But he had been charged by Circe not to allow the ghastly crew to slake their thirst, until he had evoked the shade of Tiresias, the blind prophet of Thebes, who retained his art and his honours even in these regions of the dead. So he kept them off with his sword,—not suffering even the phantom of his dead mother Anticleia, who came among the rest, to taste, until the great prophet appeared, leaning on his golden staff.
“To the bloody brink
He stooped, and with his shadowy lips made shrink
The sacrificial pool that darkling lay
Beneath him.”
From the lips of Tiresias Ulysses has learnt the future which awaits him. On the coast of Sicily he should find pasturing the herds and flocks of the Sun: if he and his comrades left them uninjured, they should soon see again their native Ithaca; if they laid sacrilegious hands on them, he alone should escape, and reach home after long suffering.
The shade of his mother has been sitting meanwhile in gloomy silence, eyeing the coveted blood. Not until she had drank of it might she open her lips to speak, or have power to recognise her son. To his eager inquiries as to her own fate and that of his father Laertes she made answer that she herself had died of grief, and that the old man was wearing out a joyless life in bitter anxiety.
“Therewith she ended, and a deep unrest
Urged me to clasp the spirit of the dead,
And fold a phantom to my yearning breast.
Thrice I essayed, with eager hands out-spread
Thrice like a shadow or a dream she fled,
And my hands closed on unsubstantial air.”
As they talked together, there swept forth out of the gloom a crowd of female shapes—the mothers of the mighty men of old. There came Tyro, beloved by the sea-god Neptune, from whom sprang Neleus, father of Nestor: next followed Antiope, who bore to Jupiter Amphion and Zethus, who built the seven-gated Thebes; Iphimedeia, mother of the giants Otus and Ephialtes, who strove to take heaven itself by storm; Alcmena, Leda, Ariadne, and a crowd of the heroines of Greek romance, who had found the loves of the gods more or less disastrous in their earthly lot, and who were reaping, in the gloomy immortality which the poet assigns them, such consolation as they might from knowing themselves the mothers of heroes.
Here Ulysses would have ended his tale, and for a while a charmed silence falls upon his Phæacian audience. But the king would hear more. Did he see, in the realms of the dead, no one of those renowned champions who had fought with him at Troy?
Yes—if his host cares to listen, Ulysses can tell him a sad tale of some of his old comrades. He saw the great Agamemnon there, and heard from his lips the treachery of the adulterous Clytemnestra. Antilochus and Patroclus, too, he had recognised, and Ajax; but the latter, retaining in the world below the animosities of earthly life, had stood far aloof, and sullenly refused to speak a word in answer to his successful rival. The only one who reveals anything of the secrets of his prison-house is Achilles. He asks of his adventurous visitor what has prompted him to risk this intrusion into the gloomy dwelling, where the dead live indeed, but without thought or purpose, mere shadows of what they were. And when Ulysses attempts to comfort him with the thought of the deathless glory which surrounds his name, the hopelessness of his answer sets forth, in the darkest colours, that gloomy view of human destiny which breaks out from time to time in the creed of the poet, and which belongs to the character of his favourite hero. Whether the Odyssey did or did not come from the same hand as the Iliad, at least Achilles is the same in both. In the former poem we find him indulging in all the mournful irony of the Hebrew Preacher, in his perplexed thought before he was led to “the conclusion of the whole matter”—complaining, like him, that “one event happeneth to all,” and that “the wise man dieth as the fool;” that he, the bravest and most beautiful of living heroes, would have to meet the same lot as his victim Lycaon; so here, in the Odyssey, he adopts the text that “a living dog is better than a dead lion:”—
“Rather would I, in the sun’s warmth divine,
Serve some poor churl who drags his days in grief,
Than the whole lordship of the dead were mine.”
Such was the immortality to which Paganism condemned even its best and bravest.