITORS.
The surviving heroes of the great expedition against Troy, after long wanderings, have at length reached their homes, with one exception—Ulysses has not been heard of in his island-kingdom of Ithaca. Ten years have nearly passed since the fall of Troy, and still his wife Penelope, and his aged father Laertes, and his young son Telemachus, now growing up to manhood, keep weary watch for the hero’s return. There is, moreover, a twofold trouble in the house. It is not only anxiety for an absent husband, but the perplexity caused by a crowd of importunate suitors for her hand, which vexes the soul of Penelope from day to day. The young nobles of Ithaca and its dependent islands have for many years flocked to the palace to seek the hand of her whom they consider as virtually a widowed queen. It is to no purpose that she professes her own firm belief that Ulysses still survives: she has no kind of proof of his existence, and the suitors demand of her that—in accordance with what would appear the custom of the country—she shall make choice of some one among them to take the lost hero’s place, and enjoy all the rights of sovereignty. How far the lovers were attracted by the wealth and position of the lady, and how far by the force of her personal charms, is a point somewhat hard to decide. The Roman poet Horace imputes to them the less romantic motive. They were, he says, of that class of prudent wooers—