“Child of Laertes, wouldst thou fain depart
Hence to thine own dear fatherland? Farewell!
Yet, couldst thou read the sorrow and the smart,
With me in immortality to dwell
Thou wouldst rejoice, and love my mansion well.
Deeply and long thou yearnest for thy wife;
Yet her in beauty I perchance excel.
Beseems not one who hath but mortal life
With forms of deathless mould to challenge a vain strife.”
Ulysses’ reply is honest and manful:—
“All this I know and do myself avow.
Well may Penelope in form and brow
And stature seem inferior far to thee,
For she is mortal, and immortal thou.
Yet even thus ’tis very dear to me
My long-desired return and ancient home to see.
“But if some god amid the wine-dark flood
With doom pursue me, and my vessel mar,
Then will I bear it as a brave man should.
Not the first time I suffer. Wave and war
Deep in my life have graven many a scar.”
It cannot but be observed, however, that while Penelope’s whole thoughts and interests are concentrated upon her absent husband, the longing of Ulysses is rather after his fatherland than his wife. She is only one of the many component parts of the home-scene which is ever before the wanderer’s eyes; and not always the most important part, for his aged father and mother and his young son seem to be at least equal objects of anxiety. It may be urged that in this parting scene with Calypso he is purposely reticent in the matter of his affection for Penelope, not caring to draw down upon himself the proverbial wrath of “a woman scorned;” and that for a similar reason he suppresses his feelings, and quite ignores the existence of his wife, at the court of Alcinous, when that king offers him his daughter in marriage. But there is, to say the least, some lack of enthusiasm on the husband’s part throughout. Of the single-hearted devotion of woman to man we have striking instances both in Penelope and in the Andromache of the Iliad; but the devotion of man to woman had yet long to wait for its development in the age of chivalry.
He builds himself a boat on the island, by Calypso’s instructions, and when all is ready, she stores it plentifully with food and wine, and gives him directions for his voyage. He launches and sets sail; but the angry god of the sea (irate especially against Ulysses for having blinded his son, the giant Polyphemus, as we shall learn hereafter) stirs winds and waves against him, wrecks his bark, and leaves him clinging for life to a broken spar. One of the sea-nymphs, Ino, takes pity on him, and gives him a charmed scarf—so long as he wears it his life is safe. For two nights and days he is tossed helplessly on the ocean; on the third, with sore wounds and bruises, he makes good his landing on the rock-bound coast of a strange island. Utterly exhausted, he scrapes together a bed of leaves, and creeping into it, sinks into a profound sleep.
He awakes to find himself in a kind of faeryland. The island on which he has been cast is Scheria,[32] inhabited by the Phæacians, whose king and people are very far indeed from being of the ordinary type of mortal men. Whether the poet, in his description of these Phæacian islanders, was exercising his imagination only, or indulging his talent for satire, is a controverted question with Homeric critics. Those who would assign this poem of the Odyssey to a different author from the writer or writers of the Iliad, and to a much later date than that commonly given to Homer, have thought that in the good-humoured boastfulness of the Phæacian character, their love of pleasure and novelty, and their attachment to the sea, some Ionian poet was showing up, under fictitious names, the weaknesses of his own countrymen. Others take the Phæacians to be only another name for the Phœnicians, the sailors of all seas, who had probably in their character somewhat of the egotism and exaggeration which have been commonly reputed faults of men who have travelled far and seen much. Whatever may be the true interpretation of the story, or whether there be any interpretation at all, this curious episode in the adventures of Ulysses is unquestionably rather comic than serious. The names are all significant, somewhat after the fashion of those assumed by the Red men. The king (Alcinous) is “Strong-mind,” son of “The Swift Seaman,” and he has a brother called “Crusher of Men.” The nautical names of his courtiers—“Prow-man” and “Stern-man,” and the rest—are as palpably conventional as our own Tom Bowline and Captain Crosstree. The hero’s introduction to his new hosts presents, nevertheless, one of the most beautiful scenes in the poem. The patriarchal simplicity of the tale cannot fail to remind the reader, as Homer so often does, of the narratives of the earlier Scriptures.
The princess Nausicaa, daughter of the king of the Phæacians, has had a dream. The dream—which comes as naturally to princesses, no doubt, as to other young people—is of marriage; and in this case it could be no possible reproach to the dreamer, since the goddess of wisdom is represented as having herself suggested it. Nor is the dream of any bridegroom in particular, but simply of what seems to us the very prosaic fact that a wedding outfit, which must soon come to be thought of, required household stores of good linen; and that the family stock in the palace, from long disuse, stood much in need of washing. Nausicaa awakes in the morning, and begs of her father to lend her a chariot and a yoke of mules, that she and her maidens may go down to the shore, where the river joins the sea, to perform this domestic duty. The pastoral simplicity of the whole scene is charming. It has all the freshness of those earlier ages when the business of life was so leisurely and jovially conducted, that much of it wore the features of a holiday. The princess and her maidens plunge the linen in the stream, and stamp it clean with their pretty bare feet (a process which will remind an English reader of Arlette and Robert of Normandy, and which may be seen in operation still at many a burn-side in Scotland), and then go themselves to bathe. An outdoor banquet forms part of the day’s enjoyment; for the good queen, Nausicaa’s mother, has stored the wain with delicate viands and a goat-skin of sweet wine. When this is over, the girls begin to play at ball. Ulysses, be it remembered, is all this while lying fast asleep under his heap of leaves, and, as it happens, close by the spot where this merry party are disporting themselves. By chance Nausicaa, too eager in her game, throws the ball out into the sea; whereupon the whole chorus of handmaidens raise a cry of dismay, which at once awakens the sleeper. He is puzzled, when he comes to himself, to make out where he is; and still more confounded, when he peers out from his hiding-place, to find himself in the close neighbourhood of this bevy of joyous damsels, especially when he bethinks himself of the very primitive style of his present costume; for the scarf which the sea-nymph gave him us a talisman he had cast into the sea upon his landing, as she had especially charged him. But Ulysses is far too old a traveller to allow an over-punctilious modesty to stand in his way when he is in danger of starving. He has no idea of missing this opportunity of supplying his wants merely because he has lost his wardrobe. He extemporises some very slight covering out of an olive-bough, and, in this strange attire, makes his sudden appearance before the party. Nausicaa’s maidens all scream and take to flight—very excusably; but the king’s daughter, with a true nobility, stands firm. She sees only a shipwrecked man, and “to the pure all things are pure.” Ulysses is a courtier as well as a traveller, and knows much of “cities and men;” and it is not the flattery of a suppliant, but the quick discernment of a man of the world, which makes him at once assign her true rank to the fair stranger who stands before him. He remains at a respectful distance, while, in the language of Eastern compliment, he compares her to the young palm-tree for grace and beauty, and invokes the blessing of the gods upon her marriage-hour, if she will take pity on his miserable case. Nausicaa recalls her fugitive attendants, and rebukes them for their folly, reminding them that “the stranger and the poor are the messengers of the gods.” The shipwrecked hero is supplied at once with food and drink and raiment; and when he reappears, after having bathed and clothed himself, it is with a mien and stature more majestic than his wont, with the “hyacinthine locks” of immortal youth flowing round his stately shoulders—such grace does his guardian goddess bestow upon him, that he may find favour in the sight of the Phæacian princess. She looks upon him now with simple and undisguised admiration, confessing aside to her handmaidens that, when her time for marriage does come, she should wish for just such a husband as this godlike stranger. There is nothing unmaidenly in such language from the lips of Nausicaa. To remain unmarried was a reproach in her day, whatever it may be in ours, and a reproach not likely to fall upon a king’s daughter; so, looking upon the marriage state as inevitable, and at her age very near at hand, she thinks and speaks of it unreservedly to her companions. Our modern conventional silence on such topics arises in great degree from the fact that a perpetual maidenhood is the inevitable lot of far too many in our over-civilised society, and, being inevitable, is no reproach. It does not consort, therefore, with maidenly dignity to express any interest about marriage, for which an opportunity may never be offered.
But Nausicaa is at least as careful to observe the proprieties, according to her own view of them, as any modern young lady. She will promise the shipwrecked stranger a welcome at her father’s court; but he must by no means ride home in the wain with her, or even be seen entering the city in her company. So Ulysses runs by the side of her mules, and waits in a sacred grove near the city gates, until the princess and her party have re-entered the palace. When they have disappeared, he issues forth, and meets a girl carrying a pitcher. It is once more his guardian goddess in disguise. She veils him in a mist, so that he passes the streets unquestioned by the natives (who have no love for strangers), and stands at last in the presence of King Alcinous.
The king of the Phæacians, as well as his queen, boast to be descended from Neptune. His subjects therefore, are, as has been said, emphatically a seagoing people. Ulysses has already seen with admiration, as he passed,