Homer: The Iliad; The Odyssey

by W. Lucas Collins

Penelope does recognise the form and features—it is indeed, to all outward appearance, the Ulysses from whom she parted in tears twenty years ago. But such appearances are deceitful; gods have been known, ere now, to put on the form of men to gain the love of mortals. She will put him to one certain test she wots of. “Give him his own bed,” she says to the nurse; “go, bring it forth from what was our bridal chamber.” But the couch of which she speaks is, as she and he both well know, immovable. Its peculiar structure, as detailed in Homer’s verse, is by no means easy to unravel. But it is formed in some cunning fashion out of the stem of an olive-tree, rooted and growing, round which the hero himself had built a bridal chamber. Move it?—“There lives no mortal,” exclaims Ulysses, “who could stir it from its place.” Then, at last, all Penelope’s long doubts are solved in happy certainty:—

“Then from her eyelids the quick tears did start,
And she ran to him from her place, and threw
Her arms about his neck, and a warm dew
Of kisses poured upon him, and thus spake:
‘Frown not, Odysseus; thou art wise and true!
But God gave sorrow, and hath grudged to make
Our path to old age sweet, nor willed us to partake

“‘Youth’s joys together. Yet forgive me this,
Nor hate me that when first I saw thy brow
I fell not on thy neck, and gave no kiss,
Nor wept in thy dear arms as I weep now.
For in my breast a bitter fear did bow
My soul, and I lived shuddering day by day,
Lest a strange man come hither, and avow
False things, and steal my spirit, and bewray
My love; such guile men scheme, to lead the pure astray.
......
“‘But now, since clearly thou unfoldest this,
The secret of our couch, which none hath read,
Save only thee and me and Actoris,
Whom my sire gave me, when I first was wed,
To guard the chamber of our bridal bed—
Now I believe against my own belief.’
She ending a desire of weeping bred
Within him, and in tears the noble chief
Clasped his true wife, exulting in their glorious grief.

“Sweet as to swimmers the dry land appears,
Whose bark Poseidon in the angry sea
Strikes with a tempest, and in pieces tears,
And a few swimmers from the white deep flee,
Crested with salt foam, and with tremulous knee
Spring to the shore exulting; even so
Sweet was her husband to Penelope,
Nor from his neck could she at all let go
Her white arms, nor forbid her thickening tears to flow.”

When they retire to rest, each has a long tale to tell. The personal adventures of Ulysses alone (however careful he might have been to abridge them in some particulars for his present auditor) would have made up many an Arabian Night’s entertainment. There would surely have been little time left for Penelope’s story, but that Minerva’s agency lengthens the ordinary night—

“Nor from the rolling river of Ocean’s stream
Suffered the golden-thronèd Dawn to beam,
Or yoke the horses that bear light to men.”

Here, according to our modern notions of completeness, the Odyssey should surely end. Accordingly some critics have surmised that the twenty-fourth and last book is not Homer’s, but a later addition. But we may very well suppose that the primitive taste for narrative in the poet’s day was more simple and childlike; that an ancient Greek audience would inquire, as our own children would, into all the details of the sequel, and not be satisfied even with the comprehensive assertion that “they lived happy ever afterwards.” We have therefore, in the text as it has come down to us, a kind of supplement to the tale, which, as is the case with the later scenes in some of Shakespeare’s tragedies, rather weakens the force of the real catastrophe. An episode at the beginning of this last book shows us again the regions of the dead, to which the god Mercury is conducting the spirits of the dead suitors—pale ghosts who follow him, gibbering and cowering with fear, into that “sunless land.” The main purpose of the poet seems to be the opportunity once more of introducing the shades of the great heroes, Achilles and Agamemnon; the latter contrasting his own miserable and dishonoured end with that of Achilles, blest above all mortals, dying in battle with all the flower of Ilium and Greece around him, and leaving a name which is a sound of glory over the whole earth. So also does he contrast, to Penelope’s honour, her fidelity with the treachery of his own queen Clytemnestra; giving voice to a prophecy which has been fulfilled almost beyond even a poet’s aspirations:—

“O to her first one love how true was she!
Nought shall make dim the flower of her sweet fame
For ever, but the gods unceasingly
Shall to the earth’s inhabitants her name,
Wide on the wings of song, with endless praise proclaim.”

Ulysses himself has yet to visit and make himself known to his aged father Laertes, who is still alive, but living in sad retirement on his island-farm, solacing himself as well as he may with pruning and tending his orchard-grounds. The recognition scene, in which the scar left by the boar’s tusk is once more the touchstone, will seem tedious, as savouring too much of repetition, to most readers of our day. But there is one point which has a special and simple beauty of its own. When Laertes seems yet incredulous as to his son’s identity, Ulysses reminds him how, when he was yet a child, following his father about the orchards, and begging with a child’s pertinacity, he had given him “for his very own” a certain number of apple, fig, and pear trees and vines—all which he can still remember and enumerate. The token is irresistible, and the old man all but faints for joy.

An attempt at rebellion on the part of some of his Ithacan subjects, who are enraged at his slaughter of their nobles, and which is headed by the father of the dead Antinous, fails to revive the fading interest of the tale. The ringleader falls by a spear cast by the trembling hand of Laertes, and the malcontents submit, after a brief contest, to their lawful chief.