[33] This humorous impersonation of one of the lowest, but certainly the strongest, influences of our common nature, has been made use of by later writers. The Roman poets Virgil and Persius take up Homer’s idea; and Rabelais, closely following the latter, introduces his readers to a certain powerful personage whom he found surrounded by worshippers—“one Master Gaster, the greatest Master of Arts in the world.” [“Gaster” is Homer’s Greek word, which Mr Worsley renders by “appetite,” but which is more literally Englished by the old Scriptural word “belly.”]
[34] The Greek historian Herodotus places a tribe of lotus-eaters, “who live by eating nothing but the fruit of the lotus,” on the coast of Africa somewhere near Tripoli. Pliny and other ancient writers on natural history speak of this fruit as in shape like an olive, with a flavour like that of figs or dates, not only pleasant to eat fresh, but which, when dry, was made into a kind of meal. The English travellers Shaw and Park found (in the close neighbourhood of Herodotus’ lotus-eaters) what they thought to be the true lotus—a shrub bearing “small farinaceous berries, of a yellow colour and delicious taste.” Park says—“An army may very well have been fed with the bread I have tasted made of the meal of the fruit, as is said by Pliny to have been done in Libya.” There is also a water-plant in Egypt mentioned by Herodotus under the name of lotus—probably the Nymphæa lotus of Linnæus.
[35] Tennyson, “The Lotus-Eaters.”
[36] So sensible was Fénélon of this contrast that, in his romance already mentioned, when he describes Calypso’s cave, he thinks it necessary, like a true Frenchman of the days of the great Louis, almost to apologise for the rude simplicity of nature, as hardly befitting so enchanting a personage. There were no statues, he says, no pictures, no painted ceilings, but the roof was set with shells and pebbles, and the want of tapestry was supplied by the tendrils of a vine.
[37] So the Spirit, in Milton’s “Comus,” gives to the brother of the Lady a sure antidote to the spell of the enchanter (himself represented as a son of Circe):—
“Among the rest a small unsightly root,
But of divine effect, he culled me out;
The leaf was darkish, and had prickles on’t,
But in another country, as he said,
Bore a bright golden flower, but not in this soil:
Unknown, and like esteemed, and the dull swain
Treads on it daily with his clouted shoon;
And yet more med’cinal is it than that Moly
That Hermes once to wise Ulysses gave.”
[38] The judges of the Dead—Minos, Rhadamanthus, and Æacus.
[39] ‘Faery Queen,’ Book ii. c. 12.
[40] When Adam Bede speaks roughly to his mother, and then tenderly to his dog Gyp, the author thus moralises on his inconsistency: “We are apt to be kinder to the brutes that love us than to the women that love us. Is it because the brutes are dumb?”
[41] From this maternal ancestor Ulysses might have inherited a large share of the subtlety which distinguished him. Autolycus was the reputed son of Hermes (Mercury)—the god of thieves—and did not in that point disgrace his blood. He was said to have the power of so transforming all stolen property, that the owner could not possibly recognise it. Shakespeare borrows the name, and some of the qualities, for one of his characters in the ‘Winter’s Tale’—“Autolycus, a rogue,” as he stands in the list of dramatis personæ, who professes himself “not naturally honest, but sometimes so by chance.”