The outward tokens of grief are wholly Eastern. Achilles, in the Iliad, when he hears of the death of his friend Patroclus—Laertes, in the Odyssey, when he believes his son’s return hopeless—throw dust upon their heads, like Joshua and the elders of Israel when they hear of the disaster at Ai. King Priam tears his hair and beard in his vain appeal to Hector at the Scæan gates, as Ezra does, when he hears of the trespasses of the Jewish princes.[49] Penelope sits “on the threshold” to weep, just as Moses “heard the people weeping, every man in the door of his tent.” “Call for the mourning women,” says the prophet Jeremiah,[50] “that they may come; and let them make haste, and take up a wailing for us.” So when the Trojan king bears off his dead son at last to his own palace, the professional mourners are immediately sent for—“the bards, to begin the lament.”[51] As Moses carries forth the bones of Joseph into Canaan, and David gathers carefully those of Saul and Jonathan from the men of Jabesh-Gilead, so Nestor charges the Greeks, when they have almost determined to quit Troy in despair, to carry the bones of their slain comrades home to their native land. Sarpedon’s body is borne to his native Lycia, there to be honoured “with a mound and with a column”—as Jacob set up a pillar for his dead Rachel on the road by Bethlehem. The Philistines, after the battle of Gilboa, bestow the armour of Saul in the house of their goddess Ashtaroth: the sword of Goliath is laid up as a trophy with the priest Ahimelech, “wrapped in a cloth behind the ephod;”[52] even so does Hector vow to hang up the armour of Menelaus in the temple of Apollo in Troy.
The more peaceful images have the same remarkable likeness. The fountain in the island of Ithaca, faced with stone, the work of the forefathers of the nation, Ithacus and Neritus, recalls that “well of the oath”—Beer-sheba—which Abraham dug, or that by which the woman of Samaria sat, known as “the well of our father Jacob.” The stone which the goddess Minerva upheaves to hurl against Mars, which “men of old had set to be a boundary of the land”—the two white stones,[53] of unknown date and history even in the poet’s own day, of which he doubts whether they be sepulchral or boundary, which Achilles made the turning-point for the chariot-race,—these cannot fail to remind us of the stones Bohan and Ebenezer, and of the warning in the Proverbs—“Remove not the ancient landmark, which thy fathers have set up.” The women grinding at the mill, the oxen treading out the corn, the measure by cubit, the changes of raiment, the reverence due to the stranger and to the poor,—the dowry given by the bridegroom, as by way of purchase, not received with the bride,—all these are as familiar to us in the books of Moses as in the poems of Homer. The very figures of speech are the same. The passionate apostrophe of Moses and Isaiah—“Hear, O heavens, and give ear, O earth”—is used by Juno in the Iliad, and by Calypso in the Odyssey.[54] “Day” is commonly employed as an equivalent for fate or judgment; “the half of one’s kingdom” is held to be a right royal gift; “the gates of hell” are the culmination of evil. Telemachus swears “by the woes of his father,” as Jacob does “by the fear of his father Isaac;” and the curse pronounced on Phœnix by his father—“that never grandchild of his begetting might sit upon his knees”[55]—recalls the sacred text in which we are told that “the children of Machir, the son of Manasseh, were brought up on Joseph’s knees.”
Many and various have been the theories of interpretation which have been employed, by more or less ingenious writers, to develop what they have considered the inner meaning of the poet’s tale. Such speculations began at a very early date in literary history. They were current among Greek philosophers in the days of Socrates, but he himself would not admit them. It is impossible, and would be wearisome even if it were possible, to discuss them all. But one especially must be mentioned, not wholly modern, but which has won much favour of late in the world of scholars,—that in both poems we have certain truths of physical and astronomical science represented under an allegorical form, imported into Greek fable from Eastern sources. This theory is, to say the least, so interesting and ingenious, that without presuming here to discuss its truth, it claims a brief mention. It may be fairest to put it in the words of one of its most enthusiastic advocates. So far as it applies to the Odyssey, it stands thus:—
“The Sun [Ulysses] leaves his bride the Twilight [Penelope] in the sky, where he sinks beneath the sea, to journey in silence and darkness to the scene of the great fight with the powers of Darkness [the Siege of Troy]. The ten weary years of the war are the weary hours of the night.... The victory is won: but the Sun still longs to see again the beautiful bride from whom he parted yester-eve. Dangers may await him, but they cannot arrest his steps: things lovely may lavish their beauty upon him, but they cannot make him forget her.... But he cannot reach his home until another series of ten long years have come to an end—the Sun cannot see the Twilight until another day is done.”[56]
So, in the Iliad, as has been already noticed, Paris and the Trojans represent the powers of Darkness, “who steal away the beautiful Twilight [Helen] from the western sky;” while Achilles is the Sun, who puts to rout these forces of the Night.[57]
In contrast, though not necessarily in contradiction, to this physical allegory, stands the moral interpretation, a favourite one with some of the mediæval students of Homer, which sees in the Odyssey nothing less than the pilgrimage of human life—beset with dangers and seductions on every side, yet blessed with divine guidance, and reaching its goal at last, through suffering and not without loss. Every point in the wanderings of the hero has been thus made to teach its parable, more or less successfully. The different adventures have each had their special application: Circe represents the especially sensual appetites; the Lotus-eating is indolence; the Sirens the temptations of the ear; the forbidden oxen of the Sun the “flesh-pots of Egypt”—the sin of gluttony. It is at least well worthy of remark how, throughout the whole narrative, the false rest is brought into contrast with the true. Not in the placid indolence of the Lotus-eaters, not in the luxurious halls of Circe or in the grotto of Calypso, nor even in the joyous society of the Phæacians, but only in the far-off home, the seat of the higher and better affections, is the pilgrim’s real resting-place. The key-note of this didactic interpretation, which has an undoubted beauty and pathos of its own, making the old Greek poet, like the Mosaic law, a schoolmaster to Christian doctrine, has been well touched by a modern writer:—
“O beautiful and strange epitome
Of this our life, while through the tale we trace
Homeless Ulysses on the land and sea!
From childhood to old age it is the face
Of heaven-lost, yearning man: from place to place
Whether he wander forth abroad, or knows
No change but of home-nature and of grace,
Still is he as one seeking for repose—
A man of many thoughts, a man of many woes.”[58]
Some of the early religious commentators pushed such interpretations to extravagance; they dealt with Homer as the extreme patristic school of theology dealt with the Old Testament: they so busied themselves in seeking for mystical interpretations in every verse, that they held the plain and literal meaning of the text as of almost secondary importance. It was said of one French scholar—D’Aurat—a man of some learning, that he spent his life in trying to find all the Bible in Homer. Such men saw Paradise disguised in the gardens of Alcinous; the temptation of the chaste Bellerophon was but a pagan version of the story of Joseph; the fall of Troy evidently prefigured, to their fancy, the destruction of Jerusalem. Some went even further, and turned this tempting weapon of allegory against their religious opponents: thus Doctor Jacobus Hugo saw the Lutheran heretics prefigured in the Lotus-eaters of the Odyssey, and thought that the reckless Antinous was a type of Martin Luther himself. Those who are content to take Homer as he is, the poet of all ages, without seeking to set him up either as a prophet or as a moral philosopher, may take comfort from, the brief criticism of Lord Bacon upon all over-curious interpretation—“I do rather think the fable was first, and the exposition devised after.” The most ingenious theories as to the hidden meaning of the song are at best but the mists which the Homerists have thrown round their deity—
“The moony vapour rolling round the king.”
He moves among them all, a dim mysterious figure, but hardly less than divine.