and on the other side the “Rock of Vile Reproach,” whose fatal magnetic power draws in all who try to shun the whirlpool opposite, are the Scylla and Charybdis of Homer.
At length the voyagers reached the shore where the oxen of the Sun were pastured. In vain did Ulysses, remembering the prophecy of Tiresias, bid them steer on and leave the land unvisited. Eurylochus, his lieutenant, broke out at last into something like mutiny. He had some show of reason, when he complained of his chief, almost in the words of Sir Dinadan to Sir Tristram in the ‘Morte d’Arthur,’ that he was tired of such mad company, and would no longer follow a man to whose iron frame the toils and dangers which wore out ordinary mortals were a mere disport. Seeing that the rest backed Eurylochus in his proposal to land and rest, Ulysses was fain to give way, after exacting a vow that at least none of them should lay sacrilegious hands upon the sacred herds, since they had store of corn and wine, the parting gifts of Circe, on board their vessel. But stress of weather detained them in the anchorage a whole month, until corn and wine were exhausted, and they had to snare birds and catch fish—a kind of food which a Greek seaman especially despised—to keep them from starving. Then at last, while their chief had withdrawn to a quiet spot, and fallen asleep wearied with long prayer, Eurylochus persuaded the rest to break their vow, and slay the choicest of the oxen. Terrible prodigies followed the unhallowed meal; the skins of the slain animals moved and crawled after their slayers, and the meat, while roasting on the spits, uttered fearful cries and groans. One of the old allegorical interpreters has drawn from this incident a moral which, however fanciful, is not without a certain beauty and appositeness of illustration—the sins of the wicked, he says, dog their steps, and cry aloud against them. When next they put to sea, Jupiter raised winds and waves to punish them; for the Sun had threatened that, if such insult went unavenged, he would light the heavens no more, but go down and shine in Hades. Their ship was riven by a thunderbolt, and Ulysses alone, sole survivor of all his crew, after once more narrowly escaping the whirlpool of Charybdis, after floating nine days upon the broken mast, was cast ashore on the island of Calypso, and there detained until his release by the intercession of Minerva, as has been told, which had ended in this second shipwreck on the coast of his present entertainers.
CHAPTER VI.
ULYSSES’ RETURN TO ITHACA.
The hero, at his departure, is loaded with rich presents of honour from his Phæacian hosts. The twelve princes of the kingdom each contribute their offering—gold and changes of raiment; the king adds a gold drinking-cup of his own, and Queen Arete a mantle and tunic. The careful queen also supplies him with a magnificent chest, in which she packs his treasures with her own royal hands; and Ulysses secures the whole with a “seaman’s knot,” whose complications will defy the uninitiated—a secret which he has learnt from Circe, and which he seems to have handed down to modern sailors. Thus equipped, he is sent on board one of the magic galleys, to be conveyed home to his native Ithaca. They embark in the evening, and early the next morning the crew—apparently in order to give the adventure the half-ludicrous turn which seems inseparable from the Phæacians—land their passenger, still sound asleep, and leave him on shore under an olive-tree, with his store of presents heaped beside him. When he awakes, he fails to recognise his native island, for Minerva has spread a mist over it. The goddess herself presently accosts him, in the form of a shepherd, and listens patiently to a story which the hero invents, with his usual readiness, to account for his presence on the island. Then she discovers herself, with a somewhat ironical compliment on the inveterate craftiness which has led him to attempt to impose on the wisest of the immortals. She tells him news of his wife and of his son, and promises him her help against the accursed suitors. She lays her golden wand upon him, and lo! the majestic presence which had touched the maiden fancy of Nausicaa, and won him favour in the eyes of the Phæacian court (to say nothing of Circe and Calypso) has at once given place to the decrepitude of age. The ruddy cheeks grow wrinkled, the bright eyes are dimmed, the flowing locks turned grey, and Ulysses is, to all appearance, an aged beggar, clad in squalid rags. Thus disguised, so that none shall recognise him till his hour comes, he seeks shelter, by direction of the goddess, with his own swineherd Eumæus.
Eumæus is one of the most characteristic personages in the poem, and has given the most trouble to the poet’s various critics. He occupies a sort of forester’s lodge in the woods, where the vast herds of swine belonging to the absent king are fed by day, and carefully lodged at night. Though he is but a keeper of swine, Homer applies to him continually the epithets “godlike,” and “chief of men,” which he commonly uses only of territorial lords such as Ulysses and Menelaus. He not only has subordinates in his employ, but an attendant slave, whom he has purchased with his own money; and he so far exercises an independent right of property in the animals which are under his care as to kill and dress them—two at a time, such is the lavish hospitality of the age—to feast the stranger-guest who has now come to him. It may be straining a point to see in him, as one of the most genial of Homeric critics does, “a genuine country gentleman of the age of Homer;” but his position, so far as it is possible to compare it with anything at all in modern social life, appears something like that of the agricultural steward of a large landed proprietor, with whom his relations, though strictly subordinate, are of a highly confidential and friendly character. The charge of the swine would be a much more important office in an age when, as is plain from many passages both in the Iliad and the Odyssey, the flesh of those animals held a place of honour at the banquets of chiefs and kings: and as we find that even the sons of a royal household did not think the keeping of sheep beneath their dignity, so the care of other animals would by no means imply a menial position. Eumæus, indeed, turns out to be himself of princely birth—stolen in his childhood by a treacherous nurse from the island where his father was king, sold by Phœnician merchants to Laertes in Ithaca, and brought up in his household almost as a son, and regarding the lost Ulysses “as an elder brother.” Very loyal is he to the house of his benefactors; prefacing his meal by a prayer that his lord may yet return in safety, and grieving specially that the lady Penelope, in her present troubles, has seldom the opportunity to see or speak with him in the kindly intercourse of old. The cordial and simple relations between master and servant—even though the servant was commonly nothing more or less than a purchased slave—are a striking feature, very pleasant to dwell upon, in these Homeric poems. They remind us, as Homer does so often, of similar pictures in the sacred narrative of the gentler affections which redeemed so often the curse of slavery—of the little captive Israelite maiden whose concern for her Syrian master led to his cure, and of the faithful steward, “born in the house” of Abraham, whom the childless patriarch once thought to make his heir.
Eumæus entertains the stranger right hospitably—warning him, at the same time, not to pretend, as others have often done in the hope of reward, to bring tidings of the lost Ulysses. His guest’s own story he will be glad to hear. The hero is always ready at narrative, whether the tale is to be fact or fiction. At present he chooses fiction; he gives his listener an imaginary history of his past life, as a Cretan chief who had seen much good service in many lands, especially under King Idomeneus at Troy, but who had met with a succession of disasters since. Of course he had seen and known Ulysses; had heard of him since the fall of Troy; and he offers his host a wager that he will yet return. Eumæus will hear nothing of such flattering hopes; by this time his men are coming in from the field, and when the swine are safely housed, supper and bedtime follow. But the night is bitter cold, and Ulysses has nothing but his beggar’s rags. He indirectly begs a covering from his host by an ingenious story, very characteristic of the style of the lighter episodes of the Odyssey. He relates an adventure of his own while lying in ambush, one winter night, under the walls of Troy. Dr Maginn’s translation of this passage, in the old English ballad style, though somewhat free, preserves fairly the spirit and humour of the original:—
“Oh! were I as young and as fresh and as strong
As when under Troy, brother soldiers among,
In ambush as captains were chosen to lie
Odysseus and King Menelaus and I!
“They called me as third, and I came at the word,
And reached the high walls that the citadel gird;
When under the town we in armour lay down
By a brake in the marshes with weeds overgrown.
The night came on sharp, bleak the north wind did blow,
And frostily cold fell a thick shower of snow.
“Soon with icicles hoar every shield was frozen o’er;
But they who their cloaks and their body-clothes wore
The night lightly passed, secure from the blast,
Asleep with their shields o’er their broad shoulders cast;
But I, like a fool, had my cloak left behind,
Not expecting to shake in so piercing a wind.
“My buckler and zone—nothing more—had I on;
But when the third part of the night-watch was gone,
And the stars left the sky, with my elbow then I
Touched Odysseus, and spoke to him, lying close by—
Noble son of Laertes, Odysseus the wise,
I fear that alive I shall never arise.