stories from the odyssey retold by h. l. havell b.a. late reader in english in the university of halle formerly scholar of university college oxford author of _stories from herodotus_, _stories from greek tragedy_, _stories from the æneid_, _stories from the iliad_, etc. [illustration: reading from homer] "o well for him whose will is strong! he suffers, but he will not suffer long; he suffers, but he cannot suffer wrong: for him nor moves the loud world's random mock nor all calamity's hugest waves confound who seems a promontory of rock, that compass'd round with turbulent sound in middle ocean meets the surging shock, tempest-buffeted, citadel-crown'd." tennyson contents introduction telemachus, penelope, and the suitors the assembly; the voyage of telemachus the visit to nestor at pylos telemachus at sparta odysseus and calypso odysseus among the phæacians the wanderings of odysseus the visit to hades the sirens; scylla and charybdis; thrinacia odysseus lands in ithaca odysseus and eumæus the return of telemachus the meeting of telemachus and odysseus the home-coming of odysseus the beggar irus penelope and the wooers odysseus and penelope the end draws near; signs and wonders the bow of odysseus the slaying of the wooers odysseus and penelope conclusion pronouncing list of names illustrations reading from homer (l. alma tadema) penelope (the vatican, rome) telemachus departing from nestor (henry howard) odysseus and nausicaä (charles gleyre) odysseus and polyphemus (j. m. w. turner) circe (sir e. burne-jones) the return of odysseus (l. f. schützenberger) odysseus and eurycleia (christian g. heyne) introduction the impersonal character of the homeric poems has left us entirely in the dark as to the birthplace, the history, and the date, of their author. so complete is the darkness which surrounds the name of homer that his very existence has been disputed, and his works have been declared to be an ingenious compilation, drawn from the productions of a multitude of singers. it is not my intention here to enter into the endless and barren controversy which has raged round this question. it will be more to the purpose to try and form some general idea of the characteristics of the greek epic; and to do this it is necessary to give a brief review of the political and social conditions in which it was produced. i the world as known to homer is a mere fragment of territory, including a good part of the mainland of greece, with the islands and coast districts of the ægæan. outside of these limits his knowledge of geography is narrow indeed. he has heard of sicily, which he speaks of under the name of thrinacia; and he speaks once of libya, or the north coast of africa, as a district famous for its breed of sheep. there is one vague reference to the vast scythian or tartar race (called by homer thracians), who live on the milk of mares; and he mentions a copper-coloured people, the "red-faces," who dwell far remote in the east and west. the nile is mentioned, under the name of ægyptus; and the egyptians are celebrated by the poet as a people skilled in medicine, a statement which is repeated by herodotus. the phoenicians appear several times in the _odyssey_, and we hear once or twice of the sidonians, as skilled workers in metal. as soon as we pass these boundaries, we enter at once into the region of fairyland. ii in speaking of the religion of the homeric greeks we have to draw a distinction between the _iliad_ and the _odyssey_. in the _iliad_ the gods play a much livelier and more human part than in the latter poem, and it is highly remarkable that the only comic scenes in the first and greatest of epics are those in which the gods are the chief actors--as when the lame hephæstus takes upon him the office of cupbearer at the olympian banquet, or when artemis gets her ears boxed by the angry hera. it would almost seem as if there were a vein of deliberate satire running through these descriptions, so daring is the treatment of the divine personages. in the _odyssey_, on the other hand, religion has become more spiritual. olympus is no longer the mountain of that name, but a vague term, like our "heaven," denoting a place remote from all earthly cares and passions, a far-off abode in the stainless ether, where the gods dwell in everlasting peace, and from which they occasionally descend, to give an eye to the righteous and unrighteous deeds of men. in his conception of the state of the soul after death homer is very interesting. his _hades_, or place of departed spirits, is a dim, shadowy region beyond the setting of the sun, where, after life's trials are over, the souls of men keep up a faint and feeble being. it is highly significant that the word which in homer means "self" has also the meaning of "body"--showing how intimately the sense of personal identity was associated with the condition of bodily existence. the disembodied spirit is compared to a shadow, a dream, or a waft of smoke. "alas!" cries achilles, after a visit from the ghost of patroclus, "i perceive that even in the halls of hades there is a spirit and a phantom, but understanding none at all"; for the mental condition of these cold, uncomfortable ghosts is as feeble as their bodily form is shadowy and unsubstantial. they hover about with a fitful motion, uttering thin, gibbering cries, like the voice of a bat, and before they can obtain strength to converse with a visitor from the other world, they have to be fortified by a draught of fresh blood. the subject is summed up by achilles, when odysseus felicitates him on the honour which he enjoys, even in hades: "tell me not of comfort in death," he says: "i had rather be the thrall of the poorest wight that ever tilled a thankless soil for bread, than rule as king over all the shades of the departed." iii homeric society is essentially aristocratic. at its head stands the king, who may be a great potentate, like agamemnon, ruling over a wide extent of territory, or a petty prince, like odysseus, who exercises a sort of patriarchal authority within the limits of a small island. the person of the king is sacred, and his office is hereditary. he bears the title of _diogenes_, "jove-born," and is under the especial protection of the supreme ruler of olympus. he is leader in war, chief judge, president of the council of elders, and representative of the state at the public sacrifices. the symbol of his office is the sceptre, which in some cases is handed down as an heirloom from father to son. next to the king stand the elders, a title which has no reference to age, but merely denotes those of noble birth and breeding. the elders form a senate, or deliberative body, before which all questions of public importance are laid by the king. their decisions are afterwards communicated to the general assembly of the people, who signify their approval or dissent by tumultuous cries, but have no power of altering or reversing the measures proposed by the nobles. thus we have already the three main elements of political life: king, lords, and commons--though the position of the last is at present almost entirely passive. iv the morality of the homeric age is such as we may expect to find among a people which has only partially emerged from barbarism. crimes of violence are very common, and a familiar figure in the society of this period is that of the fugitive, who "has slain a man," and is flying from the vengeance of his family. patroclus, when a mere boy, kills his youthful playmate in a quarrel over a game of knucklebones--an incident which may be seen illustrated in one of the statues in the british museum. one of the typical scenes of hellenic life depicted on the shield of achilles is a trial for homicide; and such cases were of so frequent occurrence that they afford materials for a simile in the last book of the _iliad_. where life is held so cheap, opinion is not likely to be very strict in matters of property. and we find accordingly a general acquiescence in "the good old rule, the ancient plan, that they may take who have the power, and they may keep who can." cattle-lifting is as common as it formerly was on the scottish border. the bold buccaneer is a character as familiar as in the good old days when drake and raleigh singed the spanish king's beard, with this important difference, that the buccaneer of ancient greece plundered greek and barbarian with fine impartiality. a common question addressed to persons newly arrived from the sea is, "are you a merchant, a traveller, or a pirate?" and this curious query implies no reproach, and calls for no resentment. still more startling are the terms in which autolycus, the maternal grandfather of odysseus, is spoken of. this worthy, we are informed, "surpassed all mankind in thieving and lying"; and the information is given in a manner which shows that the poet intended it as a grave compliment. in another passage the same hero is celebrated as an accomplished burglar. so low was the standard of homeric ethics in this respect; and even in the historical age of greece, want of honesty and want of truthfulness were too often conspicuous failings in some of her most famous men. even more shocking to the moral sense is the wild ferocity which sometimes breaks out in the language and conduct of both men and women. the horrible practice of mutilating the dead after a battle is viewed with indifference, and even with complacency, by the bravest warriors. even patroclus, the most amiable of the heroes in the _iliad_, proposes to inflict this dastardly outrage on the body of the fallen sarpedon. achilles drags the body of hector behind his chariot from the battlefield, and keeps it in his tent for many days, that he may repeat this hideous form of vengeance in honour of his slaughtered friend. when the dying hector begs him to restore his body to the trojans for burial he replies with savage taunts, and wishes that he could find it in his heart to carve the flesh of hector and eat it raw! and hecuba, the venerable queen of troy, expresses herself in similar terms when priam is preparing to set forth on his mission to the tent of achilles. turning now to the more attractive side of the picture, we shall find much to admire in the character of homer's heroes. in the first place we have to note their intense vitality and keen sense of pleasure, natural to a young and vigorous people. the outlook on life is generally bright and cheerful, and there is hardly any trace of that corroding pessimism which meets us in later literature. cases of suicide, so common in the tragedians, are almost unknown. in one respect, and that too a point of the very highest importance, the greeks of this age were far in advance of those who came after them, and not behind the most polished nations of modern europe. we refer to the beauty, the tenderness, and the purity of their domestic relations. the whole story of the _odyssey_ is founded on the faithful wedded love of odysseus and penelope, and the contrasted example of agamemnon and his demon wife is repeatedly held up to scorn and abhorrence. the world's poetry affords no nobler scene than the parting of hector and andromache in the _iliad_, nor has the ideal of perfect marriage ever found grander expression than in the words addressed by odysseus to nausicaä: "there is nothing mightier and nobler than when man and wife are of one mind and heart in a house, a grief to their foes, and to their friends a great joy, but their own hearts know it best."[1] [footnote 1: butcher and lang's translation.] hospitality in a primitive state of society, where inns are unknown, is not so much a virtue as a necessity. even in these early times the greeks, within the limits of their little world, were great travellers, and their swift chariots, and galleys propelled by sail and oar, enabled them to make considerable journeys with speed and safety. arrived at their destination for the night they were sure of a warm welcome at the first house at which they presented themselves; and he who played the host on one occasion expected and found a like return when, perhaps years afterwards, he was brought by business or pleasure to the home of his former guest. nor were these privileges confined to the wealthy and noble, who were able, when the time came, to make payment in kind, but the poorest and most helpless outcast, the beggar, the fugitive, and the exile, found countenance and protection, when he made his plea in the name of zeus, the god of hospitality. v this frankness and simplicity of manners runs through the whole life of the homeric greek, and is reflected in every page of the two great epics which are the lasting monuments of that bright and happy age. as civilisation advances, and life becomes more complicated and artificial, human activity tends more and more to split up into an infinite number of minute occupations, and the whole time and energy of each individual are not more than sufficient to make him master in some little corner of art, science, or industry. a vast system of commerce brings the products of the whole world to our doors; and it is almost appalling to think of the millions of toiling hands and busy brains which must pass all their days in unceasing toil, in order that the humblest citizen may find his daily wants supplied. to give only one example: how vast and tremendous is the machinery which must be set at work before a single letter or post-card can reach its destination! this multiplication of needs, and endless subdivision of labour, too often results in stunting and crippling the development of the individual, so that it becomes harder, as time advances, to find a complete man, with all his faculties matured by equable and harmonious growth. very different were the conditions of life in the homeric age. then the wealthy man's house was a little world in itself, capable of supplying all the simple wants of its inhabitants. the women spun wool and flax, the produce of the estate, and wove them into cloth and linen, to be dyed and wrought into garments by the same skilful hands. on the sunny slopes of the hills within sight of the doors the grapes were ripening against the happy time of vintage, when merry troops of children would bring them home with dance and song to be trodden in the winepress. nearer at hand was the well-kept orchard, bowing under its burden of apples, pears, and figs; and groves of grey olive-trees promised abundance of oil. in the valleys waved rich harvests of wheat and barley, which were reaped, threshed, ground, and made into bread, by the master's thralls. herds of oxen, and flocks of sheep and goats, roved on the broad upland pastures, and in the forest multitudes of swine were fattening on the beech-mast and acorns. and the owner of all these blessings was no luxurious drone, living in idleness on the labour of other men's hands. he was, in the fullest sense of the word, the father of his household. his was the vigilant eye which watched and directed every member in the little army of workers, and his the generous hand which dealt out bountiful reward for faithful service. if need were he could take his share in the hardest field labour, and plough a straight furrow, or mow a heavy crop of grass from dawn till sunset without breaking his fast. nothing was too great or too little to engage his attention, as the necessity arose. he was a warrior, whose single prowess might go far in deciding the issue of a hard-fought battle--an orator, discoursing with weighty eloquence on grave questions of state--a judge, whose decisions helped to build up the as yet unwritten code of law. descending from these high altitudes, he could take up his bow and spear, and go forth to hunt the boar and the stag, or wield the woodman's axe, or the carpenter's saw and chisel. he could kill, dress, and serve his own dinner; and when the strenuous day was over, he could tune the harp, discourse sweet music, and sing of the deeds of heroes and gods. such was the versatility, and such the many-sided energy, of the greek as he appears in the _iliad_ and _odyssey_. and as these two poems contain the elements of all subsequent thought and progress in the greek nation, so in the typical character of odysseus are concentrated all the qualities which distinguish the individual greek--his insatiable curiosity, which left no field of thought unexplored--his spirit of daring enterprise, which carried the banner of civilisation to the borders of india and the straits of gibraltar--and his subtlety and craft, which in a later age made him a byword to the grave moralists of rome. in the _iliad_ odysseus is constantly exhibited as a contrast to the youthful achilles. wherever prudence, experience, and policy, are required, odysseus comes to the front. in achilles, with his furious passions and ill-regulated impulses, there is always something of the barbarian; while odysseus in all his actions obeys the voice of reason. it will readily be seen that such a character, essentially intellectual, always moving within due measure, never breaking out into eccentricity or excess, would appeal less to the popular imagination than the fiery nature of pelides, "strenuous, passionate, implacable, and fierce." and on this ground we may partly explain the unamiable light in which odysseus appears in later greek literature. already in pindar we find him singled out for disapproval. in sophocles he has sunk still lower; and in euripides his degradation is completed. vi space does not allow us to give a detailed criticism of the _odyssey_ as a poem, and determine its relation to the _iliad_. we must content ourselves with quoting the words of the most eloquent of ancient critics, which sum up the subject with admirable brevity and insight: "homer in his _odyssey_ may be compared to the setting sun: he is still as great as ever, but he has lost his fervent heat. the strain is now pitched in a lower key than in the 'tale of troy divine': we begin to miss that high and equable sublimity which never flags or sinks, that continuous current of moving incidents, those rapid transitions, that force of eloquence, that opulence of imagery which is ever true to nature. like the sea when it retires upon itself and leaves its shores waste and bare, henceforth the tide of sublimity begins to ebb, and draws us away into the dim region of myth and legend."[1] [footnote 1: longinus: "on the sublime." translated by h.l. havell, b.a. p. 20. macmillan & co.] stories from the odyssey telemachus, penelope, and the suitors i in a high, level spot, commanding a view of the sea, stands the house of odysseus, the mightiest prince in ithaca. it is a spacious building, two storeys high, constructed entirely of wood, and surrounded on all sides by a strong wooden fence. within the enclosure, and in front of the house, is a wide courtyard, containing the stables, and other offices of the household. a proud maiden was penelope, when odysseus wedded her in her youthful bloom, and made her the mistress of his fair dwelling and his rich domain. one happy year they lived together, and a son was born to them, whom they named telemachus. then war arose between greece and asia, and odysseus was summoned to join the train of chieftains who followed agamemnon to win back helen, his brother's wife. ten years the war lasted; then troy was taken, and those who had survived the struggle returned to their homes. among these was odysseus, who set sail with joyful heart, hoping, before many days were passed, to take up anew the thread of domestic happiness which had been so rudely broken. but since that hour he has vanished from sight, and for ten long years from the fall of troy the house has been mourning its absent lord. during the last three years a new trouble has been present, to fill the cup of penelope's sorrow to the brim. a host of suitors, drawn from the most powerful families in ithaca and the neighbouring islands, have beset the house of odysseus, desiring to wed his wife and possess her wealth. all her friends urge her to make choice of a husband from that clamorous band; for no one now believes that there is any hope left of odysseus' return. only penelope still clings to the belief that he is yet living, and will one day come home. so for three years she has put them off by a cunning trick. she began to weave a shroud for her father-in-law, laertes, promising that, as soon as the garment was finished, she would wed one of the suitors. then all day long she wove that choice web; and every night she undid the work of the day, unravelling the threads which she had woven. so for three years she beguiled the suitors, but at last she was betrayed by her handmaids, and the fraud was discovered. the princes upbraided her loudly for her deceit, and became more importunate than ever. the substance of odysseus was wasting away; for day after day the wooers came thronging to the house, a hundred strong, and feasted at the expense of its absent master, and drank up his wine. no hope seems left to the heartbroken, faithful wife. even her son has grown impatient at the waste of his goods, and urges her to make the hard choice, and the hateful hour is at hand which will part her for ever from the scene of her brief wedded joy. [illustration: penelope] ii it was the hour of noon, and the sun was beating hot on the rocky hills of ithaca, when a solitary wayfarer was seen approaching the outer gateway which led into the courtyard of odysseus' house. he was a man of middle age, dressed like a chieftain, and carrying a long spear in his hand. passing through the covered gateway he halted abruptly, and gazed in astonishment at the strange sight which met his eyes. all was noise and bustle in the courtyard, where a busy troop of servants were preparing the materials for a great feast. some were carrying smoking joints of roast meat, others were filling huge bowls with wine and water, and others were washing the tables and setting them out to dry. in the portico before the house sat a great company of young nobles, comely of aspect, and daintily attired, taking their ease on couches of raw ox-hide, and playing at draughts to while away the time until the banquet should be ready. loud was their talk, and boisterous their laughter, as of men who have no respect for themselves or for others. "surely this was the house of odysseus," murmured the stranger to himself, "but now it seems like a den of thieves. but who is that tall and goodly lad, who sits apart, with gloomy brow, and seems ill-pleased with the doings of that riotous crew? surely i should know that face, the very face of my old friend as i knew him long years ago." as he spoke, the youth who had attracted his notice glanced in his direction, and seeing a stranger standing unheeded at the entrance, he rose from his seat and came with hasty step and heightened colour towards him. "forgive me, friend," he said, with hand outstretched in welcome, "that i marked thee not before. my thoughts were far away. but come into the house, and sit down to meat, and when thou hast eaten we will inquire the reason of thy coming." so saying, and taking the stranger's spear, he led him into the great hall of the house, and sat down with him in a corner, remote from the noise of the revel. and a handmaid bare water in a golden ewer, and poured it over their hands into a basin of silver; and when they had washed, a table was set before them, heaped with delicate fare. then host and guest took their meal together, and comforted their hearts with wine. before they had finished, the whole company came trooping in from the courtyard, and filled the room with uproar, calling aloud for food and drink. not a chair was left empty, and the servants hurried to and fro, supplying the wants of these unwelcome visitors. vast quantities of flesh were consumed, and many a stout jar of wine was drained to the dregs, to supply the wants of that greedy multitude. when at last their hunger was appeased, and every goblet stood empty, phemius, the minstrel, stood up in their midst, and after striking a few chords on his harp, began to sing a famous lay. then the youth who had been entertaining the stranger drew closer his chair, and thus addressed him, speaking low in his ear: "thou seest what fair company we keep, how wanton they are, and how gay. yet there was once a man who would have driven them, like beaten hounds, from this hall, even he whose substance they are devouring. but his bones lie whitening at the bottom of the sea, and we who are left must tamely suffer this wrong. but now thou hast eaten, and i may question thee without reproach. say, therefore, who art thou, and where is thy home? comest thou for the first time to ithaca, or art thou an old friend of this house, bound to us by ties of ancient hospitality?" "my name is mentes," answered the stranger, "and i am a prince of the taphians, a bold race of sailors. i am a friend of this house, well known to its master, odysseus, and his father, laertes. be of good cheer, for he whom thou mournest is not dead, nor shall his coming be much longer delayed. but tell me now of a truth, art not thou the son of that man? i knew him well, and thou hast the very face and eyes of odysseus." "my mother calls me his son," replied the youth, who was indeed telemachus himself, "and i am bound to believe her. would that it were otherwise! i have little cause to bless my birth." "yet shalt thou surely be blest," said mentes; "thou art not unmarked of the eye of heaven. but answer me once more, what means this lawless riot in the house? and what cause has brought all these men hither?" "this also thou shalt know," replied telemachus. "these are the princes who have come to woo my mother; and while she keeps them waiting for her answer they eat up my father's goods. ere long, methinks, they will make an end of me also." "fit wooers indeed for the wife of such a man!" said mentes with a bitter smile. "would that he were standing among them now as i saw him once in my father's house, armed with helmet and shield and spear! he would soon wed them to another bride. but whether it be god's will that he return or not, 'tis for thee to devise means to drive these men from thy house. take heed, therefore, to my words, and do as i bid thee. to-morrow thou shalt summon the suitors to the place of assembly, and charge them that they depart to their homes. and do thou thyself fit out a ship, with twenty rowers, and get thee to pylos, where the aged nestor dwells, and inquire of him concerning thy father. from pylos proceed to sparta, the kingdom of menelaus; he was the last of the greeks to reach home, after the fall of troy; and perchance thou mayest learn something from him. and if thou hearest sure tidings of thy father's death, then get thee home, and raise a tomb to his memory, and keep his funeral feast. then let thy mother wed whom she will; and if these men still beset thee, thou must devise means to slay them, either by guile or openly. thou art now a man, and must play a man's part. hast thou not heard of the fame which orestes won, when he slew the murderer of his sire? be thou valiant, even as he; tall thou art, and fair, and shouldst be a stout man of thy hands. but 'tis time for me to be going; my ship awaits me in the harbour, and my comrades will be tired of waiting for me." "stay yet awhile," answered telemachus, "until thou hast refreshed thyself with the bath; and i will give thee a costly gift to bear with thee as a memorial of thy visit." but even as he spoke mentes rose from his seat and, gliding like a shadow through the sunlit doorway, disappeared. telemachus followed, in wonder and displeasure; but no trace of the strange visitor was to be seen. looking upward he saw a great sea-eagle winging his way towards the shore; and a voice seemed to whisper in his ear: "no mortal was thy guest, but the great goddess athene, daughter of zeus, and ever thy father's true comrade and faithful ally." iii with a strange elation of spirits telemachus returned to the hall, and sat down among the suitors. hitherto he had shown a certain weakness and indecision of character, natural in a young lad, who had grown up without the strong guiding hand of a father, and who, since the first dawn of his manhood, had been surrounded by a host of subtle foes. but the words of athene have gone home, and he resolves that from this hour he will take his proper place in the house as his mother's guardian and the heir of a great prince. there was an unwonted stillness among that lawless troop, and they sat silent and attentive in the great, dimly lighted chamber. for the minstrel was singing a sweet and solemn strain, which told of the home-coming of the greeks from troy, and of all the disasters which befell them on the way. suddenly the singer paused in the midst of his lay, for his fine ear had caught the sound of a sobbing sigh. looking round, he saw a tall and stately lady standing in the doorway which led to the women's apartments at the back of the house. she was closely veiled, but he instantly recognised the form of penelope, his beloved mistress. "phemius," said penelope, in a tone of gentle reproach, "hast thou no other lay to sing, but must needs recite this tale of woe, which fills my soul with tears, by calling up the image of him for whom i sorrow night and day?" phemius stood abashed, and ventured no reply; but telemachus answered for him. "mother," he said, "blame not the sweet minstrel for his song. the bard is not the author of the woes of which he sings, but zeus assigns to each his portion of good and ill; and thou must submit to his ordinance, like many another lady who has lost her lord. thou hast thy province in the house, and i mine; thine is to govern thy handmaids, and mine to take the lead where the men are gathered together. and i say that the minstrel has chosen well." there was a new note of command in the voice of telemachus as he uttered these words. penelope heard it, and wondered what change had come over her son; but a hundred bold eyes were gazing insolently at her, and without another word she turned away, and ascended the steep stairs which led to her bower. there she reclined on a couch, and her tears flowed freely; for the song of phemius had reopened the fountain of her grief. presently the sound of sobbing died away, and she drew her breath gently in a sweet and placid sleep. the sudden appearance of penelope had excited the suitors, and they began to brawl noisily among themselves. presently telemachus raised his voice, commanding silence for the minstrel. "and i have something else to say unto you," he added. "to-morrow at dawn i bid you come to the place of assembly, that we may make an end of these wild doings in my house. i will bear it no longer, but will publish your evil deeds to the ears of gods and men." among the suitors there was a certain antinous, a tall and stout fellow, of commanding presence, who was looked up to by the others as a sort of leader, being the boldest and most brutal in the band. and now he answered for the rest "heaven speed thy boasting, young braggart!" he cried in rude and jeering tones. "it will be a happy day for the men of ithaca when they have thee for their king." "i claim not the kingdom," answered telemachus firmly, "but i am resolved to be master in my own house." by the side of antinous sat eurymachus, who was next to him in power and rank. this was a smooth and subtle villain, not less dangerous than antinous, but glib and plausible of speech. and he too made answer after his kind: "telemachus, thou sayest well, and none can dispute thy right. but with thy good leave i would ask thee concerning the stranger. he seemed a goodly man; but why did he start up and leave us so suddenly? did he bring any tidings of thy father?" "there can be no tidings of him," answered telemachus sadly, "except that we shall never see him again. and as to this stranger, it was mentes, a friend of my father's, and prince of the taphians." night was now coming on, the suitors departed to their homes, and telemachus, who meditated an early start next day, retired early to his chamber. the room where he slept stood in the courtyard, apart from the house, and was reached by a stairway. he was attended by an aged dame, eurycleia, who had nursed him in his infancy. and all night long he lay sleepless, pondering on the perils and the adventures which awaited him. the assembly; the voyage of telemachus i at the first peep of dawn telemachus was afoot, and summoning the heralds he ordered them to make proclamation of an assembly to be held in a public place in the town of ithaca. then he went down to the place of assembly, with two favourite hounds following close at his heels; and when he arrived he found the princes and elders of the people already gathered together. all eyes were turned to the gallant lad, as he sat down on his father's seat among the noblest of the sons of ithaca. never had he worn so princely an air, or seemed so worthy of his mighty sire. then the old chieftain ægyptus began the debate; he was bent double with age, and one of his sons, antiphus, had followed odysseus to troy, while another, eurynomus, was among the suitors of penelope. it was of antiphus that he thought, as he stood up and made harangue among the elders: "who has summoned us hither, and what is his need? never have we met together in council since the day when odysseus set sail from ithaca. hath any tidings come of the return of those who followed him to troy, or is it some other business of public moment which has called us hither? but whoever sent out this summons, i doubt not he is a worthy man, and may zeus accomplish his purpose, whatever it be." such chance sayings were regarded as a sign of heaven's will, and telemachus rejoiced in spirit at the old man's blessing. and forthwith he stood up in the midst, and, taking the sceptre from the herald's hand, rushed at once into the subject of which his mind was full. "behold me here, old man," he said, addressing ægyptus. "it is i who have called you together, and surely not without a cause. is it not enough that i have lost my brave father, whose gentleness and loving-kindness ye all knew, when he was your king? but must i sit still, day after day, and see the fattest of my flocks and herds slaughtered, and the red wine poured out wastefully, by these men who have come to woo my mother? take shame to yourselves, and restrain them; fear the reproach of men, and the wrath of heaven, and suffer me not thus to be evilly entreated, unless ye harbour revengeful thoughts against my father, for some wrong which he has done you." he had spoken thus far, when tears choked his voice, and flinging the sceptre on the ground he returned to his seat. there was a general feeling of compassion among his hearers, and not one of the suitors ventured to answer him, save only antinous, who began in his wonted style of brutal insolence, upbraiding telemachus in violent terms, and throwing all the blame on penelope, who, he said, had beguiled them for three years by holding out promises which she never meant to fulfil. then he told the story of penelope's web, and concluded his speech with these words: "as long as thy mother continues in this mind, so long will we stay here and consume thy living. if thou wouldst be quit of us, send her to her father's house and bid her marry the man of her choice." telemachus replied: "how can i drive away the mother who bare me and nourished me? and where shall i find means to pay back her dower? but most of all i dread my mother's curse. no, never shall that word be spoken by me. therefore, if ye know aught of fair and honest dealing, depart from my house, and live on your own goods; but if it seems good to you to eat up another man's living, then will i appeal to the justice of heaven, and pray for vengeance on your heads." "behold, his prayer is answered," cried halitherses, a venerable elder, with snow-white beard, who was skilled in augury; and looking up they saw two eagles winging their way at full speed towards the place of assembly. now the two great birds hovered over the meeting; and just at this moment they wheeled round and attacked each other fiercely with beak and claw. after fighting for some time they shot away to the right and were soon lost to view. then halitherses spake again, interpreting the omen: "hearken, men of ithaca, to my words, and to you, the suitors of penelope, especially do i speak. woe is coming upon you; i see it rising and swelling as a wave. not long shall odysseus be absent, but even now he is near at hand hatching mischief for those who sit here. and many another shall suffer, besides these who have done the wrong. therefore, i say, let us stop their evil deeds, or let them cease themselves. the hour is near at hand which i foretold, when odysseus embarked for troy: i said that after many sufferings, having lost all his comrades, unknown to all in the twentieth year he should come home. and now all these things are coming to pass." then up rose eurymachus, in an angry and scornful mood. "old man," said he, "go home and prophesy to thine own children, lest some harm befall thee here. thinkest thou that every fowl of the air is a messenger from heaven? odysseus has perished, and would that thou hadst perished with him! art thou not ashamed to take sides with this malapert boy, feeding his passion and folly with thy crazy prophecies? doubtless thou lookest to him for favour and reward, but thou wilt find that his friendship will cost thee dear. telemachus has heard our answer to his complaint; let him keep his eloquence for his froward mother, and bring her to a better mind, for neither his speeches nor thy prophecies will turn us from our purpose." the principal object of the meeting was now attained: the villainy of the suitors had been publicly exposed, and they were left without excuse or hope of mercy when the day of reckoning should arrive. accordingly telemachus, dismissing the subject of his wrongs, now spoke of his intended voyage to pylos and sparta, and begged for the loan of a ship to carry him and his comrades to the mainland. no response was made to his request; but one man still attempted to rouse public opinion against the suitors. this was mentor, an old friend of odysseus, who had been left in charge of his household on his departure from ithaca. "is there not one among you," he cried indignantly, "who will speak a word for telemachus, or testify against the wickedness of these men? no more let kings be gentle and merciful towards their people, as was odysseus when he ruled over you, loving and tender-hearted as a father. let righteousness give place to oppression, if these are its rewards. there you sit, like cowed and beaten men, and suffer a handful of worthless men to lord it over you all." after this last appeal, which was as fruitless as the others, the meeting broke up, and the suitors returned to their revels in the house of odysseus. ii full of anxious thought, telemachus went down to the shore, wondering how he should find means to accomplish his voyage. stooping down, he bathed his hands in the sea, and after this act of purification he lifted up his hands and prayed to athene: "o thou who camest yesterday to our house, and badest me go on this quest, give ear and help me in this strait." he had hardly finished his prayer when he heard a footstep, and looking round saw mentor, who had come to his aid at the meeting, approaching from the town. "be not cast down," said mentor, "remember whose son thou art, and all shall be well with thee. as to this voyage, that shall be my care. i will find thee a ship, and will go with thee to pylos. meanwhile go thou home and make ready all things for victualling the ship, corn and wine and barley-meal, and bestow them heedfully in vessels and in bags of leather. ships there are in plenty, new and old, in seagirt ithaca; i will choose the best of them all, and man her with a crew who will serve thee freely and with all goodwill." away went telemachus, much comforted in spirit, though his heart fluttered when he thought of the great adventure which lay before him. when he entered the courtyard of his house he found the suitors flaying goats and singeing swine for the midday feast. antinous hailed his coming with a rude laugh, and running up to him seized his hand and said mockingly: "well met, sir eloquence! thy face, i see, is full of care, as of one who is bent on high designs. but lay thy graver burdens aside for awhile, and eat and drink with us. thou shalt want neither ship nor men to carry thee to holy pylos." telemachus snatched his hand away, and answered sternly: "my thoughts are not of feasting and merry-making, nor would i eat and drink with you if they were. i am no longer a child, to be flouted and robbed without a word. i tell you i shall find it in my heart to do you a mischief, before many days are passed. but now i am going, as i said, on this journey. i must go as a passenger, since ye will not lend me a ship." many a scornful face was turned upon him, and many a taunt aimed at him, as he uttered these bold words. "we are all undone!" cried one in pretended alarm, "telemachus is gone to gather an army in pylos or in sparta, and he will come back with his mighty men and take all our lives." "or perhaps he is going to bring poison from ephyra," said another, "and he will cast it in the bowl, and we shall be all dead corpses.[1]" and a third cried: "take care of thyself, telemachus, or we shall have double labour because of thee, in dividing thy goods among us." [footnote 1: 2 kings xix. 35.] but the taunts of fools and knaves have no sting for honest ears. without another word telemachus left that gibing mob, and went straight to the strong-room where his father's treasure was stored. there lay heaps of gold and silver, and chests full of fine raiment, and great jars of fragrant olive-oil. along the wall was a long row of portly casks, filled with the choicest wine; there they had stood untouched for twenty years, awaiting the master's return. all this wealth was given in charge to eurycleia, the nurse of telemachus, a wise and careful dame, who watched the chamber day and night. her telemachus now summoned, and said: "fill me twelve jars of wine--not the best, which thou art keeping for my father, but the next best to that. and take twenty measures of barley-meal, and store it in sacks of leather, and keep all these things together till i send for them. keep close counsel, and above all let not my mother know. i am going to sparta and to sandy pylos to inquire of my father's return; and i shall start in the evening when my mother is gone to rest." "who put such a thought into thy heart?" cried eurycleia in wailing tones. "why wilt thou take this dreadful journey, thou, an only child, so loved, and so dear? odysseus is lost for ever, and if thou go we shall lose thee too, for the suitors will plot thy ruin while thou art far away." "fear nothing for me," answered telemachus, "heaven's eye is upon me, and the hand of zeus is spread over me. swear to me now that thou wilt not tell my mother until twelve days have past." eurycleia swore as he bade her, and at once set about making the preparations for his journey. the suitors were in high spirits at the result of the meeting, and they ate heavily and drank deeply to celebrate their triumph. hence it happened that they retired to rest earlier than usual, being drowsy from their intemperate revel; and when telemachus returned to the banquet-hall he found all the guests departed, and the servants removing the remains of the feast. soon afterwards mentor appeared, and announced that the ship lay ready at her moorings outside the harbour. the stores were carried down to the sea, and stowed under the rowers' benches. "all hands on board!" cried mentor, and took his place in the stern, telemachus sitting by his side. the crew sat ready at their oars, the ship was cast loose from the moorings, and a few vigorous strokes impelled her into deep water. then a strong breeze sprang up from the west, the big sail was set, and the good ship bounded joyfully over the waves, with the white wake roaring behind. the oars were shipped, the sheets made fast, and all the company pledged each other in brimming cups, drinking to their prosperous voyage. the visit to nestor at pylos i so all night long the ship clave her way; and at sunrise they reached the flat, sandy coast of pylos. there they found a great multitude assembled, keeping the feast of poseidon with sacrifices of oxen. the solemn rite was nearly ended when they brought their vessel to land. "courage, now," said mentor to telemachus, seeing the young lad somewhat abashed by the presence of so large a company. "remember whom thou seekest, and lay thy modest scruples aside. thou seest that venerable man, still tall and erect, though he numbers more than a hundred years. that is nestor, son of neleus, wisest of the greeks, a king and the friend and counsellor of kings. go straight to him, and tell him thy errand." seeing telemachus, who was a homebred youth, still hanging back, in dread of that august presence, mentor renewed his friendly remonstrances, "what, still tongue-tied?" he said, taking him by the arm, and leading him forward. "heaven mend thy wits, poor lad! knowest thou not that thou art a child of great hopes, and a favourite of heaven?" when they came to the place where nestor was seated with his sons, they found them busy preparing the feast which followed the sacrifice. as soon as those of nestor's company saw the strangers they came forward in a body to greet them, and made them sit down in places of honour, where soft fleeces were heaped up on the level sand. a youth, about the same age as telemachus, placed a goblet of gold in mentor's hand, and gave him that portion of the flesh which was set apart as an offering to the gods. "welcome, friend," he said, after pledging him from the cup. "put up thy prayer with us to the lord poseidon, for it is to his feast that ye have come. and when thou hast prayed, give the cup to thy young companion, who has been bred, methinks, as i have, to deeds of piety." mentor first asked a blessing on their hosts, and then prayed for a prosperous issue to their own adventure. after him telemachus uttered his prayer in similar words, and then they all sat down to meat. when they had finished, nestor looked earnestly at them, and asked them who they were, and what was the purpose of their journey. "are ye merchants," he said, "or bold buccaneers, who roam the seas, a peril to others, and ever in peril themselves?" telemachus, cheered by good fare, and encouraged by the kind manner of nestor, answered confidently, and explained the nature of his errand. "concerning all the other greeks," he added, "we know at least the manner of their death; but even this poor comfort is denied to the wife and son of odysseus. therefore, if thou hast aught to tell, i beseech thee by thy friendship with my father, let me know all, and soften not the tale, out of kindness or pity to me." "ah! my friend," answered nestor. "what woeful memories thou hast awakened by thy words!--perils by land and perils by water, long years of siege and battle, sleepless nights and toilsome days. ill-fated land of troy! the grave of grecian chivalry! there lies heroic ajax, there lies achilles, and patroclus, sage in counsel, and there lies antilochus, my own dear son, fleet of foot and strong of hand. and art thou indeed the son of odysseus, whom none could match in craft and strategy? but why do i ask? when thou speakest, i seem to hear the very tones of his voice. he was my friend, one with me in mind and heart, and during all the time of the siege we took counsel together for the weal of greece. but when the war was over disasters came thick and fast upon the host. and first, division arose between the two sons of atreus; agamemnon wished to abide in troy until sacrifice had been offered to appease the anger of athene, but menelaus advised immediate departure. the party of menelaus, of whom i was one, launched their ships and sailed to tenedos; there odysseus, who had set sail with us, put back to the mainland of asia, wishing to do a favour to agamemnon. but i, and diomede with me, set forth at once, and, crossing the sea from lesbos, came to euboea; thence, after sacrifice to poseidon, i steered due south, and parting from diomede at argos continued my voyage, and landed safe in pylos. thus it happened that i was not witness of the good or evil fortunes of the other greeks on their voyage home, and know only by rumour how they fared. of agamemnon's fate thou hast surely heard thyself, how he was murdered on his own hearth by the treachery of ægisthus, and how the murder was avenged by orestes. happy the father who has such a son! and such, methinks, art thou." "ay," answered telemachus, when nestor had finished his long story, "i have heard of that glorious deed; and would to heaven that by the might of my hands i might so take vengeance on the evil men who have come to woo my mother, and who fill my house with injury and outrage." "ah! thou hast reminded me," said nestor. "i heard of the shameful wrong which thou hast suffered. but do not despair! who knows but that odysseus will yet return, and make them drink the cup which they have filled? it may well come to pass, if athene continues to thy house the favour which she showed thy father, plain for all eyes to see, in the land of troy." "nay, 'tis too much to hope," answered telemachus with a sigh, "the thing is too hard--even a god could hardly bring it to pass." "now out on thy faint heart!" cried mentor, who hitherto had sat silent. "better for him that his homecoming should be long delayed than that he should have died, like agamemnon, fresh from his victory. heaven will guide him yet to his own door, though now he be at the uttermost parts of the earth." telemachus shook his head as he answered: "no more of that, i pray thee; it can never be." then, addressing nestor, he said: "i would fain ask thee more concerning the manner of agamemnon's death. where was menelaus when that foul deed was done? and how did ægisthus contrive to slay a man mightier far than himself?" "thou askest well," replied nestor. "menelaus was far away, or we should have another tale to tell. and had the return of menelaus not been delayed, vengeance would have been forestalled by many years. yea, the dogs would have eaten the flesh of that vile churl, and not a tear would have been shed for him. but this is how it fell out: while we were toiling and warring at troy, ægisthus sat close to the ear of clytæmnestra, agamemnon's wife, and poured sweet poison into her mind. for a long while she refused to hearken to his base proposals, for she was of a good understanding, and moreover there was ever at her side a minstrel, into whose care agamemnon had given her when he went to troy. but ægisthus seized upon the minstrel, and left him on a desert island to be devoured by carrion birds. then clytæmnestra yielded to his suit, and he brought her to his own house. "but as to thy question concerning menelaus, he left troy in my company, as i told thee, and we sailed together as far as sunium. there menelaus lost his steersman, who was visited by apollo with sudden death, as he sat by the helm; so he remained there to bury his comrade. but his misfortunes were not yet over; for when he reached the steep headland at malea a violent storm arose, and parted his fleet. some of his ships ran into crete for shelter, while he himself was carried away to egypt, where he remained many days, and gathered store of wealth. "now thou understandest why ægisthus was able to work his will on agamemnon, and why he escaped vengeance so long. for seven years he sat on the throne of golden mycenæ, and grievously oppressed the people. but in the eighth year came orestes, and cut him off in the fulness of his sin; and on that very day menelaus came to him, loaded with the treasures of egypt. "far and long had he wandered; but so do not thou, my child. leave not thy house unguarded, while so many foes are gathered against thee, lest when thou return thou find thyself stripped of all. but to menelaus i would have thee go; him thou must by all means consult; for who knows what he may have learnt on that wondrous voyage? vast is the space of water over which he has travelled, not to be measured in one year by a bird in her speediest flight. if thou wilt, thou canst go to sparta in thy ship, or if thou choose to go by land, my chariots and my horses are thine for this service, and my sons shall guide you on the way." ii amid such talk as this, with many a brave story "of moving accidents by flood and field," and many a pithy saw from the white-haired nestor, who had lived so long and seen so much, the hours glided swiftly by, and the red sun was stooping to the horizon when mentor rose from his seat and said: "we must be going; the hour of rest is at hand, and to-morrow we have far to go." "tarry yet a little," said nestor, "and eat a morsel and drink a cup with us. and after that, if ye are fain to sleep, ye shall have fit lodging in my house. heaven forbid that i should suffer such guests as you to sleep on the cold deck, covered with dew, as if i were some needy wretch, with never a blanket to spare for a friend. may the gods preserve me from such a reproach!" "thou sayest well," answered mentor, "and telemachus shall be thy guest to-night. but for me, i pray thee have me excused. my place is on the ship, that i may give an eye to the crew, for i am the only man of experience among them. and to-morrow i must go to elis, to recover a debt of long standing due to me there. i leave telemachus to thy care, that thou mayest cherish him and speed him on his way." as he said these words, while all eyes were fixed upon him, the speaker vanished from sight, and in his stead a great sea-eagle rose into the air, and sped westwards towards the setting sun. long they sat speechless and amazed, and nestor was the first to break the silence. "great things are in store for thee, my son," said he to telemachus, "since thou keepest such company thus early in life. this was none other than jove's mighty daughter, athene, who honoured thy father so highly among the greeks. be gracious to us, our queen, and let thy blessing rest on me and on my house! and i will offer to thee a yearling heifer, that hath never felt the yoke. to thee will i sacrifice her, when i have made gilt her horns with gold." then nestor led the way to his house, and telemachus sat down with him and his sons in the hall. and they filled a bowl with wine eleven years old, exceeding choice, which was reserved for honoured guests. and after they had finished the bowl, and offered prayer to athene, they parted for the night. for telemachus a bed was prepared in the portico, and close by him slept pisistratus, the youngest of nestor's sons. when telemachus rose next morning he found his host already afoot, giving orders to his sons to prepare the sacrifice to athene. one was sent to fetch the heifer, another to summon the goldsmith, and a third to bring up the crew of telemachus' ship, while the rest busied themselves in raising the altar and making all ready for the sacrifice. presently the heifer was driven lowing into the courtyard, and the goldsmith followed with the instruments of his art. nestor gave him gold, and the smith beat it into thin leaf with his hammer, and laid it skilfully over the horns of the heifer. a handmaid brought pure water, and barley-meal in a basket, while one of nestor's sons stood ready with an axe, and another held a bowl to catch the blood. then nestor dipped his hands in the water, took barley-meal from the basket and sprinkled it on the head of the beast, and cutting a tuft of hair from the forehead cast it into the fire. the prayer was spoken, and all due rites being ended he who held the axe smote the heifer on the head, just behind the horns. the women raised the sacrificial cry as the heifer dropped to the ground; and next they whose office it was lifted up the victim's head, and pisistratus cut the throat. when the last quiver of life was over they flayed the carcass, cut strips of flesh from the thighs, and enveloping them in fat, burnt them on the altar. the gods had now their share of the feast; the rest was cut into slices, and broiled over the live embers. while the meal was preparing, telemachus enjoyed the refreshment of a bath; and polycaste, the youngest of nestor's daughters, waited on him; for such was the patriarchal simplicity of those days. when he had bathed, and finished his morning meal, the chariot was brought out, and a strong pair of horses led under the yoke. and the house-dame came with a basket, loaded with wine and delicate viands, and placed it behind the seat. telemachus took his place by the side of pisistratus, who was to drive the horses; the last farewells were spoken, pisistratus cracked his whip, and away they went under the echoing gateway, and on through the streets of pylos. [illustration: telemachus departing from nestor] that night they slept at the house of a friend, and early next day they continued their journey. the way grew steep and difficult, great masses of mountains rose near at hand, and at length they entered a wide valley, covered with waving fields of corn. by sunset they reached the end of their journey, and drew up before the stately portals of king menelaus. telemachus at sparta i menelaus was keeping the double marriage feast of his son and daughter, and his house was thronged with wedding guests. all sat silent and attentive, listening to the strains of a harper, and watching the gambols of a pair of tumblers, who were whirling in giddy reels round the hall. presently voices were heard at the entrance, and one of the squires of menelaus came and informed his master that two strangers of noble mien were standing without, craving hospitality. "shall i bring them in," asked the squire, "or send them on to another house?" "hast thou lost thy wits?" answered menelaus in some heat, being touched in his most sensitive point. "shall we, who owe so much to the kindness of strangers, in the long years of our wanderings, send any man from our doors? unyoke the horses, and bid our new guests enter." four or five servants hastened to do his bidding. the horses, covered with sweat from their hard journey, were unyoked and led into the stable, and telemachus, with his companion, was ushered with all courtesy into the great hall of menelaus. the palace was one of the wealthiest and most splendid in greece; and telemachus, accustomed to a much humbler style of dwelling, stood amazed at the glories which met his eyes. after bathing and changing their raiment they returned to the hall, and were assigned places close to the chair of menelaus. the prince greeted them kindly, and said: "welcome to our halls, young sirs. ye are, as i see, of no mean descent, for zeus has set his stamp on your faces,[1] and none can mistake the signs of kingly birth. when ye have eaten, we will inquire of you further." [footnote 1: in homer, all kings and their families are supposed to be descended from zeus.] a plentiful and delicate meal was promptly set before the young travellers, and they ate and drank with keen appetite. when they had finished, telemachus said to pisistratus, speaking low, that he might not be overheard: "dear son of nestor, is not this a brave place! hast thou ever seen such lavish ornament of silver, and gold, and ivory? surely such is the dwelling of olympian zeus; more magnificent it can hardly be." the quick ear of menelaus caught his last words, and he answered, smiling: "nay, my friend, no mortal may vie with the everlasting glories of zeus. but whether any man can equal me in riches, i know not. for indeed i wandered far and long to gather all this treasure, to cyprus, and phoenicia, and egypt, to æthiopia, and sidon, and the afric shore, a land unmatched in its countless multitudes of sheep. there the ewes bring forth young three times a year, and the poorest shepherd has abundance of cheese, and flesh, and milk. from all these lands i gathered many a costly freight, and now i dwell in the midst of plenty. nevertheless my heart is sad, when i think of all that i have lost. had i returned home straight from troy, i should have come back a poor man, for my house had gone to waste in my absence; but i should not have had to mourn for the death of my brother, struck down, as doubtless ye have heard, by a murderer's hand. and then the thought lies heavy upon me of all those who fell in my cause at troy, and especially of one who was dear to me above all, odysseus, ever the foremost in every toil and adventure. his image haunts me by day and by night, marring my slumbers, and making my food taste bitter in my mouth. he was a man of many woes, and sorrowful is the lot of his wife penelope and telemachus his son." at this mention of his father telemachus could not control his tears, but covered his face with his mantle, and wept without restraint. menelaus saw his emotion, and began to suspect who he was; but for the present he said nothing. a slight stir was now heard at the back of the hall, and a low murmur went round among the guests, who whispered to each other: "the queen! the queen!" and in she came softly, with slow and stately step, helen, the daughter of tyndareus, and wife of menelaus, fairest among all the high-born dames of greece. her wondrous beauty was now ripened into matronly perfection, but now and then a shadow seemed to pass over her face, like the ghost of an old sin, long repented and forgiven. a handmaid set a chair for her, throwing over it a soft rug, and brought a footstool for her feet, while another bare a silver basket, with rims of gold, and placed it ready, filled with purple yarn. when helen was seated, she gazed long and earnestly at telemachus, and then, turning to her husband, she said; "menelaus, shall i utter the thought which is in my heart? nay, speak i must. ne'er saw i such a likeness, either in man or woman, as is the likeness of this fair youth to odysseus. surely this is telemachus, whom he left an infant in ithaca when the host was summoned to troy to fight in a worthless woman's cause." "i have marked it too," answered menelaus. "such were his very hands and feet, and the carriage of his head, and the glance of his eye. moreover, when i made mention of odysseus he covered his face, and wept full sore." telemachus was still too much distressed to speak, and pisistratus had to answer for him: "thou sayest truly, my lord; it is telemachus himself. nestor sent me with him to inquire of thee, and crave counsel of thy wisdom. he is left like an orphan in his home, with none to aid him, and take his father's place." then menelaus drew near to telemachus, and taking his hand kindly said: "welcome again, and thrice welcome to these halls, thou son of my trustiest friend and helper! it was the dream of my life to bring odysseus and all his household from ithaca, and give him a home and a city in this land, that we might grow old together in friendship and loving-kindness, never to be parted until death. but envious heaven has blighted my hopes and hindered his return." at these sad words every eye was moist, and all sat silent, absorbed in sorrowful memories. pisistratus was the first to speak, and his words roused the rest from their melancholy mood. "son of atreus," he said, "my father has often spoken of thy wisdom, and perchance it has taught thee that sorrow is an ill guest at a banquet. the dead, indeed, claim their due, and he would be hard-hearted who would grudge them the poor tribute of a tear. but we cannot mourn for ever, even for such a one as my brother antilochus, whom i never saw, but thou knewest him well, stout in battle, and swift in the pursuit." "'tis well said," replied menelaus. "thou art wise beyond thy years, and a true son of nestor. happy is he, beyond the common lot of men, and smooth and fair runs the thread of his destiny. he dwells in a green old age in his father's house, and sees his sons growing up around him, true heirs of his valour and prudence. now let us banish care, and get to our supper, for the day is far spent, and we have matter for talk which will last us all the morrow." when they had finished eating, and the cups were about to be replenished, helen rose from her seat, and, whispering a few words to the cupbearer, left the hall. in a few minutes she returned, carrying in her hand a small phial, whose contents she poured into the great mixing-bowl from which the cups were filled. "now, drink," she said, "and fear not that black care will pay us a second visit to-night. i have poured into the wine a drug of wondrous potency and virtue, which was given me in egypt by polydamna, the wife of thon. many such drugs the soil of egypt bears, some baneful and some good. and the egyptians are skilled in such craft beyond all mankind. he who drinks of this drug will be armed for that day against all the assaults of sorrow, and will not shed one tear, though his father and mother were to die, no, not though he saw his brother or his son slain before his eyes. so mighty is the virtue of this drug." and when they had drunk of the magic potion helen began again: "'tis now the witching hour, when all hearts are opened, and the burden of life presses lightest on men's shoulders. come, let me tell you a story, one among many, of the deeds and the hardihood of odysseus. it was in the days of the siege, and the trojans were kept close prisoners in their city by the leaguer of the greeks. then he disguised himself as a beggar, clothed himself in filthy rags, and marred his goodly person with cruel stripes. in such fashion he entered the foemen's walls, as if he were a slave flying from a hard master.[1] and i alone in all the city knew who he was. so i brought him to my house, and began to question him; but he made as if he understood not. but when i entertained him as an honoured guest, and swore a solemn oath not to betray him, he trusted me, and declared all the purpose of the greeks. at dead of night he stole out into the town, and, having slain many of the trojans with the edge of the sword, he went back to the camp, and brought much information to his friends. [footnote 1: compare the stratagem of zopyrus, in "stories from greek history."] "when morning came, the voice of wailing rose high in the streets of troy; but my heart rejoiced, for i was filled with longing for my home, and my eyes were opened to the folly which i had wrought by the beguilement of aphrodite, when i left my fatherland and broke faith with my lord." "tis a good story, and thou hast told it well, fair wife," said menelaus. "now hear my tale. it was the time when i and the other champions were shut up in the wooden horse; and odysseus was with us. then thou camest thither, led, i suppose, by some god, hostile to greece, who wished to work our ruin; and deiphobus followed thee. three times thou didst pace around our hollow ambush, feeling it with thy hands, and calling aloud to the princes of greece by name; and thy voice was like the voice of all their wives. there we sat, i, and diomede, and the rest, and heard thee calling. now i and diomede were minded to answer thee, or to go forth and confer with thee; but odysseus suffered it not, and when one of our number was about to lift up his voice he pressed his hands on that foolish mouth, and restrained him by force until thou hadst left the place. and so he saved all our lives." "yes," said telemachus, "he had a heart of iron. but what has it availed him? it could not save him from ruin. howbeit, no more of this; 'tis time to go to rest and forget our cares in sleep." ii early next morning telemachus found his host sitting by his bedside; and as soon as he was dressed menelaus led him to a quiet place, and inquired the reason of his coming. he listened with attention while telemachus explained the purpose of his visit; but when he heard of the suitors, and their riot and waste, he was filled with indignation. "what!" he cried, "would these dastards fill the seat and wed the wife of that mighty man? their lot shall be the lot of a pair of fawns, left by the mother hind in a lion's lair. the hind goes forth to pasture, and in her absence the lion returns, and devours them where they lie. even so shall odysseus return, and bring swift destruction on the whole crew. "but thou hast asked me what i know of the fortunes of odysseus, since he departed from troy; and verily i will tell thee all that i have heard, without turning aside in my tale. i must go back to the time when i lay wind-bound with my ships in a little island off the mouth of the nile. the island is called pharos, and it is distant a day's voyage from the river's mouth. i had lain there twenty days, and still not a breath of air ruffled the glassy surface of the sea. all our stores were consumed, and we had nothing to eat but the fish which my men caught with rudely fashioned hooks and lines. one day i left my men busy with their angling, and wandered away along the shore, full of sad thoughts, and wondering how all this would end. suddenly i heard a light footstep on the pebbles, and there stepped forth from behind a tall rock a young maiden in white, flowing robes. full of dread i saw her coming towards me; for i knew that she was no mortal woman. but her look was gracious, and her voice was sweet; so i took courage as she said: 'who art thou, stranger, and why lingerest thou with thy company in this desert place? i am eidothea, daughter of proteus, the ancient one of the sea; and i am ready to help thee, if thou wilt tell me thy need.' "then i told her how i had been kept an unwilling captive on the island, and begged her to let me know what power i had offended, that he might be appeased by sacrifice, and suffer the wind to blow. 'there is one who can tell thee all that thou desirest to know,' answered she. 'yea, proteus, my father, will show thee how to win thy path across the watery waste. no secrets are hidden from him, neither on earth nor in the sea; and he can tell thee all that hath befallen in thy house in the long years of thine absence. now hearken, and i will tell thee how thou mayest wring from him all his secrets. every day at noon he comes forth from the sea, and lays him down to sleep in a rocky cave; and about him are couched his herd of seals. i will bring thee to the place in the early morning, and set thee in ambush to await his coming. choose three of the stoutest of thy men to aid thee in the adventure, and as soon as thou seest him asleep rush upon him and hold him fast. he will struggle hard, and take a hundred different shapes; but loose him not until he return to his own form, and then will he reveal to thee all that he has to tell.' "so saying, the goddess disappeared beneath the waves. next morning i went with three picked men to the appointed place, and soon eidothea arrived, bearing four hides of seals, freshly flayed. then she hollowed out four pits in the sand for us to lie in, and clothed us in the skins, and couched us together. now that bed had like to have been our last, for we were stifled by the dreadful stench of the seabred seals. but the goddess saw our distress, and found a remedy; for she brought ambrosia and set it beneath our nostrils, and that heavenly perfume overpowered the noisome stench. "so all the morning we lay and wafted patiently, and at noon the seals came up out of the sea and lay down in order on the sand. last of all came proteus, and counted his herd, reckoning us among their number, with no suspicion of guile. we waited until he was fast asleep, and then we rushed from our ambush and seized him hand and foot. long and hard was the struggle, and many the shapes which he took. first he became a bearded lion, then a snake, then a leopard, then a huge boar; after these he turned into running water and a tall, leafy tree. but we only held him the more firmly, and at last he grew weary and spake to me in his own shape: 'what wouldst thou have, son of atreus, and who has taught thee to outwit me and take me captive by craft?' "'thou knowest my need,' i answered; 'why dost thou waste thy words? tell me rather how i may find release from my present strait' "'hear, then,' said he: 'thou hast forgotten thy duty to zeus and the other gods. not a victim bled, not a prayer was offered, when thou didst embark on this voyage. go back to egypt, to the holy waters of nile, and there pay thy vows, and offer a great sacrifice to their offended deity; thus, and thus only, canst thou win thy return to thine own country and thy stately home.' "when i heard this my heart was broken within me, to think of that long and perilous path across the misty deep. nevertheless i consented to take that journey, for i saw no other way of escape. and after i had promised to obey him, i began to inquire further of the fate of nestor and the rest, whom i left behind me on my way home. "''tis a grievous story that thou requirest of me,' said proteus, 'and thou shalt have little joy in the hearing. many have been taken and many left. two only perished in returning, and one is still living, a prisoner of the sea. ajax has paid his debt to athene, whose shrine he polluted; and this was the manner of his death: when his vessel was shattered by that great tempest, he himself escaped to a rock, for poseidon came to his aid. but even the peril which he had just escaped could not subdue his haughtiness and his pride, and he uttered an impious vaunt, boasting that in despite of heaven he had escaped a watery grave. then poseidon was wroth, and smote the rock with his trident, and that half of the rock on which ajax was sitting fell into the sea, bearing him with it. so he died, when he had drunk the brine. "'now harden thy heart, and learn how thy brother agamemnon fell. after a long and stormy voyage he at length brought his shattered vessels safe into harbour, and set foot on his native soil at argos. with tears of joy and thankfulness he fell on his knees and kissed the sod, trusting that now his sorrows were passed. now there was a watchman whom ægisthus had posted on a high place commanding the sea to look out for agamemnon's return. a whole year he watched, for he had been promised a great reward. and when he saw the king's face he went with all speed to tell his master. forthwith ægisthus prepared an ambush of twenty armed men; these he kept in hiding at the back of the hall, while he ordered his servants to prepare a great banquet. then he went to meet agamemnon with horses and with chariots, and brought him to his house, and made good cheer. and when he had feasted him he smote and slew him, as a man slaughters an ox in his stall.' "at that tale of horror i fell upon the sand, weeping bitterly, for i had no desire to live any longer or look on the light of the sun. long i lay mourning, as one who had lost all hope, but at last proteus checked the torrent of my passion, and bade me take thought of my own homecoming. 'this is no time,' he said, 'to melt away in womanish grief. haste thee to take vengeance, if so be that orestes hath not forestalled thee, and slain his father's murderer.' "somewhat comforted by these words, i took courage to ask who was the man of whom he had spoken as a prisoner of the sea. 'it is the son of laertes,' answered proteus, 'odysseus, whose home is in ithaca. i myself saw him on an island, in the house of the nymph calypso; and sore he wept because he could not leave the goddess, who holds him in thrall, and will not suffer him to return to his country.' "lastly, he told me concerning my own fate. 'thou, menelaus,' he said, 'art exempt from the common lot of men, because thou art the husband of helen, and she is a daughter of zeus. therefore it is not appointed for thee to die, but when thine hour is come the gods shall convey thee to the elysian fields, where dwell the elect spirits in everlasting blessedness. there falls not snow nor rain, there blows no rude blast, but the fresh cool breath of the west comes softly from ocean to refresh them that dwell in that happy clime.'" thus happily ended the story of the spartan prince's wanderings. and when he had finished, he pressed telemachus to prolong his visit; but that prudent youth declined the invitation, pleading the necessity of a speedy return to ithaca, that he might keep an eye on the doings of the suitors. menelaus was compelled to allow the justice of his plea, and accordingly all things were made ready for a speedy departure. iii we must now return to ithaca, and see what reception was preparing for telemachus when he came back from his adventurous journey. two or three days after he left ithaca the suitors were gathered before the doors of odysseus, playing at quoits, or hurling their javelins at a mark. presently a young noble came up to the group, and addressing antinous, who was watching the sport, asked him if he had heard aught of telemachus. "i would fain know how long he is like to be absent from ithaca," he said; "for he has borrowed my ship, and i have need of her. know ye when he is to return from pylos?" antinous heard him with amazement; for neither he nor any other of the suitors knew that telemachus had sailed from ithaca, supposing him to be absent on his farm. so he questioned the youth closely as to the time and manner of that voyage, how the crew was composed, and whether the vessel was lent willingly, or taken by force. "of my own free will i lent her," answered the lad, "why should i not help him in his need? as to the crew, they were all picked men, and well born; and the captain was mentor, or some god in his likeness; for i saw mentor yesterday in the town, and not a ship has touched at ithaca since they sailed." when he who had lent the ship was departed the suitors left their sports, and drawing close together began to converse in low tones. they were full of anger against telemachus because of this journey, which gave the lie to their malicious prophecies, and was not without prospect of danger to themselves. accordingly antinous found ready hearers when he stood up and spoke as follows:--"this forward boy must be put down, or he will mar our wooing. it is a great deed which he has done, and he will not stop here, unless we find means to cut short his adventures. now hear what i advise: let us man a ship and moor her in the narrow sea between ithaca and samos, and lie in wait for him there. this cruise of his is like to cost him dear." the plan was highly approved, and the whole body rose and entered the house together, resolved to act at once on the advice of antinous. before long news of their wicked designs came to the ears of penelope, who was still ignorant of her son's departure; for eurycleia had kept her counsel well. the evil tidings were brought by medon, a servant in the house of odysseus, who had overheard the suitors plotting together, while he stood concealed behind a buttress of the courtyard fence. without delay he went in search of penelope, whom he found sitting with her handmaids in her chamber. as soon as he appeared on the threshold penelope looked at him reproachfully, and said: "what message bringest thou from thy fair masters? is it their pleasure that my maidens should leave their tasks and spread the board for them? out on your feasting and your wooing! may this be the last morsel that ye ever taste! ungrateful men, have ye forgotten all the good deeds that were wrought here by the hands of odysseus, and all the kindness that ye received from him? yes, all is forgotten; ye have no thought in your hearts but to grow fat at his cost, and devour his living." "alas! lady," answered medon, "would that this were the worst! but i am the bearer of heavier news than this. telemachus has sailed to pylos, to inquire concerning his father, and the suitors have plotted to slay him on his way home." having delivered his message, medon left the chamber, and the door was shut. long penelope sat without a word, struck dumb by this cruel blow. then, as if seized by a sudden thought, she rose from her seat, and took two paces towards the door. but her strength failing her she tottered backward, and sank down upon the ground, leaning against the wall. her handmaids gathered round her, and would have lifted her up, but she waved them off and at last gave utterance to her feelings in wailing and broken tones: "woeful beyond the lot of all women on earth is my portion! first, i lost my lion-hearted lord, rich in every excellent gift, a hero among heroes; and now the powers of the air[1] have carried off my child, my well-beloved, without one word of farewell. hearts of stone, why did ye not tell me of his going? had i known his purpose i would have prevailed on him to stay, or he must have left me dead in these halls. go, one of you, and call dolius, the keeper of my garden and orchard, and send him to tell all to laertes, if haply he may devise some way to turn the hearts of the people, and save his race from being utterly cut off." [footnote 1: demons, to whom sudden disappearance was attributed.] "sweet lady," answered eurycleia, who was sitting among the women, "i will tell thee all the truth, and then thou shalt slay me, if it be thy will. i was privy to this journey, and telemachus made me swear a solemn oath not to reveal it to thee until twelve days were passed, or thou hadst heard of it from others. for he feared that thou wouldst waste thy fair cheeks with weeping. but be not cast down; i am sure that the gods hate not so utterly the house of odysseus, nor purpose to destroy it altogether. vex not the old man laertes in his sorrow, but go wash thyself, put on clean raiment, and go up and pray to athene in thy upper chamber to guard and keep thy son from harm." then penelope was comforted, and dried her tears, and went up with her handmaids to the upper chamber. there she made her offering before the shrine of athene, and lifted up her voice in prayer: "daughter of zeus, stern warrior maiden, if ever my lord odysseus offered acceptable sacrifice to thee, remember now his service, save my son, and let not the wooers work evil against him." when her prayer was ended the women joined their voices with hers, and called again and again on the awful name of athene. after that they left her, and she sank down on a couch, exhausted by her emotions, and full of anxious thought. at length she ceased her weary tossing, and fell into a quiet and refreshing sleep. athene had heard her prayer, and being full of pity for the sorely tried lady she resolved to find means to soothe her troubled spirit. so she made a phantom, like in form and in feature to iphthime, a sister of penelope, who lived with her husband in distant pheræ. and the phantom came to the house of penelope, and entering her chamber by the keyhole, stood by her bedside and spake to her thus: "sorrow not at all, nor vex thy soul for the sake of telemachus. the gods love thy son, and will bring him safe home." then wise penelope made answer, slumbering right sweetly at the gates of dreams: "dear sister, what has brought thee hither from thy far distant home? thou biddest me take comfort, but my heart is torn with fear and grief for my brave lord, and yet more for telemachus, who is encompassed with perils by sea and by land." "fear nothing," answered the dim phantom. "he has a mighty helper by his side, even pallas athene, who sent me hither to strengthen and console thee." with that the ghostly visitor vanished as it came, and left penelope much cheered by the clear vision which had brought her words of healing at the blackest hour of the night. meanwhile antinous had taken steps to carry out his villainous design. at nightfall he went down to the sea with twenty picked men, boarded the vessel which had been prepared for their use, and sailed out to a little island which lies in the middle of the strait between samos and ithaca. there they anchored in a sheltered bay, and waited for the coming of telemachus. odysseus and calypso i we have waited long for the appearance of odysseus, and at last he is about to enter the scene, which he will never leave again until the final act of the great drama is played out. hitherto he has been pursued by the malice of poseidon, who wrecked his fleet, drowned all his men, and kept him confined for seven years in calypso's island, in vengeance for the blinding of his son polyphemus. but now the prayers of athene have prevailed, and hermes, the messenger of the gods, is on his way from olympus, bearing a peremptory summons to calypso to let odysseus depart. shod with his golden, winged sandals, which bear him, swift as the wind, over moist and dry, and holding in his hand his magic wand, hermes skimmed like a seagull over the blue waters of the ægæan, until he came to that far distant isle. arrived there, he went straight to the great cavern where calypso dwelt; and he found her there, walking about her room, weaving with a golden shuttle, and singing sweetly at her work. a great fire was blazing on the hearth, sending forth a sweet odour of cedar and sandal-wood. round about the cavern grew a little wood of blossoming trees, "alder and poplar tall, and cypress sweet of smell"; and there owls and hawks and cormorants built their nests. over the threshold was trained a wide-branching vine, with many a purple cluster and wealth of rustling leaves. four springs of clear water welled up before the cave, and wandered down to the meadows where the violet and parsley grew. it was a choice and cool retreat, meet dwelling for a lovely nymph. calypso greeted her visitor kindly, bade him be seated, and set nectar and ambrosia before him. and when he had refreshed himself, he told his message. "i bear the commands of zeus," he said, "and to do his high will have i travelled this long and weary way. it is said that thou keepest with thee a man of many woes, who has suffered more than any of those who fought at troy. him thou art commanded to send away from thee with all speed; for it is not destined for him to end his days here, but the hour has come when he must go back to his home and country, zeus has spoken, and thou must obey." this was bitter news to calypso, for she loved odysseus, and would have made him immortal, that he might abide with her for ever. she wrung her hands, and said in a mournful voice: "now i know of a truth that the gods are a jealous race, and will not suffer one of their kind to wed with a mortal mate. therefore orion fell by the unseen arrows of artemis, when fair aurora chose him for her lord; and therefore zeus slew iasion with his lightning, because he was loved of demeter. is not odysseus mine? did i not save him and cherish him when he was flung naked and helpless on these shores? but since no other deity may evade or frustrate the will of zeus, let him go, and i will show him how he may reach his own country without scathe." when he had heard calypso's answer, hermes took leave of her, and returned to olympus, and the nymph went down to the part of the shore where she knew odysseus was accustomed to sit. there he would remain all day, gazing tearfully over the barren waste of waters, and wearing out his soul with ceaseless lamentation. for he had long grown weary of his soft slavery in calypso's cave, and yearned with exceeding great desire for the familiar hills of ithaca, so rugged, but so dear. and there calypso found him now, sitting on a rock with dejected mien. she sat down at his side, and said: "a truce to thy complaints, thou man of woes! thou hast thy wish; i will let thee go with all good-will, and i will show thee how to build a broad raft, which shall bear thee across the misty deep. i will victual her with corn and wine, and clothe thee in new garments, and send a breeze behind thee to waft thee safe. thus am i commanded by the gods, whose dwelling is in the wide heaven, and their will i do. up now and fell me yon tall trees for timber to make the raft." odysseus was by nature a very shrewd and cautious man, and he feared that calypso was contriving some mischief against him, in revenge for his coldness. he looked at her doubtfully, and answered: "i fear thee, nymph, and i mistrust thy purpose. how shall a man cross this dreadful gulf, where no ship is ever seen, on a raft? and though that were possible, i will never leave thee against thy will. swear to me now that thou intendest me no harm." calypso smiled at his suspicions, and patted him on the shoulder as she answered: "thou art a sad rogue, and very deep of wit, as anyone may see by these words of thine. now hear me swear: witness, thou earth, and the wide heaven above us, and the dark waterfall of styx, the greatest and most awful thing by which a god may swear, that i intend no ill, but only good, to this man." having sworn that oath calypso rose, and bidding odysseus follow led the way to her cave. there she set meat before him, such as mortal men eat, and wine to drink; but she herself was served by her handmaids with immortal food, and nectar, the wine of the gods. when they had supped, calypso looked at odysseus and said: "and wilt thou indeed leave me, thou strange man? am i not tall and fair, and worthy to be called a daughter of heaven? and is thy penelope so rare a dame, that thou preferrest her to me! ah! if thou knewest all the toils which await thee before thou reachest thy home, and all the perils prepared for thee there, thou wouldst renounce thy purpose, and dwell for ever with me. nevertheless go, if go thou must, and my blessing go with thee." her words were kind, but some anger lurked in her tone, which odysseus hastened to appease. "fair goddess," he answered, "be not wroth with me. i know that thou art more lovely far than my wife penelope; for thou art divine, and she is but a mortal woman. nevertheless i long day and night to see her face, and to sit beneath the shadow of my own rooftree. and if i be stricken again by the hand of heaven on the purple sea, i will bear it, for i have a very patient heart. long have i toiled, and much have i suffered, amid waves and wars. if more remains, i will endure that also." ii at early dawn, when the eastern wave was just silvered by the dim light, calypso roused odysseus, and equipped him for the task of the day. first she gave him a weighty two-edged axe, well balanced on its haft of olive-wood, and an adze, freshly ground; then she showed him where the tall trees grew, and bade him fall to work with the axe. twenty great trees fell beneath his sturdy strokes, and he trimmed the trunks with the axe, and stripped off the bark. meanwhile calypso had brought him an augur, and he bored the timbers, and fitted them together, and fastened them with bolts and cross-pieces. so the raft grew under his hands, broad as the floor of a stout merchantship. and he fenced her with bulwarks, piling up blocks of wood to steady them. last of all he made mast and sail and rigging; and when all was ready he thrust the frail vessel with rollers and levers down to the sea. four times the sun had risen and set before his labour was ended; and on the fifth day calypso brought him provisions for the voyage, a great goatskin bottle full of water, and a smaller one of wine, and a sack of corn, with other choice viands as a relish to his bread. a joyful man was odysseus when he spread his sail, and took his place at the helm, and waved a last farewell to his gentle friend. a fair breeze wafted him swiftly from the shore, and ere long that lovely island, at once his home and his prison for seven long years, became a mere shadow in the distance. all night he sat sleepless, tiller in hand, watching the pilot stars, the pleiades, and boötes, and the bear, named also the wain, which turns on one spot, and watches orion, and never dips into the ocean stream. for the goddess calypso had bidden him keep that star on the left hand as he sailed the seas. thus he voyaged for seventeen days, and on the eighteenth he saw afar off, dimly outlined, a range of hills, rising, like the back of a shield, above the horizon's verge. now poseidon, his great enemy, had been absent for many days on a far journey, and thus had taken no part in the council at olympus when zeus had issued his order for the release of odysseus. just at this time he was on his way back to olympus, and caught sight of the bold voyager steering towards the nearest land. "ha! art thou there?" said the implacable god, shaking his head; "and have the other powers plotted against me in my absence, to frustrate my just anger? thy wanderings are well-nigh over, poor wretch! but thou shalt taste once more of my vengeance, before thou reachest yonder shore." so saying the lord of ocean took his trident and stirred up the deep; and the clouds came trooping at his call, covering the sky with a black curtain. soon a great tempest broke loose, blowing in violent and fitful blasts from all the four quarters of heaven. then pale fear got hold of odysseus, as he saw the great curling billows heaving round his frail craft. "woe is me!" he cried, "when shall my troubles have an end? surely the goddess spoke truth, when she foretold me that i should perish amid the waves, and never see my home again. here i lie helpless, given over to destruction, the sport of all the winds of heaven. happy, thrice happy, were my comrades who fell fighting bravely and found honourable burial in the soil of troy! would that i had died on that great day when the battle raged fiercest over the body of pelides; then should i have found death with honour, but now i am doomed to a miserable and dishonoured end." the words were hardly uttered when a huge toppling wave struck the raft with tremendous force, carrying away mast and sail, and hurling odysseus into the sea. deep down he sank, and the waters darkened over his head, for he was encumbered by the weight of his clothes. at last he rose to the surface, gasping, and spitting out the brine, and though sore spent, he swam towards the raft, and hauled himself on board. there he sat clinging to the dismasted and rudderless vessel, which was tossed to and fro from wave to wave, as the winds of autumn sport with the light thistledown and drive it hither and thither. but help was at hand. there was a certain ocean nymph, named ino, daughter of cadmus, who had once been a mortal woman, but now was numbered among the immortal powers. she saw and pitied odysseus, and boarding the raft addressed him in this wise: "poor man, why is poseidon so wroth with thee that he maltreats thee thus? yet shall he not destroy thee, for all his malice. only do as i bid thee, and thou shalt get safely to land: take this veil, and when thou hast stripped off thy garments, bind it across thy breast. then leave the raft to its fate, and swim manfully to land; and when thou art safe fling the veil back into the sea, and go thy way." so saying the goddess sank beneath the waves, leaving odysseus with her veil in his hand. but that cautious veteran did not at once act on her advice, for he feared that some treachery was intended against him. he resolved therefore to remain on the raft as long as her timbers held together, and only to have recourse to the veil in the last extremity. he had just taken this prudent resolution, when another wave, more huge than the last, thundered down on the raft, scattering her timbers, as the wind scatters a heap of chaff. odysseus clung fast to one beam and, mounting it, sat astride as on a horse, until he had stripped off his clothes. then he bound the veil round him, flung himself head foremost into the billows, and swam lustily towards land. the storm was now subsiding, and a steady breeze succeeded, blowing from the north, which helped that much-tried hero in his struggle for life. yet for two days and two nights he battled with the waves, and when day broke on the third day he found himself close under a frowning wall of cliffs, at whose foot the sea was breaking with a noise like thunder. odysseus ceased swimming, and trod the water, looking anxiously round for an opening in the cliffs where he might land. while he hesitated, a great foaming wave came rushing landward, threatening to sweep him against that rugged shore; but odysseus saw his danger in time, and succeeded in gaining a rocky mass which stood above the surface just before him, and clutching it with hands and knees, contrived to keep his hold until the huge billow was past. in another moment he was caught by the recoil of the wave, and flung back into the boiling surf, with fingers torn and bleeding. with desperate exertions he fought his way out into the comparatively calm water, outside the line of breakers, and swam parallel to the shore, until he saw with delight a sheltered inlet, whence a river flowed into the sea. murmuring a prayer to the god of the river he steered for land, and a few strokes brought him to a smooth sandy beach, where he lay for a long time without sense or motion. all his flesh was swollen by his long immersion in the water, the skin was stripped from his hands, and when his breath came back to him he felt as weak as a child. then a deadly nausea came over him, and the water which he had swallowed gushed up through his mouth and nostrils. somewhat relieved by this, he rose to his feet, and tottering to the river's brink loosed the veil from his waist, and dropped it into the flowing water. for he remembered the request of ino, to whom he owed his life. he had indeed escaped the sea; but his position seemed almost hopeless. there he lay, naked, and more dead than alive, without food or shelter, in a strange land, without a sign of human habitation in view. crawling painfully to a bed of rushes he lay down and considered what was best for him to do. he could not remain where he was, for it was an exposed place, with no protection from the dew, and open to the chill breeze from the river, which blows at early dawn. a few hours of such a vigil would certainly kill him in his exhausted state. if, on the other hand, he sought the shelter of the woods, he feared that he would fall a prey to some prowling beast. at last he determined to face the less certain peril, and made his way into a thicket not far from the river side. searching for a place where he might lie he soon came upon two dense bushes of olive, whose leaves and branches were so closely interwoven that they formed a sort of natural arbour, impenetrable by sun, or rain, or wind. "in good time!" murmured odysseus, as he crept beneath that green roof, and scooped out a deep bed for himself in the fallen leaves. there he lay down, and piled the leaves high over him. and as a careful housewife in some remote farmhouse, where there are no neighbours near, covers up a burning brand among the ashes, so that it may last all night, and preserve the seed of fire; so lay odysseus, nursing the spark of life, in his deep bed of leaves. and soon he forgot all his troubles in a deep and dreamless sleep. odysseus among the phæacians i the land on which odysseus had thus been cast like a piece of broken wreckage was called phæacia, and derived its name from the phæacians, a race of famous mariners, who had settled there some fifty years before, having been driven from their former seat by the cyclopes, a savage tribe, who dwelt on their borders. the phæacians were an unwarlike people, and being in no condition to resist the fierce assaults of these lawless neighbours, they abandoned their homes and built a new city on a little peninsula, connected with the mainland by a narrow isthmus. defended by strong walls they were now safe against all attacks, and they soon grew rich and prosperous in the exercise of a thriving trade. at this time the king of the phæacians was alcinous, who had a fair daughter, named nausicaä. on the night when odysseus lay couched in his bed of leaves nausicaä was sleeping in her bower, and with her were two handmaids, whose beds were set on either side of the door. and in a dream she seemed to hear one of her girlish friends, the daughter of a neighbouring house, speaking to her thus: "nausicaä, why art thou grown so careless as to suffer all the raiment in thy father's house to remain unwashen, when thy bridal day is so near? wouldst thou be wedded in soiled attire, and have all thy friends clad unseemly, to put thee to shame? these are a woman's cares, by which she wins a good report among men, and gladdens her mother's heart. arise, therefore, at break of day, and beg thy father to let harness the mules to the wain, that thou mayest take the linen to the place of washing, far away by the river's side. i will go with thee, and help thee in the work." so dreamed nausicaä, and so spake the vision. but the voice which seemed the voice of her friend came from no mortal lips; it was athene herself who had visited the maiden's bower, in her care for odysseus, that he might get safe conduct to the city of the phæacians. and when she had done her errand the goddess went back to olympus, where is the steadfast, everlasting seat of the blessed gods, not shaken of any wind, nor wet with rain, nor chilled by snow, but steeped for ever in cloudless, sunny air. there the gods abide for ever and take their delight. nausicaä rose betimes, with her mind full of the dream, and went down to the hall, where she found her mother sitting by the hearth with her women, spinning the bright sea-purple thread. inquiring for her father she learnt that he had but that moment gone forth to attend the council of elders, and hastening after him she found him before the doors of the house. "father," she said, "may i have the waggon to take the household raiment to the place of washing? thou thyself hast ever need of clean garments when thou goest to the council, and my brothers will reproach me if they lack clean raiment when they go to the dance." thus spake the maiden, being ashamed to make mention of her own marriage. but alcinous knew, and smiled to himself, as he ordered his thralls to prepare the waggon. so when they had harnessed the mules, nausicaä and her handmaids brought the soiled garments, and bestowed them behind the seat. and her mother brought a basket with food for the midday meal and oil for her daughter and the other maidens when they took their bath. then they took their seats, nausicaä grasped the reins, and they went off at a sharp trot towards the riverside. after a pleasant drive, they came to the place where stood a row of cisterns on the river's bank. there they unharnessed the mules, and left them to crop the sweet clover in the water-meadows. then they unloaded the waggon, threw the garments into washing-troughs, and trod them with their feet until they were thoroughly cleansed, and having wrung them out, they spread them on the white pebbly beach to dry. while the garments were bleaching in the wholesome sun and air, they took their bath, and afterwards sat down to the midday meal. when that was ended, they threw off their veils, and stood up to play at ball. it was a pretty and graceful sight; they were all comely maidens, glowing with youth and health. their sport was accompanied by dance and song, and as they chased the flying ball, keeping time with hand and foot and voice, they seemed like a choir of mountain nymphs, led by artemis, when she goes forth to the chase, in the wild valleys of arcady or lacedæmon. tallest and fairest of them all was nausicaä, who led the sport, moving like a queen among her vassals. presently they grew tired of their sport, and nausicaä flung the ball for the last time to one of her handmaids. the girl missed the ball, and it fell into the middle of the river, whereupon the whole company set up a sharp cry. the sound came to the ears of odysseus, and woke him from his long slumber. he sat up in his bed of leaves and communed with himself: "behold i hear the shrill cry of women, or perhaps of the nymphs who haunt this wild place. now may i learn of what sort are the natives of this land, whether they be fierce and inhospitable, or gentle and kind to strangers." plucking a leafy bough, and holding it before him to cover himself, he stepped forth from the thicket, and came in sight of that gentle company. grim and dreadful he looked, like a hungry lion, buffeted by rain and wind, who goes forth in a tempest to seek his prey; for he was haggard with long fasting, and sore disfigured by his battle with the sea; his eyes glared with famine, and his hair and beard hung ragged and unkempt about his face. at this fearful apparition the maidens fled shrieking along the river bank, all but nausicaä, who stood her ground, and gazed fearlessly, though in wonder, while odysseus came slowly forward. when he was still some way off he stopped, fearing to offend her delicacy if he came nearer. then with a gesture of entreaty he began to speak, and nausicaä knew at once that it was no common man who stood before her. "have pity on me, o queen!" he began, in soft and insinuating tones. "art thou a goddess, or a mortal woman? if thou art a goddess, thou seemest to me most like to artemis, daughter of great zeus, both in face, and in stature, and in form. but if thou art mortal, then thrice blessed are thy father and mother, and thrice blessed thy brethren, and their spirits are refreshed because of thee, when thou goest, a very rose of beauty, to the dance. happy the man who wins thee for his bride! never yet have i seen the like of thee among all the children of men. only once have i beheld aught to compare unto thee, a young palm-tree which i saw growing tall and straight by the altar of apollo at delos. i saw it, and was amazed, for it was wondrous fair; and even so is my soul filled with wonder and dread when i look upon thy face, so that i am afraid to draw near unto thee, though sore is my need. yesterday i was flung naked on thy coast, after a voyage of twenty days. many things have i suffered, and more, i ween, remains for me in store; for i am a man of many woes. have compassion on me, dread lady! i am thy suppliant, and to thee first i address my prayer. show me the way to the city, and give me a cloth to wrap round me, that i may go among the people without shame. and may the gods give thee all, whatsoever thy heart desireth, a husband and a home, and happy wedded love, shedding warmth in thine house, and a strong defence against all ills from without, but above all a sacred treasure in thy husband's heart, and in thine." "whatever be thy misfortunes," answered nausicaä, "i am sure they are not the fruit of thine own folly or wickedness. and since thou art come as a suppliant to this land of ours, thou shalt want nothing, whether it be raiment, or aught else that befits thy state. i will show thee our city, and tell thee the name of the people. know that thou hast come to the country of the phæacians, whose ruler and king is alcinous, and i am his daughter." then she called to her handmaids, who were looking on, half frightened, half curious, from behind rocks and trees, a long way off, ready to resume their flight at the slightest alarm: "come hither, and fear not the man; neither he nor any other shall ever come to this land with thoughts of harm; for we are very dear to the immortal gods. far away we dwell amidst the rolling seas, remote from the haunts of men. but this is some hapless wanderer, driven by chance to our shores, and we must cherish him, for from zeus come all strangers and beggars, and a little gift is a great thing to them. take the stranger to a sheltered place, where he may wash and dress him, and give him wherewithal to clothe himself, and after that, meat and drink." when they heard the words of their mistress the girls came stealing timidly back, one by one. and they gave odysseus clean raiment, and when he had washed and clothed himself, he came back to the place where nausicaä was waiting. wonderful was the change which had been made in his appearance by the refreshing bath and fitting apparel. instead of the squalid, battered wretch who had begged for countenance and shelter, nausicaä saw before her a stalwart, stately man, broad-shouldered, and deep of chest, with dark clustering hair and beard, like the curling hyacinth, and an air of majesty and command. "hear me, friends," whispered nausicaä, as she saw him coming, "methinks some god hath wrought a miracle on this man, who but now was so hideous to behold. would that we might prevail with him to make his abode among us! she would be a proud maiden who should wed with such as him. now give the stranger food and drink." and they did so, and odysseus ate and drank with keen appetite, having tasted nothing for many days. while he was eating, the maidens folded the garments and placed them in the waggon, and when he had finished, nausicaä mounted the waggon, and bidding him and the handmaids follow on foot started the mules and drove slowly towards the city. when they reached the cultivated lands outside the walls she drew up, and addressed odysseus thus: "stranger, i may not go with thee further, for i fear the envious tongues of the citizens, who will point the finger at us and say: 'see what a tall and handsome stranger nausicaä hath brought with her!--some seafaring man whom she hath brought with her to be her husband, since she despises the men of her own nation.' and this will be a reproach unto me. therefore wait thou awhile, and do as i bid thee. not far from here is a temple and grove of athene, a fair coppice of poplar-trees, and a spring of clear water. go thou thither, and wait until we have time to reach my father's house, then rise and go into the city and inquire for the dwelling of alcinous. a little child could show thee the way, for there is none like it in all the city." [illustration: odysseus and nausicaä] so saying, nausicaä drove on, leaving odysseus where he was. he soon found the temple, and going in knelt down and prayed to the goddess to continue her favour. when he thought that nausicaä had had time to reach home, he rose and went into the city. the road lay along a narrow causeway, which connected the city with the mainland, and on either side was a sheltered haven, with ships drawn up on the beach. passing through the gates he came next to the place of assembly, in front of a temple of poseidon, with a circle of massive stones bedded deeply in the earth. wherever he looked he saw signs of a busy seafaring people--masts, and oars, and great coils of rope--and his ears were filled with the sound of saw and hammer from the shipwrights' yards. ii as he stood thus gazing about him, he saw a young maiden coming towards him, carrying a pitcher. he inquired of her the way to the house of alcinous, and she bade him follow her, as she was going that way. "my father's house," she said, "is close to the house which thou seekest. but thou art a stranger, i perceive, and not of this land; walk therefore warily, and regard no man, for the phæacians love not the face of the stranger, nor are they given to hospitality. their home is the deep, and their ships are as swift as a bird--swift as a thought--for they are the favourites of poseidon." so saying, the maiden led the way swiftly, and odysseus followed, keeping close behind. he remarked with wonder that though the streets were full of people, so that they had to walk carefully, and thread their way through the crowd, none seemed to notice him or his companion, or gave any sign of being conscious of their presence. the truth was that the supposed maiden was none other than his patron goddess athene, who so ordered it that he was invisible to all eyes but hers. as they went, his companion entertained him with an account of the family history of the phæacian king, alcinous, whose father, nausithous, was the son of poseidon. alcinous married arete, who was related to him by blood, and was honoured exceedingly by her husband and by all the phæacians. "she is the idol of her household," continued the maiden, "and all eyes follow her with love and reverence when she goes through the town. so high is her character that even men consult her in their differences, and defer to her judgment. if thou canst enlist her on thy side, thou wilt soon obtain the safe conduct which thou desirest, and reach thy home in safety and honour." they had now reached a large enclosed piece of land, surrounded by a tall fence, above which appeared the boughs of goodly trees, laden with their burden of fruit. "here is the garden of alcinous," whispered the maiden, "and yonder is the gate. enter boldly in, and seek out the queen, who is now sitting at meat with her husband's guests. make thy petition to her, for if her heart incline unto thee all will be well." with that word she vanished from his sight, and left him standing at the gates of alcinous. wondering greatly he entered the garden, and gazed about him. so fair a sight had never met his eyes. fruit-trees without number stood ranged in ordered rows, pear-trees, and pomegranates, and rosy apples, the luscious fig, and olives in their bloom. their fruit never failed, summer or winter, all the year round. there blows the warm west wind without ceasing, nursing the tender blossom, and mellowing the swelling fruit. he saw pears and figs hanging on the trees in every stage of growth. another part of the enclosure was set apart for the cultivation of the vine; and here also the same wonder was to be seen, springtime and summer dancing hand-in-hand, and yellow autumn treading close in their footsteps. side by side hung the ripe, purple cluster, the crude grape just turning from green to red, and tiny green bunches lately formed from the blossom. there the labour of the vintagers never ceased, and the winepress overflowed without end. between the rows of fruit-trees were garden-beds, in which grew all manner of flowers and useful herbs; and the whole was watered by a perennial stream, divided into channels which brought the water to every part of the garden. turning with a sigh from that paradise of colour and perfume, odysseus passed on to the house, and stood for a while, scanning that stately structure. his eyes were almost blinded by the light which flashed from the outer walls, which were built of solid brass, with a coping of blue steel. the doors were of gold, with silver lintel and doorposts, and brazen threshold. then he entered the hall, still unseen of all eyes; and here new wonders awaited him. within the doorway on either side sat dogs wrought in silver and gold, living creatures, that know neither age nor death, which hephæstus, the divine artificer, made, in the wisdom of his heart, to guard the house of the prince alcinous day and night. at intervals stood figures of youths fashioned in gold, with torches in their hands, which at night-time shed a blaze of light throughout the hall. and all round the walls were set rows of seats, covered with richly woven cloths, the work of women's hands. there sat the noble chieftains of phæacia, feasting on the bounty of their king. far within, visible through a wide-opened door, was seen another chamber, where a troop of domestics were busy at their tasks. some were grinding the yellow grain in hand-mills, others were walking to and fro at the loom, and others sat plying distaff and spindle, nodding their heads like poplars waving in the wind. very choice was the fabric woven in that chamber, for the women of phæacia were famed beyond all others for their skill in weaving, even as the men surpassed all the world in seamanship. such were the glories of the house of alcinous, and when odysseus had gazed his fill he began to think of the purpose for which he had come. the feasters were just pouring a libation to hermes, to be followed by a parting cup, before they went home. at that very moment their eyes were opened, and they saw odysseus kneeling at the feet of arete, and heard him utter these words: "great queen, daughter of a race divine, behold me, a toil-worn wanderer, who hath come hither to implore thy grace. intercede for me, i pray thee, with thy husband, that he may send me speedily to my native land: and may it be well with thee, and with all this fair company, and with the children who come after thee." thereupon he sat down by the hearth in the ashes near the fire; and for awhile not a word was spoken, but all sat gazing at him in wonder. at last an aged phæacian broke the silence, and said, looking at alcinous: "my prince, it becomes thee not to suffer this stranger to sit on the ground in the ashes. behold, we are all waiting for thee to speak and declare thy will. give this poor man thy hand, and set him on a seat, that he may know that his prayer is granted. and let them give him to eat, and fill a bowl for a libation to zeus, in whose care are all suppliants." alcinous rose in response to the words of the elder, who was famed among the phæacians for his eloquence and wisdom, and taking odysseus by the hand raised him from his abject posture, and seated him by his side. food and drink were placed before him, and while he was eating, alcinous ordered a bowl to be filled for a libation to zeus, the god of hospitality. the wine was served out to the guests, the libations were poured, and then alcinous began to speak again, unfolding his purpose towards odysseus. "here me, ye princes of phæacia. go ye now to your rest, and to-morrow we will call an assembly of all the elders, and make a great feast and sacrifice, and after that we will take counsel how we may best send the stranger on his way. safe and sound we will bring him to his native land, but after that he must take up his portion, according as the fates have ordained for him, and spun the thread of his life, rough or smooth, from the hour when his mother bare him. i speak as supposing our guest to be a man; but if he be a god, come down from heaven, then i fear that the gods are devising some snare against us. for never has it been their wont to appear among us in disguise, but at sacrifice and at feast they freely consort with us in their own shape, seeing that we are of their own kin." "alcinous," answered odysseus, "let not this fear trouble thee. i am no god, as thou mayest see right well. if ye know any man conspicuous for the burden of sorrow which he bears, ye may learn my lot from his. but none, methinks, can equal the sum of what i have endured by the ordinance of heaven. care sits by my side day and night, but within me is a monitor whose voice i must obey, even my hungry belly, that calls aloud to be filled, and will not let me alone to chew the cud of bitter thought. shameless he is, and clamorous exceedingly. therefore let me sup and question me no further to-night; but rouse thee betimes to-morrow, and send me with all speed to my native land. let me once see my possessions, and my household, and my stately home, and then i will close mine eyes in peace." a murmur of approval went round the hall as odysseus ended his speech. one by one the guests took leave of alcinous, and he and his hosts sat awhile conversing together, while the servants were removing the remnants of the feast, and setting the house in order for the night. arete was the first to speak, for she recognised the garments which odysseus was wearing as the work of her own hands. "friend," said she, "let me ask thee one question. how camest thou by this raiment? for surely thou hast not brought it with thee in thy voyage across the deep. say who thou art and whence thou comest." thus challenged odysseus told her all the story of his shipwreck on the island of calypso, of his long sojourn there, of his voyage on the raft, his second shipwreck, and his landing on the coast of phæacia. concluding he touched feelingly on his meeting with nausicaä, and the kindness, courtesy, and modesty of her behaviour. "never saw i such grace and prudence," he added, "in one so young and so lovely." "yet in this she did not well," replied alcinous, "that she brought thee not straightway to this house, but suffered thee to find thy way alone." "nay, blame her not," answered odysseus, "she bade me come hither with herself and the maidens, but i feared to offend thee, and chose to come alone." "think not that i am so hasty, or given to causeless anger," said alcinous; "excess in all things is evil."[1] then he looked earnestly at odysseus, and continued, after a pause: "i would to heaven that thy thoughts were as mine; then wouldst thou abide for ever in this land, and take my daughter to wife, and i would give thee house and lands. but i see that thou art steadfastly purposed to leave us; and none shall detain thee against thy will. to-morrow thou shalt go. i will appoint a ship and a crew, and they shall bear thee sleeping to thine own land, yea though it be more distant than far euboea, which lies, as i am told, in the uttermost parts of the earth. yet the phæacians went thither in their ships, and returned on the same day. they have no equals, as thou shalt soon learn, in seamanship, and no ships in all the world are like mine." [footnote 1: _nothing too much_, the corner-stone of greek morality.] after some further talk they parted for the night, and odysseus, after all his hardships, was right glad to lay him down in the soft bed prepared for him in the gallery before the house. but before he closed his eyes he muttered a prayer to zeus that alcinous might abide by his promise, and send him safely home. iii next day was appointed for a great feast in the palace of alcinous, to which all the chief men of phæacia were invited, and when odysseus returned to the house, after some hours spent in a visit to the town, hefound the courts and galleries thronged with a great company. the preparations for the banquet were on a heroic scale: twelve sheep, eight fat swine, and two oxen, the choicest of the herd, were slaughtered, and a goodly row of casks, filled with the finest vintages, gave further token that alcinous was no niggardly host. "come," said alcinous, meeting odysseus at the gate. "the guests are seated, and all is ready. trouble not thyself as to the manner of thy home-coming; that is cared for already, and the ship lies at her moorings. but to-day is a day of good cheer, when thou shalt learn how gay and joyous a life the phæacians live." as he spoke, they entered the banquet hall, and odysseus sat down by the side of alcinous. rich and dainty was the fare, and many times the great wine-bowls were filled and emptied; for the phæacians were a luxurious race, much given to the pleasures of the table. among the guests odysseus was especially struck by one venerable figure, who sat by himself against a pillar, on which hung a harp within reach of his hands. odysseus noticed that he ate slowly and deliberately, and seemed to feel for the cup when he wished to drink, "it is demodocus, the blind harper," whispered alcinous. "we shall presently have a taste of his quality. he is a rare minstrel." accordingly, when the last course was removed, the harp was placed in the singer's hands, and after striking a deep chord he began to sing, choosing for his theme a famous tale of troy, which told how achilles and odysseus quarrelled at a banquet, and reviled each other with bitter words, and how agamemnon rejoiced in spirit because of the strife; for he had heard an oracle from apollo, foretelling that when the noblest of the greeks fell out troy's end would be near at hand. odysseus listened, and a flood of emotion filled his mind, so sad were the memories recalled by the minstrel's lay. of all his gallant peers, for ten years his companions in many a joyful feast, and many a high adventure, how many were left? and he, among the last of the survivors, was now growing old, after twenty years of war and wandering, far from his wife and home. he was now, indeed, on the eve of his return; but at what a price had it been won! and who could tell what heavy trials awaited him when once more he set foot on his native soil? was it not but too probable that he would find his house made desolate, telemachus dead, and penelope wedded to another? overpowered by these gloomy forebodings, he covered his face, and wept aloud. when demodocus paused in his singing he wiped away his tears, and poured a drink-offering from his cup; but every time the minstrel resumed his lay a new fit of weeping succeeded. at last, alcinous, who had hitherto been totally absorbed in that rare minstrelsy, observed his guest's emotion, and partly divining the cause came to his relief. "how say ye, fair sirs?" he said, rising and addressing the company. "shall we go forth for awhile, and show the stranger that we have other and manlier pastimes, now that we have eaten and drunken, and cheered our souls with song? let him not say of us when he goes home that we sit all day by the wine-cup, but let him learn that the phæacians surpass all mankind in boxing, and in wrestling, and in leaping, and in the speed of their feet." so saying he rose from his seat and led the way to the place of assembly. crowds soon flocked to see the friendly trial of strength and skill. the first event was the foot race, and this was followed by matches of wrestling, boxing, leaping, and throwing the weight. odysseus stood watching the phæacians at their sports, and thinking of the mighty feats which he had witnessed and shared at the funeral games of patroclus. presently he felt a hand on his shoulder, and heard himself challenged by a young phæacian, whose name was euryalus, in these terms: "why so gloomy, father? away with care! all is ready for thy departure, and thou shalt soon be home again. but come, give us a proof of thy manhood, if thou knowest aught of games of skill. thou seemest a stout fellow, and i doubt not that thou wilt acquit thee well." "friend," answered odysseus, "mock me not. thou seest how broken i am, and worn by my long battle with the sea; and care sits heavy on my heart, forbidding me to think of the things which thou namest." "nay," said euryalus, with a scornful laugh, "i see that i was mistaken in thee. thou art plainly no athlete, but some cunning merchant, with thy head full of thy cargo, and fingers only skilled in counting thy gains." then odysseus bent his brows, and answered with a stern look: "friend, thou art over-saucy of thy tongue. but so it ever is; the gods dispense their gifts with sparing hand, and give not all excellence to the same man. one man is mean of aspect, but heaven's grace descends upon his lips, so that men look upon him with delight while he discourses smoothly with a winning modesty. he is the observed of all observers, and when he walks through the town all eyes follow him as if he were a god. another again is glorious, like a very god, in the splendour of his face and form, but no grace attends upon his speech. even so thou art conspicuous for thy beauty, as though the hand of a god had fashioned thee, but in understanding thou art naught. thou hast stung me by thy unseemly words; i am not ignorant of manly sports, as thou sayest, but i tell thee that i was among the foremost as long as i trusted in my youth and in the might of my hands. but now i am sore spent with woe and pain, for many things have i suffered in battles by land, and buffeting with the sea. nevertheless, broken as i am, i will give proof of my strength, for thou hast provoked me bitterly by thy wanton words." thereupon, without waiting to throw off his cloak, he sprang into the arena, and caught up a massy disc of iron, far heavier than those with which the phæacians had been throwing. poising it lightly, with one hand he flung it, as one who flings a ball. the phæacians sank back in dismay as they saw the huge mass flying high over their heads, and when it fell all rushed to the spot to mark the distance. there it lay, far beyond the longest cast of the native athletes, and odysseus pointed to it, and said: "reach that mark, my young masters, if ye can! and if any among you have a mind to try a match with me in boxing or in wrestling, or in the foot race, they shall have their will; only with the sons of alcinous i will not strive, for he is my host, and it were not fitting or prudent to challenge them. whatever a man can do with his hands i can do: i can send an arrow sure and strong, and strike down my foe, and herein can no archer surpass me, save one only, philoctetes, who bare the bow of hercules; and i can fling a javelin farther than another man can shoot an arrow. only in speed of foot i fear that some of you may surpass me; for my knees are yet weak from long fasting and fighting with the waves." not one of the phæacians took up the challenge, but all sat mute, gazing in wonder and awe at this strange man, who had just given such signal proof of the power of his arm. at last alcinous answered and said: "stranger, none here can take thy words amiss, for, as thou sayest, thou hast been bitterly provoked. but hear me now in turn, and push not thy quarrel further, but rest satisfied with the proof of thy prowess which thou hast given. i will speak to thee frankly, that thou mayest know what manner of men the phæacians are. we are not mighty men of valour, like thee, yet we too have our own peculiar excellence. we are good runners, and none can approach us in all that belongs to the mariner's art. but at home we live softly, loving the banquet, and music and dancing, clean raiment, warm baths, and long repose." then turning to his attendants he added: "go, some of you, and bring hither the harper demodocus, and clear a space for the dancers, that our guest may see something of the native sports of phæacia." then those whose business it was chose a fair level space for the dance, and when demodocus arrived he took his harp and struck up a lively measure. a fair troop of boys stood in a circle around him, and the dance began. alcinous had not overrated the skill of his people in this graceful pastime, and odysseus was filled with wonder as he watched the intricate yet ordered movements of the youthful troop. when the dance was ended, demodocus sang a soft lay of love, and after that the two most skilful dancers, one of whom was laodamas, a son of alcinous, stood up to dance a reel together. one of them held a crimson ball, and, keeping time to the music flung it high into the air; while the other leaped high from the ground, and caught the ball as it fell. then they flung the ball with lightning rapidity from hand to hand, so that it seemed a mere streak of crimson shooting backward and forward; and all the time the dance went gaily on, while the whole company of the phæacians kept up a merry din, beating time to the music with their feet. "of a truth," said odysseus, addressing alcinous, "thou hast not boasted for naught; never saw i such dancing in all my long travels." a proud man was alcinous to hear such praise from such a man, and he was not slow to testify his gratitude. "hear me," he said, "ye princes of phæacia! methinks our guest is a man of exceeding shrewd wit. let us bestow on him a parting gift, that he may remember us, and rejoice in spirit when he thinks of his sojourn in phæacia. thirteen there are, of whom i am one, who sit in high places, and are notable men in the land; let each of us give him a change of raiment and a talent of gold. and euryalus shall crave pardon of him for his ill-chosen words, and appease him with a gift." the generous proposal was well received, and each of the twelve nobles sent his body-servant to fetch the gifts. euryalus also was prompt to make his peace with odysseus. he presented him with a fine sword of tempered bronze, with silver hilt, and scabbard of ivory. "behold my peace-offering," he said, "and take my goodwill with the gift. forget my foolish words, and think of me kindly when thou art safe among thine own people." odysseus acknowledged the courtesy of euryalus in becoming terms, and then the whole company rose and went back to the palace of alcinous, where they found the gifts for odysseus all set in order against his departure. then alcinous brought a golden goblet, beautifully fashioned, and richly chased, and bade arete bring a coffer to hold the gifts. the coffer was displayed, and was in itself a gift of no mean value, being a choice piece of work. "now bid thy handmaids prepare a bath for our guest," said alcinous to his wife, and "receive this as a memorial of me," he added, placing the goblet in odysseus' hands, "that thou mayest remember me all the days of thy life, when thou pourest libations to zeus and the other deathless gods." arete gave the order as required, and while the bath was preparing she arranged all the gifts in the coffer. then closing the lid she said to odysseus: "make all fast with thine own hands, that none may meddle with thy goods as thou liest asleep on thy passage across the sea." odysseus made fast the cord, securing it with an intricate and cunning knot, which he had learnt from the great sorceress circe; and when he had finished he was summoned by the eldest of the handmaids to the bath. when he had bathed and put on fresh raiment he came back to the dining-hall; and as he entered he saw nausicaä leaning against a pillar. sweet was the maiden's face, and kind her eyes, as she gazed with innocent admiration on the stately figure of her father's guest. "farewell, my friend," said she, "and when thou arrivest home think sometimes of her to whom thou owest thy life." "fair daughter of alcinous," answered odysseus, "if that day ever comes--if i ever see my home again, by favour of zeus, the lord of hera--be assured that i shall remember thee in my prayers, as long as this life which thou hast given me shall last." and so he parted from the maiden, and she went back to her mother's bower. odysseus again received a place of honour by the side of alcinous, and a goodly portion of meat was set before him. looking round the circle of guests he saw demodocus, the blind harper, sitting in their midst, and wishing to show him honour, he cut off a choice piece from the flesh which had been set before him, and bade a servant carry it to the bard, and greet him in the giver's name. the servant did as he was bidden, and demodocus received the portion of honour with becoming gratitude. when the banquet was drawing towards its close odysseus approached the minstrel, and after praising his former lay, which told of the disastrous homeward voyage of the greeks, he begged him to sing the lay of the wooden horse, the device by which troy was taken. demodocus complied, and taking his harp began to chant that famous lay, which told how the greeks burnt their tents and sailed away, leaving the wooden monster behind them, how the trojans dragged the horse into the city, and how the fatal engine sent forth its burden of armed men in the night. the name of odysseus, the arch-plotter, occurred again and again as the tale went on; and once more odysseus was moved to tears by the memories which the words of the bard awakened. alcinous observed his emotion, and called to demodocus to cease his song. "we vex our guest," he said, "for whose sake we are gathered here. doubtless the minstrel has touched some hidden spring of sorrow. but come now," he continued, addressing odysseus, "we have honoured thee exceedingly, and given thee of our best. wilt thou not repay us by telling something of thyself? let us hear thy name, and say of what land and of what city thou art, that our ships may know whither to steer their course. for know that we mariners of phæacia need no pilots nor rudders, but our ships by their own instinct take us to whatsoever place we would visit, gliding like phantoms, invisible, swift as thought. nor has any vessel from our ports ever suffered shipwreck or harm. "thou likewise hast been a great traveller, and seen many lands and nations, both such as are wild and fierce and such as are gentle and of godly mind. tell us then the tale of thy wanderings, and say why thou weepest ever at the name of troy." all the guests bent forward with eager faces, and strained their ears to catch odysseus' answer; for there was something mysterious about this strange guest, something which marked him as a man of no common stamp, and their curiosity, which had hitherto been held in check by the laws of courtesy, was now set free from all restraint by the frank question of alcinous. "illustrious prince," answered odysseus, after a moment's pause, "methinks it were best to sit silent and listen to the sweet voice of the harper; for what better thing has life to offer than a full cup and brave minstrelsy heard at the quiet hour of eventide? but if thou must needs hear a tale of sorrow it is not for me to deny thee. first of all i will tell thee my name. i am odysseus, son of laertes, and my name is in all men's mouths because of my deep wit and manifold wiles, yea, the renown thereof reaches even unto heaven. my home is the sunny isle of ithaca, last in a line of islands lying in the western sea. it is a rugged land, but a nurse of gallant sons; and sweet, ah! very sweet, is the name of home. never hath my heart been turned from that dear spot, no, not by all the loveliness of calypso, nor by all the witchery of circe, but ever i remained faithful to the one lodestar of my life." here odysseus began the wondrous story of his wanderings, which kept his hearers spellbound until far into the night. the wanderings of odysseus i after leaving troy, odysseus first sailed to the coast of thrace, and collected a rich booty in a sudden raid on the district. but while his men lingered to enjoy the first-fruits of their spoil, the wild tribes of the neighbourhood rallied their forces, and falling upon the invaders, while they were engaged in a drunken revel, drove them with great slaughter to their ships. no sooner had they put to sea than a wild tempest came down upon them from the north, and drove them to seek shelter again on the mainland, where they lay for two days and nights in constant dread of another attack from the injured thracians. on the third day they set sail again and got as far as malea, the southernmost headland of greece. here they were again driven from their course, and after nine days' tossing on the waves they reached the land of the lotus-eaters. when his men had refreshed themselves, odysseus sent three of their number to explore the country and learn the manners of the inhabitants. presently these three came to the dwellings of the lotus-eaters, who received them kindly and gave them to eat of the lotus-plant. with the first taste of that magic food the men forgot the purpose for which they had been sent, forgot their friends and their home, and had no desire left in life but to remain there all their days and feast with the lotus-eaters. in this state they were found by odysseus, who compelled them by force, though they wept and complained bitterly, to return to their ships. there he bound them fast under the benches, and bade the rest take to their oars and fly from that seductive clime, lest others should fall under the same fatal spell. ii thence they came to the land of the cyclopes, a rude and monstrous tribe, but favoured of the immortal gods, by whose bounty they live. they toil not, neither do they sow, nor till the ground, but the earth of herself brings forth for them a bountiful living, wheat and barley, and huge swelling clusters of the grape. naught know they of law or civil life, but each lives in his cave on the wild mountain-side, dwelling apart, careless of his neighbours, with his wife and children. it was a dark, cloudy night, and a thick mist overspread the sea, when suddenly odysseus heard the booming of breakers on a rocky shore. before an order could be given, or any measure taken for the safety of the ships, the little fleet was caught by a strong landward current, and whirled pell-mell through a narrow passage between the cliffs into a land-locked harbour. drawing their breath with relief at their wonderful escape, they beached their vessels on the level sand and lay down to wait for the day. in the morning they found that they had been driven to the landward shore of a long island, which formed a natural breakwater to a spacious bay, with a narrow entrance at either end. the island was thickly covered with woods, giving shelter to a multitude of wild goats, its only inhabitants. for the cyclopes have no ships, so that the goats were left in undisturbed possession, though the place was well suited for human habitation, with a deep, rich soil, and plentiful springs of water. the first care of odysseus was to supply the crews of his vessels, which were twelve in number, with fresh meat. armed with bows and spears, he and a picked body of men scoured the woods in search of game. they soon obtained a plentiful booty, and nine goats were assigned to each vessel, with ten for that of odysseus. so all that day till the setting of the sun they sat and feasted on fat venison and drank of the wine which they had taken in their raid on the thracians. early next morning odysseus manned his own galley, and set forth to explore the mainland, leaving the rest of the crews to await his return on the island. as they drew near the opposite shore of the bay, the mariners came in view of a gigantic cavern overshadowed by laurel-trees. round the front of the cavern was a wide court-yard rudely fenced with huge blocks of stone and unhewn trunks of trees. having moored his vessel in a sheltered place, odysseus chose twelve of his men to accompany him on his perilous adventure, and charging the others to keep close, and not stir from the ship, he prepared for his visit to the cyclops, who dwelt apart from his brethren in the cavern. amongst the spoils obtained in thrace was a small store of peculiarly rich and generous wine, which had been given him by a priest of apollo whom he had protected, with his wife and child, while his men were pillaging the town. twelve jars of this precious vintage the priest brought forth from a secret hiding-place, known only to himself and his wife and one trusty servant. so potent was the wine that it needed but one measure of it to twenty of water to make a fragrant and comfortable drink, from which few could refrain. odysseus now filled a great goatskin bottle with this wine, and carried it with him. and well it was for him that he did so. during the day the cyclops was abroad, watching his flocks as they grazed on the mountain pastures; so that when odysseus and his men came to the cavern, they had ample time to look about them. the courtyard was fenced off into pens, well stocked with ewes and she-goats, with their young--huge beasts, rivalling in stature their gigantic shepherd. within the cavern was a sort of dairy, with great piles of cheeses, and vessels brimming with whey. "quick now," whispered one of the men to odysseus. "let us take of the cheeses, and drive off the best of the lambs and kids to the ship before the cyclops returns; for methinks he will give us but sorry welcome if he finds us here." "nay," answered odysseus, "i will wait for the master, that i may see him face to face. it may be that he will bestow on me some gift, such as strangers receive from their hosts." so they remained, and having kindled a fire they prepared savoury meat, and ate of the cheeses which they found in the cave. then they waited, until the lengthening shadows showed that evening was drawing near. while they sat thus, conversing in low tones, and casting fearful glances towards the cavern's mouth, all at once they heard a sound like the trampling of many feet, accompanied by loud bleatings, which were answered by the ewes and she-goats in the courtyard. then a vast shadow darkened the cavern's entrance, and in came polyphemus, driving his flock before him. at the sight of that fearful monster, huge as a mountain, with one vast red eye glaring in the middle of his forehead, odysseus and his comrades fled in terror to the darkest corner of the cave. the cyclops bore in one hand a mighty log for his evening fire. flinging it down with a crash that awakened all the echoes of the cavern, he closed the entrance with an immense mass of stone, which served as a door. then he sat down and began to milk the ewes and she-goats. half of the milk he curdled for cheese, and half he kept for drinking. so when he had strained off the whey, and pressed the curds into wicker-baskets, he kindled a fire, and as the flame blazed up, illumining every corner of the cavern, he caught sight of the intruders, and with a voice which sounded like the roaring of a torrent cried out: "who are ye that have come to the cave of polyphemus, and what would ye have of him?" when he heard that appalling voice, and looked at that horrible face, fitfully lighted up by the blaze of the fire, odysseus felt his heart stand still with terror. nevertheless he manned himself to answer, and spake boldly thus: "we are greeks, driven from our course in our voyage from troy, and brought by the winds and waves to these shores. and we are they who have served agamemnon, son of atreus, whose fame now fills the whole earth; so mighty was the city which he overthrew, with all the host within her. and now we have come to kneel at thy feet and beseech thee of thy favour to bestow on us some gift such as strangers receive. have pity on us, great and mighty as thou art, and forget not that zeus hath the stranger and the suppliant in his keeping." but there was no sign of pity or mercy in the cyclops' face as he made answer: "thou art full simple, my friend, or unversed in the ways of this land, if thou thinkest that i and my brethren care aught for zeus or any other god. nay, we are mightier far than they, and if thou seekest aught of me thou must seek it of my favour, and not of my fears. but tell me truly, where didst thou moor thy vessel on thy landing? lies she near at hand, or on a distant part of the coast?" odysseus easily divined the purpose of polyphemus in putting this question, and answered accordingly: "my ship was wrecked on a distant part of your coast, dashed all to pieces against the rocks; and i and these twelve escaped by swimming." polyphemus made no reply, but sprang up and seized two of the men, grasping them easily together in one hand, and dashed their brains out against the rocky ground. then he cut them in pieces and made his supper on them. fearful it was to see him as he ate, crunching up flesh and bones and marrow all together, like a ravening lion. when he had devoured the last morsel he took a deep draught of milk, and lay down on the cavern floor among his flocks to sleep. as soon as the heavy breathing of polyphemus showed that he was fast asleep, odysseus crept from his corner, resolved to slay the cannibal giant on the spot. he had already drawn his sword, when a sudden thought made him pause. if he killed polyphemus, how was he to escape from the cavern? the entrance was blocked by that ponderous stone, which a hundred men could not have moved; and he and his men must in that case perish miserably of hunger and thirst. restrained by this reflection, he put up his sword, and went back to his companions to wait for day. polyphemus rose early, and after milking his flocks he laid hold of two more of the miserable captives, butchered them in the same manner, and made his breakfast on their warm, quivering bodies. then he drove forth his sheep and goats, pushing aside the door of rock, and set it back in its place, as a man sets the lid on a quiver. they heard his wild cries, as he called to his flocks, and their loud bleatings as he drove them out to pasture; then the sounds grew fainter and fainter, and silence settled on the vast, shadowy cave. forthwith odysseus began to devise means to escape from that murderous den, and avenge the slaughter of his friends. as he peered about in the twilight, he caught sight of a mighty stake of green olive-wood, tall and stout as the mast of a twenty-oared galley,[1] which had been cut by the cyclops for a staff, and laid aside to season. odysseus cut off about a fathom's length, and with the help of his comrades made it round and smooth, and tapered it off at one end to a point. then he hardened the sharp end in the fire, and when it was ready he hid the rude weapon away under a pile of refuse. of the twelve who had followed him from the ship, there only remained eight; four of these were chosen by lot to aid him in his plan of vengeance; and odysseus noted with satisfaction that they were the stoutest and bravest of the company. all being now ready, they sat down to wait for the return of polyphemus. [footnote 1: imitated, with characteristic amplification, by milton, "paradise lost," i. 292 (satan's spear).] the setting sun was pouring his level rays through the chinks of the doorway when they heard the ponderous tread of the cyclops approaching. this time he drove the whole of his flocks into the cave, leaving the courtyard empty. having milked the herd, he laid hands on two of odysseus' comrades, and slaughtered and devoured them as before. the moment had now come for odysseus to carry out his design. so he filled a wooden bowl with unmixed wine, and drawing near to polyphemus addressed him thus: "take, polyphemus, and drink of this wine, now that thou hast eaten of human flesh. i warrant that thou hast never tasted such a choice vintage as this, and i brought it as a gift to thy divinity, that thou mightest have pity, and let me go in peace. little did i dream to find thee so cruel and so wild. who in all the world will ever draw near to thee again, after the hideous deeds which thou hast wrought?" polyphemus took the cup and drained it to the bottom. then he rolled his great eye with ecstasy, as the last drop trickled down his monstrous gullet, and holding out the cup said with a sort of growling good humour: "give me to drink again, and make haste and tell me thy name, that i may bestow on thee a gift of hospitality to gladden thy heart. i and my brethren have wine in plenty, for the earth gives us of her abundance, and the soft rain of heaven swells the grape to ripeness; but this is a drink divine, fit for the banquets of olympus." again the cup was filled, and yet a third time; and polyphemus drank out every drop. before long his great head began to droop, and his eye blinked mistily, like the red sun looming through a fog. seeing that the good wine was doing its work, odysseus lost no time in telling his name. "thou askest how i am called," he said in cozening tones, "and thou shalt hear, that i may receive the gift which thou hast promised me. my name is noman; so call me my father and my mother, and all my friends." when he heard that, polyphemus "grinned horribly a ghastly smile," and answered: "this shall be thy gift: i will eat thee last of all, for the sake of thy good wine." with that he sank down backward on the floor, and lay like a leviathan, with his head lolling sideways, and his mouth gaping, buried in drunken sleep. "now is our time!" whispered odysseus, and taking the sharpened stake from its hiding place he thrust the point into the glowing embers of the fire. as soon as he saw that the weapon was red hot and about to burst into flame, he took it up, and gave it to his men. then, breathing a prayer to heaven for strength and courage, they stole softly to the place where the cyclops lay. odysseus clambered up to the forehead of the cyclops, holding on by his hair, and while the others pressed the glowing point of the ponderous stake into the monster's eye he whirled it round by means of a thong, as men turn an auger to bore a ship's timber. the point hissed and sputtered as it sank deep into the pulpy substance of the eye, and there was an acrid smell of burning flesh, while the great shaggy eyebrow took fire, and cracked like a burning bush. "it is a fine tempering bath for this good spear of ours," muttered odysseus, as he worked away at the strap. "temper it well--polyphemus shall have it as a parting gift" at first the cyclops writhed and groaned in his sleep; then with a roar as of a hundred lions he awoke, and started up to a sitting posture, scattering his puny tormentors, who fled in wild haste, and hid themselves in the angle of a projecting rock. polyphemus rose slowly to his feet, tore the stake from the empty eye-socket, and flung it from him, still uttering his fearful cries. his brethren heard him, and quitting their caverns, came flocking round his gate, to see what had befallen. "what ails thee, polyphemus," they asked, "that thou makest this dreadful din, murdering our sleep? is anyone stealing thy sheep or thy goats? or seeks anyone to slay thee by force or by guile?" "friends," answered the afflicted giant, "noman is slaying me by guile, neither by force." "go to," replied his brethren, "if no man is using thee despitefully, why callest thou to us? thou art stricken, it seems, with some sore disease: pray, then, to thy father poseidon, and cumber us no more." so away they went, growling at their broken sleep, and left their blinded brother to roar alone. meanwhile odysseus had been hard at work, taking measures to escape with his comrades from the cave. among the flocks of polyphemus were several big rams, with fleeces of remarkable thickness and beauty. of these he took three at a time, and lashed them together, side by side, with osiers, which served polyphemus for a bed. each middle ram bore one of the men firmly bound with osiers under his belly; while the two outside rams served to conceal that living burden. last of all odysseus provided for his own safety. there was one monster ram, the leader of the flock, with a grand fleece which trailed on the ground, like the leaves of the weeping ash. him odysseus reserved for himself, and creeping under his belly hauled himself up until he was entirely hidden by the drooping fleece, and so hung on steadfastly, waiting for the day. at last the weary vigil was over, the huge stone portal was rolled aside, and the male sheep and goats went forth to pasture, while the females remained in their pens, bleating and in pain, for they were swollen with milk, and there was none to relieve them. as the rams went past polyphemus felt their backs, to see if the men were there; but the simple monster never thought of feeling under their bellies. last in the train came the big ram, with odysseus clinging underneath. then said polyphemus, as his great hands passed over his back: "dear ram, why art thou the last to leave the cave? thou wast never wont to be a sluggard, but ever thou tookest the lead, walking with long strides, whether thou wast cropping the tender, flowering grass, or going down to the waterside, or returning at even to the fold. surely thou art heavy with sorrow for thy master's eye, which the villain noman and his pitiful mates have blinded. would that thou hadst a voice, to tell me where he is skulking from my fury! then would i pour forth his brains like water on the ground, and lighten my heart of the woe which hath been brought upon me by the hands of this nithering[1] noman." [footnote 1: see scott, "ivanhoe."] so saying he let the ram go, and as soon as he was clear of the courtyard odysseus dropped to the ground, and ran to loose his comrades. with all speed they made their way down to the ship, driving the rams before them, with many a fearful backward glance. right glad were their friends to see them again, though their faces fell when they saw their numbers reduced by half. but there was no time for regrets, for polyphemus was already close upon them, groping his way painfully from rock to rock. so they flung the sheep on board, shoved off the vessel, and took to their oars. while they were still within earshot odysseus bade his men cease rowing, and standing up in the stern called aloud to the cyclops in mocking tones: "how likest thou my gift for thy hospitality, my gentle host? methinks thou art paid in full, and canst not complain that i have not given thee good measure." when he heard that, polyphemus bellowed with rage, and tearing up a great boulder from the side of the cliff he flung it with mighty force in the direction of the voice. it fell into the sea right in front of the ship, and raised a billow which washed her back to the shore. odysseus pushed her off with a long pole, and signalled to his men to give way. they rowed for dear life, and had attained twice the former distance from the shore when odysseus stopped them again, though they besought him earnestly to forego his rash purpose, and to refrain from provoking polyphemus more. but he, being exceeding wroth for the murder of his men, would not be persuaded; and lifting up his voice he spake again: "cyclops, if anyone ask thee to whom thou owest the loss of thine eye, say that it was odysseus, the son of laertes, who reft thee of sight, and his home is in rocky ithaca." [illustration: odysseus and polyphemus] now it happened that many a year back polyphemus had heard a prophecy, foretelling that he should one day be blinded by a certain odysseus. so when he heard that name he was stricken to the very heart, and cried aloud: "this, then, is the fulfilment of the oracle! verily i thought that some tall and proper man would come hither to assail me, but now i have been outwitted, made drunk, and blinded, by this little, paltry wretch." after a pause he spoke again, thinking to fight that man of many wiles with his own weapons. "come hither, odysseus," he said, softening his big voice as well as he could, "that i may entertain thee with loving-kindness; and afterwards i will pray to poseidon, whose son i am, to send a fair breeze for thy homeward voyage. and he also shall heal my hurt, and give me back my sight." odysseus laughed aloud at the poor monster's simplicity, whereupon polyphemus lifted up his hands to heaven, and prayed to his sire, the lord poseidon: "hear me, thou who holdest the earth in thine arms, if i am indeed thy son. grant me that odysseus may never reach his home, or if that is fixed beyond repeal, let him come home in evil plight, with the loss of all his men, on a strange ship, to a house of woe."[1] [footnote 1: compare dido's curse ("stories from the æneid," p. 84).] such was the curse of polyphemus, to be fulfilled, as we shall see, to the letter. and having uttered it he flung another rock, which fell just short of the vessel's stern, and raised a wave which washed her towards the island. soon they reached the harbour where the rest of the fleet lay moored. joyful were the greetings of their comrades, who had given them up for lost; and a merry feast they made on the flesh of the fat sheep, though their mirth was checkered by sadness when they thought of the brave six who had come to so horrible an end in the cyclops' cave. after leaving the land of the cyclopes they came next to the æolian island, where dwelt æolus with his wife and twelve sons and daughters. the island floated on the sea, and all around it tall cliffs ran sheer down to the water, crowned on their summit by a wall of brass. here they remained a whole month, and were hospitably entertained by æolus, revelling in the abundance of his wealthy house, and whiling away the time with music, and dance, and song, and brave stories of the trojan war. and when they departed he gave odysseus a leathern bag, tied with a silver cord, in which were confined all the winds that blow, except only the good west wind, which he left free to blow behind them and speed them on their way. so for nine days and nights they sailed without let or hindrance, and on the tenth they came in sight of ithaca, which they approached so near that they saw the smoke and flame of the beacon-fires along the coast. odysseus was worn out with watching, for during all the voyage he had not closed his eyes, but had sat the whole time with his hand on the sheet, and suffered no one to relieve him. but now within sight of his native land he sank down in utter weariness, and fell into a deep sleep. that fatal moment of weakness led to a long train of disasters. his men had long gazed with curious and jealous eyes at the mysterious wallet, which they supposed to be full of gold and silver. as long as odysseus was on his guard they durst not give utterance to their thoughts; but when they saw him overtaken by slumber they began to murmur among themselves. and thus they spake one to another: "behold how this man is honoured and beloved whithersoever he goes! he left troy-land laden with booty, and thereto hath æolus added this rich treasure, while we must come home with empty hands. go to, let us have sight of all this gold and silver." so waking folly prevailed over slumbering prudence. in a moment the silver cord was loosened, and all the boisterous winds rushed forth and bore them weeping and wailing far from their native land. roused by the tumult of the tempest, and the despairing cries of his men, odysseus sprang up, just in time to see the last glimpse of the hills of ithaca as they melted in the distance. his first impulse was to fling himself into the sea and perish; but mastering his frenzy he covered his face, and sat down in speechless misery, while the winds bore them swiftly back to the isle of æolus. with a heavy heart odysseus went up to the house where he had been received so kindly, and told his sorrowful tale. "pity my weakness," he pleaded, "and let me not suffer for the sins of my men." but æolus was not to be moved. "begone," he said sternly, "quit this island at once, thou caitiff! heaven hath set the seal of its hatred upon thee, and i may not give countenance to such as thou. out of my sight!" he thundered, and odysseus crept sadly back to his ship. then for six days they voyaged on, toiling continually at the oar, for now there was no favourable wind to waft them on. they were almost dead with fatigue when they sighted land on the seventh day, and came to anchor in a sheltered bay, surrounded on all sides by towering cliffs, with a narrow entrance, guarded by a tall spire of rock on either side the place was called læstrygonia, and the nights in that country are so short that the shepherd as he drives home his flocks at sundown meets his fellow-toiler on his way to the pasture. the cautious odysseus moored his ship close to the entrance of the harbour, while all the others came to anchor at the head of the bay under the shadow of the cliffs; for there was not a wave, not a ripple, in that sheltered spot, but the water slumbered, as in a mountain tarn. having secured his vessel, by making fast her cable to the rocks, he scaled the cliff with a few of his men, and seeing smoke rising in the distance he sent three scouts to explore the country, meantime going back to his ship to await their return. sooner than he expected he saw two of the men descending the cliff in headlong haste, and as they drew near he could read on their white, terror-stricken faces what sort of news they had to bring. their report was as dismal as their looks. when they left the coast they struck into a level road cut through the forest, and presently came to a spring on the outskirts of a town. here they met a maiden, drawing water at the well, who told them that she was the daughter of antiphates, king of that country, and offered to conduct them to her father's house. they went with her, and when she had brought them home she left them to summon her father. "as soon as we caught sight of him," continued he who was telling the story, "we were stricken with terror, for he was of monstrous stature and hideous to behold. one of us he seized, and rent him in pieces on the spot; but we two fled for our lives. there is no time to lose. the town is in uproar, and before long the whole cannibal tribe will be upon us." hardly had he finished when a multitude of these huge savages was seen rushing along the edge of the cliffs which overlooked the harbour. arming themselves with great rocks, they began to bombard the ships which had taken the inside station; and a dreadful din arose of shattered timbers, mingled with the cries of dying men. not one ship escaped destruction, and when that part of their work was ended the barbarians swarmed down the cliffs, speared the floating corpses, and dragged them to land for a cannibal feast. all this time odysseus and his crew had been helpless spectators of this scene of massacre. but when they saw that all was over they cut their cable, and taking to their oars rowed with might and main until a wide space of open water divided them from that ill-fated shore, where all their friends had found a grave. iv of the thirteen vessels with which odysseus sailed from troy only one was now left. weary and broken in spirit they voyaged on over the waste of waters; and when, after two or three days' sail, they landed on a low-lying coast, they lay down for two days and two nights, like men whose last hope in life was gone. on the third morning odysseus roused himself, and ascending a rising ground saw to his dismay that they had landed on a small island. on all sides stretched the boundless sea, without a trace of land on the whole horizon. as he was descending the hill he heard a rustling in a neighbouring thicket, and a tall stag with branching antlers stepped forth, and began to make his way down to a little stream which skirted the foot of the hill. from the high ground on which he stood odysseus had a full view of the beast's broad back, and taking steady aim he flung his spear and pierced him through the spine. odysseus' eyes glistened when he saw the splendid quarry at his feet, for never had he seen so fine a buck. not without effort he took the carcass on his back, and bore it down to his ship, where he found his men still lying listlessly where he had left them. "courage, comrades," he cried, as he flung his heavy burden on the sand. "we shall not die before our day, and while we have life we must eat and drink. better a full sorrow than a fasting."[1] so they ate and drank, and made good cheer. [footnote 1: see the whole incident imitated in virgil ("stories from the æneid," p. 49).] next day odysseus divided his whole crew into two companies, two and twenty each, with himself as captain of one division, and eurylochus, his faithful squire, in command of the other. then he drew lots with eurylochus to determine which of the two should undertake the perilous duty of exploring the island. the lot fell upon eurylochus, and he at once set forth with his party, pursued by the prayers and tears of those who remained behind. passing the low hills which skirted the coast, they struck into a forest path, and presently came to an open glade, in the midst of which stood a fair stone dwelling. and as they came and drew nigh unto the house they saw a strange sight: before the doors stalked and glared a multitude of wolves and lions, and other beasts of prey, and when they saw the men these fearful creatures came fawning round them, like hounds welcoming their master, and did them no harm. quaking with wonder and fear, they came and stood on the threshold, through which they caught sight of a young and lovely dame, pacing to and fro about her loom, and weaving a wondrous web, fair and large, such as the daughters of the gods are wont to weave. and as she plied her task, she sang to herself in a low and thrilling voice, sad and sweet as the notes of the æolian harp. presently she turned her face to the doorway, and saw the men standing without. with a bright smile she came forward, and bade them enter; and they all went in, save only eurylochus, who was older than the rest, and liked not the look in that fair lady's eyes. "welcome, fair youths," she said, "to the halls of circe, daughter of the sun. sit ye down, while i prepare you a posset to slake your thirst on this hot day." so they sat down, and circe took wine, and grated cheese, and honey, and barley-meal, and mixed them in a bowl, muttering strange words, and adding a single drop from a little phial which she took from a secret cupboard. then she gave them to drink, touching them, as she did so, with a wand; and no sooner had they tasted than their form and countenance was changed into the likeness of swine, though they kept the mind and feelings of men. circe now drove them all together into a stye, and flung down beechmast, and acorns, and cornel berries, for them to eat. it was drawing towards noon when odysseus saw a solitary figure descending the slope which led down to the beach. "eurylochus!" he cried, recognising the familiar features of his squire. "why comest thou alone?" for some time eurylochus was unable to utter a word; at last he spoke, in a broken and altered voice, while his face was blanched with deadly terror. "they are gone," he faltered--"spirited away--vanished without a sign. the place is haunted: let us away!" without a word, odysseus caught up his sword and bow, and ordered eurylochus to show him the way to the place where he had lost his men. but eurylochus clung to his knees, and besought him to remain, and prepare for instant flight. seeing him to be unnerved by terror, odysseus bade him stay by the ship, and he himself set out alone to learn the secrets of this mysterious island. just before coming within sight of circe's palace, he saw, standing in his path, a fair and comely youth, who greeted him kindly, and took him by the hand. there was something more than human beauty in the face of this stranger, and his words showed more than human knowledge of odysseus and his affairs; for indeed he was no other than hermes, the messenger of the gods, sent down from heaven to aid odysseus in this strait. "son of laertes," he said, "why goest thou thus unwarily, even as a silly bird into the net of the fowler? pause awhile, or, instead of setting free thy men, thou wilt become even as they are." so saying he stooped down, and with careful hands tore up a little plant which was growing at their feet; the flower of it was white as milk, and the root was black. "take this plant," he said, giving it to odysseus. "it is the magic herb, moly, and no human hand may pluck it; having this, thou mayest defy all the spells of circe. and when thou comest to the house of that fair witch, she will offer thee a potion, mixed with baneful drugs: drink thou thereof, for it shall do thee no harm. but when she smites thee with her wand draw thou thy sword and make as though thou wouldst slay her; and she will be filled with fear, for none ever resisted her power before. then do thou compel her to swear a great oath that she will devise no further ill against thee." as the last words were uttered hermes vanished, leaving odysseus standing with the plant in his hand. [illustration: circe] and as the god had spoken, even so it came to pass. circe welcomed odysseus with the same treacherous smile, gave him to drink of the same cup, and struck him with her wand in the same manner; but when she saw him standing, unchanged and unmoved, threatening her with drawn sword, she feared exceedingly, and falling at his feet spake thus in pitiful tones: "who art thou, that thou yieldest not to the power of my drugs, which never mortal resisted before? art thou that odysseus of whom hermes spake, telling me that he should come hither on his voyage from troy? put up thy sword, and thou shalt be my guest to-night, and for many days to come." "no guest will i be of thine," answered odysseus sternly, "unless thou wilt swear a great oath to do me no hurt. before that i will not trust thee, or receive aught at thy hands. hast thou not turned my men into swine, and didst thou not seek even now to put thy wicked spells upon me?" then circe took the oath that was required of her, and thus secured odysseus consented to remain. forthwith his beautiful hostess summoned her handmaids, sweet nymphs of rivers, and woods, and springs, and bade them make all things ready to entertain the wanderer. with white feet tripping nimbly, and many a curious glance at the majestic stranger, the maidens hastened to obey her command. and soon the tables, which were all of silver, were set forth with golden vessels, the chairs spread with purple tapestries, and the rich red wine mingled in a silver bowl. others prepared a bath for odysseus, and when he had bathed, more than mortal health and vigour seemed to enter his limbs, such virtue had circe shed into the water. after that they sat down to meat; but odysseus, whose mind was full of his comrades, left every dish untasted, and sat without uttering a word. when she observed it, circe rallied him for his sullenness: "art thou afraid to eat?" she said, smiling: "have i not sworn to do thee no harm? ah! thou art thinking of thy friends. come, then, and i will restore them to thee." so she brought him to the stye where they were confined together, and opening the gate drove them all forth, a herd of bristly swine. then she anointed them one by one with another drug; and instantly the bristles fell away from them, and they became men again, only younger and fairer to behold than they were before. with tears of joy they embraced odysseus, and the whole place rang with their happy greetings, so that even circe was moved by the tender scene. when they had grown calmer she bade odysseus go down to the sea, and bring back all the rest of his company to take up their abode in her house. being now quite reassured as to her purpose, he hesitated not to obey, and went down alone to carry the message from circe. arrived at the ship he was hailed by his comrades as one returned from the dead; but putting aside their eager questions he told them to beach the vessel, stow away all her tackle, and follow him to the house of circe, where they would find all their fellows feasting and making merry. much cheered by his words the men set to work with willing hands, and before an hour had passed the whole company was reunited under circe's hospitable roof. the dreaded witch had laid aside all her terrors, and now appeared only in the character of a kind and generous hostess, whose sole care was for the comfort and welfare of her guests. days lengthened into weeks, and weeks into months, and still they lingered on in that luxurious clime, as if there were no such place as ithaca, and no wide waste of sea to be crossed. at last, when they had lived a whole year on the island, odysseus' men began to grow weary of their long inaction, and begged their leader to obtain circe's permission to depart. not without some misgivings, odysseus preferred his request. "deem me not ungrateful," he said, "if my heart turns ever to my wife and home. i am but a mortal man, with human needs and frailties, and no fit mate for a goddess like thee. and my men weary me with their importunity, when thou art not near." circe heard him graciously, knowing well that they must part. "i will not keep thee," she said, "against thy will. but a long journey lies before thee, even to the very ends of the earth, and not until that is past canst thou set thy sail for home. to the halls of hades thou must go, and consult the spirit of theban teiresias, who alone among all the dead hath an understanding heart, while the rest are but flitting shadows. now hearken, and i will tell thee all that thou must do. when thou leavest these shores thou shalt sail ever southward, until thou hast reached the farther side of the river oceanus, and come to the shadowy grove which stands at the confines of the realm of persephone. there thou shalt land with thy company, and dig a trench a cubit in length and breadth, and pour about it a libation of mead and water and wine; and after that thou shalt offer a sacrifice of black sheep, in such wise that the blood thereof shall flow into the trench and fill it. thither will flock the whole multitude of departed spirits, to drink of the blood; but do thou draw thy sword, and hold it over the trench, nor suffer any of the other spirits to draw near until thou hast seen teiresias and hearkened to his lore." all that night odysseus remained in deep conference with circe, and as soon as day dawned he went to rouse his men who were sleeping in the outer chamber. "up, comrades!" he cried, "all is prepared, and we must embark without delay." his loud summons proved fatal to one of the company, a certain elpenor, the youngest of them all, who, the night before, had lain down to sleep on the housetop, for the sake of the coolness, being heated with wine. roused suddenly by the voice of odysseus, he staggered to his feet, and, still half asleep, stumbled over the parapet in his haste, and fell headlong from the roof. in the hurry of their departure the body was left where it lay, and odysseus, when they reached the ship, did not notice his absence. they found that circe had been there before them, and left the victims for sacrifice bound to the vessel's side. she herself was nowhere to be seen, and so without another word of farewell they launched their galley and put out into the deep. the visit to hades i a clear, strong wind came down from the north, sent by the favour of the mighty enchantress circe, and over the trackless sea they sped, where never furrow of mortal ship was seen before. after a long day's sail they came to the farther shore of the ocean stream, which surrounds the earth as with a girdle. there is the abode of the people called the cimmerians, wrapped in shadow and mist; for never doth the sun look down upon them with his rays, neither when he climbs the starry sky, nor yet when he goeth down unto the place of his rest. and thus they dwell miserably under the curse of perpetual night. as they peered through the gloom they saw what seemed a grove of dusky trees, in shape like the poplar and willow, fringing the shore. "it is the sign which circe gave me," whispered odysseus to his awestruck comrades; "we are at the very gates of hades." landing in silence, they carried the victims for sacrifice to the verge of the grove, and odysseus with his sword dug a trench, a cubit in length and breadth, and poured about it a libation of mead and water and wine. then the sheep were slaughtered, and the trench was filled to the brim with their blood. when the solemn rite was ended, odysseus called in a loud voice to the spirits of the dead, and waited in breathless expectation with his men. presently a rustling sound was heard, like the sound of the autumn wind in the dry leaves of the forest; it grew louder and louder, and out of the gloom the ghosts came flocking, youths and maidens cut off in their bloom, old men with all their burden of sorrow, and warriors slain in battle, still wearing the bloodstained armour.[1] with a wild unearthly cry they came crowding to the trench, eager to drink of the blood. but odysseus, though quaking with fear, stood his ground firmly, and held his drawn sword over the trench to keep off the multitude, until he had seen and spoken with teiresias. [footnote 1: compare "stories from the æneid," p. 119.] among the hosts of spirits there was one who lingered near the trench, and seemed by his beseeching gestures and earnest looks to desire speech with odysseus. when his first fears were over odysseus recognised the features of elpenor, who had come to an untimely end on the morning of their journey, and whose body still lay unburied in the house of circe. registering a mental vow to perform all due rites to that poor spirit on his homeward voyage, odysseus warned him back, and stood waiting for the coming of the seer. at last came one with tottering footsteps, leaning on a golden sceptre, and halted on the farther edge of the trench. it seemed a very aged man, with flowing white beard, and sightless eyes; and odysseus knew by these signs that he was in the presence of teiresias, the famous prophet of thebes, who alone among departed spirits preserves his understanding, while the rest are flitting phantoms, with no sense at all. "what wouldst thou of me, odysseus, son of laertes," said the spectre in faltering tones, "and wherefore hast thou left the glad light of day to visit this drear and joyless realm of the dead? draw back from the trench, and put up thy sword in its sheath, that i may drink of the blood and tell thee all that thou wouldst know." thereupon odysseus fell back, and sheathed his sword; and teiresias, when he had drunk of the blood, spoke again in firmer and clearer tones: "thou art fain to hear of thy home-coming, illustrious hero; but thy path to ithaca shall be beset with sorrows, because of the wrath of poseidon, whose son, polyphemus, thou hast blinded. nevertheless thou and all thy company shall return safe to ithaca, if only ye leave untouched the sacred flocks and herds of helios,[1] when ye come to the island of thrinacia. but if harm befall them at your hands, from that hour thy ship and all her crew are doomed and forfeit to destruction: and though thou thyself escape, yet thou shalt return after many days, in evil plight, to a house of woe.[2] and now learn how thou mayest at last appease the anger of the god who pursues thee with his vengeance. when thou art once more master in thine own house thou shalt go on a far journey, carrying with thee an oar of thy vessel, until thou comest to a people that dwell far from the sea, and know naught of ships or the mariner's art. and there shalt meet thee by the way a man who shall say that thou bearest a winnowing shovel[3] on thy shoulder; and this shall be a sign unto thee, whereby thou shalt know that thou hast reached the end of thy journey. then plant thy oar in the ground, and offer sacrifice to poseidon. this shall be the end of thy toils, and death shall come softly upon thee where thou dwellest in a green old age among thy happy people." [footnote 1: the sun god.] [footnote 2: the very words of polyphemus, p. 93.] [footnote 3: the oar.] when he had thus spoken teiresias vanished into the darkness; and one by one the spirits came up to the trench, as odysseus suffered them, and having drunk of the blood obtained strength to speak and answer his questions. first among them was the spirit of his mother, anticleia, daughter of autolycus, who had been hovering near during his conference with teiresias. when she had drunk she said: "whence comest thou, my son? art thou still wandering on thy long voyage from troy, or hast thou been in ithaca, and seen thy wife?" "nay, mother," answered odysseus, "i am wandering still, still treading the path of woe, since the day when i followed agamemnon to troy. but tell me now, and answer me truly, what was the manner of thy death? came it slowly, by long disease, or did artemis lay thee low in a moment with a painless arrow from her bow?[1] and tell me of my father and my son whom i left in ithaca; do they still hold my possessions, or hath some other thrust them with violence from my seat? tell me also of penelope, my wedded wife, whether she abides steadfast and guards my goods, or whether she is gone to cheer some other man's heart." [footnote 1: sudden death was ascribed to artemis or apollo.] "steadfast indeed she is," replied anticleia, "and wondrous patient of heart; all her thoughts are ever of thee. no one has yet usurped thy place in ithaca, but telemachus still reaps thy fields and sits down to meat with the noblest in the land. as to thy father, he comes no more to the town, but dwells continually on his farm. he lives not delicately, as princes use, but is clad in sorry raiment, and sleeps in the winter among the ashes of the hearth with his thralls, and in summer on a bed of dry leaves in his vineyard. there he lies forsaken, heavy with years and sorrows, mourning for thee. and in such wise also death came upon me, neither by wasting sickness nor by the gentle shafts of artemis, but my sore longing for thee, odysseus, and for thy sweet counsels, at last broke my heart." a flood of tenderness overpowered odysseus at these sad words, and he sprang forward with arms outstretched to clasp his mother to his breast. thrice he essayed to embrace her, and thrice his arms closed on emptiness,[1] while that ghostly presence still flitted before him like a shadow or a dream. "o my mother," cried odysseus in deep distress, "why dost thou mock me thus? come to my heart, dear mother; let me hold thee in mine arms once more, and mingle my tears with thine. or art thou but the shadow of a shade, a phantom sent by persephone to deceive me?" [footnote 1: compare "stories from the æneid," p. 24.] "persephone deceives thee not," answered the ghost, "but this is the fashion of mortals when they die. flesh and bone and sinew are consumed by the might of fire, but the spirit takes flight and hovers ever like a winged dream. but make haste and get thee back to the daylight, and keep all that thou hast seen in memory that thou mayest tell it to thy wife." when the spirit of anticleia was gone, a shadowy throng pressed forward to the trench, all the ghosts of noble dames, wives and daughters of princes. and odysseus kept his place, sword in hand, suffering them only to drink one by one, that he might question them and learn their story. there he saw alcmene, the mother of hercules, and leda, to whose twin sons, castor and pollux, a strange destiny was allotted; for after their death they rose to life again on alternate days, one lying in the tomb, while the other walked the earth as a living man. there too was iphimedeia, mother of the giants otus and ephialtes, who at nine years of age were nine fathoms in height and nine cubits in breadth. haughty were they, and presumptuous in their youth; for they made war on the gods, and piled ossa on olympus, and pelion on ossa, that they might scale the sky. but they perished in their impiety, shot down by the bolts of apollo's golden bow. last came eriphyle, the false wife, who sold her husband's life for a glittering bribe. that dream of fair women melted away and another ghostly band succeeded, the souls of great captains and mighty men of war. foremost among these was seen one of regal port, around whom was gathered a choice company of veteran warriors, all gored and gashed with recent wounds. he who seemed their leader stretched out his hands towards odysseus with a piteous gesture, and tears such as spirits weep[1] gushed from his eyes. instantly odysseus recognised in that stricken spirit his great commander agamemnon, once the proud captain of a thousand ships, now wandering, forlorn and feeble, with all his glory faded. [footnote 1: "tears such as _angels_ weep," milton, "paradise lost," i. 619.] "royal son of atreus," he said, in a voice broken with weeping, "is it here that i find thee, great chieftain of the embattled greeks? say, how comest thou hither, and what arm aimed the stroke which laid thee low?" "not in honour's field did i fall," answered agamemnon, "nor yet amid the waves. it was a traitor's hand that cut me off, the hand of ægisthus, and the guile of my accursed wife. he feasted me at his board, and slaughtered me as one slaughters a stalled ox; and all my company fell with me in that den of butchery. it was pitiful to see all that brave band of veterans writhing in their death agony among the tables loaded with good cheer, and goblets brimming with wine. but that which gave me my sorest pang was the dying shriek of cassandra, daughter of priam, who was struck down at my side by the dagger of clytæmnestra. then the murderess turned away and left me with staring eyes and mouth gaping in death. for naught is so vile, naught so cruel, as a woman who hath hardened her heart to tread the path of crime. even so did she break her marriage vows, and afterwards slew the husband of her youth. i thought to have found far other welcome when i passed under the shadow of mine own roof-tree. but this demon-wife imagined evil against me, and brought infamy on the very name of woman." "strange ordinance of zeus!" said odysseus musingly, "which hath turned the choicest blessing of man's life, the love of woman, into the bitterest of curses for thee and for thy house. yea, and upon all the land of hellas hath woe been brought by the deed of a woman--helen, thy brother's wife." "ay, trust them not," replied agamemnon bitterly, "never give thy heart into a woman's keeping; she will rifle thy very soul's flower, and then laugh thee to scorn. but why do i speak thus to thee? thou hast indeed a treasure in thy wife; no wiser head, no truer heart, than hers. happy art thou, and sweet the refuge which is prepared for thee after all thy toils, well i remember the day when we set sail from greece, and how fondly thou spakest of her, thy young bride, with her babe at her breast. now he will be a tall youth, and with what joy will he look into the eyes of his father, whom he was then too young to know!" after that odysseus was silent, his mind full of sweet and anxious thoughts. meanwhile other familiar forms had drawn near, the spirits of warriors renowned, whose very names were as a battle-cry when they dwelt on earth: achilles, patroclus, and antilochus, and farther off, looming dimly in the darkness, the gigantic shade of ajax. achilles was the first to speak. "son of laertes," he said, "thou man of daring, hast thou reached the limit of thy rashness, or wilt thou go yet further? are there no perils left for thee in the land of the living that thou must invade the very realm of hades, the sunless haunts of the dead?" "i came to inquire of teiresias," answered odysseus, "concerning my return to ithaca. all my life i am a bondslave to toil and woe; but thou, achilles, wast happy in thy life, honoured as a god by all the sons of hellas; and now thou art happy, even in death, for honour waits on thy footsteps still." "tell me not of comfort in death," replied achilles. "rather would i breathe the air of heaven, yea, though i were thrall to a man of little substance, than reign as king over all the shades of the dead. but give me some news of my son, neoptolemus. came he to fight with the trojans after i was gone, and did he acquit him well? and knowest thou aught of my father, peleus? lives he still in honour and comfort among my people, or has he been driven into beggary by violent men, now that he is old and i am not near to aid him? oh, for an hour of life, with such might as was mine when i fought in the van for greece? then should they pay a bitter reckoning, whosoever they be that wrong him and keep him from his own." "of peleus," answered odysseus, "i have heard nothing, but of thy son, neoptolemus, i can tell thee much, for i myself brought him from scyros to fight in helen's cause, and thereafter my eye was ever upon him, to mark how he bore himself. in council none could vie with him, save only nestor and myself; ne'er saw i so rare a wit in so young a head. and when the greeks were arrayed in battle against the trojans he was never seen to hang back, but fought ever in the van among the foremost champions, like a mighty man of war. nor was it only in the clamour and heat of war that he proved his mettle; for in that perilous hour when we lay ambushed in the wooden horse, when the stoutest hearts among us quailed, he never changed colour, but sat fingering his spear and sword, waiting for the signal to go forth to the assault. and after we had sacked the lofty towers of troy he received a goodly portion of the spoil, and a special prize of honour, and so departed, untouched by point or blade, to his father's house." when he heard these brave tidings of his son, achilles rejoiced in spirit, and strode with lofty gait along the plain of asphodel. so one by one the spirits came up, and inquired of odysseus of their dear ones at home. only the soul of ajax, son of telamon, stood sullenly aloof; for between him and odysseus there was an old quarrel. after the death of achilles a dispute arose among the surviving chieftains for the possession of his armour. it was decided to refer the matter to the trojan captives in the camp, and they were asked who of all the greeks had done them most harm. they answered in favour of odysseus, who accordingly received the armour. thereupon ajax fell into a frenzy of rage, and slew himself. when odysseus saw him, and marked his unforgiving mood, he was filled with remorse and pity, and strove to soften his resentment with gentle words. "ah! son of telamon," he said, "canst thou not forgive me, even here? sorely the argives mourned thee, and heavy was the loss brought on them by thy rash act. thou wast a very tower of strength to the host, and we wept for thee as for a second achilles. draw near, great prince, subdue thy haughty spirit, and speak to me as thou wast wont to speak before the will of heaven set enmity between us." thus earnestly odysseus pleaded, but there was no reply, and the angry spirit passed away into the gloom of erebus.[1] [footnote 1: compare the silence of dido, "stories from the æneid," p. 123.] ii odysseus still lingered, hoping yet to have speech with other souls of heroes who had once rivalled him in valour and wisdom while they dwelt in the flesh. but he was destined to see another and more awful vision. suddenly the pall of darkness which shrouded the secrets of the nether abyss was lifted, and the whole realm of hades was exposed to view. there he saw the place of torment, where great malefactors atone for their crime, and minos, the infernal judge, sitting at the gates, passing sentence, and giving judgment among the shades. within appeared the gigantic form of tityos, stretched at full length along the ground, and two vultures sat ever at his side, tearing his liver. this was his punishment for violence offered to leto, the mother of apollo and artemis. not far from him appeared tantalus, plunged up to the neck in a cool stream; the water lapped against his chin, but he had not power to drink it, though he was tormented with a burning thirst. as often as he stooped to drink, the water was swallowed up, and the earth lay dry as the desert sand at his feet. and nodding boughs of trees drooped, heavy with delicious fruit, over his head; but when he put forth his hand to pluck the fruit, a furious gust of wind swept it away far beyond his reach. and yet another famous criminal he saw, sisyphus, the most cunning and most covetous of the sons of men. he was toiling painfully up a steep mountain's side, heaving a weighty stone before him, and straining with hands and feet to push it to the summit. but every time he approached the top, the stone slipped through his hands, and thundered and smoked down the mountain's side till it reached the plain. other wonders and terrors might still have been revealed, but as that hardy watcher stood at his post a great tumult and commotion arose in that populous city of the dead, and the whole multitude of its ghostly denizens came rushing towards the trench, as if resolved to expel the daring intruder. odysseus' heart failed him when he saw the air thick with hovering spectres, who glared with dreadful eyes, and filled the air with the sound of their unearthly voices. turning his back on that place of horror he made his way slowly towards the shore, where he found his men anxiously awaiting him. the sirens; scylla and charybdis; thrinacia i following the same course as on his outward voyage, odysseus put in again at the island of circe, where his first duty was to bury the body of the young elpenor, whose ghost he had seen in an attitude of mute reproach at the threshold of hades. they were again received with all hospitality by circe. after the evening meal circe drew odysseus apart, and questioned him on all that he had seen and heard on that strange journey, from which he had returned, as she said, like one ransomed from death. and when he had told his story she instructed him as to the course which he had to steer on leaving the island, and warned him against the manifold perils of the voyage. "first," said she, "thou wilt come to the rocks of the sirens, maidens of no mortal race, who beguile the ears of all that hear them. woe to him who draws near to listen to their song! he shall never see the faces of his wife and children again, or feel their arms about his neck, but there he shall perish, and there his bones shall rot. therefore take heed, and when thou drawest near the place stop the ears of thy men with wax, and bid them bind thee fast with cords, that thou mayest hear the song of the sirens. and when that seducing melody fills thine ears, thou wilt beg and implore thy comrades to set thee free, that thou mayest draw near and have speech of the sirens. then let them bind thee more firmly to the mast, and take to their oars, and fly the enchanted rocks. "this peril past, thou hast the choice of two different routes. one of these will bring thee to the wandering isles, which stand, front to front, with steep slippery sides of rock, running sheer down to the sea. between them lies a narrow way, which is the very gate of death. for if aught living attempts to pass between, those rocky jaws close upon it and grind it to powder. only the doves which bear ambrosia to father zeus can pass that awful strait, and one of these pays toll with her life as she passes, but zeus sends another to fill her place. and one ship sailed safely through, even the famous _argo_ when she bore jason and his crew on their voyage from the land of æetes. all others when they essayed the task perished, and were brought to naught in a whirlwind of foam and fire. "but if thou takest the other way thou wilt come to another strait, guarded day and night by two sleepless sentinels, scylla and charybdis. on one side thereof towers a lofty peak, shrouded, even in the noon of summer, in clouds and thick darkness. no mortal man could climb that steep and slippery rock, not though he had twenty hands and twenty feet; for the side is smooth as polished marble, and in the midst of the cliff is a shadowy cave overlooking the track by which thou must guide thy ship, odysseus. deep down it goes into the heart of the mountain, so that a man in his lusty prime could not shoot an arrow from his ship to the bottom of that yawning pit in the cave dwells scylla, and yelps without ceasing. her voice is thin and shrill, like the cry of a hound newly littered, but she herself is a monster horrible to behold, so that neither man nor god could face her without affright. twelve feet hath she, and six necks of prodigious length, and on each neck a fearful head, whose ravening jaws are armed with triple rows of teeth. as far as her waist she is hidden in the hollow cave, but she thrusts out her serpent necks from the abyss, and fishes in the waters for dolphins and sea-dogs and other creatures whose pasture is the sea. on every ship that passes her den she levies a tribute of six of her crew. "on the other side of the strait thou wilt see a second rock, lying flat and low, about a bowshot from the first. there stands a great fig-tree, thick with leaves, and under it sits charybdis, sucking down the water, and belching it up again three times a day. beware that thou approach not when she sucks down the water, for then none could save thee from destruction, no, not poseidon himself. rather steer thy galley past scylla's cave, for it is better to lose six of thy men than to lose them all. "next thou shalt come to the island of thrinacia, where graze the oxen of helios and his goodly sheep--seven herds of oxen, and as many fair flocks of sheep, and fifty in each flock and herd. they are not born, neither do they die, and two goddesses have charge of them, fair-haired nymphs, the daughters of helios. take heed that thou harm not the sacred beasts, that it may be well with thee, and that thou and thy company may come safely home." ii once more they were afloat, and the brave little vessel bounded gaily over the waves, her canvas bellying in the wind. for some hours they sailed on thus, and odysseus recited to his men all that he had heard from circe. then suddenly the wind dropped, and the sail hung idly to the mast. having furled and stowed the sail, they took to their oars, while the sea went down, and at last sunk to a level calm. in the distance a low-lying coast appeared, which odysseus knew to be the island of the sirens, forthwith he began to make his preparations to meet the danger which lay before them. taking a ball of wax he cut it into small pieces, and having worked each piece in his hand until it was soft and plastic he carefully stopped the ears of all his men with the wax. then two of the crew, to whom he had already given his orders, bound him hand and foot to the mast of the vessel. all being ready, they rowed forward until they came within full view of the island. and there, in a low-lying meadow hard by the sea, sat the sirens; lovely they were of aspect, and gracious of mien; but all around them were piled the bones of men who had fallen victims to their wicked wit,[1] fleshless ribs, from which the skin still hung in yellow shreds, and grinning skulls, gazing with eyeless sockets at the sea. [footnote 1: shakespeare, "hamlet."] as the ship drew near, the whole choir lifted up their voices and began to sing a sweet and piercing strain, which thrilled the very marrow of odysseus as he listened. the winds hovered near on flagging wing, the sea lay locked in deep repose, and all nature paused with attentive ear, to catch the song of the sirens. "mighty warrior, sage renowned, turn, o turn thy bark this way! rest upon this holy ground, listen to the sirens' lay. never yet was seaman found passing our enchanted bay, but he paused, and left our bound filled with wisdom from his stay. all we know, whatever befell on the tented fields of troy, all the lore that time can tell, all the mystic fount of joy." it was a strain cunningly calculated to flatter a deep, subtle spirit like that of odysseus. to know all! to read all secrets, and unravel the tangled skein of human destiny! what a bribe was this to this restless and eager mind! then the voices of the witch-women were so liquid, and the music so lovely, that they took the very air with ravishment, and melted the hearer's soul within him. odysseus struggled to break his bonds, and nodded to his men to come and loose him. but they, who had been warned of this very thing, rose up and bound him with fresh cords. then they grasped their oars again, the water roared under their sturdy strokes, and soon they were out of hearing of that seductive melody. they had not long lost sight of the sirens' rocks when they heard the booming of breakers, which warned them that the fearful strait between scylla and charybdis was close at hand. a strong current caught the galley and whirled her with appalling swiftness towards the point of danger. the water boiled and eddied around them, and the blinding spray was dashed into their faces. then a sudden panic came upon the crew, so that they dropped their oars, and sat helpless and unnerved, expecting instant death. in this emergency, odysseus summoned up all his courage, and strode up and down between the benches, exhorting, entreating, and calling each man by name. "why sit ye thus," he cried, "huddled together like sheep? row, men, row for your lives! and thou, helmsman, steer straight for the passage, lest we fall into a direr strait, and be crushed between the wandering rocks. we have faced a worse peril than this, when we were penned together in the cyclops' cave; and we shall escape this time also, if only ye will keep a stout heart." circe had cautioned odysseus on no account to attempt resistance when he approached the cave of scylla; nevertheless, he put on his armour, and took his stand on the prow of the vessel, holding in each hand a lance. so on they sped, steering close to the tall cliff under which scylla lay hid, and gazing fearfully at the boiling whirlpool on the other side. just as they passed, a huge column of water shot into the air, belched up from the vast maw of charybdis, and the galley was half swamped under a fountain of falling water. when that ended, a black yawning chasm appeared, the very throat, as it seemed, of charybdis, into which the water rushed in a roaring torrent. odysseus was gazing intently at this wondrous sight when he heard a sharp cry, and, looking back he saw six of his men, the stoutest of the crew, dangling high in the air, firmly clutched in the six sharklike jaws of scylla. there they hung for a moment, like fishes just caught by the angler's hook; the next instant they were dragged into the black mouth of the cavern, calling with their last breath on their leader's name. this was the most pitiful thing that odysseus had ever beheld, in all his long years of travel on the sea. iii the last trial was now at hand, and if they could stand this final test a happy home-coming was promised to them all. by next day's dawn they ran down to the fair isle of helios, and as they drew near they heard the lowing of oxen and the bleating of sheep. then odysseus remembered the warnings of circe and teiresias, and sought to persuade his men to sail past the island and fly from the reach of temptation. but they murmured against him, and eurylochus, his lieutenant, gave voice to their feelings thus: "thou man of iron, thou hast no pity on us, but thinkest that we are all as hardy and as strong as thou art. hungry and weary as we are, wouldst thou have us turn away from this fair isle, where we could prepare a comfortable meal, and take refreshing sleep? shall we add the horrors of night to the horrors of the sea, and confront the demons of storm that haunt the caverns of darkness? nay, suffer us to abide here to-night, and to-morrow we will hoist sail again." odysseus saw by the looks of his men that it would be useless to strain his authority, and so he gave way, though with sore reluctance, only exacting a solemn oath from the whole company that they would keep their hands off the cattle of helios. when each in turn had taken the oath they landed on the shore of a sheltered bay, and encamped by a fair spring of fresh water. during the night it began to blow hard, and early next morning, as the weather was still stormy and the wind contrary, they hauled up their galley and bestowed her in a roomy cave, beyond the reach of wind and water. odysseus repeated his warnings, and the crew then dispersed, to while away the time until the weather should mend. for a whole month they had nothing but contrary gales from the south and east, and long before that time had run out they had come to the end of their store of provisions. for some time they contrived to live on the fish which they caught by angling from the rocks, though this was but poor fare for the robust appetites of those heroic days. all this time odysseus kept a careful watch over the movements of his men, fearing that they might be driven by hunger to break the oath which they had taken. but one morning he wandered away to a distant part of the island, that he might spend an hour in solitary prayer and meditation. having found a secluded spot, he washed his hands, and prayed earnestly to the gods for succour: and when he had prayed, heaven so ordered it that he fell into a deep sleep. then the demon of mischief entered into the heart of eurylochus, a factious knave, who had more than once thwarted the counsels of odysseus. "comrades," he said, "let us make an end of this misery. death in any shape is loathly to us poor mortals, but death by hunger is the most hideous of all. come, let us take the choicest of the herds of helios, and feast upon them, after sacrifice to the gods. when we return to ithaca we will build a temple to helios, and appease him with rich offerings. and even though he choose to wreck our ship and drown us all, i would rather swallow the brine, and so make an end, than waste away by inches on a desert island." the famishing sailors lent a ready ear to his words, and having picked out the fattest of the oxen they slaughtered them and offered sacrifice, plucking the leaves of an oak as a substitute for the barley-meal for sprinkling between the horns of the victims, and pouring libations of water instead of wine. when the vain rite was finished, they spitted slices of the meat, and roasted them over the glowing embers. meanwhile odysseus had awakened from his sleep, and made his way, not without forebodings of ill, back to the camp. as he approached, the steam of roasting meat was borne to his nostrils. "woe is me!" he cried, "the deed is done! what a price must we now pay for one hour of sleep." vengeance, indeed, was already prepared. helios received prompt news of the sacrilege from one of the nymphs who had charge of his flocks and herds, and hastened to olympus to demand speedy punishment for the transgressors, vowing that if they escaped he would leave the earth in darkness and carry the lamp of day to the nether world. zeus promised that the retribution should be swift and complete, and helios thereupon returned immediately to his daily round, knowing full well that the father of gods would keep his word. when odysseus entered the camp he rebuked his men bitterly for their impiety. but no words, and no repentance, could now repair the mischief; the cattle were slain, and in that very hour dire portents occurred, to show them the enormity of their crime. a strange moaning sound, like the lowing of kine, came from the meat on the spits, and the hides of the slaughtered beasts crawled and writhed. in spite of these dreadful omens they continued for six days to feast upon the herds of helios. on the seventh day the wind blew fair, and they launched their vessel and continued their voyage. the last vestige of the island had hardly been lost to view when the sky became black with clouds, and a violent squall struck the ship, snapping her mast, which fell upon the helmsman, and dashed out his brains. a moment after, a deafening peal of thunder broke overhead, and the avenging bolt of zeus fell upon the ship, scattering her timbers, and strewing the charred carcasses of the crew upon the waves. odysseus alone escaped with his life from that tremendous stroke, and clinging to a spar floated all day, until he came in sight of the strait between scylla and charybdis. by the favour of heaven he was once more preserved from this great peril, and on the tenth day after the loss of his vessel he was thrown ashore by the waves on the island of calypso. odysseus lands in ithaca i the last farewell has been spoken, the good ship is loosed from her moorings, and alcinous is standing on the quay, surrounded by the nobles of phæacia, to bid his illustrious guest god-speed. the picked crew bend to their oars, and the galley leaps forward, like a mettled steed who knows his master's voice. the setting sun is just gilding the towers of the city as they cross the harbour bar. swift as a falcon the magic vessel skims over the swelling waters, and the toil-worn hero lays him down to rest on a soft couch prepared for him in the stern. then a deep and deathlike sleep falls upon him, and he lies breathing gently as an infant, while the soft southern breeze plays with his dark clustering hair. there is a certain haven in the island of ithaca, protected by two lofty headlands, leaving a narrow passage between them. within, the water is so still that ships lie there without moorings, safe and motionless. at the head of the haven is a long-leaved olive-tree, overshadowing a cool and pleasant cave, sacred to the "nymphs called naiads, of the running brooks."[1] inside the cave are bowls and pitchers of stone, and great stone looms, at which the naiads weave their fine fabrics of sea-purple dye. it is a favourite haunt of the honey-bee, whose murmurs mingled with the splashing of perennial springs make drowsy music in the place. there are two gates to the cavern, one towards the north, where mortal feet may pass, and the other on the south side, which none may enter save the gods alone. [footnote 1: shakespeare, "tempest."] the day-star was gazing on that still, glassy mere as the phæacians steered between the sentinel cliffs and drove their galley ashore in front of the cave. they lifted odysseus, still sleeping, from the stern, and laid him down gently, couch and all, on the sand. then they brought all the rich gifts, and set them down by the root of the olive-tree, out of the reach of any chance wayfarer; and having bestowed all safely they launched their ship, and started on their voyage home. but they were destined to pay dear for their good service to the stranger. poseidon marked their course with a jealous eye, and he went to his brother, zeus, and thus preferred his complaint: "behold now this man hath reached home in safety and honour, and brought the oath to naught which i sware against him, when i vowed that he should return to ithaca in evil plight! is my power to be defied, and my worship slighted, by these phæacians, who are of mine own race?" "thine honour is in thine own hands," answered zeus. "assert thy power, lift up thy hand and strike, that all men may fear to infringe thy privilege as lord of the sea." having thus obtained his brother's consent, poseidon went and took his stand by the harbour mouth at phæacia, and as soon as the vessel drew near he smote her with his hand, and turned her with all her crew into a rock, which remains there, rooted in the sea, unto this day. ii twilight had not yielded to day when odysseus awoke from his trancelike sleep, and gazed in bewilderment around him. his senses had not yet fully come back to him, and after his twenty years' absence he knew not where he was. all seemed strange--the winding paths, the harbour, the cliffs, and the very trees. with a cry of dismay he sprang to his feet, and cried aloud: "good lack, what land have i come to now, and who be they that dwell there? are they savage and rude, or gentle and hospitable to strangers?" then his eye fell on the gifts which had been brought with him from phæacia. what was he to do with all this wealth? "now this is a sorry trick which the phæacians have played me," he muttered again, "to carry me to a strange land, when they had promised to convey me safe to ithaca." so unworthily did odysseus deem of his benefactors that he fell to counting his goods, for fear lest they should have carried off a portion of the gifts while he slept. he found the tale complete, and when he had finished counting them he wandered disconsolate along the sand, mourning for the country which he thought still far away. as he went thus, with heavy steps and downcast eyes, a shadow fell across his path, and looking up he saw a fair youth, clad and armed like a young prince, who stood before him and smiled in his face with kindly eyes. glad to meet anyone of so friendly an aspect, odysseus greeted him, asked for his countenance and protection, and inquired the name of the country. "either thou art simple," answered the youth, "or thy home is far away, if thou knowest not this land. it is a place not unknown to fame, but named with honour wherever mortal speech is heard. rugged indeed it is, and unfit for horses and for chariots, but rich in corn and wine, and blessed by the soft rain of heaven. on its green pastures roam countless flocks and herds, and streams pour their abundance from its forest-clad hills. therefore the name of ithaca is spoken far and wide, and hath reached even to the distant land of troy." the wanderer's heart burned within him when he heard his dear native island described with such loving praise. but dissembling his joy he set his nimble wits to work, and began to spin a fine fiction for the stranger's ear. "i have heard of ithaca," he said, "as thou sayest, even in troy, where i fought under idomeneus, king of crete. and now i am an exile, flying from the vengeance of idomeneus, whose son, orsilochus, i slew, because he sought to deprive me of my share in the trojan spoil. for he bore a grudge against me, because i would not pay court to his father at troy, but made a party of my own, and fought for my own hand. for him i laid an ambush, and slew him in a secret place, under cover of night. then i fled down to the sea, and bribed the crew of a phoenician ship to carry me and my goods to pylos. but the storm wind drove them out of their course, and they put in here for shelter. sore battered and weary we landed here, having hardly escaped with our lives; and while i slept they brought my goods ashore, and sailed away for sidon, leaving me alone with my sorrow." intent on his tale, odysseus had not noticed the sudden change which had come over his hearer; for his eyes had been turned away, as he strove to spell out the features of the country, which still seemed unfamiliar. now he looked round again, and instead of that dainty youth he saw a stately female form, tall and fair, in aspect like the mighty goddess athene. and in truth it was the daughter of zeus herself who answered him, smiling and touching him with a playful gesture. "thou naughty rogue!" she said, "wilt thou never forget thy cunning shifts, wherein none can surpass thee, no, not the gods themselves? yea, thou hast a knavish wit, and no man can equal thee in craft, as no god can rival me. yet for all thy skill thou knewest me not for pallas athene, who is ever near thee in all thy trials, and made thee dear to all the phæacians. and now am i come to help thee hide thy goods, and weave a plot to ensnare the foes who beset thy house. thou hast still much to endure, before thy final triumph, and thou must enter thy halls as a stranger, and suffer many things by the hands of violent men." "it is hard, o goddess," answered odysseus, "for a mortal man to know thee, keen though he be of wit; for thou appearest in a hundred shapes. yet well i know that thou wast kind to me in days of old, when i fought with the greeks at troy. but since that time i have never seen thee, in all my wanderings and perils, save once in phæacia. now tell me truly, i implore thee, what is this place where i am wandering? thou saidst 'twas ithaca, but in that i think thou speakest falsely, with intent to deceive me; or is this indeed my native land?" "ever the same odysseus as of old," said athene, smiling again, "cautious and wary, and hard to convince. verily thou art a man after mine own heart, and therefore can i never leave thee or forsake thee in all thy cares. any other man would have rushed to embrace his wife, after so many years of wandering; but thou must needs prove her and make trial of her constancy, before thou takest her to thy heart. and if thou wouldst know why i held aloof from thee so long, it was because of poseidon, my father's brother, who ever pursued thee with his ire. yet i knew that thou wouldst return at last, and have waited patiently for that hour, and now i will open thine eyes, that thou mayest know the land of thy birth." as she spoke she touched his eyes, and a mist seemed to fall away from them, so that he recognised every feature of the place, the slopes of neritus, waving with forest trees, the spreading olive-tree, the harbour, and the cavern where he had many a time sacrificed to the nymphs. then odysseus rejoiced in spirit, and kneeling down he kissed his native soil, and put up a prayer to the guardian deities of the place: "greeting, lovely naiads, maiden daughters of zeus! ne'er hoped i to see your faces again, give ear unto my prayer, and if i live and prosper by the favour of athene i will pay you rich offerings, as i was wont to do." "doubt not my good-will," said athene, when he had finished; "that is assured thee. but it is time to secure these goods of thine in a safe hiding-place. after that we will advise what is next to be done." with that she dived into the cave, closely followed by odysseus, and showed him where he best might conceal his treasure. when all was safely bestowed, she set a great stone in the mouth of the cavern, and sat down at the foot of the olive-tree, motioning odysseus to take his place at her side. "now mark my words," began athene, "thou hast a heavy task before thee, to purge thy house of the shameless crew who for three years past have held the mastery there, and sought to tempt thy wife from her loyalty to thee. all this time she has been putting them off with promises which she has no mind to fulfil." "tis well," answered odysseus, "that thou hast warned me; else had i fallen in my own hall, even as agamemnon fell. but come, contrive some cunning device, whereby i may avenge me, and be thou at my side to aid me, that my heart fail me not. pour into me the same might and the same valour as when we sacked priam's royal citadel; then should i fear nothing, though i fought single-handed against three hundred men." "i will not fail thee, of that be sure," replied athene, "when the time comes to enter on that task. they shall pay full dear for thy substance which they devour, even with their very blood and brains, which shall be shed upon the ground like water. but thou must not appear among them in this fashion. i will give thee a disguise which none can penetrate, not even penelope herself. and when thou leavest this place, go first to the swineherd, who abides ever by his charge, faithful to thee and to thy house. thou wilt find him sitting by the swine on their feeding ground, near raven's rock and the fountain arethusa, where there is abundance of acorns and fair water. remain there and inquire of him concerning all things, while i go to sparta to summon telemachus, thy son, who went to visit menelaus to ask news of thee." "why didst thou permit him to go on a vain errand?" asked odysseus. "was it that he might suffer as i have suffered, in wandering o'er the deep, while others devour his living?" "be not over anxious for him," answered athene; "i myself sent him on that quest, that he might win a good name among men. and now he sits secure in the wealthy house of menelaus, dwelling in luxury and honour. the wooers have laid an ambush against his return; but all their malice shall be brought to naught." it was now time for odysseus to start on his way to the swineherd. but first he had to submit to a strange transformation. athene touched him with a rod which she was carrying, and instantly the flesh shrivelled on his limbs, the clustering locks fell away from his head, and the keen, piercing glance of his eyes was quenched. he who a moment before had been a mighty man in his prime was now become a wrinkled, aged beggar, clad in miserable, grimy rags, with a staff, and a tattered scrip, hanging by a cord from his shoulder. for a cloak she gave him an old deer's hide, from which all the hair was gone. thus totally disguised, he parted from the goddess, and started inland, following a rugged mountain path, while athene went to summon telemachus from sparta. odysseus and eumæus i the office of swineherd was a position of great trust and importance among the patriarchal chieftains of homeric greece. the principal diet was the flesh of swine and oxen, and these animals formed the chief part of their wealth. eumæus, the chief swineherd of odysseus, lived apart in a lonely place among the hills, where he had enclosed a wide space of ground with a stone fence defended at the top with brambles, and in front by a palisade of oak. within the fence were twelve styes, and in each stye were fifty sows with their young. the boars had their quarters outside the enclosure, and their number had been greatly diminished by the constant demand for hog's flesh among the suitors. still, they reached the formidable total of three hundred and fifty--a noisy and ravenous multitude. it was no light task to provide shelter for nearly a thousand swine, with their young; yet eumæus had undertaken this duty during his master's long absence, without the knowledge of laertes or penelope. and here he was sitting, on this sunny morning, cutting up a well-tanned ox-hide to make straps for sandals, while four dogs, large and fierce as wolves, prowled near at hand. three of his helpers were gone with the swine to their feeding ground, and the fourth had been sent to the town with a fat hog for the wooers. suddenly the dogs rushed forward, baying furiously, and an old man in tattered raiment appeared at the gate of the courtyard. it would have gone hard with the stranger if eumæus had not promptly come to the rescue, and driven the dogs off with a volley of stones. "old man," said eumæus, as the dogs slunk away yelping, "it was well that i was near, or thou hadst surely been torn to pieces, and brought shame on me. i have trouble enough without that. here i sit, fattening my master's swine for other men's tables, while he wanders, perchance, among strangers, in poverty and want. but come into my hut, and when thou hast comforted thy soul with meat and wine thou shalt tell thy tale of sorrow." odysseus (for he it was, though sorely disfigured) followed eumæus into the hut, and sat down on a shaggy goatskin, which the swineherd spread for him on a heap of brushwood. "heaven bless thee," he said, when he was seated, "for this kindly welcome!" "i do but my duty," answered eumæus. "the stranger and the beggar are sacred, by law divine. 'tis but little that i can do, who serve young and haughty masters, in the absence of my true lord, who would have rewarded me nobly, and given me a plot of ground and a wife, had he been here to see how heaven blesses the work of my hands. but he is gone to swell the host of those who fell in helen's cause. cursed be she, and all her race, for she hath robbed me of the kindest master that ever man served." in the midst of his sorrow, eumæus forgot not his duties as host. going out he took two young swine, slaughtered and dressed them, and set the flesh, all smoking on the spits, before odysseus. then he mixed wine in a bowl of ivy wood, and sitting down opposite to his guest bade him eat and drink. "'tis but poor fare which i have to offer you," he said. "the best of the herd ever goes to the young lords who are wooing my mistress. their wantonness and riot calls aloud to heaven for vengeance. they are worse than the wildest band of robbers that ever lived by open pillage and violence. such waste of good meat and wine was never seen before. for a wealthy man was odysseus, and his flocks and herds still range over all the hills of ithaca. and from every flock the fattest and the choicest is driven off day by day to feed their dainty mouths." odysseus fell to with keen appetite, for he had eaten nothing since he left phæacia. and when he had satisfied his hunger he pledged eumæus in a full cup, and led him on to discourse on his favourite theme--the virtues and the sorrows of his lord. "tell me more," he said, "of thy master. who knows but that i may have met him in my travels, for i have wandered in many lands." "old man," answered eumæus, "i see thy bent. thou wouldst forge some glozing tale to beguile the ears of that poor stricken lady, penelope. many a beggar has come to her doors crammed full of lies to amuse her widowed heart; and she listens, and doubts, and weeps. and thou too, methinks, hast a like fertile fancy; for hunger and want are rare inventors. but save thy wits for a better purpose; thou canst not bring him back to life, or clothe with warm flesh his bones, long since picked clean by carrion birds or ravenous fish. he is lost for ever, and sorrow is the portion of us who remain, but especially of me, for he was dearer to me than father and mother, dearer than my native land." "friend," said odysseus, "thou hast misjudged me sorely, in thinking me one of those greedy mendicants who tell lies for the sake of meat and drink. believe me or not, i will say what is in my heart, and when my words are proved true by the event i will claim my reward. odysseus is near at hand, and ere many days have passed he shall be seen in ithaca, and take vengeance on those who oppress his wife and son. i swear it by this table at which i have eaten, and by the hearth of odysseus, and by zeus, the god of hospitality." eumæus remained totally unconvinced by this solemn assertion. "talk no more of him," he said with emotion, "it cuts me to the heart to hear his very name. would that it might be as thou sayest!--but 'tis an idle dream. peace be unto his ashes! and may the gods at least preserve unto us his son, telemachus, who lately departed on a witless errand, led thereto, as i think, by some malign deity who hates the house of odysseus. but no more of this! tell me rather of thyself, who and whence thou art, and how thou camest to ithaca." eumæus had not extolled the fertile invention of odysseus for nothing. forthwith he began a wondrous tale of adventure, a little epic in itself, with some points of resemblance to his own true story. "i am a native of crete," he began, "and the son of a wealthy man. when my father died i received but a scanty portion of his goods. nevertheless, because of my valour and the might of my hands, i won a noble and wealthy lady for my wife. thou wouldst not deem, perhaps, to see me now, that i was once a mighty man of war; yet even in the stubble we may judge what the wheat has been. from my youth up i lived amidst the clash of shield and spear, and loved battle and ambush, siege and foray. but i cared not for plodding industry, which gives increase unto a house, and fills it with the bright faces of children. such i was as heaven made me, a man of war and blood. "before the sons of greece went up to troy i was nine times chosen captain of an armed band to make war in the land of strangers, and came back laden with booty, so that my name was known and dreaded in crete. and when the summons went round in all the coasts of greece to follow the banner of agamemnon, who but i was chosen by the common voice to share the command with idomeneus? i was fain to renounce that hard and perilous service, but it might not be; so for nine years i fought at troy, and after our return to crete i abode but one month with my wife and children, for at the end of that time my spirit called me to egypt. i manned nine ships, and on the fifth day the north wind brought me safe with all my company to the land of nile. "then i sent out a few chosen men to explore the country, and kept myself close with the rest of my force until they should bring back their report. but my scouts forgot their duty, and carried away by lust of plunder began to harry and ravage the fields of the egyptians. quickly the hue and cry went round, and an armed multitude, both horse and foot, came suddenly upon us, breathing fury and vengeance. we could make no stand against such a host, and all my comrades were speedily slain or taken captive. when i saw that all was lost i threw away helmet and shield, dropped my spear, and falling on my knees before the chief captain of the egyptians begged him to spare my life. he heard my petition, set me on his chariot, and brought me to his home. there i remained seven years and gathered much wealth; for i had found favour in the eyes of the egyptians, and they gave me freely of their possessions. "in the eighth year there came a certain phoenician to egypt, a crafty and covetous rogue, and he persuaded me to go with him to phoenicia. so i went, and abode with him a whole year, and when the spring came round again i sailed with him to africa, whither he was bound with a freight of merchandise. his purpose was to sell me in africa as a slave for a great price; but zeus willed it otherwise, for as we sailed southwards from crete a great storm arose, and the ship went down with all her men, while i escaped by clinging to the mast, and after nine days was carried by the winds and the waves to thesprotia, where i was kindly entreated by the king of that country. "there i had news of odysseus, who had touched at that coast on his voyage to ithaca, and stayed as a guest in that same house. this i heard from the king's own lips, and he showed me all the treasure which odysseus had left in his charge, while he himself went on a journey to dodona, to inquire of the oracle concerning the manner of his return. thou wouldst wonder to behold all the wealth which thy lord had gathered, an exceeding great store. "odysseus himself i saw not; for it chanced that a ship was sailing for dulichium, and the king commended me to her captain, bidding him carry me thither with all care and tenderness. now this man was a villain, and be devised evil against me; for when we left the coast of thesprotia, he stripped me of the raiment which the king had given me, clothed me in these rags, and bound me with cords, intending to sell me as a slave. in the evening he landed in ithaca, leaving me, bound as i was, in the ship. but i broke my bonds, and escaped by swimming to another part of the coast, where i lay all night in a thicket. in the morning they sought me with great outcry, but found me not; and after awhile they sailed away. when they were gone i arose, and was led by heaven's hand to thy doors." the swineherd listened attentively to the well-imagined tale, and when it was ended he said: "hapless man, thou hast been the very sport of destiny, and my heart is big when i think of thy wanderings and thy woes. but as touching odysseus, that part of thy story likes me not; methinks 'tis a cunning invention to flatter my ears. long ago i was deceived by a false report, brought hither by a wandering exile like thee, who said that he had seen odysseus repairing his ships in crete, and bade us look for his coming in the autumn of that year. since then i have closed my ears against all such rumours, and therefore i say, tell me no more of him, for i cannot and will not believe but that he is dead." ii evening was now coming on, and it was time for the herdsmen to return with their charge from the feeding-ground. presently, with huge commotion, and multitudinous din, the swine were driven home and penned in their styes. then eumæus called to his helpers, and bade them bring the best of the herd to make savoury meat for his guest "spare not," he said, "to bring the fattest and choicest of them all, for why should we be careful, when strangers devour our labour?" so they brought a hog of five years old, exceeding fat, and having slaughtered it they offered sacrifice, not forgetting a prayer for the return of odysseus. when all rites of religion were duly paid, they roasted the flesh, and served it on wooden platters. odysseus was honoured by eumæus with a choice portion of the loin. when they had finished, night came on, dark and stormy, with furious gusts of rain and wind. just as they were about to retire to rest, odysseus, who seldom spoke without a purpose, turned to his kind host and said: "eumæus, the good wine has loosened my tongue, and moved me to tell thee a story of long ago, when these withered limbs were in their lusty prime, and my heart burned with the fire of youth. then i was chosen with menelaus and odysseus to lead an ambush under the walls of troy. with a picked company we took up our position in a marshy place, and lay down in our armour among the rushes. it was a bitter night, with snow and frost, and our shields were soon coated with ice. now it chanced that i had left my cloak in the camp, and while the others lay warm in their thick woollen mantles, i was perishing with cold. at last i could bear it no longer, so i nudged odysseus, who was lying next to me, with my elbow, and said to him: 'son of laertes, the cold is killing me. i came in my folly without a cloak, and i can never hold out until dawn in this cruel frost.' and he, ever ready of wit as he was, instantly contrived means to relieve me. whispering to me to keep counsel he rose on his elbow, and called to the others, saying: 'comrades, i have been warned in a dream that our numbers are too weak for the task which has been laid upon us. will not one of you run down to the camp, and ask agamemnon to send us further succour?' "thereupon one of our men arose, and flinging off his cloak ran off to carry the message to agamemnon. and i lay wrapped in the garment, warm and safe, until the dawn. ah! those were brave days; what changes have i seen since then!" "i read thy meaning," said eumæus; "and as a reward for thy good story thou shalt sleep in comfort to-night. but to-morrow thou must make shift to wear thine own rags again, for i am but ill furnished with changes of raiment. when telemachus returns he will supply all thy wants, and send thee whithersoever thou art minded to go." so saying he drew a truckle-bed close to the fire, and heaped it with the skins of sheep and goats. there odysseus lay down to rest, and eumæus threw over him a stout mantle of his own. all the other herdsmen slept in the hut; but eumæus, ever watchful for his master's property, went out, armed to the teeth, to pass the night among the swine, under the shelter of a hollow rock, which kept off the cold north wind. and odysseus was glad when he saw that good servant so faithful to his trust. the return of telemachus i while these important events were happening in ithaca, telemachus was living as an honoured guest in the house of menelaus. one night, while he lay between sleeping and waking, full of anxious thought, athene appeared to him in her own person, and addressed him thus: "thou lingerest too long here, telemachus. it is time for thee to return and keep an eye on thy goods, lest thou be stripped of all in thy absence. thy mother's kinsmen are urgent with her to wed eurymachus, the wealthiest of the wooers; and, if she yield, it may be that she will take of thy heritage to increase the house of the man who wins her. therefore make haste and get thee home, that thou mayest be at hand to defend thy rights. know also that the wooers are lying in wait for thee in the strait between ithaca and samos, with intent to slay thee; take heed then that thou shun that passage, and sail home by another way. and when thou art come to ithaca, go straight to the dwelling of eumæus, and send him down to penelope with news of thy return." such a message, brought by such a messenger, was not to be neglected. telemachus at once roused pisistratus, the son of nestor, who was sleeping near, and declared his intention of starting at once; but when pisistratus pointed out how displeasing such conduct would be to their princely host he consented to wait till morning. accordingly, when day was come, he went to menelaus, and asked leave to depart at once. menelaus consented, only insisting that he should remain for the morning meal. while this was preparing, the generous prince went to his treasure chamber, and returned laden with a splendid silver bowl, the work of phoenician artists, which he had received when he visited the king of sidon on his voyage from troy. and helen brought an embroidered robe, the work of her own fair hands, as a wedding gift for his future bride. as soon as they had eaten they mounted the chariot, and drove slowly through the outer gate of the courtyard, menelaus and helen following on foot here they drew up to say farewell, and menelaus pledged them in a bowl of wine, wishing them god-speed. "and forget not," he added, "to greet nestor for me when ye come to pylos, for he was ever gentle to me as a father when we sojourned in the land of troy." "i will not forget to carry thy message," answered telemachus; "would that i were as sure to see my father when i come to ithaca, that i might tell him of thy noble hospitality, and show him thy gifts." hardly had the words been uttered when a clamour of voices was heard, and a crowd of men and women ran past, pursuing with loud cries an eagle, which had just seized a great white goose from the courtyard, and was carrying her off in his talons. straight over the chariot he flew, and with a scream of triumph sped away to the mountains with his booty. "consider now, my prince," said pisistratus, "whether this omen was sent to us or to thee." menelaus, who was somewhat slow of wit, paused to deliberate; but before he could frame an answer, the quick brain of helen was ready with an interpretation. "the eagle is thy father, odysseus," she said to telemachus, "and the meaning of the omen is that he is already in ithaca, or close at hand, bringing death and doom to his foes." thus encouraged by fair portents, they took leave of their kind hosts, and started on their way to pylos, where they arrived on the following day. as they drew near to the house of nestor, telemachus begged his friend to drive straight down to the sea. "for i know," he said, "that thy father will constrain me to abide with him, and will take no denial; and i wish to embark for ithaca without further delay." pisistratus agreed, and avoiding the house of nestor they passed on to the place where the ship lay moored. having summoned his crew, telemachus was preparing to embark, when a man armed and equipped as a traveller approached the vessel, and inquired who he was and whither he was bound. having received an answer, he requested telemachus to carry him to ithaca. "my name," he said, "is theoclymenus, and i am descended from melampus, the famous seer, from whom i have inherited the prophetic gift. i am an exile from my native land of argos, for i have slain a man of my own tribe, and am flying from the avenger of blood. set me, i pray thee, on thy ship, and take me with you, for sore is my need." "heaven forbid," answered telemachus, "that i should deny thee, seeing that thy very life is at stake. make haste, and come on board"; and he made room for the stranger to sit by him in the stern of the vessel. after a quick and prosperous voyage they sighted the coast of ithaca, and landed on a deserted part of the coast within easy reach of the swineherd's dwelling. here telemachus dismissed his company, bidding them take the galley round to the harbour of ithaca, and promising to reward them for their good service. he was just about to depart when theoclymenus detained him and asked where he was to find shelter. telemachus answered in some embarrassment. "'twere no friendly act," he said, "to send thee to my house, for my mother lives apart in her own chamber and sees no man, and i fear lest thou suffer some harm from the lawless men who riot in my halls. therefore i advise thee to go to eurymachus, who is now the most powerful man in ithaca, and hopes to sit in my father's seat; but perchance zeus will send him another issue of his wooing." just as he spoke a rushing of wings was heard on the right, and they saw a falcon passing close at hand with a dove clutched in his talons, and tearing his prey so that the feathers fluttered down at their feet. then theoclymenus, who was deeply skilled in augury, drew telemachus apart and said: "it is a manifest sign of victory to thee and to thy house." "may heaven fulfil thy prophecy," answered telemachus, "and if thy words prove true i will load thee with benefits, and give thee cause to bless this hour." being now convinced that he had found a friend, he called peiræus, in whom he had full confidence, and bade him take theoclymenus under his care until he himself returned to the town. peiræus readily undertook the charge, and this point being settled they thrust out from the shore and rowed away in the direction of the harbour, while telemachus strode off with rapid footsteps along the path which led to the swineherd's hut. ii on the evening before the arrival of telemachus odysseus was sitting after supper with eumæus and the other herdsmen, and wishing to learn the purpose of eumæus towards him he said: "i will no longer be a burden to thee and thy fellows. to-morrow i will go to the town and beg my living, if thou wilt send one of thy men to show me the way. perchance also i might visit the house of odysseus, and have speech with penelope. and it may be that the wooers will take me into their service, for i would have thee know that by favour of hermes i am right skilful of my hands, and no one can match me in laying a fire and cleaving dry logs, in carving and roasting meat, and in pouring of wine." but this proposal found no favour with the honest swineherd. "who put such a thought," he asked, "into thy mind? serve with the wooers! they would put a speedy end to thy service, and pay thee thy wages in blood. those who wait upon them are of a different sort from thee--gay striplings, daintily clad, with glossy hair and comely faces. remain with us until telemachus comes home; thou art no burden either to me or to my men." "be it so, then," answered odysseus, "and may heaven requite thee for thy goodness to a poor homeless outcast, who wanders in misery, driven by hunger from door to door! and since i am still to be thy guest, tell me something of thy master's mother, and of the father whom he left behind when he went to the wars. do they still live, or have they gone to their rest?" "this also thou shalt know," replied eumæus. "laertes his father still lives, though sore stricken with years and sorrows; for his son's long absence and his wife's miserable end have brought him to the verge of the grave. she died long ago, and by such a death as i pray may never come to anyone who is dear to me--she, my kind mistress, who brought me up with her youngest daughter, and hardly loved me less. as long as she lived i would often go down to the house, and she ever entertained me kindly, and gave me something to carry back with me to my dwelling on the land. full well she knew how to sweeten the lot of a thrall with pleasant words, and little acts of tenderness and love. but now i seldom leave my charge, for since the wooers brought this curse upon my master's house penelope hides her face from us, and has no comfort for us either in word or deed." odysseus listened with deep interest, and when eumæus paused he expressed a desire to hear the story of his life. "how was it," he asked, "that already in early childhood thou wast cast on the mercy of strangers? wast thou taken captive in war, or did robbers seize thee as thou satst watching sheep on the lonely hills, and sell thee into bondage?" "fill thy cup," answered eumæus, "we will pledge each other in a hearty draught, and then thou shalt hear my tale. the nights are long at this season, and we shall have time enough to sleep when i have done. fate has dealt hardly with me, even as with thee; and we can find some comfort in telling over our sorrows to each other. "there is a certain island called syria, lying north of ortygia, not very large or populous, but a good land, rich in pasture, with waving cornfields and goodly vineyards. there famine never comes, nor sickness, but all the people reach a good old age, and then die by the painless shafts of artemis or of apollo. there are two cities which divide the territory equally between them; and there was one king over both, my father, ctesius, son of ormenus. "when i was still very young there came to the island a phoenician ship, laden with trinkets for barter. now in my father's house was a phoenician woman, tall and fair, and skilled in needlework. she was my nurse, and i was wont to run about the town with her. one day, as she was washing clothes not far from the ship, she was recognised by a phoenician sailor as being of his own race, and he inquired how she came to the island. she answered that she was a native of sidon, and a rich man's daughter, stolen from her home by pirates, and sold across the seas. 'and hast thou a mind to see thy native land again?' asked the fellow. 'thy father and mother still live and prosper'; for she had told him that her father's name was arybas. 'i will go with you,' answered the woman, 'if ye will swear an oath to carry me home unharmed.' they all swore to do as she said, and after that she instructed them how to proceed. 'keep close counsel,' she said, 'and let none of you seem to know me when ye meet me in the street, nor yet by the well, lest anyone tell it to my master; for if he suspects that aught is amiss it will be the ruin of us all. lose no time in selling your wares, and when the ship is freighted for her homeward voyage let one of you come up to the house and give me a sign. i will not come empty-handed, but will bring with me vessels of gold to pay for my passage. furthermore, i have charge of my master's child, a knowing little lad; and, if it be possible, i will bring him with me, that ye may sell him for a great price.' "the bargain was struck, and the woman departed. then for a whole year they remained among us and traded; at last, when they had sold out all their goods, and stowed their cargo, they sent up a man to my father's house, to warn the woman that the time was come. he brought with him a necklace of gold and amber, a thing of most rare device; and while my mother and her women were handling it, and bargaining for the price, the fellow made a sign to my nurse. when he was gone she took me by the hand and led me with her into the courtyard before the house. there she found tables set with vessels of gold, where my father had been dining with his guests. they had now gone forth to attend the council, and the place was deserted; so she caught up three goblets and hid them in her bosom. then with one rapid glance round, to make sure that she was not observed, she hastened down to the spot where the phoenician ship lay moored; and i, poor child, followed her, fearing nothing. "evening was coming on as we reached the shore, and the crew were sitting ready at their oars, only waiting for our arrival. they took us on board, rowed their galley into open water, and, a strong breeze springing up from the land, they hoisted sail, and were soon beyond the reach of pursuit. on the seventh day of the voyage the hand of vengeance fell upon the woman, and she was struck dead by an invisible blow. they flung her body to the fishes, and soon after we landed in ithaca, where they sold me as a slave to laertes." "twas a sad fate for one of thy tender years," remarked odysseus, when eumæus had finished his story. "nevertheless thou wast happy to find such a master--happier far than i, who am still a vagabond and a wanderer in my old age." the meeting of telemachus and odysseus i early next day eumæus and odysseus were preparing their morning meal, when they heard the sound of footsteps approaching the hut. the hounds pricked up their ears at the sound, and ran fawning round the new-comer, who was evidently well known to them. odysseus called to eumæus, who was busy drawing wine, and said: "some friend of thine is coming; for the dogs fawn upon him, and bark not." even as he spoke, a tall figure appeared in the open doorway, and his own dear son stood before him. eumæus sprang up amazed, and let fall the pitcher into which he had been drawing the wine. then with a cry of joy he ran to greet his young lord, kissed his hands and his face, and wept over him. even as a father yearns over his only son, just returned from abroad after a ten years' absence, so eumæus yearned over telemachus, and hailed him as one returned from the dead. "thou art come, telemachus," he faltered at last, when his emotion suffered him to speak, "thou art come back again, dear as mine own life! ne'er thought i to see thee again, after thou wast gone to pylos. sit thee down, that i may feast mine eyes upon thee; seldom dost thou come this way, but abidest in the house, to watch the wasteful deeds of the wooers." odysseus, in his character of beggar, rose respectfully from his seat, to make room for the young prince, but telemachus motioned him to resume his place, and sat down himself on a heap of brushwood, on which the swineherd had spread a fleece. while eumæus was bringing bread and meat, and filling the cups with wine, telemachus questioned him as to his mother, and learnt that no change had occurred in her relation to the wooers since he left ithaca. breakfast being over, eumæus, in answer to his inquiry, told him the story of the supposed stranger. "i have done what i could for him," he added, when he had repeated what he had heard from odysseus. "now i deliver him unto thee, to do with him as thou wilt; all his hopes are in thy grace." "what can i do?" answered telemachus, in perplexity. "thou knowest that i am not master in my own house, and my mother is torn between two purposes: whether to wait still in patience for her lord's coming, or to choose a new husband from the noblest of the suitors. neither she nor i can give protection to such a guest as this. therefore i will bestow upon him a new cloak and doublet, with sandals for his feet, and arm him with a good sword, and send him whithersoever he chooses to go. or if thou art willing, thou canst keep him here with thee, and i will send down food and raiment for him, that he may not be a burden to thee and thy men. but i will not allow him to go among the wooers, and suffer ill-treatment which i have no power to prevent." odysseus, who had not seen his son since he was an infant, desired to learn something more of his mind and character; and in order to draw him into further speech he asked, with an air of indignation, who the wooers were, and how it was that he submitted to their violence. "is the public voice against thee," he asked, "or art thou at feud with thy brethren, so that they will not help thee? if i were in thy place i would fall upon them singlehanded, for it were better to die once for all than tamely to submit to such outrage." "behold i will tell thee all the truth," answered telemachus. "'tis neither by the consent of the people nor by the ill-will of my brethren, that this evil hath come upon me. but heaven hath ordained that the honours and the burden of our house should ever rest upon one alone. laertes, my grandsire, was an only son, and odysseus was the sole issue of his marriage; and even so i am the only child of odysseus. therefore i sit helpless and alone, at the mercy of this ruffian band. but enough of this! we have no hope left, save in the justice of heaven." then he turned to eumæus, and said: "make haste now, go down to the house, and tell penelope that i have come back safe from pylos. let none else hear it, but come back hither at once, when thou hast delivered thy message, and i will wait here until thy return." "shall i not go to laertes, and tell him also?" asked the swineherd. "since the day of thy departure he has tasted neither meat nor drink, but sits alone in his sorrow, and will not be comforted." "my mother can send a handmaid to inform him," answered telemachus. "but as for thee, see that thou return here straightway, and lose no time." ii soon after the departure of eumæus, odysseus and telemachus were sitting before the door of the hut, each lost in his own thoughts, when their attention was attracted by the strange behaviour of the dogs. these animals, which had been lying basking in the sun, all at once started up with a stifled cry, and ran whining, with every sign of terror, to a distant corner of the courtyard. "what ails the hounds?" said telemachus, looking up in surprise. but odysseus was not long before he saw the cause of their alarm: standing at the outer gate was a tall female figure, of majestic countenance, and more than mortal beauty. telemachus saw her not, but odysseus instantly knew who she was, and, obeying a gesture of her hand, he rose from his seat and went out through the gate. she led him to a place where they were out of hearing, and then said: "it is time for thee to reveal thyself to thy son, that together ye may contrive destruction for the wooers. when the hour of reckoning comes, i shall be near to aid you." thereupon she touched him with her wand, and in a moment he was once more the old odysseus, still in the full vigour of his manhood, dark and sunburnt, with thick black hair and curling beard. his rags also had been replaced by fair clean raiment; and thus completely transformed he went back to the hut to reveal himself to telemachus. athene, having done her part, had forthwith disappeared. fear came upon telemachus, and he marvelled exceedingly, when the real odysseus appeared before him. "who art thou," he asked, "that comest back in a moment thus wondrously transfigured? if thou be a god, as methinks thou art, let me find favour in thy sight, and we will honour thee with rich offerings of gold, and with humble prayers." "no god am i," answered odysseus, "but thine own dear father, for whose sake thou hast suffered so long with groanings and tears." with that he kissed him, and giving vent to the tenderness which he had hitherto restrained he lifted up his voice and wept. but telemachus could not yet believe that it was indeed his father whom he saw before him. "it cannot be," he said, drawing back in affright. "it is mere magic and glamour practised against me by some hostile power, to mock my sorrow. no being of flesh and blood could work such a change upon himself. a moment since thou wast an old man in sordid raiment, and now thou art like unto the sons of heaven." "forbear!" said odysseus, "no more amazement! i am thy father, and no other; if not, thou shalt never see him more. much have i suffered, and wandered far, and now in the twentieth year i am come back to my native land. this change at which thou marvellest is no work of mine, but was wrought by athene, daughter of zeus. the gods can deal with us as they will, both for our glory and for our shame." then telemachus was convinced, and fell into his father's arms, and they wept long and sore over each other, for joy and grief are near neighbours. presently they grew calmer, and odysseus, in answer to his son's inquiry, told how the phæacians had conveyed him to ithaca, and of all the treasures which he had brought with him. "but now we must speak of a sterner task," said odysseus, when his story was ended. "tell me now the number of the wooers, that i may know how many and what manner of men they be, and thereafter contrive how we may best assail them, whether by ourselves or with others to help us." "father," answered telemachus, "i knew thy high renown, as a warrior mighty in word and deed. but i fear me greatly that this task is too hard for us; how shall two men prevail against so many? listen now and i will tell thee their number. from dulichium are two and fifty, with six men-servants, from same twenty-four, from zacynthus twenty, and from ithaca itself twelve, all proper men and tall. if we twain fall upon such a host, we may find the work of vengeance a bitter morsel, and our bane. it were better, then, to look for some other help." "helpers we shall find, and stout ones too," said odysseus. "what sayest thou to athene and her father, zeus? is their aid enough or shall we look for more?" "mighty indeed are the champions thou namest," replied telemachus, "though throned far remote among the clouds; supreme are they in sovereignty, both on earth and in heaven." "thou sayest well," answered odysseus; "and ere long the wooers shall feel their might. now learn further what thou must do. to-morrow thou shalt go up to the house, and join the company of the wooers, and afterwards the swineherd will bring me thither in the disguise of a beggar old and miserable. if the wooers use me despitefully seek not to prevent it, but let thy heart endure, even though they beat me, or drag me by the feet through the doors. thou mayest reprove them gently, and bid them cease from their wantonness, but they will not heed thee for their lives are forfeit already. mark further, and take heed what i say. when the time to strike is come i will give thee a signal, and, forthwith, thou shalt remove all the weapons from the halls, and make excuse to the wooers, saying that thou art bestowing them in a safe place, out of reach of the smoke. leave only two swords and two shields and two spears, as weapons for ourselves. but above all i charge thee to let none know of my coming--neither laertes, nor eumæus, nor penelope herself. alone we must work, and watch the temper of the thralls, to see if there be any on our side." iii meanwhile the faithful swineherd made all haste to carry his message to penelope. just as he was approaching the house, he met one of the crew of telemachus' ship coming up from the harbour on the same errand. so they went together, and while eumæus conveyed the tidings privately to penelope, he who was sent from the ship delivered his report in the hearing of the whole household. great was the dismay of the suitors when they learnt that their foul plot had been frustrated. one by one they stole out of the house to a secret place of meeting; and when they were all assembled they began to devise what was next to be done. while they were debating they were joined by antinous and the crew of the ship which had been lying in wait for telemachus in the strait. always the foremost in violent counsels, antinous breathed out threatenings and slaughter against the young prince. "the boy only escaped us by a miracle," he said. "all day long we had sentinels on all the heights commanding the sea, and at night we patrolled the waters in our ship. yet for all our vigilance he has slipped through our hands. but i will not be baffled thus," he added, stamping with fury. "this wretched boy must die, or we shall never accomplish our purpose. let us make haste and slay him before he comes back to the town, or he will call a meeting of the people and proclaim to all ithaca that we sought to slay him, and failed. then the whole city will rise against us, and we shall have to fly for our lives." then another of the wooers rose up and rebuked antinous for his bloodthirsty counsels. this man's name was amphinomus, and he was the chief among the wooers who came from dulichium. more than any of the other suitors he found favour with penelope, for he was a prudent man and a just, and his voice was pleasant to her ear. "remember," he said, "that telemachus is of royal race; and it is a dreadful thing to shed the blood of kings. i will have no hand in such an act, without sure and manifest sign that it is the will of zeus." the speech of amphinomus was received with a murmur of applause; for most of the wooers were averse to the violent measures proposed by antinous. so they arose, and returned to the house. penelope had heard of their plotting from the herald, medon, and obeying a sudden impulse she came down from her chamber, and standing in the doorway began to upbraid antinous for his wicked purpose. "thou hast the name of a wise and eloquent man," she said, "but thy fame is better than thy deeds. wretch, why dost thou lay snares against the life of my son? hast thou never heard how thy father came to this house, flying from the wrath of the ithacans, who would have slain him, because he had joined the taphian pirates in a raid on the thesprotians, who were our allies? but odysseus stood between him and their fury, and saved his life. a fair return thou art making for that good service, devouring his substance, paying court to his wife, and compassing the death of his son." antinous sat biting his lips, and made no answer; but eurymachus, a subtler villain, smooth and specious, but all the more dangerous, spoke for him, and said: "sage daughter of icarius, fear nothing for thy son telemachus, for while i live no man shall offer him violence. by this sword i swear it, and i care not who hears me, the man who seeks to harm him shall die by my hand. i at least have not forgotten the loving-kindness of thy lord, odysseus, on whose knees i have often sat, and taken food and drink from his hand. therefore i love telemachus as a brother, and i swear to thee that none of the wooers shall do him any harm." the home-coming of odysseus i when eumæus came back from his errand, odysseus, who in the meantime had resumed his disguise, was helping telemachus to prepare the evening meal. telemachus questioned him about the ship which the wooers had sent out to waylay him on his return from pylos, but eumæus had been in such haste to get back to his farm that he had not stopped to inquire about the matter. "but thus much i can tell thee," he said: "as i was crossing the hill which overlooks the town i saw a galley, bristling with spear and helm, entering the harbour; and i believe that this was the ship of which thou speakest" "no doubt of it," answered telemachus, with a significant glance at his father. then they all fell to their suppers with hearty appetite, and soon afterwards retired to rest. the first chill of dawn was still in the air when telemachus roused the swineherd, and announced his intention of proceeding at once to the town. "i know," he said, "that my mother will have no peace until she sees me with her own eyes. now as to this stranger, i charge thee to take him with thee into the town, that he may beg his bread from house to house. burdened as i am already, and full of care, i cannot provide for him. if he thinks it hard, all the worse for him." "thou sayest well," answered odysseus; "i have no mind to remain here. i am too old to take orders from a master, and it is better to beg my living in the town than in the fields. therefore i will go, when i have warmed me at the fire, and the sun is up; for i am ill equipped to face the frosts of morning." away went telemachus, covering the ground with rapid strides, his mind occupied all the way with thoughts of vengeance against the wooers. the first who saw him when he crossed the threshold of his home was his old nurse, eurycleia, who was just then spreading fleeces on the seats in the great hall. with a cry of joy she ran and fell on his neck, and kissed him; and all the faithful handmaids of penelope crowded round to welcome their young master home. the sound of their voices reached the ears of penelope, and with swift steps she came gliding into the hall, fair as artemis, or golden aphrodite. when she saw telemachus she flung her arms round his neck and covered his face with kisses. "welcome," she sobbed, "telemachus, my heart's darling, restored to me beyond all hope! say, hast thou brought any news of thy father?" but telemachus was too full of the stern task which lay before him to leave room for softer emotions. gently extricating himself from his mother's embrace he said: "dear mother, thou shalt hear all in due season; at present i have other work to do. go thou to thy chamber, and put on clean raiment, and when thou hast purified thyself pray to all the immortal gods to hasten the day of atonement for those who have wronged our house. i will return presently, when i have done my business in the town." the gentle penelope went to do her son's bidding, and telemachus started for the town, with two hounds following close at his heels. he seemed taller and manlier after his short absence, and many an eye followed him with wonder as he passed through the streets. presently he came to the place where the wooers were assembled, and they came crowding about him with false words of welcome. but he turned his back on them with scorn, and seeing a little group of his father's friends, among whom were mentor and the aged halitherses, he went and sat down among them. while they were questioning him about his travels, peiræus came up, bringing with him the seer, theoclymenus, whom telemachus had left in his charge the day before. "i restore to thee thy guest," said peiræus, "who has been entertained in all honour at my house; and if thou wilt send thy handmaids, i will deliver unto them the treasure which thou hast brought with thee from pylos." "i thank thee," answered telemachus; "theoclymenus shall go with me; but as to the treasure, do thou keep it for me until these evil days are passed. if aught untoward befall me, i had rather it remained with thee than that it should fall into the hands of the wooers." having taken leave of his friends, he returned to the house, taking theoclymenus with him. and when they had bathed and put on fresh raiment, they sat down to meat. the meal proceeded in silence, and at last penelope, who was sitting near, busy with her distaff, and longing impatiently to hear her son's news, said in a tone of displeasure: "hast thou no word for thy mother, telemachus? or art thou keeping thy tidings until the wooers return? surely i thought in this rare interval of quiet to hear how thou hast fared and what thou hast learnt on this journey. but if thou hast naught to tell me, i will go to my widowed bed, and weep away the hours until dawn." roused from his reverie by his mother's reproaches, telemachus gave a brief account of his visit to nestor and menelaus, and of what they had told him. penelope was musing on her son's report, when theoclymenus, the second-sighted man, started up from his seat, and cried: "i see him, i see him! he is landed in ithaca, he is coming hither, he is here! woe unto the suitors! their hour is at hand, and not one of them shall escape." penelope had heard such prophecies too often to pay much heed to the seer's vision. "ah! my friend," she said, with a sad smile, "i can but pray that thy words will be fulfilled; if ever they are, it shall be a happy day for thee." at this moment the wooers came trooping in, filling the house with riot and uproar; and there was an end of all quiet converse for that day. ii it was past noon before odysseus and eumæus set out for the town; for eumæus had conceived a great liking for his guest, and listened with delight to his wonderful tales of adventure. "come," he said at last, when odysseus had finished one of his long stories. "it is time to be going, though i would willingly have kept thee here. but my young lord has spoken and we must obey." "lead on," said odysseus, "i know what thou wouldst say; but first give me a staff to lean on, for i heard thee say that the path was rough." so saying he threw his tattered wallet over his shoulder, and taking a stout staff, which eumæus offered him, started with his friend across the hills. after a toilsome walk they reached the top of the hill which overlooked the town, and descending the slope they came to a copious spring of water, well fenced with stones, and shaded by a grove of alders. the water descended into a basin from the face of a rock in a cool and copious stream; and on either side stood an altar to the nymphs. "it is the common fountain of the townspeople," explained eumæus. "the altars and the basin which receives the water are the work of our ancient kings." odysseus paused a moment, lost in the memories which were awakened by that familiar scene. but his reverie was rudely interrupted. while he stood gazing at the fountain, he heard a rude voice hailing them from the road, and looking round he saw a man leading a pair of fine goats towards the town. it was melanthius, his own goatherd, who was bringing the best of his flock to make savoury meat for the wooers. "here are two birds of a feather!" shouted the fellow, in jeering tones--"that wretched swineherd, and a ravenous beggar. a fine guest thou art bringing to our young masters, and a fair welcome, without doubt, they will give him. were it not better that i took him with me to my farm? he could sweep out the pens, and gather green shoots for the kids; and we would give him whey to drink, and put some flesh on these shrunk shanks[1] of his. but the lazy knave will do no work; he would rather rub his shoulders against every door-post, begging for broken meat. broken bones will be his portion, if the wooers see him near the house of odysseus." [footnote 1: "a world too wide for his shrunk shanks,"--shakespeare: "as you like it."] while he uttered these taunts melanthius had gradually come close to odysseus, and with the last word he lifted up his foot and kicked him with all his force on the hip. odysseus stood like a rock, and stirred not an inch from his ground; his first impulse was to seize the ruffian by the ankles, and dash out his brains on the road; but he checked himself with a great effort, and said not a word. but eumæus rebuked the goatherd, and invoked the vengeance of heaven against him. "would that our noble master were here!" he cried, "he would soon make an end of thee, thou braggart! unfaithful herdsman, that rovest ever about the town, leaving thy flock to underlings!" "go to, thou dog!" retorted melanthius, with a savage laugh. "wilt thou be ever harping on that string? thy noble master is dust long ago, and i would that telemachus were lying with him. as for thee, i will one day cast thee bound into a ship, and sell thee across the seas for a great price." with that he left them, and stepped briskly out towards the house, while odysseus and eumæus followed more slowly. presently they came to an extensive enclosure, standing conspicuously on a high level plateau overlooking the town. behind the fence towered the roof of a great timber house. they passed through the outer gates, and as they entered the courtyard they heard the sounds of a harp, and the steam of roast flesh was borne to their nostrils. "take heed now," said eumæus, lowering his voice, as they approached the door of the house. "i will go in first, and do thou follow me close, lest anyone find thee outside and do thee some hurt." "fear nothing for me," answered odysseus, "i am no stranger to blows, for i have been sore buffeted on land and sea. the belly is a stern taskmaster, which compels us to face both wounds and death." so saying he stepped aside to let eumæus pass, then checked him with a hasty exclamation; for he had seen something which sent a pang of sorrow to his heart. heaped up against the wall by the doorway was a great pile of refuse, left there until the thralls should carry it away and lay it on the fields; and there, grievously neglected, and almost blind with age, lay a great gaunt hound, to all seeming more dead than alive. what was the emotion of odysseus when he recognised in that poor creature his old favourite, argus, whom he had reared with his own hand, and trained to the chase, in the old days before he sailed to troy! as he stooped down with a caressing gesture the hound feebly raised his head; a strange light came into his eyes, he drooped his ears, and wagged his tail, but was too weak to stir from the place where he lay. odysseus brushed away a tear, and said to eumæus: "'tis strange that so fine a hound should lie thus uncared for in his old age. or do his looks belie his qualities? handsome he must have been, as i can see still; but perhaps his beauty was all he had to boast of." "he was my master's favourite hound," answered eumæus, "and there was none swifter or keener of scent in all the land. formerly the young men would take him with them to hunt the wild goat or the hare or the deer; but now that he is sore stricken with years not one of the women will bring him a morsel to eat, or a little water to drink. so it ever is when the master is absent; for a slave has no conscience when his owner's eye is not upon him." when eumæus had entered the house, odysseus lingered awhile, gazing sadly at the faithful argus. the old hound raised himself, and struggled painfully to drag himself to his master's feet; but the effort was too much for him, and he sank back on his sorry bed, and breathed his last. with a heavy heart odysseus turned away, and passing into the hall sat down on the threshold and laid his scrip beside him. telemachus was the first to notice him, and calling the swineherd, who was sitting near, he gave him a loaf of bread and a good handful of meat, and bade him carry it to the beggar. "and tell him to go round and beg of all the wooers," he said: "want and modesty agree ill together." eumæus brought the gift and the message, which odysseus received with a blessing on the giver. and when he had eaten he rose and went round the hall, begging of the wooers. all gave him something until he came to antinous, who stared at him insolently and asked who he was. "i saw the fellow," answered melanthius, "a little while ago. eumæus brought him hither, but who he is i know not." "ah! thou rogue," said antinous to the swineherd, "we know thy ways! why didst thou bring this caitiff to the town? are there not beggars enough here already to mar our pleasure when we sit down to meat? 'tis nought to thee, it seems, that these palmer-worms come swarming round the house to devour thy master's living." [illustration: the return of odysseus] "he is no guest of my inviting," answered eumæus. "i would not invite to this house any wandering stranger, unless he were a prophet, or leech, or shipwright, or minstrel; and he is none of these. but thou art ever hard on the servants of odysseus, and especially on me; yet i care not, so long as i satisfy penelope and my young lord, telemachus." "eumæus, thou art overbold of speech," said telemachus; then turning to antinous he added: "i thank thee for thy fatherly care, but we are not so poor that we need to drive the stranger from our doors--heaven forbid! give him something; 'tis i that bid thee: but thou art ever better at taking than at giving." "i will give him something, thou malapert boy," answered antinous, grinding his teeth with rage, "something which will keep him from the house for three months to come." as he spoke he thrust forward a heavy footstool from under the table, and placed it ready at hand. meanwhile, odysseus, having filled his wallet, was preparing to return to his place on the threshold. but first he came to antinous, and addressed to him a long harangue in the common style of the professional beggar, who had seen better days and been brought to want by the malice of fortune. he concluded with a fragment of the story which he had already told to eumæus. antinous heard him to the end with ill-disguised impatience, and then broke out in angry tones: "who brought this wretched fellow here to vex us? stand off from my table, thou shameless varlet! egypt, sayest thou? i will send thee to egypt, and with a vengeance, too! it is a shame to see how they have squandered good meat on a dog like thee"; and he pointed to the wallet, now filled with the cheap bounty of the wooers. odysseus drew back and made for the door, saying as he went: "of a truth, i wonder to find so princely a presence wedded to so mean a temper." when he heard that antinous began to curse and to swear, and lifting the footstool he hurled it with all his force at the retreating figure of odysseus. it struck him on the shoulder, with a crash that vibrated through the hall; but odysseus heeded it not, but passed on without a pause or a stumble to his place on the threshold. when he was seated he complained loudly of the brutal conduct of antinous. "accursed be he," he said, "who lifts up his hand against a helpless beggar; may heaven requite him for this foul deed!" "thou hadst best be quiet," said antinous, "or we will drag thee by the heels through the hall, until we have stripped the flesh off thy bones." but this was too much even for the wooers. "antinous," said one of them, "it was ill done of thee to strike the hapless wanderer. take heed that thou bring not a curse upon thyself, if there be gods in heaven to see such deeds. and what if a god should visit this house in some strange disguise, to make trial of our hearts? it were no new thing." a chill seemed to have fallen on the company after this shameful incident. the wooers had ceased their clamour, and sat talking in low tones together; odysseus and telemachus sat silent in their places, brooding gloomily on the outrage; antinous alone remained unmoved, being hardened, within and without, against all reproach. when penelope, who was sitting among her maidens in her chamber, heard how the stranger had been ill-treated, she cried: "so may apollo smite thee, antinous, thou godless man!" "ay," said eurycleia, "if prayers could slay them, not one of these men would see to-morrow's dawn." "go, one of you," said penelope, "and bring hither the swineherd. i would fain speak with this stranger; who knows but he may have somewhat to tell me of odysseus, my lord?" eumæus was summoned, and having heard the desire of penelope, he answered: "my queen, there is a rare pleasure awaiting thee. this man hath a tongue to charm thy very soul. three days and nights he abode with me, and all that time he kept us spellbound by the tale of his adventures. it was as if we were listening to the lay of some rare minstrel, a god-gifted man, who sways all hearts as he will by the magic of his voice. and he brings sure tidings of odysseus too, if we may believe what he says." "call him hither," answered penelope, "that he may speak to me face to face. if his news be true, we may yet see the day when these men shall pay a heavy price for their plunder of our house." as she spoke, a loud sneeze was heard in the room below. "it was my son," said penelope, laughing, "i know it by the sound; and it is a sign that my words will be fulfilled. make haste now, and bring the stranger to me." eumæus went, and presently returned with a message from the supposed beggar, to say that he feared fresh violence from the wooers, if he left his place by the door and passed through them again. the truth was that odysseus feared recognition if he appeared before his wife in broad daylight; so he affected to complain of the indifference of telemachus, who had allowed the savage deed of antinous to go unpunished, and begged permission to wait until the evening, when the wooers would be gone home, and he could tell his story unmolested. "he says well," answered penelope, when she had heard the message. "and he seems to be a man of sense. we will wait until evening, as he desires." the day was waning when eumæus returned to the hall, and the wooers had already begun their evening pastimes. the swineherd went up to telemachus, and said to him in a low tone: "it is time for me to return to my farm, that i may give an eye to the things which i have in charge. i leave thee to look to the house, and all that it contains; but above all be careful of thyself, for there are many here who wish thee ill." the beggar irus just after eumæus had left, a huge, ungainly fellow came slouching up to the place where odysseus was sitting, and eyed him with a look of great disfavour. he was the town beggar, known far and wide in ithaca as the greediest and laziest knave in the whole island. his real name was arnæus, but from being employed to run errands about the place he had received the nickname of irus. highly indignant at finding his rights usurped by a new-comer, and thinking to find in that battered old man an easy victim, he began to rate his supposed rival in a big, blustering voice: "give place, old man, to thy betters, and force me not to use my hands upon thee. begone, and that quickly, or it shall be the worse for thee; out of the way, i say!" with a stern look odysseus answered him, and said: "what possesses thee, fellow, that thou seekest a quarrel with me? thou art, as i perceive, a beggar like me, and i grudge thee not anything which thou mayest receive in the way of alms from those who sit here. there is room on this threshold for us both. but i warn thee not to provoke me to blows, for old as i am i will set a mark upon thee which thou wilt carry to thy death." trusting in his size, and encouraged by the nods and winks of the wooers who sat near, irus was only too ready to take up the challenge. "hark to the old starveling cur!" he shouted. "how glib of tongue he is, like any scolding hag! get thee to thy fists then, since thou wilt have it so, and i will knock all thy teeth out, if thou hast any left"; and he thrust odysseus with his foot. all the wooers now came running up, and crowded round the exasperated beggars, hoping to see fine sport. antinous took the lead, such a scene being exactly to his taste. "here is matter for mirth," he cried, laughing, "for many a day. make a ring quickly, and let them fight it out." in the courtyard there was a red smouldering fire, on which two huge sausages were roasting, a sort of haggis made by filling the belly of a goat with fat and blood. it was determined to give one of these messes to the winner in the fight; and he also was henceforth to have the sole right to receive the broken meats at the wooers' feasts. odysseus now pretended to draw back, as if he feared an encounter with a man younger than himself; but at last he consented to the match, on condition that the wooers would swear an oath not to strike him a foul blow while he was fighting with irus. to this they all agreed, and forthwith odysseus stripped to the waist, and girded his rags about his loins. by some strange magic his limbs seemed to have filled out; and when the wooers saw his mighty chest and broad shoulders they cried out in amazement "methinks irus will pay dearly for his ire,"[1] said one. "look what a brawny thigh the old carle shows under his rags!" [footnote 1: the pun is an attempt to reproduce a similar word-play in the original.] irus himself was not less astonished than dismayed, so that they were obliged to use force to make him face his opponent; and as he stood there quaking with fear antinous reviled him bitterly, and threatened, if he were defeated, to carry him to the mainland, and hand him over to a robber chieftain, nicknamed the mutilator, and notorious for his cruelties. "he will carve thee into collops and fling them to his dogs," said the ferocious prince. little encouraged, as may be supposed, this prospect, irus in his despair aimed a blow at odysseus, and struck him on the right shoulder. then odysseus, who had resolved to put forth but half his force, lest he should betray himself to the wooers, struck the wretched man under the ear. there was a crash of broken bones, and down went irus in the dust, spitting blood, and beating the ground with his heels. the wooers hailed his fall with shouts of laughter, and odysseus, seizing the prostrate beggar by the foot, dragged him through the courtyard gate, and propped him against the wall. "sit there," he said, placing his staff in his hand, "and keep off dogs and swine. methinks thou hast had enough of playing the tyrant among strangers and beggars." when he returned to his place on the threshold he found the wooers in high good humour at the defeat of irus. "may heaven fulfil all thy heart's desire!" cried one who sat near, "seeing that thou hast rid us of that hungry, brawling rogue." his words had a meaning which he little guessed, and odysseus rejoiced when he heard them. then antinous brought the pudding, all steaming from the fire, and set it by him; and amphinomus gave him two loaves, and filled a cup with wine. "hail, old friend!" he said, offering the cup, "and mayest thou live to see happier days." this amphinomus differed in character from the other suitors, being a prudent and fair-minded man. odysseus knew him and his father well, and being willing to save him, if possible, he looked earnestly at him, and said: "amphinomus, thou seemest to be a man of understanding, and therefore i will give thee a word of warning. hark, in thine ear! quit this company at once! the day of doom is very near to them all, and i would not that thou shouldst perish with them." these words, spoken in a low and solemn tone, so that none besides might hear, sent a chill to the heart of amphinomus. slowly and sadly he went back to his seat, his mind full of dark foreboding. nevertheless, he did not profit by the warning; for he had thrown in his lot with that guilty band, and had to drink of the same cup. penelope and the wooers i "how slowly move the hours," said penelope to eurycleia, yawning and then laughing in sheer vacancy of spirit. "how would it be if i showed myself to the wooers? i hate them, it is true, but it would serve to pass the time, and i could caution my son not to be so familiar with these treacherous friends." "do so, my child," answered eurycleia, "but first wash and anoint thyself, and go not among them with this tear-stained face. and waste not thy life in perpetual mourning; think what a comfort thou hast in thy son." "speak not to me of such vanities," answered penelope; "why should i wish to preserve this poor remnant of my beauty? foul or fair, what matters it in my widowed state? but send two of my handmaids hither to attend me, for it is not seemly that i should go alone among the men." while the nurse was gone to fetch the maidens, a sudden drowsiness overpowered penelope, and she sank back in her chair, subdued by a short but trancelike sleep. and while she slumbered, invisible hands were busy with her person, washing away all the stains which sorrow had left on her face, and shedding upon her immortal loveliness, such as clothes the queen of love herself, when she joins the sister graces in the dance. the voices of the women entering her chamber roused her from that strange sleep, and sitting up she rubbed her cheeks and said: "wondrous soft was the slumber which overtook me in my sorrow! would that it were death which had come upon me with like softness, that i might no longer waste away in mourning for the excellence of my dear, dear lord!" thereupon she arose, and descending the stairs stood in the open doorway of the hall, with a handmaid on either side. a murmur of surprise and admiration went round the whole company, for never had she seemed so wondrous fair. turning to telemachus she said: "my son, with grief i perceive that thy understanding increaseth not with thy growth, but rather becometh less. who would think, seeing thee thus tall and comely, like a prince's true son, that thou wouldst suffer such deeds to be wrought upon the stranger within thy gates? what if he had come by his death through this violence? what shame and infamy to thee!" "mother," answered telemachus, "thou hast some reason for thine anger. howbeit, i have a man's wit, and am not, as thou sayest, more foolish than a child. but what can one do against so many? and as to this stranger, thou wouldst know that thy fears are idle, if thou couldst see irus as he now sits at the gate, rolling his head like a drunkard, with no strength to stand on his feet or stir from his place. would that all the wooers were in the same plight!" while telemachus was defending himself, eurymachus had been gazing with bold eyes on that fair lady; and now he addressed her with smooth words of flattery: "daughter of icarius, sage penelope, if all the greeks could behold thee as now thou art, this house would not contain the multitude of thy wooers. thou surpassest all the daughters of men in beauty, and in stature, and in thy even-balanced wit" "eurymachus," answered penelope, "all the bloom of my womanhood was blighted on the evil day when the greeks embarked for troy, and odysseus, my lord, went with them. but now i am like some poor hunted creature, hard beset by the hounds of fate. well i remember my husband's parting words. holding my right hand he said: 'dear wife, i am going into the midst of perils, and it may be that we shall never see each other again. be thou but faithful to thy trust, and remember whose daughter thou art; and when thou seest thy son with a beard on his cheeks, thou art free to marry whom thou wilt.' such were his words, and now they shall shortly be fulfilled. i see the day approaching which shall make me another man's wife; better for me if i were the bride of death! for who ever beheld such wooing as yours? 'twas ever the custom among those who sought the daughter of a wealthy house in marriage to bring with them their own sheep and oxen to make good cheer for the friends of the bride; but ye sit here as unbidden guests, and devour my living." odysseus smiled to himself with pleasure when he heard this artful speech of penelope, for he perceived her intention, which was to draw gifts from the wooers, and raise their hopes by the prospect of her approaching marriage. and the artifice was successful, for the wooers, following the lead of antinous and eurymachus, at once despatched their servants to bring the bride gifts from their houses. antinous gave a splendid embroidered robe, with twelve golden clasps, eurymachus a necklace of amber and gold, and eurydamas a pair of jewelled earrings. these and other costly offerings were brought to penelope in her chamber. ii when evening came on, the wooers ordered three braziers to be set up in the hall, to give them light as they sat at their pastimes. the braziers were fed with dry chips of pine-wood, and the maid-servants relieved each other from time to time in the duty of keeping up the fires. presently odysseus drew near to the handmaids, and said: "go ye and attend the queen in her chamber, i will serve the fires, and give light to the company. yea, though they sit here all night they shall not tire me out, for i am a much-enduring man." the women laughed, and glanced at one another; and one of them, whose name was melantho, spoke bitterly to odysseus, and reviled him, saying: "thou wretched old man, why goest thou not to find a bed in the smithy, or wherever else thou canst, instead of loitering here, and vexing us with thy prate? either thou hast drunk a cup too much, or else thou art stricken in thy wits. get thee gone, lest a stronger than irus lay his hand upon thee and break thy bones." "now will i go straightway to telemachus," answered odysseus fiercely, "yonder where he sits, and tell him what thou sayest, thou vixen, that he may hew thee in pieces on the spot." so menacing were his looks and his tones that the women fled quaking from the hall and left him to tend the fires. so there he stood in view of the whole company, to their eyes a poor outcast, intent on his menial task; but thoughts other than of the fires filled his heart. as he stooped over one of the braziers and stirred the fuel into a blaze, eurymachus noticed the red gleam which was reflected from the smooth, bald crown of the supposed beggar. "look!" he cried, laughing and pointing at odysseus, "surely this man is a favourite of heaven; for see how the light shines like a crown of glory on his hairless pate!" then he called to odysseus, and said: "how sayest thou, friend, wilt thou be my thrall, and work on my farm among the hills for a fixed wage? thy business would be to repair the stone fences and work on the plantation; thou wouldst have a whole coat to thy back, and shoes to thy feet, and thy penny fee, and bread to eat all the year round. but i can read thine answer in thy face: thou wouldst rather crouch and whine for bread than do aught useful to earn thy living." "eurymachus," answered odysseus firmly, "i would that i could prove my manhood against thine in any trial of strength and endurance. let it be a match of mowing, in a rich meadow-land, on the longest day in spring, and let us ply the scythe together, fasting, from dawn till eve. or give me a stout pair of oxen, mighty beasts, equal in strength, and both well filled with fodder, and set me to plough a field of four acres, of rich, deep soil--then wouldst thou see if i could drive a straight furrow. or stand by my side on the perilous edge of battle, with equal arms, and try whether i would flinch sooner than thou. a great man and a mighty thou seemest to thyself, having never learnt what true manhood is. poor windy braggart, if odysseus set foot in this house again, the doors would seem too narrow to thee in thy haste to escape." "thou saucy knave!" cried eurymachus, incensed by this daring speech, "i will teach thee respect for thy betters"; and seizing a footstool he prepared to hurl it at the offender's head. but odysseus sprang aside and ran to amphinomus for protection; the heavy missile flew hurtling through the air, and struck one of the servants, who was just crossing the room, on the arm. down went the man with a cry of pain, and the wooers raised an uproar throughout the hall. "a murrain on this begging loon!" exclaimed one. "why came he hither to bring strife among us?" "ye are mad, my masters!" said telemachus, raising his voice; "verily ye are flown with insolence and wine.[1] ye had better go home and sleep off your liquor before worse comes of it." [footnote 1: milton, "paradise lost," i. 502.] the wooers were indeed in a dangerous mood, and they began to finger their weapons, and utter fierce threats against telemachus. but amphinomus interposed, and by exerting all his influence induced them to forgo their murderous purpose and disperse quietly to their homes. odysseus and penelope as soon as the house was quiet, telemachus, obeying a sign from his father, prepared to convey the weapons which hung about the hall to an inner chamber, out of the reach of the wooers. first he ordered eurycleia to keep the women out of the way, and having barred the doors leading to the inner apartments, he took down helmet and spear and shield from the walls, and carried them, with his father's help, to the upper room. when this important task was performed he withdrew for the night, and odysseus was left alone in the hall to await the coming of penelope. presently the doors were opened, and by the flickering light of the braziers odysseus, for the first time after twenty years, saw the face of his wife. lovely indeed she seemed in his eyes, not less than when he wedded her in her maiden bloom. her handmaids brought a chair of silver and ivory, a work of most rare device, and set it by the fire with a soft fleece upon it. penelope took the seat prepared for her and gazed curiously at the stranger, who sat crouched in the shadow of a pillar, avoiding her eye. meanwhile the women were bustling about the hall, removing the remains of the feast, and heaping fresh fuel on the fires. among them was melantho, who had spoken so roughly to odysseus an hour or two before. when she saw odysseus she began railing at him again, and rudely bade him begone. penelope soon reduced her to silence, and then calling eurycleia she bade her place a seat for the stranger. "now tell me," began penelope, when the chair had been brought, "who art thou, and of what country? and who were thy father and mother?" "ah! lady," answered odysseus, "i beseech thee, question me not as to my country and my friends, lest thou open anew the fountain of my grief. it is not seemly to sit weeping and wailing in a stranger's house; and i fear that thou wilt say that my tears are the tears of drunkenness." penelope pressed him for an answer. "thou surely art of some country," she said, smiling; "or art thou one of those of whom old stories tell, born of stocks and stones?" "since thou urgest it so strongly," replied odysseus, "i cannot deny thee. in the broad realm of crete there is a certain city, cnosus by name; there reigned minos, and begat deucalion, my famous sire. to deucalion two sons were born, idomeneus the elder, and myself, whom he named æthon. when war arose between the greeks and trojans, idomeneus sailed to fight for the sons of atreus, and i was left behind in my father's house. then it was that i saw odysseus, who was driven by stress of weather to seek shelter on our coasts. when he had anchored his ships in the harbour, he came up to the town and inquired for idomeneus, whom he said was his friend, honoured and beloved; but we told him that idomeneus had departed ten days before. then i received him in my house, and feasted him and all his company for twelve days; for all that time the north wind blew, so that a man could not stand up against it. on the thirteenth day the wind ceased and they put out to sea." penelope's tears flowed fast as she listened to that cunning fiction, which seemed to bring her husband before her eyes. odysseus watched her, with eyes set like horn or iron, as she sat before him sobbing and rocking herself to and fro; but his heart grew big within him, and he could hardly keep back his own tears. at length she grew calmer, and wishing to try him, asked him this searching question: "if thou didst indeed entertain my husband in thy house, tell me what manner of man he was, and what garments he had on, and who they were that attended him." "it is hard," answered odysseus, "to tell thee of what thou askest, after twenty years; nevertheless i will attempt to call up his image from the past. he wore a purple woollen cloak, of two folds, and it was held by a golden brooch with a double clasp; and on the brooch was fashioned a hound, holding in his jaws a fawn; and so skilfully was it wrought that the figures seemed to live, the fawn struggling to escape, and the hound clenching his fangs to hold him--so rare a piece it was. under his cloak, odysseus wore a close-fitting tunic, which glistened like the peel of a dried onion; for very soft and fine was the texture. i cannot tell whether these were the garments which he had on when he left you; it may be that they were a gift received on his voyage, for he had many friends. even so i gave him a sword of bronze and a mantle, and a fringed tunic, when i bade him adieu. further, i would have thee know that he had a squire with him, somewhat older than himself, a round-shouldered man, dark of complexion, and with curling hair. his name was eurybates, and odysseus held him in high regard." what were the emotions of penelope, when she heard the raiment and ornaments which her husband was wearing the last time she saw him thus described down to the minutest detail! for a long time she remained silent, overpowered by her feelings; and when she spoke again there was a ring of sincere warmth and friendliness in her voice. "i pitied thee before," she said, "seeing thee thus forlorn, but now thou shalt be my dear and honoured guest, for i know that thou hast spoken the truth. these garments, and the golden brooch, were a gift from my own hands to my dear lord. alas! i shall never see him again. cursed be the day that parted me from him, and sent him to the land of troy, that name abhorred of my soul!" "lady," answered odysseus, "no one could blame thee, or say that thou sorrowest beyond measure, for such a husband as thine. he was indeed a man of rare and god-like gifts. nevertheless be comforted; for ere many days are passed thou wilt see him here, safe and sound, and loaded with the wealth which he has gathered in his wanderings." then he went on to repeat the story which he had already told to eumæus, with some further facts, drawn from his own experience in the last ten years; and concluded with this solemn adjuration: "witness, this hearth of odysseus, to which i am come, and witness zeus, the supreme lord of heaven, if i lie! ere yonder moon hath waned, odysseus will be sitting under this roof." penelope shook her head sadly, as she replied: "it will be a happy day for thee, if thy prophecy is confirmed by the event. but what am i saying? 'tis an empty dream. but come, let the maidens prepare a bath for thee, and afterwards them shalt sleep sound in a soft, warm bed. well hast thou deserved to receive all honour and worship at my hands, and woe unto him that shall seek to harm thee! i will put a speedy end to his wooing. for what wilt thou say of me, when thou art wandering in distant lands, if i suffer thee to abide here thus poorly clad, unwashed, and uncared for? few and evil are the days of our life; and the best we can do is to win a good name by our gentle deeds while we live, and leave a fair memory behind us when we die." "i doubt not thy goodness," replied odysseus; "but i have long been a stranger to the comforts of which thou speakest, and they suit not my forlorn and desolate state. nor would i that any of thy handmaids should wash my feet, and mock my infirmities; but if thou hast here an aged house-dame, like unto me in years and in sorrows, i grudge not that such a one should wait upon me." "thou speakest as a prudent man," said penelope, "and i have such an aged dame as thou describest among my household. she was the first who took my ill-fated husband in her arms when his mother bare him, and she nursed him tenderly and well. she shall wash thy feet, old though she be, and feeble." then she called eurycleia, who was sitting near, and said to her: "come hither, nurse, and wash the stranger's feet. who knows but thy master is now in like evil case, grown old before his time through care and misery?" when she heard that, the old woman lifted up her voice and wept: "odysseus," she cried, "child of my sorrow, what have i not borne for thee! pious thou wast, and righteous in all thy dealings, yet zeus hath chosen thee out from among all men to be the object of his hate. yea, and perchance even now he is mocked in the house of strangers, as these women were lately mocking thee. yea, i will wash thee, as penelope bids me, and for thy sake also, for my heart is moved with pity because of thy woes." with such speed as her years allowed, the dame went and fetched warm water, and a vessel for washing the feet. she set them down in front of odysseus, and before she began her task, stood for some time peering curiously into his face. "hear me, friend," she said, after a while, "of all the strangers that ever entered these doors, ne'er saw i one so like unto odysseus as thou art, in form, and in voice, and in feet." "so said everyone who saw us together," answered odysseus. but her words filled him with alarm, and recalled to his mind an old scar, just above the knee, caused by a wound which he had received from a wild boar while hunting in his boyhood in the valleys of parnassus, during a visit to autolycus, penelope's father. if his old nurse should discover the scar she would be certain to recognise him, and the consequences of the premature discovery might be fatal. however, he had now no excuse for declining the bath, so he drew back his chair into the shadow, still hoping to escape detection. but eurycleia, whose suspicions were already aroused, was not thus to be evaded. as she handled the limb her fingers felt the well-known mark, and she let the foot fall with a loud cry. the vessel was overset, and the water ran over the floor. half laughing and half weeping, the old woman fell upon his neck. "thou art odysseus, dear child!" she cried, "and yet i knew thee not till i had touched thee with my hands." [illustration: odysseus and eurycleia] during all this scene penelope had been sitting like one in a dream, lost in the memories awakened by the supposed beggar's story. the nurse now turned to rouse her from her reverie, and tell her the joyful news; but odysseus, seeing her intention, pressed a heavy hand on her mouth, and, drawing her down to him with the other, said in a fierce whisper: "peace, woman, or i will slay thee! wouldst thou destroy him whom thou hast nursed at thine own breast?" eurycleia had now recovered from the shock of that sudden recognition. "fear me not," she said, "i will be as secret as the grave. but see, the water is all spilt; i go to fetch more." and so with a grave face, but a heart bounding with delight, the faithful old creature brought a fresh supply of water, and proceeded with the task of washing her master's feet. when he resumed his place by the fire, he found penelope in a soft and pensive mood, and dwelling, as was her wont, on the sorrows of her widowed state. "friend," she said, with a gentle sigh, "i will not keep thee much longer from thy rest, for the hour approaches which brings sweet oblivion to careworn hearts--all save mine. for the night brings me no respite from my woes, but rather increases them. when the day's duties are over, and all the house is still, i lie tossing ceaselessly, torn by conflicting doubts and fears. e'en as the wakeful bird sits darkling all night long, and pours her endless plaint, now low and mellow, now piercing high and shrill, so wavers my spirit in its purpose, and threads the unending maze of thought. sweet home of my wedded joy, must i leave thee, and all the faces which i love so well, and the great possessions which he gave into my keeping? shall i become a byword among the people, as false to the memory of my true lord? yet how can i face the reproaches of my son, who since he is come to manhood grows more impatient day by day, seeing the waste of his wealth, of which i am the cause? "but i wished to ask thee concerning a dream which i had last night. there are twenty geese which i keep about the house, and i take pleasure in seeing them crop the grain from the water trough. in my dream i saw a great eagle swoop down from the mountains and slay them all, breaking their necks, there they lay dead in one heap; and i made loud lament for the slaying of my geese, so that the women gathered round me to comfort me. but the eagle descended again, and alighted on a jutting beam of the roof, and thus spake unto me with a human voice: 'take comfort, daughter of icarius; no dream is this, but a waking vision, which shall surely be fulfilled. the geese are the wooers, and i the eagle am thy husband, who will shortly come and give them to their doom.' even as he said this i awoke, and going to the window i saw the geese by the door, cropping the grain from the trough, as is their wont." "lady," answered odysseus, "there is but one interpretation of thy dream, and thy husband declared it with his own voice. death looms near at hand for the wooers, and not one of them shall escape." but penelope shook her head. "it is ill trusting in dreams," she said, "and hard to discern the false from the true. there are two gates from which flitting dreams are sent to men: one is of horn, and the other of ivory: and the dreams which pass through the ivory gate are sent to beguile, while those which come from the gate of horn are a true message to him who sees them. and my dream, i believe, was sent me from the gate of ivory. yea, the day is approaching, the hateful day, which shall part me for ever from the house of odysseus; and this shall be the manner of the trial whereby i will prove which of the wooers is to win me: i will set up twelve axes, like the trestles on which the keel of a ship is laid, in the hall, and he who can send an arrow through the line of double axeheads from the further end of the hall shall win me for his bride. this device i learnt from odysseus, who was wont thus to prove his skill in archery. then farewell my home, the house of my lord, the home of my love, so fair, so full of plenty, which will haunt me in my dreams even unto life's end." "tis well-imagined, this trial of the wooers," answered odysseus, "and i counsel thee to put them to the proof without delay; for i am sure that odysseus will return here again before ever one of these men shall string his bow and shoot an arrow through the line of axes." "well, my friend," said penelope, "i will now bid thee good-night, though gladly would i sit here till to-morrow's dawn, and let thee discourse to enchant mine ear. but there is a time for all things, and i would not rob thee of thy needful rest. therefore i will go and lay my head on my uneasy pillow, and the women shall lay a bed for thee here, or where thou choosest." the end draws near; signs and wonders true to his character as a wandering beggar, odysseus lay down to rest on a pile of sheepskins in the portico of the house. his mind was full of the events of the day, and of the terrible task which he had to perform on the morrow. when he thought of all the insults which had been heaped upon him in his own house, he ground his teeth with rage, and muttered bitter curses against the wooers. as if on purpose to provoke him further, just at this moment melantho, and several of the other women, who slept in the town, came forth from the house, and passed by him with shrill laughter and merry gibes. then his heart growled within him, even as a mother-hound growls over her whelps when she sees a stranger approaching, and in a sudden impulse of fury he started up to slay those faithless women on the spot; but repressing his mad purpose he smote his breast and rebuked his fiery spirit. had he not borne even worse than this on the day when the cyclops devoured his comrades in the cave? when anger and shame had had their turn, other and more pressing anxieties came crowding upon him, banishing sleep from his eyelids. how was he with such help as telemachus could give him to overpower and slay a hundred men in the prime of their youth and strength? it seemed an impossible feat, and his heart quaked within him as he counted those fearful odds. at last sleep came upon him unawares, and in a dream he saw his divine friend and helper, athene, standing by him, robed in awful beauty. "where is thy faith?" she asked, in sweet and solemn tones. "dost thou doubt my power to help thee? know this, that with me at thy side thou couldst rout and slay a thousand armed men. sleep on, then, and vex thyself no more; in a few short hours all thy trials shall be passed, and thou shalt rest in triumph under thine own roof-tree." then she touched his brow with her finger, and departed; and after that he slept on soundly until dawn. in the first grey light of morning he awoke, roused by a sound as of one wailing within the house. he sat up in his bed and listened: it was the voice of penelope, his wife; for she too had had her dreams, sweet, indeed, while they lasted, but bitter to her waking memory. she thought that her husband came to her, in all the glory of his manhood, even as when he set out for troy, and put his arms about her, and kissed her tenderly. therefore she wept and wailed, thinking that it was another false vision, sent by some hostile deity to mock her widowhood. what a sound was that for the lonely watcher before the house! "patience, fond, sad heart!" he murmured to himself, "this very night thou shalt hold me in thine arms, and sob out thy sorrows on my breast." with that he rose to his feet, and lifting up his hands to heaven put up a prayer to zeus: "dread sire of gods, if with good will ye have brought me thus far, after so many perils by land and by water, send me a sign from heaven, and reveal unto me your purpose by the lips of one of those that be within the house." a loud peal of thunder was heard in answer to his prayer; and a second sign was sent by the voice of a woman in the house. she was one of twelve maid-servants, whose duty it was to grind wheat and barley for the daily supply of bread. the others had finished their task, but she, being old and weak, was still toiling at her mill. when she heard the thunder she stopped for a moment, and thus uttered her complaint: "thunder in a clear sky! that bodes ill to some that be here. heaven grant that it may be to the wooers, for whom day by day i suffer this cruel toil, making meal for them! may this be the very last time that they sit down to meat in this house!" so saying, she returned to her labour, and odysseus rejoiced at the double sign which had been vouchsafed to him. by this time the whole household was afoot, and a score of busy hands were at work, under the direction of eurycleia, preparing for the coming of the wooers. for it was a general holiday, being the festival of apollo, and the guests were expected earlier than usual. some went to the public fountain to fetch water, some swept and sprinkled the floor, and some sponged the tables and scoured the drinking vessels. presently the herdsmen came in, driving before them the beasts for sacrifice; and of these the first to arrive was eumæus, who brought three fat hogs as his part of the daily tribute. leaving his charge to grub about in the courtyard, he came up to odysseus, and inquired how he had fared among the wooers on the previous day. "i fared ill," answered odysseus, "and ill fare the villains who deal thus with the stranger under another man's roof!" a rude voice here broke in upon him, and melanthius the goatherd thrust himself between them, jostling odysseus, and reviling him in brutal terms, "what, still loitering here, thou vagabond? wilt thou go begging at other men's tables, or art thou waiting to taste of my fists?" odysseus deigned no reply, but shook his head, biding his time. another herdsman now entered the courtyard; this was philoetius, who had charge of the herds of odysseus on the mainland. he brought a heifer and two or three fat goats, having crossed over to ithaca by the ferry. when he saw odysseus he took eumæus aside, and inquired who he was. "he is of kingly aspect," remarked the new-comer, "in spite of his wretched garb. but even kings may come to beggary, if it be heaven's will." having heard from eumæus what he had to tell, philoetius approached odysseus, and taking his right hand greeted him kindly, saying: "welcome, old friend, for my master's sake! e'en such, methinks, is his case, if he still lives and looks upon the daylight. ah! what a thought is that! it brings the sweat of agony to my brow when i think that even now he may be wandering in rags from door to door, begging for a morsel of bread, while his flocks and herds roam in thousands on the hills. what shall i do? it is not to be borne that all this wealth should increase and multiply, to feed the mouths of thieves and rogues. often have i resolved to drive off my cattle into a far country, and no longer to abet these men in their riotous living; but my duty to telemachus, and the hope that even now my lord may return, still hold me back." perceiving the neatherd to be loyal and staunch, odysseus resolved to take him partly into his confidence, and answered accordingly: "thy hope is nearer to fulfilment than thou thinkest. hear me swear, by the hearth of odysseus, and by the board at which i have fed, that before thou leavest ithaca thou shalt see thy master with thine own eyes--thou shalt see him slaying the wooers who play the master here." "would that i might live to behold that day!" cried philoetius. "may i never eat bread again, if the wooers felt not the might of my hands." eumæus also declared himself ready to risk all by the side of odysseus. while they were thus conversing, the whole body of the wooers came thronging into the house, and the daily banquet began. at the inner end of the hall, commanding the door which led to the women's quarters, was a sort of platform or dais of stone, raised to some height above the general level of the floor, and facing the main entrance. here telemachus, as giver of the feast, was seated; and while the servants were handing round the dishes he called odysseus from his place by the door, and made him sit down by his side. "sit down here," he said, "and eat and drink thy fill. and you, sirs," he added, addressing the wooers, "keep a guard on your hands and your tongues. this is no tavern, but my own house, and i will not suffer my guest to be wronged by word or deed under my roof." this bold speech passed for the present unchallenged, though many a threatening look was directed at the young prince. by order of telemachus, odysseus received an equal portion with the other guests, and the banquet proceeded. presently a new instance of the wooers' brutality was given, as if they were resolved to keep the edge of his anger fresh and keen. the author of this outrage was ctesippus, a wealthy lord of same. taking up a bullock's foot from a basket, in which the refuse of the meal was thrown, he made this merry jest: "the stranger has received an equal share of our meat, as is but right; for who would wish to stint a guest of telemachus? and now i will make him a present over and above, that he may bestow somewhat on the bathwoman, or some other of the servants." suiting the action to the word he hurled the missile with savage force at odysseus; but he, ever on the alert, avoided it by bowing his head, and it struck the wall with a crash. "ctesippus," said telemachus sternly, "it is well for thee that thou hast missed, else thou hadst died by my hand. is it not enough that ye slaughter my cattle and pour out my wine like water, but must i sit here day after day while ye fill my house with riot and injury and outrage?" the wooers sat silent, being somewhat abashed by the just rebuke; and after a long pause, one of them, whose name was agelaus, answered mildly: "telemachus says well, for indeed he hath been sorely provoked. let there be an end of these mad doings, which it is a shame to see. and if telemachus will be advised by me he will urge his mother to make choice of a husband, that he may henceforth dwell unmolested in his father's house. why will she delay us further? surely by this time she must have given up all hope of ever seeing odysseus again." "now by the woes of my father!" answered telemachus, "i hinder her not from wedding whom she pleases; nay, i bid her do so, and offer bridal gifts besides. but i cannot drive her by force from my doors." his words had a strange effect on the wooers: with one accord they broke out into a yelling peal of laughter, like women in a hysteric fit, while their eyes were filled with tears. and, more awful still! their meat dropped blood as they conveyed it to their lips, and an unearthly wailing was heard, like the cry of a spirit in torment. among those present was theoclymenus, the man of second sight, and in that very hour the vision came upon him, and he cried aloud from the place where he sat: "woe unto you, ye doomed and miserable men! thick darkness is wrapped about you, the darkness of the grave! all the air is loud with wailing, and your cheeks are wet with tears. see, see! the walls and the rafters are sprinkled with blood, and the porch and the courtyard are thronged with ghosts, hurrying downward to the nether pit; and the sun has died out of heaven, and all the house lies in darkness and the shadow of death." but the wooers had now recovered from their strange fit, and they laughed gaily at the terrible warning of the seer. "poor man!" said eurymachus, "he has left his wits at home. go, someone, and show him the way to the town, if he finds it so dark here." "i need no guide," answered theoclymenus, "i have eyes and ears, and feet, and a steady brain, so that i shall not go astray. farewell, unhappy men! your hour of grace is past." and forthwith he arose and went his way to the town. when he was gone the wooers began jeering at telemachus, and taunted him with the behaviour of his guests. "thou hast a rare taste," said one, "in the choice of thy company! first, this filthy beggar that cumbers the ground with his greedy carcass, and after him comes the mad prophet, and screams like a raven over our meat" one meaning glance passed between telemachus and his father; the day was drawing on, and they cared not now to bandy words with the wooers. and so the merry feast came to an end with jesting, and mirth, and laughter; and after a few short hours they were to sit down to supper--such a supper as they had never tasted before, with a hero and a goddess to spread the board. the bow of odysseus i the time had now arrived for the great trial of strength and skill of which penelope had spoken, and which was to decide deeper and deadlier issues than those of marriage. among the treasures which odysseus had left behind him was a famous bow, which he had received as a gift from iphitus, son of eurytus, whom he met in his youth during a visit to messene. he who strung this bow, and shot an arrow through a line of axes set up in the hall, was to be rewarded by the hand of penelope. "mother, it is time!" whispered telemachus, soon after the departure of theoclymenus. obeying the signal, penelope, who had been sitting in the hall listening to the talk of the wooers, left her place, and ascending a steep staircase made her way to the store-room, which was situated at the farther end of the house. in her hand she carried a brazen key with a handle of ivory; and when she came to the door, she loosened the strap which served to draw the bolt from the outside, and inserting the key drew back the bolt. the double doors flew open with a crash, and the treasury with all its wealth was revealed. great coffers of cedar-wood lined the walls, filled with fine raiment, which her own hands had wrought. it was a cool and quiet retreat, dimly lighted, remote from all rude sounds, full of fragrant odours, and fit to guard the possessions of a prince. and there, hanging from a pin, and heedfully wrapped in its case, was seen the fatal bow. she took it down, and, sitting on one of the coffers, laid it on her knees, and gazed on it fondly with her eyes full of tears. how often had she seen it in the hands of odysseus, when he went forth at sunrise to hunt the hare and the deer! how often had she taken it from him when he came back at evening loaded with the spoils of the chase! and now a keen shaft from this very bow was to cut the last tender chord of memory, and make her another man's wife! with a heavy heart she took the bow with its quiver in her hands, and descending the staircase re-entered the hall, followed by her maidens, who carried a chest containing the axes. "behold the bow, fair sirs!" she said to the wooers, "and behold me, the prize for this fine feat of archery!" therewith she gave the bow to eumæus, who received it with tears; and philoetius wept likewise when he saw the treasured weapon of his lord. these signs of emotion stirred the anger of antinous, who rebuked the herdsmen fiercely. "peace, fools!" he cried. "peace, miserable churls! why pierce ye the heart of the lady with your howlings? has she not grief enough already? go forth, and howl with the dogs outside, and we will make trial of the bow; yet me thinks it will be long ere anyone here shall string it" "anyone save thyself, thou wouldst say!" rejoined telemachus with a loud laugh. then, seeing his mother regarding him with gentle reproach, he added: "tis strange that i should feel so gay and light of heart at the moment when i am about to lose my mother. zeus, methinks, has turned my brain, and made me laugh when i should weep. but come, ye bold wooers, which of you will be the first to enter the lists for this matchless prize, a lady without peer in all the land of hellas? why sit ye thus silent? must i show you the way? so be it, then; and if i can bend the bow, and shoot an arrow straight, the prize shall be mine, and my mother shall abide here in her widowed state." so saying he sprang up, flung off his cloak, and laid aside his sword. and first he made a long shallow trench in the floor of the hall, and set up the axes with their double heads in a straight line, stamping down the earth about the handles to make all firm. then he took the bow from eumæus; it was a weighty and powerful weapon, fashioned from the horns of an ibex, which were firmly riveted into a massive bridge, and great force was required to string it. telemachus set the end against the floor, and strove with all his might to drive the string into its socket. three times he tried, and failed; but the fourth time, making a great effort, he was on the point of succeeding, when his father nodded to him to desist. "plague on it!" cried telemachus, laying the bow aside with an air of vexation, "must i be called a poltroon all my life, or is it that i have not yet attained the full measure of my strength? let the others now take their turn." then one by one the wooers rose up, in the order in which they sat, and tried to bend the bow. the first to essay it was leiodes, a soothsayer, and a man of gentle and godly mind. but he was a soft liver, unpractised in all manly pastimes, and the bow was like iron in his white, womanish hands. "i fear that this bow will make an end of many a bold spirit," he said, little guessing how true his words were to prove; "for better it were to die than to go away beaten and broken men, after all the long years of our wooing." "fie on thee!" cried antinous, "thinkest thou that there are no better men here than thou art? doubt not that one of those present shall bend the bow and win the lady." then he called melanthius, and bade him light a fire, and bring a ball of lard to anoint the bow and make it easier to bend. the lard was brought, and the wooers sat in turn by the fire, rubbing and anointing the bow, but all to no purpose. only antinous and eurymachus still held back, each in the full assurance that he, and none other, had strength to bend the bow. ii odysseus sat watching the wooers from his place at the upper end of the hall, and his heart misgave him when he thought of the appalling task which he had undertaken. he had acquitted himself like a hero in many a hard-fought field, but never in all his life had he faced such odds as these. while he thus mused, and weighed the chances in his mind, he saw eumæus and philoetius leave the hall together, and pass out through the courtyard gate. then a sudden thought struck him, and muttering to himself, "i must risk it," he rose and followed the two men. he found them talking together outside the courtyard fence, and in order to make trial of their temper he addressed them in these cautious terms: "tell me truly, good friends, which side would ye take, if by some miracle odysseus suddenly appeared in this house? would ye be for the wooers or for him?" eumæus and philoetius with one voice protested that they were ready to hazard their lives for the rights of their master, whereupon odysseus hesitated no longer, but answered: "the miracle has been wrought; i am he! after twenty years of toil and wandering heaven hath brought me home. i have watched ye both, and i know that ye alone among all the thralls remain true to me. only continue steadfast for this day, and your reward is assured. i will build houses for ye both, close to my own, and ye shall dwell there with your wives, as my friends and neighbours, equals in honour with telemachus, my son." the swineherd and neatherd listened with amazement, willing to believe, but still half in doubt; but when odysseus showed them the scar, which they had seen many a time before, they were convinced, and embraced their old master with tears and cries of joy. having allowed them some moments to indulge their feelings, odysseus checked them with a warning gesture. "take heed to yourselves," he said, "or your cries will betray us. and now mark what i shall tell you. i will go back to the house first, and do ye two follow me one by one. to thee, philoetius, i give charge to make fast the gate of the courtyard, with bolt, and with bar, and with cord. and thou, eumæus, when the time comes, shalt bring the bow and place it in my hands, whether the wooers cry out on thee or not; and when thou hast given me the bow, go straightway and command the women to make fast the doors of their apartments, and remain quiet by their work until i have finished what i have to do." at the moment when odysseus returned to his place in the hall, eurymachus was just making a last attempt to bend the bow. "out on it!" he cried, finding all his efforts of no avail. "it is a shame to think how far beneath odysseus we all are in the strength of our hands; 'tis this that stings me, much more than the loss of the lady." "thou mistakest the cause," answered antinous. "this day is the holy feast of the divine archer, apollo, and doubtless he is jealous because we try our skill in his own art on his sacred day. let us leave the axes where they stand, and try our fortune again to-morrow." the proposal was received with general applause, and forthwith the whole company called loud for wine, and began drinking heavily to drown their disappointment odysseus watched the progress of the revel with grim satisfaction, and when the flushed faces and thick talk of the wooers showed that they were far gone in drunkenness he asked, with an air of deep humility, to be allowed to try his hand at stringing the bow. his request was greeted with a loud cry of contempt and indignation from all the wooers; and antinous especially was highly incensed, threatening him with dire pains and penalties for his presumption. hereupon penelope interposed, and rebuked antinous for his violence. "why should not the stranger try his skill with the rest?" asked she. "thinkest thou that the poor man will win me for his wife if he succeeds? sure i am that he is not so foolish as to entertain such a thought." "'tis not for that," said eurymachus, answering her. "he cannot be so mad as that. but what a shame to all this noble company if a houseless beggar should accomplish a feat which none of us was able to perform." "talk not of shame," replied penelope with scorn. "are ye not covered with shame already, by your foul deeds done in this house in the absence of its lord? give him the bow, i say! and if he string it, by apollo's grace, i will clothe him in a new cloak and doublet, and give him a sharp javelin, to keep off dogs and men, and a two-edged sword, and sandals for his feet, and give him safe conduct to whatsoever place he desires to reach." the decisive moment was at hand, and telemachus saw the necessity of removing his mother from the scene of the approaching conflict. "mother," he said in a tone of authority, "leave these things to me; i am master here. evening draws on, and it is time for thee to retire." when penelope had withdrawn, eumæus took the bow, and was about to carry it to odysseus, but paused half-way, in doubt and alarm, for a perfect storm of threats and abuse assailed his ears. "halt, thou dog! put down the bow! art thou tired of thy life?" appalled by the menacing cries of the wooers, the swineherd stood hesitating; but telemachus raised his voice, and commanded him instantly to deliver the bow to odysseus. "i will teach thee," he said, "who is thy master; thou shalt carry the marks of my hands to thy farm, if thou do not as i tell thee. would that i could as easily drive the whole of this drunken rout from my doors!" "well bragged, sir valiant!" cried antinous; and all the wooers laughed boisterously when they heard him. seizing his opportunity while their attention was thus diverted, eumæus came and placed the bow in the hands of odysseus; then, calling eurycleia, he bade her make fast the door of the women's apartments. meanwhile philoetius secured the gates of the courtyard, and returning to his place sat watching the movements of odysseus. with anxious eye the hero scrutinised the great weapon, turning it this way and that, to see if it had been injured by worms or natural decay. to his great joy he found that it was sound and untouched. then, easily as a minstrel fastens a new cord to a lyre, without effort he strung the bow, and bending it made the string twang loud and clear, like the shrill voice of the swallow. a hundred mocking eyes and sneering faces had been turned towards him, as he sat fingering the bow and weighing it in his hands; but pale grew those faces now, and blank was that gaze. to add to their terror, at this moment a loud peal of thunder shook the house. filled with high courage by the happy omen, odysseus took an arrow, and, fitting it to the string, sent it with sure aim from the place where he sat along the whole line of axeheads, from the first to the last. "telemachus," he said, "thy guest hath not shamed thee. my hand is firm, and mine eye is true, poor worn-out wanderer though i be. now let us give these fair guests their supper, and afterwards entertain them with music and with dancing, which are the fit accompaniment of a feast." then he beckoned to his son to draw near; and telemachus made haste, and came and stood by his father's side, armed with sword and lance. the slaying of the wooers i stripping off his rags, and girding them round his waist, odysseus took the quiver, and poured out all the arrows on the ground at his feet. "now guide my hand, apollo," he cried, "and make sure mine aim, for this time i will shoot at a mark which never man hit before." therewith he bent his bow again, and pointed the arrow at antinous, who just at that moment was raising a full goblet of wine to his lips. little thought that proud and insolent man, as the wine gleamed red before him, that he had tasted his last morsel, and drunk his last drop. he was in the prime of his manhood, surrounded by his friends, and in the midst of a joyous revel; who would dream of death and doom in such an hour? yet at that very instant he felt a sharp, sudden pang, and fell back in his seat, pierced through the throat by the arrow of odysseus. the blood poured from his nostrils, he let fall the cup, and spurning the table with his feet in his agony he overset it, and the bread and meat were scattered on the floor. then arose a wild clamour and uproar among the wooers, and starting from their seats they sought eagerly for the weapons which were wont to hang along the walls; but not a spear, not a shield, was to be seen. finding themselves thus baffled, they turned furiously on odysseus, shouting, "down with the knave!" "hew him in pieces!" "fling his carcass to the vultures!" as yet they had not recognised him, and they thought that he had slain antinous by mischance. they were soon undeceived. "ye dogs!" he cried, in a terrible voice, "long have ye made my house into a den of thieves, thinking that i had died long ago in a distant land. ye have devoured my living, and wooed my wife, and mishandled my servants, having no fear of god or man before your eyes. but now are ye all fallen into the pit which ye have digged, and are fast bound in the bonds of death." like beaten hounds, that dastardly crew cowered before the man whom they had wronged, and every heart quaked with fear. presently eurymachus stood forward, and tried to make terms for them all. "if thou be indeed odysseus," he said, "thou speakest justly concerning the evil doings of the wooers. and there lies the cause of the mischief, antinous, struck down by thy righteous hand. he it was who sought to slay telemachus, that he might usurp thy place, and make himself king in ithaca. but now that he is gone to his own place, let us, the rest, find favour in thy sight. and as for thy possessions which have been wasted, we will pay thee back out of our own goods, as much as thou shalt require." but there were no signs of relenting on that stern, set face. "talk not to me of payment," he answered, with a brow as black as night; "ye shall pay me with your lives, every one of you. fight, if ye will, or die like sheep. not one of you shall escape." thus driven to extremity, eurymachus drew his sword and shouting to the others to follow his example he picked up a table to serve him as a shield, and raising his war-cry rushed at odysseus. in the midst of his onset an arrow struck him in the liver, and he fell doubled-up over a table, smiting the floor with his forehead. then he rolled over with a groan, and his eyes grew dim in death. before odysseus could fix another arrow to the string, amphinomus was upon him, with sword uplifted to slay him. telemachus saw his father's peril, and thrust amphinomus in the back with his spear. the fall of their leaders arrested the advance of the wooers, and they drew back in a body to the lower end of the hall. leaving the spear in the body of the fallen man, telemachus ran to fetch armour for himself and odysseus, and the two herdsmen. quickly he brought shields and helmets and lances for the four, and they arrayed themselves and took their stand together on the platform. while these preparations were in progress, odysseus continued showering his arrows among the huddled troop of terrified men; and at every shot one of the wooers fell. at last melanthius, the goatherd, made a desperate effort to save his party. assisted by several of the wooers, he climbed up the wall of the banquet-room, and made his exit through the open timbers at the top into a narrow passage which gave access to the inner part of the house. presently he returned, laden with spears and shields and helmets, which he had found in the chamber where they had been stored away by telemachus. what was the dismay of odysseus when he saw his enemies arming themselves with spear and shield, and brandishing long lances in their hands! "telemachus!" he cried, "we are betrayed! the women have sold us to the wooers." "alas! i have erred," answered telemachus, "for i left the door of the armoury open, and one of them has observed it." while they thus debated, eumæus saw the goatherd making his way out of the hall again by the same exit. "it is the traitor melanthius," he whispered; "now have we need of prompt action, or we are all undone." odysseus had now recovered his courage, and he issued his orders without losing another moment. "go thou with the neatherd," he said to eumæus, "and seize that villain before he has time to return. bind him hand and foot, and come back with all speed to the hall" at the side of the hall, close to the platform where odysseus and his party were stationed, there was a door leading into the passage already mentioned. through this the two men passed, and made their way stealthily to the armoury. there they waited on either side of the door for melanthius, whom they heard moving within. before long he came out, bearing in one hand a helmet, and in the other an old battered shield, once the property of laertes. together they fell upon him, dragged him down by the hair, and having bound him tight with a long cord they hauled him up to a beam of the roof and left him hanging. "long and sweet be thy slumbers, goatherd!" said eumæus as he contemplated his work, "thou hast a soft bed, such as thou lovest. rest there till the morning light shall call thee to make breakfast for the wooers." when they returned to the hall they found that a new ally had joined their party, in the person of mentor, the old friend of odysseus. no one saw when he came thither; but there he was, and right glad they were to see him. very different were the feelings of the wooers when they saw their enemies thus reinforced, and one of them, named agelaus, cried out upon mentor, and threatened him, saying: "give place, rash man, or thou wilt bring destruction on thyself and all thy house." when he heard that, mentor was wroth, and rebuked odysseus as slow of hand and cold of heart. "why standest thou idle?" he cried. "get thee to thy weapons, and finish the work which thou hast to do, if thou art verily that odysseus who wrought such havoc among the trojans in the nine years' war." with these words the supposed mentor vanished as mysteriously as he had appeared, and a little swallow was seen darting hither and thither among the smoke-blackened beams of the roof. the wooers understood not in whose presence they had been, and, thinking that mentor had fled before their threats, they took courage again, and prepared to make a fresh assault. agelaus now took the lead, and at his command six of them advanced and hurled their spears. but they were all dazed with drink, and weakened by long habits of loose indulgence, and not one of their weapons took effect. "now hurl ye your spears!" shouted odysseus, and the four lances flew, and four wooers bit the dust. at the next discharge from the wooers telemachus received a slight wound on the wrist, and eumæus was similarly injured on the shoulder by the spear of the brutal ctesippus. a moment after ctesippus himself was struck down by the lance of philoetius, who mocked him as he fell saying: "there is for the ox-foot which thou didst lately bestow on odysseus, thou noisy railer!" and so the great fight went on, and at every cast of the spear odysseus and his men added another to the list of the slain. seeing their numbers dwindling fast, the wretched remnant of the wooers lost heart altogether and huddled together like sheep at the end of the hall. to complete their discomfiture a terrible voice was suddenly heard in the air, and a gleam as from a bright shield was seen high up among the rafters. "tis athene herself come to our aid!" cried odysseus; "advance, and make an end of them. athene is on our side!" forthwith they all sprang down from the platform and charged the wooers, of whom some dozen still remained alive. what followed was not a battle, but a massacre. like a drove of kine plunging frantically over a field, tortured by the sting of the hovering gadfly--like a flock of small birds scattered by the sudden swoop of a falcon--the panic-stricken wooers fled hither and thither through the hall, seeking shelter behind pillars and under tables from the blows which rained upon them. but vain was their flight. in a very short time the last of that guilty band was sent to his account, and the great act of vengeance was completed. ii like a lion fresh from the slaughter stood odysseus, leaning on his spear, and covered with blood from head to foot. as he glared round him to see if any of his foes were still alive, his eye fell on phemius, the minstrel, who was crouching in a corner near the side door, and clinging in terror to his harp. seeing the stern gaze of odysseus fixed upon him phemius sprang forward, with a sudden impulse, and threw himself at the conqueror's feet, "pity me, odysseus," he cried, "and spare me! thy days will be darkened by remorse if thou slay the sweet minstrel whom gods and men revere. i am no common school-taught bard, who sings what he has learned by rote; but in mine own heart is a sweet fountain of melody, which shall be shed like the dew from heaven on thy fame, and keep it green for ever. therefore stay thy hand, and harm me not. telemachus, thy son, knows that it was not of mine own will, nor for greed of gain, that i sang among the wooers, but they compelled me by force, being so many, and all stronger than i." thus appealed to, telemachus readily confirmed what the minstrel had said, which was indeed the literal truth. then he thought of the trusty medon, who had been kind to him when a child, and remained loyal to the last to him and penelope. "i trust he has not been slain among the wooers," he said. "medon, if thou art still alive, come forth and fear nothing." when he heard that, medon, who had been huddled in a heap behind a chair, covered with a freshly-flayed ox-hide, flung off his covering, and came running to telemachus. the poor man was still half-mad with terror. "here i am!" he gasped, with staring eyes, "speak to thy father, that he slay me not in his rage and his fury," odysseus smiled grimly at the poor serving-man, and bade him be of good cheer. "live," he said, "thou and the minstrel, that ye may know, and tell it also to others, how much better are good deeds than evil. now go ye forth and wait in the courtyard until i have finished what remains to be done." so forth they went, and sat down by the altar of zeus, glancing fearfully about them, as if expecting every moment to be their last. as soon as they were gone odysseus walked slowly up and down the hall to see if any of the wooers still survived. but there was no sound or motion, save the tread of his own feet, to break the awful stillness in that chamber of death. there they lay, stark and silent, heap upon heap, like a great draught of fishes which have been hauled to shore in a drag-net, and have gasped out their lives on the beach. having assured himself that he had not done the work negligently, he bade telemachus summon the nurse, eurycleia. telemachus obeyed, and going to the door of the women's apartments, he smote upon it, and called aloud to the nurse. a moment after the bolts were drawn back, and eurycleia entered the hall. when she saw odysseus standing among the heaps of slain wooers, she opened her mouth to utter a cry of triumph, but odysseus checked her, saying: "hold thy peace, dame, and give not voice to thy joy: it is an impious thing to exult over the dead. they are the victims of heaven's righteous law, and i was but the instrument of divine vengeance. tell me now which of the women in the house have dishonoured me, and which of them be blameless." "behold i will tell thee all the truth," answered the nurse; "fifty women there are in all in thy house, that card the wool and bear the yoke of bondage. and of these twelve have been faithless, honouring neither me nor penelope, their mistress. but now let me go and tell the news to thy wife, who all this time has been lying in a deep sleep." "rouse her not yet," said odysseus, "but go quickly and send those guilty women hither." while eurycleia was gone to summon the maid-servants, telemachus and the two herdsmen began, by the command of odysseus, to set the hall in order, and wash away the traces of slaughter. presently, with loud weeping and lamentation, the wretched women entered, and were compelled to assist in the horrid task. the bodies of the slain were carried out, and laid in order along the wall of the courtyard. then they washed and scoured the tables, and scraped the floor with spades; and when all was ready odysseus bade his son and the two others to drive the women forth, and slay them with the edge of the sword. so these three drove them into a corner of the courtyard, and eumæus and philoetius drew their swords to slay them. but telemachus held them back saying: "let them die in shame, even as they have lived." so they took a long ship's cable, which was lying in an outhouse, and stretched it across an angle of the wall; to this they attached twelve nooses, and left the women hanging there by the neck until they were dead. a horrid death was reserved for the traitor melanthius. dragging him out into the courtyard, they cut off his nose and ears, and his hands and feet, and so left him to die. after that they washed themselves and went back to the hall. then odysseus bade eurycleia kindle a fire, and bring sulphur to purify the chamber. and having thoroughly cleansed the house from the fumes of slaughter, he sat down to wait for the coming of his wife. odysseus and penelope i her face beaming with joy, and her feet stumbling over one another in their haste, eurycleia ascended to the chamber where penelope lay sleeping. "awake, penelope, awake!" she cried, standing by the bedside; "come and see with thine own eyes the fulfilment of all thy hopes. odysseus has come home at last, and all the wooers lie slain by his hand!" "thou art mad, nurse," answered penelope pettishly, turning in her bed and rubbing her eyes; "why mockest thou me in my sorrow with thy folly? and why hast thou disturbed me in the sweetest sleep that ever i had since the fatal, the accursed day when my lord sailed for troy? but for thy years and thy faithful service i would have paid thee unkindly for this wanton insult" "heaven forbid that i should mock or insult thee, dear child!" cried the nurse, her eyes filling with tears. "i have told thee naught but the truth. the stranger whom we thought a beggar was odysseus himself. telemachus knew this all the time, but kept it from thee by the command of his father." "may the gods ever bless thee for these tidings!" said penelope, springing from the couch, and throwing her arms round the nurse's neck. "but tell me truly, how did he with his single hand gain the mastery over such a multitude?" "i saw not how it was done," answered eurycleia. "i heard but the groans of the men as they were stricken, for i was shut up with the handmaids in the women's chamber. when it was over, he called me, and i found him standing among the slain, like a lion by his prey. it was a sight to gladden thy heart." but penelope's first impulse of joyful surprise had passed, and a cold fit of doubt and distrust succeeded, "it cannot be!" she murmured; "some god has taken the likeness of my husband, and slain the wooers." even when eurycleia told her how she had discovered the scar, while washing the feet of odysseus, she remained unshaken in her unbelief. "the counsels of the gods," she said, "are beyond our knowing, and they can take upon them disguises too deep for a poor woman's wit. but come, let us go and see the slaughtered wooers, and their slayer, whoever he be." ii odysseus was sitting bowed over the fire, which shone redly on his face, as he leaned his head upon his hand. he was still clothed in his beggar's rags, and strangely disfigured by the magic power of athene; while the red stains of slaughter, which still lay thick upon him, served to render his disguise yet deeper. small wonder then that penelope hesitated long to acknowledge him for her husband, as she sat some way off scanning his features with timid yet attentive gaze, like one who strives to decipher a blurred and blotted manuscript. more than once she started up, as if about to fall upon his neck; then the gleam which had lighted up her face died away, her arms drooped listlessly at her side, and she remained motionless and cold. when this had lasted for some time, telemachus, who was present, rebuked his mother in angry terms, saying: "fie upon thee, my mother! hast thou no heart at all? why holdest thou thus aloof from my father, who has come back to thee after twenty years of suffering and toil? but 'twas ever thus with thee--thou art harder than stone." "my child," answered penelope, "i am sore amazed; i cannot speak, or ask any question, or look him in the face. but if this man be indeed my husband, he knows how to convince me, and scatter all my doubts to the winds, for there are secrets between us whereof no one knoweth, save only ourselves." odysseus smiled at his wife's caution. "not in vain," he thought, "is she known to all the world as the prudent penelope." then, in order to give her time, he turned to telemachus and said: "come not between my wife and me, telemachus; we shall know each other in due season. i have another charge for thee, and do thou mark heedfully what i shall say. we have slain the noblest in the land, not one, but many, who leave a host of friends to take up their cause: how then shall we escape the blood feud? we had best look to it warily and well." "father," answered telemachus, "thou hast the name of wise, beyond all living men. be it thine, therefore, to declare thy counsel, and i will follow it, to the utmost stretch of my power." "thus, then, shalt thou do," said odysseus: "let all the household put on clean raiment, and bid the minstrel take his harp and make sweet music for the festal dance. then foot it merrily, everyone, that all they who pass by the house may think that ye are keeping the marriage feast. in this wise the rumour of the wooers' death shall not reach the town until we have had time to collect our men and prepare for our defence." telemachus went forthwith to carry out his father's orders. the whole household, men and women, arrayed themselves in festal attire, and soon the hall echoed to the throbbing notes of the lyre, and the loud patter of the dancers' feet. and those who heard it from without said to one another: "so the long wooing of our queen has come to an end at last! fickle woman, that could not endure unto the end, and keep faith with the husband of her youth!" iii after giving his orders to telemachus, odysseus had retired to refresh himself with the bath, and put on fresh raiment, while penelope remained seated in her former place. after an interval of some length he re-entered the hall, and sat down face to face with his wife. but what miracle was this? the haggard, timeworn beggar was gone, and in his place sat her husband, as she had known him in the days of old, with the added dignity which he had gained by twenty years of strenuous life. but the frost which had lain upon her spirit during her long period of weary waiting was not easily to be broken, and still she doubted. after a long silence odysseus spoke, and now for the first time his tones had a ring of reproach: "still not a word for thy husband, who has come back to thee after twenty years? surely the very demon of unbelief possesses thee!" even then penelope made no answer, for she was waiting to put the final test, and at length odysseus gave her the opportunity. "go, eurycleia," he said, "and prepare a bed for me; i will leave this iron-hearted wife and go to my rest." "ay, do so," said penelope, "take the bed from the chamber which he built with his own hands, and lay it in another room, that he may slumber there." this she said to prove him, for the bed and the chamber had a secret history, known only to herself and her husband and the faithful nurse. odysseus rose bravely to the test: whether divining his wife's purpose or not, he exclaimed, with an air of surprise and indignation: "lady, what meanest thou by this order? who hath moved my bed from its place? he must be of more than mortal skill who could remove it, for it was fashioned in wondrous wise, and with my own hands i wrought it, to be a sign and a secret between thee and me. and this was the manner of the work. within the courtyard there grew an olive-tree, a fair tree and a large, with a world of green leaves, and a stem like a stout pillar. round this i built the walls of the chamber with close-fitting stones, and roofed it over, and hung the door on its hinges. then i went to work on the tree, lopping off the boughs, and smoothing the trunk with the adze, so as to fashion it into a bedpost, and beginning from this i made the frame of a bed, and decorated it with gold and silver and ivory, and over the frame i stretched broad bands of ox-hide, stained with bright purple. this i tell thee as a sign by which thou mayest know me." the last shadow was now removed, and before odysseus had well ended what he was saying penelope sprang towards him, threw her arms round his neck, and covered his face with kisses. "be not angry with me, my dear lord," she murmured tenderly, "because i held back so long, and gave thee not loving welcome, as i do now. thou art very wise, and knowest the dangers which beset a lonely woman who is over hasty to believe when a stranger comes and calls himself her husband. many there be that lie in wait to lay snares for a weak and loving heart. but now i know thee for mine own dear love, and now is the winter of my widowhood made glorious summer, since i have seen thy face again." so they sat locked in each other's arms, that valiant, long-suffering man, and his faithful wife, two brave and patient souls, parted so long, and tried so hard, but now united once more in wedded love and bliss. the hours went by unheeded, and day would have overtaken them in that trance of delight, had not athene marked them with pity from her heavenly seat, and stayed the steeds of the morning in the east, and prolonged the reign of night, that the joy of that first meeting might not be broken until they had tasted all its honey to the lees. conclusion i early next day odysseus rose and donned his armour, and having charged penelope to keep close in her chamber, and admit no one into the house, he set forth to visit laertes on his farm, attended by telemachus and the two faithful herdsmen, all armed to the teeth. arrived at the farmhouse he left his companions there, bidding them prepare the morning meal, and went out alone to find his father. passing through the courtyard gate, he entered a large plot of ground, planted by laertes as a garden and orchard; and there he found the old man, who was digging about the roots of a young tree. with strange emotions odysseus noted every detail of his dress and figure--the soiled and tattered coat, the gaiters of clouted leather, the old gauntlets on his hands, and the goatskin cap. he who had once been the wealthiest prince in ithaca had now the appearance of an ancient serving-man, broken down with years and toil. but in the midst of his sorrow a freakish whim came into the head of odysseus, characteristic of his subtle and tortuous nature. approaching his father, who was still stooping over his work, he said to him in a disguised voice: "old man, i perceive that thou art well skilled in the gardener's art: never saw i a garden better tended--not a tree, not a shrub, but bears witness to thy fostering care. and be not wroth with me if i say that is a wonder to see the keeper of so fair a garden himself so squalid and unkempt. surely he whom thou servest must be an ungrateful master. tell me his name, if thou wilt, and answer me truly if this be indeed the land of ithaca to which i am come, as i heard from a man whom i met by the way. he seemed a churlish fellow, and would not stay to answer my questions; for i was fain to ask him concerning a friend whom i once entertained in my house, a native of ithaca, as he told me, and a son of one laertes. many days he dwelt with me, eating and drinking of the best, and i sent him away laden with rich gifts, gold and silver, and costly raiment." "friend," answered laertes, shedding tears, "to ithaca indeed art thou come, but he of whom thou askest is no longer here. in vain were thy gifts bestowed, for he who would have repaid thee richly for all thy kindness hath perished long ago, and his bones lie bleaching on the bare earth, or at the bottom of the sea. tell me, how long is it since thou didst receive him, and who art thou, and where is thy home?" "i am a man of alybas," replied odysseus, "the son of apheidas the son of polypemon, and eperitus is my name; and it is now five years since odysseus departed from my home. fair omens attended him on his starting, and we parted in high hopes that we should meet again in his own land." at these words of odysseus the poor old man was overwhelmed with sorrow, and he heaped dust upon his grey head, groaning in bitterness of spirit. odysseus was moved with pity at the sight of his distress, and thinking that he had now tried him enough, he revealed himself, pointing as proofs to the scar above his knee, and to certain trees which laertes had allowed him to call his own when he walked with him, hand-in-hand, as a little child, through the garden. the sudden shock of joyful recognition was too much for the old man, and he fell fainting into his son's arms. when he was somewhat recovered they went back together towards the house, and on the way odysseus spoke of the slaying of the wooers, and of the danger which threatened him from the vengeance of their friends. ii meanwhile the news of the wooers' violent death had spread like wildfire through the island, and their kinsmen went with loud clamour to the house of odysseus to carry away the dead bodies. when this was done they gathered together at the place of assembly to devise some plan of vengeance; and eupeithes, the father of antinous, made violent outcry against odysseus for his great act of savage justice. while they were debating, medon and phemius appeared on the scene, and described the manner in which the wooers had met their end. "the hand of heaven," said medon, "was made manifest in the deed. i myself saw athene leading the onset, and your sons were laid low like ripe sheaves before the sickle." this report chilled their courage not a little; and halitherses, seeing the effect produced, exerted all his eloquence to put an end to the blood feud. nevertheless more than half of those present persisted in their purpose, and donning their armour went forth from the town to meet the party of odysseus. the encounter took place in front of the farmhouse, where odysseus and the others had just taken their morning meal. laertes, who seemed to have recovered all the vigour of his youth, led the attack, and by a well-aimed cast of his lance struck down eupeithes, the leader of the opposing party. this success was followed up by a vigorous charge, in the midst of which a supernatural voice was heard in the air, striking terror into the assailants of odysseus, who turned and fled in wild panic towards the town. they were hotly pursued, and not a man would have been left alive had not zeus himself interposed to stay the slaughter. by his command athene acted as mediator between odysseus and the kinsmen of the wooers, and an oath of amnesty was taken on both sides, confirmed with solemn prayer and sacrifice. pronouncing list of names [transcriber's note: the orignial list contains characters that are not found in normal ascii, indicating the long or short stress to be put on the vowels. these are rendered below by the characters in [square brackets], thus: a ")" indicates a short vowel, and a "=" indicates a long. so "hay" would be rendered as "h[=a]" and "aha" would be "[)a]h[)a]" and so on.] achilles ([)a]kil'ez) æetes ([=e]-[=e]'-tez) ægæan ([=e]g[=e]'an) ægisthus ([=e]gis'thus) ægyptus ([=e]gyp'tus) æolus ([=e]'[)o]lus) æthon ([=e]'thon) agamemnon ([)a]g[)a]m[)e]m'non) agelaus ([)a]g[)e]l[=a]'us) ajax ([=a]'jax) alcinous (als[)i]n'-[)o]-us) alcmene (alkm[=e]'n[=e]) alybas ([=a]l'[)i]bas) amphinomus (amph[)i]n'[)o]mus) anticleia (ant[)i]kl[=i]'a) antilochus (ant[)i]l'[)o]chus) antiphates (ant[)i]ph'[)a]t[=e]z) antinous (ant[)i]n'[)o]us) antiphus (an't[)i]fus) apheidas ([)a]f[=i]'das) aphrodite ([)a]fr[)o]d[=i]'t[=e]) arcady (ar'c[)a]d[)i]) arete ([=a]r[=e]'t[=e]) arethusa ([)a]r[)e]thy[=u]'s[)a]) arnæus (arn[=e]'us) artemis (ar't[)e]mis) arybas ([)a]'ribas) athene ([)a]th[=e]'n[=e]) atreus ([=a]'tr[=u]s) aurora ([=o]r[=o]'r[)a]) boötes (b[)o][=o]'t[=e]z) calypso (k[)a]l[)i]p's[=o]) cassandra (cassan'dr[)a]) charybdis (k[)a]rib'dis) cimmerians (simm[)e]'r[)i]ans) circe (s[)i]r's[=e]) clytæmnestra (cl[=i]t[=e]mn[)e]s'tr[)a]) cnosus (kn[=o]'s[)u]s) ctesippus (kt[)e]'s[)i]pus) ctesius (kt[=e]'s[)i]us) cyclopes (s[=i]kl[=o]'p[=e]z) cyclops (s[=i]'klops) deiphobus (d[=e][)i]f'[)o]bus) delos (d[)e]'los) demeter (d[=e]m[=e]'t[=e]r) demodocus (d[=e]m[)o]'d[)o]cus) deucalion (d[=u]ka'l[)i]on) diomede (d[)i]'[)o]meed) dodona (d[=o]-d[=o]'n[)a]) dolius (d[)o]l'[)i]us) dulichium (dy[=u]l[)i]'-k[)i]um) eidothea ([=i]d[=o]'th[)i]-[)e][)a]) elis ([=e]'lis) elpenor ([)e]lp[=e]'n[=o]r) eperitus ([)e]p[=e]'r[)i]tus) ephialtes ([)e]f[)i]al't[=e]z) ephyra ([)e]f'[)i]r[)a]) eriphyle ([)e]r[)i]f[=i]'l[=e]) euboea (y[=u]b[=e]'a) eumæus (y[=u]m[=e]'us) eupeithes (y[=u]p[=i]'th[=e]z) eurymachus (y[=u]r[)i]'m[)a]kus) eurynomus (y[=u]r[)i]'n[)o]mus) eurycleia (y[=u]r[=i]cl[=i]'[)a]) euryalus (y[=u]r[=i]'[)a]lus) eurylochus (y[=u]r[)i]l'[)o]kus) eurydamas (y[=u]r[)i]d'[)a]mas) eurytus (y[=u]'r[)i]tus) hades (h[=a]'d[=e]z) halitherses (h[)a]l[)i]ther's[=e]z) helios (h[)e]'l[)i]os) hephæstus (h[=e]f[=e]s'tus) hera (h[=e]'r[)a]) hercules (her'c[)u]l[=e]z) hermes (her'm[=e]z) iasion ([=i][)a]'s[)i]on) icarius ([=i]k[)a]'r[)i]us) idomeneus ([=i]d[=o]m'[)e]ny[=u]s) ino ([=i]'n[)o]) iphimedeia (if[)i]m[)e]d[=i]'[)a]) iphitus (if'[)i]tus) iphthime (ifth[=i]'m[=e]) irus ([=i]'rus) ithaca ([)i]th'[)a]c[)a]) lacedæmon (l[)a]s[)e]d[=e]'mon) laertes (l[=a][)e]r't[=e]z) læstrygonia (l[=e]str[)i]g[)o]'n[)i][)a]) leda (l[=e]'d[)a]) leiodes (l[=i][=o]'d[=e]z) lesbos (l[)e]z'bos) leto (l[=e]'t[=o]) malea (m[)a]l'[)e][)a]) medon (med'on) melampus (m[)e]lam'pus) melanthius (m[)e]lan'th[)i]us) melantho (m[)e]lan'th[=o]) menelaus (m[)e]n[)e]l[=a]'us) mentes (men'tez) mentor (men't[=o]r) messene (mess[=e]'n[=e]) minos (m[=i]'nos) mycenæ (m[=i]s[=e]'n[=e]) nausicaa (naus[)i]k'[)a]-[)a]) neleus (n[=e]'ly[=u]s) neoptolemus (neopt[)o]l'[)e]mus) neritus (n[=e]'r[)i]tus) nestor (n[)e]s't[=o]r) oceanus (os[=e]'anus) odysseus (odis'y[=u]s) orestes ([)o]r[)e]s't[=e]z) orion ([=o]r[=i]'on) ormenius (orm[)e]n'[)i]us) orsilochus (ors[)i]l'[)o]kus) ortygia (ort[)i]'g[)i][)a]) otus ([)o]'tus) patroclus (p[)a]tr[)o]'clus) peiræus (p[=i]r[=e]'us) peleus (p[=e]'ly[=u]s) pelides (p[)e]l[=i]'d[=e]z) pelion (p[=e]'l[)i]on) penelope (p[=e]n[)e]l'[)o]p[=e]) persephone (pers[)e]f'[)o]n[=e]) pharos (f[=a]'ros) phæacia (f[=e][=a]'si[)a]) phemius (f[=e]'m[)i]us) pheræ (f[=e]'r[=e]) philoctetes (f[)i]lokt[=e]'t[=e]z) philoetius (f[)i]l[=e]'t[)i]us) pisistratus (p[=i]sis'tr[)a]tus) pleiades (pl[=i]'ad[=e]z) polycaste (p[)o]l[)i]cas't[=e]) polydamna (p[)o]l[)i]dam'na) polypemon (p[)o]l[)i]p[=e]'mon) polyphemus (p[)o]l[)i]f[=e]'mus) poseidon (p[)o]s[=i]'don) proteus (pr[=o]'ty[=u]s) pylos (p[=i]'los) same (s[=a]'m[=e]) scylla (sil'l[)a]) scyros (sk[=i]'ros) sirens (s[=i]'rens) sisyphus (s[)i]'s[)i]fus) sunium (sy[=u]'n[)i]um) tantalus (tan't[)a]lus) teiresias (t[=i]r[)e]'s[)i]as) telamon (t[)e]l'[)a]mon) telemachus (t[=e]l[=e]'m[)a]kus) tenedos (t[)e]n'[)e]dos) theoclymenus (th[)e][)o]cly'm[)e]nus) thesprotia (th[)e]spr[=o]'t[=i][)a]) thon (th[=o]n) tityos (t[)i]t'[)i]os) tyndareus (tin'd[)a]ry[=u]s) zacynthus (z[)a]kin'thus) zeus (zy[=u]s) the fall of troy by quintus smyrnaeus ("quintus of smyrna") fl. 4th century a.d. originally written in greek, sometime about the middle of the 4th century a.d. translation by a.s. way, 1913. ***************************************************************** selected bibliography: original text-way, a.s. (ed. & trans.): "quintus smyrnaeus: the fall of troy" (loeb classics #19; harvard university press, cambridge ma, 1913). greek text with side-by-side english translation. other translations-combellack, frederick m. (trans.): "the war at troy: what homer didn't tell" (university of oklahoma press, norman ok, 1968). recommended reading-fitzgerald, robert (trans.): "homer: the iliad" (viking press, new york, 1968). ***************************************************************** introduction homer's "iliad" begins towards the close of the last of the ten years of the trojan war: its incidents extend over some fifty days only, and it ends with the burial of hector. the things which came before and after were told by other bards, who between them narrated the whole "cycle" of the events of the war, and so were called the cyclic poets. of their works none have survived; but the story of what befell between hector's funeral and the taking of troy is told in detail, and well told, in a poem about half as long as the "iliad". some four hundred years after christ there lived at smyrna a poet of whom we know scarce anything, save that his first name was quintus. he had saturated himself with the spirit of homer, he had caught the ring of his music, and he perhaps had before him the works of those cyclic poets whose stars had paled before the sun. we have practically no external evidence as to the date or place of birth of quintus of smyrna, or for the sources whence he drew his materials. his date is approximately settled by two passages in the poem, viz. vi. 531 sqq., in which occurs an illustration drawn from the man-and-beast fights of the amphitheatre, which were suppressed by theodosius i. (379-395 a.d.); and xiii. 335 sqq., which contains a prophecy, the special particularity of which, it is maintained by koechly, limits its applicability to the middle of the fourth century a.d. his place of birth, and the precise locality, is given by himself in xii. 308-313, and confirmatory evidence is afforded by his familiarity, of which he gives numerous instances, with many natural features of the western part of asia minor. with respect to his authorities, and the use he made of their writings, there has been more difference of opinion. since his narrative covers the same ground as the "aethiopis" ("coming of memnon") and the "iliupersis" ("destruction of troy") of arctinus (circ. 776 b.c.), and the "little iliad" of lesches (circ. 700 b.c.), it has been assumed that the work of quintus "is little more than an amplification or remodelling of the works of these two cyclic poets." this, however, must needs be pure conjecture, as the only remains of these poets consist of fragments amounting to no more than a very few lines from each, and of the "summaries of contents" made by the grammarian proclus (circ. 140 a.d.), which, again, we but get at second-hand through the "bibliotheca" of photius (ninth century). now, not merely do the only descriptions of incident that are found in the fragments differ essentially from the corresponding incidents as described by quintus, but even in the summaries, meagre as they are, we find, as german critics have shown by exhaustive investigation, serious discrepancies enough to justify us in the conclusion that, even if quintus had the works of the cyclic poets before him, which is far from certain, his poem was no mere remodelling of theirs, but an independent and practically original work. not that this conclusion disposes by any means of all difficulties. if quintus did not follow the cyclic poets, from what source did he draw his materials? the german critic unhesitatingly answers, "from homer." as regards language, versification, and general spirit, the matter is beyond controversy; but when we come to consider the incidents of the story, we find deviations from homer even more serious than any of those from the cyclic poets. and the strange thing is, that each of these deviations is a manifest detriment to the perfection of his poem; in each of them the writer has missed, or has rejected, a magnificent opportunity. with regard to the slaying of achilles by the hand of apollo only, and not by those of apollo and paris, he might have pleaded that homer himself here speaks with an uncertain voice (cf. "iliad" xv. 416-17, xxii. 355-60, and xxi. 277-78). but, in describing the fight for the body of achilles ("odyssey" xxiv. 36 sqq.), homer makes agamemnon say: "so we grappled the livelong day, and we had not refrained us then, but zeus sent a hurricane, stilling the storm of the battle of men." now, it is just in describing such natural phenomena, and in blending them with the turmoil of battle, that quintus is in his element; yet for such a scene he substitutes what is, by comparison, a lame and impotent conclusion. of that awful cry that rang over the sea heralding the coming of thetis and the nymphs to the death-rites of her son, and the panic with which it filled the host, quintus is silent. again, homer ("odyssey" iv. 274-89) describes how helen came in the night with deiphobus, and stood by the wooden horse, and called to each of the hidden warriors with the voice of his own wife. this thrilling scene quintus omits, and substitutes nothing of his own. later on, he makes menelaus slay deiphobus unresisting, "heavy with wine," whereas homer ("odyssey" viii. 517-20) makes him offer such a magnificent resistance, that odysseus and menelaus together could not kill him without the help of athena. in fact, we may say that, though there are echoes of the "iliad" all through the poem, yet, wherever homer has, in the "odyssey", given the outline-sketch of an effective scene, quintus has uniformly neglected to develop it, has sometimes substituted something much weaker--as though he had not the "odyssey" before him! for this we have no satisfactory explanation to offer. he may have set his own judgment above homer--a most unlikely hypothesis: he may have been consistently following, in the framework of his story, some original now lost to us: there may be more, and longer, lacunae in the text than any editors have ventured to indicate: but, whatever theory we adopt, it must be based on mere conjecture. the greek text here given is that of koechly (1850) with many of zimmermann's emendations, which are acknowledged in the notes. passages enclosed in square brackets are suggestions of koechly for supplying the general sense of lacunae. where he has made no such suggestion, or none that seemed to the editors to be adequate, the lacuna has been indicated by asterisks, though here too a few words have been added in the translation, sufficient to connect the sense. --a. s. way contents book i how died for troy the queen of the amazons, penthesileia. ii how memnon, son of the dawn, for troy's sake fell in the battle. iii how by the shaft of a god laid low was hero achilles. iv how in the funeral games of achilles heroes contended. v how the arms of achilles were cause of madness and death unto aias. vi how came for the helping of troy eurypylus, hercules' grandson. vii how the son of achilles was brought to the war from the isle of scyros. viii how hercules' grandson perished in fight with the son of achilles. ix how from his long lone exile returned to the war philoctetes. x how paris was stricken to death, and in vain sought help of oenone. xi how the sons of troy for the last time fought from her walls and her towers. xii how the wooden horse was fashioned, and brought into troy by her people. xiii how troy in the night was taken and sacked with fire and slaughter. xiv how the conquerors sailed from troy unto judgment of tempest and shipwreck. book i: how died for troy the queen of the amazons, penthesileia. when godlike hector by peleides slain passed, and the pyre had ravined up his flesh, and earth had veiled his bones, the trojans then tarried in priam's city, sore afraid before the might of stout-heart aeacus' son: as kine they were, that midst the copses shrink from faring forth to meet a lion grim, but in dense thickets terror-huddled cower; so in their fortress shivered these to see that mighty man. of those already dead they thought of all whose lives he reft away as by scamander's outfall on he rushed, and all that in mid-flight to that high wall he slew, how he quelled hector, how he haled his corse round troy;--yea, and of all beside laid low by him since that first day whereon o'er restless seas he brought the trojans doom. ay, all these they remembered, while they stayed thus in their town, and o'er them anguished grief hovered dark-winged, as though that very day all troy with shrieks were crumbling down in fire. then from thermodon, from broad-sweeping streams, came, clothed upon with beauty of goddesses, penthesileia--came athirst indeed for groan-resounding battle, but yet more fleeing abhorred reproach and evil fame, lest they of her own folk should rail on her because of her own sister's death, for whom ever her sorrows waxed, hippolyte, whom she had struck dead with her mighty spear, not of her will--'twas at a stag she hurled. so came she to the far-famed land of troy. yea, and her warrior spirit pricked her on, of murder's dread pollution thus to cleanse her soul, and with such sacrifice to appease the awful ones, the erinnyes, who in wrath for her slain sister straightway haunted her unseen: for ever round the sinner's steps they hover; none may 'scape those goddesses. and with her followed twelve beside, each one a princess, hot for war and battle grim, far-famous each, yet handmaids unto her: penthesileia far outshone them all. as when in the broad sky amidst the stars the moon rides over all pre-eminent, when through the thunderclouds the cleaving heavens open, when sleep the fury-breathing winds; so peerless was she mid that charging host. clonie was there, polemusa, derinoe, evandre, and antandre, and bremusa, hippothoe, dark-eyed harmothoe, alcibie, derimacheia, antibrote, and thermodosa glorying with the spear. all these to battle fared with warrior-souled penthesileia: even as when descends dawn from olympus' crest of adamant, dawn, heart-exultant in her radiant steeds amidst the bright-haired hours; and o'er them all, how flawless-fair soever these may be, her splendour of beauty glows pre-eminent; so peerless amid all the amazons unto troy-town penthesileia came. to right, to left, from all sides hurrying thronged the trojans, greatly marvelling, when they saw the tireless war-god's child, the mailed maid, like to the blessed gods; for in her face glowed beauty glorious and terrible. her smile was ravishing: beneath her brows her love-enkindling eyes shone like to stars, and with the crimson rose of shamefastness bright were her cheeks, and mantled over them unearthly grace with battle-prowess clad. then joyed troy's folk, despite past agonies, as when, far-gazing from a height, the hinds behold a rainbow spanning the wide sea, when they be yearning for the heaven-sent shower, when the parched fields be craving for the rain; then the great sky at last is overgloomed, and men see that fair sign of coming wind and imminent rain, and seeing, they are glad, who for their corn-fields' plight sore sighed before; even so the sons of troy when they beheld there in their land penthesileia dread afire for battle, were exceeding glad; for when the heart is thrilled with hope of good, all smart of evils past is wiped away: so, after all his sighing and his pain, gladdened a little while was priam's soul. as when a man who hath suffered many a pang from blinded eyes, sore longing to behold the light, and, if he may not, fain would die, then at the last, by a cunning leech's skill, or by a god's grace, sees the dawn-rose flush, sees the mist rolled back from before his eyes,- yea, though clear vision come not as of old, yet, after all his anguish, joys to have some small relief, albeit the stings of pain prick sharply yet beneath his eyelids;--so joyed the old king to see that terrible queen- the shadowy joy of one in anguish whelmed for slain sons. into his halls he led the maid, and with glad welcome honoured her, as one who greets a daughter to her home returned from a far country in the twentieth year; and set a feast before her, sumptuous as battle-glorious kings, who have brought low nations of foes, array in splendour of pomp, with hearts in pride of victory triumphing. and gifts he gave her costly and fair to see, and pledged him to give many more, so she would save the trojans from the imminent doom. and she such deeds she promised as no man had hoped for, even to lay achilles low, to smite the wide host of the argive men, and cast the brands red-flaming on the ships. ah fool!--but little knew she him, the lord of ashen spears, how far achilles' might in warrior-wasting strife o'erpassed her own! but when andromache, the stately child of king eetion, heard the wild queen's vaunt, low to her own soul bitterly murmured she: "ah hapless! why with arrogant heart dost thou speak such great swelling words? no strength is thine to grapple in fight with peleus' aweless son. nay, doom and swift death shall he deal to thee. alas for thee! what madness thrills thy soul? fate and the end of death stand hard by thee! hector was mightier far to wield the spear than thou, yet was for all his prowess slain, slain for the bitter grief of troy, whose folk the city through looked on him as a god. my glory and his noble parents' glory was he while yet he lived--o that the earth over my dead face had been mounded high, or ever through his throat the breath of life followed the cleaving spear! but now have i looked--woe is me!--on grief unutterable, when round the city those fleet-footed steeds haled him, steeds of achilles, who had made me widowed of mine hero-husband, made my portion bitterness through all my days." so spake eetion's lovely-ankled child low to her own soul, thinking on her lord. so evermore the faithful-hearted wife nurseth for her lost love undying grief. then in swift revolution sweeping round into the ocean's deep stream sank the sun, and daylight died. so when the banqueters ceased from the wine-cup and the goodly feast, then did the handmaids spread in priam's halls for penthesileia dauntless-souled the couch heart-cheering, and she laid her down to rest; and slumber mist-like overveiled her eyes [depths like sweet dew dropping round. from heavens' blue slid down the might of a deceitful dream at pallas' hest, that so the warrior-maid might see it, and become a curse to troy and to herself, when strained her soul to meet; the whirlwind of the battle. in this wise the trito-born, the subtle-souled, contrived: stood o'er the maiden's head that baleful dream in likeness of her father, kindling her fearlessly front to front to meet in fight fleetfoot achilles. and she heard the voice, and all her heart exulted, for she weened that she should on that dawning day achieve a mighty deed in battle's deadly toil ah, fool, who trusted for her sorrow a dream out of the sunless land, such as beguiles full oft the travail-burdened tribes of men, whispering mocking lies in sleeping ears, and to the battle's travail lured her then! but when the dawn, the rosy-ankled, leapt up from her bed, then, clad in mighty strength of spirit, suddenly from her couch uprose penthesileia. then did she array her shoulders in those wondrous-fashioned arms given her of the war-god. first she laid beneath her silver-gleaming knees the greaves fashioned of gold, close-clipping the strong limbs. her rainbow-radiant corslet clasped she then about her, and around her shoulders slung, with glory in her heart, the massy brand whose shining length was in a scabbard sheathed of ivory and silver. next, her shield unearthly splendid, caught she up, whose rim swelled like the young moon's arching chariot-rail when high o'er ocean's fathomless-flowing stream she rises, with the space half filled with light betwixt her bowing horns. so did it shine unutterably fair. then on her head she settled the bright helmet overstreamed with a wild mane of golden-glistering hairs. so stood she, lapped about with flaming mail, in semblance like the lightning, which the might, the never-wearied might of zeus, to earth hurleth, what time he showeth forth to men fury of thunderous-roaring rain, or swoop resistless of his shouting host of winds. then in hot haste forth of her bower to pass caught she two javelins in the hand that grasped her shield-band; but her strong right hand laid hold on a huge halberd, sharp of either blade, which terrible eris gave to ares' child to be her titan weapon in the strife that raveneth souls of men. laughing for glee thereover, swiftly flashed she forth the ring of towers. her coming kindled all the sons of troy to rush into the battle forth which crowneth men with glory. swiftly all hearkened her gathering-ery, and thronging came, champions, yea, even such as theretofore shrank back from standing in the ranks of war against achilles the all-ravager. but she in pride of triumph on she rode throned on a goodly steed and fleet, the gift of oreithyia, the wild north-wind's bride, given to her guest the warrior-maid, what time she came to thrace, a steed whose flying feet could match the harpies' wings. riding thereon penthesileia in her goodlihead left the tall palaces of troy behind. and ever were the ghastly-visaged fates thrusting her on into the battle, doomed to be her first against the greeks--and last! to right, to left, with unreturning feet the trojan thousands followed to the fray, the pitiless fray, that death-doomed warrior-maid, followed in throngs, as follow sheep the ram that by the shepherd's art strides before all. so followed they, with battle-fury filled, strong trojans and wild-hearted amazons. and like tritonis seemed she, as she went to meet the giants, or as flasheth far through war-hosts eris, waker of onset-shouts. so mighty in the trojans' midst she seemed, penthesileia of the flying feet. then unto cronos' son laomedon's child upraised his hands, his sorrow-burdened hands, turning him toward the sky-encountering fane of zeus of ida, who with sleepless eyes looks ever down on ilium; and he prayed: "father, give ear! vouchsafe that on this day achaea's host may fall before the hands of this our warrior-queen, the war-god's child; and do thou bring her back unscathed again unto mine halls: we pray thee by the love thou bear'st to ares of the fiery heart thy son, yea, to her also! is she not most wondrous like the heavenly goddesses? and is she not the child of thine own seed? pity my stricken heart withal! thou know'st all agonies i have suffered in the deaths of dear sons whom the fates have torn from me by argive hands in the devouring fight. compassionate us, while a remnant yet remains of noble dardanus' blood, while yet this city stands unwasted! let us know from ghastly slaughter and strife one breathing-space!" in passionate prayer he spake:--lo, with shrill scream swiftly to left an eagle darted by and in his talons bare a gasping dove. then round the heart of priam all the blood was chilled with fear. low to his soul he said: "ne'er shall i see return alive from war penthesileia!" on that selfsame day the fates prepared his boding to fulfil; and his heart brake with anguish of despair. marvelled the argives, far across the plain seeing the hosts of troy charge down on them, and midst them penthesileia, ares' child. these seemed like ravening beasts that mid the hills bring grimly slaughter to the fleecy flocks; and she, as a rushing blast of flame she seemed that maddeneth through the copses summer-scorched, when the wind drives it on; and in this wise spake one to other in their mustering host: "who shall this be who thus can rouse to war the trojans, now that hector hath been slain- these who, we said, would never more find heart to stand against us? lo now, suddenly forth are they rushing, madly afire for fight! sure, in their midst some great one kindleth them to battle's toil! thou verily wouldst say this were a god, of such great deeds he dreams! go to, with aweless courage let us arm our own breasts: let us summon up our might in battle-fury. we shall lack not help of gods this day to close in fight with troy." so cried they; and their flashing battle-gear cast they about them: forth the ships they poured clad in the rage of fight as with a cloak. then front to front their battles closed, like beasts of ravin, locked in tangle of gory strife. clanged their bright mail together, clashed the spears, the corslets, and the stubborn-welded shields and adamant helms. each stabbed at other's flesh with the fierce brass: was neither ruth nor rest, and all the trojan soil was crimson-red. then first penthesileia smote and slew molion; now persinous falls, and now eilissus; reeled antitheus 'neath her spear the pride of lernus quelled she: down she bore hippalmus 'neath her horse-hoofs; haemon's son died; withered stalwart elasippus' strength. and derinoe laid low laogonus, and clonie menippus, him who sailed long since from phylace, led by his lord protesilaus to the war with troy. then was podarces, son of iphiclus, heart-wrung with ruth and wrath to see him lie dead, of all battle-comrades best-beloved. swiftly at clonie he hurled, the maid fair as a goddess: plunged the unswerving lance 'twixt hip and hip, and rushed the dark blood forth after the spear, and all her bowels gushed out. then wroth was penthesileia; through the brawn of his right arm she drave the long spear's point, she shore atwain the great blood-brimming veins, and through the wide gash of the wound the gore spirted, a crimson fountain. with a groan backward he sprang, his courage wholly quelled by bitter pain; and sorrow and dismay thrilled, as he fled, his men of phylace. a short way from the fight he reeled aside, and in his friends' arms died in little space. then with his lance idomeneus thrust out, and by the right breast stabbed bremusa. stilled for ever was the beating of her heart. she fell, as falls a graceful-shafted pine hewn mid the hills by woodmen: heavily, sighing through all its boughs, it crashes down. so with a wailing shriek she fell, and death unstrung her every limb: her breathing soul mingled with multitudinous-sighing winds. then, as evandre through the murderous fray with thermodosa rushed, stood meriones, a lion in the path, and slew: his spear right to the heart of one he drave, and one stabbed with a lightning sword-thrust 'twixt the hips: leapt through the wounds the life, and fled away. oileus' fiery son smote derinoe 'twixt throat and shoulder with his ruthless spear; and on alcibie tydeus' terrible son swooped, and on derimacheia: head with neck clean from the shoulders of these twain he shore with ruin-wreaking brand. together down fell they, as young calves by the massy axe of brawny flesher felled, that, shearing through the sinews of the neck, lops life away. so, by the hands of tydeus' son laid low upon the trojan plain, far, far away from their own highland-home, they fell. nor these alone died; for the might of sthenelus down on them hurled cabeirus' corse, who came from sestos, keen to fight the argive foe, but never saw his fatherland again. then was the heart of paris filled with wrath for a friend slain. full upon sthenelus aimed he a shaft death-winged, yet touched him not, despite his thirst for vengeance: otherwhere the arrow glanced aside, and carried death whither the stern fates guided its fierce wing, and slew evenor brazen-tasleted, who from dulichium came to war with troy. for his death fury-kindled was the son of haughty phyleus: as a lion leaps upon the flock, so swiftly rushed he: all shrank huddling back before that terrible man. itymoneus he slew, and hippasus' son agelaus: from miletus brought they war against the danaan men by nastes led, the god-like, and amphimachus mighty-souled. on mycale they dwelt; beside their home rose latmus' snowy crests, stretched the long glens of branchus, and panormus' water-meads. maeander's flood deep-rolling swept thereby, which from the phrygian uplands, pastured o'er by myriad flocks, around a thousand forelands curls, swirls, and drives his hurrying ripples on down to the vine-clad land of carian men these mid the storm of battle meges slew, nor these alone, but whomsoe'er his lance black-shafted touched, were dead men; for his breast the glorious trito-born with courage thrilled to bring to all his foes the day of doom. and polypoetes, dear to ares, slew dresaeus, whom the nymph neaera bare to passing-wise theiodamas for these spread was the bed of love beside the foot of sipylus the mountain, where the gods made niobe a stony rock, wherefrom tears ever stream: high up, the rugged crag bows as one weeping, weeping, waterfalls cry from far-echoing hermus, wailing moan of sympathy: the sky-encountering crests of sipylus, where alway floats a mist hated of shepherds, echo back the cry. weird marvel seems that rock of niobe to men that pass with feet fear-goaded: there they see the likeness of a woman bowed, in depths of anguish sobbing, and her tears drop, as she mourns grief-stricken, endlessly. yea, thou wouldst say that verily so it was, viewing it from afar; but when hard by thou standest, all the illusion vanishes; and lo, a steep-browed rock, a fragment rent from sipylus--yet niobe is there, dreeing her weird, the debt of wrath divine, a broken heart in guise of shattered stone. all through the tangle of that desperate fray stalked slaughter and doom. the incarnate onset-shout raved through the rolling battle; at her side paced death the ruthless, and the fearful faces, the fates, beside them strode, and in red hands bare murder and the groans of dying men. that day the beating of full many a heart, trojan and argive, was for ever stilled, while roared the battle round them, while the fury of penthesileia fainted not nor failed; but as amid long ridges of lone hills a lioness, stealing down a deep ravine, springs on the kine with lightning leap, athirst for blood wherein her fierce heart revelleth; so on the danaans leapt that warrior-maid. and they, their souls were cowed: backward they shrank, and fast she followed, as a towering surge chases across the thunder-booming sea a flying bark, whose white sails strain beneath the wind's wild buffering, and all the air maddens with roaring, as the rollers crash on a black foreland looming on the lee where long reefs fringe the surf-tormented shores. so chased she, and so dashed the ranks asunder triumphant-souled, and hurled fierce threats before: "ye dogs, this day for evil outrage done to priam shall ye pay! no man of you shall from mine hands deliver his own life, and win back home, to gladden parents eyes, or comfort wife or children. ye shall lie dead, ravined on by vultures and by wolves, and none shall heap the earth-mound o'er your clay. where skulketh now the strength of tydeus' son, and where the might of aeacus' scion? where is aias' bulk? ye vaunt them mightiest men of all your rabble. ha! they will not dare with me to close in battle, lest i drag forth from their fainting frames their craven souls!" then heart-uplifted leapt she on the foe, resistless as a tigress, crashing through ranks upon ranks of argives, smiting now with that huge halberd massy-headed, now hurling the keen dart, while her battle-horse flashed through the fight, and on his shoulder bare quiver and bow death-speeding, close to her hand, if mid that revel of blood she willed to speed the bitter-biting shaft. behind her swept the charging lines of men fleet-footed, friends and brethren of the man who never flinched from close death-grapple, hector, panting all the hot breath of the war-god from their breasts, all slaying danaans with the ashen spear, who fell as frost-touched leaves in autumn fall one after other, or as drops of rain. and aye went up a moaning from earth's breast all blood-bedrenched, and heaped with corse on corse. horses pierced through with arrows, or impaled on spears, were snorting forth their last of strength with screaming neighings. men, with gnashing teeth biting the dust, lay gasping, while the steeds of trojan charioteers stormed in pursuit, trampling the dying mingled with the dead as oxen trample corn in threshing-floors. then one exulting boasted mid the host of troy, beholding penthesileia rush on through the foes' array, like the black storm that maddens o'er the sea, what time the sun allies his might with winter's goat-horned star; and thus, puffed up with vain hope, shouted he: "o friends, in manifest presence down from heaven one of the deathless gods this day hath come to fight the argives, all of love for us, yea, and with sanction of almighty zeus, he whose compassion now remembereth haply strong-hearted priam, who may boast for his a lineage of immortal blood. for this, i trow, no mortal woman seems, who is so aweless-daring, who is clad in splendour-flashing arms: nay, surely she shall be athene, or the mighty-souled enyo--haply eris, or the child of leto world-renowned. o yea, i look to see her hurl amid yon argive men mad-shrieking slaughter, see her set aflame yon ships wherein they came long years agone bringing us many sorrows, yea, they came bringing us woes of war intolerable. ha! to the home-land hellas ne'er shall these with joy return, since gods on our side fight." in overweening exultation so vaunted a trojan. fool!--he had no vision of ruin onward rushing upon himself and troy, and penthesileia's self withal. for not as yet had any tidings come of that wild fray to aias stormy-souled, nor to achilles, waster of tower and town. but on the grave-mound of menoetius' son they twain were lying, with sad memories of a dear comrade crushed, and echoing each one the other's groaning. one it was of the blest gods who still was holding back these from the battle-tumult far away, till many greeks should fill the measure up of woeful havoc, slain by trojan foes and glorious penthesileia, who pursued with murderous intent their rifled ranks, while ever waxed her valour more and more, and waxed her might within her: never in vain she aimed the unswerving spear-thrust: aye she pierced the backs of them that fled, the breasts of such as charged to meet her. all the long shaft dripped with steaming blood. swift were her feet as wind as down she swooped. her aweless spirit failed for weariness nor fainted, but her might was adamantine. the impending doom, which roused unto the terrible strife not yet achilles, clothed her still with glory; still aloof the dread power stood, and still would shed splendour of triumph o'er the death-ordained but for a little space, ere it should quell that maiden 'neath the hands of aeaeus' son. in darkness ambushed, with invisible hand ever it thrust her on, and drew her feet destruction-ward, and lit her path to death with glory, while she slew foe after foe. as when within a dewy garden-close, longing for its green springtide freshness, leaps a heifer, and there rangeth to and fro, when none is by to stay her, treading down all its green herbs, and all its wealth of bloom, devouring greedily this, and marring that with trampling feet; so ranged she, ares' child, through reeling squadrons of achaea's sons, slew these, and hunted those in panic rout. from troy afar the women marvelling gazed at the maid's battle-prowess. suddenly a fiery passion for the fray hath seized antimachus' daughter, meneptolemus' wife, tisiphone. her heart waxed strong, and filled with lust of fight she cried to her fellows all, with desperate-daring words, to spur them on to woeful war, by recklessness made strong. "friends, let a heart of valour in our breasts awake! let us be like our lords, who fight with foes for fatherland, for babes, for us, and never pause for breath in that stern strife! let us too throne war's spirit in our hearts! let us too face the fight which favoureth none! for we, we women, be not creatures cast in diverse mould from men: to us is given such energy of life as stirs in them. eyes have we like to theirs, and limbs: throughout fashioned we are alike: one common light we look on, and one common air we breathe: with like food are we nourished--nay, wherein have we been dowered of god more niggardly than men? then let us shrink not from the fray see ye not yonder a woman far excelling men in the grapple of fight? yet is her blood nowise akin to ours, nor fighteth she for her own city. for an alien king she warreth of her own heart's prompting, fears the face of no man; for her soul is thrilled with valour and with spirit invincible. but we--to right, to left, lie woes on woes about our feet: this mourns beloved sons, and that a husband who for hearth and home hath died; some wail for fathers now no more; some grieve for brethren and for kinsmen lost. not one but hath some share in sorrow's cup. behind all this a fearful shadow looms, the day of bondage! therefore flinch not ye from war, o sorrow-laden! better far to die in battle now, than afterwards hence to be haled into captivity to alien folk, we and our little ones, in the stern grip of fate leaving behind a burning city, and our husbands' graves." so cried she, and with passion for stern war thrilled all those women; and with eager speed they hasted to go forth without the wall mail-clad, afire to battle for their town and people: all their spirit was aflame. as when within a hive, when winter-tide is over and gone, loud hum the swarming bees what time they make them ready forth to fare to bright flower-pastures, and no more endure to linger therewithin, but each to other crieth the challenge-cry to sally forth; even so bestirred themselves the women of troy, and kindled each her sister to the fray. the weaving-wool, the distaff far they flung, and to grim weapons stretched their eager hands. and now without the city these had died in that wild battle, as their husbands died and the strong amazons died, had not one voice of wisdom cried to stay their maddened feet, when with dissuading words theano spake: "wherefore, ah wherefore for the toil and strain of battle's fearful tumult do ye yearn, infatuate ones? never your limbs have toiled in conflict yet. in utter ignorance panting for labour unendurable, ye rush on all-unthinking; for your strength can never be as that of danaan men, men trained in daily battle. amazons have joyed in ruthless fight, in charging steeds, from the beginning: all the toil of men do they endure; and therefore evermore the spirit of the war-god thrills them through. 'they fall not short of men in anything: their labour-hardened frames make great their hearts for all achievement: never faint their knees nor tremble. rumour speaks their queen to be a daughter of the mighty lord of war. therefore no woman may compare with her in prowess--if she be a woman, not a god come down in answer to our prayers. yea, of one blood be all the race of men, yet unto diverse labours still they turn; and that for each is evermore the best whereto he bringeth skill of use and wont. therefore do ye from tumult of the fray hold you aloof, and in your women's bowers before the loom still pace ye to and fro; and war shall be the business of our lords. lo, of fair issue is there hope: we see the achaeans falling fast: we see the might of our men waxing ever: fear is none of evil issue now: the pitiless foe beleaguer not the town: no desperate need there is that women should go forth to war." so cried she, and they hearkened to the words of her who had garnered wisdom from the years; so from afar they watched the fight. but still penthesileia brake the ranks, and still before her quailed the achaeans: still they found nor screen nor hiding-place from imminent death. as bleating goats are by the blood-stained jaws of a grim panther torn, so slain were they. in each man's heart all lust of battle died, and fear alone lived. this way, that way fled the panic-stricken: some to earth had flung the armour from their shoulders; some in dust grovelled in terror 'neath their shields: the steeds fled through the rout unreined of charioteers. in rapture of triumph charged the amazons, with groan and scream of agony died the greeks. withered their manhood was in that sore strait; brief was the span of all whom that fierce maid mid the grim jaws of battle overtook. as when with mighty roaring bursteth down a storm upon the forest-trees, and some uprendeth by the roots, and on the earth dashes them down, the tail stems blossom-crowned, and snappeth some athwart the trunk, and high whirls them through air, till all confused they lie a ruin of splintered stems and shattered sprays; so the great danaan host lay, dashed to dust by doom of fate, by penthesileia's spear. but when the very ships were now at point to be by hands of trojans set aflame, then battle-bider aias heard afar the panic-cries, and spake to aeacus' son: "achilles, all the air about mine ears is full of multitudinous eries, is full of thunder of battle rolling nearer aye. let us go forth then, ere the trojans win unto the ships, and make great slaughter there of argive men, and set the ships aflame. foulest reproach such thing on thee and me should bring; for it beseems not that the seed of mighty zeus should shame the sacred blood of hero-fathers, who themselves of old with hercules the battle-eager sailed to troy, and smote her even at her height of glory, when laomedon was king. ay, and i ween that our hands even now shall do the like: we too are mighty men." he spake: the aweless strength of aeacus' son hearkened thereto, for also to his ears by this the roar of bitter battle came. then hasted both, and donned their warrior-gear all splendour-gleaming: now, in these arrayed facing that stormy-tossing rout they stand. loud clashed their glorious armour: in their souls a battle-fury like the war-god's wrath maddened; such might was breathed into these twain by atrytone, shaker of the shield, as on they pressed. with joy the argives saw the coming of that mighty twain: they seemed in semblance like aloeus' giant sons who in the old time made that haughty vaunt of piling on olympus' brow the height of ossa steeply-towering, and the crest of sky-encountering pelion, so to rear a mountain-stair for their rebellious rage to scale the highest heaven. huge as these the sons of aeacus seemed, as forth they strode to stem the tide of war. a gladsome sight to friends who have fainted for their coming, now onward they press to crush triumphant foes. many they slew with their resistless spears; as when two herd-destroying lions come on sheep amid the copses feeding, far from help of shepherds, and in heaps on heaps slay them, till they have drunken to the full of blood, and filled their maws insatiate with flesh, so those destroyers twain slew on, spreading wide havoc through the hosts of troy. there deiochus and gallant hyllus fell by alas slain, and fell eurynomus lover of war, and goodly enyeus died. but peleus' son burst on the amazons smiting antandre, polemusa then, antibrote, fierce-souled hippothoe, hurling harmothoe down on sisters slain. then hard on all their-reeling ranks he pressed with telamon's mighty-hearted son; and now before their hands battalions dense and strong crumbled as weakly and as suddenly as when in mountain-folds the forest-brakes shrivel before a tempest-driven fire. when battle-eager penthesileia saw these twain, as through the scourging storm of war like ravening beasts they rushed, to meet them there she sped, as when a leopard grim, whose mood is deadly, leaps from forest-coverts forth, lashing her tail, on hunters closing round, while these, in armour clad, and putting trust in their long spears, await her lightning leap; so did those warriors twain with spears upswung wait penthesileia. clanged the brazen plates about their shoulders as they moved. and first leapt the long-shafted lance sped from the hand of goodly penthesileia. straight it flew to the shield of aeacus' son, but glancing thence this way and that the shivered fragments sprang as from a rock-face: of such temper were the cunning-hearted fire-god's gifts divine. then in her hand the warrior-maid swung up a second javelin fury-winged, against aias, and with fierce words defied the twain: "ha, from mine hand in vain one lance hath leapt! but with this second look i suddenly to quell the strength and courage of two foes,- ay, though ye vaunt you mighty men of war amid your danaans! die ye shall, and so lighter shall be the load of war's affliction that lies upon the trojan chariot-lords. draw nigh, come through the press to grips with me, so shall ye learn what might wells up in breasts of amazons. with my blood is mingled war! no mortal man begat me, but the lord of war, insatiate of the battle-cry. therefore my might is more than any man's." with scornful laughter spake she: then she hurled her second lance; but they in utter scorn laughed now, as swiftly flew the shaft, and smote the silver greave of aias, and was foiled thereby, and all its fury could not scar the flesh within; for fate had ordered not that any blade of foes should taste the blood of aias in the bitter war. but he recked of the amazon naught, but turned him thence to rush upon the trojan host, and left penthesileia unto peleus' son alone, for well he knew his heart within that she, for all her prowess, none the less would cost achilles battle-toil as light, as effortless, as doth the dove the hawk. then groaned she an angry groan that she had sped her shafts in vain; and now with scoffing speech to her in turn the son of peleus spake: "woman, with what vain vauntings triumphing hast thou come forth against us, all athirst to battle with us, who be mightier far than earthborn heroes? we from cronos' son, the thunder-roller, boast our high descent. ay, even hector quailed, the battle-swift, before us, e'en though far away he saw our onrush to grim battle. yea, my spear slew him, for all his might. but thou--thine heart is utterly mad, that thou hast greatly dared to threaten us with death this day! on thee thy latest hour shall swiftly come--is come! thee not thy sire the war-god now shall pluck out of mine hand, but thou the debt shalt pay of a dark doom, as when mid mountain-folds a pricket meets a lion, waster of herds. what, woman, hast thou heard not of the heaps of slain, that into xanthus' rushing stream were thrust by these mine hands?--or hast thou heard in vain, because the blessed ones have stol'n wit and discretion from thee, to the end that doom's relentless gulf might gape for thee?" he spake; he swung up in his mighty hand and sped the long spear warrior-slaying, wrought by chiron, and above the right breast pierced the battle-eager maid. the red blood leapt forth, as a fountain wells, and all at once fainted the strength of penthesileia's limbs; dropped the great battle-axe from her nerveless hand; a mist of darkness overveiled her eyes, and anguish thrilled her soul. yet even so still drew she difficult breath, still dimly saw the hero, even now in act to drag her from the swift steed's back. confusedly she thought: "or shall i draw my mighty sword, and bide achilles' fiery onrush, or hastily cast me from my fleet horse down to earth, and kneel unto this godlike man, and with wild breath promise for ransoming great heaps of brass and gold, which pacify the hearts of victors never so athirst for blood, if haply so the murderous might of aeacus' son may hearken and may spare, or peradventure may compassionate my youth, and so vouchsafe me to behold mine home again?--for o, i long to live!" so surged the wild thoughts in her; but the gods ordained it otherwise. even now rushed on in terrible anger peleus' son: he thrust with sudden spear, and on its shaft impaled the body of her tempest-footed steed, even as a man in haste to sup might pierce flesh with the spit, above the glowing hearth to roast it, or as in a mountain-glade a hunter sends the shaft of death clear through the body of a stag with such winged speed that the fierce dart leaps forth beyond, to plunge into the tall stem of an oak or pine. so that death-ravening spear of peleus' son clear through the goodly steed rushed on, and pierced penthesileia. straightway fell she down into the dust of earth, the arms of death, in grace and comeliness fell, for naught of shame dishonoured her fair form. face down she lay on the long spear outgasping her last breath, stretched upon that fleet horse as on a couch; like some tall pine snapped by the icy mace of boreas, earth's forest-fosterling reared by a spring to stately height, amidst long mountain-glens, a glory of mother earth; so from the once fleet steed low fallen lay penthesileia, all her shattered strength brought down to this, and all her loveliness. now when the trojans saw the warrior-queen struck down in battle, ran through all their lines a shiver of panic. straightway to their walls turned they in flight, heart-agonized with grief. as when on the wide sea, 'neath buffetings of storm-blasts, castaways whose ship is wrecked escape, a remnant of a crew, forspent with desperate conflict with the cruel sea: late and at last appears the land hard by, appears a city: faint and weary-limbed with that grim struggle, through the surf they strain to land, sore grieving for the good ship lost, and shipmates whom the terrible surge dragged down to nether gloom; so, troyward as they fled from battle, all those trojans wept for her, the child of the resistless war-god, wept for friends who died in groan-resounding fight. then over her with scornful laugh the son of peleus vaunted: "in the dust lie there a prey to teeth of dogs, to ravens' beaks, thou wretched thing! who cozened thee to come forth against me? and thoughtest thou to fare home from the war alive, to bear with thee right royal gifts from priam the old king, thy guerdon for slain argives? ha, 'twas not the immortals who inspired thee with this thought, who know that i of heroes mightiest am, the danaans' light of safety, but a woe to trojans and to thee, o evil-starred! nay, but it was the darkness-shrouded fates and thine own folly of soul that pricked thee on to leave the works of women, and to fare to war, from which strong men shrink shuddering back." so spake he, and his ashen spear the son of peleus drew from that swift horse, and from penthesileia in death's agony. then steed and rider gasped their lives away slain by one spear. now from her head he plucked the helmet splendour-flashing like the beams of the great sun, or zeus' own glory-light. then, there as fallen in dust and blood she lay, rose, like the breaking of the dawn, to view 'neath dainty-pencilled brows a lovely face, lovely in death. the argives thronged around, and all they saw and marvelled, for she seemed like an immortal. in her armour there upon the earth she lay, and seemed the child of zeus, the tireless huntress artemis sleeping, what time her feet forwearied are with following lions with her flying shafts over the hills far-stretching. she was made a wonder of beauty even in her death by aphrodite glorious-crowned, the bride of the strong war-god, to the end that he, the son of noble peleus, might be pierced with the sharp arrow of repentant love. the warriors gazed, and in their hearts they prayed that fair and sweet like her their wives might seem, laid on the bed of love, when home they won. yea, and achilles' very heart was wrung with love's remorse to have slain a thing so sweet, who might have borne her home, his queenly bride, to chariot-glorious phthia; for she was flawless, a very daughter of the gods, divinely tall, and most divinely fair. then ares' heart was thrilled with grief and rage for his child slain. straight from olympus down he darted, swift and bright as thunderbolt terribly flashing from the mighty hand of zeus, far leaping o'er the trackless sea, or flaming o'er the land, while shuddereth all wide olympus as it passeth by. so through the quivering air with heart aflame swooped ares armour-clad, soon as he heard the dread doom of his daughter. for the gales, the north-wind's fleet-winged daughters, bare to him, as through the wide halls of the sky he strode, the tidings of the maiden's woeful end. soon as he heard it, like a tempest-blast down to the ridges of ida leapt he: quaked under his feet the long glens and ravines deep-scored, all ida's torrent-beds, and all far-stretching foot-hills. now had ares brought a day of mourning on the myrmidons, but zeus himself from far olympus sent mid shattering thunders terror of levin-bolts which thick and fast leapt through the welkin down before his feet, blazing with fearful flames. and ares saw, and knew the stormy threat of the mighty-thundering father, and he stayed his eager feet, now on the very brink of battle's turmoil. as when some huge crag thrust from a beetling cliff-brow by the winds and torrent rains, or lightning-lance of zeus, leaps like a wild beast, and the mountain-glens fling back their crashing echoes as it rolls in mad speed on, as with resistless swoop of bound on bound it rushes down, until it cometh to the levels of the plain, and there perforce its stormy flight is stayed; so ares, battle-eager son of zeus, was stayed, how loth soe'er; for all the gods to the ruler of the blessed needs must yield, seeing he sits high-throned above them all, clothed in his might unspeakable. yet still many a wild thought surged through ares' soul, urging him now to dread the terrible threat of cronos' wrathful son, and to return heavenward, and now to reck not of his sire, but with achilles' blood to stain those hands, the battle-tireless. at the last his heart remembered how that many and many a son of zeus himself in many a war had died, nor in their fall had zeus availed them aught. therefore he turned him from the argives--else, down smitten by the blasting thunderbolt, with titans in the nether gloom he had lain, who dared defy the eternal will of zeus. then did the warrior sons of argos strip with eager haste from corpses strown all round the blood-stained spoils. but ever peleus' son gazed, wild with all regret, still gazed on her, the strong, the beautiful, laid in the dust; and all his heart was wrung, was broken down with sorrowing love, deep, strong as he had known when that beloved friend patroclus died. loud jeered thersites, mocking to his face: "thou sorry-souled achilles! art not shamed to let some evil power beguile thine heart to pity of a pitiful amazon whose furious spirit purposed naught but ill to us and ours? ha, woman-mad art thou, and thy soul lusts for this thing, as she were some lady wise in household ways, with gifts and pure intent for honoured wedlock wooed! good had it been had her spear reached thine heart, the heart that sighs for woman-creatures still! thou carest not, unmanly-souled, not thou, for valour's glorious path, when once thine eye lights on a woman! sorry wretch, where now is all thy goodly prowess? where thy wit? and where the might that should beseem a king all-stainless? dost not know what misery this self-same woman-madness wrought for troy? nothing there is to men more ruinous than lust for woman's beauty; it maketh fools of wise men. but the toil of war attains renown. to him that is a hero indeed glory of victory and the war-god's works are sweet. 'tis but the battle-blencher craves the beauty and the bed of such as she!" so railed he long and loud: the mighty heart of peleus' son leapt into flame of wrath. a sudden buffet of his resistless hand smote 'neath the railer's ear, and all his teeth were dashed to the earth: he fell upon his face: forth of his lips the blood in torrent gushed: swift from his body fled the dastard soul of that vile niddering. achaea's sons rejoiced thereat, for aye he wont to rail on each and all with venomous gibes, himself a scandal and the shame of all the host. then mid the warrior argives cried a voice: "not good it is for baser men to rail on kings, or secretly or openly; for wrathful retribution swiftly comes. the lady of justice sits on high; and she who heapeth woe on woe on humankind, even ate, punisheth the shameless tongue." so mid the danaans cried a voice: nor yet within the mighty soul of peleus' son lulled was the storm of wrath, but fiercely he spake: "lie there in dust, thy follies all forgot! 'tis not for knaves to beard their betters: once thou didst provoke odysseus' steadfast soul, babbling with venomous tongue a thousand gibes, and didst escape with life; but thou hast found the son of peleus not so patient-souled, who with one only buffet from his hand unkennels thy dog's soul! a bitter doom hath swallowed thee: by thine own rascalry thy life is sped. hence from achaean men, and mouth out thy revilings midst the dead!" so spake the valiant-hearted aweless son of aeacus. but tydeus' son alone of all the argives was with anger stirred against achilles for thersites slain, seeing these twain were of the self-same blood, the one, proud tydeus' battle-eager son, the other, seed of godlike agrius: brother of noble oeneus agrius was; and oeneus in the danaan land begat tydeus the battle-eager, son to whom was stalwart diomedes. therefore wroth was he for slain thersites, yea, had raised against the son of peleus vengeful hands, except the noblest of aehaea's sons had thronged around him, and besought him sore, and held him back therefrom. with peleus' son also they pleaded; else those mighty twain, the mightiest of all argives, were at point to close with clash of swords, so stung were they with bitter wrath; yet hearkened they at last to prayers of comrades, and were reconciled. then of their pity did the atreid kings- for these too at the imperial loveliness of penthesileia marvelled--render up her body to the men of troy, to bear unto the burg of ilus far-renowned with all her armour. for a herald came asking this boon for priam; for the king longed with deep yearning of the heart to lay that battle-eager maiden, with her arms, and with her war-horse, in the great earth-mound of old laomedon. and so he heaped a high broad pyre without the city wall: upon the height thereof that warrior-queen they laid, and costly treasures did they heap around her, all that well beseems to burn around a mighty queen in battle slain. and so the fire-god's swift-upleaping might, the ravening flame, consumed her. all around the people stood on every hand, and quenched the pyre with odorous wine. then gathered they the bones, and poured sweet ointment over them, and laid them in a casket: over all shed they the rich fat of a heifer, chief among the herds that grazed on ida's slope. and, as for a beloved daughter, rang all round the trojan men's heart-stricken wail, as by the stately wall they buried her on an outstanding tower, beside the bones of old laomedon, a queen beside a king. this honour for the war-god's sake they rendered, and for penthesileia's own. and in the plain beside her buried they the amazons, even all that followed her to battle, and by argive spears were slain. for atreus' sons begrudged not these the boon of tear-besprinkled graves, but let their friends, the warrior trojans, draw their corpses forth, yea, and their own slain also, from amidst the swath of darts o'er that grim harvest-field. wrath strikes not at the dead: pitied are foes when life has fled, and left them foes no more. far off across the plain the while uprose smoke from the pyres whereon the argives laid the many heroes overthrown and slain by trojan hands what time the sword devoured; and multitudinous lamentation wailed over the perished. but above the rest mourned they o'er brave podarces, who in fight was no less mighty than his hero-brother protesilaus, he who long ago fell, slain of hector: so podarces now, struck down by penthesileia's spear, hath cast over all argive hearts the pall of grief. wherefore apart from him they laid in clay the common throng of slain; but over him toiling they heaped an earth-mound far-descried in memory of a warrior aweless-souled. and in a several pit withal they thrust the niddering thersites' wretched corse. then to the ships, acclaiming aeacus' son, returned they all. but when the radiant day had plunged beneath the ocean-stream, and night, the holy, overspread the face of earth, then in the rich king agamemnon's tent feasted the might of peleus' son, and there sat at the feast those other mighty ones all through the dark, till rose the dawn divine. book ii how memnon, son of the dawn, for troy's sake fell in the battle. when o'er the crests of the far-echoing hills the splendour of the tireless-racing sun poured o'er the land, still in their tents rejoiced achaea's stalwart sons, and still acclaimed achilles the resistless. but in troy still mourned her people, still from all her towers seaward they strained their gaze; for one great fear gripped all their hearts--to see that terrible man at one bound overleap their high-built wall, then smite with the sword all people therewithin, and burn with fire fanes, palaces, and homes. and old thymoetes spake to the anguished ones: "friends, i have lost hope: mine heart seeth not or help, or bulwark from the storm of war, now that the aweless hector, who was once troy's mighty champion, is in dust laid low. not all his might availed to escape the fates, but overborne he was by achilles' hands, the hands that would, i verily deem, bear down a god, if he defied him to the fight, even as he overthrew this warrior-queen penthesileia battle-revelling, from whom all other argives shrank in fear. ah, she was marvellous! when at the first i looked on her, meseemed a blessed one from heaven had come down hitherward to bring light to our darkness--ah, vain hope, vain dream! go to, let us take counsel, what to do were best for us. or shall we still maintain a hopeless fight against these ruthless foes, or shall we straightway flee a city doomed? ay, doomed!--for never more may we withstand argives in fighting field, when in the front of battle pitiless achilles storms." then spake laomedon's son, the ancient king: "nay, friend, and all ye other sons of troy, and ye our strong war-helpers, flinch we not faint-hearted from defence of fatherland! yet let us go not forth the city-gates to battle with yon foe. nay, from our towers and from our ramparts let us make defence, till our new champion come, the stormy heart of memnon. lo, he cometh, leading on hosts numberless, aethiopia's swarthy sons. by this, i trow, he is nigh unto our gates; for long ago, in sore distress of soul, i sent him urgent summons. yea, and he promised me, gladly promised me, to come to troy, and make all end of all our woes. and now, i trust, he is nigh. let us endure a little longer then; for better far it is like brave men in the fight to die than flee, and live in shame mid alien folk." so spake the old king; but polydamas, the prudent-hearted, thought not good to war thus endlessly, and spake his patriot rede: "if memnon have beyond all shadow of doubt pledged him to thrust dire ruin far from us, then do i gainsay not that we await the coming of that godlike man within our walls--yet, ah, mine heart misgives me, lest, though he with all his warriors come, he come but to his death, and unto thousands more, our people, nought but misery come thereof; for terribly against us leaps the storm of the achaeans' might. but now, go to, let us not flee afar from this our troy to wander to some alien land, and there, in the exile's pitiful helplessness, endure all flouts and outrage; nor in our own land abide we till the storm of argive war o'erwhelm us. nay, even now, late though it be, better it were for us to render back unto the danaans helen and her wealth, even all that glory of women brought with her from sparta, and add other treasure--yea, repay it twofold, so to save our troy and our own souls, while yet the spoiler's hand is laid not on our substance, and while yet troy hath not sunk in gulfs of ravening flame. i pray you, take to heart my counsel! none shall, well i wot, be given to trojan men better than this. ah, would that long ago hector had hearkened to my pleading, when i fain had kept him in the ancient home!" so spake polydamas the noble and strong, and all the listening trojans in their hearts approved; yet none dared utter openly the word, for all with trembling held in awe their prince and helen, though for her sole sake daily they died. but on that noble man turned paris, and reviled him to his face: "thou dastard battle-blencher polydamas! not in thy craven bosom beats a heart that bides the fight, but only fear and panic. yet dost thou vaunt thee--quotha!--still our best in counsel!--no man's soul is base as thine! go to, thyself shrink shivering from the strife! cower, coward, in thine halls! but all the rest, we men, will still go armour-girt, until we wrest from this our truceless war a peace that shall not shame us! 'tis with travail and toil of strenuous war that brave men win renown; but flight?--weak women choose it, and young babes! thy spirit is like to theirs. no whit i trust thee in the day of battle--thee, the man who maketh faint the hearts of all the host!" so fiercely he reviled: polydamas wrathfully answered; for he shrank not, he, from answering to his face. a caitiff hound, a reptile fool, is he who fawns on men before their faces, while his heart is black with malice, and, when they be gone, his tongue backbites them. openly polydamas flung back upon the prince his taunt and scoff: "o thou of living men most mischievous! thy valour--quotha!--brings us misery! thine heart endures, and will endure, that strife should have no limit, save in utter ruin of fatherland and people for thy sake! ne'er may such wantwit valour craze my soul! be mine to cherish wise discretion aye, a warder that shall keep mine house in peace." indignantly he spake, and paris found no word to answer him, for conscience woke remembrance of all woes he had brought on troy, and should bring; for his passion-fevered heart would rather hail quick death than severance from helen the divinely fair, although for her sake was it that the sons of troy even then were gazing from their towers to see the argives and achilles drawing nigh. but no long time thereafter came to them memnon the warrior-king, and brought with him a countless host of swarthy aethiops. from all the streets of troy the trojans flocked glad-eyed to gaze on him, as seafarers, with ruining tempest utterly forspent, see through wide-parting clouds the radiance of the eternal-wheeling northern wain; so joyed the troyfolk as they thronged around, and more than all laomedon's son, for now leapt in his heart a hope, that yet the ships might by those aethiop men be burned with fire; so giantlike their king was, and themselves so huge a host, and so athirst for fight. therefore with all observance welcomed he the strong son of the lady of the dawn with goodly gifts and with abundant cheer. so at the banquet king and hero sat and talked, this telling of the danaan chiefs, and all the woes himself had suffered, that telling of that strange immortality by the dawn-goddess given to his sire, telling of the unending flow and ebb of the sea-mother, of the sacred flood of ocean fathomless-rolling, of the bounds of earth that wearieth never of her travail, of where the sun-steeds leap from orient waves, telling withal of all his wayfaring from ocean's verge to priam's wall, and spurs of ida. yea, he told how his strong hands smote the great army of the solymi who barred his way, whose deed presumptuous brought upon their own heads crushing ruin and woe. so told he all that marvellous tale, and told of countless tribes and nations seen of him. and priam heard, and ever glowed his heart within him; and the old lips answering spake: "memnon, the gods are good, who have vouchsafed to me to look upon thine host, and thee here in mine halls. o that their grace would so crown this their boon, that i might see my foes all thrust to one destruction by thy spears. that well may be, for marvellous-like art thou to some invincible deathless one, yea, more than any earthly hero. wherefore thou, i trust, shalt hurl wild havoc through their host. but now, i pray thee, for this day do thou cheer at my feast thine heart, and with the morn shalt thou go forth to battle worthy of thee." then in his hands a chalice deep and wide he raised, and memnon in all love he pledged in that huge golden cup, a gift of gods; for this the cunning god-smith brought to zeus, his masterpiece, what time the mighty in power to hephaestus gave for bride the cyprian queen; and zeus on dardanus his godlike son bestowed it, he on erichthonius; erichthonius to tros the great of heart gave it, and he with all his treasure-store bequeathed it unto ilus, and he gave that wonder to laomedon, and he to priam, who had thought to leave the same to his own son. fate ordered otherwise. and memnon clasped his hands about that cup so peerless-beautiful, and all his heart marvelled; and thus he spake unto the king: "beseems not with great swelling words to vaunt amidst the feast, and lavish promises, but rather quietly to eat in hall, and to devise deeds worthy. whether i be brave and strong, or whether i be not, battle, wherein a man's true might is seen, shall prove to thee. now would i rest, nor drink the long night through. the battle-eager spirit by measureless wine and lack of sleep is dulled." marvelled at him the old king, and he said: "as seems thee good touching the banquet, do after thy pleasure. i, when thou art loth, will not constrain thee. yea, unmeet it is to hold back him who fain would leave the board, or hurry from one's halls who fain would stay. so is the good old law with all true men." then rose that champion from the board, and passed thence to his sleep--his last! and with him went all others from the banquet to their rest: and gentle sleep slid down upon them soon. but in the halls of zeus, the lightning-lord, feasted the gods the while, and cronos' son, all-father, of his deep foreknowledge spake amidst them of the issue of the strife: "be it known unto you all, to-morn shall bring by yonder war affliction swift and sore; for many mighty horses shall ye see in either host beside their chariots slain, and many heroes perishing. therefore ye remember these my words, howe'er ye grieve for dear ones. let none clasp my knees in prayer, since even to us relentless are the fates." so warned he them, which knew before, that all should from the battle stand aside, howe'er heart-wrung; that none, petitioning for a son or dear one, should to olympus vainly come. so, at that warning of the thunderer, the son of cronos, all they steeled their hearts to bear, and spake no word against their king; for in exceeding awe they stood of him. yet to their several mansions and their rest with sore hearts went they. o'er their deathless eyes the blessing-bringer sleep his light veils spread. when o'er precipitous crests of mountain-walls leapt up broad heaven the bright morning-star who rouseth to their toils from slumber sweet the binders of the sheaf, then his last sleep unclasped the warrior-son of her who brings light to the world, the child of mists of night. now swelled his mighty heart with eagerness to battle with the foe forthright. and dawn with most reluctant feet began to climb heaven's broad highway. then did the trojans gird their battle-harness on; then armed themselves the aethiop men, and all the mingled tribes of those war-helpers that from many lands to priam's aid were gathered. forth the gates swiftly they rushed, like darkly lowering clouds which cronos' son, when storm is rolling up, herdeth together through the welkin wide. swiftly the whole plain filled. onward they streamed like harvest-ravaging locusts drifting on in fashion of heavy-brooding rain-clouds o'er wide plains of earth, an irresistible host bringing wan famine on the sons of men; so in their might and multitude they went. the city streets were all too strait for them marching: upsoared the dust from underfoot. from far the argives gazed, and marvelling saw their onrush, but with speed arrayed their limbs in brass, and in the might of peleus' son put their glad trust. amidst them rode he on like to a giant titan, glorying in steeds and chariot, while his armour flashed splendour around in sudden lightning-gleams. it was as when the sun from utmost bounds of earth-encompassing ocean comes, and brings light to the world, and flings his splendour wide through heaven, and earth and air laugh all around. so glorious, mid the argives peleus' son rode onward. mid the trojans rode the while memnon the hero, even such to see as ares furious-hearted. onward swept the eager host arrayed about their lord. then in the grapple of war on either side closed the long lines, trojan and danaan; but chief in prowess still the aethiops were. crashed they together as when surges meet on the wild sea, when, in a day of storm, from every quarter winds to battle rush. foe hurled at foe the ashen spear, and slew: screams and death-groans went up like roaring fire. as when down-thundering torrents shout and rave on-pouring seaward, when the madding rains stream from god's cisterns, when the huddling clouds are hurled against each other ceaselessly, and leaps their fiery breath in flashes forth; so 'neath the fighters' trampling feet the earth thundered, and leapt the terrible battle-yell through frenzied air, for mad the war-cries were. for firstfruits of death's harvest peleus' son slew thalius and mentes nobly born, men of renown, and many a head beside dashed he to dust. as in its furious swoop a whirlwind shakes dark chasms underground, and earth's foundations crumble and melt away around the deep roots of the shuddering world, so the ranks crumbled in swift doom to the dust before the spear and fury of peleus's son. but on the other side the hero child of the dawn-goddess slew the argive men, like to a baleful doom which bringeth down on men a grim and ghastly pestilence. first slew he pheron; for the bitter spear plunged through his breast, and down on him he hurled goodly ereuthus, battle-revellers both, dwellers in thryus by alpheus' streams, which followed nestor to the god-built burg of ilium. but when he had laid these low, against the son of neleus pressed he on eager to slay. godlike antilochus strode forth to meet him, sped the long spear's flight, yet missed him, for a little he swerved, but slew his aethiop comrade, son of pyrrhasus. wroth for his fall, against antilochus he leapt, as leaps a lion mad of mood upon a boar, the beast that flincheth not from fight with man or brute, whose charge is a flash of lightning; so was his swift leap. his foe antilochus caught a huge stone from the ground, hurled, smote him; but unshaken abode his strength, for the strong helm-crest fenced his head from death; but rang the morion round his brows. his heart kindled with terrible fury at the blow more than before against antilochus. like seething cauldron boiled his maddened might. he stabbed, for all his cunning of fence, the son of nestor above the breast; the crashing spear plunged to the heart, the spot of speediest death. then upon all the danaans at his fall came grief; but anguish-stricken was the heart of nestor most of all, to see his child slain in his sight; for no more bitter pang smiteth the heart of man than when a son perishes, and his father sees him die. therefore, albeit unused to melting mood, his soul was torn with agony for the son by black death slain. a wild cry hastily to thrasymedes did he send afar: "hither to me, thrasymedes war-renowned! help me to thrust back from thy brother's corse, yea, from mine hapless son, his murderer, that so ourselves may render to our dead all dues of mourning. if thou flinch for fear, no son of mine art thou, nor of the line of periclymenus, who dared withstand hercules' self. come, to the battle-toil! for grim necessity oftentimes inspires the very coward with courage of despair." then at his cry that brother's heart was stung with bitter grief. swift for his help drew nigh phereus, on whom for his great prince's fall came anguish. charged these warriors twain to face strong memnon in the gory strife. as when two hunters 'mid a forest's mountain-folds, eager to take the prey, rush on to meet a wild boar or a bear, with hearts afire to slay him, but in furious mood he leaps on them, and holds at bay the might of men; so swelled the heart of memnon. nigh drew they, yet vainly essayed to slay him, as they hurled the long spears, but the lances glanced aside far from his flesh: the dawn-queen turned them thence. yet fell their spears not vainly to the ground: the lance of fiery-hearted phereus, winged with eager speed, dealt death to meges' son, polymnius: laomedon was slain by the wrath of nestor's son for a brother dead, the dear one memnon slew in battle-rout, and whom the slayer's war-unwearied hands now stripped of his all-brazen battle-gear, nought recking, he, of thrasymedes' might, nor of stout phereus, who were unto him but weaklings. a great lion seemed he there standing above a hart, as jackals they, that, howso hungry, dare not come too nigh. but hard thereby the father gazed thereon in agony, and cried the rescue-cry to other his war-comrades for their aid against the foe. himself too burned to fight from his war-car; for yearning for the dead goaded him to the fray beyond his strength. ay, and himself had been on his dear son laid, numbered with the dead, had not the voice of memnon stayed him even in act to rush upon him, for he reverenced in his heart the white hairs of an age-mate of his sire: "ancient," he cried, "it were my shame to fight. with one so much mine elder: i am not blind unto honour. verily i weened that this was some young warrior, when i saw thee facing thus the foe. my bold heart hoped for contest worthy of mine hand and spear. nay, draw thou back afar from battle-toil and bitter death. go, lest, how loth soe'er, i smite thee of sore need. nay, fall not thou beside thy son, against a mightier man fighting, lest men with folly thee should charge, for folly it is that braves o'ermastering might." he spake, and answered him that warrior old: "nay, memnon, vain was that last word of thine. none would name fool the father who essayed, battling with foes for his son's sake, to thrust the ruthless slayer back from that dear corpse, but ah that yet my strength were whole in me, that thou might'st know my spear! now canst thou vaunt proudly enow: a young man's heart is bold and light his wit. uplifted is thy soul and vain thy speech. if in my strength of youth thou hadst met me--ha, thy friends had not rejoiced, for all thy might! but me the grievous weight of age bows down, like an old lion whom a cur may boldly drive back from the fold, for that he cannot, in his wrath's despite, maintain his own cause, being toothless now, and strengthless, and his strong heart tamed by time. so well the springs of olden strength no more now in my breast. yet am i stronger still than many men; my grey hairs yield to few that have within them all the strength of youth." so drew he back a little space, and left lying in dust his son, since now no more lived in the once lithe limbs the olden strength, for the years' weight lay heavy on his head. back leapt thrasymedes likewise, spearman good, and battle-eager phereus, and the rest their comrades; for that slaughter-dealing man pressed hard on them. as when from mountains high a shouting river with wide-echoing din sweeps down its fathomless whirlpools through the gloom, when god with tumult of a mighty storm hath palled the sky in cloud from verge to verge, when thunders crash all round, when thick and fast gleam lightnings from the huddling clouds, when fields are flooded as the hissing rain descends, and all the air is filled with awful roar of torrents pouring down the hill-ravines; so memnon toward the shores of hellespont before him hurled the argives, following hard behind them, slaughtering ever. many a man fell in the dust, and left his life in blood 'neath aethiop hands. stained was the earth with gore as danaans died. exulted memnon's soul as on the ranks of foemen ever he rushed, and heaped with dead was all the plain of troy. and still from fight refrained he not; he hoped to be a light of safety unto troy and bane to danaans. but all the while stood baleful doom beside him, and spurred on to strife, with flattering smile. to right, to left his stalwart helpers wrought in battle-toil, alcyoneus and nychius, and the son of asius furious-souled; meneclus' spear, clydon and alexippus, yea, a host eager to chase the foe, men who in fight quit them like men, exulting in their king. then, as meneclus on the danaans charged, the son of neleus slew him. wroth for his friend, whole throngs of foes fierce-hearted memnon slew. as when a hunter midst the mountains drives swift deer within the dark lines of his toils- the eager ring of beaters closing in presses the huddled throng into the snares of death: the dogs are wild with joy of the chase ceaselessly giving tongue, the while his darts leap winged with death on brocket and on hind; so memnon slew and ever slew: his men rejoiced, the while in panic stricken rout before that glorious man the argives fled. as when from a steep mountain's precipice-brow leaps a huge crag, which all-resistless zeus by stroke of thunderbolt hath hurled from the crest; crash oakwood copses, echo long ravines, shudders the forest to its rattle and roar, and flocks therein and herds and wild things flee scattering, as bounding, whirling, it descends with deadly pitiless onrush; so his foes fled from the lightning-flash of memnon's spear. then to the side of aeacus' mighty son came nestor. anguished for his son he cried: "achilles, thou great bulwark of the greeks, slain is my child! the armour of my dead hath memnon, and i fear me lest his corse be cast a prey to dogs. haste to his help! true friend is he who still remembereth a friend though slain, and grieves for one no more." achilles heard; his heart was thrilled with grief: he glanced across the rolling battle, saw memnon, saw where in throngs the argives fell beneath his spear. forthright he turned away from where the rifted ranks of troy fell fast before his hands, and, thirsting for the fight, wroth for antilochus and the others slain, came face to face with memnon. in his hands that godlike hero caught up from the ground a stone, a boundary-mark 'twixt fields of wheat, and hurled. down on the shield of peleus' son it crashed. but he, the invincible, shrank not before the huge rock-shard, but, thrusting out his long lance, rushed to close with him, afoot, for his steeds stayed behind the battle-rout. on the right shoulder above the shield he smote and staggered him; but he, despite the wound, fought on with heart unquailing. swiftly he thrust and pricked with his strong spear achilles' arm. forth gushed the blood: rejoicing with vain joy to aeacus' son with arrogant words he cried: "now shalt thou in thy death fill up, i trow, thy dark doom, overmastered by mine hands. thou shalt not from this fray escape alive! fool, wherefore hast thou ruthlessly destroyed trojans, and vaunted thee the mightiest man of men, a deathless nereid's son? ha, now thy doom hath found thee! of birth divine am i, the dawn-queen's mighty son, nurtured afar by lily-slender hesperid maids, beside the ocean-river. therefore not from thee nor from grim battle shrink i, knowing well how far my goddess-mother doth transcend a nereid, whose child thou vauntest thee. to gods and men my mother bringeth light; on her depends the issue of all things, works great and glorious in olympus wrought whereof comes blessing unto men. but thine- she sits in barren crypts of brine: she dwells glorying mid dumb sea-monsters and mid fish, deedless, unseen! nothing i reck of her, nor rank her with the immortal heavenly ones." in stern rebuke spake aeacus' aweless son: "memnon, how wast thou so distraught of wit that thou shouldst face me, and to fight defy me, who in might, in blood, in stature far surpass thee? from supremest zeus i trace my glorious birth; and from the strong sea-god nereus, begetter of the maids of the sea, the nereids, honoured of the olympian gods. and chiefest of them all is thetis, wise with wisdom world-renowned; for in her bowers she sheltered dionysus, chased by might of murderous lycurgus from the earth. yea, and the cunning god-smith welcomed she within her mansion, when from heaven he fell. ay, and the lightning-lord she once released from bonds. the all-seeing dwellers in the sky remember all these things, and reverence my mother thetis in divine olympus. ay, that she is a goddess shalt thou know when to thine heart the brazen spear shall pierce sped by my might. patroclus' death i avenged on hector, and antilochus on thee will i avenge. no weakling's friend thou hast slain! but why like witless children stand we here babbling our parents' fame and our own deeds? now is the hour when prowess shall decide." then from the sheath he flashed his long keen sword, and memnon his; and swiftly in fiery fight closed they, and rained the never-ceasing blows upon the bucklers which with craft divine hephaestus' self had fashioned. once and again clashed they together, and their cloudy crests touched, mingling all their tossing storm of hair. and zeus, for that he loved them both, inspired with prowess each, and mightier than their wont he made them, made them tireless, nothing like to men, but gods: and gloated o'er the twain the queen of strife. in eager fury these thrust swiftly out the spear, with fell intent to reach the throat 'twixt buckler-rim and helm, thrust many a time and oft, and now would aim the point beneath the shield, above the greave, now close beneath the corslet curious-wrought that lapped the stalwart frame: hard, fast they lunged, and on their shoulders clashed the arms divine. roared to the very heavens the battle-shout of warring men, of trojans, aethiops, and argives mighty-hearted, while the dust rolled up from 'neath their feet, tossed to the sky in stress of battle-travail great and strong. as when a mist enshrouds the hills, what time roll up the rain-clouds, and the torrent-beds roar as they fill with rushing floods, and howls each gorge with fearful voices; shepherds quake to see the waters' downrush and the mist, screen dear to wolves and all the wild fierce things nursed in the wide arms of the forest; so around the fighters' feet the choking dust hung, hiding the fair splendour of the sun and darkening all the heaven. sore distressed with dust and deadly conflict were the folk. then with a sudden hand some blessed one swept the dust-pall aside; and the gods saw the deadly fates hurling the charging lines together, in the unending wrestle locked of that grim conflict, saw where never ceased ares from hideous slaughter, saw the earth crimsoned all round with rushing streams of blood, saw where dark havoc gloated o'er the scene, saw the wide plain with corpses heaped, even all bounded 'twixt simois and xanthus, where they sweep from ida down to hellespont. but when long lengthened out the conflict was of those two champions, and the might of both in that strong tug and strain was equal-matched, then, gazing from olympus' far-off heights, the gods joyed, some in the invincible son of peleus, others in the goodly child of old tithonus and the queen of dawn. thundered the heavens on high from east to west, and roared the sea from verge to verge, and rocked the dark earth 'neath the heroes' feet, and quaked proud nereus' daughters all round thetis thronged in grievous fear for mighty achilles' sake; and trembled for her son the child of the mist as in her chariot through the sky she rode. marvelled the daughters of the sun, who stood near her, around that wondrous splendour-ring traced for the race-course of the tireless sun by zeus, the limit of all nature's life and death, the dally round that maketh up the eternal circuit of the rolling years. and now amongst the blessed bitter feud had broken out; but by behest of zeus the twin fates suddenly stood beside these twain, one dark--her shadow fell on memnon's heart; one bright--her radiance haloed peleus' son. and with a great cry the immortals saw, and filled with sorrow they of the one part were, they of the other with triumphant joy. still in the midst of blood-stained battle-rout those heroes fought, unknowing of the fates now drawn so nigh, but each at other hurled his whole heart's courage, all his bodily might. thou hadst said that in the strife of that dread day huge tireless giants or strong titans warred, so fiercely blazed the wildfire of their strife, now, when they clashed with swords, now when they leapt hurling huge stones. nor either would give back before the hail of blows, nor quailed. they stood like storm-tormented headlands steadfast, clothed with might past words, unearthly; for the twain alike could boast their lineage of high zeus. therefore 'twixt these enyo lengthened out the even-balanced strife, while ever they in that grim wrestle strained their uttermost, they and their dauntless comrades, round their kings with ceaseless fury toiling, till their spears stood shivered all in shields of warriors slain, and of the fighters woundless none remained; but from all limbs streamed down into the dust the blood and sweat of that unresting strain of fight, and earth was hidden with the dead, as heaven is hidden with clouds when meets the sun the goat-star, and the shipman dreads the deep. as charged the lines, the snorting chariot-steeds trampled the dead, as on the myriad leaves ye trample in the woods at entering-in of winter, when the autumn-tide is past. still mid the corpses and the blood fought on those glorious sons of gods, nor ever ceased from wrath of fight. but eris now inclined the fatal scales of battle, which no more were equal-poised. beneath the breast-bone then of godlike memnon plunged achilles' sword; clear through his body all the dark-blue blade leapt: suddenly snapped the silver cord of life. down in a pool of blood he fell, and clashed his massy armour, and earth rang again. then turned to flight his comrades panic-struck, and of his arms the myrmidons stripped the dead, while fled the trojans, and achilles chased, as whirlwind swift and mighty to destroy. then groaned the dawn, and palled herself in clouds, and earth was darkened. at their mother's hest all the light breathings of the dawn took hands, and slid down one long stream of sighing wind to priam's plain, and floated round the dead, and softly, swiftly caught they up, and bare through silver mists the dawn-queen's son, with hearts sore aching for their brother's fall, while moaned around them all the air. as on they passed, fell many blood-gouts from those pierced limbs down to the earth, and these were made a sign to generations yet to be. the gods gathered them up from many lands, and made thereof a far-resounding river, named of all that dwell beneath long ida's flanks paphlagoneion. as its waters flow 'twixt fertile acres, once a year they turn to blood, when comes the woeful day whereon died memnon. thence a sick and choking reek steams: thou wouldst say that from a wound unhealed corrupting humours breathed an evil stench. ay, so the gods ordained: but now flew on bearing dawn's mighty son the rushing winds skimming earth's face and palled about with night. nor were his aethiopian comrades left to wander of their king forlorn: a god suddenly winged those eager souls with speed such as should soon be theirs for ever, changed to flying fowl, the children of the air. wailing their king in the winds' track they sped. as when a hunter mid the forest-brakes is by a boar or grim-jawed lion slain, and now his sorrowing friends take up the corse, and bear it heavy-hearted; and the hounds follow low-whimpering, pining for their lord in that disastrous hunting lost; so they left far behind that stricken field of blood, and fast they followed after those swift winds with multitudinous moaning, veiled in mist unearthly. trojans over all the plain and danaans marvelled, seeing that great host vanishing with their king. all hearts stood still in dumb amazement. but the tireless winds sighing set hero memnon's giant corpse down by the deep flow of aesopus' stream, where is a fair grove of the bright-haired nymphs, the which round his long barrow afterward aesopus' daughters planted, screening it with many and manifold trees: and long and loud wailed those immortals, chanting his renown, the son of the dawn-goddess splendour-throned. now sank the sun: the lady of the morn wailing her dear child from the heavens came down. twelve maidens shining-tressed attended her, the warders of the high paths of the sun for ever circling, warders of the night and dawn, and each world-ordinance framed of zeus, around whose mansion's everlasting doors from east to west they dance, from west to east, whirling the wheels of harvest-laden years, while rolls the endless round of winter's cold, and flowery spring, and lovely summer-tide, and heavy-clustered autumn. these came down from heaven, for memnon wailing wild and high; and mourned with these the pleiads. echoed round far-stretching mountains, and aesopus' stream. ceaseless uprose the keen, and in their midst, fallen on her son and clasping, wailed the dawn; "dead art thou, dear, dear child, and thou hast clad thy mother with a pall of grief. oh, i, now thou art slain, will not endure to light the immortal heavenly ones! no, i will plunge down to the dread depths of the underworld, where thy lone spirit flitteth to and fro, and will to blind night leave earth, sky, and sea, till chaos and formless darkness brood o'er all, that cronos' son may also learn what means anguish of heart. for not less worship-worthy than nereus' child, by zeus's ordinance, am i, who look on all things, i, who bring all to their consummation. recklessly my light zeus now despiseth! therefore i will pass into the darkness. let him bring up to olympus thetis from the sea to hold for him light forth to gods and men! my sad soul loveth darkness more than day, lest i pour light upon thy slayer's head: thus as she cried, the tears ran down her face immortal, like a river brimming aye: drenched was the dark earth round the corse. the night grieved in her daughter's anguish, and the heaven drew over all his stars a veil of mist and cloud, of love unto the lady of light. meanwhile within their walls the trojan folk for memnon sorrowed sore, with vain regret yearning for that lost king and all his host. nor greatly joyed the argives, where they lay camped in the open plain amidst the dead. there, mingled with achilles' praise, uprose wails for antilochus: joy clasped hands with grief. all night in groans and sighs most pitiful the dawn-queen lay: a sea of darkness moaned around her. of the dayspring nought she recked: she loathed olympus' spaces. at her side fretted and whinnied still her fleetfoot steeds, trampling the strange earth, gazing at their queen grief-stricken, yearning for the fiery course. suddenly crashed the thunder of the wrath of zeus; rocked round her all the shuddering earth, and on immortal eos trembling came. swiftly the dark-skinned aethiops from her sight buried their lord lamenting. as they wailed unceasingly, the dawn-queen lovely-eyed changed them to birds sweeping through air around the barrow of the mighty dead. and these still do the tribes of men "the memnons" call; and still with wailing cries they dart and wheel above their king's tomb, and they scatter dust down on his grave, still shrill the battle-cry, in memory of memnon, each to each. but he in hades' mansions, or perchance amid the blessed on the elysian plain, laugheth. divine dawn comforteth her heart beholding them: but theirs is toil of strife unending, till the weary victors strike the vanquished dead, or one and all fill up the measure of their doom around his grave. so by command of eos, lady of light, the swift birds dree their weird. but dawn divine now heavenward soared with the all-fostering hours, who drew her to zeus' threshold, sorely loth, yet conquered by their gentle pleadings, such as salve the bitterest grief of broken hearts. nor the dawn-queen forgat her daily course, but quailed before the unbending threat of zeus, of whom are all things, even all comprised within the encircling sweep of ocean's stream, earth and the palace-dome of burning stars. before her went her pleiad-harbingers, then she herself flung wide the ethereal gates, and, scattering spray of splendour, flashed there-through. book iii how by the shaft of a god laid low was hero achilles. when shone the light of dawn the splendour-throned, then to the ships the pylian spearmen bore antilochus' corpse, sore sighing for their prince, and by the hellespont they buried him with aching hearts. around him groaning stood the battle-eager sons of argives, all, of love for nestor, shrouded o'er with grief. but that grey hero's heart was nowise crushed by sorrow; for the wise man's soul endures bravely, and cowers not under affliction's stroke. but peleus' son, wroth for antilochus his dear friend, armed for vengeance terrible upon the trojans. yea, and these withal, despite their dread of mighty achilles' spear, poured battle-eager forth their gates, for now the fates with courage filled their breasts, of whom many were doomed to hades to descend, whence there is no return, thrust down by hands of aeacus' son, who also was foredoomed to perish that same day by priam's wall. swift met the fronts of conflict: all the tribes of troy's host, and the battle-biding greeks, afire with that new-kindled fury of war. then through the foe the son of peleus made wide havoc: all around the earth was drenched with gore, and choked with corpses were the streams of simois and xanthus. still he chased, still slaughtered, even to the city's walls; for panic fell on all the host. and now all had he slain, had dashed the gates to earth, rending them from their hinges, or the bolts, hurling himself against them, had he snapped, and for the danaans into priam's burg had made a way, had utterly destroyed that goodly town--but now was phoebus wroth against him with grim fury, when he saw those countless troops of heroes slain of him. down from olympus with a lion-leap he came: his quiver on his shoulders lay, and shafts that deal the wounds incurable. facing achilles stood he; round him clashed quiver and arrows; blazed with quenchless flame his eyes, and shook the earth beneath his feet. then with a terrible shout the great god cried, so to turn back from war achilles awed by the voice divine, and save from death the trojans: "back from the trojans, peleus' son! beseems not that longer thou deal death unto thy foes, lest an olympian god abase thy pride." but nothing quailed the hero at the voice immortal, for that round him even now hovered the unrelenting fates. he recked naught of the god, and shouted his defiance. "phoebus, why dost thou in mine own despite stir me to fight with gods, and wouldst protect the arrogant trojans? heretofore hast thou by thy beguiling turned me from the fray, when from destruction thou at the first didst save hector, whereat the trojans all through troy exulted. nay, thou get thee back: return unto the mansion of the blessed, lest i smite thee--ay, immortal though thou be!" then on the god he turned his back, and sped after the trojans fleeing cityward, and harried still their flight; but wroth at heart thus phoebus spake to his indignant soul: "out on this man! he is sense-bereft! but now not zeus himself nor any other power shall save this madman who defies the gods!" from mortal sight he vanished into cloud, and cloaked with mist a baleful shaft he shot which leapt to achilles' ankle: sudden pangs with mortal sickness made his whole heart faint. he reeled, and like a tower he fell, that falls smit by a whirlwind when an earthquake cleaves a chasm for rushing blasts from underground; so fell the goodly form of aeacus' son. he glared, a murderous glance, to right, to left, [upon the trojans, and a terrible threat] shouted, a threat that could not be fulfilled: "who shot at me a stealthy-smiting shaft? let him but dare to meet me face to face! so shall his blood and all his bowels gush out about my spear, and he be hellward sped! i know that none can meet me man to man and quell in fight--of earth-born heroes none, though such an one should bear within his breast a heart unquailing, and have thews of brass. but dastards still in stealthy ambush lurk for lives of heroes. let him face me then!- ay! though he be a god whose anger burns against the danaans! yea, mine heart forebodes that this my smiter was apollo, cloaked in deadly darkness. so in days gone by my mother told me how that by his shafts i was to die before the scaean gates a piteous death. her words were not vain words." then with unflinching hands from out the wound incurable he drew the deadly shaft in agonized pain. forth gushed the blood; his heart waxed faint beneath the shadow of coming doom. then in indignant wrath he hurled from him the arrow: a sudden gust of wind swept by, and caught it up, and, even as he trod zeus' threshold, to apollo gave it back; for it beseemed not that a shaft divine, sped forth by an immortal, should be lost. he unto high olympus swiftly came, to the great gathering of immortal gods, where all assembled watched the war of men, these longing for the trojans' triumph, those for danaan victory; so with diverse wills watched they the strife, the slayers and the slain. him did the bride of zeus behold, and straight upbraided with exceeding bitter words: "what deed of outrage, phoebus, hast thou done this day, forgetful of that day whereon to godlike peleus' spousals gathered all the immortals? yea, amidst the feasters thou sangest how thetis silver-footed left the sea's abysses to be peleus' bride; and as thou harpedst all earth's children came to hearken, beasts and birds, high craggy hills, rivers, and all deep-shadowed forests came. all this hast thou forgotten, and hast wrought a ruthless deed, hast slain a godlike man, albeit thou with other gods didst pour the nectar, praying that he might be the son by thetis given to peleus. but that prayer hast thou forgotten, favouring the folk of tyrannous laomedon, whose kine thou keptest. he, a mortal, did despite to thee, the deathless! o, thou art wit-bereft! thou favourest troy, thy sufferings all forgot. thou wretch, and doth thy false heart know not this, what man is an offence, and meriteth suffering, and who is honoured of the gods? ever achilles showed us reverence--yea, was of our race. ha, but the punishment of troy, i ween, shall not be lighter, though aeacus' son have fallen; for his son right soon shall come from scyros to the war to help the argive men, no less in might than was his sire, a bane to many a foe. but thou--thou for the trojans dost not care, but for his valour enviedst peleus' son, seeing he was the mightest of all men. thou fool! how wilt thou meet the nereid's eyes, when she shall stand in zeus' hall midst the gods, who praised thee once, and loved as her own son?" so hera spake, in bitterness of soul upbraiding, but he answered her not a word, of reverence for his mighty father's bride; nor could he lift his eyes to meet her eyes, but sat abashed, aloof from all the gods eternal, while in unforgiving wrath scowled on him all the immortals who maintained the danaans' cause; but such as fain would bring triumph to troy, these with exultant hearts extolled him, hiding it from hera's eyes, before whose wrath all heaven-abiders shrank. but peleus' son the while forgat not yet war's fury: still in his invincible limbs the hot blood throbbed, and still he longed for fight. was none of all the trojans dared draw nigh the stricken hero, but at distance stood, as round a wounded lion hunters stand mid forest-brakes afraid, and, though the shaft stands in his heart, yet faileth not in him his royal courage, but with terrible glare roll his fierce eyes, and roar his grimly jaws; so wrath and anguish of his deadly hurt to fury stung peleides' soul; but aye his strength ebbed through the god-envenomed wound. yet leapt he up, and rushed upon the foe, and flashed the lightning of his lance; it slew the goodly orythaon, comrade stout of hector, through his temples crashing clear: his helm stayed not the long lance fury-sped which leapt therethrough, and won within the bones the heart of the brain, and spilt his lusty life. then stabbed he 'neath the brow hipponous even to the eye-roots, that the eyeball fell to earth: his soul to hades flitted forth. then through the jaw he pierced alcathous, and shore away his tongue: in dust he fell gasping his life out, and the spear-head shot out through his ear. these, as they rushed on him, that hero slew; but many a fleer's life he spilt, for in his heart still leapt the blood. but when his limbs grew chill, and ebbed away his spirit, leaning on his spear he stood, while still the trojans fled in huddled rout of panic, and he shouted unto them: "trojan and dardan cravens, ye shall not even in my death, escape my merciless spear, but unto mine avenging spirits ye shall pay--ay, one and all--destruction's debt!" he spake; they heard and quailed: as mid the hills fawns tremble at a lion's deep-mouthed roar, and terror-stricken flee the monster, so the ranks of trojan chariot-lords, the lines of battle-helpers drawn from alien lands, quailed at the last shout of achilles, deemed that he was woundless yet. but 'neath the weight of doom his aweless heart, his mighty limbs, at last were overborne. down midst the dead he fell, as fails a beetling mountain-cliff. earth rang beneath him: clanged with a thundercrash his arms, as peleus' son the princely fell. and still his foes with most exceeding dread stared at him, even as, when some murderous beast lies slain by shepherds, tremble still the sheep eyeing him, as beside the fold he lies, and shrinking, as they pass him, far aloof and, even as he were living, fear him dead; so feared they him, achilles now no more. yet paris strove to kindle those faint hearts; for his own heart exulted, and he hoped, now peleus' son, the danaans' strength, had fallen, wholly to quench the argive battle-fire: "friends, if ye help me truly and loyally, let us this day die, slain by argive men, or live, and hale to troy with hector's steeds in triumph peleus' son thus fallen dead, the steeds that, grieving, yearning for their lord to fight have borne me since my brother died. might we with these but hale achilles slain, glory were this for hector's horses, yea, for hector--if in hades men have sense of righteous retribution. this man aye devised but mischief for the sons of troy; and now troy's daughters with exultant hearts from all the city streets shall gather round, as pantheresses wroth for stolen cubs, or lionesses, might stand around a man whose craft in hunting vexed them while he lived. so round achilles--a dead corpse at last!- in hurrying throngs troy's daughters then shall come in unforgiving, unforgetting hate, for parents wroth, for husbands slain, for sons, for noble kinsmen. most of all shall joy my father, and the ancient men, whose feet unwillingly are chained within the walls by eld, if we shall hale him through our gates, and give our foe to fowls of the air for meat." then they, which feared him theretofore, in haste closed round the corpse of strong-heart aeacus' son, glaucus, aeneas, battle-fain agenor, and other cunning men in deadly fight, eager to hale him thence to ilium the god-built burg. but aias failed him not. swiftly that godlike man bestrode the dead: back from the corpse his long lance thrust them all. yet ceased they not from onslaught; thronging round, still with swift rushes fought they for the prize, one following other, like to long-lipped bees which hover round their hive in swarms on swarms to drive a man thence; but he, recking naught of all their fury, carveth out the combs of nectarous honey: harassed sore are they by smoke-reek and the robber; spite of all ever they dart against him; naught cares he; so naught of all their onsets aias recked; but first he stabbed agelaus in the breast, and slew that son of maion: thestor next: ocythous he smote, agestratus, aganippus, zorus, nessus, erymas the war-renowned, who came from lycia-land with mighty-hearted glaucus, from his home in melanippion on the mountain-ridge, athena's fane, which massikyton fronts anigh chelidonia's headland, dreaded sore of scared seafarers, when its lowering crags must needs be doubled. for his death the blood of famed hippolochus' son was horror-chilled; for this was his dear friend. with one swift thrust he pierced the sevenfold hides of aias' shield, yet touched his flesh not; stayed the spear-head was by those thick hides and by the corset-plate which lapped his battle-tireless limbs. but still from that stern conflict glaucus drew not back, burning to vanquish aias, aeacus' son, and in his folly vaunting threatened him: "aias, men name thee mightiest man of all the argives, hold thee in passing-high esteem even as achilles: therefore thou, i wot, by that dead warrior dead this day shalt lie!" so hurled he forth a vain word, knowing not how far in might above him was the man whom his spear threatened. battle-bider aias darkly and scornfully glaring on him, said "thou craven wretch, and knowest thou not this, how much was hector mightier than thou in war-craft? yet before my might, my spear, he shrank. ay, with his valour was there blent discretion. thou thy thoughts are deathward set, who dar'st defy me to the battle, me, a mightier far than thou! thou canst not say that friendship of our fathers thee shall screen; nor me thy gifts shall wile to let thee pass scatheless from war, as once did tydeus' son. though thou didst 'scape his fury, will not i suffer thee to return alive from war. ha, in thy many helpers dost thou trust who with thee, like so many worthless flies, flit round the noble achilles' corpse? to these death and black doom shall my swift onset deal." then on the trojans this way and that he turned, as mid long forest-glens a lion turns on hounds, and trojans many and lycians slew that came for honour hungry, till he stood mid a wide ring of flinchers; like a shoal of darting fish when sails into their midst dolphin or shark, a huge sea-fosterling; so shrank they from the might of telamon's son, as aye he charged amidst the rout. but still swarmed fighters up, till round achilles' corse to right, to left, lay in the dust the slain countless, as boars around a lion at bay; and evermore the strife waxed deadlier. then too hippolochus' war-wise son was slain by aias of the heart of fire. he fell backward upon achilles, even as falls a sapling on a sturdy mountain-oak; so quelled by the spear on peleus' son he fell. but for his rescue anchises' stalwart son strove hard, with all his comrades battle-fain, and haled the corse forth, and to sorrowing friends gave it, to bear to ilium's hallowed burg. himself to spoil achilles still fought on, till warrior aias pierced him with the spear through the right forearm. swiftly leapt he back from murderous war, and hasted thence to troy. there for his healing cunning leeches wrought, who stanched the blood-rush, and laid on the gash balms, such as salve war-stricken warriors' pangs. but aias still fought on: here, there he slew with thrusts like lightning-flashes. his great heart ached sorely for his mighty cousin slain. and now the warrior-king laertes' son fought at his side: before him blenched the foe, as he smote down peisander's fleetfoot son, the warrior maenalus, who left his home in far-renowned abydos: down on him he hurled atymnius, the goodly son whom pegasis the bright-haired nymph had borne to strong emathion by granicus' stream. dead by his side he laid orestius' son, proteus, who dwelt 'neath lofty ida's folds. ah, never did his mother welcome home that son from war, panaceia beauty-famed! he fell by odysseus' hands, who spilt the lives of many more whom his death-hungering spear reached in that fight around the mighty dead. yet alcon, son of megacles battle-swift, hard by odysseus' right knee drave the spear home, and about the glittering greave the blood dark-crimson welled. he recked not of the wound, but was unto his smiter sudden death; for clear through his shield he stabbed him with his spear amidst his battle-fury: to the earth backward he dashed him by his giant might and strength of hand: clashed round him in the dust his armour, and his corslet was distained with crimson life-blood. forth from flesh and shield the hero plucked the spear of death: the soul followed the lance-head from the body forth, and life forsook its mortal mansion. then rushed on his comrades, in his wound's despite, odysseus, nor from that stern battle-toil refrained him. and by this a mingled host of danaans eager-hearted fought around the mighty dead, and many and many a foe slew they with those smooth-shafted ashen spears. even as the winds strew down upon the ground the flying leaves, when through the forest-glades sweep the wild gusts, as waneth autumn-tide, and the old year is dying; so the spears of dauntless danaans strewed the earth with slain, for loyal to dead achilles were they all, and loyal to hero aias to the death. for like black doom he blasted the ranks of troy. then against aias paris strained his bow; but he was ware thereof, and sped a stone swift to the archer's head: that bolt of death crashed through his crested helm, and darkness closed round him. in dust down fell he: naught availed his shafts their eager lord, this way and that scattered in dust: empty his quiver lay, flew from his hand the bow. in haste his friends upcaught him from the earth, and hector's steeds hurried him thence to troy, scarce drawing breath, and moaning in his pain. nor left his men the weapons of their lord, but gathered up all from the plain, and bare them to the prince; while aias after him sent a wrathful shout: "dog, thou hast 'scaped the heavy hand of death to-day! but swiftly thy last hour shall come by some strong argive's hands, or by mine own, but now have i a nobler task in hand, from murder's grip to rescue achilles' corse." then turned he on the foe, hurling swift doom on such as fought around peleides yet. 'these saw how many yielded up the ghost neath his strong hands, and, with hearts failing them for fear, against him could they stand no more. as rascal vultures were they, which the swoop of an eagle, king of birds, scares far away from carcasses of sheep that wolves have torn; so this way, that way scattered they before the hurtling stones, the sword, the might of aias. in utter panic from the war they fled, in huddled rout, like starlings from the swoop of a death-dealing hawk, when, fleeing bane, one drives against another, as they dart all terror-huddled in tumultuous flight. so from the war to priam's burg they fled wretchedly clad with terror as a cloak, quailing from mighty aias' battle-shout, as with hands dripping blood-gouts he pursued. yea, all, one after other, had he slain, had they not streamed through city-gates flung wide hard-panting, pierced to the very heart with fear. pent therewithin he left them, as a shepherd leaves folded sheep, and strode back o'er the plain; yet never touched he with his feet the ground, but aye he trod on dead men, arms, and blood; for countless corpses lay o'er that wide stretch even from broad-wayed troy to hellespont, bodies of strong men slain, the spoil of doom. as when the dense stalks of sun-ripened corn fall 'neath the reapers' hands, and the long swaths, heavy with full ears, overspread the field, and joys the heart of him who oversees the toil, lord of the harvest; even so, by baleful havoc overmastered, lay all round face-downward men remembering not the death-denouncing war-shout. but the sons of fair achaea left their slaughtered foes in dust and blood unstripped of arms awhile till they should lay upon the pyre the son of peleus, who in battle-shock had been their banner of victory, charging in his might. so the kings drew him from that stricken field straining beneath the weight of giant limbs, and with all loving care they bore him on, and laid him in his tent before the ships. and round him gathered that great host, and wailed heart-anguished him who had been the achaeans' strength, and now, forgotten all the splendour of spears, lay mid the tents by moaning hellespont, in stature more than human, even as lay tityos, who sought to force queen leto, when she fared to pytho: swiftly in his wrath apollo shot, and laid him low, who seemed invincible: in a foul lake of gore there lay he, covering many a rood of ground, on the broad earth, his mother; and she moaned over her son, of blessed gods abhorred; but lady leto laughed. so grand of mould there in the foemen's land lay aeacus' son, for joy to trojans, but for endless grief to achaean men lamenting. moaned the air with sighing from the abysses of the sea; and passing heavy grew the hearts of all, thinking: "now shall we perish by the hands of trojans!" then by those dark ships they thought of white-haired fathers left in halls afar, of wives new-wedded, who by couches cold mourned, waiting, waiting, with their tender babes for husbands unreturning; and they groaned in bitterness of soul. a passion of grief came o'er their hearts; they fell upon their faces on the deep sand flung down, and wept as men all comfortless round peleus' mighty son, and clutched and plucked out by the roots their hair, and east upon their heads defiling sand. their cry was like the cry that goeth up from folk that after battle by their walls are slaughtered, when their maddened foes set fire to a great city, and slay in heaps on heaps her people, and make spoil of all her wealth; so wild and high they wailed beside the sea, because the danaans' champion, aeacus' son, lay, grand in death, by a god's arrow slain, as ares lay, when she of the mighty father with that huge stone down dashed him on troy's plain. ceaselessly wailed the myrmidons achilles, a ring of mourners round the kingly dead, that kind heart, friend alike to each and all, to no man arrogant nor hard of mood, but ever tempering strength with courtesy. then aias first, deep-groaning, uttered forth his yearning o'er his father's brother's son god-stricken--ay, no man had smitten him of all upon the wide-wayed earth that dwell! him glorious aias heavy-hearted mourned, now wandering to the tent of peleus' son, now cast down all his length, a giant form, on the sea-sands; and thus lamented he: "achilles, shield and sword of argive men, thou hast died in troy, from phthia's plains afar, smitten unwares by that accursed shaft, such thing as weakling dastards aim in fight! for none who trusts in wielding the great shield, none who for war can skill to set the helm upon his brows, and sway the spear in grip, and cleave the brass about the breasts of foes, warreth with arrows, shrinking from the fray. not man to man he met thee, whoso smote; else woundless never had he 'scaped thy lance! but haply zeus purposed to ruin all, and maketh all our toil and travail vain- ay, now will grant the trojans victory who from achaea now hath reft her shield! ah me! how shall old peleus in his halls take up the burden of a mighty grief now in his joyless age! his heart shall break at the mere rumour of it. better so, thus in a moment to forget all pain. but if these evil tidings slay him not, ah, laden with sore sorrow eld shall come upon him, eating out his heart with grief by a lone hearth peleus so passing dear once to the blessed! but the gods vouchsafe no perfect happiness to hapless men." so he in grief lamented peleus' son. then ancient phoenix made heart-stricken moan, clasping the noble form of aeacus' seed, and in wild anguish wailed the wise of heart: "thou art reft from me, dear child, and cureless pain hast left to me! oh that upon my face the veiling earth had fallen, ere i saw thy bitter doom! no pang more terrible hath ever stabbed mine heart no, not that hour of exile, when i fled from fatherland and noble parents, fleeing hellas through, till peleus welcomed me with gifts, and lord of his dolopians made me. in his arms thee through his halls one day he bare, and set upon my knees, and bade me foster thee, his babe, with all love, as mine own dear child: i hearkened to him: blithely didst thou cling about mine heart, and, babbling wordless speech, didst call me `father' oft, and didst bedew my breast and tunic with thy baby lips. ofttimes with soul that laughed for glee i held thee in mine arms; for mine heart whispered me `this fosterling through life shall care for thee, staff of thine age shall be.' and that mine hope was for a little while fulfilled; but now thou hast vanished into darkness, and to me is left long heart-ache wild with all regret. ah, might my sorrow slay me, ere the tale to noble peleus come! when on his ears falleth the heavy tidings, he shall weep and wail without surcease. most piteous grief we twain for thy sake shall inherit aye, thy sire and i, who, ere our day of doom, mourning shall go down to the grave for thee- ay, better this than life unholpen of thee!" so moaned his ever-swelling tide of grief. and atreus' son beside him mourned and wept with heart on fire with inly smouldering pain: "thou hast perished, chiefest of the danaan men, hast perished, and hast left the achaean host fenceless! now thou art fallen, are they left an easier prey to foes. thou hast given joy to trojans by thy fall, who dreaded thee as sheep a lion. these with eager hearts even to the ships will bring the battle now. zeus, father, thou too with deceitful words beguilest mortals! thou didst promise me that priam's burg should be destroyed; but now that promise given dost thou not fulfil, but thou didst cheat mine heart: i shall not win the war's goal, now achilles is no more." so did he cry heart-anguished. mourned all round wails multitudinous for peleus' son: the dark ships echoed back the voice of grief, and sighed and sobbed the immeasurable air. and as when long sea-rollers, onward driven by a great wind, heave up far out at sea, and strandward sweep with terrible rush, and aye headland and beach with shattered spray are scourged, and roar unceasing; so a dread sound rose of moaning of the danaans round the corse, ceaselessly wailing peleus' aweless son. and on their mourning soon black night had come, but spake unto atreides neleus' son, nestor, whose own heart bare its load of grief remembering his own son antilochus: "o mighty agamemnon, sceptre-lord of argives, from wide-shrilling lamentation refrain we for this day. none shall withhold hereafter these from all their heart's desire of weeping and lamenting many days. but now go to, from aweless aeacus' son wash we the foul blood-gouts, and lay we him upon a couch: unseemly it is to shame the dead by leaving them untended long." so counselled neleus' son, the passing-wise. then hasted he his men, and bade them set caldrons of cold spring-water o'er the flames, and wash the corse, and clothe in vesture fair, sea-purple, which his mother gave her son at his first sailing against troy. with speed they did their lord's command: with loving care, all service meetly rendered, on a couch laid they the mighty fallen, peleus' son. the trito-born, the passing-wise, beheld and pitied him, and showered upon his head ambrosia, which hath virtue aye to keep taintless, men say, the flesh of warriors slain. like softly-breathing sleeper dewy-fresh she made him: over that dead face she drew a stern frown, even as when he lay, with wrath darkening his grim face, clasping his slain friend patroclus; and she made his frame to be more massive, like a war-god to behold. and wonder seized the argives, as they thronged and saw the image of a living man, where all the stately length of peleus' son lay on the couch, and seemed as though he slept. around him all the woeful captive-maids, whom he had taken for a prey, what time he had ravaged hallowed lemnos, and had scaled the towered crags of thebes, eetion's town, wailed, as they stood and rent their fair young flesh, and smote their breasts, and from their hearts bemoaned that lord of gentleness and courtesy, who honoured even the daughters of his foes. and stricken most of all with heart-sick pain briseis, hero achilles' couchmate, bowed over the dead, and tore her fair young flesh with ruthless fingers, shrieking: her soft breast was ridged with gory weals, so cruelly she smote it thou hadst said that crimson blood had dripped on milk. yet, in her griefs despite, her winsome loveliness shone out, and grace hung like a veil about her, as she wailed: "woe for this grief passing all griefs beside! never on me came anguish like to this not when my brethren died, my fatherland was wasted--like this anguish for thy death! thou wast my day, my sunlight, my sweet life, mine hope of good, my strong defence from harm, dearer than all my beauty--yea, more dear than my lost parents! thou wast all in all to me, thou only, captive though i be. thou tookest from me every bondmaid's task and like a wife didst hold me. ah, but now me shall some new achaean master bear to fertile sparta, or to thirsty argos. the bitter cup of thraldom shall i drain, severed, ah me, from thee! oh that the earth had veiled my dead face ere i saw thy doom!" so for slain peleus' son did she lament with woeful handmaids and heart-anguished greeks, mourning a king, a husband. never dried her tears were: ever to the earth they streamed like sunless water trickling from a rock while rime and snow yet mantle o'er the earth above it; yet the frost melts down before the east-wind and the flame-shafts of the sun. now came the sound of that upringing wail to nereus' daughters, dwellers in the depths unfathomed. with sore anguish all their hearts were smitten: piteously they moaned: their cry shivered along the waves of hellespont. then with dark mantles overpalled they sped swiftly to where the argive men were thronged. as rushed their troop up silver paths of sea, the flood disported round them as they came. with one wild cry they floated up; it rang, a sound as when fleet-flying cranes forebode a great storm. moaned the monsters of the deep plaintively round that train of mourners. fast on sped they to their goal, with awesome cry wailing the while their sister's mighty son. swiftly from helicon the muses came heart-burdened with undying grief, for love and honour to the nereid starry-eyed. then zeus with courage filled the argive men, that-eyes of flesh might undismayed behold that glorious gathering of goddesses. then those divine ones round achilles' corse pealed forth with one voice from immortal lips a lamentation. rang again the shores of hellespont. as rain upon the earth their tears fell round the dead man, aeacus' son; for out of depths of sorrow rose their moan. and all the armour, yea, the tents, the ships of that great sorrowing multitude were wet with tears from ever-welling springs of grief. his mother cast her on him, clasping him, and kissed her son's lips, crying through her tears: "now let the rosy-vestured dawn in heaven exult! now let broad-flowing axius exult, and for asteropaeus dead put by his wrath! let priam's seed be glad but i unto olympus will ascend, and at the feet of everlasting zeus will cast me, bitterly planning that he gave me, an unwilling bride, unto a man- a man whom joyless eld soon overtook, to whom the fates are near, with death for gift. yet not so much for his lot do i grieve as for achilles; for zeus promised me to make him glorious in the aeacid halls, in recompense for the bridal i so loathed that into wild wind now i changed me, now to water, now in fashion as a bird i was, now as the blast of flame; nor might a mortal win me for his bride, who seemed all shapes in turn that earth and heaven contain, until the olympian pledged him to bestow a godlike son on me, a lord of war. yea, in a manner this did he fulfil faithfully; for my son was mightiest of men. but zeus made brief his span of life unto my sorrow. therefore up to heaven will i: to zeus's mansion will i go and wail my son, and will put zeus in mind of all my travail for him and his sons in their sore stress, and sting his soul with shame." so in her wild lament the sea-queen cried. but now to thetis spake calliope, she in whose heart was steadfast wisdom throned: "from lamentation, thetis, now forbear, and do not, in the frenzy of thy grief for thy lost son, provoke to wrath the lord of gods and men. lo, even sons of zeus, the thunder-king, have perished, overborne by evil fate. immortal though i be, mine own son orpheus died, whose magic song drew all the forest-trees to follow him, and every craggy rock and river-stream, and blasts of winds shrill-piping stormy-breathed, and birds that dart through air on rushing wings. yet i endured mine heavy sorrow: gods ought not with anguished grief to vex their souls. therefore make end of sorrow-stricken wail for thy brave child; for to the sons of earth minstrels shall chant his glory and his might, by mine and by my sisters' inspiration, unto the end of time. let not thy soul be crushed by dark grief, nor do thou lament like those frail mortal women. know'st thou not that round all men which dwell upon the earth hovereth irresistible deadly fate, who recks not even of the gods? such power she only hath for heritage. yea, she soon shall destroy gold-wealthy priam's town, and trojans many and argives doom to death, whomso she will. no god can stay her hand." so in her wisdom spake calliope. then plunged the sun down into ocean's stream, and sable-vestured night came floating up o'er the wide firmament, and brought her boon of sleep to sorrowing mortals. on the sands there slept they, all the achaean host, with heads bowed 'neath the burden of calamity. but upon thetis sleep laid not his hand: still with the deathless nereids by the sea she sate; on either side the muses spake one after other comfortable words to make that sorrowing heart forget its pain. but when with a triumphant laugh the dawn soared up the sky, and her most radiant light shed over all the trojans and their king, then, sorrowing sorely for achilles still, the danaans woke to weep. day after day, for many days they wept. around them moaned far-stretching beaches of the sea, and mourned great nereus for his daughter thetis' sake; and mourned with him the other sea-gods all for dead achilles. then the argives gave the corpse of great peleides to the flame. a pyre of countless tree-trunks built they up which, all with one mind toiling, from the heights of ida they brought down; for atreus' sons sped on the work, and charged them to bring thence wood without measure, that consumed with speed might be achilles' body. all around piled they about the pyre much battle-gear of strong men slain; and slew and cast thereon full many goodly sons of trojan men, and snorting steeds, and mighty bulls withal, and sheep and fatling swine thereon they cast. and wailing captive maids from coffers brought mantles untold; all cast they on the pyre: gold heaped they there and amber. all their hair the myrmidons shore, and shrouded with the same the body of their king. briseis laid her own shorn tresses on the corpse, her gift, her last, unto her lord. great jars of oil full many poured they out thereon, with jars of honey and of wine, rich blood of the grape that breathed an odour as of nectar, yea, cast incense-breathing perfumes manifold marvellous sweet, the precious things put forth by earth, and treasures of the sea divine. then, when all things were set in readiness about the pyre, all, footmen, charioteers, compassed that woeful bale, clashing their arms, while, from the viewless heights olympian, zeus rained down ambrosia on dead aeacus' son. for honour to the goddess, nereus' child, he sent to aeolus hermes, bidding him summon the sacred might of his swift winds, for that the corpse of aeacus' son must now be burned. with speed he went, and aeolus refused not: the tempestuous north in haste he summoned, and the wild blast of the west; and to troy sped they on their whirlwind wings. fast in mad onrush, fast across the deep they darted; roared beneath them as they flew the sea, the land; above crashed thunder-voiced clouds headlong hurtling through the firmament. then by decree of zeus down on the pyre of slain achilles, like a charging host swooped they; upleapt the fire-god's madding breath: uprose a long wail from the myrmidons. then, though with whirlwind rushes toiled the winds, all day, all night, they needs must fan the flames ere that death-pyre burned out. up to the heavens vast-volumed rolled the smoke. the huge tree-trunks groaned, writhing, bursting, in the heat, and dropped the dark-grey ash all round. so when the winds had tirelessly fulfilled their mighty task, back to their cave they rode cloud-charioted. then, when the fire had last of all consumed that hero-king, when all the steeds, the men slain round the pyre had first been ravined up, with all the costly offerings laid around the mighty dead by achaia's weeping sons, the glowing embers did the myrmidons quench with wine. then clear to be discerned were seen his bones; for nowise like the rest were they, but like an ancient giant's; none beside with these were blent; for bulls and steeds, and sons of troy, with all that mingled hecatomb, lay in a wide ring round his corse, and he amidst them, flame-devoured, lay there alone. so his companions groaning gathered up his bones, and in a silver casket laid massy and deep, and banded and bestarred with flashing gold; and nereus' daughters shed ambrosia over them, and precious nards for honour to achilles: fat of kine and amber honey poured they over all. a golden vase his mother gave, the gift in old time of the wine-god, glorious work of the craft-master fire-god, in the which they laid the casket that enclosed the bones of mighty-souled achilles. all around the argives heaped a barrow, a giant sign, upon a foreland's uttermost end, beside the hellespont's deep waters, wailing loud farewells unto the myrmidons' hero-king. nor stayed the immortal steeds of aeacus' son tearless beside the ships; they also mourned their slain king: sorely loth were they to abide longer mid mortal men or argive steeds bearing a burden of consuming grief; but fain were they to soar through air, afar from wretched men, over the ocean's streams, over the sea-queen's caverns, unto where divine podarge bare that storm-foot twain begotten of the west-wind clarion-voiced yea, and they had accomplished their desire, but the gods' purpose held them back, until from scyros' isle achilles' fleetfoot son should come. him waited they to welcome, when he came unto the war-host; for the fates, daughters of holy chaos, at their birth had spun the life-threads of those deathless foals, even to serve poseidon first, and next peleus the dauntless king, achilles then the invincible, and, after these, the fourth, the mighty-hearted neoptolemus, whom after death to the elysian plain they were to bear, unto the blessed land, by zeus' decree. for which cause, though their hearts were pierced with bitter anguish, they abode still by the ships, with spirits sorrowing for their old lord, and yearning for the new. then from the surge of heavy-plunging seas rose the earth-shaker. no man saw his feet pace up the strand, but suddenly he stood beside the nereid goddesses, and spake to thetis, yet for achilles bowed with grief: "refrain from endless mourning for thy son. not with the dead shall he abide, but dwell with gods, as doth the might of herakles, and dionysus ever fair. not him dread doom shall prison in darkness evermore, nor hades keep him. to the light of zeus soon shall he rise; and i will give to him a holy island for my gift: it lies within the euxine sea: there evermore a god thy son shall be. the tribes that dwell around shall as mine own self honour him with incense and with steam of sacrifice. hush thy laments, vex not thine heart with grief." then like a wind-breath had he passed away over the sea, when that consoling word was spoken; and a little in her breast revived the spirit of thetis: and the god brought this to pass thereafter. all the host moved moaning thence, and came unto the ships that brought them o'er from hellas. then returned to helicon the muses: 'neath the sea, wailing the dear dead, nereus' daughters sank, book iv how in the funeral games of achilles heroes contended. nor did the hapless trojans leave unwept the warrior-king hippolochus' hero-son, but laid, in front of the dardanian gate, upon the pyre that captain war-renowned. but him apollo's self caught swiftly up out of the blazing fire, and to the winds gave him, to bear away to lycia-land; and fast and far they bare him, 'neath the glens of high telandrus, to a lovely glade; and for a monument above his grave upheaved a granite rock. the nymphs therefrom made gush the hallowed water of a stream for ever flowing, which the tribes of men still call fair-fleeting glaucus. this the gods wrought for an honour to the lycian king. but for achilles still the argives mourned beside the swift ships: heart-sick were they all with dolorous pain and grief. each yearned for him as for a son; no eye in that wide host was tearless. but the trojans with great joy exulted, seeing their sorrow from afar, and the great fire that spake their foe consumed. and thus a vaunting voice amidst them cried: "now hath cronion from his heaven vouchsafed a joy past hope unto our longing eyes, to see achilles fallen before troy. now he is smitten down, the glorious hosts of troy, i trow, shall win a breathing-space from blood of death and from the murderous fray. ever his heart devised the trojans' bane; in his hands maddened aye the spear of doom with gore besprent, and none of us that faced him in the fight beheld another dawn. but now, i wot, achaea's valorous sons shall flee unto their galleys shapely-prowed, since slain achilles lies. ah that the might of hector still were here, that he might slay the argives one and all amidst their tents!" so in unbridled joy a trojan cried; but one more wise and prudent answered him: "thou deemest that yon murderous danaan host will straightway get them to the ships, to flee over the misty sea. nay, still their lust is hot for fight: us will they nowise fear, still are there left strong battle-eager men, as aias, as tydeides, atreus' sons: though dead achilles be, i still fear these. oh that apollo silverbow would end them! then in that day were given to our prayers a breathing-space from war and ghastly death." in heaven was dole among the immortal ones, even all that helped the stalwart danaans' cause. in clouds like mountains piled they veiled their heads for grief of soul. but glad those others were who fain would speed troy to a happy goal. then unto cronos' son great hera spake: "zeus, lightning-father, wherefore helpest thou troy, all forgetful of the fair-haired bride whom once to peleus thou didst give to wife midst pelion's glens? thyself didst bring to pass those spousals of a goddess: on that day all we immortals feasted there, and gave gifts passing-fair. all this dost thou forget, and hast devised for hellas heaviest woe." so spake she; but zeus answered not a word; for pondering there he sat with burdened breast, thinking how soon the argives should destroy the city of priam, thinking how himself would visit on the victors ruin dread in war and on the great sea thunder-voiced. such thoughts were his, ere long to be fulfilled. now sank the sun to ocean's fathomless flood: o'er the dim land the infinite darkness stole, wherein men gain a little rest from toil. then by the ships, despite their sorrow, supped the argives, for ye cannot thrust aside hunger's importunate craving, when it comes upon the breast, but straightway heavy and faint lithe limbs become; nor is there remedy until one satisfy this clamorous guest therefore these ate the meat of eventide in grief for achilles' hard necessity constrained them all. and, when they had broken bread, sweet sleep came on them, loosening from their frames care's heavy chain, and quickening strength anew but when the starry bears had eastward turned their heads, expectant of the uprushing light of helios, and when woke the queen of dawn, then rose from sleep the stalwart argive men purposing for the trojans death and doom. stirred were they like the roughly-ridging sea icarian, or as sudden-rippling corn in harvest field, what time the rushing wings of the cloud-gathering west sweep over it; so upon hellespont's strand the folk were stirred. and to those eager hearts cried tydeus' son: "if we be battle-biders, friends, indeed, more fiercely fight we now the hated foe, lest they take heart because achilles lives no longer. come, with armour, car, and steed let us beset them. glory waits our toil?" but battle-eager aias answering spake "brave be thy words, and nowise idle talk, kindling the dauntless argive men, whose hearts before were battle-eager, to the fight against the trojan men, o tydeus' son. but we must needs abide amidst the ships till goddess thetis come forth of the sea; for that her heart is purposed to set here fair athlete-prizes for the funeral-games. this yesterday she told me, ere she plunged into sea-depths, yea, spake to me apart from other danaans; and, i trow, by this her haste hath brought her nigh. yon trojan men, though peleus' son hath died, shall have small heart for battle, while myself am yet alive, and thou, and noble atreus' son, the king." so spake the mighty son of telamon, but knew not that a dark and bitter doom for him should follow hard upon those games by fate's contrivance. answered tydeus' son "o friend, if thetis comes indeed this day with goodly gifts for her son's funeral-games, then bide we by the ships, and keep we here all others. meet it is to do the will of the immortals: yea, to achilles too, though the immortals willed it not, ourselves must render honour grateful to the dead." so spake the battle-eager tydeus' son. and lo, the bride of peleus gliding came forth of the sea, like the still breath of dawn, and suddenly was with the argive throng where eager-faced they waited, some, that looked soon to contend in that great athlete-strife, and some, to joy in seeing the mighty strive. amidst that gathering thetis sable-stoled set down her prizes, and she summoned forth achaea's champions: at her best they came. but first amidst them all rose neleus' son, not as desiring in the strife of fists to toil, nor strain of wrestling; for his arms and all his sinews were with grievous eld outworn, but still his heart and brain were strong. of all the achaeans none could match himself against him in the folkmote's war of words; yea, even laertes' glorious son to him ever gave place when men for speech were met; nor he alone, but even the kingliest of argives, agamemnon, lord of spears. now in their midst he sang the gracious queen of nereids, sang how she in willsomeness of beauty was of all the sea-maids chief. well-pleased she hearkened. yet again he sang, singing of peleus' bridal of delight, which all the blest immortals brought to pass by pelion's crests; sang of the ambrosial feast when the swift hours brought in immortal hands meats not of earth, and heaped in golden maunds; sang how the silver tables were set forth in haste by themis blithely laughing; sang how breathed hephaestus purest flame of fire; sang how the nymphs in golden chalices mingled ambrosia; sang the ravishing dance twined by the graces' feet; sang of the chant the muses raised, and how its spell enthralled all mountains, rivers, all the forest brood; how raptured was the infinite firmament, cheiron's fair caverns, yea, the very gods. such noble strain did neleus' son pour out into the argives' eager ears; and they hearkened with ravished souls. then in their midst he sang once more the imperishable deeds of princely achilles. all the mighty throng acclaimed him with delight. from that beginning with fitly chosen words did he extol the glorious hero; how he voyaged and smote twelve cities; how he marched o'er leagues on leagues of land, and spoiled eleven; how he slew telephus and eetion's might renowned in thebe; how his spear laid cyenus low, poseidon's son, and godlike polydorus, troilus the goodly, princely asteropaeus; and how he dyed with blood the river-streams of xanthus, and with countless corpses choked his murmuring flow, when from the limbs he tore lycaon's life beside the sounding river; and how he smote down hector; how he slew penthesileia, and the godlike son of splendour-throned dawn;--all this he sang to argives which already knew the tale; sang of his giant mould, how no man's strength in fight could stand against him, nor in games where strong men strive for mastery, where the swift contend with flying feet or hurrying wheels of chariots, nor in combat panoplied; and how in goodlihead he far outshone all danaans, and how his bodily might was measureless in the stormy clash of war. last, he prayed heaven that he might see a son like that great sire from sea-washed scyros come. that noble song acclaiming argives praised; yea, silver-looted thetis smiled, and gave the singer fleetfoot horses, given of old beside caicus' mouth by telephus to achilles, when he healed the torturing wound with that same spear wherewith himself had pierced telephus' thigh, and thrust the point clear through. these nestor neleus' son to his comrades gave, and, glorying in their godlike lord, they led the steeds unto his ships. then thetis set amidst the athlete-ring ten kine, to be her prizes for the footrace, and by each ran a fair suckling calf. these the bold might of peleus' tireless son had driven down from slopes of ida, prizes of his spear. to strive for these rose up two victory-fain, teucer the first, the son of telamon, and aias, of the locrian archers chief. these twain with swift hands girded them about with loin-cloths, reverencing the goddess-bride of peleus, and the sea-maids, who with her came to behold the argives' athlete-sport. and atreus' son, lord of all argive men, showed them the turning-goal of that swift course. then these the queen of rivalry spurred on, as from the starting-line like falcons swift they sped away. long doubtful was the race: now, as the argives gazed, would aias' friends shout, now rang out the answering cheer from friends of teucer. but when in their eager speed close on the end they were, then teucer's feet were trammelled by unearthly powers: some god or demon dashed his foot against the stock of a deep-rooted tamarisk. sorely wrenched was his left ankle: round the joint upswelled the veins high-ridged. a great shout rang from all that watched the contest. aias darted past exultant: ran his locrian folk to hail their lord, with sudden joy in all their souls. then to his ships they drave the kine, and cast fodder before them. eager-helpful friends led teucer halting thence. the leeches drew blood from his foot: then over it they laid soft-shredded linen ointment-smeared, and swathed with smooth bands round, and charmed away the pain. then swiftly rose two mighty-hearted ones eager to match their strength in wrestling strain, the son of tydeus and the giant aias. into the midst they strode, and marvelling gazed the argives on men shapen like to gods. then grappled they, like lions famine-stung fighting amidst the mountains o'er a stag, whose strength is even-balanced; no whit less is one than other in their deadly rage; so these long time in might were even-matched, till aias locked his strong hands round the son of tydeus, straining hard to break his back; but he, with wrestling-craft and strength combined, shifted his hip 'neath telamon's son, and heaved the giant up; with a side-twist wrenched free from aias' ankle-lock his thigh, and so with one huge shoulder-heave to earth he threw that mighty champion, and himself came down astride him: then a mighty shout went up. but battle-stormer aias, chafed in mind, sprang up, hot-eager to essay again that grim encounter. from his terrible hands he dashed the dust, and challenged furiously with a great voice tydeides: not a whit that other quailed, but rushed to close with him. rolled up the dust in clouds from 'neath their feet: hurtling they met like battling mountain-bulls that clash to prove their dauntless strength, and spurn the dust, while with their roaring all the hills re-echo: in their desperate fury these dash their strong heads together, straining long against each other with their massive strength, hard-panting in the fierce rage of their strife, while from their mouths drip foam-flakes to the ground; so strained they twain with grapple of brawny hands. 'neath that hard grip their backs and sinewy necks cracked, even as when in mountain-glades the trees dash storm-tormented boughs together. oft tydeides clutched at aias' brawny thighs, but could not stir his steadfast-rooted feet. oft aias hurled his whole weight on him, bowed his shoulders backward, strove to press him down; and to new grips their hands were shifting aye. all round the gazing people shouted, some cheering on glorious tydeus' son, and some the might of aias. then the giant swung the shoulders of his foe to right, to left; then gripped him 'neath the waist; with one fierce heave and giant effort hurled him like a stone to earth. the floor of troyland rang again as fell tydeides: shouted all the folk. yet leapt he up all eager to contend with giant aias for the third last fall: but nestor rose and spake unto the twain: "from grapple of wrestling, noble sons, forbear; for all we know that ye be mightiest of argives since the great achilles died." then these from toil refrained, and from their brows wiped with their hands the plenteous-streaming sweat: they kissed each other, and forgat their strife. then thetis, queen of goddesses, gave to them four handmaids; and those strong and aweless ones marvelled beholding them, for these surpassed all captive-maids in beauty and household-skill, save only lovely-tressed briseis. these achilles captive brought from lesbos' isle, and in their service joyed. the first was made stewardess of the feast and lady of meats; the second to the feasters poured the wine; the third shed water on their hands thereafter; the fourth bare all away, the banquet done. these tydeus' son and giant aias shared, and, parted two and two, unto their ships sent they those fair and serviceable ones. next, for the play of fists idomeneus rose, for cunning was he in all athlete-lore; but none came forth to meet him, yielding all to him, the elder-born, with reverent awe. so in their midst gave thetis unto him a chariot and fleet steeds, which theretofore mighty patroclus from the ranks of troy drave, when he slew sarpedon, seed of zeus, these to his henchmen gave idomeneus to drive unto the ships: himself remained still sitting in the glorious athlete-ring. then phoenix to the stalwart argives cried: "now to idomeneus the gods have given a fair prize uncontested, free of toil of mighty arms and shoulders, honouring the elder-born with bloodless victory. but lo, ye younger men, another prize awaiteth the swift play of cunning hands. step forth then: gladden great peleides' soul." he spake, they heard; but each on other looked, and, loth to essay the contest, all sat still, till neleus' son rebuked those laggard souls: "friends, it were shame that men should shun the play of clenched hands, who in that noble sport have skill, wherein young men delight, which links glory to toil. ah that my thews were strong as when we held king pelias' funeral-feast, i and acastus, kinsmen joining hands, when i with godlike polydeuces stood in gauntlet-strife, in even-balanced fray, and when ancaeus in the wrestlers' ring mightier than all beside, yet feared and shrank from me, and dared not strive with me that day, for that ere then amidst the epeian men- no battle-blenchers they!--i had vanquished him, for all his might, and dashed him to the dust by dead amaryncus' tomb, and thousands round sat marvelling at my prowess and my strength. therefore against me not a second time raised he his hands, strong wrestler though he were; and so i won an uncontested prize. but now old age is on me, and many griefs. therefore i bid you, whom it well beseems, to win the prize; for glory crowns the youth who bears away the meed of athlete-strife." stirred by his gallant chiding, a brave man rose, son of haughty godlike panopeus, the man who framed the horse, the bane of troy, not long thereafter. none dared meet him now in play of fists, albeit in deadly craft of war, when ares rusheth through the field, he was not cunning. but for strife of hands the fair prize uncontested had been won by stout epeius--yea, he was at point to bear it thence unto the achaean ships; but one strode forth to meet him, theseus' son, the spearman acamas, the mighty of heart, bearing already on his swift hands girt the hard hide-gauntlets, which evenor's son agelaus on his prince's hands had drawn with courage-kindling words. the comrades then of panopeus' princely son for epeius raised a heartening cheer. he like a lion stood forth in the midst, his strong hands gauntleted with bull's hide hard as horn. loud rang the cheers from side to side of that great throng, to fire the courage of the mighty ones to clash hands in the gory play. sooth, little spur needed they for their eagerness for fight. but, ere they closed, they flashed out proving blows to wot if still, as theretofore, their arms were limber and lithe, unclogged by toil of war; then faced each other, and upraised their hands with ever-watching eyes, and short quick steps a-tiptoe, and with ever-shifting feet, each still eluding other's crushing might. then with a rush they closed like thunder-clouds hurled on each other by the tempest-blast, flashing forth lightnings, while the welkin thrills as clash the clouds and hollow roar the winds; so 'neath the hard hide-gauntlets clashed their jaws. down streamed the blood, and from their brows the sweat blood-streaked made on the flushed cheeks crimson bars. fierce without pause they fought, and never flagged epeius, but threw all his stormy strength into his onrush. yet did theseus' son never lose heart, but baffled the straight blows of those strong hands, and by his fighting-craft flinging them right and left, leapt in, brought home a blow to his eyebrow, cutting to the bone. even then with counter-stroke epeius reached acamas' temple, and hurled him to the ground. swift he sprang up, and on his stalwart foe rushed, smote his head: as he rushed in again, the other, slightly swerving, sent his left clean to his brow; his right, with all his might behind it, to his nose. yet acamas still warded and struck with all the manifold shifts of fighting-craft. but now the achaeans all bade stop the fight, though eager still were both to strive for coveted victory. then came their henchmen, and the gory gauntlets loosed in haste from those strong hands. now drew they breath from that great labour, as they bathed their brows with sponges myriad-pored. comrades and friends with pleading words then drew them face to face, and prayed, "in friendship straight forget your wrath." so to their comrades' suasion hearkened they; for wise men ever bear a placable mind. they kissed each other, and their hearts forgat that bitter strife. then thetis sable-stoled gave to their glad hands two great silver bowls the which euneus, jason's warrior son in sea-washed lemnos to achilles gave to ransom strong lycaon from his hands. these had hephaestus fashioned for his gift to glorious dionysus, when he brought his bride divine to olympus, minos' child far-famous, whom in sea-washed dia's isle theseus unwitting left. the wine-god brimmed with nectar these, and gave them to his son; and thoas at his death to hypsipyle with great possessions left them. she bequeathed the bowls to her godlike son, who gave them up unto achilles for lycaon's life. the one the son of lordly theseus took, and goodly epeius sent to his ship with joy the other. then their bruises and their scars did podaleirius tend with loving care. first pressed he out black humours, then his hands deftly knit up the gashes: salves he laid thereover, given him by his sire of old, such as had virtue in one day to heal the deadliest hurts, yea, seeming-cureless wounds. straight was the smart assuaged, and healed the scars upon their brows and 'neath their clustering hair then for the archery-test oileus' son stood forth with teucer, they which in the race erewhile contended. far away from these agamemnon, lord of spears, set up a helm crested with plumes, and spake: "the master-shot is that which shears the hair-crest clean away." then straightway aias shot his arrow first, and smote the helm-ridge: sharply rang the brass. then teucer second with most earnest heed shot: the swift shaft hath shorn the plume away. loud shouted all the people as they gazed, and praised him without stint, for still his foot halted in pain, yet nowise marred his aim when with his hands he sped the flying shaft. then peleus' bride gave unto him the arms of godlike troilus, the goodliest of all fair sons whom hecuba had borne in hallowed troy; yet of his goodlihead no joy she had; the prowess and the spear of fell achilles reft his life from him. as when a gardener with new-whetted scythe mows down, ere it may seed, a blade of corn or poppy, in a garden dewy-fresh and blossom-flushed, which by a water-course crowdeth its blooms--mows it ere it may reach its goal of bringing offspring to the birth, and with his scythe-sweep makes its life-work vain and barren of all issue, nevermore now to be fostered by the dews of spring; so did peleides cut down priam's son the god-like beautiful, the beardless yet and virgin of a bride, almost a child! yet the destroyer fate had lured him on to war, upon the threshold of glad youth, when youth is bold, and the heart feels no void. forthwith a bar of iron massy and long from the swift-speeding hand did many essay to hurl; but not an argive could prevail to cast that ponderous mass. aias alone sped it from his strong hand, as in the time of harvest might a reaper fling from him a dry oak-bough, when all the fields are parched. and all men marvelled to behold how far flew from his hand the bronze which scarce two men hard-straining had uplifted from the ground. even this antaeus' might was wont to hurl erstwhile, ere the strong hands of hercules o'ermastered him. this, with much spoil beside, hercules took, and kept it to make sport for his invincible hand; but afterward gave it to valiant peleus, who with him had smitten fair-towered ilium's burg renowned; and he to achilles gave it, whose swift ships bare it to troy, to put him aye in mind of his own father, as with eager will he fought with stalwart trojans, and to be a worthy test wherewith to prove his strength. even this did aias from his brawny hand fling far. so then the nereid gave to him the glorious arms from godlike memnon stripped. marvelling the argives gazed on them: they were a giant's war-gear. laughing a glad laugh that man renowned received them: he alone could wear them on his brawny limbs; they seemed as they had even been moulded to his frame. the great bar thence he bore withal, to be his joy when he was fain of athlete-toil. still sped the contests on; and many rose now for the leaping. far beyond the marks of all the rest brave agapenor sprang: loud shouted all for that victorious leap; and thetis gave him the fair battle-gear of mighty cycnus, who had smitten first protesilaus, then had reft the life from many more, till peleus' son slew him first of the chiefs of grief-enshrouded troy. next, in the javelin-cast euryalus hurled far beyond all rivals, while the folk shouted aloud: no archer, so they deemed, could speed a winged shaft farther than his cast; therefore the aeacid hero's mother gave to him a deep wide silver oil-flask, ta'en by achilles in possession, when his spear slew mynes, and he spoiled lyrnessus' wealth. then fiery-hearted aias eagerly rose, challenging to strife of hands and feet the mightiest hero there; but marvelling they marked his mighty thews, and no man dared confront him. chilling dread had palsied all their courage: from their hearts they feared him, lest his hands invincible should all to-break his adversary's face, and naught but pain be that man's meed. but at the last all men made signs to battle-bider euryalus, for well they knew him skilled in fighting-craft; but he too feared that giant, and he cried: "friends, any other achaean, whom ye will, blithe will i face; but mighty alas--no! far doth he overmatch me. he will rend mine heart, if in the onset anger rise within him: from his hands invincible, i trow, i should not win to the ships alive." loud laughed they all: but glowed with triumph-joy the heart of aias. gleaming talents twain of silver he from thetis' hands received, his uncontested prize. his stately height called to her mind her dear son, and she sighed. they which had skill in chariot-driving then rose at the contest's summons eagerly: menelaus first, eurypylus bold in fight, eumelus, thoas, godlike polypoetes harnessed their steeds, and led them to the cars all panting for the joy of victory. then rode they in a glittering chariot rank out to one place, to a stretch of sand, and stood ranged at the starting-line. the reins they grasped in strong hands quickly, while the chariot-steeds shoulder to shoulder fretted, all afire to take the lead at starting, pawed the sand, pricked ears, and o'er their frontlets flung the foam. with sudden-stiffened sinews those ear-lords lashed with their whips the tempest-looted steeds; then swift as harpies sprang they forth; they strained furiously at the harness, onward whirling the chariots bounding ever from the earth. thou couldst not see a wheel-track, no, nor print of hoof upon the sand--they verily flew. up from the plain the dust-clouds to the sky soared, like the smoke of burning, or a mist rolled round the mountain-forelands by the might of the dark south-wind or the west, when wakes a tempest, when the hill-sides stream with rain. burst to the front eumelus' steeds: behind close pressed the team of godlike thoas: shouts still answered shouts that cheered each chariot, while onward they swept across the wide-wayed plain. ((lacuna)) "from hallowed elis, when he had achieved a mighty triumph, in that he outstripped the swift ear of oenomaus evil-souled, the ruthless slayer of youths who sought to wed his daughter hippodameia passing-wise. yet even he, for all his chariot-lore, had no such fleetfoot steeds as atreus' son- far slower!--the wind is in the feet of these." so spake he, giving glory to the might of those good steeds, and to atreides' self; and filled with joy was menelaus' soul. straightway his henchmen from the yoke-band loosed the panting team, and all those chariot-lords, who in the race had striven, now unyoked their tempest-footed steeds. podaleirius then hasted to spread salves over all the wounds of thoas and eurypylus, gashes scored upon their frames when from the cars they fell but menelaus with exceeding joy of victory glowed, when thetis lovely-tressed gave him a golden cup, the chief possession once of eetion the godlike; ere achilles spoiled the far-famed burg of thebes. then horsemen riding upon horses came down to the course: they grasped in hand the whip and bounding from the earth bestrode their steeds, the while with foaming mouths the coursers champed the bits, and pawed the ground, and fretted aye to dash into the course. forth from the line swiftly they darted, eager for the strife, wild as the blasts of roaring boreas or shouting notus, when with hurricane-swoop he heaves the wide sea high, when in the east uprises the disastrous altar-star bringing calamity to seafarers; so swift they rushed, spurning with flying feet the deep dust on the plain. the riders cried each to his steed, and ever plied the lash and shook the reins about the clashing bits. on strained the horses: from the people rose a shouting like the roaring of a sea. on, on across the level plain they flew; and now the flashing-footed argive steed by sthenelus bestridden, had won the race, but from the course he swerved, and o'er the plain once and again rushed wide; nor capaneus' son, good horseman though he were, could turn him back by rein or whip, because that steed was strange still to the race-course; yet of lineage noble was he, for in his veins the blood of swift arion ran, the foal begotten by the loud-piping west-wind on a harpy, the fleetest of all earth-born steeds, whose feet could race against his father's swiftest blasts. him did the blessed to adrastus give: and from him sprang the steed of sthenelus, which tydeus' son had given unto his friend in hallowed troyland. filled with confidence in those swift feet his rider led him forth unto the contest of the steeds that day, looking his horsemanship should surely win renown: yet victory gladdened not his heart in that great struggle for achilles' prizes; nay, swift albeit he was, the king of men by skill outraced him. shouted all the folk, "glory to agamemnon!" yet they acclaimed the steed of valiant sthenelus and his lord, for that the fiery flying of his feet still won him second place, albeit oft wide of the course he swerved. then thetis gave to atreus' son, while laughed his lips for joy, god-sprung polydorus' breastplate silver-wrought. to sthenelus asteropaeus' massy helm, two lances, and a taslet strong, she gave. yea, and to all the riders who that day came at achilles' funeral-feast to strive she gave gifts. but the son of the old war-lord, laertes, inly grieved to be withheld from contests of the strong, how fain soe'er, by that sore wound which alcon dealt to him in the grim fight around dead aeacas' son. book v how the arms of achilles were cause of madness and death unto aias. so when all other contests had an end, thetis the goddess laid down in the midst great-souled achilles' arms divinely wrought; and all around flashed out the cunning work wherewith the fire-god overchased the shield fashioned for aeacus' son, the dauntless-souled. inwrought upon that labour of a god were first high heaven and cloudland, and beneath lay earth and sea: the winds, the clouds were there, the moon and sun, each in its several place; there too were all the stars that, fixed in heaven, are borne in its eternal circlings round. above and through all was the infinite air where to and fro flit birds of slender beak: thou hadst said they lived, and floated on the breeze. here tethys' all-embracing arms were wrought, and ocean's fathomless flow. the outrushing flood of rivers crying to the echoing hills all round, to right, to left, rolled o'er the land. round it rose league-long mountain-ridges, haunts of terrible lions and foul jackals: there fierce bears and panthers prowled; with these were seen wild boars that whetted deadly-clashing tusks in grimly-frothing jaws. there hunters sped after the hounds: beaters with stone and dart, to the life portrayed, toiled in the woodland sport. and there were man-devouring wars, and all horrors of fight: slain men were falling down mid horse-hoofs; and the likeness of a plain blood-drenched was on that shield invincible. panic was there, and dread, and ghastly enyo with limbs all gore-bespattered hideously, and deadly strife, and the avenging spirits fierce-hearted--she, still goading warriors on to the onset they, outbreathing breath of fire. around them hovered the relentless fates; beside them battle incarnate onward pressed yelling, and from their limbs streamed blood and sweat. there were the ruthless gorgons: through their hair horribly serpents coiled with flickering tongues. a measureless marvel was that cunning work of things that made men shudder to behold seeming as though they verily lived and moved. and while here all war's marvels were portrayed, yonder were all the works of lovely peace. the myriad tribes of much-enduring men dwelt in fair cities. justice watched o'er all. to diverse toils they set their hands; the fields were harvest-laden; earth her increase bore. most steeply rose on that god-laboured work the rugged flanks of holy honour's mount, and there upon a palm-tree throned she sat exalted, and her hands reached up to heaven. all round her, paths broken by many rocks thwarted the climbers' feet; by those steep tracks daunted ye saw returning many folk: few won by sweat of toil the sacred height. and there were reapers moving down long swaths swinging the whetted sickles: 'neath their hands the hot work sped to its close. hard after these many sheaf-binders followed, and the work grew passing great. with yoke-bands on their necks oxen were there, whereof some drew the wains heaped high with full-eared sheaves, and further on were others ploughing, and the glebe showed black behind them. youths with ever-busy goads followed: a world of toil was there portrayed. and there a banquet was, with pipe and harp, dances of maids, and flashing feet of boys, all in swift movement, like to living souls. hard by the dance and its sweet winsomeness out of the sea was rising lovely-crowned cypris, foam-blossoms still upon her hair; and round her hovered smiling witchingly desire, and danced the graces lovely-tressed. and there were lordly nereus' daughters shown leading their sister up from the wide sea to her espousals with the warrior-king. and round her all the immortals banqueted on pelion's ridge far-stretching. all about lush dewy watermeads there were, bestarred with flowers innumerable, grassy groves, and springs with clear transparent water bright. there ships with sighing sheets swept o'er the sea, some beating up to windward, some that sped before a following wind, and round them heaved the melancholy surge. seared shipmen rushed this way and that, adread for tempest-gusts, hauling the white sails in, to 'scape the death- it all seemed real--some tugging at the oars, while the dark sea on either side the ship grew hoary 'neath the swiftly-plashing blades. and there triumphant the earth-shaker rode amid sea-monsters' stormy-footed steeds drew him, and seemed alive, as o'er the deep they raced, oft smitten by the golden whip. around their path of flight the waves fell smooth, and all before them was unrippled calm. dolphins on either hand about their king swarmed, in wild rapture of homage bowing backs, and seemed like live things o'er the hazy sea swimming, albeit all of silver wrought. marvels of untold craft were imaged there by cunning-souled hephaestus' deathless hands upon the shield. and ocean's fathomless flood clasped like a garland all the outer rim, and compassed all the strong shield's curious work. and therebeside the massy helmet lay. zeus in his wrath was set upon the crest throned on heaven's dome; the immortals all around fierce-battling with the titans fought for zeus. already were their foes enwrapped with flame, for thick and fast as snowflakes poured from heaven the thunderbolts: the might of zeus was roused, and burning giants seemed to breathe out flames. and therebeside the fair strong corslet lay, unpierceable, which clasped peleides once: there were the greaves close-lapping, light alone to achilles; massy of mould and huge they were. and hard by flashed the sword whose edge and point no mail could turn, with golden belt, and sheath of silver, and with haft of ivory: brightest amid those wondrous arms it shone. stretched on the earth thereby was that dread spear, long as the tall-tressed pines of pelion, still breathing out the reek of hector's blood. then mid the argives thetis sable-stoled in her deep sorrow for achilles spake; "now all the athlete-prizes have been won which i set forth in sorrow for my child. now let that mightiest of the argives come who rescued from the foe my dead: to him these glorious and immortal arms i give which even the blessed deathless joyed to see." then rose in rivalry, each claiming them, laertes' seed and godlike telamon's son, aias, the mightiest far of danaan men: he seemed the star that in the glittering sky outshines the host of heaven, hesperus, so splendid by peleides' arms he stood; "and let these judge," he cried, "idomeneus, nestor, and kingly-counselled agamemnon," for these, he weened, would sureliest know the truth of deeds wrought in that glorious battle-toil. "to these i also trust most utterly," odysseus said, "for prudent of their wit be these, and princeliest of all danaan men." but to idomeneus and atreus' son spake nestor apart, and willingly they heard: "friends, a great woe and unendurable this day the careless gods have laid on us, in that into this lamentable strife aias the mighty hath been thrust by them against odysseus passing-wise. for he, to whichsoe'er god gives the victor's glory- o yea, he shall rejoice! but he that loseth- all for the grief in all the danaans' hearts for him! and ours shall be the deepest grief of all; for that man will not in the war stand by us as of old. a sorrowful day it shall be for us, whichsoe'er of these shall break into fierce anger, seeing they are of our heroes chiefest, this in war, and that in counsel. hearken then to me, seeing that i am older far than ye, not by a few years only: with mine age is prudence joined, for i have suffered and wrought much; and in counsel ever the old man, who knoweth much, excelleth younger men. therefore let us ordain to judge this cause 'twixt godlike aias and war-fain odysseus, our trojan captives. they shall say whom most our foes dread, and who saved peleides' corse from that most deadly fight. lo, in our midst be many spear-won trojans, thralls of fate; and these will pass true judgment on these twain, to neither showing favour, since they hate alike all authors of their misery." he spake: replied agamemnon lord of spears: "ancient, there is none other in our midst wiser than thou, of danaans young or old, in that thou say'st that unforgiving wrath will burn in him to whom the gods herein deny the victory; for these which strive are both our chiefest. therefore mine heart too is set on this, that to the thralls of war this judgment we commit: the loser then shall against troy devise his deadly work of vengeance, and shall not be wroth with us." he spake, and these three, being of one mind, in hearing of all men refused to judge judgment so thankless: they would none of it. therefore they set the high-born sons of troy there in the midst, spear-thralls although they were, to give just judgment in the warriors' strife. then in hot anger aias rose, and spake: "odysseus, frantic soul, why hath a god deluded thee, to make thee hold thyself my peer in might invincible? dar'st thou say that thou, when slain achilles lay in dust, when round him swarmed the trojans, didst bear back that furious throng, when i amidst them hurled death, and thou coweredst away? thy dam bare thee a craven and a weakling wretch frail in comparison of me, as is a cur beside a lion thunder-voiced! no battle-biding heart is in thy breast, but wiles and treachery be all thy care. hast thou forgotten how thou didst shrink back from faring with achaea's gathered host to ilium's holy burg, till atreus' sons forced thee, the cowering craven, how loth soe'er, to follow them--would god thou hadst never come! for by thy counsel left we in lemnos' isle groaning in agony poeas' son renowned. and not for him alone was ruin devised of thee; for godlike palamedes too didst thou contrive destruction--ha, he was alike in battle and council better than thou! and now thou dar'st to rise up against me, neither remembering my kindness, nor having respect unto the mightier man who rescued thee erewhile, when thou didst quaff in fight before the onset of thy foes, when thou, forsaken of all greeks beside, midst tumult of the fray, wast fleeing too! oh that in that great fight zeus' self had stayed my dauntless might with thunder from his heaven! then with their two-edged swords the trojan men had hewn thee limb from limb, and to their dogs had cast thy carrion! then thou hadst not presumed to meet me, trusting in thy trickeries! wretch, wherefore, if thou vauntest thee in might beyond all others, hast thou set thy ships in the line's centre, screened from foes, nor dared as i, on the far wing to draw them up? because thou wast afraid! not thou it was who savedst from devouring fire the ships; but i with heart unquailing there stood fast facing the fire and hector ay, even he gave back before me everywhere in fight. thou--thou didst fear him aye with deadly fear! oh, had this our contention been but set amidst that very battle, when the roar of conflict rose around achilles slain! then had thine own eyes seen me bearing forth out from the battle's heart and fury of foes that goodly armour and its hero lord unto the tents. but here thou canst but trust in cunning speech, and covetest a place amongst the mighty! thou--thou hast not strength to wear achilles' arms invincible, nor sway his massy spear in thy weak hands! but i they are verily moulded to my frame: yea, seemly it is i wear those glorious arms, who shall not shame a god's gifts passing fair. but wherefore for achilles' glorious arms with words discourteous wrangling stand we here? come, let us try in strife with brazen spears who of us twain is best in murderous right! for silver-footed thetis set in the midst this prize for prowess, not for pestilent words. in folkmote may men have some use for words: in pride of prowess i know me above thee far, and great achilles' lineage is mine own." he spake: with scornful glance and bitter speech odysseus the resourceful chode with him: "aias, unbridled tongue, why these vain words to me? thou hast called me pestilent, niddering, and weakling: yet i boast me better far than thou in wit and speech, which things increase the strength of men. lo, how the craggy rock, adamantine though it seem, the hewers of stone amid the hills by wisdom undermine full lightly, and by wisdom shipmen cross the thunderous-plunging sea, when mountain-high it surgeth, and by craft do hunters quell strong lions, panthers, boars, yea, all the brood of wild things. furious-hearted bulls are tamed to bear the yoke-bands by device of men. yea, all things are by wit accomplished. still it is the man who knoweth that excels the witless man alike in toils and counsels. for my keen wit did oeneus' valiant son choose me of all men with him to draw nigh to hector's watchmen: yea, and mighty deeds we twain accomplished. i it was who brought to atreus' sons peleides far-renowned, their battle-helper. whensoe'er the host needeth some other champion, not for the sake of thine hands will he come, nor by the rede of other argives: of achaeans i alone will draw him with soft suasive words to where strong men are warring. mighty power the tongue hath over men, when courtesy inspires it. valour is a deedless thing; and bulk and big assemblage of a man cometh to naught, by wisdom unattended. but unto me the immortals gave both strength and wisdom, and unto the argive host made me a blessing. nor, as thou hast said, hast thou in time past saved me when in flight from foes. i never fled, but steadfastly withstood the charge of all the trojan host. furious the enemy came on like a flood but i by might of hands cut short the thread of many lives. herein thou sayest not true me in the fray thou didst not shield nor save, but for thine own life roughtest, lest a spear should pierce thy back if thou shouldst turn to flee from war. my ships? i drew them up mid-line, not dreading the battle-fury of any foe, but to bring healing unto atreus' sons of war's calamities: and thou didst set far from their help thy ships. nay more, i seamed with cruel stripes my body, and entered so the trojans' burg, that i might learn of them all their devisings for this troublous war. nor ever i dreaded hector's spear; myself rose mid the foremost, eager for the fight, when, prowess-confident, he defied us all. yea, in the fight around achilles, i slew foes far more than thou; 'twas i who saved the dead king with this armour. not a whit i dread thy spear now, but my grievous hurt with pain still vexeth me, the wound i gat in fighting for these arms and their slain lord. in me as in achilles is zeus' blood." he spake; strong aias answered him again. "most cunning and most pestilent of men, nor i, nor any other argive, saw thee toiling in that fray, when trojans strove fiercely to hale away achilles slain. my might it was that with the spear unstrung the knees of some in fight, and others thrilled with panic as they pressed on ceaselessly. then fled they in dire straits, as geese or cranes flee from an eagle swooping as they feed along a grassy meadow; so, in dread the trojans shrinking backward from my spear and lightening sword, fled into ilium to 'scape destruction. if thy might came there ever at all, not anywhere nigh me with foes thou foughtest: somewhere far aloot mid other ranks thou toiledst, nowhere nigh achilles, where the one great battle raged." he spake; replied odysseus the shrewd heart: "aias, i hold myself no worse than thou in wit or might, how goodly in outward show thou be soever. nay, i am keener far of wit than thou in all the argives' eyes. in battle-prowess do i equal thee haply surpass; and this the trojans know, who tremble when they see me from afar. aye, thou too know'st, and others know my strength by that hard struggle in the wrestling-match, when peleus' son set glorious prizes forth beside the barrow of patroclus slain." so spake laertes' son the world-renowned. then on that strife disastrous of the strong the sons of troy gave judgment. victory and those immortal arms awarded they with one consent to odysseus mighty in war. greatly his soul rejoiced; but one deep groan brake from the greeks. then aias' noble might stood frozen stiff; and suddenly fell on him dark wilderment; all blood within his frame boiled, and his gall swelled, bursting forth in flood. against his liver heaved his bowels; his heart with anguished pangs was thrilled; fierce stabbing throes shot through the filmy veil 'twixt bone and brain; and darkness and confusion wrapped his mind. with fixed eyes staring on the ground he stood still as a statue. then his sorrowing friends closed round him, led him to the shapely ships, aye murmuring consolations. but his feet trod for the last time, with reluctant steps, that path; and hard behind him followed doom. when to the ships beside the boundless sea the argives, faint for supper and for sleep, had passed, into the great deep thetis plunged, and all the nereids with her. round them swam sea-monsters many, children of the brine. against the wise prometheus bitter-wroth the sea-maids were, remembering how that zeus, moved by his prophecies, unto peleus gave thetis to wife, a most unwilling bride. then cried in wrath to these cymothoe: "o that the pestilent prophet had endured all pangs he merited, when, deep-burrowing, the eagle tare his liver aye renewed!" so to the dark-haired sea-maids cried the nymph. then sank the sun: the onrush of the night shadowed the fields, the heavens were star-bestrewn; and by the long-prowed ships the argives slept by ambrosial sleep o'ermastered, and by wine the which from proud idomeneus' realm of crete: the shipmen bare o'er foaming leagues of sea. but aias, wroth against the argive men, would none of meat or drink, nor clasped him round the arms of sleep. in fury he donned his mail, he clutched his sword, thinking unspeakable thoughts; for now he thought to set the ships aflame, and slaughter all the argives, now, to hew with sudden onslaught of his terrible sword guileful odysseus limb from limb. such things he purposed--nay, had soon accomplished all, had pallas not with madness smitten him; for over odysseus, strong to endure, her heart yearned, as she called to mind the sacrifices offered to her of him continually. therefore she turned aside from argive men the might of aias. as a terrible storm, whose wings are laden with dread hurricane-blasts, cometh with portents of heart-numbing fear to shipmen, when the pleiads, fleeing adread from glorious orion, plunge beneath the stream of tireless ocean, when the air is turmoil, and the sea is mad with storm; so rushed he, whithersoe'er his feet might bear. this way and that he ran, like some fierce beast which darteth down a rock-walled glen's ravines with foaming jaws, and murderous intent against the hounds and huntsmen, who have torn out of the cave her cubs, and slain: she runs this way and that, and roars, if mid the brakes haply she yet may see the dear ones lost; whom if a man meet in that maddened mood, straightway his darkest of all days hath dawned; so ruthless-raving rushed he; blackly boiled his heart, as caldron on the fire-god's hearth maddens with ceaseless hissing o'er the flames from blazing billets coiling round its sides, at bidding of the toiler eager-souled to singe the bristles of a huge-fed boar; so was his great heart boiling in his breast. like a wild sea he raved, like tempest-blast, like the winged might of tireless flame amidst the mountains maddened by a mighty wind, when the wide-blazing forest crumbles down in fervent heat. so aias, his fierce heart with agony stabbed, in maddened misery raved. foam frothed about his lips; a beast-like roar howled from his throat. about his shoulders clashed his armour. they which saw him trembled, all cowed by the fearful shout of that one man. from ocean then uprose dawn golden-reined: like a soft wind upfloated sleep to heaven, and there met hera, even then returned to olympus back from tethys, unto whom but yester-morn she went. she clasped him round, and kissed him, who had been her marriage-kin since at her prayer on ida's erest he had lulled to sleep cronion, when his anger burned against the argives. straightway hera passed to zeus's mansion, and sleep swiftly flew to pasithea's couch. from slumber woke all nations of the earth. but aias, like orion the invincible, prowled on, still bearing murderous madness in his heart. he rushed upon the sheep, like lion fierce whose savage heart is stung with hunger-pangs. here, there, he smote them, laid them dead in dust thick as the leaves which the strong north-wind's might strews, when the waning year to winter turns; so on the sheep in fury aias fell, deeming he dealt to danaans evil doom. then to his brother menelaus came, and spake, but not in hearing of the rest: "this day shall surely be a ruinous day for all, since aias thus is sense-distraught. it may be he will set the ships aflame, and slay us all amidst our tents, in wrath for those lost arms. would god that thetis ne'er had set them for the prize of rivalry! would god laertes' son had not presumed in folly of soul to strive with a better man! fools were we all; and some malignant god beguiled us; for the one great war-defence left us, since aeacus' son in battle fell, was aias' mighty strength. and now the gods will to our loss destroy him, bringing bane on thee and me, that all we may fill up the cup of doom, and pass to nothingness." he spake; replied agamemnon, lord of spears: "now nay, menelaus, though thine heart he wrung, be thou not wroth with the resourceful king of cephallenian folk, but with the gods who plot our ruin. blame not him, who oft hath been our blessing and our enemies' curse." so heavy-hearted spake the danaan kings. but by the streams of xanthus far away 'neath tamarisks shepherds cowered to hide from death, as when from a swift eagle cower hares 'neath tangled copses, when with sharp fierce scream this way and that with wings wide-shadowing he wheeleth very nigh; so they here, there, quailed from the presence of that furious man. at last above a slaughtered ram he stood, and with a deadly laugh he cried to it: "lie there in dust; be meat for dogs and kites! achilles' glorious arms have saved not thee, for which thy folly strove with a better man! lie there, thou cur! no wife shall fall on thee, and clasp, and wail thee and her fatherless childs, nor shalt thou greet thy parents' longing eyes, the staff of their old age! far from thy land thy carrion dogs and vultures shall devour!" so cried he, thinking that amidst the slain odysseus lay blood-boltered at his feet. but in that moment from his mind and eyes athena tore away the nightmare-fiend of madness havoc-breathing, and it passed thence swiftly to the rock-walled river styx where dwell the winged erinnyes, they which still visit with torments overweening men. then aias saw those sheep upon the earth gasping in death; and sore amazed he stood, for he divined that by the blessed ones his senses had been cheated. all his limbs failed under him; his soul was anguished-thrilled: he could not in his horror take one step forward nor backward. like some towering rock fast-rooted mid the mountains, there he stood. but when the wild rout of his thoughts had rallied, he groaned in misery, and in anguish wailed: "ah me! why do the gods abhor me so? they have wrecked my mind, have with fell madness filled, making me slaughter all these innocent sheep! would god that on odysseus' pestilent heart mine hands had so avenged me! miscreant, he brought on me a fell curse! o may his soul suffer all torments that the avenging fiends devise for villains! on all other greeks may they bring murderous battle, woeful griefs, and chiefly on agamemnon, atreus' son! not scatheless to the home may he return so long desired! but why should i consort, i, a brave man, with the abominable? perish the argive host, perish my life, now unendurable! the brave no more hath his due guerdon, but the baser sort are honoured most and loved, as this odysseus hath worship mid the greeks: but utterly have they forgotten me and all my deeds, all that i wrought and suffered in their cause." so spake the brave son of strong telamon, then thrust the sword of hector through his throat. forth rushed the blood in torrent: in the dust outstretched he lay, like typhon, when the bolts of zeus had blasted him. around him groaned the dark earth as he fell upon her breast. then thronging came the danaans, when they saw low laid in dust the hero; but ere then none dared draw nigh him, but in deadly fear they watched him from afar. now hasted they and flung themselves upon the dead, outstretched upon their faces: on their heads they cast dust, and their wailing went up to the sky. as when men drive away the tender lambs out of the fleecy flock, to feast thereon, and round the desolate pens the mothers leap ceaselessly bleating, so o'er aias rang that day a very great and bitter cry. wild echoes pealed from ida forest-palled, and from the plain, the ships, the boundless sea. then teucer clasping him was minded too to rush on bitter doom: howbeit the rest held from the sword his hand. anguished he fell upon the dead, outpouring many a tear more comfortlessly than the orphan babe that wails beside the hearth, with ashes strewn on head and shoulders, wails bereavement's day that brings death to the mother who hath nursed the fatherless child; so wailed he, ever wailed his great death-stricken brother, creeping slow around the corpse, and uttering his lament: "o aias, mighty-souled, why was thine heart distraught, that thou shouldst deal unto thyself murder and bale? all, was it that the sons of troy might win a breathing-space from woes, might come and slay the greeks, now thou art not? from these shall all the olden courage fail when fast they fall in fight. their shield from harm is broken now! for me, i have no will to see mine home again, now thou art dead. nay, but i long here also now to die, that so the earth may shroud me--me and thee not for my parents so much do i care, if haply yet they live, if haply yet spared from the grave, in salamis they dwell, as for thee, o my glory and my crown!" so cried he groaning sore; with answering moan queenly tecmessa wailed, the princess-bride of noble aias, captive of his spear, yet ta'en by him to wife, and household-queen o'er all his substance, even all that wives won with a bride-price rule for wedded lords. clasped in his mighty arms, she bare to him a son eurysaces, in all things like unto his father, far as babe might be yet cradled in his tent. with bitter moan fell she on that dear corpse, all her fair form close-shrouded in her veil, and dust-defiled, and from her anguished heart cried piteously: "alas for me, for me now thou art dead, not by the hands of foes in fight struck down, but by thine own! on me is come a grief ever-abiding! never had i looked to see thy woeful death-day here by troy. ah, visions shattered by rude hands of fate! oh that the earth had yawned wide for my grave ere i beheld thy bitter doom! on me no sharper, more heart-piercing pang hath come- no, not when first from fatherland afar and parents thou didst bear me, wailing sore mid other captives, when the day of bondage had come on me, a princess theretofore. not for that dear lost home so much i grieve, nor for my parents dead, as now for thee: for all thine heart was kindness unto me the hapless, and thou madest me thy wife, one soul with thee; yea, and thou promisedst to throne me queen of fair-towered salamis, when home we won from troy. the gods denied accomplishment thereof. and thou hast passed unto the unseen land: thou hast forgot me and thy child, who never shall make glad his father's heart, shall never mount thy throne. but him shall strangers make a wretched thrall: for when the father is no more, the babe is ward of meaner men. a weary life the orphan knows, and suffering cometh in from every side upon him like a flood. to me too thraldom's day shall doubtless come, now thou hast died, who wast my god on earth." then in all kindness agamemnon spake: "princess, no man on earth shall make thee thrall, while teucer liveth yet, while yet i live. thou shalt have worship of us evermore and honour as a goddess, with thy son, as though yet living were that godlike man, aias, who was the achaeans' chiefest strength. ah that he had not laid this load of grief on all, in dying by his own right hand! for all the countless armies of his foes never availed to slay him in fair fight." so spake he, grieved to the inmost heart. the folk woefully wafted all round. o'er hellespont echoes of mourning rolled: the sighing air darkened around, a wide-spread sorrow-pall. yea, grief laid hold on wise odysseus' self for the great dead, and with remorseful soul to anguish-stricken argives thus he spake: "o friends, there is no greater curse to men than wrath, which groweth till its bitter fruit is strife. now wrath hath goaded aias on to this dire issue of the rage that filled his soul against me. would to god that ne'er yon trojans in the strife for achilles' arms had crowned me with that victory, for which strong telamon's brave son, in agony of soul, thus perished by his own right hand! yet blame not me, i pray you, for his wrath: blame the dark dolorous fate that struck him down. for, had mine heart foreboded aught of this, this desperation of a soul distraught, never for victory had i striven with him, nor had i suffered any danaan else, though ne'er so eager, to contend with him. nay, i had taken up those arms divine with mine own hands, and gladly given them to him, ay, though himself desired it not. but for such mighty grief and wrath in him i had not looked, since not for a woman's sake nor for a city, nor possessions wide, i then contended, but for honour's meed, which alway is for all right-hearted men the happy goal of all their rivalry. but that great-hearted man was led astray by fate, the hateful fiend; for surely it is unworthy a man to be made passion's fool. the wise man's part is, steadfast-souled to endure all ills, and not to rage against his lot." so spake laertes' son, the far-renowned. but when they all were weary of grief and groan, then to those sorrowing ones spake neleus' son: "o friends, the pitiless-hearted fates have laid stroke after stroke of sorrow upon us, sorrow for aias dead, for mighty achilles, for many an argive, and for mine own son antilochus. yet all unmeet it is day after day with passion of grief to wail men slain in battle: nay, we must forget laments, and turn us to the better task of rendering dues beseeming to the dead, the dues of pyre, of tomb, of bones inurned. no lamentations will awake the dead; no note thereof he taketh, when the fates, the ruthless ones, have swallowed him in night." so spake he words of cheer: the godlike kings gathered with heavy hearts around the dead, and many hands upheaved the giant corpse, and swiftly bare him to the ships, and there washed they away the blood that clotted lay dust-flecked on mighty limbs and armour: then in linen swathed him round. from ida's heights wood without measure did the young men bring, and piled it round the corpse. billets and logs yet more in a wide circle heaped they round; and sheep they laid thereon, fair-woven vests, and goodly kine, and speed-triumphant steeds, and gleaming gold, and armour without stint, from slain foes by that glorious hero stripped. and lucent amber-drops they laid thereon, years, say they, which the daughters of the sun, the lord of omens, shed for phaethon slain, when by eridanus' flood they mourned for him. these, for undying honour to his son, the god made amber, precious in men's eyes. even this the argives on that broad-based pyre cast freely, honouring the mighty dead. and round him, groaning heavily, they laid silver most fair and precious ivory, and jars of oil, and whatsoe'er beside they have who heap up goodly and glorious wealth. then thrust they in the strength of ravening flame, and from the sea there breathed a wind, sent forth by thetis, to consume the giant frame of aias. all the night and all the morn burned 'neath the urgent stress of that great wind beside the ships that giant form, as when enceladus by zeus' levin was consumed beneath thrinacia, when from all the isle smoke of his burning rose--or like as when hercules, trapped by nessus' deadly guile, gave to devouring fire his living limbs, what time he dared that awful deed, when groaned all oeta as he burned alive, and passed his soul into the air, leaving the man far-famous, to be numbered with the gods, when earth closed o'er his toil-tried mortal part. so huge amid the flames, all-armour clad, lay aias, all the joy of fight forgot, while a great multitude watching thronged the sands. glad were the trojans, but the achaeans grieved. but when that goodly frame by ravening fire was all consumed, they quenched the pyre with wine; they gathered up the bones, and reverently laid in a golden casket. hard beside rhoeteium's headland heaped they up a mound measureless-high. then scattered they amidst the long ships, heavy-hearted for the man whom they had honoured even as achilles. then black night, bearing unto all men sleep, upfloated: so they brake bread, and lay down waiting the child of the mist. short was sleep, broken by fitful staring through the dark, haunted by dread lest in the night the foe should fall on them, now telamon's son was dead. book vi how came for the helping of troy eurypylus, hercules' grandson. rose dawn from ocean and tithonus' bed, and climbed the steeps of heaven, scattering round flushed flakes of splendour; laughed all earth and air. then turned unto their labours, each to each, mortals, frail creatures daily dying. then streamed to a folkmote all the achaean men at menelaus' summons. when the host were gathered all, then in their midst he spake: "hearken my words, ye god-descended kings: mine heart within my breast is burdened sore for men which perish, men that for my sake came to the bitter war, whose home-return parents and home shall welcome nevermore; for fate hath cut off thousands in their prime. oh that the heavy hand of death had fallen on me, ere hitherward i gathered these! but now hath god laid on me cureless pain in seeing all these ills. who could rejoice beholding strivings, struggles of despair? come, let us, which be yet alive, in haste flee in the ships, each to his several land, since aias and achilles both are dead. i look not, now they are slain, that we the rest shall 'scape destruction; nay, but we shall fall before yon terrible trojans for my sake and shameless helen's! think not that i care for her: for you i care, when i behold good men in battle slain. away with her- her and her paltry paramour! the gods stole all discretion out of her false heart when she forsook mine home and marriage-bed. let priam and the trojans cherish her! but let us straight return: 'twere better far to flee from dolorous war than perish all." so spake he but to try the argive men. far other thoughts than these made his heart burn with passionate desire to slay his foes, to break the long walls of their city down from their foundations, and to glut with blood ares, when paris mid the slain should fall. fiercer is naught than passionate desire! thus as he pondered, sitting in his place, uprose tydeides, shaker of the shield, and chode in fiery speech with menelaus: "o coward atreus' son, what craven fear hath gripped thee, that thou speakest so to us as might a weakling child or woman speak? not unto thee achaea's noblest sons will hearken, ere troy's coronal of towers be wholly dashed to the dust: for unto men valour is high renown, and flight is shame! if any man shall hearken to the words of this thy counsel, i will smite from him his head with sharp blue steel, and hurl it down for soaring kites to feast on. up! all ye who care to enkindle men to battle: rouse our warriors all throughout the fleet to whet the spear, to burnish corslet, helm and shield; and cause both man and horse, all which be keen in fight, to break their fast. then in yon plain who is the stronger ares shall decide." so speaking, in his place he sat him down; then rose up thestor's son, and in the midst, where meet it is to speak, stood forth and cried: "hear me, ye sons of battle-biding greeks: ye know i have the spirit of prophecy. erewhile i said that ye in the tenth year should lay waste towered ilium: this the gods are even now fulfilling; victory lies at the argives' very feet. come, let us send tydeides and odysseus battle-staunch with speed to scyros overseas, by prayers hither to bring achilles' hero son: a light of victory shall he be to us." so spake wise thestius' son, and all the folk shouted for joy; for all their hearts and hopes yearned to see calchas' prophecy fulfilled. then to the argives spake laertes' son: "friends, it befits not to say many words this day to you, in sorrow's weariness. i know that wearied men can find no joy in speech or song, though the pierides, the immortal muses, love it. at such time few words do men desire. but now, this thing that pleaseth all the achaean host, will i accomplish, so tydeides fare with me; for, if we twain go, we shall surely bring, won by our words, war-fain achilles' son, yea, though his mother, weeping sore, should strive within her halls to keep him; for mine heart trusts that he is a hero's valorous son." then out spake menelaus earnestly: "odysseus, the strong argives' help at need, if mighty-souled achilles' valiant son from scyros by thy suasion come to aid us who yearn for him, and some heavenly one grant victory to our prayers, and i win home to hellas, i will give to him to wife my noble child hermione, with gifts many and goodly for her marriage-dower with a glad heart. i trow he shall not scorn either his bride or high-born sire-in-law." with a great shout the danaans hailed his words. then was the throng dispersed, and to the ships they scattered hungering for the morning meat which strengtheneth man's heart. so when they ceased from eating, and desire was satisfied, then with the wise odysseus tydeus' son drew down a swift ship to the boundless sea, and victual and all tackling cast therein. then stepped they aboard, and with them twenty men, men skilled to row when winds were contrary, or when the unrippled sea slept 'neath a calm. they smote the brine, and flashed the boiling foam: on leapt the ship; a watery way was cleft about the oars that sweating rowers tugged. as when hard-toiling oxen, 'neath the yoke straining, drag on a massy-timbered wain, while creaks the circling axle 'neath its load, and from their weary necks and shoulders streams down to the ground the sweat abundantly; so at the stiff oars toiled those stalwart men, and fast they laid behind them leagues of sea. gazed after them the achaeans as they went, then turned to whet their deadly darts and spears, the weapons of their warfare. in their town the aweless trojans armed themselves the while war-eager, praying to the gods to grant respite from slaughter, breathing-space from toil. to these, while sorely thus they yearned, the gods brought present help in trouble, even the seed of mighty hercules, eurypylus. a great host followed him, in battle skilled, all that by long caicus' outflow dwelt, full of triumphant trust in their strong spears. round them rejoicing thronged the sons of troy: as when tame geese within a pen gaze up on him who casts them corn, and round his feet throng hissing uncouth love, and his heart warms as he looks down on them; so thronged the sons of troy, as on fierce-heart eurypylus they gazed; and gladdened was his aweless soul to see those throngs: from porchways women looked wide-eyed with wonder on the godlike man. above all men he towered as on he strode, as looks a lion when amid the hills he comes on jackals. paris welcomed him, as hector honouring him, his cousin he, being of one blood with him, who was born of astyoche, king priam's sister fair whom telephus embraced in his strong arms, telephus, whom to aweless hercules auge the bright-haired bare in secret love. that babe, a suckling craving for the breast, a swift hind fostered, giving him the teat as to her own fawn in all love; for zeus so willed it, in whose eyes it was not meet that hercules' child should perish wretchedly. his glorious son with glad heart paris led unto his palace through the wide-wayed burg beside assaracus' tomb and stately halls of hector, and tritonis' holy fane. hard by his mansion stood, and therebeside the stainless altar of home-warder zeus rose. as they went, he lovingly questioned him of brethren, parents, and of marriage-kin; and all he craved to know eurypylus told. so communed they, on-pacing side by side. then came they to a palace great and rich: there goddess-like sat helen, clothed upon with beauty of the graces. maidens four about her plied their tasks: others apart within that goodly bower wrought the works beseeming handmaids. helen marvelling gazed upon eurypylus, on helen he. then these in converse each with other spake in that all-odorous bower. the handmaids brought and set beside their lady high-seats twain; and paris sat him down, and at his side eurypylus. that hero's host encamped without the city, where the trojan guards kept watch. their armour laid they on the earth; their steeds, yet breathing battle, stood thereby, and cribs were heaped with horses' provender. upfloated night, and darkened earth and air; then feasted they before that cliff-like wall, ceteian men and trojans: babel of talk rose from the feasters: all around the glow of blazing campfires lighted up the tents: pealed out the pipe's sweet voice, and hautboys rang with their clear-shrilling reeds; the witching strain of lyres was rippling round. from far away the argives gazed and marvelled, seeing the plain aglare with many fires, and hearing notes of flutes and lyres, neighing of chariot-steeds and pipes, the shepherd's and the banquet's joy. therefore they bade their fellows each in turn keep watch and ward about the tents till dawn, lest those proud trojans feasting by their walls should fall on them, and set the ships aflame. within the halls of paris all this while with kings and princes telephus' hero son feasted; and priam and the sons of troy each after each prayed him to play the man against the argives, and in bitter doom to lay them low; and blithe he promised all. so when they had supped, each hied him to his home; but there eurypylus laid him down to rest full nigh the feast-hall, in the stately bower where paris theretofore himself had slept with helen world-renowned. a bower it was most wondrous fair, the goodliest of them all. there lay he down; but otherwhere their rest took they, till rose the bright-throned queen of morn. up sprang with dawn the son of telephus, and passed to the host with all those other kings in troy abiding. straightway did the folk all battle-eager don their warrior-gear, burning to strike in forefront of the fight. and now eurypylus clad his mighty limbs in armour that like levin-flashes gleamed; upon his shield by cunning hands were wrought all the great labours of strong hercules. thereon were seen two serpents flickering black tongues from grimly jaws: they seemed in act to dart; but hercules' hands to right and left- albeit a babe's hands--now were throttling them; for aweless was his spirit. as zeus' strength from the beginning was his strength. the seed of heaven-abiders never deedless is nor helpless, but hath boundless prowess, yea, even when in the womb unborn it lies. nemea's mighty lion there was seen strangled in the strong arms of hercules, his grim jaws dashed about with bloody foam: he seemed in verity gasping out his life. thereby was wrought the hydra many-necked flickering its dread tongues. of its fearful heads some severed lay on earth, but many more were budding from its necks, while hercules and iolaus, dauntless-hearted twain, toiled hard; the one with lightning sickle-sweeps lopped the fierce heads, his fellow seared each neck with glowing iron; the monster so was slain. thereby was wrought the mighty tameless boar with foaming jaws; real seemed the pictured thing, as by aleides' giant strength the brute was to eurystheus living borne on high. there fashioned was the fleetfoot stag which laid the vineyards waste of hapless husbandmen. the hero's hands held fast its golden horns, the while it snorted breath of ravening fire. thereon were seen the fierce stymphalian birds, some arrow-smitten dying in the dust, some through the grey air darting in swift flight. at this, at that one--hot in haste he seemed- hercules sped the arrows of his wrath. augeias' monstrous stable there was wrought with cunning craft on that invincible targe; and hercules was turning through the same the deep flow of alpheius' stream divine, while wondering nymphs looked down on every hand upon that mighty work. elsewhere portrayed was the fire-breathing bull: the hero's grip on his strong horns wrenched round the massive neck: the straining muscles on his arm stood out: the huge beast seemed to bellow. next thereto wrought on the shield was one in beauty arrayed as of a goddess, even hippolyta. the hero by the hair was dragging her from her swift steed, with fierce resolve to wrest with his strong hands the girdle marvellous from the amazon queen, while quailing shrank away the maids of war. there in the thracian land were diomedes' grim man-eating steeds: these at their gruesome mangers had he slain, and dead they lay with their fiend-hearted lord. there lay the bulk of giant geryon dead mid his kine. his gory heads were cast in dust, dashed down by that resistless club. before him slain lay that most murderous hound orthros, in furious might like cerberus his brother-hound: a herdman lay thereby, eurytion, all bedabbled with his blood. there were the golden apples wrought, that gleamed in the hesperides' garden undefiled: all round the fearful serpent's dead coils lay, and shrank the maids aghast from zeus' bold son. and there, a dread sight even for gods to see, was cerberus, whom the loathly worm had borne to typho in a craggy cavern's gloom close on the borders of eternal night, a hideous monster, warder of the gate of hades, home of wailing, jailer-hound of dead folk in the shadowy gulf of doom. but lightly zeus' son with his crashing blows tamed him, and haled him from the cataract flood of styx, with heavy-drooping head, and dragged the dog sore loth to the strange upper air all dauntlessly. and there, at the world's end, were caucasus' long glens, where hercules, rending prometheus' chains, and hurling them this way and that with fragments of the rock whereinto they were riveted, set free the mighty titan. arrow-smitten lay the eagle of the torment therebeside. there stormed the wild rout of the centaurs round the hall of pholus: goaded on by strife and wine, with hercules the monsters fought. amidst the pine-trunks stricken to death they lay still grasping those strange weapons in dead hands, while some with stems long-shafted still fought on in fury, and refrained not from the strife; and all their heads, gashed in the pitiless fight, were drenched with gore--the whole scene seemed to live- with blood the wine was mingled: meats and bowls and tables in one ruin shattered lay. there by evenus' torrent, in fierce wrath for his sweet bride, he laid with the arrow low nessus in mid-flight. there withal was wrought antaeus' brawny strength, who challenged him to wrestling-strife; he in those sinewy arms raised high above the earth, was crushed to death. there where swift hellespont meets the outer sea, lay the sea-monster slain by his ruthless shafts, while from hesione he rent her chains. of bold alcides many a deed beside shone on the broad shield of eurypylus. he seemed the war-god, as from rank to rank he sped; rejoiced the trojans following him, seeing his arms, and him clothed with the might of gods; and paris hailed him to the fray: "glad am i for thy coming, for mine heart trusts that the argives all shall wretchedly be with their ships destroyed; for such a man mid greeks or trojans never have i seen. now, by the strength and fury of hercules- to whom in stature, might, and goodlihead most like thou art i pray thee, have in mind him, and resolve to match his deeds with thine. be the strong shield of trojans hard-bestead: win us a breathing-space. thou only, i trow, from perishing troy canst thrust the dark doom back." with kindling words he spake. that hero cried: "great-hearted paris, like the blessed ones in goodlihead, this lieth foreordained on the gods' knees, who in the fight shall fall, and who outlive it. i, as honour bids, and as my strength sufficeth, will not flinch from troy's defence. i swear to turn from fight never, except in victory or death." gallantly spake he: with exceeding joy rejoiced the trojans. champions then he chose, alexander and aeneas fiery-souled, polydamas, pammon, and deiphobus, and aethicus, of paphlagonian men the staunchest man to stem the tide of war; these chose he, cunning all in battle-toil, to meet the foe in forefront of the fight. swiftly they strode before that warrior-throng then from the city cheering charged. the host followed them in their thousands, as when bees follow by bands their leaders from the hives, with loud hum on a spring day pouring forth. so to the fight the warriors followed these; and, as they charged, the thunder-tramp of men and steeds, and clang of armour, rang to heaven. as when a rushing mighty wind stirs up the barren sea-plain from its nethermost floor, and darkling to the strand roll roaring waves belching sea-tangle from the bursting surf, and wild sounds rise from beaches harvestless; so, as they charged, the wide earth rang again. now from their rampart forth the argives poured round godlike agamemnon. rang their shouts cheering each other on to face the fight, and not to cower beside the ships in dread of onset-shouts of battle-eager foes. they met those charging hosts with hearts as light as calves bear, when they leap to meet the kine down faring from hill-pastures in the spring unto the steading, when the fields are green with corn-blades, when the earth is glad with flowers, and bowls are brimmed with milk of kine and ewes, and multitudinous lowing far and near uprises as the mothers meet their young, and in their midst the herdman joys; so great was the uproar that rose when met the fronts of battle: dread it rang on either hand. hard-strained was then the fight: incarnate strife stalked through the midst, with slaughter ghastly-faced. crashed bull-hide shields, and spears, and helmet-crests meeting: the brass flashed out like leaping flames. bristled the battle with the lances; earth ran red with blood, as slaughtered heroes fell and horses, mid a tangle of shattered ears, some yet with spear-wounds gasping, while on them others were falling. through the air upshrieked an awful indistinguishable roar; for on both hosts fell iron-hearted strife. here were men hurling cruel jagged stones, there speeding arrows and new-whetted darts, there with the axe or twibill hewing hard, slashing with swords, and thrusting out with spears: their mad hands clutched all manner of tools of death. at first the argives bore the ranks of troy backward a little; but they rallied, charged, leapt on the foe, and drenched the field with blood. like a black hurricane rushed eurypylus cheering his men on, hewing argives down awelessly: measureless might was lent to him by zeus, for a grace to glorious hercules. nireus, a man in beauty like the gods, his spear long-shafted stabbed beneath the ribs, down on the plain he fell, forth streamed the blood drenching his splendid arms, drenching the form glorious of mould, and his thick-clustering hair. there mid the slain in dust and blood he lay, like a young lusty olive-sapling, which a river rushing down in roaring flood, tearing its banks away, and cleaving wide a chasm-channel, hath disrooted; low it lieth heavy-blossomed; so lay then the goodly form, the grace of loveliness of nireus on earth's breast. but o'er the slain loud rang the taunting of eurypylus: "lie there in dust! thy beauty marvellous naught hath availed thee! i have plucked thee away from life, to which thou wast so fain to cling. rash fool, who didst defy a mightier man unknowing! beauty is no match for strength!" he spake, and leapt upon the slain to strip his goodly arms: but now against him came machaon wroth for nireus, by his side doom-overtaken. with his spear he drave at his right shoulder: strong albeit he was, he touched him, and blood spurted from the gash. yet, ere he might leap back from grapple of death, even as a lion or fierce mountain-boar maddens mid thronging huntsmen, furious-fain to rend the man whose hand first wounded him; so fierce eurypylus on machaon rushed. the long lance shot out swiftly, and pierced him through on the right haunch; yet would he not give back, nor flinch from the onset, fast though flowed the blood. in haste he snatched a huge stone from the ground, and dashed it on the head of telephus' son; but his helm warded him from death or harm then waxed eurypylus more hotly wroth with that strong warrior, and in fury of soul clear through machaon's breast he drave his spear, and through the midriff passed the gory point. he fell, as falls beneath a lion's jaws a bull, and round him clashed his glancing arms. swiftly eurypylus plucked the lance of death out of the wound, and vaunting cried aloud: "wretch, wisdom was not bound up in thine heart, that thou, a weakling, didst come forth to fight a mightier. therefore art thou in the toils of doom. much profit shall be thine, when kites devour the flesh of thee in battle slain! ha, dost thou hope still to return, to 'scape mine hands? a leech art thou, and soothing salves thou knowest, and by these didst haply hope to flee the evil day! not thine own sire, on the wind's wings descending from olympus, should save thy life, not though between thy lips he should pour nectar and ambrosia!" faint-breathing answered him the dying man: "eurypylus, thine own weird is to live not long: fate is at point to meet thee here on troy's plain, and to still thine impious tongue." so passed his spirit into hades' halls. then to the dead man spake his conqueror: "now on the earth lie thou. what shall betide hereafter, care i not--yea, though this day death's doom stand by my feet: no man may live for ever: each man's fate is foreordained." stabbing the corpse he spake. then shouted loud teucer, at seeing machaon in the dust. far thence he stood hard-toiling in the fight, for on the centre sore the battle lay: foe after foe pressed on; yet not for this was teucer heedless of the fallen brave, neither of nireus lying hard thereby behind machaon in the dust. he saw, and with a great voice raised the rescue-cry: "charge, argives! flinch not from the charging foe! for shame unspeakable shall cover us if trojan men hale back to ilium noble machaon and nireus godlike-fair. come, with a good heart let us face the foe to rescue these slain friends, or fall ourselves beside them. duty bids that men defend friends, and to aliens leave them not a prey, not without sweat of toil is glory won!" then were the danaans anguish-stung: the earth all round them dyed they red with blood of slain, as foe fought foe in even-balanced fight. by this to podaleirius tidings came how that in dust his brother lay, struck down by woeful death. beside the ships he sat ministering to the hurts of men with spears stricken. in wrath for his brother's sake he rose, he clad him in his armour; in his breast dread battle-prowess swelled. for conflict grim he panted: boiled the mad blood round his heart he leapt amidst the foemen; his swift hands swung the snake-headed javelin up, and hurled, and slew with its winged speed agamestor's son cleitus, a bright-haired nymph had given him birth beside parthenius, whose quiet stream fleets smooth as oil through green lands, till it pours its shining ripples to the euxine sea. then by his warrior-brother laid he low lassus, whom pronoe, fair as a goddess, bare beside nymphaeus' stream, hard by a cave, a wide and wondrous cave: sacred it is men say, unto the nymphs, even all that haunt the long-ridged paphlagonian hills, and all that by full-clustered heracleia dwell. that cave is like the work of gods, of stone in manner marvellous moulded: through it flows cold water crystal-clear: in niches round stand bowls of stone upon the rugged rock, seeming as they were wrought by carvers' hands. statues of wood-gods stand around, fair nymphs, looms, distaffs, all such things as mortal craft fashioneth. wondrous seem they unto men which pass into that hallowed cave. it hath, up-leading and down-leading, doorways twain, facing, the one, the wild north's shrilling blasts, and one the dank rain-burdened south. by this do mortals pass beneath the nymphs' wide cave; but that is the immortals' path: no man may tread it, for a chasm deep and wide down-reaching unto hades, yawns between. this track the blest gods may alone behold. so died a host on either side that warred over machaon and aglaia's son. but at the last through desperate wrestle of fight the danaans rescued them: yet few were they which bare them to the ships: by bitter stress of conflict were the more part compassed round, and needs must still abide the battle's brunt. but when full many had filled the measure up of fate, mid tumult, blood and agony, then to their ships did many argives flee pressed by eurypylus hard, an avalanche of havoc. yet a few abode the strife round aias and the atreidae rallying; and haply these had perished all, beset by throngs on throngs of foes on every hand, had not oileus' son stabbed with his spear 'twixt shoulder and breast war-wise polydamas; forth gushed the blood, and he recoiled a space. then menelaus pierced deiphobus by the right breast, that with swift feet he fled. and many of that slaughter-breathing throng were slain by agamemnon: furiously he rushed on godlike aethicus with the spear; but he shrank from the forefront back mid friends. now when eurypylus the battle-stay marked how the ranks of troy gave back from fight, he turned him from the host that he had chased even to the ships, and rushed with eagle-swoop on atreus' strong sons and oileus' seed stout-hearted, who was passing fleet of foot and in fight peerless. swiftly he charged on these grasping his spear long-shafted: at iris side charged paris, charged aeneas stout of heart, who hurled a stone exceeding huge, that crashed on aias' helmet: dashed to the dust he was, yet gave not up the ghost, whose day of doom was fate-ordained amidst caphaerus' rocks on the home-voyage. now his valiant men out of the foes' hands snatched him, bare him thence, scarce drawing breath, to the achaean ships. and now the atreid kings, the war-renowned, were left alone, and murder-breathing foes encompassed them, and hurled from every side whate'er their hands might find the deadly shaft some showered, some the stone, the javelin some. they in the midst aye turned this way and that, as boars or lions compassed round with pales on that day when kings gather to the sport the people, and have penned the mighty beasts within the toils of death; but these, although with walls ringed round, yet tear with tusk and fang what luckless thrall soever draweth near. so these death-compassed heroes slew their foes ever as they pressed on. yet had their might availed not for defence, for all their will, had teucer and idomeneus strong of heart come not to help, with thoas, meriones, and godlike thrasymedes, they which shrank erewhile before eurypylus yea, had fled unto the ships to 'scape the crushing doom, but that, in fear for atreus' sons, they rallied against eurypylus: deadly waxed the fight. then teucer with a mighty spear-thrust smote aeneas' shield, yet wounded not his flesh, for the great fourfold buckler warded him; yet feared he, and recoiled a little space. leapt meriones upon laophoon the son of paeon, born by axius' flood of bright-haired cleomede. unto troy with noble asteropaeus had he come to aid her folk: him meriones' keen spear stabbed 'neath the navel, and the lance-head tore his bowels forth; swift sped his soul away into the shadow-land. alcimedes, the warrior-friend of aias, oileus' son, shot mid the press of trojans; for he sped with taunting shout a sharp stone from a sling into their battle's heart. they quailed in fear before the hum and onrush of the bolt. fate winged its flight to the bold charioteer of pammon, hippasus' son: his brow it smote while yet he grasped the reins, and flung him stunned down from the chariot-seat before the wheels. the rushing war-wain whirled his wretched form 'twixt tyres and heels of onward-leaping steeds, and awful death in that hour swallowed him when whip and reins had flown from his nerveless hands. then grief thrilled pammon: hard necessity made him both chariot-lord and charioteer. now to his doom and death-day had he bowed, had not a trojan through that gory strife leapt, grasped the reins, and saved the prince, when now his strength failed 'neath the murderous hands of foes. as godlike acamas charged, the stalwart son of nestor thrust the spear above his knee, and with that wound sore anguish came on him: back from the fight he drew; the deadly strife he left unto his comrades: quenched was now his battle-lust. eurypylus' henchman smote echemmon, thoas' friend, amidst the fray beneath the shoulder: nigh his heart the spear passed bitter-biting: o'er his limbs brake out mingled with blood cold sweat of agony. he turned to flee; eurypylus' giant might chased, caught him, shearing his heel-tendons through: there, where the blow fell, his reluctant feet stayed, and the spirit left his mortal frame. thoas pricked paris with quick-thrusting spear on the right thigh: backward a space he ran for his death-speeding bow, which had been left to rearward of the fight. idomeneus upheaved a stone, huge as his hands could swing, and dashed it on eurypylus' arm: to earth fell his death-dealing spear. backward he stepped to grasp another, since from out his hand the first was smitten. so had atreus' sons a moment's breathing-space from stress of war. but swiftly drew eurypylus' henchmen near bearing a stubborn-shafted lance, wherewith he brake the strength of many. in stormy might then charged he on the foe: whomso he met he slew, and spread wide havoc through their ranks. now neither atreus' sons might steadfast stand, nor any valiant danaan beside, for ruinous panic suddenly gripped the hearts of all; for on them all eurypylus rushed flashing death in their faces, chased them, slew, cried to the trojans and to his chariot-lords: "friends, be of good heart! to these danaans let us deal slaughter and doom's darkness now! lo, how like scared sheep back to the ships they flee! forget not your death-dealing battle-lore, o ye that from your youth are men of war!" then charged they on the argives as one man; and these in utter panic turned and fled the bitter battle, those hard after them followed, as white-fanged hounds hold deer in chase up the long forest-glens. full many in dust they dashed down, howsoe'er they longed to escape. the slaughter grim and great of that wild fray. eurypylus hath slain bucolion, nesus, and chromion and antiphus; twain in mycenae dwelt, a goodly land; in lacedaemon twain. men of renown albeit they were, he slew them. then he smote a host unnumbered of the common throng. my strength should not suffice to sing their fate, how fain soever, though within my breast were iron lungs. aeneas slew withal antimachus and pheres, twain which left crete with idomeneus. agenor smote molus the princely,--with king sthenelus he came from argos,--hurled from far behind a dart new-whetted, as he fled from fight, piercing his right leg, and the eager shaft cut sheer through the broad sinew, shattering the bones with anguished pain: and so his doom met him, to die a death of agony. then paris' arrows laid proud phorcys low, and mosynus, brethren both, from salamis who came in aias' ships, and nevermore saw the home-land. cleolaus smote he next, meges' stout henchman; for the arrow struck his left breast: deadly night enwrapped him round, and his soul fleeted forth: his fainting heart still in his breast fluttering convulsively made the winged arrow shiver. yet again did paris shoot at bold eetion. through his jaw leapt the sudden-flashing brass: he groaned, and with his blood were mingled tears. so ever man slew man, till all the space was heaped with argives each on other cast. now had the trojans burnt with fire the ships, had not night, trailing heavy-folded mist, uprisen. so eurypylus drew back, and troy's sons with him, from the ships aloof a little space, by simois' outfall; there camped they exultant. but amidst the ships flung down upon the sands the argives wailed heart-anguished for the slain, so many of whom dark fate had overtaken and laid in dust. book vii how the son of achilles was brought to the war from the isle of scyros. when heaven hid his stars, and dawn awoke outspraying splendour, and night's darkness fled, then undismayed the argives' warrior-sons marched forth without the ships to meet in fight eurypylus, save those that tarried still to render to machaon midst the ships death-dues, with nireus--nireus, who in grace and goodlihead was like the deathless ones, yet was not strong in bodily might: the gods grant not perfection in all things to men; but evil still is blended with the good by some strange fate: to nireus' winsome grace was linked a weakling's prowess. yet the greeks slighted him not, but gave him all death-dues, and mourned above his grave with no less grief than for machaon, whom they honoured aye, for his deep wisdom, as the immortal gods. one mound they swiftly heaped above these twain. then in the plain once more did murderous war madden: the multitudinous clash and cry rose, as the shields were shattered with huge stones, were pierced with lances. so they toiled in fight; but all this while lay podaleirius fasting in dust and groaning, leaving not his brother's tomb; and oft his heart was moved with his own hands to slay himself. and now he clutched his sword, and now amidst his herbs sought for a deadly drug; and still his friends essayed to stay his hand and comfort him with many pleadings. but he would not cease from grieving: yea, his hands had spilt his life there on his noble brother's new-made tomb, but nestor heard thereof, and sorrowed sore in his affliction, and he came on him as now he flung him on that woeful grave, and now was casting dust upon his head, beating his breast, and on his brother's name crying, while thralls and comrades round their lord groaned, and affliction held them one and all. then gently spake he to that stricken one: "refrain from bitter moan and deadly grief, my son. it is not for a wise man's honour to wail, as doth a woman, o'er the fallen. thou shalt not bring him up to light again whose soul hath fleeted vanishing into air, whose body fire hath ravined up, whose bones earth has received. his end was worthy his life. endure thy sore grief, even as i endured, who lost a son, slain by the hands of foes, a son not worse than thy machaon, good with spears in battle, good in counsel. none of all the youths so loved his sire as he loved me. he died for me yea, died to save his father. yet, when he was slain, did i endure to taste food, and to see the light, well knowing that all men must tread one path hades-ward, and before all lies one goal, death's mournful goal. a mortal man must bear all joys, all griefs, that god vouchsafes to send." made answer that heart-stricken one, while still wet were his cheeks with ever-flowing tears: "father, mine heart is bowed 'neath crushing grief for a brother passing wise, who fostered me even as a son. when to the heavens had passed our father, in his arms he cradled me: gladly he taught me all his healing lore; we shared one table; in one bed we lay: we had all things in common these, and love. my grief cannot forget, nor i desire, now he is dead, to see the light of life." then spake the old man to that stricken one: "to all men fate assigns one same sad lot, bereavement: earth shall cover all alike, albeit we tread not the same path of life, and none the path he chooseth; for on high good things and bad lie on the knees of gods unnumbered, indistinguishably blent. these no immortal seeth; they are veiled in mystic cloud-folds. only fate puts forth her hands thereto, nor looks at what she takes, but casts them from olympus down to earth. this way and that they are wafted, as it were by gusts of wind. the good man oft is whelmed in suffering: wealth undeserved is heaped on the vile person. blind is each man's life; therefore he never walketh surely; oft he stumbleth: ever devious is his path, now sloping down to sorrow, mounting now to bliss. all-happy is no living man from the beginning to the end, but still the good and evil clash. our life is short; beseems not then in grief to live. hope on, still hope for better days: chain not to woe thine heart. there is a saying among men that to the heavens unperishing mount the souls of good men, and to nether darkness sink souls of the wicked. both to god and man dear was thy brother, good to brother-men, and son of an immortal. sure am i that to the company of gods shall he ascend, by intercession of thy sire." then raised he that reluctant mourner up with comfortable words. from that dark grave he drew him, backward gazing oft with groans. to the ships they came, where greeks and trojan men had bitter travail of rekindled war. eurypylus there, in dauntless spirit like the war-god, with mad-raging spear and hands resistless, smote down hosts of foes: the earth was clogged with dead men slain on either side. on strode he midst the corpses, awelessly he fought, with blood-bespattered hands and feet; never a moment from grim strife he ceased. peneleos the mighty-hearted came against him in the pitiless fray: he fell before eurypylus' spear: yea, many more fell round him. ceased not those destroying hands, but wrathful on the argives still he pressed, as when of old on pholoe's long-ridged heights upon the centaurs terrible hercules rushed storming in might, and slew them, passing-swift and strong and battle-cunning though they were; so rushed he on, so smote he down the array, one after other, of the danaan spears. heaps upon heaps, here, there, in throngs they fell strewn in the dust. as when a river in flood comes thundering down, banks crumble on either side to drifting sand: on seaward rolls the surge tossing wild crests, while cliffs on every hand ring crashing echoes, as their brows break down beneath long-leaping roaring waterfalls, and dikes are swept away; so fell in dust the war-famed argives by eurypylus slain, such as he overtook in that red rout. some few escaped, whom strength of fleeing feet delivered. yet in that sore strait they drew peneleos from the shrieking tumult forth, and bare to the ships, though with swift feet themselves were fleeing from ghastly death, from pitiless doom. behind the rampart of the ships they fled in huddled rout: they had no heart to stand before eurypylus, for hercules, to crown with glory his son's stalwart son, thrilled them with panic. there behind their wall they cowered, as goats to leeward of a hill shrink from the wild cold rushing of the wind that bringeth snow and heavy sleet and haft. no longing for the pasture tempteth them over the brow to step, and face the blast, but huddling screened by rock-wall and ravine they abide the storm, and crop the scanty grass under dim copses thronging, till the gusts of that ill wind shall lull: so, by their towers screened, did the trembling danaans abide telephus' mighty son. yea, he had burnt the ships, and all that host had he destroyed, had not athena at the last inspired the argive men with courage. ceaselessly from the high rampart hurled they at the foe with bitter-biting darts, and slew them fast; and all the walls were splashed with reeking gore, and aye went up a moan of smitten men. so fought they: nightlong, daylong fought they on, ceteians, trojans, battle-biding greeks, fought, now before the ships, and now again round the steep wall, with fury unutterable. yet even so for two days did they cease from murderous fight; for to eurypylus came a danaan embassage, saying, "from the war forbear we, while we give unto the flames the battle-slain." so hearkened he to them: from ruin-wreaking strife forebore the hosts; and so their dead they buried, who in dust had fallen. chiefly the achaeans mourned peneleos; o'er the mighty dead they heaped a barrow broad and high, a sign for men of days to be. but in a several place the multitude of heroes slain they laid, mourning with stricken hearts. on one great pyre they burnt them all, and buried in one grave. so likewise far from thence the sons of troy buried their slain. yet murderous strife slept not, but roused again eurypylus' dauntless might to meet the foe. he turned not from the ships, but there abode, and fanned the fury of war. meanwhile the black ship on to scyros ran; and those twain found before his palace-gate achilles' son, now hurling dart and lance, now in his chariot driving fleetfoot steeds. glad were they to behold him practising the deeds of war, albeit his heart was sad for his slain sire, of whom had tidings come ere this. with reverent eyes of awe they went to meet him, for that goodly form and face seemed even as very achilles unto them. but he, or ever they had spoken, cried: "all hail, ye strangers, unto this mine home say whence ye are, and who, and what the need that hither brings you over barren seas." so spake he, and odysseus answered him: "friends are we of achilles lord of war, to whom of deidameia thou wast born- yea, when we look on thee we seem to see that hero's self; and like the immortal ones was he. of ithaca am i: this man of argos, nurse of horses--if perchance thou hast heard the name of tydeus' warrior son or of the wise odysseus. lo, i stand before thee, sent by voice of prophecy. i pray thee, pity us: come thou to troy and help us. only so unto the war an end shall be. gifts beyond words to thee the achaean kings shall give: yea, i myself will give to thee thy godlike father's arms, and great shall be thy joy in bearing them; for these be like no mortal's battle-gear, but splendid as the very war-god's arms. over their marvellous blazonry hath gold been lavished; yea, in heaven hephaestus' self rejoiced in fashioning that work divine, the which thine eyes shall marvel to behold; for earth and heaven and sea upon the shield are wrought, and in its wondrous compass are creatures that seem to live and move--a wonder even to the immortals. never man hath seen their like, nor any man hath worn, save thy sire only, whom the achaeans all honoured as zeus himself. i chiefliest from mine heart loved him, and when he was slain, to many a foe i dealt a ruthless doom, and through them all bare back to the ships his corse. therefore his glorious arms did thetis give to me. these, though i prize them well, to thee will i give gladly when thou com'st to troy. yea also, when we have smitten priam's towns and unto hellas in our ships return, shall menelaus give thee, an thou wilt, his princess-child to wife, of love for thee, and with his bright-haired daughter shall bestow rich dower of gold and treasure, even all that meet is to attend a wealthy king." so spake he, and replied achilles' son: "if bidden of oracles the achaean men summon me, let us with to-morrow's dawn fare forth upon the broad depths of the sea, if so to longing danaans i may prove a light of help. now pass we to mine halls, and to such guest-fare as befits to set before the stranger. for my marriage-day- to this the gods in time to come shall see." then hall-ward led he them, and with glad hearts they followed. to the forecourt when they came of that great mansion, found they there the queen deidameia in her sorrow of soul grief-wasted, as when snow from mountain-sides before the sun and east-wind wastes away; so pined she for that princely hero slain. then came to her amidst her grief the kings, and greeted her in courteous wise. her son drew near and told their lineage and their names; but that for which they came he left untold until the morrow, lest unto her woe there should be added grief and floods of tears, and lest her prayers should hold him from the path whereon his heart was set. straight feasted these, and comforted their hearts with sleep, even all which dwelt in sea-ringed scyros, nightlong lulled by long low thunder of the girdling deep, of waves aegean breaking on her shores. but not on deidameia fell the hands of kindly sleep. she bore in mind the names of crafty odysseus and of diomede the godlike, how these twain had widowed her of battle-fain achilles, how their words had won his aweless heart to fare with them to meet the war-cry where stern fate met him, shattered his hope of home-return, and laid measureless grief on peleus and on her. therefore an awful dread oppressed her soul lest her son too to tumult of the war should speed, and grief be added to her grief. dawn climbed the wide-arched heaven, straightway they rose from their beds. then deidameia knew; and on her son's broad breast she cast herself, and bitterly wailed: her cry thrilled through the air, as when a cow loud-lowing mid the hills seeks through the glens her calf, and all around echo long ridges of the mountain-steep; so on all sides from dim recesses rang the hall; and in her misery she cried: "child, wherefore is thy soul now on the wing to follow strangers unto ilium the fount of tears, where perish many in fight, yea, cunning men in war and battle grim? and thou art but a youth, and hast not learnt the ways of war, which save men in the day of peril. hearken thou to me, abide here in thine home, lest evil tidings come from troy unto my ears, that thou in fight hast perished; for mine heart saith, never thou hitherward shalt from battle-toil return. not even thy sire escaped the doom of death- he, mightier than thou, mightier than all heroes on earth, yea, and a goddess' son- but was in battle slain, all through the wiles and crafty counsels of these very men who now to woeful war be kindling thee. therefore mine heart is full of shuddering fear lest, son, my lot should be to live bereaved of thee, and to endure dishonour and pain, for never heavier blow on woman falls than when her lord hath perished, and her sons die also, and her house is left to her desolate. straightway evil men remove her landmarks, yea, and rob her of her all, setting the right at naught. there is no lot more woeful and more helpless than is hers who is left a widow in a desolate home." loud-wailing spake she; but her son replied: "be of good cheer, my mother; put from thee evil foreboding. no man is in war beyond his destiny slain. if my weird be to die in my country's cause, then let me die when i have done deeds worthy of my sire." then to his side old lycomedes came, and to his battle-eager grandson spake: "o valiant-hearted son, so like thy sire, i know thee strong and valorous; yet, o yet for thee i fear the bitter war; i fear the terrible sea-surge. shipmen evermore hang on destruction's brink. beware, my child, perils of waters when thou sailest back from troy or other shores, such as beset full oftentimes the voyagers that ride the long sea-ridges, when the sun hath left the archer-star, and meets the misty goat, when the wild blasts drive on the lowering storm, or when orion to the darkling west slopes, into ocean's river sinking slow. beware the time of equal days and nights, when blasts that o'er the sea's abysses rush, none knoweth whence in fury of battle clash. beware the pleiads' setting, when the sea maddens beneath their power nor these alone, but other stars, terrors of hapless men, as o'er the wide sea-gulf they set or rise." then kissed he him, nor sought to stay the feet of him who panted for the clamour of war, who smiled for pleasure and for eagerness to haste to the ship. yet were his hurrying feet stayed by his mother's pleading and her tears still in those halls awhile. as some swift horse is reined in by his rider, when he strains unto the race-course, and he neighs, and champs the curbing bit, dashing his chest with foam, and his feet eager for the course are still never, his restless hooves are clattering aye; his mane is a stormy cloud, he tosses high his head with snortings, and his lord is glad; so reined his mother back the glorious son of battle-stay achilles, so his feet were restless, so the mother's loving pride joyed in her son, despite her heart-sick pain. a thousand times he kissed her, then at last left her alone with her own grief and moan there in her father's halls. as o'er her nest a swallow in her anguish cries aloud for her lost nestlings which, mid piteous shrieks, a fearful serpent hath devoured, and wrung the loving mother's heart; and now above that empty cradle spreads her wings, and now flies round its porchway fashioned cunningly lamenting piteously her little ones: so for her child deidameia mourned. now on her son's bed did she cast herself, crying aloud, against his door-post now she leaned, and wept: now laid she in her lap those childhood's toys yet treasured in her bower, wherein his babe-heart joyed long years agone. she saw a dart there left behind of him, and kissed it o'er and o'er yea, whatso else her weeping eyes beheld that was her son's. naught heard he of her moans unutterable, but was afar, fast striding to the ship. he seemed, as his feet swiftly bare him on, like some all-radiant star; and at his side with tydeus' son war-wise odysseus went, and with them twenty gallant-hearted men, whom deidameia chose as trustiest of all her household, and unto her son gave them for henchmen swift to do his will. and these attended achilles' valiant son, as through the city to the ship he sped. on, with glad laughter, in their midst he strode; and thetis and the nereids joyed thereat. yea, glad was even the raven-haired, the lord of all the sea, beholding that brave son of princely achilles, marking how he longed for battle. beardless boy albeit he was, his prowess and his might were inward spurs to him. he hasted forth his fatherland like to the war-god, when to gory strife he speedeth, wroth with foes, when maddeneth his heart, and grim his frown is, and his eyes flash levin-flame around him, and his face is clothed with glory of beauty terror-blent, as on he rusheth: quail the very gods. so seemed achilles' goodly son; and prayers went up through all the city unto heaven to bring their noble prince safe back from war; and the gods hearkened to them. high he towered above all stateliest men which followed him. so came they to the heavy-plunging sea, and found the rowers in the smooth-wrought ship handling the tackle, fixing mast and sail. straightway they went aboard: the shipmen cast the hawsers loose, and heaved the anchor-stones, the strength and stay of ships in time of need. then did the sea-queen's lord grant voyage fair to these with gracious mind; for his heart yearned o'er the achaeans, by the trojan men and mighty-souled eurypylus hard-bestead. on either side of neoptolemus sat those heroes, gladdening his soul with tales of his sire's mighty deeds--of all he wrought in sea-raids, and in valiant telephus' land, and how he smote round priam's burg the men of troy, for glory unto atreus' sons. his heart glowed, fain to grasp his heritage, his aweless father's honour and renown. in her bower, sorrowing for her son the while, deidameia poured forth sighs and tears. with agony of soul her very heart melted in her, as over coals doth lead or wax, and never did her moaning cease, as o'er the wide sea her gaze followed him. ay, for her son a mother fretteth still, though it be to a feast that he hath gone, by a friend bidden forth. but soon the sail of that good ship far-fleeting o'er the blue grew faint and fainter--melted in sea-haze. but still she sighed, still daylong made her moan. on ran the ship before a following wind, seeming to skim the myriad-surging sea, and crashed the dark wave either side the prow: swiftly across the abyss unplumbed she sped. night's darkness fell about her, but the breeze held, and the steersman's hand was sure. o'er gulfs of brine she flew, till dawn divine rose up to climb the sky. then sighted they the peaks of ida, chrysa next, and smintheus' fane, then the sigean strand, and then the tomb of aeacus' son. yet would laertes' seed, the man discreet of soul, not point it out to neoptolemus, lest the tide of grief too high should swell within his breast. they passed calydnae's isles, left tenedos behind; and now was seen the fane of eleus, where stands protesilaus' tomb, beneath the shade of towery elms; when, soaring high above the plain, their topmost boughs discern troy, straightway wither all their highest sprays. nigh ilium now the ship by wind and oar was brought: they saw the long strand fringed with keels of argives, who endured sore travail of war even then about the wall, the which themselves had reared to screen the ships and men in stress of battle. even now eurypylus' hands to earth were like to dash it and destroy; but the quick eyes of tydeus' strong son marked how rained the darts and stones on that long wall. forth of the ship he sprang, and shouted loud with all the strength of his undaunted breast: "friends, on the argive men is heaped this day sore travail! let us don our flashing arms with speed, and to yon battle-turmoil haste. for now upon our towers the warrior sons of troy press hard--yea, haply will they tear the long walls down, and burn the ships with fire, and so the souls that long for home-return shall win it never; nay, ourselves shall fall before our due time, and shall lie in graves in troyland, far from children and from wives." all as one man down from the ship they leapt; for trembling seized on all for that grim sight- on all save aweless neoptolemus whose might was like his father's: lust of war swept o'er him. to odysseus' tent in haste they sped, for close it lay to where the ship touched land. about its walls was hung great store of change of armour, of wise odysseus some, and rescued some from gallant comrades slain. then did the brave man put on goodly arms; but they in whose breasts faintlier beat their hearts must don the worser. odysseus stood arrayed in those which came with him from ithaca: to diomede he gave fair battle-gear stripped in time past from mighty socus slain. but in his father's arms achilles' son clad him and lo, he seemed achilles' self! light on his limbs and lapping close they lay- so cunning was hephaestus' workmanship- which for another had been a giant's arms. the massive helmet cumbered not his brows; yea, the great pelian spear-shaft burdened not his hand, but lightly swung he up on high the heavy and tall lance thirsting still for blood. of many argives which beheld him then might none draw nigh to him, how fain soe'er, so fast were they in that grim grapple locked of the wild war that raged all down the wall. but as when shipmen, under a desolate isle mid the wide sea by stress of weather bound, chafe, while afar from men the adverse blasts prison them many a day; they pace the deck with sinking hearts, while scantier grows their store of food; they weary till a fair wind sings; so joyed the achaean host, which theretofore were heavy of heart, when neoptolemus came, joyed in the hope of breathing-space from toil. then like the aweless lion's flashed his eyes, which mid the mountains leaps in furious mood to meet the hunters that draw nigh his cave, thinking to steal his cubs, there left alone in a dark-shadowed glen but from a height the beast hath spied, and on the spoilers leaps with grim jaws terribly roaring; even so that glorious child of aeacus' aweless son against the trojan warriors burned in wrath. thither his eagle-swoop descended first where loudest from the plain uproared the fight, there weakest, he divined, must be the wall, the battlements lowest, since the surge of foes brake heaviest there. charged at his side the rest breathing the battle-spirit. there they found eurypylus mighty of heart and all his men scaling a tower, exultant in the hope of tearing down the walls, of slaughtering the argives in one holocaust. no mind the gods had to accomplish their desire! but now odysseus, diomede the strong, leonteus, and neoptolemus, as a god in strength and beauty, hailed their javelins down, and thrust them from the wall. as dogs and shepherds by shouting and hard fighting drive away strong lions from a steading, rushing forth from all sides, and the brutes with glaring eyes pace to and fro; with savage lust for blood of calves and kine their jaws are slavering; yet must their onrush give back from the hounds and fearless onset of the shepherd folk; [so from these new defenders shrank the foe] a little, far as one may hurl a stone exceeding great; for still eurypylus suffered them not to flee far from the ships, but cheered them on to bide the brunt, until the ships be won, and all the argives slain; for zeus with measureless might thrilled all his frame. then seized he a rugged stone and huge, and leapt and hurled it full against the high-built wall. it crashed, and terribly boomed that rampart steep to its foundations. terror gripped the greeks, as though that wall had crumbled down in dust; yet from the deadly conflict flinched they not, but stood fast, like to jackals or to wolves bold robbers of the sheep--when mid the hills hunter and hound would drive them forth their caves, being grimly purposed there to slay their whelps. yet these, albeit tormented by the darts, flee not, but for their cubs' sake bide and fight; so for the ships' sake they abode and fought, and for their own lives. but eurypylus afront of all the ships stood, taunting them: "coward and dastard souls! no darts of yours had given me pause, nor thrust back from your ships, had not your rampart stayed mine onset-rush. ye are like to dogs, that in a forest flinch before a lion! skulking therewithin ye are fighting--nay, are shrinking back from death! but if ye dare come forth on trojan ground, as once when ye were eager for the fray, none shall from ghastly death deliver you: slain by mine hand ye all shall lie in dust!" so did he shout a prophecy unfulfilled, nor heard doom's chariot-wheels fast rolling near bearing swift death at neoptolemus' hands, nor saw death gleaming from his glittering spear. ay, and that hero paused not now from fight, but from the ramparts smote the trojans aye. from that death leaping from above they quailed in tumult round eurypylus: deadly fear gripped all their hearts. as little children cower about a father's knees when thunder of zeus crashes from cloud to cloud, when all the air shudders and groans, so did the sons of troy, with those ceteians round their great king, cower ever as prince neoptolemus hurled; for death rode upon all he cast, and bare his wrath straight rushing down upon the heads of foes. now in their hearts those wildered trojans said that once more they beheld achilles' self gigantic in his armour. yet they hid that horror in their breasts, lest panic fear should pass from them to the ceteian host and king eurypylus; so on every side they wavered 'twixt the stress of their hard strait and that blood-curdling dread, 'twixt shame and fear. as when men treading a precipitous path look up, and see adown the mountain-slope a torrent rushing on them, thundering down the rocks, and dare not meet its clamorous flood, but hurry shuddering on, with death in sight holding as naught the perils of the path; so stayed the trojans, spite of their desire [to flee the imminent death that waited them] beneath the wall. godlike eurypylus aye cheered them on to fight. he trusted still that this new mighty foe would weary at last with toil of slaughter; but he wearied not. that desperate battle-travail pallas saw, and left the halls of heaven incense-sweet, and flew o'er mountain-crests: her hurrying feet touched not the earth, borne by the air divine in form of cloud-wreaths, swifter than the wind. she came to troy, she stayed her feet upon sigeum's windy ness, she looked forth thence over the ringing battle of dauntless men, and gave the achaeans glory. achilles' son beyond the rest was filled with valour and strength which win renown for men in whom they meet. peerless was he in both: the blood of zeus gave strength; to his father's valour was he heir; so by those towers he smote down many a foe. and as a fisher on the darkling sea, to lure the fish to their destruction, takes within his boat the strength of fire; his breath kindles it to a flame, till round the boat glareth its splendour, and from the black sea dart up the fish all eager to behold the radiance--for the last time; for the barbs of his three-pointed spear, as up they leap, slay them; his heart rejoices o'er the prey. so that war-king achilles' glorious son slew hosts of onward-rushing foes around that wall of stone. well fought the achaeans all, here, there, adown the ramparts: rang again the wide strand and the ships: the battered walls groaned ever. men with weary ache of toil fainted on either side; sinews and might of strong men were unstrung. but o'er the son of battle-stay achilles weariness crept not: his battle-eager spirit aye was tireless; never touched by palsying fear he fought on, as with the triumphant strength of an ever-flowing river: though it roll 'twixt blazing forests, though the madding blast roll stormy seas of flame, it feareth not, for at its brink faint grows the fervent heat, the strong flood turns its might to impotence; so weariness nor fear could bow the knees of hero achilles' gallant-hearted son, still as he fought, still cheered his comrades on. of myriad shafts sped at him none might touch his flesh, but even as snowflakes on a rock fell vainly ever: wholly screened was he by broad shield and strong helmet, gifts of a god. in these exulting did the aeacid's son stride all along the wall, with ringing shouts cheering the dauntless argives to the fray, being their mightiest far, bearing a soul insatiate of the awful onset-cry, burning with one strong purpose, to avenge his father's death: the myrmidons in their king exulted. roared the battle round the wall. two sons he slew of meges rich in gold, scion of dymas--sons of high renown, cunning to hurl the dart, to drive the steed in war, and deftly cast the lance afar, born at one birth beside sangarius' banks of periboea to him, celtus one, and eubius the other. but not long his boundless wealth enjoyed they, for the fates span them a thread of life exceeding brief. as on one day they saw the light, they died on one day by the same hand. to the heart of one neoptolemus sped a javelin; one he smote down with a massy stone that crashed through his strong helmet, shattered all its ridge, and dashed his brains to earth. around them fell foes many, a host untold. the war-god's work waxed ever mightier till the eventide, till failed the light celestial; then the host of brave eurypylus from the ships drew back a little: they that held those leaguered towers had a short breathing-space; the sons of troy had respite from the deadly-echoing strife, from that hard rampart-battle. verily all the argives had beside their ships been slain, had not achilles' strong son on that day withstood the host of foes and their great chief eurypylus. came to that young hero's side phoenix the old, and marvelling gazed on one the image of peleides. tides of joy and grief swept o'er him--grief, for memories of that swift-footed father--joy, for sight of such a son. he for sheer gladness wept; for never without tears the tribes of men live--nay, not mid the transports of delight. he clasped him round as father claspeth son whom, after long and troublous wanderings, the gods bring home to gladden a father's heart. so kissed he neoptolemus' head and breast, clasping him round, and cried in rapture of joy: "hail, goodly son of that achilles whom i nursed a little one in mine own arms with a glad heart. by heaven's high providence like a strong sapling waxed he in stature fast, and daily i rejoiced to see his form and prowess, my life's blessing, honouring him as though he were the son of mine old age; for like a father did he honour me. i was indeed his father, he my son in spirit: thou hadst deemed us of one blood who were in heart one: but of nobler mould was he by far, in form and strength a god. thou art wholly like him--yea, i seem to see alive amid the argives him for whom sharp anguish shrouds me ever. i waste away in sorrowful age--oh that the grave had closed on me while yet he lived! how blest to be by loving hands of kinsmen laid to rest! ah child, my sorrowing heart will nevermore forget him! chide me not for this my grief. but now, help thou the myrmidons and greeks in their sore strait: wreak on the foe thy wrath for thy brave sire. it shall be thy renown to slay this war-insatiate telephus' son; for mightier art thou, and shalt prove, than he, as was thy father than his wretched sire." made answer golden-haired achilles' son: "ancient, our battle-prowess mighty fate and the o'ermastering war-god shall decide." but, as he spake, he had fain on that same day forth of the gates have rushed in his sire's arms; but night, which bringeth men release from toil, rose from the ocean veiled in sable pall. with honour as of mighty achilles' self him mid the ships the glad greeks hailed, who had won courage from that his eager rush to war. with princely presents did they honour him, with priceless gifts, whereby is wealth increased; for some gave gold and silver, handmaids some, brass without weight gave these, and iron those; others in deep jars brought the ruddy wine: yea, fleetfoot steeds they gave, and battle-gear, and raiment woven fair by women's hands. glowed neoptolemus' heart for joy of these. a feast they made for him amidst the tents, and there extolled achilles' godlike son with praise as of the immortal heavenly ones; and joyful-voiced agamemnon spake to him: "thou verily art the brave-souled aeacid's son, his very image thou in stalwart might, in beauty, stature, courage, and in soul. mine heart burns in me seeing thee. i trust thine hands and spear shall smite yon hosts of foes, shall smite the city of priam world-renowned- so like thy sire thou art! methinks i see himself beside the ships, as when his shout of wrath for dead patroclus shook the ranks of troy. but he is with the immortal ones, yet, bending from that heaven, sends thee to-day to save the argives on destruction's brink." answered achilles' battle-eager son: "would i might meet him living yet, o king, that so himself might see the son of his love not shaming his great father's name. i trust so shall it be, if the gods grant me life." so spake he in wisdom and in modesty; and all there marvelled at the godlike man. but when with meat and wine their hearts were filled, then rose achilles' battle-eager son, and from the feast passed forth unto the tent that was his sire's. much armour of heroes slain lay there; and here and there were captive maids arraying that tent widowed of its lord, as though its king lived. when that son beheld those trojan arms and handmaid-thralls, he groaned, by passionate longing for his father seized. as when through dense oak-groves and tangled glens comes to the shadowed cave a lion's whelp whose grim sire by the hunters hath been slain, and looketh all around that empty den, and seeth heaps of bones of steeds and kine slain theretofore, and grieveth for his sire; even so the heart of brave peleides' son with grief was numbed. the handmaids marvelling gazed; and fair briseis' self, when she beheld achilles' son, was now right glad at heart, and sorrowed now with memories of the dead. her soul was wildered all, as though indeed there stood the aweless aeacid living yet. meanwhile exultant trojans camped aloof extolled eurypylus the fierce and strong, as erst they had praised hector, when he smote their foes, defending troy and all her wealth. but when sweet sleep stole over mortal men, then sons of troy and battle-biding greeks all slumber-heavy slept unsentinelled. book viii how hercules' grandson perished in fight with the son of achilles. when from the far sea-line, where is the cave of dawn, rose up the sun, and scattered light over the earth, then did the eager sons of troy and of achaea arm themselves athirst for battle: these achilles' son cheered on to face the trojans awelessly; and those the giant strength of telephus' seed kindled. he trusted to dash down the wall to earth, and utterly destroy the ships with ravening fire, and slay the argive host. ah, but his hope was as the morning breeze delusive: hard beside him stood the fates laughing to scorn his vain imaginings. then to the myrmidons spake achilles' son, the aweless, to the fight enkindling them: "hear me, mine henchmen: take ye to your hearts the spirit of war, that we may heal the wounds of argos, and be ruin to her foes. let no man fear, for mighty prowess is the child of courage; but fear slayeth strength and spirit. gird yourselves with strength for war; give foes no breathing-space, that they may say that mid our ranks achilles liveth yet." then clad he with his father's flashing arms his shoulders. then exulted thetis' heart when from the sea she saw the mighty strength of her son's son. then forth with eagle-speed afront of that high wall he rushed, his ear drawn by the immortal horses of his sire. as from the ocean-verge upsprings the sun in glory, flashing fire far over earth- fire, when beside his radiant chariot-team races the red star sirius, scatterer of woefullest diseases over men; so flashed upon the eyes of ilium's host that battle-eager hero, achilles' son. onward they whirled him, those immortal steeds, the which, when now he longed to chase the foe back from the ships, automedon, who wont to rein them for his father, brought to him. with joy that pair bore battleward their lord, so like to aeacus' son, their deathless hearts held him no worser than achilles' self. laughing for glee the argives gathered round the might resistless of neoptolemus, eager for fight as wasps [whose woodland bower the axe] hath shaken, who dart swarming forth furious to sting the woodman: round their nest long eddying, they torment all passers by; so streamed they forth from galley and from wall burning for fight, and that wide space was thronged, and all the plain far blazed with armour-sheen, as shone from heaven's vault the sun thereon. as flees the cloud-rack through the welkin wide scourged onward by the north-wind's titan blasts, when winter-tide and snow are hard at hand, and darkness overpalls the firmament; so with their thronging squadrons was the earth covered before the ships. to heaven uprolled, dust hung on hovering wings' men's armour clashed; rattled a thousand chariots; horses neighed on-rushing to the fray. each warrior's prowess kindled him with its trumpet-call to war. as leap the long sea-rollers, onward hurled by two winds terribly o'er th' broad sea-flood roaring from viewless bournes, with whirlwind blasts crashing together, when a ruining storm maddens along the wide gulfs of the deep, and moans the sea-queen with her anguished waves which sweep from every hand, uptowering like precipiced mountains, while the bitter squall, ceaselessly veering, shrieks across the sea; so clashed in strife those hosts from either hand with mad rage. strife incarnate spurred them on, and their own prowess. crashed together these like thunderclouds outlightening, thrilling the air. with shattering trumpet-challenge, when the blasts are locked in frenzied wrestle, with mad breath rending the clouds, when zeus is wroth with men who travail with iniquity, and flout his law. so grappled they, as spear with spear clashed, shield with shield, and man on man was hurled. and first achilles' war-impetuous son struck down stout melaneus and alcidamas, sons of the war-lord alexinomus, who dwelt in caunus mountain-cradled, nigh the clear lake shining at tarbelus' feet 'neath snow-capt imbrus. menes, fleetfoot son of king cassandrus, slew he, born to him by fair creusa, where the lovely streams of lindus meet the sea, beside the marches of battle-biding carians, and the heights of lycia the renowned. he slew withal morys the spearman, who from phrygia came; polybus and hippomedon by his side he laid, this stabbed to the heart, that pierced between shoulder and neck: man after man he slew. earth groaned 'neath trojan corpses; rank on rank crumbled before him, even as parched brakes sink down before the blast of ravening fire when the north wind of latter summer blows; so ruining squadrons fell before his charge. meanwhile aeneas slew aristolochus, crashing a great stone down on his head: it brake helmet and skull together, and fled his life. fleetfoot eumaeus diomede slew; he dwelt in craggy dardanus, where the bride-bed is whereon anchises clasped the queen of love. agamemnon smote down stratus: unto thrace returned he not from war, but died far off from his dear fatherland. and meriones struck chlemus down, peisenor's son, the friend of god-like glaucus, and his comrade leal, who by limurus' outfall dwelt: the folk honoured him as their king, when reigned no more glaucus, in battle slain,--all who abode around phoenice's towers, and by the crest of massicytus, and chimaera's glen. so man slew man in fight; but more than all eurypylus hurled doom on many a foe. first slew he battle-bider eurytus, menoetius of the glancing taslet next, elephenor's godlike comrades. fell with these harpalus, wise odysseus' warrior-friend; but in the fight afar that hero toiled, and might not aid his fallen henchman: yet fierce antiphus for that slain man was wroth, and hurled his spear against eurypylus, yet touched him not; the strong shaft glanced aside, and pierced meilanion battle-staunch, the son of cleite lovely-faced, erylaus' bride, who bare him where caicus meets the sea. wroth for his comrade slain, eurypylus rushed upon antiphus, but terror-winged he plunged amid his comrades; so the spear of the avenger slew him not, whose doom was one day wretchedly to be devoured by the manslaying cyclops: so it pleased stern fate, i know not why. elsewhither sped eurypylus; and aye as he rushed on fell 'neath his spear a multitude untold. as tall trees, smitten by the strength of steel in mountain-forest, fill the dark ravines, heaped on the earth confusedly, so fell the achaeans 'neath eurypylus' flying spears- till heart-uplifted met him face to face achilles' son. the long spears in their hands they twain swung up, each hot to smite his foe. but first eurypylus cried the challenge-cry; "who art thou? whence hast come to brave me here? to hades merciless fate is bearing thee; for in grim fight hath none escaped mine hands; but whoso, eager for the fray, have come hither, on all have i hurled anguished death. by xanthus' streams have dogs devoured their flesh and gnawed their bones. answer me, who art thou? whose be the steeds that bear thee exultant on?" answered achilles' battle-eager son: "wherefore, when i am hurrying to the fray, dost thou, a foe, put question thus to me, as might a friend, touching my lineage, which many know? achilles' son am i, son of the man whose long spear smote thy sire, and made him flee--yea, and the ruthless fates of death had seized him, but my father's self healed him upon the brink of woeful death. the steeds which bear me were my godlike sire's; these the west-wind begat, the harpy bare: over the barren sea their feet can race skimming its crests: in speed they match the winds. since then thou know'st the lineage of my steeds and mine, now put thou to the test the might of my strong spear, born on steep pelion's crest, who hath left his father-stock and forest there." he spake; and from the chariot sprang to earth that glorious man: he swung the long spear up. but in his brawny hand his foe hath seized a monstrous stone: full at the golden shield of neoptolemus he sped its flight; but, no whir staggered by its whirlwind rush, he like a giant mountain-foreland stood which all the banded fury of river-floods can stir not, rooted in the eternal hills; so stood unshaken still achilles' son. yet not for this eurypylus' dauntless might shrank from achilles' son invincible, on-spurred by his own hardihood and by fate. their hearts like caldrons seethed o'er fires of wrath, their glancing armour flashed about their limbs. like terrible lions each on other rushed, which fight amid the mountains famine-stung, writhing and leaping in the strain of strife for a slain ox or stag, while all the glens ring with their conflict; so they grappled, so clashed they in pitiless strife. on either hand long lines of warriors greek and trojan toiled in combat: round them roared up flames of war. like mighty rushing winds they hurled together with eager spears for blood of life athirst. hard by them stood enyo, spurred them on ceaselessly: never paused they from the strife. now hewed they each the other's shield, and now thrust at the greaves, now at the crested helms. reckless of wounds, in that grim toil pressed on those aweless heroes: strife incarnate watched and gloated o'er them. ran the sweat in streams from either: straining hard they stood their ground, for both were of the seed of blessed ones. from heaven, with hearts at variance, gods looked down; for some gave glory to achilles' son, some to eurypylus the godlike. still they fought on, giving ground no more than rock. of granite mountains. rang from side to side spear-smitten shields. at last the pelian lance, sped onward by a mighty thrust, hath passed clear through eurypylus' throat. forth poured the blood torrent-like; through the portal of the wound the soul from the body flew: darkness of death dropped o'er his eyes. to earth in clanging arms he fell, like stately pine or silver fir uprooted by the fury of boreas; such space of earth eurypylus' giant frame covered in falling: rang again the floor and plain of troyland. grey death-pallor swept over the corpse, and all the flush of life faded away. with a triumphant laugh shouted the mighty hero over him: "eurypylus, thou saidst thou wouldst destroy the danaan ships and men, wouldst slay us all wretchedly--but the gods would not fulfil thy wish. for all thy might invincible, my father's massy spear hath now subdued thee under me, that spear no man shall 'scape, though he be brass all through, who faceth me." he spake, and tore the long lance from the corse, while shrank the trojans back in dread, at sight of that strong-hearted man. straightway he stripped the armour from the dead, for friends to bear fast to the ships achaean. but himself to the swift chariot and the tireless steeds sprang, and sped onward like a thunderbolt that lightning-girdled leaps through the wide air from zeus's hands unconquerable--the bolt before whose downrush all the immortals quail save only zeus. it rusheth down to earth, it rendeth trees and rugged mountain-crags; so rushed he on the trojans, flashing doom before their eyes; dashed to the earth they fell before the charge of those immortal steeds: the earth was heaped with slain, was dyed with gore. as when in mountain-glens the unnumbered leaves down-streaming thick and fast hide all the ground, so hosts of troy untold on earth were strewn by neoptolemus and fierce-hearted greeks, shed by whose hands the blood in torrents ran 'neath feet of men and horses. chariot-rails were dashed with blood-spray whirled up from the tyres. now had the trojans fled within their gates as calves that flee a lion, or as swine flee from a storm--but murderous ares came, unmarked of other gods, down from the heavens, eager to help the warrior sons of troy. red-fire and flame, tumult and panic-fear, his car-steeds, bare him down into the fight, the coursers which to roaring boreas grim-eyed erinnys bare, coursers that breathed life-blasting flame: groaned all the shivering air, as battleward they sped. swiftly he came to troy: loud rang the earth beneath the feet of that wild team. into the battle's heart tossing his massy spear, he came; with a shout he cheered the trojans on to face the foe. they heard, and marvelled at that wondrous cry, not seeing the god's immortal form, nor steeds, veiled in dense mist. but the wise prophet-soul of helenus knew the voice divine that leapt unto the trojans' ears, they knew not whence, and with glad heart to the fleeing host he cried: "o cravens, wherefore fear achilles' son, though ne'er so brave? he is mortal even as we; his strength is not as ares' strength, who is come a very present help in our sore need. that was his shout far-pealing, bidding us fight on against the argives. let your hearts be strong, o friends: let courage fill your breasts. no mightier battle-helper can draw nigh to troy than he. who is of more avail for war than ares, when he aideth men hard-fighting? lo, to our help he cometh now! on to the fight! cast to the winds your fears!" they fled no more, they faced the argive men, as hounds, that mid the copses fled at first, turn them about to face and fight the wolf, spurred by the chiding of their shepherd-lord; so turned the sons of troy again to war, casting away their fear. man leapt on man valiantly fighting; loud their armour clashed smitten with swords, with lances, and with darts. spears plunged into men's flesh: dread ares drank his fill of blood: struck down fell man on man, as greek and trojan fought. in level poise the battle-balance hung. as when young men in hot haste prune a vineyard with the steel, and each keeps pace with each in rivalry, since all in strength and age be equal-matched; so did the awful scales of battle hang level: all trojan hearts beat high, and firm stood they in trust on aweless ares' might, while the greeks trusted in achilles' son. ever they slew and slew: stalked through the midst deadly enyo, her shoulders and her hands blood-splashed, while fearful sweat streamed from her limbs. revelling in equal fight, she aided none, lest thetis' or the war-god's wrath be stirred. then neoptolemus slew one far-renowned, perimedes, who had dwelt by smintheus' grove; next cestrus died, phalerus battle-staunch, perilaus the strong, menalcas lord of spears, whom iphianassa bare by the haunted foot of cilla to the cunning craftsman medon. in the home-land afar the sire abode, and never kissed his son's returning head: for that fair home and all his cunning works did far-off kinsmen wrangle o'er his grave. deiphobus slew lycon battle-staunch: the lance-head pierced him close above the groin, and round the long spear all his bowels gushed out. aeneas smote down dymas, who erewhile in aulis dwelt, and followed unto troy arcesilaus, and saw never more the dear home-land. euryalus hurled a dart, and through astraeus' breast the death-winged point flew, shearing through the breathways of man's life; and all that lay within was drenched with blood. and hard thereby great-souled agenor slew hippomenes, hero teucer's comrade staunch, with one swift thrust 'twixt shoulder and neck: his soul rushed forth in blood; death's night swept over him. grief for his comrade slain on teucer fell; he strained his bow, a swift-winged shaft he sped, but smote him not, for slightly agenor swerved. yet nigh him deiophontes stood; the shaft into his left eye plunged, passed through the ball, and out through his right ear, because the fates whither they willed thrust on the bitter barbs. even as in agony he leapt full height, yet once again the archer's arrow hissed: it pierced his throat, through the neck-sinews cleft unswerving, and his hard doom came on him. so man to man dealt death; and joyed the fates and doom, and fell strife in her maddened glee shouted aloud, and ares terribly shouted in answer, and with courage thrilled the trojans, and with panic fear the greeks, and shook their reeling squadrons. but one man he scared not, even achilles' son; he abode, and fought undaunted, slaying foes on foes. as when a young lad sweeps his hand around flies swarming over milk, and nigh the bowl here, there they lie, struck dead by that light touch, and gleefully the child still plies the work; so stern achilles' glorious scion joyed over the slain, and recked not of the god who spurred the trojans on: man after man tasted his vengeance of their charging host. even as a giant mountain-peak withstands on-rushing hurricane-blasts, so he abode unquailing. ares at his eager mood grew wroth, and would have cast his veil of cloud away, and met him face to face in fight, but now athena from olympus swooped to forest-mantled ida. quaked the earth and xanthus' murmuring streams; so mightily she shook them: terror-stricken were the souls of all the nymphs, adread for priam's town. from her immortal armour flashed around the hovering lightnings; fearful serpents breathed fire from her shield invincible; the crest of her great helmet swept the clouds. and now she was at point to close in sudden fight with ares; but the mighty will of zeus daunted them both, from high heaven thundering his terrors. ares drew back from the war, for manifest to him was zeus's wrath. to wintry thrace he passed; his haughty heart reeked no more of the trojans. in the plain of troy no more stayed pallas; she was gone to hallowed athens. but the armies still strove in the deadly fray; and fainted now the trojans' prowess; but all battle-fain the argives pressed on these as they gave ground. as winds chase ships that fly with straining sails on to the outsea--as on forest-brakes leapeth the fury of flame--as swift hounds drive deer through the mountains, eager for the prey, so did the argives chase them: achilles' son still cheered them on, still slew with that great spear whomso he overtook. on, on they fled till into stately-gated troy they poured. then had the argives a short breathing-space from war, when they had penned the hosts of troy in priam's burg, as shepherds pen up lambs upon a lonely steading. and, as when after hard strain, a breathing-space is given to oxen that, quick-panting 'neath the yoke, up a steep hill have dragged a load, so breathed awhile the achaeans after toil in arms. then once more hot for the fray did they beset the city-towers. but now with gates fast barred the trojans from the walls withstood the assault. as when within their steading shepherd-folk abide the lowering tempest, when a day of storm hath dawned, with fury of lightnings, rain and heavy-drifting snow, and dare not haste forth to the pasture, howsoever fain, till the great storm abate, and rivers, wide with rushing floods, again be passable; so trembling on their walls they abode the rage of foes against their ramparts surging fast. and as when daws or starlings drop in clouds down on an orchard-close, full fain to feast upon its pleasant fruits, and take no heed of men that shout to scare them thence away, until the reckless hunger be appeased that makes them bold; so poured round priam's burg the furious danaans. against the gates they hurled themselves, they strove to batter down the mighty-souled earth-shaker's work divine. yet did tim troyfolk not, despite their fear, flinch from the fight: they manned their towers, they toiled unresting: ever from the fair-built walls leapt arrows, stones, and fleet-winged javelins down amidst the thronging foes; for phoebus thrilled their souls with steadfast hardihood. fain was he to save them still, though hector was no more. then meriones shot forth a deadly shaft, and smote phylodamas, polites' friend, beneath the jaw; the arrow pierced his throat. down fell he like a vulture, from a rock by fowler's barbed arrow shot and slain; so from the high tower swiftly down he fell: his life fled; clanged his armour o'er the corpse. with laughter of triumph stalwart molus' son a second arrow sped, with strong desire to smite polites, ill-starred priam's son: but with a swift side-swerve did he escape the death, nor did the arrow touch his flesh. as when a shipman, as his bark flies on o'er sea-gulfs, spies amid the rushing tide a rock, and to escape it swiftly puts the helm about, and turns aside the ship even as he listeth, that a little strength averts a great disaster; so did he foresee and shun the deadly shaft of doom. ever they fought on; walls, towers, battlements were blood-besprent, wherever trojans fell slain by the arrows of the stalwart greeks. yet these escaped not scatheless; many of them dyed the earth red: aye waxed the havoc of death as friends and foes were stricken. o'er the strife shouted for glee enyo, sister of war. now had the argives burst the gates, had breached the walls of troy, for boundless was their might; but ganymedes saw from heaven, and cried, anguished with fear for his own fatherland: "o father zeus, if of thy seed i am, if at thine best i left far-famous troy for immortality with deathless gods, o hear me now, whose soul is anguish-thrilled! i cannot bear to see my fathers' town in flames, my kindred in disastrous strife perishing: bitterer sorrow is there none! oh, if thine heart is fixed to do this thing, let me be far hence! less shall be my grief if i behold it not with these mine eyes. that is the depth of horror and of shame to see one's country wrecked by hands of foes." with groans and tears so pleaded ganymede. then zeus himself with one vast pall of cloud veiled all the city of priam world-renowned; and all the murderous fight was drowned in mist, and like a vanished phantom was the wall in vapours heavy-hung no eye could pierce; and all around crashed thunders, lightnings flamed from heaven. the danaans heard zeus' clarion peal awe-struck; and neleus' son cried unto them: "far-famous lords of argives, all our strength palsied shall be, while zeus protecteth thus our foes. a great tide of calamity on us is rolling; haste we then to the ships; cease we awhile from bitter toil of strife, lest the fire of his wrath consume us all. submit we to his portents; needs must all obey him ever, who is mightier far than all strong gods, all weakling sons of men. on the presumptuous titans once in wrath he poured down fire from heaven: then burned all earth beneath, and ocean's world-engirdling flood boiled from its depths, yea, to its utmost bounds: far-flowing mighty rivers were dried up: perished all broods of life-sustaining earth, all fosterlings of the boundless sea, and all dwellers in rivers: smoke and ashes veiled the air: earth fainted in the fervent heat. therefore this day i dread the might of zeus. now, pass we to the ships, since for to-day he helpeth troy. to us too shall he grant glory hereafter; for the dawn on men, though whiles it frown, anon shall smile. not yet, but soon, shall fate lead us to smite yon town, if true indeed was calchas' prophecy spoken aforetime to the assembled greeks, that in the tenth year priam's burg should fall." then left they that far-famous town, and turned from war, in awe of zeus's threatenings, hearkening to one with ancient wisdom wise. yet they forgat not friends in battle slain, but bare them from the field and buried them. these the mist hid not, but the town alone and its unscaleable wall, around which fell trojans and argives many in battle slain. so came they to the ships, and put from them their battle-gear, and strode into the waves of hellespont fair-flowing, and washed away all stain of dust and sweat and clotted gore. the sun drave down his never-wearying steeds into the dark west: night streamed o'er the earth, bidding men cease from toil. the argives then acclaimed achilles' valiant son with praise high as his father's. mid triumphant mirth he feasted in kings' tents: no battle-toil had wearied him; for thetis from his limbs had charmed all ache of travail, making him as one whom labour had no power to tire. when his strong heart was satisfied with meat, he passed to his father's tent, and over him sleep's dews were poured. the greeks slept in the plain before the ships, by ever-changing guards watched; for they dreaded lest the host of troy, or of her staunch allies, should kindle flame upon the ships, and from them all cut off their home-return. in priam's burg the while by gate and wall men watched and slept in turn, adread to hear the argives' onset-shout. book ix how from his long lone exile returned to the war philoctetes. when ended was night's darkness, and the dawn rose from the world's verge, and the wide air glowed with splendour, then did argos' warrior-sons gaze o'er the plain; and lo, all cloudless-clear stood ilium's towers. the marvel of yesterday seemed a strange dream. no thought the trojans had of standing forth to fight without the wall. a great fear held them thralls, the awful thought that yet alive was peleus' glorious son. but to the king of heaven antenor cried: "zeus, lord of ida and the starry sky, hearken my prayer! oh turn back from our town that battle-eager murderous-hearted man, be he achilles who hath not passed down to hades, or some other like to him. for now in heaven-descended priam's burg by thousands are her people perishing: no respite cometh from calamity: murder and havoc evermore increase. o father zeus, thou carest not though we be slaughtered of our foes: thou helpest them, forgetting thy son, godlike dardanus! but, if this be the purpose of thine heart that argives shall destroy us wretchedly, now do it: draw not out our agony!" in passionate prayer he cried; and zeus from heaven hearkened, and hasted on the end of all, which else he had delayed. he granted him this awful boon, that myriads of troy's sons should with their children perish: but that prayer he granted not, to turn achilles' son back from the wide-wayed town; nay, all the more he enkindled him to war, for he would now give grace and glory to the nereid queen. so purposed he, of all gods mightiest. but now between the city and hellespont were greeks and trojans burning men and steeds in battle slain, while paused the murderous strife. for priam sent his herald menoetes forth to agamemnon and the achaean chiefs, asking a truce wherein to burn the dead; and they, of reverence for the slain, gave ear; for wrath pursueth not the dead. and when they had lain their slain on those close-thronging pyres, then did the argives to their tents return, and unto priam's gold-abounding halls the trojans, for eurypylus sorrowing sore: for even as priam's sons they honoured him. therefore apart from all the other slain, before the gate dardanian--where the streams of eddying xanthus down from ida flow fed by the rains of heavens--they buried him. aweless achilles' son the while went forth to his sire's huge tomb. outpouring tears, he kissed the tall memorial pillar of the dead, and groaning clasped it round, and thus he cried: "hail, father! though beneath the earth thou lie in hades' halls, i shall forget thee not. oh to have met thee living mid the host! then of each other had our souls had joy, then of her wealth had we spoiled ilium. but now, thou hast not seen thy child, nor i seen thee, who yearned to look on thee in life. yet, though thou be afar amidst the dead, thy spear, thy son, have made thy foes to quail; and danaans with exceeding joy behold one like to thee in stature, fame and deeds." he spake, and wiped the hot tears from his face; and to his father's ships passed swiftly thence: with him went myrmidon warriors two and ten, and white-haired phoenix followed on with these woefully sighing for the glorious dead. night rose o'er earth, the stars flashed out in heaven; so these brake bread, and slept till woke the dawn. then the greeks donned their armour: flashed afar its splendour up to the very firmament. forth of their gates in one great throng they poured, like snowflakes thick and fast, which drift adown heavily from the clouds in winter's cold; so streamed they forth before the wall, and rose their dread shout: groaned the deep earth 'neath their tramp. the trojans heard that shout, and saw that host, and marvelled. crushed with fear were all their hearts foreboding doom; for like a huge cloud seemed that throng of foes: with clashing arms they came: volumed and vast the dust rose 'neath their feet. then either did some god with hardihood thrill deiphobus' heart, and made it void of fear, or his own spirit spurred him on to fight, to drive by thrust of spear that terrible host of foemen from the city of his birth. so there in troy he cried with heartening speech: "o friends, be stout of heart to play the men! remember all the agonies that war brings in the end to them that yield to foes. ye wrestle not for alexander alone, nor helen, but for home, for your own lives, for wives, for little ones, for parents grey, for all the grace of life, for all ye have, for this dear land--oh may she shroud me o'er slain in the battle, ere i see her lie 'neath foemen's spears--my country! i know not a bitterer pang than this for hapless men! o be ye strong for battle! forth to the fight with me, and thrust this horror far away! think not achilles liveth still to war against us: him the ravening fire consumed. some other achaean was it who so late enkindled them to war. oh, shame it were if men who fight for fatherland should fear achilles' self, or any greek beside! let us not flinch from war-toil! have we not endured much battle-travail heretofore? what, know ye not that to men sorely tried prosperity and joyance follow toil? so after scourging winds and ruining storms zeus brings to men a morn of balmy air; after disease new strength comes, after war peace: all things know time's changeless law of change." then eager all for war they armed themselves in haste. all through the town rang clangour of arms as for grim fight strong men arrayed their limbs. here stood a wife, shuddering with dread of war, yet piling, as she wept, her husband's arms before his feet. there little children brought to a father his war-gear with eager haste; and now his heart was wrung to hear their sobs, and now he smiled on those small ministers, and stronger waxed his heart's resolve to fight to the last gasp for these, the near and dear. yonder again, with hands that had not lost old cunning, a grey father for the fray girded a son, and murmured once and again: "dear boy, yield thou to no man in the war!" and showed his son the old scars on his breast, proud memories of fights fought long ago. so when they all stood mailed in battle-gear, forth of the gates they poured all eager-souled for war. against the chariots of the greeks their chariots charged; their ranks of footmen pressed to meet the footmen of the foe. the earth rang to the tramp of onset; pealed the cheer from man to man; swift closed the fronts of war. loud clashed their arms all round; from either side war-cries were mingled in one awful roar swift-winged full many a dart and arrow flew from host to host; loud clanged the smitten shields 'neath thrusting spears, 'neath javelin-point and sword: men hewed with battle-axes lightening down; crimson the armour ran with blood of men. and all this while troy's wives and daughters watched from high walls that grim battle of the strong. all trembled as they prayed for husbands, sons, and brothers: white-haired sires amidst them sat, and gazed, while anguished fear for sons devoured their hearts. but helen in her bower abode amidst her maids, there held by utter shame. so without pause before the wall they fought, while death exulted o'er them; deadly strife shrieked out a long wild cry from host to host. with blood of slain men dust became red mire: here, there, fast fell the warriors mid the fray. then slew deiphobus the charioteer of nestor, hippasus' son: from that high car down fell he 'midst the dead; fear seized his lord lest, while his hands were cumbered with the reins, he too by priam's strong son might be slain. melanthius marked his plight: swiftly he sprang upon the car; he urged the horses on, shaking the reins, goading them with his spear, seeing the scourge was lost. but priam's son left these, and plunged amid a throng of foes. there upon many he brought the day of doom; for like a ruining tempest on he stormed through reeling ranks. his mighty hand struck down foes numberless: the plain was heaped with dead. as when a woodman on the long-ridged hills plunges amid the forest-depths, and hews with might and main, and fells sap-laden trees to make him store of charcoal from the heaps of billets overturfed and set afire: the trunks on all sides fallen strew the slopes, while o'er his work the man exulteth; so before deiphobus' swift death-dealing hands in heaps the achaeans each on other fell. the charging lines of troy swept over some; some fled to xanthus' stream: deiphobus chased into the flood yet more, and slew and slew. as when on fish-abounding hellespont's strand the fishermen hard-straining drag a net forth of the depths to land; but, while it trails yet through the sea, one leaps amid the waves grasping in hand a sinuous-headed spear to deal the sword-fish death, and here and there, fast as he meets them, slays them, and with blood the waves are reddened; so were xanthus' streams impurpled by his hands, and choked with dead. yet not without sore loss the trojans fought; for all this while peleides' fierce-heart son of other ranks made havoc. thetis gazed rejoicing in her son's son, with a joy as great as was her grief for achilles slain. for a great host beneath his spear were hurled down to the dust, steeds, warriors slaughter-blent. and still he chased, and still he slew: he smote amides war-renowned, who on his steed bore down on him, but of his horsemanship small profit won. the bright spear pierced him through from navel unto spine, and all his bowels gushed out, and deadly doom laid hold on him even as he fell beside his horse's feet. ascanius and oenops next he slew; under the fifth rib of the one he drave his spear, the other stabbed he 'neath the throat where a wound bringeth surest doom to man. whomso he met besides he slew--the names what man could tell of all that by the hands of neoptolemus died? never his limbs waxed weary. as some brawny labourer, with strong hands toiling in a fruitful field the livelong day, rains down to earth the fruit of olives, swiftly beating with his pole, and with the downfall covers all the ground, so fast fell 'neath his hands the thronging foe. elsewhere did agamemnon, tydeus' son, and other chieftains of the danaans toil with fury in the fight. yet never quailed the mighty men of troy: with heart and soul they also fought, and ever stayed from flight such as gave back. yet many heeded not their chiefs, but fled, cowed by the achaeans' might. now at the last achilles' strong son marked how fast beside scamander's outfall greeks were perishing. those troyward-fleeing foes whom he had followed slaying, left he now, and bade automedon thither drive, where hosts were falling of the achaeans. straightway he hearkened, and scourged the steeds immortal on to that wild fray: bearing their lord they flew swiftly o'er battle-highways paved with death. as ares chariot-borne to murderous war fares forth, and round his onrush quakes the ground, while on the god's breast clash celestial arms outflashing fire, so charged achilles' son against deiphobus. clouds of dust upsoared about his horses' feet. automedon marked the trojan chief, and knew him. to his lord straightway he named that hero war-renowned: "my king, this is deiphobus' array- the man who from thy father fled in fear. some god or fiend with courage fills him now." naught answered neoptolemus, save to bid drive on the steeds yet faster, that with speed he might avert grim death from perishing friends. but when to each other now full nigh they drew, deiphobus, despite his battle-lust, stayed, as a ravening fire stays when it meets water. he marvelled, seeing achilles' steeds and that gigantic son, huge as his sire; and his heart wavered, choosing now to flee, and now to face that hero, man to man as when a mountain boar from his young brood chases the jackals--then a lion leaps from hidden ambush into view: the boar halts in his furious onset, loth to advance, loth to retreat, while foam his jaws about his whetted tusks; so halted priam's son car-steeds and car, perplexed, while quivered his hands about the lance. shouted achilles' son: "ho, priam's son, why thus so mad to smite those weaker argives, who have feared thy wrath and fled thine onset? so thou deem'st thyself far mightiest! if thine heart be brave indeed, of my spear now make trial in the strife." on rushed he, as a lion against a stag, borne by the steeds and chariot of his sire. and now full soon his lance had slain his foe, him and his charioteer--but phoebus poured a dense cloud round him from the viewless heights of heaven, and snatched him from the deadly fray, and set him down in troy, amid the rout of fleeing trojans: so did peleus' son stab but the empty air; and loud he cried: "dog, thou hast 'scaped my wrath! no might of thine saved thee, though ne'er so fain! some god hath cast night's veil o'er thee, and snatched thee from thy death." then cronos' son dispersed that dense dark cloud: mist-like it thinned and vanished into air: straightway the plain and all the land were seen. then far away about the scaean gate he saw the trojans: seeming like his sire, he sped against them; they at his coming quailed. as shipmen tremble when a wild wave bears down on their bark, wind-heaved until it swings broad, mountain-high above them, when the sea is mad with tempest; so, as on he came, terror clad all those trojans as a cloak, the while he shouted, cheering on his men: "hear, friends!--fill full your hearts with dauntless strength, the strength that well beseemeth mighty men who thirst to win them glorious victory, to win renown from battle's tumult! come, brave hearts, now strive we even beyond our strength till we smite troy's proud city, till we win our hearts' desire! foul shame it were to abide long deedless here and strengthless, womanlike! ere i be called war-blencher, let me die!" then unto ares' work their spirits flamed. down on the trojans charged they: yea, and these fought with high courage, round their city now, and now from wall and gate-towers. never lulled the rage of war, while trojan hearts were hot to hurl the foemen back, and the strong greeks to smite the town: grim havoc compassed all. then, eager for the trojans' help, swooped down out of olympus, cloaked about with clouds, the son of leto. mighty rushing winds bare him in golden armour clad; and gleamed with lightning-splendour of his descent the long highways of air. his quiver clashed; loud rang the welkin; earth re-echoed, as he set his tireless feet by xanthus. pealed his shout dreadly, with courage filling them of troy, scaring their foes from biding the red fray. but of all this the mighty shaker of earth was ware: he breathed into the fainting greeks fierce valour, and the fight waxed murderous through those immortals' clashing wills. then died hosts numberless on either side. in wrath apollo thought to smite achilles' son in the same place where erst he smote his sire; but birds of boding screamed to left, to stay his mood, and other signs from heaven were sent; yet was his wrath not minded to obey those portents. swiftly drew earth-shaker nigh in mist celestial cloaked: about his feet quaked the dark earth as came the sea-king on. then, to stay phoebus' hand, he cried to him: "refrain thy wrath: achilles' giant son slay not! olympus' lord himself shall be wroth for his death, and bitter grief shall light on me and all the sea-gods, as erstwhile for achilles' sake. nay, get thee back to heights celestial, lest thou kindle me to wrath, and so i cleave a sudden chasm in earth, and ilium and all her walls go down to darkness. thine own soul were vexed thereat." then, overawed by the brother of his sire, and fearing for troy's fate and for her folk, to heaven went back apollo, to the sea poseidon. but the sons of men fought on, and slew; and strife incarnate gloating watched. at last by calchas' counsel achaea's sons drew back to the ships, and put from them the thought of battle, seeing it was not foreordained that ilium should fall until the might of war-wise philoctetes came to aid the achaean host. this had the prophet learnt. from birds of prosperous omen, or had read in hearts of victims. wise in prophecy-lore was he, and like a god knew things to be. trusting in him, the sons of atreus stayed awhile the war, and unto lemnos, land of stately mansions, sent they tydeus' son and battle-staunch odysseus oversea. fast by the fire-god's city sped they on over the broad flood of the aegean sea to vine-clad lemnos, where in far-off days the wives wreaked murderous vengeance on their lords, in fierce wrath that they gave them not their due, but couched beside the handmaid-thralls of thrace, the captives of their spears when they laid waste the land of warrior thracians. then these wives, their hearts with fiery jealousy's fever filled, murdered in every home with merciless hands their husbands: no compassion would they show to their own wedded lords--such madness shakes the heart of man or woman, when it burns with jealousy's fever, stung by torturing pangs. so with souls filled with desperate hardihood in one night did they slaughter all their lords; and on a widowed nation rose the sun. to hallowed lemnos came those heroes twain; they marked the rocky cave where lay the son of princely poeas. horror came on them when they beheld the hero of their quest groaning with bitter pangs, on the hard earth lying, with many feathers round him strewn, and others round his body, rudely sewn into a cloak, a screen from winter's cold. for, oft as famine stung him, would he shoot the shaft that missed no fowl his aim had doomed. their flesh he ate, their feathers vestured him. and there lay herbs and healing leaves, the which, spread on his deadly wound, assuaged its pangs. wild tangled elf-locks hung about his head. he seemed a wild beast, that hath set its foot, prowling by night, upon a hidden trap, and so hath been constrained in agony to bite with fierce teeth through the prisoned limb ere it could win back to its cave, and there in hunger and torturing pains it languisheth. so in that wide cave suffering crushed the man; and all his frame was wasted: naught but skin covered his bones. unwashen there he crouched with famine-haggard cheeks, with sunken eyes glaring his misery 'neath cavernous brows. never his groaning ceased, for evermore the ulcerous black wound, eating to the bone, festered with thrills of agonizing pain. as when a beetling cliff, by seething seas aye buffeted, is carved and underscooped, for all its stubborn strength, by tireless waves, till, scourged by winds and lashed by tempest-flails, the sea into deep caves hath gnawed its base; so greater 'neath his foot grew evermore the festering wound, dealt when the envenomed fangs tare him of that fell water-snake, which men say dealeth ghastly wounds incurable, when the hot sun hath parched it as it crawls over the sands; and so that mightiest man lay faint and wasted with his cureless pain; and from the ulcerous wound aye streamed to earth fetid corruption fouling all the floor of that wide cave, a marvel to be heard of men unborn. beside his stony bed lay a long quiver full of arrows, some for hunting, some to smite his foes withal; with deadly venom of that fell water-snake were these besmeared. before it, nigh to his hand, lay the great bow, with curving tips of horn, wrought by the mighty hands of hercules. now when that solitary spied these twain draw nigh his cave, he sprang to his bow, he laid the deadly arrow on the string; for now fierce memory of his wrongs awoke against these, who had left him years agone, in pain groaning upon the desolate sea-shore. yea, and his heart's stem will he had swiftly wrought, but, even as upon that godlike twain he gazed, athena caused his bitter wrath to melt away. then drew they nigh to him with looks of sad compassion, and sat down on either hand beside him in the cave, and of his deadly wound and grievous pangs asked; and he told them all his sufferings. and they spake hope and comfort; and they said: "thy woeful wound, thine anguish, shall be healed, if thou but come with us to achaea's host- the host that now is sorrowing after thee with all its kings. and no man of them all was cause of thine affliction, but the fates, the cruel ones, whom none that walk the earth escape, but aye they visit hapless men unseen; and day by day with pitiless hearts now they afflict men, now again exalt to honour--none knows why; for all the woes and all the joys of men do these devise after their pleasure." hearkening he sat to odysseus and to godlike diomede; and all the hoarded wrath for olden wrongs and all the torturing rage, melted away. straight to the strand dull-thundering and the ship, laughing for joy, they bare him with his bow. there washed they all his body and that foul wound with sponges, and with plenteous water bathed: so was his soul refreshed. then hasted they and made meat ready for the famished man, and in the galley supped with him. then came the balmy night, and sleep slid down on them. till rose the dawn they tarried by the strand of sea-girt lemnos, but with dayspring cast the hawsers loose, and heaved the anchor-stones out of the deep. athena sent a breeze blowing behind the galley taper-prowed. they strained the sail with either stern-sheet taut; seaward they pointed the stout-girdered ship; o'er the broad flood she leapt before the wind; broken to right and left the dark wave sighed, and seething all around was hoary foam, while thronging dolphins raced on either hand flashing along the paths of silver sea. full soon to fish-fraught hellespont they came and the far-stretching ships. glad were the greeks to see the longed-for faces. forth the ship with joy they stepped; and poeas' valiant son on those two heroes leaned thin wasted hands, who bare him painfully halting to the shore staying his weight upon their brawny arms. as seems mid mountain-brakes an oak or pine by strength of the woodcutter half hewn through, which for a little stands on what was left of the smooth trunk by him who hewed thereat hard by the roots, that its slow-smouldering wood might yield him pitch--now like to one in pain it groans, in weakness borne down by the wind, yet is upstayed upon its leafy boughs which from the earth bear up its helpless weight; so by pain unendurable bowed down leaned he on those brave heroes, and was borne unto the war-host. men beheld, and all compassionated that great archer, crushed by anguish of his hurt. but one drew near, podaleirius, godlike in his power to heal. swifter than thought he made him whole and sound; for deftly on the wound he spread his salves, calling on his physician-father's name; and soon the achaeans shouted all for joy, all praising with one voice asclepius' son. lovingly then they bathed him, and with oil anointed. all his heaviness of cheer and misery vanished by the immortals' will; and glad at heart were all that looked on him; and from affliction he awoke to joy. over the bloodless face the flush of health glowed, and for wretched weakness mighty strength thrilled through him: goodly and great waxed all his limbs. as when a field of corn revives again which erst had drooped, by rains of ruining storm down beaten flat, but by warm summer winds requickened, o'er the laboured land it smiles, so philoctetes' erstwhile wasted frame was all requickened:--in the galley's hold he seemed to have left all cares that crushed his soul. and atreus' sons beheld him marvelling as one re-risen from the dead: it seemed the work of hands immortal. and indeed so was it verily, as their hearts divined; for 'twas the glorious trito-born that shed stature and grace upon him. suddenly he seemed as when of old mid argive men he stood, before calamity struck him down. then unto wealthy agamemnon's tent did all their mightiest men bring poeas' son, and set him chief in honour at the feast, extolling him. when all with meat and drink were filled, spake agamemnon lord of spears: "dear friend, since by the will of heaven our souls were once perverted, that in sea-girt lemnos we left thee, harbour not thine heart within fierce wrath for this: by the blest gods constrained we did it; and, i trow, the immortals willed to bring much evil on us, bereft of thee, who art of all men skilfullest to quell with shafts of death all foes that face thee in fight. for all the tangled paths of human life, by land and sea, are by the will of fate hid from our eyes, in many and devious tracks are cleft apart, in wandering mazes lost. along them men by fortune's dooming drift like unto leaves that drive before the wind. oft on an evil path the good man's feet stumble, the brave finds not a prosperous path; and none of earth-born men can shun the fates, and of his own will none can choose his way. so then doth it behove the wise of heart though on a troublous track the winds of fate sweep him away to suffer and be strong. since we were blinded then, and erred herein, with rich gifts will we make amends to thee hereafter, when we take the stately towers of troy: but now receive thou handmaids seven, fleet steeds two-score, victors in chariot-race, and tripods twelve, wherein thine heart may joy through all thy days; and always in my tent shall royal honour at the feast be thine." he spake, and gave the hero those fair gifts. then answered poeas' mighty-hearted son; "friend, i forgive thee freely, and all beside whoso against me haply hath trangressed. i know how good men's minds sometimes be warped: nor meet it is that one be obdurate ever, and nurse mean rancours: sternest wrath must yield anon unto the melting mood. now pass we to our rest; for better is sleep than feasting late, for him who longs to fight." he spake, and rose, and came to his comrades' tent; then swiftly for their war-fain king they dight the couch, while laughed their hearts for very joy. gladly he laid him down to sleep till dawn. so passed the night divine, till flushed the hills in the sun's light, and men awoke to toil. then all athirst for war the argive men 'gan whet the spear smooth-shafted, or the dart, or javelin, and they brake the bread of dawn, and foddered all their horses. then to these spake poeas' son with battle-kindling speech: "up! let us make us ready for the war! let no man linger mid the galleys, ere the glorious walls of ilium stately-towered be shattered, and her palaces be burned!" then at his words each heart and spirit glowed: they donned their armour, and they grasped their shields. forth of the ships in one huge mass they poured arrayed with bull-hide bucklers, ashen spears, and gallant-crested helms. through all their ranks shoulder to shoulder marched they: thou hadst seen no gap 'twixt man and man as on they charged; so close they thronged, so dense was their array. book x how paris was stricken to death, and in vain sought help of oenone. now were the trojans all without the town of priam, armour-clad, with battle-cars and chariot-steeds; for still they burnt their dead, and still they feared lest the achaean men should fall on them. they looked, and saw them come with furious speed against the walls. in haste they cast a hurried earth-mound o'er the slain, for greatly trembled they to see their foes. then in their sore disquiet spake to them polydamas, a wise and prudent chief: "friends, unendurably against us now maddens the war. go to, let us devise how we may find deliverance from our strait. still bide the danaans here, still gather strength: now therefore let us man our stately towers, and thence withstand them, fighting night and day, until yon danaans weary, and return to sparta, or, renownless lingering here beside the wall, lose heart. no strength of theirs shall breach the long walls, howsoe'er they strive, for in the imperishable work of gods weakness is none. food, drink, we shall not lack, for in king priam's gold-abounding halls is stored abundant food, that shall suffice for many more than we, through many years, though thrice so great a host at our desire should gather, eager to maintain our cause." then chode with him anchises' valiant son: "polydamas, wherefore do they call thee wise, who biddest suffer endless tribulations cooped within walls? never, how long soe'er the achaeans tarry here, will they lose heart; but when they see us skulking from the field, more fiercely will press on. so ours shall be the sufferance, perishing in our native home, if for long season they beleaguer us. no food, if we be pent within our walls, shall thebe send us, nor maeonia wine, but wretchedly by famine shall we die, though the great wall stand firm. nay, though our lot should be to escape that evil death and doom, and not by famine miserably to die; yet rather let us fight in armour clad for children and grey fathers! haply zeus will help us yet; of his high blood are we. nay, even though we be abhorred of him, better straightway to perish gloriously fighting unto the last for fatherland, than die a death of lingering agony!" shouted they all who heard that gallant rede. swiftly with helms and shields and spears they stood in close array. the eyes of mighty zeus from heaven beheld the trojans armed for fight against the danaans: then did he awake courage in these and those, that there might be strain of unflinching fight 'twixt host and host. that day was paris doomed, for helen's sake fighting, by philoctetes' hands to die. to one place strife incarnate drew them all, the fearful battle-queen, beheld of none, but cloaked in clouds blood-raining: on she stalked swelling the mighty roar of battle, now rushed through troy's squadrons, through achaea's now; panic and fear still waited on her steps to make their father's sister glorious. from small to huge that fury's stature grew; her arms of adamant were blood-besprent, the deadly lance she brandished reached the sky. earth quaked beneath her feet: dread blasts of fire flamed from her mouth: her voice pealed thunder-like kindling strong men. swift closed the fronts of fight drawn by a dread power to the mighty work. loud as the shriek of winds that madly blow in early spring, when the tall woodland trees put forth their leaves--loud as the roar of fire blazing through sun-scorched brakes--loud as the voice of many waters, when the wide sea raves beneath the howling blast, with thunderous crash of waves, when shake the fearful shipman's knees; so thundered earth beneath their charging feet. strife swooped on them: foe hurled himself on foe. first did aeneas of the danaans slay harpalion, arizelus' scion, born in far boeotia of amphinome, who came to troy to help the argive men with godlike prothoenor. 'neath his waist aeneas stabbed, and reft sweet life from him. dead upon him he cast thersander's son, for the barbed javelin pierced through hyllus' throat whom arethusa by lethaeus bare in crete: sore grieved idomeneus for his fall. by this peleides' son had swiftly slain twelve trojan warriors with his father's spear. first cebrus fell, harmon, pasitheus then, hysminus, schedius, and imbrasius, phleges, mnesaeus, ennomus, amphinous, phasis, galenus last, who had his home by gargarus' steep--a mighty warrior he among troy's mighties: with a countless host to troy he came: for priam dardanus' son promised him many gifts and passing fair. ah fool! his own doom never he foresaw, whose weird was suddenly to fall in fight ere he bore home king priam's glorious gifts. doom the destroyer against the argives sped valiant aeneas' friend, eurymenes. wild courage spurred him on, that he might slay many--and then fill death's cup for himself. man after man he slew like some fierce beast, and foes shrank from the terrible rage that burned on his life's verge, nor reeked of imminent doom. yea, peerless deeds in that fight had he done, had not his hands grown weary, his spear-head bent utterly: his sword availed him not, snapped at the hilt by fate. then meges' dart smote 'neath his ribs; blood spurted from his mouth, and in death's agony doom stood at his side. even as he fell, epeius' henchmen twain, deileon and amphion, rushed to strip his armour; but aeneas brave and strong chilled their hot hearts in death beside the dead. as one in latter summer 'mid his vines kills wasps that dart about his ripening grapes, and so, ere they may taste the fruit, they die; so smote he them, ere they could seize the arms. menon and amphinous tydeides slew, both goodly men. paris slew hippasus' son demoleon, who in laconia's land beside the outfall of eurotas dwelt, the stream deep-flowing, and to troy he came with menelaus. under his right breast the shaft of paris smote him unto death, driving his soul forth like a scattering breath. teucer slew zechis, medon's war-famed son, who dwelt in phrygia, land of myriad flocks, below that haunted cave of fair-haired nymphs where, as endymion slept beside his kine, divine selene watched him from on high, and slid from heaven to earth; for passionate love drew down the immortal stainless queen of night. and a memorial of her couch abides still 'neath the oaks; for mid the copses round was poured out milk of kine; and still do men marvelling behold its whiteness. thou wouldst say far off that this was milk indeed, which is a well-spring of white water: if thou draw a little nigher, lo, the stream is fringed as though with ice, for white stone rims it round. rushed on alcaeus meges, phyleus' son, and drave his spear beneath his fluttering heart. loosed were the cords of sweet life suddenly, and his sad parents longed in vain to greet that son returning from the woeful war to margasus and phyllis lovely-girt, dwellers by lucent streams of harpasus, who pours the full blood of his clamorous flow into maeander madly rushing aye. with glaucus' warrior-comrade scylaceus odeus' son closed in the fight, and stabbed over the shield-rim, and the cruel spear passed through his shoulder, and drenched his shield with blood. howbeit he slew him not, whose day of doom awaited him afar beside the wall of his own city; for when illium's towers were brought low by that swift avenging host fleeing the war to lycia then he came alone; and when he drew nigh to the town, the thronging women met and questioned him touching their sons and husbands; and he told how all were dead. they compassed him about, and stoned the man with great stones, that he died. so had he no joy of his winning home, but the stones muffled up his dying groans, and of the same his ghastly tomb was reared beside bellerophon's grave and holy place in tlos, nigh that far-famed chimaera's crag. yet, though he thus fulfilled his day of doom, as a god afterward men worshipped him by phoebus' hest, and never his honour fades. now poeas' son the while slew deioneus and acamas, antenor's warrior son: yea, a great host of strong men laid he low. on, like the war-god, through his foes he rushed, or as a river roaring in full flood breaks down long dykes, when, maddening round its rocks, down from the mountains swelled by rain it pours an ever-flowing mightily-rushing stream whose foaming crests over its forelands sweep; so none who saw him even from afar dared meet renowned poeas' valiant son, whose breast with battle-fury was fulfilled, whose limbs were clad in mighty hercules' arms of cunning workmanship; for on the belt gleamed bears most grim and savage, jackals fell, and panthers, in whose eyes there seems to lurk a deadly smile. there were fierce-hearted wolves, and boars with flashing tusks, and mighty lions all seeming strangely alive; and, there portrayed through all its breadth, were battles murder-rife. with all these marvels covered was the belt; and with yet more the quiver was adorned. there hermes was, storm-footed son of zeus, slaying huge argus nigh to inachus' streams, argus, whose sentinel eyes in turn took sleep. and there was phaethon from the sun-car hurled into eridanus. earth verily seemed ablaze, and black smoke hovered on the air. there perseus slew medusa gorgon-eyed by the stars' baths and utmost bounds of earth and fountains of deep-flowing ocean, where night in the far west meets the setting sun. there was the titan iapetus' great son hung from the beetling crag of caucasus in bonds of adamant, and the eagle tare his liver unconsumed--he seemed to groan! all these hephaestus' cunning hands had wrought for hercules; and these to poeas' son, most near of friends and dear, he gave to bear. so glorying in those arms he smote the foe. but paris at the last to meet him sprang fearlessly, bearing in his hands his bow and deadly arrows--but his latest day now met himself. a flying shaft he sped forth from the string, which sang as leapt the dart, which flew not vainly: yet the very mark it missed, for philoctetes swerved aside a hair-breadth, and it smote above the breast cleodorus war-renowned, and cleft a path clear through his shoulder; for he had not now the buckler broad which wont to fence from death its bearer, but was falling back from fight, being shieldless; for polydamas' massy lance had cleft the shoulder-belt whereby his targe hung, and he gave back therefore, fighting still with stubborn spear. but now the arrow of death fell on him, as from ambush leaping forth. for so fate willed, i trow, to bring dread doom on noble-hearted lernus' scion, born of amphiale, in rhodes the fertile land. but soon as poeas' battle-eager son marked him by paris' deadly arrow slain, swiftly he strained his bow, shouting aloud: "dog! i will give thee death, will speed thee down to the unseen land, who darest to brave me! and so shall they have rest, who travail now for thy vile sake. destruction shall have end when thou art dead, the author of our bane." then to his breast he drew the plaited cord. the great bow arched, the merciless shaft was aimed straight, and the terrible point a little peered above the bow, in that constraining grip. loud sang the string, as the death-hissing shaft leapt, and missed not: yet was not paris' heart stilled, but his spirit yet was strong in him; for that first arrow was not winged with death: it did but graze the fair flesh by his wrist. then once again the avenger drew the bow, and the barbed shaft of poeas' son had plunged, ere he could swerve, 'twixt flank and groin. no more he abode the fight, but swiftly hasted back as hastes a dog which on a lion rushed at first, then fleeth terror-stricken back. so he, his very heart with agony thrilled, fled from the war. still clashed the grappling hosts, man slaying man: aye bloodier waxed the fray as rained the blows: corpse upon corpse was flung confusedly, like thunder-drops, or flakes of snow, or hailstones, by the wintry blast at zeus' behest strewn over the long hills and forest-boughs; so by a pitiless doom slain, friends with foes in heaps on heaps were strown. sorely groaned paris; with the torturing wound fainted his spirit. leeches sought to allay his frenzy of pain. but now drew back to troy the trojans, and the danaans to their ships swiftly returned, for dark night put an end to strife, and stole from men's limbs weariness, pouring upon their eyes pain-healing sleep. but through the livelong night no sleep laid hold on paris: for his help no leech availed, though ne'er so willing, with his salves. his weird was only by oenone's hands to escape death's doom, if so she willed. now he obeyed the prophecy, and he went--exceeding loth, but grim necessity forced him thence, to face the wife forsaken. evil-boding fowl shrieked o'er his head, or darted past to left, still as he went. now, as he looked at them, his heart sank; now hope whispered, "haply vain their bodings are!" but on their wings were borne visions of doom that blended with his pain. into oenone's presence thus he came. amazed her thronging handmaids looked on him as at the nymph's feet that pale suppliant fell faint with the anguish of his wound, whose pangs stabbed him through brain and heart, yea, quivered through his very bones, for that fierce venom crawled through all his inwards with corrupting fangs; and his life fainted in him agony-thrilled. as one with sickness and tormenting thirst consumed, lies parched, with heart quick-shuddering, with liver seething as in flame, the soul, scarce conscious, fluttering at his burning lips, longing for life, for water longing sore; so was his breast one fire of torturing pain. then in exceeding feebleness he spake: "o reverenced wife, turn not from me in hate for that i left thee widowed long ago! not of my will i did it: the strong fates dragged me to helen--oh that i had died ere i embraced her--in thine arms had died! all, by the gods i pray, the lords of heaven, by all the memories of our wedded love, be merciful! banish my bitter pain: lay on my deadly wound those healing salves which only can, by fate's decree, remove this torment, if thou wilt. thine heart must speak my sentence, to be saved from death or no. pity me--oh, make haste to pity me! this venom's might is swiftly bringing death! heal me, while life yet lingers in my limbs! remember not those pangs of jealousy, nor leave me by a cruel doom to die low fallen at thy feet! this should offend the prayers, the daughters of the thunderer zeus, whose anger followeth unrelenting pride with vengeance, and the erinnys executes their wrath. my queen, i sinned, in folly sinned; yet from death save me--oh, make haste to save!" so prayed he; but her darkly-brooding heart was steeled, and her words mocked his agony: "thou comest unto me!--thou, who didst leave erewhile a wailing wife in a desolate home!- didst leave her for thy tyndarid darling! go, lie laughing in her arms for bliss! she is better than thy true wife--is, rumour saith, immortal! make haste to kneel to her but not to me! weep not to me, nor whimper pitiful prayers! oh that mine heart beat with a tigress' strength, that i might tear thy flesh and lap thy blood for all the pain thy folly brought on me! vile wretch! where now is love's queen glory-crowned? hath zeus forgotten his daughter's paramour? have them for thy deliverers! get thee hence far from my dwelling, curse of gods and men! yea, for through thee, thou miscreant, sorrow came on deathless gods, for sons and sons' sons slain. hence from my threshold!--to thine helen go! agonize day and night beside her bed: there whimper, pierced to the heart with cruel pangs, until she heal thee of thy grievous pain." so from her doors she drave that groaning man- ah fool! not knowing her own doom, whose weird was straightway after him to tread the path of death! so fate had spun her destiny-thread. then, as he stumbled down through ida's brakes, where doom on his death-path was leading him painfully halting, racked with heart-sick pain, hera beheld him, with rejoicing soul throned in the olympian palace-court of zeus. and seated at her side were handmaids four whom radiant-faced selene bare to the sun to be unwearying ministers in heaven, in form and office diverse each from each; for of these seasons one was summer's queen, and one of winter and his stormy star, of spring the third, of autumn-tide the fourth. so in four portions parted is man's year ruled by these queens in turn--but of all this be zeus himself the overseer in heaven. and of those issues now these spake with her which baleful fate in her all-ruining heart was shaping to the birth the new espousals of helen, fatal to deiphobus- the wrath of helenus, who hoped in vain for that fair bride, and how, when he had fled, wroth with the trojans, to the mountain-height, achaea's sons would seize him and would hale unto their ships--how, by his counselling strong tydeus' son should with odysseus scale the great wall, and should slay alcathous the temple-warder, and should bear away pallas the gracious, with her free consent, whose image was the sure defence of troy;- yea, for not even a god, how wroth soe'er, had power to lay the city of priam waste while that immortal shape stood warder there. no man had carven that celestial form, but cronos' son himself had cast it down from heaven to priam's gold-abounding burg. of these things with her handmaids did the queen of heaven hold converse, and of many such, but paris, while they talked, gave up the ghost on ida: never helen saw him more. loud wailed the nymphs around him; for they still remembered how their nursling wont to lisp his childish prattle, compassed with their smiles. and with them mourned the neatherds light of foot, sorrowful-hearted; moaned the mountain-glens. then unto travail-burdened priam's queen a herdman told the dread doom of her son. wildly her trembling heart leapt when she heard; with failing limbs she sank to earth and wailed: "dead! thou dead, o dear child! grief heaped on grief hast thou bequeathed me, grief eternal! best of all my sons, save hector alone, wast thou! while beats my heart, my grief shall weep for thee. the hand of heaven is in our sufferings: some fate devised our ruin--oh that i had lived not to endure it, but had died in days of wealthy peace! but now i see woes upon woes, and ever look to see worse things--my children slain, my city sacked and burned with fire by stony-hearted foes, daughters, sons' wives, all trojan women, haled into captivity with our little ones!" so wailed she; but the king heard naught thereof, but weeping ever sat by hector's grave, for most of all his sons he honoured him, his mightiest, the defender of his land. nothing of paris knew that pierced heart; but long and loud lamented helen; yet those wails were but for trojan ears; her soul with other thoughts was busy, as she cried: "husband, to me, to troy, and to thyself a bitter blow is this thy woeful death! in misery hast thou left me, and i look to see calamities more deadly yet. oh that the spirits of the storm had snatched me from the earth when first i fared with thee drawn by a baleful fate! it might not be; the gods have meted ruin to thee and me. with shuddering horror all men look on me, all hate me! place of refuge is there none for me; for if to the danaan host i fly, with torments will they greet me. if i stay, troy's sons and daughters here will compass me and rend me. earth shall cover not my corpse, but dogs and fowl of ravin shall devour. oh had fate slain me ere i saw these woes!" so cried she: but for him far less she mourned than for herself, remembering her own sin. yea, and troy's daughters but in semblance wailed for him: of other woes their hearts were full. some thought on parents, some on husbands slain, these on their sons, on honoured kinsmen those. one only heart was pierced with grief unfeigned, oenone. not with them of troy she wailed, but far away within that desolate home moaning she lay on her lost husband's bed. as when the copses on high mountains stand white-veiled with frozen snow, which o'er the glens the west-wind blasts have strown, but now the sun and east-wind melt it fast, and the long heights with water-courses stream, and down the glades slide, as they thaw, the heavy sheets, to swell the rushing waters of an ice-cold spring, so melted she in tears of anguished pain, and for her own, her husband, agonised, and cried to her heart with miserable moans: "woe for my wickedness! o hateful life! i loved mine hapless husband--dreamed with him to pace to eld's bright threshold hand in hand, and heart in heart! the gods ordained not so. oh had the black fates snatched me from the earth ere i from paris turned away in hate! my living love hath left me!--yet will i dare to die with him, for i loathe the light." so cried she, weeping, weeping piteously, remembering him whom death had swallowed up, wasting, as melteth wax before the flame yet secretly, being fearful lest her sire should mark it, or her handmaids till the night rose from broad ocean, flooding all the earth with darkness bringing men release from toil. then, while her father and her maidens slept, she slid the bolts back of the outer doors, and rushed forth like a storm-blast. fast she ran, as when a heifer 'mid the mountains speeds, her heart with passion stung, to meet her mate, and madly races on with flying feet, and fears not, in her frenzy of desire, the herdman, as her wild rush bears her on, so she but find her mate amid the woods; so down the long tracks flew oenone's feet; seeking the awful pyre, to leap thereon. no weariness she knew: as upon wings her feet flew faster ever, onward spurred by fell fate, and the cyprian queen. she feared no shaggy beast that met her in the dark who erst had feared them sorely--rugged rock and precipice of tangled mountain-slope, she trod them all unstumbling; torrent-beds she leapt. the white moon-goddess from on high looked on her, and remembered her own love, princely endymion, and she pitied her in that wild race, and, shining overhead in her full brightness, made the long tracks plain. through mountain-gorges so she won to where wailed other nymphs round alexander's corpse. roared up about him a great wall of fire; for from the mountains far and near had come shepherds, and heaped the death-bale broad and high for love's and sorrow's latest service done to one of old their comrade and their king. sore weeping stood they round. she raised no wail, the broken-hearted, when she saw him there, but, in her mantle muffling up her face, leapt on the pyre: loud wailed that multitude. there burned she, clasping paris. all the nymphs marvelled, beholding her beside her lord flung down, and heart to heart spake whispering: "verily evil-hearted paris was, who left a leal true wife, and took for bride a wanton, to himself and troy a curse. ah fool, who recked not of the broken heart of a most virtuous wife, who more than life loved him who turned from her and loved her not!" so in their hearts the nymphs spake: but they twain burned on the pyre, never to hail again the dayspring. wondering herdmen stood around, as once the thronging argives marvelling saw evadne clasping mid the fire her lord capaneus, slain by zeus' dread thunderbolt. but when the blast of the devouring fire had made twain one, oenone and paris, now one little heap of ashes, then with wine quenched they the embers, and they laid their bones in a wide golden vase, and round them piled the earth-mound; and they set two pillars there that each from other ever turn away; for the old jealousy in the marble lives. book xi how the sons of troy for the last time fought from her walls and her towers. troy's daughters mourned within her walls; might none go forth to paris' tomb, for far away from high-built troy it lay. but the young men without the city toiled unceasingly in fight wherein from slaughter rest was none, though dead was paris; for the achaeans pressed hard on the trojans even unto troy. yet these charged forth--they could not choose but so, for strife and deadly enyo in their midst stalked, like the fell erinyes to behold, breathing destruction from their lips like flame. beside them raged the ruthless-hearted fates fiercely: here panic-fear and ares there stirred up the hosts: hard after followed dread with slaughter's gore besprent, that in one host might men see, and be strong, in the other fear; and all around were javelins, spears, and darts murder-athirst from this side, that side, showered. aye, as they hurled together, armour clashed, as foe with foe grappled in murderous fight. there neoptolemus slew laodamas, whom lycia nurtured by fair xanthus' stream, the stream revealed to men by leto, bride of thunderer zeus, when lycia's stony plain was by her hands uptorn mid agonies of travail-throes wherein she brought to light mid bitter pangs those babes of birth divine. nirus upon him laid he dead; the spear crashed through his jaw, and clear through mouth and tongue passed: on the lance's irresistible point shrieking was he impaled: flooded with gore his mouth was as he cried. the cruel shaft, sped on by that strong hand, dashed him to earth in throes of death. evenor next he smote above the flank, and onward drave the spear into his liver: swiftly anguished death came upon him. iphition next he slew: he quelled hippomedon, hippasus' bold son, whom ocyone the nymph had borne beside sangarius' river-flow. ne'er welcomed she her son's returning face, but ruthless fate with anguish thrilled her of her child bereaved. bremon aeneas slew, and andromachus, of cnossus this, of hallowed lyctus that: on one spot both from their swift chariots fell; this gasped for breath, his throat by the long spear transfixed; that other, by a massy stone, sped from a strong hand, on the temple struck, breathed out his life, and black doom shrouded him. the startled steeds, bereft of charioteers, fleeing, mid all those corpses were confused, and princely aeneas' henchmen seized on them with hearts exulting in the goodly spoil. there philoctetes with his deadly shaft smote peirasus in act to flee the war: the tendons twain behind the knee it snapped, and palsied all his speed. a danaan marked, and leapt on that maimed man with sweep of sword shearing his neck through. on the breast of earth the headless body fell: the head far flung went rolling with lips parted as to shriek; and swiftly fleeted thence the homeless soul. polydamas struck down eurymachus and cleon with his spear. from syme came with nireus' following these: cunning were both in craft of fisher-folk to east the hook baited with guile, to drop into the sea the net, from the boat's prow with deftest hands swiftly and straight to plunge the three-forked spear. but not from bane their sea-craft saved them now. eurypylus battle-staunch laid hellus low, whom cleito bare beside gygaea's mere, cleito the fair-cheeked. face-down in the dust outstretched he lay: shorn by the cruel sword from his strong shoulder fell the arm that held his long spear. still its muscles twitched, as though fain to uplift the lance for fight in vain; for the man's will no longer stirred therein, but aimlessly it quivered, even as leaps the severed tail of a snake malignant-eyed, which cannot chase the man who dealt the wound; so the right hand of that strong-hearted man with impotent grip still clutched the spear for fight. aenus and polydorus odysseus slew, ceteians both; this perished by his spear, that by his sword death-dealing. sthenelus smote godlike abas with a javelin-cast: on through his throat and shuddering nape it rushed: stopped were his heart-beats, all his limbs collapsed. tydeides slew laodocus; melius fell by agamemnon's hand; deiphobus smote alcimus and dryas: hippasus, how war-renowned soe'er, agenor slew far from peneius' river. crushed by fate, love's nursing-debt to parents ne'er he paid. lamus and stalwart lyncus thoas smote, and meriones slew lycon; menelaus laid low archelochus. upon his home looked down corycia's ridge, and that great rock of the wise fire-god, marvellous in men's eyes; for thereon, nightlong, daylong, unto him fire blazes, tireless and unquenchable. laden with fruit around it palm-trees grow, while mid the stones fire plays about their roots. gods' work is this, a wonder to all time. by teucer princely hippomedon's son was slain, menoetes: as the archer drew on him, rushed he to smite him; but already hand and eye, and bow-craft keen were aiming straight on the arching horn the shaft. swiftly released it leapt on the hapless man, while sang the string. stricken full front he heaved one choking gasp, because the fates on the arrow riding flew right to his heart, the throne of thought and strength for men, whence short the path is unto death. far from his brawny hand euryalus hurled a massy stone, and shook the ranks of troy. as when in anger against long-screaming cranes a watcher of the field leaps from the ground, in swift hand whirling round his head the sling, and speeds the stone against them, scattering before its hum their ranks far down the wind outspread, and they in huddled panic dart with wild cries this way and that, who theretofore swept on in ordered lines; so shrank the foe to right and left from that dread bolt of doom hurled of euryalus. not in vain it flew fate-winged; it shattered meles' helm and head down to the eyes: so met him ghastly death. still man slew man, while earth groaned all around, as when a mighty wind scourges the land, and this way, that way, under its shrieking blasts through the wide woodland bow from the roots and fall great trees, while all the earth is thundering round; so fell they in the dust, so clanged their arms, so crashed the earth around. still hot were they for fell fight, still dealt bane unto their foes. nigh to aeneas then apollo came, and to eurymachus, brave antenor's son; for these against the mighty achaeans fought shoulder to shoulder, as two strong oxen, matched in age, yoked to a wain; nor ever ceased from battling. suddenly spake the god to these in polymestor's shape, the seer his mother by xanthus bare to the far-darter's priest: "eurymachus, aeneas, seed of gods, 'twere shame if ye should flinch from argives! nay, not ares' self should joy to encounter you, an ye would face him in the fray; for fate hath spun long destiny-threads for thee and thee." he spake, and vanished, mingling with the winds. but their hearts felt the god's power: suddenly flooded with boundless courage were their frames, maddened their spirits: on the foe they leapt like furious wasps that in a storm of rage swoop upon bees, beholding them draw nigh in latter-summer to the mellowing grapes, or from their hives forth-streaming thitherward; so fiercely leapt these sons of troy to meet war-hardened greeks. the black fates joyed to see their conflict, ares laughed, enyo yelled horribly. loud their glancing armour clanged: they stabbed, they hewed down hosts of foes untold with irresistible hands. the reeling ranks fell, as the swath falls in the harvest heat, when the swift-handed reapers, ranged adown the field's long furrows, ply the sickle fast; so fell before their hands ranks numberless: with corpses earth was heaped, with torrent blood was streaming: strife incarnate o'er the slain gloated. they paused not from the awful toil, but aye pressed on, like lions chasing sheep. then turned the greeks to craven flight; all feet unmaimed as yet fled from the murderous war. aye followed on anchises' warrior son, smiting foes' backs with his avenging spear: on pressed eurymachus, while glowed the heart of healer apollo watching from on high. as when a man descries a herd of swine draw nigh his ripening corn, before the sheaves fall neath the reapers' hands, and harketh on against them his strong dogs; as down they rush, the spoilers see and quake; no more think they of feasting, but they turn in panic flight huddling: fast follow at their heels the hounds biting remorselessly, while long and loud squealing they flee, and joys the harvest's lord; so rejoiced phoebus, seeing from the war fleeing the mighty argive host. no more cared they for deeds of men, but cried to the gods for swift feet, in whose feet alone was hope to escape eurymachus' and aeneas' spears which lightened ever all along their rear. but one greek, over-trusting in his strength, or by fate's malice to destruction drawn, curbed in mid flight from war's turmoil his steed, and strove to wheel him round into the fight to face the foe. but fierce agenor thrust ere he was ware; his two-edged partizan shore though his shoulder; yea, the very bone of that gashed arm was cloven by the steel; the tendons parted, the veins spirted blood: down by his horse's neck he slid, and straight fell mid the dead. but still the strong arm hung with rigid fingers locked about the reins like a live man's. weird marvel was that sight, the bloody hand down hanging from the rein, scaring the foes yet more, by ares' will. thou hadst said, "it craveth still for horsemanship!" so bare the steed that sign of his slain lord. aeneas hurled his spear; it found the waist of anthalus' son, it pierced the navel through, dragging the inwards with it. stretched in dust, clutching with agonized hands at steel and bowels, horribly shrieked he, tore with his teeth the earth groaning, till life and pain forsook the man. scared were the argives, like a startled team of oxen 'neath the yoke-band straining hard, what time the sharp-fanged gadfly stings their flanks athirst for blood, and they in frenzy of pain start from the furrow, and sore disquieted the hind is for marred work, and for their sake, lest haply the recoiling ploughshare light on their leg-sinews, and hamstring his team; so were the danaans scared, so feared for them achilles' son, and shouted thunder-voiced: "cravens, why flee, like starlings nothing-worth scared by a hawk that swoopeth down on them? come, play the men! better it is by far to die in war than choose unmanly flight!" then to his cry they hearkened, and straightway were of good heart. mighty of mood he leapt upon the trojans, swinging in his hand the lightening spear: swept after him his host of myrmidons with hearts swelled with the strength resistless of a tempest; so the greeks won breathing-space. with fury like his sire's one after other slew he of the foe. recoiling back they fell, as waves on-rolled by boreas foaming from the deep to the strand, are caught by another blast that whirlwind-like leaps, in a short lull of the north-wind, forth, smites them full-face, and hurls them back from the shore; so them that erewhile on the danaans pressed godlike achilles' son now backward hurled a short space only brave aeneas' spirit let him not flee, but made him bide the fight fearlessly; and enyo level held the battle's scales. yet not against aeneas achilles' son upraised his father's spear, but elsewhither turned his fury: in reverence for aphrodite, thetis splendour-veiled turned from that man her mighty son's son's rage and giant strength on other hosts of foes. there slew he many a trojan, while the ranks of greeks were ravaged by aeneas' hand. over the battle-slain the vultures joyed, hungry to rend the hearts and flesh of men. but all the nymphs were wailing, daughters born of xanthus and fair-flowing simois. so toiled they in the fight: the wind's breath rolled huge dust-clouds up; the illimitable air was one thick haze, as with a sudden mist: earth disappeared, faces were blotted out; yet still they fought on; each man, whomso he met, ruthlessly slew him, though his very friend it might be--in that turmoil none could tell who met him, friend or foe: blind wilderment enmeshed the hosts. and now had all been blent confusedly, had perished miserably, all falling by their fellows' murderous swords, had not cronion from olympus helped their sore strait, and he swept aside the dust of conflict, and he calmed those deadly winds. yet still the hosts fought on; but lighter far their battle-travail was, who now discerned whom in the fray to smite, and whom to spare. the danaans now forced back the trojan host, the trojans now the danaan ranks, as swayed the dread fight to and fro. from either side darts leapt and fell like snowflakes. far away shepherds from ida trembling watched the strife, and to the heaven-abiders lifted hands of supplication, praying that all their foes might perish, and that from the woeful war troy might win breathing-space, and see at last the day of freedom: the gods hearkened not. far other issues fate devised, nor recked of zeus the almighty, nor of none beside of the immortals. her unpitying soul cares naught what doom she spinneth with her thread inevitable, be it for men new-born or cities: all things wax and wane through her. so by her hest the battle-travail swelled 'twixt trojan chariot-lords and greeks that closed in grapple of fight--they dealt each other death ruthlessly: no man quailed, but stout of heart fought on; for courage thrusts men into war. but now when many had perished in the dust, then did the argive might prevail at last by stern decree of pallas; for she came into the heart of battle, hot to help the greeks to lay waste priam's glorious town. then aphrodite, who lamented sore for paris slain, snatched suddenly away renowned aeneas from the deadly strife, and poured thick mist about him. fate forbade that hero any longer to contend with argive foes without the high-built wall. yea, and his mother sorely feared the wrath of pallas passing-wise, whose heart was keen to help the danaans now--yea, feared lest she might slay him even beyond his doom, who spared not ares' self, a mightier far than he. no more the trojans now abode the edge of fight, but all disheartened backward drew. for like fierce ravening beasts the argive men leapt on them, mad with murderous rage of war. choked with their slain the river-channels were, heaped was the field; in red dust thousands fell, horses and men; and chariots overturned were strewn there: blood was streaming all around like rain, for deadly doom raged through the fray. men stabbed with swords, and men impaled on spears lay all confusedly, like scattered beams, when on the strand of the low-thundering sea men from great girders of a tall ship's hull strike out the bolts and clamps, and scatter wide long planks and timbers, till the whole broad beach is paved with beams o'erplashed by darkling surge; so lay in dust and blood those slaughtered men, rapture and pain of fight forgotten now. a remnant from the pitiless strife escaped entered their stronghold, scarce eluding doom. children and wives from their limbs blood-besprent received their arms bedabbled with foul gore; and baths for all were heated. leeches ran through all the town in hot haste to the homes of wounded men to minister to their hurts. here wives and daughters moaned round men come back from war, there cried on many who came not here, men stung to the soul by bitter pangs groaned upon beds of pain; there, toil-spent men turned them to supper. whinnied the swift steeds and neighed o'er mangers heaped. by tent and ship far off the greeks did even as they of troy. when o'er the streams of ocean dawn drove up her splendour-flashing steeds, and earth's tribes waked, then the strong argives' battle-eager sons marched against priam's city lofty-towered, save some that mid the tents by wounded men tarried, lest haply raiders on the ships might fall, to help the trojans, while these fought the foe from towers, while rose the flame of war. before the scaean gate fought capaneus' son and godlike diomedes. high above deiphobus battle-staunch and strong polites with many comrades, stoutly held them back with arrows and huge stones. clanged evermore the smitten helms and shields that fenced strong men from bitter doom and unrelenting fate, before the gate idaean achilles' son set in array the fight: around him toiled his host of battle-cunning myrmidons. helenus and agenor gallant-souled, down-hailing darts, against them held the wall, aye cheering on their men. no spurring these needed to fight hard for their country's walls. odysseus and eurypylus made assault unresting on the gates that fated the plain and looked to the swift ships. from wall and tower with huge stones brave aeneas made defence. in battle-stress by simons teucer toiled. each endured hardness at his several post. then round war-wise odysseus men renowned, by that great captain's battle cunning ruled, locked shields together, raised them o'er their heads ranged side by side, that many were made one. thou hadst said it was a great hall's solid roof, which no tempestuous wind-blast misty wet can pierce, nor rain from heaven in torrents poured. so fenced about with shields firm stood the ranks of argives, one in heart for fight, and one in that array close-welded. from above the trojans hailed great stones; as from a rock rolled these to earth. full many a spear and dart and galling javelin in the pierced shields stood; some in the earth stood; many glanced away with bent points falling baffled from the shields battered on all sides. but that clangorous din none feared; none flinched; as pattering drops of rain they heard it. up to the rampart's foot they marched: none hung back; shoulder to shoulder on they came like a long lurid cloud that o'er the sky cronion trails in wild midwinter-tide. on that battalion moved, with thunderous tread of tramping feet: a little above the earth rose up the dust; the breeze swept it aside drifting away behind the men. there went a sound confused of voices with them, like the hum of bees that murmur round the hives, and multitudinous panting, and the gasp of men hard-breathing. exceeding glad the sons of atreus, glorying in them, saw that wall unwavering of doom-denouncing war. in one dense mass against the city-gate they hurled themselves, with twibills strove to breach the long walls, from their hinges to upheave the gates, and dash to earth. the pulse of hope beat strong in those proud hearts. but naught availed targes nor levers, when aeneas' might swung in his hands a stone like a thunderbolt, hurled it with uttermost strength, and dashed to death all whom it caught beneath the shields, as when a mountain's precipice-edge breaks off and falls on pasturing goats, and all that graze thereby tremble; so were those danaans dazed with dread. stone after stone he hurled on the reeling ranks, as when amid the hills olympian zeus with thunderbolts and blazing lightnings rends from their foundations crags that rim a peak, and this way, that way, sends them hurtling down; then the flocks tremble, scattering in wild flight; so quailed the achaeans, when aeneas dashed to sudden fragments all that battle-wall moulded of adamant shields, because a god gave more than human strength. no man of them could lift his eyes unto him in that fight, because the arms that lapped his sinewy limbs flashed like the heaven-born lightnings. at his side stood, all his form divine in darkness cloaked, ares the terrible, and winged the flight of what bare down to the argives doom or dread. he fought as when olympian zeus himself from heaven in wrath smote down the insolent bands of giants grim, and shook the boundless earth, and sea, and ocean, and the heavens, when reeled the knees of atlas neath the rush of zeus. so crumbled down beneath aeneas' bolts the argive squadrons. all along the wall wroth with the foeman rushed he: from his hands whatso he lighted on in onslaught-haste hurled he; for many a battle-staying bolt lay on the walls of those staunch dardan men. with such aeneas stormed in giant might, with such drave back the thronging foes. all round the trojans played the men. sore travail and pain had all folk round the city: many fell, argives and trojans. rang the battle-cries: aeneas cheered the war-fain trojans on to fight for home, for wives, and their own souls with a good heart: war-staunch achilles' son shouted: "flinch not, ye argives, from the walls, till troy be taken, and sink down in flames!" and round these twain an awful measureless roar rang, daylong as they fought: no breathing-space came from the war to them whose spirits burned, these, to smite ilium, those, to guard her safe. but from aeneas valiant-souled afar fought aias, speeding midst the men of troy winged death; for now his arrow straight through air flew, now his deadly dart, and smote them down one after one: yet others cowered away before his peerless prowess, and abode the fight no more, but fenceless left the wall then one, of all the locrians mightiest, fierce-souled alcimedon, trusting in his prince and his own might and valour of his youth, all battle-eager on a ladder set swift feet, to pave for friends a death-strewn path into the town. above his head he raised the screening shield; up that dread path he went hardening his heart from trembling, in his hand now shook the threatening spear, now upward climbed fast high in air he trod the perilous way. now on the trojans had disaster come, but, even as above the parapet his head rose, and for the first time and the last from her high rampart he looked down on troy, aeneas, who had marked, albeit afar, that bold assault, rushed on him, dashed on his head so huge a stone that the hero's mighty strength shattered the ladder. down from on high he rushed as arrow from the string: death followed him as whirling round he fell; with air was blent his lost life, ere he crashed to the stony ground. strong spear, broad shield, in mid fall flew from his hands, and from his head the helm: his corslet came alone with him to earth. the locrian men groaned, seeing their champion quelled by evil doom; for all his hair and all the stones around were brain-bespattered: all his bones were crushed, and his once active limbs besprent with gore. then godlike poeas' war-triumphant son marked where aeneas stormed along the wall in lion-like strength, and straightway shot a shaft aimed at that glorious hero, neither missed the man: yet not through his unyielding targe to the fair flesh it won, being turned aside by cytherea and the shield, but grazed the buckler lightly: yet not all in vain fell earthward, but between the targe and helm smote medon: from the tower he fell, as falls a wild goat from a crag, the hunter's shaft deep in its heart: so nerveless-flung he fell, and fled away from him the precious life. wroth for his friend, a stone aeneas hurled, and philoctetes' stalwart comrade slew, toxaechmes; for he shattered his head and crushed helmet and skull-bones; and his noble heart was stilled. loud shouted princely poeas' son: "aeneas, thou, forsooth, dost deem thyself a mighty champion, fighting from a tower whence craven women war with foes! now if thou be a man, come forth without the wall in battle-harness, and so learn to know in spear-craft and in bow-craft poeas' son!" so cried he; but anchises' valiant seed, how fain soe'er, naught answered, for the stress of desperate conflict round that wall and burg ceaselessly raging: pause from fight was none: yea, for long time no respite had there been for the war-weary from that endless toil. book xii how the wooden horse was fashioned, and brought into troy by her people. when round the walls of troy the danaan host had borne much travail, and yet the end was not, by calchas then assembled were the chiefs; for his heart was instructed by the hests of phoebus, by the flights of birds, the stars, and all the signs that speak to men the will of heaven; so he to that assembly cried: "no longer toil in leaguer of yon walls; some other counsel let your hearts devise, some stratagem to help the host and us. for here but yesterday i saw a sign: a falcon chased a dove, and she, hard pressed, entered a cleft of the rock; and chafing he tarried long time hard by that rift, but she abode in covert. nursing still his wrath, he hid him in a bush. forth darted she, in folly deeming him afar: he swooped, and to the hapless dove dealt wretched death. therefore by force essay we not to smite troy, but let cunning stratagem avail." he spake; but no man's wit might find a way to escape their grievous travail, as they sought to find a remedy, till laertes' son discerned it of his wisdom, and he spake: "friend, in high honour held of the heavenly ones, if doomed it be indeed that priam's burg by guile must fall before the war-worn greeks, a great horse let us fashion, in the which our mightiest shall take ambush. let the host burn all their tents, and sail from hence away to tenedos; so the trojans, from their towers gazing, shall stream forth fearless to the plain. let some brave man, unknown of any in troy, with a stout heart abide without the horse, crouching beneath its shadow, who shall say: "`achaea's lords of might, exceeding fain safe to win home, made this their offering for safe return, an image to appease the wrath of pallas for her image stolen from troy.' and to this story shall he stand, how long soe'er they question him, until, though never so relentless, they believe, and drag it, their own doom, within the town. then shall war's signal unto us be given- to them at sea, by sudden flash of torch, to the ambush, by the cry, `come forth the horse!' when unsuspecting sleep the sons of troy." he spake, and all men praised him: most of all extolled him calchas, that such marvellous guile he put into the achaeans' hearts, to be for them assurance of triumph, but for troy ruin; and to those battle-lords he cried: "let your hearts seek none other stratagem, friends; to war-strong odysseus' rede give ear. his wise thought shall not miss accomplishment. yea, our desire even now the gods fulfil. hark! for new tokens come from the unseen! lo, there on high crash through the firmament zeus' thunder and lightning! see, where birds to right dart past, and scream with long-resounding cry! go to, no more in endless leaguer of troy linger we. hard necessity fills the foe with desperate courage that makes cowards brave; for then are men most dangerous, when they stake their lives in utter recklessness of death, as battle now the aweless sons of troy all round their burg, mad with the lust of fight." but cried achilles' battle-eager son: "calchas, brave men meet face to face their foes! who skulk behind their walls, and fight from towers, are nidderings, hearts palsied with base fear. hence with all thought of wile and stratagem! the great war-travail of the spear beseems true heroes. best in battle are the brave." but answer made to him laertes' seed: "bold-hearted child of aweless aeacus' son, this as beseems a hero princely and brave, dauntlessly trusting in thy strength, thou say'st. yet thine invincible sire's unquailing might availed not to smite priam's wealthy burg, nor we, for all our travail. nay, with speed, as counselleth calchas, go we to the ships, and fashion we the horse by epeius' hands, who in the woodwright's craft is chiefest far of argives, for athena taught his lore." then all their mightiest men gave ear to him save twain, fierce-hearted neoptolemus and philoctetes mighty-souled; for these still were insatiate for the bitter fray, still longed for turmoil of the fight. they bade their own folk bear against that giant wall what things soe'er for war's assaults avail, in hope to lay that stately fortress low, seeing heaven's decrees had brought them both to war. yea, they had haply accomplished all their will, but from the sky zeus showed his wrath; he shook the earth beneath their feet, and all the air shuddered, as down before those heroes twain he hurled his thunderbolt: wide echoes crashed through all dardania. unto fear straightway turned were their bold hearts: they forgat their might, and calchas' counsels grudgingly obeyed. so with the argives came they to the ships in reverence for the seer who spake from zeus or phoebus, and they obeyed him utterly. what time round splendour-kindled heavens the stars from east to west far-flashing wheel, and when man doth forget his toil, in that still hour athena left the high mansions of the blest, clothed her in shape of a maiden tender-fleshed, and came to ships and host. over the head of brave epeius stood she in his dream, and bade him build a horse of tree: herself would labour in his labour, and herself stand by his side, to the work enkindling him. hearing the goddess' word, with a glad laugh leapt he from careless sleep: right well he knew the immortal one celestial. now his heart could hold no thought beside; his mind was fixed upon the wondrous work, and through his soul marched marshalled each device of craftsmanship. when rose the dawn, and thrust back kindly night to erebus, and through the firmament streamed glad glory, then epeius told his dream to eager argives--all he saw and heard; and hearkening joyed they with exceeding joy. straightway to tall-tressed ida's leafy glades the sons of atreus sent swift messengers. these laid the axe unto the forest-pines, and hewed the great trees: to their smiting rang the echoing glens. on those far-stretching hills all bare of undergrowth the high peaks rose: open their glades were, not, as in time past, haunted of beasts: there dry the tree-trunks rose wooing the winds. even these the achaeans hewed with axes, and in haste they bare them down from those shagged mountain heights to hellespont's shores. strained with a strenuous spirit at the work young men and mules; and all the people toiled each at his task obeying epeius's hest. for with the keen steel some were hewing beams, some measuring planks, and some with axes lopped branches away from trunks as yet unsawn: each wrought his several work. epeius first fashioned the feet of that great horse of wood: the belly next he shaped, and over this moulded the back and the great loins behind, the throat in front, and ridged the towering neck with waving mane: the crested head he wrought, the streaming tail, the ears, the lucent eyes- all that of lifelike horses have. so grew like a live thing that more than human work, for a god gave to a man that wondrous craft. and in three days, by pallas's decree, finished was all. rejoiced thereat the host of argos, marvelling how the wood expressed mettle, and speed of foot--yea, seemed to neigh. godlike epeius then uplifted hands to pallas, and for that huge horse he prayed: "hear, great-souled goddess: bless thine horse and me!" he spake: athena rich in counsel heard, and made his work a marvel to all men which saw, or heard its fame in days to be. but while the danaans o'er epeius' work joyed, and their routed foes within the walls tarried, and shrank from death and pitiless doom, then, when imperious zeus far from the gods had gone to ocean's streams and tethys' caves, strife rose between the immortals: heart with heart was set at variance. riding on the blasts of winds, from heaven to earth they swooped: the air crashed round them. lighting down by xanthus' stream arrayed they stood against each other, these for the achaeans, for the trojans those; and all their souls were thrilled with lust of war: there gathered too the lords of the wide sea. these in their wrath were eager to destroy the horse of guile and all the ships, and those fair ilium. but all-contriving fate held them therefrom, and turned their hearts to strife against each other. ares to the fray rose first, and on athena rushed. thereat fell each on other: clashed around their limbs the golden arms celestial as they charged. round them the wide sea thundered, the dark earth quaked 'neath immortal feet. rang from them all far-pealing battle-shouts; that awful cry rolled up to the broad-arching heaven, and down even to hades' fathomless abyss: trembled the titans there in depths of gloom. ida's long ridges sighed, sobbed clamorous streams of ever-flowing rivers, groaned ravines far-furrowed, argive ships, and priam's towers. yet men feared not, for naught they knew of all that strife, by heaven's decree. then her high peaks the gods' hands wrenched from ida's crest, and hurled against each other: but like crumbling sands shivered they fell round those invincible limbs, shattered to small dust. but the mind of zeus, at the utmost verge of earth, was ware of all: straight left he ocean's stream, and to wide heaven ascended, charioted upon the winds, the east, the north, the west-wind, and the south: for iris rainbow-plumed led 'neath the yoke of his eternal ear that stormy team, the ear which time the immortal framed for him of adamant with never-wearying hands. so came he to olympus' giant ridge. his wrath shook all the firmament, as crashed from east to west his thunders; lightnings gleamed, as thick and fast his thunderbolts poured to earth, and flamed the limitless welkin. terror fell upon the hearts of those immortals: quaked the limbs of all--ay, deathless though they were! then themis, trembling for them, swift as thought leapt down through clouds, and came with speed to them- for in the strife she only had no part and stood between the fighters, and she cried: "forbear the conflict! o, when zeus is wroth, it ill beseems that everlasting gods should fight for men's sake, creatures of a day: else shall ye be all suddenly destroyed; for zeus will tear up all the hills, and hurl upon you: sons nor daughters will he spare, but bury 'neath one ruin of shattered earth all. no escape shall ye find thence to light, in horror of darkness prisoned evermore." dreading zeus' menace gave they heed to her, from strife refrained, and cast away their wrath, and were made one in peace and amity. some heavenward soared, some plunged into the sea, on earth stayed some. amid the achaean host spake in his subtlety laertes' son: "o valorous-hearted lords of the argive host, now prove in time of need what men ye be, how passing-strong, how flawless-brave! the hour is this for desperate emprise: now, with hearts heroic, enter ye yon carven horse, so to attain the goal of this stern war. for better it is by stratagem and craft now to destroy this city, for whose sake hither we came, and still are suffering many afflictions far from our own land. come then, and let your hearts be stout and strong for he who in stress of fight hath turned to bay and snatched a desperate courage from despair, oft, though the weaker, slays a mightier foe. for courage, which is all men's glory, makes the heart great. come then, set the ambush, ye which be our mightiest, and the rest shall go to tenedos' hallowed burg, and there abide until our foes have haled within their walls us with the horse, as deeming that they bring a gift unto tritonis. some brave man, one whom the trojans know not, yet we lack, to harden his heart as steel, and to abide near by the horse. let that man bear in mind heedfully whatsoe'er i said erewhile. and let none other thought be in his heart, lest to the foe our counsel be revealed." then, when all others feared, a man far-famed made answer, sinon, marked of destiny to bring the great work to accomplishment. therefore with worship all men looked on him, the loyal of heart, as in the midst he spake: "odysseus, and all ye achaean chiefs, this work for which ye crave will i perform- yea, though they torture me, though into fire living they thrust me; for mine heart is fixed not to escape, but die by hands of foes, except i crown with glory your desire." stoutly he spake: right glad the argives were; and one said: "how the gods have given to-day high courage to this man! he hath not been heretofore valiant. heaven is kindling him to be the trojans' ruin, but to us salvation. now full soon, i trow, we reach the goal of grievous war, so long unseen." so a voice murmured mid the achaean host. then, to stir up the heroes, nestor cried: "now is the time, dear sons, for courage and strength: now do the gods bring nigh the end of toil: now give they victory to our longing hands. come, bravely enter ye this cavernous horse. for high renown attendeth courage high. oh that my limbs were mighty as of old, when aeson's son for heroes called, to man swift argo, when of the heroes foremost i would gladly have entered her, but pelias the king withheld me in my own despite. ah me, but now the burden of years--o nay, as i were young, into the horse will i fearlessly! glory and strength shall courage give." answered him golden-haired achilles' son: "nestor, in wisdom art thou chief of men; but cruel age hath caught thee in his grip: no more thy strength may match thy gallant will; therefore thou needs must unto tenedos' strand. we will take ambush, we the youths, of strife insatiate still, as thou, old sire, dost bid." then strode the son of neleus to his side, and kissed his hands, and kissed the head of him who offered thus himself the first of all to enter that huge horse, being peril-fain, and bade the elder of days abide without. then to the battle-eager spake the old: "thy father's son art thou! achilles' might and chivalrous speech be here! o, sure am i that by thine hands the argives shall destroy the stately city of priam. at the last, after long travail, glory shall be ours, ours, after toil and tribulation of war; the gods have laid tribulation at men's feet but happiness far off, and toil between: therefore for men full easy is the path to ruin, and the path to fame is hard, where feet must press right on through painful toil." he spake: replied achilles' glorious son: "old sire, as thine heart trusteth, be it vouchsafed in answer to our prayers; for best were this: but if the gods will otherwise, be it so. ay, gladlier would i fall with glory in fight than flee from troy, bowed 'neath a load of shame." then in his sire's celestial arms he arrayed his shoulders; and with speed in harness sheathed stood the most mighty heroes, in whose healers was dauntless spirit. tell, ye queens of song, now man by man the names of all that passed into the cavernous horse; for ye inspired my soul with all my song, long ere my cheek grew dark with manhood's beard, what time i fed my goodly sheep on smyrna's pasture-lea, from hermus thrice so far as one may hear a man's shout, by the fane of artemis, in the deliverer's grove, upon a hill neither exceeding low nor passing high. into that cavernous horse achilles' son first entered, strong menelaus followed then, odysseus, sthenelus, godlike diomede, philoctetes and menestheus, anticlus, thoas and polypoetes golden-haired, aias, eurypylus, godlike thrasymede, idomeneus, meriones, far-famous twain, podaleirius of spears, eurymachus, teucer the godlike, fierce ialmenus, thalpius, antimachus, leonteus staunch, eumelus, and euryalus fair as a god, amphimachus, demophoon, agapenor, akamas, meges stalwart phyleus' son- yea, more, even all their chiefest, entered in, so many as that carven horse could hold. godlike epeius last of all passed in, the fashioner of the horse; in his breast lay the secret of the opening of its doors and of their closing: therefore last of all he entered, and he drew the ladders up whereby they clomb: then made he all secure, and set himself beside the bolt. so all in silence sat 'twixt victory and death. but the rest fired the tents, wherein erewhile they slept, and sailed the wide sea in their ships. two mighty-hearted captains ordered these, nestor and agamemnon lord of spears. fain had they also entered that great horse, but all the host withheld them, bidding stay with them a-shipboard, ordering their array: for men far better work the works of war when their kings oversee them; therefore these abode without, albeit mighty men. so came they swiftly unto tenedos' shore, and dropped the anchor-stones, then leapt in haste forth of the ships, and silent waited there keen-watching till the signal-torch should flash. but nigh the foe were they in the horse, and now looked they for death, and now to smite the town; and on their hopes and fears uprose the dawn. then marked the trojans upon hellespont's strand the smoke upleaping yet through air: no more saw they the ships which brought to them from greece destruction dire. with joy to the shore they ran, but armed them first, for fear still haunted them then marked they that fair-carven horse, and stood marvelling round, for a mighty work was there. a hapless-seeming man thereby they spied, sinon; and this one, that one questioned him touching the danaans, as in a great ring they compassed him, and with unangry words first questioned, then with terrible threatenings. then tortured they that man of guileful soul long time unceasing. firm as a rock abode the unquivering limbs, the unconquerable will. his ears, his nose, at last they shore away in every wise tormenting him, until he should declare the truth, whither were gone the danaans in their ships, what thing the horse concealed within it. he had armed his mind with resolution, and of outrage foul recked not; his soul endured their cruel stripes, yea, and the bitter torment of the fire; for strong endurance into him hera breathed; and still he told them the same guileful tale: "the argives in their ships flee oversea weary of tribulation of endless war. this horse by calchas' counsel fashioned they for wise athena, to propitiate her stern wrath for that guardian image stol'n from troy. and by odysseus' prompting i was marked for slaughter, to be sacrificed to the sea-powers, beside the moaning waves, to win them safe return. but their intent i marked; and ere they spilt the drops of wine, and sprinkled hallowed meal upon mine head, swiftly i fled, and, by the help of heaven, i flung me down, clasping the horse's feet; and they, sore loth, perforce must leave me there dreading great zeus's daughter mighty-souled." in subtlety so he spake, his soul untamed by pain; for a brave man's part is to endure to the uttermost. and of the trojans some believed him, others for a wily knave held him, of whose mind was laocoon. wisely he spake: "a deadly fraud is this," he said, "devised by the achaean chiefs!" and cried to all straightway to burn the horse, and know if aught within its timbers lurked. yea, and they had obeyed him, and had 'scaped destruction; but athena, fiercely wroth with him, the trojans, and their city, shook earth's deep foundations 'neath laocoon's feet. straight terror fell on him, and trembling bowed the knees of the presumptuous: round his head horror of darkness poured; a sharp pang thrilled his eyelids; swam his eyes beneath his brows; his eyeballs, stabbed with bitter anguish, throbbed even from the roots, and rolled in frenzy of pain. clear through his brain the bitter torment pierced even to the filmy inner veil thereof; now bloodshot were his eyes, now ghastly green; anon with rheum they ran, as pours a stream down from a rugged crag, with thawing snow made turbid. as a man distraught he seemed: all things he saw showed double, and he groaned fearfully; yet he ceased not to exhort the men of troy, and recked not of his pain. then did the goddess strike him utterly blind. stared his fixed eyeballs white from pits of blood; and all folk groaned for pity of their friend, and dread of the prey-giver, lest he had sinned in folly against her, and his mind was thus warped to destruction yea, lest on themselves like judgment should be visited, to avenge the outrage done to hapless sinon's flesh, whereby they hoped to wring the truth from him. so led they him in friendly wise to troy, pitying him at the last. then gathered all, and o'er that huge horse hastily cast a rope, and made it fast above; for under its feet smooth wooden rollers had epeius laid, that, dragged by trojan hands, it might glide on into their fortress. one and all they haled with multitudinous tug and strain, as when down to the sea young men sore-labouring drag a ship; hard-crushed the stubborn rollers groan, as, sliding with weird shrieks, the keel descends into the sea-surge; so that host with toil dragged up unto their city their own doom, epeius' work. with great festoons of flowers they hung it, and their own heads did they wreathe, while answering each other pealed the flutes. grimly enyo laughed, seeing the end of that dire war; hera rejoiced on high; glad was athena. when the trojans came unto their city, brake they down the walls, their city's coronal, that the horse of death might be led in. troy's daughters greeted it with shouts of salutation; marvelling all gazed at the mighty work where lurked their doom. but still laocoon ceased not to exhort his countrymen to burn the horse with fire: they would not hear, for dread of the gods' wrath. but then a yet more hideous punishment athena visited on his hapless sons. a cave there was, beneath a rugged cliff exceeding high, unscalable, wherein dwelt fearful monsters of the deadly brood of typhon, in the rock-clefts of the isle calydna that looks troyward from the sea. thence stirred she up the strength of serpents twain, and summoned them to troy. by her uproused they shook the island as with earthquake: roared the sea; the waves disparted as they came. onward they swept with fearful-flickering tongues: shuddered the very monsters of the deep: xanthus' and simois' daughters moaned aloud, the river-nymphs: the cyprian queen looked down in anguish from olympus. swiftly they came whither the goddess sped them: with grim jaws whetting their deadly fangs, on his hapless sons sprang they. all trojans panic-stricken fled, seeing those fearsome dragons in their town. no man, though ne'er so dauntless theretofore, dared tarry; ghastly dread laid hold on all shrinking in horror from the monsters. screamed the women; yea, the mother forgat her child, fear-frenzied as she fled: all troy became one shriek of fleers, one huddle of jostling limbs: the streets were choked with cowering fugitives. alone was left laocoon with his sons, for death's doom and the goddess chained their feet. then, even as from destruction shrank the lads, those deadly fangs had seized and ravined up the twain, outstretching to their sightless sire agonized hands: no power to help had he. trojans far off looked on from every side weeping, all dazed. and, having now fulfilled upon the trojans pallas' awful hest, those monsters vanished 'neath the earth; and still stands their memorial, where into the fane they entered of apollo in pergamus the hallowed. therebefore the sons of troy gathered, and reared a cenotaph for those who miserably had perished. over it their father from his blind eyes rained the tears: over the empty tomb their mother shrieked, boding the while yet worse things, wailing o'er the ruin wrought by folly of her lord, dreading the anger of the blessed ones. as when around her void nest in a brake in sorest anguish moans the nightingale whose fledglings, ere they learned her plaintive song, a hideous serpent's fangs have done to death, and left the mother anguish, endless woe, and bootless crying round her desolate home; so groaned she for her children's wretched death, so moaned she o'er the void tomb; and her pangs were sharpened by her lord's plight stricken blind. while she for children and for husband moaned- these slain, he of the sun's light portionless- the trojans to the immortals sacrificed, pouring the wine. their hearts beat high with hope to escape the weary stress of woeful war. howbeit the victims burned not, and the flames died out, as though 'neath heavy-hissing rain; and writhed the smoke-wreaths blood-red, and the thighs quivering from crumbling altars fell to earth. drink-offerings turned to blood, gods' statues wept, and temple-walls dripped gore: along them rolled echoes of groaning out of depths unseen; and all the long walls shuddered: from the towers came quick sharp sounds like cries of men in pain; and, weirdly shrieking, of themselves slid back the gate-bolts. screaming "desolation!" wailed the birds of night. above that god-built burg a mist palled every star; and yet no cloud was in the flashing heavens. by phoebus' fane withered the bays that erst were lush and green. wolves and foul-feeding jackals came and howled within the gates. ay, other signs untold appeared, portending woe to dardanus' sons and troy: yet no fear touched the trojans' hearts who saw all through the town those portents dire: fate crazed them all, that midst their revelling slain by their foes they might fill up their doom. one heart was steadfast, and one soul clear-eyed, cassandra. never her words were unfulfilled; yet was their utter truth, by fate's decree, ever as idle wind in the hearers' ears, that no bar to troy's ruin might be set. she saw those evil portents all through troy conspiring to one end; loud rang her cry, as roars a lioness that mid the brakes a hunter has stabbed or shot, whereat her heart maddens, and down the long hills rolls her roar, and her might waxes tenfold; so with heart aflame with prophecy came she forth her bower. over her snowy shoulders tossed her hair streaming far down, and wildly blazed her eyes. her neck writhed, like a sapling in the wind shaken, as moaned and shrieked that noble maid: "o wretches! into the land of darkness now we are passing; for all round us full of fire and blood and dismal moan the city is. everywhere portents of calamity gods show: destruction yawns before your feet. fools! ye know not your doom: still ye rejoice with one consent in madness, who to troy have brought the argive horse where ruin lurks! oh, ye believe not me, though ne'er so loud i cry! the erinyes and the ruthless fates, for helen's spousals madly wroth, through troy dart on wild wings. and ye, ye are banqueting there in your last feast, on meats befouled with gore, when now your feet are on the path of ghosts!" then cried a scoffing voice an ominous word: "why doth a raving tongue of evil speech, daughter of priam, make thy lips to cry words empty as wind? no maiden modesty with purity veils thee: thou art compassed round with ruinous madness; therefore all men scorn thee, babbler! hence, thine evil bodings speak to the argives and thyself! for thee doth wait anguish and shame yet bitterer than befell presumptuous laocoon. shame it were in folly to destroy the immortals' gift." so scoffed a trojan: others in like sort cried shame on her, and said she spake but lies, saying that ruin and fate's heavy stroke were hard at hand. they knew not their own doom, and mocked, and thrust her back from that huge horse for fain she was to smite its beams apart, or burn with ravening fire. she snatched a brand of blazing pine-wood from the hearth and ran in fury: in the other hand she bare a two-edged halberd: on that horse of doom she rushed, to cause the trojans to behold with their own eyes the ambush hidden there. but straightway from her hands they plucked and flung afar the fire and steel, and careless turned to the feast; for darkened o'er them their last night. within the horse the argives joyed to hear the uproar of troy's feasters setting at naught cassandra, but they marvelled that she knew so well the achaeans' purpose and device. as mid the hills a furious pantheress, which from the steading hounds and shepherd-folk drive with fierce rush, with savage heart turns back even in departing, galled albeit by darts: so from the great horse fled she, anguish-racked for troy, for all the ruin she foreknew. book xiii how troy in the night was taken and sacked with fire and slaughter. so feasted they through troy, and in their midst loud pealed the flutes and pipes: on every hand were song and dance, laughter and cries confused of banqueters beside the meats and wine. they, lifting in their hands the beakers brimmed, recklessly drank, till heavy of brain they grew, till rolled their fluctuant eyes. now and again some mouth would babble the drunkard's broken words. the household gear, the very roof and walls seemed as they rocked: all things they looked on seemed whirled in wild dance. about their eyes a veil of mist dropped, for the drunkard's sight is dimmed, and the wit dulled, when rise the fumes to the brain: and thus a heavy-headed feaster cried: "for naught the danaans mustered that great host hither! fools, they have wrought not their intent, but with hopes unaccomplished from our town like silly boys or women have they fled." so cried a trojan wit-befogged with wine, fool, nor discerned destruction at the doors. when sleep had locked his fetters everywhere through troy on folk fulfilled of wine and meat, then sinon lifted high a blazing torch to show the argive men the splendour of fire. but fearfully the while his heart beat, lest the men of troy might see it, and the plot be suddenly revealed. but on their beds sleeping their last sleep lay they, heavy with wine. the host saw, and from tenedos set sail. then nigh the horse drew sinon: softly he called, full softly, that no man of troy might hear, but only achaea's chiefs, far from whose eyes sleep hovered, so athirst were they for fight. they heard, and to odysseus all inclined their ears: he bade them urgently go forth softly and fearlessly; and they obeyed that battle-summons, pressing in hot haste to leap to earth: but in his subtlety he stayed them from all thrusting eagerly forth. but first himself with swift unfaltering hands, helped of epeius, here and there unbarred the ribs of the horse of beams: above the planks a little he raised his head, and gazed around on all sides, if he haply might descry one trojan waking yet. as when a wolf, with hunger stung to the heart, comes from the hills, and ravenous for flesh draws nigh the flock penned in the wide fold, slinking past the men and dogs that watch, all keen to ward the sheep, then o'er the fold-wall leaps with soundless feet; so stole odysseus down from the horse: with him followed the war-fain lords of hellas' league, orderly stepping down the ladders, which epeius framed for paths of mighty men, for entering and for passing forth the horse, who down them now on this side, that side, streamed as fearless wasps startled by stroke of axe in angry mood pour all together forth from the tree-bole, at sound of woodman's blow; so battle-kindled forth the horse they poured into the midst of that strong city of troy with hearts that leapt expectant. [with swift hands snatched they the brands from dying hearths, and fired temple and palace. onward then to the gates sped they,] and swiftly slew the slumbering guards, [then held the gate-towers till their friends should come.] fast rowed the host the while; on swept the ships over the great flood: thetis made their paths straight, and behind them sent a driving wind speeding them, and the hearts achaean glowed. swiftly to hellespont's shore they came, and there beached they the keels again, and deftly dealt with whatso tackling appertains to ships. then leapt they aland, and hasted on to troy silent as sheep that hurry to the fold from woodland pasture on an autumn eve; so without sound of voices marched they on unto the trojans' fortress, eager all to help those mighty chiefs with foes begirt. now these--as famished wolves fierce-glaring round fall on a fold mid the long forest-hills, while sleeps the toil-worn watchman, and they rend the sheep on every hand within the wall in darkness, and all round [are heaped the slain; so these within the city smote and slew, as swarmed the awakened foe around them; yet, fast as they slew, aye faster closed on them those thousands, mad to thrust them from the gates.] slipping in blood and stumbling o'er the dead [their line reeled,] and destruction loomed o'er them, though danaan thousands near and nearer drew. but when the whole host reached the walls of troy, into the city of priam, breathing rage of fight, with reckless battle-lust they poured; and all that fortress found they full of war and slaughter, palaces, temples, horribly blazing on all sides; glowed their hearts with joy. in deadly mood then charged they on the foe. ares and fell enyo maddened there: blood ran in torrents, drenched was all the earth, as trojans and their alien helpers died. here were men lying quelled by bitter death all up and down the city in their blood; others on them were falling, gasping forth their life's strength; others, clutching in their hands their bowels that looked through hideous gashes forth, wandered in wretched plight around their homes: others, whose feet, while yet asleep they lay, had been hewn off, with groans unutterable crawled mid the corpses. some, who had rushed to fight, lay now in dust, with hands and heads hewn off. some were there, through whose backs, even as they fled, the spear had passed, clear through to the breast, and some whose waists the lance had pierced, impaling them where sharpest stings the anguish-laden steel. and all about the city dolorous howls of dogs uprose, and miserable moans of strong men stricken to death; and every home with awful cries was echoing. rang the shrieks of women, like to screams of cranes, which see an eagle stooping on them from the sky, which have no courage to resist, but scream long terror-shrieks in dread of zeus's bird; so here, so there the trojan women wailed, some starting from their sleep, some to the ground leaping: they thought not in that agony of robe and zone; in naught but tunics clad distraught they wandered: others found nor veil nor cloak to cast about them, but, as came onward their foes, they stood with beating hearts trembling, as lettered by despair, essaying, all-hapless, with their hands alone to hide their nakedness. and some in frenzy of woe: their tresses tore, and beat their breasts, and screamed. others against that stormy torrent of foes recklessly rushed, insensible of fear, through mad desire to aid the perishing, husbands or children; for despair had given high courage. shrieks had startled from their sleep soft little babes whose hearts had never known trouble--and there one with another lay gasping their lives out! some there were whose dreams changed to a sudden vision of doom. all round the fell fates gloated horribly o'er the slain. and even as swine be slaughtered in the court of a rich king who makes his folk a feast, so without number were they slain. the wine left in the mixing-bowls was blent with blood gruesomely. no man bare a sword unstained with murder of defenceless folk of troy, though he were but a weakling in fair fight. and as by wolves or jackals sheep are torn, what time the furnace-breath of midnoon-heat darts down, and all the flock beneath the shade are crowded, and the shepherd is not there, but to the homestead bears afar their milk; and the fierce brutes leap on them, tear their throats, gorge to the full their ravenous maws, and then lap the dark blood, and linger still to slay all in mere lust of slaughter, and provide an evil banquet for that shepherd-lord; so through the city of priam danaans slew one after other in that last fight of all. no trojan there was woundless, all men's limbs with blood in torrents spilt were darkly dashed. nor seetheless were the danaans in the fray: with beakers some were smitten, with tables some, thrust in the eyes of some were burning brands snatched from the hearth; some died transfixed with spits yet left within the hot flesh of the swine whereon the red breath of the fire-god beat; others struck down by bills and axes keen gasped in their blood: from some men's hands were shorn the fingers, who, in wild hope to escape the imminent death, had clutched the blades of swords. and here in that dark tumult one had hurled a stone, and crushed the crown of a friend's head. like wild beasts trapped and stabbed within a fold on a lone steading, frenziedly they fought, mad with despair-enkindled rage, beneath that night of horror. hot with battle-lust here, there, the fighters rushed and hurried through the palace of priam. many an argive fell spear-slain; for whatso trojan in his halls might seize a sword, might lift a spear in hand, slew foes--ay, heavy though he were with wine. upflashed a glare unearthly through the town, for many an argive bare in hand a torch to know in that dim battle friends from foes. then tydeus' son amid the war-storm met spearman coroebus, lordly mygdon's son, and 'neath the left ribs pierced him with the lance where run the life-ways of man's meat and drink; so met him black death borne upon the spear: down in dark blood he fell mid hosts of slain. ah fool! the bride he won not, priam's child cassandra, yea, his loveliest, for whose sake to priam's burg but yesterday he came, and vaunted he would thrust the argives back from ilium. never did the gods fulfil his hope: the fates hurled doom upon his head. with him the slayer laid eurydamas low, antenor's gallant son-in-law, who most for prudence was pre-eminent in troy. then met he ilioneus the elder of days, and flashed his terrible sword forth. all the limbs of that grey sire were palsied with his fear: he put forth trembling hands, with one he caught the swift avenging sword, with one he clasped the hero's knees. despite his fury of war, a moment paused his wrath, or haply a god held back the sword a space, that that old man might speak to his fierce foe one word of prayer. piteously cried he, terror-overwhelmed: "i kneel before thee, whosoe'er thou be of mighty argives. oh compassionate my suppliant hands! abate thy wrath! to slay the young and valiant is a glorious thing; but if thou smite an old man, small renown waits on thy prowess. therefore turn from me thine hands against young men, if thou dost hope ever to come to grey hairs such as mine." so spake he; but replied strong tydeus' son: "old man, i look to attain to honoured age; but while my strength yet waxeth, will not i spare any foe, but hurl to hades all. the brave man makes an end of every foe." then through his throat that terrible warrior drave the deadly blade, and thrust it straight to where the paths of man's life lead by swiftest way blood-paved to doom: death palsied his poor strength by diomedes' hands. thence rushed he on slaying the trojans, storming in his might all through their fortress: pierced by his long spear eurycoon fell, perimnestor's son renowned. amphimedon aias slew: agamemnon smote damastor's son: idomeneus struck down mimas: by meges deiopites died. achilles' son with his resistless lance smote godlike pammon; then his javelin pierced polites in mid-rush: antiphonus dead upon these he laid, all priam's sons. agenor faced him in the fight, and fell: hero on hero slew he; everywhere stalked at his side death's black doom manifest: clad in his sire's might, whomso he met he slew. last, on troy's king in murderous mood he came. by zeus the hearth-lord's altar. seeing him, old priam knew him and quaked not; for he longed himself to lay his life down midst his sons; and craving death to achilles' seed he spake: "fierce-hearted son of achilles strong in war, slay me, and pity not my misery. i have no will to see the sun's light more, who have suffered woes so many and so dread. with my sons would i die, and so forget anguish and horror of war. oh that thy sire had slain me, ere mine eyes beheld aflame illium, had slain me when i brought to him ransom for hector, whom thy father slew. he spared me--so the fates had spun my thread of destiny. but thou, glut with my blood thy fierce heart, and let me forget my pain." answered achilles' battle-eager son: "fain am i, yea, in haste to grant thy prayer. a foe like thee will i not leave alive; for naught is dearer unto men than life." with one stroke swept he off that hoary head lightly as when a reaper lops an ear in a parched cornfield at the harvest-tide. with lips yet murmuring low it rolled afar from where with quivering limbs the body lay amidst dark-purple blood and slaughtered men. so lay he, chiefest once of all the world in lineage, wealth, in many and goodly sons. ah me, not long abides the honour of man, but shame from unseen ambush leaps on him so clutched him doom, so he forgat his woes. yea, also did those danaan car-lords hurl from a high tower the babe astyanax, dashing him out of life. they tore the child out of his mother's arms, in wrathful hate of hector, who in life had dealt to them such havoc; therefore hated they his seed, and down from that high rampart flung his child- a wordless babe that nothing knew of war! as when amid the mountains hungry wolves chase from the mother's side a suckling calf, and with malignant cunning drive it o'er an echoing cliffs edge, while runs to and fro its dam with long moans mourning her dear child, and a new evil followeth hard on her, for suddenly lions seize her for a prey; so, as she agonized for her son, the foe to bondage haled with other captive thralls that shrieking daughter of king eetion. then, as on those three fearful deaths she thought of husband, child, and father, andromaehe longed sore to die. yea, for the royally-born better it is to die in war, than do the service of the thrall to baser folk. all piteously the broken-hearted cried: "oh hurl my body also from the wall, or down the cliff, or cast me midst the fire, ye argives! woes are mine unutterable! for peleus' son smote down my noble father in thebe, and in troy mine husband slew, who unto me was all mine heart's desire, who left me in mine halls one little child, my darling and my pride--of all mine hopes in him fell merciless fate hath cheated me! oh therefore thrust this broken-hearted one now out of life! hale me not overseas mingled with spear-thralls; for my soul henceforth hath no more pleasure in life, since god hath slain my nearest and my dearest! for me waits trouble and anguish and lone homelessness!" so cried she, longing for the grave; for vile is life to them whose glory is swallowed up of shame: a horror is the scorn of men. but, spite her prayers, to thraldom dragged they her. in all the homes of troy lay dying men, and rose from all a lamentable cry, save only antenor's halls; for unto him the argives rendered hospitality's debt, for that in time past had his roof received and sheltered godlike menelaus, when he with odysseus came to claim his own. therefore the mighty sons of achaea showed grace to him, as to a friend, and spared his life and substance, fearing themis who seeth all. then also princely anchises' noble son- hard had he fought through priam's burg that night with spear and valour, and many had he slain- when now he saw the city set aflame by hands of foes, saw her folk perishing in multitudes, her treasures spoiled, her wives and children dragged to thraldom from their homes, no more he hoped to see the stately walls of his birth-city, but bethought him now how from that mighty ruin to escape. and as the helmsman of a ship, who toils on the deep sea, and matches all his craft against the winds and waves from every side rushing against him in the stormy time, forspent at last, both hand and heart, when now the ship is foundering in the surge, forsakes the helm, to launch forth in a little boat, and heeds no longer ship and lading; so anchises' gallant son forsook the town and left her to her foes, a sea of fire. his son and father alone he snatched from death; the old man broken down with years he set on his broad shoulders with his own strong hands, and led the young child by his small soft hand, whose little footsteps lightly touched the ground; and, as he quaked to see that work of deaths his father led him through the roar of fight, and clinging hung on him the tender child, tears down his soft cheeks streaming. but the man o'er many a body sprang with hurrying feet, and in the darkness in his own despite trampled on many. cypris guided them, earnest to save from that wild ruin her son, his father, and his child. as on he pressed, the flames gave back before him everywhere: the blast of the fire-god's breath to right and left was cloven asunder. spears and javelins hurled against him by the achaeans harmless fell. also, to stay them, calchas cried aloud: "forbear against aeneas' noble head to hurl the bitter dart, the deadly spear! fated he is by the high gods' decree to pass from xanthus, and by tiber's flood to found a city holy and glorious through all time, and to rule o'er tribes of men far-sundered. of his seed shall lords of earth rule from the rising to the setting sun. yea, with the immortals ever shall he dwell, who is son of aphrodite lovely-tressed. from him too is it meet we hold our hands because he hath preferred his father and son to gold, to all things that might profit a man who fleeth exiled to an alien land. this one night hath revealed to us a man faithful to death to his father and his child." then hearkened they, and as a god did all look on him. forth the city hasted he whither his feet should bear him, while the foe made havoc still of goodly-builded troy. then also menelaus in helen's bower found, heavy with wine, ill-starred deiphobus, and slew him with the sword: but she had fled and hidden her in the palace. o'er the blood of that slain man exulted he, and cried: "dog! i, even i have dealt thee unwelcome death this day! no dawn divine shall meet thee again alive in troy--ay, though thou vaunt thyself spouse of the child of zeus the thunder-voiced! black death hath trapped thee slain in my wife's bower! would i had met alexander too in fight ere this, and plucked his heart out! so my grief had been a lighter load. but he hath paid already justice' debt, hath passed beneath death's cold dark shadow. ha, small joy to thee my wife was doomed to bring! ay, wicked men never elude pure themis: night and day her eyes are on them, and the wide world through above the tribes of men she floats in air, holpen of zeus, for punishment of sin." on passed he, dealing merciless death to foes, for maddened was his soul with jealousy. against the trojans was his bold heart full of thoughts of vengeance, which were now fulfilled by the dread goddess justice, for that theirs was that first outrage touching helen, theirs that profanation of the oaths, and theirs that trampling on the blood of sacrifice when their presumptuous souls forgat the gods. therefore the vengeance-friends brought woes on them thereafter, and some died in fighting field, some now in troy by board and bridal bower. menelaus mid the inner chambers found at last his wife, there cowering from the wrath of her bold-hearted lord. he glared on her, hungering to slay her in his jealous rage. but winsome aphrodite curbed him, struck out of his hand the sword, his onrush reined, jealousy's dark cloud swept she away, and stirred love's deep sweet well-springs in his heart and eyes. swept o'er him strange amazement: powerless all was he to lift the sword against her neck, seeing her splendour of beauty. like a stock of dead wood in a mountain forest, which no swiftly-rushing blasts of north-winds shake, nor fury of south-winds ever, so he stood, so dazed abode long time. all his great strength was broken, as he looked upon his wife. and suddenly had he forgotten all yea, all her sins against her spousal-troth; for aphrodite made all fade away, she who subdueth all immortal hearts and mortal. yet even so he lifted up from earth his sword, and made as he would rush upon his wife but other was his intent, even as he sprang: he did but feign, to cheat achaean eyes. then did his brother stay his fury, and spake with pacifying words, fearing lest all they had toiled for should be lost: "forbear wrath, menelaus, now: 'twere shame to slay thy wedded wife, for whose sake we have suffered much affliction, while we sought vengeance on priam. not, as thou dost deem, was helen's the sin, but his who set at naught the guest-lord, and thine hospitable board; so with death-pangs hath god requited him." then hearkened menelaus to his rede. but the gods, palled in dark clouds, mourned for troy, a ruined glory save fair-tressed tritonis and hera: their hearts triumphed, when they saw the burg of god-descended priam destroyed. yet not the wise heart trito-born herself was wholly tearless; for within her fane outraged cassandra was of oileus son lust-maddened. but grim vengeance upon him ere long the goddess wreaked, repaying insult with mortal sufferance. yea, she would not look upon the infamy, but clad herself with shame and wrath as with a cloak: she turned her stern eyes to the temple-roof, and groaned the holy image, and the hallowed floor quaked mightily. yet did he not forbear his mad sin, for his soul was lust-distraught. here, there, on all sides crumbled flaming homes in ruin down: scorched dust with smoke was blent: trembled the streets to the awful thunderous crash. here burned aeneas' palace, yonder flamed antimachus' halls: one furnace was the height of fair-built pergamus; flames were roaring round apollo's temple, round athena's fane, and round the hearth-lord's altar: flames licked up fair chambers of the sons' sons of a king; and all the city sank down into hell. of trojans some by argos' sons were slain, some by their own roofs crashing down in fire, giving at once in death and tomb to them: some in their own throats plunged the steel, when foes and fire were in the porch together seen: some slew their wives and children, and flung themselves dead on them, when despair had done its work of horror. one, who deemed the foe afar, caught up a vase, and, fain to quench the flame, hasted for water. leapt unmarked on him an argive, and his spirit, heavy with wine, was thrust forth from the body by the spear. clashed the void vase above him, as he fell backward within the house. as through his hall another fled, the burning roof-beam crashed down on his head, and swift death came with it. and many women, as in frenzied flight they rushed forth, suddenly remembered babes left in their beds beneath those burning roofs: with wild feet sped they back--the house fell in upon them, and they perished, mother and child. horses and dogs in panic through the town fled from the flames, trampling beneath their feet the dead, and dashing into living men to their sore hurt. shrieks rang through all the town. in through his blazing porchway rushed a man to rescue wife and child. through smoke and flame blindly he groped, and perished while he cried their names, and pitiless doom slew those within. the fire-glow upward mounted to the sky, the red glare o'er the firmament spread its wings, and all the tribes of folk that dwelt around beheld it, far as ida's mountain-crests, and sea-girt tenedos, and thracian samos. and men that voyaged on the deep sea cried: "the argives have achieved their mighty task after long toil for star-eyed helen's sake. all troy, the once queen-city, burns in fire: for all their prayers, no god defends them now; for strong fate oversees all works of men, and the renownless and obscure to fame she raises, and brings low the exalted ones. oft out of good is evil brought, and good from evil, mid the travail and change of life." so spake they, who from far beheld the glare of troy's great burning. compassed were her folk with wailing misery: through her streets the foe exulted, as when madding blasts turmoil the boundless sea, what time the altar ascends to heaven's star-pavement, turned to the misty south overagainst arcturus tempest-breathed, and with its rising leap the wild winds forth, and ships full many are whelmed 'neath ravening seas; wild as those stormy winds achaea's sons ravaged steep ilium while she burned in flame. as when a mountain clothed with shaggy woods burns swiftly in a fire-blast winged with winds, and from her tall peaks goeth up a roar, and all the forest-children this way and that rush through the wood, tormented by the flame; so were the trojans perishing: there was none to save, of all the gods. round these were staked the nets of fate, which no man can escape. then were demophoon and acamas by mighty theseus' mother aethra met. yearning to see them was she guided on to meet them by some blessed one, the while 'wildered from war and fire she fled. they saw in that red glare a woman royal-tall, imperial-moulded, and they weened that this was priam's queen, and with swift eagerness laid hands on her, to lead her captive thence to the danaans; but piteously she moaned: "ah, do not, noble sons of warrior greeks, to your ships hale me, as i were a foe! i am not of trojan birth: of danaans came my princely blood renowned. in troezen's halls pittheus begat me, aegeus wedded me, and of my womb sprang theseus glory-crowned. for great zeus' sake, for your dear parents' sake, i pray you, if the seed of theseus came hither with atreus' sons, o bring ye me unto their yearning eyes. i trow they be young men like you. my soul shall be refreshed if living i behold those chieftains twain." hearkening to her they called their sire to mind, his deeds for helen's sake, and how the sons of zeus the thunderer in the old time smote aphidnae, when, because these were but babes, their nurses hid them far from peril of fight; and aethra they remembered--all she endured through wars, as mother-in-law at first, and thrall thereafter of helen. dumb for joy were they, till spake demophoon to that wistful one: "even now the gods fulfil thine heart's desire: we whom thou seest are the sons of him, thy noble son: thee shall our loving hands bear to the ships: with joy to hellas' soil thee will we bring, where once thou wast a queen." then his great father's mother clasped him round with clinging arms: she kissed his shoulders broad, his head, his breast, his bearded lips she kissed, and acamas kissed withal, the while she shed glad tears on these who could not choose but weep. as when one tarries long mid alien men, and folk report him dead, but suddenly he cometh home: his children see his face, and break into glad weeping; yea, and he, his arms around them, and their little heads upon his shoulders, sobs: echoes the home with happy mourning's music-beating wings; so wept they with sweet sighs and sorrowless moans. then, too, affliction-burdened priam's child, laodice, say they, stretched her hands to heaven, praying the mighty gods that earth might gape to swallow her, ere she defiled her hand with thralls' work; and a god gave ear, and rent deep earth beneath her: so by heaven's decree did earth's abysmal chasm receive the maid in troy's last hour. electra's self withal, the star-queen lovely-robed, shrouded her form in mist and cloud, and left the pleiad-band, her sisters, as the olden legend tells. still riseth up in sight of toil-worn men their bright troop in the skies; but she alone hides viewless ever, since the hallowed town of her son dardanus in ruin fell, when zeus most high from heaven could help her not, because to fate the might of zeus must bow; and by the immortals' purpose all these things had come to pass, or by fate's ordinance. still on troy's folk the argives wreaked their wrath, and battle's issues strife incarnate held. book xiv. how the conquerors sailed from troy unto judgment of tempest and shipwreck. then rose from ocean dawn the golden-throned up to the heavens; night into chaos sank. and now the argives spoiled fair-fenced troy, and took her boundless treasures for a prey. like river-torrents seemed they, that sweep down, by rain, floods swelled, in thunder from the hills, and seaward hurl tall trees and whatsoe'er grows on the mountains, mingled with the wreck of shattered cliff and crag; so the long lines of danaans who had wasted troy with fire seemed, streaming with her plunder to the ships. troy's daughters therewithal in scattered bands they haled down seaward--virgins yet unwed, and new-made brides, and matrons silver-haired, and mothers from whose bosoms foes had torn babes for the last time closing lips on breasts. amidst of these menelaus led his wife forth of the burning city, having wrought a mighty triumph--joy and shame were his. cassandra heavenly-fair was haled the prize of agamemnon: to achilles' son andromache had fallen: hecuba odysseus dragged unto his ship. the tears poured from her eyes as water from a spring; trembled her limbs, fear-frenzied was her heart; rent were her hoary tresses and besprent with ashes of the hearth, cast by her hands when she saw priam slain and troy aflame. and aye she deeply groaned for thraldom's day that trapped her vainly loth. each hero led a wailing trojan woman to his ship. here, there, uprose from these the wild lament, the woeful-mingling cries of mother and babe. as when with white-tusked swine the herdmen drive their younglings from the hill-pens to the plain as winter closeth in, and evermore each answereth each with mingled plaintive cries; so moaned troy's daughters by their foes enslaved, handmaid and queen made one in thraldom's lot. but helen raised no lamentation: shame sat on her dark-blue eyes, and cast its flush over her lovely cheeks. her heart beat hard with sore misgiving, lest, as to the ships she passed, the achaeans might mishandle her. therefore with fluttering soul she trembled sore; and, her head darkly mantled in her veil, close-following trod she in her husband's steps, with cheek shame-crimsoned, like the queen of love, what time the heaven-abiders saw her clasped in ares' arms, shaming in sight of all the marriage-bed, trapped in the myriad-meshed toils of hephaestus: tangled there she lay in agony of shame, while thronged around the blessed, and there stood hephaestus' self: for fearful it is for wives to be beheld by husbands' eyes doing the deed of shame. lovely as she in form and roseate blush passed helen mid the trojan captives on to the argive ships. but the folk all around marvelled to see the glory of loveliness of that all-flawless woman. no man dared or secretly or openly to cast reproach on her. as on a goddess all gazed on her with adoring wistful eyes. as when to wanderers on a stormy sea, after long time and passion of prayer, the sight of fatherland is given; from deadly deeps escaped, they stretch hands to her joyful-souled; so joyed the danaans all, no man of them remembered any more war's travail and pain. such thoughts cytherea stirred in them, for grace to helen starry-eyed, and zeus her sire. then, when he saw that burg beloved destroyed, xanthus, scarce drawing breath from bloody war, mourned with his nymphs for ruin fallen on troy, mourned for the city of priam blotted out. as when hail lashes a field of ripened wheat, and beats it small, and smites off all the ears with merciless scourge, and levelled with the ground are stalks, and on the earth is all the grain woefully wasted, and the harvest's lord is stricken with deadly grief; so xanthus' soul was utterly whelmed in grief for ilium made a desolation; grief undying was his, immortal though he was. mourned simois and long-ridged ida: all who on ida dwelt wailed from afar the ruin of priam's town. but with loud laughter of glee the argives sought their galleys, chanting the triumphant might of victory, chanting now the blessed gods, now their own valour, and epeius' work ever renowned. their song soared up to heaven, like multitudinous cries of daws, when breaks a day of sunny calm and windless air after a ruining storm: from their glad hearts so rose the joyful clamour, till the gods heard and rejoiced in heaven, all who had helped with willing hands the war-fain argive men. but chafed those others which had aided troy, beholding priam's city wrapped in flame, yet powerless for her help to override fate; for not cronos' son can stay the hand of destiny, whose might transcendeth all the immortals, and zeus sanctioneth all her deeds. the argives on the flaming altar-wood laid many thighs of oxen, and made haste to spill sweet wine on their burnt offerings, thanking the gods for that great work achieved. and loudly at the feast they sang the praise of all the mailed men whom the horse of tree had ambushed. far-famed sinon they extolled for that dire torment he endured of foes; yea, song and honour-guerdons without end all rendered him: and that resolved soul glad-hearted joyed for the argives victory, and for his own misfeaturing sorrowed not. for to the wise and prudent man renown is better far than gold, than goodlihead, than all good things men have or hope to win. so, feasting by the ships all void of fear, cried one to another ever and anon: "we have touched the goal of this long war, have won glory, have smitten our foes and their great town! now grant, o zeus, to our prayers safe home-return!" but not to all the sire vouchsafed return. then rose a cunning harper in their midst. and sang the song of triumph and of peace re-won, and with glad hearts untouched by care they heard; for no more fear of war had they, but of sweet toil of law-abiding days and blissful, fleeting hours henceforth they dreamed. all the war's story in their eager ears he sang--how leagued peoples gathering met at hallowed aulis--how the invincible strength of peleus' son smote fenced cities twelve in sea-raids, how he marched o'er leagues on leagues of land, and spoiled eleven--all he wrought in fight with telephus and eetion- how he slew giant cycnus--all the toil of war that through achilles' wrath befell the achaeans--how he dragged dead hector round his own troy's wall, and how he slew in fight penthesileia and tithonus' son:- how aias laid low glaucus, lord of spears, then sang he how the child of aeacus' son struck down eurypylus, and how the shafts of philoctetes dealt to paris death. then the song named all heroes who passed in to ambush in the horse of guile, and hymned the fall of god-descended priam's burg; the feast he sang last, and peace after war; then many another, as they listed, sang. but when above those feasters midnight's stars hung, ceased the danaans from the feast and wine, and turned to sleep's forgetfulness of care, for that with yesterday's war-travail all were wearied; wherefore they, who fain all night had revelled, needs must cease: how loth soe'er, sleep drew them thence; here, there, soft slumbered they. but in his tent menelaus lovingly with bright-haired helen spake; for on their eyes sleep had not fallen yet. the cyprian queen brooded above their souls, that olden love might be renewed, and heart-ache chased away. helen first brake the silence, and she said: "o menelaus, be not wroth with me! not of my will i left thy roof, thy bed, but alexander and the sons of troy came upon me, and snatched away, when thou wast far thence. oftentimes did i essay by the death-noose to perish wretchedly, or by the bitter sword; but still they stayed mine hand, and still spake comfortable words to salve my grief for thee and my sweet child. for her sake, for the sake of olden love, and for thine own sake, i beseech thee now, forget thy stern displeasure against thy wife." answered her menelaus wise of wit: "no more remember past griefs: seal them up hid in thine heart. let all be locked within the dim dark mansion of forgetfulness. what profits it to call ill deeds to mind?" glad was she then: fear flitted from her heart, and came sweet hope that her lord's wrath was dead. she cast her arms around him, and their eyes with tears were brimming as they made sweet moan; and side by side they laid them, and their hearts thrilled with remembrance of old spousal joy. and as a vine and ivy entwine their stems each around other, that no might of wind avails to sever them, so clung these twain twined in the passionate embrace of love. when came on these too sorrow-drowning sleep, even then above his son's head rose and stood godlike achilles' mighty shade, in form as when he lived, the trojans' bane, the joy of greeks, and kissed his neck and flashing eyes lovingly, and spake comfortable words: "all hail, my son! vex not thine heart with grief for thy dead sire; for with the blessed gods now at the feast i sit. refrain thy soul from sorrow, and plant my strength within thy mind. be foremost of the argives ever; yield to none in valour, but in council bow before thine elders: so shall all acclaim thy courtesy. honour princely men and wise; for the true man is still the true man's friend, even as the vile man cleaveth to the knave. if good thy thought be, good shall be thy deeds: but no man shall attain to honour's height, except his heart be right within: her stem is hard to climb, and high in heaven spread her branches: only they whom strength and toil attend, strain up to pluck her blissful fruit, climbing the tree of honour glow-crowned. thou therefore follow fame, and let thy soul be not in sorrow afflicted overmuch, nor in prosperity over-glad. to friends, to comrades, child and wife, be kindly of heart, remembering still that near to all men stand the gates of doom, the mansions of the dead: for humankind are like the flower of grass, the blossom of spring; these fade the while those bloom: therefore be ever kindly with thy kind. now to the argives say--to atreus' son agamemnon chiefly--if my battle-toil round priam's walls, and those sea-raids i led or ever i set foot on trojan land, be in their hearts remembered, to my tomb be priam's daughter polyxeina led- whom as my portion of the spoil i claim- and sacrificed thereon: else shall my wrath against them more than for briseis burn. the waves of the great deep will i turmoil to bar their way, upstirring storm on storm, that through their own mad folly pining away here they may linger long, until to me they pour drink-offerings, yearning sore for home. but, when they have slain the maiden, i grudge not that whoso will may bury her far from me." then as a wind-breath swift he fleeted thence, and came to the elysian plain, whereto a path to heaven reacheth, for the feet ascending and descending of the blest. then the son started up from sleep, and called his sire to mind, and glowed the heart in him. when to wide heaven the child of mist uprose, scattering night, unveiling earth and air, then from their rest upsprang achaea's sons yearning for home. with laughter 'gan they hale down to the sea the keels: but lo, their haste was reined in by achilles' mighty son: he assembled them, and told his sire's behest: "hearken, dear sons of argives battle-staunch, to this my glorious father's hest, to me spoken in darkness slumbering on my bed: he saith, he dwells with the immortal gods: he biddeth you and atreus' son the king to bring, as his war-guerdon passing-fair, to his dim dark tomb polyxeina queenly-robed, to slay her there, but far thence bury her. but if ye slight him, and essay to sail the sea, he threateneth to stir up the waves to bar your path upon the deep, and here storm-bound long time to hold you, ships and men." then hearkened they, and as to a god they prayed; for even now a storm-blast on the sea upheaved the waves, broad-backed and thronging fast more than before beneath the madding wind. tossed the great deep, smit by poseidon's hands for a grace to strong achilles. all the winds swooped on the waters. prayed the dardans all to achilles, and a man to his fellow cried: "great zeus's seed achilles verily was; therefore is he a god, who in days past dwelt among us; for lapse of dateless time makes not the sons of heaven to fade away." then to achilles' tomb the host returned, and led the maid, as calf by herdmen dragged for sacrifice, from woodland pastures torn from its mother's side, and lowing long and loud it moans with anguished heart; so priam's child wailed in the hands of foes. down streamed her tears as when beneath the heavy sacks of sand olives clear-skinned, ne'er blotched by drops of storm, pour out their oil, when the long levers creak as strong men strain the cords; so poured the tears of travail-burdened priam's daughter, haled to stern achilles' tomb, tears blent with moans. drenched were her bosom-folds, glistened the drops on flesh clear-white as costly ivory. then, to crown all her griefs, yet sharper pain fell on the heart of hapless hecuba. then did her soul recall that awful dream, the vision of sleep of that night overpast: herseemed that on achilles' tomb she stood moaning, her hair down-streaming to the ground, and from her breasts blood dripped to earth the while, and drenched the tomb. fear-haunted touching this, foreboding all calamity, she wailed piteously; far rang her wild lament. as a dog moaning at her master's door, utters long howls, her teats with milk distent, whose whelps, ere their eyes opened to the light, her lords afar have flung, a prey to kites; and now with short sharp cries she plains, and now long howling: the weird outcry thrills the air; so wailed and shrieked for her child hecuba: "ah me! what sorrows first or last shall i lament heart-anguished, who am full of woes? those unimagined ills my sons, my king have suffered? or my city, or daughters shamed? or my despair, my day of slavery? oh, the grim fates have caught me in a net of manifold ills! o child, they have spun for thee dread weird of unimagined misery! they have thrust thee away, when near was hymen's hymn, from thine espousals, marked thee for destruction dark, unendurable, unspeakable! for lo, a dead man's heart, achilles' heart, is by our blood made warm with life to-day! o child, dear child, that i might die with thee, that earth might swallow me, ere i see thy doom!" so cried she, weeping never-ceasing tears, for grief on bitter grief encompassed her. but when these reached divine achilles' tomb, then did his son unsheathe the whetted sword, his left hand grasped the maid, and his right hand was laid upon the tomb, and thus he cried: "hear, father, thy son's prayer, hear all the prayers of argives, and be no more wroth with us! lo, unto thee now all thine heart's desire will we fulfil. be gracious to us thou, and to our praying grant sweet home-return." into the maid's throat then he plunged the blade of death: the dear life straightway sobbed she forth, with the last piteous moan of parting breath. face-downward to the earth she fell: all round her flesh was crimsoned from her neck, as snow stained on a mountain-side with scarlet blood rushing, from javelin-smitten boar or bear. the maiden's corpse then gave they, to be borne unto the city, to antenor's home, for that, when troy yet stood, he nurtured her in his fair halls, a bride for his own son eurymachus. the old man buried her, king priam's princess-child, nigh his own house, by ganymedes' shrine, and overagainst the temple of pallas the unwearied one. then were the waves stilled, and the blast was hushed to sleep, and all the sea-flood lulled to calm. swift with glad laughter hied they to the ships, hymning achilles and the blessed ones. a feast they made, first severing thighs of kine for the immortals. gladsome sacrifice steamed on all sides: in cups of silver and gold they drank sweet wine: their hearts leaped up with hope of winning to their fatherland again. but when with meats and wine all these were filled, then in their eager ears spake neleus' son: "hear, friends, who have 'scaped the long turmoil of war, that i may say to you one welcome word: now is the hour of heart's delight, the hour of home-return. away! achilles soul hath ceased from ruinous wrath; earth-shaker stills the stormy wave, and gentle breezes blow; no more the waves toss high. haste, hale the ships down to the sea. now, ho for home-return!" eager they heard, and ready made the ships. then was a marvellous portent seen of men; for all-unhappy priam's queen was changed from woman's form into a pitiful hound; and all men gathered round in wondering awe. then all her body a god transformed to stone- a mighty marvel for men yet unborn! at calchas' bidding this the achaeans bore in a swift ship to hellespont's far side. then down to the sea in haste they ran the keels: their wealth they laid aboard, even all the spoil taken, or ever unto troy they came, from conquered neighbour peoples; therewithal whatso they took from ilium, wherein most they joyed, for untold was the sum thereof. and followed with them many a captive maid with anguished heart: so went they aboard the ships. but calchas would not with that eager host launch forth; yea, he had fain withheld therefrom all the achaeans, for his prophet-soul foreboded dread destruction looming o'er the argives by the rocks capherean. but naught they heeded him; malignant fate deluded men's souls: only amphilochus the wise in prophet-lore, the gallant son of princely amphiaraus, stayed with him. fated were these twain, far from their own land, to reach pamphylian and cilician burgs; and this the gods thereafter brought to pass. but now the achaeans cast the hawsers loose from shore: in haste they heaved the anchor-stones. roared hellespont beneath swift-flashing oars; crashed the prows through the sea. about the bows much armour of slain foes was lying heaped: along the bulwarks victory-trophies hung countless. with garlands wreathed they all the ships, their heads, the spears, the shields wherewith they had fought against their foes. the chiefs stood on the prows, and poured into the dark sea once and again wine to the gods, to grant them safe return. but with the winds their prayers mixed; far away vainly they floated blent with cloud and air. with anguished hearts the captive maids looked back on ilium, and with sobs and moans they wailed, striving to hide their grief from argive eyes. clasping their knees some sat; in misery some veiled with their hands their faces; others nursed young children in their arms: those innocents not yet bewailed their day of bondage, nor their country's ruin; all their thoughts were set on comfort of the breast, for the babe's heart hath none affinity with sorrow. all sat with unbraided hair and pitiful breasts scored with their fingers. on their cheeks there lay stains of dried tears, and streamed thereover now fresh tears full fast, as still they gazed aback on the lost hapless home, wherefrom yet rose the flames, and o'er it writhed the rolling smoke. now on cassandra marvelling they gazed, calling to mind her prophecy of doom; but at their tears she laughed in bitter scorn, in anguish for the ruin of her land. such trojans as had scaped from pitiless war gathered to render now the burial-dues unto their city's slain. antenor led to that sad work: one pyre for all they raised. but laughed with triumphing hearts the argive men, as now with oars they swept o'er dark sea-ways, now hastily hoised the sails high o'er the ships, and fleeted fast astern dardania-land, and hero achilles' tomb. but now their hearts, how blithe soe'er, remembered comrades slain, and sorely grieved, and wistfully they looked back to the alien's land; it seemed to them aye sliding farther from their ships. full soon by tenedos' beaches slipt they: now they ran by chrysa, sminthian phoebus' holy place, and hallowed cilla. far away were glimpsed the windy heights of lesbos. rounded now was lecton's foreland, where is the last peak of ida. in the sails loud hummed the wind, crashed round the prows the dark surge: the long waves showed shadowy hollows, far the white wake gleamed. now had the argives all to the hallowed soil of hellas won, by perils of the deep unscathed, but for athena daughter of zeus the thunderer, and her indignation's wrath. when nigh euboea's windy heights they drew, she rose, in anger unappeasable against the locrian king, devising doom crushing and pitiless, and drew nigh to zeus lord of the gods, and spake to him apart in wrath that in her breast would not be pent: "zeus, father, unendurable of gods is men's presumption! they reck not of thee, of none of the blessed reck they, forasmuch as vengeance followeth after sin no more; and ofttimes more afflicted are good men than evil, and their misery hath no end. therefore no man regardeth justice: shame lives not with men! and i, i will not dwell hereafter in olympus, not be named thy daughter, if i may not be avenged on the achaeans' reckless sin! behold, within my very temple oileus' son hath wrought iniquity, hath pitied not cassandra stretching unregarded hands once and again to me; nor did he dread my might, nor reverenced in his wicked heart the immortal, but a deed intolerable he did. therefore let not thy spirit divine begrudge mine heart's desire, that so all men may quake before the manifest wrath of gods." answered the sire with heart-assuaging words: "child, not for the argives' sake withstand i thee; but all mine armoury which the cyclops' might to win my favour wrought with tireless hands, to thy desire i give. o strong heart, hurl a ruining storm thyself on the argive fleet." then down before the aweless maid he cast swift lightning, thunder, and deadly thunderbolt; and her heart leapt, and gladdened was her soul. she donned the stormy aegis flashing far, adamantine, massy, a marvel to the gods, whereon was wrought medusa's ghastly head, fearful: strong serpents breathing forth the blast of ravening fire were on the face thereof. crashed on the queen's breast all the aegis-links, as after lightning crashes the firmament. then grasped she her father's weapons, which no god save zeus can lift, and wide olympus shook. then swept she clouds and mist together on high; night over earth was poured, haze o'er the sea. zeus watched, and was right glad as broad heaven's floor rocked 'neath the goddess's feet, and crashed the sky, as though invincible zeus rushed forth to war. then sped she iris unto acolus, from heaven far-flying over misty seas, to bid him send forth all his buffering winds o'er iron-bound caphereus' cliffs to sweep ceaselessly, and with ruin of madding blasts to upheave the sea. and iris heard, and swift she darted, through cloud-billows plunging down- thou hadst said: "lo, in the sky dark water and fire!" and to aeolia came she, isle of caves, of echoing dungeons of mad-raging winds with rugged ribs of mountain overarched, whereby the mansion stands of aeolus hippotas' son. him found she therewithin with wife and twelve sons; and she told to him athena's purpose toward the homeward-bound achaeans. he denied her not, but passed forth of his halls, and in resistless hands upswung his trident, smiting the mountain-side within whose chasm-cell the wild winds dwelt tempestuously shrieking. ever pealed weird roarings of their voices round its vaults. cleft by his might was the hill-side; forth they poured. he bade them on their wings bear blackest storm to upheave the sea, and shroud caphereus' heights. swiftly upsprang they, ere their king's command was fully spoken. mightily moaned the sea as they rushed o'er it; waves like mountain-cliffs from all sides were uprolled. the achaeans' hearts were terror-palsied, as the uptowering surge now swung the ships up high through palling mist, now hurled them rolled as down a precipice to dark abysses. up through yawning deeps some power resistless belched the boiling sand from the sea's floor. tossed in despair, fear-dazed, men could not grasp the oar, nor reef the sail about the yard-arm, howsoever fain, ere the winds rent it, could not with the sheets trim the torn canvas, buffeted so were they by ruining blasts. the helmsman had no power to guide the rudder with his practised hands, for those ill winds hurled all confusedly. no hope of life was left them: blackest night, fury of tempest, wrath of deathless gods, raged round them. still poseidon heaved and swung the merciless sea, to work the heart's desire of his brother's glorious child; and she on high stormed with her lightnings, ruthless in her rage. thundered from heaven zeus, in purpose fixed to glorify his daughter. all the isles and mainlands round were lashed by leaping seas nigh to euboea, where the power divine scourged most with unrelenting stroke on stroke the argives. groan and shriek of perishing men rang through the ships; started great beams and snapped with ominous sound, for ever ship on ship with shivering timbers crashed. with hopeless toil men strained with oars to thrust back hulls that reeled down on their own, but with the shattered planks were hurled into the abyss, to perish there by pitiless doom; for beams of foundering ships from this, from that side battered out their lives, and crushed were all their bodies wretchedly. some in the ships fell down, and like dead men lay there; some, in the grip of destiny, clinging to oars smooth-shaven, tried to swim; some upon planks were tossing. roared the surge from fathomless depths: it seemed as though sea, sky, and land were blended all confusedly. still from olympus thundering atrytone wielded her father's power unshamed, and still the welkin shrieked around. her ruin of wrath now upon aias hurled she: on his ship dashed she a thunderbolt, and shivered it wide in a moment into fragments small, while earth and air yelled o'er the wreck, and whirled and plunged and fell the whole sea down thereon. they in the ship were all together flung forth: all about them swept the giant waves, round them leapt lightnings flaming through the dark. choked with the strangling surf of hissing brine, gasping out life, they drifted o'er the sea. but even in death those captive maids rejoiced, as some ill-starred ones, clasping to their breasts their babes, sank in the sea; some flung their arms round danaans' horror-stricken heads, and dragged these down with them, so rendering to their foes requital for foul outrage down to them. and from on high the haughty trito-born looked down on all this, and her heart was glad. but aias floated now on a galley's plank, now through the brine with strong hands oared his path, like some old titan in his tireless might. cleft was the salt sea-surge by the sinewy hands of that undaunted man: the gods beheld and marvelled at his courage and his strength. but now the billows swung him up on high through misty air, as though to a mountain's peak, now whelmed him down, as they would bury him in ravening whirlpits: yet his stubborn hands toiled on unwearied. aye to right and left flashed lightnings down, and quenched them in the sea; for not yet was the child of thunderer zeus purposed to smite him dead, despite her wrath, ere he had drained the cup of travail and pain down to the dregs; so in the deep long time affliction wore him down, tormented sore on every side. grim fates stood round the man unnumbered; yet despair still kindled strength. he cried: "though all the olympians banded come in wrath, and rouse against me all the sea, i will escape them!" but no whit did he elude the gods' wrath; for the shaker of earth in fierceness of his indignation marked where his hands clung to the gyraean rock, and in stern anger with an earthquake shook both sea and land. around on all sides crashed caphereus' cliffs: beneath the sea-king's wrath the surf-tormented beaches shrieked and roared. the broad crag rifted reeled into the sea, the rock whereto his desperate hands had clung; yet did he writhe up round its jutting spurs, while flayed his hands were, and from 'neath his nails the blood ran. wrestling with him roared the waves, and the foam whitened all his hair and beard. yet had he 'scaped perchance his evil doom, had not poseidon, wroth with his hardihood, cleaving the earth, hurled down the chasm the rock, as in the old time pallas heaved on high sicily, and on huge enceladus dashed down the isle, which burns with the burning yet of that immortal giant, as he breathes fire underground; so did the mountain-crag, hurled from on high, bury the locrian king, pinning the strong man down, a wretch crushed flat. and so on him death's black destruction came whom land and sea alike were leagued to slay. still over the great deep were swept the rest of those achaeans, crouching terror-dazed down in the ships, save those that mid the waves had fallen. misery encompassed all; for some with heavily-plunging prows drave on, with keels upturned some drifted. here were masts snapped from the hull by rushing gusts, and there were tempest-rifted wrecks of scattered beams; and some had sunk, whelmed in the mighty deep, swamped by the torrent downpour from the clouds: for these endured not madness of wind-tossed sea leagued with heaven's waterspout; for streamed the sky ceaselessly like a river, while the deep raved round them. and one cried: "such floods on men fell only when deucalion's deluge came, when earth was drowned, and all was fathomless sea!" so cried a danaan, seeing soul-appalled that wild storm. thousands perished; corpses thronged the great sea-highways: all the beaches were too strait for them: the surf belched multitudes forth on the land. the heavy-booming sea with weltering beams of ships was wholly paved, and here and there the grey waves gleamed between. so found they each his several evil fate, some whelmed beneath broad-rushing billows, some wretchedly perishing with their shattered ships by nauplius' devising on the rocks. wroth for that son whom they had done to death, he; when the storm rose and the argives died, rejoiced amid his sorrow, seeing a god gave to his hands revenge, which now he wreaked upon the host he hated, as o'er the deep they tossed sore-harassed. to his sea-god sire he prayed that all might perish, ships and men whelmed in the deep. poseidon heard his prayer, and on the dark surge swept them nigh his land. he, like a harbour-warder, lifted high a blazing torch, and so by guile he trapped the achaean men, who deemed that they had won a sheltering haven: but sharp reefs and crags gave awful welcome unto ships and men, who, dashed to pieces on the cruel rocks in the black night, crowned ills with direr ills. some few escaped, by a god or power unseen plucked from death's hand. athena now rejoiced her heart within, and now was racked with fears for prudent-souled odysseus; for his weird was through poseidon's wrath to suffer woes full many. but earth-shaker's jealousy now burned against those long walls and towers uppiled by the strong argives for a fence against the trojans' battle-onset. swiftly then he swelled to overbrimming all the sea that rolls from euxine down to hellespont, and hurled it on the shore of troy: and zeus, for a grace unto the glorious shaker of earth, poured rain from heaven: withal far-darter bare in that great work his part; from ida's heights into one channel led he all her streams, and flooded the achaeans' work. the sea dashed o'er it, and the roaring torrents still rushed on it, swollen by the rains of zeus; and the dark surge of the wide-moaning sea still hurled them back from mingling with the deep, till all the danaan walls were blotted out beneath their desolating flood. then earth was by poseidon chasm-cleft: up rushed deluge of water, slime and sand, while quaked sigeum with the mighty shock, and roared the beach and the foundations of the land dardanian. so vanished, whelmed from sight, that mighty rampart. earth asunder yawned, and all sank down, and only sand was seen, when back the sea rolled, o'er the beach outspread far down the heavy-booming shore. all this the immortals' anger wrought. but in their ships the argives storm-dispersed went sailing on. so came they home, as heaven guided each, even all that 'scaped the fell sea-tempest blasts. homer and his age by andrew lang [illustration: algonquins under shield _frontispiece_] to r. w. raper in all gratitude [etext editor's note: due to unclear typesetting of the original work, which contains unidentifiable characters and blank spaces, it has not been possible to capture this text completely. where we have been unable to recover the meaning of the text, this has been indicated by the annotation [sic] or [blank space]. we hope that in the future a complete edition can be found and these gaps can be filled.] preface in _homer and the epic_, ten or twelve years ago, i examined the literary objections to homeric unity. these objections are chiefly based on alleged discrepancies in the narrative, of which no one poet, it is supposed, could have been guilty. the critics repose, i venture to think, mainly on a fallacy. we may style it the fallacy of "the analytical reader." the poet is expected to satisfy a minutely critical reader, a personage whom he could not foresee, and whom he did not address. nor are "contradictory instances" examined--that is, as blass has recently reminded his countrymen, homer is put to a test which goethe could not endure. no long fictitious narrative can satisfy "the analytical reader." the fallacy is that of disregarding the homeric poet's audience. he did not sing for aristotle or for aristarchus, or for modern minute and reflective inquirers, but for warriors and ladies. he certainly satisfied them; but if he does not satisfy microscopic professors, he is described as a syndicate of many minstrels, living in many ages. in the present volume little is said in defence of the poet's consistency. several chapters on that point have been excised. the way of living which homer describes is examined, and an effort is made to prove that he depicts the life of a single brief age of culture. the investigation is compelled to a tedious minuteness, because the points of attack--the alleged discrepancies in descriptions of the various details of existence--are so minute as to be all but invisible. the unity of the epics is not so important a topic as the methods of criticism. they ought to be sober, logical, and self-consistent. when these qualities are absent, homeric criticism may be described, in the recent words of blass, as "a swamp haunted by wandering fires, will o' the wisps." in our country many of the most eminent scholars are no believers in separatist criticism. justly admiring the industry and erudition of the separatists, they are unmoved by their arguments, to which they do not reply, being convinced in their own minds. but the number and perseverance of the separatists make on "the general reader" the impression that homeric unity is chose _jugée_, that _scientia locuta est_, and has condemned homer. this is far from being the case: the question is still open; "science" herself is subject to criticism; and new materials, accruing yearly, forbid a tame acquiescence in hasty theories. may i say a word to the lovers of poetry who, in reading homer, feel no more doubt than in reading milton that, on the whole, they are studying a work of one age, by one author? do not let them be driven from their natural impression by the statement that science has decided against them. the certainties of the exact sciences are one thing: the opinions of homeric commentators are other and very different things. among all the branches of knowledge which the homeric critic should have at his command, only philology, archaeology, and anthropology can be called "sciences"; and they are not exact sciences: they are but skirmishing advances towards the true solution of problems prehistoric and "proto-historic." our knowledge shifts from day to day; on every hand, in regard to almost every topic discussed, we find conflict of opinions. there is no certain scientific decision, but there is the possibility of working in the scientific spirit, with breadth of comparison; consistency of logic; economy of conjecture; abstinence from the piling of hypothesis on hypothesis. nothing can be more hurtful to science than the dogmatic assumption that the hypothesis most in fashion is scientific. twenty years ago, the philological theory of the solar myth was preached as "scientific" in the books, primers, and lectures of popular science. to-day its place knows it no more. the separatist theories of the homeric poems are not more secure than the solar myth, "like a wave shall they pass and be passed." when writing on "the homeric house" (chapter x.) i was unacquainted with mr. percy gardner's essay, "the palaces of homer" (_journal of hellenic studies_, vol. iii. pp. 264-282). mr. gardner says that dasent's plan of the scandinavian hall "offers in most respects not likeness, but a striking contrast to the early greek hall." mr. monro, who was not aware of the parallel which i had drawn between the homeric and icelandic houses, accepted it on evidence more recent than that of sir george dasent. cf. his _odyssey_, vol. ii. pp. 490-494. mr. r. w. raper, of trinity college, oxford, has read the proof sheets of this work with his habitual kindness, but is in no way responsible for the arguments. mr. walter leaf has also obliged me by mentioning some points as to which i had not completely understood his position, and i have tried as far as possible to represent his ideas correctly. i have also received assistance from the wide and minute homeric lore of mr. a. shewan, of st. andrews, and have been allowed to consult other scholars on various points. the first portion of the chapter on "bronze and iron" appeared in the revue _archéologique_ for april 1905, and the editor, monsieur salomon reinach, obliged me with a note on the bad iron swords of the celts as described by polybius. the design of men in three shields of different shapes, from a dipylon vase, is reproduced, with permission, from the british museum _guide to the antiquities of the iron age_; and the shielded chessmen from catalogue of scottish society of antiquaries. thanks for the two ships with men under shield are offered to the rev. mr. browne, s.j., author of _handbook of homeric studies_ (longmans). for the mycenaean gold corslet i thank mr. john murray (schliemann's mycenae and tiryns), and for all the other mycenaean illustrations messrs. macmillan and mr. leaf, publishers and author of mr. leaf's edition of the _iliad_. contents: chapter i: the homeric age chapter ii: hypotheses as to the growth of the epics chapter iii: hypotheses of epic composition chapter iv: loose feudalism: the over-lord in "iliad," books i. and ii. chapter v: agamemnon in the later "iliad" chapter vi: archaeology of the "iliad"--burial and cremation chapter vii: homeric armour chapter viii: the breastplate chapter ix: bronze and iron chapter x: the homeric house chapter xi: notes of change in the "odyssey" chapter xii: linguistic proofs of various dates chapter xiii: the "doloneia"--"iliad," book x. chapter xiv: the interpolations of nestor chapter xv: the comparative study of early epics chapter xvi: homer and the french mediaeval epics chapter xvii: conclusion list of illustrations: algonquins under shield the vase of aristonothos dagger with lion-hunters rings: swords and shields fragments of warrior vase fragment of siege vase algonquin corslet gold corslet chapter i the homeric age the aim of this book is to prove that the homeric epics, as wholes, and apart from passages gravely suspected in antiquity, present a perfectly harmonious picture of the entire life and civilisation of one single age. the faint variations in the design are not greater than such as mark every moment of culture, for in all there is some movement; in all, cases are modified by circumstances. if our contention be true, it will follow that the poems themselves, as wholes, are the product of a single age, not a mosaic of the work of several changeful centuries. this must be the case--if the life drawn is harmonious, the picture must be the work of a single epoch--for it is not in the nature of early uncritical times that later poets should adhere, or even try to adhere, to the minute details of law, custom, opinion, dress, weapons, houses, and so on, as presented in earlier lays or sagas on the same set of subjects. even less are poets in uncritical times inclined to "archaise," either by attempting to draw fancy pictures of the manners of the past, or by making researches in graves, or among old votive offerings in temples, for the purpose of "preserving local colour." the idea of such archaising is peculiar to modern times. to take an instance much to the point, virgil was a learned poet, famous for his antiquarian erudition, and professedly imitating and borrowing from homer. now, had virgil worked as a man of to-day would work on a poem of trojan times, he would have represented his heroes as using weapons of bronze. [footnote: looking back at my own poem, _helen of troy_ (1883), i find that when the metal of a weapon is mentioned the metal is bronze.] no such idea of archaising occurred to the learned virgil. it is "the iron" that pierces the head of remulus (_aeneid_, ix. 633); it is "the iron" that waxes warm in the breast of antiphates (ix. 701). virgil's men, again, do not wear the great homeric shield, suspended by a baldric: aeneas holds up his buckler (_clipeus_), borne "on his left arm" (x. 26 i). homer, familiar with no buckler worn on the left arm, has no such description. when the hostile ranks are to be broken, in the _aeneid_ it is "with the iron" (x. 372), and so throughout. the most erudite ancient poet, in a critical age of iron, does not archaise in our modern fashion. he does not follow his model, homer, in his descriptions of shields, swords, and spears. but, according to most homeric critics, the later continuators of the greek epics, about 800-540 b.c., are men living in an age of iron weapons, and of round bucklers worn on the left arm. yet, unlike virgil, they always give their heroes arms of bronze, and, unlike virgil (as we shall see), they do not introduce the buckler worn on the left arm. they adhere conscientiously to the use of the vast mycenaean shield, in their time obsolete. yet, by the theory, in many other respects they innovate at will, introducing corslets and greaves, said to be unknown to the beginners of the greek epics, just as virgil innovates in bucklers and iron weapons. all this theory seems inconsistent, and no ancient poet, not even virgil, is an archaiser of the modern sort. all attempts to prove that the homeric poems are the work of several centuries appear to rest on a double hypothesis: first, that the later contributors to the _iliad_ kept a steady eye on the traditions of the remote achaean age of bronze; next, that they innovated as much as they pleased. poets of an uncritical age do not archaise. this rule is overlooked by the critics who represent the homeric poems as a complex of the work of many singers in many ages. for example, professor percy gardner, in his very interesting _new chapters in greek history_ (1892), carries neglect of the rule so far as to suppose that the late homeric poets, being aware that the ancient heroes could not ride, or write, or eat boiled meat, consciously and purposefully represented them as doing none of these things. this they did "on the same principle on which a writer of pastoral idylls in our own day would avoid the mention of the telegraph or telephone." [footnote: _op. cit._, p. 142.] "a writer of our own day,"--there is the pervading fallacy! it is only writers of the last century who practise this archaeological refinement. the authors of _beowulf_ and the _nibelungenlied_, of the chansons de _geste_ and of the arthurian romances, always describe their antique heroes and the details of their life in conformity with the customs, costume, and armour of their own much later ages. but mr. leaf, to take another instance, remarks as to the lack of the metal lead in the epics, that it is mentioned in similes only, as though the poet were aware the metal was unknown in the heroic age. [footnote: _iliad_, note on, xi. 237.] here the poet is assumed to be a careful but ill-informed archaeologist, who wishes to give an accurate representation of the past. lead, in fact, was perfectly familiar to the mycenaean prime. [footnote: tsountas and manatt, p. 73.] the critical usage of supposing that the ancients were like the most recent moderns--in their archaeological preoccupations--is a survival of the uncritical habit which invariably beset old poets and artists. ancient poets, of the uncritical ages, never worked "on the same principle as a writer in our day," as regards archaeological precision; at least we are acquainted with no example of such accuracy. let us take another instance of the critical fallacy. the age of the achaean warriors, who dwelt in the glorious halls of mycenae, was followed, at an interval, by the age represented in the relics found in the older tombs outside the dipylon gate of athens, an age beginning, probably, about 900-850 b.c. the culture of this "dipylon age," a time of geometrical ornaments on vases, and of human figures drawn in geometrical forms, lines, and triangles, was quite unlike that of the achaean age in many ways, for example, in mode of burial and in the use of iron for weapons. mr. h. r. hall, in his learned book, _the oldest civilisation of greece_ (1901), supposes the culture described in the homeric poems to be contemporary in asia with that of this dipylon period in greece. [footnote: op. cit., pp. 49, 222.] he says, "the homeric culture is evidently the culture of the poet's own days; there is no attempt to archaise here...." they do not archaise as to the details of life, but "the homeric poets consciously and consistently archaised, in regard to the political conditions of continental greece," in the achaean times. they give "in all probability a pretty accurate description" of the loose feudalism of mycenaean greece. [footnote: op. cit., pp. 223, 225.] we shall later show that this homeric picture of a past political and social condition of greece is of vivid and delicate accuracy, that it is drawn from the life, not constructed out of historical materials. mr. hall explains the fact by "the conscious and consistent" archaeological precision of the asiatic poets of the ninth century. now to any one who knows early national poetry, early uncritical art of any kind, this theory seems not easily tenable. the difficulty of the theory is increased, if we suppose that the achaeans were the recent conquerors of the mycenaeans. whether we regard the achaeans as "celts," with mr. ridgeway, victors over an aryan people, the pelasgic mycenaeans; or whether, with mr. hall, we think that the achaeans were the aryan conquerors of a non-aryan people, the makers of the mycenaean civilisation; in the stress of a conquest, followed at no long interval by an expulsion at the hands of dorian invaders, there would be little thought of archaising among achaean poets. [footnote: mr. hall informs me that he no longer holds the opinion that the poets archaised.] a distinction has been made, it is true, between the poet and other artists in this respect. monsieur perrot says, "the vase-painter reproduces what he sees; while the epic poets endeavoured to represent a distant past. if homer gives swords of bronze to his heroes of times gone by, it is because he knows that such were the weapons of these heroes of long ago. in arming them with bronze he makes use, in his way, of what we call 'local colour....' thus the homeric poet is a more conscientious historian than virgil!" [footnote: la _grète de l'epopée_, perrot et chipiez, p. 230.] now we contend that old uncritical poets no more sought for antique "local colour" than any other artists did. m. perrot himself says with truth, "the _chanson de roland_, and all the _gestes_ of the same cycle explain for us the iliad and the odyssey." [footnote: op. cit., p. 5.] but the poet of the _chanson de roland_ accoutres his heroes of old time in the costume and armour of his own age, and the later poets of the same cycle introduce the innovations of their time; they do not hunt for "local colour" in the _chanson de roland_. the very words "local colour" are a modern phrase for an idea that never occurred to the artists of ancient uncritical ages. the homeric poets, like the painters of the dipylon period, describe the details of life as they see them with their own eyes. such poets and artists never have the fear of "anachronisms" before them. this, indeed, is plain to the critics themselves, for they, detect anachronisms as to land tenure, burial, the construction of houses, marriage customs, weapons, and armour in the _iliad_ and _odyssey_. these supposed anachronisms we examine later: if they really exist they show that the poets were indifferent to local colour and archaeological precision, or were incapable of attaining to archaeological accuracy. in fact, such artistic revival of the past in its habit as it lived is a purely modern ideal. we are to show, then, that the epics, being, as wholes, free from such inevitable modifications in the picture of changing details of life as uncritical authors always introduce, are the work of the one age which they represent. this is the reverse of what has long been, and still is, the current theory of homeric criticism, according to which the homeric poems are, and bear manifest marks of being, a mosaic of the poetry of several ages of change. till wolf published his _prolegomena_ to [blank space] (1795) there was little opposition to the old belief that the _iliad_ and odyssey were, allowing for interpolations, the work of one, or at most of two, poets. after the appearance of wolfs celebrated book, homeric critics have maintained, generally speaking, that the _iliad_ is either a collection of short lays disposed in sequence in a late age, or that it contains an ancient original "kernel" round which "expansions," made throughout some centuries of changeful life, have accrued, and have been at last arranged by a literary redactor or editor. the latter theory is now dominant. it is maintained that the _iliad_ is a work of at least four centuries. some of the objections to this theory were obvious to wolf himself--more obvious to him than to his followers. he was aware, and some of them are not, of the distinction between reading the _iliad_ as all poetic literature is naturally read, and by all authors is meant to be read, for human pleasure, and studying it in the spirit of "the analytical reader." as often as he read for pleasure, he says, disregarding the purely fanciful "historical conditions" which he invented for homer; as often as he yielded himself to that running stream of action and narration; as often as he considered the _harmony_ of _colour_ and of characters in the epic, no man could be more angry with his own destructive criticism than himself. wolf ceased to be a wolfian whenever he placed himself at the point of view of the reader or the listener, to whom alone every poet makes his appeal. but he deemed it his duty to place himself at another point of view, that of the scientific literary historian, the historian of a period concerning whose history he could know nothing. "how could the thing be possible?" he asked himself. "how could a long poem like the _iliad_ come into existence in the historical circumstances?" [footnote, exact place in paragraph unknown: preface to homer, p, xxii., 1794.]. wolf was unaware that he did not know what the historical circumstances were. we know how little we know, but we do know more than wolf. he invented the historical circumstances of the supposed poet. they were, he said, like those of a man who should build a large ship in an inland place, with no sea to launch it upon. the _iliad_ was the large ship; the sea was the public. homer could have no _readers_, wolf said, in an age that, like the old hermit of prague, "never saw pen and ink," had no knowledge of letters; or, if letters were dimly known, had never applied them to literature. in such circumstances no man could have a motive for composing a long poem. [footnote: _prolegomena to the iliad_, p. xxvi.] yet if the original poet, "homer," could make "the greater part of the songs," as wolf admitted, what physical impossibility stood in the way of his making the whole? meanwhile, the historical circumstances, as conceived of by wolf, were imaginary. he did not take the circumstances of the poet as described in the odyssey. here a king or prince has a minstrel, honoured as were the minstrels described in the ancient irish books of law. his duty is to entertain the prince and his family and guests by singing epic chants after supper, and there is no reason why his poetic narratives should be brief, but rather he has an opportunity that never occurred again till the literary age of greece for producing a long poem, continued from night to night. in the later age, in the asiatic colonies and in greece, the rhapsodists, competing for prizes at feasts, or reciting to a civic crowd, were limited in time and gave but snatches of poetry. it is in this later civic age that a poet without readers would have little motive for building wolfs great ship of song, and scant chance of launching it to any profitable purpose. to this point we return; but when once critics, following wolf, had convinced themselves that a long early poem was impossible, they soon found abundant evidence that it had never existed. they have discovered discrepancies of which, they say, no one sane poet could have been guilty. they have also discovered that the poems had not, as wolf declared, "one 'harmony of colour" (_unus color_). each age, they say, during which the poems were continued, lent its own colour. the poets, by their theory, now preserved the genuine tradition of things old; cremation, cairn and urn burial; the use of the chariot in war; the use of bronze for weapons; a peculiar stage of customary law; a peculiar form of semi-feudal society; a peculiar kind of house. but again, by a change in the theory, the poets introduced later novelties; later forms of defensive armour; later modes of burial; later religious and speculative beliefs; a later style of house; an advanced stage of law; modernisms in grammar and language. the usual position of critics in this matter is stated by helbig; and we are to contend that the theory is contradicted by all experience of ancient literatures, and is in itself the reverse of consistent. "the _artists_ of antiquity," says helbig, with perfect truth, "had no idea of archaeological studies.... they represented legendary scenes in conformity with the spirit of their own age, and reproduced the arms and implements and costume that they saw around them." [footnote: _l'épopée homerique_, p. 5; _homerische epos_, p. 4.] now a poet is an _artist_, like another, and he, too--no less than the vase painter or engraver of gems--in dealing with legends of times past, represents (in an uncritical age) the arms, utensils, costume, and the religious, geographical, legal, social, and political ideas of his own period. we shall later prove that this is true by examples from the early mediaeval epic poetry of europe. it follows that if the _iliad_ is absolutely consistent and harmonious in its picture of life, and of all the accessories of life, the _iliad_ is the work of a single age, of a single stage of culture, the poet describing his own environment. but helbig, on the other hand, citing wilamowitz moellendorff, declares that the _iliad_--the work of four centuries, he says--maintains its unity of colour by virtue of an uninterrupted poetical tradition. [footnote: _homerische untersuchungen_, p. 292; _homerische epos_, p. i.] if so, the poets must have archaeologised, must have kept asking themselves, "is this or that detail true to the past?" which artists in uncritical ages never do, as we have been told by helbig. they must have carefully pondered the surviving old achaean lays, which "were born when the heroes could not read, or boil flesh, or back a steed." by carefully observing the earliest lays the late poets, in times of changed manners, "could avoid anachronisms by the aid of tradition, which gave them a very exact idea of the epic heroes." such is the opinion of wilamowitz moellendorff. he appears to regard the tradition as keeping the later poets in the old way automatically, not consciously, but this, we also learn from helbig, did not occur. the poets often wandered from the way. [footnote: helbig, _homerische epos,_ pp. 2, 3.] thus old mycenaean lays, if any existed, would describe the old mycenaean mode of burial. the homeric poet describes something radically different. we vainly ask for proof that in any early national literature known to us poets have been true to the colour and manners of the remote times in which their heroes moved, and of which old minstrels sang. the thing is without example: of this proofs shall be offered in abundance. meanwhile, the whole theory which regards the _iliad_ as the work of four or five centuries rests on the postulate that poets throughout these centuries did what such poets never do, kept true to the details of a life remote from their own, and also did not. for helbig does not, after all, cleave to his opinion. on the other hand, he says that the later poets of the _iliad_ did not cling to tradition. "they allowed themselves to be influenced by their own environment: _this influence betrays itself in the descriptions of details_.... the rhapsodists," (reciters, supposed to have altered the poems at will), "did not fail to interpolate relatively recent elements into the oldest parts of the epic." [footnote: _homerische epos,_ p. 2.] at this point comes in a complex inconsistency. the tenth book of the _iliad_, thinks helbig--in common with almost all critics--"is one of the most recent lays of the _iliad_." but in this recent lay (say of the eighth or seventh century) the poet describes the thracians as on a level of civilisation with the achaeans, and, indeed, as even more luxurious, wealthy, and refined in the matter of good horses, glorious armour, and splendid chariots. but, by the time of the persian wars, says helbig, the thracians were regarded by the greeks as rude barbarians, and their military equipment was totally un-greek. they did not wear helmets, but caps of fox-skin. they had no body armour; their shields were small round bucklers; their weapons were bows and daggers. these customs could not, at the time of the persian wars, be recent innovations in thrace. [footnote: herodotus, vii. 75.] had the poet of _iliad_, book x., known the thracians in _this_ condition, says helbig, as he was fond of details of costume and arms, he would have certainly described their fox-skin caps, bows, bucklers, and so forth. he would not here have followed the epic tradition, which represented the thracians as makers of great swords and as splendidly armed charioteers. his audience had met the thracians in peace and war, and would contradict the poet's description of them as heavily armed charioteers. it follows, therefore, that the latest poets, such as the author of book x., did not introduce recent details, those of their own time, but we have just previously been told that to do so was their custom in the description of details. now studniczka [footnote: _homerische epos, pp. 7-11, cf._ note i; _zeitschrift fur die oestern gymnasien_, 1886, p. 195.] explains the picture of the thracians in _iliad_, book x., on helbig's _other_ principle, namely, that the very late author of the tenth book merely conforms to the conventional tradition of the epic, adheres to the model set in ancient achaean, or rather ancient ionian times, and scrupulously preserved by the latest poets--that is, when the latest poets do not bring in the new details of their own age. but helbig will not accept his own theory in this case, whence does it follow that the author of the tenth book must, in his opinion, have lived in achaean times, and described the thracians as they then were, charioteers, heavily armed, not light-clad archers? if this is so, we ask how helbig can aver that the tenth book is one of the latest parts of the _iliad?_ in studying the critics who hold that the _iliad_ is the growth of four centuries--say from the eleventh to the seventh century b.c.--no consistency is to be discovered; the earth is never solid beneath our feet. we find now that the poets are true to tradition in the details of ancient life--now that the poets introduce whatever modern details they please. the late poets have now a very exact knowledge of the past; now, the late poets know nothing about the past, or, again, some of the poets are fond of actual and very minute archaeological research! the theory shifts its position as may suit the point to be made at the moment by the critic. all is arbitrary, and it is certain that logic demands a very different method of inquiry. if helbig and other critics of his way of thinking mean that in the _iliad_ (1) there are parts of genuine antiquity; other parts (2) by poets who, with stern accuracy, copied the old modes; other parts (3) by poets who tried to copy but failed; with passages (4) by poets who deliberately innovated; and passages (5) by poets who drew fanciful pictures of the past "from their inner consciousness," while, finally (6), some poets made minute antiquarian researches; and if the argument be that the critics can detect these six elements, then we are asked to repose unlimited confidence in critical powers of discrimination. the critical standard becomes arbitrary and subjective. it is our effort, then, in the following pages to show that the _unus_ color of wolf does pervade the epics, that recent details are not often, if ever, interpolated, that the poems harmoniously represent one age, and that a brief age, of culture; that this effect cannot, in a thoroughly uncritical period, have been deliberately aimed at and produced by archaeological learning, or by sedulous copying of poetic tradition, or by the scientific labours of an editor of the sixth century b.c. we shall endeavour to prove, what we have already indicated, that the hypotheses of expansion are not self-consistent, or in accordance with what is known of the evolution of early national poetry. the strongest part, perhaps, of our argument is to rest on our interpretation of archaeological evidence, though we shall not neglect the more disputable or less convincing contentions of literary criticism. chapter ii hypotheses as to the growth of the epics a theorist who believes that the homeric poems are the growth of four changeful centuries, must present a definite working hypothesis as to how they escaped from certain influences of the late age in which much of them is said to have been composed. we must first ask to what manner of audiences did the poets sing, in the alleged four centuries of the evolution of the epics. mr. leaf, as a champion of the theory of ages of "expansion," answers that "the _iliad_ and _odyssey_ are essentially, and above all, court poems. they were composed to be sung in the palaces of a ruling aristocracy ... the poems are aristocratic and courtly, not popular." [footnote: companion to the _iliad_, pp. 2,8. 1892.] they are not _volkspoesie_; they are not ballads. "it is now generally recognised that this conception is radically false." these opinions, in which we heartily agree--there never was such a thing as a "popular" epic--were published fourteen years ago. mr. leaf, however, would not express them with regard to "our" _iliad_ and odyssey, because, in his view, a considerable part of the _iliad_, as it stands, was made, not by court bards in the achaean courts of europe, not for an audience of noble warriors and dames, but by wandering minstrels in the later ionian colonies of asia. they did not chant for a military aristocracy, but for the enjoyment of town and country folk at popular festivals. [footnote: iliad, vol. i. p. xvi. 1900.] the poems were _begun_, indeed, he thinks, for "a wealthy aristocracy living on the product of their lands," in european greece; were begun by contemporary court minstrels, but were continued, vastly expanded, and altered to taste by wandering singers and reciting rhapsodists, who amused the holidays of a commercial, expansive, and bustling ionian democracy. [footnote: _companion to the iliad_, p. ii.] we must suppose that, on this theory, the later poets pleased a commercial democracy by keeping up the tone that had delighted an old land-owning military aristocracy. it is not difficult, however, to admit this as possible, for the poems continued to be admired in all ages of greece and under every form of society. the real question is, would the modern poets be the men to keep up a tone some four or five centuries old, and to be true, if they were true, to the details of the heroic age? "it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that some part of the most primitive _iliad_ may have been actually sung by the court minstrel in the palace whose ruins can still be seen in mycenae." [footnote: leaf, _iliad_, vol. i. p. xv.] but, by the expansionist theory, even the oldest parts of our _iliad_ are now full of what we may call quite recent ionian additions, full of late retouches, and full, so to speak, of omissions of old parts. through four or five centuries, by the hypothesis, every singer who could find an audience was treating as much as he knew of a vast body of ancient lays exactly as he pleased, adding here, lopping there, altering everywhere. moreover, these were centuries full of change. the ancient achaean palaces were becoming the ruins which we still behold. the old art had faded, and then fallen under the disaster of the dorian conquest. a new art, or a recrudescence of earlier art, very crude and barbaric, had succeeded, and was beginning to acquire form and vitality. the very scene of life was altered: the new singers and listeners dwelt on the eastern side of the aegean. knights no longer, as in europe, fought from chariots: war was conducted by infantry, for the most part, with mounted auxiliaries. with the disappearance of the war chariot the huge mycenaean shields had vanished or were very rarely used. the early vase painters do not, to my knowledge, represent heroes as fighting from war chariots. they had lost touch with that method. fighting men now carried relatively small round bucklers, and iron was the metal chiefly employed for swords, spears, and arrow points. would the new poets, in deference to tradition, abstain from mentioning cavalry, or small bucklers, or iron swords and spears? or would they avoid puzzling their hearers by speaking of obsolete and unfamiliar forms of tactics and of military equipment? would they therefore sing of things familiar--of iron weapons, small round shields, hoplites, and cavalry? we shall see that confused and self-contradictory answers are given by criticism to all these questions by scholars who hold that the epics are not the product of one, but of many ages. there were other changes between the ages of the original minstrel and of the late successors who are said to have busied themselves in adding to, mutilating, and altering his old poem. kings and courts had passed away; old ionian myths and religious usages, unknown to the homeric poets, had come out into the light; commerce and pleasure and early philosophies were the chief concerns of life. yet the poems continued to be aristocratic in manners; and, in religion and ritual, to be pure from recrudescences of savage poetry and superstition, though the ionians "did not drop the more primitive phases of belief which had clung to them; these rose to the surface with the rest of the marvellous ionic genius, and many an ancient survival was enshrined in the literature or mythology of athens which had long passed out of all remembrance at mycenas." [footnote: _companion to the iliad_, p. 7.] amazing to say, none of these "more primitive phases of belief," none of the recrudescent savage magic, was intruded by the late ionian poets into the iliad which they continued, by the theory. such phases of belief were, indeed, by their time popular, and frequently appeared in the cyclic poems on the trojan war; continuations of the _iliad_, which were composed by ionian authors at the same time as much of the _iliad_ itself (by the theory) was composed. the authors of these cyclic poems--authors contemporary with the makers of much of the _iliad_--_were_ eminently "un-homeric" in many respects. [footnote: _cf_. monro, _the cyclic poets; odyssey_, vol. ii, pp. 342-384.] they had ideas very different from those of the authors of the _iliad_ and _odyssey_, as these ideas have reached us. helbig states this curious fact, that the homeric poems are free from many recent or recrudescent ideas common in other epics composed during the later centuries of the supposed four hundred years of epic growth. [footnote: _homerische epos_, p. 3.] thus a signet ring was mentioned in the _ilias puma_, and there are no rings in _iliad_ or _odyssey_. but helbig does not perceive the insuperable difficulty which here encounters his hypothesis. he remarks: "in certain poems which were grouping themselves around the _iliad and _odyssey, we meet data absolutely opposed to the conventional style of the epic." he gives three or four examples of perfectly un-homeric ideas occurring in epics of the eighth to seventh centuries, b.c., and a large supply of such cases can be adduced. but helbig does not ask how it happened that, if poets of these centuries had lost touch with the epic tradition, and had wandered into a new region of thought, as they had, examples of their notions do not occur in the _iliad_ and _odyssey_. by his theory these poems were being added to and altered, even in their oldest portions, at the very period when strange fresh, or old and newly revived fancies were flourishing. if so, how were the _iliad_ and _odyssey_, unlike the cyclic poems, kept uncontaminated, as they confessedly were, by the new romantic ideas? here is the real difficulty. cyclic poets of the eighth and seventh centuries had certainly lost touch with the epic tradition; their poems make that an admitted fact. yet poets of the eighth to seventh centuries were, by the theory, busily adding to and altering the ancient lays of the _iliad_. how did _they_ abstain from the new or revived ideas, and from the new _genre_ of romance? are we to believe that one set of late ionian poets--they who added to and altered the iliad--were true to tradition, while another contemporary set of ionian poets, the cyclics--authors of new epics on homeric themes--are known to have quite lost touch with the homeric taste, religion, and ritual? the reply will perhaps be a cyclic poet said, "here i am going to compose quite a new poem about the old heroes. i shall make them do and think and believe as i please, without reference to the evidence of the old poems." but, it will have to be added, the rhapsodists of 800-540 b.c., and the general editor of the latter date, thought, _we_ are continuing an old set of lays, and we must be very careful in adhering to manners, customs, and beliefs as described by our predecessors. for instance, the old heroes had only bronze, no iron,--and then the rhapsodists forgot, and made iron a common commodity in the _iliad_. again, the rhapsodists knew that the ancient heroes had no corslets--the old lays, we learn, never spoke of corslets--but they made them wear corslets of much splendour. [footnote: the reader must remember that the view of the late poets as careful adherents of tradition in usages and ideas only obtains _sometimes_; at others the critics declare that archaeological precision is _not_ preserved, and that the ionic continuators introduced, for example, the military gear of their own period into a poem which represents much older weapons and equipments.] this theory does not help us. in an uncritical age poets could not discern that their genre of romance and religion was alien from that of homer. to return to the puzzle about the careful and precise continuators of the _iliad_, as contrasted with their heedless contemporaries, the authors of the cyclic poems. how "non-homeric" the authors of these cyclic poems were, before and after 660 b.c., we illustrate from examples of their left hand backslidings and right hand fallings off. they introduced (1) the apotheosis of the dioscuri, who in homer (_iliad_, iii. 243) are merely dead men (_cypria_). (2) story of iphigenia _cypria_. (3) story of palamedes, who is killed when angling by odysseus and diomede (cypria). homer's heroes never fish, except in stress of dire necessity, in the odyssey, and homer's own diomede and odysseus would never stoop to assassinate a companion when engaged in the contemplative man's recreation. we here see the heroes in late degraded form as on the attic stage. (4) the cyclics introduce helen as daughter of nemesis, and describe the flight of nemesis from zeus in various animal forms, a märchen of a sort not popular with homer; an ionic märchen, mr. leaf would say. there is nothing like this in the iliad and odyssey. (5) they call the son of achilles, not neoptolemus, as homer does, but pyrrhus. (6) they represent the achaean army as obtaining supplies through three magically gifted maidens, who produce corn, wine, and oil at will, as in fairy tales. another ionic non-achaean märchen! they bring in ghosts of heroes dead and buried. such ghosts, in homer's opinion, were impossible if the dead had been cremated. all these non-homeric absurdities, save the last, are from the cypria, dated by sir richard jebb about 776 b.c., long before the odyssey was put into shape, namely, after 660 b. c. in his opinion. yet the alleged late compiler of the odyssey, in the seventh century, never wanders thus from the homeric standard in taste. what a skilled archaeologist he must have been! the author of the cypria knew the iliad, [footnote: monro, odyssey, vol. ii. p. 354.] but his knowledge could not keep him true to tradition. (7) in the aethiopis (about 776 b.c.) men are made immortal after death, and are worshipped as heroes, an idea foreign to iliad and odyssey. (8) there is a savage ritual of purification from blood shed by a homicide (compare eumenides, line 273). this is unheard of in iliad and odyssey, though familiar to aeschylus. (9) achilles, after death, is carried to the isle of leuke. (10) the fate of ilium, in the cyclic little _iliad_, hangs on the palladium, of which nothing is known in _iliad_ or _odyssey_. the _little iliad_ is dated about 700 b.c. (11) the _nostoi_ mentions molossians, not named by homer (which is a trifle); it also mentions the asiatic city of colophon, an ionian colony, which is not a trivial self-betrayal on the part of the poet. he is dated about 750 b.c. thus, more than a century before the _odyssey_ received its final form, after 660 b.c., from the hands of one man (according to the theory), the other ionian poets who attempted epic were betraying themselves as non-homeric on every hand. [footnote: monro, _odyssey_, vol. ii. pp. 347-383.] our examples are but a few derived from the brief notices of the cyclic poets' works, as mentioned in ancient literature; these poets probably, in fact, betrayed themselves constantly. but their contemporaries, the makers of late additions to the _odyssey_, and the later mosaic worker who put it together, never betrayed themselves to anything like the fatal extent of anachronism exhibited by the cyclic poets. how, if the true ancient tone, taste, manners, and religion were lost, as the cyclic poets show that they were, did the contemporary ionian poets or rhapsodists know and preserve the old manner? the best face we can put on the matter is to say that all the cyclic poets were recklessly independent of tradition, while all men who botched at the _iliad_ were very learned, and very careful to maintain harmony in their pictures of life and manners, except when they introduced changes in burial, bride-price, houses, iron, greaves, and corslets, all of them things, by the theory, modern, and when they sang in modern grammar. yet despite this conscientiousness of theirs, most of the many authors of our _iliad_ and _odyssey_ were, by the theory, strolling irresponsible rhapsodists, like the later _jongleurs_ of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries in mediaeval france. how could these strollers keep their modern ionian ideas, or their primitive, recrudescent phases of belief, out of their lays, as far as they _did_ keep them out, while the contemporary authors of the _cypria_, _the sack of ilios_, and other cyclic poets were full of new ideas, legends, and beliefs, or primitive notions revived, and, save when revived, quite obviously late and quite un-homeric in any case? the difficulty is the greater if the cyclic poems were long poems, with one author to each epic. such authors were obviously men of ambition; they produced serious works _de longue haleine_. it is from them that we should naturally expect conservative and studious adhesion to the traditional models. from casual strollers like the rhapsodists and chanters at festivals, we look for nothing of the sort. _they_ might be expected to introduce great feats done by sergeants and privates, so to speak--men of the nameless [greek: laos], the host, the foot men--who in homer are occasionally said to perish of disease or to fall under the rain of arrows, but are never distinguished by name. the strollers, it might be thought, would also be the very men to introduce fairy tales, freaks of primitive ionian myth, discreditable anecdotes of the princely heroes, and references to the ionian colonies. but it is not so; the serious, laborious authors of the long cyclic poems do such un-homeric things as these; the gay, irresponsible strolling singers of a lay here and a lay there--lays now incorporated in the _iliad_ and _odyssey_--scrupulously avoid such faults. they never even introduce a signet ring. these are difficulties in the theory of the _iliad_ as a patchwork by many hands, in many ages, which nobody explains; which, indeed, nobody seems to find difficult. yet the difficulty is insuperable. even if we take refuge with wilamowitz in the idea that the cyclic and homeric poems were at first mere protoplasm of lays of many ages, and that they were all compiled, say in the sixth century, into so many narratives, we come no nearer to explaining why the tone, taste, and ideas of two such narratives--illiad and odyssey--are confessedly distinct from the tone, taste, and ideas of all the others. the cyclic poems are certainly the production of a late and changed age? [footnote: for what manner of audience, if not for readers, the cyclic poems were composed is a mysterious question.] the _iliad_ is not in any degree--save perhaps in a few interpolated passages--touched by the influences of that late age. it is not a complex of the work of four incompatible centuries, as far as this point is concerned--the point of legend, religion, ritual, and conception of heroic character. chapter iii hypotheses of epic composition whosoever holds that the homeric poems were evolved out of the lays of many men, in many places, during many periods of culture, must present a consistent and logical hypothesis as to how they attained their present plots and forms. these could not come by accident, even if the plots are not good--as all the world held that they were, till after wolf's day--but very bad, as some critics now assert. still plot and form, beyond the power of chance to produce, the poems do possess. nobody goes so far as to deny that; and critics make hypotheses explanatory of the fact that a single ancient "kernel" of some 2500 lines, a "kernel" altered at will by any one who pleased during four centuries, became a constructive whole. if the hypotheses fail to account for the fact, we have the more reason to believe that the poems are the work of one age, and, mainly, of one man. in criticising homeric criticism as it is to-day, we cannot do better than begin by examining the theories of mr. leaf which are offered by him merely as "a working hypothesis." his most erudite work is based on a wide knowledge of german homeric speculation, of the exact science of grammar, of archaeological discoveries, and of manuscripts. [footnote: the iliad. macmillan & co. 1900, 1902.] his volumes are, i doubt not, as they certainly deserve to be, on the shelves of every homeric student, old or young, and doubtless their contents reach the higher forms in schools, though there is reason to suppose that, about the unity of homer, schoolboys remain conservative. in this book of more than 1200 pages mr. leaf's space is mainly devoted to textual criticism, philology, and pure scholarship, but his introductions, notes, and appendices also set forth his mature ideas about the homeric problem in general. he has altered some of his opinions since the publication of his _companion to the iliad_(1892), but the main lines of his old system are, except on one crucial point, unchanged. his theory we shall try to state and criticise; in general outline it is the current theory of separatist critics, and it may fairly be treated as a good example of such theories. the system is to the following effect: greek tradition, in the classical period, regarded the _iliad_ and _odyssey_ as the work of one man, homer, a native of one or other of the ionian colonies of asia minor. but the poems show few obvious signs of origin in asia. they deal with dwellers, before the dorian invasion (which the poet never alludes to), on the continent of europe and in crete. [footnote: if the poet sang after the tempest of war that came down with the dorians from the north, he would probably have sought a topic in the achaean exploits and sorrows of that period. the dorians, not the trojans, would have been the foes. the epics of france of the eleventh and twelfth centuries dwell, not on the real victories of the remote charlemagne so much as on the disasters of aliscans and roncesvaux--defeats at saracen hands, saracens being the enemies of the twelfth-century poets. no saracens, in fact, fought at roncesvaux.] the lays are concerned with "good old times"; presumably between 1500 and 1100 b.c. their pictures of the details of life harmonise more with what we know of the society of that period from the evidence of buildings and recent excavations, than with what we know of the life and the much more rude and barbaric art of the so-called "dipylon" period of "geometrical" ornament considerably later. in the dipylon age though the use of iron, even for swords (made on the lines of the old bronze sword), was familiar, art was on a most barbaric level, not much above the bed indian type, as far, at least, as painted vases bear witness. the human figure is designed as in tommy traddles's skeletons; there is, however, some crude but promising idea of composition. the picture of life in the homeric poems, then, is more like that of, say, 1500-1100 b.c. than of, say, 1000-850 b.c. in mr. leaf's opinion. certainly homer describes a wealthy aristocracy, subject to an over-lord, who rules, by right divine, from "golden mycenae." we hear of no such potentate in ionia. homer's accounts of contemporary art seem to be inspired by the rich art generally dated about 1500-1200. yet there are "many traces of apparent anachronism," of divergence from the more antique picture of life. in these divergences are we to recognise the picture of a later development of the ancient existence of 1500-1200 b.c.? or have elements of the life of a much later age of greece (say, 800-550 b.c.) been consciously or unconsciously introduced by the late poets? here mr. leaf recognises a point on which we have insisted, and must keep insisting, for it is of the first importance. "it is _a priori_ the most probable" supposition that, "in an uncritical age," poets do _not_ "reproduce the circumstances of the old time," but "only clothe the old tale in the garb of their own days." poets in an uncritical age always, in our experience, "clothe old tales with the garb of their own time," but mr. leaf thinks that, in the case of the homeric poems, this idea "is not wholly borne out by the facts." in fact, mr. leaf's hypothesis, like helbig's, exhibits a come-and-go between the theory that his late poets clung close to tradition and so kept true to ancient details of life, and the theory that they did quite the reverse in many cases. of this frequent examples will occur. he writes, "the homeric period is certainly later than the shaft tombs" (discovered at mycenae by dr. schliemann), "but it does not necessarily follow that it is post-mycenaean. it is quite possible that certain notable differences between the poems and the monuments" (of mycenae) "in burial, for instance, and in women's dress may be due to changes which arose within the mycenaean age itself, in that later part of it of which our knowledge is defective--almost as defective as it is of the subsequent 'dipylon' period. on the whole, the resemblance to the typical mycenaean culture is more striking than the difference." [footnote: leaf, iliad, vol. i. pp. xiii.-xv. 1900.] so far mr. leaf states precisely the opinion for which we argue. the homeric poems describe an age later than that of the famous tombs--so rich in relics--of the mycenaean acropolis, and earlier than the tombs of the dipylon of athens. the poems thus spring out of an age of which, except from the poems themselves, we know little or nothing, because, as is shown later, no cairn burials answering to the frequent homeric descriptions have ever been discovered--so relics corroborating homeric descriptions are to seek. but the age attaches itself in many ways to the age of the mycenaean tombs, while, in our opinion, it stands quite apart from the post-dorian culture. where we differ from mr. leaf is in believing that the poems, as wholes, were composed in that late mycenaean period of which, from material remains, we know very little; that "much new" was not added, as he thinks, in "the ionian development" which lasted perhaps "from the ninth century b.c. to the seventh." we cannot agree with mr. leaf, when he, like helbig, thinks that much of the detail of the ancient life in the poems had early become so "stereotyped" that no continuator, however late, dared "intentionally to sap" the type, "though he slipped from time to time into involuntary anachronism." some poets are also asserted to indulge in _voluntary_ anachronism when, as mr. leaf supposes, they equip the ancient warriors with corslets and greaves and other body armour of bronze such as, in his opinion, the old heroes never knew, such as never were mentioned in the oldest parts or "kernel" of the poems. thus the traditional details of mycenaean life sometimes are regarded as "stereotyped" in poetic tradition; sometimes as subject to modern alterations of a sweeping and revolutionary kind. as to deliberate adherence to tradition by the poets, we have proved that the cyclic epic poets of 800-660 b.c. wandered widely from the ancient models. if, then, every minstrel or rhapsodist who, anywhere, added at will to the old "kernel" of the _achilles_ was, so far as he was able, as conscientiously precise in his stereotyped archaeological details as mr. leaf sometimes supposes, the fact is contrary to general custom in such cases. when later poets in an uncritical age take up and rehandle the poetic themes of their predecessors, they always give to the stories "a new costume," as m. gaston paris remarks in reference to thirteenth century dealings with french epics of the eleventh century. but, in the critics' opinion, the late rehandlers of old achaean lays preserved the archaic modes of life, war, costume, weapons, and so forth, with conscientious care, except in certain matters to be considered later, when they deliberately did the very reverse. sometimes the late poets devoutly follow tradition. sometimes they deliberately innovate. sometimes they pedantically "archaise," bringing in genuine, but by their time forgotten, mycenaean things, and criticism can detect their doings in each case. though the late continuators of the _iliad_ were able, despite certain inadvertencies, to keep up for some four centuries in asia the harmonious picture of ancient achaean life and society in europe, critics can distinguish four separate strata, the work of many different ages, in the _iliad_. of the first stratum composed in europe, say about 1300-1150 b.c. (i give a conjectural date under all reserves), the topic was _the wrath of achilles_. of this poem, in mr. leaf's opinion, (a) the first book and fifty lines of the second book remain intact or, perhaps, are a blend of two versions. (b) the _valour of agamemnon_ and _defeat of the achaeans_. of this there are portions in book xi., but they were meddled with, altered, and generally doctored, "down to the latest period," namely, the age of pisistratus in athens, the middle of the sixth century b.c. (c) the fight in which, after their defeat, the achaeans try to save the ships from the torch of hector, and the _valour of patroclus_ (but some critics do not accept this), with his death (xv., xvi. in parts). (d) some eighty lines on the _arming of achilles_ (xix.). (e) perhaps an incident or two in books xx., xxi. (f) the _slaying hector_ by achilles, in books xxi., xxii. (but some of the learned will not admit this, and we shall, unhappily, have to prove that, if mr. leaf's principles be correct, we really know nothing about the _slaying of hector_ in its original form). of these six elements only did the original poem consist, mr. leaf thinks; a rigid critic will reject as original even the _valour of patroclus_ and the _death of hector_, but mr. leaf refuses to go so far as that. the original poem, as detected by him, is really "the work of a single poet, perhaps the greatest in all the world's history." if the original poet did no more than is here allotted to him, especially if he left out the purpose of zeus and the person of thetis in book i., we do not quite understand his unapproachable greatness. he must certainly have drawn a rather commonplace achilles, as we shall see, and we confess to preferring the _iliad_ as it stands. the brief narrative cut out of the mass by mr. leaf, then, was the genuine old original poem or "kernel." what we commonly call the _iliad_, on the other hand, is, by his theory, a thing of shreds and patches, combined in a manner to be later described. the blend, we learn, has none of the masterly unity of the old original poem. meanwhile, as criticism of literary composition is a purely literary question, critics who differ from mr. leaf have a right to hold that the _iliad_ as it stands contains, and always did contain, a plot of masterly perfection. we need not attend here so closely to mr. leaf's theory in the matter of the first expansions, (2) and the second expansions, (3) but the latest expansions (4) give the account of _the embassy_ to _achilles_ with his refusal of _agamemnon's apology_(book ix.), the [blank space] (book xxiv.), the _reconciliation of achilles and agamemnon, and the funeral games_ of _patroclus_ (xxiii.). in all these parts of the poem there are, we learn, countless alterations, additions, and expansions, with, last of all, many transitional passages, "the work of the editor inspired by the statesman," that is, of an hypothetical editor who really by the theory made our _iliad_, being employed to that end by pistratus about 540 b.c. [footnote: leaf, _iliad_, vol. ii. pp. x., xiv. 1900.]. mr. leaf and critics who take his general view are enabled to detect the patches and tatters of many ages by various tests, for example, by discovering discrepancies in the narrative, such as in their opinion no one sane poet could make. other proofs of multiplex authorship are discovered by the critic's private sense of what the poem ought to be, by his instinctive knowledge of style, by detection of the poet's supposed errors in geography, by modernisms and false archaisms in words and grammar, and by the presence of many objects, especially weapons and armour, which the critic believes to have been unknown to the original minstrel. thus criticism can pick out the things old, fairly old, late, and quite recent, from the mass, evolved through many centuries, which is called the _iliad_. if the existing _iliad_ is a mass of "expansions," added at all sorts of dates, in any number of places, during very different stages of culture, to a single short old poem of the mycenaean age, science needs an hypothesis which will account for the _iliad_ "as it stands." everybody sees the need of the hypothesis, how was the medley of new songs by many generations of irresponsible hands codified into a plot which used to be reckoned fine? how were the manners, customs, and characters, _unus color_, preserved in a fairly coherent and uniform aspect? how was the whole greek world, throughout which all manner of discrepant versions and incongruous lays must, by the theory, have been current, induced to accept the version which has been bequeathed to us? why, and for what audience or what readers, did somebody, in a late age of brief lyrics and of philosophic poems, take the trouble to harmonise the body of discrepant wandering lays, and codify them in the _iliad_? an hypothesis which will answer all these questions is the first thing needful, and hypotheses are produced. believers like mr. leaf in the development of the _iliad_ through the changing revolutionary centuries, between say 1200 and 600 b.c., consciously stand in need of a working hypothesis which will account, above all, for two facts: first, the relatively correct preservation of the harmony of the picture of life, of ideas political and religious, of the characters of the heroes, of the customary law (such as the bride-price in marriage), and of the details as to weapons, implements, dress, art, houses, and so forth, when these are not (according to the theory) deliberately altered by late poets. next, the hypothesis must explain, in mr. leafs own words, how a single version of the _iliad_ came to be accepted, "where many rival versions must, from the necessity of the case, have once existed side by side." [footnote: _iliad_, vol. i. p. xviii. 1900.] three hypotheses have, in fact, been imagined: the first suggests the preservation of the original poems in very early written texts; not, of course, in "homer's autograph." this view mr. leaf, we shall see, discards. the second presents the notion of one old sacred college for the maintenance of poetic uniformity. mr. leaf rejects this theory, while supposing that there were schools for professional reciters. last, there is the old hypothesis of wolf: "pisistratus" (about 540 b.c.) "was the first who had the homeric poems committed to writing, and brought into that order in which we now possess them." this hypothesis, now more than a century old, would, if it rested on good evidence, explain how a single version of the various lays came to be accepted and received as authorised. the greek world, by the theory, had only in various places various sets of incoherent chants _orally_ current on the wrath of the public was everywhere a public of listeners, who heard the lays sung on rare occasions at feasts and fairs, or whenever a strolling rhapsodist took up his pitch, for a day or two, at a street corner. there was, by the theory, no reading public for the homeric poetry. but, by the time of pisistratus, a reading public was coming into existence. the tyrant had the poems collected, edited, arranged into a continuous narrative, primarily for the purpose of regulating the recitals at the panathenaic festival. when once they were written, copies were made, and the rest of hellas adopted these for their public purposes. on a small scale we have a case analogous. the old songs of scotland existed, with the airs, partly in human memory, partly in scattered broadsheets. the airs were good, but the words were often silly, more often they were fescennine--"more dirt than wit." burns rewrote the words, which were published in handsome volumes, with the old airs, or with these airs altered, and his became the authorised versions, while the ancient anonymous chants were almost entirely forgotten. the parallel is fairly close, but there are points of difference. burns was a great lyric poet, whereas we hear of no great epic poet in the age of pisistratus. the old words which burns's songs superseded were wretched doggerel; not such were the ancient greek heroic lays. the old scottish songs had no sacred historic character; they did not contain the history of the various towns and districts of scotland. the heroic lays of greece were believed, on the other hand, to be a kind of domesday book of ancient principalities, and cities, and worshipped heroes. thus it was much easier for a great poet like burns to supersede with his songs a mass of unconsidered "sculdudery" old lays, in which no man or set of men had any interest, than for a mere editor, in the age of pisistratus, to supersede a set of lays cherished, in one shape or another, by every state in greece. this holds good, even if, prior to pisistratus, there existed in greece no written texts of homer, and no reading public, a point which we shall show reasons for declining to concede. the theory of the edition of pisistratus, if it rested on valid evidence, would explain "how a single version of the poems came to be accepted," namely, because the poem was now _written_ for the first time, and oral versions fell out of memory. but it would not, of course, explain how, before pisistratus, during four or five centuries of change, the new poets and reciters, throughout the greek world, each adding such fresh verses as he pleased, and often introducing such modern details of life as he pleased, kept up the harmony of the homeric picture of life, and character, and law, as far as it confessedly exists. to take a single instance: the poems never allude to the personal armorial bearings of the heroes. they are unknown to or unnamed by homer, but are very familiar on the shields in seventh century and sixth century vases, and aeschylus introduces them with great poetic effect in [blank space]. how did late continuators, familiar with the serpents, lions, bulls' heads, crabs, doves, and so forth, on the contemporary shields, keep such picturesque and attractive details out of their new rhapsodies? in mediaeval france, we shall show, the epics (eleventh to thirteenth centuries) deal with charlemagne and his peers of the eighth century a.d. but they provide these heroes with the armorial bearings which came in during the eleventh to twelfth century a.d. the late homeric rhapsodists avoided such tempting anachronisms. wolf's theory, then, explains "how a single version came to be accepted." it was the first _written_ version; the others died out, like the old scots orally repeated songs, when burns published new words to the airs. but wolf's theory does not explain the harmony of the picture of life, the absence of post-homeric ideas and ways of living, in the first written version, which, practically, is our own version. in 1892 (_companion to the iliad_) mr. leaf adopted a different theory, the hypothesis of a homeric "school" "which busied itself with the tradition of the homeric poetry," for there must have been some central authority to preserve the text intact when it could not be preserved in writing. were there no such body to maintain a fixed standard, the poems must have ended by varying indefinitely, according to the caprice of their various reciters. this is perfectly obvious. such a school could keep an eye on anachronisms and excise them; in fact, the maori priests, in an infinitely more barbarous state of society, had such schools for the preservation of their ancient hymns in purity. the older priests "insisted on a critical and verbatim rehearsal of all the ancient lore." proceedings were sanctioned by human sacrifices and many mystic rites. we are not told that new poems were produced and criticised; it does not appear that this was the case. pupils attended from three to five years, and then qualified as priests or _tohunga_ [footnote: white, _the ancient history of the maori, vol._ i. pp. 8-13.]. suppose that the asiatic greeks, like the maoris and zuñis, had poetic colleges of a sacred kind, admitting new poets, and keeping them up to the antique standard in all respects. if this were so, the relative rarity of "anachronisms" and of modernisms in language in the homeric poems is explained. but mr. leaf has now entirely and with a light heart abandoned his theory of a school, which is unsupported by evidence, he says.' "the great problem," he writes, "for those who maintain the gradual growth of the poems by a process of crystallisation has been to understand how a single version came to be accepted, where many rival versions must, from the necessity of the case, have once existed side by side. the assumption of a school or guild of singers has been made," and mr. leaf, in 1892, made the assumption himself: "as some such hypothesis we are bound to make in order to explain the possibility of any theory" (1892). [footnote: _companion to the iliad, pp. 20, 21._] but now (1900) he says, after mentioning "the assumption of a school or guild of singers," that "the rare mention of [greek: homeridai] in chios gives no support to this hypothesis, which lacks any other confirmation." [footnote: _iliad_, vol. i. xviii. p. xix.] he therefore now adopts the wolfian hypothesis that "an official copy of homer was made in athens at the time of solon or pisistratus," from the rhapsodies existing in the memory of reciters. [footnote: _iliad_, vol. i. p. xix.] but mr. leaf had previously said [footnote: _companion to the iliad_, p. 190.] that "the legend which connects his" (pisistratus's) "name with the homeric poems is itself probably only conjectural, and of late date." now the evidence for pisistratus which, in 1892, he thought "conjectural and of late date," seems to him a sufficient basis for an hypothesis of a pisistratean editor of the iliad, while the evidence for an homeric school which appeared to him good enough for an hypothesis in 1892 is rejected as worthless, though, in each case, the evidence itself remains just what it used to be. this is not very satisfactory, and the pisistratean hypothesis is much less useful to a theorist than the former hypothesis of an homeric school, for the pisistratean hypothesis cannot explain the harmony of the characters and the details in the _iliad_, nor the absence of such glaring anachronisms as the cyclic poets made, nor the general "pre-odyssean" character of the language and grammar. by the pisistratean hypothesis there was not, what mr. leaf in 1892 justly deemed essential, a school "to maintain a fixed standard," throughout the changes of four centuries, and against the caprice of many generations of fresh reciters and irresponsible poets. the hypothesis of a school _was_ really that which, of the two, best explained the facts, and there is no more valid evidence for the first making and writing out of our _iliad_ under pisistratus than for the existence of a homeric school. the evidence for the _iliad_ edited for pisistratus is examined in a note at the close of this chapter. meanwhile mr. leaf now revives wolf's old theory to account for the fact that somehow "a single version" (of the homeric poems) "came to be accepted." his present theory, if admitted, does account for the acceptation of a single version of the poems, the first standard _written_ version, but fails to explain how "the caprice of the different reciters" (as he says) did not wander into every variety of anachronism in detail and in diction, thus producing a chaos which no editor of about 540 a.d. could force into its present uniformity. such an editor is now postulated by mr. leaf. if his editor's edition, as being _written_, was accepted by greece, then we "understand how a single version came to be accepted." but we do not understand how the editor could possibly introduce a harmony which could only have characterised his materials, as mr. leaf has justly remarked, if there was an homeric school "to maintain a fixed standard." but now such harmony in the picture of life as exists in the poems is left without any explanation. we have now, by the theory, a crowd of rhapsodists, many generations of uncontrolled wandering men, who, for several centuries, "rave, recite, and madden through the land," with no written texts, and with no "fixed body to maintain a standard." such men would certainly not adhere strictly to a stereotyped early tradition: _that_ we cannot expect from them. again, no editor of about 540 b.c. could possibly bring harmony of manners, customs, and diction into such of their recitals as he took down in writing. let us think out the supposed editor's situation. during three centuries nine generations of strollers have worked their will on one ancient short poem, _the wrath_ of _achilles_. this is, in itself, an unexampled fact. poets turn to new topics; they do not, as a rule, for centuries embroider one single situation out of the myriads which heroic legend affords. strolling reciters are the least careful of men, each would recite in the language and grammar of his day, and introduce the newly evolved words and idioms, the new and fashionable manners, costume, and weapons of his time. when war chariots became obsolete, he would bring in cavalry; when there was no over-lord, he would not trouble himself to maintain correctly the character and situation of agamemnon. he would speak of coined money, in cases of buying and selling; his european geography would often be wrong; he would not ignore the ionian cities of asia; most weapons would be of iron, not bronze, in his lays. ionian religious ideas could not possibly be excluded, nor changes in customary law, civil and criminal. yet, we think, none of these things occurs in homer. the editor of the theory had to correct all these anachronisms and discrepancies. what a task in an uncritical age! the editor's materials would be the lays known to such strollers as happened to be gathered, in athens, perhaps at the panathenaic festival. the _répertoire_ of each stroller would vary indefinitely from those of all the others. one man knew this chant, as modified or made by himself; other men knew others, equally unsatisfactory. the editor must first have written down from recitation all the passages that he could collect. then he was obliged to construct a narrative sequence containing a plot, which he fashioned by a process of selection and rejection; and then he had to combine passages, alter them, add as much as he thought fit, remove anachronisms, remove discrepancies, accidentally bring in fresh discrepancies (as always happens), weave transitional passages, look with an antiquarian eye after the too manifest modernisms in language and manners, and so produce the [blank space]. that, in the sixth century b.c., any man undertook such a task, and succeeded so well as to impose on aristotle and all the later greek critics, appears to be a theory that could only occur to a modern man of letters, who is thinking of the literary conditions of his own time. the editor was doing, and doing infinitely better, what lönnrot, in the nineteenth century, tried in vain to achieve for the finnish _kalewala_. [footnote: see comparetti, _the kalewala_.] centuries later than pisistratus, in a critical age, apollonius rhodius set about writing an epic of the homeric times. we know how entirely he failed, on all hands, to restore the manner of homer. the editor of 540 b.c. was a more scientific man. can any one who sets before himself the nature of the editor's task believe in him and it? to the master-less floating jellyfish of old poems and new, mr. leaf supposes that "but small and unimportant additions were made after the end of the eighth century or thereabouts," especially as "the creative and imaginative forces of the ionian race turned to other forms of expression," to lyrics and to philosophic poems. but the able pisistratean editor, after all, we find, introduced quantities of new matter into the poems--in the middle of the sixth century; that kind of industry, then, did not cease towards the end of the eighth century, as we have been told. on the other hand, as we shall learn, the editor contributed to the _iliad_, among other things, nestor's descriptions of his youthful adventures, for the purpose of flattering nestor's descendant, the tyrant pisistratus of athens. one hypothesis, the theory of an homeric school--which would answer our question, "how was the harmony of the picture of life in remote ages preserved in poems composed in several succeeding ages, and in totally altered conditions of life?"--mr. leaf, as we know, rejects. we might suggest, again, that there were written texts handed down from an early period, and preserved in new copies from generation to generation. mr. leaf states his doubt that there were any such texts. "the poems were all this time handed down orally only by tradition among the singers (_sic_), who used to wander over greece reciting them at popular festivals. writing was indeed known through the whole period of epic development" (some four centuries at least), "but it is in the highest degree unlikely that it was ever employed to form a standard text of the epic or _any_ part of it. there can hardly have been any standard text; at best there was a continuous tradition of those parts of the poems which were especially popular, and the knowledge of which was a valuable asset to the professional reciter." now we would not contend for the existence of any [blank space] text much before 600 b.c., and i understand mr. leaf not to deny, now, that there may have been texts of the _odyssey_ and _iliad_ before, say, 600-540 b.c. if cities and reciters had any ancient texts, then texts existed, though not "standard" texts: and by this means the harmony of thought, character, and detail in the poems might be preserved. we do not think that it is "in the highest degree unlikely" that there were no texts. is this one of the many points on which every savant must rely on his own sense of what is "likely"? to this essential point, the almost certain existence of written texts, we return in our conclusion. what we have to account for is not only the relative lack of anachronisms in poems supposed to have been made through a period of at least four hundred years, but also the harmony of the _characters_ in subtle details. some of the characters will be dealt with later; meanwhile it is plain that mr. leaf, when he rejects both the idea of written texts prior to 600-540 b.c., and also the idea of a school charged with the duty of "maintaining a fixed standard," leaves a terrible task to his supposed editor of orally transmitted poems which, he says--if unpreserved by text or school--"must have ended by varying infinitely according to the caprice of their various reciters." [footnote: _companion to the iliad, p. 21._] on that head there can be no doubt; in the supposed circumstances no harmony, no _unus_ color, could have survived in the poems till the days of the sixth century editor. here, then, is another difficulty in the path of the theory that the _iliad_ is the work of four centuries. if it was, we are not enabled to understand how it came to be what it is. no editor could possibly tinker it into the whole which we possess; none could steer clear of many absurd anachronisms. these are found by critics, but it is our hope to prove that they do not exist. note the legend of the making of the "iliad" under pisistratos it has been shown in the text that in 1892 mr. leaf thought the story about the making of the _iliad_ under pisistratus, a legend without authority, while he regarded the traditions concerning an homeric school as sufficient basis for an hypothesis, "which we are bound to make in order to explain the possibility of any theory." in 1900 he entirely reversed his position, the school was abandoned, and the story of pisistratus was accepted. one objection to accepting any of the various legends about the composing and writing out, for the first time, of the _iliad_, in the sixth century, the age of pisistratus, was the silence of aristarchus on the subject. he discussed the authenticity of lines in the _iliad_ which, according to the legend, were interpolated for a political purpose by solon or pisistratus, but, as far as his comments have reached us in the scholia, he never said a word about the tradition of athenian interpolation. now aristarchus must, at least, have known the tradition of the political use of a disputed line, for aristotle writes (_rhetoric_, i. 15) that the athenians, early in the sixth century, quoted _iliad_, ii. 558, to prove their right to salamis. aristarchus also discussed _iliad_, ii. 553, 555, to which the spartans appealed on the question of supreme command against persia (herodotus, vii. 159). again aristarchus said nothing, or nothing that has reached us, about athenian interpolation. once more, odyssey, ii. 631, was said by hereas, a megarian writer, to have been interpolated by pisistratus (plutarch.) but "the scholia that represent the teaching of aristarchus" never make any reference to the alleged dealings of pisistratus with the _iliad_. the silence of aristarchus, however, affords no safe ground of argument to believers or disbelievers in the original edition written out by order of pisistratus. it can never be proved that the scholiasts did not omit what aristarchus said, though we do not know why they should have done so; and it can never be proved that aristarchus was ignorant of the traditions about pisistratus, or that he thought them unworthy of notice. all is matter of conjecture on these points. mr. leaf's conversion to belief in the story that our _iliad_ was practically edited and first committed to writing under pisistratus appears to be due to the probability that aristarchus must have known the tradition. but if he did, there is no proof that he accepted it as historically authentic. there is not, in fact, any proof even that aristarchus must have known the tradition. he had probably read dieuchidas of megara, for "wilamowitz has shown that dieuchidas wrote in the fourth century." [footnote: _iliad_, vol. i. p. xix.] but, unluckily, we do not know that dieuchidas stated that the _iliad_ was made and first committed to writing in the sixth century b.c. no mortal knows what dieuchidas said: and, again, what dieuchidas said is not evidence. he wrote as a partisan in a historical dispute. the story about pisistratus and his editor, the practical maker of the _iliad_, is interwoven with a legend about an early appeal, in the beginning of the sixth century b.c., to homer as an historical authority. the athenians and megarians, contending for the possession of the island of salamis, the home of the hero aias, are said to have laid their differences before the spartans (_cir._ 600-580 b.c.). each party quoted homer as evidence. aristotle, who, as we saw, mentions the tale (rhetoric, i. 15), merely says that the athenians cited _iliad_, ii. 558: "aias led and stationed his men where the phalanxes of the athenians were posted." aristarchus condemned this line, not (as far as evidence goes) because there was a tradition that the athenians had interpolated it to prove their point, but because he thought it inconsistent with _iliad_, iii. 230; iv. 251, which, if i may differ from so great a critic, it is not; these two passages deal, not with the position of the camps, but of the men in the field on a certain occasion. but if aristarchus had thought the tradition of athenian interpolation of ii. 558 worthy of notice, he might have mentioned it in support of his opinion. perhaps he did. no reference to his notice has reached us. however this may be, mr. leaf mainly bases his faith in the pisistratean editor (apparently, we shall see, an asiatic greek, residing in athens), on a fragmentary passage of diogenes laertius (third century a.d.), concerned with the tale of homer's being cited about 600-580 b.c. as an authority for the early ownership of salamis. in this text diogenes quotes dieuchidas as saying something about pisistratus in relation to the homeric poems, but what dieuchidas really said is unknown, for a part has dropped out of the text. the text of diogenes laertius runs thus (solon, i. 57): "he (solon) decreed that the homeric poems should be recited by rhapsodists [greek text: ex hypobolaes]" (words of disputed sense), so that where the first reciter left off thence should begin his successor. it was rather solon, then, than pisistratus who brought homer to light ([greek text: ephotisen]), as diogenes says in the fifth book of his _megarica_. and _the lines_ were _especially these_: "they who held athens," &c. (_iliad_, ii. 546-558), the passage on which the athenians rested in their dispute with the megarians. and _what_ "lines were especially these"? mr. leaf fills up the gap in the sense, after "pisistratus" thus, "for it was he" (solon) "who interpolated lines in the _catalogue_, and not pisistratus." he says: "the natural sense of the passage as it stands" (in diogenes laertius) "is this: it was not peisistratos, as is generally supposed, but solon _who collected the scattered homer_ of _his_ day, for he it was who interpolated the lines in the _catalogue of the ships_".... but diogenes neither says for himself nor quotes from dieuchidas anything about "collecting the scattered homer of his day." that pisistratus did so is mr. leafs theory, but there is not a hint about anybody collecting anything in the greek. ritschl, indeed, conjecturally supplying the gap in the text of diogenes, invented the words, "who _collected_ the homeric poems, and inserted some things to please the athenians." but mr. leaf rejects that conjecture as "clearly wrong." then why does he adopt, as "the natural sense of the passage," "it was not peisistratos but solon who _collected_ the scattered homer of his day?" [footnote: _iliad_, vol. i. p. xviii.] the testimony of dieuchidas, as far as we can see in the state of the text, "refers," as mr. monro says, "to the _interpolation_ that has just been mentioned, and need not extend further back." "interpolation is a process that postulates a text in which the additional verses can be inserted," whereas, if i understand mr. leaf, the very first text, in his opinion, was that compiled by the editor for pisistratus. [footnote: monro, odyssey, vol. ii. pp. 400 410, especially pp. 408-409.] mr. leaf himself dismisses the story of the athenian appeal to homer for proof of their claim as "a fiction." if, so, it does not appear that ancient commentaries on a fiction are of any value as proof that pisistratus produced the earliest edition of the _iliad_. [footnote: mr. leaf adds that, except in one disputed line (_iliad_, ii. 558) aias "is not, in the _iliad_, encamped next the athenians." his proofs of this odd oversight of the fraudulent interpolator, who should have altered the line, are _iliad_, iv. 327 ff, and xii. 681 ff. in the former passage we find odysseus stationed next to the athenians. but odysseus would have neighbours on either hand. in the second passage we find the athenians stationed next to the boeotians and ionians, but the athenians, too, had neighbours on either side. the arrangement was, on the achaean extreme left, protesilaus's command (he was dead), and that of aias; then the boeotians and ionians, with "the picked men of the athenians"; and then odysseus, on the boeotolono-athenian right; or so the athenians would read the passage. the texts must have seemed favourable to the fraudulent athenian interpolator denounced by the megarians, or he would have altered them. mr. leaf, however, argues that line 558 of book ii. "cannot be original, as is patent from the fact that aias in the rest of the _iliad_ is not encamped next the athenians" (see iv. 327; xiii. 681). the megarians do not seem to have seen it, or they would have cited these passages. but why argue at all about the megarian story if it be a fiction? mr. leaf takes the brief bald mention of aias in _iliad_, ii. 558 as "a mocking cry from athens over the conquest of the island of the aiakidai." but as, in this same _catalogue_, aias is styled "by far the best of warriors" after achilles (ii. 768), while there is no more honourable mention made of diomede than that he had "a loud war cry" (ii. 568), or of menelaus but that he was also sonorous, and while nestor, the ancestor of pisistratus, receives not even that amount of praise (line 601), "the mocking cry from athens" appears a vain imagination.] the lines disputed by the megarians occur in the _catalogue_, and, as to the date and original purpose of the _catalogue_, the most various opinions prevail. in mr. leaf's earlier edition of the _iliad_ (vol. i. p. 37), he says that "nothing convincing has been urged to show" that the _catalogue_ is "of late origin." we know, from the story of solon and the megarians, that the _catalogue_ "was considered a classical work--the domesday book of greece, at a very early date"--say 600-580 b.c. "it agrees with the poems in being pre-dorian" (except in lines 653-670). "there seems therefore to be no valid reason for doubting that it, like the bulk of the _iliad_ and _odyssey_, was composed in achaean times, and carried with the emigrants to the coast of asia minor...." in his new edition (vol. ii. p. 86), mr. leaf concludes that the _catalogue_ "originally formed an introduction to the whole cycle," the compiling of "the whole cycle" being of uncertain date, but very late indeed, on any theory. the author "studiously preserves an ante-dorian standpoint. it is admitted that there can be little doubt that some of the material, at least, is old." these opinions are very different from those expressed by mr. leaf in 1886. he cannot now give "even an approximate date for the composition of the _catalogue_" which, we conceive, must be the latest thing in homer, if it was composed "for that portion of the whole cycle which, as worked up in a separate poem, was called the _kypria_" for the _kypria_ is obviously a very late performance, done as a prelude to the _iliad_. i am unable to imagine how this mutilated passage of diogenes, even if rightly restored, proves that dieuchidas, a writer of the fourth century b.c., alleged that pisistratus made a collection of scattered homeric poems--in fact, made "a standard text." the pisistratean hypothesis "was not so long ago unfashionable, but in the last few years a clear reaction has set in," says mr. leaf. [footnote: _iliad_, i. p. xix.] the reaction has not affected that celebrated scholar, dr. blass, who, with teutonic frankness, calls the pisistratean edition "an absurd legend." [footnote: blass, die _interpolationen_ in der _odyssee_, pp. i, 2. halle, 1904.] meyer says that the alexandrians rejected the pisistratean story "as a worthless fable," differing here from mr. leaf and wilamowitz; and he spurns the legend, saying that it is incredible that the whole greek world would allow the tyrants of athens to palm off a homer on them. [footnote: meyer, _geschichte des alterthums_, ii. 390, 391. 1893.] mr. t. w. allen, an eminent textual scholar, treats the pisistratean editor with no higher respect. in an egyptian papyrus containing a fragment of julius africanus, a christian chronologer, mr. allen finds him talking confidently of the pisistratidae. they "stitched together the rest of the epic," but excised some magical formulae which julius africanus preserves. mr. allen remarks: "the statements about pisistratus belong to a well-established category, that of homeric mythology.... the anecdotes about pisistratus and the poet himself are on a par with dares, who 'wrote the _iliad_ before homer.'" [footnote: _classical review_ xviii. 148.] the editor of pisistratus is hardly in fashion, though that is of no importance. of importance is the want of evidence for the editor, and, as we have shown, the impossible character of the task allotted to him by the theory. as i suppose mr. leaf to insinuate, "fashion" has really nothing to do with the question. people who disbelieve in written texts must, and do, oscillate between the theory of an homeric "school" and the wolfian theory that pisistratus, or solon, or somebody procured the making of the first written text at athens in the sixth century--a theory which fails to account for the harmony of the picture of life in the poems, and, as mr. monro, grote, nutzhorn, and many others argue, lacks evidence. as mr. monro reasons, and as blass states the case bluntly, "solon, or pisistratus, or whoever it was, put a stop, at least as far as athens was concerned, to the mangling of homer" by the rhapsodists or reciters, each anxious to choose a pet passage, and not going through the whole _iliad_ in due sequence. "but the unity existed before the mangling. that this has been so long and so stubbornly misunderstood is no credit to german scholarship: blind uncritical credulity on one side, limitless and arbitrary theorising on the other!" we are not solitary sceptics when we decline to accept the theory of mr. leaf. it is neither bottomed on evidence nor does it account for the facts in the case. that is to say, the evidence appeals to mr. leaf as valid, but is thought worse than inadequate by other great scholars, such as monro and blass; while the fact of the harmony of the picture of life, preserved through four or five centuries, appears to be left without explanation. mr. leaf holds that, in order to organise recitations in due sequence, the making of a text, presenting, for the first time, a due sequence, was necessary. his opponents hold that the sequence already existed, but was endangered by the desultory habits of the rhapsodists. we must here judge each for himself; there is no court of final appeal. i confess to feeling some uncertainty about the correctness of my statement of mr. leaf's opinions. he and i both think an early attic "recension" probable, or almost certain. but (see' "conclusion") i regard such recension as distinct from the traditional "edition" of pisistratus. mr. leaf, i learn, does not regard the "edition" as having "made" the _iliad_; yet his descriptions of the processes and methods of his pisistratean editor correspond to my idea of the "making" of our _iliad_ as it stands. see, for example, mr. leaf's introduction to _iliad_, book ii. he will not even insist on the early attic as the first _written_ text; if it was not, its general acceptance seems to remain a puzzle. he discards the idea of one homeric "school" of paramount authority, but presumes that, as recitation was a profession, there must have been schools. we do not hear of them or know the nature of their teaching. the beauvais "school" of _jongleurs_ in lent (fourteenth century a.d.) seems to have been a holiday conference of strollers. chapter iv loose feudalism: the over-lord in "iliad," books i. and ii. we now try to show that the epics present an historical unity, a complete and harmonious picture of an age, in its political, social, legal, and religious aspects; in its customs, and in its military equipment. a long epic can only present an unity of historical ideas if it be the work of one age. wandering minstrels, living through a succession of incompatible ages, civic, commercial, democratic, could not preserve, without flaw or failure, the attitude, in the first place, of the poet of feudal princes towards an over-lord who rules them by undisputed right divine, but rules weakly, violently, unjustly, being subject to gusts of arrogance, and avarice, and repentance. late poets not living in feudal society, and unfamiliar alike with its customary law, its jealousy of the over-lord, its conservative respect for his consecrated function, would inevitably miss the proper tone, and fail in some of the many [blank space] of the feudal situation. this is all the more certain, if we accept mr. leaf's theory that each poet-rhapsodist's _répertoire_ varied from the _répertoires_ of the rest. there could be no unity of treatment in their handling of the character and position of the over-lord and of the customary law that regulates his relations with his peers. again, no editor of 540 b.c. could construct an harmonious picture of the over-lord in relation to the princes out of the fragmentary _répertoires_ of strolling rhapsodists, which now lay before him in written versions. if the editor could do this, he was a man of shakespearian genius, and had minute knowledge of a dead society. this becomes evident when, in place of examining the _iliad_ through microscopes, looking out for discrepancies, we study it in its large lines as a literary whole. the question being, is the _iliad_ a literary whole or a mere literary mosaic? we must ask "what, taking it provisionally as a literary whole, are the qualities of the poet as a painter of what we may call feudal society?" choosing the part of the over-lord agamemnon, we must not forget that he is one of several analogous figures in the national poetry and romance of other feudal ages. of that great analogous figure, charlemagne, and of his relations with his peers in the earlier and later french mediaeval epics we shall later speak. another example is arthur, in some romances "the blameless king," in others _un roi fainéant_. the parallel irish case is found in the irish saga of diarmaid and grainne. we read mr. o'grady's introduction on the position of eionn mac cumhail, the legendary over-lord of ireland, the agamemnon of the celts. "fionn, like many men in power, is variable; he is at times magnanimous, at other times tyrannical and petty. diarmaid, oisin, oscar, and caoilte mac rohain are everywhere the [greek: kaloi kachotoi] of the fenians; of them we never hear anything bad." [footnote: _transactions of the ossianic_ society, vol. iii. p. 39.] human nature eternally repeats itself in similar conditions of society, french, norse, celtic, and achaean. "we never hear anything bad" of diomede, odysseus, or aias, and the evil in achilles's resentment up to a certain point is legal, and not beyond what the poet thinks natural and pardonable in his circumstances. the poet's view of agamemnon is expressed in the speeches and conduct of the peers. in book i. we see the bullying truculence of agamemnon, wreaked first on the priest of apollo, chryses, then in threats against the prophet chalcas, then in menaces against any prince on whom he chooses to avenge his loss of fair chryseis, and, finally, in the seizure of briseis from achilles. this part of the first book of the _iliad_ is confessedly original, and there is no varying, throughout the epic, from the strong and delicate drawing of an historical situation, and of a complex character. agamemnon is truculent, and eager to assert his authority, but he is also possessed of a heavy sense of his responsibilities, which often unmans him. he has a legal right to a separate "prize of honour" (geras) after each capture of spoil. considering the wrath of apollo for the wrong done in refusing his priest's offered ransom for his daughter, agamemnon will give her back, "if that is better; rather would i see my folks whole than perishing." [footnote: _iliad_, i. 115-117.] here we note points of feudal law and of kingly character. the giving and taking of ransom exists as it did in the middle ages; ransom is refused, death is dealt, as the war becomes more fierce towards its close. agamemnon has sense enough to waive his right to the girlish prize, for the sake of his people, but is not so generous as to demand no compensation. but there are no fresh spoils to apportion, and the over-lord threatens to take the prize of one of his peers, even of achilles. thereon achilles does what was frequently done in the feudal age of western europe, he "renounces his fealty," and will return to phthia. he adds insult, "thou dog-face!" the whole situation, we shall show, recurs again and again in the epics of feudal france, the later epics of feudal discontent. agamemnon replies that achilles may do as he pleases. "i have others by my side that shall do me honour, and, above all, zeus, lord of counsel" (i. 175). he rules, literally, by divine right, and we shall see that, in the french feudal epics, as in homer, this claim of divine right is granted, even in the case of an insolent and cowardly over-lord. achilles half draws "his great sword," one of the long, ponderous cut-and-thrust bronze swords of which we have actual examples from mycenae and elsewhere. he is restrained by athene, visible only to him. "with words, indeed," she says, "revile him .... hereafter shall goodly gifts come to thee, yea, in threefold measure...." gifts of atonement for "surquedry," like that of agamemnon, are given and received in the french epics, for example, in the [blank space]. the _iliad_ throughout exhibits much interest in such gifts, and in the customary law as to their acceptance, and other ritual or etiquette of reconciliation. this fact, it will be shown, accounts for a passage which critics reject, and which is tedious to our taste, as it probably was tedious to the age of the supposed late poets themselves. (book xix.). but the taste of a feudal audience, as of the audience of the saga men, delighted in "realistic" descriptions of their own customs and customary law, as in descriptions of costume and armour. this is fortunate for students of customary law and costume, but wearies hearers and readers who desire the action to advance. passages of this kind would never be inserted by late poets, who had neither the knowledge of, nor any interest in, the subjects. to return to achilles, he is now within his right; the moral goddess assures him of that, and he is allowed to give the reins to his tongue, as he does in passages to which the mediaeval epics offer many parallels. in the mediaeval epics, as in homer, there is no idea of recourse to a duel between the over-lord and his peer. achilles accuses agamemnon of drunkenness, greed, and poltroonery. he does not return home, but swears by the sceptre that agamemnon shall rue his _outrecuidance_ when hector slays the host. by the law of the age achilles remains within his right. his violent words are not resented by the other peers. they tacitly admit, as athene admits, that achilles has the right, being so grievously injured, to "renounce his fealty," till agamemnon makes apology and gives gifts of atonement. such, plainly, is the unwritten feudal law, which gives to the over-lord the lion's share of booty, the initiative in war and council, and the right to command; but limits him by the privilege of the peers to renounce their fealty under insufferable provocation. in no book is agamemnon so direfully insulted as in the first, which is admitted to be of the original "kernel." elsewhere the sympathy of the poet occasionally enables him to feel the elements of pathos in the position of the over-tasked king of men. as concerns the apology and the gifts of atonement, the poet has feudal customary law and usage clearly before his eyes. he knows exactly what is due, and the limits of the rights of over-lord and prince, matters about which the late ionian poets could only pick up information by a course of study in constitutional history--the last thing they were likely to attempt--unless we suppose that they all kept their eyes on the "kernel," and that steadily, through centuries, generations of strollers worked on the lines laid down in that brief poem. thus the poet of book ix.--one of "the latest expansions,"--thoroughly understands the legal and constitutional situation, as between agamemnon and achilles. or rather all the poets who collaborated in book ix., which "had grown by a process of accretion," [footnote: leaf, iliad, vol. i. p. 371.] understood the legal situation. returning to the poet's conception of agamemnon, we find in the character of agamemnon himself the key to the difficulties which critics discover in the second book. the difficulty is that when zeus, won over to the cause of achilles by thetis, sends a false dream to agamemnon, the dream tells the prince that he shall at once take troy, and bids him summon the host to arms. but agamemnon, far from doing that, summons the host to a peaceful assembly, with the well-known results of demoralisation. mr. leaf explains the circumstances on his own theory of expansions compiled into a confused whole by a late editor. he thinks that probably there were two varying versions even of this earliest book of the poem. in one (a), the story went on from the quarrel between agamemnon and achilles, to the holding of a general assembly "to consider the altered state of affairs." this is the assembly of book h, but debate, in version a, was opened by thersites, not by agamemnon, and thersites proposed instant flight! that was probably the earlier version. in the other early version (b), after the quarrel between the chiefs, the story did not, as in a, go on straight to the assembly, but achilles appealed to his mother, the fair sea-goddess, as in our iliad, and she obtained from zeus, as in the actual _iliad_, his promise to honour achilles by giving victory, in his absence, to the trojans. the poet of version b, in fact, created the beautiful figure of thetis, so essential to the development of the tenderness that underlies the ferocity of achilles. the other and earliest poet, who treated of the wrath of the author of version a, neglected that opportunity with all that it involved, and omitted the purpose of zeus, which is mentioned in the fifth line of the epic. the editor of 540 b.c., seeing good in both versions, a and b, "combined his information," and produced books i. and ii. of the _iliad_ as they stand. [footnote: leaf, _iliad_, vol. i. p. 47.] mr. leaf suggests that "there is some ground for supposing that the oldest version of the wrath of achilles did not contain the promise of zeus to thetis; it was a tale played exclusively on the earthly stage." [footnote: _ibid_, vol. i. p. xxiii.] in that case the author of the oldest form (a) must have been a poet very inferior indeed to the later author of b who took up and altered his work. in _his_ version, book i. does not end with the quarrel of the princes, but achilles receives, with all the courtesy of his character, the unwelcome heralds of agamemnon, and sends briseis with them to the over-lord. he then with tears appeals to his goddess-mother, thetis of the sea, who rose from the grey mere like a mist, leaving the sea deeps where she dwelt beside her father, the ancient one of the waters. then sat she face to face with her son as he let the tears down fall, and caressed him, saying, "child, wherefore weepest thou, for what sorrow of heart? hide it not, tell it to me; that i may know it as well as thou." here the poet strikes the keynote of the character of achilles, the deadly in war, the fierce in council, who weeps for his lost lady and his wounded honour, and cries for help to his mother, as little children cry. such is the achilles of the _iliad_ throughout and consistently, but such he was not to the mind of mr. leaf's probably elder poet, the author of version a. thetis, in version b, promises to persuade zeus to honour achilles by making agamemnon rue his absence, and, twelve days after the quarrel, wins the god's consent. in book ii. zeus reflects on his promise, and sends a false dream to beguile agamemnon, promising that now he shall take troy. agamemnon, while asleep, is full of hope; but when he wakens he dresses in mufti, in a soft doublet, a cloak, and sandals; takes his sword (swords were then worn as part of civil costume), and the ancestral sceptre, which he wields in peaceful assemblies. day dawns, and "he bids the heralds...." a break here occurs, according to the theory. here (_iliad_, book ii., line 50) the kernel ceases, mr. leaf says, and the editor of 540 b.c. plays his pranks for a while. the kernel (or one of the _two_ kernels), we are to take up again at book ii., 443-483, and thence "skip" to xi. 56, and now "we have a narrative masterly in conception and smooth in execution," [footnote: _iliad_, vol. i. p. 47.] says mr. leaf. this kernel is kernel b, probably the later kernel of the pair, that in which achilles appeals to his lady mother, who wins from zeus the promise to cause achaean defeat, till achilles is duly honoured. the whole epic turns on this promise of zeus, as announced in the fifth, sixth, and seventh lines of the very first book. if kernel a is the first kernel, the poet left out the essence of the plot he had announced. however, let us first examine probable kernel b, reading, as advised, book ii. 1-50, [blank space]; xi. 56 ff. we left agamemnon (though the dream bade him summon the host to arms) dressed in _civil costume_. his ancestral sceptre in his hand, he is going to hold a deliberative assembly of the unarmed host. his attire proves that fact ([greek: _prepodaes de ae stolae to epi boulaen exionti_], says the scholiast). then if we skip, as advised, to ii. 443-483 he bids the heralds call the host not to peaceful council, for which his costume is appropriate, but to _war_! the host gathers, "and in their midst the lord agamemnon,"--still in civil costume, with his sceptre (he has not changed his attire as far as we are told)--"in face and eyes like zeus; in waist like ares" (god of war); "in breast like poseidon,"--yet, for all that we are told, entirely unarmed! the host, however, were dressed "in innumerable bronze," "war was sweeter to them than to depart in their ships to their dear native land,"--so much did athene encourage them. but nobody had been speaking of flight, in the kernel b: that proposal was originally made by thersites, in kernel a, and was attributed to agamemnon in the part of book ii. where the editor blends a and b. this part, at present, mr. leaf throws aside as a very late piece of compilation. turning next, as directed, to xi. 56, we find the trojans deploying in arms, and the hosts encounter with fury--agamemnon still, for all that appears, in the raiment of peace, and with the sceptre of constitutional monarchy. "in he rushed, first of all, and slew bienor," and many other gentlemen of troy, not with his sceptre! clearly all this is the reverse of "a narrative masterly in conception and smooth in execution:" it is an impossible narrative. mr. leaf has attempted to disengage one of two forms of the old original poem from the parasitic later growths; he has promised to show us a smooth and masterly narrative, and the result is a narrative on which no achasan poet could have ventured. in ii. 50 the heralds are bidden [greek: _kurussein_], that is to summon the host--to _what_? to a peaceful assembly, as agamemnon's costume proves, says the next line (ii. 51), but that is excised by mr. leaf, and we go on to ii. 443, and the reunited passage now reads, "agamemnon bade the loud heralds" (ii. 50) "call the achaeans to battle" (ii. 443), and they came, in harness, but their leader--when did he exchange chiton, cloak, and sceptre for helmet, shield, and spear? a host appears in arms; a king who set out with sceptre and doublet is found with a spear, in bronze armour: and not another word is said about the dream of agamemnon. it is perfectly obvious and certain that the two pieces of the broken kernel b do not fit together at all. nor is this strange, if the kernel was really broken and endured the insertion of matter enough to fill nine books (il-xl). if kernel b really contained book ii., line 50, as mr. leaf avers, if agamemnon, as in that line (50) "bade the clear-voiced heralds do...." something--what he bade them do was, necessarily, as his peaceful costume proves, to summon the peaceful assembly which he was to moderate with his sceptre. at such an assembly, or at a preliminary council of chiefs, he would assuredly speak of his dream, as he does in the part excised. mr. leaf, if he will not have a peaceful assembly as part of kernel b, must begin his excision at the middle of line 42, in ii., where agamemnon wakens; and must make him dress not in mufti but in armour, and call the host of the achaeans to arm, as the dream bade him do, and as he does in ii. 443. perhaps we should then excise ii. 45 2, 45 3, with the reference to the plan of retreat, for _that_ is part of kernel a where there was no promise of zeus, and no dream sent to agamemnon. then from ii. 483, the description of the glorious armed aspect of agamemnon, mr. leaf may pass to xi. 56, the account of the trojans under hector, of the battle, of the prowess of agamemnon, inspired by the dream which he, contrary to homeric and french epic custom, has very wisely mentioned to nobody--that is, in the part not excised. this appears to be the only method by which mr. leaf can restore the continuity of his kernel b. though mr. leaf has failed to fit book xi. to any point in book ii., of course it does not follow that book xi. cannot be a continuation of the original _wrath_ of _achilles_ (version b). if so, we understand why agamemnon plucks up heart, in book xi., and is the chief cause of a temporary trojan reverse. he relies on the dream sent from zeus in the opening lines of book ii., the dream which was not in kernel a; the dream which he communicated to nobody; the dream conveying the promise that he should at once take troy. this is perhaps a tenable theory, though agamemnon had much reason to doubt whether the host would obey his command to arm, but an alternative theory of why and wherefore agamemnon does great feats of valour, in book xi., will later be propounded. note that the events of books xl.-xviii., by mr. leaf's theory, all occur on the very day after thetis (according to kernel b)' [79] obtains from zeus his promise to honour achilles by the discomfiture of the achaeans; they have suffered nothing till that moment, as far as we learn, from the absence of achilles and his 2500 men: allowing for casualties, say 2000. so far we have traced--from books i. and ii. to book xi.--the fortunes of kernel b, of the supposed later of two versions of the opening of the _iliad_. but there may have been a version (a) probably earlier, we have been told, in which achilles did not appeal to his mother, nor she to zeus, and zeus did not promise victory to the trojans, and sent no false dream of success to agamemnon. what were the fortunes of that oldest of all old kernels? in this version (a) agamemnon, having had no dream, summoned a peaceful assembly to discuss the awkwardness caused by the mutiny of achilles. the host met (_iliad,_ ii. 87-99). here we pass from line 99 to 212-242: thersites it is who opens the debate, (in version a) insults agamemnon, and advises flight. the army rushed off to launch the ships, as in ii. 142-210, and were brought back by odysseus, who made a stirring speech, and was well backed by agamemnon, urging to battle. version a appears to us to have been a version that no heroic audience would endure. a low person like thersites opens a debate in an assembly called by the over-lord; this could not possibly pass unchallenged among listeners living in the feudal age. when a prince called an assembly, he himself opened the debate, as achilles does in book i. 54-67. that a lewd fellow, the buffoon and grumbler of the host, of "the people," nameless and silent throughout the epic, should rush in and open debate in an assembly convoked by the over-lord, would have been regarded by feudal hearers, or by any hearers with feudal traditions, as an intolerable poetical license. thersites would have been at once pulled down and beaten; the host would not have rushed to the ships on _his_ motion. any feudal audience would know better than to endure such an impossibility; they would have asked, "how could thersites speak--without the sceptre?" as the poem stands, and ought to stand, nobody less than the over-lord, acting within his right, ([greek: ae themis esti] ii. 73), could suggest the flight of the host, and be obeyed. it is the absolute demoralisation of the host, in consequence of the strange test of their lord, agamemnon, making a feigned proposal to fly, and it is their confused, bewildered return to the assembly under the persuasions of odysseus, urged by athene, that alone, in the poem, give thersites his unique opportunity to harangue. when the over-lord had called an assembly the first word, of course, was for to speak, as he does in the poem as it stands. that thersifes should rise in the arrogance bred by the recent disorderly and demoralised proceedings is one thing; that he should open the debate when excitement was eager to hear agamemnon, and before demoralisation set in, is quite another. we never hear again of thersites, or of any one of the commonalty, daring to open his mouth in an assembly. thersites sees his one chance, the chance of a life time, and takes it; because agamemnon, by means of the test--a proposal to flee homewards--which succeeded, it is said, in the case of cortès,--has reduced the host, already discontented, to a mob. before agamemnon thus displayed his ineptitude, as he often does later, thersites had no chance. all this appears sufficiently obvious, if we put ourselves at the point of view of the original listeners. thersites merely continues, in full assembly, the mutinous babble which he has been pouring out to his neighbours during the confused rush to launch the ships and during the return produced by the influence of odysseus. the poet says so himself (_iliad_, ii. 212). "the rest sat down ... only thersites still chattered on." no original poet could manage the situation in any other way. we have now examined mr. leaf's two supposed earliest versions of the beginning of the _iliad_. his presumed earlier version (a), with no thetis, no promise of zeus, and no dream, and with thersites opening debate, is jejune, unpoetical, and omits the gentler and most winning aspect of the character of achilles, while it could not possibly have been accepted by a feudal audience for the reasons already given. his presumed later version (b), with thetis, zeus, and the false dream, cannot be, or certainly has not been, brought by mr. leaf into congruous connection with book xi., and it results in the fighting of the _unarmed_ agamemnon, which no poet could have been so careless as to invent. agamemnon could not go into battle without helmet, shield, and spears (the other armour we need not dwell upon here), and thersites could not have opened a debate when the over-lord had called the assembly, nor could he have moved the chiefs to prepare for flight, unless, as in the actual _iliad_, they had already been demoralised by the result of the feigned proposal of flight by agamemnon, and its effect upon the host. probably every reader who understands heroic society, temper, and manners will, so far, agree with us. our own opinion is that the difficulties in the poem are caused partly by the poet's conception of the violent, wavering, excitable, and unstable character of agamemnon; partly by some accident, now indiscoverable, save by conjecture, which has happened to the text. the story in the actual _iliad_ is that zeus, planning disaster for the achaeans, in accordance with his promise to thetis, sends a false dream, to tell agamemnon that he will take troy instantly. he is bidden by the dream to summon the host to arms. agamemnon, _still asleep_, "has in his mind things not to be fulfilled: him seemeth that he shall take priam's town that very day" (ii. 36, 37). "then he awoke" (ii. 41), and, obviously, was no longer so sanguine, once awake! being a man crushed by his responsibility, and, as commander-in-chief, extremely timid, though personally brave, he disobeys the dream, dresses in civil costume, and summons the host to a _peaceful_ assembly, not to war, as the dream bade him do. probably he thought that the host was disaffected, and wanted to argue with them, in place of commanding. here it is that the difficulty comes in, and our perplexity is increased by our ignorance of the regular procedure in homeric times. was the host not in arms and fighting every day, when there was no truce? there seems to have been no armistice after the mutiny of achilles, for we are told that, in the period between his mutiny and the day of the dream of agamemnon, achilles "was neither going to the assembly, nor into battle, but wasted his heart, abiding there, longing for war and the slogan" (i. 489, 492). thus it seems that war went on, and that assemblies were being held, in the absence of achilles. it appears, however, that the fighting was mere skirmishing and raiding, no general onslaught was attempted; and from book ii. _73_, 83 it seems to have been a matter of doubt, with agamemnon and nestor, whether the army would venture a pitched battle. it also appears, from the passage cited (i. 489, 492) that assemblies were being regularly held; we are told that achilles did not attend them. yet, when we come to the assembly (ii. 86-100) it seems to have been a special and exciting affair, to judge by the brilliant picture of the crowds, the confusion, and the cries. nothing of the sort is indicated in the meeting of the assembly in i. _54-5_ 8. why is there so much excitement at the assembly of book ii.? partly because it was summoned _at_ dawn, whereas the usual thing was for the host to meet in arms before fighting on the plain or going on raids; assemblies were held when the day's work was over. the host, therefore, when summoned to an assembly _at dawn_, expects to hear of something out of the common--as the mutiny of achilles suggests--and is excited. we must ask, then, why does agamemnon, after the dream has told him merely to summon the host to arm--a thing of daily routine--call a deliberative morning assembly, a thing clearly not of routine? if agamemnon is really full of confidence, inspired by the dream, why does he determine, not to do what is customary, call the men to arms, but as jeanne d'arc said to the dauphin, to "hold such long and weary councils"? mr. jevons speaks of agamemnon's "confidence in the delusive dream" as at variance with his proceedings, and would excise ii. 35-41, "the only lines which represent agamemnon as confidently believing in the dream." [footnote: _journal_ of _hellenic_ studies, vol. vii. pp. 306, 307.] but the poet never once says that agamemnon, awake, did believe confidently in the dream! agamemnon dwelt with hope _while_ asleep; when he wakened--he went and called a peaceful morning assembly, though the dream bade him call to arms. he did not dare to risk his authority. this was exactly in keeping with his character. the poet should have said, "when he woke, the dream appeared to him rather poor security for success" (saying so in poetic language, of course), and then there would be no difficulty in the summoning of an assembly at dawn. but either the poet expected us to understand the difference between the hopes of agamemnon sleeping, and the doubts of agamemnon waking to chill realities--an experience common to all of us who dream--or some explanatory lines have been dropped out--one or two would have cleared up the matter. if i am right, the poet has not been understood. people have not observed that agamemnon hopes while asleep, and doubts, and acts on his doubt, when awake. thus mr. leaf writes: "elated by the dream, as we are led to suppose, agamemnon summons the army--to lead them into battle? nothing of the sort; he calls them to assembly." [footnote: _iliad_, vol. ii. p. 46.] but we ought not to have been led to suppose that the waking agamemnon was so elated as the sleeping agamemnon. he was "disillusioned" on waking; his conduct proves it; he did not know what to think about the dream; he did not know how the host would take the dream; he doubted whether they would fight at his command, so he called an assembly. mr. jevons very justly cites a parallel case. grote has remarked that in book vii. of herodotus, "the dream sent by the gods to frighten xerxes when about to recede from his project," has "a marked parallel in the _iliad_." thus xerxes, after the defection of artabanus, was despondent, like agamemnon after the mutiny of achilles, and was about to recede from his project. to both a delusive dream is sent urging them to proceed. xerxes calls an assembly, however, and says that he will not proceed. why? because, says herodotus, "when day came, he thought nothing of his dream." agamemnon, once awake, thought doubtfully of _his_ dream; he called a privy council, told the princes about his dream--of which nestor had a very dubious opinion--and said that he would try the temper of the army by proposing instant flight: the chiefs should restrain the men if they were eager to run away. now the epic prose narrative of herodotus is here clearly based on _iliad_, ii., which herodotus must have understood as i do. but in homer there is no line to say--and one line or two would have been enough--that agamemnon, when awake, doubted, like xerxes, though agamemnon, when asleep, had been confident. the necessary line, for all that we know, still existed in the text used by herodotus. homer may lose a line as well as dieuchidas of megara, or rather diogenes laertius. juvenal lost a whole passage, re-discovered by mr. winstedt in a bodleian manuscript. if homer expected modern critics to note the delicate distinction between agamemnon asleep and agamemnon awake, or to understand agamemnon's character, he expected too much. [footnote: cf. jevons, _journal of hellenic studies_, vol. vii. pp. 306, 307.] the poet then treats the situation on these lines: agamemnon, awake and free from illusion, does not obey the dream, does _not_ call the army to war; he takes a middle course. in the whole passage the poet's main motive, as mr. monro remarks with obvious truth, is "to let his audience become acquainted with the temper and spirit of the army as it was affected by the long siege ... and by the events of the first book." [footnote: monro, _iliad_, vol. i. p. 261.] the poet could not obtain his object if agamemnon merely gave the summons to battle; and he thinks agamemnon precisely the kind of waverer who will call, first the privy council of the chiefs, and then an assembly. herein the homesick host will display its humours, as it does with a vengeance. agamemnon next tells his dream to the chiefs (if he had a dream of this kind he would most certainly tell it), and adds (as has been already stated) that he will first test the spirit of the army by a feigned proposal of return to greece, while the chiefs are to restrain them if they rush to launch the ships. nestor hints that there is not much good in attending to dreams; however, this is the dream of the over-lord, who is the favoured of zeus. agamemnon next, addressing the assembly, says that posterity will think it a shameful thing that the achaeans raised the siege of a town with a population much smaller than their own army; but allies from many cities help the trojans, and are too strong for him, whether posterity understands that or not. "let us flee with our ships!" on this the host break up, in a splendid passage of poetry, and rush to launch the ships, the passion of _nostalgie_ carrying away even the chiefs, it appears--a thing most natural in the circumstances. but athene finds odysseus in grief: "neither laid he any hand upon his ship," as the others did, and she encouraged him to stop the flight. this he does, taking the sceptre of agamemnon from his unnerved hand. he goes about reminding the princes "have we not heard agamemnon's real intention in council?" (ii. 188-197), and rating the common sort. the assembly meets again in great confusion; thersites seizes the chance to be insolent, and is beaten by odysseus. the host then arms for battle. the poet has thus shown agamemnon in the colours which he wears consistently all through the _iliad_. he has, as usual, contrasted with him odysseus, the type of a wise and resolute man. this contrast the poet maintains without fail throughout. he has shown us the temper of the weary, home-sick army, and he has persuaded us that he knows how subtle, dangerous, and contagious a thing is military panic. thus, at least, i venture to read the passage, which, thus read, is perfectly intelligible. agamemnon is no personal coward, but the burden of the safety of the host overcomes him later, and he keeps suggesting flight in the ships, as we shall see. suppose, then, we read on from ii. 40 thus: "the dream left him thinking of things not to be, even that on this day he shall take the town of priam.... but he awoke from sleep with the divine voice ringing in his ears. (_then it seemed him that some dreams are true and_ some _false, for all do_ not _come through the gate of_ horn.) so he arose and sat up and did on his soft tunic, and his great cloak, and grasped his ancestral sceptre ... and bade the clear-voiced heralds summon the achaeans of the long locks to the deliberative assembly." he then, as in ii. 53-75 told his dream to the preliminary council, and proposed that he should try the temper of the host by proposing flight--which, if it began, the chiefs were to restrain--before giving orders to arm. the test of the temper of the host acted as it might be expected to act; all rushed to launch the ships, and the princes were swept away in the tide of flight, agamemnon himself merely looking on helpless. the panic was contagious; only odysseus escaped its influence, and redeemed the honour of the achaeans, as he did again on a later day. the passage certainly has its difficulties. but erhardt expresses the proper state of the case, after giving his analysis. "the hearer's imagination is so captured, first by the dream, then by the brawling assembly, by the rush to the ships, by the intervention of odysseus, by the punishment of thersites--all these living pictures follow each other so fleetly before the eyes that we have scarcely time to make objections." [footnote: _die enstehung der homerische gedichte_, p. 29.]. the poet aimed at no more and no less effect than he has produced, and no more should be required by any one, except by that anachronism--"the analytical reader." _he_ has "time to make objections": the poet's audience had none; and he must be criticised from their point of view. homer did not sing for analytical readers, for the modern professor; he could not possibly conceive that time would bring such a being into existence. to return to the character of agamemnon. in moments of encouragement agamemnon is a valiant fighter, few better spearmen, yet "he attains not to the first three," achilles, aias, diomede. but agamemnon is unstable as water; again and again, as in book ii., the lives and honour of the achaeans are saved in the over-lord's despite by one or other of the peers. the whole _iliad_, with consistent uniformity, pursues the scheme of character and conduct laid down in the two first books. it is guided at once by feudal allegiance and feudal jealousy, like the _chansons de geste_ and the early sagas or romances of ireland. a measure of respect for agamemnon, even of sympathy, is preserved; he is not degraded as the kings and princes are often degraded on the attic stage, and even in the cyclic poems. would wandering ionian reciters at fairs have maintained this uniformity? would the tyrant pisistratus have made his literary man take this view? chapter v agamemnon in the later "iliad" in the third book, agamemnon receives the compliments due to his supremacy, aspect, and valour from the lips of helen and priam. there are other warriors taller by a head, and odysseus was shorter than he by a head, so agamemnon was a man of middle stature. he is "beautiful and royal" of aspect; "a good king and a mighty spearman," says helen. the interrupted duel between menelaus and paris follows, and then the treacherous wounding of menelaus by pandarus. one of agamemnon's most sympathetic characteristics is his intense love of his brother, for whose sake he has made the war. he shudders on seeing the arrow wound, but consoles menelaus by the certainty that troy will fall, for the trojans have broken the solemn oath of truce. zeus "doth fulfil at last, and men make dear amends." but with characteristic inconsistency he discourages menelaus by a picture of many a proud trojan leaping on his tomb, while the host will return home-an idea constantly present to agamemnon's mind. he is always the first to propose flight, though he will "return with shame" to mycenae. menelaus is of much better cheer: "be of good courage, [blank space] all the host of the [misprint]"--a thing which agamemnon does habitually, though he is not a personal poltroon. as menelaus has only a slight flesh wound after all, and as the trojans are doomed men, agamemnon is now "eager for glorious battle." he encourages the princes, but, of all men, rebukes odysseus as "last at a fray and first at a feast": such is his insolence, for which men detest him. this is highly characteristic in agamemnon, who has just been redeemed from ruin by odysseus. rebuked by odysseus, he "takes back his word" as usual, and goes on to chide diomede as better at making speeches than at fighting! but diomede made no answer, "having respect to the chiding of the revered king." he even rebukes the son of capaneus for answering agamemnon haughtily. diomede, however, does not forget; he bides his time. he now does the great deeds of his day of valour (book v.). agamemnon meanwhile encourages the host. during books v., vi. agamemnon's business is "to bid the rest keep fighting." when hector, in book vii., challenges any achaean, nobody volunteers except menelaus, who has a strong sense of honour. agamemnon restrains him, and lots are cast: the host pray that the lot may fall on aias, diomede, or agamemnon (vii. 179-180). thus the over-lord is acknowledged to be a man of his hands, especially good at hurling the spear, as we see again in book xxiii. a truce is proposed for the burial of the dead, and paris offers to give up the wealth that he brought to troy, and more, if the achaeans will go home, but helen he will not give up. we expect agamemnon to answer as becomes him. but no! all are silent, till diomede rises. they will not return, he says, even if helen be restored, for even a fool knows that troy is doomed, because of the broken oath. the rest shout acquiescence, and agamemnon refuses the compromise. apparently he would not have disdained it, but for diomede's reply. on the following day the trojans have the better in the battle, and agamemnon "has no heart to stand," nor have some of his peers. but diomede has more courage, and finally agamemnon begins to call to the host to fight, but breaks down, weeps, and prays to zeus "that we ourselves at least flee and escape;" he is not an encouraging commander-in-chief! zeus, in pity, sends a favourable omen; aias fights well; night falls, and the trojans camp on the open plain. agamemnon, in floods of tears, calls an assembly, and proposes to "return to argos with dishonour." "let us flee with our ships to our dear native land, for now shall we never take wide-wayed troy," all are silent, till diomede rises and reminds agamemnon that "thou saidst i was no man of war, but a coward." (in book v.; we are now in book ix.) "zeus gave thee the honour of the sceptre above all men, but valour he gave thee not.... go thy way; thy way is before thee, and thy ships stand beside the sea. but all the other flowing-haired achaeans will tarry here until we waste troy." nestor advises agamemnon to set an advanced guard, which that martialist had never thought of doing, and to discuss matters over supper. a force of 700 men, under meriones and the son of nestor, was posted between the foss and the wall round the camp; the council met, and nestor advised agamemnon to approach achilles with gentle words and gifts of atonement. agamemnon, full of repentance, acknowledges his folly and offers enormous atonement. heralds and three ambassadors are sent; and how achilles received them, with perfect courtesy, but with absolute distrust of agamemnon and refusal of his gifts, sending the message that he will fight only when fire comes to his own ships, we know. achilles is now entirely in the wrong, and the over-lord is once more within his right. he has done all, or more than all, that customary law demands. in book ix. phoenix states the case plainly. "if agamemnon brought thee not gifts, and promised thee more hereafter, ... then were i not he that should bid thee cast aside thine anger, and save the argives...." (ix. 515-517). the case so stands that, if achilles later relents and fights, the gifts of atonement will no longer be due to him, and he "will not be held in like honour" (ix. 604). the poet knows intimately, and, like his audience, is keenly interested in the details of the customary law. we cannot easily suppose this frame of mind and this knowledge in a late poet addressing a late ionian audience. the ambassadors return to agamemnon; their evil tidings are received in despairing silence. but diomede bids agamemnon take heart and fight next day, with his host arrayed "before the ships" (ix. 708). this appears to counsel defensive war; but, in fact, and for reasons, when it comes to fighting they do battle in the open. the next book (x.) is almost universally thought a late interpolation; an opinion elsewhere discussed (see [blank space]). let us, then, say with mr. leaf that the book begins with "exaggerated despondency" and ends with "hasty exultation," in consequence of a brilliant camisade, wherein odysseus and diomede massacre a thracian contingent. our point is that the poet carefully (see _the doloneia_) continues the study of agamemnon in despondency, and later, by his "hasty exultation," preludes to the valour which the over-lord displays in book xi. the poet knows that something in the way of personal valour is due to agamemnon's position; he fights brilliantly, receives a flesh wound, retires, and is soon proposing a general flight in his accustomed way. when the trojans, in book xiv., are attacking the ships, agamemnon remarks that he fears the disaffection of his whole army (xiv. 49, 51), and, as for the coming defeat, that he "knew it," even when zeus helped the greeks. they are all to perish far from argos. let them drag the ships to the sea, moor them with stones, and fly, "for there is no shame in fleeing from ruin, even in the night. better doth he fare who flees from trouble than he that is overtaken." it is now the turn of odysseus again to save the honour of the army. "be silent, lest some other of the achaeans hear this word, that no man should so much as suffer to pass through his mouth.... and now i wholly scorn thy thoughts, such a word hast thou uttered." on this agamemnon instantly repents. "right sharply hast thou touched my heart with thy stern reproof:" he has not even the courage of his nervousness. the combat is now in the hands of aias and patroclus, who is slain. agamemnon, who is wounded, does not reappear till book xix., when achilles, anxious to fight and avenge patroclus at once, without formalities of reconciliation, professes his desire to let bygones be bygones. agamemnon excuses his insolence to achilles as an inspiration of ate: a predestined fault--"not i am the cause, but zeus and destiny." odysseus, to clinch the reunion and fulfil customary law, advises agamemnon to bring out the gifts of atonement (the gifts prepared in book ix.), after which the right thing is for him to give a feast of reconciliation, "that achilles may have nothing lacking of his right." [footnote: book xix. 179, 180.] the case is one which has been provided for by customary law in every detail. mr. leaf argues that all this part must be late, because of the allusion to the gifts offered in book ix. but we reply, with mr. monro, that the ninth book is "almost necessary to any achilleis." the question is, would a late editor or poet know all the details of customary law in such a case as a quarrel between over-lord and peer? would a feudal audience have been satisfied with a poem which did not wind the quarrel up in accordance with usage? and would a late poet, in a society no longer feudal, know how to wind it up? would he find any demand on the part of his audience for a long series of statements, which to a modern seem to interrupt the story? to ourselves it appears that a feudal audience desired the customary details; to such an audience they were most interesting. this is a taste which, as has been said, we find in all early poetry and in the sagas; hence the long "runs" of the celtic sagas, minutely repeated descriptions of customary things. the icelandic saga-men never weary, though modern readers do, of legal details. for these reasons we reckon the passages in book xix. about the reconciliation as original, and think they can be nothing else. it is quite natural that, in a feudal society of men who were sticklers for custom, the hearers should insist on having all things done duly and in order--the giving of the gifts and the feast of reconciliation--though the passionate achilles himself desires to fight at once. odysseus insists that what we may call the regular routine shall be gone through. it is tedious to the modern reader, but it is surely much more probable that a feudal poet thus gratified his peculiar audience (he looked for no other) than that a late poet, with a different kind of audience, thrust the reconciliation in as an "after-thought." [footnote: leaf, _iliad_, vol. ii. p. 317.] the right thing must be done, odysseus assures achilles, "for i was born first, and know more things." it is not the right thing to fight at once, unfed, and before the solemn sacrifice by the over-lord, the prayer, the oath of agamemnon, and the reception of the gifts by achilles; only after these formalities, and after the army has fed, can the host go forth. "i know more than you do; you are a younger man," says odysseus, speaking in accordance with feudal character, at the risk of wearying later unforeseen generations. this is not criticism inspired by mere "literary feeling," for "literary feeling" is on the side of achilles, and wishes the story to hurry to his revenge. but ours is [blank space] criticism; we must think of the poet in relation to his audience and of their demands, which we can estimate by similar demands, vouched for by the supply, in the early national poetry of other peoples and in the icelandic sagas. we hear no more of agamemnon till, in book xxiii, 35-38, after the slaying of hector, achilles "was brought to noble agamemnon" (for that, as odysseus said, was the regular procedure) "by the achaean chiefs, hardly persuading him thereto, for his heart was wroth for his comrade." here they feast, achilles still full of grief and resentment. he merely goes through the set forms, much against his will. it does appear to us that the later the poet the less he would have known or cared about the forms. an early society is always much interested in forms and in funerals and funeral games, so the poet indulges their taste with the last rites of patroclus. the last view of agamemnon is given when, at the end of the games, achilles courteously presents him with the flowered _lebes_, the prize for hurling the spear, without asking him to compete, since his superior skill is notorious. this act of courtesy is the real reconciliation; previously achilles had but gone reluctantly through the set forms in such cases provided. even when agamemnon offered the gifts of atonement, achilles said, "give them, as is customary, or keep them, as you please" (xix. 146, 148). achilles, young and passionate, cares nothing for the feudal procedure. this rapid survey seems to justify the conclusion that the poet presents an uniform and historically correct picture of the over-lord and of his relations with his peers, a picture which no late editor could have pieced together out of the widely varying _repertoires_ of late strolling reciters. such reciters would gladly have forgotten, and such an editor would gladly have "cut" the "business" of the reconciliation. they would also, in a democratic spirit, have degraded the over-lord into the tyrant, but throughout, however low agamemnon may fall, the poet is guided by the knowledge that his right to rule is _jure divino_, that he has qualities, that his responsibilities are crushing, "i, whom among all men zeus hath planted for ever among labours, while my breath abides within me, and my limbs move," says the over-lord (x. sg, go.[sic]). in short, the poet's conception of the over-lord is throughout harmonious, is a contemporary conception entertained by a singer who lives among peers that own, and are jealous of, and obey an over-lord. the character and situation of agamemnon are a poetic work of one age, one moment of culture. chapter vi archaeology of the "iliad". burial and cremation in archaeological discoveries we find the most convincing proofs that the _iliad_, on the whole, is the production of a single age, not the patchwork of several changeful centuries. this may seem an audacious statement, as archaeology has been interpreted of late in such a manner as to demand precisely the opposite verdict. but if we can show, as we think we can, that many recent interpretations of the archaeological evidence are not valid, because they are not consistent, our contention, though unexpected, will be possible. it is that the combined testimony of archaeology and of the epic proves the _iliad_ to represent, as regards customs, weapons, and armour, a definite moment of evolution; a period between the age recorded in the art of the mycenaean shaft graves and the age of early iron swords and the "dipylon" period. before the discoveries of the material remains of the "mycenzean" times, the evidence of archaeology was seldom appropriately invoked in discussions of the homeric question. but in the thirty years since schliemann explored the buried relics of the mycenzean acropolis, his "grave of agamemnon," a series of excavations has laid bare the interments, the works of art, and the weapons and ornaments of years long prior to the revolution commonly associated with the "dorian invasion" of about 1100-1000 b.c. the objects of all sorts which have been found in many sites of greece and the isles, especially of cyprus and crete, in some respects tally closely with homeric descriptions, in others vary from them widely. nothing can be less surprising, if the heroes whose legendary feats inspired the poet lived centuries before his time, as charlemagne and his paladins lived some three centuries before the composition of the earliest extant _chansons de geste_ on their adventures. there was, in such a case, time for much change in the details of life, art, weapons and implements. taking the relics in the graves of the mycenaean acropolis as a starting-point, some things would endure into the age of the poet, some would be modified, some would disappear. we cannot tell how long previous to his own date the poet supposes the achaean heroes to have existed. he frequently ascribes to them feats of strength which "no man of such as now are" could perform. this gives no definite period for the interval; he might be speaking of the great grandfathers of his own generation. but when he regards the heroes as closely connected by descent of one or two generations with the gods, and as in frequent and familiar intercourse with gods and goddesses, we must suppose that he did not think their period recent. the singers of the _chansons de geste_ knew that angels' visits were few and far between at the period, say, of the norman conquest; but they allowed angels to appear in epics dealing with the earlier time, almost as freely as gods intervene in homer. in short, the homeric poet undeniably treats the age of his heroes as having already, in the phrase of thucydides, "won its way to the mythical," and therefore as indefinitely remote. it is impossible here to discuss in detail the complex problems of mycenaean chronology. if we place the mycenaean "bloom-time" from "the seventeenth or sixteenth to the twelfth century b.c.," [footnote: tsountas and manatt, p. 322.] it is plain that there is space to spare, between the poet's age and that of his heroes, for the rise of changes in war, weapons, and costume. indeed, there are traces enough of change even in the objects and art discovered in the bloom-time, as represented by the mycenaean acropolis itself and by other "mycenaean" sites. the art of the fragment of a silver vase in a grave, on which a siege is represented, is not the art, the costumes are not the costumes, of the inlaid bronze dagger-blade. the men shown on the vase and the lion-hunters on the dagger both have their hair close cropped, but on the vase they are naked, on the dagger they wear short drawers. on the vaphio cups, found in a _tholos_ chamber-tomb near amyclae, the men are "long-haired achaeans," with heavy, pendent locks, like the man on a pyxis from knossos, published by mr. evans; they are of another period than the close-cropped men of the vase and dagger. [footnote: _journal of hellenic studies_, vol. xvi. p. 102.] two of the men on the silver vase are covered either with shields of a shape and size elsewhere unknown in mycenaean art, or with cloaks of an unexampled form. the masonry of the city wall, shown on the vase in the mycenaean grave, is not the ordinary masonry of mycenae itself. on the vase the wall is "isodomic," built of cut stones in regular layers. most of the mycenaean walls, on the other hand, are of "cyclopean" style, in large irregular blocks. art, good and very bad, exists in many various stages in mycenaean relics. the drawing of a god, with a typical mycenaean shield in the form of a figure 8, on a painted sarcophagus from milato in crete, is more crude and savage than many productions of the australian aboriginals, [footnote: _journal of hellenic studies, vol. xvi. _p._ 174, fig. 50._ grosse. _les debuts de l'art,_ pp. 124-176.] the thing is on the level of red indian work. meanwhile at vaphio, enkomi, knossos, and elsewhere the art is often excellent. in one essential point the poet describes a custom without parallel among the discovered relics of the mycenaean age--namely, the disposal of the bodies of the dead. they are neither buried with their arms, in stately _tholos_ tombs nor in shaft graves, as at mycenae: whether they be princes or simple oarsmen, they are cremated. a pyre of wood is built; on this the warrior's body is laid, the pyre is lighted, the body is reduced to ashes, the ashes are placed in a vessel or box of gold, wrapped round with precious cloths (no arms are buried, as a general rule), and a mound, howe, barrow, or tumulus is raised over all. usually a _stele_ or pillar crowns the edifice. this method is almost uniform, and, as far as cremation and the cairn go, is universal in the _iliad_ and _odyssey_ whenever a burial is described. now this mode of interment must be the mode of a single age in greek civilisation. it is confessedly not the method of the mycenaeans of the shaft grave, or of the latter _tholos_ or stone beehive-shaped grave; again, the mycenaeans did not burn the dead; they buried. once more, the homeric method is not that of the dipylon period (say 900-750 b.c.) represented by the tombs outside the dipylon gate of athens. the people of that age now buried, now burned, their dead, and did not build cairns over them. thus the homeric custom comes between the shaft graves and the latter _tholos_ graves, on the one hand, and the dipylon custom of burning or burying, with sunk or rock-hewn graves, on the other. the homeric poets describe the method of their own period. they assuredly do not adhere to an older epic tradition of shaft graves or _tholos_ graves, though these must have been described in lays of the period when such methods of disposal of the dead were in vogue. the altar above the shaft-graves in mycenae proves the cult of ancestors in mycenae; of this cult in the _iliad_ there is no trace, or only a dim trace of survival in the slaughter of animals at the funeral. the homeric way of thinking about the state of the dead, weak, shadowy things beyond the river oceanus, did not permit them to be worshipped as potent beings. only in a passage, possibly interpolated, of the _odyssey_, do we hear that castor and polydeuces, brothers of helen, and sons of tyndareus, through the favour of zeus have immortality, and receive divine honours. [footnote: odyssey, xi. 298-304.] these facts are so familiar that we are apt to overlook the strangeness of them in the history of religious evolution. the cult of ancestral spirits begins in the lowest barbarism, just above the level of the australian tribes, who, among the dieri, show some traces of the practice, at least, of ghost feeding. [footnote: howitt, _native tribes of south-eastern australia,_ p. 448. there are also traces of propitiation in western australia (ms. of mrs. bates).] sometimes, as in many african tribes, ancestor worship is almost the whole of practical cult. usually it accompanies polytheism, existing beside it on a lower plane. it was prevalent in the mycenae of the shaft graves; in attica it was uninterrupted; it is conspicuous in greece from the ninth century onwards. but it is unknown to or ignored by the homeric poets, though it can hardly have died out of folk custom. consequently, the poems are of one age, an age of cremation and of burial in barrows, with no ghost worship. apparently some revolution as regards burial occurred between the age of the graves of the mycenaean acropolis and the age of homer. that age, coming with its form of burning and its absence of the cult of the dead, between two epochs of inhumation, ancestor worship, and absence of cairns, is as certainly and definitely an age apart, a peculiar period, as any epoch can be. cremation, with cairn burial of the ashes, is, then, the only form of burial mentioned by homer, and, as far as the poet tells us, the period was not one in which iron was used for swords and spears. at assarlik (asia minor) and in thera early graves, prove the use of cremation, but also, unlike homer, of iron weapons. [footnote: paton, journal _of hellenic studies,_ viii. 64_ff_. for other references, cf. poulsen, _die dipylongräben_, p. 2, notes. leipzig 1905.] in these graves the ashes are inurned. there are examples of the same usage in salamis, without iron. in crete, in graves of the period of geometrical ornament ("dipylon"), burning is more common than inhumation. cremation is attested in a _tholos_ or beehive-shaped grave in argos, where the vases were late mycenaean. below this stratum was an older shaft grave, as is usual in _tholos_ interments; it had been plundered? [footnote: poulsen, p.2.] the cause of the marked change from mycenaean inhumation to homeric cremation is matter of conjecture. it has been suggested that burning was introduced during the migrations after the dorian invasion. men could carry the ashes of their friends to the place where they finally settled. [footnote: helbig, _homerische epos,_ p.83] the question may, perhaps, be elucidated by excavation, especially in asia minor, on the sites of the earliest greek colonies. at colophon are many cairns unexplored by science. mr. ridgeway, as is well known, attributes the introduction of cremation to a conquering northern people, the achaeans, his "celts." it is certain that cremation and urn burial of the ashes prevailed in britain during the age of bronze, and co-existed with inhumation in the great cemetery of hallstatt, surviving into the age of iron. [footnote: cf. _guide to antiquities of early iron age,_ british museum, 1905, by mr. reginald a. smith, under direction of mr. charles h. read, for a brief account of hallstatt culture.] others suppose a change in achaean ideas about the soul; it was no longer believed to haunt the grave and grave goods and be capable of haunting the living, but to be wholly set free by burning, and to depart for ever to the house of hades, powerless and incapable of hauntings. it is never easy to decide as to whether a given mode of burial is the result of a definite opinion about the condition of the dead, or whether the explanation offered by those who practise the method is an afterthought. in tasmania among the lowest savages, now extinct, were found monuments over cremated human remains, accompanied with "characters crudely marked, similar to those which the aborigines tattooed on their forearms." in one such grave was a spear, "for the dead man to fight with when he is asleep," as a native explained. some tasmanian tribes burned the dead and carried the ashes about in amulets; others buried in hollow trees; others simply inhumed. some placed the dead in a hollow tree, and cremated the body after lapse of time. some tied the dead up tightly (a common practice with inhumation), and then burned him. some buried the dead in an erect 'posture. the common explanation of burning was that it prevented the dead from returning, thus it has always been usual to burn the bodies of vampires. did a race so backward hit on an idea unknown to the mycenaean greeks? [footnote: ling roth., _the tasmanians_, pp. 128-134. reports of early discoverers.] if the usual explanation be correct--burning prevents the return of the dead--how did the homeric greeks come to substitute burning for the worship and feeding of the dead, which had certainly prevailed? how did the ancient method return, overlapping and blent with the method of cremation, as in the early dipylon interments? we can only say that the homeric custom is definite and isolated, and that but slight variations occur in the methods of homeric burial. (1)in _iliad_, vi, 4 i 6 _ff_, andromache _says_ that achilles slew her father, "yet he despoiled him not, for his soul had shame of that; but he burnt him in his inlaid armour, and raised a barrow over him." we are not told that the armour was interred with the ashes of eetion. this is a peculiar case. we always hear in the that the dead are burned, and the ashes of princes are placed in a vessel of gold within an artificial hillock; but we do not hear, except in this passage, that they are burned in their armour, or that it is burned, or that it is buried with the ashes of the dead. the invariable practice is for the victor, if he can, to despoil the body of the fallen foe; but achilles for some reason spared that indignity in the case of eetion. [footnote: german examples of burning the amis of the cremated dead and then burying them are given by mr. ridgeway, _early age of greece,_ vol. i. pp. 498, 499.] (2) _iliad,_ vii. 85. hector, in his challenge to a single combat, makes the conditions that the victor shall keep the arms and armour of the vanquished, but shall restore his body to his friends. the trojans will burn him, if he falls; if the achaean falls, the others will do something expressed by the word [greek: tarchuchosi] probably a word surviving from an age of embalment. [footnote: helbig, _homerische epos,_ pp. 55, 56.] it has come to mean, generally, to do the funeral rites. the hero is to have a barrow or artificial howe or hillock built over him, "beside wide hellespont," a memorial of him, and of hector's valour. on the river helmsdale, near kildonan, on the left bank, there is such a hillock which has never, it is believed, been excavated. it preserves the memory of its occupant, an early celtic saint; whether he was cremated or not it is impossible to say. but his memory is not lost, and the howe, cairn, or hillock, in homer is desired by the heroes as a memorial. on the terms proposed by hector the arms of the dead could not be either burned or buried with him. (3) iliad, ix. 546. phoenix says that the calydonian boar "brought many to the mournful pyre." all were cremated. (4) _iliad_, xxii 50-55. andromache in her dirge (the _regret_ of the french mediaeval epics) says that hector lies unburied by the ships and naked, but she will burn raiment of his, "delicate and fair, the work of women ... to thee no profit, since thou wilt never lie therein, yet this shall be honour to thee from the men and women of troy." her meaning is not very clear, but she seems to imply that if hector's body were in troy it would be clad in garments before cremation. helbig appears to think that to clothe the dead in _garments_ was an ionian, not an ancient epic custom. but in homer the dead always wear at least one garment, the [greek: pharos], a large mantle, either white or purple, such as agamemnon wears in peace (iliad, ii 43), except when, like eetion and elpenor in the odyssey, they are burned in their armour. in _iliad,_ xxiii. 69 _ff_., the shadow of the dead unburned patroclus appears to achilles in his sleep asking for "his dues of fire." the whole passage, with the account of the funeral of patroclus, must be read carefully, and compared with the funeral rites of hector at the end of book xxiv. helbig, in an essay of great erudition, though perhaps rather fantastic in its generalisations, has contrasted the burials of the two heroes. patroclus is buried, he says, in a true portion of the old aeolic epic (sir richard jebb thought the whole passage "ionic"), though even into this the late ionian _bearbeiter_ (a spectral figure), has introduced his ionian notions. but the twenty-fourth book itself is late and ionian, helbig says, not genuine early aeolian epic poetry. [footnote: helbig, _zu den homerischen bestattungsgebraüchen_. aus den sitzungsberichten der philos. philol. und histor. classe der kgl. bayer. academie der wissenschaften. 1900. heft. ii. pp. 199-299.] the burial of patroclus, then, save for ionian late interpolations, easily detected by helbig, is, he assures us, genuine "kernel," [footnote: 2 op. _laud._, p. 208.] while hector's burial "is partly ionian, and describes the destiny of the dead heroes otherwise than as in the old aeolic epos." here helbig uses that one of his two alternate theories according to which the late ionian poets do not cling to old epic tradition, but bring in details of the life of their own date. by helbig's other alternate theory, the late poets cling to the model set in old epic tradition in their pictures of details of life. disintegrationists differ: far from thinking that the late ionian poet who buried hector varied from the aeolic minstrel who buried patroclus (in book xxiii.), mr. leaf says that hector's burial is "almost an abstract" of that of patroclus. [footnote: leaf, iliad, xxii note to 791.] he adds that helbig's attempts "to distinguish the older aeolic from the newer and more sceptical 'ionic' faith seem to me visionary." [footnote: iliad, vol. ii. p. 619. note 2] visionary, indeed, they do seem, but they are examples of the efforts made to prove that the iliad bears marks of composition continued through several centuries. we must remember that, according to helbig, the ionians, colonists in a new country, "had no use for ghosts." a fresh colony does not produce ghosts. "there is hardly an english or scottish castle without its spook (_spuck_). on the other hand, you look in vain for such a thing in the united states"--spiritualism apart. [footnote: op. _laud._, p. 204.] this is a hasty generalisation! helbig will, if he looks, find ghosts enough in the literature of north america while still colonial, and in australia, a still more newly settled country, sixty years ago fisher's ghost gave evidence of fisher's murder, evidence which, as in another australian case, served the ends of justice. [footnote: see, in _the_ valet's tragedy (a. l.): "fisher's ghost."] more recent australian ghosts are familiar to psychical research. this colonial theory is one of helbig's too venturous generalisations. he studies the ghost, or rather dream-apparition, of patroclus after examining the funeral of hector; but we shall begin with patroclus. achilles (xxiii. 4-16) first hails his friend "even in the house of hades" (so he believes that spirits are in hades), and says that he has brought hector "raw for dogs to devour," and twelve trojans of good family "to slaughter before thy pyre." that night, when achilles is asleep (xxiii. 65) the spirit ([greek: psyche]) of patroclus appears to him, says that he is forgotten, and begs to be burned at once, that he may pass the gates of hades, for the other spirits drive him off and will not let him associate with them "beyond the river," and he wanders vaguely along the wide-gated dwelling of hades. "give me thy hand, for never more again shall i come back from hades, when ye have given me my due of fire." patroclus, being newly discarnate, does not yet know that a spirit cannot take a living man's hand, though, in fact, tactile hallucinations are not uncommon in the presence of phantasms of the dead. "lay not my bones apart from thine ... let one coffer" ([greek: soros]) "hide our bones." [greek: soros], like _larnax_, is a coffin (_sarg_), or what the americans call a "casket," in the opinion of helbig: [footnote: op. _laud_., p.217.] it is an oblong receptacle of the bones and dust. hector was buried in a _larnax_; so will achilles and patroclus be when achilles falls, but the dust of patroclus is kept, meanwhile, in a golden covered cup (phialae) in the quarters of achilles; it is not laid in howe after his cremation (xxiii. 243). achilles tries to embrace patroclus, but fails, like odysseus with the shade of his mother in hades, in the _odyssey_. he exclaims that "there remaineth then even in the house of hades a spirit and phantom of the dead, albeit the life" (or the wits) "be not anywise therein, for all night hath the spirit of hapless patroclus stood over me...." in this speech helbig detects the hand of the late ionian poet. what goes before is part of the genuine old epic, the kernel, done at a time when men believed that spooks could take part in the affairs of the upper world. achilles therefore (in his dream), thought that he could embrace his friend. it was the sceptical ionian, in a fresh and spookless colony, who knew that he could not; he thinks the ghost a mere dream, and introduces his scepticism in xxiii. 99-107. he brought in "the ruling ideas of his own period." the ghost, says the ionian _bearbeiter_, is intangible, though in the genuine old epic the ghost himself thought otherwise--he being new to the situation and without experience. this is the first sample of the critical ionian spirit, later so remarkable in philosophy and natural science, says helbig. [footnote: op. laud., pp. 233,234.] we need not discuss this acute critical theory. the natural interpretation of the words of achilles is obvious; as mr. leaf remarks, the words are "the cry of sudden personal conviction in a matter which has hitherto been lazily accepted as an orthodox dogma." [footnote: _iliad_, vol. ii. p. 620.] already, as we have seen, achilles has made promises to patroclus in the house of hades, now he exclaims "there really is something in the doctrine of a feeble future life." it is vain to try to discriminate between an old epic belief in able-bodied ghosts and an ionian belief in mere futile _shades_, in the homeric poems. everywhere the dead are too feeble to be worth worshipping after they are burned; but, as mr. leaf says with obvious truth, and with modern instances, "men are never so inconsistent as in their beliefs about the other world." we ourselves hold various beliefs simultaneously. the natives of australia and of tasmania practise, or did practise, every conceivable way of disposing of the dead--burying, burning, exposure in trees, carrying about the bodies or parts of them, eating the bodies, and so forth. if each such practice corresponded, as archaeologists believe, to a different opinion about the soul, then all beliefs were held together at once, and this, in fact, is the case. there is not now one and now another hard and fast orthodoxy of belief about the dead, though now we find ancestor worship prominent and now in the shade. after gifts of hair and the setting up of jars full of oil and honey, achilles has the body laid on the top of the pyre in the centre. bodies of sheep and oxen, two dogs and four horses, are strewed around: why, we know not, for the dead is not supposed to need food: the rite may be a survival, for there were sacrifices at the burials of the mycenaean shaft graves. achilles slays also the twelve trojans, "because of mine anger at thy slaying," he says (xxiii. 23). this was his reason, as far as he consciously had any reason, not that his friend might have twelve thralls in hades. after the pyre is alit achilles drenches it all night with wine, and, when the flame dies down, the dead hero's bones are collected and placed in the covered cup of gold. the circle of the barrow is then marked out, stones are set up round it (we see them round highland tumuli), and earth is heaped up; no more is done; the tomb is empty; the covered cup holding the ashes is in the hut of achilles. we must note another trait. after the body of patroclus was recovered, it was washed, anointed, laid on a bier, and covered from head to foot [greek: heano liti], translated by helbig, "with a linen sheet" (cf. xxiii. 254). the golden cup with the ashes is next wrapped [greek: heano liti]; here mr. myers renders the words "with a linen veil." scottish cremation burials of the bronze age retain traces of linen wrappings of the urn. [footnote: _proceedings of the scottish society of antiquaries_, 1905, p. 552. for other cases, _cf._ leaf, _iliad_, xxiv. 796. note.] over all a white [greek: pharos] (mantle) was spread. in _iliad_, xxiv. 231, twelve [greek: pharea] with chitons, single cloaks, and other articles of dress, are taken to achilles by priam as part of the ransom of hector's body. such is the death-garb of patroclus; but helbig, looking for ionian innovations in book xxiv., finds that the death-garb of hector is not the same as that of patroclus in book xxiii. one difference is that when the squires of achilles took the ransom of hector from the waggon of priam, they left in it two [greek: pharea] and a well-spun chiton. the women washed and anointed hector's body; they clad him in the chiton, and threw one [greek: pharos] over it; we are not told what they did with the other. perhaps, as mr. leaf says, it was used as a cover for the bier, perhaps it was not, but was laid under the body (helbig). all we know is that hector's body was restored to priam in a chiton and a [greek: pharos], which do not seem to have been removed before he was burned; while patroclus had no chiton in death, but a [greek: pharos] and, apparently, a linen sheet. to the ordinary reader this does not seem, in the circumstances, a strong mark of different ages and different burial customs. priam did not bring any linen sheet--or whatever [greek: heanos lis] may be--in the waggon as part of hector's ransom; and it neither became achilles to give nor priam to receive any of achilles's stuff as death-garb for hector. the squires, therefore, gave back to priam, to clothe his dead son, part of what he had brought; nothing can be more natural, and there, we may say, is an end on't. they did what they could in the circumstances. but helbig has observed that, in a cean inscription of the fifth century b.c., there is a sumptuary law, forbidding a corpse to wear more than three white garments, a sheet under him, a chiton, and a mantle cast over him. [footnote: op. _laud_., p. 209.] he supposes that hector wore the chiton, and had one [greek: pharos] over him and the other under him, though homer does not say that. the laws of solon also confined the dead man to three articles of dress. [footnote: plutarch, solon, 21.] in doing so solon sanctioned an old custom, and that ionian custom, described by the author of book xxiv., bewrays him, says helbig, for a late ionian _bearbeiter_, deserting true epic usages and inserting those of his own day. but in some attic dipylon vases, in the pictures of funerals, we see no garments or sheets over the corpses. penelope also wove a [greek: charos] against the burial of old laertes, but surely she ought to have woven for him; on helbig's showing hector had _two_, patroclus had only one; patroclus is in the old epic, hector and laertes are in the ionian epics; therefore, laertes should have had two [greek: charea] but we only hear of one. penelope had to finish the [greek: charos] and show it; [footnote: odyssey, xxiv. 147.] now if she wanted to delay her marriage, she should have begun the second [greek: charos] just as necessary as the first, if hector, with a pair of [greek: charea] represents ionian usage. but penelope never thought of what, had she read helbig, she would have seen to be so obvious. she thought of no funeral garments for the old man but one shroud [greek: speiron] (odyssey, ii. 102; xix. 147); yet, being, by the theory, a character of late ionian, not of genuine old aeolic epic, she should have known better. it is manifest that if even the acuteness and vast erudition of helbig can only find such invisible differences as these between the manners of the genuine old epic and the late ionian innovations, there is really no difference, beyond such trifles as diversify custom in any age. hector, when burned and when his ashes have been placed in the casket, is laid in a [greek: kapetos], a ditch or trench (_iliad_, xv. 356; xviii. 564); but here (xxiv. 797) [greek: kapetos] is a chamber covered with great stones, within the howe, the casket being swathed with purple robes, and this was the end. the ghost of hector would not revisit the sun, as ghosts do freely in the cyclic poems, a proof that the cyclics are later than the homeric poems. [footnote: helbig, op. _laud_., pp. 240, 241.] if the burning of the weapons of eetion and elpenor are traces of another than the _old_ aeolic epic faith, [footnote: ibid., p. 253.] they are also traces of another than the late _ionic_ epic faith, for no weapons are burned with hector. in the _odyssey_ the weapons of achilles are not burned; in the _iliad_ the armour of patroclus is not burned. no victims of any kind are burned with hector: possibly the poet was not anxious to repeat what he had just described (his last book is already a very long book); possibly the trojans did not slay victims at the burning. the howes or barrows built over the homeric dead were hillocks high enough to be good points of outlook for scouts, as in the case of the barrow of aesyetes (_iliad_, ii. 793) and "the steep mound," the howe of lithe myrine (ii. 814). we do not know that women were usually buried in howe, but myrine was a warrior maiden of the amazons. we know, then, minutely what the homeric mode of burial was, with such variations as have been noted. we have burning and howe even in the case of an obscure oarsman like elpenor. it is not probable, however, that every peaceful mechanic had a howe all to himself; he may have had a small family cairn; he may not have had an expensive cremation. the interesting fact is that no barrow burial precisely of the homeric kind has ever been discovered in greek sites. the old mycenaeans buried either in shaft graves or in a stately _tholos_; and in rock chambers, later, in the town cemetery: they did not burn the bodies. the people of the dipylon period sometimes cremated, sometimes inhumed, but they built no barrow over the dead. [footnote: _annal. de l'inst.,_ 1872, pp. 135, 147, 167. plausen, _ut supra_.] the dipylon was a period of early iron swords, made on the lines of not the best type of bronze sword. now, in mr. leaf's opinion, our homeric accounts of burial "are all late; the oldest parts of the poems tell us nothing." [footnote: _iliad_, vol. ii. p. 619. note 2. while mr. leaf says that "the oldest parts of the poems tell us nothing" of burial, he accepts xxii. 342, 343 as of the oldest part. these lines describe cremation, and mr. leaf does not think them borrowed from the "later" vii. 79, 80, but that vii. 79, 80 are "perhaps borrowed" from xxii. 342, 343. it follows that "the oldest parts of the poems" do tell us of cremation.] we shall show, however, that mr. leaf's "kernel" alludes to cremation. what is "late"? in this case it is not the dipylon period, say 900-750 b.c. it is not any later period; one or two late barrow burials do not answer to the homeric descriptions. the "late" parts of the poems, therefore, dealing with burials, in books vi., vii., xix., xxiii., xxiv., and the odyssey, are of an age not in "the mycenaean prime," not in the dipylon period, not in any later period, say the seventh or sixth centuries b.c., and, necessarily, not of any subsequent period. yet nobody dreams of saying that the poets describe a purely fanciful form of interment. they speak of what they know in daily life. if it be argued that the late poets preserve, by sheer force of epic tradition, a form of burial unknown in their own age, we ask, "why did epic tradition not preserve the burial methods of the mycenaean prime, the shaft grave, or the _tholos_, without cremation?" mr. leaf's own conclusion is that the people of mycenae were "spirit worshippers, practising inhumation, and partial mummification;" the second fact is dubious. "in the post-mycenaean 'dipylon' period, we find cremation and sepulture practised side by side. in the interval, therefore, two beliefs have come into conflict. [footnote: all conceivable beliefs, we have said, about the dead are apt to coexist. for every conceivable and some rather inconceivable contemporary australian modes of dealing with the dead, see howitt, _native tribes of south-east australia_; spencer and gillen, _northern tribes of central australia_.] it seems that the homeric poems mark this intermediate point...." [footnote: leaf, _iliad_, vol. ii. p. 622.] in that case the homeric poems are of one age, or, at least, all of them save "the original kernel" are of one age, namely, a period subsequent to the mycenaean prime, but considerably prior to the dipylon period, which exhibits a mixture of custom; cremation and inhumation coexisting, without barrows or howes. we welcome this conclusion, and note that (whatever may be the case with the oldest parts of the poems which say nothing about funerals) the latest expansions must be of about 1100-1000 b.c. (?). the poem is so early that it is prior to hero worship and ancestor worship; or it might be more judicious to say that the poem is of an age that did not, officially, practise ancestor worship, whatever may have occurred in folk-custom. the homeric age is one which had outgrown ancestor and hero worship, and had not, like the age of the cyclics, relapsed into it. _enfin_, unless we agree with helbig as to essential variations of custom, the poems are the work of one age, and that a brief age, and an age of peculiar customs, cremation and barrow burial; and of a religion that stood, without spirit worship, between the mycenzean period and the ninth century. that seems as certain as anything in prehistoric times can be, unless we are to say, that after the age of shaft graves and spirit worship came an age of cremation and of no spirit worship; and that late poets consciously and conscientiously preserved the tradition of _this_ period into their own ages of hero worship and inhumation, though they did not preserve the tradition of the shaft-grave period. we cannot accept this theory of adherence to stereotyped poetical descriptions, nor can any one consistently adopt it in this case. the reason is obvious. mr. leaf, with many other critics, distinguishes several successive periods of "expansion." in the first stratum we have the remains of "the original kernel." among these remains is the slaying of hector (xxii. 1-404), "with but slight additions." [footnote: leaf, _iliad_, vol. ii. p. xi.] in the slaying of hector that hero indicates cremation as the mode of burial. "give them my body back again, that the trojans and trojans' wives grant me my due of fire after my death." perhaps this allusion to cremation, in the "original kernel" in the slaying of hector, may be dismissed as a late borrowing from book vii. 79, 80, where hector makes conditions that the fallen hero shall be restored to his friends when he challenges the achaeans to a duel. but whoever knows the curious economy by way of repetition that marks early national epics has a right to regard the allusion to cremation (xxii, 342,343) as an example of this practice. compare _la chancun de williame_, lines 1041-1058 with lines 1140-1134. in both the dinner of a knight who has been long deprived of food is described in passages containing many identical lines. the poet, having found his formula, uses it whenever occasion serves. there are several other examples in the same epic. [footnote: _romania_, xxxiv. pp. 245, 246.] repetitions in homer need not indicate late additions; the artifice is part of the epic as it is of the ballad manner. if we are right, cremation is the mode of burial even in "the original kernel." hector, moreover, in the kernel (xxii. 256-259) makes, before his final fight with achilles, the same proposal as he makes in his challenge to a duel (vii. 85 et _seqq_.). the victor shall give back the body of the vanquished to his friends, but how the friends are to bury it hector does not say--in this place. when dying, he does say (xxii. 342, 343). in the kernel and all periods of expansion, funeral rites are described, and in all the method is cremation, with a howe or a barrow. thus the method of cremation had come in as early as the "kernel," the slaying of hector, and as early as the first expansions, and it lasted till the period of the latest expansions, such as books xxiii., xxiv. but what is the approximate date of the various expansions of the original poem? on that point mr. leaf gives his opinion. the making of the arms of achilles (books xviii., xix. 1-39) is, with the funeral of patroclus (xxiii. 1-256), in the second set of expansions, and is thus two removes later than the original "kernel." [footnote: leaf, _iliad_, vol. ii. p. xii.] now this is the period--the making of the shield for achilles is, at least, in touch with the period--of "the eminently free and naturalistic treatment which we find in the best mycenaean work, in the dagger blades, in the siege fragment, and notably in the vaphio cups," (which show long-haired men, not men close-cropped, as in the daggers and siege fragment). [footnote: leaf, _iliad_, vol. ii. p, 606.] the poet of the age of the second expansions, then,' is at least in touch with the work of the shaft grave and ages. he need not be contemporary with that epoch, but "may well have had in his mind the work of artists older than himself." it is vaguely possible that he may have seen an ancient shield of the mycenaean prime, and may be inspired by that. [footnote: _ibid_., vol. ii. pp. 606, 607.] moreover, and still more remarkable, the ordinary homeric form of cremation and howe-burial is even older than the period which, if not contemporary with, is clearly reminiscent of, the art of the shaft graves. for, in the period of the first expansions (vii. 1-3 i 2), the form of burial is cremation, with a barrow or tumulus. [footnote: _ibid_., vol. ii. p. xi. and pp. 606, 607.] thus mr. leaf's opinion might lead us to the conclusion that the usual homeric form of burial occurs in a period _prior_ to an age in which the poet is apparently reminiscent of the work of two early epochs--the epoch of shaft graves and that of _tholos_ graves. if this be so, cremation and urn burial in cairns may be nearly as old as the mycenaean shaft graves, or as old as the _tholos_ graves, and they endure into the age of the latest expansions. we must not press, however, opinions founded on the apparent technical resemblance of the free style and coloured metal work on the shield of achilles, to the coloured metal work and free design on the daggers of the mycenaean shaft graves. it is enough for us to note that the passages concerning burial, from the "kernel" itself, and also from the earliest to the latest expansions, are all perfectly harmonious, and of a single age--unless we are convinced by helbig's objections. that age must have been brief, indeed, for, before it arrives, the period of _tholos_ graves, as at vaphio, must expire, on one hand, while the blending of cremation with inhumation, in the dipylon age, must have been evolved after the cremation age passed, on the other. that brief intervening age, however, was the age of the _iliad_ and odyssey. this conclusion can only be avoided by alleging that late poets, however recent and revolutionary, carefully copied the oldest epic model of burial, while they innovated in almost every other point, so we are told. we can go no further till we find an unrifled cairn burial answering to homeric descriptions. we have, indeed, in thessaly, "a large tumulus which contained a silver urn with burned remains." but the accompanying pottery dated it in the second century b.c. [footnote: ridgeway, _early age of greece_, vol. i. p. 491; _journal of hellenic studies, vol. xx_. pp. 20-25.] it is possible enough that all tumuli of the homeric period have been robbed by grave plunderers in the course of the ages, as the vikings are said to have robbed the cairns of sutherlandshire, in which they were not likely to find a rich reward for their labours. a conspicuous howe invites robbery--the heroes of the saga, like grettir, occasionally rob a howe--and the fact is unlucky for the homeric archaeologist. we have now tried to show that, as regards (1) to the absence from homer of new religious and ritual ideas, or of very old ideas revived in ionia, (2) as concerns the clear conception of a loose form of feudalism, with an over-lord, and (3) in the matter of burial, the _iliad_ and odyssey are self-consistent, and bear the impress of a single and peculiar moment of culture. the fact, if accepted, is incompatible with the theory that the poets both introduced the peculiar conditions of their own later ages and also, on other occasions, consciously and consistently "archaised." not only is such archaising inconsistent with the art of an uncritical age, but a careful archaiser, with all the resources of alexandrian criticism at his command, could not archaise successfully. we refer to quintus smyrnaeus, author of the _post homerica_, in fourteen books. quintus does his best; but we never observe in him that _naïf_ delight in describing weapons and works of art, and details of law and custom which are so conspicuous in homer and in other early poets. he does give us penthesilea's great sword, with a hilt of ivory and silver; but of what metal was the blade? we are not told, and the reader of quintus will observe that, though he knows [greek: chalkos], bronze, as a synonym for weapons, he scarcely ever, if ever, says that a sword or spear or arrow-head was of bronze--a point on which homer constantly insists. when he names the military metal quintus usually speaks of iron. he has no interest in the constitutional and legal sides of heroic life, so attractive to homer. yet quintus consciously archaises, in a critical age, with homer as his model. any one who believes that in an uncritical age rhapsodists archaised, with such success as the presumed late poets of the _iliad_ must have done, may try his hand in our critical age, at a ballad in the style of the border ballads. if he succeeds in producing nothing that will at once mark his work as modern, he will be more successful than any poet who has made the experiment, and more successful than the most ingenious modern forgers of gems, jewels, and terra-cottas. they seldom deceive experts, and, when they do, other experts detect the deceit. chapter vii homeric armour tested by their ideas, their picture of political society, and their descriptions of burial rites, the presumed authors of the alleged expansions of the _iliad_ all lived in one and the same period of culture. but, according to the prevalent critical theory, we read in the _iliad_ not only large "expansions" of many dates, but also briefer interpolations inserted by the strolling reciters or rhapsodists. "until the final literary redaction had come," says mr. leaf--that is about 540 b.c.--"we cannot feel sure that any details, even of the oldest work, were secure from the touch of the latest poet." [footnote: leaf, _iliad_, vol. ii. p. ix.] here we are far from mr. leaf's own opinion that "the whole scenery of the poems, the details of armour, palaces, dress, decoration ... had become stereotyped, and formed a foundation which the epic poet dared not intentionally sap...." [footnote: _ibid_., vol. i. p. xv.] we now find [footnote: _ibid_., vol. ii. p. ix.] that "the latest poet" saps as much as he pleases down to the middle of the sixth century b.c. moreover, in the middle of the sixth century b.c., the supposed editor employed by hsistratus made "constant additions of transitional passages," and added many speeches by nestor, an ancestor of pisistratus. did these very late interlopers, down to the sixth century, introduce modern details into the picture of life? did they blur the _unus_ color? we hope to prove that, if they did so at all, it was but slightly. that the poems, however, with a mycenaean or sub-mycenaean basis of actual custom and usage, contain numerous contaminations from the usage of centuries as late as the seventh, is the view of mr. leaf, and reichel and his followers. [footnote: homerische waffen. von wolfgang reichel. wien, 1901.] reichel's hypothesis is that the heroes of the original poet had no defensive armour except the great mycenaean shields; that the ponderous shield made the use of chariots imperatively necessary; that, after the mycenaean age, a small buckler and a corslet superseded the unwieldy shield; that chariots were no longer used; that, by the seventh century b.c., a warrior could not be thought of without a breastplate; and that new poets thrust corslets and greaves into songs both new and old. how the new poets could conceive of warriors as always in chariots, whereas in practice they knew no war chariots, and yet could not conceive of them without corslets which the original poet never saw, is reichel's secret. the new poets had in the old lays a plain example to follow. they did follow it as to chariots and shields; as to corslets and greaves they reversed it. such is the reichelian theory. the shield as regards armour, controversy is waged over the shield, corslet, and bronze greaves. in homer the shield is of leather, plated with bronze, and of bronze is the corslet. no shields of bronze plating and no bronze corslets have been found in mycenaean excavations. we have to ask, do the homeric descriptions of shields tally with the representations of shields in works of art, discovered in the graves of mycenae, spata in attica, vaphio in sparta, and elsewhere? if the descriptions in homer vary from these relics, to what extent do they vary? and do the differences arise from the fact that the poet describes consistently what he sees in his own age, or are the variations caused by late rhapsodists in the iron age, who keep the great obsolete shields and bronze weapons, yet introduce the other military gear of their day, say 800-600 b.c.--gear unknown to the early singers? it may be best to inquire, first, what does the poet, or what do the poets, say about shields? and, next, to examine the evidence of representations of shields in mycenaean art; always remembering that the poet does not pretend to live, and beyond all doubt does not live, in the mycenaean prime, and that the testimony of the tombs is liable to be altered by fresh discoveries. in _iliad_, ii. 388, the shield (_aspis_) is spoken of as "covering a man about" ([greek: _amphibrotae_]), while, in the heat of battle, the baldric (_telamon_), or belt of the shield, "shall be wet with sweat." the shield, then, is not an ionian buckler worn on the left arm, but is suspended by a belt, and covers a man, or most of him, just as mycenaean shields are suspended by belts shown in works of art, and cover the body and legs. this (ii. 388) is a general description applying to the shields of all men who fight from chariots. their great shield answers to the great mediaeval shield of the knights of the twelfth century, the "double targe," worn suspended from the neck by a belt. such a shield covers a mounted knight's body from mouth to stirrup in an ivory chessman of the eleventh to twelfth century a.d., [footnote: _catalogue of scottish national antiquities_, p. 375.] so also in the bayeux tapestry, [footnote: gautier, _chanson de roland_. seventh edition, pp. 393, 394.] and on seals. dismounted men have the same shield (p. 132). the shield of menelaus (iii. 348) is "equal in all directions," which we might conceive to mean, mathematically "circular," as the words do mean that. a shield is said to have "circles," and a spear which grazes a shield--a shield which was _[greek: panton eesae]_, "every way equal"--rends both circles, the outer circle of bronze, and the inner circle of leather (_iliad_, xx. 273-281). but the passage is not unjustly believed to be late; and we cannot rely on it as proof that homer knew circular shields among others. the epithet _[greek: eukuklykos]_, "of good circle," is commonly given to the shields, but does not mean that the shield was circular, we are told, but merely that it was "made of circular plates." [footnote: leaf, _iliad_, vol. i. p. 573.] as for the shield of menelaus, and other shields described in the same words, "every way equal," the epithet is not now allowed to mean "circular." mr. leaf, annotating _iliad_, i. 306, says that this sense is "intolerably mathematical and prosaic," and translates _[greek: panton eesae]_ as "well balanced on every side." helbig renders the epithets in the natural sense, as "circular." [footnote: helbig, _homerische epos_, p. 315; cf., on the other hand, p. 317, note i.] to the rendering "circular" it is objected that a circular shield of, say, four feet and a half in diameter, would be intolerably heavy and superfluously wide, while the shields represented in mycenaean art are not circles, but rather resemble a figure of eight, in some cases, or a section of a cylinder, in others, or, again, a door (fig. 5, p. 130). what homer really meant by such epithets as "equal every way," "very circular," "of a good circle," cannot be ascertained, since homeric epithets of the shield, which were previously rendered "circular," "of good circle," and so on, are now translated in quite other senses, in order that homeric descriptions may be made to tally with mycenaean representations of shields, which are never circular as represented in works of art. in this position of affairs we are unable to determine the shape, or shapes, of the shields known to homer. a scholar's rendering of homer's epithets applied to the shield is obliged to vary with the variations of his theory about the shield. thus, in 1883, mr. leaf wrote, "the poet often calls the shield by names which seem to imply that it was round, and yet indicates that it was large enough to cover the whole body of a man.... in descriptions the round shape is always implied." the words which indicated that the shield (or one shield) "really looked like a tower, and really reached from neck to ankles" (in two or three cases), were "received by the poet from the earlier achaean lays." "but to homer the warriors appeared as using the later small round shield. his belief in the heroic strength of the men of old time made it quite natural to speak of them as bearing a shield which at once combined the later circular shape and the old heroic expanse...." [footnote: _journal of hellenic studies, iv. pp._ 283-285.] here the homeric words which naturally mean "circular" or "round" are accepted as meaning "round" or "circular." homer, it is supposed, in practice only knows the round shields of the later age, 700 b.c., so he calls shields "round," but, obedient to tradition, he conceives of them as very large. but, after the appearance of reichel's speculations, the homeric words for "round" and "circular" have been explained as meaning something else, and mr. leaf, in place of maintaining that homer knew no shields but round shields, now writes (1900), "the small circular shield of later times...is equally unknown to homer, with a very few curious exceptions," which reichel discovered--erroneously, as we shall later try to show. [footnote: leaf, _iliad_, vol. i. p. 575.] thus does science fluctuate! now homer knows in practice none but light round bucklers, dating from about 700 b.c.; again, he does not know them at all, though they were habitually used in the period at which the later parts of his epic were composed. we shall have to ask, how did small round bucklers come to be unknown to late poets who saw them constantly? some scholars, then, believe that the old original poet always described mycenaean shields, which are of various shapes, but never circular in mycenaean art. if there are any circular shields in the poems, these, they say, must have been introduced by poets accustomed, in a much later age, to seeing circular bucklers. therefore homeric words, hitherto understood as meaning "circular," must now mean something else--even if the reasoning seems circular. other scholars believe that the poet in real life saw various types of shields in use, and that some of them were survivals of the mycenaean shields, semi-cylindrical, or shaped like figures of 8, or like a door; others were circular; and these scholars presume that homer meant "circular" when he said "circular." neither school will convert the other, and we cannot decide between them. we do not pretend to be certain as to whether the original poet saw shields of various types, including the round shape, in use, though that is possible, or whether he saw only the mycenaean types. as regards size, homer certainly describes, in several cases, shields very much larger than most which we know for certain to have been common after, say, 700 b.c. he speaks of shields reaching from neck to ankles, and "covering the body of a man about." whether he was also familiar with smaller shields of various types is uncertain; he does not explicitly say that any small bucklers were used by the chiefs, nor does he explicitly say that all shields were of the largest type. it is possible that at the time when the epic was composed various types of shield were being tried, while the vast ancient shield was far from obsolete. to return to the _size_ of the shield. in a feigned tale of odysseus (odyssey, xiv. 474-477), men in a wintry ambush place their shields over their shoulders, as they lie on the ground, to be a protection against snow. but any sort of shield, large or small, would protect the shoulders of men in a recumbent position. quite a large shield may seem to be indicated in _iliad_, xiii. 400-405, where idomeneus curls up his whole person behind his shield; he was "hidden" by it. yet, as any one can see by experiment, a man who crouched low would be protected entirely by a highland targe of less than thirty inches in diameter, so nothing about the size of the shield is ascertained in this passage. on a black-figured vase in the british museum (b, 325) the entire body of a crouching warrior is defended by a large boeotian buckler, oval, and with _échancrures_ in the sides. the same remark applies to _z&ad_[sic], xxii. 273-275. hector watches the spear of achilles as it flies; he crouches, and the spear flies over him. robert takes this as an "old mycenaean" dodge--to duck down to the bottom of the shield. [footnote: _studien zur ilias_, p. 21.] the avoidance by ducking can be managed with no shield, or with a common highland targe, which would cover a man in a crouching posture, as when glenbucket's targe was peppered by bullets at clifton (746), and cluny shouted "what the devil is this?" the assailants firing unexpectedly from a ditch. a few moments of experiment, we repeat, prove that a round targe can protect a man in hector's attitude, and that the homeric texts here throw no light on the _size_ of the shield. the shield of hector was of black bull's-hide, and as large and long as any represented in mycenaean art, so that, as he walked, the rim knocked against his neck and ankles. the shape is not mentioned. despite its size, he _walked_ under it from the plain and field of battle into troy (_iliad_, vi. 116-118). this must be remembered, as reichel [footnote: reichel, 38, 39. father browne (_handbook_, p. 230) writes, "in _odyssey_, xiv 475, odysseus says he slept within the shield." he says "under arms" (_odyssey_, xiv. 474, but _cf_. xiv. 479).] maintains that a man could not walk under shield, or only for a short way; wherefore the war chariot was invented, he says, to carry the fighting man from point to point (leaf, _iliad_, vol. i. p. 573). mr. leaf elaborates these points: "why did not the homeric heroes ride? because no man could carry such a shield on horseback." [footnote: _iliad_, vol. i. p. 573.] we reply that men could and did carry such shields on horseback, as we know on the evidence of works of art and poetry of the eleventh to twelfth centuries a.d. mr. ridgeway has explained the introduction of chariots as the result of horses too small to carry a heavy and heavily-armed man as a cavalier. the shield ([greek: aspis]), we are told by followers of reichel, was only worn by princes who could afford to keep chariots, charioteers, and squires of the body to arm and disarm them. but this can scarcely be true, for all the comrades of diomede had the shield ([greek: aspis], _iliad_, x. 152), and the whole host of pandarus of troy, a noted bowman, were shield-bearers ([greek: aspistaon laon], _iliad_, iv. 90), and some of them held their shields ([greek: sakae]) in front of pandarus when he took a treacherous shot at menelaus (iv. 113). the whole host could not have chariots and squires, we may presume, so the chariot was not indispensable to the _écuyer_ or shield-bearing man. the objections to this conjecture of reichel are conspicuous, as we now prove. no mycenaean work of art shows us a shielded man in a chariot; the men with the monstrous shields are always depicted on foot. the only modern peoples who, to our knowledge, used a leather shield of the mycenaean size and even of a mycenaean shape had no horses and chariots, as we shall show. the ancient eastern peoples, such as the khita and egyptians, who fought from chariots, carried _small_ shields of various forms, as in the well-known picture of a battle between the khita, armed with spears, and the bowmen of rameses ii, who kill horse and man with arrows from their chariots, and carry no spears; while the khita, who have no bows, merely spears, are shot down as they advance. [footnote: maspero, _hist. ancienne_, ii. p. 225.]. egyptians and khita, who fight from chariots, use _small_ bucklers, whence it follows that war chariots were not invented, or, at least, were not retained in use, for the purpose of giving mobility to men wearing gigantic shields, under which they could not hurry from point to point. war chariots did not cease to be used in egypt, when men used small shields. moreover, homeric warriors can make marches under shield, while there is no mention of chariots to carry them to the point where they are to lie in ambush (odyssey, xiv. 470-510). if the shield was so heavy as to render a chariot necessary, would homer make hector trudge a considerable distance under shield, while achilles, under shield, sprints thrice round the whole circumference of troy? helbig notices several other cases of long runs under shield. either reichel is wrong, when he said that the huge shield made the use of the war chariot necessary, or the poet is "late"; he is a man who never saw a large shield like hector's, and, though he speaks of such shields, he thinks that men could walk and run under them. when men did walk or run under shield, or ride, if they ever rode, they would hang it over the left side, like the lion-hunters on the famous inlaid dagger of mycenae, [footnote: for the chariots, _cf_. reichel, _homerische waffen_, 120_ff_. wien, 1901.] or the warrior on the chessman referred to above (p. 111). aias, again, the big, brave, stupid porthos of the _iliad_, has the largest shield of all, "like a tower" (this shield cannot have been circular), and is recognised by his shield. but he never enters a chariot, and, like odysseus, has none of his own, because both men come from rugged islands, unfit for chariot driving. odysseus has plenty of shields in his house in ithaca, as we learn from the account of the battle with the wooers in the _odyssey;_ yet, in ithaca, as at troy, he kept no chariot. here, then, we have nations who fight from chariots, yet use small shields, and heroes who wear enormous shields, yet never own a chariot. clearly, the great shield cannot have been the cause of the use of the war chariot, as in the theory of reichel. aias and his shield we meet in _iliad_, vii. 206-220. "he clothed himself upon his flesh in _all_ his armour" ([greek: teuchea]), to quote mr. leaf's translation; but the poet only _describes_ his shield: his "towerlike shield of bronze, with sevenfold ox-hide, that tychius wrought him cunningly; tychius, the best of curriers, that had his home in hyle, who made for him his glancing shield of sevenfold hides of stalwart bulls, and overlaid the seven with bronze." the shield known to homer then is, in this case, so tall as to resemble a tower, and has bronze plating over bull's hide. by tradition from an age of leather shields the currier is still the shield-maker, though now the shield has metal plating. it is fairly clear that greek tradition regarded the shield of aias as of the kind which covered the body from chin to ankles, and resembled a bellying sail, or an umbrella unfurled, and drawn in at the sides in the middle, so as to offer the semblance of two bellies, or of one, pinched in at or near the centre. this is probable, because the coins of salamis, where aias was worshipped as a local hero of great influence, display this shield as the badge of the aeginetan dynasty, claiming descent from aias. the shield is bossed, or bellied out, with two half-moons cut in the centre, representing the _waist_, or pinched--in part, of the ancient mycenaean shield; the same device occurs on a mycenaean ring from aegina in the british museum. [footnote: evans, _journal of hellenic studies_, xiii. 213-216.] in a duel with aias the spear of hector pierced the bronze and six layers of hide on his shield, but stuck in the seventh. the spear of aias went through the circular (or "every way balanced") huge shield of hector, and through his corslet and _chiton_, but hector had doubled himself up laterally ([greek: eklinthae], vii. 254), and was not wounded. the next stroke of aias pierced his shield, and wounded his neck; hector replied with a boulder that lighted on the centre of the shield of aias, "on the boss," whether that means a mere ornament or knob, or whether it was the genuine boss--which is disputed. aias broke in the shield of hector with another stone; and the gentle and joyous passage of arms was stopped. the shield of agamemnon was of the kind that "cover all the body of a man," and was "every way equal," or "circular." it was plated with twelve circles of bronze, and had twenty [greek: omphaloi], or ornamental knobs of tin, and the centre was of black cyanus (xi. 31-34). there was also a head of the gorgon, with fear and panic. the description is not intelligible, and i do not discuss it. a man could be stabbed in the middle of the belly, "under his shield" (xi. 424-425), not an easy thing to do, if shields covered the whole body to the feet; but, when a hero was leaping from his chariot (as in this case), no doubt a spear could be pushed up under the shield. the ancient irish romances tell of a _gae bulg_, a spear held in the warrior's toes, and jerked up under the shield of his enemy! shields could be held up on high, in an attack on a wall garrisoned by archers (xii. 139), the great norman shield, also, could be thus lifted. the locrians, light armed infantry, had no shields, nor bronze helmets, nor spears, but slings and bows (xiii. 714). mr. leaf suspects that this is a piece of "false archaism," but we do not think that early poets in an uncritical age are ever archaeologists, good or bad. the poet is aware that some men have larger, some smaller shields, just as some have longer and some shorter spears (xiv. 370-377); but this does not prove that the shields were of different types. a tall man might inherit the shield of a short father, or _versa_. a man in turning to fly might trip on the rim of his shield, which proves how large it was: "it reached to his feet." this accident of tripping occurred to periphetes of mycenae, but it might have happened to hector, whose shield reached from neck to ankles. [footnote: _iliad_, xv. 645-646.] achilles must have been a large man, for he knew nobody whose armour would fit him when he lost his own (though his armour fitted patroclus), he could, however, make shift with the tower-like shield of aias, he said. [illustration 1: "the vase of aristonothos"] the evidence of the iliad, then, is mainly to the effect that the heroes carried huge shields, suspended by belts, covering the body and legs. if homer means, by the epithets already cited, "of good circle" and "every way equal," that some shields of these vast dimensions were circular, we have one example in early greek art which corroborates his description. this is "the vase of aristonothos," signed by that painter, and supposed to be of the seventh century (fig. 1). on one side, the companions of odysseus are boring out the eye of the cyclops; on the other, a galley is being rowed to the attack of a ship. on the raised deck of the galley stand three warriors, helmeted and bearing spears. the artist has represented their shields as covering their right sides, probably for the purpose of showing their devices or blazons. _their_ shields are small round bucklers. on the ship are three warriors whose shields, though circular, _cover the body from chin to ankles_, as in homer. one shield bears a bull's head; the next has three crosses; the third blazon is a crab. [footnote: mon. _dell_. inst., is. pl. 4.] such personal armorial bearings are never mentioned by homer. it is not usually safe to argue, from his silence, that he is ignorant of anything. he never mentions seals or signet rings, yet they cannot but have been familiar to his time. odysseus does not seal the chest with the phaeacian presents; he ties it up with a cunning knot; there are no rings named among the things wrought by hephaestus, nor among the offerings of the wooers of penelope. [footnote: helbig citing odyssey, viii. 445-448; _iliad_, xviii. 401; odyssey, xviii. 292-301.] but, if we are to admit that homer knew not rings and seals, which lasted to the latest mycenaean times, through the dipylon age, to the very late aeginetan treasure (800 b.c.) in the british museum, and appear again in the earliest dawn of the classical age and in a cyclic poem, it is plain that all the expansionists lived in one, and that a most peculiar _ringless_ age. this view suits our argument to a wish, but it is not credible that rings and seals and engraved stones, so very common in mycenaean and later times, should have vanished wholly in the homeric time. the poet never mentions them, just as shakespeare never mentions a thing so familiar to him as tobacco. how often are finger rings mentioned in the whole mass of attic tragic poetry? we remember no example, and instances are certainly rare: liddell and scott give none. yet the tragedians were, of course, familiar with rings and seals. manifestly, we cannot say that homer knew no seals, because he mentions none; but armorial blazons on shields could be ignored by no poet of war, if they existed. meanwhile, the shields of the warriors on the vase, being circular and covering body and legs, answer most closely to homer's descriptions. helbig is reduced to suggest, first, that these shields are worn by men aboard ship, as if warriors had one sort of shield when aboard ship and another when fighting on land, and as if the men in the other vessel were not equally engaged in a sea fight. no evidence in favour of such difference of practice, by sea and land, is offered. again, helbig does not trust the artist, in this case, though the artist is usually trusted to draw what he sees; and why should he give the men in the other ship or boat small bucklers, genuine, while bedecking the warriors in the adverse vessel with large, purely imaginary shields? [footnote: helbig, _das homerische epos_, ii. pp. 313-314.] it is not in the least "probable," as helbig suggests, that the artist is shirking the trouble of drawing the figure. reichel supposes that round bucklers were novelties when the vase was painted (seventh century), and that the artist did not understand how to depict them. [footnote: _homerische waffen_, p. 47.] but he depicted them very well as regards the men in the galley, save that, for obvious aesthetic reasons, he chose to assume that the men in the galley were left-handed and wore their shields on their right arms, his desire being to display the blazons of both parties. [footnote: see the same arrangement in a dipylon vase. baumeister, _denkmaler_, iii. p. 1945.] we thus see, if the artist may be trusted, that shields, which both "reached to the feet" and were circular, existed in his time (the seventh century), so that possibly they may have existed in homer's time and survived into the age of small bucklers. tyrtaeus (late seventh century), as helbig remarks, speaks of "a _wide_ shield, covering thighs, shins, breast, and shoulders." [footnote: _tyrtaeus_, xi. 23; helbig, _das homerische epos_, ii. p. 315, note 2.] nothing can be more like the large shields of the vase of aristonothos. thus the huge circular shield seems to have been a practicable shield in actual use. if so, when homer spoke of large circular shields he may have meant large circular shields. on the dodwell pyxis of 650 to 620 b.c., a man wears an oval shield, covering him from the base of the neck to the ankles. he wears it on his left arm. [footnote: walters, _ancient pottery_, p. 316.] of shields certainly small and light, worn by the chiefs, there is not a notice in the _iliad_, unless there be a hint to that effect in the accounts of heroes running, walking considerable distances, and "stepping lightly" under shields, supposed, by the critics, to be of crushing weight. in such passages the poet may be carried away by his own _verve_, or the heroes of ancient times may be deemed capable of exertions beyond those of the poet's contemporaries, as he often tells us that, in fact, the old heroes were. a poet is not a scientific military writer; and in the epic poetry of all other early races very gross exaggeration is permitted, as in the [blank space] the old celtic romances, and, of course, the huge epics of india. in homer "the skill of the poet makes things impossible convincing," aristotle says; and it is a critical error to insist on taking homer absolutely and always _au pied de la lettre_. he seems, undeniably, to have large body-covering shields present to his mind as in common use. small shields of the greek historic period are "unknown to homer," mr. leaf says, "with a very few curious exceptions," [footnote: _iliad_, vol. i. p. 575.] detected by reichel in book x. 15 [footnote: _ibid,_ vol. i. p. 569, fig. 2.], where diomede's men sleep with their heads resting on their shields, whereas a big-bellied mycenaean shield rises, he says, too high for a pillow. but some mycenzean shields were perfectly flat; while, again, nothing could be more comfortable, as a head-rest, than the hollow between the upper and lower bulges of the mycenzean huge shield. the zulu wooden head-rest is of the same character. thus this passage in book x. does not prove that small circular shields were known to homer, nor does x. 5 13. 526-530, an obscure text in which it is uncertain whether diomede and odysseus ride or drive the horses of rhesus. they _could_ ride, as every one must see, even though equipped with great body-covering shields. true, the shielded hero could neither put his shield at his back nor in front of him when he rode; but he could hang it sidewise, when it would cover his left side, as in the early middle ages (1060-1160 a.d.). the taking of the shield from a man's shoulders (xi. 374) does not prove the shield to be small; the shield hung by the belt (_telamon_) from the shoulder. [footnote: on the other side, see reichel, _homerische waffen_, pp. 40-44. wien, 1901. we have replied to his arguments above.] so far we have the results that homer seems most familiar with vast body-covering shields; that such shields were suspended by a baldric, not worn on the left arm; that they were made of layers of hide, plated with bronze, and that such a shield as aias wore must have been tall, doubtless oblong, "like a tower," possibly it was semi-cylindrical. whether the epithets denoting roundness refer to circular shields or to the double _targe_, g-shaped, of mycenaean times is uncertain. we thus come to a puzzle of unusual magnitude. if homer does not know small circular shields, but refers always to huge shields, whereas, from the eighth century b.c. onwards, such shields were not in use (disregarding tyrtaeus, and the vase of aristonothos on which they appear conspicuously, and the dodwell pyxis), where are we? either we have a harmonious picture of war from a very ancient date of large shields, or late poets did not introduce the light round buckler of their own period. meanwhile they are accused of introducing the bronze corslets and other defensive armour of their own period. defensive armour was unknown, we are told, in the mycenaean prime, which, if true, does not affect the question. homer did not live in or describe the mycenaean prime, with its stone arrow-tips. why did the late poets act so inconsistently? why were they ignorant of small circular shields, which they saw every day? or why, if they knew them, did they not introduce them in the poems, which, we are told, they were filling with non-mycenaean greaves and corslets? this is one of the dilemmas which constantly arise to confront the advocates of the theory that the _iliad_ is a patchwork of many generations. "late" poets, if really late, certainly in every-day life knew small parrying bucklers worn on the left arm, and huge body-covering shields perhaps they rarely saw in use. they also knew, and the original poet, we are told, did not know bronze corslets and greaves. the theory of critics is that late poets introduced the bronze corslets and greaves with which they were familiar into the poems, but scrupulously abstained from alluding to the equally familiar small shields. why are they so recklessly anachronistic and "up-to-date" with the corslets and greaves, and so staunchly but inconsistently conservative about keeping the huge shields? mr. leaf explains thus: "the groundwork of the epos is mycenaean, in the arrangement of the house, in the prevalence of copper" (as compared with iron), "and, as reichel has shown, in armour. yet in many points the poems are certainly later than the prime, at least, of the mycenaean age"--which we are the last to deny. "is it that the poets are deliberately trying to present the conditions of an age anterior to their own? or are they depicting the circumstances by which they are surrounded--circumstances which slowly change during the period of the development of the epos? cauer decides for the latter alternative, _the only one which is really conceivable_ [footnote: then how is the alleged archaeology of the poet of book x. conceivable?] in an age whose views are in many ways so naïve as the poems themselves prove them to have been." [footnote: _classical review, ix. pp. 463, 464._] here we entirely side with mr. leaf. no poet, no painter, no sculptor, in a naïf, uncritical age, ever represents in art anything but what he sees daily in costume, customs, weapons, armour, and ways of life. mr. leaf, however, on the other hand, occasionally chides pieces of deliberate archaeological pedantry in the poets, in spite of his opinion that they are always "depicting the circumstances by which they are surrounded." but as huge man-covering shields are _not_ among the circumstances by which the supposed late poets were surrounded, why do they depict them? here mr. leaf corrects himself, and his argument departs from the statement that only one theory is "conceivable," namely, that the poets depict their own surroundings, and we are introduced to a new proposition. "or rather we must recognise everywhere a compromise between two opposing principles: the singer, on the one hand, has to be conservatively tenacious of the old material which serves as the substance of his song; on the other hand, he has to be vivid and actual in the contributions which he himself makes to the common stock." [footnote: _ibid._, ix. pp. 463, 464.] the conduct of such singers is so weirdly inconsistent as not to be easily credible. but probably they went further, for "it is possible that the allusions" to the corslet "may have been introduced in the course of successive modernisation such as the oldest parts of the _iliad_ seem in many cases to have passed through. but, in fact, _iliad_, xi. 234 is the only mention of a corslet in any of the oldest strata, so far as we can distinguish them, and here reichel translates _thorex_ 'shield.'" [footnote: leaf, _iliad_, vol. i. p. 578.] mr. leaf's statement we understand to mean that, when the singer or reciter was delivering an ancient lay he did not introduce any of the military gear--light round bucklers, greaves, and corslets--with which his audience were familiar. but when the singer delivers a new lay, which he himself has added to "the kernel," then he is "vivid and actual," and speaks of greaves and corslets, though he still cleaves in his new lay to the obsolete chariot, the enormous shield, and, in an age of iron, to weapons of bronze. he is a sadly inconsistent new poet! meanwhile, sixteen allusions to the corslet "can be cut out," as probably "some or all these are additions to the text made at a time when it seemed absurd to think of a man in full armour without a corslet." [footnote: _ibid_, vol. i. p. 577.] thus the reciters, after all, did not spare "the old material" in the matter of corslets. the late singers have thus been "conservatively tenacious" in clinging to chariots, weapons of bronze, and obsolete enormous shields, while they have also been "vivid and actual" and "up to date" in the way of introducing everywhere bronze corslets, greaves, and other armour unknown, by the theory, in "the old material which is the substance of their song." by the way, they have not even spared the shield of the old material, for it was of leather or wood (we have no trace of metal plating on the old mycenaean shields), and the singer, while retaining the size of it, has added a plating of bronze, which we have every reason to suppose that mycenaean shields of the prime did not present to the stone-headed arrow. this theory of singers, who are at once "conservatively tenacious" of the old and impudently radical in pushing in the new, appears to us to be logically untenable. we have, in chapter i, observed the same inconsistency in helbig, and shall have occasion to remark again on its presence in the work of that great archaeologist. the inconsistency is inseparable from theories of expansion through several centuries. "many a method," says mr. leaf, "has been proposed which, up to a certain point, seemed irresistible, but there has always been a residuum which returned to plague the inventor." [footnote: _iliad_, vol. ii. p. x.] this is very true, and our explanation is that no method which starts from the hypothesis that the poems are the product of several centuries will work. the "residuum" is the element which cannot be fitted into any such hypothesis. but try the hypothesis that the poems are the product of a single age, and all is harmonious. there is no baffling "residuum." the poet describes the details of a definite age, not that of the mycenaean bloom, not that of 900-600 a.d. we cannot, then, suppose that many generations of irresponsible reciters at fairs and public festivals conservatively adhered to the huge size of the shield, while altering its material; and also that the same men, for the sake of being "actual" and up to date, dragged bronze corslets and greaves not only into new lays, but into passages of lays by old poets who had never heard of such things. consequently, the poetic descriptions of arms and armour must be explained on some other theory. if the poet, again, as others suppose--mr. ridgeway for one--knew such bronze-covered circular shields as are common in central and western europe of the bronze age, why did he sometimes represent them as extending from neck to ankles, whereas the known bronze circular shields are not of more than 2 feet 2 inches to 2 feet 6 inches in diameter? [footnote: ridgeway, _early age of greece, vol. i pp. 453, 471._] such a shield, without the wood or leather, weighed 5 lbs. 2 ozs., [footnote: _ibid., vol._ i. p. 462.] and a strong man might walk or run under it. homer's shields would be twice as heavy, at least, though, even then, not too heavy for a hector, or an aias, or achilles. i do not see that the round bronze shields of limerick, yetholm, beith, lincolnshire, and tarquinii, cited by mr. ridgeway, answer to homer's descriptions of huge shields. they are too small. but it is perfectly possible, or rather highly probable, that in the poet's day shields of various sizes and patterns coexisted. archaeology of the shields turning to archaeological evidence, we find no remains in the graves of the mycenaean prime of the bronze which covered the ox-hides of homeric shields, though we do find gold ornaments supposed to have been attached to shields. there is no evidence that the mycenaean shield was plated with bronze. but if we judge from their shape, as represented in works of mycenaean art, some of the mycenaean shields were not of wood, but of hide. in works of art, such as engraved rings and a bronze dagger (fig. 2) with pictures inlaid in other metals, the shield, covering the whole body, is of the form of a bellying sail, or a huge umbrella "up," and pinched at both sides near the centre: or is like a door, or a section of a cylinder; only one sort of shield resembles a big-bellied figure of 8. ivory models of shields indicate the same figure. [footnote: schuchardt, _schliemann's excavations_, p. 192.] a gold necklet found at enkomi, in cyprus, consists of a line of models of this mycenaean shield. [footnote: _excavations in cyprus_, pl. vii. fig. 604. a. s. murray, 1900.] [illustration: fig. 2. dagger with lion-hunters] [illustration: fig. 3.] there also exists a set of small mycenaean relics called palladia, found at mycenae, spata and in the earliest strata of the acropolis at athens. they resemble "two circles joined together so as to intersect one another slightly," or "a long oval pinched in at the middle." they vary in size from six inches to half an inch, and are of ivory, glazed ware, or glass. several such shields are engraved on mycenaean gems; one, in gold, is attached to a silver vase. the ornamentation shown on them occurs, too, on mycenaean shields in works of art; in short, these little objects are representations in miniature of the big double-bellied mycenaean shield. mr. ernest gardner concludes that these objects are the "schematised" reductions of an armed human figure, only the shield which covered the whole body is left. they are talismans symbolising an armed divinity, pallas or another. a dipylon vase (fig. 3) shows a man with a shield, possibly evolved out of this kind, much scooped out at the waist, and reaching from neck to knees. the shield covers his side, not his back or front. [footnote: _journal of hellenic studies_, vol. xiii. pp. 21-24.] [illustration: fig. 4.] one may guess that the original pinch at the waist of the mycenaean shield was evolved later into the two deep scoops to enable the warrior to use his arms more freely, while the shield, hanging from his neck by a belt, covered the front of his body. fig. 4 shows shields of 1060-1160 a.d. equally designed to cover body and legs. men wore shields, if we believe the artists of mycenae, when lion-hunting, a sport in which speed of foot is desirable; so they cannot have been very weighty. the shield then was hung over one side, and running was not so very difficult as if it hung over back or front (_cf._ fig. 5). the shields sometimes reach only from the shoulders to the calf of the leg. [footnote: reichel, p. 3, fig. 5, grave iii. at mycenae.] the wearer of the largest kind could only be got at by a sword-stab over the rim into the throat [footnote: _ibid_., p. 2, fig. 2.] (fig. 5). some shields of this shape were quite small, if an engraved rock-crystal is evidence; here the shield is not half so high as an adjacent goat, but it may be a mere decoration to fill the field of the gem. [footnote: reichel, p. 3, fig. 7.] [illustration: fig. 5. rings: swords and shields] other shields, covering the body from neck to feet, were sections of cylinders; several of these are represented on engraved mycenaean ring stones or on the gold; the wearer was protected in front and flank [footnote: _ibid._, p. 4, fig ii, 12; p. i, fig i.] (fig. 5). in a "maze of buildings" outside the precincts of the graves of mycenae, dr. schliemann found fragments of vases much less ancient than the contents of the sepulchres. there was a large amphora, the "warrior vase" (fig. 6). the men wear apparently a close-fitting coat of mail over a chiton, which reaches with its fringes half down the thigh. the shield is circular, with a half-moon cut out at the bottom. the art is infantile. other warriors carry long oval shields reaching, at least, from neck to shin. [footnote: schuchardt, _schliemann's_ excavations, pp. 279-285.] they wear round leather caps, their enemies have helmets. on a mycenaean painted _stele_, apparently of the same relatively late period, the costume is similar, and the shield--oval--reaches from neck to knee. [footnote: ridgeway, vol. i. p. 314.] the homeric shields do not answer to the smaller of these late and ugly representations, while, in their bronze plating, homeric shields seem to differ from the leather shields of the mycenaean prime. finally, at enkomi, near salamis, in cyprus, an ivory carving (in the british museum) shows a fighting man whose perfectly circular shield reaches from neck to knee; this is one of several figures in which mr. arthur evans finds "a most valuable illustration of the typical homeric armour." [footnote: _journal of the anthropological institute, vol. xxx. pp. 209-214, figs. 5, 6, 9._] the shield, however, is not so huge as those of aias, hector, and periphetes. i can only conclude that homer describes intermediate types of shield, as large as the mycenaean but plated with bronze, for a reason to be given later. this kind of shield, the kind known to homer, was not the invention of late poets living in an age of circular bucklers, worn on the left arm, and these supposed late poets never introduce into the epics such bucklers. what manner of military needs prompted the invention of the great mycenaean shields which, by homer's time, were differentiated by the addition of metal plating? [illustration: fig. 6. fragments of warrior vase] the process of evolution of the huge mycenaean shields, and of the homeric shields covering the body from chin to ankles, can easily be traced. the nature of the attack expected may be inferred from the nature of the defence employed. body-covering shields were, obviously, at first, _defences against showers of arrows_ tipped with stone. "in the earlier mycenaean times the arrow-head of obsidian alone appears," as in mycenaean grave iv. in the upper strata of mycenae and in the later tombs the arrow-head is usually of bronze. [footnote: tsountas and manatt, p. 206.] no man going into battle naked, without body armour, like the mycenaeans (if they had none), could protect himself with a small shield, or even with a round buckler of twenty-six inches in diameter, against the rain of shafts. in a fight, on the other hand, where man singled out man, and spears were the missiles, and when the warriors had body armour, or even when they had not, a small shield sufficed; as we see among the spear-throwing zulus and the spear-throwing aborigines of australia (unacquainted with bows and arrows), who mainly use shields scarcely broader than a bat. on the other hand, the archers of the algonquins in their wars with the iroquois, about 1610, used clubs and tomahawks but no spears, no missiles but arrows, and their leather shield was precisely the [greek: amphibrotae aspis] of homer, "covering the whole of a man." it is curious to see, in contemporary drawings (1620), mycenaean shields on red indian shoulders! in champlain's sketches of fights between french and algonquins against iroquois (1610-1620), we see the algonquins outside the iroquois stockade, which is defended by archers, sheltering under huge shields shaped like the mycenaean "tower" shield, though less cylindrical; in fact, more like the shield of the fallen hunter depicted on the dagger of mycenae. these algonquin shields partially cover the sides as well as the front of the warrior, who stoops behind them, resting the lower rim of the shield on the ground. the shields are oblong and rounded at the top, much like that of achilles [footnote: iliad, vol. ii p. 605] in mr. leaf's restoration? the sides curve inward. another shield, oval in shape and flat, appears to have been suspended from the neck, and covers an iroquois brave from chin to feet. the red indian shields, like those of mycenae, were made of leather; usually of buffalo hide, [footnote: _les voyages de sr. de champlain_, paris, 1620, f. 22: "rondache de cuir bouili, qui est d'un animal, comme le boufle."] good against stone-tipped arrows. the braves are naked, like the unshielded archers on the mycenaean silver vase fragment representing a siege (fig. 7). the description of the algonquin shields by champlain, when compared with his drawings, suggests that we cannot always take artistic representations as exact. in his designs only a few algonquins and one iroquois carry the huge shields; the unshielded men are stark naked, as on the mycenaean silver vase. but in his text champlain says that the iroquois, like the algonquins, "carried arrow-proof shields" and "a sort of armour woven of cotton thread"--homer's [greek: linothoraex] (_iliad_, ii. 259, 850). these facts appear in only one of champlain's drawings [footnote: dix's _champlain_, p. 113. appleton, new york, 1903. laverdière's _champlain_, vol. iv., plate opposite p. 85 (1870).] (fig. 8). these iroquois and algonquin shields are the armour of men exposed, not to spears, but to a hail of flint-tipped arrows. as spears came in for missiles in greek warfare, arrows did not wholly go out, but the noble warriors preferred spear and sword. [footnote: cf. archilochus, 3.] mr. ridgeway erroneously says that "no achaean warrior employs the bow for war." [footnote: _early age of greece_, i. 301.] teucer, frequently, and meriones use the bow; like pandarus and paris, on the trojan side, they resort to bow or spear, as occasion serves. odysseus, in _iliad_, book x., is armed with the bow and arrows of meriones when acting as a spy; in the _odyssey_ his skill as an archer is notorious, but he would not pretend to equal famous bowmen of an older generation, such as heracles and eurytus of oechalia, whose bow he possessed but did not take to troy. philoctetes is his master in archery. [footnote: odyssey, viii. 219-222.] [illustration: fig. 7. fragment of siege vase] the bow, however, was little esteemed by greek warriors who desired to come to handstrokes, just as it was despised, to their frequent ruin, by the scots in the old wars with england. dupplin, falkirk, halidon hill and many another field proved the error. there was much need in homeric warfare for protection against heavy showers of arrows. mr. monro is hardly correct when he says that, in homer, "we do not hear of _bodies_ of archers, of arrows darkening the air, as in descriptions of oriental warfare." [footnote: _ibid._, vol. ii. 305.] these precise phrases are not used by homer; but, nevertheless, arrows are flying thick in his battle pieces. the effects are not often noticed, because, in homer, helmet, shield, corslet, _zoster_, and greaves, as a rule prevent the shafts from harming the well-born, well-armed chiefs; the nameless host, however, fall frequently. when hector came forward for a parley (_iliad_, iii. 79), the achaens "kept shooting at him with arrows," which he took unconcernedly. teucer shoots nine men in _iliad_, viii. 297-304. in xi. _85_ the shafts ([greek: belea]) showered and the common soldiers fell--[misprint] being arrows as well as thrown spears. [footnote: _iliad_, iv. 465; xvi. 668, 678.] agamemnon and achilles are as likely, they say, to be hit by arrow as by spear (xi. 191; xxi. 13). machaon is wounded by an arrow. patroclus meets eurypylus limping, with an arrow in his thigh--archer unknown. [footnote: _iliad_, xi. 809, 810.] meriones, though an achaean paladin, sends a bronze-headed arrow through the body of harpalion (xiii. _650_). the light-armed locrians are all bowmen and slingers (xiii. 716). acamas taunts the argives as "bowmen" (xiv. 479). "the war-cry rose on both sides, and the arrows leaped from the bowstrings" (xv. 313). manifestly the arrows are always on the wing, hence the need for the huge homeric and mycenaean shields. therefore, as the achaeans in homer wore but flimsy corslets (this we are going to prove), the great body-covering shield of the mycenaean prime did not go out of vogue in homer's time, when bronze had superseded stone arrow-heads, but was strengthened by bronze plating over the leather. in a later age the bow was more and more neglected in greek warfare, and consequently large shields went out, after the close of the mycenaean age, and round parrying bucklers came into use. the greeks appear never to have been great archers, for some vases show even the old heroes employing the "primary release," the arrow nock is held between the thumb and forefinger--an ineffectual release. [footnote: c. j. longman, _archery_. badminton series.] the archers in early greek art often stoop or kneel, unlike the erect archers of old england; the bow is usually small--a child's weapon; the string is often drawn only to the breast, as by pandarus in the _iliad_ (iv. i 23). by 730 b.c. the release with three fingers, our western release, had become known. [footnote: leaf _iliad_, vol. i. p. 585.] [illustration: fig. 8.--algonquin corslet. from laverdiere, _oeuvres de champlain_, vol. iv. fol. 4. quebec, 1870.] the course of evolution seems to be: (1) the mycenaean prime of much archery, no body armour (?); huge leather "man-covering" shields are used, like those of the algonquins; (2) the same shields strengthened with metal, light body armour-thin corslets--and archery is frequent, but somewhat despised (the homeric age); (3) the parrying shield of the latest mycenaean age (infantry with body armour); (4) the ionian hoplites, with body armour and small circular bucklers. it appears, then, that the monstrous mycenaean shield is a survival of an age when bows and arrows played the same great part as they did in the wars of the algonquins and iroquois. the celebrated picture of a siege on a silver vase, of which fragments were found in grave iv., shows archers skirmishing; there is an archer in the lion hunt on the dagger blade; thirty-five obsidian arrow-heads were discovered in grave iv., while "in the upper strata of mycenae and in the later tombs the arrow-head is usually of bronze, though instances of obsidian still occur." in 1895 dr. tsountas found twenty arrow-heads of bronze, ten in each bundle, in a mycenaean chamber tomb. messrs. tsountas and manatt say, "in the acropolis graves at mycenae... the spear-heads were but few... arrow-heads, on the contrary, are comparatively abundant." they infer that "picked men used shield and spear; the rank and file doubtless fought simply with bow and sling." [footnote: tsountas and manatt, zog. [sic]]. the great mycenaean shield was obviously evolved as a defence against arrows and sling-stones flying too freely to be parried with a small buckler. what other purpose could it have served? but other defensive armour was needed, and was evolved, by homer's men, as also, we shall see, by the algonquins and iroquois. the algonquins and iroquois thus prove that men who thought their huge shields very efficient, yet felt the desirableness of the protection afforded by corslets, for they wore, in addition to their shields, such corslets as they were able to manufacture, made of cotton, and corresponding to the homeric [greek: linothoraex]. [footnote: in the interior of some shields, perhaps of all, were two [greek: kanones] (viii 193; xiii. 407). these have been understood as meaning a brace through which the left arm went, and another brace which the left hand grasped. herodotus says that the carians first used shield grips, and that previously shields were suspended by belts from the neck and left shoulder (herodotus, i. 171). it would be interesting to know how he learned these facts-perhaps from homer; but certainly the homeric shield is often described as suspended by a belt. mr. leaf used to explain the [greek: kanones] (xiii. 407) as "serving to attach the two ends of the baldrick to the shield" (_hellenic_ society's _journal_, iv. 291), as does mr. ridgeway. but now he thinks that they were two pieces of wood, crossing each other, and making the framework on which the leather of the shield was stretched. the hero could grasp the cross-bar, at the centre of gravity, in his left hand, rest the lower rim of the shield on the ground, and crouch behind it (xi. 593; xiii 157). in neither passage cited is anything said about resting the lower rim "on the ground," and in the second passage the warrior is actually advancing. in this attitude, however-grounding the lower rim of the great body-covering shield, and crouching behind it--we see algonquin warriors of about 1610 in champlain's drawings of red indian warfare.] mr. leaf, indeed, when reviewing reichel, says that "the use of the mycenaean shield is inconsistent with that of the metal breastplate; 'the shield' covers the wearer in a way which makes a breastplate an useless encumbrance; or rather, it is ignorance of the breastplate which alone can explain the use of such frightfully cumbrous gear as the huge shield." [footnote: _classical review_, ix. p. 55. 1895.] but the algonquins and iroquois wore such breastplates as they could manufacture, though they also used shields of great size, suspended, in mycenaean fashion, from the neck and shoulder by a _telamon_ or belt. the knights of the eleventh century a.d., in addition to very large shields, wore ponderous hauberks or byrnies, as we shall prove presently. as this combination of great shield with corslet was common and natural, we cannot agree with mr. leaf when he says, "it follows that the homeric warriors wore no metal breastplate, and that all the passages where the [greek: thoraes] is mentioned are either later interpolations or refer to some other sort of armour," which, _ex hypothesi_, would itself be superfluous, given the body-covering shield. shields never make corslets superfluous when men can manufacture corslets. the facts speak for themselves: the largest shields are not exclusive, so to speak, of corslets; the homeric warriors used both, just as did red indians and the mediaeval chivalry of europe. the use of the aspis in homer, therefore, throws no suspicion on the concomitant use of the corslet. the really surprising fact would be if late poets, who knew only small round bucklers, never introduced them into the poems, but always spoke of enormous shields, while they at the same time did introduce corslets, unknown to the early poems which they continued. clearly reichel's theory is ill inspired and inconsistent. this becomes plain as soon as we trace the evolution of shields and corslets in ages when the bow played a great part in war. the homeric bronze-plated shield and bronze corslet are defences of a given moment in military evolution; they are improvements on the large leather shield of mycenaean art, but, as the arrows still fly in clouds, the time for the small parrying buckler has not yet come. by the age of the dipylon vases with human figures, the shield had been developed into forms unknown to homer. in fig. 3 (p. 131) we see one warrior with a fantastic shield, slim at the waist, with horns, as it were, above and below; the greater part of the shield is expended uselessly, covering nothing in particular. in form this targe seems to be a burlesque parody of the figure of a mycenaean shield. the next man has a short oblong shield, rather broad for its length--perhaps a reduction of the mycenaean door-shaped shield. the third warrior has a round buckler. all these shields are manifestly post-homeric; the first type is the most common in the dipylon art; the third survived in the eighth-century buckler. [illustration: fig. 9.-gold corslet] chapter viii the breastplate no "practicable" breastplates, hauberks, corslets, or any things of the kind have so far been discovered in graves of the mycenaean prime. a corpse in grave v. at mycenae had, however, a golden breastplate, with oval bosses representing the nipples and with prettily interlaced spirals all over the remainder of the gold (fig. 9). another corpse had a plain gold breastplate with the nipples indicated. [footnote: schuchardt, _schliemann's_ excavations, pp. 254-257, fig. 256.] these decorative corslets of gold were probably funereal symbols of practicable breastplates of bronze, but no such pieces of armour are worn by the fighting-men on the gems and other works of art of mycenae, and none are found in mycenaean graves. but does this prove anything? leg-guards, broad metal bands clasping the leg below the knee, are found in the mycenaean shaft graves, but are never represented in mycenaean art. [footnote: leaf, _iliad_, vol. i. p. 575.] meanwhile, bronze corslets are very frequently mentioned in the "rarely alluded to," says mr. leaf, [footnote: _iliad_, vol. i. p. 576.] but this must be a slip of the pen. connected with the breastplate or _thorex_ ([greek: thoraex]) is the verb [greek: thoraesso, thoraessethai], which means "to arm," or "equip" in general. the achaeans are constantly styled in the _iliad_ and in the _odyssey_ "_chalkochitones_," "with bronze chitons." epics have therefore boldly argued that by "bronze chitons" the poet pleasantly alludes to shields. but as the mycenaeans seem scarcely to have worn any _chitons_ in battle, as far as we are aware from their art, and are not known to have had any bronze shields, the argument evaporates, as mr. ridgeway has pointed out. nothing can be less like a _chiton_ or smock, loose or tight, than either the double-bellied huge shield, the tower-shaped cylindrical shield, or the flat, doorlike shield, covering body and legs in mycenaean art. "the bronze _chiton_," says helbig, "is only a poetic phrase for the corslet." reichel and mr. leaf, however, think that "bronze chitoned" is probably "a picturesque expression... and refers to the bronze-covered shield." [footnote: leaf, _iliad_, i. 578.] the breastplate covered the upper part of the _chiton_, and so might be called a "bronze _chiton_," above all, if it had been evolved, as corselets usually have been, out of a real _chiton_, interwoven with small plates or rings of bronze. the process of evolution might be from a padded linen _chiton_ ([greek: linothooraes]) worn by teucer, and on the trojan side by amphius (as by nervous protestants during oates's "popish plot"), to a leathern _chiton_, strengthened by rings, or studs, or scales of bronze, and thence to plates. [footnote: ridgeway, _early age of greece_, vol. i. pp. 309, 310.] here, in this armoured _chiton_, would be an object that a poet might readily call "a _chiton_ of bronze." but that, if he lived in the mycenaean age, when, so far as art shows, _chitons_ were not worn at all, or very little, and scarcely ever in battle, and when we know nothing of bronze-plating on shields, the poet should constantly call a monstrous double-bellied leather shield, or any other mycemean type of shield, "a _bronze chiton_," seems almost unthinkable. "a leather cloak" would be a better term for such shields, if cloaks were in fashion. according to mr. myres (1899) the "stock line" in the _iliad_, about piercing a [greek: poludaidalos thoraex] or corslet, was inserted "to satisfy the practical criticisms of a corslet-wearing age," the age of the later poets, the age of iron. but why did not such practical critics object to the constant presence in the poems of bronze weapons, in their age out of date, if they objected to the absence from the poems of the corslets with which they were familiar? mr. myres supposes that the line about the [greek: poludaidalos] corslet was already old, but had merely meant "many-glittering body clothing"--garments set with the golden discs and other ornaments found in mycemean graves. the bronze corslet, he says, would not be "many glittering," but would reflect "a single star of light." [footnote: _journal of hellenic studies._ 1899] now, first, even if the star were a single star, it would be as "many glittering" when the warrior was in rapid and changeful motion as the star that danced when beatrix was born. secondly, if the contemporary corslets of the iron age were not "many glittering," practical corslet-wearing critics would ask the poet, "why do you call corslets 'many glittering'?" thirdly, [greek: poludaidalos] may surely be translated "a thing of much art," and greek corslets were incised with ornamental designs. thus messrs. hogarth and bosanquet report "a very remarkable 'mycemean' bronze breastplate" from crete, which "shows four female draped figures, the two central ones holding a wreath over a bird, below which is a sacred tree. the two outer figures are apparently dancing. it is probably a ritual scene, and may help to elucidate the nature of early aegean cults." [footnote: _journal of hellenic studies, vol. xx_. p. 322. 1899.] here, [greek: poludaidalos]--if that word means "artistically wrought." helbig thinks the epics silent about the gold spangles on dresses. [footnote: helbig, p. 71.] mr. myres applauds reichel's theory that [blank space] first meant a man's chest. if _thorex_ means a man's breast, then _thorex_ in a secondary sense, one thinks, would mean "breastplate," as waist of a woman means, first, her waist; next, her blouse (american). but mr. myres and reichel say that the secondary sense of _thorex_ is not breastplate but "body clothing," as if a man were all breast, or wore only a breast covering, whereas mycenaean art shows men wearing nothing on their breasts, merely drawers or loin-cloths, which could not be called _thorex_, as they cover the antipodes of the breast. the verb [greek: thoraesestai], the theory runs on, merely meant "to put on body clothing," which mycenaeans in works of art, if correctly represented, do not usually put on; they fought naked or in bathing drawers. surely we might as well argue that a "waistcoat" might come to mean "body clothing in general," as that a word for the male breast became, first, a synonym for the covering of the male buttocks and for apparel in general, and, next, for a bronze breastplate. these arguments appear rather unconvincing, [footnote: _journal of hellenic studies_, vol. xx. pp. 149, 150.] nor does mycenaean art instruct us that men went into battle dressed in body clothing which was thickly set with many glittering gold ornaments, and was called "a many-glittering _thorex_." further, if we follow reichel and mr. leaf, the mycenaeans wore _chitons_ and called them _chitons_. they also used bronze-plated shields, though of this we have no evidence. taking the bronze-plated (?) shield to stand poetically for the _chiton_, the poet spoke of "_the bronze-chitoned achaeans_" but, if we follow mr. myres, the mycenaeans also applied the word _thorex_ to body clothing at large, in place of the word _chiton_; and when a warrior was transfixed by a spear, they said that his "many-glittering, gold-studded _thorex_," that is, his body clothing in general, was pierced. it does seem simpler to hold that _chiton_ meant _chiton_; that _thorex_ meant, first, "breast," then "breastplate," whether of linen, or plaited leather, or bronze, and that to pierce a man through his [greek: poludaidalos thoraex] meant to pierce him through his handsome corslet. no mortal ever dreamt that this was so till reichel tried to make out that the original poet describes no armour except the large mycenaean shield and the _mitrê_, and that all corslets in the poems were of much later introduction. possibly they were, but they had plenty of time wherein to be evolved long before the eighth century, reichel's date for corslets. the argument is that a man with a large shield needs no body armour, or uses the shield because he has no body armour. but the possession and use of a large shield did not in the middle ages, or among the iroquois and algonquins, make men dispense with corslets, even when the shield was worn, as in homer, slung round the neck by a _telamon_ (_guige_ in old french), belt, or baldric. we turn to a french _chanson de geste--la chancun de willem_--of the twelfth century a.d., to judge by the handwriting. one of the heroes, girard, having failed to rescue vivien in battle, throws down his weapons and armour, blaming each piece for having failed him. down goes the heavy lance; down goes the ponderous shield, suspended by a _telamon: "ohitarge grant cume peises al col_!" down goes the plated byrnie, "_ohi grant broine cum me vas apesant_" [footnote: _la chancun de willame_, lines 716-726.] the mediaeval warrior has a heavy byrnie as well as a great shield suspended from his neck. it will be remarked also that the algonquins and iroquois of the beginning of the seventeenth century, as described by champlain, give us the whole line of mycenaean evolution of armour up to a certain point. not only had they arrow-proof, body-covering shields of buffalo hide, but, when champlain used his arquebus against the iroquois in battle, "they were struck amazed that two of their number should have been killed so promptly, seeing that they wore a sort of armour, woven of cotton thread, and carried arrow-proof shields." we have already alluded to this passage, but must add that parkman, describing from french archives a battle of illinois against iroquois in 1680, speaks of "corslets of tough twigs interwoven with cordage." [footnote: _discovery of the great iv_, [misprint] 1869.] golden, in his _five nations_, writes of the red indians as wearing "a kind of cuirass made of pieces of wood joined together." [footnote: dix, _champlion_ [misprint]] to the kindness of mr. hill tout i also owe a description of the armour of the indian tribes of north-west america, from a work of his own. he says: "for protective purposes in warfare they employed shields and coat-armour. the shields varied in form and material from tribe to tribe. among the interior salish they were commonly made of wood, which was afterwards covered with hide. sometimes they consisted of several thicknesses of hide only. the hides most commonly used were those of the elk, buffalo, or bear. after the advent of the hudson's bay co. some of the indians used to beat out the large copper kettles they obtained from the traders and make polished circular shields of these. in some centres long rectangular shields, made from a single or double hide, were employed. these were often from 4 to 5 feet in length and from 3 to 4 feet in width--large enough to cover the whole body. among the déné tribes (sikanis) the shield was generally made of closely-woven wicker-work, and was of an ovaloid form (exact size not given). "the coat armour was _everywhere used_, and varied in form and style in almost every centre. there were two ways in which this was most commonly made. one of these was the slatted cuirass or corslet, which was formed of a series of narrow slats of wood set side by side vertically and fastened in place by interfacings of raw hide. it went all round the body, being hung from the shoulders with straps. the other was a kind of shirt of double or treble elk hide, fastened at the side with thongs. another kind of armour, less common than that just described, was the long elk-hide tunic, which reached to and even _below the knees and was sleeved to the elbow."_ mr. hill tout's minute description, with the other facts cited, leaves no doubt that even in an early stage, as in later stages of culture, the use of the great shield does not exclude the use of such body armour as the means of the warriors enable them to construct. to take another instance, pausanias describes the corslets of the neolithic sarmatae, which he saw dedicated in the temple of asclepius at athens. corslets these bowmen and users of the lasso possessed, though they did not use the metals. they fashioned very elegant corslets out of horses' hoofs, cutting them into scales like those of a pine cone, and sewing them on to cloth. [footnote: pausanias, i. 211. [misprint] 6.] certain small, thin, perforated discs of stone found in scotland have been ingeniously explained as plates to be strung together on a garment of cloth, a neolithic _chiton_. however this may be, since iroquois and algonquins and déné had some sort of woven, or plaited, or wooden, or buff corslet, in addition to their great shields, we may suppose that the achaeans would not be less inventive. they would pass from the [greek: linothoraex] (answering to the cotton corslet of the iroquois) to a sort of jack or _jaseran_ with rings, scales, or plates, and thence to bronze-plate corslets, represented only by the golden breastplates of the mycenaean grave. even if the mycenaeans did not evolve the corslet, there is no reason why, in the homeric times, it should not have been evolved. for linen corslets, such as homer mentions, in actual use and represented in works of art we consult mr. leaf on _the armour_ of _homeric_ heroes.' he finds memnon in a white corslet, on a black-figured vase in the british museum. there is another white corsleted [footnote: _journal_ of _hellenic_ studies, vol. iv. pp. 82, 83, 85.] memnon figured in the _vases peints_ of the duc de luynes (plate xii.). mr. leaf suggests that the white colour represents "a corslet not of metal but of linen," and cites _iliad_, ii. 529, 5 30. "xenophon mentions linen corslets as being worn by the chalybes" (_anabasis_, iv. 15). two linen corslets, sent from egypt to sparta by king amasis, are recorded by herodotus (ii. 182; iii. 47). the corslets were of linen, embroidered in cotton and gold. such a piece of armour or attire might easily develop into the [greek: streptos chitoon] of _iliad_, v. 113, in which aristarchus appears to have recognised chain or scale armour; but we find no such object represented in mycenaean art, which, of course, does not depict homeric armour or costume, and it seems probable that the bronze corslets mentioned by homer were plate armour. the linen corslet lasted into the early sixth century b.c. in the poem called _stasiotica_, alcaeus (_no_. 5) speaks of his helmets, bronze greaves and corslets of linen ([choorakes te neoi linoo]) as a defence against arrows. meanwhile a "bronze _chiton_" or corslet would turn spent arrows and spent spears, and be very useful to a warrior whose shield left him exposed to shafts shot or spears thrown from a distance. again, such a bronze _chiton_ might stop a spear of which the impetus was spent in penetrating the shield. but homeric corslets did not, as a rule, avail to keep out a spear driven by the hand at close quarters, or powerfully thrown from a short distance. even the later greek corslets do not look as if they could resist a heavy spear wielded by a strong hand. i proceed to show that the homeric corslet did not avail against a spear at close quarters, but could turn an arrow point (once), and could sometimes turn a spear which had perforated a shield. so far, and not further, the homeric corslet was serviceable. but if a warrior's breast or back was not covered by the shield, and received a thrust at close quarters, the corslet was pierced more easily than the pad of paper which was said to have been used as secret armour in a duel by the master of sinclair (1708). [footnote: _proceedings in court marshal held upon john, master of sinclair_. sir walter scott. roxburghe club. (date of event, 1708.)] it is desirable to prove this feebleness of the corslet, because the poet often says that a man was smitten with the spear in breast or back when unprotected by the shield, without mentioning the corslet, whence it is argued by the critics that corslets were not worn when the original lays were fashioned, and that they have only been sporadically introduced, in an after age when the corslet was universal, by "modernising" later rhapsodists aiming at the up-to-date. a weak point is the argument that homer says back or breast was pierced, without mentioning the corslet, whence it follows that he knew no corslets. quintus smyrnaeus does the same thing. of course, quintus knew all about corslets, yet (book i. 248, 256, 257) he makes his heroes drive spear or sword through breast or belly without mentioning the resistance of the corslet, even when (i. 144, 594) he has assured us that the victim was wearing a corslet. these facts are not due to inconsistent interpolation of corslets into the work of this post-christian poet quintus. [footnote: i find a similar omission in the _chanson de roland_.] corslets, in homer, are flimsy; that of lycaon, worn by paris, is pierced by a spear which has also perforated his shield, though the spear came only from the weak hand of menelaus (_iliad_, iii. 357, 358). the arrow of pandarus whistles through the corslet of menelaus (iv. 136). the same archer pierces with an arrow the corslet of diomede (v. 99, 100). the corslet of diomede, however, avails to stop a spear which has traversed his shield (v. 281). the spear of idomeneus pierces the corslet of othryoneus, and the spear of antilochus perforates the corslet of a charioteer (xiii. 371, 397). a few lines later diomede's spear reaches the midriff of hypsenor. no corslet is here mentioned, but neither is the shield mentioned (this constantly occurs), and we cannot argue that hypsenor wore no corslet, unless we are also to contend that he wore no shield, or a small shield. idomeneus drives his spear through the "_bronze chiton_" of alcathöus (xiii. 439, 440). mr. leaf reckons these lines "probably an interpolation to turn the linen _chiton_, the rending of which is the sign of triumph, into a bronze corslet." but we ask why, if an editor or rhapsodist went through the _iliad_ introducing corslets, he so often left them out, where the critics detect their absence because they are not mentioned? the spear of idomeneus pierces another feeble corslet over the victim's belly (xiii. 506-508). it is quite a surprise when a corslet does for once avail to turn an arrow (xiii. 586-587). but aias drives his spear through the corslet of phorcys, into his belly (xvii 311-312). thus the corslet scarcely ever, by itself, protects a hero; it never protects him against an unspent spear; even when his shield stands between his corslet and the spear both are sometimes perforated. yet occasionally the corslet saves a man when the spear has gone through the shield. the poet, therefore, sometimes gives us a man pierced in a part which the corslet covers, without mentioning the flimsy article that could not keep out a spear. reichel himself came to see, before his regretted death, that he could not explain away the _thorex_ or corslet, on his original lines, as a mere general name for "a piece of armour"; and he inclined to think that jacks, with metal plates sewn on, did exist before the ionian corslet. [footnote: _homerische waffen_, pp. 93-94. 1901.] the gold breastplates of the mycenaean graves pointed in this direction. but his general argument is that corslets were interpolated into the old lays by poets of a corslet-wearing age; and mr. leaf holds that corslets may have filtered in, "during the course of successive modernisation, such as the oldest parts of the _iliad_ seem in many cases to have passed through," [footnote: leaf, iliad, i. p. 578.] though the new poets were, for all that, "conservatively tenacious of the old material." we have already pointed out the difficulty. the poets who did not introduce the new small bucklers with which they were familiar, did stuff the _iliad_ full of corslets unknown, by the theory, to the original poet, but familiar to rhapsodists living centuries later. why, if they were bent on modernising, did they not modernise the shields? and how, if they modernised unconsciously, as all uncritical poets do, did the shield fail to be unconsciously "brought up to date"? it seems probable that homer lived at a period when both huge shield and rather feeble corslet were in vogue. we shall now examine some of the passages in which mr. leaf, mainly following reichel, raises difficulties about corslets. we do not know their mechanism; they were composed of [greek: guala], presumed to be a backplate and a breastplate. the word _gualon_ appears to mean a hollow, or the converse, something convex. we cannot understand the mechanism (see a young man putting on a corslet, on an amphora by euthymides. walter, vol. ii. p. 176); but, if late poets, familiar with such corslets, did not understand how they worked, they were very dull men. when their descriptions puzzle us, that is more probably because we are not at the point of view than because poets interpolated mentions of pieces of armour which they did not understand, and therefore cannot have been familiar with, and, in that case, would not introduce. mr. leaf starts with a passage in the _iliad_ (iii. 357-360)--it recurs in another case: "through the bright shield went the ponderous spear, and through the inwrought" (very artfully wrought), [greek: poludaidalou] "breastplate it pressed on, and straight beside his flank it rent the tunic, but he swerved and escaped black death." mr. leaf says, "it is obvious that, after a spear has passed through a breastplate, there is no longer any possibility for the wearer to bend aside and so to avoid the point...." but i suppose that the wearer, by a motion very natural, doubled up sideways, so to speak, and so the spear merely grazed his flesh. that is what i suppose the poet to intend. the more he knew of corslets, the less would he mention an impossible circumstance in connection with a corslet. again, in many cases the late poets, by the theory--though it is they who bring the corslets in--leave the corslets out! a man without shield, helmet, and spear calls himself "naked." why did not these late poets, it is asked, make him take off his corslet, if he had one, as well as his shield? the case occurs in xxii. 111-113,124-125. hector thinks of laying aside helmet, spear, and shield, and of parleying with achilles. "but then he will slay me naked," that is, unarmed. "he still had his corslet," the critics say, "so how could he be naked? or, if he had no corslet, this is a passage uncontaminated by the late poets of the corslet age." now certainly hector _was_ wearing a corslet, which he had taken from patroclus: that is the essence of the story. he would, however, be "naked" or unprotected if he laid aside helmet, spear, and shield, because achilles could hit him in the head or neck (as he did), or lightly drive the spear through the corslet, which, we have proved, was no sound defence against a spear at close quarters, though useful against chance arrows, and occasionally against spears spent by traversing the shield. we next learn that no corslet occurs in the _odyssey_, or in _iliad_, book x., called "very late": mr. leaf suggests that it is of the seventh century b.c. but if the odyssey and iliad, book x., are really very late, their authors and interpolators were perfectly familiar with ionian corslets. why did they leave corslets out, while their predecessors and contemporaries were introducing them all up and down the _iliad_? in fact, in book x, no prince is regularly equipped; they have been called up to deliberate in the dead of night, and when two go as spies they wear casual borrowed gear. it is more important that no corslet is mentioned in nestor's arms in his tent. but are we to explain this, and the absence of mention of corslets in the odyssey (where there is little about regular fighting), on the ground that the author of _iliad_, book x., and all the many authors and editors of the _odyssey_ happened to be profound archaeologists, and, unlike their contemporaries, the later poets and interpolators of the _iliad_, had formed the theory that corslets were not known at the time of the siege of troy and therefore must not be mentioned? this is quite incredible. no hypothesis can be more improbable. we cannot imagine late ionian rhapsodists listening to the _iliad_, and saying, "these poets of the _iliad_ are all wrong: at the date of the mycenaean prime, as every educated man knows, corslets were not yet in fashion. so we must have no corslets in the _odyssey_?" a modern critic, who thinks this possible, is bringing the practice of archaising poets of the late nineteenth century into the minds of rhapsodists of the eighth century before christ. artists of the middle of the sixteenth century always depict jeanne d'arc in the armour and costume of their own time, wholly unlike those of 1430. this is the regular rule. late rhapsodists would not delve in the archaeology of the mycenaean prime. indeed, one does not see how they could discover, in asia, that corslets were not worn, five centuries earlier, on the other side of the sea. we are told that aias and some other heroes are never spoken of as wearing corslets. but aias certainly did put on a set of pieces of armour, and did not trust to his shield alone, tower-like as it was. the description runs thus: the achaeans have disarmed, before the duel of aias and hector. aias draws the lucky lot; he is to 'meet hector, and bids the others pray to zeus "while i clothe me in my armour of battle." while they prayed, aias "arrayed himself in flashing bronze. and when he had now clothed upon his flesh _all_ his pieces of armour" ([greek: panta teuchae]) "he went forth to fight." if aias wore only a shield, as on mr. leaf's hypothesis, he could sling it on before the achaeans could breathe a _pater noster_. his sword he would not have taken off; swords were always worn. what, then, are "all his pieces of armour"? (vii. 193, 206). carl robert cites passages in which the [greek: teuchea], taken from the shoulders, include corslets, and are late and ionian, with other passages which are mycenaean, with no corslet involved. he adds about twenty more passages in which [greek: teuchea] include corslets. among these references two are from the _doloneia_ (x. 254, 272), where reichel finds no mention of corslets. how robert can tell [greek: teuchea], which mean corslets, from [greek: teuchea], which exclude corslets, is not obvious. but, at all events, he does see corslets, as in vii. 122, where reichel sees none, [footnote: robert, _studien zur ilias_, pp. 20-21.] and he is obviously right. it is a strong point with mr. leaf that "we never hear of the corslet in the case of aias...." [footnote: leaf, _iliad_, vol. i. p. 576.] robert, however, like ourselves, detects the corslet among "_al_ the [greek: teuchea]" which aias puts on for his duel with hector (iliad, vii. 193, 206-207). in the same book (vii. 101-103, 122) the same difficulty occurs. menelaus offers to fight hector, and says, "i will put on my harness" [greek: thooraxomai], and does "put on his fair pieces of armour" [greek: teuchea kala], agamemnon forbids him to fight, and his friends "joyfully take his pieces of armour" [greek: teuchea] "from his shoulders" (_iliad_, vii. 206-207). they take off pieces of armour, in the plural, and a shield cannot be spoken of in the plural; while the sword would not be taken off--it was worn even in peaceful costume. idomeneus is never named as wearing a corslet, but he remarks that he has plenty of corslets (xiii. 264); and in this and many cases opponents of corslets prove their case by cutting out the lines which disprove it. anything may be demonstrated if we may excise whatever passage does not suit our hypothesis. it is impossible to argue against this logical device, especially when the critic, not satisfied with a clean cut, supposes that some late enthusiast for corslets altered the prayer of thetis to hephaestus for the very purpose of dragging in a corslet. [footnote: leaf, note to _iliad_, xviii. 460, 461.] if there is no objection to a line except that a corslet occurs in it, where is the logic in excising the line because one happens to think that corslets are later than the oldest parts of the _iliad_? another plan is to maintain that if the poet does not in any case mention a corslet, there was no corslet. thus in v. 99, an arrow strikes diomede "hard by the right shoulder, the plate of the corslet." thirteen lines later (v. 112, 113) "sthenelus drew the swift shaft right through out of diomede's shoulder, and the blood darted up through the pliant _chiton_." we do not know what the word here translated "pliant" [greek: streptos] means, and aristarchus seems to have thought it was "a coat of mail, chain, or scale armour." if so, here is the corslet, but in this case, if a corslet or jack with intertwisted small plates or scales or rings of bronze be meant, _gualon_ cannot mean a large "plate," as it does. mr. ridgeway says, "it seems certain that [greek: streptos chitoon] means, as aristarchus held, a shirt of mail." [footnote: _early age of greece_, vol. i. p, 306.] mr. leaf says just the reverse. as usual, we come to a deadlock; a clash of learned opinion. but any one can see that, in the space of thirteen lines, no poet or interpolator who wrote v. i 12, i 13 could forget that diomede was said to be wearing a corslet in v. 99; and even if the poet could forget, which is out of the question, the editor of 540 b.c. was simply defrauding his employer, piaistratus, if he did not bring a remedy for the stupid fault of the poet. when this or that hero is not specifically said to be wearing a corslet, it is usually because the poet has no occasion to mention it, though, as we have seen, a man is occasionally smitten, in the midriff, say, without any remark on the flimsy piece of mail. that corslets are usually taken for granted as present by the poet, even when they are not explicitly named, seems certain. he constantly represents the heroes as "stripping the pieces of mail" [greek: teuchea], when they have time and opportunity, from fallen foes. if only the shield is taken, if there is nothing else in the way of bronze body armour to take, why have we the plural, [greek: teuchea]? the corslet, as well as the shield, must be intended. the stripping is usually "from the shoulders," and it is "from his shoulders" that hector hopes to strip the corslet of diomede (iliad, viii. 195) in a passage, to be sure, which the critics think interpolated. however this may be, the stripping of the (same greek characters), cannot be the mere seizure of the shield, but must refer to other pieces of armour: "all the pieces of armour." so other pieces of defensive armour besides the shield are throughout taken for granted. if they were not there they could not be stripped. it is the chitons that agamemnon does something to, in the case of two fallen foes (_iliad_, xi. 100), and aristarchus thought that these _chitons_ were corslets. but the passage is obscure. in _iliad_, xi. 373, when diomede strips helmet from head, shield from shoulder, corslet from breast of agastrophus, reichel was for excising the corslet, because it was not mentioned when the hero was struck on the hip joint. i do not see that an inefficient corslet would protect the hip joint. to do that, in our eighteenth century cavalry armour, was the business of a _zoster_, as may be seen in a portrait of the chevalier de st. george in youth. it is a thick ribbed _zoster_ that protects the hip joints of the king. finally, mr. evans observes that the western invaders of egypt, under rameses iii, are armed, on the monuments, with cuirasses formed of a succession of plates, "horizontal, or rising in a double curve," while the enkomi ivories, already referred to, corroborate the existence of corslet, _zoster_, and _zoma_ as articles of defensive armour. [footnote: _journal of anthropological institute_, xxx. p. 213.] "recent discoveries," says mr. evans, "thus supply a double corroboration of the homeric tradition which carries back the use of the round shield and the cuirass or [greek: thoraex] to the earlier epic period... with such a representation before us, a series of homeric passages on which dr. reichel... has exhausted his powers of destructive criticism, becomes readily intelligible." [footnote: ibid., p. 214.] homer, then, describes armour _later_ than that of the mycenaean prime, when, as far as works of art show, only a huge leathern shield was carried, though the gold breastplates of the corpses in the grave suggest that corslets existed. homer's men, on the other hand, have, at least in certain cases quoted above, large bronze-plated shields and bronze cuirasses of no great resisting power, perhaps in various stages of evolution, from the byrnie with scales or small plates of bronze to the breastplate and backplate, though the plates for breast and back certainly appear to be usually worn. it seems that some critics cannot divest themselves of the idea that "the original poet" of the "kernel" was contemporary with them who slept in the shaft graves of mycenae, covered with golden ornaments, and that for body armour he only knew their monstrous shields. mr. leaf writes: "the armour of homeric heroes corresponds closely to that of the mykenaean age as we learn it from the monuments. the heroes wore no breastplate; their only defensive armour was the enormous mykenaean shield...." this is only true if we excise all the passages which contradict the statement, and go on with mr. leaf to say, "by the seventh century b.c., or thereabouts, the idea of a panoply without a breastplate had become absurd. by that time the epic poems had almost ceased to grow; but they still admitted a few minor episodes in which the round shield" (where (?) "and corslet played a part, as well as the interpolation of a certain number of lines and couplets in which the new armament was mechanically introduced into narratives which originally knew nothing of it." [footnote: _iliad_, vol. i. p. 568.] on the other hand, mr. leaf says that "the small circular shield of later times is unknown to homer," with "a very few curious exceptions," in which the shields are not said to be small or circular. [footnote: _iliad_, vol. i. p, 575.] surely this is rather arbitrary dealing! we start from our theory that the original poet described the armour of "the monuments" though _they_ are "of the prime," while he professedly lived long after the prime--lived in an age when there must have been changes in military equipment. we then cut out, as of the seventh century, whatever passages do not suit our theory. anybody can prove anything by this method. we might say that the siege scene on the mycenaean silver vase represents the mycenaean prime, and that, as there is but one jersey among eight men otherwise stark naked, we must cut out seven-eighths of the _chitons_ in the _iliad_, these having been interpolated by late poets who did not run about with nothing on. we might call the whole poem late, because the authors know nothing of the mycenaean bathing-drawers so common on the "monuments." the argument compels mr. leaf to assume that a shield can be called [greek: teuchea] in the plural, so, in _iliad_, vii. 122, when the squires of menelaus "take the [greek: teuchea] from his shoulders," we are assured that "the shield (aspis) was for the chiefs alone" (we have seen that all the host of pandarus wore shields), "for those who could keep a chariot to carry them, and squires to assist them in taking off this ponderous defence" (see vii 122). [footnote: _iliad_, vol. i. p. 583.] we do "see vii. 122," and find that not a _single_ shield, but pieces of gear in the plural number were taken off menelaus. the feeblest warrior without any assistance could stoop his head and put it through the belt of his shield, as an angler takes off his fishing creel, and there he was, totally disarmed. no squire was needed to disarm him, any more than to disarm girard in the _chancun de willame_. nobody explains why a shield is spoken of as a number of things, in the plural, and that constantly, and in lines where, if the poet means a shield, prosody permits him to _say_ a shield, [greek: therapontes ap oopoon aspid elonto]. it really does appear that reichel's logic, his power of visualising simple things and processes, and his knowledge of the evolution of defensive armour everywhere, were not equal to his industry and classical erudition. homer seems to describe what he saw: shields, often of great size, made of leather, plated with bronze, and suspended by belts; and, for body armour, feeble bronze corslets and _zosters_. there is nothing inconsistent in all this: there was no more reason why an homeric warrior should not wear a corslet as well as a shield than there was reason why a mediaeval knight who carried a _targe_ should not also wear a hauberk, or why an iroquois with a shield should not also wear his cotton or wicker-work armour. defensive gear kept pace with offensive weapons. a big leather shield could keep out stone-tipped arrows; but as bronze-tipped arrows came in and also heavy bronze-pointed spears, defensive armour was necessarily strengthened; the shield was plated with bronze, and, if it did not exist before, the bronze corslet was developed. to keep out stone-tipped arrows was the business of the mycenaean wooden or leather shield. "bronze arrow-heads, so common in the _iliad_, are never found," says schuchardt, speaking of schliemann's mycenaean excavations. [footnote: schuchardt, p. 237.] there was thus, as far as arrows went, no reason why mycenaean shields should be plated with bronze. if the piece of wood in grave v. was a shield, as seems probable, what has become of its bronze plates, if it had any? [footnote: schuchardt, p. 269] gold ornaments, which could only belong to shields, [footnote: _ibid_., p. 237.] were found, but bronze shield plates never. the inference is certain. the mycenaean shields of the prime were originally wooden or leather defences against stone-headed arrows. homer's shields are bronze-plated shields to keep out bronze-headed or even, perhaps, iron-pointed arrows of primitive construction (iv. 123). homer describes armour based on mycenaean lines but developed and advanced as the means of attack improved. where everything is so natural it seems fantastic to explain the circumstances by the theory that poets in a late age sometimes did and sometimes did not interpolate the military gear of four centuries posterior to the things known by the original singer. these rhapsodists, we reiterate, are now said to be anxiously conservative of mycenaean detail and even to be deeply learned archaeologists. [footnote: leaf, _iliad_, vol. ii. p. 629.] at other times they are said to introduce recklessly part of the military gear of their own age, the corslets, while sternly excluding the bucklers. all depends on what the theory of very late developments of the epic may happen to demand at this or that moment. again, mr. leaf informs us that "the first rhapsodies were born in the bronze age, in the day of the ponderous mycenaean shield; the last in the iron age, when men armed themselves with breastplate and light round buckler." [footnote: _ibid_., vol. ii. p. x.] we cannot guess how he found these things out, for corslets are as common in one "rhapsody" as in another when circumstances call for the mention of corslets, and are entirely unnamed in the odyssey (save that the achaeans are "bronze-chitoned"), while the odyssey is alleged to be much later than the _iliad_. as for "the iron age," no "rhapsodist" introduces so much as one iron spear point. it is argued that he speaks of bronze in deference to tradition. then why does he scout tradition in the matter of greaves and corslets, while he sometimes actually goes behind tradition to find mycenaean things unknown to the original poets? these theories appear too strangely inconsistent; really these theories cannot possibly be accepted. the late poets, of the theory, are in the iron age, and are, of course, familiar with iron weapons; yet, in conservative deference to tradition, they keep them absolutely out of their rhapsodies. they are equally familiar with bronze corslets, so, reckless this time of tradition, they thrust them even into rhapsodies which are centuries older than their own day. they are no less familiar with small bucklers, yet they say nothing about them and cling to the traditional body-covering shield. the source of the inconsistent theories which we have been examining is easily discovered. the scholars who hold these opinions see that several things in the homeric picture of life are based on mycenaean facts; for example, the size of the shields and their suspension by baldrics. but the scholars also do steadfastly believe, following the wolfian tradition, that there could be no _long_ epic in the early period. therefore the greater part, much the greater part of the _iliad_, must necessarily, they say, be the work of continuators through several centuries. critics are fortified in this belief by the discovery of inconsistencies in the epic, which, they assume, can only be explained as the result of a compilation of the patchwork of ages. but as, on this theory, many men in many lands and ages made the epic, their contributions cannot but be marked by the inevitable changes in manners, customs, beliefs, implements, laws, weapons, and so on, which could not but arise in the long process of time. yet traces of change in law, religion, manners, and customs are scarcely, if at all, to be detected; whence it logically follows that a dozen generations of irresponsible minstrels and vagrant reciters were learned, conscientious, and staunchly conservative of the archaic tone. their erudite conservatism, for example, induced them, in deference to the traditions of the bronze age, to describe all weapons as of bronze, though many of the poets were living in an age of weapons of iron. it also prompted them to describe all shields as made on the far-away old mycenaean model, though they were themselves used to small circular bucklers, with a bracer and a grip, worn on the left arm. but at this point the learning and conservatism of the late poets deserted them, and into their new lays, also into the old lays, they eagerly introduced many unwarrantable corslets and greaves--things of the ninth to seventh centuries. we shall find helbig stating, on the same page, that in the matter of usages "the epic poets shunned, as far as possible, all that was recent," and also that for fear of puzzling their military audiences they did the reverse: "they probably kept account of the arms and armour of their own day." [footnote: la _question mycénienne_, p. 50. _cf_. note i.] now the late poets, on this showing, must have puzzled warriors who used iron weapons by always speaking of bronze weapons. they pleased the critical warriors, on the other hand, by introducing the corslets and greaves which every military man of their late age possessed. but, again, the poets startled an audience which used light bucklers, worn on the left arm, by talking of enormous _targes_, slung round the neck. all these inconsistencies of theory follow from the assumption that the _iliad_ _must_ be a hotch-potch of many ages. if we assume that, on the whole, it is the work of one age, we see that the poet describes the usages which obtained in his own day. the dead are cremated, not, as in the mycenaean prime, inhumed. the shield has been strengthened to meet bronze, not stone-tipped, arrows by bronze plates. corslets and greaves have been elaborated. bronze, however, is still the metal for swords and spears, and even occasionally for tools and implements, though these are often of iron. in short, we have in homer a picture of a transitional age of culture; we have not a medley of old and new, of obsolete and modern. the poets do not describe inhumation, as they should do, if they are conservative archaeologists. in that case, though they burn, they would have made their heroes bury their dead, as they did at mycenas. they do not introduce iron swords and spears, as they must do, if, being late poets, they keep in touch with the armament of their time. if they speak of huge shields only because they are conservative archaeologists, then, on the other hand, they speak of corslets and greaves because they are also reckless innovators. they cannot be both at once. they are depicting a single age, a single "moment in culture." that age is certainly sundered from the mycenaean prime by the century or two in which changing ideas led to the superseding of burial by burning, or it is sundered from the mycenaean prime by a foreign conquest, a revolution, and the years in which the foreign conquerors acquired the language of their subjects. in either alternative, and one or other must be actual, there was time enough for many changes in the culture of the mycenaean prime to be evolved. these changes, we say, are represented by the descriptions of culture in the iliad. that hypothesis explains, simply and readily, all the facts. the other hypothesis, that the _iliad_ was begun near the mycenaean prime and was continued throughout four or five centuries, cannot, first, explain how the _iliad_ was _composed_, and, next, it wanders among apparent contradictories and through a maze of inconsistencies. the zoster, zoma, and mitre we are far from contending that it is always possible to understand homer's descriptions of defensive armour. but as we have never seen the actual objects, perhaps the poet's phrases were clear enough to his audience and are only difficult to us. i do not, for example, profess to be sure of what happened when pandarus shot at menelaus. the arrow lighted "where the golden buckles of the _zoster_ were clasped, and the doubled breastplate met them. so the bitter arrow alighted upon the firm _zoster_; through the wrought _zoster_ it sped, and through the curiously wrought breastplate it pressed on, and through the _mitre_ he wore to shield his flesh, a barrier against darts; and this best shielded him, yet it passed on even through this," and grazed the hero's flesh (_iliad_, iv. i 32 seq.). menelaus next says that "the glistering _zoster_ in front stayed the dart, and the _zoma_ beneath, and the _mitrê_ that the coppersmiths fashioned" (iv. 185-187). then the surgeon, machaon, "loosed the glistering _zoster_ and the _zoma_, and the _mitrê_ beneath that the coppersmiths fashioned" (iv. 215, 216). reading as a mere student of poetry i take this to mean that the corslet was of two pieces, fastening in the middle of the back and the middle of the front of a man (though mr. monro thinks that the plates met and the _zoster_ was buckled at the side); that the _zoster_, a mailed belt, buckled just above the place where the plates of the corslet met; that the arrow went through the meeting-place of the belt buckles, through the place where the plates of the corslet met, and then through the _mitrê_, a piece of bronze armour worn under the corslet, though the nature of this _mitrê_ and of the _zoma_ i do not know. was the _mitrê_ a separate article or a continuation of the breastplate, lower down, struck by a dropping arrow? in 1883 mr. leaf wrote: "i take it that the _zoma_ means the waist of the cuirass which is covered by the _zoster_, and has the upper edge of the _mitrê_ or plated apron beneath it fastened round the warrior's body. ... this view is strongly supported by all the archaic vase paintings i have been able to find." [footnote: _journal of hellenic studies, vol. iv. pp. 74,75_.] we see a "corslet with a projecting rim"; that rim is called zoma and holds the _zoster_. "the hips and upper part of the thighs were protected either by a belt of leather, sometimes plated, called the _mitrê_, or else only by the lower part of the _chiton_, and this corresponds exactly with homeric description." [footnote: _journal of hellenic_ studies, _pp. 76, 77_.] at this time, in days before reichel, mr. leaf believed in bronze corslets, whether of plates or plated jacks; he also believed, we have seen, that the huge shields, as of aias, were survivals in poetry; that "homer" saw small round bucklers in use, and supposed that the old warriors were muscular enough to wear circular shields as great as those in the vase of aristonothos, already described. [footnote: _ibid., vol. iv p. 285_.] on the corslet, as we have seen, mr. leaf now writes as a disciple of reichel. but as to the _mitrê_, he rejects helbig's and mr. ridgeway's opinion that it was a band of metal a foot wide in front and very narrow behind. such things have been found in euboea and in italy. mr. ridgeway mentions examples from bologna, corneto, este, hallstatt, and hungary. [footnote: _early age of greece, p. 31 i_.] the _zoster_ is now, in mr. leaf's opinion, a "girdle" "holding up the waist-cloth (_zoma_), so characteristic of mycenaean dress!" reichel's arguments against corslets "militate just as strongly against the presence of such a _mitrê_, which is, in fact, just the lower half of a corslet.... the conclusion is that the metallic _mitrê_ is just as much an intruder into the armament of the _epos_ as the corslet." the process of evolution was, mr. leaf suggests, first, the abandonment of the huge shield, with the introduction of small round bucklers in its place. then, second, a man naturally felt very unprotected, and put on "the metallic _mitrê_" of helbig (which covered a foot of him in front and three inches behind). "only as technical skill improved could the final stage, that of the elaborate cuirass, be attained." this appears to us an improbable sequence of processes. while arrows were flying thick, as they do fly in the _iliad_, men would not reject body-covering shields for small bucklers while they were still wholly destitute of body armour. nor would men arm only their stomachs when, if they had skill enough to make a metallic _mitrê_, they could not have been so unskilled as to be unable to make corslets of some more or less serviceable type. probably they began with huge shields, added the _linothorex_ (like the iroquois cotton _thorex_), and next, as a rule, superseded that with the bronze _thorex_, while retaining the huge shield, because the bronze _thorex_ was so inadequate to its purpose of defence. then, when archery ceased to be of so much importance as coming to the shock with heavy spears, and as the bronze _thorex_ really could sometimes keep out an arrow, they reduced the size of their shields, and retained surface enough for parrying spears and meeting point and edge of the sword. that appears to be a natural set of sequences, but i cannot pretend to guess how the corslet fastened or what the _mitrê_ and _zoster_ really were, beyond being guards of the stomach and lower part of the trunk. helmets, greaves, spears no helmets of metal, such as homer mentions, have been found in mycenaean graves. a quantity of boars' teeth, sixty in all, were discovered in grave v. and may have adorned and strengthened leather caps, now mouldered into dust. an ivory head from mycenae shows a conical cap set with what may be boars' tusks, with a band of the same round the chin, and an earpiece which was perhaps of bronze? spata and the graves of the lower town of mycenae and the enkomi ivories show similar headgear. [footnote: tsountas and manatt, pp. 196, 197.] this kind of cap set with boars' tusks is described in _iliad_, book x., in the account of the hasty arraying of two spies in the night of terror after the defeat and retreat to the ships. the trojan spy, dolon, also wears a leather cap. the three spies put on no corslets, as far as we can affirm, their object being to remain inconspicuous and unburdened with glittering bronze greaves and corslets. the trojan camp was brilliantly lit up with fires, and there may have been a moon, so the less bronze the better. in these circumstances alone the heroes of the iliad are unequipped, certainly, with bronze helmets, corslets, and bronze greaves. [dislocated footnote: evans, _journal of the anthropological institute, xxx. pp._ 209-215.] [footnote: _iliad, x._ 255-265.] the author of book x. is now regarded as a precise archaeologist, who knew that corslets and bronze helmets were not used in agamemnon's time, but that leather caps with boars' tusks were in fashion; while again, as we shall see, he is said to know nothing about heroic costume (cf. the _doloneia_). as a fact, he has to describe an incident which occurs nowhere else in homer, though it may often have occurred in practice--a hurried council during a demoralised night, and the hasty arraying of two spies, who wish to be lightfooted and inconspicuous. the author's evidence as to the leather cap and its garnishing of boars' tusks testifies to a survival of such gear in an age of bronze battle-helmets, not to his own minute antiquarian research. greaves bronze greaves are not found, so far, in mycenaean tombs in greece, and reichel argued that the original homer knew none. the greaves, [greek: kunmides] "were gaiters of stuff or leather"; the one mention of bronze greaves is stuff and nonsense interpolated (vii. 41). but why did men who were interpolating bronze corslets freely introduce bronze so seldom, if at all, as the material of greaves? bronze greaves, however, have been found in a cypro-mycenaean grave at enkomi (tomb xv.), _accompanied_ by _an early type_ of _bronze_ dagger, while bronze greaves adorned with mycenaean ornament are discovered in the balkan peninsula at glassinavç. [footnote: evans, _journal of the anthropological institute,_ pp. 214, 215, figs. 10, 11.] thus all homer's description of arms is here corroborated by archaeology, and cannot be cut out by what mr. evans calls "the procrustean method" of dr. reichel. a curious feature about the spear may be noticed. in book x. while the men of diomede slept, "their spears were driven into the ground erect on the spikes of the butts" (x. 153). aristotle mentions that this was still the usage of the illyrians in his day. [footnote: _poctica_, 25.] though the word for the spike in the butt (_sauroter_) does not elsewhere occur in the _iliad_, the practice of sticking the spears erect in the ground during a truce is mentioned in iii. 135: "they lean upon their shields" (clearly large high shields), "and the tall spears are planted by their sides." no butt-spikes have been found in graves of the mycenaean prime. the _sauroter_ was still used, or still existed, in the days of herodotus. [footnote: tsountas and manatt, p. 205; ridgeway, vol. i. pp. 306, 307.] on the whole, homer does not offer a medley of the military gear of four centuries--that view we hope to have shown to be a mass of inconsistencies--but describes a state of military equipment in advance of that of the most famous mycenaean graves, but other than that of the late "warrior vase." he is also very familiar with some uses of iron, of which, as we shall see, scarcely any has been found in mycenaean graves of the central period, save in the shape of rings. homer never mentions rings of any metal. chapter ix bronze and iron taking the iliad and odyssey just as they have reached us they give, with the exception of one line, an entirely harmonious account of the contemporary uses of bronze and iron. bronze is employed in the making of weapons and armour (with cups, ornaments, &c.); iron is employed (and bronze is also used) in the making of tools and implements, such as knives, axes, adzes, axles of a chariot (that of hera; mortals use an axle tree of oak), and the various implements of agricultural and pastoral life. meanwhile, iron is a substance perfectly familiar to the poets; it is far indeed from being a priceless rarity (it is impossible to trace homeric stages of advance in knowledge of iron), and it yields epithets indicating strength, permanence, and stubborn endurance. these epithets are more frequent in the odyssey and the "later" books of the iliad than in the "earlier" books of the iliad; but, as articles made of iron, the odyssey happens to mention only one set of axes, which is spoken of ten times--axes and adzes as a class--and "iron bonds," where "iron" probably means "strong," "not to be broken." [footnote: in these circumstances, it is curious that mr. monro should have written thus: "in homer, as is well known, iron is rarely mentioned in comparison with bronze, but the proportion is greater in the odyssey (25 iron, 80 bronze) than in the iliad" (23 iron, 279 bronze).--monro, odyssey, vol. ii. p. 339. these statistics obviously do not prove that, at the date of the composition of the odyssey, the use of iron was becoming more common, or that the use of bronze was becoming more rare, than when the _iliad_ was put together. bronze is, in the poems, the military metal: the _iliad_ is a military poem, while the _odyssey_ is an epic of peace; consequently the _iliad_ is much more copious in references to bronze than the _odyssey_ has any occasion to be. wives are far more frequently mentioned in the odyssey than in the _iliad_, but nobody will argue that therefore marriage had recently come more into vogue. again, the method of counting up references to iron in the odyssey is quite misleading, when we remember that ten out of the twenty references are only _one_ reference to one and the same set of iron tools-axes. mr. monro also proposed to leave six references to iron in the _iliad_ out of the reckoning, "as all of them are in lines which can be omitted without detriment to the sense." most of the six are in a recurrent epic formula descriptive of a wealthy man, who possesses iron, as well as bronze, gold, and women. the existence of the formula proves familiarity with iron, and to excise it merely because it contradicts a theory is purely arbitrary.--monro, odyssey, vol. ii. p. 339.]. the statement of facts given here is much akin to helbig's account of the uses of bronze and iron in homer. [footnote: helbig, _das homerischi epos_, pp. 330, 331. _1887_.] helbig writes: "it is notable that in the epic there is much more frequent mention of iron _implements_ than of iron _weapons of war_." he then gives examples, which we produce later, and especially remarks on what achilles says when he offers a mass of iron as a prize in the funeral games of patroclus. the iron, says achilles, will serve for the purposes of the ploughman and shepherd, "a surprising speech from the son of peleus, from whom we rather expect an allusion to the military uses of the metal." of course, if iron weapons were not in vogue while iron was the metal for tools and implements, the words of achilles are appropriate and intelligible. the facts being as we and helbig agree in stating them, we suppose that the homeric poets sing of the usages of their own time. it is an age when iron, though quite familiar, is not yet employed for armour, or for swords or spears, which must be of excellent temper, without great weight in proportion to their length and size. iron is only employed in homer for some knives, which are never said to be used in battle (not even for dealing the final stab, like the mediaeval poniard, the _miséricorde_), for axes, which have a short cutting edge, and may be thick and weighty behind the edge, and for the rough implements of the shepherd and ploughman, such as tips of ploughshares, of goads, and so forth. as far as archaeological excavations and discoveries enlighten us, these relative uses of bronze and iron did not exist in the ages of mycenaean culture which are represented in the _tholos_ of vaphio and the graves, earlier and later, of mycenae. even in the later mycenaean graves iron is found only in the form of finger rings (iron rings were common in late greece). [footnote: tsountas and manatt, pp. 72, 146, 165.] iron was scarce in the cypro-mycenaean graves of enkomi. a small knife with a carved handle had left traces of an iron blade. a couple of lumps of iron, one of them apparently the head of a club, were found in schliemann's "burned city" at hissarlik; for the rest, swords, spear-heads, knives, and axes are all of bronze in the age called "mycenaean." but we do not know whether iron _implements_ may not yet be found in the sepulchres of _thetes_, and other poor and landless men. the latest discoveries in minoan graves in crete exhibit tools of bronze. iron, we repeat, is in the poems a perfectly familiar metal. ownership of "bronze, gold, and iron, which requires much labour" (in the smithying or smelting), appears regularly in the recurrent epic formula for describing a man of wealth. [footnote: _iliad_, vi. 48; ix. 365-366; x. 379; xi. 133; _odyssey_, xiv. 324; xxi. 10.] iron, bronze, slaves, and hides are bartered for sea-borne wine at the siege of troy? [footnote: _iliad_, vii. 472-475.] athene, disguised as mentes, is carrying a cargo of iron to temesa (tamasus in cyprus?), to barter for copper. the poets are certainly not describing an age in which only a man of wealth might indulge in the rare and extravagant luxury of an iron ring: iron was a common commodity, like cattle, hides, slaves, bronze, and other such matters. common as it was, homer never once mentions its use for defensive armour, or for swords and spears. only in two cases does homer describe any weapon as of iron. there is to be sure the "iron," the knife with which antilochus fears achilles will cut his own throat. [footnote: _iliad_ xviii. 34.] but no knife is ever used as a weapon of war: knives are employed in cutting the throats of victims (see _iliad_, iii. 271 and xxiii. 30); the knife is said to be of iron, in this last passage; also patroclus uses the knife to cut the arrow-head out of the flesh of a wounded friend. [footnote: _iliad_, xi. 844.] it is the _knife_ of achilles that is called "the iron," and on "the iron" perish the cattle in _iliad_, xxiii. 30. mr. leaf says that by "the usual use, the metal" (iron) "is confined to tools of small size." [footnote: leaf, _iliad_, xxiii. 30, note.] this is incorrect; the odyssey speaks of _great axes_ habitually made of iron. [footnote: odyssey, ix. 391.] but we do find a knife of bronze, that of agamemnon, used in sacrificing victims; at least so i infer from iliad, iii. 271-292. the only two specimens of _weapons_ named by homer as of iron are one arrow-head, used by pandarus, [footnote: _iliad_, iv. 123.] and one mace, borne, before nestor's time, by areithöus. to fight with an iron mace was an amiable and apparently unique eccentricity of areithbus, and caused his death. on account of his peculiar practice he was named "the mace man." [footnote: iliad, vii. 141.] the case is mentioned by nestor as curious and unusual. mr. leaf gets rid of this solitary iron _casse tête_ in a pleasant way. since he wrote his _companion to the iliad_, 1902, he has become converted, as we saw, to the theory, demolished by mr. monro, nutzhorn, and grote, and denounced by blass, that the origin of our homer is a text edited by some literary retainer of pisistratus of athens (about 560-540 b.c.). the editor arranged current lays, "altered" freely, and "wrote in" as much as he pleased. probably he wrote this passage in which nestor describes the man of the iron mace, for "the tales of nestor's youthful exploits, all of which bear the mark of late work, are introduced with no special applicability to the context, but rather with the intention of glorifying the ancestor of pisistratus." [footnote: iliad (1900), vii. 149, note.] if pisistratus was pleased with the ancestral portrait, nobody has a right to interfere, but we need hardly linger over this hypothesis (cf. pp. 281-288). iron axes are offered as prizes by achilles, [footnote: iliad, xxiii. 850.] and we have the iron axes of odysseus, who shot an arrow through the apertures in the blades, at the close of the odyssey. but all these axes, as we shall show, were not weapons, but _peaceful implements_. as a matter of certain fact the swords and spears of homer's warriors are invariably said by the poet to be of bronze, not of iron, in cases where the metal of the weapons is specified. except for an arrow-head (to which we shall return) and the one iron mace, noted as an eccentricity, no weapon in homer is ever said to be of iron. the richest men use swords of bronze. not one chooses to indulge in a sword said to be of iron. the god, hephaestus, makes a bronze sword for achilles, whose own bronze sword was lent to patroclus, and lost by him to hector. [footnote: _iliad_ xvi. 136; xix. 372-373.] this bronze sword, at least, achilles uses, after receiving the divine armour of the god. the sword of paris is of bronze, as is the sword of odysseus in the odyssey. [footnote: _iliad_, iii. 334-335] bronze is the sword which he brought from troy, and bronze is the sword presented to him by euryalus in phaeacia, and bronze is the spear with which he fought under the walls of ilios. [footnote: _odyssey_, x. 162, 261-262] there are other examples of bronze swords, while spears are invariably said to be of bronze, when the metal of the spear is specified. here we are on the ground of solid certainty: we see that the homeric warrior has regularly spear and sword of bronze. if any man used a spear or sword of iron, homer never once mentions the fact. if the poets, in an age of iron weapons, always spoke of bronze, out of deference to tradition, they must have puzzled their iron-using military patrons. thus, as regards weapons, the homeric heroes are in the age of bronze, like them who slept in the tombs of the mycenaean age. when homer speaks of the use of cutting instruments of iron, he is always concerned, except in the two cases given, not with [blank space] but with _implements_, which really were of iron. the wheelwright fells a tree "with the iron," that is, with an axe; antilochus fears that achilles "will cut his own throat with the iron," that is, with his knife, a thing never used in battle; the cattle struggle when slain with "the iron," that is, the butcher's knife; and odysseus shoots "through the iron," that is, through the holes in the blade of the iron axes. [footnote: for this peculiar kind of mycenaean axe with holes in the blade, see the design of a bronze example from vaphio in tsountas and manatt, _the mycenaean age_, p. 207, fig. 94.] thus homer never says that this or that was done "with the iron" in the case of any but one weapon of war. pandarus "drew the bow-string to his breast and to the bow." [footnote: iliad, w. 123.] whoever wrote that line was writing in an age, we may think, when arrow-heads were commonly of iron; but in homer, when the metal of the arrow-head is mentioned, except, in this one case, it is always bronze. the iron arrow-tip of pandarus was of an early type, the shaft did not run into the socket of the arrow-head; the tang of the arrow-head, on the other hand, entered the shaft, and was whipped on with sinew. [_iliad_, iv. 151.] pretty primitive this method, still the iron is an advance on the uniform bronze of homer. the line about pandarus and the iron arrow-head may really be early enough, for the arrow-head is of a primitive kind--socketless--and primitive is the attitude of the archer: he "drew the arrow to his breast." on the mycenaean silver bowl, representing a siege, the archers draw to the breast, in the primitive style, as does the archer on the bronze dagger with a representation of a lion hunt. the assyrians and khita drew to the ear, as the monuments prove, and so does the "cypro-mycenaean" archer of the ivory draught-box from enkomi. [footnote: evans, journal of the anthropological institute, vol. xxx. p. 210.] in these circumstances we cannot deny that the poet may have known iron arrow-heads. we now take the case of axes. we never hear from homer of the use of an iron axe in battle, and warlike use of an axe only occurs twice. in _iliad_, xv. 711, in a battle at and on the ships, "they were fighting with sharp axes and battle-axes" ([greek text: axinai]) "and with great swords, and spears armed at butt and tip." at and on the ships, men would set hand to whatever tool of cutting edge was accessible. seiler thinks that only the trojans used the battle-axe; perhaps for damaging the ships: he follows the scholiast. [greek text: axinae], however, [footnote: _iliad_, xiii. 611.] may perhaps be rendered "battle-axe," as a trojan, peisandros, fights with an [greek text: axinae], and this is the only place in the _iliad_, except xv. 711, where the thing is said to be used as a weapon. but it is not an _iron_ axe; it is "of fine bronze." only one bronze _battle-axe_, according to dr. joseph anderson, is known to have been found in scotland, though there are many bronze heads of axes which were tools. axes ([greek text: pelekeis]) were _implements_, tools of the carpenter, woodcutter, shipwright, and so on; they were not weapons of war of the achaeans. as implements they are, with very rare exceptions, of iron. the wheelwright fells trees "with the gleaming iron," iron being a synonym for axe and for knife. [footnote: _iliad_, iv. 485] in _iliad_, xiii. 391, the shipwrights cut timber with axes. in _iliad_, xxiii. 114, woodcutters' axes are employed in tree-felling, but the results are said to be produced [greek text: tanaaekei chalcho], "by the long-edged bronze," where the word [greek text: tanaaekaes] is borrowed from the usual epithet of swords; "the long edge" is quite inappropriate to a woodcutter's axe. on calypso's isle calypso gives to odysseus a bronze axe for his raft-making. butcher's work is done with an axe. [footnote: _iliad_, xvii. 520; odyssey, iii. 442-449.] the axes offered by achilles as a prize for archers and the axes through which odysseus shot are _implements_ of iron. [footnote: _iliad_, xxiii. 850; odyssey, xxi. 3, 81, 97.] in the odyssey, when the poet describes the process of tempering iron, we read, "as when a smith dips a great axe or an adze in chill water, for thus men temper iron." [footnote: odyssey, ix. 391-393.] he is not using iron to make a sword or spear, but a tool-adze or axe. the poet is perfectly consistent. there are also examples both of bronze axes and, apparently, of bronze knives. thus, though the woodcutter's or carpenter's axe is of bronze in two passages cited, iron is the usual material of the axe or adze. again we saw, when achilles gives a mass of iron as a prize in the games, he does not mean the armourer to fashion it into sword or spear, but says that it will serve the shepherd or ploughman for domestic implements, [footnote: leaf, _iliad_ (1902), xxiii. line 30, note.] so that the men need not, on an upland farm, go to the city for iron implements. in commenting upon this mr. leaf is scarcely at the proper point of view. he says, [footnote: _iliad_, xxiii. 835, note.] "the idea of a state of things when the ploughman and shepherd forge their own tools from a lump of raw iron has a suspicious appearance of a deliberate attempt to represent from the inner consciousness an archaic state of civilisation. in homeric times the [greek: chalceus] is already specialised as a worker in metals...." however, homer does not say that the ploughman and shepherd "forge their own tools." a homeric chief, far from a town, would have his own smithy, just as the laird of runraurie (now urrard) had his smithy at the time of the battle of killicrankie (1689). mackay's forces left their _impedimenta_ "at the laird's smithy," says an eye-witness. [footnote: napier's _life_ of _dundee_, iii. p. 724.] the idea of a late homeric poet trying to reconstruct from his fancy a prehistoric state of civilisation is out of the question. even historical novelists of the eighteenth century a.d. scarcely attempted such an effort. this was the regular state of things in the highlands during the eighteenth century, when many chiefs, and most of the clans, lived far from any town. but these rural smiths did not make sword-blades, which prince charles, as late as 1750, bought on the continent. the andrea ferrara-marked broadsword blades of the clans were of foreign manufacture. the highland smiths did such rough iron work as was needed for rural purposes. perhaps the homeric chief may have sometimes been a craftsman like the heroes of the sagas, great sword-smiths. odysseus himself, notably an excellent carpenter, may have been as good a sword-smith, but every hero was not so accomplished. in searching with microscopes for homeric discrepancies and interpolations, critics are apt to forget the ways of old rural society. the homeric poems, whether composed in one age or throughout five centuries, are thus entirely uniform in allotting bronze as the material for all sorts of warlike gear, down to the solitary battle-axe mentioned; and iron as the usual metal for heavy tools, knives, carpenters' axes, adzes, and agricultural implements, with the rare exceptions which we have cited in the case of bronze knives and axes. either this distinction--iron for tools and implements; bronze for armour, swords, and spears--prevailed throughout the period of the homeric poets or poet; or the poets invented such a stage of culture; or poets, some centuries later, deliberately kept bronze for weapons only, while introducing iron for implements. in that case they were showing archaeological conscientiousness in following the presumed earlier poets of the bronze age, the age of the mycenaean graves. now early poets are never studious archaeologists. examining the [blank space] certainly based on old lays and legends which survive in the edda, we find that the poets of the _nibelungenlied_ introduce chivalrous and christian manners. they do not archaeologise. the poets of the french _chansons de geste_ (eleventh to thirteenth centuries) bring their own weapons, and even armorial bearings, into the 'remote age of charlemagne, which they know from legends and _cantilènes_. again, the later _remanieurs_ of the earliest _chansons de geste_ modernise the details of these poems. but, _per impossibile_, and for the sake of argument, suppose that the later interpolators and continuators of the homeric lays were antiquarian precisians, or, on the other hand, "deliberately attempted to reproduce from their inner consciousness an archaic state of civilisation." suppose that, though they lived in an age of iron weapons, they knew, as hesiod knew, that the old heroes "had warlike gear of bronze, and ploughed with bronze, and there was no black iron." [footnote: hesiod, _works and days_, pp. 250, 251.] in that case, why did the later interpolating poets introduce iron as the special material of tools and implements, knives and axes, in an age when they knew that there was no iron? savants such as, by this theory, the later poets of the full-blown age of iron were, they must have known that the knives and axes of the old heroes were made of bronze. in old votive offerings in temples and in any mycenaean graves which might be opened, the learned poets of 800-600 b.c. saw with their eyes knives and axes of bronze. [footnote: _early age of greece_, i. 413-416.] the knife of agamemnon ([greek: machaira]), which hangs from his girdle, beside his sword, [footnote: _iliad_, iii. 271; xix. 252.] corresponds to the knives found in grave iv. at mycenae; the handles of these dirks have a ring for suspension. [footnote: tsountas and manatt, p. 204.] but these knives, in mycenaean graves, are of bronze, and of bronze are the axes in the mycenaean deposits and the dagger of enkomi. [footnote: _ibid._, pp. 145, 207, 208, 256. _evans, journal of the anthropological institute_, vol xxx. p, 214.] why, then, did the late poetic interpolators, who knew that the spears and swords of the old warriors were of bronze, and who describe them as of bronze, not know that their knives and axes were also of bronze? why did they describe the old knives and axes as of iron, while hesiod knew, and could have told them--did tell them, in fact--that they were of bronze? clearly the theory that homeric poets were archaeological precisians is impossible. they describe arms as of bronze, tools usually as of iron, because they see them to be such in practice. the poems, in fact, depict a very extraordinary condition of affairs, such as no poets could invent and adhere to with uniformity. we are accustomed in archaeology to seeing the bronze sword pass by a gradual transition into the iron sword; but, in homer, people with abundance of iron never, in any one specified case, use iron sword blades or spears. the greatest chiefs, men said to be rich in gold and iron, always use swords and spears of _bronze_ in _iliad_ and _odyssey_. the usual process of transition from bronze to iron swords, in a prehistoric european age, is traced by mr. ridgeway at hallstatt, "in the heart of the austrian alps," where a thousand old graves have been explored. the swords pass from bronze to iron with bronze hilts, and, finally, are wholly of iron. weapons of bronze are fitted with iron edges. axes of iron were much more common than axes of bronze. [footnote: _early age of greece_, i. 413-416.] the axes were fashioned in the old shapes of the age of bronze, were not of the _bipennis_ mycenaean model--the double axe--nor of the shape of the letter d, very thick, with two round apertures in the blade, like the bronze axe of vaphio. [footnote: monro, odyssey, vol. ii. 176.] probably the axes through which odysseus shot an arrow were of this kind, as mr. monro, and, much earlier, mr. butcher and i have argued. [footnote: _ibid_. (1901), vol. ii. book xix. line 572. note. butcher and lang, odyssey, appendix (1891).] at hallstatt there was the _normal_ evolution from bronze swords and axes to iron swords and axes. why, then, had homer's men in his time not made this step, seeing that they were familiar with the use of iron? why do they use bronze for swords and spears, iron for tools? the obvious answer is that they could temper bronze for military purposes much better than they could temper iron. now mr. ridgeway quotes polybius (ii. 30; ii. 33) for the truly execrable quality of the iron of the celtic invaders of italy as late as 225 b.c. their swords were as bad as, or worse than, british bayonets; they _always_ "doubled up." "their long iron swords were easily bent, and could only give one downward stroke with any effect; but after this the edges got so turned and the blades so bent that, unless they had time to straighten them with the foot against the ground, they could not deliver a second blow." [footnote: _early age of greece_, vol. i. 408.] if the heroes in homer's time possessed iron as badly tempered as that of the celts of 225 b.c., they had every reason to prefer, as they did, excellent bronze for all their military weapons, while reserving iron for pacific purposes. a woodcutter's axe might have any amount of weight and thickness of iron behind the edge; not so a sword blade or a spear point. [footnote: monsieur salomon reinach suggests to me that the story of polybius may be a myth. swords and spear-heads in graves are often found doubled up; possibly they are thus made dead, like the owner, and their spirits are thus set free to be of use to his spirit. finding doubled up iron swords in celtic graves, the romans, m. beinach suggests, may have explained their useless condition by the theory that they doubled up in battle, leaving their owners easy victims, and this myth was accepted as fact by polybius. but he was not addicted to myth, nor very remote from the events which he chronicles. again, though bronze grave-weapons in our museum are often doubled up, the myth is not told of the warriors of the age of bronze. we later give examples of the doubling up, in battle, of scandinavian iron swords as late as 1000 a.d.] in the _iliad_ we hear of swords breaking at the hilt in dealing a stroke at shield or helmet, a thing most incident to bronze swords, especially of the early type, with a thin bronze tang inserted in a hilt of wood, ivory, or amber, or with a slight shelf of the bronze hilt riveted with three nails on to the bronze blade. lycaon struck peneleos on the socket of his helmet crest, "and his sword brake at the hilt." [footnote: _iliad_, xvi. 339.] the sword of menelaus broke into three or four pieces when he smote the helmet ridge of paris. [footnote: _iliad_, iii. 349, 380.] iron of the celtic sort described by polybius would have bent, not broken. there is no doubt on that head: if polybius is not romancing, the celtic sword of 225 b.c. doubled up at every stroke, like a piece of hoop iron. but mr. leaf tells us that, "by primitive modes of smelting," iron is made "hard and brittle, like cast iron." if so, it would be even less trustworthy for a sword than bronze. [footnote: _iliad_ (1900), book vi, line 48, note.] perhaps the celts of 225 b.c. did not smelt iron by primitive methods, but discovered some process for making it not hard and brittle, but flabby. the swords of the mycenaean graves, we know, were all of bronze, and, in three intaglios on rings from the graves, the point, not the edge, is used, [footnote: tsountas and manatt, p. 199.] once against a lion, once over the rim of a shield which covers the whole body of an enemy, and once at too close quarters to permit the use of the edge. it does not follow from these three cases (as critics argue) that no bronze sword could be used for a swashing blow, and there are just half as many thrusts as strokes with the bronze sword in the _iliad_. [footnote: twenty-four cuts to eleven lunges, in the _iliad_.] as the poet constantly dwells on the "long edge" of the _bronze_ swords and makes heroes use both point and edge, how can we argue that homeric swords were of iron and ill fitted to give point? the highlanders at clifton (1746) were obliged, contrary to their common practice, to use the point against cumberland's dragoons. they, like the achaeans, had heavy cut and thrust swords, but theirs were of steel. if the achaeans had thoroughly excellent bronze, and had iron as bad as that of the celts a thousand years later, their preference for bronze over iron for weapons is explained. in homer the fighters do not very often come to sword strokes; they fight mainly with the spear, except in pursuit, now and then. but when they do strike, they cleave heads and cut off arms. they could not do this with bronze rapiers, such as those with which men give point over the rim of the shield on two mycenaean gems. but mr. myres writes, "from the shaft graves (of mycenae) onwards there are two types of swords in the mycenaean world--one an exaggerated dagger riveted into the front end of the hilt, the other with a flat flanged tang running the whole length of the hilt, and covered on either face by ornamental grip plates riveted on. this sword, though still of bronze, can deal a very effective cut; and, as the mycenaeans had no armour for body or head," (?) "the danger of breaking or bending the sword on a cuirass or helmet did not arise." [footnote: _classical review_, xvi. 72.] the danger did exist in homer's time, as we have seen. but a bronze sword, published by tsountas and manatt (_mycenaean age_, p. 199, fig. 88), is emphatically meant to give both point and edge, having a solid handle--a continuation of the blade--and a very broad blade, coming to a very fine point. even in grave v. at mycenae, we have a sword blade so massive at the top that it was certainly capable of a swashing blow. [footnote: schuchardt, _schliemann's excavations_, p. _265, fig._ 269.] the sword of the charioteer on the _stêlê_ of grave v. is equally good for cut and thrust. a pleasanter cut and thrust bronze sword than the one found at ialysus no gentleman could wish to handle. [footnote: furtwängler und loeschke, _myk. va._ taf. d.] homer, in any case, says that his heroes used bronze swords, well adapted to strike. if his age had really good bronze, and iron as bad as that of the celts of polybius, a thousand years later, their preference of bronze over iron for weapons needs no explanation. if their iron was not so bad as that of the celts, their military conservatism might retain bronze for weapons, while in civil life they often used iron for implements. the uniform evidence of the homeric poems can only be explained on the supposition that men had plenty of iron; but, while they used it for implements, did not yet, with a natural conservatism, trust life and victory to iron spears and swords. unluckily, we cannot test the temper of the earliest known iron swords found in greece, for rust hath consumed them, and i know not that the temper of the mycenaean bronze swords has been tested against helmets of bronze. i can thus give no evidence from experiment. there is just one line in homer which disregards the distinction--iron for implements, bronze for weapons; it is in _odyssey_, xvi. 294; xix. 13. telemachus is told to remove the warlike harness of odysseus from the hall, lest the wooers use it in the coming fray. he is to explain the removal by saying that it has been done, "lest you fall to strife in your cups, and harm each other, and shame the feast, and _this_ wooing; _for iron of himself draweth a man to him_." the proverb is manifestly of an age when iron was almost universally used for weapons, and thus was, as in thucydides, synonymous with all warlike gear; but throughout the poems no single article of warlike gear is of iron except one eccentric mace and one arrow-head of primitive type. the line in the odyssey must therefore be a very late addition; it may be removed without injuring the sense of the passage in which it occurs. [footnote: this fact, in itself, is of course no proof of interpolation. _cf._ helbig, _op_. cit., p. 331. he thinks the line very late.] if, on the other hand, the line be as old as the oldest parts of the poem, the author for once forgets his usual antiquarian precision. we are thus led to the conclusion that either there was in early greece an age when weapons were all of bronze while implements were often of iron, or that the poet, or crowd of poets, invented that state of things. now early poets never invent in this way; singing to an audience of warriors, critical on such a point, they speak of what the warriors know to be actual, except when, in a recognised form of decorative exaggeration, they introduce "masts of the beaten gold and sails of taffetie." our theory is, then, that in the age when the homeric poems were composed, iron, though well known, was on its probation. men of the sword preferred bronze for all their military purposes, just as fifteenth-century soldiers found the long-bow and cross-bow much more effective than guns, or as the duke of wellington forbade the arming of all our men with rifles in place of muskets ... for reasons not devoid of plausibility. sir john evans supposes that, in the seventh century, the carian and ionian invaders of egypt were still using offensive arms of bronze, not of iron. [footnote: ancient _bronze implements_, p. 8 (1881), citing herodotus, ii. c. 112. sir john is not sure that achaean spear-heads were not of copper, for they twice double up against a shield. _iliad_, iii. 348; vii. 259; evans, p. 13.] sir john remarks that "for a considerable time after the homeric period, bronze remained in use for offensive weapons," especially for "spears, lances, and arrows." hesiod, quite unlike his contemporaries, the "later" poets of iliad and _odyssey_, gives to heracles an iron helmet and sword. [footnote: _scutum herculis_, pp. 122-138.] hesiod knew better, but was not a consistent archaiser. sir john thinks that as early as 500 or even 600 b.c. iron and steel were in common use for weapons in greece, but not yet had they altogether superseded bronze battle-axes and spears. [footnote: evans, p. 18.] by sir john's showing, iron for offensive weapons superseded bronze very slowly indeed in greece; and, if my argument be correct, it had not done so when the homeric poems were composed. iron merely served for utensils, and the poems reflect that stage of transition which no poet could dream of inventing. these pages had been written before my attention was directed to m. bérard's book, _les pheniciens et l'odyssée_ (paris, 1902). m. bérard has anticipated and rather outrun my ideas. "i might almost say," he remarks, "that iron is the popular metal, native and rustic... the shepherd and ploughman can extract and work it without going to the town." the chief's smith could work iron, if he had iron to work, and this iron achilles gave as a prize. "with rustic methods of working it iron is always impure; it has 'straws' in it, and is brittle. it may be the metal for peace and for implements. in our fields we see the reaper sit down and repair his sickle. in war is needed a metal less hard, perhaps, but more tough and not so easily broken. you cannot sit down in the field of battle, as in a field of barley, to beat your sword straight...." [footnote: bérard, i. 435.] so the celts found, if we believe polybius. on the other hand, iron swords did supersede bronze swords in the long run. apparently they had not done so in the age of the poet, but iron had certainly ceased to be "a precious metal"; knives and woodcutters' axes are never made of a metal that is precious and rare. i am thus led, on a general view, to suppose that the poems took shape when iron was very well known, but was not yet, as in the "dipylon" period in crete, commonly used by sword-smiths. the ideas here stated are not unlike those of paul cauer. [footnote: _grundfrager des homerkritik,_ pp. 183-187. leipsic, 1895.] i do not, however, find the mentions of iron useful as a test of "early" and "late" lays, which it is his theory that they are. thus he says:-(1) iron is often mentioned as part of a man's personal property, while we are not told how he means to use it. it is named with bronze, gold, and girls. the poet has no definite picture before his eyes; he is vague about iron. but, we reply, his picture of iron in these passages is neither more nor less definite than his mental picture of the other commodities. he calls iron "hard to smithy," "grey," "dark-hued"; he knows, in fact, all about it. he does not tell us what the owner is going to do with the gold and the bronze and the girls, any more than he tells us what is to be done with the iron. such information was rather in the nature of a luxury than a necessity. every hearer knew the uses of all four commodities. this does not seem to have occurred to cauer. (2) iron is spoken of as an emblem of hard things, as, to take a modern example, in mr. swinburne's "armed and iron maidenhood "--said of atalanta. hearts are "iron," strength is "iron," flesh is not "iron," an "iron" noise goes up to the heaven of bronze. it may not follow, cauer thinks, from these phrases that iron was used in any way. men are supposed to marvel at its strange properties; it was "new and rare." i see no ground for this inference. (3) we have the "iron gates" of tartarus, and the "iron bonds" in which odysseus was possibly lying; it does not follow that chains or gates were made of iron any more than that gates were of chrysoprase in the days of st. john. (4) next, we have mention of implements, not weapons, of iron--a remarkable trait of culture. greek ploughs and axes were made of iron before spears and swords were of iron. (5) we have mention of iron weapons, namely, the unique iron mace of areithous and the solitary iron arrow-head of pandarus, and what cauer calls the iron swords (more probably knives) of achilles and others. it is objected to the "iron" of achilles that antilochus fears he will cut his throat with it on hearing of the death of patroclus, while there is no other mention of suicide in the _iliad_. it does not follow that suicide was unheard of; indeed, achilles may be thinking of suicide presently, in xiii. 98, when he says to his mother: "let me die at once, since it was not my lot to succour my comrade." (6) we have the iron-making spoken of in book ix. 393 of the _odyssey_. it does not appear to us that the use of iron as an epithet bespeaks an age when iron was a mysterious thing, known mainly by reputation, "a costly possession." the epithets "iron strength," and so on, may as readily be used in our own age or any other. if iron were at first a "precious" metal, it is odd that homeric men first used it, as cauer sees that they did, to make points to ploughshares and "tools of agriculture and handiwork." "then people took to working iron for weapons." just so, but we cannot divide the _iliad_ into earlier and later portions in proportion to the various mentions of iron in various books. these statistics are of no value for separatist purposes. it is impossible to believe that men when they spoke of "iron strength," "iron hearts," "grey iron," "iron hard to smithy," did so because iron was, first, an almost unknown legendary mineral, next, "a precious metal," then the metal of drudgery, and finally the metal of weapons. the real point of interest is, as cauer sees, that domestic preceded military uses of iron among the achaeans. he seems, however, to think that the confinement of the use of bronze to weapons is a matter of traditional style. [footnote: "nur die sprache der dichter hielt an dem gebrauch der bronze fest, die in den jahrhunderten, während deren der epische stil erwachsen war, allein geherrscht hatte."] but, in the early days of the waxing epics, tools as well as weapons were, as in homer they occasionally are, of bronze. why, then, do the supposed late continuators represent tools, not weapons, as of iron? why do they not cleave to the traditional term--bronze--in the case of tools, as the same men do in the case of weapons? helbig offers an apparently untenable explanation of this fact. he has proposed an interpretation of the uses of bronze and iron in the poems entirely different from that which i offer. [footnote: _sur la question mycénienne_. 1896.] unfortunately, one can scarcely criticise his theory without entering again into the whole question of the construction of the epics. he thinks that the origin of the poems dates from "the mycenaean period," and that the later continuators of the poems retained the traditions of that remote age. thus they thrice call mycenae "golden," though, in the changed economic conditions of their own period, mycenae could no longer be "golden"; and i presume that, if possible, the city would have issued a papyrus currency without a metallic basis. however this may be, "in the description of customs the epic poets did their best to avoid everything modern." here we have again that unprecedented phenomenon--early poets who are archaeologically precise. we have first to suppose that the kernel of the _iliad_ originated in the mycenaean age, the age of bronze. we are next to believe that this kernel was expanded into the actual epic in later and changed times, but that the later poets adhered in their descriptions to the mycenaean standard, avoiding "everything modern." that poets of an uncritical period, when treating of the themes of ancient legend or song, carefully avoid everything modern is an opinion not warranted by the usage of the authors of the _chansons de geste_, of _beowulf_, and of the _nibelungenlied_. these poets, we must repeat, invariably introduce in their chants concerning ancient days the customs, costume, armour, religion, and weapons of their own time. dr. helbig supposes that the late greek poets, however, who added to the _iliad_, carefully avoided doing what other poets of uncritical ages have always done. [footnote: _la question mycénienne_, p. 50.] this is his position in his text (p. 50). in his note 1 to page 50, however, he occupies the precisely contrary position. "the epic poems were chanted, as a rule, in the houses of more or less warlike chiefs. it is, then, _à priori_ probable that the later poets took into account the _contemporary_ military state of things. their audience would have been much perturbed (_bien chequés_) if they had heard the poet mention nothing but arms and forms of attack and defence to which they were unaccustomed." if so, when iron weapons came in the poets would substitute iron for bronze, in lays new and old, but they never do. however, this is helbig's opinion in his note. but in his text he says that the poets, carefully avoiding the contemporary, "the modern," make the heroes fight, not on horseback, but from chariots. their listeners, according to his note, must have been _bien chequés_, for there came a time when _they_ were not accustomed to war chariots. thus the poets who, in dr. helbig's text, "avoid as far as possible all that is modern," in his note, on the same page, "take account of the contemporary state of things," and are as modern as possible where weapons _are_ concerned. their audience would be sadly put out (_bien chequés_) "if they heard talk only of arms ... to which they were unaccustomed"; talk of large suspended shields, of uncorsleted heroes, and of bronze weapons. they had to endure it, whether they liked it or not, _teste_ reichel. dr. helbig seems to speak correctly in his note; in his text his contradictory opinion appears to be wrong. experience teaches us that the poets of an uncritical age--shakespeare, for example--introduce the weapons of their own period into works dealing with remote ages. hamlet uses the elizabethan rapier. in his argument on bronze and iron, unluckily, dr. helbig deserts the judicious opinions of his note for the opposite theory of his text. his late poets, in the age of iron, always say that the weapons of the heroes are made of bronze. [footnote: _op. laud_., p. 51.] they thus, "as far as possible avoid what is modern." but, of course, warriors of the age of iron, when they heard the poet talk only of weapons of bronze, "_aurient été bien choqués_" (as dr. helbig truly says in his note), on hearing of nothing but "_armes auxquels ils n'étaient pas habitués,_"--arms always of bronze. though dr. helbig in his text is of the opposite opinion, i must agree entirely with the view which he states so clearly in his note. it follows that if a poet speaks invariably of weapons of bronze, he is living in an age when weapons are made of no other material. in his text, however, dr. helbig maintains that the poets of later ages "as far as possible avoid everything modern," and, therefore, mention none but bronze weapons. but, as he has pointed out, they do mention iron tools and implements. why do they desert the traditional bronze? because "it occasionally happened that a poet, when thinking of an entirely new subject, wholly emancipated himself from traditional forms," [footnote: _op. laud_., pp. 51, 52] the examples given in proof are the offer by achilles of a lump of iron as the prize for archery--the iron, as we saw, being destined for the manufacture of pastoral and agricultural implements, in which dr. helbig includes the lances of shepherds and ploughmen, though the poet never says that they were of iron. [footnote: _iliad_, xxiii. 826, 835; odyssey, xiv. 531; xiii. 225.] there are also the axes through which odysseus shoots his arrow. [footnote: _odyssey_, xix. 587; xxi. 3, x, 97, 114, 127, 138; xxiv. 168, 177; cf. xxi. 61.] "the poet here treated an entirely new subject, in the development of which he had perfect liberty." so he speaks freely of iron. "but," we exclaim, "tools and implements, axes and knives, are not a perfectly new subject!" they were extremely familiar to the age of bronze, the mycenaean age. examples of bronze tools, arrow-heads, and implements are discovered in excavations on mycenaean sites. there was nothing new about bronze tools and implements. men had bronze tips to their ploughshares, bronze knives, bronze axes, bronze arrow-heads before they used iron. perhaps we are to understand that feats of archery, non-military contests in bowmanship, are _un sujet à fait nouveau_: a theme so very modern that a poet, in singing of it, could let himself go, and dare to speak of iron implements. but where was the novelty? all peoples who use the bow in war practise archery in time of peace. the poet, moreover, speaks of bronze tools, axes and knives, in other parts of the _iliad_; neither tools nor bronze tools constitute _un sujet tout à fait nouveau_. there was nothing new in shooting with a bow and nothing new in the existence of axes. bows and axes were as familiar to the age of stone and to the age of bronze as to the age of iron. dr. helbig's explanation, therefore, explains nothing, and, unless a better explanation is offered, we return to the theory, rejected by dr. helbig, that implements and tools were often, not always, of iron, while weapons were of bronze in the age of the poet. dr. helbig rejects this opinion. he writes: "we cannot in any way admit that, at a period when the socks of the plough, the lance points of shepherds" (which the poet never describes as of iron), "and axe-heads were of iron, warriors still used weapons of bronze." [footnote: op. _laud._, p. 53.] but it is logically possible to admit that this was the real state of affairs, while it is logically impossible to admit that bows and tools were "new subjects"; and that late poets, when they sang of military gear, "_tenaient compte de l'armement contemporain,_" carefully avoiding the peril of bewildering their hearers by speaking of antiquated arms, and, at the same time, spoke of nothing but antiquated arms--weapons of bronze--and of war chariots, to fighting men who did not use war chariots and did use weapons of iron. these logical contradictions beset all arguments in which it is maintained that "the late poets" are anxious archaisers, and at the same time are eagerly introducing the armour and equipment of their own age. the critics are in the same quandary as to iron and bronze as traps them in the case of large shields, small bucklers, greaves, and corslets. they are obliged to assign contradictory attitudes to their "late poets." it does not seem possible to admit that a poet, who often describes axes as of iron in various passages, does so in his account of a peaceful contest in bowmanship, because contests in bowmanship are _un sujet tout à fait nouveau;_ and so he feels at liberty to describe axes as of iron, while he adheres to bronze as the metal for weapons. he, or one of the odyssean poets, had already asserted (odyssey, ix. 391) that iron _was_ the metal for adzes and axes. dr. helbig's argument [footnote: _la question mycénienne_, p. 54.] does not explain the facts. the bow of eurytus and the uses to which odysseus is to put it have been in the poet's mind all through the conduct of his plot, and there is nothing to suggest that the exploit of bowmanship is a very new lay, tacked on to the odyssey. after writing this chapter, i observed that my opinion had been anticipated by s. h. naber. [footnote: _quaestiones homericae_, p. 60. amsterdam. van der post, 1897.] "quod herodoti diserto testimonio novimus, homeri restate ferruminatio nondum inventa erat necdum bene noverant mortales, uti opinor, _acuere_ ferrum. hinc pauperes homines ubi possunt, ferro utuntur; sed in plerisque rebus turn domi turn militiae imprimis coguntur uti aere...." the theory of mr. ridgeway as to the relative uses of iron and bronze is not, by myself, very easily to be understood. "the homeric warrior ... has regularly, as we have seen, spear and sword of iron." [footnote: _early age of greece_, vol. i. p. 301.] as no spear or sword of iron is ever mentioned in the _iliad_ or odyssey, as both weapons are always of bronze when the metal is specified, i have not "seen" that they are "regularly," or ever, of iron. in proof, mr. ridgeway cites the axes and knives already mentioned--which are not spears or swords, and are sometimes of bronze. he also quotes the line in the odyssey, "iron of itself doth attract a man." but if this line is genuine and original, it does not apply to the state of things in the _iliad_, while it contradicts the whole odyssey, in which swords and spears are _always_ of bronze when their metal is mentioned. if the line reveals the true state of things, then throughout the odyssey, if not throughout the _iliad_, the poets when they invariably speak of bronze swords and spears invariably say what they do not mean. if they do this, how are we to know when they mean what they say, and of what value can their evidence on points of culture be reckoned? they may always be retaining traditional terms as to usages and customs in an age when these are obsolete. if the achaeans were, as in mr. ridgeway's theory, a northern people--"celts"--who conquered with iron weapons a pelasgian bronze-using mycenaean people, it is not credible to me that achaean or pelasgian poets habitually used the traditional pelasgian term for the metal of weapons, namely, bronze, in songs chanted before victors who had won their triumph with iron. the traditional phrase of a conquered bronze-using race could not thus survive and flourish in the poetry of an outlandish iron-using race of conquerors. mr. ridgeway cites the odyssey, wherein we are told that "euryalus, the phaeacian, presented to odysseus a bronze sword, though, as we have seen" (mr. ridgeway has seen), "the usual material for all such weapons is iron. but the phoeacians both belonged to the older race and lived in a remote island, and therefore swords of bronze may well have continued in use in such out-of-the-world places long after iron swords were in use everywhere else in greece. the man who could not afford iron had to be satisfied with bronze." [footnote: _early age of greece_, p. 305.] here the poet is allowed to mean what he says. the phaeacian sword is really of bronze, with silver studs, probably on the hilt (odyssey, viii. 401-407), which was of ivory. the "out-of-the-world" islanders could afford ivory, not iron. but when the same poet tells us that the sword which odysseus brought from troy was "a great silver-studded bronze sword" (odyssey, x. 261, 262), then mr. ridgeway does not allow the poet to mean what he says. the poet is now using an epic formula older than the age of iron swords. that mr. ridgeway adopts helbig's theory--the poet says "bronze," by a survival of the diction of the bronze age, when he means iron--i infer from the following passage: "_chalkos_ is the name for the older metal, of which cutting weapons were made, and it thus lingered in many phrases of the epic dialect; 'to smite with the _chalkos_' was equivalent to our phrase 'to smite with the steel.'" [footnote: _early age of greece_, i. 295.] but we certainly do smite with the steel, while the question is, "_did_ homer's men smite with the iron?" homer says not; he does not merely use "an epic phrase" "to smite with the _chalkos_," but he carefully describes swords, spears, and usually arrow-heads as being of bronze (_chalkos_), while axes, adzes, and knives are frequently described by him as of iron. mr. ridgeway has an illustrative argument with some one, who says: "the dress and weapons of the saxons given in the lay of _beowulf_ fitted exactly the bronze weapons in england, for they had shields, and spears, and battle-axes, and swords." if you pointed out to him that the saxon poem spoke of these weapons as made of iron, he would say, "i admit that it is a difficulty, but the resemblances are so many that the discrepancies may be jettisoned." [footnote: _ridgeway,_ i. 83, 84.] now, if the supposed controversialist were a homeric critic, he would not admit any difficulty. he would say, "yes; in _beowulf_ the weapons are said to be of iron, but that is the work of the christian _remanieur,_ or _bearbeiter,_ who introduced all the christian morality into the old heathen lay, and who also, not to puzzle his iron-using audience, changed the bronze into iron weapons." we may prove anything if we argue, now that the poets retain the tradition of obsolete things, now that they modernise as much as they please. into this method of reasoning, after duly considering it, i am unable to come with enthusiasm, being wedded to the belief that the poets say what they mean. were it otherwise, did they not mean what they say, their evidence would be of no value; they might be dealing throughout in terms for things which were unrepresented in their own age. to prove this possible, it would be necessary to adduce convincing and sufficient examples of early national poets who habitually use the terminology of an age long prior to their own in descriptions of objects, customs, and usages. meanwhile, it is obvious that my whole argument has no archaeological support. we may find "mycenaean" corslets and greaves, but they are not in cremation burials. no homeric cairn with homeric contents has ever been discovered; and if we did find examples of homeric cairns, it appears, from the poems, that they would very seldom contain the arms of the dead. nowhere, again, do we find graves containing bronze swords and iron axes and adzes. i know nothing nearer in discoveries to my supposed age of bronze weapons and iron tools than a grave of the early iron and geometrical ornament age of crete--a _tholos_ tomb, with a bronze spear-head and a set of iron tools, among others a double axe and a pick of iron. but these were in company with iron swords? to myself the crowning mystery is, what has become of the homeric tumuli with their contents? one can but say that only within the last thirty years have we found, or, finding, have recognised mycenaean burial records. as to the badness of the iron of the north for military purposes, and the probable badness of all early iron weapons, we have testimony two thousand years later than homer and some twelve hundred years later than polybius. in the eyrbyggja saga (morris and maguússon, chap, xxiv.) we read that steinthor "was girt with a sword that was cunningly wrought; the hilts were white with silver, and the grip wrapped round with the same, but the strings thereof were gilded." this was a splendid sword, described with the homeric delight in such things; but the battle-cry arises, and then "the fair-wrought sword bit not when it smote armour, and steinthor must _straighten it under_ his _foot._" messrs. morris and maguússon add in a note: "this is a very common experience in scandinavian weapons, and for the first time heard of at the battle of aquae sextiae between marius and the teutons." [footnote: the reference is erroneous.] "in the north weapon-smiths who knew how to forge tempered or steel-laminated weapons were, if not unknown, at least very rare." when such skill was unknown or rare in homer's time, nothing was more natural than that bronze should hold its own, as the metal for swords and spears, after iron was commonly used for axes and ploughshares. chapter x the homeric house if the homeric poems be, as we maintain, the work of a peculiar age, the homeric house will also, in all likelihood, be peculiar. it will not be the hellenic house of classical times. manifestly the dwelling of a military-prince in the heroic age would be evolved to meet his needs, which were not the needs of later hellenic citizens. in time of peace the later greeks are weaponless men, not surrounded by and entertaining throngs of armed retainers, like the homeric chief. the women of later greece, moreover, are in the background of life, dwelling in the women's chambers, behind those of the men, in seclusion. the homeric women also, at least in the house of odysseus, have their separate chambers, which the men seem not to enter except on invitation, though the ladies freely honour by their presence the hall of the warriors. the circumstances, however, were peculiar--penelope being unprotected in the absence of her lord. the whole domestic situation in the homeric poems--the free equality of the women, the military conditions, the life of the chiefs and retainers--closely resembles, allowing for differences of climate, that of the rich landowners of early iceland as described in the sagas. there can be no doubt that the house of the icelandic chief was analogous to the house of the homeric prince. societies remarkably similar in mode of life were accommodated in dwellings similarly arranged. though the icelanders owned no over-lord, and, indeed, left their native scandinavia to escape the sway of harold fairhair, yet each wealthy and powerful chief lived in the manner of a homeric "king." his lands and thralls, horses and cattle, occupied his attention when he did not chance to be on viking adventure--"bearing bane to alien men." he always carried sword and spear, and often had occasion to use them. he entertained many guests, and needed a large hall and ample sleeping accommodation for strangers and servants. his women were as free and as much respected as the ladies in homer; and for a husband to slap a wife was to run the risk of her deadly feud. thus, far away in the frosts of the north, the life of the chief was like that of the homeric prince, and their houses were alike. it is our intention to use this parallel in the discussion of the homeric house. all icelandic chiefs' houses in the tenth and eleventh centuries were not precisely uniform in structure and accommodation, and saga writers of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, living more comfortably than their forefathers, sometimes confuse matters by introducing the arrangements of their own into the tale of past times. but, in any case, one icelandic house of the tenth or eleventh century might differ from another in certain details. it is not safe, therefore, to argue that difference of detail in homer's accounts of various houses means that the varying descriptions were composed in different ages. in the _odyssey_ the plot demands that the poet must enter into domestic details much more freely than he ever has occasion to do in the iliad. he may mention upper chambers freely, for example; it will not follow that in the _iliad_ upper chambers do not exist because they are only mentioned twice in that epic. it is even more important to note that in the house of odysseus we have an unparalleled domestic situation. the lady of the house is beset by more than a hundred wooers--"sorning" on her, in the old scots legal phrase--making it impossible for her to inhabit her own hall, and desirable to keep the women as much as possible apart from the men. thus the homeric house of which we know most, that of odysseus, is a house in a most abnormal condition. for the sake of brevity we omit the old theory that the homeric house was practically that of historical greece, with the men's hall approached by a door from the courtyard; while a door at the upper end of the men's hall yields direct access to the quarters where the women dwelt apart, at the rear of the men's hall. that opinion has not survived the essay by mr. j. l. myres on the "plan of the homeric house." [footnote: _journal of hellenic studies_, vol. xx, 128-150.] quite apart from arguments that rest on the ground plans of palaces at mycenae and tiryns, mr. myres has proved, by an exact reading of the poet's words, that the descriptions in the _odyssey_ cannot be made intelligible on the theory that the poet has in his mind a house of the hellenic pattern. but in his essay he hardly touches on any homeric house except that of odysseus, in which the circumstances were unusual. a later critic, ferdinand noack, has demonstrated that we must take other homeric houses into consideration. [footnote: _homerische paläste_. teubner. leipzig, 1903.] the prae-mycenaean house is, according to mr. myres, on the whole of the same plan as the hellenic house of historic days; between these comes the mycenaean and homeric house; "so that the mycenaean house stands out _as an intrusive phenomenon_, of comparatively late arrival _and short of duration_..." [footnote: myres, _journal_ of _hellenic_ studies, vol. xx. p. 149.] noack goes further; he draws a line between the mycenaean houses on one hand and the houses described by homer on the other; while he thinks that the "_late_ homeric house," that of the closing books of the odyssey, is widely sundered from the homeric house of the _iliad_ and from the houses of menelaus and alcinous in earlier books of the _odyssey._ [footnote: noack, p. 73.] in this case the iliadic and earlier odyssean houses are those of a single definite age, neither mycenaean of the prime, nor hellenic--a fact which entirely suits our argument. but it is not so certain, that the house of odysseus is severed from the other homeric houses by the later addition of an upper storey, as noack supposes, and of women's quarters, and of separate sleeping chambers for the heads of the family. the _iliad,_ save in two passages, and earlier books of the _odyssey_ may not mention upper storeys because they have no occasion, or only rare occasion, to do so; and some houses may have had upper sleeping chambers while others of the same period had not, as we shall prove from the icelandic parallel. mr. myres's idea of the homeric house, or, at least, of the house of odysseus, is that the women had a _meguron,_ or common hall, apart from that of the men, with other chambers. these did not lie to the direct rear of the men's hall, nor were they entered by a door that opened in the back wall of the men's hall. penelope has a chamber, in which she sleeps and does woman's work, upstairs; her connubial chamber, unoccupied during her lord's absence, is certainly on the ground floor. the women's rooms are severed from the men's hall by a courtyard; in the courtyard are chambers. telemachus has his [greek: thalamos], or chamber, in the men's courtyard. all this appears plain from the poet's words; and mr. myres corroborates, by the ground plans of the palaces of tiryns and mycenae, a point on which mr. monro had doubts, as regards tiryns, while he accepted it for mycenae. [footnote: monro, odyssey, ii. 497; _journal of hellenic studies_, xx. 136.] noack [footnote: noack, p. 39.] does not, however, agree. there appears to be no doubt that in the centre of the great halls of tiryns and of mycenae, as of the houses in homer, was the hearth, with two tall pillars on each side, supporting a _louvre_ higher than the rest of the roof, and permitting some, at least, of the smoke of the fire to escape. beside the fire were the seats of the master and mistress of the house, of the minstrel, and of honoured guests. the place of honour was not on a dais at the inmost end of the hall, like the high table in college halls. mr. myres holds that in the homeric house the [greek: prodomos], or "forehouse," was a chamber, and was not identical with the [greek: aethousa], or portico, though he admits that the two words "are used indifferently to describe the sleeping place of a guest." [footnote: _journal of hellenic studies_, xx. 144, 155.] this was the case at tiryns; and in the house of the father of phoenix, in the _iliad_, the _prodomos_, or forehouse, and the _aethousa_, or portico, are certainly separate things (iliad, ix. 473). noack does not accept the tiryns evidence for the homeric house. on mr. myres's showing, the women in the house of odysseus had distinct and separate quarters into which no man goes uninvited. odysseus when at home has, with his wife, a separate bedroom; and in his absence penelope sleeps upstairs, where there are several chambers for various purposes. granting that all this is so, how do the pictures of the house given in the final part of the _odyssey_ compare with those in the [blank space] and with the accounts of the dwellings of menelaus and alcinous in the odyssey? noack argues that the house of odysseus is unlike the other homeric houses, because in these, he reasons, the women have no separate quarters, and the lord and lady of the house sleep in the great hall, and have no other bedroom, while there are no upper chambers in the houses of the _iliad_, except in two passages dismissed as "late." if all this be so, then the homeric period, as regards houses and domestic life, belongs to an age apart, not truly mycenaean, and still less later hellenic. it must be remembered that noack regards the odyssey as a composite and in parts very late mosaic (a view on which i have said what i think in _homer and the epic_). according to this theory (kirchhoff is the exponent of a popular form thereof) the first book of the odyssey belongs to "the latest stratum," and is the "copy" of the general "worker-up," whether he was the editor employed by pisistratus or a laborious amateur. this theory is opposed by sittl, who makes his point by cutting out, as interpolations, whatever passages do not suit his ideas, and do suit kirchhoff's--this is the regular method of homeric criticism. the whole cruise of telemachus (book iv.) is also regarded as a late addition: on this point english scholars hitherto have been of the opposite opinion. [footnote: cf. monro, _odyssey_, vol. ii. 313-317.] the method of all parties is to regard repetitions of phrases as examples of borrowing, except, of course, in the case of the earliest poet from whom the others pilfer, and in other cases of prae-homeric surviving epic formulae. critics then dispute as to which recurrent passage is the earlier, deciding, of course, as may happen to suit their own general theory. in our opinion these passages are traditional formulae, as in our own old ballads and in the _chansons de geste_, and noack also takes this view every now and then. they may well be older, in many cases, than _iliad_ and _odyssey_; or the poet, having found his own formula, economically used it wherever similar circumstances occurred. such passages, so considered, are no tests of earlier composition in one place, of later composition in another. we now look into noack's theory of the homeric house. where do the lord and lady sleep? _not_, he says, as odysseus and penelope do (when odysseus is at home), in a separate chamber (_thalamos_) on the ground floor, nor, like gunnar and halgerda (njal's saga), in an upper chamber. they sleep _mucho domou_; that is, not in a separate recess in the _house_, but in a recess of the great hall or _megaron_. thus, in the hall of alcinous, the whole space runs from the threshold to the _muchos_, the innermost part (_odyssey_, vii. 87-96). in the hall of odysseus, the wooers retreat to the _muchos_, "the innermost part of the hall" (_odyssey_, xxii. 270). "the _muchos_, in homer, never denotes a separate chamber." [footnote: noack, p. 45. _cf_. monro, note to odyssey, xxii. 270.] in odyssey, xi. 373, alcinous says it is not yet time to sleep _ev megaro_, "in the hall." alcinous and arete, his wife, sleep "in the recess of the lofty _domos_," that is, in the recess of the _hall_, not of "the house" (odyssey, vii. 346). the same words are used of helen and menelaus (odyssey, iv. 304). but when menelaus goes forth next morning, he goes _ek thalamoio_, "out of his _chamber_" (_odyssey_, iv. 310). but this, says noack, is a mere borrowing of odyssey, ii 2-5, where the same words are used of telemachus, leaving his chamber, which undeniably was a separate chamber in the court: eurycleia lighted him thither at night (odyssey, i. 428). in odyssey, iv. 121, helen enters the hall "from her fragrant, lofty chamber," so she _had_ a chamber, not in the hall. but, says noack, this verse "is not original." the late poet of _odyssey_, iv. has cribbed it from the early poet who composed _odyssey, xix. 53._ in that passage penelope "comes from her chamber, like artemis or golden aphrodite." penelope _had_ a chamber--being "a lone lorn woman," who could not sleep in a hall where the wooers sat up late drinking--and the latest poet transfers this chamber to helen. but however late and larcenous he may have been, the poet of iv. 121 certainly did not crib the words of the poet of xix. 53, for he says, "helen came out of her _fragrant, high-roofed_ chamber." the _hall_ was not precisely "fragrant"! however, noack supposes that the late poet of book iv. let helen have a chamber apart, to lead up to the striking scene of her entry to the hall where her guests are sitting. may helen not even have a boudoir? in _odyssey_, iv. 263, helen speaks remorsefully of having abandoned her "chamber," and husband, and child, with paris; but the late poet says this, according to noack, because he finds that he is in for a chamber, so to speak, at all events, as a result of his having previously cribbed the word "chamber" from odyssey, xix. 53. otherwise, we presume helen would have said that she regretted having left "the recess of the lofty hall" where she really did sleep. [footnote: noack, pp. 47-48] the merit of this method of arguing may be left to the judgment of the reader, who will remark that wedded pairs are not described as leaving the hall when they go to bed; they sleep in "a recess of the lofty house," the innermost part. is this the same as the "recess of the _hall_" or is it an innermost part of the _house?_ who can be certain? the bridal chamber, built so cunningly, with the trunk of a tree for the support of the bed, by odysseus (odyssey, xxiii. 177-204), is, according to noack, an exception, a solitary freak of odysseus. but we may reply that the _thalamos_, the separate chamber, is no freak; the freak, by knowledge of which odysseus proves his identity, is the use of the tree in the construction of the bed. [blank space] was highly original. that separate chambers are needed for grown-up children, _because_ the parents sleep in the hall, is no strong argument. if the parents had a separate chamber, the young people, unless they slept in the hall, would still need their own. the girls, of course, could not sleep in the hall; and, in the absence of both penelope and odysseus from the hall, ever since telemachus was a baby, telemachus could have slept there. but it will be replied that the wooers did not beset the hall, and penelope did not retire to a separate chamber, till telemachus was a big boy of sixteen. noack argues that he had a separate chamber, though the hall was free, _tradition_. [footnote: noack, p. 49.] where does noack think that, in a normal homeric house, the girls of the family slept? _they_ could not sleep in the hall, and on the two occasions when the _iliad_ has to mention the chambers of the young ladies they are "upper chambers," as is natural. but as noack wants to prove the house of odysseus, with its upper chambers, to be a late peculiar house, he, of course, expunges the two mentions of girls' upper chambers in the _odyssey_. the process is simple and easy. we find (_iliad_, xvii. 36) that a son, wedding in his father's and mother's life-time, has a _thalamos_ built for him, and a _muchos_ in the _thalamos_, where he leaves his wife when he goes to war. this dwelling of grown-up married children, as in the case of the sons of priam, has a _thalamos_, or _doma_, and a courtyard--is a house, in fact (_iliad_, vi. 3 16). here we seem to distinguish the bed-chamber from the _doma_, which is the hall. noack objects that when odysseus fumigates his house, after slaying the wooers, he thus treats the _megaron_, _and_ the _doma_, _and_ the courtyard. therefore, noack argues, the _megaron_, or hall, is one thing; the _doma_ is another. mr. monro writes, "_doma_ usually means _megaron_," and he supposes a slip from another reading, _thalamon_ for _megaron_, which is not satisfactory. but if _doma_ here be not equivalent to _megaron_, what room can it possibly be? who was killed in another place? what place therefore needed purification except the hall and courtyard? no other places needed purifying; there is therefore clearly a defect in the lines which cannot be used in the argument. noack, in any case, maintains that paris has but one place to live in by day and to sleep in by night--his [greek: talamos]. there he sleeps, eats, and polishes his weapons and armour. there hector finds him looking to his gear; helen and the maids are all there (_iliad,_ vi. 321-323). is this quite certain? are helen and the maids in the [greek: talamos], where paris is polishing his corslet and looking to his bow, or in an adjacent room? if not in another room, why, when hector is in the room talking to paris, does helen ask him to "come in"? (_iliad,_ vi. 354). he is in, is there another room whence she can hear him? the minuteness of these inquiries is tedious! in _iliad,_ iii. 125, iris finds helen "in the hall" weaving. she summons her to come to priam on the gate. helen dresses in outdoor costume, and goes forth "from the chamber," [greek: talamos] (iii. 141-142). are hall and chamber the same room, or did not helen dress "in the chamber"? in the same book (iii. 174) she repents having left the [greek: talamos] of menelaus, not his hall: the passage is not a repetition in words of her speech in the odyssey. the gods, of course, are lodged like men. when we find that zeus has really a separate sleeping chamber, built by hephaestus, as odysseus has (_iliad,_ xiv. 166-167), we are told that this is a late interpolation. mr. leaf, who has a high opinion of this scene, "the beguiling of zeus," places it in the "second expansions"; he finds no "late odyssean" elements in the language. in _iliad,_ i. 608-611, zeus "departed to his couch"; he seems not to have stayed and slept in the hall. here a quaint problem occurs. of all late things in the odyssey the latest is said to be the song of demodocus about the loves of ares and aphrodite in the house of hephaestus. [footnote: odyssey, viii. 266-300.] we shall show that this opinion is far from certainly correct. hephaestus sets a snare round the bed in his [greek: talamos] and catches the guilty lovers. _now_, was his [greek: talamos] or bedroom, also his dining-room? if so, the author of the song, though so "late," knows what noack knows, and what the poets who assign sleeping chambers to wedded folks do not know, namely, that neither married gods nor married men have separate bedrooms. this is plain, for he makes hephaestus stand at the front door of his house, and shout to the gods to come and see the sinful lovers. [footnote: ibid., vi. 304-305] they all come and look on _from the front door_ (_odyssey_, vii. 325), which leads into the [greek: megaron], the hall. if the lovers are in bed in the hall, then hall and bedroom are all one, and the terribly late poet who made this lay knows it, though the late poets of the _odyssey_ and _iliad_ do not. it would appear that the author of the lay is not "late," as we shall prove in another case. noack, then, will not allow man or god to have a separate wedding chamber, nor women, before the late parts of the _odyssey_, to have separate quarters, except in the house of odysseus. women's chambers do not exist in the homeric house. [footnote: noack, p. 50.] if so, how remote is the true homeric house from the house of historical greece! as for upper chambers, those of the daughter of the house (_iliad,_ ii. 514; xvi. 184), both passages are "late," as we saw (noack, p.[blank space]). in the _odyssey_ penelope both sleeps and works at the shroud in an upper chamber. but the whole arrangement of upper chambers as women's apartments is as late, says noack, as the time of the poets and "redactors" (whoever they may have been) of the odyssey, xxi., xxii., xxiii. [footnote: noack, p. 68.] at the earliest these books are said to be of the eighth century b.c. here the late poets have their innings at last, and do modernise the homeric house. to prove the absence of upper rooms in the _iliad_ we have to abolish ii. 514, where astyoche meets her divine lover in her upper chamber, and xvi. 184, where polymêlê celebrates her amour with hermes "in the upper chambers." the places where these two passages occur, _catalogue_ (book ii.) and the _catalogue_ of the _myrmidons_ (book xvi.) are, indeed, both called "late," but the author of the latter knows the early law of bride-price, which is supposed to be unknown to the authors of "late" passages in the odyssey (xvi. 190). stated briefly, such are the ideas of noack. they leave us, at least, with permission to hold that the whole of the epics, except books xxi., xxii., and xxiii. of the odyssey, bear, as regards the house, the marks of a distinct peculiar age, coming between the period of mycenae and tiryns on one hand and the eighth century b.c. on the other. this is the point for which we have contended, and this suits our argument very well, though we are sorry to see that odyssey, books xxi., xxii., and xxiii., are no older than the eighth century b.c. but we have not been quite convinced that helen had not her separate chamber, that zeus had not his separate chamber, and that the upper chambers of the daughters of the house in the iliad are "late." where, if not in upper chambers, did the young princesses repose? again, the marked separation of the women in the house of odysseus may be the result of penelope's care in unusual circumstances, though she certainly would not build a separate hall for them. there are over a hundred handsome young scoundrels in her house all day long and deep into the night; she would, vainly, do her best to keep her girls apart. it stands to reason that young girls of princely families would have bedrooms in the house, not in the courtyard-bedrooms out of the way of enterprising young men. what safer place could be found for them than in upper chambers, as in the iliad? but, if their lovers were gods, we know that none "can see a god coming or going against his will." the arrangements of houses may and do vary in different cases in the same age. as examples we turn to the parallel afforded by the icelandic sagas and their pictures of houses of the eleventh century b.c. the present author long ago pointed out the parallel of the houses in the sagas and in homer. [footnote: _the_ house. butcher and lang. translation of the odyssey.] he took his facts from dasent's translation of the njal saga (1861, vol. i. pp. xcviii., ciii., with diagrams). as far as he is aware, no critic looked into the matter till mr. monro (1901), being apparently unacquainted with dasent's researches, found similar lore in works by dr. valtyr gudmundsson [footnote: monro, odyssey, vol. ii. pp. 491-495; _cf_. gudmundsson, _der islandske bottg i fristats tiden_, 1894; _cf_. dasent, _oxford_ essays, 1858.] the roof of the hall is supported by four rows of columns, the two inner rows are taller, and between them is the hearth, with seats of honour for the chief guests and the lord. the fire was in a kind of trench down the hall; and in very cold weather, we learn from dasent, long fires could be lit through the extent of the hall. the chief had a raised seat; the guests sat on benches. the high seats were at the centre; not till later times on the dais, as in a college hall. the tables were relatively small, and, as in homer, could be removed after a meal. the part of the hall with the dais in later days was partitioned off as a _stofa_ or parlour. in early times cooking was done in the hall. dr. gudmundsson, if i understand him, varies from dasent in some respects. i quote an abstract of his statement. "about the year 1000 houses generally consisted of, at least, four rooms; often a fifth was added, the so-called bath-room. the oldest form for houses was that of one long line or row of separate rooms united by wooden or clay corridors or partitions, and each covered with a roof. later, this was considered unpractical, and they began building some of the houses or rooms behind the others, which facilitated the access from one to another, and diminished the number of outer doors and corridors." "towards the latter part of the tenth century the _skaal_ was used as common sleeping-room for the whole family, including servants and serfs; it was fitted up in the same way as the hall. like this, it was divided in three naves by rows of wooden pillars; the middle floor was lower than that of the two side naves. in these were placed the so-called _saet_ or bed-places, not running the whole length of the [blank space] from gable to gable, but sideways, filling about a third part. each _saet_ was enclosed by broad, strong planks joined into the pillars, but not nailed on, so they might easily be taken out. these planks, called _sattestokke_, could also be turned sideways and used as benches during the day; they were often beautifully carved, and consequently highly valued." "when settling abroad the people took away with them these planks, and put them up in their new home as a symbol of domestic happiness. the _saet_ was occupied by the servants of the farm as sleeping-rooms; generally it was screened by hangings and low panels, which partitioned it off like huge separate boxes, used as beds." "all beds were filled with hay or straw; servants and serfs slept on this without any bedclothes, sometimes a sleeping-bag was used, or they covered themselves with deerskins or a mantle. the family had bed-clothes, but only in very wealthy houses were they also provided for the servants. moveable beds were extremely rare, but are sometimes mentioned. generally two people slept in each bed." "in the further end of the _skaal_, facing the door, opened out one or several small bedrooms, destined for the husband with wife and children, besides other members of the family, including guests of a higher standing. these small dormitories were separated by partitions of planks into bedrooms with one or several beds, and shut away from the outer _skaal_ either by a sliding-door in the wall or by an ordinary door shutting with a hasp. sometimes only a hanging covered the opening." "in some farms were found underground passages, leading from the master's bedside to an outside house, or even as far as a wood or another sheltered place in the neighbourhood, to enable the inhabitants to save themselves during a night attack. for the same reason each man had his arms suspended over his bed." "_ildhus_ or fire-house was the kitchen, often used besides as a sleeping-room when the farms were very small. this was quite abolished after the year 1000." "_buret_ was the provision house." "the bathroom was heated from a stone oven; the stones were heated red-hot and cold water thrown upon them, which developed a quantity of vapour. as the heat and the steam mounted, the people--men and women--crawled up to a shelf under the roof and remained there as in a turkish bath." "in large and wealthy houses there was also a women's room, with a fireplace built low down in the middle, as in the hall, where the women used to sit with their handiwork all day. the men were allowed to come in and talk to them, also beggar-women and other vagabonds, who brought them the news from other places. towards evening and for meals all assembled together in the hall." on this showing, people did not sleep in cabins partitioned off the dining-hall, but in the _skaale_; and two similar and similarly situated rooms, one the common dining-hall, the other the common sleeping-hall, have been confused by writers on the sagas. [footnote: gudmundsson, p, 14, note i.] can there be a similar confusion in the uses of _megaron_, _doma_, and _domos_? in the eyrbyggja saga we have descriptions of the "fire-hall," _skáli_ or _eldhús_. "the fire-hall was the common sleeping-room in icelandic homesteads." guests and strangers slept there; not in the portico, as in homer. "here were the lock-beds." there were butteries; one of these was reached by a ladder. the walls were panelled. [footnote: _the ere dwellers_, p. 145.] thorgunna had a "berth," apparently partitioned off, in the hall. [footnote: _ibid_., 137-140.] as in homer the hall was entered from the courtyard, in which were separate rooms for stores and other purposes. in the courtyard also, in the houses of gunnar of lithend and gisli at hawkdale, and doubtless in other cases, were the _dyngfur_, or ladies' chambers, their "bowers" (_thalamos_, like that of telemachus in the courtyard), where they sat spinning and gossiping. the _dyngja_ was originally called _búr_, our "bower"; the ballads say "in bower and hall." in the ballad of _margaret_, her parents are said to put her in the way of deadly sin by building her a bower, apparently separate from the main building; she would have been safer in an upper chamber, though, even there, not safe--at least, if a god wooed her! it does not appear that all houses had these chambers for ladies apart from the main building. you did not enter the main hall in iceland from the court directly in front, but by the "man's door" at the west side, whence you walked through the porch or outer hall (_prodomos_, _aithonsa_), in the centre of which, to the right, were the doors of the hall. the women entered by the women's door, at the eastern extremity. guests did not sleep, as in homer, in the _prodomos_, or the portico--the climate did not permit it--but in one or other hall. the hall was wainscotted; the walls were hung with shields and weapons, like the hall of odysseus. the heads of the family usually slept in the aisles, in chambers entered through the wainscot of the hall. such a chamber might be called _muchos_; it was private from the hall though under the same roof. it appears not improbable that some homeric halls had sleeping places of this kind; such a _muchos_ in iceland seems to have had windows. [footnote: story of burnt _njal_, i. 242.] gunnar himself, however, slept with his wife, halegerda, in an upper chamber; his mother, who lived with him, also had a room upstairs. in njal's house, too, there was an upper chamber, wherein the foes of njal threw fire. [footnote:_ibid_., ii. 173.] but njal and bergthora, his wife, when all hope was ended, went into their own bride-chamber in the separate aisle of the hall "and gave over their souls into god's hand." under a hide they lay; and when men raised up the hide, after the fire had done its work, "they were unburnt under it. all praised god for that, and thought it was a _great_ token." in this house was a weaving room for the women. [footnote:_ibid_, ii. 195.] it thus appears that icelandic houses of the heroic age, as regards structural arrangements, were practically identical with the house of odysseus, allowing for a separate sleeping-hall, while the differences between that and other homeric houses may be no more than the differences between various icelandic dwellings. the parents might sleep in bedchambers off the hall or in upper chambers. ladies might have bowers in the courtyard or might have none. the [greek: laurae]--each passage outside the hall--yielded sleeping rooms for servants; and there were store-rooms behind the passage at the top end of the hall, as well as separate chambers for stores in the courtyard. mr. leaf judiciously reconstructs the homeric house in its "public rooms," of which we hear most, while he leaves the residential portion with "details and limits probably very variable." [footnote: _iliad_, vol. i. pp. 586-589, with diagram based on the palace of tiryns.] given variability, which is natural and to be expected, and given the absence of detail about the "residential portion" of other houses than that of odysseus in the poems, it does not seem to us that this house is conspicuously "late," still less that it is the house of historical greece. manifestly, in all respects it more resembles the houses of njal and gunnar of lithend in the heroic age of iceland. in the house, as in the uses of iron and bronze, the weapons, armour, relations of the sexes, customary laws, and everything else, homer gives us an harmonious picture of a single and peculiar age. we find no stronger mark of change than in the odyssean house, if that be changed, which we show reason to doubt. chapter xi notes of change in the "odyssey" if the homeric descriptions of details of life contain anachronisms, points of detail inserted in later progressive ages, these must be peculiarly conspicuous in the odyssey. longinus regarded it as the work of homer's advanced life, the sunset of his genius, and nobody denies that it assumes the existence of the _iliad_ and is posterior to that epic. in the odyssey, then, we are to look, if anywhere, for indications of a changed society. that the language of the _odyssey_, and of four books of the _iliad_ (ix., x., xxiii., xxiv.), exhibits signs of change is a critical commonplace, but the language is matter for a separate discussion; we are here concerned with the ideas, manners, customary laws, weapons, implements, and so forth of the epics. taking as a text mr. monro's essay, _the relation of the odyssey to the iliad_, [footnote: monro, odyssey, vol. ii. pp. 324, _seqq_.] we examine the notes of difference which he finds between the twin epics. as to the passages in which he discovers "borrowing or close imitation of passages" in the _iliad_ by the poet of the _odyssey_, we shall not dwell on the matter, because we know so little about the laws regulating the repetition of epic formulae. it is tempting, indeed, to criticise mr. monro's list of twenty-four odyssean "borrowings," and we might arrive at some curious results. for example, we could show that the _klôthes_, the spinning women who "spae" the fate of each new-born child, are not later, but, as less abstract, are if anything earlier than "the simple _aisa_ of the _iliad_." [footnote: _odyssey_, vii. 197; _iliad_, xx. 127.] but our proof would require an excursion into the beliefs of savage and barbaric peoples who have their _klôthes_, spae-women attending each birth, but who are not known to have developed the idea of _aisa_ or fate. we might also urge that "to send a spear through the back of a stag" is not, as mr. monro thought, "an improbable feat," and that a man wounded to death as leiocritus was wounded, would not, as mr. monro argued, fall backwards. he supposes that the poet of the _odyssey_ borrowed the forward fall from a passage in the _iliad_, where the fall is in keeping. but, to make good our proof, it might be necessary to spear a human being in the same way as leiocritus was speared. [footnote: monro, odyssey, vol. ii. pp. 239, 230.] the repetitions of the epic, at all events, are not the result of the weakness of a poet who had to steal his expressions like a schoolboy. they have some other cause than the indolence or inefficiency of a _cento_--making undergraduate. indeed, a poet who used the many terms in the _odyssey_ which do not occur in the _iliad_ was not constrained to borrow from any predecessor. it is needless to dwell on the odyssean novelties in vocabulary, which were naturally employed by a poet who had to sing of peace, not of war, and whose epic, as aristotle says, is "ethical," not military. the poet's rich vocabulary is appropriate to his novel subject, that is all. coming to religion (i) we find mr. leaf assigning to his original _achilleis_--"the kernel"--the very same religious ideas as mr. monro takes to be marks of "lateness" and of advance when he finds them in the odyssey! in the original oldest part of the _iliad_, says mr. leaf, "the gods show themselves just so much as to let us know what are the powers which control mankind from heaven.... their interference is such as becomes the rulers of the world, not partisans in the battle." [footnote: leaf, _iliad_, vol. ii. pp. xii., xiii.] it is the later poets of the _iliad_, in mr. leaf's view, who introduce the meddlesome, undignified, and extremely unsportsmanlike gods. the original early poet of the _iliad_ had the nobler religious conceptions. in that case--the _odyssey_ being later than the original kernel of the iliad--the _odyssey_ ought to give us gods as undignified and unworthy as those exhibited by the later continuators of the _iliad_. but the reverse is the case. the gods behave fairly well in book xxiv. of the _iliad_, which, we are to believe, is the latest, or nearly the latest, portion. they are all wroth with the abominable behaviour of achilles to dead hector (xxiv. 134). they console and protect priam. as for the _odyssey_, mr. monro finds that in this late epic the gods are just what mr. leaf proclaims them to have been in his old original kernel. "there is now an olympian concert that carries on something like a moral government of the world. it is very different in the _iliad_...." [footnote: monro, _odyssey_, ii. 335.] but it was not very different; it was just the same, in mr. leaf's genuine old original germ of the _iliad_. in fact, the gods are "very much like you and me." when their _ichor_ is up, they misbehave as we do when our blood is up, during the fury of war. when hector is dead and when the war is over, the gods give play to their higher nature, as men do. there is no difference of religious conception to sever the _odyssey_ from the later but not from the original parts of the _iliad_. it is all an affair of the circumstances in each case. the _odyssey_ is calmer, more reflective, more _religious_ than the _iliad_, being a poem of peace. the _iliad_, a poem of war, is more _mythological_ than the _odyssey_: the gods in the _iliad_ are excited, like the men, by the great war and behave accordingly. that neither gods nor men show any real sense of the moral weakness of agamemnon or achilles, or of the moral superiority of hector, is an unacceptable statement. [footnote: monro, odyssey, vol. ii. p. 336.] even achilles and agamemnon are judged by men and by the poet according to their own standard of ethics and of customary law. there is really no doubt on this point. too much (2) is made of the supposed different views of olympus--a mountain in thessaly in the _iliad_; a snowless, windless, supra-mundane place in _odyssey_, v. 41-47. [footnote: _ibid_., ii. 396.] of the odyssean passage mr. merry justly says, "the actual description is not irreconcilable with the general homeric picture of olympus." it is "an idealised mountain," and conceptions of it vary, with the variations which are essential to and inseparable from all mythological ideas. as mr. leaf says, [footnote: note to _iliad_, v. 750.] "heaven, _ouranos_ and olympus, if not identical, are at least closely connected." in v. 753, the poet "regarded the summit of olympus as a half-way stage between heaven and earth," thus "departing from the oldest homeric tradition, which made the earthly mountain olympus, and not any aerial region, the dwelling of the gods." but precisely the same confusion of mythical ideas occurs among a people so backward as the australian south-eastern tribes, whose all father is now seated on a hill-top and now "above the sky." in _iliad_, viii. 25, 26, the poet is again said to have "entirely lost the real epic conception of olympus as a mountain in thessaly," and to "follow the later conception, which removed it from earth to heaven." in _iliad_, xi. 184, "from heaven" means "from the summit of olympus, which, though homer does not identify it with _oupavos_, still, as a mountain, reached into heaven" (leaf). the poet of iliad, xi. 184, says plainly that zeus descended "_from_ heaven" to mount ida. in fact, all that is said of olympus, of heaven, of the home of the gods, is poetical, is mythical, and so is necessarily subject to the variations of conception inseparable from mythology. this is certain if there be any certainty in mythological science, and here no hard and fast line can be drawn between _odyssey_ and _iliad_. (3) the next point of difference is that, "we hear no more of iris as the messenger of zeus;" in the odyssey, "the agent of the will of zeus is now hermes, as in the twenty-fourth book of the _iliad_," a late "odyssean" book. but what does that matter, seeing that _iliad_, book viii, is declared to be one of the latest additions; yet in book viii. iris, not hermes, is the messenger (viii. 409-425). if in late times hermes, not iris, is the messenger, why, in a very "late" book (viii.) is iris the messenger, not hermes? _iliad_, book xxiii., is also a late "odyssean" book, but here iris goes on her messages (xxiii. 199) moved merely by the prayers of achilles. in the late odyssean book (xxiv.) of the _iliad_, iris runs on messages from zeus both to priam and to achilles. if iris, in "odyssean" times, had resigned office and been succeeded by hermes, why did achilles pray, not to hermes, but to iris? there is nothing in the argument about hermes and iris. there is nothing in the facts but the variability of mythical and poetical conceptions. moreover, the conception of iris as the messenger certainly existed through the age of the odyssey, and later. in the odyssey the beggar man is called "irus," a male iris, because he carries messages; and iris does her usual duty as messenger in the homeric hymns, as well as in the so-called late odyssean books of the _iliad_. the poet of the odyssey knew all about iris; there had arisen no change of belief; he merely employed hermes as messenger, not of the one god, but of the divine assembly. (4) another difference is that in the _iliad_ the wife of hephaestus is one of the graces; in the odyssey she is aphrodite. [footnote: monro, _odyssey_, vol. ii. p. 336.] this is one of the inconsistencies which are the essence of mythology. mr. leaf points out that when hephaestus is about exercising his craft, in making arms for achilles, charis "is made wife of hephaestus by a more transparent allegory than we find elsewhere in homer," whereas, when aphrodite appears in a comic song by demodocus (odyssey, viii. 266-366), "that passage is later and un-homeric." [footnote: leaf, _iliad_, vol. ii. p. 246.] of this we do not accept the doctrine that the lay is un-homeric. the difference comes to no more than _that;_ the accustomed discrepancy of mythology, of story-telling about the gods. but as to the lay of demodocus being un-homeric and late, the poet at least knows the regular homeric practice of the bride-price, and its return by the bride's father to the husband of an adulterous wife (odyssey, viii. 318, 319). the poet of this lay, which mr. merry defends as homeric, was intimately familiar with homeric customary law. now, according to paul cauer, as we shall see, other "odyssean" poets were living in an age of changed law, later than that of the author of the lay of demodocus. all these so-called differences between _iliad_ and odyssey do not point to the fact that the _odyssey_ belongs to a late and changed period of culture, of belief and customs. there is nothing in the evidence to prove that contention. there (5) are two references to local oracles in the _odyssey,_ that of dodona (xiv. 327; xix. 296) and that of pytho (viii. 80). this is the old name of delphi. pytho occurs in _iliad,_ ix. 404, as a very rich temple of apollo--the oracle is not named, but the oracle brought in the treasures. achilles (xvi. 233) prays to pelasgian zeus of dodona, whose priests were thickly tabued, but says nothing of the oracle of dodona. neither when in leaguer round troy, nor when wandering in fairy lands forlorn, had the achaeans or odysseus much to do with the local oracles of greece; perhaps not, in homer's time, so important as they were later, and little indeed is said about them in either epic. (6) "the geographical knowledge shown in the odyssey goes beyond that of the _iliad_ ... especially in regard to egypt and sicily." but a poet of a widely wandering hero of western greece has naturally more occasion than the poet of a fixed army in asia to show geographical knowledge. egyptian thebes is named, in _iliad_, ix., as a city very rich, especially in chariots; while in the _odyssey_ the poet has occasion to show more knowledge of the way to egypt and of viking descents from crete on the coast (odyssey, iii. 300; iv. 351; xiv. 257; xvii. 426). archaeology shows that the mycenaean age was in close commercial relation with egypt, and that the mycenaean civilisation extended to most mediterranean lands and islands, and to italy and sicily. [footnote: ridgeway, _early age of greece_, i. 69.] there is nothing suspicious, as "late," in the mention of sicily by odysseus in ithaca (odyssey, xx. 383; xxiv. 307). in the same way, if the poet of a western poem does not dilate on the troad and the people of asia minor as the poet of the _iliad_ does, that is simply because the scene of the _iliad_ is in asia and the scene of the odyssey is in the west, when it is not in no man's land. from the same cause the poet of sea-faring has more occasion to speak of the phoenicians, great sea-farers, than the poet of the trojan leaguer. (7) we know so little about land tenure in homeric times--and, indeed, early land tenure is a subject so complex and obscure that it is not easy to prove advance towards separate property in the _odyssey_--beyond what was the rule in the time of the _iliad_. in the making of the arms (xviii. 541-549) we find many men ploughing a field, and this may have been a common field. but in what sense? many ploughs were at work at once on a scottish runrig field, and each farmer had his own strip on several common fields, but each farmer held by rent, or by rent and services, from the laird. these common fields were not common property. in xii. 422 we have "a common field," and men measuring a strip and quarrelling about the marking-stones, across the "baulk," but it does not follow that they are owners; they may be tenants. such quarrels were common in scotland when the runrig system of common fields, each man with his strip, prevailed. [footnote: grey graham, _social life in scotland in the eighteenth century_, i. 157.] a man had a [greek: klaeros] or lot (_iliad_, xv. 448), but what was a "lot"? at first, probably, a share in land periodically shifted-& _partage noir_ of the russian peasants. kings and men who deserve public gratitude receive a [greek: temenos] a piece of public land, as bellerophon did from the lycians (vi. 194). in the case of melager such an estate is offered to him, but by whom? not by the people at large, but by the [greek: gerontes] (ix. 574). who are the [greek: gerontes]? they are not ordinary men of the people; they are, in fact, the gentry. in an age so advanced from tribal conditions as is the homeric time--far advanced beyond ancient tribal scotland or ireland--we conceive that, as in these countries during the tribal period, the [greek: gerontes] (in celtic, the _flaith_) held in possession, if not in accordance with the letter of the law, as property, much more land than a single "lot." the irish tribal freeman had a right to a "lot," redistributed by rotation. wealth consisted of cattle; and a _bogire_, a man of many kine, let _them_ out to tenants. such a rich man, a _flatha_, would, in accordance with human nature, use his influence with kineless dependents to acquire in possession several lots, avoid the partition, and keep the lots in possession though not legally in property. such men were the irish _flaith_, gentry under the _ri_, or king, his [greek: gerontes], each with his _ciniod_, or near kinsmen, to back his cause. "_flaith_ seems clearly to mean land-owners," or squires, says sir james ramsay. [footnote: _foundations of england_, i. 16, note 4.] if land, contrary to the tribal ideal, came into private hands in early ireland, we can hardly suppose that, in the more advanced and settled homeric society, no man but the king held land equivalent in extent to a number of "lots." the [greek: gerontes], the gentry, the chariot-owning warriors, of whom there are hundreds not of kingly rank in homer (as in ireland there were many _flaith_ to one _ri_) probably, in an informal but tight grip, held considerable lands. when we note their position in the _iliad_, high above the nameless host, can we imagine that they did not hold more land than the simple, perhaps periodically shifting, "lot"? there were "lotless" men (odyssey, xl 490), lotless _freemen_, and what had become of their lots? had they not fallen into the hands of the [greek: gerontes] or the _flaith_? mr. ridgeway in a very able essay [footnote: _journal of hellenic studies_, vi. 319-339.] holds different opinions. he points out that among a man's possessions, in the _iliad_, we hear only of personal property and live stock. it is in one passage only in the odyssey (xiv. 211) that we meet with men holding several lots of land; but _they_, we remark, occur in cretean isle, as we know, of very advanced civilisation from of old. mr. ridgeway also asks whether the lotless men may not be "outsiders," such as are attached to certain villages of central and southern india; [footnote: maine, _village communities_, p. 127.] or they may answer to the _fuidhir_, or "broken men," of early ireland, fugitives from one to another tribe. they would be "settled on the waste lands of a community." if so, they would not be lotless; they would have new lots. [footnote: _journal of hellenic studies_, vi. 322, 323.] laertes, though a king, is supposed to have won his farm by his own labours from the waste (odyssey, xxiv. 207). mr. monro says, "the land having thus been won from the wastes (the [greek: gae aklaeros te kai aktitos] of _h., ven._ 123), was a [greek: temenos] or separate possession of laertes." the passage is in the rejected conclusion of the odyssey; and if any man might go and squat in the waste, any man might have a lot, or better than one lot. in _iliad_, xxiii. 832-835, achilles says that his offered prize of iron will be useful to a man "whose rich fields are very remote from any town," teucer and meriones compete for the prize: probably they had such rich remote fields, not each a mere lot in a common field. these remote fields they are supposed to hold in perpetuity, apart from the _temenos_, which, in mr. ridgeway's opinion, reverted, on the death of each holder, to the community, save where kingship was hereditary. now, if [greek: klaeros] had come to mean "a lot of land," as we say "a building lot," obviously men like teucer and meriones had many lots, rich fields, which at death might sometimes pass to their heirs. thus there was separate landed property in the _iliad_; but the passage is denounced, though not by mr. ridgeway, as "late." the absence of enclosures ([greek: herkos arouraes]) proves nothing about absence of several property in land. in scotland the laird's lands were unenclosed till deep in the eighteenth century. my own case for land in private possession, in homeric times, rests mainly on human nature in such an advanced society. such possession as i plead for is in accordance with human nature, in a society so distinguished by degrees of wealth as is the homeric. unless we are able to suppose that all the gentry of the _iliad_ held no "rich fields remote from towns," each having but one rotatory lot apiece, there is no difference in iliadic and odyssean land tenure, though we get clearer lights on it in the _odyssey_. the position of the man of several lots may have been indefensible, if the ideal of tribal law were ever made real, but wealth in growing societies universally tends to override such law. mr. keller [footnote: homeric society, p. 192. 1902.] justly warns us against the attempt "to apply universally certain fixed rules of property development. the passages in homer upon which opinions diverge most are isolated ones, occurring in similes and fragmentary descriptions. under such conditions the formulation of theories or the attempt rigorously to classify can be little more than an intellectual exercise." we have not the materials for a scientific knowledge of homeric real property; and, with all our materials in irish law books, how hard it is for us to understand the early state of such affairs in ireland! but does any one seriously suppose that the knightly class of the _iliad_, the chariot-driving gentlemen, held no more land--legally or by permitted custom--than the two homeric swains who vituperate each other across a baulk about the right to a few feet of a strip of a runrig field? whosoever can believe that may also believe that the practice of adding "lot" to "lot" began in the period between the finished composition of the _iliad_ (or of the parts of it which allude to land tenure) and the beginning of the _odyssey_ (or of the parts of it which refer to land tenure). the inference is that, though the fact is not explicitly stated in the _iliad_, there were men who held more "lots" than one in iliadic times as well as in the odyssean times, when, in a solitary passage of the odyssey, we do hear of such men in crete. but whosoever has pored over early european land tenures knows how dim our knowledge is, and will not rush to employ his lore in discriminating between the date of the _iliad_ and the date of the odyssey. not much proof of change in institutions between iliadic and odyssean times can be extracted from two passages about the ethna, or bride-price of penelope. the rule in both _iliad_ and _odyssey_ is that the wooer gives a bride-price to the father of the bride, ethna. this was the rule known even to that painfully late and un-homeric poet who made the song of demodocus about the loves of ares and aphrodite. in that song the injured husband, hephaestus, claims back the bride-price which he had paid to the father of his wife, zeus. [footnote: odyssey, viii. 318.] this is the accepted custom throughout the _odyssey_ (vi. 159; xvi. 77; xx. 335; xxi. 162; xv. 17, &c.). so far there is no change of manners, no introduction of the later practice, a dowry given with the bride, in place of a bride-price given to the father by the bridegroom. but penelope was neither maid, wife, nor widow; her husband's fate, alive or dead, was uncertain, and her son was so anxious to get her out of the house that he says he offered gifts _with_ her (xx. 342). in the same way, to buy back the goodwill of achilles, agamemnon offers to give him his daughter without bride-price, and to add great gifts (_iliad_, ix. l47)--the term for the gifts is [greek: mailia]. people, of course, could make their own bargain; take as much for their daughter as they could get, or let the gifts go from husband to bride, and then return to the husband's home with her (as in germany in the time of tacitus, _germania_, 18), or do that, and throw in more gifts. but in odyssey, ii. 53, telemachus says that the wooers shrink from going to the house of penelope's father, icarius, who would endow (?) his daughter ([greek: eednoosaito]) and again (_odyssey_, i. 277; ii. 196), her father's folk will furnish a bridal feast, and "array the [greek: heedna], many, such as should accompany a dear daughter." some critics think that the gifts here are _dowry_, a later institution than bride-price; others, that the father of the dear daughter merely chose to be generous, and returned the bride-price, or its equivalent, in whole or part. [footnote: merry, odyssey, vol. i. p. 50. note to book i 277.] if the former view be correct, these passages in odyssey, i., ii. are later than the exceedingly "late" song of demodocus. if the latter theory be correct the father is merely showing goodwill, and doing as the germans did when they were in a stage of culture much earlier than the homeric. the position of penelope is very unstable and legally perplexing. has her father her marriage? has her son her marriage? is she not perhaps still a married woman with a living husband? telemachus would give much to have her off his hands, but he refuses to send her to her father's house, where the old man might be ready enough to return the bride-price to her new husband, and get rid of her with honour. for if telemachus sends his mother away against her will he will have to pay a heavy fine to her father, and to thole his mother's curse, and lose his character among men (odyssey, ii. 130-138). the icelanders of the saga period gave dowries with their daughters. but when njal wanted hildigunna for his foster-son, hauskuld, he offered to give [greek: hedna]. "i will lay down as much money as will seem fitting to thy niece and thyself," he says to flosi, "if thou wilt think of making this match." [footnote: story of _burnt njal_, ii. p. 81.] circumstances alter cases, and we must be hard pressed to discover signs of change of manners in the odyssey as compared with the _iliad_ if we have to rely on a solitary mention of "men of many lots" in crete, and on the perplexed proposals for the second marriage of penelope. [footnote: for the alleged "alteration of old customs" see cauer, _grundfragen der homerkritik_, pp. 193-194.] we must not be told that the many other supposed signs of change, iris, olympus, and the rest, have "cumulative weight." if we have disposed of each individual supposed note of change in beliefs and manners in its turn, then these proofs have, in each case, no individual weight and, cumulatively, are not more ponderous than a feather. chapter xii linguistic proofs of various dates the great strength of the theory that the poems are the work of several ages is the existence in them of various strata of languages, earlier and later. not to speak of differences of vocabulary, mr. monro and mr. leaf, with many scholars, detect two strata of earlier and later _grammar_ in iliad and odyssey. in the _iliad_ four or five books are infected by "the later grammar," while the odyssey in general seems to be contaminated. mr. leafs words are: "when we regard the epos in large masses, we see that we can roughly arrange the inconsistent elements towards one end or the other of a line of development both linguistic and historical. the main division, that of _iliad_ and odyssey, shows a distinct advance along this line; and the distinction is still more marked if we group with the _odyssey_ four books of the _iliad_ whose odyssean physiognomy is well marked. taking as our main guide the dissection of the plot as shown in its episodes, we find that marks of lateness, though nowhere entirely absent, group themselves most numerously in the later additions ..." [footnote: _iliad_, vol. ii. p. x.] we are here concerned with _linguistic_ examples of "lateness." the "four books whose odyssean physiognomy" and language seem "well marked," are ix., x., xxiii., xxiv. here mr. leaf, mr. monro, and many authorities are agreed. but to these four odyssean books of the _iliad_ mr. leaf adds _iliad_, xi. 664-772: "probably a later addition," says mr. monro. "it is notably odyssean in character," says mr. leaf; and the author "is ignorant of the geography of the western peloponnesus. no doubt the author was an asiatic greek." [footnote: _iliad_, vol. i. pp. 465-466. note on book xi. 756.] the value of this discovery is elsewhere discussed (see _the interpolations of nestor_). the odyssean notes in this passage of a hundred lines (_iliad_, xi. 670-762) are the occurrence of "a purely odyssean word" (677), an attic form of an epic word, and a "forbidden trochaic caesura in the fourth foot"; an odyssean word for carving meat, applied in a _non_-odyssean sense (688), a verb for "insulting," not elsewhere found in the _iliad_ (though the noun is in the _iliad_) (695), an odyssean epithet of the sun, "four times in the _odyssey_" (735). it is also possible that there is an allusion to a four-horse chariot (699). these are the proofs of odyssean lateness. the real difficulty about odyssean words and grammar in the _iliad_ is that, if they were in vigorous poetic existence down to the time of pisistratus (as the odysseanism of the asiatic editor proves that they were), and if every rhapsodist could add to and alter the materials at the disposal of the pisistratean editor at will, we are not told how the fashionable odysseanisms were kept, on the whole, out of twenty books of the iliad. this is a point on which we cannot insist too strongly, as an argument against the theory that, till the middle of the sixth century b.c., the _iliad_ scarcely survived save in the memory of strolling rhapsodists. if that were so, all the books of the _iliad_ would, in the course of recitation of old and composition of new passages, be equally contaminated with late odyssean linguistic style. it could not be otherwise; all the books would be equally modified in passing through the lips of modern reciters and composers. therefore, if twenty out of twenty-four books are pure, or pure in the main, from odysseanisms, while four are deeply stained with them, the twenty must not only be earlier than the four, but must have been specially preserved, and kept uncontaminated, in some manner inconsistent with the theory that all alike scarcely existed save in the memory or invention of late strolling reciters. how the twenty books relatively pure "in grammatical forms, in syntax, and in vocabulary," could be kept thus clean without the aid of written texts, i am unable to imagine. if left merely to human memory and at the mercy of reciters and new poets, they would have become stained with "the defining article"--and, indeed, an employment of the article which startles grammarians, appears even in the eleventh line of the first book of the _iliad_? [footnote (exact placing uncertain): cf. monro and leaf, on iliad, i. 11-12.] left merely to human memory and the human voice, the twenty more or less innocent books would have abounded, like the odyssey, in [greek: amphi] with the dative meaning "about," and with [greek: ex] "in consequence of," and "the extension of the use of [greek: ei] clauses as final and objective clauses," and similar marks of lateness, so interesting to grammarians. [footnote: monro, _odyssey_, ii. pp. 331-333.] but the twenty books are almost, or quite, inoffensive in these respects. now, even in ages of writing, it has been found difficult or impossible to keep linguistic novelties and novelties of metre out of old epics. we later refer (_archaeology of the epic_) to the _chancun de willame_, of which an unknown benefactor printed two hundred copies in 1903. mr. raymond weeks, in _romania_, describes _willame_ as taking a place beside the _chanson de roland_ in the earliest rank of _chansons de geste_. if the text can be entirely restored, the poem will appear as "the most primitive" of french epics of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. but it has passed from copy to copy in the course of generations. the methods of versification change, and, after line 2647, "there are traces of change in the language. the word _ço_, followed by a vowel, hitherto frequent, never again reappears. the vowel _i_, of _li_, nominative masculine of the article" (_li reis_, "the king"), "never occurs in the text after line 2647. up to that point it is elided or not at pleasure.... there is a progressive tendency towards hiatus. after line 1980 the system of assonance changes. _an_ and en have been kept distinct hitherto; this ceases to be the case." [footnote: _romania_, xxxiv. pp. 240-246.] the poem is also notable, like the _iliad_, for textual repetition of passages, but that is common to all early poetry, which many homeric critics appear not to understand. in this example we see how apt novelties in grammar and metre are to steal into even written copies of epics, composed in and handed down through uncritical ages; and we are confirmed in the opinion that the relatively pure and orthodox grammar and metre of the twenty books must have been preserved by written texts carefully 'executed. the other four books, if equally old, were less fortunate. their grammar and metre, we learn, belong to a later stratum of language. these opinions of grammarians are not compatible with the hypothesis that _all_ of the _iliad_, even the "earliest" parts, are loaded with interpolations, forced in at different places and in any age from 1000 b.c. to 540 b.c.; for if that theory were true, the whole of the _iliad_ would equally be infected with the later odyssean grammar. according to mr. monro and sir richard jebb, it is not. but suppose, on the other hand, that the later odyssean grammar abounds all through the whole _iliad_, then that grammar is not more odyssean than it is iliadic. the alleged distinction of early iliadic grammar, late odyssean grammar, in that case vanishes. mr. leaf is more keen than mr. monro and sir richard jebb in detecting late grammar in the _iliad_ beyond the bounds of books ix., x., xxiii., xxiv. but he does not carry these discoveries so far as to make the late grammar no less iliadic than odyssean. in book viii. of the _iliad_, which he thinks was only made for the purpose of introducing book ix., [footnote: _iliad_, vol. i. p. 332. 1900.] we ought to find the late odyssean grammar just as much as we do in book ix., for it is of the very same date, and probably by one or more of the same authors as book ix. but we do not find the odyssean grammar in book viii. mr. leaf says, "the peculiar character" of book viii. "is easily understood, when we recognise the fact that book viii. is intended to serve only as a means for the introduction of book ix...." which is "late" and "odyssean." then book viii., intended to introduce book ix., must be at least as late as book ix. and might be expected to be at least as odyssean, indeed one would think it could not be otherwise. yet it is not so. mr. leaf's theory has thus to face the difficulty that while the whole _iliad_, by his view, for more than four centuries, was stuffed with late interpolations, in the course of oral recital through all greek lands, and was crammed with original "copy" by a sycophant of pisistratus about 540 b.c., the late grammar concentrated itself in only some four books. till some reasonable answer is given to this question--how did twenty books of the iliad preserve so creditably the ancient grammar through centuries of change, and of recitation by rhapsodists who used the odyssean grammar, which infected the four other books, and the whole of the _odyssey?_--it seems hardly worth while to discuss this linguistic test. any scholar who looks at these pages knows all about the proofs of grammar of a late date in the _odyssey_ and the four contaminated books of the _iliad_. but it may be well to give a few specimens, for the enlightenment of less learned readers of homer. the use of [greek: amfi], with the dative, meaning "about," when _thinking_ or _speaking_ "about" odysseus or anything else, is peculiar to the _odyssey_. but how has it not crept into the four odyssean contaminated books of the _iliad_? [greek: peri], with the genitive, "follows verbs meaning to speak or know _about_ a person," but only in the _odyssey_. what preposition follows such verbs in the _iliad_? here, again, we ask: how did the contaminated books of the _iliad_ escape the stain of [greek: peri], with the genitive, after verbs meaning to speak or know? what phrase do they use in the _iliad_ for speaking or asking _about_ anybody? [footnote (exact placing uncertain): monro, homeric _grammar_. see index, under _iliad_, p. 339.] [greek: meta], with the genitive, meaning "among" or "with," comes twice in the odyssey (x. 320; xvi. 140) and thrice in the _iliad_ (xiii. 700; xxi. 458; xxiv. 400); but all these passages in the _iliad_ are disposed of as "late" parts of the poem. [greek: epi], with the accusative, meaning _towards_ a person, comes often in the _iliad_; once in the odyssey. but it comes four times in _iliad_, book x., which almost every critic scouts as very "late" indeed. if so, why does the "late" _odyssey_ not deal in this grammatical usage so common in the "late" book x. of the _iliad_? [greek: epi], with the accusative, "meaning _extent_ (without _motion_)," is chiefly found in the _odyssey_, and in the iliad, ix., x., xxiv. on consulting grammarians one thinks that there is not much in this. [greek: proti] with the dative, meaning "in addition to," occurs only once (_odyssey, x. 68_). if it occurs only once, there is little to be learned from the circumstance. [greek: ana] with the genitive, is only in _odyssey_, only thrice, always of going on board a ship. there are not many ship-farings in the _iliad_. odysseus and his men are not described as going on board their ship, in so many words, in _iliad_, book i. the usage occurs in the poem where the incidents of seafaring occur frequently, as is to be expected? it is not worth while to persevere with these tithes of mint and cummin. if "neglect of position" be commoner--like "hiatus in the bucolic diaeresis"--in the _odyssey_ and in _iliad_, xxiii., xxiv., why do the failings not beset _iliad_, ix., x., these being such extremely "late" books? as to the later use of the article in the _odyssey_ and the odyssean books of the _iliad_, it appears to us that book i. of the _iliad_ uses the article as it is used in book x.; but on this topic we must refer to a special treatise on the language of _iliad_, book x., which is promised. turning to the vocabulary: "words expressive of civilisation" are bound to be more frequent, as they are, in the odyssey, a poem of peaceful life, than in a poem about an army in action, like the _iliad_. out of all this no clue to the distance of years dividing the two poems can be found. as to words concerning religion, the same holds good. the odyssey is more frequently _religious_ (see the case of eumaeus) than the _iliad_. in morals the term [greek: dikaios] is more used in the _odyssey_, also [greek: atemistos] ("just" and "lawless"). but that is partly because the odyssey has to contrast civilised ("just") with wild outlandish people--cyclopes and laestrygons, who are "lawless." the _iliad_ has no occasion to touch on savages; but, as the [greek: hybris] of the wooers is a standing topic in the odyssey (an ethical poem, says aristotle), the word [greek: hybris] is of frequent occurrence in the _odyssey_, in just the same sense as it bears in _iliad_, i 214--the insolence of agamemnon. yet when achilles has occasion to speak of agamemnon's insolence in _iliad_, book ix., he does not use the _word_ [greek: hybris], though book ix. is so very "late" and "odyssean." it would be easy to go through the words for moral ideas in the _odyssey_, and to show that they occur in the numerous moral situations which do not arise, or arise much less frequently, in the _iliad_. there is not difference enough in the moral standard of the two poems to justify us in assuming that centuries of ethical progress had intervened between their dates of composition. if the _iliad_, again, were really, like the _odyssey_, a thing of growth through several centuries, which overlapped the centuries in which the _odyssey_ grew, the moral ideas of the _iliad_ and _odyssey_ would necessarily be much the same, would be indistinguishable. but, as a matter of fact, it would be easy to show that the moral standard of the _iliad_ is higher, in many places, than the moral standard of the _odyssey_; and that, therefore, by the critical hypothesis, the _iliad_ is the later poem of the twain. for example, the behaviour of achilles is most obnoxious to the moralist in _iliad_, book ix., where he refuses gifts of conciliation. but by the critical hypothesis this is not the fault of the _iliad_, for book ix. is declared to be "late," and of the same date as late parts of the _odyssey_. achilles is not less open to moral reproach in his abominable cruelty and impiety, as shown in his sacrifice of prisoners of war and his treatment of dead hector, in _iliad_, xxiii., xxiv. but these books also are said to be as late as the _odyssey_. the solitary "realistic" or "naturalistic" passage in homer, with which a lover of modern "problem novels" feels happy and at home, is the story of phoenix, about his seduction of his father's mistress at the request of his mother. what a charming situation! but that occurs in an "odyssean" book of the _iliad_, book ix.; and thus odyssean seems lower, not more advanced, than iliadic taste in morals. to be sure, the poet disapproves of all these immoralities. in the odyssey the hero, to the delight of athene, lies often and freely and with glee. the achilles of the _iliad_ hates a liar "like the gates of hades"; but he says so in an "odyssean" book (book ix.), so there were obviously different standards in odyssean ethics. as to the odyssey being the work of "a milder age," consider the hanging of penelope's maids and the abominable torture of melanthius. there is no torturing in the [blank space] for the _iliad_ happens not to deal with treacherous thralls. _enfin_, there is no appreciable moral advance in the _odyssey_ on the moral standard of the _iliad_. it is rather the other way. odysseus, in the _odyssey_, tries to procure poison for his arrow-heads. the person to whom he applies is too moral to oblige him. we never learn that a hero of the _iliad_ would use poisoned arrows. the poet himself obviously disapproves; in both poems the poet is always on the side of morality and of the highest ethical standard of his age. the standard in both epics is the same; in both some heroes fall short of the standard. to return to linguistic tests, it is hard indeed to discover what mr. leaf's opinion of the value of linguistic tests of lateness really is. "it is on such fundamental discrepancies"--as he has found in books ix., xvi.--"that we can depend, _and on these alone_, when we come to dissect the _iliad_ ... some critics have attempted to base their analysis on evidences from language, but i do not think they are sufficient to bear the super-structure which has been raised on them." [footnote: _companion,_ p. 25.] he goes on, still placing a low value on linguistic tests alone, to say: "it is on the broad grounds of the construction and motives of the poem, _and not on any merely linguistic considerations_, that a decision must be sought." [footnote: _ibid_., p. x.] but he contradicts these comfortable words when he comes to "the latest expansions," such as books xxiii., xxiv. "the latest expansions are thoroughly in the spirit of those which precede, _them on account of linguistic evidence,_ which definitely classes them with the _odyssey_ rather than the rest of the _iliad_." [footnote: _iliad_, vol. ii. p. xiv.] now as mr. leaf has told us that we must depend on "fundamental discrepancies," "on these alone," when we want to dissect the _iliad;_ as he has told us that linguistic tests alone are "not sufficient to bear the superstructure," &c., how can we lop off two books "only on account of linguistic evidence"? it would appear that on this point, as on others, mr. leaf has entirely changed his mind. but, even in the _companion_ (p. 388), he had amputated book xxiv. for no "fundamental discrepancy," but because of "its close kinship to the _odyssey_, as in the whole language of the book." here, as in many other passages, if we are to account for discrepancies by the theory of multiplex authorship, we must decide that mr. leaf's books are the work of several critics, not of one critic only. but there is excellent evidence to prove that here we would be mistaken. confessedly and regretfully no grammarian, i remain unable, in face of what seem contradictory assertions about the value of linguistic tests, to ascertain what they are really worth, and what, if anything, they really prove. mr. monro allows much for "the long insensible influence of attic recitation upon the homeric text;" ... "many attic peculiarities may be noted" (so much so that aristarchus thought homer must have been an athenian!). "the poems suffered a gradual and unsystematic because generally unconscious process of modernising, the chief agents in which were the rhapsodists" (reciters in a later democratic age), "who wandered over all parts of greece, and were likely to be influenced by all the chief forms of literature." [footnote: monro, _homeric grammar_, pp 394-396. 1891] then, wherefore insist so much on tests of language? mr. monro was not only a great grammarian; he had a keen appreciation of poetry. thus he was conspicuously uneasy in his hypothesis, based on words and grammar, that the two last books of the _iliad_ are by a late hand. after quoting shelley's remark that, in these two books, "homer truly begins to be himself," mr. monro writes, "in face of such testimony can we say that the book in which the climax is reached, in which the last discords of the _iliad_ are dissolved in chivalrous pity and regret, is not the work of the original poet, but of some homerid or rhapsodist?" mr. monro, with a struggle, finally voted for grammar, and other indications of lateness, against shelley and against his own sense of poetry. in a letter to me of may 1905, mr. monro sketched a theory that book ix. (without which he said that he deemed an _achilleis_ hardly possible) might be a _remanié_ representative of an earlier lay to the same general effect. some greek shakespeare, then, treated an older poem on the theme of book ix. as shakespeare treated old plays, namely, as a canvas to work over with a master's hand. probably mr. monro would not have gone _so_ far in the case of book xxiv., _the repentance_ of achilles. he thought it in too keen contrast with the brutality of book xxii. (obviously forgetting that in book xxiv. achilles is infinitely more brutal than in book xxii.), and thought it inconsistent with the refusal of achilles to grant burial at the prayer of the dying hector, and with his criminal treatment of the dead body of his chivalrous enemy. but in book xxiv. his ferocity is increased. mr. leaf shares mr. monro's view; but mr. leaf thinks that a greek audience forgave achilles, because he was doing "the will of heaven," and "fighting the great fight of hellenism against barbarism." [footnote: leaf, _iliad,_ vol.-ii. p. 429. 1902.] but the achzeans were not puritans of the sixteenth century! moreover, the trojans are as "hellenic" as the achzeans. they converse, clearly, in the same language. they worship the same gods. the achzeans cannot regard them (unless on account of the breach of truce, by no trojan, but an ally) as the covenanters regarded "malignants," their name for loyal cavaliers, whom they also styled "amalekites," and treated as samuel treated agag. the achaeans to whom homer sang had none of this sanguinary pharisaism. others must decide on the exact value and import of odyssean grammar as a test of lateness, and must estimate the probable amount of time required for the development of such linguistic differences as they find in the _odyssey_ and _iliad_. in undertaking this task they may compare the literary language of america as it was before 1860 and as it is now. the language of english literature has also been greatly modified in the last forty years, but our times are actively progressive in many directions; linguistic variations might arise more slowly in the greece of the epics. we have already shown, in the more appropriate instance of the _chancun de willame_, that considerable varieties in diction and metre occur in a single ms. of that poem, a ms. written probably within less than a century of the date of the poem's composition. we can also trace, in _remaniements_ of the _chanson de roland_, comparatively rapid and quite revolutionary variations from the oldest--the oxford--manuscript. rhyme is substituted for assonance; the process entails frequent modernisations, and yet the basis of thirteenth-century texts continues to be the version of the eleventh century. it may be worth the while of scholars to consider these parallels carefully, as regards the language and prosody of the odyssean books of the _iliad_, and to ask themselves whether the processes of alteration in the course of transmission, which we know to have occurred in the history of the old french, may not also have affected the _iliad_, though why the effect is mainly confined to four books remains a puzzle. it is enough for us to have shown that if odyssean varies from iliadic language, in all other respects the two poems bear the marks of the same age. meanwhile, a homeric scholar so eminent as mr. t. w. allen, says that "the linguistic attack upon their age" (that of the homeric poems) "may be said to have at last definitely failed, and archaeology has erected an apparently indestructible buttress for their defence." [footnote: _classical review, may_ 1906, p. 194.] chapter xiii the "doloneia" "iliad," book x. of all books in the [blank space] book x., called the _doloneia_, is most generally scouted and rejected. the book, in fact, could be omitted, and only a minutely analytic reader would perceive the lacuna. he would remark that in iliad, ix. 65-84, certain military preparations are made which, if we suppress book x., lead up to nothing, and that in _iliad_, xiv. 9-11, we find nestor with the shield of his son, thrasymedes, while thrasymedes has his father's shield, a fact not explained, though the poet certainly meant something by it. the explanation in both cases is found in book x., which may also be thought to explain why the achaeans, so disconsolate in book ix., and why agamemnon, so demoralised, so gaily assume the offensive in book xi. some ancient critics, scholiast t and eustathius, attributed the _doloneia_ to homer, but supposed it to have been a separate composition of his added to the _iliad_ by pisistratus. this merely proves that they did not find any necessity for the existence of the _doloneia_. mr. allen, who thinks that "it always held its present place," says, "the _doloneia_ is persistently written down." [footnote: _classical review_, may 1906, p. 194] to understand the problem of the _doloneia_, we must make a summary of its contents. in book ix. 65-84, at the end of the disastrous fighting of book viii, the achaeans, by nestor's advice, station an advanced guard of "_the young men_" between the fosse and wall; 700 youths are posted there, under meriones, the squire of idomeneus, and thrasymedes, the son of nestor. all this is preparation for book x., as mr. leaf remarks, [footnote: _companion_, p. 174.] though in any case an advanced guard was needed. their business is to remain awake, under arms, in case the trojans, who are encamped on the plain, attempt a night attack. at their station the young men will be under arms till dawn; they light fires and cook their provisions; the trojans also surround their own watchfires. the achaean chiefs then hold council, and agamemnon sends the embassy to achilles. the envoys bring back his bitter answer; and all men go to sleep in their huts, deeply discouraged, as even odysseus avowed. here the tenth book begins, and it is manifest that the poet is thoroughly well acquainted with the ninth book. without the arrangements made in the ninth book, and without the despairing situation of that book, his lay is impossible. it will be seen that critics suppose him, alternately, to have "quite failed to realise the conditions of life of the heroes of whom he sang" (that is, if certain lines are genuine), and also to be a peculiarly learned archaeologist and a valuable authority on weapons. he is addicted to introducing fanciful "touches of heroic simplicity," says mr. leaf, and is altogether a puzzling personage to the critics. the book opens with the picture of agamemnon, sleepless from anxiety, while the other chiefs, save menelaus, are sleeping. he "hears the music of the joyous trojan pipes and flutes" and sees the reflected glow of their camp-fires, we must suppose, for he could not see the fires themselves through the new wall of his own camp, as critics very wisely remark. he tears out his hair before zeus; no one else does so, in the _iliad_, but no one else is agamemnon, alone and in despair. he rises to consult nestor, throwing a lion's skin over his _chiton_, and grasping a spear. much noise is made about the furs, such as this lion's pelt, which the heroes, in book x., throw about their shoulders when suddenly aroused. that sportsmen like the heroes should keep the pelts of animals slain by them for use as coverlets, and should throw on one of the pelts when aroused in a hurry, is a marvellous thing to the critics. they know that fleeces were used for coverlets of beds (ix. 661), and pelts of wild animals, slain by anchises, cover his bed in the hymn to aphrodite. but the facts do not enlighten critics. yet no facts could be more natural. a scientific critic, moreover, never reflects that the poet is dealing with an unexampled situation--heroes wakened and called into the cold air in a night of dread, but not called to battle. thus reichel says: "the poet knows so little about true heroic costume that he drapes the princes in skins of lions and panthers, like giants.... but about a corslet he never thinks." [footnote: reichel, p.70.] the simple explanation is that the poet has not hitherto had to tell us about men who are called up, not to fight, on a night that must have been chilly. in war they do not wear skins, though paris, in archer's equipment, wears a pard's skin (iii. 17). naturally, the men throw over themselves their fur coverlets; but nestor, a chilly veteran, prefers a _chiton_ and a wide, double-folded, fleecy purple cloak. the cloak lay ready to his hand, for such cloaks were used as blankets (xxiv. 646; odyssey, iii. 349, 351; iv. 299; ii. 189). we hear more of such bed-coverings in the odyssey than in the merely because in the _odyssey_ we have more references to beds and to people in bed. that a sportsman may have (as many folk have now) a fur coverlet, and may throw it over him as a kind of dressing-gown or "bed-gown," is a simple circumstance which bewilders the critical mind and perplexed reichel. if the poet knew so little as reichel supposed his omission of corslets is explained. living in an age of corslets (seventh century), he, being a literary man, knew nothing about corslets, or, as he is also an acute archaeologist, he knew too much; he knew that they were not worn in the mycenaean prime, so he did not introduce them. the science of this remarkable ignoramus, in _this_ view, accounts for his being aware that pelts of animals were in vogue as coverlets, just as fur dressing-gowns were worn in the sixteenth century, and he introduces them precisely as he leaves corslets out, because he knows that pelts of fur were in use, and that, in the mycenaean prime, corslets were not worn. in speaking to nestor, agamemnon awakens sympathy: "me, of all the achaeans, zeus has set in toil and labour ceaselessly." they are almost the very words of charlemagne in the _chanson de roland: "deus, dist li reis, si peneuse est ma vie."_ the author of the _doloneia_ consistently conforms to the character of agamemnon as drawn in the rest of the _iliad_. he is over-anxious; he is demoralising in his fits of gloom, but all the burden of the host hangs on him--sipeneuse _est ma via_. to turn to higher things. menelaus, too, was awake, anxious about the argives, who risked their lives in his cause alone. he got up, put on a pard's skin and a bronze helmet (here the poet forgets, what he ought to have known, that no bronze helmets have been found in the mycenaean graves). menelaus takes a spear, and goes to look for agamemnon, whom he finds arming himself beside his ship. he discovers that agamemnon means to get nestor to go and speak to the advanced guard, as his son is their commander, and they will obey nestor. agamemnon's pride has fallen very low! he tells menelaus to waken the other chief with all possible formal courtesy, for, brutally rude when in high heart, at present agamemnon cowers to everybody. he himself finds nestor in bed, his _shield_, two spears, and helmet beside him, also his glittering _zoster_. his corslet is not named; perhaps the poet knew that the _zoster_, or broad metallic belt, had been evolved, but that the corslet had not been invented; or perhaps he "knows so little about the costume of the heroes" that he is unaware of the existence of corslets. nestor asks agamemnon what he wants; and agamemnon says that his is a toilsome life, that he cannot sleep, that his knees tremble, and that he wants nestor to come and visit the outposts. there is really nothing absurd in this. napoleon often visited his outposts in the night before waterloo, and cromwell rode along his lines all through the night before dunbar, biting his lips till the blood dropped on his linen bands. in all three cases hostile armies were arrayed within striking distance of each other, and the generals were careworn. nestor admits that it is an anxious night, and rather blames menelaus for not rousing the other chiefs; but agamemnon explains and defends his brother. nestor then puts on the comfortable cloak already described, and picks up a spear, [blank space] _in his quarters_. as for odysseus, he merely throws a shield over his shoulders. the company of diomede are sleeping with their heads on their shields. thence reichel (see "the shield") infers that the late poet of book x. gave them small ionian round bucklers; but it has been shown that no such inference is legitimate. their spears were erect by their sides, fixed in the ground by the _sauroter_, or butt-spike, used by the men of the late "warrior vase" found at mycenae. to arrange the spears thus, we have seen, was a point of drill that, in aristotle's time, survived among the illyrians. [footnote: _poetics_, xxv.] the practice is also alluded to in _iliad_, iii 135. during a truce "the tall spears are planted by their sides." the poet, whether ignorant or learned, knew that point of war, later obsolete in greece, but still extant in illyria. nestor aroused diomede, whose night apparel was the pelt of a lion; he took his spear, and they came to the outposts, where the men were awake, and kept a keen watch on all movements among the trojans. nestor praised them, and the princes, taking nestor's son, thrasymedes, and meriones with them, went out into the open in view of the trojan camp, sat down, and held a consultation. nestor asked if any one would volunteer to go as a spy among the trojans and pick up intelligence. his reward will be "a black ewe with her lamb at her foot," from their chiefs--"nothing like her for value"--and he will be remembered in songs at feasts, _or_ will be admitted to feasts and wine parties of the chiefs. [footnote: leaf, note on x. 215.] the proposal is very odd; what do the princes want with black ewes, while at feasts they always have honoured places? can nestor be thinking of sending out any brave swift-footed young member of the outpost party, to whom the reward would be appropriate? after silence, diomede volunteers to go, with a comrade, though this kind of work is very seldom undertaken in any army of any age by a chief, and by his remark about admission to wine parties it is clear that nestor was not thinking of a princely spy. many others volunteer, but agamemnon bids diomede choose his own companion, with a very broad hint not to take menelaus. _his_ death, agamemnon knows, would mean the disgraceful return of the host to greece; besides he is, throughout the _iliad_, deeply attached to his brother. the poet of book x., however late, knows the _iliad_ well, for he keeps up the uniform treatment of the character of the over-lord. as he knows the _iliad_ well, how can he be ignorant of the conditions of life of the heroes? how can he dream of "introducing a note of heroic simplicity" (mr. leaf's phrase), when he must be as well aware as we are of the way in which the heroes lived? we cannot explain the black ewes, if meant as a princely reward, but we do not know everything about homeric life. diomede chooses odysseus, "whom pallas athene loveth"; she was also the patroness of diomede himself, in books v., vi. as they are unarmed--all of the chiefs hastily aroused were unarmed, save for a spear there or a sword here--thrasymedes gives to diomede his two-edged sword, _his_ shield, and "a helm of bull's hide, without horns or crest, that is called a skull-cap (knap-skull), and keeps the heads of strong young men." all the advanced guard were young men, as we saw in book ix. 77. obviously, thrasymedes must then send back to camp, though we are not told it, for another shield, sword, and helmet, as he is to lie all night under arms. we shall hear of the shield later. meriones, who is an archer (xiii. 650), lends to odysseus his bow and quiver and a sword. he also gives him "a helm made of leather; and with many a thong it was stiffly wrought within, while without the white teeth of a boar of flashing tusks were arrayed, thick set on either side well and cunningly... ." here reichel perceives that the ignorant poet is describing a piece of ancient headgear represented in mycenaean art, while the boars' teeth were found by schliemann, to the number of sixty, in grave iv. at mycenae. each of them had "the reverse side cut perfectly flat, and with the borings to attach them to some other object." they were "in a veritable funereal armoury." the manner of setting the tusks on the cap is shown on an ivory head of a warrior from mycenae. [footnote: tsountas and manatt, 196-197.] reichel recognises that the poet's description in book x. is excellent, "_ebenso klar als eingehend_." he publishes another ivory head from spata, with the same helmet set with boars' tusks. [footnote: reichel, pp. 102-104] mr. leaf decides that this description by the poet, wholly ignorant of heroic costume, as reichel thinks him, must be "another instance of the archaic and archaeologising tendency so notable in book x." [footnote: _iliad_, vol. ii. p. 629.] at the same time, according to reichel and mr. leaf, the poet of book x. introduces the small round ionian buckler, thus showing his utter ignorance of the great mycenaean shield. the ignorance was most unusual and quite inexcusable, for any one who reads the rest of the _iliad_ (which the poet of book x. knew well) is aware that the homeric shields were huge, often covering body and legs. this fact the poet of book x. did not know, in reichel's opinion. [footnote: leaf, _iliad_, vol. i. p. 575] how are we to understand this poet? he is such an erudite archaeologist that, in the seventh century, he knows and carefully describes a helmet of the mycenaean prime. did he excavate it? and had the leather interior lasted with the felt cap through seven centuries? or did he see a sample in an old temple of the mycenaean prime, or in a museum of his own period? or had he heard of it in a lost mycenaean poem? yet, careful as he was, so pedantic that he must have puzzled his seventh-century audience, who never saw such caps, the poet knew nothing of the shields and costumes of the heroes, though he might have found out all that is known about them in the then existing iliadic lays with which he was perfectly familiar--see his portrait of agamemnon. he was well aware that corslets were, in homeric poetry, anachronisms, for he gave nestor none; yet he fully believed, in his ignorance, that small ionian bucklers loveth; (which need the aid of corslets badly) were the only wear among the heroes! criticism has, as we often observe, no right to throw the first stone at the inconsistencies of homer. as we cannot possibly believe that one poet knew so much which his contemporaries did not know (and how, in the seventh century, could he know it?), and that he also knew so little, knew nothing in fact, we take our own view. the poet of book x. sings of _a_ fresh topic, a confused night of dread; of young men wearing the headgear which, he says, young men _do_ wear; of pelts of fur such as suddenly wakened men, roused, but not roused for battle, would be likely to throw over their bodies against the chill air. he describes things of his own day; things with which he is familiar. he is said to "take quite a peculiar delight in the minute description of dress and weapons." [footnote: leaf, _iliad_, vol. i. p. 423.] we do not observe that he does describe weapons or shields minutely; but homer always loves to describe weapons and costume--scores of examples prove it--and here he happens to be describing such costume as he nowhere else has occasion to mention. by an accident of archaeological discovery, we find that there were such caps set with boars' tusks as he introduces. they had survived, for young men on night duty, into the poet's age. we really cannot believe that a poet of the seventh century had made excavations in mycenaean graves. if he did and put the results into his lay, his audience--not wearing boars' tusks--would have asked, "what nonsense is the man talking?" erhardt, remarking on the furs which the heroes throw over their shoulders when aroused, says that this kind of wrap is very late. it was peisander who, in the second half of the seventh century, clothed herakles in a lion's skin. peisander brought this costume into poetry, and the author of the _doloneia_ knew no better than to follow peisander. [footnote: _die enstehung der homerischen gedichte_, pp. 163-164.] the poet of the _doloneia_ was thus much better acquainted with peisander than with the homeric lays, which could have taught him that a hero would never wear a fur coverlet when aroused--not to fight--from slumber. yet he knew about leathern caps set with boars' tusks. he must have been an erudite excavator, but, in literature, a reader only of recent minor poetry. having procured arms, without corslets (_with_ corslets, according to carl robert)--whether, if they had none, because the poet knew that corslets were anachronisms, or because spies usually go as lightly burdened as possible--odysseus and diomede approach the trojan camp. the hour is the darkest hour before dawn. they hear, but do not see, a heron sent by athene as an omen, and pray to the goddess, with promise of sacrifice. in the trojan camp hector has called a council, and asked for a volunteer spy to seek intelligence among the achaeans. he offers no black ewes as a reward, but the best horses of the enemy. this allures dolon, son of a rich trojan, "an only son among five sisters," a poltroon, a weak lad, ugly, but swift of foot, and an enthusiastic lover of horses. he asks for the steeds of achilles, which hector swears to give him; and to be lightly clad he takes merely spear and bow and a cap of ferret skin, with the pelt of a wolf for covering. odysseus sees him approach; he and diomede lie down among the dead till dolon passes, then they chase him towards the achaean camp and catch him. he offers ransom, which before these last days of the war was often accepted. odysseus replies evasively, and asks for information. dolon, thinking that the bitterness of death is past, explains that only the trojans have watch-fires; the allies, more careless, have none. at the extreme flank of the host sleep the newly arrived thracians, under their king, rhesus, who has golden armour, and "the fairest horses that ever i beheld" (the ruling passion for horses is strong in dolon), "and the greatest, whiter than snow, and for speed like the winds." having learned all that he needs to know, diomede ruthlessly slays dolon. odysseus thanks athene, and hides the poor spoils of the dead, marking the place. they then creep into the dark camp of the sleeping thracians, and as diomede slays them odysseus drags each body aside, to leave a clear path for the horses, that they may not plunge and tremble when they are led forth, "for they were not yet used to dead men." no line in homer shows more intimate knowledge and realisation of horses and of war. odysseus drives the horses of rhesus out of the camp with the bow of meriones; he has forgotten to take the whip from the chariot. diomede, having slain king rhesus asleep, thinks whether he shall lift out the chariot (war chariots were very light) or drag it by the pole; but athene warns him to be going. he "springs upon the steeds," and they make for their camp. it is not clearly indicated whether they ride or drive (x., 5 i 3, 527-528, 541); but, suppose that they ride, are we to conclude that the fact proves "lateness"? the heroes always drive in homer, but it is inconceivable that they could not ride in cases of necessity, as here, if diomede has thought it wiser not to bring out the chariot and harness the horses. riding is mentioned in _iliad_, xv. 679, in a simile; again, in a simile, _odyssey_, v. 37 i. it is not the custom for heroes to ride; the chariot is used in war and in travelling, but, when there are horses and no chariot, men could not be so imbecile as not to mount the horses, nor could the poet be so pedantic as not to make them do so. the shields would cause no difficulty; they would be slung sideways, like the shields of knights in the early middle ages. the pair, picking up dolon's spoils as they pass, hurry back to the chiefs, where nestor welcomes them. the others laugh and are encouraged (to encourage them and his audience is the aim of the poet); while the pair go to diomede's quarters, wash off the blood and sweat from their limbs in the sea, and then "enter the polished baths," common in the _odyssey_, unnamed in the iliad. but on no other occasion in the iliad are we admitted to view this part of heroic toilette. nowhere else, in fact, do we accompany a hero to his quarters and his tub after the day's work is over. achilles, however, refuses to wash, after fighting, in his grief for patroclus, though plenty of water was being heated for the purpose, and it is to be presumed that a bath was ready for the water (_iliad_, xxiii. 40). see, too, for hector's bath, xxii. 444. the two heroes then refresh themselves; breakfast, in fact, and drink, as is natural. by this time the dawn must have been in the sky, and in book xi. men are stirring with the dawn. such is the story of book x. the reader may decide as to whether it is "_very_ late; barely homeric," or a late and deliberate piece of burlesque, [footnote: henry, _classical review_. march 1906.] or whether it is very homeric, though the whole set of situations--a night of terror, an anxious chief, a nocturnal adventure--are unexampled in the poem. the poet's audience of warriors must have been familiar with such situations, and must have appreciated the humorous, ruthless treatment of dolon, the spoiled only brother of five sisters. mr. monro admitted that dolon is shakespearian, but added, "too shakespearian for homer." one may as well say that agincourt, in henry v., is "too homeric for shakespeare." mr. monro argued that "the tenth book comes in awkwardly after the ninth." nitzsche thinks just the reverse. the patriotic warrior audience would delight in the _doloneia_ after the anguish of book ix.; would laugh with odysseus at the close of his adventure, and rejoice with the other achaeans (x. 505). "the introductory part of the book is cumbrous," says mr. monro. to us it is, if we wish to get straight to the adventure, just as the customary delays in book xix., before achilles is allowed to fight, are tedious to us. but the poet's audience did not necessarily share our tastes, and might take pleasure (as i do) in the curious details of the opening of book x. the poet was thinking of his audience, not of modern professors. "we hear no more of rhesus and his thracians." of rhesus there was no more to hear, and his people probably went home, like glenbuckie's stewarts after the mysterious death of their chief in amprior's house of leny before prestonpans (1745). glenbuckie was mysteriously pistolled in the night. "the style and tone is unlike that of the iliad ... it is rather akin to comedy of a rough farcical kind." but it was time for "comic relief." if the story of dolon be comic, it is comic with the practical humour of the sagas. in an isolated nocturnal adventure and massacre we cannot expect the style of an heroic battle under the sunlight. is the poet not to be allowed to be various, and is the scene of the porter in _macbeth_, "in style and tone," like the rest of the drama? (_macbeth_, act ii. sc. 3). here, of course, shakespeare indulges infinitely more in "comedy of a rough practical kind" than does the author of the _doloneia_. the humour and the cruelty do not exceed what is exhibited in many of the _gabes_, or insulting boasts of heroes over dead foes in other parts of the _iliad_; such as the taunting comparison of a warrior falling from his chariot to a diver after oysters, or as "one of the argives hath caught the spear in his flesh, and leaning thereon for a staff, methinks that he will go down within the house of hades" (xiv. 455-457). the _iliad_, like the sagas, is rich in this extremely practical humour. mr. leaf says that the book "must have been composed before the _iliad_ had reached its present form, for it cannot have been meant to follow on book ix. it is rather another case of a parallel rival to that book, coupled with it only in the final literary redaction," which mr. leaf dates in the middle of the sixth century. "the book must have been composed before the _iliad_ had reached its present form," [footnote: _iliad_, vol. i. p. 424.] it is not easy to understand this decision; for, as mr. leaf had previously written, about book ix. 60-68, "the posting of the watch is at least not necessary to the story, and it has a suspicious air of being merely a preparation for the next book, which is much later, and which turns entirely upon a visit to the sentinels." [footnote: _companion,_ p.174.] now a military audience would not have pardoned the poet of book ix. if, in the circumstances of defeat, with a confident enemy encamped within striking distance, he had not made the achaeans throw forth their outposts. the thing was inevitable and is not suspicious; but the poet purposely makes the advanced guard consist of young men under nestor's son and meriones. he needs them for book x. therefore the poet of book ix. is the poet of book x. preparing his effect in advance; or the poet of book x. is a man who cleverly takes advantage of book ix., or he composed his poem of "a night of terror and adventure," "in the air," and the editor of 540 b.c., having heard it recited and copied it out, went back to book ix. and inserted the advanced guard, under thrasymedes and meriones, to lead up to book x. on mr. leafs present theory, [footnote: iliad, vol. i. p.424.] book x., we presume, was meant, not to follow book ix., but to follow the end of book vii, being an alternative to book viii. (composed, he says, to lead up to book ix.) and book ix. but book vii. closes with the achaean refusal of the compromise offered by paris--the restoration of the property but not of the wife of menelaus. the trojans and achaeans feast all night; the trojans feast in the city. there is therefore no place here for book x. after book vii, and the achaeans cannot roam about all night, as they are feasting; nor can agamemnon be in the state of anxiety exhibited by him in book x. book x. could not exist without book ix., and _must_ have been "meant to follow on it." mr. leaf sees that, in his preface to book ix., [footnote: _iliad_, vol. i. p. 371.] "the placing of sentinels" (in book ix. 80, 84) "is needed as an introduction to book x. but has nothing to do with this book" (ix.). but, we have said, it was inevitable, given the new situation in book ix. (an achaean repulse, and the enemy camped in front), that an advanced guard must be placed, even if there proved to be no need of their services. we presume that mr. leaf's literary editor, finding that book x. existed and that the advanced guard was a necessity of its action, went back to book ix. and introduced an advanced guard of young men, with its captains, thrasymedes and meriones. even after this the editor had much to do, if book ix. originally exhibited agamemnon as not in terror and despair, as it now does. we need not throw the burden of all this work on the editor. as mr. leaf elsewhere writes, in a different mind, the tenth book "is obviously adapted to its present place in the _iliad_, for it assumes a moment when achilles is absent from the field, and when the greeks are in deep dejection from a recent defeat. these conditions are exactly fulfilled by the situation at the end of book ix." [footnote: _companion_, p. 190.] this is certainly the case. the tenth book could not exist without the ninth; yet mr. leaf's new opinion is that it "cannot have been meant to follow on book ix." [footnote: _iliad_, vol. i. p. 424.] he was better inspired when he held the precisely opposite opinion. dr. adolf kiene [footnote: die _epen des homer, zweiter theil,_ pp. 90-94. hanover, 1884.] accepts book xi. as originally composed to fill its present place in the _iliad._ he points out the despondency of the chiefs after receiving the reply of achilles, and supposes that even diomede (ix. 708) only urges agamemnon to "array before the ships thy folk and horsemen," for defensive battle. but, encouraged by the success of the night adventure, agamemnon next day assumes the offensive. to consider thus is perhaps to consider too curiously. but it is clear that the achaeans have been much encouraged by the events of book x., especially agamemnon, whose character, as kiene observes, is very subtly and consistently treated, and "lies near the poet's heart." this is the point which we keep urging. agamemnon's care for menelaus is strictly preserved in book x. nitzsche (i 897) writes, "between book ix. and book xi there is a gap; that gap the _doloneia_ fills: it must have been composed to be part of the _iliad_." but he thinks that the _doloneia_ has taken the place of an earlier lay which filled the gap. [footnote: die _echtheit der doloneia,_ p. 32. programme des k. k. staats gymnasium zu marburg, 1877.] that the book is never referred to later in the _iliad_, even if it be true, is no great argument against its authenticity. for when later references are made to book ix., they are dismissed as clever late interpolations. if the horses of rhesus took part, as they do not, in the sports at the funeral of patroclus, the passage would be called a clever interpolation: in fact, diomede had better horses, divine horses to run. however, it is certainly remarkable that the interpolation was not made by one of the interpolators of critical theory. meanwhile there is, we think, a reference to book x. in book xiv. [footnote: this was pointed out to me by mr. shewan, to whose great knowledge of homer i am here much indebted.] in _iliad_, xiv. 9-11, we read that nestor, in his quarters with the wounded machaon, on the day following the night of dolon's death, hears the cry of battle and goes out to see what is happening. "he took the well-wrought shield of his son, horse-taming thrasymedes, which was lying in the hut, all glistening with bronze, but _the son had the shield of his father_." why had thrasymedes the shield of his father? at about 3 a.m. before dawn the shield of nestor was lying beside him in his own bedroom (book x. 76), and at the same moment his son thrasymedes _was_ on outpost duty, and had his own shield with him (book ix. 81). when, then, did father and son exchange shields, and why? mr. leaf says, "it is useless to inquire why father and son had thus changed shields, as the scholiasts of course do." the scholiasts merely babble. homer, of course, meant _something_ by this exchange of shields, which occurred late in the night of book ix. or very early in the following day, that of books xi-xvi. let us follow again the sequence of events. on the night before the day when nestor had thrasymedes' shield and thrasymedes had nestor's, thrasymedes was sent out, with shield and all, in command of one of the seven companies of an advanced guard, posted between fosse and wall, in case of a camisade by the trojans, who were encamped on the plain (ix. 81). with him in command were meriones and five other young men less notable. they had supplies with them and whatever was needed: they cooked supper in bivouac. in the _doloneia_ the wakeful princes, after inspecting the advanced guard, go forward within view of the trojan ranks and consult. with them they take nestor's son, thrasymedes, and meriones (x. 196). the two young men, being on active service, are armed; the princes are not. diomede, having been suddenly roused out of sleep, with no intention to fight, merely threw on his dressing-gown, a lion's skin. nestor wore a thick, double, purple dressing-gown. odysseus had cast his shield about his shoulders. it was decided that odysseus and diomede should enter the trojan camp and "prove a jeopardy." diomede had no weapon but his spear; so thrasymedes, who is armed as we saw, lends him his bull's-hide cap, "that keeps the heads of stalwart youths," his sword (for that of diomede "was left at the ships"), and his shield. diomede and odysseus successfully achieve their adventure and return to the chiefs, where they talk with nestor; and then they go to diomede's hut and drink. the outposts remain, of course, at their stations. meanwhile, thrasymedes, having lent his shield to diomede, has none of his own. naturally, as he was to pass the night under arms, he would send to his father's quarters for the old man's shield, a sword, and a helmet. he would remain at his post (his men had provisions) till the general _reveillez_ at dawn, and would then breakfast at his post and go into the fray. nestor, therefore, missing his shield, would send round to diomede's quarters for the shield of thrasymedes, which had been lent overnight to diomede, would take it into the fight, and would bring it back to his own hut when he carried the wounded machaon thither out of the battle. when he arms to go out and seek for information, he picks up the shield of thrasymedes. nothing can be more obvious; the poet, being a man of imagination, not a professor, sees it all, and casually mentions that the son had the father's and the father had the son's shield. his audience, men of the sword, see the case as clearly as the poet does: only we moderns and the scholiasts, almost as modern as ourselves, are puzzled. it may also be argued, though we lay no stress on it, that in book xi. 312, when agamemnon has been wounded, we find odysseus and diomede alone together, without their contingents, because they have not separated since they breakfasted together, after returning from the adventure of book x., and thus they have come rather late to the field. they find the achaeans demoralised by the wounding of agamemnon, and they make a stand. "what ails us," asks odysseus, "that we forget our impetuous valour?" the passage appears to take up the companionship of odysseus and diomede, who were left breakfasting together at the end of book x. and are not mentioned till we meet them again in this scene of book xi., as if they had just come on the field. as to the linguistic tests of lateness "there are exceptionally numerous traces of later formation," says mr. monro; while fick, tout _contraire,_ writes, "clumsy ionisms are not common, and, as a rule, occur in these parts which on older grounds show themselves to be late interpolations." "the cases of agreement" (between fick and mr. monro), "are few, and the passages thus condemned are not more numerous in the _doloneia_ than in any average book." [footnote: jevons, _journal of hellenic studies_, vii. p. 302.] the six examples of "a post-homeric use of the article" do not seem so very post-homeric to an ordinary intelligence--parallels occur in book i.--and "perfects in [greek: ka] from derivative verbs" do not destroy the impression of antiquity and unity which is left by the treatment of character; by the celebrated cap with boars' tusks, which no human being could archaeologically reconstruct in the seventh century; and by the homeric vigour in such touches as the horses unused to dead men. as the _iliad_ certainly passed through centuries in which its language could not but be affected by linguistic changes, as it could not escape from _remaniements_, consciously or unconsciously introduced by reciters and copyists, the linguistic objections are not strongly felt by us. an unphilological reader of homer notes that duntzer thinks the _doloneia_ "older than the oldest portion of the odyssey," while gemoll thinks that the author of the _doloneia_. was familiar with the _odyssey_. [footnote: duntzer, _homer. abhanglungen_, p. 324. gemoll, _hermes_, xv. 557 ff.] meanwhile, one thing seems plain to us: when the author of book ix. posted the guards under thrasymedes, he was deliberately leading up to book x.; while the casual remark in book xiv. about the exchange of shields between father and son, nestor and thrasymedes, glances back at book x. and possibly refers to some lost and more explicit statement. it is not always remembered that, if things could drop into the interpolations, things could also drop out of the _iliad,_ causing _lacunae_, during the dark backward of its early existence. if the _doloneia_ be "barely homeric," as father browne holds, this opinion was not shared by the listeners or readers of the sixth century. the vase painters often illustrate the _doloneia;_ but it does not follow that "the story was fresh" because it was "popular," as mr. leaf suggests, and "was treated as public property in a different way" (namely, in a comic way) "from the consecrated early legends" (_iliad,_ ii 424, 425). the sixth century vase painters illustrated many passages in homer, not the _doloneia_ alone. the "comic way" was the ruthless humour of two strong warriors capturing one weak coward. much later, wild caricature was applied in vase painting to the most romantic scenes in the odyssey, which were "consecrated" enough. chapter xiv the interpolations of nestor that several of the passages in which nestor speaks are very late interpolations, meant to glorify pisistratus, himself of nestor's line, is a critical opinion to which we have more than once alluded. the first example is in _iliad,_ ii. 530-568. this passage "is meant at once to present nestor as the leading counsellor of the greek army, and to introduce the coming _catalogue_." [footnote: leaf, _iliad,_ vol. i. p. 70.] now the _catalogue_ "originally formed an introduction to the whole cycle." [footnote: ibid., vol. i. p. 87.] but, to repeat an earlier observation, surely the whole cycle was much later than the period of pisistratus and his sons; that is, the compilation of the homeric and cyclic poems into one body of verse, named "the cycle," is believed to have been much later. it is objected that nestor's advice in this passage, "separate thy warriors by tribes and clans" ([greek: phyla, phraetras]), "is out of place in the last year of the war"; but this suggestion for military reorganisation may be admitted as a mere piece of poetical perspective, like helen's description of the achaean chiefs in book iii, or nestor may wish to return to an obsolete system of clan regiments. the athenians had "tribes" and "clans," political institutions, and nestor's advice is noted as a touch of late attic influence; but about the nature and origin of these social divisions we know so little that it is vain to argue about them. the advice of nestor is an appeal to the clan spirit--a very serviceable military spirit, as the highlanders have often proved--but we have no information as to whether it existed in achaean times. nestor speaks as the aged lochiel spoke to claverhouse before killiecrankie. did the athenian army of the sixth century fight in clan regiments? the device seems to belong to an earlier civilisation, whether it survived in sixth century athens or not. it is, of course, notorious that tribes and clans are most flourishing among the most backward people, though they were welded into the constitution of athens. the passage, therefore, cannot with any certainty be dismissed as very late, for the words for "tribe" and "clan" could not be novel athenian inventions, the institutions designated being of prehistoric origin. nestor shows his tactics again in iv. 303-309, offers his "inopportune tactical lucubrations, doubtless under athenian (pisistratean) influence." the poet is here denied a sense of humour. that a veteran military polonius should talk as inopportunely about tactics as dugald dalgetty does about the sconce of drumsnab is an essential part of the humour of the character of nestor. this is what nestor's critics do not see; the inopportune nature of his tactical remarks is the point of them, just as in the case of the laird of drumthwacket, "that should be." scott knew little of homer, but coincided in the nestorian humour by mere congruity of genius. the pisistratidze must have been humourless if they did not see that the poet smiled as he composed nestor's speeches, glorifying old deeds of his own and old ways of fighting. he arrays his pylians with chariots in front, footmen in the rear. in the [blank space] the princely heroes dismounted to fight, the chariots following close behind them. [footnote: _iliad_, xi. 48-56.] in the same way during the hundred years' war the english knights dismounted and defeated the french chivalry till, under jeanne d'arc and la hire, the french learned the lesson, and imitated the english practice. on the other hand, egyptian wall-paintings show the egyptian chariotry advancing in neat lines and serried squadrons. according to nestor these had of old been the achaean tactics, and he preferred the old way. nestor's advice in book iv. is _not_ to dismount or break the line of chariots; these, he says, were the old tactics: "even so is the far better way; thus, moreover, did men of old time lay low cities and walls." there was to be no rushing of individuals from the ranks, no dismounting. nestor's were not the tactics of the heroes--they usually dismount and do single valiances; but nestor, commanding his local contingent, recommends the methods of the old school, [greek: hoi pretoroi]. what can be more natural and characteristic? the poet's meaning seems quite clear. he is not flattering pisistratus, but, with quiet humour, offers the portrait of a vain, worthy veteran. it is difficult to see how this point can be missed; it never was missed before nestor's speeches seemed serviceable to the pisistratean theory of the composition of the _iliad_. in his first edition mr. leaf regarded the interpolations as intended "to glorify nestor" without reference to pisistratus, whom mr. leaf did not then recognise as the master of a sycophantic editor. the passages are really meant to display the old man's habit of glorifying himself and past times. pisistratus could not feel flattered by passages intended to exhibit his ancestor as a conceited and inopportune old babbler. i ventured in 1896 to suggest that the interpolator was trying to please pisistratus, but this was said in a spirit of mockery. of all the characters in homer that of nestor is most familiar to the unlearned world, merely because nestor's is a "character part," very broadly drawn. the third interpolation of flattery to pisistratus in the person of nestor is found in vii. 125-160. the achaean chiefs are loath to accept the challenge of hector to single combat. only menelaus rises and arms himself, moved by the strong sense of honour which distinguishes a warrior notoriously deficient in bodily strength. agamemnon refuses to let him fight; the other peers make no movement, and nestor rebukes them. it is entirely in nature that he should fall back on his memory of a similar situation in his youth; when the arcadian champion, ereuthalion, challenged any prince of the pylians, and when "no man plucked up heart" to meet him except nestor himself. had there never been any pisistratus, any poet who created the part of a worthy and wordy veteran must have made nestor speak just as he does speak. ereuthalion "was the tallest and strongest of men that i have slain!" and nestor, being what he is, offers copious and interesting details about the armour of ereuthalion and about its former owners. the passage is like those in which the icelandic sagamen dwelt lovingly on the history of a good sword, or the maoris on the old possessors of an ancient jade _patu_. an objection is now taken to nestor's geography: he is said not to know the towns and burns of his own country. he speaks of the swift stream keladon, the streams of iardanus, and the walls of pheia. pheia "is no doubt the same as pheai" [footnote: monro, note on odyssey, xv. 297.] (odyssey, xv. 297), "but that was a maritime town not near arkadia. there is nothing known of a keladon or iardanus anywhere near it." now didymus (schol. a) "is said to have read [greek: phaeraes] for [greek: pheias]," following pherekydes. [footnote: leaf, _iliad_, vol. i. 308.] m. victor bérard, who has made an elaborate study of elian topography, says that "pheia is a cape, not a town," and adopts the reading "phera," the [greek: pherae] of the journey of telemachus, in the odyssey. he thinks that the [greek: pherae] of nestor is the aliphera of polybius, and believes that the topography of nestor and of the journey of telemachus is correct. the keladon is now the river or burn of saint isidore; the iardanus is at the foot of mount kaiapha. keladon has obviously the same sense as the gaelic altgarbh, "the rough and brawling stream." iardanus is also a stream in crete, and mr. leaf thinks it semitic--"_yarden_, from yarad to flow"; but the semites did not give the _yar_ to the _yarrow_ nor to the australian _yarra yarra_. the country, says m. bérard, is a network of rivers, burns, and rivulets; and we cannot have any certainty, we may add, as the same river and burn names recur in many parts of the same country; [footnote: bérard, _les phéniciens et l'odyssée,_ 108-113, 1902] many of them, in england, are plainly prae-celtic. while the correct geography may, on this showing, be that of homer, we cannot give up homer's claim to nestor's speech. as to nestor's tale about the armour of ereuthalion, it is manifest that the first owner of the armour of ereuthalion, namely are'ithous, "the maceman," so called because he had the singularity of fighting with an iron _casse-tête,_ as nestor explains (vii. 138-140), was a famous character in legendary history. he appears "as prince areithous, the maceman," father (or grand-father?) of an areithous slain by hector (vii. 8-10). in greece, it was not unusual for the grandson to bear the grandfather's name, and, if the maceman was grand-father of hector's victim, there is no chronological difficulty. the chronological difficulty, in any case, if hector's victim is the son of the maceman, is not at all beyond a poetic narrator's possibility of error in genealogy. if nestor's speech is a late interpolation, if its late author borrowed his vivid account of the maceman and his _casse-tête_ from the mere word "maceman" in vii. 9, he must be credited with a lively poetic imagination. few or none of these reminiscences of nestor are really "inapplicable to the context." here the context demands encouragement for heroes who shun a challenge. nestor mentions an "applicable" and apposite instance of similar want of courage, and, as his character demands, he is the hero of his own story. his brag, or _gabe,_ about "he was the tallest and strongest of all the men i ever slew," is deliciously in keeping, and reminds us of the college don who said of the czar, "he is the nicest emperor i ever met." the poet is sketching an innocent vanity; he is not flattering pisistratus. the next case is the long narrative of nestor to the hurried patroclus, who has been sent by achilles to bring news of the wounded machaon (xi. 604-702). nestor on this occasion has useful advice to give, namely, that achilles, if he will not fight, should send his men, under patroclus, to turn the tide of trojan victory. but the poet wishes to provide an interval of time and of yet more dire disaster before the return of patroclus to achilles. by an obvious literary artifice he makes nestor detain the reluctant patroclus with a long story of his own early feats of arms. it is a story of a "hot-trod," so called in border law; the eleians had driven a _creagh_ of cattle from the pylians, who pursued, and nestor killed the eleian leader, itymoneus. the speech is an achaean parallel to the border ballad of "jamie telfer of the fair dodhead," in editing which scott has been accused of making a singular and most obvious and puzzling blunder in the topography of his own sheriffdom of the forest. on scott's showing the scene of the raid is in upper ettrickdale, not, as critics aver, in upper teviotdale; thus the narrative of the ballad would be impossible. [footnote: in fact both sites on the two dodburns are impossible; the fault lay with the ballad-maker, not with scott.] the pisistratean editor is accused of a similar error. "no doubt he was an asiatic greek, completely ignorant of the peloponnesus." [footnote: _iliad_. note to xi. 756, and to the _catalogue_, ii. 615-617.] it is something to know that pisistratus employed an editor, or that his editor employed a collaborator who was an asiatic greek! meanwhile, nothing is less secure than arguments based on the _catalogue_. we have already shown how mr. leaf's opinions as to the date and historical merits of the _catalogue_ have widely varied, while m. bérard appears to have vindicated the topography of nestor. of the _catalogue_ mr. allen writes, "as a table, according to regions, of agamemnon's forces it bears every mark of venerable antiquity," showing "a state of things which never recurred in later history, and which no one had any interest to invent, or even the means for inventing." he makes a vigorous defence of the _catalogue,_ as regards the dominion of achilles, against mr. leaf. [footnote: _classical review,_ may 1906, pp. x94-201.] into the details we need not go, but it is not questions of homeric topography, obscure as they are, that can shake our faith in the humorous portrait of old nestor, or make us suppose that the sympathetic mockery of the poet is the sycophantic adulation of the editor to his statesman employer, pisistratus. if any question may be left to literary discrimination it is the authentic originality of the portrayal of nestor. chapter xv the comparative study of early epics though comparison is the method of science, the comparative study of the national poetry of warlike aristocracies, its conditions of growth and decadence, has been much neglected by homeric critics. sir richard jebb touched on the theme, and, after devoting four pages to a sketch of sanskrit, finnish, persian, and early teutonic heroic poetry and _saga,_ decided that "in our country, as in others, we fail to find any true parallel to the case of the homeric poems. these poems must be studied in themselves, without looking for aid, in this sense, to the comparative method." [footnote: _homer_, p. 135.] part of this conclusion seems to us rather hasty. in a brief manual sir richard had not space for a thorough comparative study of old heroic poetry at large. his quoted sources are: for india, lassen; for france, mr. saintsbury's short history of _french literature_ (sixteen pages on this topic), and a work unknown to me, by "m. paul"; for iceland he only quoted _the encyclopedia britannica_ (mr. edmund gosse); for germany, lachmann and bartsch; for the finnish _kalewala,_ the _encyclopedia britannica_ (mr. sime and mr. keltie); and for england, a _primer of english literature_ by mr. stopford brooke. these sources appear less than adequate, and celtic heroic romance is entirely omitted. a much deeper and wider comparative criticism of early heroic national poetry is needed, before any one has a right to say that the study cannot aid our critical examination of the homeric problem. many peoples have passed through a stage of culture closely analogous to that of achaean society as described in the _iliad_ and odyssey. every society of this kind has had its ruling military class, its ancient legends, and its minstrels who on these legends have based their songs. the similarity of human nature under similar conditions makes it certain that comparison will discover useful parallels between the poetry of societies separated in time and space but practically identical in culture. it is not much to the credit of modern criticism that a topic so rich and interesting has been, at least in england, almost entirely neglected by homeric scholars. meanwhile, it is perfectly correct to say, as sir richard observes, that "we fail to find any true parallel to the case of the homeric poems," for we nowhere find the legends of an heroic age handled by a very great poet--the greatest of all poets--except in the _iliad_ and _odyssey_. but, on the other hand, the critics refuse to believe that, in the _iliad_ and _odyssey,_ we possess the heroic achaean legends handled by one great poet. they find a composite by many hands, good and bad, and of many ages, they say; sometimes the whole composition and part of the poems are ascribed to a late _littérateur_. now to that supposed state of things we do find several "true parallels," in germany, in finland, in ireland. but the results of work by these many hands in many ages are anything but "a true parallel" to the results which lie before us in the _iliad_ and _odyssey_. where the processes of composite authorship throughout many _ages_ certainly occur, as in germany and ireland, there we find no true parallel to the homeric poems. it follows that, in all probability, no such processes as the critics postulate produced the _iliad_ and odyssey, for where the processes existed, beyond doubt they failed egregiously to produce the results. sir richard's argument would have been logical if many efforts by many hands, in many ages, in england, finland, ireland, iceland, and germany did actually produce true parallels to the achaean epics. they did not, and why not? simply because these other races had no homer. all the other necessary conditions were present, the legendary material, the heroic society, the court minstrels, all--except the great poet. in all the countries mentioned, except finland, there existed military aristocracies with their courts, castles, and minstrels, while the minstrels had rich material in legendary history and in myth, and _märchen_, and old songs. but none of the minstrels was adequate to the production of an english, german, or irish _iliad_ or _odyssey_, or even of a true artistic equivalent in france. we have tried to show that the critics, rejecting a homer, have been unable to advance any adequate hypothesis to account for the existence of the _iliad_ and _odyssey_. now we see that, where such conditions of production as they postulate existed but where there was no great epic genius, they can find no true parallels to the epics. their logic thus breaks down at both ends. it may be replied that in non-greek lands one condition found in greek society failed: the succession of a reading age to an age of heroic listeners. but this is not so. in france and germany an age of readers duly began, but they did not mainly read copies of the old heroic poems. they turned to lyric poetry, as in greece, and they recast the heroic songs into modern and popular forms in verse and prose, when they took any notice of the old heroic poems at all. one merit of the greek epics is a picture of "a certain phase of early civilisation," and that picture is "a naturally harmonious whole," with "unity of impression," says sir richard jebb. [footnote: homer, p. 37.] certainly we can find no true parallel, on an homeric scale, to this "harmonious picture" in the epics of germany and england or in the early literature of ireland. sir richard, for england, omits notice of _beowulf_; but we know that _beowulf_, a long heroic poem, is a mass of anachronisms--a heathen legend in a christian setting. the hero, that great heathen champion, has his epic filled full of christian allusions and christian morals, because the clerical redactor, in christian england, could not but intrude these things into old pagan legends evolved by the continental ancestors of our race. he had no "painful anxiety," like the supposed ionic continuators of the achaean poems (when they are not said to have done precisely the reverse), to preserve harmony of ancient ideas. such archaeological anxieties are purely modern. if we take the _nibelungenlied_, [footnote: see chapter on the _nibelungenlied_ in homer _and the epic_, pp. 382-404.] we find that it is a thing of many rehandlings, even in existing manuscripts. for example, the greeks clung to the hexameter in homer. not so did the germans adhere to old metres. the poem that, in the oldest ms., is written in assonances, in later mss. is reduced to regular rhymes and is retouched in many essential respects. the matter of the _nibelungenlied_ is of heathen origin. we see the real state of heathen affairs in the icelandic versions of the same tale, for the icelanders were peculiar in preserving ancient lays; and, when these were woven into a prose saga, the archaic and heathen features were retained. had the post-christian prose author of the _volsunga_ been a great poet, we might find in his work a true parallel to the _iliad_. but, though he preserves the harmony of his picture of pre-christian princely life (save in the savage beginnings of his story), he is not a poet; so the true parallel to the greek epic fails, noble as is the saga in many passages. in the german _nibelungenlied_ all is modernised; the characters are christian, the manners are chivalrous, and _märchen_ older than homer are forced into a wandering mediaeval chronicle-poem. the germans, in short, had no early poet of genius, and therefore could not produce a true parallel to _iliad_ or odyssey. the mediaeval poets, of course, never dreamed of archaeological anxiety, as the supposed ionian continuators are sometimes said to have done, any more than did the french and late welsh handlers of the ancient celtic arthurian materials. the late german _bearbeiter_ of the _nibelungenlied_ has no idea of unity of plot--_enfin_, germany, having excellent and ancient legendary material for an epic, but producing no parallel to _iliad_ and odyssey, only proves how absolutely essential a homer was to the greek epics. "if any inference could properly be drawn from the edda" (the icelandic collection of heroic lays), says sir richard jebb, "it would be that short separate poems on cognate subjects can long exist as a collection _without_ coalescing into such an artistic whole as the iliad or the odyssey." [footnote: homer, p. 33.] it is our own argument that sir richard states. "short separate poems on cognate subjects" can certainly co-exist for long anywhere, but they cannot automatically and they cannot by aid of an editor become a long epic. nobody can stitch and vamp them into a poem like the _iliad_ or odyssey. to produce a poem like either of these a great poetic genius must arise, and fuse the ancient materials, as hephaestus fused copper and tin, and then cast the mass into a mould of his own making. a small poet may reduce the legends and lays into a very inartistic whole, a very inharmonious whole, as in the _nibelungenlied_, but a controlling poet, not a mere redactor or editor, is needed to perform even that feat. where a man who is not a poet undertakes to produce the coalescence, as dr. lönnrot (1835-1849) did in the case of the peasant, not courtly, lays of finland, he "fails to prove that mere combining and editing can form an artistic whole out of originally distinct songs, even though concerned with closely related themes," says sir richard jebb. [footnote: homer, p. 134-135.] this is perfectly true; much as lönnrot botched and vamped the finnish lays he made no epic out of them. but, as it is true, how did the late athenian drudge of pisistratus succeed where lönnrot failed? "in the dovetailing of the _odyssey_ we see the work of one mind," says sir richard. [footnote: homer, p. 129.] this mind cannot have been the property of any one but a great poet, obviously, as the _odyssey_ is confessedly "an artistic whole." consequently the disintegrators of the odyssey, when they are logical, are reduced to averring that the poem is an exceedingly inartistic whole, a whole not artistic at all. while mr. leaf calls it "a model of skilful construction," wilamowitz mollendorff denounces it as the work of "a slenderly-gifted botcher," of about 650 b.c., a century previous to mr. leaf's athenian editor. thus we come, after all, to a crisis in which mere literary appreciation is the only test of the truth about a work of literature. the odyssey is an admirable piece of artistic composition, or it is the very reverse. blass, mr. leaf, sir richard jebb, and the opinion of the ages declare that the composition is excellent. a crowd of german critics and father browne, s.j., hold that the composition is feeble. the criterion is the literary taste of each party to the dispute. kirchhoff and wilamowitz möllendorff see a late bad patchwork, where mr. leaf, sir richard jebb, blass, wolf, and the verdict of all mankind see a masterpiece of excellent construction. the world has judged: the _odyssey_ is a marvel of construction: therefore is not the work of a late botcher of disparate materials, but of a great early poet. yet sir richard jebb, while recognising the _odyssey_ as "an artistic whole" and an harmonious picture, and recognising lönnrot's failure "to prove that mere combining and editing can form an artistic whole out of originally distinct songs, even though concerned with closely related themes," thinks that kirchhoff has made the essence of his theory of late combination of distinct strata of poetical material from different sources and periods, in the _odyssey_, "in the highest degree probable." [footnote: homer, p. 131.] it is, of course, possible that mr. leaf, who has not edited the _odyssey,_ may now, in deference to his belief in the pisistratean editor, have changed his opinion of the merits of the poem. if the _odyssey,_ like the _iliad_, was, till about 540 b.c., a chaos of lays of all ages, variously known in various _répertoires_ of the rhapsodists, and patched up by the pisistratean editor, then of two things one--either mr. leaf abides by his enthusiastic belief in the excellency of the composition, or he does not. if he does still believe that the composition of the _odyssey_ is a masterpiece, then the pisistratean editor was a great master of construction. if he now, on the other hand, agrees with wilamowitz möllendorff that the _odyssey_ is cobbler's work, then his literary opinions are unstable. chapter xvi homer and the french mediaeval epics sir richard jebb remarks, with truth, that "before any definite solution of the homeric problem could derive scientific support from such analogies" (with epics of other peoples), "it would be necessary to show that the particular conditions under which the homeric poems appear in early greece had been reproduced with sufficient closeness elsewhere." [footnote: homer, pp. 131, 132.] now we can show that the particular conditions under which the homeric poems confessedly arose were "reproduced with sufficient closeness elsewhere," except that no really great poet was elsewhere present. this occurred among the germanic aristocracy, "the franks of france," in the eleventh, twelfth, and early thirteenth centuries of our era. the closeness of the whole parallel, allowing for the admitted absence in france of a very great and truly artistic poet, is astonishing. we have first, in france, answering to the achaean aristocracy, the frankish noblesse of warriors dwelling in princely courts and strong castles, dominating an older population, owing a practically doubtful fealty to an over-lord, the king, passing their days in the chace, in private war, or in revolt against the over-lord, and, for all literary entertainment, depending on the recitations of epic poems by _jongleurs_, who in some cases are of gentle birth, and are the authors of the poems which they recite. "this national poetry," says m. gaston paris, "was born and mainly developed among the warlike class, princes, lords, and their courts.... at first, no doubt, some of these men of the sword themselves composed and chanted lays" (like achilles), "but soon there arose a special class of poets ... they went from court to court, from castle ... later, when the townsfolk began to be interested in their chants, they sank a degree, and took their stand in public open places ..." [footnote: _literature française au moyen age_, pp. 36, 37. 1898.] in the _iliad_ we hear of no minstrels in camp: in the _odyssey_ a prince has a minstrel among his retainers--demodocus, at the court of phaeacia; phemius, in the house of odysseus. in ionia, when princes had passed away, rhapsodists recited for gain in marketplaces and at fairs. the parallel with france is so far complete. the french national epics, like those of the achaeans, deal mainly with legends of a long past legendary age. to the french authors the greatness and the fortunes of the emperor charles and other heroic heads of great houses provide a theme. the topics of song are his wars, and the prowess and the quarrels of his peers with the emperor and among themselves. these are seen magnified through a mist of legend; saracens are substituted for gascon foes, and the great charles, so nobly venerable a figure in the oldest french epic (the _chanson de roland, circ._ 1050-1070 in its earliest extant form), is more degraded, in the later epics, than agamemnon himself. the "machinery" of the gods in homer is replaced by the machinery of angels, but the machinery of dreams is in vogue, as in the iliad and _odyssey_. the sources are traditional and legendary. we know that brief early lays of charles and other heroes had existed, and they may have been familiar to the french epic poets, but they were not merely patched into the epics. the form of verse is not ballad-like, but a series of _laisses_ of decasyllabic lines, each _laisse_ presenting one assonance, not rhyme. as time went on, rhyme and alexandrine lines were introduced, and the old epics were expanded, altered, condensed, _remaniés_, with progressive changes in taste, metre, language, manners, and ways of life. finally, an age of cyclic poems began; authors took new characters, whom they attached by false genealogies to the older heroes, and they chanted the adventures of the sons of the former heroes, like the cyclic poet who sang of the son of odysseus by circe. all these conditions are undeniably "true parallels" to "the conditions under which the homeric poems appeared." the only obvious point of difference vanishes if we admit, with sir richard jebb and m. salomon reinach, the possibility of the existence of written texts in the greece of the early iron age. we do not mean texts prepared for a _reading_ public. in france such a public, demanding texts for reading, did not arise till the decadence of the epic. the oldest french texts of their epics are small volumes, each page containing some thirty lines in one column. such volumes were carried about by the _jongleurs_, who chanted their own or other men's verses. they were not in the hands of readers. [footnote: _épopées françaises_, léon gautier, vol. i. pp. 226-228. 1878.] an example of an author-reciter, jendeus de brie (he was the maker of the first version of the _bataille loquifer_, twelfth century) is instructive. of jendeus de brie it is said that "he wrote the poem, kept it very carefully, taught it to no man, made much gain out of it in sicily where he sojourned, and left it to his son when he died." similar statements are made in _renaus de montauban_ (the existing late version is of the thirteenth century) about huon de villeneuve, who would not part with his poem for horses or furs, or for any price, and about other poets. [footnote: _épopées françaises, léon gautier_, vol. i. p. 215, note i.] these early _jongleurs_ were men of position and distinction; their theme was the _gestes_ of princes; they were not under the ban with which the church pursued vulgar strollers, men like the greek rhapsodists. pindar's story that homer wrote the _cypria_ [footnote: _pindari opera_, vol. iii. p. 654. boeckh.] and gave the copy, as the dowry of his daughter, to stasinus who married her, could only have arisen in greece in circumstances exactly like those of jendeus de brie. jendeus lived on his poem by reciting it, and left it to his son when he died. the story of homer and stasinus could only have been invented in an age when the possession of the solitary text of a poem was a source of maintenance to the poet. this condition of things could not exist, either when there were no written texts or when such texts were multiplied to serve the wants of a reading public. again, a poet in the fortunate position of jendeus would not teach his epic in a "school" of reciters unless he were extremely well paid. in later years, after his death, his poem came, through copies good or bad, into circulation. late, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, we hear of a "school" of _jongleurs_ at beauvais. in lent they might not ply their profession, so they gathered at beauvais, where they could learn _cantilenae_, new lays. [footnote: _épopées françaises_, léon gautier, vol. ii. pp. 174, 175.] but by that time the epic was decadent and dying? the audiences of the _jongleurs_, too, were no longer, by that time, what they had been. the rich and great, now, had library copies of the epics; not small _jongleurs'_ copies, but folios, richly illuminated and bound, with two or three columns of matter on each page. [footnote: ibid., vol. i. p. 228. see, too, photographs of an illuminated, double-columned library copy in _la chancun de willame_., london, 1903.] the age of recitations from a text in princely halls was ending or ended; the age of a reading public was begun. the earlier condition of the _jongleur_ who was his own poet, and carefully guarded his copyright in spite of all temptations to permit the copying of his ms., is regarded by sir richard jebb as quite a possible feature of early greece. he thinks that there was "no wide circulation of writings by numerous copies for a reading public" before the end of the fifth century b.c. as greek mercenaries could write, and write well, in the seventh to sixth centuries, i incline to think that there may then, and earlier, have been a reading public. however, long before that a man might commit his poems to writing. "wolf allows that some men did, as early at least as 776 b.c. the verses might never be read by anybody except himself" (the author) "or those to whom he privately bequeathed them" (as jendeus de brie bequeathed his poem to his son), "but his end would have been gained." [footnote: _homer_, p. 113.] recent discoveries as to the very early date of linear non-phoenician writing in crete of course increase the probability of this opinion, which is corroborated by the story of the _cypria_, given as a dowry with the author's daughter. thus "the particular conditions under which the homeric poems appeared" "been reproduced with sufficient closeness" in every respect, with surprising closeness, in the france of the eleventh to thirteenth centuries. the social conditions are the same; the legendary materials are of identical character; the method of publication by recitation is identical; the cyclic decadence occurs in both cases, the _monomanie cyclique_. in the greece of homer we have the four necessary conditions of the epic, as found by m. léon gautier in mediaeval france. we have:-(1) an uncritical age confusing history by legend. (2) we have a national _milieu_ with religious uniformity. (3) we have poems dealing with- "old unhappy far-off things and battles long ago." (4) we have representative heroes, the over-lord, and his peers or paladins. [footnote: _épopées françaises_, léon gautier, vol. i. pp. 6-9] it may be added that in greece, as in france, some poets adapt into the adventures of their heroes world-old _märchen_, as in the odyssey, and in the cycle of the parents of charles. in the french, as in the greek epics, we have such early traits of poetry as the textual repetition of speeches, and the recurring epithets, "swift-footed achilles," "charles of the white beard," "blameless heroes" (however blamable). ladies, however old, are always "of the clear face." thus the technical manners of the french and greek epics are closely parallel; they only differ in the exquisite art of homer, to which no approach is made by the french poets. the french authors of epic, even more than homer, abound in episodes much more distracting than those of the _iliad_. of blood and wounds, of course, both the french and the greek are profuse: they were writing for men of the sword, not for modern critics. indeed, the battle pieces of france almost translate those of homer. the achaean "does on his goodly corslet"; the french knight "_sur ses espalles son halberc li colad_." the achaean, with his great sword, shears off an arm at the shoulder. the french knight-"_trenchad le braz, parmi leschine sun grant espee li passe_." the huge shield of aias becomes _cele grant targe duble_ in france, and the warriors boast over their slain in france, as in the _iliad_. in france, as in greece, a favourite epic theme was "the wrath" of a hero, of achilles, of roland, of ganelon, of odysseus and achilles wrangling at a feast to the joy of agamemnon, "glad that the bravest of his peers were at strife." [footnote: odyssey, viii. 75-7s [sic].] of all the many parallels between the greek and french epics, the most extraordinary is the coincidence between charles with his peers and agamemnon with his princes. the same historical conditions occurred, at an interval of more than two thousand years. agamemnon is the bretwalda, the over-lord, as mr. freeman used to say, of the achaeans: he is the suzerain. charles in the french epics holds the same position, but the french poets regard him in different lights. in the earliest epic, the _chanson_ de roland, a divinity doth hedge the famous emperor, whom jeanne d'arc styled "st. charlemagne." he was, in fact, a man of thirty-seven at the date of the disaster of roncesvaux, where roland fell (778 a.d.). but in the tradition that has reached the poet of the _chanson_ he is a white-bearded warrior, as vigorous as he is venerable. as he rules by advice of his council, he bids them deliberate on the proposals of the paynim king, marsile--to accept or refuse them. roland, the counterpart of achilles in all respects (oliver is his patroclus), is for refusing: ganelon appears to have the rest with him when he speaks in favour of peace and return to france out of spain. so, in the _iliad_ (ii.), the achaeans lend a ready ear to agamemnon when he proposes the abandonment of the siege of troy. each host, french and achaean, is heartily homesick. ganelon's advice prevailing, it is necessary to send an envoy to the saracen court. it is a dangerous mission; other envoys have been sent and been murdered. the peers, however, volunteer, beginning with the aged naismes, the nestor of the franks. his offer is not accepted, nor are those of oliver, roland, and turpin. roland then proposes that ganelon shall be sent; and hence arises the wrath of ganelon, which was the ruin of roland and the peers who stood by him. the warriors attack each other in speeches of homeric fury. charles preserves his dignity, and ganelon departs on his mission. he deliberately sells himself, and seals the fate of the peers whom he detests: the surprise of the rearguard under roland, the deadly battle, and the revenge of charles make up the rest of the poem. not even in victory is charles allowed repose; the trumpet again summons him to war. he is of those whom heaven has called to endless combat- "their whole lives long to be winding skeins of grievous wars, till every soul of them perish," in the words of diomede. such is the picture of the imperial charles in one of the oldest of the french epics. the heart of the poet is with the aged, but unbroken and truly imperial, figure of st. charlemagne--wise, just, and brave, a true "shepherd of the people," regarded as the conqueror of all the known kingdoms of the world. he is, among his fierce paladins, like "the conscience of a knight among his warring members." "the greatness of charlemagne has entered even into his name;" but as time went on and the feudal princes began the long struggle against the french king, the poets gratified their patrons by degrading the character of the emperor. they created a second type of charles, and it is the second type that on the whole most resembles the agamemnon of the _iliad._ we ask why the widely ruling lord of golden mycenae is so skilfully and persistently represented as respectable, indeed, by reason of his office, but detestable, on the whole, in character? the answer is that just as the second type of charles is the result of feudal jealousies of the king, so the character of agamemnon reflects the princely hatreds of what we may call the feudal age of greece. the masterly portrait of agamemnon could only have been designed to win the sympathies of feudal listeners, princes with an over-lord whom they cannot repudiate, for whose office they have a traditional reverence, but whose power they submit to with no good will, and whose person and character some of them can barely tolerate. [blank space] _an historical unity._ the poem deals with what may be called a feudal society, and the attitudes of the achaean bretwalda and of his peers are, from beginning to end of the _iliad_ and in every book of it, those of the peers and king in the later _chansons de geste_. returning to the decadent charles of the french epics, we lay no stress on the story of his incest with his sister, gilain, "whence sprang roland." the house of thyestes, whence agamemnon sprang, is marked by even blacker legends. the scandal is mythical, like the same scandal about the king arthur, who in romance is so much inferior to his knights, a reflection of feudal jealousies and hatreds. in places the reproaches hurled by the peers at charles read like paraphrases of those which the achaean princes cast at agamemnon. even naismes, the nestor of the french epics, cries: "it is for you that we have left our lands and fiefs, our fair wives and our children ... but, by the apostle to whom they pray in rome, were it not that we should be guilty before god we would go back to sweet france, and thin would be your host." [footnote: _chevalerie ogier_, 1510-1529. _épopées françaises_, léon gautier, vol. iii. pp. 156-157.] in the lines quoted we seem to hear the voice of the angered achilles: "we came not hither in our own quarrel, thou shameless one, but to please thee! but now go i back to phthia with my ships--the better part." [footnote: _iliad_, i. 158-169.] agamemnon answers that zeus is on his side, just as even the angry naismes admits that duty to god demands obedience to charles. there cannot be parallels more close and true than these, between poems born at a distance from each other of more than two thousand years, but born in similar historical conditions. in guide _bourgogne,_ a poem of the twelfth century, ogier cries, "they say that charlemagne is the conqueror of kingdoms: they lie, it is roland who conquers them with oliver, naismes of the long beard, and myself. as to charles, he eats." compare achilles to agamemnon, "thou, heavy with wine, with dog's eyes and heart of deer, never hast thou dared to arm thee for war with the host ..." [footnote: _iliad_, i. 227, 228. _gui de bourgogne_, pp. 37-41.] it is achilles or roland who stakes his life in war and captures cities; it is agamemnon or charles who camps by the wine. charles, in the _chanson de saisnes_, abases himself before herapois, even more abjectly than agamemnon in his offer of atonement to achilles. [footnote: _épopées françaises_, léon gautier, vol. iii. p. 158.] charles is as arrogant as agamemnon: he strikes roland with his glove, for an uncommanded victory, and then he loses heart and weeps as copiously as the penitent agamemnon often does when he rues his arrogance. [footnote: _entrée en espagne_.] the poet of the _iliad_ is a great and sober artist. he does not make agamemnon endure the lowest disgraces which the latest french epic poets heap on charles. but we see how close is the parallel between agamemnon and the charles of the decadent type. both characters are reflections of feudal jealousy of the over-lord; both reflect real antique historical conditions, and these were the conditions of the achaeans in europe, not of the ionians in asia. the treatment of agamemnon's character is harmonious throughout. it is not as if in "the original poem" agamemnon were revered like st. charlemagne in the _chanson de roland_, and in the "later" parts of the _iliad_ were reduced to the contemptible estate of the charles of the decadent _chanson de geste_. in the _iliad_ agamemnon's character is consistently presented from beginning to end, presented, i think, as it could only be by a great poet of the feudal achaean society in europe. the ionians--"democratic to the core," says mr. leaf--would either have taken no interest in the figure of the over-lord, or would have utterly degraded him below the level of the charles of the latest _chansons_. or the late rhapsodists, in their irresponsible lays, would have presented a wavering and worthless portrait. the conditions under which the _chansons_ arose were truly parallel to the conditions under which the homeric poems arose, and the poems, french and achaean, are also true parallels, except in genius. the french have no homer: _cared vate sacro_. it follows that a homer was necessary to the evolution of the greek epics. it may, perhaps, be replied to this argument that our _iliad_ is only a very late _remaniement_, like the fourteenth century _chansons de geste_, of something much earlier and nobler. but in france, in the age of _remaniement_, even the versification had changed from assonance to rhyme, from the decasyllabic line to the alexandrine in the decadence, while a plentiful lack of seriousness and a love of purely fanciful adventures in fairyland take the place of the austere spirit of war. ladies "in a coming on humour" abound, and charles is involved with his paladins in _gauloiseries_ of a rabelaisian cast. the french language has become a new thing through and through, and manners and weapons are of a new sort; but the high seriousness of the _iliad_ is maintained throughout, except in the burlesque battle of the gods: the versification is the stately hexameter, linguistic alterations are present, extant, but inconspicuous. that the armour and weapons are uniform in character throughout we have tried to prove, while the state of society and of religion is certainly throughout harmonious. our parallel, then, between the french and the greek national epics appears as perfect as such a thing can be, surprisingly perfect, while the great point of difference in degree of art is accounted for by the existence of an achaean poet of supreme genius. not such, certainly, were the composers of the cyclic poems, men contemporary with the supposed later poets of the _iliad_. chapter xvii conclusion the conclusion at which we arrive is that the _iliad_, as a whole, is the work of one age. that it has reached us without interpolations and _lacunae_ and _remaniements_ perhaps no person of ordinary sense will allege. but that the mass of the epic is of one age appears to be a natural inference from the breakdown of the hypotheses which attempt to explain it as a late mosaic. we have also endeavoured to prove, quite apart from the failure of theories of expansion and compilation, that the _iliad_ presents an historical unity, unity of character, unity of customary law, and unity in its archaeology. if we are right, we must have an opinion as to how the epic was preserved. if we had evidence for an homeric school, we might imagine that the epic was composed by dint of memory, and preserved, like the sanskrit hymns of the rig veda, and the hymns of the maoris, the zuñis, and other peoples in the lower or middle stage of barbarism, by the exertions and teaching of schools. but religious hymns and mythical hymns--the care of a priesthood--are one thing; a great secular epic is another. priests will not devote themselves from age to age to its conservation. it cannot be conserved, with its unity of tone and character, and, on the whole, even of language, by generations of paid strollers, who recite new lays of their own, as well as any old lays that they may remember, which they alter at pleasure. we are thus driven back to the theory of early written texts, not intended to meet the wants of a reading public, but for the use of the poet himself and of those to whom he may bequeath his work. that this has been a method in which orally published epics were composed and preserved in a non-reading age we have proved in our chapter on the french chansons _de geste_. unhappily, the argument that what was done in mediaeval france might be done in sub-mycenaean greece, is based on probabilities, and these are differently estimated by critics of different schools. all seems to depend on each individual's sense of what is "likely." in that case science has nothing to make in the matter. nitzsche thought that writing might go back to the time of homer. mr. monro thought it "probable enough that writing, even if known at the time of homer, was not used for literary purposes." [footnote: _iliad_, vol. i. p. xxxv.] sir richard jebb, as we saw, took a much more favourable view of the probability of early written texts. m. salomon reinach, arguing from the linear written clay tablets of knossos and from a knossian cup with writing on it in ink, thinks that there may have existed whole "minoan" libraries--manuscripts executed on perishable materials, palm leaves, papyrus, or parchment. [footnote: _l'anthropologie_, vol. xv, pp. 292, 293.] mr. leaf, while admitting that "writing was known in some form through the whole period of epic development," holds that "it is in the highest degree unlikely that it was ever employed to form a standard text of the epic or any portion of it.... at best there was a continuous tradition of those portions of the poems which were especially popular ..." [footnote: _iliad_, vol. i. pp. xvi., xvii.] father browne dates the employment of writing for the preservation of the epic "from the sixth century onwards." [footnote: _handbook of homeric study_, p. 134.] he also says that "it is difficult to suppose that the mycenaeans, who were certainly in contact with this form of writing" (the cretan linear), "should not have used it much more freely than our direct evidence warrants us in asserting." he then mentions the knossian cup "with writing inscribed on it apparently in pen and ink ... the conclusion is that ordinary writing was in use, but that the materials, probably palm leaves, have disappeared." [footnote: _ibid_., pp. 258, 259.] why it should be unlikely that a people confessedly familiar with writing used it for the preservation of literature, when we know that even the red indians preserve their songs by means of pictographs, while west african tribes use incised characters, is certainly not obvious. many sorts of prae-phoenician writing were current during the mycenaean age in asia, egypt, assyria, and in cyprus. as these other peoples used writing of their own sort for literary purposes, it is not easy to see why the cretans, for example, should not have done the same thing. indeed, father browne supposes that the mycenaeans used "ordinary writing," and used it freely. nevertheless, the epic was not written, he says, till the sixth century b.c. cauer, indeed, remarks that "the finnish epic" existed unwritten till lbnnrot, its pisistratus, first collected it from oral recitation. [footnote: _grundfragen der homerkritik_, p. 94.] but there is not, and never was, any "finnish epic." there were cosmogonic songs, as among the maoris and zuñis--songs of the beginnings of things; there were magical songs, songs of weddings, a song based on the same popular tale that underlies the legend of the argonauts. there were songs of the culture hero, songs of burial and feast, and of labour. lönnrot collected these, and tried by interpolations to make an epic out of them; but the point, as comparetti has proved, is that he failed. there is no finnish epic, only a mass of _volkslieder._ cauer's other argument, that the german popular tales, grimm's tales, were unwritten till 1812, is as remote from the point at issue. nothing can be less like an epic than a volume of _märchen._ as usual we are driven back upon a literary judgment. is the _iliad_ a patchwork of metrical _märchen_ or is it an epic nobly constructed? if it is the former, writing was not needed; if it is the latter, in the absence of homeric guilds or colleges, only writing can account for its preservation. it is impossible to argue against a critic's subjective sense of what is likely. possibly that sense is born of the feeling that the cretan linear script, for example, or the cyprian syllabary, looks very odd and outlandish. the critic's imagination boggles at the idea of an epic written in such scripts. in that case his is not the scientific imagination; he is checked merely by the unfamiliar. or his sense of unlikelihood may be a subconscious survival of wolf's opinion, formed by him at a time when the existence of the many scripts of the old world was unknown. our own sense of probability leads us to the conclusion that, in an age when people could write, people wrote down the epic. if they applied their art to literature, then the preservation of the epic is explained. written first in a prae-phoenician script, it continued to be written in the greek adaptation of the phoenician alphabet. there was not yet, probably, a reading public, but there were a few clerkly men. that the cretans, at least, could write long before the age of homer, mr. arthur evans has demonstrated by his discoveries. prom my remote undergraduate days i was of the opinion which he has proved to be correct, starting, like him, from what i knew about savage pictographs. [footnote: cretan _pictographs_ and _prae-phoenician_ script. london, 1905. annual of british _school_ of athens, 1900-1901, p. 10. journal of _hellenic studies,_ 1897, pp. 327-395.] m. reinach and mr. evans have pointed out that in this matter tradition joins hands with discovery. diodorus siculus, speaking of the cretan zeus and probably on cretan authority, says: "as to those who hold that the syrians invented letters, from whom the phoenicians received them and handed them on to the greeks, ... and that for this reason the greeks call letters 'phoenician,' some reply that the phoenicians did not [blank space] letters, but merely modified (transposed 3) the forms of the letters, and that most men use this form of script, and thus letters came to be styled 'phoenician.'" [footnote: diodorus siculus, v. 74. _l'anthropologie,_ vol. xi. pp. 497-502.] in fact, the alphabet is a collection of signs of palaeolithic antiquity and of vast diffusion. [footnote: origins of the alphabet. a. l. fortnightly review, 1904, pp. 634-645] thus the use of writing for the conservation of the epic cannot seem to me to be unlikely, but rather probable; and here one must leave the question, as the subjective element plays so great a part in every man's sense of what is likely or unlikely. that writing cannot have been used for this literary purpose, that the thing is impossible, nobody will now assert. my supposition is, then, that the text of the epic existed in aegean script till greece adapted to her own tongue the "phoenician letters," which i think she did not later than the ninth to eighth centuries; "at the beginning of the ninth century," says professor bury. [footnote: _history of greece_, vol. i. p. 78. 1902.] this may seem an audaciously early date, but when we find vases of the eighth to seventh centuries bearing inscriptions, we may infer that a knowledge of reading and writing was reasonably common. when such a humble class of hirelings or slaves as the pot-painters can sign their work, expecting their signatures to be read, reading and writing must be very common accomplishments among the more fortunate classes. if mr. gardner is right in dating a number of incised inscriptions on early pottery at naucratis before the middle of the seventh century, we reach the same conclusion. in fact, if these inscriptions be of a century earlier than the abu simbel inscriptions, of date 590 b.c., we reach 690 b.c. wherefore, as writing does not become common in a moment, it must have existed in the eighth century b.c. we are not dealing here with a special learned class, but with ordinary persons who could write. [footnote: _the early ionic alphabet: journal of hellenic studies_, vol. vii. pp. 220-239. roberts, _introduction to greek epigraphy_, pp. 31, 151, 159, 164, 165-167] interesting for our purpose is the verse incised on a dipylon vase, found at athens in 1880. it is of an ordinary cream-jug shape, with a neck, a handle, a spout, and a round belly. on the neck, within a zigzag "geometrical" pattern, is a doe, feeding, and a tall water-fowl. on the shoulder is scratched with a point, in very antique attic characters running from right to left, [greek: os nun orchaeston panton hatalotata pais ei, tou tode]. "this is the jug of him who is the most delicately sportive of all dancers of our time." the jug is attributed to the eighth century. [footnote: walters, _history of ancient pottery_, vol. ii. p, 243; kretschmer, _griechischen vasen inschriften_, p. 110, 1894, of the seventh century. h. von rohden, _denkmaler_, iii. pp. 1945, 1946: "probably dating from the seventh century." roberts, op. cit., vol. i. p. 74, "at least as far back as the seventh century," p. 75.] taking the vase, with mr. walters, as of the eighth century, i do not suppose that the amateur who gave it to a dancer and scratched the hexameter was of a later generation than the jug itself. the vase may have cost him sixpence: he would give his friend a _new_ vase; it is improbable that old jugs were sold at curiosity shops in these days, and given by amateurs to artists. the inscription proves that, in the eighth to seventh centuries, at a time of very archaic characters (the alpha is lying down on its side, the aspirate is an oblong with closed ends and a stroke across the middle, and the iota is curved at each end), people could write with ease, and would put verse into writing. the general accomplishment of reading is taken for granted. reading is also taken for granted by the gortyn (cretan) inscription of twelve columns long, _boustro-phedon_ (running alternately from left to right, and from right to left). in this inscribed code of laws, incised on stone, money is not mentioned in the more ancient part, but fines and prices are calculated in "chalders" and "bolls" ([greek: lebaetes] and [greek: tripodes]), as in scotland when coin was scarce indeed. whether the law contemplated the value of the vessels themselves, or, as in scotland, of their contents in grain, i know not. the later inscriptions deal with coined money. if coin came in about 650 b.c., the older parts of the inscription may easily be of 700 b.c. the gortyn inscription implies the power of writing out a long code of laws, and it implies that persons about to go to law could read the public inscription, as we can read a proclamation posted up on a wall, or could have it read to them. [footnote: roberts, vol. i. pp. 52-55.] the alphabets inscribed on vases of the seventh century (abecedaria), with "the archaic greek forms of every one of the twenty-two phoenician letters arranged precisely in the received semitic order," were, one supposes, gifts for boys and girls who were learning to read, just like our english alphabets on gingerbread. [footnote: for abecedaria, cf. roberts, vol. i. pp. 16-21.] among inscriptions on tombstones of the end of the seventh century, there is the epitaph of a daughter of a potter. [footnote: roberts, vol. i. p. 76.] these writings testify to the general knowledge of reading, just as much as our epitaphs testify to the same state of education. the athenian potter's daughter of the seventh century b.c. had her epitaph, but the grave-stones of highlanders, chiefs or commoners, were usually uninscribed till about the end of the eighteenth century, in deference to custom, itself arising from the illiteracy of the highlanders in times past. [footnote: ramsay, _scotland and scotsmen_, ii. p. 426. 1888.] i find no difficulty, therefore, in supposing that there were some greek readers and writers in the eighth century, and that primary education was common in the seventh. in these circumstances my sense of the probable is not revolted by the idea of a written epic, in [blank space] characters, even in the eighth century, but the notion that there was no such thing till the middle of the sixth century seems highly improbable. all the conditions were present which make for the composition and preservation of literary works in written texts. that there were many early written copies of homer in the eighth century i am not inclined to believe. the greeks were early a people who could read, but were not a reading people. setting newspapers aside, there is no such thing as a reading _people_. the greeks preferred to listen to recitations, but my hypothesis is that the rhapsodists who recited had texts, like the _jongleurs_' books of their epics in france, and that they occasionally, for definite purposes, interpolated matter into their texts. there were also texts, known in later times as "city texts" ([greek: ai kata poleis]), which aristarchus knew, but he did not adopt the various readings. [footnote: monro, odyssey, vol. ii. p, 435.] athens had a text in solon's time, if he entered the decree that the whole epic should be recited in due order, every five years, at the panathenaic festival. [footnote: _ibid_., vol. ii. p. 395.] "this implies the possession of a complete text." [footnote: _ibid_., vol. ii. p. 403.] cauer remarks that the possibility of "interpolation" "began only after the fixing of the text by pisistratus." [footnote: _grundfragen_, p. 205.] but surely if every poet and reciter could thrust any new lines which he chose to make into any old lays which he happened to know, that was interpolation, whether he had a book of the words or had none. such interpolations would fill the orally recited lays which the supposed pisistratean editor must have written down from recitation before he began his colossal task of making the _iliad_ out of them. if, on the other hand, reciters had books of the words, they could interpolate at pleasure into _them_, and such books may have been among the materials used in the construction of a text for the athenian book market. but if our theory be right, there must always have been a few copies of better texts than those of the late reciters' books, and the effort of the editors for the book market would be to keep the parts in which most manuscripts were agreed. but how did athens, or any other city, come to possess a text? one can only conjecture; but my conjecture is that there had always been texts--copied out in successive generations--in the hands of the curious; for example, in the hands of the cyclic poets, who knew our _iliad_ as the late french cyclic poets knew the earlier _chansons de geste_. they certainly knew it, for they avoided interference with it; they worked at epics which led up to it, as in the _cypria;_ they borrowed _motifs_ from hints and references in the _iliad_, [footnote: monro, _odyssey_, vol. ii. pp. 350, 351.] and they carried on the story from the death of hector, in the _aethiopis_ of arctinus of miletus. this epic ended with the death of achilles, when _the little iliad_ produced the tale to the bringing in of the wooden horse. arctinus goes on with his _sack_ of _ilios_, others wrote of _the return_ of _the heroes,_ and the _telegonia_ is a sequel to the odyssey. the authors of these poems knew the _iliad_, then, as a whole, and how could they have known it thus if it only existed in the casual _repertoire_ of strolling reciters? the cyclic poets more probably had texts of homer, and themselves wrote their own poems--how it paid, whether they recited them and collected rewards or not, is, of course, unknown. the cyclic poems, to quote sir richard jebb, "help to fix the lowest limit for the age of the homeric poems. [footnote: _homer_, pp. 151, 154.] the earliest cyclic poems, dating from about 776 b.c., presuppose the _iliad_, being planned to introduce or continue it.... it would appear, then, that the _iliad_ must have existed in something like its present compass as early as 800 b.c.; indeed a considerably earlier date will seem probable, if due time is allowed for the poem to have grown into such fame as would incite the effort to continue it and to prelude to it." sir richard then takes the point on which we have already insisted, namely, that the cyclic poets of the eighth century b.c. live in an age of ideas, religions, ritual, and so forth which are absent from the _iliad_ [footnote: homer, pp. 154, 155.] thus the _iliad_ existed with its characteristics that are prior to 800 b.c., and in its present compass, and was renowned before 800 b.c. as it could not possibly have thus existed in the _repertoire_ of irresponsible strolling minstrels and reciters, and as there is no evidence for a college, school, or guild which preserved the epic by a system of mnemonic teaching, while no one can deny at least the possibility of written texts, we are driven to the hypothesis that written texts there were, whence descended, for example, the text of athens. we can scarcely suppose, however, that such texts were perfect in all respects, for we know how, several centuries later, in a reading age, papyrus fragments of the _iliad_ display unwarrantable interpolation. [footnote: monro, _odyssey_, vol. ii. pp. 422-426.] but plato's frequent quotations, of course made at an earlier date, show that "whatever interpolated texts of homer were then current, the copy from which plato quoted was not one of them." [footnote: _ibid_., p. 429] plato had something much better. when a reading public for homer arose--and, from the evidences of the widespread early knowledge of reading, such a small public may have come into existence sooner than is commonly supposed--athens was the centre of the book trade. to athens must be due the prae-alexandrian vulgate, or prevalent text, practically the same as our own. some person or persons must have made that text--not by taking down from recitation all the lays which they could collect, as herd, scott, mrs. brown, and others collected much of the _border minstrelsy_, and not by then tacking the lays into a newly-composed whole. they must have done their best with such texts as were accessible to them, and among these were probably the copies used by reciters and rhapsodists, answering to the ms. books of the mediaeval _jongleurs._ mr. jevons has justly and acutely remarked that "we do not know, and there is no external evidence of any description which leads us to suppose, that the _iliad_ was ever expanded" (_j. h. s_, vii. 291-308). that it was expanded is a mere hypothesis based on the idea that "if there was an _iliad_ at all in the ninth century, its length must have been such as was compatible with the conditions of an oral delivery,"--"a poem or poems short enough to be recited at a single sitting." but we have proved, with mr. jevons and blass, and by the analogy of the chansons that, given a court audience (and a court audience is granted), there were no such narrow limits imposed on the length of a poem orally recited from night to night. the length of the _iliad_ yields, therefore, no argument for expansions throughout several centuries. that theory, suggested by the notion that the original poem _must_ have been short, is next supposed to be warranted by the inconsistencies and discrepancies. but we argue that these are only visible, as a rule, to "the analytical reader," for whom the poet certainly was not composing; that they occur in all long works of fictitious narrative; that the discrepancies often are not discrepancies; and, finally, that they are not nearly so glaring as the inconsistencies in the theories of each separatist critic. a theory, in such matter as this, is itself an explanatory myth, or the plot of a story which the critic invents to account for the facts in the case. these critical plots, we have shown, do not account for the facts of the case, for the critics do not excel in constructing plots. they wander into unperceived self-contradictions which they would not pardon in the poet. these contradictions are visible to "the analytical reader," who concludes that a very early poet may have been, though homer seldom is, as inconsistent as a modern critic. meanwhile, though we have no external evidence that the _iliad_ was ever expanded--that it was expanded is an explanatory myth of the critics--"we do know, on good evidence," says mr. jevons, "that the _iliad_ was rhapsodised." the rhapsodists were men, as a rule, of one day recitations, though at a prolonged festival at athens there was time for the whole _iliad_ to be recited. "they chose for recitation such incidents as could be readily detached, were interesting in themselves, and did not take too long to recite." mr. jevons suggests that the many brief poems collected in the homeric hymns are invocations which the rhapsodists preluded to their recitals. the practice seems to have been for the rhapsodist first to pay his reverence to the god, "to begin from the god," at whose festival the recitation was being given (the short proems collected in the hymns pay this reverence), "and then proceed with his rhapsody"--with his selected passage from the _iliad_, "beginning with thee" (the god of the festival), "i will go on to another lay," that is, to his selection from the epic. another conclusion of the proem often is, "i will be mindful both of thee and of another lay," meaning, says mr. jevons, that "the local deity will figure in the recitation from homer which the rhapsodist is about to deliver." these explanations, at all events, yield good sense. the invocation of athene (hymns, xi., xxviii.) would serve as the proem of invocation to the recital of _iliad_, v., vi. 1-311, the day of valour of diomede, spurred on by the wanton rebuke of agamemnon, and aided by athene. the invocation of hephaestus (hymn xx.), would prelude to a recital of the _making of the awns of achilles_, and so on. but the rhapsodist may be reciting at a festival of dionysus, about whom there is practically nothing said in the _iliad_; for it is a proof of the antiquity of the _iliad_ that, when it was composed, dionysus had not been raised to the olympian peerage, being still a folk-god only. the rhapsodist, at a feast of dionysus in later times, has to introduce the god into his recitation. the god is not in his text, but he adds him. [footnote:_ibid_., vi. 130-141] why should any mortal have made this interpolation? mr. jevons's theory supplies the answer. the rhapsodist added the passages to suit the dionysus feast, at which he was reciting. the same explanation is offered for the long story of the _birth_ of [blank space] which agamemnon tells in his speech of apology and reconciliation. [footnote:_ibid_., xix. 136.] there is an invocation to heracles (hymns, xv.), and the author may have added this speech to his rhapsody of the reconciliation, recited at a feast of heracles. perhaps the remark of mr. leaf offers the real explanation of the presence of this long story in the speech of agamemnon: "many speakers with a bad case take refuge in telling stories." agamemnon shows, says mr. leaf, "the peevish nervousness of a man who feels that he has been in the wrong," and who follows a frank speaker like achilles, only eager for agamemnon to give the word to form and charge. so agamemnon takes refuge in a long story, throwing the blame of his conduct on destiny. we do not need, then, the theory of a rhapsodist's interpolation, but it is quite plausible in itself. local heroes, as well as gods, had their feasts in post-homeric times, and a reciter at a feast of aeneas, or of his mother, aphrodite, may have foisted in the very futile discourse of achilles and aeneas, [footnote:_ibid_., xx. 213-250.] with its reference to erichthonius, an athenian hero. in other cases the rhapsodist rounded off his selected passage by a few lines, as in _iliad_, xiii. 656-659, where a hero is brought to follow his son's dead body to the grave, though the father had been killed in _v. 576_. "it is really such a slip as is often made by authors who write," says mr. leaf; and, in _esmond_, thackeray makes similar errors. the passage in xvi. 69-80, about which so much is said, as if it contradicted book ix. (_the embassy to achilles_), is also, mr. jevons thinks, to be explained as "inserted by a rhapsodist wishing to make his extract complete in itself." another example--the confusion in the beginning of book ii.--we have already discussed (see chapter iv.), and do not think that any explanation is needed, when we understand that agamemnon, once wide-awake, had no confidence in his dream. however, mr. jevons thinks that rhapsodists, anxious to recite straight on from the dream to the battle, added ii. 35-41, "the only lines which represent agamemnon as believing confidently in his dream." we have argued that he only believed _till he awoke_, and then, as always, wavered. thus, in our way of looking at these things, interpolations by rhapsodists are not often needed as explanations of difficulties. still, granted that the rhapsodists, like the _jongleurs_, had texts, and that these were studied by the makers of the vulgate, interpolations and errors might creep in by this way. as to changes in language, "a poetical dialect... is liable to be gradually modified by the influence of the ever-changing colloquial speech. and, in the early times, when writing was little used, this influence would be especially operative." [footnote: monro, _odyssey_, vol. ii. p. 461.] to conclude, the hypothesis of a school of mnemonic teaching of the _iliad_ would account for the preservation of so long a poem in an age destitute of writing, when memory would be well cultivated. there may have been such schools. we only lack evidence for their existence. but against the hypothesis of the existence of early texts, there is nothing except the feeling of some critics that it is not likely. "they are dangerous guides, the feelings." in any case the opinion that the _iliad_ was a whole, centuries before pisistratus, is the hypothesis which is by far the least fertile in difficulties, and, consequently, in inconsistent solutions of the problems which the theory of expansion first raises, and then, like an unskilled magician, fails to lay. produced from images generously made available by case western reserve university preservation department digital library) homer's odyssey. a commentary by denton j. snider the sigma publishing co. 10 van buren st., chicago, ill. 210 pine st., st. louis, mo. table of contents. page introduction 5 i. first twelve books. telemachiad 21 ulyssiad 121 (1) ocygia 129 (2) phæacia 156 (3) fableland 231 ii. second twelve books. ithakeiad 396 books 13-16 (preparation) 407 books 17-24 (execution) 461 (1) wrong (17-21) 468 (2) punishment (22) 495 (3) reconciliation (23-4) 500 summary 511 _homer's odyssey._ _book first--introduction._ the odyssey starts by organizing itself; it maps out its own structure in what may be called a general introduction. herein lies a significant difference between it and the iliad, which has simply an invocation to the muse, and then leaps into the thick of the action. the iliad, accordingly, does not formulate its own organization, which fact has been one cause of the frequent assaults upon its unity. still the architectonic principle is powerful in the iliad, though more instinctive, and far less explicit than in the odyssey. it is reasonable to suppose, therefore, that the poet has reached a profounder consciousness of his art in his later poem; he has come to a knowledge of his constructive principle, and he takes the trouble to unfold the same at the beginning. to be sure, certain critics have assailed just this structural fact as not homeric; without good grounds, in our judgment. the first book, accordingly, opens with an introduction which belongs to the entire poem, and which embraces 95 lines of the original text. this portion we shall look at separately in some detail, as it throws a number of gleams forward over the whole action, and, as before said, suggests the poetic organism. it has three divisions, the invocation, the statement of the obstacles to the return of the hero, and the assembly of the gods, who are represented as organizing the poem from olympus. the divine thus hovers over the poem from the first, starting with one grand, all-embracing providential act, which, however, is supplemented by many special interventions of deities, great and small. _the invocation._ the first line speaks of the man, ulysses, and designates his main attribute by a word, which may be translated _versatile_ or _resourceful_, though some grammarians construe it otherwise. thus we are told at the start of the chief intellectual trait of the hero, who "wandered much," and who, therefore, had many opportunities to exercise his gift. in the second line our attention is called to the real starting point of the poem, the taking of troy, which is the background of the action of the odyssey, and the great opening event of the greek world, as here revealed. for this event was the mighty shake which roused the hellenic people to a consciousness of their destiny; they show in it all the germs of their coming greatness. often such a concussion is required to waken a nation to its full energy and send it on its future career. note that ulysses is here stated to be the taker of troy, and this view is implied throughout the odyssey. note achilles is the final greek hero; he perished without capturing the city, and in his hands alone the greek cause would have been lost. the intellectual hero had to come forward ere the hostile town could be taken and helen restored. herein the odyssey does not contradict the iliad, but is clearly an advance beyond it. but troy is destroyed and now the second grand question of the greeks arises: how shall we get back! only one half of the cycle is completed by the conquest of the hostile city; the second half is the restoration. for this disjunction from hellenic life, brought about by war, is not only physical but has become spiritual. the theme, therefore, deals with the wise man, who, through his intelligence, was able to take troy, but who has now another and greater problem--the return out of the grand estrangement caused by the trojan expedition. spiritual restoration is the key-note of this _odyssey_, as it is that of all the great books of literature. here at the start we note two things coupled together which hint the nature of the whole poem: "he saw the cities of many men and knew their mind." not alone the outer habitations of people ulysses beheld, but also their inner essence, their consciousness. this last faculty indeed is the very vision of the sage; he looks through the external sensuous appearances of men into their character, into their very soul. the poem will describe many incidents, wanderings, tempests, calamities; but in them the poetic glance is to behold a great spiritual experience. the reader of the _odyssey_ must himself be a ulysses, to a degree, and not only "see the cities of many men," but also he must "know their mind." then he, too, is heroic in his reading of this book. but not merely knowledge the hero is to acquire, though this be much; the counterpart to knowledge must also be his, namely, suffering. "many things he suffered on the sea in his heart;" alas! that too belongs to the great experience. in addition to his title of wise man, he will also be called the much-enduring man. sorrow is his lot and great tribulation; the mighty sea will rise up in wrath and swallow all, except that which is mightier, namely his heroic heart. knowledge and suffering--are they not the two poles of the universal character? at any rate the old poet has mated them as counterparts in his hero; the thirst to know drives the latter to reach beyond, and then falls the avenging blow of powers unseen. furthermore, there is a third trait which is still higher, also mentioned here: he sought to save not only himself but also his companions. that wisdom of his was employed, and that suffering of his was endured, not for his own good merely, but for the good of others. he must think and suffer for his companions; a suggestion of vicariousness lies therein, a hint of self-offering, which has not yet flowered but is certainly budding far back in old hellas. he must do for others what he does for himself, if he be truly the universal man, that is, if he be hero. for is not the universal man all men--both himself and others in essence? so ulysses tries to save his companions, quite as much he tries to save himself. but he did not do it, he could not do it; herein lies his limitation and theirs also, in fact, the limitation of the entire greek world. what did these companions do? "they perished by their own folly;" they would not obey the counsel of their wise man; they rejected their hero, who could not, therefore, rescue them. a greater wisdom and a deeper suffering than that of ulysses will be required for their salvation, whereof the time has not yet come. he would bring them home, but "they ate of the oxen of the sun;" they destroyed the attribute of light in some way and perished. the fact is certainly far-reaching in its suggestion; a deep glance it throws into that old heathen world, whose greatest poet in the most unconscious manner hints here the tragic limitation of his people and his epoch. it is a hint of which we, looking back through more than twenty-five centuries can see the full meaning, as that meaning has unfolded itself in the ages. time is also a commentator on homer and has written down, in that alphabet of his, called events, the true interpretation of the old poet. still the letters of time's alphabet have also to be learned and require not only eyesight but also insight. the invocation puts all its stress upon ulysses and his attempt to save his companions. it says nothing of telemachus and his youthful experience, nothing of the grand conflict with the suitors. hence fault has been found with it in various ways. but it singles out the hero and designates three most important matters concerning him: his knowledge, his suffering, his devotion to his companions. enough; it has given a start, a light has been put into our hand which beams forward significantly upon the poem, and illumines the mazes of the hero's character. mark again the emphatic word in this invocation; it is the return (_nostos_), the whole odyssey is the return, set forth in many gradations, from the shortest and simplest to the longest and profoundest. the idea of the return dominates the poem from the start; into this idea is poured the total experience of ulysses and his companions. the two points between which the return hovers are also given: the capture of troy and the greek world. not a mere book of travels or adventure is this; it contains an inner restoration corresponding to the outer return, and the interpreter of the work, if he be true to his function, will trace the interior line of its movement, not neglecting the external side which has also a right to be. _the obstacles._ two of these are mentioned and carried back to their mythical sources. all the returning heroes are home from troy except the chief one, ulysses, whom calypso detains in her grot, "wishing him to be her husband;" she, the unmarried, keeps him, the married, from family and country, though he longs to go back to both. she is the daughter of "the evil-minded atlas," a hoary gigantesque shape of primitive legend, "who knows the depths of all the sea,"--a dark knowledge of an unseen region, from which come many fatalities, as shipwreck for the greek sailor or earthquake for the volcanic greek islands; hence he is imagined as "evil-minded" by the greek mythical fancy, which also makes him the supporter of "the long columns which hold heaven and earth apart"--surely a hard task, enough to cause anybody to be in a state of protest and opposition against the happy gods who have nothing to do but enjoy themselves on olympus. sometimes he refuses to hold the long columns for awhile, then comes the earthquake, in which what is below starts heavenward. of this atlas, calypso is the offspring, and possibly her island, "the navel of the sea," is a product of one of his movements underneath the waters. here we touch a peculiar vein in the mythical treatment of the odyssey. the fairy-tale, with its comprehensive but dark suggestiveness, is interwoven into the very fibre of the poem. this remote atlas is the father of calypso, "the hider," who has indeed hidden ulysses in her island of pleasure which will hereafter be described. but in spite of his "concealment," ulysses has aspiration, which calls down the help of the gods for fulfillment. such is the first obstacle, which, we can see, lies somewhere in the sensuous part of human nature. the second obstacle is neptune, whom we at once think of as the physical sea--certainly a great barrier. the wrath of neptune is also set off with a tale of wonder, which gives the origin of polyphemus, the cyclops--a gigantic, monstrous birth of the sea, which produces so many strange and huge shapes of living things. but neptune is now far away, outside of the greek world, so to speak, among the ethiopians. this implies a finite element in the gods; they are here, there, and elsewhere; still they have the infinite characteristic also; they easily pass from somewhere into everywhere, and ulysses will not escape neptune. such, then, are the two obstacles, both connected far back with mythical beings of the sea, wherein we may note the marine character of the odyssey, which is a sea-poem, in contrast with the iliad, which is a land-poem. the physical environment, in which each of these songs has its primary setting, is in deep accord with their respective themes--the one being more objective, singing of the deed, the other being more subjective, singing of the soul. and even in the two present obstacles we may note that the one, neptune, seems more external--that of the physical sea; while the other, calypso, seems more internal--that of the soul held in the charms of the senses. _the assembly of the gods._ the two obstacles to the return of ulysses are now to be considered by the gods in council assembled. this is, indeed, the matter of first import; no great action, no great poem is possible outside of the divine order. this order now appears, having a voice; the supreme authority of the world is to utter its decree concerning the work. the poet at the start summons before us the governing principle of the universe in the persons of the olympian deities. on the other hand, note the solitary individual ulysses, in a lonely island, with his aspiration for home and country, with his plan--will it be realized? the two sides must come together somehow; the plan of the individual must fit into the plan of the gods; only in the cooperation of the human and divine is the deed, especially the great deed, possible. accordingly we are now to behold far in advance the sweep of the poem, showing whether the man's purpose and hope be in harmony with the government of the gods. zeus is the supreme divinity, and he first speaks: "how sorely mortals blame the gods!" it is indeed an alienated discordant time like the primal fall in eden. but why this blame? "for they say that evils come from us, the gods; whereas they, through their own follies, have sorrows beyond what is ordained." the first words of the highest god concern the highest problem of the poem and of human life. it is a wrong theology, at least a wrong homeric theology, to hold that the gods are the cause of human ills; these are the consequences of man's own actions. furthermore, the cause is not a blind impersonal power outside of the individual, it is not fate but man himself. what a lofty utterance! we hear from the supreme tribunal the final decision in regard to individual free-will and divine government. not without significance is this statement put into the mouth of zeus and made his first emphatic declaration. we may read therein how the poet would have us look at his poem and the intervention of the gods. we may also infer what is the homeric view concerning the place of divinity in the workings of the world. such being the command of zeus, the interpreter has nothing to do but to obey. no longer shall we say that the gods in this odyssey destroy human freedom, but that they are deeply consistent with it; the divine interference when it takes place is not some external agency beyond the man altogether, but is in some way his own nature, veritably the essence of his own will. such is truly the thing to be seen; the poem is a poem of freedom, and yet a poem of providence; for do we not hear providence at the very start declaring man's free-will, and hence his responsibility? the god, then, is not to destroy but to secure human liberty in action, and to assert it on proper occasions. thus zeus himself has laid down the law, the fundamental principle of homer's religion as well as of his poem. have the gods, then, nothing to do in this world? certainly they have, and this is the next point upon which we shall hear our supreme authority, zeus. he has in mind the case of ægisthus whom the gods warned not to do the wicked deed; still he did it in spite of the warning, and there followed the penalty. so the gods admonish the wrong-doer, sending down their bright-flashing messenger hermes, and declaring through him the great law of justice: the deed will return unto the doer. zeus has now given expression to the law which governs the world; it is truly his law, above all caprice. moreover, the god gives a warning to the sinner; a divine mercy he shows even in the heathen world. the case of ægisthus, which zeus has in mind, is indeed a striking example of a supreme justice which smites the most exalted and successful criminal. it made a profound impression upon the greek world, and took final shape in the sublime tragedy of æschylus. throughout the _odyssey_ the fateful story peeps from the background, and strongly hints what is to become of the suitors of penelope, who are seeking to do to ulysses what ægisthus did to agamemnon. they will perish, is the decree; thus we behold at the beginning of the poem an image which foreshadows the end. that is the image of ægisthus, upon whom vengeance came for the wrongful deed. the gods, then, do really exist; they are the law and the voice of the law also, to which man may hearken if he will; but he can disobey, if he choose, and bring upon himself the consequences. the law exists as the first fact in the world, and will work itself out with the gods as executors. is not this a glorious starting-point for a poem which proposes to reveal the ways of providence unto men? the idea of the homeric world-order is now before us, which we may sum up as follows: the gods are in the man, in his reason and conscience, as we moderns say; but they are also outside of man, in the world, of which they are rulers. the two sides, divine and human, must be made one; the grand dualism between heaven and earth must be overcome in the deed of the hero, as well as in the thought of the reader. when the god appears, it is to raise man out of himself into the universal realm where lies his true being. again, let it be affirmed that the deities are not an external fate, not freedom-destroying power, but freedom-fulfilling, since they burst the narrow limits of the mere individual and elevate him into unity and harmony with the divine order. there he is truly free. thus we hear zeus in his first speech announcing from olympus the two great laws which govern the world, as well as this poem--that of freedom and that of justice. the latter, indeed, springs from the former; if man be free, he must be held responsible and receive the penalty of the wicked deed. moreover, it is the fundamental law of criticism for the _odyssey_; freedom and justice we are to see in it and unfold them in accord with the divine order; woe be to the critic who disobeys the decree of zeus, and sees in his poem only an amusing tale, or a sun-myth perchance. but here is pallas athena speaking to the supreme deity, and noting what seems to be an exception. it is the case of ulysses, who always "gave sacrifices to the immortal gods," who has done his duty, and wishes to return to family and country. pallas hints the difficulty; calypso the charmer, seeks to detain him in her isle from his wedded wife and to make him forget ithaca; but she cannot. strong is his aspiration, he is eager to break the trance of the fair nymph, and the gods must help him, when he is ready to help himself. else, indeed, they were not gods. then there is the second obstacle, neptune; he, "only one," cannot hold out "against all," for the all now decrees the restoration of the wanderer. verily it is the voice of the totality, which is here uttered by zeus, ordering the return of ulysses; the reason of the world we may also call it, if that will help the little brain take in the great thought. but we must not forget the other side. this divine power is not simply external; the mighty hand of zeus is not going to pick up ulysses from calypso's island, and set him down in ithaca. he must return through himself, yet must fit into the providential order. both sides are touched upon by zeus; ulysses "excels mortals in intelligence," and he will now require it all; but he also "gives sacrifices to the gods exceedingly," that is, he seeks to find out the will of the gods and adjust himself thereto. intellect and piety both he has, often in conflict, but in concord at last. with that keen understanding of his he will repeatedly fall into doubt concerning the divine purpose; but out of doubt he rises into a new harmony. when the decree of the highest has been given, pallas at once organizes the return of ulysses, and therewith the poem. this falls into three large divisions:-i. pallas goes to ithaca to rouse telemachus, who is just entering manhood, to be a second ulysses. he is to give the divine warning to the guilty suitors; then he is to go to pylos and sparta in order to inquire about his father, who is the great pattern for the son. thus we have a book of education for the homeric youth whose learning came through example and through the living word of wisdom from the lips of the old and experienced man. this part embraces the first four books, which may be called the telemachiad. ii. mercury is sent to calypso to bid the nymph release ulysses, who at once makes his raft and starts on his voyage homeward. in this second part we shall have the entire story of the hero from the time he leaves troy, till he reaches ithaca in the 13th book. as telemachus the youth is to have his period of education (_lehrjahre_), so ulysses the man is to have his experience of the journey of life (_wanderjahre_). both parts belong together, making a complete work on the education of man, as it could be had in that old greek world. this part is the odyssey proper, or the ulyssiad. iii. the third part brings together father and son in ithaca; then it portrays them uniting to perform the great deed of justice, the punishment of the suitors. this part embraces the last twelve books, but is not distinctly set forth in the plan of pallas as here given. such is the structure of the poem, which is organized in its main outlines from olympus. it is pallas, the deity of wisdom, who has ordered it in this way; her we shall follow, in preference to the critics, and unfold the interpretation on the same organic lines. every reader will feel that the three great joints of the poetical body are truly foreshadowed by the goddess, who indeed is the constructive principle of the poem. one likes to see this belief of the old singer that his work was of divine origin, was actually planned upon olympus by pallas in accordance with the decree of zeus. so at least the muses have told him, and they were present. but the grandest utterance here is that of zeus, the greek providence, proclaiming man's free will. very old and still very new is the problem of the odyssey; with a little care we can see that the homeric greek had to solve in his way what every one of us still has to solve, namely, the problem of life. only yesterday one might have heard the popular preacher of a great city, a kind of successor to homer, blazoning the following text as his theme: god is not to blame. thus the great poem has an eternal subject, though its outer garb be much changed by time. the soul of homer is ethical, and that is what makes him immortal. not till we realize this fact, can we be said in any true sense, to understand him. telemachiad. the introduction being concluded, the story of telemachus begins, and continues till the fifth book. two main points stand forth in the narrative. the first is the grand conflict with the suitors, the men of guilt, the disturbers of the divine order; this conflict runs through to the end of the poem, where they are swept out of the world which they have thrown into discord. the second point of the telemachiad is the education of telemachus, which is indeed the chief fact of these books; the youth is to be trained to meet the conflict which is looming up before him in the distance. thus we have one of the first educational books of the race, the very first possibly; it still has many valuable hints for the educator of the present age. its method is that of oral tradition, which has by no means lost its place in a true discipline of the human spirit. living wisdom has its advantage to-day over the dead lore of the text-books. very delightful is the school to which we see telemachus going in these four books. heroes are his instructors, men of the deed as well as of the word, and the source from which all instruction is derived is the greatest event of the age, the trojan war. the young man is to learn what that event was, what sacrifices it required, what characters it developed among his people. he is to see and converse with nestor, famous at troy for eloquence and wisdom. then he will go to menelaus, who has had an experience wider than the trojan experience, for the latter has been in egypt. young telemachus is also to behold helen, beautiful helen, the central figure of the great struggle. finally, he is to learn much about his father, and thus be prepared for the approaching conflict with the suitors in ithaca. _book first specially._ after the total odyssey has been organized on olympus, it begins at once to descend to earth and to realize itself there. for the great poem springs from the divine idea, and must show its origin in the course of its own unfolding. hence the gods are the starting-point of the odyssey, and their will goes before the terrestrial deed; moreover, the one decree of theirs overarches the poem from beginning to end, as the heavens bend over man wherever he may take his stand. still there will be many special interventions and reminders from the gods during this poetical journey. in accordance with the olympian plan, pallas takes her flight down to ithaca, after binding on her winged sandals and seizing her mighty spear; thus she humanizes herself to the greek plastic sense, and assumes finite form, adopting the shape of a stranger, mentes, king of the taphians. she finds a world full of wrong; violence and disorder rule in the house of the absent ulysses; it is indeed high time for the gods to come down from lofty olympus and bring peace and right into the course of things. let the divine image now be stamped upon terrestrial affairs, and bring harmony out of strife. still, it must not be forgotten that the work has to be done through man's own activity. the conflict which unfolds before our eyes in a series of clear-drawn classic pictures, lies between the house of ulysses on the one hand and the suitors of penelope on the other. he who is the head of the family and the ruler of state, ulysses, has been absent for twenty years; godless men have taken advantage of the youth of his son, and are consuming his substance wantonly; they also are wooing his wife who has only her cunning wherewith to help herself. the son and wife are now to be brought before us in their struggle with their bitter lot. thus we note the two main divisions in the structure of the present book: the house of ulysses and the suitors. i. the goddess pallas has already come down to ithaca and stands among the suitors. she has taken the form of mentes, the king of a neighboring tribe; she is in disguise as she usually is when she appears on earth. who will recognize her? not the suitors; they can see no god in their condition, least of all, the goddess of wisdom. "telemachus was much the first to observe her;" why just he? the fact is he was ready to see her, and not only to see her, but to hear what she had to say. "for he sat among the suitors grieved in heart, seeing his father in his mind's eye," like hamlet just before the latter saw the ghost. so careful is the poet to prepare both sides--the divine epiphany, and the mortal who is to behold it. furthermore, the young man saw his father "scattering the suitors and himself obtaining honor and ruling his own house." this is just what the goddess is going to tell with a new sanction, and it is just what is going to happen in the course of the poem. truly telemachus is prepared internally; he has already everything within him which is to come out of him. throughout the whole interview the two main facts are the example of the parent and the final revenge, both of which are urged by the goddess without and by the man within. still there is a difference. telemachus is despondent; we might almost say, he is getting to disbelieve in any divine order of the world. "the gods plot evil things" against the house of ulysses, whose fate "they make unknown above that of all men." then they have sent upon me these suitors who consume my heritage. the poor boy has had a hard time; he has come to question providence in his misery, and discredits the goodness of the gods. here, now, is the special function of pallas. she instills courage into his heart. she gives strong hope of the return of his father, who "will not long be absent from ithaca;" she also hints the purpose of the gods, which is on the point of fulfillment. be no longer a child; follow the example of thy father; go and learn about him and emulate his deeds. therewith the goddess furnishes to the doubting youth a plan of immediate action--altogether the best thing for throwing off his mental paralysis. he is to proceed at once to pylos and to sparta "to learn of his father" with the final outlook toward the destruction of the suitors. she is a veritable goddess to the young striver, speaking the word of hope and wisdom, and then turning him back upon himself. here again we must say that the goddess was in the heart of telemachus uttering her spirit, yet she was external to him also. her voice is the voice of the time, of the reality; all things are fluid to the hand of telemachus, and ready to be moulded to his scheme. still the goddess is in him just as well, is his thought, his wisdom, which has now become one with the reason of the world. both sides are brought together by the poet in the most emphatic manner; this is the supreme fact in his procedure. the subjective and objective elements are one; the divine order puts its seal on the thought of the man, unites with him, makes his plan its plan. thus the god and the individual are in harmony, and the great fulfillment becomes possible. but if the thought of telemachus were a mere scheme of his own, if it had not received the stamp of divinity, then it could never become the deed, the heroic deed, which stands forth in the world existent in its own right and eternal. the goddess flits away, "like a bird," in speed and silence. telemachus now recognizes that the stranger was a divinity. for has he not the proof in his own heart? he is indeed a new person or the beginning thereof. but hark to this song! it is the bard singing "the sad return of the greeks"--the very song which the poet himself is now singing in this odyssey. for it is also a sad return, indeed many sad returns, as we shall see hereafter. homer has thus put himself into his poem singing his poem. who cannot feel that this touch is taken from life, is an echo of his own experience in some princely hall? but here she comes, the grand lady of the story, penelope, the wife of ulysses, as it were in response to the music. a glorious appearance at a happy moment; yet she is not happy: "holding a veil before her face, and shedding tears, she bespoke the bard: phemius cease from this sad song, it cuts me to the heart." it reminds her of her husband and his sorrowful return, not yet accomplished; she cannot endure the anguish and she begs the bard to sing another strain which may delight his hearers. this, then, is the sage penelope whose character will be tested in many ways, and move through many subtle turns to the end of the poem. in this her first appearance we note that she proclaims in the presence of the suitors her undying love for her husband. this trait we may fairly consider to be the deepest of her nature. she thinks of him continually and weeps at his absence. still she has her problem which requires at times all her female tact, yes, even dissimulation. reckless suitors are pressing for her hand, she has to employ all her arts to defer the hateful marriage; otherwise she is helpless. she is the counterpart of her husband, a female ulysses, who has waited twenty years for his return. she also has had a stormy time, with the full experience of life; her adventures in her world rival his in his world. but underneath all her cunning is the rock of eternal fidelity. she went back to her room, and wept for her husband "till pallas closed her eye-lids in sweet sleep." nor can we pass over the answer of telemachus, which he makes at this point to his mother. it may be called a little homeric treatise on poetry. "mother, let the poet sing as his spirit moves him;" he is not to be constrained, but must give the great fact; "poets are not to blame but zeus," for the sad return of the greeks; "men applaud the song which is newest," novelty being already sought for in the literature of homer's time. but the son's harsh reproof of the mother, with which his speech closes, bidding her look after her own affairs, the loom and distaff and servants, is probably an interpolation. such is the judgment of aristarchus, the greatest ancient commentator on homer; such is also the judgment of professor nitzsch, the greatest modern commentator on the odyssey. ii. the other side of the collision is the party of suitors, who assail the house of ulysses in property, in the son, in the wife, and finally in ulysses himself. they are the wrong-doers whose deeds are to be avenged by the returning hero; their punishment will exemplify the faith in an ethical order of the world, upon which the poem reposes as its very foundation. they are insolent, debauched, unjust; they defy the established right. zeus has them in mind when he speaks of ægisthus, who is an example of the same sort of characters, and his fate is their fate according to the olympian lawgiver. they too are going to destruction through their own folly, yet after many an admonition. just now telemachus has spoken an impressive warning: "i shall invoke the ever-living gods, that zeus may grant deeds requiting yours." still their insolence goes on; the ethical world of justice and institutions has to be cleared of such men, if it continue to exist. who does not love this fealty of the old bard to the highest order of things? the suitors are indeed blind; they have not recognized the presence of the goddess, yet there is a slight suspicion after she is gone; one of the suitors asks who that stranger was. telemachus, to lull inquiry, gives the outer assumed form of the divine visitor, "an ancestral guest, mentes of taphos;" the poet however, is careful to add: "but he (telemachus) knew the immortal goddess in his mind." the conflict with the suitors is the framework of the entire poem. the education of telemachus as well as the discipline of ulysses reach forward to this practical end--the destruction of the wrong-doers, which is the purification of the country, and the re-establishment of the ethical order. all training is to bring forth the heroic act. the next book will unfold the conflict in greater detail. _appendix._ the reader will have observed that, in the preceding account of book first, it is regarded as setting forth three unities, that of the total odyssey, that of the telemachiad, and that of the book itself. we see them all gradually unfolding in due order under the hand of the poet, from the largest to the least. now the reader should be informed that every one of these unities has been violently attacked and proclaimed to be a sheer phantasm. chiefly in germany has the assault taken place. what we have above considered as the joints in the organism of the poem, have been cut into, pried apart, and declared to make so many separate poems or passages, which different authors have written. thus the one great homer vanishes into many little homers, and this is claimed to be the only true way of appreciating homer. the most celebrated of these dissectors is probably the german professor, kirchhoff, some of whose opinions we shall cite in this appendix. his psychological tendency is that of analysis, separation, division; the very idea of unity seems a bugbear to him, a mighty delusion which he must demolish or die. specially is his wrath directed against book first, probably because it contains the three unities above mentioned, all of which he assails and rends to shreds in his own opinion. the entire introduction (lines 1-88) he tears from its present place and puts it before the fifth book, where it serves as the prelude to the calypso tale. the rest of the telemachiad is the work of another poet. indeed the rest of the first book (after the introduction) is not by the same man who produced the second book. then the second book is certainly older than the first, and ought somehow to be placed before it. the real truth is, however, that the first book is only a hodge-podge made out of the second book by an inferior poet, who took thence fragments of sentences and of ideas and stitched them together. in the invocation kirchhoff cuts out the allusion to the oxen of the sun (lines 6-9) as being inconsistent with his theory. after disposing of the introduction in this way, kirchhoff takes up the remaining portion of the first book, which he tears to pieces almost line by line. in about forty separate notes on different passages he marks points for skepticism, having in the main one procedure: he hunts both the iliad and the odyssey through, and if he finds a line or phrase, and even a word used elsewhere, which he has observed here, he at once is inclined to conclude that the same must have been taken thence and put here by a foreign hand. every reader of homer is familiar with his habit of repeating lines and even entire passages, when necessary. all such repetitions kirchhoff seizes upon as signs of different authorship; the poet must have used the one, some redactor or imitator the other. to be sure we ought to have a criterion by which we can tell which is the original and which is the derived; but such a criterion kirchhoff fails to furnish, we must accept his judgment as imperial and final. once or twice, indeed, he seems to feel the faultiness of his procedure, and tries to bolster it, but as a rule he speaks thus: "the following verse is a formula (repetition), and _hence_ not the property of the author." (_die homerische odyssee_, p. 174.) now such repetitions are common in all old poetry, in the ballad, in the folk-song, in the _kalevala_ as well as in the homeric poems. messages sent are repeated naturally when delivered; the same event recurring, as when the boat is rowed, the banquet prepared, or the armor put on, is described in the same language. such is usually felt to be a mark of epic simplicity, of the naive use of language, which will not vary a phrase merely for the sake of variety. but kirchhoff and his followers will have it just the other way; the early poet never varies or repeats, only the later poet does that. so he seeks out a large number of passages in the rest of the odyssey, and in the iliad also, which have something in common with passages of this first book, especially in the matter of words, and easily finds it to be a "cento," a mixed mass of borrowed phrases. but who was the author of such work? not the original homer, but some later matcher and patcher, imitator or redactor. it is not easy to tell from kirchhoff just how many persons may have had a hand in this making of the odyssey, as it lies before us. in his dissertations we read of a motley multitude: original poet, continuator, interpolator, redactor, reconstructor, imitator, author of the older part, author of the newer part--not merely individuals, but apparently classes of men. thus he anatomizes old homer with a vengeance. _book second._ the general relation between the first and second books is to be grasped at once. in the first book the main fact is the assembly in the upper world, together with the descent of the divine influence which through pallas comes to telemachus in person, gives him courage and stirs him to action. this action is to bring harmony into the discordant land. in the second book the main fact is the assembly in the lower world, together with the rise of telemachus into a new participation with divine influence in the form of pallas, who sends him forth on his journey of education. we behold, therefore, in the two books a sweep from above to below, then from below back to the divine influence. earth and olympus are the halves of the cycle, but the earth is in discord and must be transformed to the harmony of olympus. looking now at the second book by itself, we note that it falls into two portions: the assembly of the people, which has been called together by telemachus, and the communion of the youth with pallas, who again appears to him at his call. the first is a mundane matter, and shows the lower world in conflict with the divine order--the sides being the suitors on the one hand and the house of ulysses on the other. the second portion lifts the young hero into a vision of divinity, and should lift the reader along with him. previously pallas had, as it were, descended into telemachus, but now he rises of himself into the goddess. clearly he possesses a new power, that of communion with the gods. these two leading thoughts divide the book into two well-marked parts--the first including lines 1-259, the second including the rest. i. the assembly of the ithacans presupposes a political habit of gathering into the town-meeting and consulting upon common interests. this usage is common to the aryan race, and from it spring parliaments, congresses, and other cognate institutions, together with oratory before the people. a wonderful development has come of this little germ, which we see here still alive in ithaca, though it has been almost choked by the unhappy condition of things. not since ulysses left has there been any such assembly, says the first speaker, an old man drawing upon his memory, not for twenty years; surely a sign of smothered institutional life. the first thing which telemachus in his new career does is to call the assembly, and start this institutional life into activity again. whereof we feel the fresh throb in the words of the aged speaker, who calls him "blessed." now the oratory begins, as it must begin in such a place. the golden gift of eloquence is highly prized by homer, and by the homeric people; prophetic it is, one always thinks of the great attic orators. the speakers are distinctly marked in character by their speeches; but the assembly itself seems to remain dumb; it was evidently divided into two parties; one well-disposed to the house of ulysses, the other to the suitors. the corruption of the time has plainly entered the soul of the people, and thorough must be the cleansing by the gods. two kinds of speakers we notice also, on the same lines, supporting each side; thus the discord of ithaca is now to be reflected in its oratory. three sets of orators speak on each side, placing before us the different phases of the case; these we shall mark off for the thought and for the eye of the reader. 1. after the short opening speech of the old man, ægyptius, the heart of the whole movement utters itself in telemachus, who remains the chief speaker throughout. his speech is strong and bold; from it two main points peer forth. the first is the wrong of the suitors, who will not take the right way of wooing penelope by going to her father and giving the bridal gift according to custom, but consume the son's property under pretense of their suit for the mother. the second point is the strong appeal to the ithacans--to their sense of right, to their sense of shame, and to their fear of the gods, who "in their divine wrath shall turn back ill deeds upon the doer." but in vain; that ithacan assembly contains friends and relatives of the suitors, and possibly purchased adherents; nay, it contains some of the suitors themselves, and here rises one of them to make a speech in reply. this is antinous, who now makes the most elaborate defense of the case of the suitors that is to be found in the poem. the speech is remarkable for throwing the whole blame upon penelope--not a gallant proceeding in a lover; still it betrays great admiration for the woman on account of her devices and her cunning. she has thwarted and fooled the whole band of unwelcome wooers for three years and more by her wonderful web, which she wove by day and unraveled by night. and even now when she has been found out, she holds them aloof but keeps them in good humor, though clearly at a great expense of the family's property, which fact has roused telemachus to his protest. antinous, though feeling that he and the rest have been outwitted by the woman, does not stint his praise on that account, he even heightens it. but we hear also his ultimatum: "send thy mother away and bid her be married to whomsoever her father commands, and whoso is pleasing to her." so the will of the parent and the choice of the daughter had to go together even in homer's days. of course antinous has no ground of right for giving this order; he is not the master of the house, though he hopes to be; his assumed authority is pure insolence. then why should the suitors injure the son because they have been wheedled by the mother? still they will continue to consume "his living and his wealth as long as she keeps her present mind." but the most interesting thing in his speech is to discover the attitude and motives of penelope. we see her fidelity, but something more than fidelity is now needed, namely the greatest skill, dissimulation, or female tact, to use the more genteel word. she has a hard problem on her hands; she has to save her son, herself, and as much of the estate as she can, from a set of bandits who have all in their might. were she to undertake to drive them away, they would pillage the house, kill her boy, and certainly carry her off. they have the power, they have the inclination; they are held by one small thread in the weak hands of a woman, but with that thread she snares them all, to the last man. love it may be called, of a certain sort; we see how antinous admires her, though conscious that she has made a fool of him and his fellows. each hopes to win the prize yet, and she feeds them with hope, "sending private messages to each man;" thus she turns every one of them against the other, and prevents concerted action which looks to violence. that wonderful female gift is hers, the gift of making each of her hundred suitors think that just he is the favored one, only let it be kept secret now till the right time comes! but penelope uses this gift as a weapon, it is her means of saving the house of ulysses, while many another fair lady uses it for the fun of the thing. is she right? does her end justify her means? true she is in the highest degree to family and state, is saving both; but she does dissemble, does cajole the suitors. one boy, one woman, one old man in the country constitute the present strength of the house of ulysses; but craft meets violence and undoes it, as always. and yet we may grant something to the other side of her character. she takes pleasure in the exercise of her gift, who does not? inasmuch as the suitors are here, and not to be dismissed, she will get a certain gratification out of their suit. a little dash of coquetry, a little love of admiration we may discern peeping through her adamantine fidelity to her husband, recollect after an absence of twenty years. as all this homage was thrust upon her, she seeks to win from it a kind of satisfaction; the admiration of a hundred men she tries to receive without making a sour face. still further she takes pleasure in the exercise of that feminine subtlety which holds them fast in the web, yet keeps them off; giving them always hope, but indefinitely extending it. verily that web which she wove is the web of fate for the suitors. so much for penelope at present, whom we shall meet again. to this demand of antinous to send the mother away, telemachus makes a noble, yes, a heroic response. it would be wrong all around, wrong to the mother, wrong to her father, unless he (telemachus) restored the dower, wrong to the gods; vengeance from the erinyes, and nemesis from man would come upon him for such a deed. thus the young hero appeals to the divine order and puts himself in harmony with its behests. boldly he declares, that if the suitors continue in their ill-doing, "i shall invoke the ever-living gods; if zeus may grant fit retribution for your crimes, ye shall die within this palace unavenged." truly a speech given with a power which brings fulfillment; prophetic it must be, if there be any gods in the world. already we have seen that telemachus was capable of this high mood, which communes with deity and utters the decree from above. behold, no sooner is the word uttered by the mortal, than we have the divine response. it is in the form of an omen, the flight of two eagles tearing each other as they fly to the right through the houses of the town. also the interpreter is present, who tells the meaning of the sign, and stamps the words of telemachus with the seal of the gods. 2. here we pass to the second set of speeches which show more distinctively the religious phase, in contrast to the preceding set, which show rather the institutional phase, of the conflict; that is, the gods are the theme of the one, family and state of the other. the old augur halitherses, the man of religion, explains the omen in full harmony with what telemachus has said; he prophesies the speedy return of ulysses and the punishment of the suitors, unless they desist. well may the aged prophet foretell some such outcome, after seeing the spirit of the son; vengeance is indeed in the air, and is felt by the sensitive seer, and also by the sensitive reader. but what is the attitude of the suitors toward such a view? eurymachus is the name of their speaker now, manifestly a representative man of their kind. he derides the prophet: "go home, old man, and forecast for thy children!" he is a scoffer and skeptic; truly a spokesman of the suitors in their relation to the gods, in whom they can have no living faith; through long wickedness they imagine that there is no retribution, they have come to believe their own lie. impiety, then, is the chief fact of this speech, which really denies the world-government and the whole lesson of this poem. thus the divine warning is contemned, the call to a change of conduct goes unheeded. 3. then we have the third set of speeches which are personal in their leading note, and pertain to the absent ulysses, whose kindness and regal character are set forth by mentor, his old comrade, with strong reproaches toward the ithacans for permitting the wrong to his house. it is intimated that they could prevent it if they chose; but they are evidently deaf to this appeal to their gratitude and affection for their chieftain. leiocrates, the third suitor, responds in a speech which is the culmination of insolence and defiance of right. the suitors would slay ulysses himself, should he now appear and undertake to put them out of his palace. he dares not come and claim his own! right or wrong we are going to stay, and, if necessary, kill the owner. it is the most open and complete expression of the spirit of the suitors, they are a lot of brigands, who must be swept away, if there be any order in the world. leiocrates dissolves the assembly, a thing which he evidently had no right to do; the people tamely obey, the institutional spirit is not strong enough to resist the man of violence. let them scatter; they are a rotten flock of sheep at any rate. here the first part of the book concludes. the three sets of speakers have given their views, one on each side; each set has represented a certain phase of the question; thus we have heard the institutional, religious and personal phases. in such manner the sweep of the conduct of the suitors is fully brought out; they are destroying state and family, are defying the gods, and are ready to slay the individual who may stand in their way. certainly their harvest is ripe for the sickle of divine justice, upon whose deep foundation this poem reposes. the assembly of the people now vanishes quite out of sight, it has indeed no valid ground of being. the young men seem to be the chief speakers, and show violent opposition, while the old men hold back, or manifest open sympathy with the house of ulysses. the youth of ithaca have had their heads turned by the brilliant prize, and rush forward forgetful of the penalty. it is indeed a time of moral loosening, of which this poem gives the source, progress, and cure. telemachus, however, rises out of the mass of young men, the future hero who is to assert the law of the gods. in such manner we are to reach down to the fact that the spirit of the odyssey is ethical in the deepest sense, and reveals unto men the divine order of the world. ii. we now pass to the second part of the book, which shows telemachus accomplishing with the aid of the deity what human institutions failed to do. if the assembly will not help him in the great cause, the gods will, and now he makes his appeal to them. the ithacans had refused a ship in order that he might go and learn something about his father; that is, they will not permit his education, which is at present the first object. he goes down to the seacoast, where he will be alone, communing with the goddess and with himself, and there he prays to pallas, washing his hands in the grey surf--which is, we may well think, a symbolic act of purification. is it a wonder that pallas, taking the human shape of mentor, comes and speaks to him? she must, if she be at all; he is ready, and she has to appear. her first words are but the echo of his conduct all through the preceding scene with the assembly: "telemachus henceforth thou shalt be wanting neither in valor nor in wisdom." she rouses him by the fame and deeds of his father, because he is already aroused. still she is a very necessary part; she is the divine element in the world speaking to telemachus and helping him; she shows that his thought is not merely subjective, but is now one with hers, with objective wisdom, and will rule the fact. he ascends into the realm of true vision, and from thence organizes his purpose. it is true that the poet represents pallas as ordering the means for the voyage, as at first she ordered the work of the whole poem. yet this is also done by telemachus who has risen to participation in that glance which beholds the truth and controls the world. often will the foregoing statement be repeated; every divine appearance in homer, of any import, is but a repetition of the one fact, which must always be re-thought by the reader. that which telemachus says is no longer his mere wish or opinion, but it is the reality, the valid thing outside of him, hence it is voiced by the goddess, and must take place. thus the poet often compels his reader to rise with him into the sphere of the divine energy, where thinking and willing are one, and man's insight is just the word of the god. the remaining circumstances of the book group themselves around the two centers--telemachus and pallas--as the goddess orders them in advance: "go thou home and get the stores ready, while i shall engage a ship and crew among the ithacans." 1. telemachus goes among the suitors, evidently to avoid suspicion, which his absence might provoke. they taunt and deride him, whereof three samples are again given. he goes his way, conscious of his divine mission, not failing however to tell them: "i shall surely make the voyage, not in vain it will be." he obtains food and wine from the aged stewardess eurycleia, who seeks to dissuade him. then too his mother must not know of his plan, she would keep him still a boy in the house, whereas he has become a man. 2. pallas in the semblance of telemachus goes through the town to secure the ship and crew. then she pours over the suitors a gentle sleep after their revel; she takes away their wisdom, yet it is their own deed, which just now has a divine importance. finally she brings all to the ship, seizes the helm and sends the favoring breeze. or, as we understand the poet, intelligence brings about these things under many guises; even nature, the breeze, it takes advantage of for its own purpose. thus pallas has the controlling hand in this second part of the book, she is above man and nature. we can say that the controlling spirit is also telemachus, who manifests reason, controlling and directing the world. note the various forms which she assumes, as mentor, as telemachus; then again she works purely through mind, in the natural way, as for example, when telemachus goes home and obtains his food and wine for the voyage. the poet thus plays with her shape; still she is essentially the divine intelligence which seizes upon men and circumstances, and fits them into the order universal, and makes them contribute to the great purpose of the poem. still the goddess does not destroy man's freedom, but supplements it, lifting it out of the domain of caprice. telemachus willingly wills the will of pallas. already it has been remarked that the goddess is made to command nature--the breeze, the sleep of the suitors. it is the method of fable thus to portray intelligence, whose function is to take control of nature and make her subserve its purpose. the breeze blows and drives the ship; it is the divine instrument for bringing telemachus to pylos, a part of the world-order, especially upon the present occasion. the born poet still talks that way, he is naturally a fabulist and cannot help himself. in his speech, the hunter does not chase the deer, but brings it before his gun by a magic power; the mystic fisher calls the fishes; the enchanted bullet finds its own game and needs only to be shot off; the tanner even lays a spell upon the water in his vat and makes it run up hill through a tube bent in a charm. but back of all this enchantment intelligence is working and assumes her mythical, supernatural garb when the poet images her control of nature. thus in general the mythus shadows forth objective mind, not subjective; it springs from the imaginative reason, and not from a cultivated reflection. in our time the demand is to have these objective forms translated into subjective thoughts; then we can understand them better. but the homeric man shows the opposite tendency: he had to translate his internal thoughts into the external shapes of the mythus before he could grasp fully his own mind. his conception of the world was mythical; this form he understood and not that of abstract reflection. we may well exclaim: happy homeric man, to whom the world was ever present, not himself. yet both sides belong to the full-grown soul, the mythical and the reflective; from homer the one-sided modern mind can recover a part of its spiritual inheritance, which is in danger of being lost. it is therefore, a significant fact that the education of the present time is seeking to restore the mythus to its true place in the development of human spirit. the imagination is recognized to have its right, and unless it be taken care of in the right way, it will turn a fury, and wreak treble vengeance upon the age which makes it an outcast. homer is undoubtedly the greatest of all mythologists, he seizes the pure mythical essence of the human mind and gives to it form and beauty. hence from this point of view, specially, we shall study him. in the present book the fact is brought out strongly that little or nothing is to be expected from the ithacan people toward rectifying the great wrong done to the house of ulysses. in part they are the wrong-doers themselves, in part they are cowed into inactivity by the wrong-doers. corruption has eaten into the spirit of the people; the result is, the great duty of deliverance is thrown back upon an individual. one man is to take the place of all, or a few men the place of the many, for the work must be done. the mightiness of the individual in the time of a great crisis is thus set forth in vivid reality; the one man with the gods on his side is the majority. with truest instinct does the old poet show the goddess pallas directing telemachus, who participates in the divine and is carrying out its decree. this communion between man and deity is no mere mythologic sport, but the sincerest faith; verily it is the solidest fact in the government of the world, and the bard is its voice to all ages. this second book has its import for the whole poem. it is now manifest that ulysses, when he returns, is not to expect a grand popular reception; he must bring himself back to his own by his skill and prowess alone. the people will not help him slay the wrong-doers; rather the contrary will happen. again the individual must work out the salvation of himself as well as of his family and his country. telemachus has shown himself the worthy son of the heroic father; the present book connects him intimately with the return of ulysses, and binds the entire odyssey into unity; especially does this book look to and prepare for the last twelve books, which bring father and son together in one great act of deliverance. if in the previous book we beheld the depravity of the suitors, we now witness the imbecility of the people. still the spark of hope flashes out brightly in this ithacan night; something is at work to punish the guilty and to redeem the land. _book third._ in narrative, the present book connects directly with the preceding book. pallas is still with telemachus, they continue the voyage together till they reach pylos, the home of nestor. they have left ithaca, and come into another realm; this change of place, as is often the case in homer, carries with it a change of inner condition; the voyage is not simply geographical but also spiritual; indeed it must be so, if the young man is to derive from it any experience. great and striking is the difference between ithaca and pylos. the latter is the abode of religion primarily, the new-comers find the pylians engaged in an act of worship, in which the whole people participate, "nine rows of seats and five hundred men in each row." too large a number, cry some commentators, but they have not looked into the real meaning of such a multitude. here is sacrifice, reverence, belief in the gods; while among the ithacans is neglect of worship, religious paralysis, and downright blasphemy on the part of the suitors. furthermore, in one country order reigns, in the other is anarchy. such is the contrast between the second and third books, the contrast between ithaca and pylos. we can well think that this contrast was intended by the poet, and thus we may catch a glimpse of his artistic procedure. the center of the picture is nestor, a very old man, who, accordingly, gives soul to the book. he is so near the world of the gods in the present life, that he seems already to dwell with them; age brings this serene piety. no accident is it that this book of nestor begins and ends with a festival of sacrifice and prayer; that is the true setting of his character. what he says to the visitors will take color and meaning from his fundamental trait; we may expect in his words a full recognition of divinity in the events of the world. but he has been a stout fighter in his time, he was in the trojan war, though old already at that period. he will give the lesson of his life, not during that war, but afterwards. he was one of the heroes of the iliad, which poem the odyssey not only does not repeat, but goes out of its way to avoid any repetition thereof. moreover he was one of those who returned home successfully, can he tell how it was done? this is the question of special interest to telemachus, as his father, after ten years, has not yet reached home. herewith the theme of the book is suggested: the return. physically this was a return from the trojan war, which is the pre-supposition of the whole odyssey; all the heroes who have not perished, have to get back to hellas in some way. these ways are very diverse, according to the character of the persons and the circumstances. thus we touch the second grand homeric subject, and, indeed, the second grand fact of the greek consciousness, which lies imbedded in the return (_nostos_). a short survey of this subject must here be given. we have in the present book several phases of the return; nestor, menelaus, ulysses are all returners, to use a necessary word for the thought; each man solves the problem in his own manner. now what is this problem? let us see. the expedition to troy involved a long separation from home and country on the part of every man who went with it; still this separation had to be made for the sake of helen, that she, the wife and queen, return to home and country, from which she had been taken. her return, indeed, is the essence of all their returns. we see that through the war they were severed from family and state, were compelled to give up for the time being their whole institutional life. this long absence deepens into alienation, into a spiritual scission, from mere habit in the first place; then, in the second place, they are seeking to destroy a home and a country; though it be that of the enemy, and the act, even if necessary, brings its penalty. it begets a spirit of violence, a disregard of human life, a destruction of institutional order. such is the training of the greeks before troy. the wanton attack of ulysses and his companions upon the city of the ciconians (book ninth) is an indication of the spirit engendered in this long period of violence, among the best and wisest greeks. still, in spite of the grand estrangement, they have the aspiration for return, and for healing the breach which had sunk so deep into their souls. did they not undergo all this severing of the dearest ties for the sake of helen, for the integrity of the family, and of their civil life also? what he has done for helen, every greek must be ready to do for himself, when the war is over; he must long for the restoration of the broken relations; he cannot remain in asia and continue a true greek. such is his conflict; in maintaining family and state, he has been forced to sacrifice family and state. then when he has accomplished the deed of sacrifice, he must restore himself to what he has immolated. a hard task, a deeply contradictory process, whose end is, however, harmony; many will not be able to reach the latter stage, but will perish by the way. the return is this great process of restoration after the estrangement. many are the returners, successful and unsuccessful in many different ways. but they all are resumed in the one long desperate return of ulysses, the wise and much-enduring man. in space as well as in time his return is the longest; in spirit it is the deepest and severest by all odds. the present poem, therefore, is a kind of resumption and summary of the entire series of returns (_nostoi_). in the old greek epical ages, the subject gave rise to many poems, which are, however, at bottom but one, and this we still possess, while the others are lost. spirit takes care of its own verily. the true returner, accordingly, gets back to the institutions from which he once separated; he knows them now, previously he only felt them. his institutional world must become thus a conscious possession; he has gone through the alienation, and has been restored; his restoration has been reached through denial, through skepticism, we may say, using the modern term. the old unconscious period before the trojan war is gone forever; that was the paradise from which the greek adam has been expelled. but the new man after the restoration is the image of the complete self-conscious being, who has taken the negative period into himself and digested it. fortunate person! he cannot now be made the subject of a poem, for he has no conflict. but the young man beginning life, the son telemachus, is to obtain the same kind of knowledge, not through experience but through inquiry. oral tradition is to give him the treasures of wisdom without the bitter personal trial. it is for this reason that pallas sends him to find out what his father did, and to make the experience of the parent his own by education; it is, indeed, the true education--to master the accumulated knowledge and wisdom of the race up to date. so we are now to have the school period of the son, who is thereby not merely the physical son (which, he remarks, is always a matter of doubt), but the spiritual son of his father, whereof there can be no doubt. the odyssey proper, toward which we may now cast a glance, contains the wanderings of ulysses, and is the work of the grown man who has to meet the world face to face and conquer it; thus he obtains the experience of life. the two parts are always to be placed together--the education of the young man and the experience of the mature man; they constitute a complete history of a human soul. both are, indeed one--bud and flower; at bottom, too, both mean the same thing--the elevation of the individual into an ethical life in which he is in harmony with himself and with the divine order. true learning and true experience reach this end, which may be rightfully called wisdom. so telemachus the youth is to listen to the great and impressive fact of his time, containing the deep spiritual problem which is designated as the return. nestor is the first and simplest of these returners; he is an old man, he has prudence, he is without passion; moreover he has not the spirit of inquiry or the searching into the beyond; he accepts the transmitted religion and opinions without question, through the conservatism of age as well as of character. it is clear that the spiritual scission of the time could not enter deep into his nature; his long absence from home and country produced no alienation; he went home direct after the fall of troy, the winds and the waters were favorable, no tempest, no upheaval, no signs of divine anger. but he foresaw the wrath of the gods and fled across the wave in all speed, the wrestle with the deity lay not in him. it is worth our while to make a little summary of these returners in classes, since in this way the thought of the present book as well as its place in the entire odyssey can be seen best. first are those who never succeeded in returning, but perished in the process of it; of this class the great example is the leader himself, agamemnon, who was slain by his own wife and her paramour. second are those who succeeded in returning; of this class there are three well-marked divisions, which are to be sharply designated in the mind of the reader. (1). the immediate returners, those who went straight home, without internal scission or external trouble; unimportant they are in this peaceful aspect though they were formerly heroes in the war. four such are passingly mentioned by nestor in his talk: diomed, neoptolemus the son of achilles, philoctetes, and idomeneus. nestor himself is the most prominent and the typical one of this set who are the returners through hellas. (2). the second one of those who have succeeded in getting home is menelaus, whose sweep is far beyond that of nestor and the immediate greek world, taking in egypt and the east. he was separated from nestor, having delayed to bury his steersman; then a storm struck him, bore him to crete and beyond, the wind and wave carried him to the land of the nile. he is the returner through the orient. (3). finally is ulysses, not yet returned, but whose time has nearly arrived. in comparison with the others he is the returner through the occident. but his return gives name to the poem, of which it is the greater portion. still the universal poem is to embrace all these phases of the return, and the son, through education, is to know them all, not by experience but by information. thus his training is to reach beyond what the life of his father can give him; it must be universal, and in this way it becomes a true discipline. we must note too, that this poem reaches beyond the return of ulysses, beyond what its title suggests, and embraces all the returns, hellenic, oriental, occidental, as well as the grand failure to return. such are some of the thoughts which gleam out the present book and illuminate the whole odyssey. we can now consider structure of the book, which falls into two distinct parts, determined by the goddess. when she makes ready to quit telemachus, we enter the second portion of the book, and telemachus continues his journey without direct divine supervision. as the previous book was marked by the coming of the goddess, the present book is marked by her going. the intercourse of the youth with nestor is the extent of her immediate guardianship; after such an experience, he must learn to make the rest of the journey through his own resources. even the deity teaches that there must not be too much reliance upon the deity. the first portion of the book extends to line 328, where nestor ends his story of the returns and suggests the journey to menelaus for another phase thereof: "the sun set and darkness came on." the second portion embraces the rest of the book. again we must note that the fundamental homeric division into the upper and lower worlds is what divides the book, thus giving to the same its organic principle. i. the religious setting of nestor's world has been noticed already. into it telemachus comes, out of a realm of violence; it must indicate some cure for the ills of ithaca. but he is now to show himself a man. pallas orders him to put aside his youthful modesty, and boldly make the inquiry concerning his father. and here the goddess utters a remark which the student may well ponder: "some things thou wilt think of in thine own mind, but a god will suggest others." again the homeric dualism--the human and the divine--and also their harmony; the two elements must come together in every high thought or action. the double relation of the individual--to himself and to the god--is necessary for all worthy speech; his own activity and that of the deity run together in true discourse as well as in true action. so the whole poem is made up of man's self-determined energy and the interference of the gods; yet both are to be seen as ultimately one in the deed. the new-comers are asked to pray, and we hear the famous utterance, which is characteristic of nestor's world, "all men have need of the gods." this is said by one of his sons. pallas makes the prayer, a happy one, which brings forth a feeling of harmony between the strangers and all the people. the sympathy is complete, and telemachus can proceed to ask concerning his father, after he has told who he himself is, and whence he has come. in response, nestor begins to tell the fateful story of the returns after the fall of troy. in his narrative we behold the starting-point of the calamities, the difference between agamemnon and menelaus, followed by a series of separations in succession. "zeus planned for them a sad return," which, however, was their own fault, "for all were neither wise nor just." it is clear that the greek unity is utterly broken, a spiritual disruption sets in after the capture of the city. it is, indeed, the new problem, this return to peace and institutional order after ten years' training to violence. such is the penalty of all war, however just and necessary; after it is over, the fighting cannot stop at once, and so the victors divide into two camps and continue the fight. nestor gives the picture of these repeated divisions; once, twice, thrice the breach occurs; first he separates from agamemnon, the second time from ulysses, the third time from menelaus. he will go directly home, and thus he has to leave the others behind; the scission is not in him as in them; he can be restored, in fact he restores himself. he has the instinctive pre-trojan character still, being an old man; but ulysses has lost that, and so separates from nestor, though never before had they differed "in the council of the chiefs or in the assembly of the people." but ulysses has to return by a far different road, and now each of the two wise men takes his own way, though both have to return. aged nestor manifestly does not belong to the new epoch, he seems to have no sense of the deep spiritual struggle involved. he instinctively went home, shunning the conflict; the others could not. in the iliad the relation between the two wise men, nestor and ulysses, is subtly yet clearly drawn; the one--the younger man--has creative intelligence, the other--the older man--has appreciative intelligence. in the odyssey, the relation is plainly evolved out of that described in the iliad; the one is the boundless striver, the other rests in the established order of things. nestor, therefore, cannot tell much about ulysses, who lies quite out of his horizon, at least in the odyssey. he can only give hope that the man of wisdom will yet return. this telemachus doubts, dropping into one of his low human moods, even in the presence of pallas, who rebukes him sharply. it is, indeed, the great lesson; he must have faith in the reality of the gods, this is the basis of all his future progress, the chief attainment of wisdom. the young man must not fall away into denial, he must be taught that there is a divine order in the world. old homer, too, had his notions about religion in education, and the goddess herself is here introduced giving a lesson. nestor, though unable himself to give much information about the return, can point to the second grand returner, menelaus, who has lately come from a distant land, and may have something to say. in fact menelaus was the last to separate from nestor, ulysses had separated long before. one other story nestor tells with great sympathy, that of agamemnon, who represents a still different form of the return. the great leader of the greeks can master the trojan difficulty, can even get back to home and country, but these are ultimately lost to him by his faithless spouse. still, after the father's death, the son orestes restores family and state. therein telemachus sees an image of himself, the son, who is to slay his mother's suitors; he sees, too, the possible fate of his father. ulysses has essentially the same problem as agamemnon, though he has not the faithless wife in addition; telemachus beholds his duty in the deed of orestes, according to greek consciousness. we shall see hereafter how ulysses takes due precaution not to be slain in his own land, as agamemnon was. in disguise he will go to his own palace and carefully note the situation in advance, and then strike the blow of deliverance. several times homer repeats in the odyssey the tragic story of agamemnon, the great leader of the greeks at troy. an awe-inspiring tale of destiny; out of it æschylus will develop his great tragedy, the oresteia. indeed the epos develops into tragedy with the full mythical unfolding of this story. æschylus will deepen the motives into internal collisions; he will show the right and the wrong in agamemnon, and even in clytemnestra. orestes, however beneficent his deed in avenging his father, will not escape the counterstroke; æschylus will send after him the furies for the guilt of having murdered his mother. thus the double nature of the deed, its reward and its penalty, unfolds out of homer into æschylus, and creates the greek drama as we know it at present. nestor has now told what lay in the immediate circle of his experience: the return direct through hellas. again he mentions the last separation; it was that of himself from menelaus, when the latter was swept beyond the limit of hellas into egypt, from which he has now returned. what next? evidently the young man must be sent to him at sparta in order to share in this larger circle of experience, extending to the orient. so greece points to the east in many ways; nestor, the purely hellenic soul, knows of that wider knowledge, though it be not his, and he knows that it should be possessed. in this book as elsewhere in the odyssey the grand background is the trojan war. the incidents of the iliad are hardly alluded to, but are certainly taken for granted; the post-iliad is the field of interest, for in it the returns take place. thus the two great poems of homer join together and show themselves as complements of each other. ii. now comes the separation which marks the second portion of the book. pallas, in the guise of mentor, coincides with nestor in advising telemachus to pay a visit to menelaus, and then she departs, "sailing off like a sea-eagle," whereat great astonishment from all present. that is, she reveals herself; all recognize the goddess, and probably that is the reason why she can no longer stay. she has become internal. telemachus is now conscious, as she disappears, and he has his own wisdom; he has seen pallas, and so he must go without her to sparta. hardly does he need her longer, being started upon the path of wisdom to know wisdom. at the court of nestor, with its deeply religious atmosphere, she can appear; but she declines to go with him in person to menelaus, though she advises the journey. all of which, to the sympathetic reader, has its significance. still pallas has by no means vanished out of the career of telemachus; she at present, however, leaves him to himself, as she often does. nestor, too, responds to the marvelous incident in true accord with his character; he invokes her with prayer and institutes a grand sacrifice, which is now described in a good deal of detail. just as the book opens with a sacrifice to a deity, so it closes with one--the two form the setting of the whole description. thus the recognition of the gods is everywhere set forth in nestor's world; he is the man of faith, of primitive, immediate faith, which has never felt the doubt. it is well that telemachus meets with such a man at the start, and gets a breath out of such an atmosphere. he has seen the ills of ithaca from his boyhood; he may well question at times the superintendence of the gods. his own experience of life would lead him to doubt the existence of a divine order. even here in pylos he challenges the supremacy of the olympians. when nestor intimates that his father will yet return and punish the suitors, with the help of pallas, or that he himself may possibly do so with the aid of the same goddess, telemachus replies: "never will that come to pass, i think, though i hope for it; no, not even if the gods should so will." assuredly a young skeptic he shows himself, probably in a fit of despondency; sharp is the reproof of the goddess: "o telemachus, what kind of talk is that? easily can a god, if he wills it, save a man even at a distance." thus she, a goddess, asserts the supremacy of the gods, even though they cannot avert death. but the youth persists at present: "let us talk no more of this; my father never will return." but when nestor has told the story of ægisthus punished by the son orestes, the impression is strong that there is a divine justice which overtakes the guilty man at last; such is the old man's lesson to the juvenile doubter. the lesson is imparted in the form of a tale, but it has its meaning, and telemachus cannot help putting himself into the place of orestes. such is, then, the training which the young man, shaken by misfortune, obtains at the court of nestor; the training to a belief in the rule of the gods in a divine order of the world--which is the fundamental belief of the present poem. it is no wonder that telemachus sees pallas at last, sees that she has been with him, recognizing her presence. to be sure, she now disappears as a personal presence, having been found out; still she sends telemachus on his journey to sparta. thus the third book has a distinctive character of its own, differing decidedly from the book which goes before and from that which follows. here is a religious world, idyllic, paradisaical in its immediate relation to the gods, and in the primitive innocence of its people, who seem to be without a jar or inner scission. no doubt or dissonance has yet entered apparently; pylos stands between ithaca, the land of absolute discord, and sparta, the land recently restored out of discord. the book hears a relation to the whole odyssey in its special theme, which is the return, of which it represents in the ruler nestor a particular phase. it prepares the way for the grand return, which is that of ulysses; it is a link connecting the whole poem into unity. moreover it shadows forth one of the movements of greek spirit, which seized upon this idea of a return from troy to express the soul's restoration from its warring, alienated, dualistic condition. it is well known that there were many poems on this subject; each hero along with his town or land had his return, which became embodied in legend and song. all hellas, in a certain stage of its spiritual movement, had a tendency to break out into the lay of the return. one of the so-called cyclic poets, hagias of troezen, collected a number of these lays into one poem and called it the _nostoi_ or returns, evidently an outgrowth of this third book in particular and of the odyssey in general. thus telemachus has witnessed and heard a good deal during his stay with nestor. he has seen a religious world, a realm of faith in the gods, which certainly has left its strong impression; he has been inspired by the example of his father, whose worth has been set forth, and whose place in the great trojan movement has been indicated, by the aged hero. still further, telemachus has been brought to share in the idea of the return, the present underlying idea of the whole greek consciousness; thus he must be led to believe in it and to work for it, applying it to his own case and his own land. largely, from a negative, despairing state of mind due to his ithacan environment, he has been led into glimpses of a positive believing one; this has sprung from his schooling with nestor, who may be called his first schoolmaster, from whom he is now to pass to his second. the reader must judge whether the preceding view be too introspective for homer, who is usually declared to be the unconscious poet, quite unaware of his purpose or process. no one can carefully read the third book without feeling its religious purport; an atmosphere it has peculiar to itself in relation to the other books of the telemachiad. to be sure, we can read it as an adventure, a mere diverting story, without further meaning than the attempt to entertain vacant heads seeking to kill time. but really it is the record of the spirit's experience, and must so be interpreted. again the question comes up: what is it to know homer? his geography, his incidents, his grammar, his entire outer world have their right and must be studied--but let us proceed to the next book. _book fourth._ the transition from book third to book fourth involves a very significant change of environment. in sparta, to which telemachus now passes, there is occurring no public sacrifice to the gods, but a domestic festal occasion gives the tone; he moves out of a religious into a secular atmosphere. pylos allows the simple state of faith, the world unfallen; sparta has in it the deep scission of the soul, which, however, is at present healed after many wanderings and struggles. nestor, as we have seen, is quite without inner conflict; menelaus and helen represent a long, long training in the school of error, tribulation, misfortune. pylos is the peace before the fall, sparta is the peace after the fall, yet with many reminiscences of the latter. this fourth book reaches out beyond greece, beyond the trojan war, it goes beyond the hellenic limit in space and time, it sweeps backward into egypt and the orient. it is a marvelous book, calling for our best study and reflection; certainly it is one of the greatest compositions of the human mind. its fundamental note is restoration after the grand lapse; witness helen, and menelaus too; the third book has no restoration, because it has no alienation. the account of the various returns from troy is continued. in the preceding book we had those given by nestor, specially his own, which was without conflict. he is the man of age and wisdom, he does not fall out with the gods, he does not try to transcend the prescribed limits, he is old and conservative. the returns which he speaks of beside his own, are confined to the greek world; that was the range of his vision. but now in the fourth book we are to hear of the second great return, in which two greeks participate, menelaus and helen. this return is by way of the east, through egypt, which is the land of ancient wisdom for the greek man, and for us too. it is the land of the past to the hellenic mind, whither the person who aspires to know the antecedents of himself and his culture must travel; or, he must learn of those who have been there, if he cannot go himself. egyptian lore, which had a great influence upon the early greek world in its formative period, must have some reflection in this primitive greek book of education. so telemachus, to complete his discipline, must reach beyond greece into the orient, he must get far back of troy, which was merely an orientalizing hellenic city; he must learn of egypt. thus he transcends the national limit, and begins to obtain an universal culture. but the moment we go beyond the greek world with its clear plastic outlines, the artistic form changes; the hellenic sunshine is tinged with oriental shadows; we pass from the unveiled zeus to the veiled isis. homer himself gets colored with touches of oriental mystery. the egyptian part of this fourth book, therefore, will show a transformation of style as well as of thought, and changeful proteus will become a true image of the poet. the work will manifest a symbolic tendency; it will have an aroma of the wisdom of the east, taught in forms of the parable, the apologue, with hints of allegory. the world, thrown outside of that transparent greek life, becomes a fairy tale, which is here taken up and incorporated into a great poem. we shall be compelled to look thoroughly into these strange shapes of egypt, and, if possible, reach down to their meaning, for meaning they must have, or be meaningless. we shall find that this fourth book stands in the front rank of homeric poetry for depth and suggestiveness, if not for epical lucidity. what did not telemachus see and hear at sparta? that was, indeed, an education. he saw the two great returned ones, the woman and the man. helen he saw, who had passed through her long alienation and was now restored to home and country after the trojan discipline. in her, the most beautiful woman, the human cycle was complete--the fall, the repentance, the restoration. then the eager youth saw menelaus, and heard his story of the return; he is the man who seeks the treasures of the east, and brings them to hellas in the hellenic way. he finds them, too, after much suffering, never losing them again in the tempests of his voyage, for does he not spread them out before us in his talk? both the man and the woman, after the greatest human trials, have reached serenity--an institutional and an intellectual harmony. the young man sees it and feels it and takes it away in his head and heart. the present book falls easily into two distinct portions. the first is the visit of telemachus to sparta and what he experiences there. sparta is at peace and in order; the youth to a degree beholds in it the ideal land to which he must help transform his own disordered country. the second portion of the book goes back to ithaca (line 625 of the greek text). here we are suddenly plunged again into the wrongful deeds of the suitors, done to the house of ulysses. they are plotting the death of telemachus, the bearing of whose new career has dawned upon them. ithaca is truly the realm of discord in contrast to the harmony of sparta and the house of menelaus, which has also had sore trials. hence sparta may be considered a prophecy of the redemption of ithaca. following out these structural suggestions, we designate the organism of the book in this manner:-i. the visit of telemachus at sparta in which he beholds and converses with two chief returners from troy, those who came back by way of the east, menelaus and helen. this part embraces the greater portion of the book and falls into three divisions. 1. the arrival and recognition of the son of ulysses by menelaus and helen who are in a mood of reminiscence, speaking of and in the present with many a glance back into the past. the oriental journey to cyprus, phoenicia, and specially egypt, plays into their conversation, making the whole a domestic tale of real life with an ideal background lying beyond hellas. 2. when the son is duly recognized and received, the father ulysses comes in for reminiscence; with him the background shifts from the orient to troy, where he was the hero of so many deeds of cunning and valor, and where both menelaus and helen were chief actors. the literary form passes out of the domestic tale of the present into the heroic tale of the past, from sorrowful retrospection to bracing description of daring deeds. helen and menelaus, each in turn, tell stories of ulysses at troy to the son, who thus learns much about his father. as already said, the background of this portion is the trojan war which was the grand hellenic separation from the orient. the iliad, and specially the post-iliad are here presupposed by the odyssey. 3. the return of menelaus is now told to telemachus, which return reaches behind the trojan war into the east and beyond the limits of the real hellas into egypt. thus the spatial and temporal bounds of greece are transcended, the actual both in the present and past goes over into the purely ideal, and the literary form becomes a marvelous tale--that of proteus, which suggests not only present and past, but all time. ii. such is the grand return of menelaus out of struggle and dualism into peace and reconciliation with himself and the world, barring certain painful memories. the poet next, in sharp contrast throws the reader back to ithaca, the land of strife and wrong, in general of limits for young telemachus, who is reaching out for freedom through intelligence, and is getting a good deal thereof. two phases: 1. the suitors' limits, which he has broken through; their wrath and their plan of murdering him in consequence. 2. the mother's limits, which he has also broken through; her paroxysm in consequence, and final consolation. i. the first portion of the book, as above given, is by all means the greatest in conception and in execution as well as the longest. as already indicated there are three kinds of writing in it, yet fused together into unity, which makes it a most varied, yet profoundly suggestive piece of art. the simple idyllic, domestic strain of ordinary real life we hear at the start in the reception and recognition of telemachus at sparta; the scene lies in the sunshine of a serene existence, yet after mighty tempests. thence we pass into the heroic world of troy out of greece and the present, and listen to an epical story of heroism told by menelaus and helen, of the hero ulysses; finally we are brought to egypt, and hear a prophecy concerning the same hero, who is now the subject of the fairy tale. in other words, in this portion of the fourth book we observe a change of scene to three localities--greece, troy, egypt, which correspond to present, past, and future, and which attune the soul respectively to sorrow, reminiscence, prophecy. in accord with this variety of place and circumstance is the variety of literary form already noted: the ordinary descriptive tale of the present, the heroic story of the past, and the fairy tale imaging what is distant in space and time. 1. as telemachus arrives, he notes the outer setting to this noble picture of menelaus and helen. there is the magnificent palace with many costly ornaments of "bronze, gold, silver, amber and ivory;" it has the ideal of greek architecture, not yet realized doubtless, still it suggests "the hall of olympian zeus" to the admiring telemachus. the new-comers happen upon a wedding-festival, which connects the place and the occasion with the trojan war and its hero achilles, whose son is now to marry helen's daughter, betrothed to him while at troy. moreover it is a time of joy, which brings all before us at first in a festal mood. nor must we pass by that astonishing utterance of menelaus to his servant who proposed to turn away the guests: "thou prattlest silly things like a child, verily have we come hither partaking of the hospitable fare of other men." therefore we ought to give that which we have received. one likes to note these touches of humanity in the old heathen greek; he too knew and applied the golden rule. the wisdom of life here peers forth in the much-traveled menelaus; suffering has taught him to consider others; sorrow he has experienced, but it has brought its best reward--compassion. this sorrow at once breaks forth in response to the admiration of telemachus for the outward splendor of his palace and possessions. the spartan king takes a short retrospect of life as it has been allotted him; the sighs well out between his words as he tells his story. eight years he wandered after the taking of troy; for he passed across the sea, to egypt, even to æthiopia and lybia, which he portrays as a wonderland of golden plenty. but while he was gone, "gathering much wealth," his brother agamemnon was slain; "therefore, small joy i have bearing rule over these possessions." but chiefly he laments the loss of one man, on account of whom "sleep and food become hateful to me when i think upon him." that man is ulysses, who has suffered more than any other greek. thus a strong deep stream of sympathy breaks forth from the heart of menelaus, and the son, hearing his father's name, holds up the purple mantle before his eyes, shedding the tear. a strong unconscious bond of feeling at once unites both. how can we fail to notice the clear indication of purpose in these passages! the poet brings menelaus, as the culmination of his story, to strike the chord which stirs most profoundly the soul of telemachus. the son is there to inquire concerning his father; without revealing himself he learns much about the character and significance of his parent. the same artistic forethought is shown, when, at this sad moment, helen enters, the primal source of all these calamities, in a glorious manifestation of her beauty. telemachus sees or may see, embodied in her the very essence of greek spirit, that which had to be restored to hellas from asia, if hellas was to exist. the poet likens her to a goddess, and places her in surroundings which are to set off her divine appearance. in her case, too, we notice the distant background: egyptian presents she has, as well as menelaus, "a golden distaff and a silver basket bound in gold." mementos from far-off wonderland are woven into the speech and character of the famous pair. now for a true female trait. helen at once recognizes the young stranger as the son of ulysses, wherein she stands in contrast to her husband menelaus, who, in spite of his thinking about his friend just at that moment, had failed to see before him the son of that friend. but no sooner had the woman laid eyes upon telemachus than she personally identified him. when the wife had spoken the words of immediate insight and instinct, the wise husband sees the truth and gives his reasons. when the fact has been told him, he can easily prove it. supremely beautiful is this appearance of helen in the odyssey; she is the completion of what we saw and knew of her in the iliad. now she is restored to home and country, after her long alienation; still she has lurking moments of self-reproach on account of her former deeds. though she has repented and has been received back, she cannot forget, ought not to forget the past altogether. the conduct of the husband is most noble in these scenes; he has forgiven her fully, never upbraiding, never even alluding to her fatal act, excepting in one passage possibly, in which there is a gentle palliation of her behavior: "thou camest to the place, moved by some divinity who wished to give glory to the trojans." the husband will not blame her, she acted under the stimulus of a god. the fallen woman restored is the divinest of all pictures; we wonder again at the far-reaching humanity of the old bard; to-day she would hardly be taken back and forgiven by the world as completely as she is in the pages of homer. she is indeed a new helen, standing forth in the purest radiance within the shining palace of menelaus. long shall the world continue to gaze at her there. telemachus is to see and to hear helen; that is, indeed, one of his supreme experiences. but it is not here a matter of superficial staring at a beautiful woman; all that helen is, the total cycle of her spirit's history, is to enter his heart and become a vital portion of his discipline. it is probable that the youth does not realize every thing that helen means and is; still he beholds her, and that in itself is an education. helen is not merely a figure of voluptuous beauty, which captivates the senses; she bears in her the experience of complete humanity; she has erred, she has transformed her error, she has been restored to that ethical order which she had violated. all of which the young man is to see written in her face, and to feel in her words and conduct, though he may not consciously formulate it in his thought. this is the true beauty of helen, not simply the outer sensuous form, though she possesses that too. she could not be the ideal of the greek world, if she were merely an oriental enchantress; indeed it is just the function of the greeks to rescue her from such a condition, which was that of helen in troy. already the heart of menelaus is full at the thought of his friend ulysses, and he warms toward the latter's son now present. he again utters words of sympathetic sorrow. all are touched; all have lost some dear relative at troy; it is a moment of overpowering emotion. the four people weep in common; it is but an outburst; they rally from their sorrow, menelaus commands: "let us cease from mourning and think of the feast." it is at this point that helen again interposes. her experience of life has been the deepest, saddest, most complete of all, she has mastered her conflicts, inner and outer, and reached the haven of serenity; she can point out the way of consolation. in fact it is her supreme function to show to others what she has gone through, and thereby save them, in part at least, the arduous way. for is not the career of every true hero or heroine vicarious to a certain degree? assuredly, if they mean any thing to the sons and daughters of men. helen can bring the relief, and does so in the present instance. she fetches forth that famous drug, the grand antidote for grief and passion, and all life's ills, the true solacer in life's journey. it had been given her by an egyptian woman, polydamna, whom she had met in her wanderings, and it had evidently helped to cure her lacerated soul. again egypt lies in the background, as it does everywhere in this book, the veritable wonderland, from which many miraculous blessings are sent. moreover it is the land of potent drugs, "some beneficial and some baneful;" its physicians too, are celebrated as excelling all men. still more curious is the fact that women possess the secret of medicine as well as men, and polydamna may be set down as the first female doctor--she who gave the wonderful drug to helen. surely there is nothing new under the sun. this marvelous drug, often called nepenthe from one of its attributes, has naturally aroused much curiosity among the many-minded readers of homer down the ages. some have held that it was an herb, which they have pointed out in the valley of the nile. others hold it to be opium literally, though it does not here put to sleep or silence the company. on the other hand allegory has tried its hand at the word. certain ancients including plutarch found in it an emblem hinting the charm of pleasing narrative. as helen at once passes to story-telling about ulysses at troy, changing from sad reminiscences of the dead to stirring deeds of living men, we may suppose that this has something to do with her nepenthe, which changes the mind from inward to outward, from emotion to action. the magic charm seems to work potently when she begins to talk. through her, the artist as well as the ideal, we make the transition into the heroic tale of the olden time, of which she gives a specimen. 2. very naturally the trojan scene is next taken, that greatest deed of the greek race, being that which really made it a new race, separating it from the orient and giving it a new destiny. helen now tells to the company myths, particularly the labors of ulysses. she narrates how he came to troy in the disguise of a beggar; none knew him, "but i alone recognized him," as she had just recognized telemachus. thus she celebrates the cunning and bravery of ulysses; but she also introduces a fragment of her own history: "i longed to return home, and i lamented the infatuation which venus sent upon me." she wished to be restored to her husband who was "in no respect lacking in mind or shape." we must not forget that the husband was before her listening; she does not forget her skill. also telemachus was present and hears her confession of guilt and her repentance--important stages in her total life, which he is to know, and to take unto himself. menelaus has also his myth of ulysses at troy, which he now proceeds to tell. it brings before us the wooden horse, really the thought of ulysses, though wrought by epeios, by which the hostile city was at last captured. here the odyssey supplies a connecting link between itself and the iliad, as the latter poem closes before the time of the wooden horse. ulysses is now seen to be the hero again, he is the man who suppresses emotion, especially domestic emotion in himself and others for the great end of the war. it suggests also the difficulty of ulysses; he had so long suppressed his domestic instincts, and done without the life of the family, that he will have great trouble in overcoming the alienation--whereof the odyssey is the record. in this story of menelaus, helen has her part too; she came to the wooden horse, "imitating in voice the wives of all the greek leaders," who were deeply moved, yet restrained themselves except one, anticlus, "over whose mouth ulysses clapped his powerful hands, and saved the greeks." truly a strong image of the suppression of feeling in himself and in others. but why did helen do thus? was it a hostile act on her part? menelaus hints that it was at least very dangerous to the greeks, though he delicately lays the blame of it on some god, "who must have inspired thee." she was testing the greeks whom she supposed to be inside the horse. will they answer the call of their wives? do they still retain their affection for their families? above all, does menelaus love me still? such was her test, in which we witness another of her many gifts. at any rate, she is not yet free, she is still married in troy, though the hour of her release be near. with these two stories, the note changes; the sad turn of the talk is transformed into a quiet earnest joy, the sorrows of the present vanish in the glorious memories of the past. the moment troy is introduced, the narrative becomes an heroic tale, a sort of iliad, with its feats of arms. thus we hear the story of ulysses while at troy, giving two instances of his craft and his daring. next we are to hear of him after his trojan experience, this now theme will give the new poem, the odyssey, which, however, is seen to interlink at many points with the iliad. but this is sufficient, night has come on, telemachus has heard and beheld enough for one day. helen disappears from the scene, she has contributed her share, her own selfhood, to the experience of the young man. telemachus has seen helen, and thus attained one supreme purpose of greek education. never can that face, beautiful still, yet stamped with all the vicissitudes of human destiny, pass out of his mind; never can that life of hers with its grand transformation pass out of his soul. the reader, too, has at this point to bid good-bye to homer's helen, the most lasting creation of a woman that has yet appeared upon our planet. a power she has, too, of continuous re-embodiment; every poet seeks to call her up afresh, that is, if he be a poet. it may be said that each age has some incarnation of helen; the greek myth for two thousand years, medieval legend, even teutonic folk-lore have caught up her spirit and incorporated it in new forms. the last great singer of the ages has in our own time, evoked her ghost once more in the shining palace of menelaus at sparta. farewell, helen, for this time, but we shall meet thee again; yesterday thou didst show thyself in a new book under a new garb, to-morrow thou art certain to appear in another. thine is the power to re-create thyself in the soul of man with every epoch and in every country. great is that discipline of telemachus, which we still to-day have to seek: he has seen helen. 3. the preceding story was the heroic tale, which goes back to the past, especially to troy, as the grand deed done by the united hellenic race, whereof the iliad is a sample. but now we enter a new field, and a new sort of composition, which, in default of a better name, we shall call the fairy tale. helen is not now present, nor is her struggle the theme; menelaus, the man, is to recount his experience in his return to hellas. the story is inspired by the desire of telemachus to know about his father. as that father is not present the question arises, where is he? menelaus will undertake to answer the question by a tale which shadows forth the distant and the future--a prophetic tale, which casts its glance through the veil of time and space. a mythical figure appears, proteus, the old man of the sea, who is to foretell to the inquiring mortal what may be needful for his safety. not an olympian god is proteus, yet a supernatural shape standing between man and deity and mediating the two, the human and the divine. for it is proteus who sends menelaus back to the gods whom he has neglected and offended. the fairy tale which we are now to consider, is not to be looked upon as an allegory; it is a story with incident, movement, character, all in their own right, and not for the sake of something else. but we must not, on this account, imagine that it has no thought; in fact, the fairy tale is just the way in which primitive peoples think. it has thought, often the profoundest thought, which darts through it, not steadily, but fitfully in flashes at the important links, like electric sparks. this thought we are to catch and hold, and not rest satisfied with the mere outer form of the story. persons we can always find who are strongly prepossessed against seeing any meaning in the fairy tale, or in the mythus. modern usage of these literary forms, doubtless, justifies such an opinion. still we must remember that homer was not playing, but thinking with his fairy tale; he had no technical terms, and almost no abstract language for expressing thought; the day of philosophic reflection had not yet dawned upon greece. homer has a great and deep thought to utter, but his utterance is and must be mythical. his problem, too, he has, and it is spiritual; the mythus is his statement, honest, earnest, final. no, he was not playing at story-telling, though it must have given him pleasure; nor was his object merely to delight somebody, though he certainly has delighted many by his song. he was the true poet, upholding his own worth and that of his vocation; he was loyal to the muse whose word he must sing whether it find listeners or not. homer built his legendary structure to live in, not to play in; with all his sportiveness, he is a deeply earnest man; if his zeus sometimes takes on a comic mask, it is because providence is a humorist. homer, when he mythologizes, is thinking, thinking as profoundly as the philosopher, and both are seeking to utter to men the same fundamental thought. the reader is to think after the poet, if not in the immediate mythical form, then in the mediate, reflective way. the present tale seeks to give an answer to the two main questions of telemachus: where is my father now? and, will he return home? to answer the one question requires a knowledge of what is distant in space; to answer the other question requires a knowledge of what is distant in time. can we not see that herein is an attempt to rise out of that twofold prison of the spirit, space and time, into what is true in all places and times? in other words, menelaus unfolds in a mythical form, the universal to his young pupil, and we may now see in what manner he gives the lesson. he leaps at once into the middle of his theme; he was in egypt and detained there by the gods, "though longing to return home." such is the great initial fact, he did not do his duty to the gods. without their aid or without their adequate recognition, he seeks to come home. this indicates the spiritual difficulty; he is indifferent to or a disbeliever in the divine. the gods are the upholders of the world-order, they are the law and the spirit of the reality. clearly menelaus could not or did not fit himself into the providential system. neglect of the gods--that detains him, must detain him. the result is, he and his companions are wasting away on an island, without any chance of return. the question of the hour is, how shall i get out of the difficulty? only in one way: acknowledge the gods, put yourself into harmony with their order, then the outer world and the inner man will be one, and must bring about the deed, which is the return. we are now to witness the process whereby this reconciliation between man and the gods takes place--surely the supreme matter in life. it is told in the form of the fairy tale or marvelous legend, which shifts and changes; we, however, must cling to the essence else it will escape us, proteus himself we must hold fast, and not be misled by his many appearances. menelaus begins to feel sorrow, which is a penitent condition antecedent to all help. moreover he wanders alone, he has gone apart from his companions; behold, the goddess steps out of the air and speaks. she reproaches him with folly, and turns him to the deity who can assist him. who is this goddess? it is eidothea, the goddess of appearance, yet the daughter of proteus, the old first one, to whom she directs menelaus, as the only means of salvation. mark how she designates proteus: "he is the true, the immortal; without error, without death; he knows the depths of all the sea"--the great sea of time and space, which envelops the poor mortal. but he must be snared and held--surely not an easy task it is to catch him. the etymology of the names of these two deities indicates their meaning and relation. the grand dualism of the world is clearly suggested: appearance and substance, the transitory and the eternal, that which seems and that which is. menelaus had gone astray, he had neglected the gods, he had followed appearance, delusion, negation; the result could only be death. but even appearance points to something beyond itself, something true and eternal. so eidothea suggests proteus, who is her parent; that is, she is the manifestation of his being. she is the many, he is the one underneath and in the many; she is change, he is the permanent in all change. he may well be designated as her father, whose transformations she knows and declares. these transformations are called his tricks or stratagems, the shapes he puts on in the world of appearance; they are indeed eidothea herself along with her voice telling what is higher than herself. when this one first principle is clearly revealed, then all is revealed; the future becomes transparent, and the distant becomes near. but you must hold fast to the one true proteus; he will turn to fire--hold fast; he will become running water--hold fast; he will change to tree, beast, reptile--hold fast. then he will show himself in his right shape, and will speak the fact. hold fast; the one is under all, and is a god, who will lift the veil of space and time from the visage of truth. but unquestionably the man in his desperate struggle must never forget the injunction. hold fast to old proteus. we must note, too, that the poet has shown menelaus as prepared to receive this divine revelation; the greek wanderer has been brought to contrition by manifold sufferings. "i surely must have sinned against the immortals," is his penitent outcry. thus he is ready for the new truth, and the voice of the goddess speaks, when he is internally in condition to hear it. the divine word is not forced upon him; he must do his share even toward creating the same within himself. now, along the shore of the sea, "he prays the gods fervently," ere he goes to his task. egyptian proteus he seeks to catch and to hold, for it is proteus who is to point out to him the way of reconciliation with zeus and the olympian gods. stress is strongly laid by the poet upon the fact that proteus is of egypt. evidently, in the mind of homer, the thought of this fourth book connects with the land of the nile. what hint lies in that? the highest wisdom of egypt, indeed, of the orient, is just this grand distinction between appearance and substance, the transitory and the eternal, the many and the one. what egypt gave to hellas is here suggested, nay, said directly. in fact, the first great step in wisdom, is still to make the above distinction, which in many ways has been handed down to us from the east. but the greeks united the two sides--that which appears and that which is, or the world of sense, and the world of spirit--and thereby produced art, the plastic forms of gods and men. hellas brought forth to the sunlight beauty, which egypt never could. even here egyptian proteus leads menelaus to the greek gods, and becomes himself a kind of antecedent hellenic deity. egypt means to greek menelaus two things: first, it is a land of error, of alienation, of darkness; secondly, it has its light, its wisdom, which, when he finds, points him homeward to hellas, to his own gods. deeply suggestive become all these mythical hints, when we once are in touch with their spirit. we naturally pass to the hebrew parallel, since that other great world-historical people of antiquity, the israelites, had their experience also with egypt. for them, too, it was a land of darkness, slavery, divine estrangement. they also sought a return, not dissimilar to the greek return, to their true home. it was a long, terrible time, a wandering not on the water, like the sea-faring hellene, but in the wilderness and desert, like the sand-faring semite. all the companions (but two) were lost, and the leader also; moreover that leader was learned in all the wisdom of the egyptians, but had to get out of it and away from it, and lead his people into their own possessions. much light egypt with all its darkness furnished to moses and judea; much to menelaus and to hellas. so the two chief streams of human culture, the greek and the hebrew, are traced back to the egyptian source in the earliest books, or bibles of the two peoples themselves. moreover we find the form of the two grand experiences quite the same; there is a going into egypt, the land of dazzling riches and power and civilization; there is the misfortune and trial in that land after a time of prosperity, finally, there is the return home, with many wanderings and sufferings. both peoples bring with them what may be called the egyptian idea, yet each transforms it into its own spirit after its own fashion. still further we may follow this thought and behold it as universal. the form of separation and return is fundamental in human spirit; this is its inherent movement, and the shape which it imparts to the great works of literature. the very destiny of man is cast into this mould; there is, first, his estrangement, the fall from his high estate; then is his return to harmony with the divine order. the hebrew bible begins with the fall of man; that is the first chapter; the rest of the book is his rise, and marks out the path of his return which, of course, shows many sinuosities. such is the deepest fact of the human soul, and to image it, there springs into existence the corresponding literary form. not that it was taken consciously by the poet or maker after much ratiocination; he has to take it, if he sees the universe as it is. this form is the form of the everlasting reality, of which he has the immediate vision, it is also the form of very selfhood, of the ego. though different in many things, the odyssey and the bible are both, at bottom, returns. they restore the man after alienation. indeed we may behold the same form as fundamental in all great literary books--in homer, in dante, in shakespeare, in goethe. many things connected with this catching and holding of proteus are suggestive, but they are the flash of the poet into the depths, and must be seen with the poetic glance, for they bear with much loss the heavy translation into thought. how this eidothea, the goddess of appearance, turns against her own father, and helps to make him reveal himself in his true shape; how menelaus and his three comrades put on the skins of the sea-calves, and deceive the deceiver, applying the latter's art of transformation to himself, and destroying appearance with appearance; how the poor mortals almost perish through the odor of the skins of the sea-calves, thus showing their human weakness and limitation, till ambrosia, the food of the immortals, is brought by the goddess, which at once relieves them of their mortal ailment--these and other incidents have their subtle, far-reaching hint of the supersensible world. the whole story is illumined with one thought, how to master the material show of things and reach their spiritual inwardness. but the chief duty of these people, now disguised to destroy disguise, is to hold the old man fast when they have once caught him, that shifty, ever-changing old man of the sea. let him turn to water, to a snake, to a lion, to a tree--hold him fast; he is the one under them all and will at last reveal himself. very necessary, indeed, is it to hold fast, and never let go in the grand play of appearances; the strength of the man is shown by his ability to hold fast, amid the fleeting shadows of time. menelaus holds the old man fast, and asks: what god detains me from my return? the answer comes home strong: thou hast neglected the sacrifice due to zeus and the other deities; thou hast not recognized the gods. verily the heart of the difficulty; menelaus has not placed himself in harmony with the divine order, in which he must act. what then? go back to the beginning, back to egypt, and start aright; commence thy return again with the new light, recognize zeus and the gods by sacrifice there, and thou shalt see home. thus the egyptian estrangement is removed, the greek hero of wisdom must reach beyond the experience of egypt and be restored to the greek gods. at once menelaus was ready to obey, though "his heart was broken" at the thought of recrossing the sea to egypt, for the "way was long and difficult." still he will do it; and next he is given a look into the distant and future, a glance into the soul of things separated from him by space and time. he will know concerning the returners, in deep accord with the spirit of the poem. he hears of the awful death of ajax, son of oileus, he hears of the sad fate of his brother agamemnon; also the old man of the sea tells him a few words concerning ulysses, who is still alive but cannot get away from the isle of calypso. news just good enough to give hope to the son who is eagerly listening, and hears that his father still lives. finally, menelaus learns of his own future existence from the old man, who is in person the very embodiment of what lies beyond the senses, of immortality. "the gods have decreed thou shalt not die, o menelaus, but shalt dwell in the elysian plain, at the ends of the earth." he is the husband of helen, and coupled forever with her destiny; he is, through her, of the divine family of zeus. such is the promise, has it not been fulfilled? the poet thus brings to an end his fairy tale, with its deep-reaching glances into egypt as one of the antecedent sources of hellenic civilization. we find therein hinted a double relation: first, egypt was the giver of much wisdom to greece especially the distinction into appearance and the one first principle; secondly, it was hostile to greek spirit, which had to pass through the egyptian stage to reach its own destiny. homer spins, in this book, a thread which connects the culture of hellas with that of egypt, so much we dare find in the present legend without much straining. the distant background of this entire visit of telemachus to sparta is egyptian and oriental, as we see from the talk of both helen and menelaus. we may now be certain that homer, the poet, had before him a thought of this kind: the inner soul of things and the outward manifestation. the story of proteus we may call not merely a fairy tale, but the fairy tale, which images its universal self in setting forth its special theme; it has the one meaning, which, however, takes on many varieties of external shape; it is the essence of all fairy tales. still you have to catch the proteus and make him tell his secret; i can only advise you to hold fast, and finally the true form of the old man will reveal itself, and speak the truth of many appearances, nay, of all. in reading this poem of homer we are only following the poet, if we seek to lay hold of its essence under its varied manifestations. the whole odyssey is a proteus, ever changing, assuming new forms, which will utterly bewilder the reader until he reaches its first principle. homer probably suggests that his own fairy tale, nay, his own poem, is a proteus, which must be grasped and held by the one central thought. in fact, does not the modern reader, like ancient menelaus, in his wanderings need an eidothea, an interpreter, to point out the old man of the sea, the first one, and to tell how to catch him? in the very names of proteus and eidothea we feel the intention, the conscious etymology which borders on personification. yet around this simple substrate of thought are woven so many wonders, so many suggestions, far-hinting and deep-glancing, that it becomes truly the tale of tales (_märchen aller märchen_). the fairy tale will appear again in the odyssey, and take possession of the whole poem for a time when we come to the wanderings of ulysses. now it is but a slight bubbling-up of what will be a great stream. at present it turns to the east and unfolds the greek relation thereto; hereafter it will turn to the west, and unfold the greek relation thereto. both have their wise men, and the return is from each direction to greece. the distinction between them we may suggest in advance: the one has more of the speculative, of the spirit; the other has more of the active, of the will, though neither side excludes the other. both men return to hellas as the common destination; hence, we find in this book everywhere expressed the intimate brotherhood between menelaus and ulysses. it is of great interest to see the poet build his fairy tale, which is but one form of his mythical procedure. instinctively he builds it, as the bee does the honey-cell. he places the god or goddess at the center of every movement or event; by divine will it is all brought about. the sea which stands in the way of the return of ulysses is a deity, poseidon; eidothea is a person, the voice of the world of appearance, and she leads to proteus, the primal one. to homer personality is at the heart of this universe. such is truly the mythical mind; all phenomena are the product of an intelligent will, not of blind law. not a long chain of cause and effect hovers before homer's soul, thus his work would be prose; but he sees self-cause at once, and so cannot help being poetical, as well as religious. the culture of to-day tends too much to divest us of the mythical spirit--which is not altogether a gain. homer, if rightly studied, will help restore that lost gift of the early ages. but now we must turn our look to the youth for whom the tale has been told--the learner telemachus. he hears of the orient and its principle; the antecedents of his people, their origins, separations, their advance upon the older nations are significantly hinted. all this is an education. for its function is to bring together the scattered wisdom of the past and to give it to the youth who is coming upon the stage of life; thus he is made the spiritual heir of all that his race has achieved in word and deed. telemachus has learned about the history of troy, the great event of the early greek world; he has heard the returns of the heroes, and he has seen helen. but, chiefly, he has been taught the grand distinction between appearance and substance; he has come to know, if he has learned his lesson, the one in the many; he has been shown how to reach beyond the sensuous appearances of things and enter the realm of spirit. such is still the best education to-day, though the manner of it be so different. there were no books in those days, no schools but the lips of the aged; every greek youth, to a degree, was a telemachus, and had a similar discipline. tradition, song, folk-lore are also means of education; we cannot do without the mythus even now, and we are in many ways seeking to restore it to its place in the training of the child, and of the grown man too. telemachus has graduated, he can now go home; so he asks to be permitted to depart for ithaca, where the hardest practical problem of life is awaiting him. but mark, he carries with him the grandest of all hospitable presents: the knowledge of the true and eternal in contrast to the unreal and transitory. in these four books of the odyssey the education of the homeric youth has been given. next we are to have the experiences of the man--those of the typical man ulysses, as he works out his own problem. menelaus could not tell that tale; the man himself must be seen doing, overcoming his obstacles by the deed. he will present a phase of life not known to the east, not known to egyptian proteus. thus the odyssey will be an entire book, a veritable bible for young and old, with its complete cycle of human discipline. the story of proteus itself is protean, and must be grasped in its essence through all its appearances. the whole odyssey is veritably a protean poem as already said, whose study is to seize the one truth which is underneath all these shifting shapes and manifold events. what are we doing now but trying to grasp proteus in this exposition? there is no mythus in homer which has wound itself so deeply and so variously into the literature of the world. it would be an interesting history to trace its employment by later poets, and see how it has mirrored itself in the consciousness of the ages. the last world-poet, goethe, takes the figure of proteus from his eldest brother, the first world-poet, and transplants it into the second part of faust, where it has its place in the development of the modern man. the mythus of evolution the tale of proteus becomes in goethe's hands, and hints of darwinism long before darwin. still the most significant historical fact of this fourth book is the connection which it makes between egypt and greece. in another greek legend, that of oedipus, the same connection is made through the sphinx, whose riddle the greek hero solves, whereat the egyptian monster destroys itself. the sphinx, the grand symbol of egypt and chief product of its art, may be taken as the egyptian starting-point for both greece and judea. the sphinx is half human, half animal; the two are put together in stone and thus stand a fixed, unreconciled contradiction. such was just the sphinx-riddle of humanity to the old egyptian: man is a beast and a spirit, linked together without any true mediation. both the hebrew and the greek sought to solve this grand riddle, each in his own way. the hebrew attempted to extirpate the sensuous element; he would have no graven image, no idolatry, he would worship only the pure spirit, and obey only the divine law. the greek reconciled the two sides, by making the sensuous element the bearer and the revealer of the spiritual. the animal must be subordinated to the spirit, then it can live, nay can have a new and higher existence. thus art arose in greece, and not in judea. the interpretations which the story of proteus has received are simply infinite. probably it appeals to every reader in a somewhat different fashion; he pours into this marvelous form certain phases of his own experience and is satisfied. indeed proteus is not only a form, but a form of forms for the human mind, hinting both the oneness and the multiplicity of the ego itself. we may go back to the vedas and find traces of it there in some sun-myth; we may go to the sea and find it a miraculous legend in which the greek sailor set forth his perils and his escapes. it certainly connects hellas with egypt, and suggests the movement of ancient civilization. menelaus in his voyage transcends the greek world of the trojan epoch, and brings back the story thereof to his country. the tale of proteus is said to have been carried back to egypt, where herodotus, several hundred years after homer, found it in a new transformation, proteus being a king of egypt, who took helen from paris and kept her till menelaus arrived and received her from the egyptian ruler. thus the fairy tale raised the old man of the sea to the royal dignity, changing sovereignty from water to land. (_herodotus_, ii. 112-20.) plato makes him typical of a sophist, schlegel of a poet, lucian of a dancer. we shall now take a glance backwards and give a short summary of the story, that its inner development in the hands of the poet may be more fully seen. 1. the desolation of menelaus and his companions on the island of pharos; no return possible, death from hunger imminent. moreover, disregard of the gods, internal estrangement, a condition of separation from the divine, truly an egyptian condition. 2. eidothea appears to him, just the goddess of appearance, and points him to a power beyond herself. hitherto he was lost in the world of appearance; but when he thinks of it, he separates himself from it, and sees its nullity. so the finite points to the infinite, the fleeting to the permanent, the sensible to the supersensible, eidothea to proteus, who is the first one, or the first principle underlying all appearance, hence her father. 3. she tells also how to catch him. when he emerges from the water, source of all forms, indeed just the formable (see goethe's faust, part ii. in the _classical walpurgisnight_), he will count by fives all his sea-calves, or sea-forms, offspring of the sea (halosydna). this counting by fives, is significant, hinting the earliest abstraction from the sensuous through number, specially by means of the five-system, though homer knew well the decimal system (see _od._ xvi, 245. _iliad_ ii. 126). menelaus with his companions is to take on this sea-form, and be counted with the rest, though in disguise; then when proteus lies down to sleep with his herds or forms, he is to be seized; that is, seized in repose, as he is himself, not in relation to his shapes. they must continue to hold fast to this primal form of proteus, or the archetype, through all his changes, till he resumes his first shape, "the one in which thou sawest him in repose." then they possess the essence as distinct from the phenomenon; they know that their disguise has torn off all disguise, and attained the real. 4. proteus will now tell menelaus the truth devoid of all delusive shows; ere the latter can leave egypt and return to greece he must put himself into harmony with the greek gods, zeus and the rest. so he has to go back to egypt's river and start over again in the right way. then he will make the return to hellas. 5. proteus also gives the fate of a number of returners. ajax he specially speaks about--ajax, son of oileus (not the greater ajax), the blasphemer, who said he would return in spite of the gods, and at once perished. the account of the death of ajax has its meaning for menelaus, who thought of getting home with paying due regard to the gods. once more agamemnon's dire lot is told with some new incidents added. thirdly proteus has seen ulysses in an ocean isle with the nymph calypso who detains him though eager to get away. thus the son hears the fact about his father. finally proteus prophesies the immortality of menelaus, for has not the latter reached beyond appearance into the eternal already, just by catching and holding proteus? so the old man of the sea cannot help giving this prophecy, which lives directly in his own experience. though telemachus is not told that his father is returning, still he may draw such an inference from the story of menelaus, who was also detained on an island longing to get home. if the gods, being duly recognized, will give their help in the one case, they will in the other; they too, will come to the aid of ulysses, when he has placed himself in harmony with them. this is what is about to happen. as already set forth, there are three divisions of this first part of the fourth book: the simple idyllic present at sparta, the disrupted strifeful past at troy, the movement out of the latter by way of egypt. taking the three divisions together, we note that they form the total sweep of one great return, that of menelaus, from unity through separation back to harmony. thus menelaus and also helen are shown to have solved their problem. but there remains the harder and deeper problem of ithaca, which is that of ulysses. here enemies have possession of the man's home, and he brings back no help, only himself. it is therefore, a natural transition to introduce at this point the ithacan condition which is seen to be more difficult than the spartan one, for menelaus seems to have had no enemies in his house to dispute his return, as agamemnon had and also ulysses has. but agamemnon perished, ulysses will not. ii. accordingly the affairs of ithaca are introduced, as they happened after the departure of telemachus. this thread is picked up from the second book, where he had his final conference with the suitors and told them his mind. we must recall that ithaca is the abode of conflict and disorder; the suitors and household of penelope are the two antagonistic elements; upon both the secret departure of telemachus explodes like a bomb, and brings the characters of each side to the surface. telemachus stands in relation to the suitors as well as to his mother; both are putting their restraints upon him which he has broken through and asserted his freedom, his new manhood. one, however, is the restraint of hate, the other is the restraint of love; both stand in the way of his development. he must get his great education in defiance of suitors and of mother. the attitudes of these two parties are described, and form the two divisions of this second part of the fourth book. 1. the suitors, when they hear of the deed of telemachus, are not only surprised but startled, and they at once recognise that a new power has risen which threatens to punish their misdeeds. the youth has plainly become a man, a man showing the skill and courage of his father, and with the sense of wrong burning in his breast. already he has declared that he would wreak vengeance upon them, the day of reckoning seems to have dawned. previously they despised his warnings as the helpless babble of a mere boy; now they have to meet him, returning, possibly, with help from his father's friends. what will the suitors do? the most audacious one, antinous, is ready with a proposal. the boy will prove a pest, we must waylay him on his return and murder him. such is their final act of wrong, which is now accepted by all, and the proposer gets ready to carry out his plan. hitherto it may be said the suitors had a certain right, the right of suit, which, however, becomes doubtful through the uncertainty about the death of the husband, and through the unwillingness of the wife. but now their guilt is brought out in strong colors, there can be no question about it. they man a boat and lie in wait for their prey on a little island which the youth has to pass in coming home. 2. the mother penelope hears of the daring act of her boy, done without her consent or knowledge. the news is brought to her, just as she is recounting the goodness of ulysses and the wrongs of the suitors. this new misfortune, for so it seemed to her, is quite too great a burden to bear; she breaks out into lamentations find recites her woes: a husband lost and now a son in the greatest danger. but she is to get both human and divine consolation. eurycleia, the old nurse, confesses to her part in the affair, and advises the queen "to put on fresh garments and to pray to pallas, ascending to the upper chamber." pallas sends to the distressed mother a refreshing sleep and a consoling dream, which we may consider to have been suggested by the words of eurycleia. her sister who dwelt far away, appears to her and says that her son, guided by pallas, will surely return. doubtless we see here an expression of the deepest instinct of penelope; the outer suggestion of the nurse and her own unconscious faith fuse together and form the phantom and give to the same an utterance. the youth who can plan and carry out such an expedition will probably be able to take care of himself. penelope of course has some doubt, since the good ulysses has had to suffer so much from the gods. about him, too, she will know and so inquires of the phantom. doth he live? but the shadowy image can tell nothing, the act of ulysses lies not in its field of vision, it declines to speak further and vanishes. thus telemachus has broken through the two restraints which held him in bondage at his ithacan home, both keeping down his manly endeavor. the first comes from the suitors and is the restraint of hate, which would give him no opportunity in the world of action, and in addition is destroying his possessions. the second restraint springs from love, and yet is injurious. the solicitude of the mother keeps him back from every enterprise; having lost her husband, as she deems, by his too adventuresome spirit, she is afraid of losing her boy for the same reason, and is in danger of losing him anyhow, by making him a cipher. such are the two obstacles in ithaca which telemachus is shown surmounting and asserting therein his freedom and manhood. the whole is a flash of his father's mettle, he is already the unconscious ulysses; no wonder that he inquires after his parent in pylos and sparta. the poet will now carry him forward to the point where he will actually meet and know ulysses himself; the son is to advance to direct communion with his great father. here the fourth book, or rather the telemachiad, reaches out and connects with the ithakeiad, which begins in the thirteenth book. ulysses returns to ithaca and steals to the hut of the swineherd eumæus; telemachus comes back from sparta, and, avoiding the ambush of the suitors, seeks the same faithful servant. thus father and son are brought together, and prepare themselves for their heroic task. but before this task can be accomplished, the grand experience of ulysses is to be told in the eight following books (v-xii); that is, we are now to have the ulyssiad, just as we have had the telemachiad. father and son are now separated from home and country; both are to return through a common deed of heroism. _general observations._ looking back at the telemachiad (the first four books) we observe that it constitutes a very distinct member of the total organism of the odyssey. so distinct is it that some expositors have held that it is a separate poem, not an integral portion of the entire action. the joint is, indeed, plain at this place, still it is a joint of the poetic body, and not a whole poetic body by itself. only too easy is it for our thought to dwell in division, separation, scission, analysis; let us now turn to the opposite and more difficult habit of mind, that of uniting, harmonizing, making the synthesis of what seems disjointed. in other words let us find the bonds of connection between the last four books and the coming eight books, or between the telemachiad and the ulyssiad. 1. we have already noticed the three grand returns, rising one above the other to the culmination--that of nestor, of menelaus, of ulysses. now the first two are told in the telemachiad; but they openly lead up to the third, which is the complete return, and which is just the theme of the ulyssiad. nestor makes the immediate return, without conflict, through greece, but he points directly to menelaus, and foreshadows the coming of ulysses. menelaus, however, prophesies the third return, and thus directly joins his account with the ulyssiad. in this manner we see and feel the intimate bond between these two grand divisions of the total odyssey. 2. we notice the same general movement in the telemachiad and in the ulyssiad; the same fundamental scheme underlies both. there is the real present, in the one case ithaca, pylos, sparta, in the other ease phæacia; then there is in the same heroic past the trojan war and its deeds of valor; thirdly there is a movement in both to an ideal world, to a fableland, outside of hellas and beyond even troy; finally there is a return in both to greece and to the present. setting the stages of this movement down in definite numbers, we have, first in the telemachiad: (1) hellas, the present; (2) back to troy, the past, in the reminiscences of nestor, menelaus, helen; (3) forward to the fairy world in the account of proteus; (4) return to ithaca at the end of the fourth book. secondly in the ulyssiad we may here note in advance the same general movement: (1) phæacia, the present; (2) back to troy in the strains of demodocus; (3) forward to the fairy world of polyphemus and circe; (4) return to ithaca in the thirteenth book. thus we reach down and grasp the fundamental norm according to which the poet wrought, and which holds in unity all the differences between these two divisions of the poem. the spiritual basis of this movement, its psychological ground, we shall endeavor to unfold more fully hereafter. 3. in correspondence with the preceding, we can distinguish in both divisions the same kinds of style: (1) the symple idyllic tale of the present; (2) the heroic tale recounting the past and specially the trojan war; (3) the fairy tale which introduces a supernatural realm. each of these styles is poetic, yet with its own coloring and character. here again we should observe the author employing his fundamental norm of composition a second time, and thus re-asserting himself as the same person in both divisions of the poem--in the telemachiad as well as in the ulyssiad. 4. in each division, again, there is a supreme woman at the center of domestic life--penelope in the one, arete in the other, each being wife and mother, each supremely faithful to her institution, the family. this predominance and glorification of the married woman and the home constitute a common characteristic of both divisions, and show the same fundamental conception of her worth, as well as of her position in the social order. it may be doubted if modern literature has improved upon this homeric representation. 5. then the contrasts between the telemachiad and the ulyssiad link them together. disturbed ithaca, peaceful phæacia; the theoretic education of the son, the practical discipline of the father; telemachus, the son of his father, nausicaa, the daughter of her mother, the ithacan boy and the phæacian girl--such are a few of these contrasts. finally father and son, strongly contrasted, yet having their unity in this family of which they are members, suggest the unity of the poem of which they are characters. these bonds of connection are so strong that they overbalance all discrepancies of single passages, interpolations, and inconsistencies of detail. still, if the mind of the critic refuses the general sweep, and insists upon prying asunder the joints, and upon looking through its microscope at the little things, it will find only separation, discord, and many small homers instead of a single great homer. the particular always divides, but the general unites; so the homeric poems will have two sets of reader, the dividers and the unifiers. _the education of telemachus._ this is another name, which we have frequently used, for the telemachiad. the homeric youth is also to get his training for life; he is to find and to take possession of his inheritance transmitted from the past. the general statement of this educational fact occurs frequently in the work: telemachus wishes to know about his father. that is his immediate inquiry, which will extend to knowing something about the fathers and what they did; then his investigation will go beyond the fathers and the greek world, reaching over into egypt and the east. the function of education is to put into possession of the coming man the wisdom of the past, and specially the means for acquiring this wisdom; then he can transmit the intelligence of the race to those who are to follow him. so telemachus has attained the age when he must know ancestral wisdom. such is his strong instinct, he feels his limitation, he is penned up in a narrow life at ithaca, whose barriers cramp his free spirit. this intense desire for education, for finding out something about the world in which he is placed, is the starting point for the boy. he shows his spirit by breaking through the restraint of the suitors and his mother in order to get an education. like many a youth to-day, he has to leave home, has to run away, in fact, that he may have his opportunity. what does he get? or, what is the content of this education! let us see. 1. we find that he gets a fair amount of religious training. he has been led through the misfortunes of his house to question the goodness of providence and the superintendence of the gods. but minerva gives him a strong lesson, so does nestor. he obtains a glimpse of the divine order, and feels the necessity of keeping in harmony with the same. the outcome of his visit must impress him with the providential side in human action. 2. he sees new countries, talks with famous men, and partakes of their wisdom. chiefly, however, he hears of the grand return in its manifold phases; he learns the story of those who failed, of those who reached home, like nestor and menelaus. great is the lesson; this return images the movement of the soul, the breach within and the restoration. it is remotely his own inner life outlined, and that of every man; telemachus has just made a separation from home and country, to which he must come back and be reconciled. his own soul-form he must dimly feel in the great return of the heroes from troy, and their various destinies he must recognize to be his own possibilities. 3. telemachus the aspiring youth, is trying to recover his patrimony, which is of two kinds, physical and spiritual. the suitors are destroying the one, and keeping it out of his hands; with them is one conflict, that of justice. but he must also inherit his father's mental riches; he has to separate from home and his mother to find this form of wealth or even to learn of its nature. so telemachus has his trojan expedition, not so great in itself, yet, adventurous enough for a boy. he is moving on the lines of his father when the latter went to troy--a national affair; but his deed is a breaking loose from boyhood--the breach out of which he is to come back a man. 4. the form of this educative process of the odyssey is very different from ours. it seizes hold of the mythical element in man, and the reader of to-day is to penetrate to the meaning by something of an effort. telemachus is to see helen; what does that signify in education? he is to hear the tale of proteus and feel its purport in relation to his own discipline. one asks: is not this imaginative form still a vital element of education? the odyssey has been and is now a school-book of the race. _the ulyssiad._ we have now reached the second grand division of the poem, the odyssey proper, which we have named under necessity the ulyssiad, and which gives an account of the adventures of ulysses before he comes to ithaca and joins telemachus. if the division which we have just had may be called the education of a youth, this division may be called the discipline of a man through experience of the world. the whole embraces eight books, fifth to twelfth inclusive, with a little of the thirteenth. there is no doubt that this is the most subtly constructed piece of writing in existence, transparent in the highest degree, and yet profound as thought itself. we may therefore, look a little at the structure in advance. the first thing to be noticed is that there are two very distinct movements in the present division. on the one hand the action moves through three separate localities--ogygia or calypso's island, phæacia, fableland. this external movement of the poem has its inner counterpart, which the reader is to penetrate. on the other hand there is the movement of the individual, the hero ulysses, who begins with fableland, passes through ogygia and comes to phæacia. this movement also has its corresponding internal significance. as the first movement is that of the poem, or of the world, we may call it objective; as the second movement is that of the individual man, we may call it subjective. the two together, accordingly, spin the two strands of the world and of man into the one thread of existence. both we shall consider. i. the objective sweep with its three localities is coupled with geographical names which have given to the erudite guild a great deal of trouble, with very small reward. in general these names of places may be deemed to be mythical, yet with certain far-off gleams of actual lands. much more distinct and real is their spiritual significance. the objective movement shadows forth the movement of society, the rise of civilization, the becoming of the institutional world, which is here unfolded through three stages in the following order:- 1. ogygia. 2. phæacia. 3. fableland. 1. ogygia is the pure product of nature without cultivation or with very little. it is the place where the natural man must conquer his appetites, and long for, and finally seek for, a realm of order. calypso is the concealer, she who conceals spirit in the jungle of nature. here, then, occurs the primordial breach between the physical and spiritual, out of which an institutional world can rise. 2. phæacia now appears, in which we behold the fundamental institutions of man, family and state, in their primitive idyllic condition, yet transcendently pure and beautiful. the evolution of this new order from the savage cyclops is hinted in the poem. only after calypso is put aside, do arete the wife and nausicaa the maid become possible. upon such a foundation a social system can be developed, with commerce, navigation, etc. still further, phæacia can begin to mirror itself in art, as it does here in the songs of the bard, and also in games. 3. fableland comes next, really a product of self-conscious art. in it are set forth the struggles which arise between man and the civilized order. phæacia is the simple condition of peace; man is in complete harmony with himself and his institutional environment. but what if he falls out with both? that will be a new stage, represented by a new set of beings, who are to indicate not so much the conflict with nature as the conflict with spirit. the world of reality is transcended, marvelous shapes sweep into view, polyphemus, circe, the sirens, even the supersensible realm of hades--all of which, however, must await a special exposition. still we should note that after this ideal realm of struggle and desperate enterprise comes the real world of strife, ithaca, which is to be harmonized by the man who has passed through this fableland, and has reached an ideal harmony in phæacia. ii. we soon find that ulysses has been thrown back to calypso's isle from fableland, of which in a certain sense it is the continuation. the circle which he has passed through is, therefore, the following:- 1. fableland. 2. ogygia. 3. phæacia. this is, then, the movement of the individual, in contrast with the previous sweep of the poem as a whole, which represents the movement of the world. both are bound together, both pass through the same stages, though in a different order. the process of social development begins with the state of nature, with ogygia, unfolds into a simple institutional life, into phæacia, which then enters into certain negative phases, such as are seen in fableland. but the man from troy, ulysses, begins with the last, and is whelmed back into the first, and finally rests in the second before going to ithaca. let us note this personal movement in a little more detail. 1. ulysses passes into fableland, having wantonly done a deed of violence against civilized life and order by destroying the city of the ciconians (book ix), as he was returning from the trojan war. such is the negative element in him, which has been engendered by that war, and which now appears in various manifestations, such as his doings with polyphemus and circe, till his career in fableland winds up with destroying the oxen of the sun. this is the extreme negative act which throws him back beyond circe's into calypso's realm. he assaults really his own will in this last act, he undermines his own power of recovery, he puts out his own light. circe would have sent him forward again, leaving intact his will-power; calypso detains him lulled in the sensuous delights of her bower. he denies his own reason; how then can he rise after a fall? indeed what use is there of rising? so he sinks down into ogygia, the dark island. 2. it is no wonder, therefore, that he remained with calypso seven years and more, draining to the dregs the cup of that life. still he has desire to return home, must have it, he must possess reason to deny reason. he longs for what he has not, sensuous charms cannot drown his aspiration; such is the hell in which he has placed himself. still even here when he has passed his probation, he must be released by a decree of the gods, who, formerly favorable to neptune, the divine foe of ulysses, have now become friendly to minerva, the hero's protectress. why this change in the everlasting powers? when ulysses is ready to leave ogygia, the gods cannot keep him there, they have to change; the divine order must help him escape, if it be divine. this is just what happens; zeus, voice of the olympian law, commands his departure, and calypso must obey. 3. ulysses, then, comes to phæacia, an institutional land with social, domestic, and political life. from the grot of calypso he passes to the home of arete; both woman and man are in an ethical relation. he sees a world of peace and harmony, he witnesses the corrective of his own negative trojan experience. he, having taken phæacia into himself, has a remedy for distracted ithaca; he has beheld an ideal to which he can adjust his own land. he was not the man to bring civil order to ithaca just after the destruction of troy; now he has passed through his own destructive phases, has become conscious of them, has told them to the phæacians, which long account has in it the character of a confession. all is given in a mythical form, but it is none the less an acknowledgment of error from first to last. he is the poetical confessor of himself, and the phæacians are contemplating the grand experience in the mirror of art. we may now see the reason why the poet began the story of ulysses with the stay at calypso's isle. thus the poem unfolds in the order of society, starting with the state of nature, passing thence to a civilized condition, and showing finally the conflicts of the same with the negative forces which develop in its own bosom. homer could have landed ulysses at phæacia, and could have made the ulyssiad start in that sphere, placing calypso's book just after the account of the slaughter of the oxen of the sun. but what a loss would that have been! no social development would thus be suggested in the movement of the poem, and the individual ulysses would have to pass, not from institutional phæacia, but from savage ogygia to the reformation of ithaca. in this way we realize to ourselves the true instinct, or perchance the profound thought which underlies the structure of this portion of the poem. thus we conceive the double movement of the ulyssiad through its three main stages, in which we feel strongly emphasized the idea of development, of a genetic process. these lands and peoples are generated by the wanderer's own spirit, though they all exist in their own right and are carefully set down in homeric geography. ogygia is the product of ulysses himself, and so he goes thither to the reality. the misfortunes in these lands are the very deeds of the offenders returning upon them. as the gods are both subjective and objective, so are these poetic places and persons; they are both in ulysses and outside of him, they are the inner change of the individual and the outer development of the world. each, however, fits into the other, is inseparably intertwined with the other; both together form the double movement which is the fundamental structural fact of the present division of the odyssey. of course our unfolding of the subject must follow the movement of the poem, but we shall not neglect the movement of the individual. accordingly calypso's island, ogygia, is the realm which is to be first considered. _book fifth._ in this book the reader will observe two distinct parts, which are so often found in homer and constitute the deepest distinction in his poems: these two parts are the upper world of the gods and the lower world of man, both of which are shown in action and counteraction. the grand dualism between the mortal and the immortal is fused into a living narrative and makes the warp and woof of homeric poesy. the general purport of both parts is seen to be the same at bottom: it is to remove the obstacles which stand in the way of the return of ulysses to home and country. these obstacles arise from the gods above and from nature below--the divine and the physical, though the latter also is presided over by deities. thus the greek hero, with the aid of the higher gods, is to put down the lower ones, or convert them into aids for his advancement towards the grand end, which is his institutional life in family and state. in this way only can ulysses, from his alienation, attain unto harmony with himself and with the divine order. the first part of the book gives the council of the gods and its consequences reaching down to the mortal who is the subject of deliberation. we shall note three stages in this movement from olympus to earth: (1) zeus to hermes, (2) hermes to calypso, (3) calypso to ulysses. thus from the highest the decree is brought below and opens the providential way. the second part deals with the mortal, who is brought into relation with three gods, all representing phases of the physical element of water: (1) neptune, the great deity of the sea, (2) ino leucothea, a lesser deity of the same, (3) the river-god, through whose channel ulysses comes at last to land. it is manifest that he must rise beyond these water-divinities with their uncertain fluctuating element, and attain to the fixed earth with its life, ere he can find repose. we shall now develop these two parts of the book with their subdivisions in the order stated above. i. first then is the divine obstacle, which has to be removed by the gods in homer, when the individual is ready to have it removed. this obstacle is at present centered in the goddess calypso, the marvelous concealer and extinguisher of the hero in her island ogygia. neptune is not here spoken of, though his element, the sea, is mentioned as something which must also be met and transcended; the hero through his own will can surmount this difficulty. verily calypso is the grand spiritual hindrance of ulysses, and, to help him get rid of it, the olympians assemble and start the movement, the conditions being that he is internally prepared to be helped by the gods. of the latter fact we shall note a number of indications hereafter. of this divine activity in removing the first obstacle we may distinguish three phases:-1. the council of the gods on olympus under the presidency of zeus, and the decree there. 2. hermes is sent by the supreme deity to calypso, with the decree. 3. calypso imparts the decree to ulysses, who soon sets about doing his part. in this brief outline we see the descent of the divine influence from zeus the highest, through hermes messenger of the gods, to calypso, a local subordinate deity, down to the mortal ulysses who is to get the benefit thereof. thus the poet makes his world-order ready for the deed of the man, who is now to act with all the energy of his being, and not lie back expecting the gods to do everything for him. such is the situation between the divine and human sides, of which we shall elaborate the former a little more fully. 1. the council of the gods in which the matter is now discussed, seems somewhat like a repetition of the one at the beginning of the first book, which indeed starts the whole poem. at present we may suppose that the poet wishes to recall that first council and its decree to the mind of the reader, inasmuch as the latter is now to begin the second grand division of the poem, the odyssey proper, or return of ulysses. pallas takes up the complaint and arraigns providence on an ethical ground: the good king is forgotten and the good man suffers. to the face of the supreme ruler she draws the conclusion: "let not any sceptered king henceforth be kind to his people and recognize justice, but always let him be harsh and work unrighteousness." then she cites the unhappy lot of ulysses. but zeus throws the charge back upon pallas, for she already had laid the divine plan that ulysses was to take vengeance on wrong-doing suitors, and telemachus she could save "by her skill," if so she chose. here pallas again hints as she did in the first book, the two lines on which the poem moves (telemachus and ulysses), and she also notes the two present obstacles (calypso and the sea) in the way of the return of ulysses. the divine activity begins work at once: zeus sends hermes to calypso with the olympian decree. ulysses, however, is to reach home "without any escort of the gods or of mortal men;" that is, he must exercise his own free-will tremendously, there is to be no special intervention of the gods without the corresponding human effort. note this passage as indicating the consciousness of the poet respecting divine help; it is not to take the place of free agency, but to complement the same. the hero will have to sail on a raft, "suffering evils;" but he will reach "the land of the phæacians, near of kin to the gods," where he will be "honored as a god," and will be sent home with abounding wealth, "more than he would ever have received at troy, returning unharmed with his share of the booty." such is the promise of the world-governor to the self-reliant man; this promise is not fate but foresight on the part of the supreme god. "thus is the hero destined to see again his friends," namely by means of a small raft or float, which he alone must control in his own strength, without the help of god or man. such is the reward of heroic endeavor, proclaimed by zeus himself. 2. the messenger hermes begins his flight down to calypso, holding his magic wand, with which he puts men to sleep or wakens them, imparting the power of vision or taking it away. he reaches the wonderful island with its grot, the account of which has been a master-stroke in literature, and shows that the description of nature was not alien to the greek poet, though he rarely indulges in it. one thinks that the passage contains a suggestion of much modern writing of the kind. it is to be noted that this island is mostly a wild product, it has had very little training from its resident. a natural house and garden we see it to be in the main; the senses, especially sight and smell, are gratified immediately by physical objects. there is little indication of art, possibly a beginning in the singing and weaving; rude nature may have been transformed somewhat in the four fountains and in the trailing grape-vine. but this description is not made for its own sake, as are many modern descriptions of nature; the whole is the true environment for calypso, and suggests her character. her name means the concealer, concealed herself in that lone sea-closed island, and concealing others. undeveloped she is, like nature, yet beautiful; sunken still in the life of the senses, she dwells in her little paradise without any inner scission. but it must be recollected that ulysses is not native to the island, he has come or rather fallen hither, from a higher condition. he, therefore, has the scission in himself, he longs to leave and be restored out of this realm of mere nature. with such a longing the gods must coincide, for they are the gods of culture, of the rise out of the physical. the long journey of hermes hints the distance between olympus and calypso's isle--a distance which has its spiritual counterpart. the command of the olympians is borne to this lower goddess; hermes is the voice of the higher ethical divinity to the lower one of mere nature. but even the higher god has his physical counterpart, is not yet wholly a spirit; so hermes eats his ambrosia and drinks his nectar set before him by calypso in true greek fashion and misses the smoke of sacrifices along his barren route. it is curious to see how hermes plays with polytheism, hinting ever so slyly the contradiction in the greek pantheon. "why dost thou a god ask me a god why i come?" it is indeed an absurd question, for a god ought to know in advance. in numerous places we can trace a subtle homeric humor which crops out in dealing with his many deities, indicating a start toward their dissolution. then with a strong assertion of the supremacy of one god, zeus, hermes utters the unwilling word: ulysses must depart from this island. the answer of calypso is significant, she charges the gods with jealousy; "ye grudge the goddesses openly to mate with men," which proposition she nails by several examples. but the gods reserve to themselves the privilege of license with mortal women. a complaint still heard, not in the olympian but in our lower world; men are not held to the same code of morals that women are! but calypso yields up her lover whom she "thought to make immortal and ageless." what else can she do? it is true that she saved him once and has preserved him till the present; she is, however, but a stage which must now be transcended. appetite may preserve man, still he is to rise above appetite. 3. now ulysses is brought before us. the first fact about him is, his intense longing to return home; he is found "sitting on the shore, and his eyes were never dry of tears" as he looked out on the sea toward his country; "for the nymph was no longer pleasing to him," whatever may have been the case once. surely the hero is in bonds which he cannot break, though he would; a penitential strand we may well find in his sorrow; thus he is ready for release. calypso, therefore, announces to him the divine plan: he must make a raft and commit himself to the waters. she has to obey, for is she not really conquered by ulysses? certainly the divine order requires her to send the man away from her island. yet the return is by no means made easy, but is to be won by hardest effort; he must grapple with the waves, with angry neptune after leaving calypso. no wonder that ulysses shuddered at the proposition; truly he has the choice between the devil and the deep sea, and he manfully chooses the latter. first, however, the goddess has to take the great oath "by earth, by heaven above and styx below," the sum total of the physical universe, from whose presence the perjurer cannot escape, though a god, that she is not practicing any hidden guile against her much-desired guest. always the doubter, the skeptic ulysses will show himself, even toward a divinity. he must test the gods also, as well as man. very beautiful and humane is the answer of the goddess: "such things i plan and deliberate for thee as i would devise for myself, were i in so great straits. for i too have a righteous mind, and the heart within my breast is not of iron, but compassionate." has a change come over the goddess through this visit from olympus? hardly could she have felt this before, else she would have sent away ulysses of her own accord. her adjustment to the divine decree seems now to be internal, and not simply a yielding to an external power. still the separation costs her deep pangs, and she wonders how ulysses, a mortal, can give her up, who is immortal, with all her beauty and the pleasures of her paradise. the answer of ulysses reveals the man in his present stale of mind. he recognizes calypso as beautiful, deathless, ever young; still he must have something more than sensuous life and beauty; though it last forever, it can never satisfy. not to be compared with the goddess in grace and stature, is his wife penelope, still he longs for his home; "yea, though some god wreck me on the wine-dark deep, i shall endure." but there is no doubt the other side is also present in ulysses; he has within himself a strong sensuous nature with which is the battle, and the poem does not disguise the matter, for he is again ready to enjoy all the pleasures of calypso's bower, after this paroxysm of home-sickness. such is the deep struggle of the man; such is also the divine obstacle, which has to be removed by an olympian interference before he can return. we see that ulysses in spite of all blandishments of the goddess and momentary weakness of himself, was ready for its removal; in his heart he has overcome calypso, and wishes to get back to his institutional life in family and state. such a man must return, the gods must be on his side, else they are not gods. according to the greek conception, calypso is a subordinate deity who must be put down by the olympians; appetite is not a devil, but a lower good, which must be adjusted to the higher. note, then, that the external stream, or the world-movement represented by the gods, now unites with the internal stream, the spirit of the individual, and brings forth the great event. as stated often before, these two streams run through all homeric poetry. ulysses now makes his raft; the hero is also a ship-builder, being the self-sufficient man, equal to any emergency, in whom lie all possibilities. the boat, still quite primitive, is constructed before our eyes; it is the weapon for conquering neptune, and prophesies navigation. calypso aids him in every way, she even supplies him with tools, the axe, the adze, the augur, which imply a more advanced state of civilization than has hitherto appeared in the dark island. whence did she obtain them? no special answer is given; hence we are thrown back upon a general answer. calypso is the original wild state of nature; but her transformation has begun, she helps ulysses in her new character. these tools are themselves formed from nature into means for subduing nature; the instrument of bronze in the hands of the wood-cutter is the master of the tree. at present calypso is also such an instrument; she, the wild product of nature, is herself transformed into a means for helping ulysses conquer the mighty physical element before him; an implement she has become in the hand of the gods for restoring the heroic endurer, and hence she can emblematically hand him these material implements, for they are one with her present spirit. indeed we may carry the analogy one step further, turning it inwardly: calypso, though once the inciter to sensuous desire, now helps the man put it away and flee from it; ethically she is converted into an instrument against her former self. in like manner nature is turned against nature by the thinking artificer. also food and drink and raiment the island goddess furnishes for the voyage; with rare skill she tells him how to direct his course by the stars; she is mistress over the winds, it seems, for she sends the right one to blow. wonderful indeed is the change; all those forces of nature, formerly so hostile, have been transformed into helpers, calypso herself being also transformed. thus we catch the outlines of the fairy tale or marvelous story, which tells, in a supernatural way, of man's mastery of the physical world, once so destructive, now so obedient. cloth for his sails she brought him, but we must recollect that she was a weaver at the start of the story. at last ulysses pushes his raft down into the fair salt sea; ogygia, the place of nature's luxuriance and delight, is left behind; he must quit the natural state, however paradisaical, and pass to the social order, to ithaca, though the latter be poor and rocky. still we may well recall the fact that the island and calypso once saved ulysses, when wrecked elsewhere, on account of the slaughter done to the oxen of the sun; this wild spot furnished him natural shelter, food, gratification; nay, it gave him love. to be sure, the other side is not to be forgotten: it had to be transcended, when it kept him away from the higher institutional life. ulysses, the wonderful, limit-transcending spirit, unfolds within even while caught in this wild jungle; he evolves out of it, as man has evolved out of it, thus he hints the movement of his race, which has to quit a cave-life and a mere sensuous existence. such is the decree of the gods, for all time: the man must abandon calypso, who is herself to be transformed into an instrument of his progress. we may now begin to see what calypso means, in outline at least. the difficulty of comprehending her lies in her twofold character: at one time she is nature, then she is the helper against nature. but just therein is her movement, her development. she is goddess of this island, where she rules; but she is a lesser deity who has to be subordinated to the olympians, as nature must be put under spirit. the greek deified nature, not being able to diabolize it; still he knew that it must be ruled and transmuted by mind. thus calypso is a goddess, inferior, confined to one locality, but having sensuous beauty as nature has. she, without ethical content, as purely physical, stands in the way of institutions, notably the family; she seduces the man, and holds him by his senses, by his passion, till he rise out of her sway. on this side her significance is plain: she is the female principle which stands between ulysses and his wedded wife, she not being wedded. thus she is an embodiment of nature, from the external landscape in which she is set, to internal impulse, to the element of sex. so it comes that she is represented as a beautiful woman, but beauty without its ethical content can no longer chain ulysses. that charm is broken, in spite of passing relapses. then comes the other side of calypso's character, as already indicated: she changes, she turns and helps ulysses put down herself and get away from her world, furnishing him quite all the means for his voyage. not without a certain regret and parting display of her charms does she do this; still the change is real, and at the last stage we must imagine a calypso transformed or partially so. the enchantress on her magic island is a favorite theme with the fairy tale, and the situation in itself rouses curiosity and wonder. the bit of land floating on the sea in appearance, yet withstanding wave and tempest, is, to the sailor, the home of supernatural beings. the story of calypso has the tinge of nautical fancy. in like manner the story of robinson crusoe is that of a sea-faring people. we see in it the ship-wrecked man, the lone island, the struggle with nature for food and shelter. but defoe has no supernatural realm playing into his narrative--no beautiful nymph, no olympian gods. that twofold homeric conception of an upper and lower world, of a human and divine element in the great experience, is lost; the englishman is practical, realistic, utilitarian even in his pious observations, which he flings into his text from the outside at given intervals. ogygia, the abode of calypso, means the dark island, upon which ulysses is cast after the destruction of the oxen of the sun. calypso, in harmony with the name of her abode, signifies the concealer--and that is what has happened to ulysses, his light is hidden. she is the daughter of atlas, who has two mental traits assigned to him; he is evil-minded and he knows all the depths of the sea. a demonic being endowed with his dark knowledge of things out of sight; he has a third trait also, "he upholds of himself the long pillars which keep heaven and earth apart" (book i. 53). naturally under such a burden he is not in good humor. calypso is the daughter who, along with her grot, may be conceived to have risen out of the obscure depths of the sea, with something of her father's disposition. doubtless greek sailors could behold in her image the dangerous rocks which lurked unseen beneath the waters around her island. the comparative mythologist finds in her tale the clouds obscuring or concealing the sun (here ulysses) till the luminary breaks out of his concealment and shines in native glory. something of truth lies in these various views, but the fundamental meaning is not physical, but ethical. ii. we now come to the great physical obstacle standing in the way of the return of ulysses, the sea, which, however, has always its divine side to the greek mind. a series of water-deities will rise before us out of this mighty element, assuming various attitudes toward the solitary voyager. three of them, showing themselves as hostile (neptune), as helpful (ino leucothea), as saving (the river-god); all three too seem in a kind of gradation, from the vast total sea, through one of its phases, to the small stream pouring into the sea from the land. thus the greek imagination, playing with water, deified the various appearances thereof, specially in their relation to man. the introduction of these three marine divinities naturally organizes this second part of the fifth book into three phases or stages. such is the divine side now to be witnessed. parallel to this runs the human side, represented by the lone hero ulysses, who is passing through a fearful ordeal of danger with its attendant emotions of anxiety, terror, hope, despair. a very hard test is surely here applied to weak mortal flesh. we shall observe that he passes through a series of mental perturbations at each divine appearance; he runs up and down a scale of doubt, complaint, resolution. his weakness he will show, yet also his strength; dubitation yet faith; he will hesitate, yet finally act. thus he saves himself at last through his own will, yet certainly with the help of the gods; for both sides have to co-operate to bring about the heroic act of his deliverance. pallas also comes to the aid of her favorite, but in an indirect manner. the sea does not seem to be her element. she stops the winds and "informs his mind with forecast," but she does not personally appear and speak, nor is she addressed, as is the case with the water-gods. she plays in by the way in this marine emergency; her appearances now do not organize the action. but the three appearances of the water-gods are the organic principle, their element being at present the scene of the adventure. on these lines we shall note the course of the poem in some detail. 1. neptune returning from the ethiopians to hellas, sees the lone sailor with his little craft from the heights of the mountain called solyma; at once the god's wrath is roused and he talks to himself, "shaking his head." the clouds, the winds, the ocean obeyed his behest, and fell upon the voyager in a furious tempest. a huge billow whirled the raft around and threw ulysses off into the deep; with difficulty be regained his place, and escaped death. a vivid picture of the grand obstacle to early navigation, of which neptune is the embodiment. why should he not be angry at the man who seeks to tame him? the raft means his ultimate subjection. nature resists the hand which subdues her at first, and then gracefully yields. to be sure there had to be a mythical ground for neptune's anger at ulysses: the latter had put out the eye of his son, the cyclops polyphemus, which was another phase of the subjection of wild nature to intelligence. for seventeen days ulysses had easy sailing, guided by the stars; but the sea has its destructive side which must also be experienced by the much-enduring man. corresponding to this outer tempest, we observe an inner tempest in the soul of ulysses. "o me wretched! what is now to happen to me!" terror unmans him for the time being; regret weakens him: "thrice happy, four times happy the greeks who fell on troy's broad plain!" thus he goes back in memory to his heroic epoch and wishes for death then. too late it is, for while he is lamenting, a wave strikes him and tosses him out into the deep; now he has to act, and this need of action saves him from his internal trituration, as well as from external death. with this renewed energy of the will, a new help appears, a divine aid from the sea. for without his own strong effort, no god can rescue him, however powerful. that toss out into the waves was not without its blessing. 2. ino leucothea, ino the white goddess, beholds him with pity in his extremity--she was once mortal herself but now is divine. her function seems to be to help the shipwrecked mariner; her name reminds the reader of the white calm of the sea, elsewhere celebrated by homer (book x, 94; nitzsch's observation). thus she appears to represent the peaceful placid mood of the marine element, which rises in the midst of the storm and imparts hope and courage, nay predicts safety. she gives her veil to ulysses, in which commentators trace a suggestion of the fillet or sacred cloth which was given out from a temple in samothrace, and had the power of saving the endangered mariner, if he had tied it round his body. as it is here employed, it strangely suggests a life-preserver. at any rate ino is the calming power opposed to angry neptune, and she works upon both the waters and the man. "ill-fated man," she cries, "why hast thou so angered neptune?" then she changes her note: "still he shall not destroy thee, however much he desires." she bids him give up his raft to the anger of neptune, throw away his clinging wet garments of calypso, and swim to the land of the phæacians. then she hands him the veil which he is to "bind beneath his breast," and, when he has reached land, he is to throw it back into the sea. a ritual of some kind, symbolic acts we feel these to be, though their exact meaning may be doubtful. ino, "the daughter of cadmus," is supposed to have been a phoenician goddess originally, and to have been transferred to the greek sailor, just as his navigation came to him, partly at least, from the phoenicians. if he girded himself with the consecrated veil of leucothea, the goddess of the calm, neptune himself in wrath could not sink him. such was the faith required of ulysses, but now comes the internal counterstroke: his skepticism. "ah me! what if some god is planning another fraud against me, bidding me quit my raft!" the doubter refuses to obey and clings to his raft. but the waves make short work of it now, and ulysses by sheer necessity has to do as the goddess bade him; "with hands outspread he plunged into the sea," the veil being underneath him. when he quits his raft, and is seen in the water, neptune dismisses him from view with a parting execration, and pallas begins to help him, not openly, but indirectly. in such manner the great doubter is getting toward shore, but even here his doubts cease not. steep jutting cliffs may not permit him to land, the billows may dash him to death on the sharp shoaly rocks, or carry him out again to sea, or some huge monster of the deep may snap him up in its jaws; thus he is dashed about internally, on the billows of doubt. but this grinding within is stopped by the grinding he gets without; a mighty surge overwhelms him, he clutches a rock and saves himself, but leaves flakes of flesh from his hands behind on the rock. "he swam along the coast and eyed it well," he even reaches the mouth of a soft-flowing river, where was a smooth beach and a shelter from the wind. here is the spot so long desired, here then he passes to an act of faith, he prays to the river which becomes at once to the greek imagination a god. 3. this brings us to the third water deity, and we observe a kind of scale from the universal one, neptune, down to a local one, that of the river. the middle one, ino, is the humane kindly phase of the great deep, showing her kinship with man; neptune was the ruder god of the physical sea, and, to the homeric greek, the most powerful and natural. no wonder that he was angry at that little raft and its builder; it meant his ultimate subjection. the prayer of ulysses to the river-god is, on the whole, the finest passage in the present book. it shows him now a man of faith, humbled though he be to the last degree of misery: "hear me, ruler, whoever thou art, i approach thee much-besought. the deathless gods revere the prayer of him who comes to them and asks for mercy, as i now come to thy stream. pity, ruler, me thy suppliant." certainly a lofty recognition of the true nature of deity; no wonder that the river stayed his current, smoothed the waves and made a calm before him. such a view of the gods reveals to us the inner depths of the hero's character; it calls to mind that speech of phoenix in the iliad (book ninth) where he says that the gods are placable. as soon as ulysses makes this utterance from his heart, he is saved, the divine order is adjusted to his prayer, he having of course put himself into harmony with the same. he has no longer any need of the protecting veil of the sea-goddess ino, having escaped from the angry element, and obtained the help of the new deity belonging to the place. he restores the veil to the goddess according to her request, in which symbolic act we may possibly read a consecration of the object which had saved him, as well as a recognition of the deity: "this veil of salvation belongs not to me, but to the goddess." not of his strength alone was he saved from the waves. such is one side of ulysses, that of faith, of the manifestation of the godlike in man, especially when he is in the very pinch of destruction. but ulysses would not be ulysses, unless he showed the other side too, that of unfaith, weak complaint, and temporary irresolution. so, when he is safe on the bank of the stream, he begins to cry out: "what now am i to suffer more! if i try to sleep on this river's brink for the night, the frost and dew and wind will kill me; and if i climb this hill to yonder thicket, i fear a savage beast will eat me while i slumber." it is well to be careful, o ulysses, in these wild solitudes; now let the petulant outburst just given, be preparatory to an act of will which will settle the problem. "he rose and went to the wood near by; he crept under two bushes that grew from the same place, one the wild and the other the tame olive." there in a heap of leaves--man's first bed--he slept under the intertwined branches of the two olives--nature's shelter against wind, rain, sun. he, with all his cultivation is quite reduced to the condition of the primitive man. one cannot help feeling a symbolic intention in these two olive trees, one wild and one cultivated. they represent in a degree the two phases of the man sleeping under them; they hint also the transition which he is making from the untamed nature of calypso's island to the more civilized land of phæacia. the whole book is indeed the movement to a new life and a new country. we might carry out the symbolic hint much further on these lines, and see a meaning in their interwoven branches and the protection they are giving at present; but the poetic suggestion flashing afar over poem backwards and forwards is the true effect, and may be dimmed by too much explanation. such is this marvelous storm with its ship-wreck, probably the first in literature, but often made use of since. the outer surges of the tempest are indeed terrific; but the main interest is, that along with this external description of the storm, we witness the corresponding internal heaving and tossing of a human soul. everywhere we notice that ulysses doubts at first, doubts calypso, doubts ino, doubts even his final safety when on land. he is the skeptical man, he never fails to call up the possibilities on the other side. though a god give the promise, he knows that there are other gods who do not promise, or may give a different promise to somebody else. it is the experience of life, this touch of doubt at first; it always accompanies the thinking man, who, like ulysses, must be aware of a negative counterpart even to truth. not pleasant, but painful is this doubt shooting through the soul, and keeping it in distress and often in lamentation. so even the hero breaks out into unmanly complaint, and reveals to the full his finite nature. yet if ulysses doubts, he always overcomes his doubt in the end; he sees the positive element in the world to be deeper than the negative one, after a little access of weakness. under his doubt is the deeper layer of faith, so he never gives up, but valiantly holds on and conquers. the gods come to his aid when he believes and acts. his intellect is doubt, his will is faith: wherein we may trace important lines which unite him with faust, the chief character in our last world-poem. ulysses will complain, and having freed his mind, will go to work and conquer the obstacle. he struggles with the billow, clinging to the mast, though he had just said: "now i shall die a miserable death." parallel to this human side runs the divine side, which we need not further describe here, with its three water-deities. a little attention we may give to the part of pallas. at one time she seems to control the outer world for her favorite, sending the wind or stopping it; then she is said to inform his mind with forecast, that he may do the thing in spite of wind or other obstacle; finally he often does the deed without any divine suggestion, acting through himself. in these stages we can see a transition of the mythus. the first stage is truly mythical, in which the deity is the mover, the second is less so, the goddess having become almost wholly internal; in the third stage the mythical is lost. all these stages are in homer and in this book, though the first is still paramount. taking into view the general character of the mythical movement of this fifth book, we observe that there is a rise in it from a lower to a higher form; calypso and neptune are intimately blended with their physical environments, the island and the sea. though elevated into persons, they are still sunk in nature; it is the function of the hero, especially the wise man, to subordinate both or to transcend both: which is just what ulysses has done. his mythus is, therefore, a higher one, telling the story of the subjection of nature and of her gods. this story marks one phase of his career. the reader will probably be impressed with the fact that in the present book the stress is upon the discipline of the will. the inner reactions of complaint, doubt, or despair turn against the deed, to which ulysses has to nerve himself by a supreme act of volition. the world of calypso is that of self-indulgence, inactivity, will-lessness, to which ulysses has sunk after his sin against the source of light, after his negation of all intelligence. it is not simply sensuous gratification with the mind still whole and capable of resolution, as was the case with ulysses in the realm of circe, in which he shows his will-power, though coupled with indulgence. such is the difference between calypso and circe, which is always a problem with the reader. in this way, too, we see how the fifth book before us is a direct continuation and unfolding out of the twelfth book. indeed the very movement of the poem is significant, which is a going backwards; so ulysses drops far to the rear out of that light-loving island of the sun, against which is his violation, when he comes to ogygia. but ulysses has now, after long discipline, transcended this sphere, and has reached a new land, of which the account is to follow next. _book sixth._ we are now to make one of the chief transitions of the poem, we are going to pass from the dark island and the stormy sea to phæacia, a bright, sunlit land, where reign peace and harmony. moreover, we move out of the realm of nature to that of institutions. still more significant are the central figures of the two localities, both women; one of these we have seen, calypso, who is now to give way to nausicaa. this book may, therefore, be called nausicaa's book, as she is the leading character in it, imparting to it a marvelous mood of idyllic beauty and womanly purity. she is the person chosen by the poet to introduce the hero into the new realm, phæacia, being in sharp contrast to calypso, who detained ulysses in dark ogygia away from his family, and whose character was adverse to the domestic relation. but nausicaa shows from the start the primal instinct of the true woman for the home. she is still young, but she has arrived at that age in which she longs with every throb of her heart to surrender her own separate existence, and to unite it with another. she manifests in all its attractiveness the primordial love of the woman for the family, basis of all institutional life, as well as fountain of the deepest joys of our terrestrial sojourn. on this account she represents the place of phæacia in the greek world as well as in the present poem; perhaps we ought to add, in the whole movement of civilization. that land may be called the idyllic one, a land of peace and of freedom from all struggle; the borderland between the natural and the civilized spheres. man has risen out of the grossness of mere sensuous individualism, such as we see in polyphemus and in other shapes of fairyland; but he has not yet reached the conflicts of higher forms of society resulting from a pursuit of wealth, from ambition, from war. here is a quiet half-way house on the road from nature to civilization; a sweet reposeful realm, almost without any development of the negative forces of society; a temporary stopping-place for ulysses in his all-embracing career, also for individuals and nations in their rush forward to reach the great end. the deep collisions of social life belong not to phæacia, nor to nausicaa, its ideal image. it is the virgin land, the virgin world, which now has a young virgin as its central character and representative, to mediate ulysses with itself, the universal man who must also have the new experience. still she is not all of phæacia, but its prelude, its introductory form; moreover, she is just the person to conduct ulysses out of his present forlorn condition of mind and body into a young fresh hope, into a new world. the calypso life is to be obliterated by the vision of the true woman and her instinctive devotion to the family. we are aware that ulysses has not been contented with the dark island and its nymph, he has had the longing to get away and has at last gotten away; but to what has he come? lost the one and not attained the other, till he beholds nausicaa, who grasps him by the hand, as it were, and delivers him wholly from calypso, leading him forth to her home, where he is to witness the central phase of domestic life, the mother. the organism of the book easily falls into two parts, one of which portrays nausicaa at home, the other gives the meeting between her and ulysses. yet over this human movement hovers always the divine, pallas is the active supernal power which brings these events to pass, introducing both the parts mentioned. she is the providence which the poet never permits to drop out. most deeply does the old singer's sincerity herein move the reader, who must rise to the same elevation; homer's loyalty is to faith, faith in the divine order of the world, for this is not suffered to go its way without a master spirit; the individual, especially in his pivotal action, is never left alone, but he fits in somewhere; the whole takes him up and directs him, and adjusts him into the providential plan; not simply from without but through himself. such is this poet's loyalty to his idea; he has faith, deep, genuine faith, yet unostentatious, quite unconventional at times; a most refreshing, yes, edifying appearance to-day, even for religious people, though he be "an old heathen." such continual recurrence of the god's interference with the course of events--what does it mean? this is unquestionably the fundamental problem with the earnest student of homer. let us observe, then, first, that the poet's principle is not to allow a divine intervention to degenerate into a merely external mechanical act; himself full of the spirit of the god, he puts the divine influence inside the individual as well as outside, and thus preserves the latter's freedom in the providential order. the faithful reader will never let these movements of the deity drop into mere machinery; when he does, he has lost the essence of homer. doubtless it requires an alert activity of mind to hold the gods always before the vision in their truth; they must be re-thought, or indeed re-created every time they appear. the somnolescent reader is only too ready to spare himself the poetic exaltation in which the old bard must be read, if we would really see the divinities, and grasp the spirit of their dealings with man. speak not, then, of epical machinery in homer, the word is misleading to the last degree, is indeed libellous, belieing the poet in the very soul of his art. in the present book there is not by any means as much divine intervention as in the preceding one; we pass from the lower realm of the water-gods to that of pallas, the goddess of intelligence, who is the sole active divinity in this book. she appears to nausicaa at the beginning in the form of a dream, and bids the maiden look after some washing. our first question is, why call in a goddess for such a purpose? the procedure seems trivial and unnecessary, and so it would be under ordinary circumstances. but through this humble and common-place duty nausicaa is made a link in the grand chain of the return of ulysses, which is the divine plan underlying the whole poem, and is specially the work of pallas. to be sure this had no place in nausicaa's intention, but it does have a place in the providential scheme, which has, therefore, to be voiced by the goddess. yet that scheme does not conflict with the free-will of the maiden, which finds its fullest scope just in this household duty, and brings out her character. she reveals to ulysses her nature, this is the occasion; she had to be free to represent what she truly was to the much-experienced man. an ordinary wash-day has little divinity in it, but this one is filled with the divine plan. thus small events, otherwise immediately forgotten, may by a mighty co-incidence he elevated into the sphere of the world's history, and become ever memorable. that french soldier who threw a camp-kettle over the head of mirabeau's ancestor and thus saved him from being trampled to death by a passing troop of cavalry, made himself a factor in the french revolution, and was inspired by whom, demon or angel? as already hinted, the structure of the book is determined by the two interventions of pallas, which divide it into two portions; these are shown in the following outline:-i. (1.) pallas appears to nausicaa in a dream, and gives the suggestion. (2.) nausicaa, when she awakes, obeys the suggestion and proceeds to the place of the washing. ii. (1.) ulysses also asleep, lies in his cover not far from the same spot, when pallas starts the plan for his waking. (2.) meeting of ulysses and nausicaa, and the going to the city. in both parts we observe the same general method; the divine influence, beginning above, moves below and weaves the mortal into its scheme through his own action. i. first is a short introduction giving a bit of the history of the phæacians, in which we catch a glimpse of their development. they once dwelt near the cyclops, the wild men of nature, from whom they moved away on account of injuries received; they could live no longer in such a neighborhood. here we note an important separation, probably a change of life which leaves the ruder stage behind. the colony is led forth to a new land by its hero, who lays the foundation of a social order by building houses, temples to the gods, and a wall round the city, and who divides the territory. thus a civil polity begins by getting away from "the insolent cyclops" or savages. on the other hand, civilized enemies who might bring war, seem not to dwell near the phæacians, beloved of the gods. beyond all conflict, inner and outer, lies the fortunate realm; it touches the happy mean between barbarism and civilization, though perchance on the road from former to latter; at present, however, it is without the evils which go before it and come after it. as already stated, it is an idyllic world, life appears to be one continued festival, with song and dance of youth. it is not real greece, not ithaca, which just now is a land of discord and conflict. what the poet says of olympus in a famous passage a little further on in this book, seems applicable, in spirit at least, to phæacia: the storm-wind shakes it not, nor is it wet by showers, and there the snow doth never fall; the calm clear ether is without a cloud, and over all is spread a soft white sheen. 1. now comes the appearance of pallas, who "like a breath of wind" approaches the couch of the maiden in slumber, and admonishes her about the washing. some such care the goddess does impose upon the housekeeper to this day, and if report be true, at times troubles her dreams. it is indeed an important duty, this necessity of keeping the household and its members clean, specially the men, too often indifferent. young nausicaa, just entering upon womanhood, is ready for the divine suggestion; plainly she has come to that age at which the goddess must speak to her on such matters. so much for pallas at present. 2. therewith we touch another fact; the maiden has reached the time when she must think, of marriage, which she instinctively regards as her true destiny in life. still it does not appear that she is betrothed though "the noblest phæacians are wooing thee." in simple innocence there hovers in her mind the thought of family, yet she shows a shy reserve even before her father. with that sweet thought is joined the primary household care, which naturally enough comes to her in a dream. cleanliness is next to godliness is our modern saying; it is certainly the outward visible token of purity, which nausicaa is going to bring into her domestic surroundings. we may reasonably think that in the present scene the external deed and the internal character mirror each other. it must be confessed, however, that to the modern woman wash-day, "blue monday," is usually a day bringing an unpleasant mood, if not positive terror. she will often declare that she cannot enjoy this phæacian idyl on account of its associations; she refuses to accept in image what in real life is so disagreeable. as a symbol of purification the thing may pass, but no human being wishes to be purified too often. nausicaa's occupation is not popular with her sex, and she herself has not altogether escaped from a tinge of disrelish. it is curious to note how customs endure. what homer saw, the traveler in greece will see to-day wherever a stream runs near a village. the nausicaas of the place, daughters and mothers too, will be found at the water's side, going through this same phæacian process, themselves in white garments even at their labor, pounding, rubbing, rinsing the white garments of their husbands, brothers, sons. not without sympathy will the by-stander look on, thinking that those efforts are to make clean themselves and their household, life being in truth a continual cleansing for every human soul. so hellas has still the appearance of an eternal wash-day. (see author's _walk in hellas, passim_.) nausicaa obtains without difficulty wagon and mules and help of servants. after all, the affair is something of a frolic or outing; when the task is done, there is the bath, the song, and a game of ball. it is worthy of notice that the word (_amaxa_) here used by old homer for _wagon_, may still be heard throughout greece for the same or a similar thing. in the harbor of piræus the hackman will ask the traveler: "do you want my _amaxa_?" the dance (_choros_), is still the chief amusement of the greek villagers, and, as in nausicaa's time, the young man wishes to enter the dance with new-washed garments, white as snow, whose folds ripple around his body in harmony with his graceful movements. many an echo of phæacia, in language, custom and costume, can be found in greece at present, indicating, like the cyclopean masonry, the solid and permanent substructure of homer's poetry, still in place after more than 2500 years of wear and tear. ii. the washing is done now, the sport is over, and the party is getting ready to go home; but the main object is not yet accomplished. ulysses and nausicaa are here to be brought together--the much-experienced man and the innocent maiden with her pure ethical instinct of family. in many ways the two stand far asunder, yet in one thing they are alike: each is seeking the domestic relation, each will consummate the bond of love which has two phases, the one being after marriage and the other before marriage. both are moving in their deepest nature toward the unity of the family, though on different lines; ulysses and nausicaa have a common trait of character, which will be sympathetically found by each and will bring them together. i. at this fresh turn of affairs there is an intervention of pallas, not prolonged, but sufficient: "thereupon athena (pallas) planned other things, that ulysses should wake, and see the fair-faced maiden who would conduct him to the city of the phæacians." the goddess does not appear in person, as the deities so often do in the iliad, nor does she take a mortal shape, or move ulysses through a dream; she simply brings about an incident, natural enough, to wake the sleeping hero. why then introduce the goddess at all? because the poet wishes to emphasize the fact that this simple incident is a link in the providential chain; otherwise it would have no mention. the ball is thrown at one of the servants, it falls into the stream, whereat there is an outcry--and ulysses wakes. of course, the latter had at first his usual fit of doubt and complaint, just when the gods are helping him: "ah me! to what land have i come! what men are here--wild, insolent, unjust, or are they hospitable, reverencing the gods? i shall go forth and test the matter"--and so by an act of will he rescues himself from inner brooding and finds out the truth. 2. now we are to witness the gradual outer approach between ulysses and nausicaa, till it becomes internal, and ends in a strong feeling of friendship if not in a warmer emotion. the wanderer, almost naked, with only "a branch of thick leaves bound about his loins," comes forth from his hiding place, a frightful object to anybody, a wild man apparently. all the servants run, but nausicaa stands her ground before the nude monster; being a princess she shows her noble blood, and, being innocent herself, what can she he afraid of? thus does the poet distinguish her spiritually among her attendants, as a few lines before in the famous comparison with diana he distinguished her physically: "over all the rest are seen her head and brow, easily is she known among them, though all are fair: such was the spotless virgin mid her maids." thus is hinted the outer and also the inner superiority which has now revealed itself in the phæacian princess. henceforth a subtle interplay takes place between her and ulysses, in which we observe three main stages: first, the wild man in appearance he steps forth, yet he succeeds in touching her sympathy, wherein her charity is shown; second, the transformed man, now a god in appearance he becomes, at whose view the maiden begins to show deep admiration, if not love; third, the passing of ulysses to the city to which he is conducted by the maiden, who also tells him how to reach the heart of the family, namely, the mother arete. thus she seeks to mediate him with her country and her hearth. (1) ulysses, issuing from his lair, addresses her in a speech which shows superb skill on account of its gradual penetration to the soul of the fair hearer. he praises first her external beauty with many a happy touch, yet with an excess which seems to border on adulation. this reaches her outer ear and bespeaks his good-will and gentleness at least. then he strikes a deeper chord: he mentions his sufferings, those which are past, and forebodes those which are yet to be, perchance upon this shore. "therefore, o princess, have compassion, since i have come to thee first; none besides thee do i know in this land. give me some old rag to throw around me, some useless wrappage which you may have brought hither." pathetic indeed is the appeal; therewith comes sympathy, the man is no wild cyclops, whom all phæacians still remembered with terror, but a victim of misfortune. now comes the culmination of his speech, which shows his keen insight into human nature, as well as his own deepest longing: "may the gods grant thy heart's desire---husband, home, and wedded harmony." with this praise of domestic life upon his lips he has touched the profoundest chord of her heart; he has divined her secretest yet strongest instinct, and has appealed to it in deep emotion. yet mark! in the same general direction lies his own dearest hope: he also will return home, to wife and family. thus he has found the common meeting-place of their souls; the two strike the absolutely concordant note and are one in feeling--he the husband, she the maiden. in her answer she expresses her strong sympathy, her words indeed rise into the realm of charity. it is no mark of baseness to be unfortunate; "but these must endure," what zeus lays upon them. such is the exhortation of the young maiden to the much-enduring man; she has divined too the ground-work of his character. "but now, since thou hast come to our land, thou shalt not want for garment or anything else proper for the needy suppliant." then she recalls her attendants, reproving them for their flight, and orders them to give to ulysses food and drink, oil to be used after bathing, and ample raiment. nor should we pass by that other expression of hers: "all strangers and the poor are jove's own," under the special protection of the supreme god, who will avenge their disregard. such is this ideal world of phæacia, still ideal to-day; for where is it realized? the old poet has cast the imago of a society which we are still trying to embody. well can she say that the phæacians dwell far apart from the rest of the nations, "nor does any mortal hold intercourse with us." thus, too, she marks unconsciously the limit of her people. (2) the reader, along with nausicaa, is to see the transformation of the beggarly wanderer, who, having taken his bath and put on his raiment, comes forth like a god. this is said to be the work of pallas, "who caused him to appear taller and more powerful, with flowing locks, like the hyacinth." he becomes plastic in form, beautiful as a statue, into which the divine soul has been transfused by the artist. such a transforming power lies within him, yet is granted also by a deity; the godlike in the man now takes on a bodily, or rather a sculpturesque appearance, and prophesies greek plastic art. the echo of this change is heard in the words of the maiden: "hear me attendants; not without the will of the olympians does this man come to us; lately i thought him unseemly, now he is like the gods who hold the broad heavens." such is her lively admiration now, but what means this? "would that such a man might be called my husband, dwelling here in phæacia!" that note is indeed deeper than admiration. (3) the third phase of this little play is the bringing of ulysses to the city and home of nausicaa. he, having satisfied his hunger, and being ready to start, receives some advice from the maiden, who seeks to conduct him at once to the center of the home. they will pass first through the outlying country, which shows cultivation; then they will go up into the city, with its lofty tower and double harbor; the seafaring character of the people is especially set forth by nausicaa, whose name is derived from the greek word for a ship. particularly we must notice her fear of gossip, which also existed in phæacia, ideal though the land was. she must not be seen with ulysses; men with evil tongues would say: "what stranger is this following nausicaa? now she will have a husband." the sharp eye of goethe detected in this passage the true motive; it is love, always having the tendency to deny itself, which dictates so carefully this avoidance of public report; the thing must not be said just because there is good reason for saying it. her solicitude betrays her feeling. in pure simplicity of heart she pays the supreme compliment to ulysses, likening him indirectly to "a god called down from heaven by her prayers, to live with her all her days." still further she intimates in the same passage, that "many noble suitors woo her, but she treats them with disdain, they are phæacians." to be sure she puts these words into the mouth of a gossipy and somewhat disgruntled countryman, but they come round to their mark like a boomerang. does she not thus announce to the much-enduring man that she is free, though under a good deal of pressure? all this is done in such an artless way, that it becomes the highest art--something which she does not intend but cannot help. surely such a speech from such a source ought to repay him for suffering shipwreck and for ten years' wandering. we cannot, therefore, think of calling this passage spurious, with some critics both ancient and modern. the complaint against it is that the young phæacian lady shows here too much reflection, in conjunction with a tendency to sarcasm foreign to her life. but we find it eminently unreflective and naive; the very point of the passage is that she unconsciously reveals the deepest hidden thought and purpose of her heart to ulysses. with all her being she must move toward the family, she would not be herself unless she did; yet how completely she preserves modesty and simple-heartedness! nor is the sarcastic tinge foreign to young girls. so we shall have to set aside the objections of aristarchus the old greek, and faesi the modern german, commentator. but the final instruction of nausicaa is the most interesting; the suppliant is not to go to the father but to the mother. nay, he is to "pass by my father's throne and clasp my mother's knees," in token of supplication; then he may see the day of return. herein we may behold in general, the honored place of the mother as the center of the family, its heart, as it were, full of the tender feelings of compassion and mercy. in the father and king, on the other hand, is the man of the state with its inflexible justice, often putting aside sympathy and commiseration with misfortune. the woman's heart may indeed be called the heart of the world, recognized here by the old poet and his phæacians. this mother, however, is in herself a great character; she is next to have a book of her own, which will more fully set forth her position. the character of nausicaa, as here unfolded in the ancient poet, has captivated many generations of readers since homer began to be read. the story has lived and renewed itself in manifold forms; it has that highest power of a genuine mythus, it produces itself through all ages, taking on a fresh vesture in time. in old hellas the tale of nausicaa was wrought over into various shapes after homer; it was transformed into a drama, love-story, as well as idyl. the myth-making spirit did not let it drop, but kept unfolding it; later legend, for instance, brought about a marriage between telemachus and nausicaa. our recent greatest poet, goethe, also responded mightily to the story of nausicaa; he planned a drama on the subject, of which the outline is to be found in his published works. he did not find time to finish his poem, but there is evidence that he thought much about it and carried it around with him, for a long period. one regrets that the german poet was not able to give this new transformation of his ancient greek brother, with whom he has manifested on so many lines an intimate connection and poetical kinship. in portions of the _italian journey_ specially we see how deeply the odyssey was moving him and how he was almost on the point of reproducing the whole poem with its marine scenery. but nausicaa in particular fascinated him, and it would have been the best commentary on the present book to have seen her in a now grand poetic epiphany in the modern drama of goethe. _book seventh._ if the last book was nausicaa's, this one is arete's; there is the transition from the daughter to the mother, from the maiden to the wife. still it is not quite so emphatically a woman's book, since the wife has to include the husband in her world. ulysses now goes to the center of the family, to its heart, that he may meet with compassion. still she withholds her sympathy at first for a good reason; arete is not wholly impulse and feeling, she has thought, reflection. so, after all, it is left to the men to take up the suppliant. very surprising to us moderns is the picture drawn by the old greek poet of this woman, and of her position: "the people look upon her as a god when she goes through the city;" her mind is especially praised; she has a judicial character, supposed usually to be alien to women: "she decides controversies among men," or perchance harmonizes them. to be sure her position is stated as exceptional: "her husband honors her, as no other woman on earth is honored;" she is evidently his counselor as well as wife. thus the poet would have us regard arete not merely as a person of kind feelings and of sweet womanly instincts, but she has also the highest order of intelligence; she is united with her husband in head as well as in heart, perchance overtopping him in ability. not domestic simply is the picture, it rises into the political sphere, even into the administration of justice. is the character of the woman, as thus set forth, possibly a thousand years before christ, by a heathen poet in an uncivilized age comparatively, to be a prophecy unto us still at this late date? certainly the most advanced woman of to-day in the most advanced part of the world as regards her opportunities, has hardly reached the height of arete. unquestionably a glorious ideal is set up before the sisterhood of all time for emulation; or is it unattainable? at any rate the woman in homer stands far in advance of her later historical position in greece. we may now turn to the husband for a moment, alcinous the king, the man of civil authority who represents the state, whose function is to be the protector of the family and of whomever the family receives into its bosom rightfully. he is the element surrounding and guarding the warm domestic center; still he seems to have stronger impulses, or probably less governed, than his wife. distinctly is the superiority accorded to the woman in this discourse of pallas to ulysses; possibly the goddess may have overdrawn the picture a little in favor of her sex, as really alcinous becomes the more prominent figure later one. so we catch a very fascinating glimpse of the phæacian world. two prominent characters representing the two great institutions of man, family and state, we witness; thus is the spirit of the whole poem ethical. here is no longer the realm of calypso, the nymph of wild untrained nature, but the clear sunlit prospect of home and country, the anticipation of sunny ithaca and prudent penelope to the hapless sufferer. ulysses sees his own land in the image of phæacia, sees what he is to make out of his own island. verily it is a great and epoch-making experience for him just before his return; he finds the ideal here which he is to realize. accordingly we have in line three women, calypso, nausicaa, arete, through whose spheres ulysses has passed on his way to his own female counterpart, penelope. we may see in them phases of man's development out of a sensuous into an institutional life. nor is the suggestion too remote that we may trace in this movement certain outlines in the progress of mankind toward civilization. in the mythical history of phæacia which is also here given, we can observe the same development suggested with greater distinctness. already in the previous book it was stated that the phæacians at first "dwelt near the insolent cyclops," from whom they had to make the removal to their present island on account of violence done them by their neighbors. but now we hear that both alcinous and arete are descended on one side from the daughter of king eurymedon, "who ruled over the arrogant race of giants," all of whom, both king and "wicked people," had perished. on the other side the royal pair had the sea-god neptune as their progenitor who was also the father of the cyclops polyphemus. it is impossible to mistake the meaning of this genealogy and the reason of its introduction at the present conjuncture. the phæacians likewise were sprung of the wild men of nature, and had been at one time savages; but they had changed, had separated from their primitive kindred and begun the march of civilization. the poet has manifestly before his mind this question: why does one branch of the same people develop, and another branch lag behind; why, of two brothers, does one become civilized and the other remain savage? of this dualism greece would furnish many striking illustrations, whereof the difference between athena and sparta is the best known. here the change from the locality of the cyclops, implying also the change in spirit, is made by a hero-king, "the large-souled nausithous," evidently a very important man to the phæacians. then this respect given to the woman has often been noted as both the sign and the cause of a higher development of a people. at any rate the phæacians have made the great transition from savagery to civilization, and thus reveal the inherent possibilities of the race. we now begin to catch a hint of the sweep of the poem in these portions. ulysses who has lapsed or at least has become separated from his institutional life, must travel back to the same through the whole rise of society; he has to see its becoming in his own experience, and to a degree create it over again in his own soul, having lost it. hence the evolution of the social organism passes before his eyes, embodied in a series of persons and places. in this seventh book, therefore, ulysses is to make the transition to family and state as shown in phæacia, and as represented by arete and alcinous. we shall mark three leading divisions:-i. ulysses enters the city in the dark, when he is met by pallas and receives her instructions. the divine principle again comes down and directs. ii. the external side of this phæacian world is shown in the city, garden, and palace of the king; nature is transformed and made beautiful for man. all this ulysses now beholds. iii. the internal side of this phæacian world, its spiritual essence, is shown in the domestic and civil life of the rulers and nobles; of this also ulysses is the spectator, recognizing and appropriating. thus we see in the book the movement from the divine to the human, which we have so often before noticed in homer. the three parts we may well put together into a whole: the goddess of intelligence informs the mind of man, which then transforms nature and builds institutions. here pallas simply directs ulysses, who, however, is now to witness the works of mind done in phæacia, to recognize them and to take them up into his spirit. i. ulysses follows the direction of nausicaa and passes to the city stealthily in a kind of concealment; "pallas threw a divine mist over him," the goddess now having the matter in hand. moreover she appeared to him in the shape of a young girl with a pitcher, who points out the house of alcinous and gives him many a precious bit of history in her prattle. again we must see what this divine intervention means; pallas is in him as well as outside of him. these are suggestions of his own ingenuity on the one hand, yet also the voice of the situation; indeed he knew them essentially already from the instructions of nausicaa. still further, they are now a part of the grand scheme, which is in the olympian order, and hence is voiced by the gods. the poet introduces his mythical forms; we hear also the fabulous genealogy of the phæacian rulers, the meaning of which has been above set forth. they, too, arete and alcinous, have come from the cyclops, and have made the same journey as ulysses, though in a different manner. it must be remembered that he has had his struggle with the giant polyphemus, one of the cyclops, whereof he will hereafter give the account. but the chief matter of the communication of pallas is to define to ulysses the position and character of arete, evidently a woman after her own heart. in this way the goddess, taking the part of a prattling maid, gives the royal pedigree, and especially dwells on the importance of the queen. also she throws side glances into the peculiar disposition of the phæacians, needful to be known to the new-comer. they are a people by themselves, distrustful of other peoples; they too must be transcended. it is well at this point to observe homer's procedure in regard to pallas. we can distinguish two different ways of employing the goddess. the poet says that pallas gives to the phæacian women surpassing skill in the art of weaving. this is almost allegorical, if not quite; the goddess stands for a quality of mind, is subjective. again, when she endows ulysses with forecast in an emergency, it is only another statement for his mental prevision. many such expressions we can find in the odyssey; pallas is becoming a formula, indicating simply some activity of mind in the individual. but in the important places the goddess is kept mythical; that is, she voices the divine order, she utters the grand ethical purpose of the poem, or makes herself a vital part thereof. thus she is objective, truly mythical; in the other case she is subjective and is getting to be an allegorical figure. the odyssey, with its greater internality compared with the iliad, is losing the mythus. there is a third way of using pallas and the gods which is hardly found in homer, indeed could not be found to any extent without destroying him. this is the external way of employing the deities, who appear wholly on the outside and give their command to mortals, or influence them by divine authority alone. thus the gods become mechanical, and are not a spiritual element of the human soul. virgil leaves such an impression, and the roman poets generally. even the greek tragic poets are not free from it; especially euripides is chargeable with this sin, which is called in dramatic language _deus ex machina_. though the homeric poems as wholes are not allegories, yet they have allegory playing into them. indeed the mythus has an inherent tendency to pitch over into allegory through culture. then there is a reaction, the mythical spirit must assert itself even among civilized peoples, since allegorized gods are felt to be hollow abstractions, having nothing divine about them. there can hardly be a doubt that a proper conception of the relation of the deities to men is the most important matter for the student of homer. but it requires an incessant alertness of mind to see the homeric gods when they appear to the mortal, and to observe that they are not always the same, that they too are in the process of evolution. for instance, in the present book as well as elsewhere, pallas must be noted as having two characters, a mythical and allegorical, as above unfolded. nitzsch, whose commentary on the odyssey, though getting a little antiquated, is still the best probably, because it grapples with so many real problems of the poem, says: "it is wholly in homer's manner to represent, in the form of a conversation with pallas, what the wise man turns over in his own mind and resolves all to himself" (_anmerkungen zu homer's odyssee, band ii, s. 137_). very true, yet on the next page nitzsch says that it is "entirely wrong to suppose that pallas represents the wisdom of ulysses _allegorically_." but what else is allegory but this embodiment of subjective wisdom? now nitzsch truly feels that pallas is something altogether more than an allegory, but he has failed to grasp distinctly her mythical character, the objective side of the goddess, and so gets confused and self-contradictory. one of the best books ever written on homer is nägelsbach's _homerische theologie_, which also wrestles with the most vital questions of the poem. but nägelsbach's stress is almost wholly on the side of the gods, he seems to have the smallest vision for beholding the free, self-acting man in homer. in his first chapter (_die gottheit, the godhead_) he recognizes the gods as the upholders and directors of the supreme order (sec. 28); also they determine, or rather create (_schaffen_) man's thought and will (sec. 42). what, then, is left for the poor mortal? of course, such a view is at variance with homer in hundreds of passages (see especially the speech of zeus with which the action of the odyssey starts, and in which the highest god asserts the free-will and hence the responsibility of the man). nägelsbach himself suspects at times that something is wrong with his view and hedges here and there by means of some limiting clauses; note in particular what he says about ulysses (sec. 31), who is an exception, being "thrown upon his own resources in cases of extreme need," without the customary intervention of the gods. but the man in his freedom, who co-operates with the god in the providential order, is often brought before the reader in the iliad as well as in the odyssey (see author's _com. on the iliad_, pp. 129, 157, 216, etc.). ii. we now come to one of the most famous passages in homer, describing the palace and garden of alcinous. first of all, we must deem it the outer setting of this phæacian world with its spirit and institutions, the framework of nature transformed which takes its character from within. civilized life assumes an external appearance corresponding to itself; it remodels the physical world after its own pattern. the result is, this garden is in striking contrast with the bower of calypso, which is almost a wild product of nature. the two localities are mirrored surrounding each home respectively. again we observe how homer employs the description of scenery: he makes it reflect the soul as its center. in a certain sense we may connect these phæacian works with pallas, who has directed ulysses hither; they are the works of intelligence. the arts and the industries spring up through the transformation of nature. here is first noted the palace of the king with certain hints of its materials and construction; especially have the metals been wrought and applied to human uses. gold, silver, steel, brass or bronze are mentioned in connection with the palace and its marvelous contents. thus an ideal sense of architecture we note; still more strongly indicated is the feeling for sculpture, the supreme greek art. those gold and silver watch-dogs at the entrance, "which vulcan made by his skill, deathless and ageless for all time;" those golden boys "upon their well-built pedestals holding lighted torches in their hands" are verily indications that the plastic artist has already appeared. the naive expression of life which the old poet gives to the sculpturesque shapes in the palace of alcinous, is fresh as the first look upon a new world, which is indeed now rising. but not only the fine arts, the industries also are touched upon. weaving is specially emphasized along with navigation, one being the phæacian woman's and the other being the phæacian man's most skillful work. other occupations are involved in these two. thus is marked the beginning of an industrial society. after the palace the garden is described with its cultivated fruit-trees--pear, pomegranate, apples--a good orchard for to-day. of course the vineyard could not be left out, being so important to the greek; three forms of its products are mentioned--the grape, the raisin, and wine. finally the last part is set off for kitchen vegetables, though some translators think that it was for flowers. nor must we omit the two fountains, such as often spout up and run through the greek village of the present time. undoubtedly fabulous threads are spun through this description. quite too lavish a use is made of the precious metals in the house of alcinous, as in some fairy tale or romantic ballad; so much gold is found nowhere outside of wonderland. in the garden fruit is never wanting, some of it just ripe, some still green, some in flower. no change of season, yet the effect of all seasons; surely a marvelous country it appears; still we learn that in campania are some sorts of grapes which produce thrice a year. a mythical garden is indeed the delight of human fancy. eden has its counterparts everywhere. indeed a significant parallel might be drawn between greek phæacia and the hebrew paradise; in the one, man unfolds out of savagery, in the other he is created at once by a divine act. can we not see orient and occident imaging themselves in their respective ideal products? the one from below upwards, the other from above downwards; both movements, the greek and the hebrew, belong to man, and have entered into his civilization. the next world-poet, dante, will unite the two streams. iii. ulysses now comes to the internal element of phæacia, to its soul as it were, manifested in the institutional life of family and state. from this indeed is derived the beautiful world which we have just witnessed; art builds up a dwelling-place, which images the spirit of the people to themselves and to others. in accord with his instructions from both. pallas and nausicaa, he first goes to arete and clasps her knees in supplication, begging for an escort to his country. but behold! she hesitates, notwithstanding his strong appeal to her domestic feeling and her sympathy with suffering. what can be the matter? another phæacian, not of the royal house apparently, but of the nobles, is the first to speak and command the stranger to be raised up and to be hospitably received. an old religious man who sees the neglect of zeus in the neglect of the suppliant, a man of long experience, "knowing things many and ancient," is this echeneus; him at once the king obeys, the queen still remaining silent. soon, however, we catch the reason of her conduct in the question: "stranger, where did you get those garments?" she noticed ulysses wearing the mantle and tunic "which she herself had made with her servants," and which nausicaa had given him. surely this is a matter which must be accounted for before proceeding further. herein the woman comes out in her own peculiar province; no man would ever have noticed the dress so closely; alcinous did not, and wise ulysses in this case did not forecast so far out of his masculine domain. but the poet had made the subtle observation and uses it as a turning-point in his little drama. now we see the queen before us: imagine a pair of dark eyes shooting indignation upon the man clothed with garments intrusted this very morning to the daughter. nor should we fail to scan her second question: "do you not say that you have come hither a wanderer over the deep?" verily the case is suspicious. ulysses sees his plight, and at once offers the most elaborate explanation, going back and giving a history of himself for the last seven or eight years. now we know why the poet specially praised the mind of arete, and why her husband so honored her, and why she could be judge of disputes among men. she shows the keenest observation united with reasoning power; she stands out in contrast with the phæacian men, who follow impulse more readily than she, as she keeps the judicial balance, though a woman, and demands evidence of truth from the uncertain stranger. we may draw from this scene certain traits of the phæacians, as we see here a man, a typical man probably who is outside of the royal family. an ideal humanity seems to live in them; they will receive the unfortunate wanderer and succor him to the fullest extent. more impressive still is their religious faith; they live in intimate communion with the gods, who appear in person at the feast "sitting among us;" nor do the deities conceal themselves from the solitary wayfarer; "since we are as near to them as are the cyclops and the wild tribes of giants." so speaks alcinous, hinting that kinship, which has been previously set forth; both himself and arete are the descendants of savages, who were children of the gods of nature. but they have risen into fellowship with the higher gods of olympus. the words of the king seemed to be tinged with sarcasm at those inferior deities, parents of savagery, from whom, however, they themselves are sprung. he cannot forget the cyclops, the men of violence who once did his people wrong. in these mythical allusions, obscure enough just here, we have already traced the rise of phæacia into an ethical existence. the worship of the higher gods is the emotional side of such a condition, and the treatment of the suppliant marks an advance toward the conception of an universal humanity. still phæacia, has its spiritual limits, genuine greek limits, of which hereafter something will be said. it is sufficient to state that the speech of ulysses has its effect, it contains a great deal which appeals to the character of arete; his leaving calypso and his desire to return to his home-life must be powerful motives towards winning her sympathy. then she cannot help recognizing and admiring his skill; there is an intellectual bond between them, as well as an ethical one. not much does she say hereafter, her part being finished; her husband takes the lead henceforth. she has tested the wanderer, alcinous can now preform the ceremonies. we soon see that the king needs a counterpart in such a wife, he being impulsively generous; he blames his daughter for her backwardness in not coming to town with ulysses, whereat the latter frames one of his smallest fibs in excuse of the maiden. still further, the king in a surprising burst of admiration, wishes that ulysses, or "such an one as thou art," might stay and be called his son-in-law. altogether too sudden; arete would not have said that, though the woman be the natural match-maker. still alcinous, in a counter-outpouring of his generosity, promises to send ulysses to his own land, though "this should be further off than euboea, the most distant country." thus overflows the noble heart of the king, but he clearly needs his other half, in the thorny journey of life. thus has ulysses reached the heart of phæacia and found its secret beat; he has felt its saving power, not simply externally but also internally; it rescues him from dangers of the sea and of himself too. the truly positive side of life begins to dawn upon him again, after his long career of struggle with dark fabulous shapes. well may he pray zeus for alcinous: "may his fame be immortal over the fertile earth"--a prayer which has been fulfilled, and is still in the process of fulfillment. arete gives the order to the servants to spread his couch for the night's repose, she has received him. in the sweep of the present book, many origins are suggested. the genealogy of the king and queen and people is significant, it might be called the genealogy of civilization. the woman is placed at the center; out of her springs the family, and with it come society, state, the institutional world. of such a world the external environment is seen in the garden, palace, and city of the phæacians, which are built by the spirit for its dwelling-place and reflect the spirit. the greek world of beauty is born, and its course is foreshadowed; this ideal homeric realm is prophetic of what greece is to become. the plastic arts and the industrial arts are suggested, and to a degree are realized. the artistic soul of hellas is fully felt in homer's phæacia. the formative impulse is everywhere alive and at work; the instinctive need of shaping and transforming nature and life is here in its first budding, and will bloom into the greatest art-people of all time. those two supreme fine arts of mature greece, architecture and sculpture, are present in examples which foretell plainly phidias and the parthenon. king alcinous; thy fair palace has had fairer offspring, thou art ruling the world still by the beautiful form; out of thy mansion majestic was born in a song the greek temple, sentineled round with a choir--titans columnar of stone, bearing forever their burden to hymns of a parian measure, wearing out heaviest fate to a pindaric high strain. look! those boys of thy garden with tapers are moving to statues, seeming to walk into stone while they are bringing the light; hellas springs out of thy palace all sculptured with actions heroic, even the god we discern turning to marble by faith. such is the originative, prophetic character of phæacia, which the reader must take profoundly into his soul, if he would understand the genetic history of greek spirit. verily the poet is the maker of archetypes and reveals in his shapes all that his people are to become. thou, old homer, wert the first builder in greece, the first carver, afterward she could but turn fancies of thine into stone; architects followed thee, building thy poem aloft into temples, sculptors followed thee too, thinking in marble thy line. nor must we forget the industrial arts here suggested--weaving, ship-building, the working of metals; in general, there is hinted the varied transformation of nature, which begets a civilized life. agriculture is present, also horticulture, which the garden of alcinous presupposes. such, then, is the grand frame-work for the social order as here portrayed. but the chief art of the homeric world has not yet been given, though it is at work now, and is just that which has reproduced phæacia with all its beauty. this is the poet's own art, which having set forth the other arts, is next to set forth itself. accordingly we are to see the poet showing the poet in the following book, which may, therefore, be named the book of the bard. thus we pass out of the industrial and plastic arts of phæacia, into the supreme art, the poetic, as it manifests itself in the phæacian singer. _book eighth._ we observe a decided change in the present book; it has a character of its own quite distinct from the preceding books. yet it is on a line of development with them, we note a further spiritual evolution which must be looked into with some attention. in general, phæacia is now seen as an art-world, in true correspondence with hellas, of which it is a kind of ideal prototype. in the two previous books we saw portrayed chiefly institutional life in family and in state. but in this book institutional life, though present and active, is withdrawn into the background, and becomes the setting for the picture, yet also is the spirit which secretly calls forth the picture. a poetic art-world now passes before us in entrancing outlines, a world filled with song, dance, games, with all the poetry of existence. such an artistic development follows from what has gone before. man, having attained culture, civilization, and a certain freedom from the necessity of working for his daily bread, begins to turn back and look at his career; he observes the past and measures how far he has come. the image of himself in his unfolding he beholds in art, specially in the poetic art, whose essence must at last be just this institutional life which has been described in phæacia. he attains it and then steps back and portrays his attaining of it; having done the heroic deed, he must see himself doing it forever, in the strains of the bard. art is thus the mirror of life and of institutions; it reflects the grand conflict of the times and the people; it seizes upon the supreme national event, and holds it up in living portraiture along with its heroes. now the great event which lies back of phæacia at the present time, in fact lies back of all greece for all ages, perchance lies back of all europe, is the trojan war. it was the first emphatic, triumphant assertion of the greek and indeed of the european world against the orient. the fight before troy was not a mere local and temporary conflict between two quarrelsome borderers, but it cuts to the very marrow of the world's history, the grand struggle between east and west. family and state are most deeply concerned in it, the restoration of the wife is the main object of the trojan war, which the chieftains of greece must conclude victoriously or perish. a new world was being born on this side of the ægean, and the greeks were its first shapers and its earliest defenders. this occidental world, whose birth is the real thing announced at troy in that marvelous cradle-song of europe, called the iliad, has already begun its career, and shows its earliest period in phæacia. it is no wonder, then, that the phæacian people wish to hear the trojan song, and it alone, and that the phæacian poet wishes to sing the trojan song, and it alone. thus we behold in the present book a quiet idyllic folk on their island home out in the west listening to the mighty struggle of their race, with dim far-off anticipations of all that it involved. nor were the women indifferent. arete, the wife and center of the family, is not henceforth to be exposed to the fate of helen; think what would phæacia be without her, or she without phæacia; think what she would be in troy, for instance. strong emotions must rise in the breasts of all the people at hearing such a song. but still stronger emotions well out of the heart of ulysses. he is one of the heroes of the trojan war not yet returned, a living image of its sacrifices. of course, he is the main hero sung of by the bard in the present book; such is the artistic adaptation of the homeric work, clearly done with a conscious design. ulysses has already passed through several stages--calypso, nausicaa, arete; now he has reached the poet, demodocus certainly, and perchance homer himself, who is to sing not only of the trojan war, but also of its consequences--this rise of man's spiritual hierarchy as here unfolded, from nature, into institutions, and thence into art. after hearing demodocus, ulysses picks up the thread and becomes his own poet, narrating his adventures in fairyland with the free full swing of the homeric hexameter. thus he acquires and applies in his own way the art of phæacia; the arch of his life spans over from the heroic fighter before troy to the romantic singer before the phæacian court. it is plain, therefore, that this book is distinctively the book of the bard. in the experience of ulysses, demodocus is placed on a line with the three leading figures in the last three books--they being women, while the singer must be a man. one reason is, possibly, that a phæacian woman could not be permitted to sing such a strain as the story of venus and mars. at any rate, he is fourth in the row of shapes, all of which are significant. we catch many touches of his personality; he is blind, though gifted with song; "evil and good" he has received, and is therein a typical man. it is in every way a beautiful loving picture, painted with strong deep undertones of sympathy; no wonder is it, therefore, that demodocus in all ages has been taken as a portrait of homer by himself, showing glimpses of the man, of his station in life, and of his vocation. later on we shall consider this point in more detail. the three songs of the bard furnish the main landmarks for the organism of the book. all of them will be found more or less intimately connected with the great event of the immediate past, the story of troy. phæacia shows an intense interest in that story and the bard approves himself its worthy singer. indeed the three songs stand in direct relation to the iliad; the first deals with an event antecedent to the iliad; the second has the theme of the iliad, though in a changed form, inasmuch as the seducer, the wife and the husband are here gods (mars, venus, vulcan) instead of mortals (paris, helen, menelaus); the third deals with an event subsequent to the iliad. yet the singer carefully avoids repeating anything in the iliad. it is almost impossible not to think that he had not that poem in mind; or, rather, we are forced to conclude that the present author of the odyssey knew the iliad, and we naturally think that both were by the same man. demodocus is the singer of the trojan war, yet he shuns singing what has already been sung about it. herein we may catch another faint reflection of homer, the organizer, the transfigurer of old legends into his two poems. note also that he hovers around the iliad, before and after it, yet never into it, here and elsewhere in the odyssey; specially in the third book have we observed the same fact. in the present book, however, is another strand; besides these songs of the bard belonging to the past are the doings in phæacia belonging to the present, which doings have a connection and a correspondence with the songs. thus we observe three divisions in the book, and two threads which run through these divisions. the following outline may serve to show the general structure:-i. there is the representation of the struggle between the physical and mental in what may be called phæacian art; skill and strength have an encounter shown in two ways: 1. past, heroic, ideal; the contest between ulysses and achilles at troy; intelligence vs. mere courage. sung by the bard. pre-iliad. 2. present, real, not heroic; the games in which there is a contest also, and in which both skill and strength are involved, with the preponderance of the physical. ii. now we drop to the sensuous inactive side of the phæacian world, the luxurious, self-indulgent phase of their life, which is also imaged in their art doubly: 1. past; an olympian episode, a story of illicit love among the gods, corresponding to the story of helen on earth. sung by the bard. 2. present; hints concerning the sensuous life of the phæacians who love the feast, the song, the warm bath and bed, along with dance and music, showing their pleasure in art. return of the men from the market-place to the palace and into the presence of arete. iii. we pass to what may be called the triumph of intelligence and the recognition thereof,--phæacian art is again introduced, ulysses is revealed. 1. past, heroic, ideal; troy is taken by skill, by the wooden horse, not by the physical might and courage of achilles. sung by the bard. post-iliad. this may be considered also a triumph over venus who favored troy. 2. present; ulysses weeps, his tears are noticed by alcinous, who demands his name, country, travels. ulysses has already in a number of ways discovered himself as connected with the past, with the trojan war. in the next book he tells his name, country, character, adventures. if we scan the sweep of this outline, we observe that it opens with the conflict between brain and brawn, or between mind and might, and ends in the victory of mind in the grand trojan conflict. similar has been the movement hitherto, from calypso onwards, which, however, shows the ethical conflict. still the intellectual and the ethical spheres have to subordinate the natural, and mind is the common principle of both. as an introduction to the book we have an account of the men assembling in the marketplace, where "they sat on polished stones near one another." pallas has, of course, to be employed, though in a passing and very subordinate way; she acts as herald to call the assembly together, and thus stamps it with a divine import. we must grant to the poet his right, but the goddess seems almost unnecessary here, as the herald could have done the same work. once more pallas interferes: "she sheds a godlike grace upon the head and shoulders of ulysses," imparting to him majesty and beauty, "that he might be dear to all the phæacians," those lovers of the beautiful in art and life. thus, like a visible deity, he was "to be feared and to be revered;" strength also the goddess gave him, "that he might accomplish all the contests which the phæacians would try him with." thus is the hero prepared divinely. alcinous makes a speech to the assembly, touching the wanderer, who is again promised an escort to ithaca; the king chooses the crew, and the ship is launched. meanwhile, however, there is to be a sacrifice with festival, the bard is led in and his harp adjusted, his portion of food and drink not being omitted, for he is not a hired musician, but an equal at the feast. we are now to witness two kinds of entertainment, both of which according to the greek conception, belong to the sphere of art. the one is an heroic song, and is thrown into the past; the other is a trial of bodily skill and strength, and belongs to the present. both kinds show contest, and this contest is mainly between the physical and the spiritual elements in man. which is paramount? each is necessary, yet one must be subordinate. 1. note, first of all, the theme of the bard: "the muse inspired him to sing the strife between ulysses and achilles, the fame whereof had reached high heaven." the trojan war lies manifestly in the background of the quarrel. when did it take place, at what period during the struggle? there is nothing to settle the question decisively, such a dispute might have arisen almost at any time. but as it is the antecedent trouble in the greek army, a dualism which this army brings with itself in its leaders, we may reasonably put it somewhere towards the beginning. this is also the opinion of nitzsch (_com. ad loc._), who places the scene of the dispute on the island of tenedos, in sight of the walls of troy and who cites the old _cypria_ in support of his opinion. other ancient authorities place it after the death of hector; not long before the fall of the city. concerning the subject of the dispute there is little difference of opinion. the greek commentator, eustathius (died about 1200 a.d.) cites the following legend in reference to it: "agamemnon, having consulted the delphic oracle about the result of the trojan war, received the answer that troy would be taken when the best men of the greeks would begin to quarrel. at a feast a dispute arose between achilles and ulysses, the former maintaining that ilion would be captured by bravery, the latter by skill and cunning." hence the joy of agamemnon at what would otherwise be regarded as a ground for sorrow. the response of the oracle was ambiguous, yet even out of its ambiguity we may read something. achilles, the man of courage, was regarded as the hero of the greeks, but this opinion must be contested, and wisdom must also have its place in the management of the war, before the hostile city can be taken. these two principles are represented by achilles and ulysses respectively. the god of wisdom, apollo, responds, therefore, in accord with his character, carefully, doubtfully, not taking a decisive stand on either side, uttering an oracle which itself needs interpretation. still we can see that it means a protest against mere brute courage--a protest which ulysses voices. the trojan horse, the grand successful stratagem, may be considered as the outcome. in shakespeare's _troilus and cressida_, the same subject is worked over very fully and is indeed the main pivot of the drama, in which achilles is substantially deposed from his heroship and replaced by ulysses. the contest between mind and might or skill and courage, is what the english poet took from his greek elder brother in part and in part derived from later legend. the struggle between brain and brawn was indeed a vital one in the greek camp; there was always the danger lest the spirit would got lost in its physical manifestation. indeed the danger of the greek world was just this, and it perished at last of the same disease which we already notice at troy. it fell to a worship of the sensuous in life and art, and so lost its soul in a grand debauch. 2. king alcinous has noticed that ulysses hid his face and wept at the song of the bard. thus strong emotion seizes him on hearing the strife at troy, while the phæacians listen with delight. such is the contrast, hinting two very different relations to the song. but the king will divert him from his grief, and so calls for the games to show him "how much we excel others in boxing, wrestling, leaping and running." the quoit was also one of the games. in like manner achilles is diverted from his sorrows for his friend patroclus, by an elaborate exhibition of games, which are set forth in book twenty-third of the iliad. contests of strength and skill they are, showing the body under control of mind and manifesting the same up to a certain point. they have an artistic side and train the man physically, requiring also no little mental alertness. when the phæacian contestants had finished, there was an attempt to bring ulysses into the game and have him show what he was, but he declined the courteous invitation; "cares are in my mind more than games." then euryalus taunts him with being a merchant, or robber, and no athlete. ulysses makes a caustic reply, picks up the quoit, and hurls it far beyond the marks of the others; then with some display of temper he challenges any of the phæacians present to any kind of contest. he even becomes boastful, and tells what he is ready to do in the way of games; still further, he can shoot the bow and throw the javelin in heroic fashion--which accomplishments he will employ with telling effect against the suitors hereafter. alcinous pacifies him with gentle words, and proceeds to withdraw all his previous claims extolling phæacian athletic skill. the soft arts of peace are theirs; "in boxing and in wrestling we have small fame;" but on the other hand "we delight in feasts, we love the harp and dance;" new clothes are in favor, and "we like the warm bath and bed." very different is now the call of king alcinous from that last one: let the stranger see "how much we excel others in the dance and song," to which is strangely added seamanship. such is the preparation for the lay of the loves of mars and venus. through these games the heroic strand in the stranger has been brought to light, somewhat in contrast with the phæacians. as he had a contest of mind with achilles at troy, so he has now a contest which shows his physical might; he is no weakling in spite of his intellect. pallas too does not fail him, she marks his superiority in the throw of his quoit, and thus inspires him with courage. ii. we have now reached the second song of the bard, for the way has been smoothed by the preceding description of the luxurious delights of the phæacians. it is often called the loves of venus and mars, or the adulterers caught on olympus. from time immemorial much doubt of various sorts, poetical, moral, philological, has been cast upon this song. some ancient commentators have regarded it an interpolation, not a genuine part of homer; modern expositors have not hesitated to follow the same opinion. and indeed there are strong grounds for suspicion. almost every reader feels at the first perusal its jar with the general character of this idyllic phæacian world; it is decidedly adverse to the spirit of arete and nausicaa, as previously unfolded; the fact would almost seem impossible that, in an atmosphere created chiefly by these two women, there could be such a kind of artistic enjoyment. the most conservative reader is inclined here to agree with those who perform an act of excision upon the text of homer. the whole passage grates too harshly upon nerves which have been attuned to the sweet innocent life depicted in the two preceding books. the objections to the song may be summed up in the following heads. (1) it is inconsistent and deeply discordant with the ethical tone of phæacia already given. (2) it does not further ulysses in any way, it shows no trait in his character, unless his faint approval signifies his liking for such songs. nor does it seem on the surface to connect him with troy, as do the other two songs of demodocus. (3) it gives an unworthy view of the gods, degrading them far below homer's general level, reducing them to ordinary burlesque figures which violate all decency, not to speak of morality. (4) philologists have picked out certain words and expressions peculiar to this passage, which, not being employed by homer elsewhere, tend to indicate some other author. still, if the passage be an interpolation, this must have taken place early in the history of the poems. pausanias the traveler declares that he saw the dancing scene of the phæacians depicted upon the throne of apollo at amyclæ, the artist of which probably flourished about 600 b. c. the old philosopher heraclitus, who would scourge homer from the festivals of the gods, doubtless had this passage in mind. plato censures its indecency specially, and, as is well known, would exclude all homer from his ideal republic. the ancients thus accepted the passage as homeric, with the exception of some of the later grammarians. next come the many attempts, old and new, to allegorize the olympian scene, or to explain it away. from the fact that the sun keeps watch and is mentioned twice in this part, the latest school of mythologists, the comparative so-called, have taken much comfort, and have at once found in the whole a sun-myth. some ancient expositors, according to athenæus, interpreted it as a story written for the purpose of deterring the listeners from doing similar bad deeds, pointing to the punishment even of gods herein designated; thus they sought to save the credit of homer, treating him quite as some commentators have treated certain morally questionable stories in the bible. thus along down the ages to the present the loves of venus and mars have created trouble. undoubtedly the song has meaning and deserves a rational exposition. has it any connection with the other songs of this book, or with homer in general? it is certainly a product of early greek poesy; can it be organically jointed into anything before it and after it? the burlesque tone which it assumes towards certain olympians has caused it to be connected with the battle of the frogs and mice, and with the war of the gods in the iliad (book twenty-first). let us extend our horizon, and take a new look in various directions. in the first place this song connects with troy and the iliad like the other two songs of demodocus. the cause of the trojan war and of its poem was the deed of paris. the seducer, the wife, the husband--paris, helen, manelaus--are the three central figures of the legend. here this legend is thrown up among the gods themselves, who furnish three corresponding characters--mars, venus, vulcan. then there is the wrong and the punishment of the wrong in both cases. such is the theme of the trojan war as it appears in the iliad. thus the three songs of demodocus indicate a pre-iliad, an iliad, and a post-iliad in due order. in the second place one asks very emphatically: why this present treatment of the gods on homer's part? but here we must make an important distinction. the supreme god, zeus, does not appear, nor does juno nor does pallas, indeed none of the goddesses except the guilty one. the disgrace falls upon two mainly: mars and venus. in the iliad they are trojan deities hostile to the greeks, and here the greek poet serves them up together in an intermezzo, which makes them comic. indeed the greek hero diomed fights and puts down just these two trojan deities in the fifth book of the iliad. so must every greek hero at troy conquer mars and venus (violence and lust, to give a suggestion of their purport) before helen can be restored to home and country; he must put down the hostile city and its gods. note too, whither the greek poet sends each of these deities after their release: mars flies off to thrace, a distant, barbarous country, beyond the borders of hellas, where he can find his own; venus on the contrary slips away southeastward to cyprus inhabited by peoples oriental or orientalizing, and therein like troy and herself. both rush out of greece with all speed; they belong somewhere in the outskirts of the greek world. we may now see why the phæacians, without being so very wicked, could find an element in the song which they enjoyed. to them, with the trojan war always in mind, this was the theme: the adulterous trojan deities caught and laughed out of olympus--those being the two deities who first misled by desire and then tried to keep by war the beautiful helen, the greek woman. throwing ourselves back into his spirit, we may also see why ulysses, the old war-horse from troy, "was rejoiced in his heart, hearing the song" which degraded and burlesqued the gods whom he had fought ten years, and who were, in part at least, the occasion of his wandering ten more. venus and mars did not find much sympathy in the phæacian company, we may be sure. why then regard them as gods? the greek deified everything; even the tendencies which he felt himself obliged to suppress had something of the divine in them. calypso, whom ulysses subordinated at last to the higher principle, was a goddess; troy, the hostile city, had its deities, whom the greek recognised. now its two chief deities are involved in a common shame, and flee from olympus, flee almost outside of the greek world. certainly the audience could take some ethical satisfaction in that. then there is a third consideration different from the two preceding, both of which seek to look at the song from the ancient greek standpoint. but from our modern standpoint it is also to be regarded. there is no doubt that we see here the beginning of the end of polytheism; the many gods collide with one another, some are now put out and all will be finally put out; they are showing their finitude and transitoriness. still further, we catch a glimpse of the sensuous side of greek life, the excess of which at last brought death. homer is the prophet of his people, when read with insight; he tells not only what they are, but hints what they are to become. in general, we pass in this second part of the present book as we have divided it, to the sensuous element of the phæacian world, the inactive, quiet, self-indulgent phase, in decided contrast to the preceding part which shows a love of manly action in games and in war. let us still further develop the twofold way in which this fact is brought out. 1. the second song of demodocus has the general theme of the trojan war and suggests the grand event of the aforetime. it manifestly carries the trojan scission into olympus and drives out in disgrace the trojan deities. vulcan, the wronged husband, is the divine artificer; he makes a network of chains which could not be broken, "like a spider's web, so fine that no one could see it, not even a god;" in this snare the guilty deities are caught, exposed, punished. these invisible, yet unbreakable chains have an ethical suggestion, and hint the law which is also to be executed on olympus, as it was below in troy. as vulcan is the artist among the gods, we are prompted to find also an artistic bearing in the scene; the artist catches the wrong-doers by his art and holds them fast in a marvelous net where they still lie, and shall lie for all time; even the intercession of neptune cannot get them free. the scene is indeed caught out of the reality and holds to-day; the dashing, finely-uniformed son of mars (so called at present) is most apt to win the heart of the gay, fashionable, beautiful daughter of venus, have an escapade, and cause a scandal. oft too they are caught in our modern, most adroitly woven spider's web, which goes under the name of newspaper, and held up, if not before a seeing olympus, at least before a reading public, which not seldom indulges in conversation very much in the style of the gods as here set forth. we moderns do not go to the market-place to hear such a strain, but have it brought to us in the morning journal. one advantage the phæacian had: arete and nausicaa did not go to the market-place, where this song was sung, only men were there, but the print will enter the household where are wife and daughter. at any rate, we have to pronounce the song of demodocus typical, universal, nay, ethical in spite of its light-hearted raillery, inasmuch as the deed is regarded as a breach of divine law, is exposed and punished, and the recompense for the release of the guilty pair, the penalty, is duly stated in accordance with law. not every modern story-teller is so scrupulous, in meting out justice to ethical violation. 2. so much for the song; we turn again to the phæacians, who are not now engaged in athletic, but in a milder sport, the dance. youths moved their bodies in tune to the strain; still in greece the dance and the song often go together. then two danced alone without the song, but employed a ball, tossing it from one to the other, for the amusement of the spectators. a rhythmical movement of the body in the dance shows more internality than the athletic game, but it is less hardy, is more indicative of luxury and effeminacy. on account of these enjoyments, which have been unrolled before us in so many striking pictures, the phæacians have been regarded by some writers both in ancient and modern times as the mythical sybarites devoted simply to a life of pleasure. the love of the warm bath and clean clothes, the dance and the song, above all the second lay of demodocus have given them a bad name. heraclides ponticus derived their whole polity of non-intercourse, of concealment, of sending away the stranger as soon as possible out of their island, from their desire to resign themselves more completely to their luxurious habits, without foreign disturbance. horace expresses a similar view of this people. nitzsch in commentary (_ad loc._) defends the phæacians warmly against the charge, and the view that arete and nausicaa cannot be products of a corrupt society holds good. an idyllic people, not by any means enervated, though pleasure-loving--so we must regard them. that lay of the bard, rightly looked into, does not tell against them as strongly as is sometimes supposed. still heraclides touched upon a limitation of phæacia in his criticism, it refused to join the family of nations, it sought to be a kind of little china and keep all to itself. it had solved, however, the problem of external war and of internal dissension; no dispute with neighboring nations about commercial privileges, no local strife which cannot be settled by arete. the poet has as nearly as possible succeeded in eliminating the negative element out of this society. an unwarlike folk, but not effeminate, happy in peace, with a childlike delight in play, which is the starting-point of art, and remains its substrate, according to schiller; truly idyllic it must be regarded, a land on the way between nature and civilization, where life is a perpetual holiday, and even labor takes on a festal appearance. ulysses gives the palm of excellence in the dance to the phæacians, and with this recognition the king proposes a large number of presents--hospitable gifts, such as the host gives to his honored guest. moreover an apology and a gift are required of that euryalus who recently offended ulysses. thus reconciliation is the word and the deed. then all are ready to return to the palace into the presence of arete, who is the orderer, and she makes arrangements for packing up the gifts. note the warm bath again, supposed sign of effeminacy; here it is taken by ulysses with decided approbation. nausicaa, too, appears in a passing glance, and simply asks to be remembered for her deed; the response of ulysses is emphatic: when he gets home he "will pray to her as to a god day by day, for thou, o maiden, hast saved my life." in this round of recognition, the bard must not be forgotten; he is again led in, a banquet is served, and ulysses takes special pains to honor him "with a part of the fat back of a white-tusked boar," and to speak a strong word of commendation: "demodocus, i praise thee above all mortals; either the muse or apollo has taught thee, so well dost thou sing the fate of the greeks." iii. the praise of the bard naturally leads to the third portion of the book, introduced by another song, which has its intimate connection with the preceding ones. then its effect is noted upon ulysses, who weeps as before, being stirred by many memories of companions lost. verily troy is a tearful subject. what motive for weeping? who is this stranger anyhow? alcinous now starts his interrogations which ulysses answers in the following book. still, though nameless, he has unfolded himself quite fully through his actions in this book. again we hear the deeds of the aforetime sung by the poet, and see their influence in the present. 1. ulysses himself now asks the poet to sing of the wooden horse which "was made by epeius with the aid of pallas," the goddess here standing for skill, as it is now skill which takes troy, not mere courage. then mark further: ulysses was the man who introduced it within the trojan walls by stratagem--clearly another case of brain-work rather than brawn-work. this famous wooden horse was "filled with men who took troy." such is the song which ulysses now calls for, mentioning himself by name--a fact which makes the announcement of his name soon after more impressive and dramatic. the phæacians had just heard the culminating act in the taking of troy, whereof ulysses was the hero; behold! he stands before them, in all the prestige of song. some critics have wondered why the name of ulysses was withheld so long, and have imagined all sorts of interpolations; surely they have not seen the plan of the poet. the wooden horse is not employed in the iliad, but is one of the striking details of the later epics, which recounted the destruction of troy. the song of demodocus carries the incident back to the time of homer, and before homer, for it suggests antecedent ballads or rhapsodies which homer knew, but did not use, and which poets after him developed. the odyssey takes for granted that its hearers knew the lay of the wooden horse, and also the lay of the strife between ulysses and achilles, "the fame of which had reached the broad heavens." thus we get a peep into the workshop of homer and catch a glimpse of his materials, which he did not invent, but found at hand. homer is the builder, the architectonic genius; he organizes the floating, disparate songs of his age into a great totality, into a greek temple of which they are the stones. note what he does with this lay of demodocus; he puts it into its place in the total structure of the odyssey, and thus preserves it forever. so he has done with all his materials doubtless. we may now see that those who cut up the homeric poems into so many different songs or ballads simply destroy the distinctive work of homer. they pry asunder the beautiful greek temple, lay its stones alongside of one another, and say: behold the poet. but this is just what he is not, and in the present book we may see him unfolding his own process. homer is not demodocus, but the latter's lay he takes up and then weaves what he wants of it into the texture of the total poem. he is thus a contrast to the bard, whom, however, he fully recognizes and makes a part of his own work. thus homer himself really answers the wolfian theory, which seeks to reduce him to a demodocus, singing fragmentary lays about the trojan war. from the greek poets the wooden horse passed to virgil, who has made it the best-known incident of the trojan war. it is probably the most famous stratagem of all time, due to the skill of ulysses. herein lies the answer to the first lay of demodocus; in the dispute ulysses is right, indeed he is a greater hero than achilles, who could never have captured the hostile city. the incident took place after the action of the iliad, and after the death of achilles, who, heroic in courage, stood in the way of intelligence. when he is gone, the city falls, overthrown by the brain of ulysses. homer does not pretend to give the song of demodocus in full, but a brief summary of what he sang before the phæacians. a later poet, arctinus, took up the legend here alluded to, and developed it in a separate epic, called the iliou-persis or sack of troy. indeed a vast number of legends and lays about the trojan war bloomed into epics, which were in later times joined together and called the epic cycle. thus we distinguish two very different stages of consciousness in early greek poetry: the ballad-making and the epical, homer being the supreme example of the latter, and demodocus an instance of the former. looking back at the three lays of the bard in the present book we find that they all are connected together in a common theme of which they show different phases, beginning, middle and end--the conflict before the iliad, the conflict of the iliad, and the conflict after the iliad, all hovering around the great national enterprise of the greeks, namely the trojan war, in which the deepest principle of the hellenic world, indeed of the entire occident, was at stake. but homer, in distinction from demodocus, weaves into his poem not only the past but the present, not only troy but phæacia, not only the movement against the east but also the movement toward the west, of which phæacia is simply one stage. the hero who unites these two great movements of greek spirit is now brought before us again. 2. ulysses weeps at the song of the bard which recalls so many memories of friends departed and of dire calamities. these tears connect him deeply with troy and its conflict; the phæacians listen intently, but are outside of the great struggle, they shed no tears. thus does ulysses in his strongest emotions unite himself with the trojan enterprise of aforetime. he is not simply a wanderer over the sea seeking to get home, but a returner from troy; he has revealed himself through his feelings. he personally shares in the woes sung by the bard, because he has experienced them. indeed the very image which the poet here employs to express sorrow, taken from the woman whose husband has been slain fighting for his city, and for his wife and his children, recalls hector, andromache and astyanax as they appear in the sixth book of the iliad. ulysses is like such a woman, without home or family, alone among strangers, shedding tears. thus he connects himself with the fateful story of ilium. previously ulysses wept at the first lay of demodocus, now he emphasizes his sorrow by repetition. whenever the theme of troy is touched, he has to respond with tears; the second time of weeping at the trojan tale is necessary in order to fix his character and identify him as a returner. yet this repetition so vitally organic is questioned by many critics, some of whom resort to excision. it is hardly worth the while to notice them in their various attempts at destruction and construction; when we once catch the underlying motive all becomes plain. the first and last scenes of weeping unifies the book, the bond of tears holds its parts indissolubly together in the emotions. alcinous has observed the stranger both times, sitting near him, while we may suppose that the other phæacians, not noticing him, to be further off. the king sees his distress and even hears his sobs; in the first case the royal host refrained from inquiry, that being the duty of hospitality; but now the time for interrogation has arrived. the speech of alcinous is characteristic; full of humanity, full of sympathy is the tone: "a guest, a suppliant stands for a brother even to the man of little feeling." a touch of prophetic boastfulness he shows here and elsewhere; the ships of the phæacians he endows with supernatural powers, which fact, however, is not without meaning: "we have no pilots, no rudders even, our boats obey our thoughts, and know the cities and lands to which they come; very quickly do they shoot across the wave, hid in fog and cloud." truly an ideal ship, which time has not yet realized, though recent navigation, with its present steam and its future electricity, is on the way thereto. still angry neptune threatens danger and may work damage, "smiting the ship on the dark deep." this speech of alcinous with its miraculous, prophetic tinge, with its far-seeing hints of coming realities, almost foretelling our modern humanity and our modern mastery of the sea through science, and putting the two side by side, has given much trouble to the critics, whom we again shall have to pass by, as they simply darken the poet. finally comes the demand: who art thou and why didst thou weep? what is thy relation to troy? such is the culminating question; ulysses has been unfolding himself more and more throughout the present book before the king and people. the games showed his heroic strength; the dances brought out his recognizing and harmonious spirit; the lays of demodocus have developed his connection with troy. he clearly belongs to the past and to the present, possibly he is a bridge spanning them, which bridge he may be induced to build in wondrous rainbow colors before the eyes of the phæacians. _appendix._ it seems never to have been noticed what an important relation the present book sustains toward the wolfian theory concerning the homeric poems. the picture of demodocus here given doubtless suggested to wolf the first outline of his view, and has influenced other commentators who lean toward similar opinions. it is well known that wolf in his famous _prolegomena_ maintains that the iliad and odyssey were originally a string of ballads more or less disconnected, and that homer was only one of the many balladists, probably the best; furthermore he holds that these ballads were brought together, edited and put into their present shape by certain literary men called _diaskeuastoe_--revisers, redactors, professors of poetry and philology at the court of peisistratus, about 500 b.c. that is, wolf regards homer as a demodocus, a singer and also a maker of disjointed ballads and war-songs, the latter pertaining mostly to the heroes of the trojan war. these were sung at the festivals of the people, at the houses of the nobility, and at the courts of kings, quite as we see the bard singing here in phæacia. this fact we may accept; but the question comes up: is homer such a balladist and nothing more? now it is clear that homer is not a demodocus, since the latter is not an epical builder, but a simple singer of separate lays for the occasion. mark well that homer in this book does not unfold the themes, "strife between ulysses and achilles," and "the wooden horse," but simply alludes to them as well-known; he barely gives the title and a little of the argument, then drops the matter, leaving us to suppose that the bard sang a somewhat lengthy lay, of which the effect upon the hearers and specially upon ulysses is duly noted. homer, therefore, in this book as well as in the first book where phemius is introduced, makes the bard or balladist merely one of his figures, and the song one of his incidents, while he, the veritable homer, portrays the total environment, showing the court, the games, the household, the complete phæacian world. here we come upon the main distinction: homer's eye is upon the totality of which the ballad-singer is but a small fragment; demodocus appears in but one phæacian book, and is by no means all of that, though for once the leading figure. a step further we may carry the thought. homer is not only not a demodocus, but he very distinctly contrasts himself with demodocus by his poetic procedure. if he is at such pains to show himself a world-builder, and then puts into his world a ballad-singer as a passing character, he certainly emphasizes the difference between himself and the latter. it is also to be noticed that demodocus does not sing an iliad, though he chants lays of troy; the iliad is an organized work, not a collection of ballads strung together. everything about demodocus indicates separate songs; everything about homer (the iliad and the odyssey) indicates unity of song. hence with the separatists, dissectors, anatomizers, demodocus is a greater favorite than homer, indeed he has taken the place of homer. moreover the poet has plainly marked another stage, a stage between himself and demodocus. in the next book ulysses will begin singing and continue through four books, giving his adventures in fableland, which by itself possesses a certain completeness. still it is but an organic part of the total odyssey, whose poetical architect is homer. ulysses as singer is clearly higher than demodocus; but homer is above both, for he takes both of them up into his unity, which is the all-embracing poem. most emphatically, therefore, homer shows himself not to be a demodocus, not to be a ballad-singer, which is an essential point in the wolfian argument. homer himself refutes wolf some 2,500 years beforehand, and his is still the best refutation. a careful study of this eighth book settles the relation between balladist and poet by a simple presentation of the facts in their proper co-ordination, and also puts the alert reader on the track of the genesis of the wolfian _prolegomena_. for there can hardly be a doubt that wolf, consciously or unconsciously, directly or indirectly, derived his main conception of homer from the present book and from the part that demodocus, the bard, plays in it. to be sure, the idea that demodocus, in a general way, is homer, is old, coming down from antiquity and suggesting itself to the modern reader, who very naturally thinks that homer is giving some traits of himself in his picture of the blind singer. so much we may grant: some traits of himself, but not all by any means; homer doubtless upon occasion could sing a short lay of troy for the amusement of his audience, like demodocus; but in such a part he is only a wee fragment of the author of those magnificent works, the iliad and the odyssey. the total homer builds totalities, by the very necessity of his genius. who, then, according to the theory, put these ballads together? wolf, fully possessed of the notion that demodocus is homer, starts to account for the present form of the poems, which he assigns to the shaping hand of peisistratus and his college of editors, critics, and poetasters. that is, the grand marvel of homeric poetry, the mighty constructive act thereof, he ascribes to a set of men essentially barren and uncreative, for all of which he cites some very dubious and inadequate ancient authority. here again we may be permitted to trace the wolfian consciousness to its origin, for origin it has in time and circumstance. wolf was a professor in a university, and his department was philology; his ideas on homer are really drawn from his vocation and his surroundings. why should he not make a philologer and a professor the author of the homeric poems? so he came to imagine that the tyrant peisistratus 500 b.c. had under his patronage a kind of german university, or at least a philological seminary, whose professors really constructed homer as we now have him, having put him together out of antecedent ballads which the actual homer and many others may have made ages before. wolf, therefore, is the founder of two philological seminaries; one at the university of berlin, and the other at the court of peisistratus. great is the professor in smelling out the professor anywhere; still we cannot help thinking that what wolf ascribed to the old greek seminary, was done only at his german seminary, namely, the patching together of homer out of ballads. _fableland._ the movement of the second grand division of the poem, the ulyssiad, has passed through two of its stages, which have been already considered; the third is now reached which we have called fableland, though it may be said that the two previous lands are also fabulous. let it then be named the fairy world, though this term also does not state or suggest the fact with precision. without troubling ourselves further about names, we shall proceed to seize the meaning by an exposition given in some detail. no careful reader can doubt that the poem changes decidedly at the present juncture in color, style, environment and purpose. what reason for it? and what is the connection with the preceding portion of the poem? four books (ix-xii) of the same character essentially, unfold themselves before us and demand a new kind of appreciation; they are not idyllic, not epical; they form a class of a peculiar sort, which class, however, we have before noticed in the odyssey, showing itself in short but suggestive interludes. we shall, accordingly, first grapple with the leading facts of this new poetic order and seek to interpret them, or rather let them interpret themselves. phæacia, which we have just seen, lies before fableland, though the story of the latter is now told in phæacia. 1. the first fact which strikes us is the decided contrast between the two realms. phæacia is the land of pure idyllic delight, its supreme characteristic is peace, its happy people seem to have no conflict; fableland, on the contrary, is one incessant course of strife, struggle and calamity, beginning with the unprovoked attack on the ciconians. polyphemus the savage cyclops is the opposite of the civil ruler alcinous; circe, the enchantress, is the insidious foe to domestic life represented by arete; state and family in phæacia are counterbalanced by an anti-state and an anti-family in fableland. thus man and woman are shown in the two different places as institutional and anti-institutional. still deeper does the opposition reach; phæacia lies wholly in the upperworld, with its sweet sunlight, while fableland has a dim underworld, beyond the sunlight, the realm of the supersensible; finally fableland witnesses the supreme negative act of man, typified in the slaying of the oxen of the sun. we may, therefore, affirm that fableland, as compared with phæacia, shadows forth the realm of negation; the one stands for the ideal greek world of ethical order and harmony; the other is the denial and destruction of the same. but we must not omit the reverse side of the contrast. in fableland there is one continued striving of the human soul, a chafing against all limits, a moving forward from one stage to another; the spirit of man is shown transcending its bounds everywhere. in phæacia, however, there is no striving apparently, it is contented with itself and stays with itself, seeking no neighbors; it is the land of rest, of cessation from conflict, possibly of stagnation, unless it is stirred by inner scission. the transition from phæacia to fableland is, therefore, full of meaning. it is possible that ulysses or the poet wished to show these people the struggles which were slumbering in their society, for all civilized order has the possibility of them. the negative spirit will rise hereafter in their midst; so it rose in legendary greece after the trojan war, so it rose in historical greece after the persian war. thus we may catch a prophetic tinge in this web of marvelous tales. on the other hand, we should note also that ulysses has reached the land of peace just through the realm of strife and negation. 2. the next important thing is to observe how the poet is going to locate, and environ this negative world. as it is the opposite of the civilized order of hellas, he throws it outside of hellenic boundaries. over the greek border somewhere it has to be placed; thus it passes easily from the known to the unknown, out of the civilized to the barbarous, out of the natural, to the supernatural. all this we feel at once in the narrative. it is true that the first destructive deed, the attack upon the ciconians, occurs within the limits of historical hellas, in a region well known; but this act is the prelude and the example, the offenders are at once borne to the lotus-eaters, who have the faintest touch of historical reality, and thence to polyphemus who is wholly fabulous. in this realm of pure fable they stay till the end, having been cast out of greece by the poet on account of their hostile spirit. moreover we should note that they move about on the sea, that most unstable element, in contrast to the fixed land; on the one there is order and law, on the other caprice and violence. yet certain fixed points are set in this uncertain domain, namely the islands, which however, are wholly separated from hellas and her life, and have inhabitants of their own, strangers to hellenic influence. ulysses and his crew will pass from island to island, each of which will show its meaning in some way antagonistic to greek spirit. out of the pale they all lie in the boundless billowy waters; thus the odyssey in this part becomes a sea poem, while in the other two parts it is essentially a land poem. the greek was and still is a native of both sea and land which are physically interwined and bound together in greece as in no other portion of the globe. his great poetical book envisages his country as well as himself. the main point, however, is that fableland being negative to the greek world is put outside of all of its known geographical limits, and thus becomes the setting for the marvelous story. it may here be added that grimm's tales have a similar border which lies between civilized life and the forest, since the forest was, for our teutonic ancestors, the fairy realm, in which their supernatural beings dwelt for the most part. out of culture back to nature the human being sometimes has to go and have strange communings with the spirits there; such is often the movement of the fairy tale. but who are these spirits or weird powers dwelling in the lone island or in the solitary wood? 3. this question brings us to the pivotal fact of all fableland: it is ruled over by a new order of deities, not olympians; the poet, throwing it out of hellas below, throws it out of olympus above. indeed what else could he do? the gods of greece are the protectors of its institutions, state and family; they are the embodiment of its spirit, of its civilization. but a spirit is now portrayed which is negative to greek spirit, which denies and defies it in its very essence; the result is a new set of supernatural shapes which dominate the separated world. the negation also must be seen taking on a plastic form, and appearing before the greek imagination. the deities of fableland, or its supernatural powers, are therefore opposite to the deities of olympus. hence their shape is changed, they can be even monstrosities, such as polyphemus, the læstrigonians, scylla and charybdis. circe and calypso are beautiful women, yet not natural women, in spite of their beauty; there is something superhuman about them, divine, though they be not olympians. shapes of wonder they all seem, unreal, yet in intimate connection with mankind. moreover they are local, attached to a given spot, or island; they are not universal, they have no general sway like the olympians; limited, confined, particular is their authority, which the human being can and must transcend. at this point olympus can descend into their world and give command. so, after all, the greek gods rule over the realm which is negative to them, must do so, else they were not gods. but they are in a far-off background, namely, in civilized hellas, beyond whose border ulysses passes in these books. still zeus, the supreme greek god, sends his decree to calypso, when ulysses is ready to leave the dark island. thus the olympians exercise a final jurisdiction even here. it is to be noticed, however, that pallas has little to do with ulysses in fableland; for is she not substantially negated? but when he touches greece again, and even in phæacia, she will not fail to be at his side. she belongs not to wonderland, but to the clear rational realm of light and order; she cannot follow even her darling mortal through these dark mazy wanderings. it is manifest that the epical upper world of the gods has receded from the place it occupies in the iliad and in the other portions of the odyssey; in fact, it has been largely but not wholly supplanted. a new order of deities is portrayed, subordinate, yet authoritative in their limited domain, which is cut off by the vast sea from united hellas, and is thus made merely individual and anti-social by its situation. what are these shapes and why? man has created them that he may indicate his own spiritual state when he has fallen out with the established order. really they are phases of the development of the hero, who is reaching out through disbelief, denial, defiance, toward a restoration. he is negative to the greek consciousness, and this negation takes shape by mind, yet has to be put down by mind. the whole process he projects out of himself into two lines of movement: the first is the row of preternatural forms arranged as if in a gallery of antique sculpture, the second is himself passing through these forms, grappling with them, mastering them, or fleeing from them. such is this fairy world which has crept in under the grand olympian order in response to a true necessity. its beings are not natural, its events are not probable; thus the poet forces us to look inward if we would see his meaning. spirit is portraying spirit, and not externality, which is here made absurd; in this manner we are driven out of the real into ideal, or we drop by the way in reading those four books. 4. but it must not for a moment be thought that homer created this fairy world or made, single-handed, these fairy tales. the latter are the work of the people, possibly of the race. comparative folk-lore has traced them around the globe in one form or other. the story of polyphemus is really a collection of stories gathered about one central person; some portions of it have been found in the east as well as the west, in arabian and tartar legend as well as in celtic and esthonian. the subtle play upon the word "nobody" as a name is known far and wide by many people who never heard of homer. wilhelm grimm took the trouble to collect a lot of examples from a great variety of sources, ancient, medieval and modern, european and asiatic, in a special treatise called the legend of polyphemus. circe, the enchantress, has been discovered in a hindoo collection of tales belonging in the main to the thirteenth century of our era; but the witch who has the power of turning men into animals is as universal as folk-lore itself. the werewolf superstition will furnish instances without number. the descent into hades has its parallel in the finnish epic _kalevala_, which reaches far back into turanian legend; even the north american and australian savages have their heroes enter the world beyond, and bring back an account of what is there. truly one of the earliest needs of the human soul is this striving to find and to shadow forth in mythical outlines the realm of the supersensible. dante's journey through inferno goes back to virgil, virgil goes back to homer, and homer to the folk-tales of his people, and these folk-tales of greece reach out to still more remote ages and peoples. thus into christian legend the old heathen stories are transformed; many descents to hell and purgatory, as well as visions of heaven are recorded in the middle ages. it may be said that folk-tales have an ancestry as old as man himself, and have followed him everywhere as his spirit's own shadow, which he casts as his body casts its visible shadow. a collection of fairy tales we may, then, consider these four books, with its giants, cannibals, enchantresses, with its bag of winds, which is still furnished by the town-witch to the outgoing sailor in some countries, if report be true. in fact, a little delving among the people, who are the great depositories of folk-lore, would probably find some of the stories of the odyssey still alive, if not in their completeness, at least some shreds or floating gossamers thereof. indestructible is the genuine tale when once made and accepted by the people, being of their very essence; it is also the primordial material of which all true poetry is produced, it is nature's parian marble of which the poetic temple of greece is built, specially this homeric temple. 5. at this point we begin to see just what is the function of homer who has inherited a vast mass of poetic material. he is its shaper, organizer, transformer; chiefly, however, he is the architect of the beautiful structure of song. he does not and cannot make the stone which goes into his edifice, but he makes the edifice. his genius is architectonic; he has an idea which he builds into harmonious measures. what the ages have furnished, he converts to his own use, and orders into a poetic whole. the store of fairy tales in those four books was unquestionably transmitted to him, but he has jointed them into the ulyssiad, and into the total odyssey, of whose structure they form the very heart. the question arises: did homer find those tales already collected? possibly he did, to a certain extent; they seem to come together of themselves, making a marvelous romance of the sea. some story-telling greek sailor may well have given him the thread of connection; certainly they are sprung of nautical experience. but in whatever shape they may come to the poet, we may be certain of one thing: his constructive spirit transformed them and put them into their present place, where they fit to perfection, forming a most important stage in the grand return. in the development of the folk-tale, we can in a general way mark three grades. (1) there is first the story which sets forth the processes in nature, the clouds, the winds, the storms, the sun and moon, the conflict of the elements. such is mainly the mythical character of the old vedas. many a trace of this ancient conception we can find in homeric fableland, which has a strong elemental substrate in the wrath of neptune, in the tempests, in the winds of æolus, in the oxen of the sun. still the odyssey has passed far beyond this phase of mythical consciousness; it cannot be explained by resolving it back into mere nature-myths, which method simply leaves out the vital fact, namely, that of development. (2) in the second stage of the fairy tale the physical meaning begins to withdraw into the background, and an ethical element becomes dominant; the outer conflicts of nature, if they be present, are taken to portray the spirit's struggle, in which a supreme moral order of some kind is brought to light. here we may well place grimm's collection of folk-tales in many ways an epoch-making book. in those simple stories of the people we observe the good and the bad marked off distinctly and engaged in some kind of a wrestle, which shows at last the supremacy of the good. not in every case perhaps, but such is the tendency. but these tales of grimm, though collected, are in no sense united; the architect never appeared, though they are the material of a great teutonic epos; they are the stones of the edifice, not the edifice itself by any means. (3) out of this second stage easily rises the third, the poet being given; whereof the best example is just those four books of the odyssey. now the folk-tale stands not alone, in widowed solitariness, but is made to take its place in the great national, or perchance universal temple of song. we may say, therefore, that homer not only gathered these tales but organized them into a whole, so that they no longer fall asunder into separate narratives, but they are deftly interwoven and form a great cycle of experience. no segment of this cycle can be taken away without breaking the totality. moreover the entire series is but an organic part of the odyssey. it is now manifest that those who resolve these tales into a disconnected bead-roll have really fallen back into the second stage before mentioned; they have undone the work of homer. if these four books be simply a string of stories without an inner movement from one to the other, or without any organic connection with the rest of the poem, the entire poetic temple is but a pile of stones and no edifice. and this is what wolf and his disciples make out of homer. in one way or other they tear asunder the structure and transform it backwards in a collection, allowing it hardly as much unity as may be found in the canterbury tales of chaucer. a school more recent than that of wolf, the comparative philologists, have gone still further backwards, and have reduced homer to the first stage, to a nature-myth. the merit of both schools is that they have called attention to homer's primitive materials; they have rendered impossible the idea that homer created the greek gods or his mythology, or even his little stories. the defect of these schools is that they fail to see the architectonic homer, the poet who builds the crude materials furnished by his people into an enduring structure of the noblest art. they recognize in the edifice the stone and also the stone-cutter, but no master-builder. homer, therefore, is not merely the editor, collector, redactor; he is not a grimm, gathering his tales from the mouths of the people with a scientific accuracy. he gathered them, doubtless, but he transfigured them into an image reflecting the experience of a human soul. our age is indeed scientific, it is collecting the folk-songs and the folk-tales from every quarter of the globe, and stringing them on a thread, like so many beads, not being able to transmute them into poetry. wolf heralded the coming time by starting to reconvert homer into his primitive materials, by making him scientific and not poetic, at least not architectonic. still we may be permitted to hope that these vast collections of the world's folk-lore will yet be transmuted by some new homer into a world-poem. 6. the careful reader will also weigh the fact that ulysses is now the story-teller himself. the entire series of adventures in fableland is put into his mouth by the poet. herein, we note a striking difference from the previous book, the ninth, in which demodocus is the singer. what is the ground of such a marked transition? demodocus has as his theme the war at troy with its lays of heroes, and its famous deeds; he celebrates the period portrayed in the iliad; his field is the heroic epos, or the songs of which it is composed. but he cannot sing of the world outside of the greco-trojan consciousness, he cannot reach beyond the olympian order into the new set of deities of fableland. ulysses, however, has transcended the trojan epoch, has, in fact, reacted against hellenic life and institutions, though he longs to get back to them, out of his alienated condition. this internal phase demodocus does not know, it manifestly lies beyond his art. he does not sing of the return at all, though phemius, the ithacan bard, did in the first book. a new strain is this, requiring a new singer, namely the man who has had the wonderful experience himself. the result is, another art-form has to be employed, the fairy tale, of which we have already spoken. the individual now turns inward and narrates his marvelous adventures in the region of spirit, his wrestlings there, his doubts, his defeats and escapes. for fableland is not actual like hellas, not even like phæacia; it is a creation of the mind in order to express mind, and its shapes have to be removed from sensuous reality to fulfill the law of their being. such is plainly homer's procedure. once before he sped off into fairyland, toward egypt and the east, leaving hellas and troy behind, quite as ulysses here does. it was the story of menelaus in the fourth book, who also found proteus and eidothea, a new order of deities, though olympus and zeus lay in the distant background. moreover, proteus and eidothea represent the two sides, the supersensible and the sensible, the latter of which must be transcended and the former grasped, ere return be possible. nestor also tells his own experience in the third book, but he keeps inside of hellas and under the direct control of the greek gods. hence no faery realm rises in his narrative, he needs none for self-expression. but menelaus and ulysses, wandering far over the greek border, reach a new world, and require a new art-form for their adequate utterance. especially is this the case with ulysses, who has had a much larger and deeper experience than menelaus, and who thus stands in strong contrast with nestor, the old man of faith with his devotion to the old order, who has no devious return from troy, and continues to live in immediate unquestioning harmony with the olympians. there is no room in pylos for a circe or a polyphemus. ulysses, therefore, having reached the court of phæacia, takes a calm retrospect of the past, and recounts the same to the people there; he comes to know himself, and he uses art for self-expression, not for the praise of the external deed of war; his inner life is the theme. in other words, he has become self-conscious in phæacia, he knows his own processes, and shows that he knows them. as already pointed out, this internal movement of his spirit is the process of the negative, he has turned denier of the old institutional order of greece, and he has to work through into a positive world again, which he now sees before himself in phæacia. to be sure, the self-consciousness to which he has attained is not expressed in the language of philosophy, but in poetry, in a transcendental fairyland. there is as yet no greek language of philosophy; a long development will bring it forth however; aristotle will deracinate the last image of homer, and leave the greek tongue supersensible. 7. the fact that ulysses must tell his own story is deeply coupled with the following characteristic: these four books of fableland are essentially a confession. from beginning to end we observe it to be an account of shortcomings and their results; we find the acknowledgment of error in the very statement of the transaction. he confesses to alcinous and the phæacians his negative attitude to the state and the consequences thereof; he confesses to arete in what way he has violated her institution. here lies the necessity: this confession is absolutely needful to his soul to free it of its negative past. he has become conscious of his condition, and utters his confession to these people who are the opposite of it, and thus gets rid of his limitation. the psychologic ground of his telling his own story is that he must. to be sure, this is all done in a mythical form, which is somewhat alien to our method of making a confession. then homer does not moralize by the way, he does not usually approve or condemn; he simply states the deed and its consequences. his procedure is objective, truly artistic, letting the thing speak for itself. the modern reader, however, likes to have moral observations interspersed, which will stir up his sentiments, and save him the trouble of thinking the matter out for himself. yet ulysses, on the other hand, is always striving to reach out of his error, to transcend his limitation. his mistake flings him to the earth, but he gets up again and marches forward. thus he asserts his own infinite worth; he is certain to reach home at last and accomplish the grand return. but he does not bring back his companions. these often seem to be lower unheroic phases of human nature, which the hero must throw off in the course of his development. in general, they may be considered to be in him, a part of himself, yet they are real persons too. this rule, however, will not always apply. still his companions are lost, having "perished by their own folly," while he is saved; the wise man is to live, the unwise to pass away. the pivotal sin committed by ulysses in fableland is against neptune, who is angry because ulysses put out the eye of his son polyphemus. so the god, after the affair of the oxen of the sun, becomes the grand obstacle to the return, and helps to keep the hero with calypso. such is the mythical statement in which three conceptions seem to blend. (1) neptune is the purely physical obstacle of the sea, very great in those early days. (2) nature has her law, and if it be not observed, the penalty follows, when she may be said to be mythically angry. if a man jump down from a high precipice, he violates a law of nature, gravitation, and she executes him on the spot, it may be; she is always angry and quick to punish in such cases; but he may climb down the height and escape. in like manner a man, undertaking to swim across the sea, encounters the wrath of neptune; but he may construct a ship, and make the voyage. (3) finally there is the ethical violation: we shall see in the narrative, how ulysses, after appealing to humanity, becomes himself inhuman and a savage toward polyphemus, who then curses him and invokes father neptune with effect. so the god visits upon ulysses the punishment for his ethical offense, which is the main one after all. in this way fableland through the story of polyphemus contains a leading motive of the ulyssiad, and thereby of the whole odyssey, and ulysses is seen to be detained really by his own deed. 8. the general structure of these four books is simple enough. they form a series of adventures, with three to a book. though the connection seems slight on the surface, there are inner threads which bind intimately together the separate adventures; one of the points in any true interpretation is to raise these threads to light. the general movement of the whole may be regarded as threefold: the sensible world (two books), the supersensible hades (one book), the sensible world a second time (one book). very significant are these changes, but it is hardly worth while to forecast them here; they must be studied in detail first, then a retrospect can be given, as the contents of the four books will be present in the reader's mind. we may now say, however, that this sweep from the sensible into the supersensible, and back again to the sensible, has in it the meaning of a soul's experience, and that the second sensible realm here mentioned is very different from the first. the central fact of fableland is, accordingly, that the man must get beyond the realm of the senses, and hold communion with pure spirit, with the prophet tiresias, and then come back to the real world, bringing the wisdom gained beyond, ere he can complete the cycle of the grand return. _book ninth._ ulysses is now called for by alcinous, and he is to be the singer. at first he naturally pays a compliment to his predecessor demodocus: "a pleasant thing to hear a bard such as this," with a voice like unto that of the gods. then he gives a delicate touch of commendation to the whole people "sitting in a row and listening to the singer" who is chanting the famous deeds of the aforetime. but when ulysses praises the tables laden with bread and meat, and the cupbearer filling the wine-cups of the guests, saying, "this seems to me the best thing," strong opposition has been aroused, shown even in antiquity by the sharp protest of plato and lucian. still this phæacian enjoyment is innocent enough; not ascetic is the trait, yet not sensual; to-day good people usually eat and drink without the song of bard or other spiritual entertainment accompanying the material one of gustation. now comes the change, ulysses is to give a song, he is to sing his own deeds, the story of his trials, "which will wake fresh sorrow in me." clearly this will be a different song from the preceding one of demodocus; not now an heroic tale of troy, but an account of the return therefrom; a tale in which endurance is the theme rather than action. the hero is more the sufferer than the doer; he is to meet the hostile blows of fate and to master it by his ability to bear as well as by his ability to act. a new poetic form will gradually rise out of the theme and in harmony with the same; the present movement runs counter to the trojan story both in space and in spirit. the first act of ulysses in this novel procedure is to be duly noted: he declares who he is, gives his father's name and utters a hint of his own character. very great surprise must the announcement have created among those phæacians--a veritable sensation, as we say in these times; for ulysses had been the real hero of the songs of demodocus just sung; behold, that hero himself is present and has been listening all the while. the dramatic disguise, in which the interest of the hearer has centered hitherto, is thrown off, the concealed man shows himself. still deeper must we look into this act of self-revelation. "i am ulysses," says the bard now, proposing to sing of ulysses. i am myself, i know what i have done and i am the man to tell it. really here is a statement of self-consciousness; the singer is no longer a demodocus singing of another man, of ulysses, at troy, but it is ulysses himself, now singing of himself, of his profoundest experiences, which none other but he can tell. his internal life opens, not that active heroic one; the trials of his spirit are the theme, therewith must follow a new manner of utterance, a poetic form which can express what is within and still remain in the domain of the imagination. a self-conscious art we must now be prepared for, which seeks to express just the self-consciousness of the poet going through his inner experiences, with the counterstroke from the outer world. what new art-form, then, will homer, the grand constructive poet, who seizes every object necessary for his temple of song, assign to ulysses singing of himself? the fairy tale is taken with its strange supernatural shapes, which have no reality, and hence can only have an ideal meaning; we are ushered into the realm of the physically impossible, where we have to see the spiritually actual, if we see anything. polyphemus is not a man, not an animal, not a direct product of nature; he is a creature of the mind made by the mind in order to express mind. undoubtedly he has external shape, but that shape is meaningless till we catch the spirit creating him. the fairy tale removes the vision from an outer sensuous world, and compels an internal vision, which looks into the soul of things and there beholds the soul. the fairy tale existed long before homer, it is a genuine product of the people. the stories which here follow have been traced among the remotest races; they spring up of themselves out of the popular heart and imagination. homer picks them up and puts them into their true place in his grand edifice, polishing, transforming them, by no means creating them; certainly he never created this art-form. his merit is that he saw where they belong and what phase of human experience they express; to this merit must be added his special power, that of poetic transfiguration. not simply a redactor or putter together externally of odd scraps, but the true architect of the totality; thus he comes before us on the present and on all other occasions. ulysses, having told us who he is, proceeds to inform us of a second important fact: his soul's strongest aspiration. he longs to return to home and country. ithaca, a small, rocky island, is the sweetest spot on earth to him; circe and then calypso tried to detain him, each wishing to keep him as husband; "but they could not shake the purpose of my heart." one thinks that he must, while saying this, have cast a sly glance at arete, for whose approval it must have been intended, for she was no friend of circe and calypso. it is a curious fact that homer, in this short description, makes two mistakes in reference to the topography of ithaca. the island can hardly be called low as here stated, nor does it lie westward of cephallenia, but northeastward. a reasonable inference is that homer was not an ithacan, and did not know the island very well, though he may have seen it in a passing visit. anaximander with his first map comes after homer several hundred years. the present book has three plainly marked portions. first comes the wanton attack on the ciconians, which connects immediately with the trojan experience of ulysses. second is the country of the lotus-eaters, to which he and his companions are driven by wind and storm. third is the land of the cyclops, especially of polyphemus, with whom he has his chief adventures. the first two portions are quite brief, are in fact introductory to the third, which takes up more than four-fifths of the book, and is the fairy tale proper. we may observe the gradual transition: the ciconians are a real people in geography and history; the lotus-eaters are getting mythical, are but half-way historical; the cyclops belong wholly to fableland. thus there is a movement out of the trojan background of reality into the fairy world. having marked the dividing lines, the next thing will be to find the connecting links between these three portions. they are not thrown together haphazard or externally joined into one book; they have an internal thought which unifies them and which must be brought to light. the poet sees in images which are separate, but the thinker must unite these images by their inner necessity, and thus justify anew the poet. i. the first sentence strikes the leading thought: "the wind, bearing me from troy, brought me to the ciconians." troy is the starting-point, the background out of which everything moves. after the fall of the city nestor gives an account of the disputes of the greek leaders and their separation (book iii. l. 134 et seq.); ulysses is driven alone with his contingent across the sea toward thrace, where he finds a city in peace, though it had been an ally of troy. "i sacked the city, i destroyed its people;" he treated them as he did the trojans, "taking as booty their wives and property." such is the spirit begotten of that ten years' war in the character of ulysses, a spirit of violence and rapine, totally unfitted for a civilized life, at bottom negative to family and state. this is the spiritual starting-point from which he is to return to home and country through a long, long, but very needful discipline. he is well aware that he has done something for which vengeance awaits him, so he urges his companions to flee at once. but they would not obey, they stayed there "drinking much wine and slaughtering sheep and oxen along the sea-shore." revel and feasting follow, till the ciconians rouse the outlying neighbors and drive the greeks to the ships, with the loss of six companions for each ship. such is the first incident after the trojan war, showing clearly the destructive phase thereof, which has been drilled into the character by so long a period of bloodshed. this is not yet fairyland, but a real people and a real conflict. the ciconians in the later historic time of herodotus still dwelt in thrace. grotius in his famous book _on the rights of peace and war_ cites the present instance as a violation of international justice. the grand positive ground of attacking troy is not found here; there was no helen detained in wrongful captivity. the sack of ismarus pictures the evil results which spring from all war, even the most just. again we must affirm that this deed of wrongful violence is the start toward the great return, and hints what has to be overcome internally by the journey through fairyland. later we find a fact, not here mentioned, pertaining to the sack of the city of the ciconians. ulysses had saved maron, the priest of apollo, who in gratitude gave him the strong wine with which he overcame polyphemus in the cave. his merciful deed thus helped him conquer the monster of nature. but in general it is plain that ulysses, though desiring to get back to an institutional life, is not ready by any means for such a step; he is in reality hostile to the very essence of institutional life. he is too much like the suitors now to be their punisher. all put to sea again, to be tossed on that unruly element, with their little vessels exposed to wind and wave. "they call thrice by name each one of their dead companions" ere they set out; the meaning of this invocation has been much discussed, but it probably rests upon the belief that they could thus call the souls of the deceased to go along with them to home and country. the fact that just six were lost from each ship was made the ground of an assault upon homer in antiquity by zoilus, famed as the homeromastix, or homer's trouncer. the great sea with its tempests is now before them, heaving and tossing; after the attack upon the ciconians we can well imagine that this storm has its inner counterpart in the soul of ulysses. does he not show within himself a deep scission--between his desire to return and his deed? at any rate he is borne forward; when he sought to round maleia, the southern point of greece (now cape st. angelo), and sail home to ithaca, he was carried out to sea by the winds, beyond the island cythera, across the main toward the coast of africa. thus he is swept outside the boundaries of hellas proper into a region dimly known, half-mythical; he cannot make the sharp turn at maleia, inside the greek world; he must go beyond it and there reach his final experience. not simply physical is this description, else it would be a mere statement in geography; it is also spiritual and hence rises into poetry. ii. next is the land of the lotus-eaters, where ulysses and his companions arrive, after being driven helplessly "across the fishy deep" for nine days (this is a favorite number in homer) by the hostile winds. the lotus-eaters, "whose food is flowers" use no violence, but reach to the new-comers their plant, the lotus, to satisfy hunger. whoever has once tasted of that pleasant food, straightway forgets home and the return, and wishes to live always among the lotus-eaters. the will is broken, all activity is sapped; the land of idlers it is, relaxed in a sensuous dream life, in which there is a complete collapse of volition. now the point is to connect this country with the ciconians, or rather to see this internal condition evolving itself out of the preceding one. for the line of conjunction must be within, of the spirit; physically the two countries are far enough apart. in the first case, we have noted a state of external violence, which really means a destroying of the will. the greeks assailed a quiet people, assailed its will; then they were beaten and driven off, they had their negative deed served up to themselves. now what? there follows an internal collapse of the will, a logical result of their own conduct, which is hinted by their being drifted about on the seas, apparently quite helpless. no wonder that, when they touched land again, and obtained some food, they desired to stay there, and eat of the lotus. yet it is the consequence of their own act; that wanton destruction of the ciconian will is at bottom the destruction of their own will; they are really assailing their own principle--a fact which is to be brought home to them by a long and bitter experience. but there is one man among them, who, though not guiltless by any means, felt the nature of the ciconian act, and who has still some volition left in the right direction. "by force i led back to the ship those who had tasted of the lotus, and bound them beneath the oar-benches." the rest of the companions were ordered aboard, they obeyed; off they sail again on the hoary deep--whitherward? thus ulysses shows himself the man of will among the will-less, and solves his part of the problem among the lotus-eaters, setting out for the new unknown. this people probably lived on the coast of lybia according to homer's conception, though the land is outside the clear greek geographical horizon, floating mistily somewhere on its borders, half real, half fabulous, on the way to fairyland. we enter more distinctly the inner realm of the spirit, as the outer realm of reality becomes less distinct and demonstrable. the ciconians were an actual people, the conflict with them also actual, quite the trojan conflict; but the lotus-eaters form the transition to the wonderland of the odyssey. as regards the lotus, several plants were called by that name; one is mentioned in a previous book of the odyssey (iv. 603) which was probably a kind of clover growing in the damp lowlands of greece and asia minor, and utilized for grazing. another sort was a species of lily which grew in the valley of the nile. but the lotus of the present passage is generally considered to be the fruit of a shrub which yields a reddish berry of the size of a common olive, having somewhat the taste of a fig. this fruit is still highly esteemed in tripolis, tunis and algiers; from the last named country it has passed over to france, and is often hawked about the streets of paris under the name of _jujube_, where the passing traveler will purchase a sample, and eat of the same, testing the truth of homer's description, but probably not losing thereby his desire for home and country. the lotus-eaters have had a famous history; they have caught the fancy of poets and literary men who have sought in various ways to reproduce and embellish them. among english-speaking peoples the poem of tennyson on this subject is a prime favorite. but in homer the lotus-eaters are not an isolated fact, they are a link in the chain of a grand development; this inner connecting thought is the true thing to grasp. let us, then, penetrate the heart of the next movement of ulysses. the lotus-eater gave up family and country; "chewing the lotus, he forgot the return." his will vanished into a sensuous oblivion; he was indifferent, and this indifference was a passive destruction of the greek world to which he was returning. but now in due order the active destroyer of that world appears; behold the cyclops, the wild man of nature, truly a monster to the greek institutional sense, being without domestic and civil order. thus we mark the inner transition: the active principle of that which was a passive lotus-eater is the cyclops, a polyphemus. the trojan negative result, so deeply lodged in the soul of ulysses and his companions, cannot remain mere indifference or forgetfulness; it must proceed to action, to virulent destructive action, which is now to be bodied forth in a fabulous shape. only a few of the weakest companions of ulysses were ready to become lotus-eaters, and they were easily thrust under the oar-benches and carried away. here there is a fresh conflict, altogether the main one of the present book. iii. if then we have seized the matter aright, we have reached a shape in fairyland, which represents what is hostile, actively hostile, to the greek institutional world, state, family, society. ulysses stands in a double relation to the present condition of things. the cyclops is really a picture of him in his negative character, a product of his destructive trojan spirit, yet he is just the man who must put down the cyclops, he must master his own negation or perish. ulysses sees the natural man, or rather, he sees himself with all culture taken away, with all institutional life eliminated from his existence. he may well be frightened at the monster, who is very real, though a dweller in fairyland. nor should we forget that the cyclops also undergoes a change, he too is in the process and shows something like development under the severe tuition of ulysses. as already said, the present portion is altogether the longest in the book, it is essentially the entire book. the other two portions were hardly more than a short introduction and a brief transitional stage; now comes the full and highly elaborated tale, in which both the land and its inhabitants are fabulous, supernatural. there are two distinct divisions treating of the cyclops: the first describes their race in general, the second gives a description of the particular grand cyclops, polyphemus, in his conflict with ulysses. i. this time there is no tempest, such as arose after leaving the ciconians, in order to reach the land of the cyclops; that collapse of the will seems to have pictured itself in the quiet deep. but who are the cyclops? a race "without law, addicted to violent deeds;" they have no agriculture, "they plant not, neither do they plow;" they get their products, "trusting to the gods," that is, trusting to nature, since the cyclops have small regard for the higher gods, as we shall soon see. another mere formula this, showing that the homeric deity was getting crystallized even for homer. "they hold no councils" in common, are not associated together, but "they dwell in vaulted caves on mountain heights," such as the famous corycian cavern which is near the top of a mountain on parnassus. there "each man rules his wives and children," evidently a herding polygamous condition of the family; "nor do they (the cyclops) care for one another." still further, "they have no ships with crimson prows," no navigation, no commerce which seeks "the cities of men" and binds them together in the bond of society and humanity. yet there is an excellent harbor and a good soil, "with copious showers from zeus;" nature has surely done her part, and is calling loudly for the enterprising colonist to come and plant here his civilized order. this passage must have stirred the greek emigrant to leave his stony hellas and seek in the west, a new home; it suggests the great hellenic movement for the colonization of italy and sicily from the 6th to the 9th century b.c. the poet has plainly been with the frontiersman, and seen the latter's giants. the main thing to be noticed in the present account is the extraordinary number of negatives. no laws, no assemblies, no association; no plows, no ships, no intercourse with other cities; the whole civilized life of man is negated, and man himself is thrown back into a state of nature. it is worth while to search for the purpose of this negative procedure on the part of the poet. he might have given a positive description of nature, telling what it is, and telling what the cyclops is, not emphasizing so much what he is not. but thus the meaning would not come out so plainly; the cyclops is just the negation of the whole civilized world of greece, which fact must be expressly imaged in the very words used in the poem. he is not so much a simple being of nature as a being antithetic to society. at this point we can trace his connection with the great trojan experience, which, as already set forth, has begotten a negative tendency in its participators. the war at troy, like all war long-continued, has bred men to be anti-social; they have to destroy state, family, commerce, agriculture, till destruction becomes habit, yea principle, and takes possession of their intellect. the cyclops was generated at ilium, and is a colossal phantasm of the spirit which prompted the attack on the ciconians. it should be stated here that the cyclops of homer are different from those of hesiod and of other mythographers, inasmuch as the latter were represented as the demons who forged the thunderbolts of zeus, and were connected with the volcanic agencies chiefly in sicily and italy. mount ætna belching forth its lava streams may have suggested to the greek imagination the sick giant polyphemus in its caverns, drunk on the red destructive wine of ulysses. first is a small island, "stretching outside the harbor" of the land of the cyclops, woody, full of wild goats; there the ships of ulysses drew to the shore. it was bare of human dwellers, the cyclops had no boats to reach it; a good place for stopping, therefore, quite out of reach of the savages. nor is the fountain forgotten, "sparkling water flowing from a hollow rock down to the harbor"--an adjunct still necessary to every greek village or encampment. "some god led us through the dark night" without our seeing the island till the boats struck it--surely a providential intervention on our behalf. leaving behind the other ships at this point, ulysses takes only his own and its crew, and goes forth to "test these people, whether just or unjust, hospitable or godless." he cannot rest in ignorance, he must have the experience and know the unknown. he soon sees "a cave high up the mountain, not far from the sea, overarched with laurel shrubs;" he observes also "an enclosure, made of stones set in the earth;" these stones are not hewn (as some translators say), since the so-called cyclopean walls so common in greece were not built by this kind of cyclops. in the enclosure were resting "many herds of sheep and goats"--just such a scene as can be witnessed in the rural parts of greece to-day. this is the environment of "the man-monster," who is now to be the theme of song. ii. polyphemus is a cyclops but he has characteristics of his own. he has no family in his cave, he lives wholly for himself apparently; he seems to be the largest of his race, "like no man who lives by bread;" he towers alone "like the peak of a high mountain shaggy with woods;" apart from others "he plans his unjust deeds." a portentous shape with but a single eye in his head, a cave-dweller similar to the primitive man; he has too an evil disposition in his huge bulk. this is the being with whom ulysses is now to engage in conflict, which becomes highly dramatic. the conquest of the man of nature by the man of intelligence--such is the theme through its various fluctuations. this man of nature, however, we are always to consider from his negative side, as hostile to a civilized order; so the poet has carefully represented him. he is to be put down; yet even polyphemus has his right, he is brought to a gleam of self-knowledge, and ulysses has to pay the penalty of his deed, which has also its curse. a very deep current runs through the poem in this part, which we shall divide into five different scenes, hoping thus to make its movement and thought somewhat more distinct. 1. ulysses, taking twelve of his bravest companions from his ship, not forgetting a goatskin of wonderful wine, for he had a presentiment that he would meet a huge wild man, who is wont to succumb readily to civilized drink, enters the cave while polyphemus is absent. a vivid picture of that primitive dairy with its cheese, milk, curds; the men fell to and helped themselves, as was natural. then the companions wished to depart at once, taking what quantity of cheese they could carry, but ulysses refused, he must "see the cyclops and test his hospitality." just the opposite was the case in the land of the ciconians; there ulysses wished to flee but his companions would not. why this difference? he must know polyphemus, must see the giant and subordinate him; that is just his supreme necessity now, he really can no more run away from the monster than from himself. but that attack on the ciconians was an unjust, violent deed of which the penalty was sure to follow; this ulysses knew and sought to escape. in the present case, however, no wrong has been done as yet, and he must meet and solve his problem, while his weaker companions would shun the trial. polyphemus returns with his herds in due time, and closes the mouth of the cave with a huge rock, "which not two and twenty wains could move from the threshold." soon by the light of his fire he sees the lurking strangers and asks, "who are you?" ulysses replies, stating that they are returning from troy, but have been driven out of their way by adverse winds; then he makes his human and religious appeal: we come as suppliants, receive us; "revere the gods," specially zeus the protector of suppliants. but the cyclops scoffs at zeus and the rest of the gods: "we are their betters." thus is witnessed in the monster the denial of the greek religion, and an atheistic turn of mind. next follows in logical sequence his supreme negative act, he is a man-eater. "he seized two of my companions and hurled them against the ground as if they were dogs, then he devoured them piecemeal, swallowing all--entrails and flesh and marrowy bones." surely ulysses is getting some experience on the line of that trojan deed. now we catch the entire sweep of this particular cyclops. he has shown himself as the representative of three mighty negations: of civilized life, of religious life, and of human life. he destroys man, feeds on him; so negation, war, revolution, must do in the end. the horrid phantasm is the true image of the destroyer of the race. nor does he belong to the old greek world and to the trojan time only; he is among us, and he can be translated into modern terms quite familiar. polyphemus is an anarchist, an atheist, and a cannibal; the ancient poet wraps the three together in one mighty monstrosity. in the morning the cyclops devoured two more companions for his breakfast, then drove his flocks afield, leaving the rest of the strangers shut up in the cave with the big stone in the opening. during the day the "man of many shifts" has an opportunity for reflection in that dark recess. he dares not kill the giant outright, "with my sharp sword stubbing him where the midriff holds the liver," for how could they then get out? no, the man of nature must be saved and utilized; with all his might he is to be overborne by the man of intelligence, and made to remove the big stone. 2. the plan of ulysses with its successful execution is the subject of the next phase of the conflict. by this plan three things must be done in order to counteract the giant and to negative his power. he must be deprived of physical vision, which becomes the more easily possible from the fact that he has but one eye; if he had two eyes like the ordinary man, he could still see though one be put out. that this purpose be accomplished, he must somehow be shorn of his physical strength; finally any resistance which might come from the rest of the cyclops outside must be rendered nugatory. such are the three chief points of the impending problem, which ulysses has to meet and does meet with astonishing skill and foresight; the cyclops is blinded, is made helpless by drink, and is befooled by a pun. ulysses burns out the eye of the monster with the charred end of a stick of olive wood, which he prepares beforehand; huge round-eye (the meaning of the word _cyclops_) has no eye now. ulysses by means of that miraculous wine, product of culture, makes the giant drunk, who thus loses his physical superiority. the ithacan evidently knew, as well as the american, the power of fire-water over the wild man; that the wine had some strength, is shown by the fact that one cup of it had to be diluted with twenty measures of water, when taken by ordinary mortals. not without significance does the exhilarated cyclops laud this civilized wine in contrast to that of the wild grapes of his own land. but the third scheme of ulysses is the most subtle of all, and touches the heart of the whole problem, though it be merely a pun. he calls himself nobody to polyphemus, who, without sight or insight, is the victim of a word. for a complete man must have not only a double sight from his eyes, but a double insight from his mind, seeing before and after in the latter case especially. the result is when the other cyclops, roused by the cries of polyphemus, ask him from outside the cave: what is the matter? he answers, nobody is killing me. whereat off they go, dropping a word or two of cold advice, or perchance of sarcastic humor. we should, however, reach down to the essence of what appears on the surface as a mere trick of speech. it may seem far-fetched to say, but it is none the less the actual fact, that ulysses is a nobody, and a very active one to polyphemus. that is, he has shown himself the negative power which overwhelms the giant, who is now himself quite reduced to a nobody by mr. nobody. or, in abstract terms, ulysses has negated the negation and has here suggested the subtle work of the process in doing so. has he not negatived polyphemus, who was himself a negative, so carefully and fully defined by the poet at the start? thus we come upon the deepest pun ever made, or possible to be made, a literary form which the greatest geniuses have been fond of sporting with; we can find puns in dante, goethe, and notably in shakespeare. the pun of ulysses rests upon the duplicity inherent in the negative; no-man is the man, especially to polyphemus, whose brain cannot span the two sides of the punning idea, who is not two-eyed but one-eyed by nature, and this one eye is soon put out by the man with two eyes. such is the earliest instance of what may be called the play of the negative, which is still subtly ensconced in the spoken and written word, and winds in an elusive game of hide-and-seek through all literature. many men, both writers and readers, are its victims, like polyphemus. and all these floating metaphysical gossamers are found in homer! yes, but not in a metaphysical form; homer's organ is poetic, he lived in the age ere philosophers had dawned. still he too had before him the problems of the soul and of the world. nor would he have been a true greek unless he had grappled with this play of the negative, which had some marvelous fascination for the greek mind. it is the leaven working in the sophists with their subtle rhetoric, in socrates with his negating elenchus, in plato with his confounding dialectic. homer, as the prophet of his people, foreshadowing all forms of greek spirit and of greek literature, bring to light repeatedly this play of the negative. the modern german, in more respects than one the spiritual heir of the ancient greek, has not failed to give evidence of his birthright in the same direction. kant's critique, and hegel's logic are the most desperate efforts to grasp this slippery, double-doing and double-thinking negative, infinitely elusive, verily the old serpent. but the supreme attempt is the modern poetic one, made by goethe in his faust poem, in which is embodied anew the mighty negative, who is now none other than the devil, mephistopheles. thus the last world-poet reaches across the ages and touches elbows with the first world-poet in a common theme. thus ulysses nullifies the cyclops, inflicting three deprivations through his three means: the charred stick takes away vision, the strong wine takes away strength, the ambiguous pun prevents help. the pun also announces covertly to polyphemus the nature of the power which is undoing him, but he does not and cannot understand that. but the problem of ulysses is not at an end with simply nullifying the cyclops; he and his companions are not yet outside of the cave. herewith we come to a new stage of process. 3. this is the escape, to which the strong giant must be made to contribute, he is skillfully turned against himself. the great stone is removed by him from the mouth of the cave, but he places himself there at the entrance, and no human being can pass. still, the herds have to go out to their pasture. ulysses dexterously binds three large sheep together, fastens a companion under the middle one, while he clings beneath a huge ram, and out they move together. but the giant stops just this ram and talks to it, being his favorite of the flock. the man of nature is again outwitted by the man of intelligence, allowing his enemy to slip through his very fingers. the conversation of the blind cyclops with the dumb animal is pathetic; his one solitary friend apparently, the only creature he loved, is compelled to silent service against its master. "why art thou last to leave, who wast always first? dost thou long to see the eye of thy ruler, which has been put out by that vile wretch, nobody?" so the cyclops speaks, without seeing or knowing, yet with a touch which excites sympathy for his misfortune. the special characteristic of this scene is that ulysses does not now destroy, but employs polyphemus and his property. nature must be used by intelligence to overcome nature; the strength of the giant must be directed to rolling away the big stone; his herds are taken to bring about the escape of his foes, and he is turned into an instrument against himself. thus he is no longer negated as in the last scene, but utilized; having been subdued, he now must serve. ulysses and his companions are outside the cave, having gotten rid of those dark and fearful limits which walled them in with a monster. mind, thought has released them; soon they are on their ship in a free element. but the end is not yet; even polyphemus, the natural man, must come to know who and what has subjected him, he too is in the grand discipline of the time. 4. two things ulysses is now to tell to the cyclops in the distance. the first is the wrong and the penalty thereof: "amply have thy evil deeds been returned to thee," namely, his treatment of men. "zeus and the other gods have punished thee," there is a divine order in the world, which looks after the wrong-doer. thus polyphemus the anarchist, atheist, and cannibal gets a short missionary sermon on justice, religion and humanity. but he does not receive it kindly, he "hurls a fragment of a mountain peak," and almost strikes the ship. the line of danger is not yet passed. still ulysses must tell something else though his frightened companions try to dissuade him. but he must, he cannot help it: "if any one ask thee, say it was ulysses, the city-destroyer, who put out thine eye." a great light this word brings to the poor blind cyclops, almost the light of self-consciousness. he recalls, he knows his conqueror, and therein begins to know himself, to recognize his error. "ah, woe is me! the ancient oracles about me are fulfilled!" of old there had been prophecies concerning his destiny, but he did not understand them, seemingly did not regard them. how could he, with his bent toward the godless? the prophet telemus had foretold "that i would lose my sight at the hands of ulysses." how shall we consider this prophecy? a dim, far-off presentiment among the cyclops themselves that they were to be subjected to a higher influence; their limited, one-eyed vision was to vanish through a more universal, two-eyed vision. such a presentiment nature everywhere shows, a presentiment of the power beyond her, of the spiritual. what else indeed is gravitation? a longing, a seeking which even the clod manifests in its fall earthward, a prophetic intimation; so the cyclops, the natural man, had his prophet whom he now begins rightly to recognize; truly he is getting religious, quite different is his present utterance from his previous blasphemy: "we are better than the gods." nay, he offers to intercede with his father neptune, praying the god to give a sending of the stranger over the sea. moreover he recognizes his divine father as the only one who can heal him in his present distress. possibly the words are spoken to beguile, but polyphemus here offers to do his duty to the stranger on his shores, and he recognizes the gods. manifestly we witness in this passage a striking development of the rude cyclops under the tough discipline of experience. he acknowledges first his mistake in regard to the prophecy: "i expected to see a man tall and beautiful and of vast strength, not this petty worthless weakling who has put out mine eye." a hero of visible might, a giant like himself, not a man of invisible intelligence, he imagined he was to meet; great was his mistake. the conflict between brain and brawn was settled long ago before troy, and has been sung of in the preceding book. here then is certainly a confession of his mistake, and, if his words are sincere, an offer to undo his wrong. 5. at this point there is a change in ulysses, his victory has begotten insolence, he becomes a kind of cyclops in his turn. such is the demon ever lurking in success. listen to his response to the confession and supplication of his wretched victim: "would that i were as sure of taking thy life and sending thee down to hades, as that the earth-shaker shall never heal thine eye." the implication is that the god cannot do it--an act of blasphemy which the god will not be slow to avenge. but how true to human nature is this new turn in ulysses, how profound! no sooner has he escaped and experiences the feeling of triumph, than his humanity, nay his religion vanishes, he sweeps over into his opposite and becomes his savage enemy. what follows? the law must be read to him too, his own law; he will hear it from the mouth of polyphemus, and it is essentially this: as thou hast done to me, so shall it be done to thee. accordingly we have next the curse of the cyclops denounced upon the head of the transgressor. this curse is to be fulfilled to the letter, the poet has fully shown the ground of it, ulysses has really invoked it upon himself, it lies in his deed. possibly polyphemus, when he offered to give the dues of hospitality and to send the guest home, was merely using the words of deception, which he had just had the opportunity of learning, and was trying to get possession of his enemy's body. doubtless it was well for ulysses to keep out of the giant's hands. but that does not justify his speech, which was both cruel and blasphemous. hear then the curse of the cyclops, which hints the great obstructing motive to the return of ulysses, and marks out the action of the poem; "give ulysses no return to his home; but if he returns, may he arrive late and in evil plight, upon a foreign ship with loss of all his companions, and may he find troubles in his house." of course neptune heard the prayer, had to hear it, in the divine order of things. the curse lay inside of ulysses, else it could not have been fulfilled; he himself could drop from his humane and religious mood in adversity and become a savage in prosperity. his chief misfortunes follow after this curse. but for the present he escapes to goat island, though another portentous rock is hurled at him by the cyclops. there he sacrifices to the highest god, zeus, who, however, pays no heed--how is it possible? such is this far-reaching fairy tale, certainly one of the greatest and most comprehensive ever written. it shows a movement, an evolution both of polyphemus and ulysses; this inner unfolding indeed is the main thing to be grasped. it is worth the while to take a short retrospect of the five leading points. (1) the completely negative character of the cyclops as to institutions, religion, and even the physical man. (2) this negative being is negated by the man of intelligence, who puts out his eye, nullifies his strength by drink, and thwarts all help for him by a punning stratagem. (3) he is made to help his enemies escape from his cave by the skill of ulysses who turns the force of nature against nature. (4) the cyclops reaches self-knowledge through ulysses, who tells his wrong and its punishment, who also tells his own name: whereat the cyclops suddenly changes and makes a humane offer. (5) ulysses changes the other way, becomes himself a kind of cyclops and receives the curse. this curse will now follow ulysses and drive him from island to island through fableland, till he gets back to ithaca with much suffering and with all companions lost, where he will find many troubles. in this manner the return of ulysses becomes intertwined with polyphemus and this fableland, which furnish an underlying motive for the third part of the odyssey (the last 12 books). the curse here spoken is still working when ulysses reaches home and finds the suitors in possession. verily his negative spirit lies deep; in cursing polyphemus, he has cursed himself. thus the impartial poet shows both sides--the guilt as well as the good in polyphemus and in ulysses. the man of nature has his right when he offers to transform his conduct, and it shows that ulysses still needs discipline when he scorns such an offer. polyphemus too is to have his chance of rising, for he certainly has within himself the possibility. has not the poet derived the noble arete and alcinous and institutional phæacia from the savage cyclops? but ulysses negatives polyphemus just at the start upward. the character which he showed in sacking the city of the ciconians is in him still, he is not yet ready to return. the ninth book has thus run through its three stages and has landed us in pure fableland. these three stages--the attack on the ciconians, the lotus-eaters, the adventure with the cyclops--may now be seen to be parts of one entire process, which we may call the purification of the spirit from its own negative condition. the man, having become destructive-minded (_oloophrn_) must be put under training by the gods, and sent to battle with the monsters of fableland. so we advance to the next book with the certainty that there is still some stern discipline in store for the wandering ulysses. _book tenth._ at the first glance we can observe a certain similarity between this book and the last one. there are in each three distinct portions or adventures, two very short and simple, and one very long and intricate. each book culminates in a fabulous being with whom the hero has a wrestle for supremacy, and in both cases he comes out victorious. we are still in wonderland, we have to reach into the ideal realm in order to find out what these strange incidents mean. the two central figures are polyphemus and circe, respectively, each of whom imparts the dominating thought to the book in which he or she appears. the first thing we ask for is the connection, the inner thread which joins these books together. it was stated that polyphemus was the negation of the institutional world, he was individualistic, he belonged to neither family nor state. no laws, no councils, no civil polity; he is a huge man of violence, hostile specially to man's social life. circe on the contrary, is the woman hostile to woman's domestic world, the family, first of all; she is the grand enchantress, representing the power and seductiveness of the senses; she is the enemy of what we call morals. to be sure, we shall find in her something more, whereof the full unfolding will be given hereafter. ulysses is the one who is to meet those negative forces and put them down. his companions give him special trouble in the present book, they seem to represent the weaker phases of man, possibly of ulysses himself. already he has suppressed polyphemus, or the institutional negation; now he is to subordinate circe or the moral negation. the latter is a woman because she must have sensuous beauty and all the charm of passionate enticement; the former is a man because he must show strength and violence rather than the allurement of pleasure. nor should we forget that these forms are in ulysses himself, and were really generated out of his trojan life; that spirit of his, shown at the start by the attack on the ciconians, has all these phases in its process. he is traveling through an inferno, seeing its entire demonic brood, which he has begotten, and which he has to fight and subject. at the same time these fantastic shapes are typical, and shadow forth the universal experience of man, belonging to all countries and all ages. as already stated, there are three different localities to which ulysses is brought. three islands, bounded, yet in a boundless sea, through which he moves on his ships; such is the outermost setting of nature, suggestive of much. no tempest occurs in this book; the stress is upon the three fixed places in the unfixed aqueous element. i. first is the island where dwells æolus with his family; hither ulysses comes after putting down polyphemus who was hostile to domestic life. in this spot the bag of winds is given into the possession of the navigator, whose companions, however, release them, and he is driven to the starting-point, with the winds at large. æolus refuses to receive him the second time. ii. next is the city of the læstrigonians, where is a civil life, a state, to which ulysses can come after subjecting the cyclops, who had no polity of the sort. but the state is verily a giant, a cannibal to him now, with all the winds loose. hence he has to flee for his life. whither now does he go? iii. not to penelope and ithaca, but to circe, and her isle. she is the form which next rises before ulysses, banished from the domestic world of æolus, and fleeing from the civil life of the læstrigonians. we shall try to bring the threads of connection to light, for it is our emphatic opinion that these three islands with their shapes are spiritually bound and wound together. still further, they reach back and interlink with the forms of the previous book, which furnish antecedent stages of the grand total movement of fairyland. separated in image are these islands and their inhabitants, but they have to be united in thought. not a mere accident is the sequence, but a necessity, a strict evolution. the work here, according our best belief, is organic, and the reader must not rest contented with his understanding of it, till he moves with the poet from place to place by the interior path of the spirit. i. the first fact about the æolian isle is that it was afloat in the waters of the sea, as delos and other islands of antiquity were reported to be. not stationary then; the king of it, æolus, has a name which indicates a changeable nature, veering about like the winds, of which he is king. the second fact pertaining to this isle is that a wall of brass encircles it not to be broken through; "and the cliff runs up sheer from the sea." manifestly two opposite ideas are suggested in this description: the fixed and the movable; the island within itself is bound fast, and cannot be driven asunder; yet it floats in the most unstable of elements, in the sea and winds. such is the physical environment, clearly mirroring the meaning. something permanent in the midst of all that is mutable we may expect to find here. on the island dwell the king of the winds and his wife, along with six blooming sons and daughters. he gave his daughters to his sons for wives; a custom not elsewhere found in homer outside of the realm of the gods; yet is claimed to have been a very ancient custom, which the ptolomies revived in egypt. at any rate here is the picture of the family in its patriarchal form, wholly separated from other connections and set apart by itself, on the brass-bound precipitous island. the family is abstracted from the rest of the world and given a dwelling-place. at this point we begin to catch a glimpse of the significance of the story. the family is the first power which seizes the emotions and passions and caprices of men (the winds of his soul) and starts the taming of them; the marriage tie is fixed, is not for a day; thus the family makes itself permanent, and makes the human being stable through feeling and duty. none but married people are here; very different will it be hereafter in the island of circe. the king of the winds is not only æolus, but also his institution, the family, rules here, for there is no state to be governed. not polygamy, but monogamy, as the great homeric principle of domestic life, do we witness--the mutual devotion of one man and one woman. externally we found the fixed and the floating; internally also we discover the fixed and the floating, or rather, that principle which fixes the floating, and makes the world stable. thus we see the reason why homer puts the family upon the isle of the winds. it is no wonder, therefore, that in such a place is held up before us a picture of happiness and plenty. "all feast from day to day with endless change of meats;" why ask whence the viands come? the inner peace provides them. even the sound of flutes is heard round about, according to one way of translating the passage; music attunes the everlasting festival. not mere gratification is this, but happiness, the outer again mirroring the inner; domestic harmony is the matter set forth. hither ulysses comes with his companions, "to the city and beautiful houses" of æolus. a city is here, but no civil life is introduced into the story. "a whole month the monarch entertained me;" what was again the interest? "he asked me about ilium," the eternal theme, which lies always in the background of fairyland as well as of historic hellas. the trojan war and also "the return of the greeks" were recounted, we may say, sung by ulysses; the iliad and the odyssey, delighted also those domestic æolians. was not troy destroyed because of a wrong done to the greek family? finally ulysses was gotten ready to be sent home by his host. æolus, the ruler of the winds, gives them into the might of ulysses; he confines them in "a bullock's bladder," which, tied by a silver chain, he places in the ship. it is manifest that the sea, deprived of these windy powers, cannot hinder the passage. again we behold the main fact of the island: the unstable, uncertain, capricious, is held by the fixed, the permanent; during his sojourn with æolus, ulysses has obtained an inner hold, an anchorage of the moral kind, which he sorely needed. this was given him by his view of the family, which was the real security of the island. all the conditions of his return (but one) are placed in his hand, tied up in a bag. "only the west-wind was allowed to blow," which sent him homewards. still the supreme condition was not, could not be given by æolus or by anybody else, could not be tied up in a bag. the free man must be alert, he must watch, and win his own salvation; his prime duty is to keep the bag tied, and therein to exercise his will. this is just what he failed to do at the last moment. he went to sleep when in sight of ithaca; his companions, led by curiosity and avarice (two blasts of the soul) open the bag, expecting to find gold and silver, and find the rushing winds. of course all are driven back to the starting-point, to the island, on which they soon land. what will ulysses do in such extremity? "shall i drop into the sea and perish, or shall i still endure and stay among the living?" suicide will not solve his problem: "i remained and suffered." herein also we trace the stamp of the hero, whose special call it is to master fate. so ulysses tries again to get the bladder of winds from æolus, confessing that it was equally the fault of himself and his companions. but the opportunity is gone; the sum total of conditions, all bagged and tied up, and put into his hands, presents itself only once. moreover the sleep of ulysses, just at the nick of destiny, showed an internal weakness; he became careless, almost insolent under such circumstances; he manifested a similar trait to that which led to the curse of the cyclops. again he hears a malediction, now uttered by his former host: "get thee out of my island quickly, most guilty of men, hated by the gods!" thus æolus regards the man before him, and reinforces the curse of polyphemus. but if ulysses had to fall asleep by sheer fatigue (which construction the passage hardly demands), then he did not look properly after his companions, making them the sharers of his knowledge. a foolish question has been asked here and much discussed: how did ulysses know what his companions said during his sleep? easily enough; but the answer is not worth the candle. æolus, therefore, refuses to receive ulysses and his companions a second time; they have fallen, they must experience the full meaning of their conduct; they must go to circe, and some of them, at least, be changed into swine, till they know the nature of their deed. æolus cannot receive them, they have destroyed his gift; they would repeat their act, if he gave all into their hands again, without the deeper penalty. the law thus is clear; they, having disregarded the fixed control of appetite and passion, which the king of the island imparts, are swept back into brutishness. many have been the interpretations of this marvelous king and his children and his island. the supporters of the physical theory of mythology have maintained that the twelve sons and daughters are the twelve months of the year, six of summer and six of winter, while æolus, the father, is the sun who produces them. others regard æolus as a mortal king, who, on account of certain traits or certain deeds, was transformed into the fabled monarch of the winds. there has been much dispute over the location of æolia; the most of those who have searched for its geographical site are in favor of one of the lipari islands, on the northern coast of sicily. finally virgil has somewhat transformed the legend and put it into his æneid. ii. ulysses and his companions now had to use the oar on seas without wind; "their spirit was worn out," hope had fled from them toiling through the becalmed deep. they arrive at the land of the læstrigonians, a race of giants, into whose narrow harbor surrounded by its high precipices the ships enter, with the exception of that of ulysses, who has learned caution. a kind of cave of the giant despair is that harbor, reflecting outwardly the internal condition of the men, after their weary labor coupled with the repulse from æolus. first of all we here observe a city with a civil order; there is the place of assembly, a king over men, with a royal palace. no husbandry appears, but there are wagons fetching wood to town on a smooth road (probably a made road); shepherds are specially designated, so that we may suppose a pastoral life prevails, yet these people in their city are not roving nomads. the family also is noticed, being composed of the king, queen, and daughter; the latter is bringing water from the town fountain--a primitive, idyllic touch. but the stress is manifestly not upon the domestic but the civil institution; the state is here in full operation, in which fact we mark the contrast with the preceding island, æolia. another sharp contrast may be drawn between the læstrigonians and the cyclops; the latter are giants also, but have no civil order. ulysses, therefore, witnesses the state, in due gradation after the family. he can come to both these institutions now, and see them at least, for he has put down polyphemus, who, we recollect, was the negation of both. but only see them, not share in them; the curse of the cyclops is still working upon him and in him; though he destroy a destroyer, that does not make him positive; the devil destroys the wicked, but that does not make him good. hence the state rejects him as did the family; he is by no means ready to return to ithaca and penelope. such is his experience at present. but why should the læstrigonians be portrayed as giants? of course the fairy tale deals in these huge beings for its own purpose. æolus and his children seem to have been of common stature. the fancy can often play into the meaning, or suggest a glimpse thereof. the state may be called the big man, the concentrated personality of many persons; he strikes hard, he overwhelms the wrong-doer. therefore he seems now so terrible to ulysses, and is really so to the latter's companions, of whom all perish here except one shipful. it is the function of the state to punish; in the sweet domestic life of æolus, there was no punishment, only banishment; thus we behold now the penalty, at the hands of that institution which is specially to administer it. the companions did no wrong to the læstrigonians, but note that just here judgment comes upon them. ulysses escapes, but to him also these people appear as destroyers, as man-devouring cannibals; so the state often seems to the guilty, overwhelming the individual with its penal vengeance. the cyclops was also a giant and a cannibal, full of hostility; but mark the difference. he was the strong man of nature, not human in shape, with that one eye in his head; his violence was against institutions, the violence of the wild barbarian, which has to be put down by man. but the læstrigonians live in a civilized order which has to punish the transgressor; their shapes are not monstrosities of nature, but magnified human bodies. both are giants and cannibals, both negative, but in a wholly different sense. what is the location of the læstrigonians? a subject much disputed recently and of old, with very little profit. some expressions are puzzling: "the herdsman coming in greets the herdsman going out;" then again, "a herdsman needing no sleep would earn double wages," which implies apparently two periods for toil in twenty-four hours, the one "for tending cows" and the other "for tending sheep;" and this is possible, "for the paths of day and night are near" to each other, as if somehow day and night ran their courses together. what does it all mean? some dim story of the polar world with its bright nights, which story may have come from the far north into greece, along with another northern product, amber, which was known to homer, may lie at the basis of this curious passage. but we can hardly place the læstrigonians under polar skies in spite of this polar characteristic. others have sought their locality in the black sea and have even seen their harbor in that of balaklava. all of which is uncertain enough, and destined to remain so, but furnishes a marvelous field for erudite conjecture and investigation. the certain matter here, and we should say the important one also, is the institutional order and its negative attitude toward ulysses. that is, we must reach down and bring to light the ethical thread which is spun through this wonderful texture of fairy tales, before we have any real explanation, or connecting principle. iii. onward the wanderer, now with his single ship, has to sail again; whither next? he arrives at another island called ææa, "where dwells the fair-haired circe, an awful goddess, endowed with a singing voice, own sister of the evil-minded wizard æætes, both sprung of the sun and of perse, daughter of oceanus." this genealogy we have set down in full, as given by the poet, on account of its suggestiveness. these names carry us back to the east, quite to primitive arya; here is the sun, the god of the old vedas; here is perse, curiously akin to persia, which was light-worshiping in her ancient religion; then we come to æætes, father of medea, usually held to be of colchis on the eastern coast of the black sea, whence we busily pass to hellas in many a legend, and from hellas we now have traveled far westward into fairyland. one ancient story, probably the first, placed circe in the remote east; another, this of homer for example, sends her to the far west; a third united the two and told of the flight of circe upon the chariot of the sun from orient to occident, which is doubtless a much later form of the tale, though ascribed to hesiod. circe is of a higher ancestry than polyphemus, though both go back in origin to the sea with their island homes; she, however, is a child of the light-giving body, and will show her descent in the end. her name is related to the circle, and hints the circling luminary, on whose car she is said to have fled once. here in homer, however, we may note an inner circle of development; she passes through a round of experience, and seems to complete a period of evolution. she must be grasped as a movement, as a cycle of character, if you please; she develops within, and this is the main fact of her portrayal. the preceding etymological intimations are dim enough, yet they point back to asia, and to an old aryan relationship. not too much stress is to be put upon them, yet they are entitled to their due recognition, and are not to be thrown aside as absolutely meaningless. by homer, himself, they could not have been understood, being traces of a migration and ethnical kinship which had been in his time long forgotten, and which modern scholarship has resurrected through the comparative study of language. more important is the connection between circe and the two preceding portions of this book, æolia and the læstrigonians. we have just seen how both family and state cast ulysses off, must cast him off, since he is without moral subordination. the inner self-control demanded by an institutional life he has not been able to reach, after the alienation produced by the trojan war; the bag of winds given into his hand by æolus he could not keep tied. why? behold circe rise up and take on shape after his twofold experience. really she is evolved out of ulysses in a certain sense; he sees her just now and not before, because he has created her. why is he thus repelled by family and state? circe is the answer; she is the enchantress who stands for sensuous pleasure in its most alluring form; with her is now the battle. thus we approach another struggle of the hero, the longest and by far the most elaborately unfolded, of the present book. in many respects it is the counterpart of the story of polyphemus in the previous book. there he meets and puts down the anti-institutional man; here he meets and puts down the anti-moral woman. the one represents more the objective side of man's spirit, the other more the subjective; both together image the totality of the ethical world, in its two supreme aspects, institutions and morals. very famous has this story of circe become in literature. it has furnished proverbs, allusions, texts for exhortation; it has been wrought over into almost every possible form--drama, novel, poem, paramyth; from the nursery to old age it retains its charm and power. its meaning is plain enough, especially at first; but it grows more weird and more profound as it develops; at last it ascends quite into the beyond and points to the supersensible world. now the main point to be seized in this tale is the movement, the development of circe through her several stages, which are in the main three, showing circe victorious, circe conquered, and circe prophetic. ulysses and his companions move along with these stages, being also in the process; but the center of interest, the complete unfolding, is found in circe. these three chief stages we may give somewhat more fully before entering upon the detailed exposition. _first._ the island is reached; some of the companions under a leader (not ulysses) go to circe's abode, and are turned into swine after partaking of her food. circe triumphant. _second._ ulysses himself then goes, having obtained the plant _moly_; he subdues, enjoys; he releases his companions. he finally asks to be sent home, according to the promise she had given. circe subordinated. _third._ then she reveals her prophetic power and announces the future journey to hades, ere he can return home. thus she sends him on beyond herself, and reaches her culmination in this book. of these three stages the last seems inappropriate to circe's character, and is always a puzzle to the reader, till he probes to the thought underlying the tale. circe, then, is to show herself a seeress, and foreshadow the world beyond the present. why just that in her case? but before the question can be answered, we must unfold the first two stages. i. after an introduction which names the new island and its occupant, as well as gives a bit of her genealogy, the tale takes up ulysses and his companions. after a rest of two days and two nights, the hero goes forth to spy out the land, ascends a hill whence he sees the smoke of circe's palace rising "through the bushes and the trees." his last experience makes him careful, his thirst for knowledge does not now drive him to go at once into her presence. he returns to his companions with his information, and on the way back he kills a high-horned stag, "which had come down from the woods to the stream to slake its thirst." the result is a good meal for all once more, and a restoration of hope. 1. in such a mood he imparts his discovery: "i have seen with mine eyes smoke in the center of the island." terror-striking was the announcement to his companions, who at once thought of "the cannibals, cyclops and læstrigonians." and they had cause for fear. it may, however, be said in advance that circe is not a man-eater, but a man-transformer; she is a new phase of the great experience, she bestializes; she is negative, not so much from without as from within, not consuming the human shape but transmuting it into that of an animal. a curious expression here needs some explanation. "we know not where is east and where is west, not where the sun goes under the earth, nor where he rises." why not? there have been several ways of viewing this passage. ulysses did not know the countries where the sun set or rose, though he must have seen the direction. a statement from voss may be here translated: "the side of night and of day he knew well, for he saw sunrise and sunset; but he does not know into what region of the world he has wandered away from home." one other suggestion: it may have been very foggy or cloudy weather at the time. the internal hint, however, is clear; he is astray, lost; he knows not what direction to take for his return. but something has to be done. accordingly ulysses divides his crew into two portions, one commanded by eurylochus, the other by himself. the lot decided that eurylochus and his company should go to the house of circe, and the lot always decides aright in the hand of ulysses. forth they "go wailing, two and twenty companions, and leave us behind, weeping." a tearful time for those forty-four people plus the two leaders; which numbers give a basis for calculating the size of the crew, of which six had been already destroyed by the ciconians and six by the cyclops. 2. soon they reach the abode of circe, whose picture is now drawn with characteristic touches. she is beautiful, sings with a beautiful voice, and makes beautiful things, weaving webs such as the goddesses weave. surely an artistic being; her palace is built of hewn stone, not of natural rock, yet it lies in the depths of the forest. here again she shows her power: wild animals, wolves and lions, lie around--fawning upon, not attacking men, tamed by her powerful drugs. that is, she shows herself the mistress of nature, or rather the transformer thereof; her mighty spell can change character and shape. there has been a difference of opinion from antiquity down to the present about these animals. are they transformed men, or merely wild animals tamed? the matter is left in doubt by the poet and either view will answer for the passage. the connection, however, with the transformation of the companions of ulysses, would suggest the first meaning. these partake of her food, with which she mingles her drug, "in order that they might wholly forget their native country." but here is something more than the indifference of the lotus-eaters; these eaters and drinkers at once become swine as to "their heads, voices and hair," and eat the acorn and the fruit of cornel-tree, "like wallowing pigs." yet their mind remained "firm as before." there can be no doubt that time has interpreted this scene in but one way, and time is probably correct. still it is not here expressly said that the companions indulged to excess in food and drink, though they apparently had just had a sufficiency of feasting along the sea-shore, on venison and wine, "unspeakable meat and sweet drink." we must, however, consider the whole to be a phase of that same lack of inner subordination which led these people to untie the fatal bag of winds upon a former occasion. 3. one man alone escaped to tell the story, as so often happens in such adventures; it is eurylochus, "who remained outside the palace suspecting guile." when ulysses hears the account, he proposes to go at once and release his comrades. eurylochus beseeches him not to attempt it, but he persists, saying, "i shall go, a strong necessity is upon me." possibly in his contemptuous expression, "you stay in this place eating and drinking," is hinted just that which he is now to put down, in contrast with his companions. eurylochus is the man who is unable to solve the problem; he runs away from it, is afraid of it, and leaves his wretched associates behind. but the problem must have a positive solution, which here follows. ii. we are now to witness the dealings of ulysses with circe; he is to subordinate her, making her into a means, not an end; she will recognize him and submit completely, taking an oath not to do him any harm; she will release his companions and restore them to their natural forms at his behest; she will then properly entertain the entire crew, no longer turning them into swine. the world of the appetites and the senses will be duly ordered and subjected to the rational; from an imperious enchantress ulysses changes circe into an instrument of life and restoration. he is the transformer of her, not she of him; for she will reduce man to a beast, unless he reduces her to reason. 1. ulysses on his way to circe's palace is met by a seeming youth (really a god, mercury) who warns him and gives him a plant potent against the drugs of the enchantress. it is manifest that ulysses has a divine call; he knows already his problem from eurylochus, the god reiterates it and inspires him with courage. in addition he receives a plant from the divine hand, whereof the description we may ponder: "the root is black, its flower white as milk; the gods call it _moly_, hard it is for men to dig up." very hard indeed! and the whole account is symbolical, we think, consciously symbolical; it has an orphic tinge, hinting of mystic rites. at any rate the hero has now the divine antidote; still he is to exert himself with all his valor; "when she shall smite thee with her staff, draw thy sword and rush upon her, as if intending to kill her." thus he is to assert the god-like element in himself, the rational, and subject to it the sensuous. it is clear that ulysses is beginning to master the lesson of his experience. 2. he does as the god (and his own valor) directed, and circe cowers down subdued. she is not supreme, there is something higher and she knows it. at once she recognizes who it is: "art thou that wily ulysses whose coming hither from troy in his black ship has often been foretold to me?" such a prophecy she must have known and felt, she had mind and was aware of a power above her, which would some day put her down, after the trojan time. in like manner polyphemus, the man of nature, has heard of a coming conqueror, and actually named him. this one kind of subjection, however, is not enough, it must be made universal. every kind of subordination of the sensuous, not merely in the matter of eating and drinking, is necessary. the next thing to be guarded against is carnal indulgence, which may "make me cowardly and unmanly." hence circe has "to swear the great oath, not to plot against me any harm." thus in the two chief forms of human appetite, that of eating and drinking and that of sexual indulgence, she is subjected. ulysses is beginning to have some claims to being a moral hero, still he is not by any means an ascetic. he has the greek notion of morality; we have a right to enjoy, but enjoyment must not make us bestial; rational moderation is the law. he drinks of circe's cup, but does not let it turn him into a swine; he shares in all her pleasures, but never suffers his head to get dizzy with her blandishments. every seductive delicacy she sets before him, mingled with the most charming flattery; "i did not like the feast." why? this leads us to the next and higher point. 3. lofty is the response of ulysses: "o circe, what right-minded man would endure to touch food and drink before seeing his companions released?" at once she goes to the sty and sets them free, restoring their shapes, "and they became younger, larger, and more beautiful than they were before." a great advantage is this to any man; it is worth the hard experience to come out with such a gain, especially as the companions must have been getting a little old, stooped and wrinkled, having gone through so many years of hardship at troy and on the sea. 4. thus ulysses has transformed circe into an instrument for restoring his fallen comrades; surely a noble act. next she of her own accord asks ulysses to go to the sea-shore for the rest of his men and to bring them to her palace for refreshment and entertainment. this he succeeds in doing after some opposition from the terrified eurylochus, who has not yet gotten over his scare. sorely did the companions need this rest and recuperation after their many sufferings on land and sea; "weak and spiritless they were, always thinking of the bitter wandering." but now in the palace of circe "they feasted every day for a whole year," eating and drinking without being turned into swine. even eurylochus follows after, "for he feared my terrible threat." thus we catch the sweep of this grand experience of and with circe; if she governs, she bestializes man; if she serves, she refreshes and restores. her complete subordination is witnessed; from transforming people into swine, she is herself transformed into their helper, and she becomes an important factor in the great return to home and country. but it is time to think of this return again; the period of repose and enjoyment must come to an end. iii. here, then, we behold a new phase of circe, that of the seeress into the beyond. ulysses says to her at the end of the year: "now make your promise good, send us home, for which we long." stunning is the answer after that period of relaxation: "ye must go another way, ye must pass into the houses of hades." it is indeed a terrible response. but for what purpose? "to consult the soul of the blind theban seer tiresias, whose mind is still unimpaired; to him alone of the dead proserpine gave a mind to know." clearly this means the pure intelligence without body; ulysses must now reach forth to the incorporeal spirit, to the very idea beyond the senses, beyond life. the first question which arises in this connection is, how can circe, the enchantress of the senses, be made the prophetess of the supersensible world? if we watch her development through the two preceding stages, we shall see that she not only can, but must point to what is beyond, to spirit. in the second stage she experiences a great change, no longer transforming into the lower, but herself transformed into the higher; she becomes a moral being, subordinating the sensuous to the spiritual; she has, therefore, spirit in her life and manifests it in her actions, when she is the willing means of subjecting appetite to reason. the same transformation we may note on her artistic side, for she remains always beautiful. the first circe is that alluring seductive beauty which destroys by catering to the senses; she is that kind of art, which debauches through its appeal to appetite and passion alone. but the second circe is transfigured, her service is of the spirit, she releases from the bondage of indulgence, she aids the ethical return to family and state. it is true that she never becomes a saint or a nun, she would not be greek if she did; moreover, according to the greek view, she must be transcended by the typical man, who is to rise into an institutional life, which is hardly circe's. still the primal moral subjection is shown in her career. the domain of morals reveals the spiritual in action, the domain of true art reveals the spiritual in representation. what shall i do with this world of the senses? was a great question to the greek, and still is to us. in conduct subordinate it; in nature transform it into an image of the higher. the work of art is a divine flash from above into a sensuous form; this flash we separate from its material, and pass into pure spirit; then we reach tiresias, the mind embodied, not limited in space and time. circe thus indicates her own limitation, which belongs to morals and art. she is not the infinite, but can point to it; she hints the rise from art to philosophy. backwards and forwards runs the suggestion in her career; the greek can lapse to the first circe and die in a debauch of the senses, or he can rise to the prophetic circe, and lay the deep foundation of all future thought. the greek world, in fact, had just this double outcome. ulysses, then, has to go to hades, the supersensible realm; his heart was wrung, "i wept sitting upon the couch, i wished no longer to live nor to see the light of the sun." but after such a fit, he is ready for action: "when i had enough of weeping and rolling about, i asked circe: who will guide me?" then he receives his instructions, which have somewhat of the character of a mystic ritual, with offerings to the dead, who will come and speak. messages from the spirit world he will get, but he must pass through the ocean stream, to the groves of proserpine. from that point, after mooring his ship, he is to go to the houses of hades, where is a rock at the meeting of two loud-roaring rivers; "pour there a libation to the dead" with due ceremony. in all of which is the method of the later necromancy, or consultation of the departed for prophetic purposes. very old is the faith that the souls of deceased persons can be made to appear and to foretell the future, after a proper rite and invocation; nor is such a belief unknown in our day. ulysses departs from circe's palace and tells his companions concerning the new voyage: whereat another scene of lamentation. to the greek the underworld was a place of gloom and terror; he liked not the spirit disembodied, he needed the sensuous form for his thought, he was an artist by nature. the homeric greek in particular was the incarnation of the sunny upperworld, he shuddered at the idea of separating from it and its fair shapes. but the thing must be done, as it lies in the path of development as well as in the movement of this poem. ulysses must therefore go below, inasmuch as this world with its moral life even, is not the finality. there is aught beyond, the limit of death we must surmount in the present existence still; a glimpse of futurity the mortal must have before going thither. so homer makes the hero transcend life as it were, during life; and extend his wanderings into the supersensible world. the reader has now witnessed the three stages of this tenth book--æolus, the læstrigonians, and circe. the inner connection between these three stages has also been investigated and brought to the surface; at least such has been the persistent attempt. especially has circe been unfolded in the different phases which she shows--all of which have been traced back to a unity of character. the intimate relation between the ninth and tenth books has been set forth along with their differences. both belong to the upperworld of this fableland; hence they stand in contrast with the netherworld, which is now to follow. _book eleventh._ the present book is one of the most influential pieces of writing which man has produced. it has come down through the ages with a marvelous power of reproduction; in many ways poets have sought to create it over; indeed time has imitated it in a series of fresh shapes. virgil, not to speak of other attempts in ancient greek epics, has re-written it in the sixth book of the æneid; from virgil it passed to dante who has made its thought the mould which shapes his entire poem--the _divine comedy_. it is one phase of the great mythus of the apocalypse, or the uncovering of the future state, which in some form belongs to all peoples, and which springs from the very nature of human spirit. man must know the beyond; especially the hero, the spiritual hero of his race, must extend his adventures, not only over the world, but into the other world, and bring back thence the news concerning those who have already departed. this then is the supreme return of the hero, the return from beyond life, still alive; he is to conquer not only the monster polyphemus and the enchantress circe, but also the greatest goblin of all, death. common mortals have to make the passage thither without returning; the hero must be the grand exception, else he were no hero. transcendent must he be, rising above all limits, even the limit of life and death. we have, therefore, in the present book the greek glance into immortality. this is the essence of it, hence its prodigious hold upon human kind. that the conscious individual persists after the dissolution of the physical body is here strongly affirmed; indeed the world beyond is organized, and its connection with the world on this side is unfolded, in a series of striking pictures for the imagination. it is thus a grand chapter in the history of the soul's consciousness of its eternal portion, is in fact the middle link between the oriental and the christian view of immortality. ulysses, as the wise man, or rather as the intellectual hero of his age, must go through the experience in question; he cannot return to home and country, and be fully reconciled with his institutional life here and now, without having seen what is eternal and abiding in the soul. the wanderer must wander thither, the absolute necessity lies upon him--and he must fetch back word about what he saw, and thus be a mediator between the sensible and supersensible, between time and eternity. in that way he means something to his people, becomes, in fact, their great man, helping them vicariously in this life to rise beyond life. the complete return, then, involves the descending to hades, the beholding the shapes there, and the coming back with the report to the living. perhaps we ought to consider just this to be the culmination of the whole journey, the grand adventure embracing all possible adventures. the connection with the preceding book can not be too strongly enforced. circe points out the way to ulysses; her nature is to point to the beyond, to which she cannot herself pass. in her last phase, she was spirit, but still in the sensuous form; that spirit in her, as in all true art and even in the world, points to its pure realm, where it is freed from the trammels of the senses. this gives the main characteristic of homeric hades; it is the supersensible world, outside of space and time; or, rather with its own space and time, since it is still an image. hence these mythical statements which seek to get beyond all known geographical limits. ulysses had to cross the ocean stream, which ran round the whole earth; to go over it was indeed to go over the border. there below is the gloomy grove of proserpine; there too, are the four rivers of the lower regions, with names terribly suggestive; into acheron the stream of pain (or lake) flow pyriphlegethon (fire-flames) and cocytus (the howler), the latter being an offshoot of styx (hate or terror). where "the two loud-sounding rivers meet" the third one (acheron) is a rock, a firm protected spot seemingly, there with mystic rites is the invocation of the dead to take place. thus we see that the poet's description remains spatial in his attempt to get beyond space. he has to express himself in images taken from the sensible world, even while pushing them beyond into the supersensible. he makes us feel that the image is inadequate, though he has to use it; poetry is driven upon its very limit. at this point specially we note the kinship of the odyssey with romantic art, which through the finite form suggests the infinite. dante comes to mind, whose great poem is one vast struggle of the limited symbol with the unlimited spirit which is symbolized. thus the old greek song becomes prophetic, foreshadowing the next great world-poem, or literary bible, written in the light of a new epoch. strong is the sympathy which one feels with the ancient singer in this attempt to probe the deepest mystery of our existence. he must have reflected long and profoundly upon such a theme, building in this book a world of spirits, and laying down the lines of it for all futurity. probably the most gigantic conception in literature: the universal hero, ere he can round the complete cycle of experience, must pass through the beyond and come back to the present. it deepens the idea of the return, till it embraces the totality of existence, by making it reach through the underworld, which is thus a domain in the spiritual circumnavigation of the globe. the structure of the book is somewhat intricate and it requires quite a little search to find the lines upon which it is built. it has at the first glance a rather scattered, disorganized look; for this reason the analytic critics have fallen upon it in particular, and have sought to tear it into fragments. it is possible that some few lines may have been interpolated, but it remains an organic whole, and the final insight into it comes from viewing it in its total constructive movement. as the book is an effort to make a bridge between the sensible and supersensible realms, manifestly this separation into two realms will constitute the fundamental division. the diremption into soul and body, into life and death, runs through the entire narrative, also that into men and women; but the main distinction is into past and present. the sensible world when canceled becomes past, the distant in time and possibly in space; this past through its characters, its spirits, is made to communicate with the present. moreover the past has its distinctions. to the greek mind of homer's age, specially in phæacia, the trojan war is the grand central fact of the aforetime; thus the past divides into the pre-trojan, trojan, and immediate past, in the book before us. a complete sweep down into the now is given--the sweep of the supersensible. also the present has two representatives: ulysses along with his companions, and the phæacians. in the past, therefore, is arranged a long gallery of souls speaking to the present, which listens and also has its communication. the problem now is to get a structural form which will hold the idea. let the following scheme be sent in advance, which scheme, however, can only be verified or understood at the close of the book on a careful review. i. the first great communication of the dead and past to the living and present, by voice and by vision; some speak, others are only seen. 1. the present and living element is made up of ulysses and his companions who are invoking by their rites and prayers the souls of the underworld. the companion elpenor dead, but not yet buried, forms the transition between the present and past. 2. the past and dead element, pre-trojan, is called up in two general forms: the ancient seer tiresias who is both past and future through his mind, and, secondly, the souls of famous women, who pass in review before the present. the hint of a world-justice runs through both the prophecies of the seer and the destinies of some of these women. ii. the second grand communication of the dead and past, now trojan--to the living and present, now phæacian prominently, given by voice and vision. 1. the present is here not only ulysses far off in hades, but the phæacians in their actual sensible world. the latter demand again the grand background and presupposition of their present life--the trojan epoch represented in its great spirits. 2. the past, trojan, in three typical greek heroes, agamemnon, achilles, ajax. the three typical greek women of the trojan epoch are also mentioned. an implicit idea of punishment, or of heroic limitation brought home to the hero, is traceable in this portion. iii. the idea of a world-justice with its universal judgment, hitherto only implied, now becomes explicit in hades and organizes itself, showing (1) the judge, minos, (2) the culprits in four condemned ones, (3) the saved one, hercules, who rises out of hades through the deed. by implication so does the living ulysses--hence the journey is at an end, hades is conquered. i. ulysses follows the direction of circe, indeed he is propelled by the wind which she sends, to the "confines of the ocean stream," to the limits of this terrestrial upperworld. here is the land of the cimmerians, "hid in fog and in cloud," which veils the realm of the dead; here the sun sends no beam, either rising or setting. again it is possible that the poet may have heard some dim account of the regions of the extreme north. but the significance of the cimmerians is to shadow forth the dark border-land between life and death, which is here that between the limited and the unlimited. we see the strong attempt of the poet to get beyond limitation in its twofold appearance: first he will transcend the external boundary of the homeric horizon, that of the sea stretching far to the westward; still more emphatic is his effort to transcend the limits of finite thinking and to reach an infinite realm, which is the goal of the spirit. he sweeps out of sensuous space, yet the poetic imagination has to remain in space after all, though it be a new space of its own creation. in like manner, he has to give the disembodied souls some finite nourishment in the shape of food and blood, in order that they become real. we feel in these dark cimmerian limits his wrestle to pass over to the supersensible by thought. i. the present is represented by ulysses and his companions, who now perform the rites consisting of a sacrifice and prayer to "the nations of the dead." we may find in the libation of "mingled honey, sweet wine, and water," a suggestion of the tissues and fluids of the body, while the blood of the sacrificed animals hints the principle of vitality. when the disembodied spirit tastes these elements, it gets a kind of body again, sufficient at least to be able to speak. that the sheep must be black is curiously symbolical, hinting the harmony expressed in the color of the animal and of hades. the souls "came thronging out of erebus," eager to communicate. this aspiration must thus be their general condition; they wish to hear from us as much as we wish to hear from them. hence there must be a selection, which involves a new rite, the flaying and the burning of the carcasses of the animals along with "prayer to pluto and proserpine" king and queen of the underworld. yet this choice requires activity from the hero, who has to draw his sword and keep off the crowd of spirits, till the right one comes, the theban seer tiresias. thus is the past linked into the present, which to receive the communications of the departed by means of a ritual, in whose symbolism we see the effort of the living to know the beyond. now occurs a curious incident: ulysses beholds his companion elpenor, dead, yet unburned, and hears his first message. this soul can still speak, and be seen; it hovers half way between the two worlds, having still a material phase of the body which has not yet been burnt. elpenor tells the nature of his death: "some deity and too much wine" did the thing--a combination which is usually effective in homer. an unhappy condition, suspended between matter and spirit; he begs that it be ended. but the poor fellow has another request which shows the longing of the humblest greek--the longing for the immortality of fame. "make a tomb beside the seashore for me, an unfortunate man, of whom posterity may hear." thus he too will live in the mouths of men; wherein we catch possibly a gleam of homer himself, who has certainly erected an imperishable monument to elpenor, voicing the aspiration of the soul even in hades. it is the hint of a deep maternal instinct that anticleia, "my mother deceased" comes at once to the blood and wishes communication. but ulysses must first hear tiresias, the strongest ties of family are subordinate to the great purpose. surely all are now ready to listen to the past with its message; here comes its spirit, voiced with a fresh power. ii. we have just had the present, and in the case of elpenor, the immediate past, which is not yet wholly gone. next we take a leap to the past of long ago, to the pre-trojan time, whose spirits will appear. two sets of them, divided according to sex into man and woman, we behold. but the man here is the prophet, hence what he says belongs to the future, into which ulysses now gets a glimpse. thus both future and past are given their place in the supersensible realm, both being abstractions from the present, which is the reality, the world of the senses. yet that which is abiding and eternal knows not past, present, or future, or knows them all equally, having that which is common to them all, being indeed the principle of them all. in a sense we may say that tiresias is past, present and future, he is the voice of the past speaking in the present foretelling the future. then the famous women come forth, whose fame causes them to appear now and to be recorded. thus the poet takes the two ancient sets and suggests that which underlies them both and makes them ever present. 1. tiresias, though he spans the three dimensions of time, is essentially the prophet, and so his stress is upon the future. his body has been long dead, but his mind is left in its untrammeled activity; he may be considered as the purest essence of spirit. no senses obstruct his vision, he sees the eternal and unchangeable law; yet he must throw it into images and apply it to special cases. what a conception for a primitive poet! we feel in this figure of tiresias that homer himself is prophetic, foreshadowing the pure ideas or archetypal forms of plato, and that he, in his struggle for adequate expression of thought, is calling for, and in fact calling forth, greek philosophy. tiresias speaks at first without drinking of the blood, yet he has to drink of it to tell his prophecy. this little contradiction is not vital, let it not trouble us. the prophetic announcement to ulysses includes four special cases. first, the hero must have his struggle with neptune on his way homeward, the god will avenge the blinding of his son, though that blinding had to take place; every man who overcomes a great power, even a natural power, will get the backstroke of his own deed. the very ship of ulysses, which defies neptune, exposes itself to a conflict which it might avoid, did it not undertake to master the god's element; such is the penalty of all victory. secondly, he must keep down appetite, particularly at the trinacrian isle, and not slay the oxen of the sun, else the penalty will follow there too. not to keep down passion and appetite is clearly to eat of those oxen in some way, which will be more carefully scrutinized hereafter. then, thirdly, "thou shalt avenge the violent deeds of the suitors, when thou hast returned home." the common ground in these three cases of prophetic insight is retribution for the act done there above on earth. the penalty is as certain in the future as it has been in the past; violation brings punishment. ulysses has had that experience often; note it is told him, or, if you wish to think the matter in that way, he tells it to himself for his own future experience. so the prophet sees the universal law, he knows what abides in all the fleeting appearances of the world. ulysses also, were he to descend into the depths of his own soul, would find the same prophecy; indeed this descent into hades is also the descent into himself, as well as into the outer supersensible world. the hero in his intellectual journey has gone far, we can now behold him near the eternal verities. but the fourth statement of the prophet is here too, it is the word of promise. when this last conflict with the suitors is over, then be reconciled with neptune by a fitting sacrifice (which means that ulysses should quit the watery element) give hecatombs to the immortals, recognize them and their rule. then serene old age will take thee off remote from the sea and all struggle, among a happy people, whom thou hast made happy. such is the promise, extending quite beyond the limits of the odyssey, which ends not at the death of ulysses, but with his last conflict. so there is hope amid all this struggle, hope of becoming the complete man, who has reached harmony with the gods, with his people, and with himself. in such fashion tiresias calls into vision the course of the entire poem, and reaches even beyond it, embracing the whole life of ulysses, till he too descends for the last time into hades. verily the prophet is past, present and future; his true abode is in the realm of pure spirit. he foretells, but the future is prefigured as the outcome of what is universal; it must be so and not otherwise, else is the world a chaos. thus tiresias is put at the beginning, he being the typical person of this underworld, in which the deities, pluto and proserpine, do not appear, being held in the dark background. the prophet telling his prophecy is the very figure of the supersensible. but again let us be reminded that these hints of pure universal thought are borne to us in images, in particular shapes, whereby ambiguity rises, and meaning runs double. nevertheless the true-hearted reader will go down with the old poet into hades, and there behold in these images things which lie beyond the senses; he will behold the very spirit of ancient tiresias. 2. having seen the man, ulysses is next to behold the famous women of the past, which is still pre-trojan with one exception. examples from all the relations of the woman in the family are given: the mother, the maiden, the wife. tragic and happy instances are brought before us--ideal forms taken from the ancient mythus of hellas, and begetting in later times a prodigious number of works of art, in poetry, sculpture and painting. here they are put into hades, the place of the spirit unbodied, which will hereafter take on body in the drama, in the statue, and in the picture. ulysses witnesses these shapes in advance, and gives their idea, which is to be realized in the coming ages of hellas. truly is homer the primordial hellenic seer, he who sees and sets forth the archetypal forms of the future of his race. undoubtedly he drew from mythical stores already existent, but he ordered them, shaped them anew, and breathed into them the breath of eternal life. no wonder the universal greek hero must go to hades to see these forms of the past which are, however, to live afresh in the future. we must also consider the audience of the singer. who are present? first of all, arete, mother and wife, together with nausicaa, the maiden, to these he is specially singing. their importance in the phæacian world has been already indicated; naturally they wish to hear of woman in the family. accordingly this portion of the eleventh book, the catalogue of famous women, or homer's "legende of good women," is organized after the relations of domestic life. three classes are suggested: the mothers; the maidens and the wives, of the grey aforetime. but by all means the glory and the stress of the song are given to the mothers; the other two classes are very briefly dismissed, as being essentially described in the first. arete is indeed the grand center and end of womanhood; nausicaa as maid is but a transitory phase, and as wife she is to become mother, and then take her supreme place in the chain which upholds and perpetuates humanity. so the old greek poet must have thought; was he very far from right? _a._ the first of these mothers to appear is anticleia, the mother of the hero ulysses, of the hero who has made this remarkable voyage to the world beyond, of its kind the supreme heroic act done by a living mortal. she, however, belongs to the immediate past, and thus corresponds to the man, elpenor, in the previous section, though she of course has been buried. note, therefore, this mark of symmetrical structure. it is the beautiful instinct of the mother, that she flits in the ghost-world to her son at once, when the chance is afforded. she has already appeared, even before tiresias came; now she is the first after that prophet, who gives directions to ulysses supplicating: "tell me, o prophet, how shall my mother recognize me as her son." ulysses learns much from her about ithaca, especially about his father laertes, who now never goes to the town but stays in the fields, "with a great sorrow in his heart, desiring thy return, while old age weighs hard upon him." such is the father, still living, whom ulysses may yet see. the mother died from longing for her son and "the memory of his gentleness;" still her longing brings her to him in the life beyond. the great revelation is concerning the future state: the soul is immortal, this fact ulysses is to tell in phæacia. the strong desire to behold the loved ones who have passed away is indeed the impulse; but they too return, though insubstantial. it is the primary groundwork of faith in immortality--this feeling of the domestic relation affirming that it is eternal and cannot be broken by death. still the mother is but a ghost and cannot be embraced; this the son has to accept, though he would have her in flesh and blood. _b._ at once there is the transition to the famous mothers of legend--"wives and daughters of heroes" says the poet, with, an eye to his audience, which has men in it also, so he does not mention mothers, though they are the burden of his strain. here follows a catalogue of women, giving them their due place in the genealogy and destiny of distinguished houses. three groups of these mothers we may distinguish. first is the group of mortal women who were embraced by some god, and gave birth to heroic offspring. tyro met neptune and brought forth pelias and neleus; from the latter sprang nestor who connects the pre-trojan and trojan ages, since he appears both in the iliad and odyssey. in the third book of the latter epos we have already seen nestor sacrificing to his divine ancestor; so the present passage has its pertinence to the total poem. in the same group are antiope and alemena, the latter of whom was the mother of hercules, whose father was zeus. at the end of the present book, hercules himself will appear as the supreme example of the greek hero. such were three typical mothers, famed in hellenic legend, being the women who bore heroes, the offspring of gods. it was deemed the highest function of the greek mother to bring forth a hero, the child of divinity, with an immortal portion. this view, in its purely sensuous aspect, is dubious enough to the modern ethical mind, still its real meaning must be looked at with sympathetic vision, which sees therein the divine descent into mortal flesh, a mythical utterance of the faith that the great man is the son of god. the christian view universalizes this conception, holding that all men, and not merely the heroes, are god's children. yet the christian world has also retained its faith in the son of god, son by a mortal woman, which faith the old greek had too, and expressed in his way. thus we may extract out of this homeric account something more than divine license; it has indeed a wonderful pre-christian suggestiveness, and gives a glimpse of the movement of universal religion. the second group of famous mothers are mortal women with mortal husbands. the wedded wife brings up now the domestic relation, which is passingly introduced by the spouse of hercules, megara, who is simply mentioned. the two chief women of the group are epicaste and chloris, the one supremely tragic in her motherhood, the other reasonably happy. epicaste is mother of oedipus, who marries her after slaying his own father who is her husband, both deeds being done in ignorance; thus the closest domestic ties are whelmed into guilt and tragedy, whereof sophocles has made a world-famous use, in his two dramas on the subject of oedipus. chloris is, on the contrary, the mother of nestor, not a tragic character by any means; also she is mother of pero, the beautiful maiden, "whom all the people around were wooing," and who was happily won by an heroic deed. mark the interest of those listeners, arete and nausicaa, mother and daughter in this tale. thus the two women, epicaste and chloris, have opposite destinies, and show the sharp contrasts of life. in the third group are two mothers who have a double honor; each has borne twins and heroic ones at that; moreover the gods again enter the domestic relation of mortals. leda's sons are "castor the horseman, and pollux the boxer," the first being mortal, the second immortal, and reputed son of zeus, who permitted the immortal brother to share his immortality with his mortal brother; hence "every other day they both are alive, and every other day they both are dead." again the divine gives itself to the human in the spirit of true brotherhood; the son of zeus takes on the ills of mortality through fraternal love. the second mother of this group is iphidameia, who declares neptune to be the father of otus and ephialtes, of her monstrous twins, "who at the age of nine years threatened war upon the gods," and proposed to storm heaven by piling mount ossa upon olympus and pelion on top of that. such is the contrast: one set of sons is noble, worthy, and "receive honor like unto gods;" the other set is defiant, assailing the divine order, and are slain by the arrows of apollo "ere the down blossomed beneath their temples, and covered their chins with tender furze." _c._ such, then, is the account of the mothers, the women who have borne children famous in legend. they have taken up nearly the whole of the present catalogue; the wives and maidens now come in for brief mention, forming two groups, three persons to the group. the poet is impartial, he introduces the faithful woman, ariadne, and the faithless woman, eriphyle; in the one case man is the betrayer of woman, and in the other case woman is the betrayer of man. possibly in ariadne may be a little hint for nausicaa, saying, beware. but the singer is tired and sleepy; moreover has he not told the essence of the matter in this portion of his song? he at once dismisses any further account of famous women, "wives and daughters of heroes," whom he saw in hades. nausicaa and arete have had their share, wonderful has been their interest in the struggles and sufferings of their sex; they feel in themselves the possibility of such conflicts. these ideal shapes of the olden time, product of the myth-making imagination, are types, are the ghosts of hades which ulysses must see and know, ere he return to the upperworld. ii. we now reach the second main division of the book, which is marked by the introduction of the audience, the phæacians, "who were held rapt with the charm" of the story. observe, too, that the palace was not brilliantly illuminated, but shadowy--fit environment for fairy tales (line 334). this main division is again separated into two subordinate divisions which embrace the present and the past, and thus is in structure homologous with the preceding main division. yet both the present and the past are not now the same as the previous present and past. i. first of the hearers speaks out the mother, wife of alcinous, arete, in response to the compliment of ulysses in singing of the famous women of greek legend. "phæacians, how does this man seem to you now in form, stature, and mind?" very different does he seem from what he once did; thus she gently apologizes for her previous treatment. she appreciates the hero; moreover, she asks that the high guest receive hospitable gifts without stint; "for much wealth lies in your halls by the bounty of the gods." having thus heard from the woman, we now are to hear from the man, the representative phæacian, king alcinous. in the first portion of the book ulysses and his companions were the present to which the past appeared in hades. now the phæacians are introduced as the present, which is to hear the voice of the past from hades. moreover, the past is not the pre-trojan, but the trojan past, which we have already (in the eighth book) seen to be dear to the phæacian heart. it is no wonder, then, that alcinous, as soon as he can urge his request, calls for a song about the greco-trojan heroes in the underworld. "tell us if thou didst see any of those godlike argives who followed thee to troy and there met their fate." not the mother of the hero, but the hero himself is now to be called up; the man wishes to listen to the deeds of man. demodocus, the phæacian bard, always sung of some phase of the trojan struggle, which was the popular subject of story and song in phæacia. thus we note again how the famous past, stored away in hades, is made to flow into the present, and to contribute an ideal of heroism, and a warning also, to the living. a touch of homer as literary critic we should not pass by, as he does not often take that part. alcinous, praising the tale of ulysses, says: "form of words is thine, and a noble meaning, and a mythus, as when a minstrel sings." three important qualities of poetry are therein set forth: beauty of language, nobleness of content, and the fable in its totality--all of which belong to the preceding narrative. moreover, alcinous draws a sharp contrast with that other sort of storytellers, mere liars, "of whom the dark earth feeds many," who go about "fabricating lies, out of which we, looking into them, can get nothing," can draw no meaning. such at least is our view of this passage (line 366) about which there is a difference of opinion among commentators. at any rate we catch a glimpse of homeric literary criticism in homer, who states the requirements of good poetry, and contrasts them with the "liar" or fabricator of yarns, which are certainly devoid of the noble spirit or worthy content. so ulysses is asked to begin his trojan story, always more interesting than that catalogue of women, at which everybody began to yawn. "it is not yet time to go to sleep," cries alcinous, "the night here is unspeakably long," and still further, "i would hold out till daylight," listening to thy story. ii. the trojan past, then, is the theme; we are to behold the ghosts of those who were famous during the war at troy, and immediately afterwards, both men and women. but the women are not here given a special portion to themselves, but are woven into the general narrative. this part of the book is sung for the men, the opposite sex is withdrawn into the background; still they will be duly mentioned, since the whole conflict is over a woman. moreover alcinous wishes to hear what the heroic men are doing in the future world, whither too he must go. 1. three greek shades will pass before us, agamemnon the leader, achilles the hero, and ajax the man of strength. we shall find them placed in a certain contrast with ulysses, who is shown greater than any of the three. all have been overwhelmed by fate through their own folly or weakness, while ulysses still lives, the master of fate, and beholds them in hades. such is his triumph, which the shades themselves declare. first comes the soul of agamemnon, the great king, who has the bond of authority in common with king alcinous. he tells the story of his own murder in considerable detail, which story has been given twice already in the poem. a most impressive event to the greek mind of homer's age; the greatest of the rulers is wretchedly cut off from his return by his wife clytæmnestra and her paramour ægisthus. this return is what points the contrast between him and ulysses; moreover the contrast is also drawn between the wives of the two men, one the faithless and the other the faithful woman. still the wrong of agamemnon is suggested by himself: "i heard the piteous voice of cassandra, whom clytæmnestra slew, crying for me; i, though dying, grasped for my sword," to no purpose, however. surely the wife had her wrongs as well as the husband, out of which double guilt æschylus will construct his mighty tragedy. next after the leader, in due order comes the hero of the greeks before troy, achilles. he recognizes this descent to hades as the greatest deed of ulysses: "what greater deed, rash man, wilt thou plan next?" it is verily the most wonderful part of his return, overtopping anything that achilles did. still ulysses pays him the meed of heroship: "we argives honored thee as a god, while living, and now thou art powerful among the dead; therefore do not sorrow at thy death, o achilles." but he answers that he would rather be the humblest day laborer to a poor man than to be king of the shades. it is not his world, he longs for the realm of heroic action, here he has no vocation. no troy to be taken, no hector to be vanquished down in hades; the heroic man must sigh for the upper world with its activity. some consolation he gets from the account which ulysses gives of his son, who was in the wooden horse and distinguished himself at troy for bravery. thus the father lives in his son and "strides off delighted through the meadow of asphodel." this plant is usually regarded as the _asphodelus ramosus_, a kind of lily with an edible tuberous root, still planted, it is said, on graves, to furnish to the dead some food which grows in the earth. this ancient custom has been supposed to be the source of the legend of its being transplanted to hades. the third heroic shade is that of ajax, son of telamon, with whom ulysses had a rivalry, the story of which runs as follows: after the death of achilles, thetis his mother offered his arms, the work of vulcan, to the worthiest of the remaining greek heroes. the contest lay between ajax and ulysses. agamemnon would not decide, but referred the question to the trojan prisoners present, asking them which of the two contestants had done them the most injury. they said ulysses. whereupon ajax went crazy and slew himself. now he appears in hades, still unreconciled; it is really the most wretched lot of all. ulysses here speaks the reconciling word, growing tender and imploring; but the hero "answered not, darting away with the other shades into erebos." wherein we may well see how much greater in spirit ulysses was than his big muscular rival. he has reached in this respect the true outcome of life's discipline: to have no revenges, and to speak the word of reconciliation. in fact the superiority of ulysses over all these heroes is clearly manifested. he brings no captive woman home to his domestic hearth, and hence he has a right to count upon penelope's fidelity, though certainly he shows himself no saint in his wanderings. moreover agamemnon lacked foresight in his return, which ulysses will exhibit in a supreme degree when he first touches his native soil. the second hero, achilles, could not conquer troy, then he could not conquer hades; yet both are conquered by ulysses who is thus the greater. finally unreconciled ajax--all are limited, incomplete, in contrast with the complete, limit-removing hero, who has just removed even the limit of death in the only way possible. verily to him they have become shadows, that whole heroic world before troy is now put by him into hades. thus we see that, while the characters belong to the trojan time, there is a movement out of that period, it is transcended. the background here is the iliad, yet the incidents are taken from the trojan war after the action of the iliad is brought to a close. the fates of the three great heroes of that poem are not given in the poem; here they are given with a tragic emphasis. thus the odyssey carries forward the iliad, supplements it, and forms its real conclusion, both being in fact one poem. in the full blaze of the glory of achilles the iliad ends; but he cannot take troy; and still less, after his death, can ajax; the divine armor must go to ulysses who has brain, then can the city be taken. even the son of achilles will fight under ulysses and enter the trojan horse, the work of pallas, of intelligence. thus we catch here as in other places, glimpses of the unity of both the iliad and the odyssey, the great work reflecting the one national consciousness of hellas in its complete cycle. 2. we should not fail to cast a separate glance at the three typical women of the trojan epoch--helen, clytemnestra, penelope--in contrast with the three heroes already described. they are all mentioned and compared in the speech of agamemnon, but do not form an organic part of the book by themselves, as do the pre-trojan women. they are wives, and wifehood not motherhood, as in the previous case, is the phase of the domestic relation which is the theme of song and struggle in their lives. possible its present importance is the reason why wifehood was dismissed with so brief mention in the portion concerning the famous mothers. note, then, the gradation of the three: clytemnestra is the fallen unrestored; helen is the fallen restored; penelope is the unfallen, who keeps a home for her absent husband during twenty years. the tragic, the mediated, the pure; or, to take a later analogy, the infernal, the purgatorial, the paradisaical; such are the three typical female characters of homer, ranging from guilt, through repentance, to innocence. in this framework lies quite all possible characterization. naturally agamemnon shows a bitter vein of misogyny, with only his wife in view; but he takes it all back when he thinks of penelope. two of these women, helen and penelope, are still alive and do not belong to the realm of hades; the ghost of the third, clytemnestra, does not appear. still all three are mentioned here in the text, and stand in relation to the three greco-trojan heroes, none of whom were restored through the return. ulysses, however, is the real solution of them all; he spans all their inadequacies, masters their fates, and reaches home. the three greek heroes above mentioned fell by the way in the course of the grand problem, and are seen in hades, complaining, unhappy, showing their full limitation. to a degree they are suffering the penalty of their own shortcomings: which fact prepares us for the third and last phase of the underworld. iii. we now come to a new division of the book, which forms in itself a complete little poem, yet is derived directly from the preceding divisions, and is harmonious with them in thought, development and structure. undoubtedly there is a difference here, but the difference means not absolute separation but a connected unfolding of parts. the present division has been assailed more violently by the critics and torn out of its place with greater unanimity than any other portion of the odyssey, with the possible exception of portions of the last two books. let us confess, however, that our tendency is to reconcile, if this can be done, the discords and to knit together the rent garment, by threads not always on the surface, but very real to any eye which is willing to look underneath. unquestionably a punitive element enters now, there is guilt and punishment in hades. but who has not felt that in the preceding division the three greek heroes were under the inevitable penalty of their own deeds? very natural is the transition. indeed the three divisions of the book show a gradual movement toward a penal view of hades: the first (tiresias and the famous mothers) has a slight suggestion of the penalty; the second (the three greek heroes) has the idea of punishment implicit everywhere; the third makes the idea explicit and organizes itself upon the same. again, there is a change of style, which now is strongly tinged with the orphic, initiatory, symbolical manner, in marked contrast with the clear-flowing narrative which has just preceded. but we noticed the same characteristic before, in the first division of the book, where the sacrificial rites and the part of tiresias were given. homer has many styles, not each style has many homers, nor is there a new homer needed for each change of style. note the great varieties of style in the two parts of faust by way of illustration. moreover we here pass into the dim pre-trojan epoch, as was the case in the first division, but guilt is now flung into that time and with it the penalty. hoary, gigantic shapes of eld do wrong to the gods, and are put into the punitory hades. thus this third division returns to the first with its own new principle. in truth one may say that homer herein shows features akin to hesiod; well, homer is hesiod and many more. we hold, therefore, that this third division is an organic part of the book both in idea and structure; it carries to completion the thought of a world-justice, which tiresias has already declared in his speech to ulysses, and which is exemplified in the three greek heroes. thus it unfolds what lies in the first two divisions, and links them together in a new and deeper thought. for this realm of hades, hitherto a distracted spot without any apparent order, now gets organized with its own justiciary and its own law. yet here too we shall find a solution and a parallel; just as ulysses was the true hero at troy, standing above all the others and solving their problems, so hercules is the great pre-trojan hero, saving himself at last and rising to olympus. finally the two careers of ulysses and hercules are affirmed to be identical. this division, therefore, falls of itself into three portions: (1) the judge, (2) the condemned, (3) the redeemed. thus the whole forms a complete little cycle within itself. 1. minos, the judge, was the ancient king of crete, where he was lawgiver and suppressed wrong-doing on sea and land. here he continues his vocation, which demands the assigning of the just penalty to the guilty. he is manifestly the type of justice, both punishing and rewarding; as punisher he has been transferred by dante to the inferno. later greek legend united with him two other judges, his brothers, rhadamanthys and æacus. 2. we have next four instances of punishment, though this is apparently of different degrees. the wrong, however, is not stated except in the case of tityos, which probably hints the general nature of the misdeeds of the three others. the poet takes for granted that his hearer could fill out each legend for himself. in every case there was evidently some violation done to the gods, not to men--some crime against olympus. the period is thrown back into the pre-trojan time, into the age of the demigods and of the free intercourse between mortals and immortals; thus it is parallel with the first division of the book. but now judgment has entered the houses of hades along with the penalty. the guilt of orion is that of love between a mortal and a goddess, aurora, which violation was punished by the "soft bolts" of artemis, protectress of chastity. this legend has already been alluded to by calypso. (book v. line 121.) jealous are the gods of that mortal man with whom a goddess falls in love, and with good reason. orion's punishment is an eternal chase, the hunter is compelled to hunt forever, repeating what he did in life. perhaps not a heavy punishment for one who is fond of hunting; yet a tremendous burden, if never interrupted with rest; indeed it becomes a labor quite like the labor of sisyphus, ever repeated. of tityos both the guilt and punishment are indicated; the legend is similar to and yet in contrast with that of orion; in the one the goddess approaches the mortal and in the other the mortal approaches the goddess; hence, too, the severer punishment in the latter case. the second legend ought to be completed here by a fact derived from the story of prometheus: the liver grows as fast as the vultures rend or consume it; thus again rises the idea of infinite repetition, now of suffering, not of action, for orion is active. the next two forms, tantalus and sisyphus, have also a kinship. both had known secrets of the gods and had betrayed them; tantalus is also reported to have taken away nectar and ambrosia from the olympian table after being a guest there; sisyphus revealed to the river-god asopus the secret that zeus had spirited away the latter's daughter, ægina. the penalty is that tantalus remains perpetually hungry and thirsty, with sight of food and drink always before his eyes; he cannot reach them when he strives. the finite, with an infinite longing, cannot compass the infinite; the man loses it just when he grasps for it--a truly greek penalty for a sin against the greek world, which rests upon the happy harmonious unity of the spirit with the body and with nature. the christian or romantic longing and grasping for the beyond is to the greek soul a punishment of hades. tantalus with his hunger and thirst seems to represent more the striving of the intellect to attain the unattainable; while sisyphus suggests the effort of the will--practical endeavor, the eternal routine of mechanical employment, which always has to begin over again. etymology brings also a suggestion. both names are reduplicated; in tantalus is the root of the word which means to suffer; in sisyphus, lurks the signification of craft; it hints the wise or crafty planner (_sophos_) who always pushes the act to a point where it undoes itself or must be done over again. note the effect of this reduplication of the first syllables, which means repetition; over and over again, in an infinite series must the matter be gone through, in suffering and in doing; the very words are in labor. indeed this indicates the common element in these four punishments: the endless repetition of the struggle of finitude. the first two, orion and tityos, reached out for goddesses, being mortals; the second two, still mortals, but in communion with deities, attempted to bring down divine secrets to earth; the one set strove to make the finite infinite, the other to make the infinite finite. both were contrary to the nature of the greek mind, which sought to keep the happy balance between the two sides, between body and spirit, between the temporal and eternal. now the punishment of these people is to give them their infinite, but in the form of an infinite repetition of their finite act, which is just the spirit-crushing penalty. the power of these two types, tantalus and sisyphus, is shown by the fact that all ages since homer have adopted them and wrought them over into many forms of art and poetry. here then is the unsolved problem of the greek world, a problem which the christian world has met and answered. tantalus and sisyphus are in pain and toil simply through themselves; man, however, must have the power to reach the apples, and roll the stone up hill, he must assert himself as limit-transcending, as infinite, for once and for all, and not caught in an infinite series, which is a veritable mill of the gods, that is, of the greek gods. now this strange fact comes to light: homer, seer that he is, has a dim consciousness of this solution, and faintly but prophetically embodies it in a new figure, namely, that of hercules, which we shall now consider. 3. the homeric solution is to divide the man, or to double him, into his shade (eidolon) and his self. the former belongs to hades and appears now; it is the finite hercules with his striving and labors; he still has his bow and arrow, is ready to slay beasts, snakes, and birds. he is in quite the same punishment as orion or even sisyphus, the penalty of all finitude is upon him. yet the other side is given, that of victory. "i, though the son of the highest god, zeus, had to endure boundless tribulation." strangely christian does this sound. "i was put under service to a far inferior man to myself, who laid upon me bitter labors." the higher must serve and save the lower. "then the mightiest labor i performed, i came down hither to hades alive and dragged thence the dog cerberus"--conquered the great terror of the underworld. thus hercules has really transcended hades, and so we read here that "he himself is among the immortal gods, in bliss," that is, his infinite nature is there, while the finite part is still below in hades. such is the old poet's far-cast glance, reaching deep into the future and beyond the greek world. still another significant word is spoken. "o ulysses, unhappy man! thou dost experience the same hard fate which i endured upon the earth." thus does hercules identify the career of ulysses with his own--the same striving and suffering, and the same final victory, the peace of olympus. who cannot attain the latter is a tantalus, seeking but never reaching the fruit. such is the outcome and culmination of hades; after hercules has spoken, no further word is heard by ulysses. dante, whose poem on so many lines grows out of this eleventh book, has also the same duplication of the person in his paradise. the soul is in its special planet, venus, mars, etc., and also it is in the highest heaven, enjoying the vision of god. but dante universalizes the greek view, making it truly christian; all men are children of god and can attain the seats of the blessed, not merely the one man, the hero hercules. still even here the inference is that ulysses must also be transferred to olympus, though no such declaration is made. we hope the reader feels how inadequate hades would be, and how incomplete the experience of ulysses would be, if this last division of the book were cut out. the wanderer has now gone through the total cycle of the underworld, not only outwardly, but inwardly; he is just ready to step out of it, because he is beyond it in spirit. this last step is now to be given in homeric fashion. there is a danger at present rising strongly into consciousness, a danger inherent in this too-long contemplation of hades; it is the danger of the gorgon, the monster whose view turns the spectator into stone, taking away all sensation, emotion, life. the greek sooner or later must quit hades, and flee from its shapes; the supersensible world he must transfuse into the sensible, else the former will rush over into the fantastic, the horrible, the ugly. the gorgon is down in hades too, having been slain in the terrestrial upperworld by a greek hero, perseus, who slew the monster of the orient which once guarded the fair andromeda, a kind of pre-trojan helen, chained in captivity, whom the heroic hellenic soul came to release. ulysses has now reached the greek limit, oriental phantasms will rise unless there be a speedy return to the reality, to the realm of sense. hades has furnished its highest image in hercules, beware of its worst. already the underworld has been in danger of running into the fantastic; then beauty, the hellenic ideal, would be lost. the figures of homeric hades hitherto have all been men and women, but the monsters are ready to come forth. so they did come forth in the later greek world under the spur of oriental influence; witness the revelations of st. john in the island of patmos, joint product of greek and hebrew spirit, showing truly the dissolution of the hellenic ideal. thus ulysses, the supreme spiritual hero of the greeks, is shown running away from the underworld, fearing to look upon coming shapes in hades; about which fact two reflections can be made: first, ulysses had to do this in order to remain a greek; secondly, the poet clearly announces, in such an action, that there is another world lying beyond his world, that underneath the greek hades is another hades, which threatens to rise into view. that hades will burst up hereafter and become the christian hell. ulysses confesses that there is a realm beyond him there, which he has not conquered, has not even dared to see, and thus he significantly points to the future. the gorgon is a shadowy anticipation of fiends, of devils, of the infernal monsters of the romantic netherworld of dante, who is to be the next great hero, passing into the dark world beyond with a new light. to be sure, virgil sends æneas into orcus, and makes such descent a book of his poem, but virgil too speaks of a realm beyond his orcus, which his hero does not enter. thus the roman poet shows substantially the same limits as the greek poet, whom he has for the most part copied. here again we find a conception embodied in song, on which the human mind has moved through many ages. poetry, art, theology, have taken from this eleventh book of the odyssey many creative hints: it is truly an epoch-making work in the history of man's spiritual unfolding. as already stated, virgil repeats it, dante grows out of it and makes it over, in accord with the spirit of christendom, which has many a root running back to this homeric hades. the present book may be called the greek prophecy heralding medieval art, and shows old homer foreshadowing romanticism. did he not see the limits of his world? the particular connecting link between two literary bibles, homer and dante, is just the present book, even if dante never read homer. for the study of universal literature it is, therefore, a specially important document. a many-sided production also; its poetic, its religious, its artistic, its philosophical sides are all present in full activity and put to test the spiritual alertness of the reader. wherein does the negative nature of hades lie? the question rises from the fact that ulysses in fableland has been declared to be passing through various negative phases; such is the expression often used already. first of all, it is a negating of the sensible world and a going into the supersensible, a seeking of the spirit without the body. hades was quite the opposite of the greek mind, which demanded embodiment, and hence was inherently artistic. still the greek mind created a hades, and finally went over into the pure idea in plato and the philosophers. even homer seems to feel that philosophy is at last a needful discipline, that the abstract thought must be taken from its concrete wrappage, that the universal must be freed from the particular. ulysses has to pass through hades in order to complete the cycle of his experience, and realize what is beyond the senses; he must know the spirit apart from the body in this life; he must see the past as it is in its great disembodied minds; he must behold the famous heroes of troy as they are in reality, not as they are in the glamor of poetry. as tested by their life and deeds he sees them below in the netherworld; greek souls stark naked in hades he beholds, and then rises out of it. _retrospect._ very important, in our judgment, is this eleventh book; it is really one of the sacred documents of universal religion, as well as a great creative idea in the world's literature, but it has fared badly as to its friends; for interpretation it usually falls into the hands of the negative, merely critical understanding, which has the unfortunate habit of turning professor of greek, commentator on homer, and philologer generally. in order to grasp and connect its leading points more completely, we shall look back at the thought and structure of the book once more. first of all, there must be felt and seen the necessity of taking this journey to the netherworld on the part of the hero, the complete person of his time. the very conception of the universal man must include the visit to the realm of the idea; the passage from the sensible to the supersensible, is the deepest need of his soul. homer can give this spiritual movement only in a mythical form, hence it occurs here in fableland. so ulysses has to make the transition from circe to hades. having the entire book now before us, we observe that it shows a threefold movement; that is, one movement with three leading stages. these take the shape of three communications from the realm of the dead, which includes all past time, imparted to the living who are now present, namely the phæacians, through ulysses, who has had this cycle of experiences and now sings them. but that which is true in past time must be seen to be true in all time--past, present and future. so there unfolds the idea of a world-order, foretold at first by the pre-trojan prophet tiresias, illustrated by the fate of the three greco-trojan heroes in hades, and finally realized and active in the realm of minos. the whole has, therefore, the secret underlying thought of a world-tribunal, which works through all human history; it is a kind of last judgment to which the deeds of men are appealed for final adjudication; it most profoundly suggests in its movement the ethical order of the universe. let us briefly sum up its three stages. i. the first communication from the hades of the past to the real world of the present through ulysses is that of the prophet tiresias, "whose mind is whole;" he may be called the pure idea (as subjective) uttering the idea (as objective, as principle of the world). for he beholds the truth of things as they are in their essence, he himself being the impersonation of truth. thus he looks through the future and foretells; he knows that neptune will avenge the deed done to polyphemus, that the oxen of the sun constitute a great danger, that ulysses will punish the suitors; then he prophesies the peace and final harmony of ulysses after his long conflict and separation from home, country, and the divine order. so speaks tiresias and is therein a kind of world-judge, prefiguring minos of the last stage of hades. for he prophesies according to the law of the deed; what you have done is sure to return upon you, be it good or bad. hence he can tell what will happen to ulysses for acts already committed (the wrath of neptune); he can give a warning concerning things which ulysses may do (the slaying of the oxen of the sun); he can affirm the certain punishment of guilt (the case of the suitors). thus the prophet voices a world-justice, which inflicts the penalty unflinchingly, but also bears within itself reconciliation. such is the prophetic idea, appearing in advance, not yet ordered and realized. ii. the second communication from hades to the phæacians through ulysses comes from the trojan past, and is voiced by the three most famous heroes of the iliad--achilles, agamemnon, ajax (the last one, however, does not speak, but acts out his communication). all three are tragic characters, are the victims of fate, that is, of their own fatal limitations. such is the world-judgment here, it is really pronounced by themselves upon themselves in each case. agamemnon states his own guilt, achilles shows his limit by his complaint, ajax does not need to speak. ulysses simply listens and sees; now he tells the story of troy and its heroes anew to the present, indicating how they have put themselves into hades. the intimate connection between this part and the preceding part of tiresias is plain. the prophet has forecast the law which rules these heroes also; they are truly illustrations of his prophecy, or of its underlying principle. they expose the heroic insufficiency of that trojan time; they are the negative, tragic phases of greatness, which have also to submit at last to the law of compensation. thus is the illustrious trojan epoch judged and sent down below; but mark! ulysses, of that same epoch, survives, is present, and is singing the judgment. iii. the world-justice which ideally underlies the prophecies of tiresias in the first part of the present book, and which is the secret moving principle in the fates of the three greco-trojan heroes in the second part, becomes explicit, recognized and ordered in the third part, which is now to be given. there is first the world-judge, minos, famous for his justice during life, distributing both penalties and rewards in the netherworld. secondly we see the condemned ones, orion, tityus, tantalus, sisyphus (mark the significant reduplication of the root in the names of each one of them). all four are represented as having wronged the gods in some way; they have violated the divine order, according to the greek conception; hence the tribunal of world-justice, now organized and at work in hades, takes them in hand. to be sure, the text of homer does not say that they were sentenced by the decree of minos, but such is certainly the implication. these four had a common sin, to the greek mind: they sought to transcend the limit which the gods have placed upon finite man, hence the image of their penalty lies in the endless repetition of their acts, which is also suggested in their names. orion has always to pursue and slay the wild beast, never getting the work done; the liver of tityus grows and swells afresh (root from _tu_, meaning to swell, latin _tumor_) though being consumed by the vultures; in like manner tantalus and sisyphus have ever-repeated labors. such is the glimpse here of the greek hades of eternal punishment. now comes the curious fact that the heroic man through labor and suffering can rise out of this hades of finitude; he can satisfy the demand of world-justice, and rise to olympus among the blessed gods. such was hercules, and such is to be ulysses, who now having seen the culmination of hades and heard its prophecy of his future state, leaves it and returns to the upperworld. undoubtedly these thoughts of future punishment and reward are very dim and shadowy in homer; still they are here in this eleventh book of the odyssey, and find their true interpretation in that view of the life to come into which they unfolded with time. the best commentary on this book, we repeat, is the _divine comedy_ of dante, the grand poem of futurity, which carries out to fullness the order, of which we here catch a little glimpse. _book twelfth._ ulysses flees from the underworld, there is something down there which he feels he cannot master, something which he has not seen but of which he has a vague presentiment. the gorgon stands for much, dimly foreshadowing a hades beyond or below the greek hades, with which, however, it is not his call to grapple. hence the poet puts upon his hero a limitation at this point, strangely prophetic, and sends him in haste back to the terrestrial upperworld. the bark crossed the stream of the "river oceanus," then it entered "the wide-wayed sea" in which lay the island of circe, "where are the houses of the dawn, and her dances, and the risings of the sun." verily the hero has got back to the beginning of the world of light, in which he is now to have a new span of existence after his experience in the supersensible realm. from the brief geographical glances which we catch up from the voyage, as well as from a number of hints scattered throughout the odyssey (for instance, from what is said of the ethiopians in the first book), we are inclined to believe that homer held the earth to be round. we like to think of the old poet seeing this fact, not as a deduction of science, not even as a misty tradition from some other land, but as an immediate act of poetic insight, which beholds the law of the physical world rising out of the spiritual by the original creative fiat; the poet witnesses the necessity by which nature conforms to mind. homer knew the spiritual return, this whole odyssey is such a return, whereby the soul is rounded off to completeness, and becomes a true totality. why should he not apply the same law to nature, to the whole earth, and behold it, not indefinitely extended as it appears to the senses, but returning into itself, whereby the line becomes a circle and the plain a globe? some such need lay deep in his poetic soul, to which he had to harmonize the entire universe, visible as well as invisible. not science is this, but an immediate vision of the true, always prophetic, which observes the impress of spirit everywhere upon the realm of matter. the old greek sages seem to have known not merely of the rotundity of the earth, but also of its movement round the sun and upon its own axis, both movements being circular, returns, which image mind. did they get their knowledge from egypt or chaldea? questionable; if they looked inwardly deep enough, they could find it all there. indeed the sages of egypt and chaldea saw the fact in their souls ere they saw it or could see it in the skies. so these homeric glimpses into the realm of what is to become science are not to be neglected or despised, in spite of their mythical, ambiguous vesture. moreover they are in profound harmony with the present poem, to which they furnish remote, but very suggestive parallels, making the physical universe correspond to the spiritual unfolding of the hero. ulysses, accordingly, comes back to the sensible world and there he finds circe again. indeed whom else ought he to find? she is the bright greek realm of the senses reposing in sunlight; she has been subordinated to the rational, she is no longer the indulgence of appetite which turns men to swine, nor is she, on the other hand, the rigid ascetic. hence we need not be surprised at her bringing good things to eat and drink: "bread and many kinds of meat and sparkling red wine." moreover, she is still prophetic, she still has the outlook upon the beyond, being spirit in the senses. her present prophecies, however, will be different from her former one, she will point to the supersensible, not in hades, for that is now past, but in the upperworld of life and experience. such is the return of the hero to circe, the fair, the terrestrial, who makes existence beautiful if she be properly held in restraint; beautiful as sunlit hellas with its plastic forms she can become, in striking contrast to the dark shapes of the sunless underworld which leads to the gorgon, the realm of spooks, shades, fiends, in general of romanticism. so much for circe in her new relation in the present book; how about ulysses? it is manifest that he too is prepared for a fresh experience. he has been in the underworld and great has been the profit. there he has seen the famous men and women of old and beheld the very heart of their destiny; the trojan and the pre-trojan worthies sweeping backward through all greek time he has witnessed and in part heard; he has become acquainted with the prophet tiresias who knows past, present and future, who is the universal mind in its purity from all material dross; he has beheld the place of doom and its penalties, as well as the supreme greek hero, the universal man of action, hercules. nor must we forget that he has run upon a limitation, that gorgon from whom he fled. truly he has obtained in this journey to hades a grand experience of the past, of all greek ages, which is now added to his own personal experience. so this past, with its knowledge, is to be applied to the future, whereby knowledge becomes foreknowledge, and experience is to be transformed into prophecy. mark then the transition from the previous to the present book: when ulysses comes back to the world of sense, he will at once see in it the supersensible, which he has just behold; he must hear in the present a prophetic voice, that of circe proclaiming the future. thus ulysses is now ready to listen to the coming event and to understand its import. it is to be observed that up to the eleventh book he has had experience merely; he took everything as it came, by chance, without knowing of it beforehand; he simply happens upon the lotus-eaters, polyphemus, circe, though the careful reader has not failed to note an interior thread of connection between all these adventures. as to hades, it is pointed out to him in advance by circe, though all is not foretold him; but in the twelfth book, now to be considered, he has everything in detail laid open to him beforehand. a great change in manner of treatment; why? because ulysses must be shown as having reached the stage of foreknowledge through his journey to hades; hitherto he was the mere empirical man, or blind adventurer, surrendering himself to hazard and trusting to his cunning for getting out of trouble. but now he foresees, and circe is the voice thereof; he knows what he has to go through before he starts, here in the upperworld, to which he has come back, and through whose conflicts he is still to pass, for life has not yet ended. such, we think, is the fruit of that trip to the underworld, the supersensible is seen in the sensible, and the future becomes transparent. accordingly circe foretells, and ulysses foreknows; the two are counterparts. then he simply goes through what has been predicted, he fills up the outline with the deed. this is the essential fact of the book, which is organized by it into two portions, namely the prophecy and the fulfillment; circe has one part, ulysses the other. moreover each part exhibits the same general movement, which has three phases with the same names: the sirens, the plangctæ on the one hand with scylla and charybdis on the other, and the oxen of the sun. i. as soon as ulysses, after coming back from hades, had performed the last rites over the corpse of elpenor, circe appears and makes a striking address: "o ye audacious, who still living have gone down to the house of hades--ye twice-dead, while others die but once." such is one side of circe, now rises the other: "but come, eat food, drink wine the whole day;" let us have a greek festival ere new labors begin. then circe holds a private conference with ulysses, she asked each thing "about the journey to hades," which, it seems, she must know ere she can foretell the remaining part. one cannot help feeling in this passage that the poet hints that these prophecies of circe have some connection with what ulysses imparts to her concerning hades. indeed she repeats what tiresias had already foretold in reference to the oxen of the sun--a matter which she probably heard from ulysses. cannot the other two adventures be derived in a general way from the experiences of the underworld? the past seems here to furnish the groundwork for the predictions of the future, and circe, knowing what has been in the pure forms of the supersensible, becomes the voice of what is to be. 1. first come the sirens, whom ulysses will have to meet again, as he has often met them before. indeed circe herself was once a siren, a charmer through the senses. the present sirens are singers, and entice to destruction through the sense of hearing, inasmuch as "heaps of bones lie about them," evidently the skeletons of persons who have perished through their seductive song. pass them the man must; what is to be done? he will have somehow to guard against his sensuous nature and keep it from destroying itself. yet on the other hand he must enjoy, which is his right in this world of sensations; each good music must be heard. so circe tells of the scheme of putting wax into his companions' ears, while he is bound to the mast. already tiresias warned ulysses in the underworld to hold his appetite in check and that of his companions, if he wished to return home. this warning circe now repeats, indeed she repeats in a new mythical form her own experience, for she, the siren, has also been met by ulysses and mastered. yet these later charmers seem to have been more dangerous. when they are passed, a new peril rises of necessity. 2. next we behold an image, or rather two sets of images, of the grand dualism of existence. that escape from the sirens is really no solution of the problem, it is external and leaves the man still unfree, still subject to his senses. there must be somehow an inner control through the understanding, an intellectual subordination. but just here trouble springs up again. the mind has two sides to it, and is certain to fall into self-opposition. two are the ways after parting from the sirens, says circe: "i shall tell thee of both." one way is by the plangctæ (rocks which clasp together); here no bird can fly through without getting caught, even the doves of zeus pay the penalty. "no ship of men, having gone thither, has ever escaped"--except the god-directed argo: surely a sufficient warning. then the second way also leads to two rocks, but of a different kind; at their bases in the sea are found scylla, the monstrous sea-bitch, on one side, and charybdis, the yawning maelstrom, on the other; between them ulysses must pass with his ship and companions. it is manifest that here are two alternatives, one after the other; the first is that of the plangctæ, the claspers, which mean death, unless they be avoided, yet this avoidance does not always mean life. we can trace the connection with the sirens: the absolute resignation to the senses is license, is destruction; we may say the same thing of the opposite, the absolute suppression of man's sensuous being is simply his dissolution. hence the extremes appear; the moral and the immoral extremes land us in the same place; they are the two mighty rocks which may smite together and crush the poor mortal who happens to get in between the closing surfaces. if we understand the image, it holds true of excess on either side; excessive indulgence is overwhelmed by its opposite, so is excessive abstinence; they co-operate, like two valves, for the destruction of the one-sided extremist. truly greek is the thought, for the greek maxim above all others was moderation, no over-doing. such then are the plangctæ, which ulysses must avoid wholly, if he wishes to escape. still, even the danger is by no means over. there is the second way which introduces a new alternative; the path of moderation has its difficulty, it too forks and produces perplexity and peril to the voyager. here is the point where scylla and charybdis appear, a new set of extremes, between which the mean is to be sought, then the passage can be made. yet even thus it costs, ulysses will lose six of his companions; the penalty has to be paid, just the penalty of moderation. _es rächt sich alles auf erden._ two sets of extremes always; if you shun one set and take the middle path, just this act of shunning produces a second set; cut the magnet in twain with its two poles, then each part will at once have two poles of its own. such is indeed the very dialectic of life, the dualism of existence, which the heroic voyager is to overcome with suffering, with danger, with many penalties. fault has often been found with this duplication of the alternative, but when rightly seen into, it will show itself as the central fact of the entire description. it casts an image of the never-ceasing differentiation both in the mind and in the world; it hints the recurring contradiction in all thought and in all conduct, always to be solved, yet never quite solved. what else indeed has man to do? to master the contradiction gives him life, movement, energy, and it must be mastered every day. the old poet is going to the bottom of the matter. the above mentioned repetition of the alternative has its correspondence with the repetition which we have seen to be the fundamental form into which the whole book is cast. plainly the double alternative here mythically set forth, springs out of the conflict with the sirens, and is a deepening of the same to the very bottom. indulgence kills, abstinence kills, in their excess; and the middle path bifurcates into two new extremes with their problem. prophetic circe can tell all this, for does it not lie just in the domain of her experience, which has also been twofold? pure forms of spirit, wholly non-natural, are these figures representing the double alternative, created by the imagination to express thought. 3. the final warning of circe is mainly a repetition of what tiresias had told ulysses already in the underworld; from the latter she heard it and puts it here into its place. beware of slaying the cattle of the sun, oxen and sheep in two flocks, over which two bright nymphs keep guard. there can scarcely be a doubt concerning the physical basis of this myth. the seven herds of oxen, fifty to the herd, suggest the number of days in the lunar year (really 354); the seven herds of sheep suggest the corresponding nights. lampelia (the moon or lamp of night) is the keeper of the one; phæthusa (the radiant one) is the keeper of the other--namely the sun as the day-bringer. seldom has the old aryan form of the myth been so well preserved; the whole reads like a transcript out of the vedas. still stronger than the physical side is the spiritual suggestion. the slaughter of these cattle of the sun points to the supreme act of negation in the intellectual man, to the sin against light. ulysses and his companions now know the way to reach home, having had the grand experience with the sirens and then with the double alternative; moreover the leader has heard the warning twice. if they now do wrong, it will be a wrong against the sun, against intelligence itself. a certain critic finds fault with circe because she repeats the warning of tiresias, and he holds that some botcher or editor, not homer, transferred the passage from one place to the other. yet this repetition is not only an organic necessity of the poem, but gives an insight into the character of circe: she cannot foresee of herself the great intellectual transgression, but tiresias can; the sirens and the double alternative, however, lie within her own experience. so she copies where she cannot originate, and in this way she is decidedly distinguished from tiresias, though both are prophetic. such is the outlook upon the future given by circe, in the way of warning, whereby the warned know what is coming. in the three adventures we feel a certain connection, in fact an unfolding of one out of the other, beginning with the primary conflict of the senses, which soon rises into the understanding, and finally ends in a revolt against reason itself, the source of light. they have the character of typical forms, derived from the past, yet they are certain to recur again, and hence can be foretold. ii. we now have reached the second portion of the book, which is the fulfillment of the prophecies of the first portion; moreover we see how the forewarnings are heeded. ulysses and his companions enter their vessel and start once more upon the sea, leaving the island of circe, who sends them a favorable wind. we note also that ulysses always repeats the warning to his companions, and tells to what they are coming next; they are to share in his knowledge. three times he does this, just before each incident, and thus prepares them, though he does not tell everything. the experience with the bag of winds has taught him much; his companions through ignorance of its nature opened it and the fatality followed. so he received the penalty of not sharing his knowledge with his fellows; now he avoids that mistake, for his conduct at present shows that he regards his failure to impart his information as a mistake. he was the cause of the ignorance of his companions, which was brought home to him by their deed. now he tells them, still he will not be able to save them; the fault is theirs when they transgress, and they will receive the penalty. 1. in accord with the plan already foretold, the ship approaches the island of the sirens, ulysses fills the ears of his men with wax and enjoys the song, being tied firmly to the mast. it is evident that he cannot control himself from within, he wishes to be loosed, but is only fastened the more tightly by his deafened associates. foreseeing his own weakness he guards against it, yet brings out the more strongly his lack of self-mastery. he gives up his freedom in order not to perish through enjoyment. herein we find suggestive hints concerning the natural man; he must be governed from without, till he become self-governable. truly this is the first stage both in the individual and in history, and ulysses is the typical personality representing both. the song of the sirens is given, which we did not hear in the previous prophetic portion. we may note in it touches of flattery, of enticement, of boundless promises, even of wisdom for the wise man. then that favorite theme, the trojan war, they claim to know, "and all that has ever happened upon the foodful earth." such are the gorgeous promises to the man thirsty for knowledge; but mark in their meadow the bones and decaying bodies of dead men. evidently their sweet song, promising all, lures only to destroy. their power, however, lasts but for the moment, while the senses are tingled; when the fit is over, ulysses is set free and he makes no attempt to return to them. indeed another problem is upon him; he sees "a great wave and mist," to which is added a loud sound of rushing waters. again he exhorts his companions and tells them all that he dares about the approaching dangers. 2. now we are to witness a practical dealing with the double alternative, which was theoretically set forth in the previous portion. but the first alternative, those bi-valvular rocks called plangctæ, which clasped the sea-faring man between their valves and crushed him to death, is wholly avoided, is not even mentioned in the present passage, though it is possibly implied in one place. at any rate the grand stress is laid upon the second alternative, scylla and charybdis, between which the ship is to pass. here again ulysses shows his limitation. in spite of circe's warning, he puts on armor, takes two spears, and goes on deck, like a homeric hero, to fight scylla. he tries to solve his problem externally, as he did in the case of the sirens. in vain; he could not see his foe anywhere, and his eyes grew weary, peering about at the mist-like rocks. not thus was scylla to be met, a monster not of mortal mould, hardly attainable by the senses. still she was present somehow, and made herself valid. the whirling waters roared and seethed, all were intent upon the maelstrom, charybdis, the other side; "we looked at her, fearing destruction," and destruction came just from the direction in which they were not looking. scylla, watched, remains invisible; unwatched, she appears and snaps up six companions; external weapons can effect nothing against her. still ulysses gets through, scotched somewhat; he has failed to see both sides at one and the same time; mind, intelligence alone can rise out of the particular thing of the senses, and grasp the two things in opposition. as we read the story here, it suggests the man, the life-faring man, who is so drawn to one part that he neglects the counterpart, which has equal validity and soon makes itself felt by the penalty. not the alternative, then, scylla _or_ charybdis, but the combined scylla _and_ charybdis is the word of mastery. the two kept in separation destroy, the two held in unity are conquerable. under all difference of nature lies the thought's oneness, which is the true synthesis of every scylla and charybdis. such is the experience of ulysses now; the sirens, the creatures of the senses, may be thwarted by a species of external force; but not the present monsters can be so treated. the dualism exists doubtless, and we can be caught in it, but the function of mind is to overspan it, and so transform all difference, discord, diabolism into unity, harmony, deity. thus ulysses disobeys circe's command not to attempt to fight scylla with weapons; the reason of her injunction becomes plain. not a sensuous thing to be slain is scylla, in spite of her animal figure; the poet hints that she is to be encountered by mind, which must here see both sides at once and so assert its supremacy over both. to be intent upon the one and disregard the other--that is the grand human danger. hence the thought of scylla and charybdis has passed into the literature of the world, nay into the proverbs of the people, to express the peril of one-sidedness, as well as the inherent dualism in all conduct. moreover the golden mean is suggested, that principle of action so familiar in later greek philosophy. deeper than this golden mean, however, runs the idea here; the dialectic of existence, the twofoldness which must be made one, the higher synthesis over all analysis are dimly intimated in the marvelous tale. 3. having escaped through the two rocks, ulysses and his companions come to "the flawless island of the sun," the all-seeing luminary of heaven. it is the total light beholding the totality. is it not manifest that we have passed out of dualism into unity, out of strife into harmony? the island is represented as pastoral, peaceful, idyllic, with its herds reposing in sunlight; certainly a decided contrast to the noise and struggle in the region of scylla and charybdis. or we may give the matter a psychological turn and say: such is the transition from the understanding with its finitude to reason with its universality, to the all-seeing light within. ulysses, having transcended the limit he showed in his last experience, has gone forward to the clear sunlit realm which illumines all limitations. but just at this point danger arises. on the island are pasturing herds of oxen and sheep sacred to the sun, things of light consecrated to light. the temptation will be to use them for the gratification of appetite, perhaps under some strong stress. already both tiresias and circe have given the warning, which ulysses now repeats to his companions and even exacts an oath from them not to harm the holy flocks. but hunger pinches, ulysses again goes to sleep at the wrong moment, and the oxen of the sun are slain by his men. it is true that the test is a hard one, death by starvation is impending, and they yield, not only violating their oaths but their light. then they defiantly repeated their deed, "for six whole days they feasted, selecting the best of the sun's oxen." when ulysses awoke, he chid them sternly, but did not, or could not, stop them. the result was, they perished. already we have touched upon the physical basis which underlies this tale. the symbolism we may consider somewhat more closely. the sin against light on the part of the companions is double: they knew better because they had been forewarned, they were not ignorant as when they opened the bag of winds. secondly, they destroyed objects sacred to the grand luminary, they assailed the very source of light. ulysses has shared in the act also, he too must take his part of the penalty. he is saved, for he forbade the wrong, yet he went to sleep at the critical moment. to be sure the companions were hungry; but that is just the test; if they had had plenty to eat, there would have been no real trial of their fidelity to principle. the ancient poet, throwing deepest glances into the soul and into the world, beholds the supreme negative act of man, and seeks to clothe it in a symbol. mind turns against mind, when the man does what he knows is wrong, and the destructive side is doubly re-inforced when he assails light itself, and knowledge slays knowledge. when a person who knows affirms in word and deed that his knowing is a lie, his light puts out a light, he destroys the oxen of the sun. what then? it is no wonder that the great luminary threatens "to go down to hades and there shine among the dead," unless the full penalty is exacted for such a deed. in fact, he is already extinguished mentally for these men, and zeus, voicing the world-order, can only hurry them off into darkness. very wonderful is the thought lurking in the symbolism of the old seer: intellectual negation, skepticism, denial, culminating in the negative deed, will at last drive the sun himself out of heaven and send him below into the underworld. it is highly probable, however, that the negative man will be sent down there first, as is done in the present case. after slaying the oxen of the sun and repeating the offense many times, ulysses and his companions must again meet life, and accordingly they set sail upon the sea, bound for home and country. but such men have not in them the elements of the return. storms arise, winds blow, the helmsman is killed by the falling mast, and the ship is struck by lightning. the destructive powers of nature seem to concentrate upon these destroyers; such is the decree of zeus, carrying out his promise to the sun; verily the supreme god could not well do otherwise. ulysses alone barely saves himself upon a fragment of the mast and keel; manifestly there is a difference between him and his companions, who disobeyed his order. the text says that "the companions feasted for six days," it would seem that he did not; still he is involved in their calamity, though not fully in their guilt. here is, then, a distinction of importance, since upon it is based the saving of ulysses, who is yet to have a career. while ulysses may not have personally participated in the guilty deed, he was not active against it, he did not apparently seem to restrain the repetitions of it, he was paralyzed in energy. it was his will which was defective, not his intellect; he did not commit the offense, but he did not stop it, and try to conciliate the wrath of the gods by sacrifices, by what we now call repentance. hence, while he does not perish, he is still unfinished, incomplete, with a limit to be removed. a training of the will is to be gone through next, till it be able to do what reason commands. a new discipline therefore is in store for the hero after the loss of his ship and his companions. what will this discipline be? to a degree his entire career must be worked over again from the beginning. upon his fragment of wood he floats back to scylla and charybdis; he falls into the old dualism in one of its phases, for he cannot stay upon the island of the sun, the place of unity and rest and light. indeed have we not just seen him in the fierce conflict between knowing and doing, which he has not been able to unify in the last adventure? so he drops back between the grinding mill-stones of two opposites; one of these opposites, the maelstrom charybdis, is sucking him in, but he clutches the branches of a large fig-tree overhanging the whirlpool, and holds fast till his mast and keel return to the surface of the water, upon which he escapes. one cannot help feeling that the poet in this description has a conscious meaning underneath, it is more or less allegorical. the will of ulysses was paralyzed in the island of the sun, he is helplessly carried forward on the sea, till the yawning gulf of charybdis (despair) threatens to swallow him, when he puts forth a mighty effort of will, represented in his clinging to the branches of the fig tree, which extends hope to him, and thus he rescues himself. now he rows his raft "with both his hands," it is indeed time to exert anew his volition. charybdis could not take him, on account of a saving germ in him still; she has to let him pass. whither? naturally the next station rearward is that of the sirens, and this in a general way is what ulysses reaches in his relapse. he comes to the realm of the senses, for the fact is that this was the source of the great trouble in the island of the sun. the companions, pressed by appetite and the needs of the body, yielded up their conviction, their intelligence; they had not reached that strength of the spirit which prefers the death of the body to a surrender of the soul. ulysses at last acquiesced, the problem was too great for him and so he also is cast out of the island of the sun back into the region of the senses. but it is a new region of the senses, not that of the sirens, not that of circe, both of which he has transcended by an effort of will-power; it is the realm of calypso, the concealer, which has been reached through the collapse of the will after the sin against light. there is unquestionably an affinity between circe, the sirens, and calypso, yet there is also such a difference between them that the poet has assigned to them distinct domains, it is plain, too, that ulysses in his present paralysis will remain long with calypso, not at once will he recover his power after such a negation. he is hidden, as it were, in her dark island ogygia after that undoing of light; he passes from the sun-world of reason to its opposite. calypso, therefore, is reached through the grand relapse, not through the progressive movement, which we have seen him going through hitherto. still ulysses has in him the germ of betterment, of salvation. he longs to reach home and country, to return to his institutional world; that spark of aspiration has a saving power; it will not be extinguished even in the sensuous delights of calypso's bower. _observations._ in looking back at the twelfth book and thinking it over as a whole, the reader will always feel that he has not fully sounded its depths. it has not exercised so great an influence upon mankind as the eleventh book, but it is probably profounder. it lures specially the thinker and the psychologist, it seems not only to set forth thought but the thought of thought. very difficult is the poetic problem in such a case, the imaginative form really is driven to its utmost limit in order to express the content. i. the first thing to be fully grasped and thoroughly studied is the structure of the book. for structure is the primordial fact of any work, and especially of any great work, structure has always its own meaning and far-reaching suggestiveness, and it points directly to what the book signifies, being its inner vital organism. in the twelfth book we shall ponder a little the three essential facts of its structure. (1) there is the twofold division of the book, while the other books of fableland have distinctly a threefold division. herewith is coupled the duplication of its content; the second part repeats what is contained in the first part; or the first part tells in advance what is to be done in the second part. thus the structure images dualism: thought and action, word and deed, idea and reality, prophecy and fulfillment. yet it also hints the oneness in the dualism. (2) the next point in structure is the threefold subdivision of each of the two parts. that is, now the structural principle falls back into that of the preceding books of fableland. each part has its three main adventures with their respective environments and shapes, quite as each book hitherto has had. what does this suggest to the reader--this duplication of the threefold form of the book? (3) finally comes the very peculiar structure of the second adventure, which we have above called the double alternative. the dualism of the book we may say, is now doubled, and transformed into the middle one of the three grand trials or exploits which the hero has to pass through. the monster scylla is here to be noted, with its six necks and heads, three on each side of the body, wherein again the triple is duplicated, though the body is certainly one. it was this monster which did most harm to ulysses, snapping up six of his companions in the passage. such are the main points in the structure of the present book, assuredly as great a marvel as anything recorded in the same, when it is once fully beheld. that it is intimately connected with the thought of the book, is indeed the very form and mould thereof, is felt by every careful reader. but what is this thought? here the difference begins, and the conflict of opinion ranges over and into fields diverse and far apart. ii. it may be said that the interpretations suggested by these three adventures--with the sirens, with scylla and charybdis, and with the oxen of the sun--belong to two extremes; those of nature and of mind. readers and commentators of different character and training will differ; one set will lean to the physical view, the other to the spiritual. it is our opinion that both views can find justification in the poem. we may first look at the physical interpretation. all these monsters have been supposed to represent perils of navigation, especially in the italian seas, which were frequented by the early greek navigator. they have also been located geographically, to be sure in a variety of places. the sirens dwelt on three dangerous rocks near the island of capræa, according to ancient authorities; or they were found on the promontory between pæstum and elea, or even down at cape pelorum in sicily. why should they not be indeed everywhere! then they have been supposed to personify the secret dangers of a calm sea, and their song is the music of splashing waters. undoubtedly a physical substrate must be granted in the case of the sirens, and in the mythus generally; still they are truly everywhere, not only in the italian sea, but also in the sea of life, and they appear not only to the professional sailor but to every human navigator. are literal rocks passed by putting wax into the ears of the crew and by tying the captain to the mast? surely some other peril is suggested. in the second adventure, the plangctæ (the claspers, not the wanderers, as some translations give it), have been located at the lipari islands in the sicilian sea, where there is strong volcanic action. the well-known symplegades of the argonautic expedition which were placed at the entrance of the euxine, were probably patterned after this homeric conception, and transferred to the north-east. the two terrors, scylla and charybdis, lie in the straits of messina, according to the accepted view, the former on the italian side, the latter on the sicilian. a town named scilla still exists in those regions, and an eddy in the straits of messina is still called charilla (from charybdis doubtless.) etymologically scylla means a bitch, charybdis is allied with chaos (from a greek word meaning to yawn). later legend gave to scylla a great variety of forms, which were reproduced in art and poetry. one story represents her as having been a beautiful maiden who was loved by glaucus, and who was turned into her present monstrous shape by circe through jealousy, for the enchantress loved glaucus too. the sucking-in of the waters by charybdis, and her disgorging of them has been connected with the ebb and flow of the tides. it may also be added that the plangctæ (in the sense of wandering or floating islands) have been supposed to refer to icebergs, some report of which may have reached the homeric world through the phoenician sailor, who must have passed outside of the straits of gibraltar, into the atlantic. iii. such are some of the physical explanations which this book has suggested; we may now consider it in relation to certain mental phenomena. already we have unfolded the ethical meaning which especially lies in these shapes, and the hero's struggle with them. but they have another and deeper suggestion; they adumbrate the nature of mind itself and the process of thinking; both in form and content the whole book strangely points to psychology, as if the poet, having created these wonders of fableland, were going to create his own creative act and present it in an image. (1) the division of the book into the two parts already alluded to in which each is what the other is, in which there are both separation and identity, calls up the fundamental fact of self-consciousness, which is often expressed in the formula ego=ego. mind, ego, separates itself into two sides, yet each side is the whole and recognizes the other side as itself. this act is the condition of knowing of every kind, which always differentiates then identifies. one step more: circe in her prophecy gave the pure form of the idea, then came its realization, so that there is suggested the primordial distinction of the mind into intellect and will, or the thought and the deed. thus we see in this division of the twelfth book the exact characteristic of subject-object, and there is still further suggested the distinction between thinking and willing. (2) passing to the threefold subdivision of each of the two parts, we observe that it also calls up psychological distinctions. three stages of the knowing mind, senses, understanding, reason, may be found here, not very definitely given, still distinctly implied. the sirens represent the sensuous, especially in its moral aspect; the plangctæ with scylla and charybdis set forth a vivid image of the divisions and conflicts of the finite understanding; the oxen of the sun point to the central light, that of reason, which, when destroyed in any way, constitutes the chief human calamity. another curious psychological hint may be noted in the text of homer. the sirens, the first or implicit stage, are sometimes spoken of in the dual and sometimes in the plural; homer would seem to imply that they are two in number, yet they always act and sing as one. that is, the dualism or separation is as yet implicit; but in the second stage (that of scylla and charybdis) it will become explicit with decided emphasis. later legend made the sirens three in number, and gave them names, and otherwise distinguished them; but this is not homeric and indeed has lost the homeric consciousness. (3) the fact that the previous books of fableland have a threefold division only, while this threefold division is duplicated in the twelfth book, has also its psychological bearing in connection with the foregoing views. in the first case, the poet was not aware of his process, he yielded to the poetic act immediately; but in the second case, he is conscious, he knows his own process and prefigures it; he holds it up before himself in advance, just as circe holds up before ulysses his future career. ulysses also must know in advance, hitherto he has simply followed instinct and chance, whithersoever they led. in like manner, the poet now shows himself knowing what he will do; his threefold organic movement, hitherto more or less implicit and unconscious, has become explicit and conscious, and can be prophesied. he himself thus is an example of the ego which both casts before and forecasts itself, in other words is self-duplicated. (4) here, however, we must note a distinction. in all four books of fableland, ulysses is the poet himself in a sense, he is singing his own adventures to the court of phæacia, he is well aware of what he has passed through and to what he has come. he is not a demodocus chanting heroic strains of the trojan past; he is ulysses telling his own spiritual experiences after the taking of troy. it has been already unfolded (p. 246-7) that he was in a negative, alienated condition; he had fallen out with and was separated from his hellenic world, whereof this fableland is the record. but he arrives at phæacia, an harmonious institutional realm, then he becomes fully conscious of his negative condition and projects it out of himself in these tales or songs. so all fableland shows this consciousness in the man; but the twelfth book shows him conscious not only of his negative state, but of his mental process, conscious of his consciousness, we may say; he is not only thought, but is thought thinking thought, or at least imaging the same; that is, thought has itself as its own object or content. so much we are inclined to find hinted in this duplication of the movement in the twelfth book. at this point we hear the cry of dissent: you make homer too introspective, you make him a self-introverted, self-torturing nineteenth century man, whereas he is the most unreflective, unconscious of poets. very natural is such a protest, my good reader; this sort of thing may be carried too far, and become fantastic. still it is a great mistake to think that homer never takes a glance at his own mind and its workings. he must have looked within in order to see his world; where else was it to be found in any such completeness? he has built it, and he must have taken some interest in the architect and in his processes. homer himself is a greater wonder than any wonder he has created, and he probably knew it. it is by no means the purpose to affirm in the preceding remarks that homer intended to make an allegorical psychology. he simply had a mind, and the essence of mind is to be able to look at mind. so homer saw himself and his own process, and set it forth in an imaginative form. very similar is the plan of shakespeare in the _tempest_. prospero is the poet, not only as poet, but the poet making his drama in the drama. there is also a significant duplication both of structure and character: prospero is at one time magician, that is, poet, and commands the elements and the spirits, especially ariel; at another time he assumes his ordinary relations as parent and as king, and is as limited as other mortals. shakespeare made many dramas, then he saw himself making dramas, then he put into a drama himself making dramas. that is, he in the end (tempest is usually held to be the last of shakespeare's plays) took up his own poetic process into a poem, and thus completed the arch of his great career. so much for the psychological aspect of these books of fableland. it must be stated again that abstract terms, so necessary for an exact science of mind, had not been elaborated to any extent in homer's day. reflective language is a later product of greek spirit. still the philosopher is anticipated and prophesied in the poet, and it certainly cannot be amiss to trace vague premonitions and promises of the coming plato and aristotle in the old poet. homer has in him the germ of the whole greek world, and for that matter, much of the modern world also; the best commentary upon him is the 2500 years since his time. iv. the slaying of the oxen of the sun has also its searching suggestiveness, and is found in one form or other in the world's greatest books. mind destroying mind may be shown as light extinguishing its own luminary; some such hint lies in the symbolism both of the act and its punishment. it is indeed the culminating point of negation--spirit denying spirit. this is the real sin against the holy spirit, unpardonable because repentance, all possibility of pardon is denied by the doer of the deed. as i understand him, this is the essence of the sin of dante against beatrice, with which she reproaches him in the last part of the purgatorio. suggestions of the same kind of guilt may be found in the characters of shakespeare's hamlet and banquo, in whose cases the violation brings on a tragic fate; indeed every true tragedy has some touches of the light-denying or light-defying deed and its penalty. above all rises in this respect the faust of goethe, the theme of which is explicitly intelligence denying intelligence, whereby the human mind becomes utterly negative, begets the devil, and enters into compact with him for a life of indulgence. while such a state lasts, repentance is impossible. some such intimation ancient homer must have had, and shadowed it forth in this strange symbolic deed. ulysses having disregarded all he had learned by his long and bitter experience, leaving unheeded the warnings and prophecies of the supersensible and the sensible world (tiresias and circe), drops back into the sphere of calypso, and has to serve the senses seven years till will and aspiration lift him again. such a servitude was not uncommon in greek legend, hercules is the very embodiment thereof; even a god, apollo, light itself, has to serve admetus, a mortal, in expiation of undivine guilt. an important element of structure is to be noted at this point: the poem bifurcates and the reader has to move in two directions. if he wishes to follow the development of ulysses, (which is indispensable) he must return with the latter to calypso's island and trace him through his three grand experiences--oyggia, phæacia, and fableland. but if the reader wishes to continue in the action of the poem, he must now pass out of fableland to ithaca in the company of the hero. (for this double movement of the ulyssiad, see pp. 121-8.) but before fableland is left behind, its full sweep may be called up once more: from the upperworld of earth (ninth and tenth books, both belong together in a general survey), which shows the negation of greek ethical life and its conflicts, we pass to the underworld of hades, which on the one hand is the negation of all greek sensible existence, and on the other hand is the revelation of the supersensible (soul, idea, world-justice); thence we come back to the upperworld in which the idea, obtained beyond, is seen struggling with the reality in various negative phases--ulysses, knowing in advance, is shown in his attempt to realize his knowledge in the deed. such then, is this grand threefold sweep of fableland. one more retrospect: let us glance back at the whole twelve books, this first half of the odyssey, composed of the telemachiad and the ulyssiad. both are parts of one whole; father and son acquire each his special discipline for the coming deed. both are brought to a recognition of the divine order, the son mainly through tradition, the father mainly through experience. both reach beyond the sensible into the supersensible or ideal realm; telemachus hears the story of proteus, which teaches the essence in all appearance; ulysses descends to hades and there communes with pure mind without its terrestrial incumbrance, in the case of tiresias and others. such is the internal preparation; now they are to do the deed. the idea they possess, the next is to make it real. accordingly the action of the poem, with ulysses as its center, moves next to ithaca, the realm in which the idea is to be realized: wherewith we enter upon a new grand division of the poem. (the reader who wishes to study the parallelism between this twelfth book and prospero can consult the author's commentary on shakespeare, where it treats of the _tempest_. in fact, the entire play, which is also a kind of fairy tale, has many correspondences with homer's fableland.) _ithakeiad._ such is the designation which we have concluded to give to the last twelve books of the odyssey, inasmuch as a name is needed for this portion corresponding to the telemachiad and the ulyssiad. the scene is laid wholly in ithaca, the characters of the poem are all brought together, and the main conflict takes place. it is the country which is to be cleansed of violence and guilt; that divine order which father and son have learned about, each in his own way, they must now make real in the world, especially in their own land. manifestly ithaca represents the realm of wrong, of hostility to the social system of man; the suitors defy law, family, state, gods. but ulysses, before he can reform his country, has had to reform himself. when he attacked the ciconians, he was as negative to institutional order as the suitors themselves; he was not the man to destroy them at that time, he was too like them to undo their work. hence the long discipline in fableland, which has been fully explained in the preceding comments; hence too he had to see phæacia, the ideal institutional life realized in family and state, as well as in industry and the fine arts. let the reader note that he passes, not from fableland, but from phæacia, to ithaca; having that phæacian idea in his soul, he can transform his own country. thus he will truly save his companions, namely, the people, whom before he lost in fableland. telemachus also in his training has seen much and brought back an ideal with him. he has heard the wise man nestor and witnessed the religious life of hellas in its highest manifestation. pylos, nestor's kingdom, is almost a greek theocracy; the gods appear visible at the feasts and hold communion with the people. likewise at sparta telemachus saw a realm of peace and concord, in striking contrast with his own ithaca; but chiefly he heard the marvelous tale of proteus, after which he was eager to return home at once. thus he too has had his experience of a social order, as well as his ideal instruction. previous to his journey he had shown a tendency to despair, and to a denial of the gods on account of the disorders of the suitors in his house. unquestionably he comes back to ithaca with renewed courage and aspiration, and with an ideal in his soul, which makes him a meet companion for his father. the third character is the swineherd eumæus who is the great addition in this portion of the odyssey. he too has had his discipline, which is to be recounted here; he has been stolen as a child and sold into slavery; still the most terrible calamities to himself and his master and to the house of ulysses, have not shaken his fealty to the gods. thus in common with telemachus and ulysses he has faith in the divine order, and can cooperate with them in realizing the same in ithaca. very different has been his discipline from that of the other two, both of whom became negative and had to be sent away from home for training, but eumæus has remained in his hut and never swerved in his fidelity to his sovereigns above and below, though he does not understand the providential reason for so much wrong and suffering. to these three men we are to add the woman, penelope, who has her part, perhaps the most difficult in this difficult business. she cannot resort to violence, she must use her feminine weapon, tact, with a degree of skill which makes her an example for all time. indeed not a few of her sex declare that she has overdone the matter, and that her acts are morally questionable. but there can be no doubt that it is the part of tact to find fault with tact, and that woman will always decry woman's skill in artifice, without refraining from its employment altogether; indeed just that is a part of the artifice. for this and similar reasons the moral bearings of this portion of the odyssey have always aroused discussion. in general, the question comes up: what constitutes a lie? is the disguise of ulysses justifiable? is the subtlety of penelope morally reprehensible? the old dispute as to conduct rises in full intensity: does the end justify the means? two parties are sure to appear with views just opposite; the one excuses, the other condemns, often with no little asperity. the odyssey has been denounced even as an immoral book and both its hero and heroine have been subjected to a burning ordeal of literary damnation. the poet has, however, his wrongful set, the suitors, about whose character there is no disagreement. they are the negation of that divine order which is to be restored by those who believe in it--the three men who come together at the hut of the swineherd, and who have been trained by the time and circumstances just to this end. ulysses has had to pass through his negative period and overcome the same within; now he is prepared to meet the suitors and to destroy them without the negative recoil which came upon him after destroying the city of troy. he can do a necessary deed of violence without becoming violent and destructive himself; he will not now re-enact the ciconian affair. let us look into the inner movement of the matter here indicated. the slaughter of the suitors by ulysses was undoubtedly a negative act, yet the suitors also were negative in conduct, wholly so; thus violence is met and undone by violence, or negation negates negation. what is the outcome? manifestly a double result is possible: if a negative cancels a negative, there may remain still negation, or there may be a positive result. ulysses has passed through the first of these stages by his discipline already recorded, after which he is master of the negative; the destruction of the suitors will not now make him destructive, as did the destruction of troy. it will be seen, therefore, that the poem has a positive outcome; after some trouble, ulysses will renovate the country, will restore family and state, in fine the whole order which had been upset by the suitors. with the transition from fableland occurs a marked change in the style of the poem. in the previous portions we have already noted the marvelous tale of fairyland, the heroic tale of troy, the idyllic epopee of the present, the latter especially in phæacia. but in these last twelve books we read a story of actual social life, a story which almost strikes into the domain of the modern novel. still fabulous adventures will be interwoven--now more in the form of the novelette--with phoenician and egyptian backgrounds. also a tone of humanity, even of sentiment, makes itself felt in various places. a new situation brings with it a new style, yet homeric still. hereafter these points will be more fully noticed. we have already indicated the fact (p. 19) that pallas starts to organize the odyssey in book first. two portions she designates, the telemachiad and the ulyssiad, which really belong together, showing the spiritual palingenesis, or internal renovation of son and father ere they proceed to the renovation of their country. such in general are the first twelve books, showing the two masters of destiny, the two positive men with their idea; the second twelve books show them realizing their idea, and doing the great deed for which they have been prepared. this second half of the odyssey falls into two divisions. the first is located at the hut of the swineherd and brings the three men together, whose general character has been already indicated; they have been trained by life to a living realization of the divine order. this division consists of four books (xiii-xvi). the second division transfers the scene from country to town, from hut to palace. ulysses in disguise will witness personally the full course of the wrong of the suitors, against his property, his family, his state, and against the gods. then he becomes the minister of the world-justice which he has already seen in hades. finally he harmonizes the distracted institutional life of his country and the poem ends. this second division embraces the last eight books, and has its own special stages in its movement. _survey of books thirteenth to sixteenth._ in this portion we are to witness the leading transition of the poem, that of ulysses and telemachus to ithaca, the transition from the long and elaborate preparation for the act to the act itself, which is the supreme one of man, that of asserting and realizing the divine order. in these four books is the gathering of the chosen forces into one spot and into one purpose--which forces have been hitherto separately developed; here it is that we behold the practical preliminary movement for destroying the suitors. hence arises the feeling which most readers express on a sympathetic perusal, that these four books of the ithakeiad, which is the name already given to the present division of the odyssey, have enough in common to cause them to be grouped together in an organic survey of the poem. they have, first of all, unity of locality--the hut of the swineherd--to which, round which, and from which their incidents move. to be sure there is a glance at the enemy, the suitors, who are at a different point; but even this glance serves to emphasize the setting common to these four books, which is the abode of eumæus. very humble it is, but it stands in every way as the contrast to the palace. this unity of place naturally suggests unity of action as to what is going on in that place. all the forces in opposition to the suitors are secretly gathering there and organizing. it is the center of attraction which is drawing out of the universe every atom of congenial energy for punishing the transgressors. it has brought ulysses from phæacia, telemachus from sparta, and possesses already the faithful eumæus in its own right. this is the fortress, and these are the three men who make the attacking army. they are now getting themselves together. all three have passed through a grand discipline just for the present end, which is to be the great deed of deliverance. moreover the place has a character of its own, a peculiar atmosphere in sympathy with its purpose. its strength we feel, its adamantine fidelity to the house of ulysses. it is a secluded spot in contrast to the palace; its occupant is a slave in contrast to the kings who are suitors; his business is to be the companion of swine in contrast to the regal entertainment at court. the highest and the humblest of the social order are here placed side by side; with what result? the unswerving rock of loyalty is the hut and the heart of the swineherd; upon it as the foundation the shattered institutional world of ithaca is to be rebuilt. the lowest class of society is, after all, the basis of the edifice; if it remain sound, then the superstructure can be erected again after the fiery purification. but if it be utterly rotten, what then? such, however, is not the case in ithaca, as long as there exists a man like the swineherd. from his rock, then, and, still more, from his spirit, is to issue the energy which is to transform that perverted land of ithaca. still, here too ulysses is the pivot, the central character; the hero both in thought and action, for whom eumæus furnishes a spatial and spiritual environment. the hut of the swineherd is but a phase, one landing-place in the career of ulysses. an idyllic spot and forever beautiful; who but homer has ever gotten so much poetry out of a pig-sty? we witness the transfiguration of what is the very lowest of human existence into what is the very highest, veritably the godlike on earth. ulysses, however, has to remain in disguise even to his most faithful servant; not out of distrust we must think, but out of prudence. knowing his master, the swineherd would be a different person in the presence of the suitors; he has an open, sincere, transparent heart, and he would probably let the secret be seen which lay therein. the gift of disguise he possesses not, as ulysses has clearly observed in his conversation; in this respect he is the contrast to the hero himself. but telemachus will get the secret, for he has craft, is the true son of his father; has he not just shown the paternal trait in cunningly thwarting the suitors who are lying in wait for him, by the help of pallas, of course? in these four books, accordingly, we behold one stage of the great preparation for the deed which is the culmination of the poem. not now the disciplinary, but the practical preparation it is, when one is ready and resolved internally, and is seeking the method and means. both ulysses and telemachus have had their training; now it must pass into action. we behold, first, ulysses making the transition from phæacia to ithaca, and thence to the fortress of loyalty, from which the movement is to be made. secondly we see all the instruments getting together, and being prepared for the work, particularly the three heroes of the attack. finally we observe ulysses inquiring and learning all about the situation in ithaca; he obtains everything that information at second hand can give. but hearsay is not enough; he must see at first hand. thus we pass to the palace, and out of the first series of four books, which we are next to consider separately. _book thirteenth._ in general, we have in this book the grand transition from phæacia to ithaca, in both of its phases, physical and spiritual. the sea is crossed from land to land in a ship; the idyllic realm is left behind, and the real world with its terrible problem is encountered. phæacia was quite without conflict. ithaca is just in the condition of conflict and discord. phæacia, moreover, was a land of looking back at the past, of reminiscence and retrospection; ithaca is the land of looking directly into the face of the future, with the deed to follow at once; it is the field for action and not contemplation. not only spatially, but also in thought we must regard this transition. ulysses has both these worlds in him; he is the man of thought and the man of action. hitherto in his career the stress has been upon the former; henceforth it is to be upon the latter. in this book, which is the overture marking the change in the key-note of the poem, we have three distinct facts brought out prominently and through them we can grasp the general structure. there is, first, the departure of ulysses from phæacia and arrival at ithaca; secondly, when this is finished, there is the glance backward, on the part of the poet, to the miraculous voyage and to phæacia itself, in which glance neptune plays an important part; thirdly, there is the glance forward, which occupies most of the book, taking in ithaca and the future, in which glance pallas, the goddess of foresight, gives the chief direction, and ulysses is her mortal counterpart. this is, accordingly, to a large extent a book of divine suggestion; two deities appear, the upper world plays into the lower world, yet in very different manners. the god of the sea seems to be an obstructionist, a reactionary, with look turned behind, an old divinity of nature; while pallas always has her look turned forward, and is furthering the great deed of purification, is wholly a divinity of spirit. these three phases of the book we shall note more fully. i. we have a glimpse of the court at phæacia; ulysses has ended the long account of his experience, the time of action has arrived. the formal yet hearty farewell is described; the gifts of the host are given, and the guest is sent on his way. nor must we forget the bard demodocus, still singing at the banquet, but the theme of his song is not now mentioned; evidently it was some tale of troy, as before, and this stage of song has been far transcended by ulysses. very eager the hero was to start; "often he turned his head toward the all-shining sun" to see how far away the hour still remained. he wishes to listen to no more lays of the past, sweet though they be, nor does he desire to tell any tales himself. moreover we hear the great longing of his heart: "may i, returning, find at home my blameless wife!" in like manner he wishes domestic joy to the king, as this whole phæacian world partakes more of the family than of the state. of course, he cannot leave without going to the heart and center of the family, namely, arete, wife, mother, and even judge of the people. so we hear from the lips of ulysses a final salutation to her in her threefold character, "within thy household rejoice in thy children, thy people and thy husband the king." she looks to the domestic part on the ship for ulysses; she sends servants bearing bread, wine and garments for the passage. nausicaa we feel to be present in the last interview, but not a word from her or from the departing guest to her; self-suppression is indeed the law for both, for is not penelope the grand end of this voyage? the ship of the phæacians in which the passage is made is a miraculous one, and yet prophetic; it is gifted with thought and flies more fleet than a falcon, swiftest of birds. again the mythical account prefigures the reality, and this little marvelous story of the sea hints, yes, calls for the speed of modern navigation. it is not a matter to be understood; ulysses, the wise man, knows nothing about it, he is sunk in sleep while making the passage. but the wise man is to come to knowledge hereafter. he has arrived in ithaca, and entered a safe port; he, still deep in slumber, is laid on the shore with all his goods and gifts, when the mariners turn back. at this point we have an interesting description of the surroundings, wherein we may observe the poet's employment of nature as a setting for the returned ulysses. there is the secure haven shutting off the winds and waves of the sea; at the end of the haven stands the olive tree, product of culture, and hinting the civilized world, which ulysses now enters; it was a tree sacred to pallas in later greek legend, and, doubtless, in homer's time also. next came the cave of the nymphs called naiads, with its curious shapes of stone, the work of the nymphs to the old greek eye, but named stalagmites and stalactites in modern speech. two are the entrances, one for gods and one for men; both human and divine visitors come thither, it is indeed a point of meeting for the two influences, which is its essential suggestion. ulysses, lying with his goods beneath the olive tree and near the cave, is under divine protection, which here nature herself is made to declare. this scenery is not introduced for its own sake, but for the divinity in it, whereof another example is to follow in the case of neptune. there have been repeated attempts to identify the locality described by the poet with the present geography of ithaca. travelers have imagined that they have found the haven and cave, notably this was the case with sir william gell; but the more common view now is that they were mistaken. homer from his knowledge of greece, which has everywhere harbors, caves and olive-trees, constructed an ideal landscape for his own purpose, quite as every poet does. he may or may not have seen ithaca; in either case, the poetic result is the same. ii. the physical transition from phæacia to ithaca is accomplished; while ulysses is asleep, the poet casts a glance backward at the marvelous ship and at the marvelous land which has just been left behind. both are henceforth to be forever closed to the real world and its intercourse; the realm of fable is shut off from ithaca, and from the rest of this poem. the matter is presented in the form of a conflict between the phæacians and neptune, between the sea-faring people and the sea; clearly it is one of the many struggles between man and nature which the greek mythus is always portraying, because these struggles were the ever-present fact in greek life. the god has been circumvented by the speed of the navigators; ulysses without suffering, without a storm, has reached ithaca. "no more honor for me from mortals or gods," cries neptune, "if i can be thus defied?" he makes his appeal to the highest god, and we hear the decision: "turn the ship to a stone and hide the city with a mountain." the first is accomplished in view of the phæacians; the second is possibly prevented by their speedy sacrifices to neptune, and the new decree of the ruler, which forbids their giving further escort over the sea to strangers. at any rate phæacia is shut off from the world, and has not been heard of since; there have been no more transitions thence since that of ulysses. the marvelous ship and the marvelous city vanish forever by a divine act, even by the will of zeus. yet, on the other hand, they eternally remain, crystallized in these verses of homer, more lasting than the rock of neptune. why this interference from above? wherein is the escort by the phæacians a violation of the divine order as voiced by the supreme god? note that ulysses has escaped, which is the will of zeus; note, too, that the phæacians are punished for helping him escape, which is also the will of zeus. the sailors bring the wanderer to his home without trouble, but they are smitten by the god while returning. for the primal suggestion of the legend, may we not say that the sea, that enormous force of nature with many reserved energies in its vast bosom, though bestrid and subdued by a ship, at times breaks loose and destroys, in spite of skillful navigation and perfect machinery? still to-day the sea has a residue of the uncontrollable, and probably will have for some ages to come. neptune has not ceased from his wrath against the man of thought, who tries to straddle and ride him, and zeus still supports at times the sea-god's appeal for honor, when his prerogative is violated. yet not always by any means, for zeus belongs to the true olympians, deities of intelligence, who once put down the old gods of nature. still nature has its right, nay, its law with the penalty. the poet looks upon the sea as a great deity demanding sacrifice and honor. furthermore, for every conquest made over it, there is the counterstroke, the resistance, which is the vengeance of the god. thus says zeus: "if any man, trusting in his own strength, refuses to give unto thee honor, always vengeance is thine afterwards." we have already noticed the creed of the poet to be that every action has its penalty; the deed, even the good deed, is the fruit of a conflict and puts down something which has its might, aye its right, which is soon to make itself felt in counteraction. _es rächt sich alles auf erden_, sings our last world-poet in full harmony with his eldest brother. it is not surprising that alcinous at this point remembers an "ancient god-spoken oracle," which had uttered in advance the wrath of neptune and the present penalty. in like manner, polyphemus, in his crisis, remembered a similar oracle. it is indeed the deep suggestion of nature which the sages have heard in all times. the poet takes his thought and works it into a mythical shape, in which, however, we are to see not merely the story but the insight into the world order. ulysses now leaves the sea, after having been chiefly in a struggle with it for years, ever since he sailed from troy. it was the element in his way, the environment always hostile to him; neptune was the deity who was angry and made him suffer. still the god of the sea could not prevent his return, such was the will of zeus. thus we cast a glance back at the phæacians who vanish, and at neptune who also vanishes. the poem henceforth quits the sea, after marking the fate of the sea-faring people of phæacia. that great mysterious body of water, with its uncertainties of wind and wave, with its hidden rocks and magic islands, is now to drop out of the horizen of the odyssey. it is the great sea-poem of the greeks, yes of the world; the sea is the setting of its adventurous, marvelous, illimitable portion. it comes out the sea, with its realm of wonders; henceforth it is a land poem in the clear finite world. ulysses the hero must turn his face away from the briny element; not without significance is that command given him that he must go till he find a people who take an oar for a winnowing-fan ere he can reach peace. so the fairy-ship ceased to run, but the steam-ship has taken its place in these ithacan waters. still the poetic atmosphere of the odyssey, in spite of steam, hovers over the islands of western greece to-day; the traveler in the harbor of corfu, will look up at the city from the deck of his vessel and call back the image of phæacia, and if he listens to the speech of the greek sailors, he will find words still in use which were employed by old homer, possibly were heard by the poet in this very harbor. iii. next comes the most important and longest portion of the book, turning the glance forward to ithaca and the future, also to the great deed of the poem. a new deity appears when neptune vanishes, not a hostile power of nature but a helpful spirit of intelligence--it is the goddess of wisdom, pallas. this divine transition from the one god to the other is the real inner fact, while the physical transition is but the outer setting and suggestion. accordingly, the theme now is the man and the deity, ulysses and pallas in their interrelation. we are to have a complete account of the human unfolding into a vision of the divine. the movement is from a complete separation of the twain, to mutual recognition, and then to co-operation. pallas has had little to do with ulysses during his great sea-journey, and since he left troy. that long wandering on the water was without her, lay not at all in her domain, which is that of clear self-conscious intelligence. that misty fableland is the realm of other divinities, though she appeared in phæacia. the question, therefore, is at present: how shall this man come into the knowledge of the goddess? how shall he know the truth of the reality about him in his new situation, how understand this world of wisdom? the sides are two: the man and the deity, and they must become one in spirit. the supreme thing, therefore, is that ulysses hear the voice of pallas, and develop into unity with her; indeed that may be held to be the supreme thing in religion and philosophy: to hear the voice of god. even in the business of daily life the first object is to find out the word of pallas. such is the dualism in the world, which must be harmonized; but in the individual also there is another dualism which has to be harmonized. ulysses is mortal, finite, given over to doubt, passion, caprice, is the unwise man, subjective; but he is also the wise man, has an infinite nature which is just the mastery of all his weakness; he has always the possibility of wisdom, and will come to it by a little discipline. he will rise out of his subjective self into the objective god. this is just the process which the poet is now going to portray; the hero overwhelmed in his new situation and with his new problem, is to ascend into communion with pallas, is to behold wisdom in person and hear her voice, and then is to advance to the deed. this process we may look at in four different stages, as they unfold on the lines laid down by the poet. 1. first we have quite a full picture of ulysses before he reaches the recognition of the divine, and of his gradual climbing-up to that point. at the start he is asleep, is not even conscious of the external world about him, he has indeed entered a new realm, yet old. as long as the phæacian spell is upon him, he can do nought but slumber. then he wakes, he sees but does not recognize his own country. he doubts, he blames the phæacians wrongfully, in his distrust of them he counts over his treasures. he is now the unwise, capricious man; he has no perception of pallas; not only the land is in disguise to him, he is in disguise to himself, to his better self. yet the poet is careful to mark the providential purpose just in this disguise. the goddess threw a mist over things, that he might not know them, or make himself known till all was in readiness for the destruction of the suitors, till she had told him what he had to do. still it is his own act or state that he cannot at first hear the voice of the goddess. the next step is that he recognizes the country, it is described to him and named by pallas. but she is in disguise now; she has appeared, but not in her true form; she is not yet wisdom, but simply identifies the land, telling him: "this is ithaca." thus he recognizes the external landscape, but not the goddess, who is as yet but a simple shepherd describing things. now what will he do? he also will disguise himself to the shepherd, because he does not recognize who it is. he makes up a fable to account for his presence and for his goods. both are now in disguise, the man and deity, to each other. they are doing the same thing, they are one, with that thin veil of concealment between them. then comes the mutual recognition. she tears away the veil, laughs at his artifice, and calls out her own designation: pallas athena. she had previously named ithaca, which brings the recognition of the outer world; now she names herself, which brings the recognition of the divine world. thus ulysses has rapidly passed from sleep through a series of non-cognizant states, till he beholds the goddess. 2. both the deity and mortal have now reached the stage of mutual recognition, and thrown off their mutual disguise, which was a false relation, though it often exists. does not the man at times conceal himself to the god, by self-deception, self-excuse, by lying to his higher nature? in such case is not the god also hidden, in fact compelled to assume a mask? thus the poet brings before us the wonderful interplay between the human and divine, till they fully recognize each other. at once pallas changes, she assumes a new form, the outward plastic shape corresponding to her godhood in the greek conception, that of "a woman beautiful and stately." nor must we forget that ulysses has also changed, the two transformations run parallel, in the spirit of the man and in the form of the goddess. this unity of character also is stated by pallas; "both of us are skilled in wiles; thou art the best of mortals in counsel and in words; i am famed among the gods for wisdom and cunning." hence her argument runs, let us throw off disguise to each other, for we have a great work before us. it is also to be noted by the reader that each, the man and the goddess, ascribes to the other the credit of skill and forethought, specially the credit of coming to ithaca in disguise to discover the true situation. says pallas: "another man would have rushed to see wife and children in his house, but thou wilt first test thy wife." here the goddess gives the thought to the man. says ulysses: "surely i would have perished in my own palace, like agamemnon, if thou, o goddess, hadst not told me everything aright." here the man gives the thought to the goddess. this is not a contradiction, both are correct, and the insight is to see that both are one, and saying the same thing at bottom. the deity must be in the man, as well as in the world; and the man must hear the deity speaking the truth of the world ere he attain unto wisdom. even the mist which hung over the landscape at first, has now completely vanished; ulysses recognizes all the local details--the haven, the olive-tree, the grot of the nymphs, and the mountain; all the ithacan objects of nature come back fully. but chiefly he recognizes the goddess, whereupon both can pass to the great matter in hand--the deed. 3. this deed has been often mentioned before--the purification of ithaca, chiefly by the slaughter of the suitors, "the shameless set, who usurp thy house and woo thy wife." sitting on the roots of the sacred olive, the two, the man and the deity, plan destruction to the guilty. verily those double elements, the human and the divine, must co-operate if the great action be performed. the eternal principle of right, the moral order of the world, must unite with the free agency of the individual in bringing about the regeneration of the land. thus after their complete recognition and harmony, which takes place out of separation, ulysses and pallas look forward to the impending deed, which is their unity realized and standing forth as a fact in the world. 4. finally we have the manner of doing the deed, the plan is laid before us. pallas tells ulysses that he must again assume his disguise, both in the hut of the swineherd and in the palace at ithaca. she does not propose to do his work for him; on the contrary it must be his own spontaneous energy. in fact, pallas is in him making this suggestion, yet outside of him, too, speaking the voice of the situation. the scheme shows the structure of these four books (xiii-xvi), organized of course by pallas. ulysses is to go to the swineherd who is loyal, and will give shelter. telemachus is to be brought to the same place by pallas, not externally, as we shall see, but through the free act of telemachus himself. thus the three chosen men are gathered together in their unsuspected fortress. two things we must note in regard to these movements: they are wholly voluntary on part of the persons making them, yet they belong in the divine order, and thus are the work of the deity. free-will and providence do not trammel each other, but harmoniously co-operate to the same end. so carefully and completely is this thought elaborated that we may consider it fundamental in the creed of the poet. in such manner the weak, finite ulysses is brought into communion with the immortal goddess. yet he, the poor frail mortal, drops for a moment even here. when pallas speaks of telemachus having gone to sparta, to learn about his father, ulysses petulantly asks: "why did not you, who know all things, tell that to him" without the peril of such a journey? the answer of pallas is clear; i sent him in order that he might be a man among men, and have the good fame of his action. telemachus, too, must be a free man; that is the education of pallas. the goddess will help him only when he helps himself. divinity is not to sap human volition, but to enforce it; she would unmake telemachus, if she allowed him to stay at home and do nothing, tied to his mother's apron strings. and here we cannot help noting an observation on homer's poetry. it must be in the reader ere he can see it in the book. unless he be ready for its spirit, it will not appear, certainly it will not speak. there must be a rise into the vision of homeric poetry on the part of the reader, as there is a rise into the vision of the goddess on the part of ulysses. the two sides, the human and the divine, or the terrestrial and the olympian, must meet and commune; thus the reader, too, in perusing homer, must become heroic and behold the gods. _book fourteenth._ the book begins with another transition in place; ulysses passes from the sea-shore, with its haven, grot, and olive-tree up into the mountain, to the hut of eumæus. we have quite a full description of the latter's abode; there is a lodge surrounded by a court and a wall; within this inclosure are the sties, and the droves of swine over which he is the keeper, with four assistants. nor must we omit the fierce dogs, savage as wild beasts. such is the new environment which ulysses enters, and which has at its center a human being who gives character to this little world. again we catch a clear quick glimpse of the greek landscape in one of its phases. the spiritual transition is, however, the main thing. ulysses passes from pallas, the deity of pure wisdom, to eumæus, the humblest of mortals in his vocation. yet this poor man too has the divine in him, and manifests it in a supreme degree, not, however, in the form of reflective wisdom, but in the form of piety, of an immediate faith in the gods. still this faith has its sore trial. such is the contrast between the two men. ulysses has brought with him the goddess of wisdom, whose words he has heard, and with whom he has held communion. hardly does eumæus know pallas, he has not the internal gift of seeing her in her own shape. thus both these men share in the divine, but in very different ways. from this difference in the two men spring both the character and the matter of the book. it is a play, a disguise; a play between wisdom and faith, in which the former must be in disguise to the latter, yet both have the same substance at bottom. for faith is faith because it cannot take the form of intelligence, yet may have in its simple immediate form all the content of intelligence. eumæus has an open single-hearted piety; he cannot play a disguise, he hates it for he has been deceived by it when assumed by lying fablers. for this reason he is not intrusted with the secret of his master's return till the last moment, he would have to dissemble, to violate his own nature, and then perhaps he would not have succeeded in his attempt. so ulysses with a true regard for his man withholds the great secret, and has to play under cover in order to get the needful information. accordingly the present book has a decided tinge of comedy. there is, on the one hand, the disguise, external and internal--in garments and in identity; on the other hand, there is the error which takes one person for another, and produces the comic situation. thus the book is prophetic of a great branch of literature, and may be considered as a starting-point of greek comedy, yes, as one of the origins of shakespeare. to be sure, it is not mere fun or amusement; it is the comedy of providence, who often is in disguise bringing his blessing. eumæus in his piety has just that which he thinks he has not; his loyalty has brought to him just that which he most desired; his mistake is in reality no mistake, but a mere appearance which will vanish in the end. it is true that this sport of comic disguise began in the previous book with pallas. but can the mortal hide himself from the deity, specially from the deity of wisdom? hence the goddess tears away the mask with a smile, and there follows the recognition. but at present it is the mortal who is the victim of disguise, by virtue of his limitations. still the mortal, when he cannot see, can believe, and so transcend these same limitations. thus it is with eumæus, his mistake is a comic nullity. in the hut of the swineherd, there is no domestic life, the woman is absent. this condition is specially ascribed to the present state of things in ithaca. eumæus, though he be a slave, could have a household, "a dwelling and ground and wife," if his old master were at home. even now he has his own servant, bought with his own wealth. slavery was not a hard condition in the house of ulysses; it was domestic in the best sense probably. indeed the slaves were often of as high birth as their masters, who in turn might be slaves in the next fluctuation of war. eumæus himself was of kingly blood, and he retains his regal character in his servitude. ulysses has now reached the fortress which is to be the rallying-point of his army of three heroes, and from which he is to issue to the work of the time. but that is hereafter. in the present book, we have his play with eumæus, his disguise, which assumes three main attitudes. first, he is passive, chiefly asking and listening; thus he gets out of eumæus what information he wishes; then he plays an active part in his disguise, telling his own history under the mask of fiction; finally he assumes an open disguise, that is, he tells of one of his artifices at troy, and then states his present object in telling it. the simple eumæus, however, does not suspect him in all these transformations. still we may notice in the swineherd a strong feeling of oneness with the stranger, an unconscious presentiment of who he is. i. the approach of ulysses to the lodge of eumæus is an experience which one may have in the mountains of greece to-day. we can find the same general outline of a hut with its surrounding fence and court, in which domestic animals are penned, particularly during the night. then there is that same welcome from the dogs, which issue forth in a pack with an unearthly howling, growling and barking at the approaching stranger, till somebody appear and pelt them with stones. often must the wandering homer have had such a greeting! the hospitable swineherd, eumæus, the poet must have met with in his travels; the whole scene and character are drawn directly from real life. a similar reception we have had in a remote pastoral lodge, dogs included. but the modern pedestrian will hardly employ the ruse of ulysses, that of sitting down on the ground and letting his staff drop out of his hand. he will use his weapon and grasp for a stone everywhere present on the greek soil, though the fight be unequal. still the sentence of pliny (_nat. hist._ viii. 61) deserves always to be cited in this connection: _impetus eorum (canum) et soevitia mitigatur ab homine considente humi_; as if dogs in the height of their rage might be touched with the plea of piety. the character of the swineherd straightway shows itself by his conduct toward this poor hungry stranger, a vagabond in appearance. to be sure, hospitality was and is a common virtue in greece; but eumæus saw at once in the wretched looking man his master "wandering among people of a strange tongue, needing food." therefore come, old man, and satisfy yourself with bread and wine. such is the strong fellow-feeling warming the hearth of that humble lodge. misfortune has not soured the swineherd, but he has extracted from it his greatest blessing--an universal charity. this is not a momentary emotion, but has risen to a religious principle: "all strangers and the poor are of zeus;" such is the vital word of his creed. he is a slave and has not much to share; "our giving is small but dear to us;" very dear indeed, a mite only, but it is as good as a world. well may we call him, with the poet, in the best sense of the title: "the divine swineherd." we should note too that the poet addresses eumæus in the second person singular, with a tone of loving familiarity very seldom employed elsewhere in his two poems. was there some intimate personal relation figured in this character which we still seem to feel afar off there in antiquity? at any rate the picture of the swineherd has the most modern touch to be found in homer. it shows the feeling of humanity developed quite to its supreme fullness; it has modern sentiment, nay, it borders at times upon modern sentimentality. it recalls the recent novel, which takes its hero from the lowest class and garnishes him with regal virtues. strange old homer, prophetic again! he seems to have anticipated the art-forms of all the ages, and to have laid down the lines on which the literary spirit must move forever. otherwise, indeed, it could not be; he has in him the germs of future development; the last novel is contained in the first, which is the tale of eumæus. in the character of the swineherd, the central point is his loyalty, adamantine as the rock of his humble home. it is loyalty in a double sense: to his divine and to his human master, to god and to man, zeus and ulysses. the same trait it is, in a terrestrial and a celestial manifestation. both sides of this loyalty are just now under the sorest trial; there is every temptation to fall away from god and man and become wholly disloyal. many have yielded but he will not; in his solitary abode he keeps piety and patriotism aflame with the breath of his spirit. hence he furnishes the rock on which the new order can be built; without this loyalty in the humble class, no restoration would be possible, even with the presence of ulysses. first we may notice that he is loyal to his human master though he believes that the latter is dead and cannot return. still he does not pass over to the side of the suitors, who are doing that master and his house the great wrong. secondly, the swineherd is loyal to zeus and the divine order of the world. hear him: "the gods love not deeds of violence; they honor justice and the rightful works of men." such is his faith; still this faith is passing through the ordeal of fire: why should the gods, being good, keep the good ulysses away from his return? the simple swineherd cannot fathom the ways of providence, still he believes in that providence; he is divinely loyal. his allegiance does not depend upon prosperity, not even upon insight. zeus may rule the world as he pleases, i shall still have faith: "though he slay me, i shall believe in him." now we may turn for a moment to ulysses. he is a passive learner from the swineherd, calling forth information by subtle inquiry; much, indeed, has he learned from the humble, pious man. first, he has seen a shadow of his own doubt, and how it may be dispelled. then he has discovered loyalty in this representative of the people, who must still possess it in their hearts, though suppressed in the present, untoward time. also he hears again of the suitors and their guilty deeds, viewed with a loyal eye. finally he plays the prophet to eumæus and foretells the return of ulysses. this is the height of his disguise, wherein he rises to the humor of providence, who has brought to the swineherd the realization of his strongest wish without his knowing it. his prayers have come to pass, could he but see. herein ulysses suggests the part of providence in disguise, bringing the fulfillment of his own prophecy. ii. it is now the turn of ulysses to give some account of himself in answer to the swineherd's pressing questions. he tells a famous story, a fiction of his own life, yet it has in its disguise the truth of his career. the outer setting is changed, but the main facts are the same. still there is enough difference to prevent it from being a repetition. it is the odyssey told over again with new incidents, and variations upon an old theme. we behold here the conscious storyteller, clothing the events of life in the garb of a marvelous adventure. ulysses had in mind his own experience in this account, and he adapts it to the time and place. the main points of its contact with himself we may note. first, there is the pre-trojan period, a time of roving and marauding, which is true of that age in general, and may have some touch of ulysses in particular. second is the trojan war, the epoch of heroic conflict to which all had to go, so strong was the public sentiment. third comes the post-trojan epoch, with the wanton attack on the ægyptians, very much like the attack upon the ciconians in the ninth book. from these attacks in both cases the grand calamity results, which causes the long wandering. the phoenician episode, however, has no counterpart in the career of ulysses. fourth is the storm at sea, with the clinging to the mast, and the landing upon the coast of the thesprotians, all of which is a transcript of the experience of ulysses in getting to phæacia from calypso's isle. fifth is the arrival at ithaca, which shows the actual fact, with changed circumstances. thus we may say that the true ulysses in disguise tells the true story of his life in disguise. this gift is what makes him the poet. indeed we are compelled to think that homer here suggests his own poetic procedure. what he narrates is his own experience, in the form of art. his poetry is and must be his own life, though in disguise. goethe has said something similar: all that i have written is what i have experienced, but not quite as i experienced it. in this story we may hear in an undertone the old greek poet telling one of his secrets of composition. moreover, it is a tale of providential escapes; thrice has the so-called cretan been saved specially, in ægypt, from the phoenicians, from the thesprotians. thus the story aims to encourage eumæus, and to answer his doubt; it affirms the return of ulysses, and tells even the manner thereof; it is a story of providence appealing to the swineherd's faith. on this line, too, it touches the ethical content of the odyssey, as the latter was sung to the whole greek world. looking at the external circumstances of the story we note that it takes them from the social life of the time. there is universal slavery, with its accompaniment, man-stealing; the pirate and the free-booter are still on the seas and furnish incidents of adventure, yet commerce has also begun; the perils of navigation turn the voyage into a series of miraculous escapes. it is a time of dawn in which many distinctions, now clear, have not yet been made. we may also see the lines, though they be faint, of the movement of the world's culture in this story. crete, on the borderland between east and west, is the home of the daring greek adventurer who attacks troy on the one hand and ægypt on the other. from crete we pass backwards to phoenicia, as well as to the land of the nile, and we catch a glimpse of the current of oriental influence flowing upon greece. already we have seen the spiritual gift of egypt to the greek mind shadowed forth in the story of menelaus in the fourth book. in these latter books of the odyssey the phoenician intercourse with hellas is more strongly emphasized, with glances into their art, their trade, their navigation. all this phoenician development the greek looks at in a wondering way as if miraculous; he is reaching out for it also. to be sure the phoenician has a bad name, as a shrewd, even dishonest trader. still he is the middleman between nations, and a necessity. thus it appears that the greeks have lost their aryan connection, and have become the heirs of a semitic civilization. homer does not seem to know his indo-european kinship, but he does connect hellas with phoenicia and egypt in many a spiritual tie. these ties take, for the most part, a mythical form, still they must have been a great fact, else they could not have influenced the mythology of the greek race. so the present tale through the fiction of the myth-maker, hints the chief social fact of the time. the fiction in the previous book, which ulysses began to tell to pallas, also started in crete, looked back at the trojan war, and connected with idomeneus, the great hero of cretan legend in the affair of troy. the phoenican trader in his ship comes in there too. but that tale is cut short by the goddess, who knows the disguise. in the present case, however, the swineherd makes no such discovery. the next book will also have its corresponding tale. ulysses has thus told all about himself to the swineherd, has even hinted in one place his disguise. he speaks of ulysses having gone to dodona to consult the sacred oracle "whether he should return to ithaca openly or secretly, after so long an absence." he runs along the very edge of discovering himself. but the swineherd will not believe; "the gods all hate my master" is still his view. already a lying ætolian had deceived him with a similar tale, which also introduced idomeneus and the cretans. ulysses has before himself a new picture of doubt, and its blindness; quite a lesson it must have been to the skeptical man. the story, in its deepest suggestion, hints the manner of providential working, as seen by the old bard. eumæus has already had his prayers for the return of his master fulfilled, though he does not know it, and believes that they never will be fulfilled. still he never gives up his divine loyalty and turns atheist. by his charity and piety he has helped, indeed has brought about the return of ulysses unwittingly. the man, if he follow the law, is always helping, though he may not see that he is, may even think that he is not. this ethical order of the world underlies the tale, and is what the ancient listener must have felt so that homer's poems became a bible to him. providence in disguise is its title, here represented by the hero in disguise. iii. the supper and its preparation are quite fully described; it is the second meal of pork in this book. this we may pass over, to note the stratagem of ulysses to obtain a cloak from the swineherd. the stranger tells his stratagem once upon a time at troy for the same purpose; whereat the swineherd takes the hint and says: "thou shalt not lack for a garment or anything else which is befitting a suppliant." thus ulysses obtained his cloak, and slept warm by the hearth. but the other hint the swineherd did not take, the hint of the disguise. he sees the artifice of his guest to obtain the cloak, but never thinks in his own mind: this is ulyssess himself, the man of wiles trying to get the cloak again tonight. yet ulysses has gone far toward telling him just that. the swineherd cannot suspect, it is foreign to his nature; this is just his beauty of character and its limitation. but ulysses has to disguise in order to do his work. he is in his own land, on his own territory, yet he dares not appear as he is. this is not his fault. his whole object is to get rid of this necessity of disguise, so that he may be himself. the time will not permit candor, hence his call is to correct the time. violence is met by disguise, as it always is; fraud destroys itself; the negation negates itself. such is the process which we are now beholding. _book fifteenth._ in contrast with the previous book, the present book has not so much disguise; ulysses falls somewhat into the background, and several undisguised characters came forward. still there are points in common, the most striking of which is the tale of eumæus, the correspondence of which with the tale of ulysses in the fourteenth book impresses itself upon every careful reader. but the main fact of the present book is the bringing together of the various threads for the grand final enterprise, which is the punishment of the guilty suitors. ulysses and eumæus are already on hand; to them now telemachus is to be added, who comes from sparta, whither he had gone for the completion of his education. thus the present book goes back and connects with the fourth book in which we left telemachus. still further, the ithakeiad is linked into and continues the telemachiad (the first four books), inasmuch as we now see the purpose of that famous journey of the son to the courts of nestor and menelaus. it was the training for a deed, a great deed which required knowledge, skill, and resolution, and which was to show the youth to be the son of his father. such is another organic link which binds the whole odyssey together. the two threads, separately developed hitherto, are now united and interwoven with a third, that of eumæus. telemachus has seen two trojan heroes and heard their varied history, he has learned about his father whom he is prepared in spirit to support. so the son has his return also, a small one, yet important, be returns to ithaca after the experience at pylos and sparta and is joined to the great return of his father. but just here with these evident marks of unity in the poem, occurs a slip in chronology which has given the most solid comfort to those who wish to break up the odyssey and assign its parts to different authors. in the fourth book (l. 594) telemachus proposes to set out at once for home, he will not be detained even by the charm of menelaus and helen. that was the 6th day of the poem, whereas we find him here leaving sparta on 36th day of the poem, according to the usual reckoning. two inferences have been drawn from this discrepancy, if it be a discrepancy. the wolfian school cries out in chorus: two different poets for the two different passages; it would have been impossible for old homer singing without any written copy thus to forget himself, whatever a modern author might do with the manuscript or printed page before him. the other set of opinions will run just in the opposite direction: the connection between the fourth and the fifteenth books is perfect, as far as thought, narrative, and incident are concerned; the ancient listener and even the modern reader could pay no attention to the intricate points of chronology in the poem, especially when these points lay more than ten books or 5,000 lines apart from each other. there is no real sign of discrepant authorship, therefore, but rather a new indication of unity. the general theme of the book is, accordingly, the return of telemachus, and his uniting with his father and the swineherd, who are still further characterized in their relation. the structure of the book falls easily into three portions: first is the separation of telemachus from menelaus and helen till his departure on the ship; second is the end to which he is moving just now, the hut of eumæus, where are ulysses and the swineherd, the latter of whom tells his tale of discipline and is seen to be a hero too in his sphere; the third part is the coming of telemachus. i. in the departure of telemachus from sparta, we witness the divine and human elements again in co-operation. the former is represented by pallas who came down to sparta to "remind the son of ulysses of his return(_nostos_)." she appears to him in the night as he lies awake full of care; he is ready to see her plan and so she appears on the spot and tells it, not in the form of a dream. in the first place, he is to hasten home in order to save his substance, which is threatened with new loss through the possible marriage of penelope with one of the suitors, eurymachus. the son (through the mouth of pallas) here shows some bitter feeling toward his mother, whose mind be manifestly does not understand; she is altogether too subtle for her own boy, who has not seen through her disguises. in the second place pallas warns him against the ambush of the suitors, which was no doubt his own forecast of the situation. in the third place, the goddess sends him to the hut of the faithful swineherd, whose character he must have already known. in this speech of pallas we feel everywhere the subjective element; she is certainly the voice of telemachus, yet also the voice of the situation; the divine and human side easily come together, with a stronger tinge of the human than is usual in homer. still we must not forget that pallas, goddess of intelligence, suggests the processes of mind more directly than any other deity. thus we again see that pallas is the organizer of the poem; she brings its threads together through her foresight; she sends telemachus where he unites with ulysses and eumæus. the separation from menelaus and helen is told in the style of lofty hospitality. menelaus brings as his present a wine-bowl wrought by divine skill, "the work of vulcan," which was given him by the king of the sidonians--another glance back to phoenicia and its art. helen gives a garment of her own making, which thou shalt preserve as "a keepsake of helen" till the day of thy marriage, "when thy bride shall wear it." a most beautiful motive, worthy indeed of helen and of helen's art; telemachus is to transfer to his bride, and to her alone, his "keepsake of helen," his memory of her, his ideal gotten during this journey. finally helen appears as prophetess and foretells the total destruction of the suitors at the hands of returning ulysses. such is the last appearance of helen to telemachus, giving strong encouragement, suggesting in her two acts a new outlook for the youth both upon family and state. no wonder his words to her rise into adoration: "zeus so ordering, there at home i shall pray unto thee as unto a god." telemachus in his return will not pass through pylos lest he be delayed by the importunate hospitality of good old nestor. and indeed what can he gain thereby? he has already seen and heard the pylian sage. so he sends the latter's son home while he himself goes aboard his ship. but just before he sets sail, there comes "a stranger, a seer, a fugitive, having slain a man." theoclymenus it is, of the prophetic race of melampus, the history of which is here given. the victim of a fateful deed now beseeches telemachus for protection and receives it; the prophet hereafter will give his forewarnings to the suitors. yet he could not save himself from his own fate in spite of his foresight; so all the seers of the family of melampus have a strain of fatality in them; they foreknow, but cannot master their destiny. ii. the scene shifts (l. 301) to the hut of the swineherd, which is the present destination of telemachus. the reader beholds a further unfolding of the character of eumæus, in fact this portion of the book might be called his discipline or preparation to take part in the impending enterprise. ulysses still further tests the charity and humanity of the swineherd by offering to go to town in order to beg for his bread among the suitors, as well as to do their menial tasks. whereat eumæus earnestly seeks to dissuade him, reminding him of the insolence of those men and of their elegant servants in livery, and assuring him that "no one here is annoyed at thy presence, neither i nor the others." well may ulysses respond to such a manifestation of charity. "may thou be as dear to zeus, the father, as thou art to me!" the stranger now tests the swineherd's interest in and devotion to laertes and eurycleia, who are the parents of ulysses, the old father and mother of the house. so eumæus gives an account of his relation to them, as well as to ktimene, sister of ulysses; "with her i was reared, and was honored by her mother only a little less." eumæus will soon tell how he came so young to the family of laertes. indeed ulysses is moved by his narrative to ask just this question. it is to be noted that the report of the swineherd about penelope is not so certain; "from the queen i have had no kindly word or deed, since that evil fell upon her house--the haughty suitors." here lies one motive why ulysses must go to the palace and test penelope. thus eumæus shows his love for the family of ulysses, and responds deeply to the test of universal charity. very naturally rises the question as to the history of his life. what experience has called forth such a marvelous character? eumæus now gives his fateful story. the phoenician background is again employed, with its commerce in merchandise, with its stealing and selling of free, high-born people into slavery, with its navigation. the pith of the story is, a phoenician female slave, who had been stolen and bought by the king of the country, plays false to her master, steals his child and what valuables she can carry off, and escapes on a phoenician trading vessel after an intrigue with one of its crew. the captive woman avenged her wrong, but was struck on "the seventh day by diana, archer-queen," for her own double guilt. eumæus was that child, also stolen and enslaved, but he is her emphatic contrast; he has been able fully to digest his fate. the phoenician galley came to ithaca, "and there laertes purchased me." the swineherd is of royal birth and retains his more than royal character; in being the humblest he can rise to the highest. interesting touches of the phoenician traders are given: "sharp fellows, having myriads of trinkets in their ship:" surely it is the ancient semitic retailer of jewelry, going from town to town in his boat. then note specially "the cunning man who came to my father's house, showing a golden necklace strung with amber beads;" this amber was obtained doubtless through commerce from the baltic, by the phoenicians, whose workmanship is also suggested. "the palace servants and my mother took the trinket into their hands, turning it over and over; they kept gazing at it haggling about the price;" the same scene can be witnessed today in our own country towns when the jewish peddler appears in the household. in the present case, however, it was part of the scheme of stealing the child. eumæus says that his father ruled a city in the island of syria. but where is this syria? some think it is conceived by homer as lying in the extreme west, "where the sun turns;" but the sun turns anywhere. rather is its position eastward toward phoenicia; the taphian pirates who stole the sidonian woman and sold her into syria, dwelt not far from ithaca and preyed upon phoenician commerce, stealing and selling in the eastern mediterranean. certainly they could find little business of their kind in the west. some vague idea of the actual land of syria must have flashed in homer's mind; no more definite description is possible. it is plain, however, that the poet makes eumæus a foreigner, not a greek, whose birth-land lies beyond the hellenic boundary to the east. but he is not a phoenician, his character is different, and his people seem not to have been sea-faring. his fundamental trait is religiosity; he lives in the eternal presence of the divine ruler of the world. his character is that of the old testament; some of his utterances are strong reminders of the psalms. we cannot help reading in him something of david and of job; misfortune he here has had, but he retains an unshaken faith in the deity; intense wrestling he shows, but it has been with him the process of purification. he is not a greek at all; he has a hebrew character, not of the modern mercantile type, which resembles more the phoenician, but of the old hebrew strain. in those times of man-stealing, homer could easily have met him in one of the greek islands, a slave yet a spiritual prince, have drawn his portrait, and have heard his story substantially as here given. indeed we think we can trace in the swineherd's thoughts and sometimes in his expressions a marked monotheistic tendency. undoubtedly eumæus speaks fluently of the greek gods, as diana and apollo; especially does he mention and honor zeus, the supreme god; still he is prone to employ the word gods in the unitary sense of providence, and he repeatedly uses the singular _god_ without the article, as in the passage: "god grants some things and withholds others at his will, for he is all-powerful" (xiv. 444). and it is characteristic that he does not like helen, for thus he says in an outburst of anti-greek spirit: "o would that helen and her tribe had utterly perished, for whose sake so many fell!" (xiv. 68.) striking is his contrast herein with the phæacians, and with their love of the trojan conflict. we have already stated that this entire ithakeiad resembles the novel, giving pictures of the social life of the time, and elevating the humblest man into heroship. in like manner, this story of eumæus might almost be called a novelette, truly an homeric novelette interwoven into the greater totality of the novel here presented in the ithakeiad, and finally into the entire odyssey. it has its correspondence with the fairy tale of the previous portions of the poem, yet stands in sharpest contrast. here is no supernatural world far away, but it is the present, it is human life just now, and the hero lives before us. here are no superhuman beings, like calypso, circe, polyphemus, proteus; the environment, the coloring, the art-form are totally changed. nor is it an heroic tale of troy, with its order of gods, descending and interfering in human affairs; no grand exploits of arms, no mighty mustering of glorious warriors. not high and magnificent achilles in all the pride of his colossal individuality, but humble eumæus, a slave and a swineherd, has become the homeric hero. surely a new style, and a new world-view; yet surely homer's, not the work of any other man. it has been already made plain that we have passed from the idyl, and heroic epos, and the fairy tale of the first portions of the odyssey into the social romance, which takes the picture of society as its setting. every human being can now be made a slave; man-stealing, woman-stealing, child-stealing, give the motives for the strangest turns of destiny. already ulysses in his fictitious tale of the previous book has become a maker of the novelette; but eumæus tells a true tale of his own life, it has no disguise; he knows his past, he is aware of his origin. thus he is an example, showing how the man is still a fate-compeller in such a state of society. though a slave externally, he can still be a king within; though struck by the hardest blow of destiny he can still remain loyal to the divine order and obtain its blessing. it is interesting to note the significance of this phoenician background, with its universal commerce. the phoenician traded already in remote antiquity with the extremes of the aryan race, from india in the east to britain in the west, including the whole intervening line of aryan migration, persia, greece, italy, gaul. the aryan race is indeed a separative, self-repellent, distracted race, always on the move out of itself, without returning into itself. the phoenician, on the contrary, in his farthest voyages, came back home with news and merchandise; the remotest phoenician settlements kept up their connection with the mother country. deep is the idea of the return to the parent city in the semitic consciousness for all time; the phoenician returned anciently to tyre and sidon; the arab mahommedan returns to-day to mecca, home of the prophet; the jew experts to return to jerusalem, the holy city of his fathers. the entire odyssey may well be supposed to show a semitic influence, in distinction from the iliad, for the odyssey is the account of many returns and of the one all-embracing return to home and country. it is, therefore, very suggestive that the odyssey has this phoenician background of a world-commerce, which is only possible for a city whose people, going forth, come back to it as a center. moreover this world-commerce is a kind of unification of the ever-separating aryan race, a bond created through the exchange of commodities. thus the semitic character has always shown itself as the unifier and mediator of aryan peoples, first through an external tie of trade, which was the work of phoenicia, and, secondly, through the far deeper spiritual tie of religion, which was the later work of judea. the semitic mind has always been necessary to the inherently centrifugal aryan soul in order to bring it back to itself from its wanderings, inner and outer, and to reconcile itself with itself and with the divine order. the semite has been and still is the priest to all arya, by the deepest necessity of the spirit. another word we may add in this connection. the semitic race has also separated itself, and shown three main branches--phoenician, hebrew, arab--a sea-people, a land-people, and a sand-people. in all three cases, however, they have a returning and therewith a mediating character. in their wildest wanderings, on water, and in the desert, and in the soul, they have the power of getting back; and that which they do for themselves, they aid others in doing. so much by way of tracing the universal relations of this poem with its phoenician background of commerce as well as with its semitic character of eumæus. for, somehow, we cannot help seeing in this latter certain traits of the old hebrew. iii. the last part of the book returns to telemachus and his ship; he has escaped the men in ambush, and has reached the ithacan shore at a distance from the palace; he sends the vessel to the town while he goes to the hut of the swineherd in accord with the plan of the goddess. but he has on his hands the seer theoclymenus, whom he first thinks of sending to one of the suitors; but when the seer utters a favorable prophecy, telemachus sends him to one of his own friends for entertainment. a curious touch of policy; it was well to have the prophet in a friendly house, where he might be ready for service; even prophetic vision can be colored by personal attachments. _book sixteenth._ this book connects directly with the preceding book, and brings about not only the external meeting and recognition of father and son, but their spiritual fusion in a common thought and purpose. the scene is still laid in the swineherd's hut, but the swineherd himself must be eliminated at this point. the question rises, why does the poet hold it so necessary to keep the matter secret from eumæus? the care which homer takes with this object in view, is noteworthy. evidently the swineherd was not ready to participate, or would endanger the scheme. yet of his fidelity there could be no question. we have already stated our opinion on this subject. various external reasons may be suggested but the real reason lay in the character of eumæus. he was too sincere, open-hearted, transparent for those wily greeks; he might let out the great secret in pure simplicity of mind; he is their contrast just herein, he is not a greek. the situation demanded disguise, dissimulation, possibly downright lying; eumæus was not the man for that. such is his greatest honor, yet such is also his limit; if ulysses and telemachus were such as he, they would have all died nobly in their cause, but the suitors would have triumphed, and the institutional world of ithaca would have gone to the dogs. at least its rescue could not have taken place through them. such is the moral contradiction which now rises, and will continue to rise more and more distinctly to view throughout the rest of the poem. there are the two strands in the book which are the main ones of the poem, that of the father and son, and that of the suitors. both are here put together and contrasted with new incidents, which are leading inevitably to the grand culmination. these two strands we shall now briefly follow out in order. there is also a third portion, the return of eumaeus from the palace to the hut, which portion is short and unimportant. i. telemachus arrives at the hut of the swineherd, the dogs give him a friendly greeting in contrast to that which they give to ulysses--a fact which shows that the youth must have been in times past a good deal with eumæus. also the affectionate meeting of the two suggests the same thing. herein we note a reason for pallas sending him hither--the goddess and the youth coincided. of course the conversation soon turns toward the stranger present, the disguised ulysses. now occurs a subtle movement between father and son who are to be brought together. (1) first they are in a state of separation, but the disguised ulysses holds the bond of unification in his power. eumæus first tells to telemachus the fictitious cretan story concerning the stranger; then ulysses gives a note of his true self: "would that i were ulysses' son or the hero himself!" what then? "i would be an evil to those suitors." thus the father secretly stirs the spirit of the son, in fact spiritually identifies himself. the son sends off the swineherd on an errand to penelope, in order to announce his safe arrival from his journey to the mainland. in this way one obstacle is removed--the swineherd; now the second obstacle, the disguise is to be stripped away. (2) herewith occurs a divine intervention, hinting the importance of the present moment. pallas appears to ulysses, "but telemachus beheld her not;" why? "for not by any means are the gods manifest to all men." as already stated, ulysses has the key of the situation, and sees what is now to be done; telemachus does not see and will not see till his father's disguise be removed. so again the goddess pallas appears to the wise man and addresses him because the two are one in thought; no other person not in this oneness of the human and divine can see her. in like manner pallas appears to achilles, "seen by him alone," in the first book of the iliad; similar too is the case of telemachus when pallas comes to him among the suitors under the form of mentes in the first book of this odyssey (see p. 26). but just here is added a fact in strangest contrast with the foregoing view; "the dogs (as well as ulysses) saw the goddess; they barked not, but ran off whining through the gate in the opposite direction." in the old teutonic faith (and probably aryan) the dog can see a ghost, hence his unaccountable whine at times. the lower animals and even the elements recognize the approaching deity by some unusual commotion. but mark the contrast: the dogs ran in terror from the presence of the goddess; ulysses, observing her, "went out of the house and stood before her alongside the wall of the court." the rational man, beholding, must commune with the deity present, and not run off like a dog. if he does not see the goddess, as in the case with telemachus here, he is simply outside of her influence. pallas gives to ulysses the strong promise of help, reflecting his own internal condition. she transforms him, he appears a new man, nay a god to his son, "some divinity whose home is the broad heaven." then the recognition follows, with its various doubts and its emotional ups and downs. "in the breasts of both rose the desire of tears; they wept shrilly, and louder their screams than those of the eagle whose young have been stolen from its nest." lamentation is a trait of the homeric hero; in the present case it asserts its fullest right. but enough! let us pass from heroic tears to heroic deeds. (3) next comes the general plan of action. what have we to encounter? telemachus gives a catalogue of the suitors; they reach the surprising number of 108 persons plus 10 attendants, including the bard and the herald. we now begin to appreciate the greatness of the task. the ithacan people are helpless or hostile, the suitors have friends and relatives everywhere, yet they must be punished, they cannot be allowed to escape. but the aid for such an enterprise--whence? asks telemachus, and also the reader. listen to the answer of ulysses: "i shall tell thee, and thou bear it well in mind; think whether pallas with her father zeus be not sufficient for us, or shall i look about for some other defender?" such a believer has the skeptic become; he now has faith in the gods, and in a world order. it is also a lofty expression of belief in his divine mission; the spirit of eumæus, which dwells in that humble hut, has entered the heart of the hero. such are the two allies: pallas, wisdom, and zeus, fountain of the world's justice, which had been deeply violated by the suitors. telemachus in response, assents to his father's words, and acknowledges the supremacy of the gods. he also lays aside his doubt and shows himself in a spiritual harmony with his father, which must be antecedent to the deed. the next part of the plan is that ulysses in disguise shall go to the palace and see for himself the wrongs done to his house, and experience some of these wrongs in his own person. then too he can make preparations on the spot and select the time for striking. also he wishes to test a little further the wife penelope. another period of disguise is necessary in order to get rid of the necessity of disguise and vindicate the right. zeus is with him, he is the bearer of universal justice, which he is to establish anew; but pallas must also be with him in the act, for it requires all his skill and cunning and forethought. thus the father and son are united in spirit; the last obstacle, which was the disguise, is removed, and they behold each other as they are in truth. the recognition is not merely an external one of face and form, or even of the tie of kinship and affection; it is in both a recognition of the divine order of the world, which they are now called upon to maintain in their own persons, and to re-stablish in their country. ii. the scene passes from the hut of the swineherd to the palace, where the suitors soon hear of the safe return of telemachus. antinous also comes back, foiled and evidently angered; he proposes to the suitors that they should slay telemachus "in the fields or on the highway" wherever found, or renounce the suit for penelope in the palace: "let each one woo her from his own house with gifts." it is clear that such a violent measure as the assassination of the royal heir in his own territory finds small response even among the suitors. antinous says that the people are no longer friendly; he thinks, when they hear of the recent ambush, that they may rise and drive out the aggressors. still they do not rise, and probably antinous tried to frighten the suitors into his drastic method. but he did not succeed, amphinomus clearly voices their sentiment, and the council dissolves. soon it is seen that antinous has lost his cause. penelope appears and gives him a thorough tongue-lashing, in which she also tells his antecedents. "thy father came to us, a fugitive from the people," who were angry at him on account of his piratical misdeeds; "they wanted to kill him, and tear out his heart, and pillage his large wealth" evidently gotten unlawfully. "but ulysses restrained them," and now this is your gratitude: "you waste his property, woo his wife, slay his son, and worry me to death." antinous is true to his ancestry, he is still a pirate. strong words are these, which call forth a hypocritical reply from another suitor, eurymachus, which she probably saw through, for she goes into her upper chamber, where "she weeps for her dear spouse ulysses, till blue-eyed pallas cast upon her eyelids sweet sleep." the internal weakness of the suitors is exposed; it is manifest that they are divided among themselves. in fact, how can they have any unity? each wishes to win the fair prize, which can belong only to one; hence every other man is his rival, whom he tries to thwart. hence come jealousy and suspicion. the single bond they have in common is their wrong-doing, which they feel cannot much longer continue, with telemachus so active. iii. on the other hand, we pass to the hut of the swineherd, where the father and son show a complete unity of spirit and purpose. eumæus returns from his errand; he brings no news specially except that the suitors who formed the ambush have come back to the town. but he is not yet to be admitted into the grand secret; so pallas stood again near ulysses, "striking him with her staff she made him an old man in wretched rags." he resumes his disguise "lest the swineherd might recognize him and hasten to announce the fact to penelope, instead of keeping the secret looked in his bosom." so the kind-hearted, sincere eumæus cannot yet be entrusted with the important secret. _books xvii-xxiv._ the time has arrived for this exposition of the odyssey to be brought to a close with some degree of rapidity. it has already expanded itself beyond its original purpose; it, too, like ulysses, has asserted itself as limit-transcending. we shall try to indicate the general character of these remaining eight books, to find their place in the total organism of the poem, and then give a brief outline of each book separately. it has already often been stated that the odyssey is a return, an outer, but specially an inner return from the trojan war and from the alienation and disruption produced by the same. this return, narrated in the twenty-four books of the poem, divides itself into two equal halves, each containing twelve books. the first half moves about two centers, telemachus and ulysses; the former is to be trained out of his ignorance, the latter is to be disciplined out of his negative attitude toward institutional life, and thus be prepared to rescue institutional life. the first twelve books are, therefore, the getting rid of the destructive results caused by the trojan war and all war, in the human soul. still ulysses, with telemachus, is to do a deed of destruction, he is to destroy the suitors, who are themselves destructive of institutional order in ithaca. in a general way they are like the trojans, they are assailing the domestic and political life of the greek world; they too must be put down at home by the hero, as troy was put down abroad by him. but at troy he became negative through the long training of a ten years' war, the spirit of which he must get rid of before he can slay the suitors, for he is too much like them to be their rightful destroyer. this, then, is the discipline of the first twelve books: through the experience of life to get internally free of that destructive trojan spirit, to overcome the negative within, and then proceed to overcome it without. now this overcoming of the negative without (embodied in the suitors) is just the work of the last twelve books of the odyssey, which we have called the ithakeiad, as the scene is laid wholly in ithaca. internally both ulysses and telemachus are ready; they have now externally to make their world conform to their idea. the trend of the poem is henceforth toward the deed which destroys the outer negation, as hitherto the trend was toward the deed which overcame the inner negation. to be sure, the destruction of the suitors has hovered before the poem from the beginning; but in the second half it is explicit, is the immediate end of the action. this second half divides itself into two distinct portions. it being the direct movement toward the deed shows in the first portion the preparation of the instruments, which takes place at the hut of the swineherd. ulysses is alone, he must find out upon whose aid he can rely; his helpers must show not only strength of limb, but strength of conviction. two persons appear--his son and his swineherd; they believe themselves to be the bearers of a divine order as against the suitors; they are the army of three to whom the cowherd is to be hereafter added on manifesting his loyalty. this part of the poem has been unfolded in the preceding four books. the second portion of this second half of the poem, consisting of eight books, we are next to consider. ulysses has hitherto only heard of the excesses of the suitors; he is now to see them directly and to experience their violence in his own person. he is in disguise and gets full possession of the fact before he proceeds to the deed. the insolent, destructive conduct of the suitors is set forth in all fullness, as well as the subtle attempt of the wife to thwart them; then the blow falls which sweeps them and their deeds out of existence. restoration follows after this terrible act of vengence; ulysses, having done his great destructive work, is to show himself constructive, not simply the destroyer, but the healer and restorer. how can we best see the sweep of these eight books and their organic connection with the total odyssey? no mere formal division will answer, nor any external separation into parts. the inner movement of the thought is to be found and shown as the organizing principle. on the whole the joints of the structure are not so manifest as in the telemachiad and the ulyssiad; still they exist. already it has been often said that the essential character of the suitors is that of destroyers; ulysses is the destroyer of these destroyers; but in destroying destruction he is also the restorer. now just these three stages of the movement of the inner thought are the three organic divisions of the last eight books; that is, the thought organizes the poem. let us look more closely. i. the first five books (xvii-xxi) are devoted to revealing the suitors as destroyers to ulysses in person, though he be disguised. three strands are interwoven into the texture, which we may separate for the purpose of an examination. 1. the suitors are destroying what may in general be called the institutional world in its three leading forms: (1) property, (2) family, (3) state. to these may be added their disregard and even open defiance of the gods, who are the upholders, or rather the personified embodiment of all institutional life. hence the statement may be made that the suitors are, as far as their deeds go, the destroyers of the divine order of the world; they are spiritually negative. 2. the second strand is that of ulysses (to whom telemachus and the swineherd can be added) who is to behold with his own eyes, to experience in his own person, the character and acts of the suitors; then he is also to plan and prepare for their destruction. as he has overcome his own negative condition inwardly, in the spirit, he must be able to overcome the same condition outwardly, in the world. 3. the third strand is that of penelope, the wife, who is seeking to thwart the attempt of the suitors to make her marry one of themselves; thus she is heroically preserving the family. she, with the loyal part of her household, co-operates with ulysses, though not aware who he is. between the second and third strands are many interweavings, both being opposed to the suitors. penelope, to delay her marriage, proposes the bending of the bow, which gives the weapon and the opportunity to ulysses. (book xxi.) ii. the second stage of the grand movement is given in one book (xxii). this is the single bloody book of the poem, it makes up all deficiencies in the way of sanguinary grewsomeness. the destroying suitors are themselves destroyed by ulysses, who therein is destroyer. hence the blood-letting character of the book and of the deed; 116 men skin, 12 women hung, and one man mutilated unto death. iii. but the destroyer ulysses destroys destruction, and so becomes positive; in the last two books he is shown as the restorer of the institutional order which the suitors had assailed and were undermining. he restores the family (book xxiii), and the state (book xxiv). this is, then, the end of the return, indeed the end of the grand disruption caused by the trojan war, to which ulysses set out from ithaca twenty years before. the absence of the husband and ruler from home and country gave the opportunity for the license of the suitors. but the return has harmonized the distracted condition of the land; institutions, family and state, are freed of their conflict; even the gods, zeus and pallas (authority and wisdom) enforce the new order, bringing peace and concord. still, despite the bloody death of the suitors, there runs through this portion of the odyssey (the last eight books) a vein of charity, of humanity, sometimes even of sentiment, which seems to link the poem with our own age. yet the other side is present also; there is little pity for the unrighteous, and justice is capable of becoming cruel. the suitors and their set of servants are represented as unfeeling and inhuman; penelope and the whole loyal household on the other hand show sympathy with poverty and misfortune. such, indeed, has been their discipline, that of adversity, which softens the heart toward the victims of hard luck. the disguise of ulysses is continued, and also the craft of penelope. the moral questioning which these two characters have always roused does not diminish. the hardest practical problem of life comes to the front in their case. both are willing to meet unjust violence with dissimulation, till they get the power to act openly. they put down a dishonest world with dishonesty, and then proceed to live honestly. it is another phase of that subtle play of the negative, with which ulysses had to grapple repeatedly in fableland, and of which the odyssey is full. every situation seems to have its intricate ethical problem, which the reader has to solve as he solves such questions in actual life. our opinion upon this element in the poem we have already given, and need not repeat it here. we must note that ulysses still keeps up his romancing in order to explain his presence in ithaca and his beggarly appearance. he introduces a kind of story, which we have called the novelette in distinction from the fairy tale. the scene is usually thrown back eastward to crete, the trojan war furnishes the background, the famous cretan hero idomeneus is usually in some way connected with the stranger who is speaking. no less than five such novelettes are found in the last twelve books--some long, some brief. he tells one to pallas (xiii. 256), to eumæus the longest one (xiv. 199), to antinous a short interrupted one (xvii. 425), to penelope (xix. 172), finally one to his father laertes (xxiv. 304), in which the scene seems to be changed to the west from the mention of sicania. for the reader who may wish to follow out in detail these eight books, we append a general survey of each, in which the thought and the structure are suggested, yet by no means elaborated. we have in the preceding pages given quite fully what we deem the main points of the odyssey; there remains only this winding-up of the work in a rapid summary. _book seventeenth._ we now pass from the country and the hut of the swineherd to the town and the palace of the king. this is an important transition, and evidently marks a turning-point in the last twelve books of the odyssey. the change of location brings us to the scene of the forthcoming deed, and into the presence of the two conflicting sides. the structure of the book moves about two centers, telemachus and ulysses. i. telemachus is first to start for the city, where he arrives, and is received with great joy by the household. the mother asks him whether he has obtained any tidings from his father. but he shuns her question, bids her make fresh vows to the gods, and goes off to look after his guest, the prophet theoclymenus. the suitors throng about him, but do him no harm; a number of his friends are near at hand, and the suitors are divided among themselves. after his return to the palace, telemachus tells his mother the story of his journey. first he went to pylos and "saw nestor there," and held intercourse with the wise old man of the greeks, which was certainly a memorable event in the life of the youth. but nestor could tell him nothing about the present condition or dwelling-place of ulysses, so the son was sent onwards to sparta, to menelaus, where "i saw argive helen, for whose sake the greeks and trojans suffered many evils by will of the gods." menelaus tells telemachus the words of proteus concerning his father ulysses, gently touching the story of the nymph calypso, whereat the queen was deeply moved. his news is that his father cannot return. at this point the prophet comes in with his prophecy. "i declare that ulysses in his own land again, sitting or creeping about in secret; he is taking note of these evil deeds just now, and plans destruction for the suitors." the response of penelope shows her mind. "may thy prophetic word be fulfilled!" it is well to note the art with which this prophet has been brought to the palace of ulysses to foreshadow the coming event. moreover this whole passage connects with the third and fourth books, which recounted the journey of telemachus to pylos and sparta. of course the school of dissectors have sought to show the entire narrative here to be an interpolation by a later hand. one says that the brief allusion to the trip is tiresome to the reader. as if homer composed for readers! but what reader ever found these few lines tiresome? the whole account of the son to the mother is one of the links which bind the odyssey into unity, hence the wrath against it in certain quarters. ii. the second part of the present book gives the movements of ulysses, and is more important and more fully elaborated than the preceding part. the hero is in disguise, he is to take his first glimpse of the state of affairs in his palace. he will experience in his own person the wrongs of the suitors and their adherents; he will apply a test to bring out their character. this test is that of humanity, of charity toward a beggar; how will the suitors behave toward him? while he is on the way to the city with eumæus, he has his preliminary skirmish. they meet the goatherd melanthius, who at the sight of the beggar breaks out into abuse. there is an inhuman note in his speech, which we may regard as one result of the present disorder of the country. doubtless the swineherd and the goatherd were rivals, and showed a professional jealousy; but melanthius had extracted from his humble calling a disposition quite opposite to that of eumæus, and had become disloyal to his master's house. the approach to the palace is indicated by the song of the bard and the noise of feasting guests. still the disguised ulysses is recognized by one living object: his old dog argo, who dies on the spot out of joy at seeing his master again. full of sentiment and tenderness is the description; it has a modernity of touch which will be often noticed in this second half of the odyssey. much comment has been bestowed upon the incident; but its most striking characteristic is its symbolism. the old dog, neglected now, full of vermin, hardly able to crawl, yet loyal in his heart; why should he not receive the praise of eumæus, who tells of his former skill in the chase! the dog argo images the house of ulysses at present; to such straits has fidelity come. a famous statement here by eumæus cannot be passed over: "the day which makes the man a slave, zeus takes half his worth away." true generally of men, but not of the slave who utters it, he being the fate-compeller. ulysses now applies his test of charity to the suitors. he goes around to them, asking for alms, like a beggar, that he might observe them all, and "know who was better and who was worse." but in the end not one of them was to be spared. such was the supreme test, that of charity; how will the suitors treat the poor beggar? will they behave toward him as eumæus has? not by any means; the test calls out the worst suitor of the lot, antinous, who finally hurls a stool at the supposed intruder. the other suitors give something, not their own; still they share in the guilt. is this test of charity, selected by the poet here, a true test of such characters? one result of the present violation of law and order is inhumanity, cruelty, disregard of the fellow-man. especially marked is their contrast with eumæus, who, in response to the harshness of antinous, says: "the famous men of earth (such as the seer, the doctor, the builder, the bard) are invited to the feast; no one would invite a beggar to an entertainment." still the beggar is here to be invited. a ring of modern sentiment is surely heard in this passage; the subjective element of christendom seems embodied in that swineherd a thousand years before its time. the poet does not leave out of this book the previous tendency of ulysses to romancing. in the talk with antinous he begins another tale or rather the old one, with egypt and cyprus in the background. it is, in substance, the story of the attack on the ciconians, which ulysses cannot help telling when he looks back toward his trojan period. here again it is truth in the form of fiction. meantime the uproar has called forth penelope, who desires to see the strange beggar. the wish is conveyed to ulysses, who artfully requests that the interview be deferred till night-fall; the wife might see through his disguise. the time for this recognition has not yet come. she wishes to hear of her husband, thinks of him in some such pitiable plight as this beggar is in; she shows sympathy. a charitable disposition is indeed a characteristic of the whole household, nurses and all; misfortune has brought its blessing. herein the contrast with the suitors is emphatic, they are a stony-hearted set, trained by their deeds to violence and inhumanity. eumæus praises the minstrel talent of ulysses; the poet endows his hero with the gift of song in this poem; compare the praise given by alcinous to the singer of fableland. so achilles in the iliad was found by the embassy singing the glory of heroes. nor must we pass by that deeply-grounded belief in the good-luck which comes from a sneeze. telemachus sneezes at the right moment, and penelope interprets the omen, with a smile, however, which hints a touch of humorous incredulity. finally we may reflect upon that true homeric view of the world indicated in the words of telemachus: "all these matters will be cared for by myself and the immortals." these are the two sides working together throughout the poem. _book eighteenth._ ulysses, as beggar, has now gotten a foothold in his own house. he has made the transition in disguise from the hut to the palace; he has tried his preliminary test upon the suitors, the test of charity, and found out their general character. he is not recognized, on account of external disguise in part; yet this disguise has its internal correspondence. the present book is one of warnings; on all sides the suitors are admonished of the day of wrath which is coming. in homeric fashion they are told to change, to repent, to cease their wrong-doing. we observe three parts: first is the conflict with the beggar irus, foreshadowing the conflict and outcome with the suitors; second is the appearance of penelope, the female ulysses in craft and in disguise, here hoodwinking the suitors; third is the male ulysses, in craft and in disguise, observing, testing, planning fate for the guilty. i. ulysses has assumed the part of a beggar, but he finds a real beggar on the ground ready to dispute his right. irus, this mendicant, has a character on a par with the suitors, violent, inhuman, insolent; he is, moreover, one with the suitors in taking other people's property for nothing. there is no doubt that the poet casts an image of the suitors in the portrait of irus, who acts toward ulysses the beggar, as they do toward ulysses the ruler. it is manifest by word and deed that his humble life has not given him the training to charity. the result of the competition between the real and the disguised beggar is a fight, which is urged on by the suitors for the sport of the thing; antinous is specially active in this business, which is a degraded olympic contest. homer too shows his love of the athlete by his warm description of the body and limbs of ulysses, who "showed his large and shapely thighs, his full broad shoulders, his chest and sinewy arms," when he stripped for the contest. there can be only one outcome of such a fight under such circumstances, especially in an heroic poem. but is not ulysses himself inhuman and uncharitable toward his poor beggar rival? certainly he does not deal with him gently, and the modern reader is apt to think that ulysses ought now to have his own test of charity applied to himself. still his defense is at hand: irus sided with the suitors, had their character, telemachus says they favored him; he is harsh and merciless to his seeming fellow-beggar, and so he gets his own, though ulysses at first warns him, and wishes to be on good terms with him: "i do not speak or do thee any wrong, nor do i envy thee getting alms; this threshold is large enough for both of us; thou art a beggar as well as i. so beware my wrath." surely a sufficient warning, which, if unheeded, draws down the fateful consequences. but the chief justification of the poet lies in the fact that this contest with irus is sent before the main conflict as a prototype and a warning. the suitors looked on and saw the miserable beggar completely undone; "they threw up their hands and nearly died laughing;" a case of blind fatuity, for they were soon to be in the place of irus, every one of them. a little later telemachus suggests the connection: "would that the suitors might droop their heads overcome in our house, as now irus sits at the hall gate with drooping head like a drunken man, and cannot stand erect or walk home, since his dear limbs have been loosened." another note of warning is given specially to amphinomus, who had extended a very friendly salutation to ulysses after the victory, and who was the most honorable man of the suitors. ulysses again resorts to fiction in order to convey his lesson, "many were the wrongs i did;" hence my present condition. "let no men ever work injustice," such as these suitors are guilty of; the avenger "i now declare to be not far away from his friends and his country." hence the warning: "may some god bring thee home" at once, for bloody will be the decision. but amphinomus does not obey, though "his mind foreboded evil;" he remained in the fateful company and afterwards fell by the hand of telemachus. ii. the real person for whose possession this whole contest is waged is now introduced--penelope. she appears in all her beauty; pallas interferes divinely in order to heighten the same, making her "more stately in form and fairer than the ivory just carved." she is indeed the embodiment of all that is beautiful and worthy in that ithacan life; loyalty to husband, love of her child, devotion to family, the strongest institutional feeling she shows, with no small degree of artifice, of course. just now she reproves her son for having permitted the recent fight: "thou hast allowed a stranger guest to be shamefully treated." thus she shows her secret unconscious sympathy with her husband in disguise. then she turns her attention to the suitors. she alludes to the parting words of her husband as he set out for troy: "when thou seest thy son a bearded man, marry whom thou wilt and leave the house." the time has come when she has to endure this hateful marriage; how the thought weighs upon her heart! but we catch a glimpse of her deeper plan in the following: "the custom of suitors in the olden time was not such as yours; they would bring along their own oxen and sheep and make a feast for the friends of the maiden whom they wooed, and give her splendid gifts; they consumed not other folk's property without recompense." what does all this mean? one result takes place at once. the suitors all hasten to bring her their presents, and thus conform to the good old time and to her opinion. great was the hurry: "each dispatched his herald to bring a gift." does the poet hint through a side glance the real state of the case? hear him: "ulysses wad delighted when he saw her wheedling the suitors out of their gifts and cajoling their mind with flattering speech, while her heart planned other things." cunning indeed she has and boundless artifice; what shall we make of her? as already often said, craft is her sole woman's weapon against man's violence, and she uses it with effect for the defense of her home and her honor. is she justified? is such deception allowable under the circumstances? thus the poem puts the test to the modern reader, and makes him ponder the moral problem of life. one other point we should note in this speech of penelope to the suitors. she says that their method of wooing was not the accustomed way; they had no right to expect such entertainment for such a body of men. they had the right of suit, but it must be conducted in a lawful manner. thus they are violating custom, or making it a pretext for doing injustice. but she meets violence with cunning, and rude force with craft. iii. ulysses now takes note of another phase of the wrong done to his household by the suitors; they debauch the female servants, of whom melantho is an example. the seeming beggar wishes to stay all night by the fires kindled in the palace, and take care of them, instead of the maids who usually looked after them. this plan of his evidently interferes with an existing arrangement, hence the abusive words of melantho toward him first, and then the scoffing speech of eurynomus, her lover, who lets fly at him a footstool which hits the cupbearer. general confusion results, in the midst of which telemachus commands order which is seconded by amphinomus. after a cup of wine, all retire to their homes. but ulysses has got an inkling of what is transpiring between the suitors and some of the maid-servants. hereafter we shall see that both share in the punishment. _book nineteenth._ this is a strong book of its kind. penelope is the center, her difficulties are shown anew, moreover they are about to reach their culmination. the husband disguised here tests the wife, and finds out by his own personal observation her fidelity. her womanly instincts are still intact, in spite of the dissolute surroundings. ulysses discovers that he is not to meet with the fate of agamemnon on his return home. from the preceding book, which was occupied with the external conflicts in the palace, we move in the present book more and more to the heart of the business, which is the union in the hearts of husband and wife. the oneness of the family after long separation of its two members is the ethical theme, showing that such union is eternal, as far as the eternal can be shown in time. two divisions we shall mark: ulysses and his son telemachus first, then ulysses and his wife penelope. i. the two men, father and son, are seen preparing for the conflict which is drawing on--just that being the duty of men. the weapons which were hanging on the walls of the banqueting-room are removed in the absence of the suitors and of the servants. also a pretext is framed for their removal. moreover "pallas, holding before them her golden lamp, made very beautiful light." certainly the goddess was there, the scene shows her in every part; "such is the wont of the olympians," says ulysses; divine illumination descends upon a work of this kind. ii. but by far the longest portion of the book is devoted to the interview between ulysses and penelope. telemachus goes off to his chamber to rest for the night; ulysses is now received by his wife at the hearth. the various turns of this lengthy account we shall throw into four divisions. 1. by way of introduction, the faithless handmaid melantho again shows her character in a harsh speech to ulysses, "get out, you beggar! will you still keep sneaking through the house by night to spy out women?" so she reveals plainly what she is, and even mentions the test which she cannot stand. ulysses in his reply enforces charity: "i was once rich, but i gave the poor wanderer alms." beware of the day of reckoning: such is his repeated warning to all these people. penelope also gives a sharp reproof to the shameless handmaid, and intimates the fate impending: "thou hast done a deed which thy head shall atone for." it is again to be noted that the guilty are the inhuman, while the faithful have charity. penelope specially shows this trait in the present book, though her threat to melantho is not gentle. quite as ulysses served irus, penelope is ready to serve melantho; both can become uncharitable toward the uncharitable; both can meet evil with evil, and fight the negative with negation. 2. the main purpose of this portion of the interview is to furnish penelope with hope. she seems on the point of giving up the long contest, she has played her last stratagem against the suitors. now she must choose one of them, her parents urge it, her son demands it; there seems no escape, though she hates the marriage like black death. in such a frame of mind, the disguised ulysses is to divert her thoughts with a story, to gain her confidence in his honesty, and to give a strong promise of her husband's speedy return. the manner in which he puts these three points in succession is worthy of study. first, he must give some account of himself, of his lineage and of his connections. here he employs his old fiction, he feigns a tale, putting the scene into crete, and allying himself with the famous stock of minos, as well as with the well-known cretan hero idomeneus so often celebrated in the iliad, whose brother he claimed to be. "there i saw ulysses and entertained him." this story of his life has an analogy to what he told eumæus (book xiv. 199) and antinous (book xvii. 425). all three differ in details, being adjusted to the person and the occasion; still all are cast into the same general mould, with the scene placed in the east on the borderland toward phenicia and with the trojan war in the background. it is another homeric novelette suggesting a life of adventure on sea and land, and showing sparks of that enterprising greek spirit, of which the odyssey is the best record. but the poet adds: "so he went on fabricating lies like truth;" which indicates that he told more than is in the text and completed his story. in the second place, penelope applies her test, for she is not so credulous as to believe every wandering story-teller: "describe me the garments he had on." truly a woman's test. it is needless to say that ulysses responds with great precision. she, however, had no suspicion, which might arise from such a complete account. it is no wonder that penelope proposed to entertain this beggar guest, one who has been so hospitable to her husband, of whom she declares in an outburst of despair: "i never shall behold him returning home." at this point the disguised ulysses makes his third and principal speech to his wife, imparting to her the hope that ulysses will return. this completes his story, introducing the thesprotians again (as in other tales) and the oracle of dodona. he almost lets the secret out: "he is alive and will soon be here; not far off is he now, i swear it." not much further could disguise be carried. still penelope remains skeptical: "i must think he will not come home." her hard lot, however, has not hardened her heart, but softened it rather; she reveals her native character in the words here spoken (bryant's translation):- short is the life of man, and whoso bears a cruel heart, devising cruel things, on him men call down evil from the gods while living, and pursue him when he dies, with scoffs. but whoso is of generous heart, and harbors generous aims, his guests proclaim his praises far and wide to all mankind, and numberless are they who call him good. 3. having been brought so near to a discovery, we next come to an actual discovery by the nurse eurycleia. she is commanded by penelope to bathe the beggar's feet, which she does with no little sympathy and lamentation. the character of the nurse is in a certain sense the echo of that of penelope, the echo in emotion, and in fidelity, if not in intelligence. she gives way to her feelings, she recalls the image of ulysses, whom she nursed, and addresses him as present. she beholds in the stranger the resemblance at the start. "i have never yet seen any one so like ulysses as thou art in body, voice and feet." we now observe that ulysses really selects eurycleia, "a certain old woman, discreet, who has endured as much as i have: she may touch my feet" (line 346). he sought for some confidant among the servants, one who might be needed for important duties before and during the fight; eurycleia is chosen, since ulysses knew that she would discover the scar on his foot and thus recognize him. all of which takes place, ulysses exacts secrecy, and she replies, giving a hint of her character as well as the reason why she was chosen: "thou knowest my firmness, i shall hold like the solid rock or iron." there is a long narrative pertaining to the manner in which ulysses received the wound which caused the scar. much fault has been found with this story for various reasons, but it gives a certain relief as well as epical fullness to the movement of the book. it is, however, one of those passages which may have been interpolated--or may not, and just there the argument stands. it traces the character of ulysses back to his grandfather antolycus, the most cunning of mortals, and also gives the etymology (fanciful probably) of the name of ulysses. (odysseus, the greek form of ulysses, is here derived from a greek word meaning _to be angry_.) 4. after the bath ulysses returns to the hearth where penelope is still sitting. she tells her dream of the eagle which destroyed her geese, and which then spoke by way of interpretation: "the geese are the suitors and i, once the eagle, am now thy husband." such is the deep-lying presentiment of penelope, indicated by the dream, which crops out in spite of her declared skepticism. note that she dreams not only the dream but also dreams its interpretation; surely she is conscious of some hope now. the legend at the end of the book, which tells of the two gates of dreams, one of ivory and one of horn, has roused much curiosity among readers about its purport, and has inspired much imitation from later poets. through the gate of horn (dimly transparent) comes the true dream; through the gate of ivory (polished on the outside, but letting no light through) comes the false dream. such is the more common explanation, but eustathius derives the whole story from two puns on greek words for horn and ivory. at any rate there are the two sorts of dreams, one getting the impress of the future event, the other being merely subjective. but penelope has another suggestion, which is found widely scattered in folk-lore, the bending of the bow. this incident, however, is developed in a later book. it is one of her schemes to defer the hated marriage, after the new hope given by the stranger. she will not yet give up. _book twentieth._ this book is devoted to describing more fully the situation in the house of ulysses just before the slaying of the suitors. the guilty and the guiltless are indicated anew, with fresh incidents; especially the fatuity of the suitors is set forth in a variety of ways. the scene is in the palace. the book may be divided into three portions, which deal with (1) the royal pair, (2) the servants faithful and faithless, (3) the suitors at their banquet. i. ulysses is lying on the porch, restless, unable to sleep; he sees the disloyal women of the household come forth to the embraces of the suitors. he commands himself: "endure it, heart; thou hast borne worse than this." pallas has at last to come and to answer his two troublesome thoughts: "how shall i, being only one, slay the suitors, being many?" and still, that is not the end. "how shall i escape afterward, if i succeed?" wherein we may note already a hint of the last book of the odyssey. pallas reproves him, yet gives him assurance. "if fifty bands of men should surround us," still we shall win, "for i am a god, and i guard thee always in thy labors." whereupon ulysses at once went to sleep. the wife penelope is also having her period of anxiety and of weeping for her husband; she prays to diana and wishes for death, being awake. but when asleep, her unconscious nature asserts itself: "this very night a man like him lay by me, my heart rejoiced, i thought it no dream." such is the contrast between her waking and her sleeping state; in the one her skepticism, in the other her instinct manifests itself. ii. we now pass to quite a full survey of the servants of the household. female slaves have to grind the corn to make bread for the suitors; one of these slaves is still at her task, though past daybreak, she being the weakest of all. standing at her hand-mill she utters the ominous word: "o zeus, ruler, fulfill this wish for me wretched: may the present feast of the suitors be their last, they who have loosed my limbs with painful toil in grinding their barley meal!" thus the prayer of the poor overworked slave-woman calls down the vengeance of the gods, giving the word of friendly omen to the avenger. certainly a most powerful motive; but again we think, how modern it sounds! yet ancient too the thought must have been, for here it stands in homer truly prophetic of many things. eurycleia is the controlling power among the handmaids, of whom there was a large number; "twenty went to the spring to fetch water, while others were busy about the house," preparing for the coming banquet. the swineherd eumæus came with three fat porkers; his disloyal counterpart, melanthius, also appeared with goats for the feast; both again show their character to ulysses. the cowherd philoetius is now introduced, in a full account; he is one of the faithful, has charity for the beggar, and shows his fidelity in a number of points. the beggar assures him: "ulysses will return, thou shalt see him slaying those suitors," whereupon philoetius volunteers his aid. thus the forces are assembling; the two sides, loyal and disloyal, are separating more and more, preparatory to the grand struggle. ulysses in his disguise has discovered those upon whom he can depend. but the banquet is ready, the suitors, who have been plotting against the life of telemachus, enter; they are divided among themselves, and can show no concerted action. iii. this banquet is noticeable, inasmuch as telemachus asserts the mastery in his own house and defies the suitors. he honors the beggar as his guest, and gives warning that nobody insult the poor stranger, "lest there be trouble." a number of suitors show their ill feeling; one of them, named ktesippus, flings a bullock's foot at ulysses "for a hospitable present," at which the latter "smiled in sardonic fashion," but said nothing. telemachus, however, reproves the agressor with great spirit, and asserts himself anew against all deeds of violence. one of the more reasonable suitors, agelaus, makes a speech, which commends telemachus but insists upon his ordering his mother "to marry the man who is best and who will give most presents." in reply telemachus declares that he does not hinder the choice of his mother, but that he will not force her to marry. "that may god never bring about." (_theos_ without article.) now follows a series of miraculous signs, prodigies, mad doings, which prefigure the coming destruction. insane laughter of the suitors, yet with eyes full of tears, and with hearts full of sorrow: what does it all forbode? here comes the seer theoclymenus with a terrible interpretation uttered in the true hebrew prophetic style: "the hall i see full of ghosts hastening down to erebus; the sun in heaven is extinguished, and a dark cloud overspreads the land." the suitors bemock the prophet, who leaves the company with another fateful vision: "i perceive evil coming upon you, from which not one of you suitors shall escape." more taunts are flung at telemachus who now says nothing; he, his father, and his mother, witness the mad banquet, which is a veritable feast of belshazzar, and which has also its prophet. the hebrew analogy is striking. _book twenty-first._ the test presented in many a tale is here introduced at the turning-point of destiny. the bending of the bow and skill in the use thereof are incidents in the folk-lore of every people. the theme is naturally derived from a social condition, in which the bow and arrow are the chief weapons of defense and offense, employed against human foes and wild animals. hence the strong man, the hero, is the one able to bend the strong bow and to use it with dexterity. such a man uses the chief implement of his time and people with the greatest success, hence he is the greatest man. so we have the test of bending the bow, which simply selects the best man for the time and circumstances. in recent interpretations of mythology, this employment of the bow and arrows has been connected with the sun and its rays. ulysses is declared to be really a sun-god, a form of apollo, deity of archery; he shoots his arrows which are sunbeams and destroys the suitors, who are the clouds obstructing his light, and wooing his spouse, the day or the sky. it is also noteworthy that on this very day of the slaughter of the suitors, there is a festival in ithaca to apollo, god of light and archery. this is usually regarded as the new moon (_neomenios_) festival. antinous refers to it (l. 259) and proposes to defer the contest on that account. but ulysses is made to shoot on the festal day of the sungod. there is no doubt that mythology is closely connected with nature, out of which it develops. in the vedic hymns we see this connection in the most explicit manner, and threads of the old aryan mythus can often be picked out in homer. still we must recollect that it was the archer man who first projected the archer god out of himself, and it is no explanation of ulysses to say that he represents the sun-god; rather the sun-god represents him. moreover, the ethical purpose of ulysses in slaying the suitors is the soul of the poem, which is to find its adequate interpretation in that purpose and in that alone. the incident of bending the bow is wrought into a grand scheme of indicating the ethical order of the world. the three divisions of the book we shall briefly note, observing how the bow rejects the unfit, and selects the right man. i. it is pallas (not apollo, the archer) who started in the mind of penelope this scheme of testing the suitors. why a goddess here? it is first a chance thought of the woman, but then it becomes an important link in the movement of divine nemesis; hence the poet, according to this custom, traces the inspiration of the idea to a deity. the history of the famous bow is given with an especial delight in details. penelope herself goes to the room where the armor of the house was kept, gets the bow, and announces the contest to the suitors. the man who can bend the bow and send the arrow through the twelve rings, is to bear her away as his bride. the trial is made, no suitor is able to bend the weapon. interesting is the prophet among the suitors, leiodes, who tries his hand, yet gives the warning: "this bow upon this spot will take from many a prince the breath of life." he foresees and forewarns, but still acts the transgressor; he prophesies death to the suitors, but remains himself a suitor, and so perishes in accord with his own prophecy. ii. ulysses, going to one side with the cowherd and swineherd (philoetius and eumæus), whose loyalty has been so conspicuous, now discloses himself to them, and assigns their duties in the approaching conflict. "i know that you alone of the servants (men) have desired my return." he will give them wife and property if he conquers the suitors, "and to me ye shall be as companions and brothers of telemachus." deserving to be adopted into the royal house of ulysses they both are, being of this little army of four against more than a hundred enemies. eumæus is to put the bow into the hands of ulysses, after the suitors have tried the test; philoetius is to fasten the gates that none escape. iii. after the suitors have failed to bend the bow and a delay is proposed, ulysses, the beggar, comes forward and asks to make the trial. violent opposition rises on part of the suitors, but penelope in two speeches insists that he shall try. here again we must ascribe to her unconscious nature some strong affinity with the ragged man before her. she praises the form of the stranger and notes his noble birth, though she denies the possibility of herself becoming his bride. still she shows a deep attraction for him, which she cannot suppress. telemachus now takes the matter in hand, orders his mother out of the way somewhat abruptly (since the fight is soon to start), and bids the bow to be carried to ulysses in face of the outcries of the suitors. eurycleia, the nurse, is commanded to fasten the doors of the house; now we see why ulysses let her recognize him by the scar. meanwhile philoetius fastens the gates of the court. apparently there is no escape for the suitors; ulysses has the bow; he has tested its quality and possesses a quiver full of arrows. such is the famous deed of bending the bow, which is a symbolic act pointing out and selecting the hero. ulysses is revealed by it to the suitors even before he calls out his name and throws off his disguise; he performs the test, he shoots through the rings without missing, he has strength and skill for the emergency. if hitherto stress has been laid upon his mind and cunning, now his athletic side is brought to the front. but it required all his intelligence to reach the point at which his will is to act. we have now gone through what may be called the first stage of this final part of the odyssey. the suitors have fully shown their destructive spirit, disregarding property, family, state, the gods. ulysses has seen and felt in person their wrongs; their negative career has reached its last deed, he has the bow in his hands and is ready for the work of retribution. such is the general sweep of the last five books; but now the destructive deeds of the suitors are to meet with a still mightier destruction. _book twenty-second._ the final act of justice, the day of judgment, perchance the crack of doom; such conceptions have long been familiar to man and still are; in the present book they find one of their most striking embodiments. that for which so long preparation has been made, is now realized: the vindication of the ethical order of the world. there is, however, little feeling for that charity and humanity before noticed; stern, inflexible, merciless justice is the mood and meaning of this piece of writing. the book has essentially two parts: the punishment of the guilty men (suitors and servants) with the sparing of the innocent, and the punishment of the guilty women (servants) with the sparing of the innocent. thus in both parts there is the penalty, yet also the discrimination, according to the deed. i. the first part is mainly a battle, an homeric battle, and reminds the reader of many a combat in the iliad. of the conflict with the suitors here described we can discern three stages, which are marked also by the use of different weapons, the bow, the spear, and the sword. (1) the first stage of the battle opens with the slaying of antinous, the ringleader of the band, who is pierced by an arrow from the bow of ulysses. the crowd threatens ulysses, who now utters to them what may be called their last judgment, announcing who he is, and his purpose to punish their crimes: "dogs! you thought i would not come back from troy, and therefore you devoured my substance, debauched my maid-servants; and wooed my wife while i was still alive. you feared not the gods, nor the vengeance of man afterwards; now destruction hangs over you all." this may be taken as a statement of the ethical content of the poem from the mouth of ulysses himself at the critical moment. the suitors feared not the gods, were violators of the divine order, for which violation man was to punish them. again the two sides, the divine and human, are put together. in vain eurymachus, a spokesman for the suitors, offers amends, guilt cannot now buy itself free when caught. ulysses answers: "if thou shouldst offer all that thou hast and all that thy father has, and other gifts, i would not desist." so eurymachus, perishes by the second arrow and still another suitor, amphinomus is pierced by the spear of telemachus. thus three leaders are slain in this preliminary stage. (2) the second stage of the conflict begins by telemachus bringing a shield, two spears, and a helmet for his father, whose arrows are not enough for the enemies. also he brings armor for the cowherd and swineherd, as well as for himself; thus the four men get themselves fully equipped. but in order to make a fair fight, it is necessary that the suitors be armed, in part at least. melanthius, the goatherd, finds his way to the chamber where the arms are deposited. arms for twelve he brings, and then goes for more, when he is caught. but now pallas has to appear in the form of mentor, in order to put courage into the heart of ulysses. the first armed set of suitors advance and throw their javelins without effect, while the four on the side of ulysses kill four men. four more suitors are slain in a fresh onset, then two more; now their store of weapons is exhausted. thirteen mentioned here by name have fallen beside those unnamed ones whom the arrows of ulysses slew. the most prominent suitors are weltering in their blood, there are no more weapons, the result is a panic. (3) this is the third stage of the battle. a large majority of the suitors, probably 80 or more out of the 108 plus 10 attendants are still alive, though without weapons and completely paralyzed with terror. "pallas held from the roof her man-destroying ægis, their hearts trembled with fear, they fled through the palace like a drove of cattle." the four men now use their swords upon the terrified, defenseless crowd, and cut them down. leiodes, the soothsayer of the suitors, begs for mercy and recounts his attempts to restrain their violent deeds; vain is his prayer, he perishes with his company of brigands, "for if thou wert their soothsayer, thou must often in my palace have prayed the gods against my return" and for the suitors. thus the priestly man too is involved in the net, he knew the wrong, yet remained the chaplain of that godless company. two, however, are saved, the guiltless. the bard, who "sings for gods and men" is spared, because he sang "by necessity for the suitors, and not for sake of gain;" also telemachus intercedes for the herald medon, who "took care of me as a child," a beautiful gleam on this ghastly scene. from ulysses, however, we hear the moral of the event proclaimed, which the reader may take unto himself: "from this thou mayst know and tell to another how much better well-doing is than evil-doing." so speaks the slayer over these corpses, which utterance we may at least regard as an attempt of the poet once more to enforce the ethical purpose of his work. not a single living suitor or attendant can be found skulking anywhere, and none have escaped. ii. having completed his task in regard to the guilty men, ulysses now turns his attention toward the guilty women of his household. for this purpose eurycleia is called, and is brought to him; when she sees the deadly work, she shouts for joy. ulysses restrains her: "it is an unholy thing to exult over the slain." here again the ethical nature of this act is emphasized: "the decree of the gods and their own evil deeds overwhelmed these men; they paid respect to no human being, high or low, who approached them." yet there are modern writers who can see no ethical purpose in the odyssey. eurycleia gives her report: out of fifty serving maids in the palace, "twelve have mounted the car of shamelessness." these latter are now called, are compelled to carry out the dead (among whom are their lovers), and to make clean the place of slaughter. then they are led out and hung: such was the ancient fate of the prostitute in the household. a still harsher and more ignoble punishment awaits the goatherd melanthius, a cruel mutilation is inflicted upon him, horrible to the last degree, but it grades his punishment according to his offense. a fumigation with sulphur we find here, as old as homer. then all the rest of the handmaids are summoned along with penelope, to witness the deed and to see the hero. such is this terrible book in which destruction is fully meted out to destroyers. according to our count 129 people are here dead, all of them guilty. a doomsday spectacle for that household, and for all readers and hearers since; it shows the return of the deed negatively upon the negative doer. but ulysses, the hero sitting amid these corpses, is simply the destroyer, the very picture and embodiment thereof. is there to be no positive result of such bloody work? yes; that is the next thing to be shown forth in the two following books; ulysses is also the restorer, wherewith his career and this poem will terminate. _book twenty-third._ the essential fact of this book is the reunion of husband and wife after twenty years separation. the eternal nature of the bond of the family is thus asserted as strongly as is possible in the world of time. this is the deep institutional foundation upon which the odyssey reposes. still the wife also has to be conquered, that is, she has to be convinced that the beggar is her husband. all along we have seen the struggle between her instinct and her intellect; her understanding persists in thinking that ulysses will not come back, yet she dreams of his restoration, and she feels a strange sympathy with the old man in rags. thus the two opposing elements of female nature have been in a conflict with each other; her instinct tries to surge over her intellect, but does not succeed; she demands the complete test of identity and gets it in the present book. the old nurse, her son, and finally ulysses himself become impatient with her delay and her circumspection, still she holds out against them all, though she has, too, her own inner emotions to combat. the gradual unfolding of this scene to the point of recognition must be pronounced a masterpiece of character evolution. the book may be divided into two portions--before and after the recognition, which culminates when penelope accepts the test of the secret bed which was once made by ulysses. i. the movement up to the recognition shows penelope undergoing a double pressure, from without and from within. yet it shows too a corresponding double resistance on her part. first eurycleia goes to her chamber, and tells her in great glee that the suitors are slain and her husband has returned. she can accept the slaughter of the suitors, that could have been done by some god, angry at their injustice; but she will not believe that ulysses is really in the palace. the nurse cries out: "truly thou hast ever had a disbelieving mind," and then tells of the scar. still incredulous; but she goes down to the court, and there sees ulysses in his rags. no sufficient proof yet, though she has a strange inner struggle not to run up to him that she might clasp his hands and kiss him. but her understanding conquers, she keeps at a distance, scrutinizing, till telemachus, impulsive youth, breaks out into a reproach: "mother, thy heart is harder than a rock." but ulysses himself speaks to his son: "suffer that thy mother test me;" she is like himself, he understands her better than the son does. finally ulysses takes the bath and puts on fresh garments, while pallas gives him fresh grace and majesty, and increased stature; he comes before penelope again; still no yielding. ulysses himself is now forced to exclaim: "above all women the gods have given thee a heart impenetrable." thus the nurse, the son, the husband in turn have failed to shake her firmness, she must have an absolute test, which is "known to him and me, and to us alone." this is that strange bed, which ulysses is unconsciously provoked by his wife to describe. penelope commands the nurse: "bring the bed out of the chamber which he made." but really it could not be removed, it was constructed of the trunk of an olive tree rooted in the soil and its construction was the secret of himself and wife. very strong is the symbolism of this bed, and is manifestly intended by the poet. it typified the firm immovable bond of marriage between the two; their unity could not be broken. mark the words of ulysses: "woman, thou hast spoken a painful word," when she commanded the bed to be removed; "who hath displaced my bed?" in it there was built "a great sign" or mystery; "now i do not know if my bed be firm in position, or whether some other man has moved it elsewhere, cutting the trunk of the olive tree up by the roots." such is his intense feeling about that marriage bed, deeply symbolic, truly "a sign," as here designated. now this is just the test which penelope wanted, a double test indeed, not only of the head, but also of the heart. he reveals to her not merely that he knows about the bed, but how strongly he feels in reference to it, and to what it signifies. for he might be the returned ulysses, and yet not be hers. but now she has yielded, she explains the reason of her hesitation, defends herself by the example of helen who was cozened by a stranger. she used her craft to defend the unity and sacredness of the family, against suitors and even against husband. after some talk, the servant lights them to their chamber, "they in great joy take their customary place in their ancient bed." ii. with the line just quoted (296 of the original) the alexandrian grammarians, aristarchus and aristophanes, concluded the odyssey, and declared the rest to be a post-homeric addition. still, this part of the poem must have been in existence and accepted as homer's long before their time. both aristotle and plato cite portions of it without any declared suspicion of its genuineness. what reason the old grammarians had for this huge excision is not definitely known; we can see, however, that they wished to end the poem with complete restoration, outer and inner, of the domestic bond between husband and wife. certainly a very noble thought in the poem, but by no means a sufficient end; beside the domestic, the political bond also must be restored, and the ethical harmony be made complete both in family and in state. ulysses, moreover, has spoken of the duty laid upon him by tiresias in hades: he must carry an oar till he comes to a land whose people take it for a winnowing fan; there he is to plant it upright and make an offering to neptune. so there is a good deal yet to be done, which the poem has already called for. but just now she tells him her story, quite briefly; then he tells her his story, more at length. this has the nature of a confession, with its circe and epecially calypso, which she has to hear and he to make. through it all runs his yearning to reach home and wife. but with the sun risen, new duties press upon him. first he will seek some compensation for his property taken by the suitors; secondly, he will have to meet the vengeance of their relatives and friends. so the army of four, himself, telemachus, swineherd and cowherd, march forth in arms from the palace gate, through the city to the country. _book twenty-fourth._ this is another book over which there has been much critical discussion. its thought, whatever may be said about its execution, is absolutely necessary to bring the odyssey to an organic conclusion, and make the poem a well-rounded totality. there is the political trouble generally, and specially the blood feud caused by the slaying of the suitors, which has to be harmonized. repeatedly hitherto we have had hints of this coming difficulty; ulysses thought of it, and made his plan concerning it before the slaughter took place. (xx. 41.) in fact the complete restoration of ulysses is both to family and state, the two great institutions which form the substructure of the odyssey. his country was quite as deeply distracted and perverted as his household; both had to undergo the process of purification. in book twenty-third we had the restoration of ulysses to family, in book twenty-fourth we are to have essentially his restoration to state; then he will truly have returned to prudent penelope and to sunny ithaca, and the poem can end. moreover his restoration _to_ family and state involves the restoration of family and state; the rightful husband and the rightful ruler heals the shattered institutions. but it is undeniable that this book is the most poorly constructed of any book in the odyssey. there is undue repetition of previous matters, yet certainly with important additions; there is unnecessary expansion in the earlier parts of the book, and too great compression and hurry at the end. in general, the subject-matter of the book is completely valid and necessary to the poem, but the execution falls below the homeric level, specially in its constructive feature. still we see ino reason why it may not be homer's; he too has his best and worst books. of the present book there are two parts: the underworld and the upperworld. i. the suitors have been sent down to the realm where ulysses in the eleventh book found the souls of the trojan heroes, agamemnon, achilles, ajax. these three again are introduced with some others. the death of achilles is described quite fully, when the souls of the suitors arrive, and one of them, amphimedon, recapitulates the story of the odyssey. it tells of the craft and fidelity of penelope, and of the return of ulysses and his destruction of the suitors. the words of agamemnon recognize the pair, ulysses and penelope, as the supreme greek man and woman, as those who have mastered the greatest difficulties of their epoch. the trojan cycle is now complete, the separation caused by the war is bridged over, both family and state are restored after the long disruption. in striking contrast was the case of agamemnon and clytæmnestra, both of whom perished without restoration. thus by means of the ghosts of the suitors, the famous careers of ulysses and penelope are taken up into the realm of the supersensible, of ideal forms, whose fame is to last forever. this part of the book (the so-called second nekyia) in which hades appears the second time, has been sharply questioned both by ancient and modern critics on a number of grounds. these we shall not discuss, only stating that they are by no means conclusive against the genuineness of the whole passage. the general idea of it belongs here; the dead suitors represent the grand end of the trojan movement, and its reception into the hades of famous deeds done and past, and very significantly agamemnon voices the praise of ulysses and penelope, the great winners in the long struggle. still the repetitions of previous portions of the odyssey are to our mind unnecessary and prolix, though the literary skill manifested just herein has been highly lauded by saint beuve and lang. ii. coming back to the upperworld we find a series of incidents following one another both slowly and hurriedly. these we shall throw in groups for the sake of a rapid survey. 1. ulysses with his three companions comes to the country seat of his father laertes. with him, too, he plays the same disguise as heretofore with penelope, eumæus and others, though its necessity is not now so plain. "i shall test my father, to see if he will know me;" how fond ulysses is of this! so we have more fictions, masquerading, and final recognition by the scar and other proofs. also an old servant here, dolius, is recognized. 2. now the scene passes to the city. the friends of the suitors have called an assembly; a strong party rises in opposition to ulysses, though two men, medon and halitherses, speak on his side. the result is, a band under eupeithes, father of antinous, marches forth to wreak vengeance upon ulysses. 3. hereupon a divine interference. zeus decrees that there must be no blood-feud between the relatives of the slain and the house of ulysses, but a league of friendship. revenge must no longer beget revenge. 4. still a fight occurs in which laertes and dolius with his six sons, take part. old laertes is now to have his warlike meed, be kills old eupeithes, so that the male members of the house of ulysses for three generations--son, grandson, grandfather--have each killed his man. 5. pallas hereupon stops the conflict, and the last lines of the poem announce the peace which she makes under the form and voice of mentor. surely the work of wisdom (pallas) as well as of supreme law (zeus)--to stop the self-repeating blood-feud. thus is the deep rent in the state healed by aid of zeus and pallas. it should be observed that pallas at the end of the _eumenides_ of the poet æschylus released orestes, who is pursued by the furies, from the guilt of his mother's blood, by casting the decisive ballot in the court of areiopagus. here we find another link between homer and æschylus. very hurried are these later incidents of the book, but they are necessary to complete the poem. the blood-feud is harmonized, the gods again make themselves valid in the land by introducing peace and harmony, which had been undermined by the suitors. property, family, state, are restored, and the divine order of the world in the person of the gods is recognized. only with this conclusion is the negative conduct of the suitors completely undone, and a positive institutional life becomes possible. it is true that in the hurry of coming to an end, the poet says nothing of the journey enjoined by tiresias in hades, the journey to a distant people who would take an oar for a winnowing fan. still we may suppose that it was performed, and that angry neptune, the great enemy of ulysses among the gods, was also reconciled. but, chiefly, ulysses has above on this earth realized the idea of a world-justice, which we found running through all hades, in the statements of tiresias, in the fates of the great greek heroes, in the punitory portion presided over by minos. from this point of view the odyssey may be truly regarded an image of the working of the spirit of history, and the poem holds good for all time. _summary._ in concluding these lengthy studies of the iliad and the odyssey, we shall try to grasp each of the poems as a whole, and then the two together is one great totality sprung of one people and of one consciousness. the central fact out of which both poems arise, to which and from which both poems move, is the trojan war. this war, whether mythical or historical, is certainly the most famous, and probably the most significant that ever took place on the earth. as to the odyssey, the first thing to be seized is the complete career of its hero ulysses. this career has naturally two parts: the going to troy from ithaca, and the coming back from troy to ithaca. every greek hero had a similar career, wholly or in part; many, of coarse, never returned. the two parts together constitute a total movement which begins at a certain point and returns to the same; hence it may be called a cycle, and its two parts may be designated in a general way as the separation and the return. the odyssey has as its theme the second half of the cycle, though, of course, it presupposes the first half, namely the going to troy and the stay there. the poem, accordingly, does not give the entire life of ulysses; what may be called the trojan half must be looked for elsewhere, mainly in the iliad. of course there are in the odyssey many allusions to incidents which belong to the first half of this career. the ulysses of the iliad is one of the great leaders and one of the great heroes, but he is neither the chief leader nor the chief hero. already he appears in book first as a member of the council, and an epithet is applied to him which suggests his wisdom. thus at the start of the iliad he is designated as the man of thought, of intelligence, of many resources. but in the second book he shines with full glory, he is indeed the pivot of the whole book. on account of a speech made by agamemnon, their leader, the greeks start at once for home, they are ready to give up the great enterprise of the restoration of helen, they act as if they would abandon their cause. it is ulysses who calls them back to themselves and restores order; he shows himself to be the only man in the whole army who knows what to do in a critical emergency. he suppresses thersites, he exhorts the chieftains, he uses force on the common people. he finally makes a speech to the entire body of greeks in the assembly, which recalls the great national purpose of the war, and is the true word for the time. nestor follows him in a similar vein, and the greek host again takes its place in line of battle and prepares for the onset upon troy. here we have a typical action of ulysses, showing his essential character, and revealing the germ out of which the odyssey may well have sprouted. other matters may also be noticed. pallas, the goddess of wisdom, appears to him in the midst of the tumult, and gives him her suggestion. she will remain with him ever afterwards, manifesting herself to him in like emergencies till the end of the odyssey. telemachus is mentioned in this book of the iliad. the distinction between ulysses and the aged nestor is drawn: the latter has appreciative wisdom, that of experience, while ulysses has creative wisdom, that of immediate divine insight, coming directly from pallas. this distinction also will show itself in the odyssey. ulysses is the real hero of the second book of the iliad; he appears in other books with the same general character, but never so prominently again. in the post-iliad, or that portion of the trojan war which lies between the iliad and odyssey, ulysses will become the chief hero. after the death of achilles, there will be a contest for the latter's arms between him and ajax; ulysses wins. that is, brain not brawn is to control henceforth. under the lead of intelligence, which is that of ulysses, troy falls. the odyssey, then, deals with the return of ulysses from the trojan war, and lasts ten years, as the account runs. but the poet is not writing a history, not even a biography, in the ordinary sense; he does not follow step by step the hero's wanderings, or state the events in chronological order; we shall see how the poem turns back upon itself and begins only some forty days before its close. still the odyssey will give not merely the entire return from troy, but will suggest the whole cycle of its hero's development. the first half of the cycle, the going to troy and the stay there, lasted ten years, though some accounts have made it longer. the iliad, though its action is compressed to a few days, treats generally of the first half of the cycle and hence it is the grand presupposition of the odyssey, which takes it for granted everywhere. the iliad, however, is a unity and has its own center of action, which is the wrath of achilles and his reconciliation also; it is in itself a complete cycle of individual experience in the trojan war. we now begin to get an outline of the unity of homer. in the first place the iliad is a unity from the stand-point of its hero achilles, who has a completely rounded period of his life portrayed therein, which portrayal, however, gives also a vivid picture of the trojan war up to date. as an individual experience it is a whole, and this is what makes it a poem and gives to it special unity. but it is only a fragment of the trojan cycle--a half or less than a half; it leaves important problems unsolved: troy is not taken, achilles is still alive, the new order under the new hero ulysses has not yet set in, and chiefly there is no return to greece, which is even more difficult than the taking of troy. hence the field of the second poem, the odyssey, which is also an individual experience--has to be so in order to be a poem--embraces the rest of the trojan cycle after the iliad. thus we may well hold to these unities in homer: the unity of the iliad, the unity of the odyssey, and the unity of the iliad and the odyssey. both together make one grand cycle of human history and of human consciousness; they portray a complete world in its deed and in its thought, as well as in manners and institutions. here is, then, the highest point of view from which to look at these poems: they are really one in two parts, written by one epoch, by one consciousness, and probably by one man. the iliad as a poem is a complete cycle of individual experience, but as an epoch is only half a cycle. in like manner the odyssey as a poem is a complete cycle of individual experience, but as an epoch is the second half of the cycle of which the iliad is essentially the first. both together constitute the one great movement usually called the trojan war. much time has been spent in discussing the question whether the trojan war was historical or mythical. we make bold to affirm that it was both--both historical and mythical. it began long before the dawn of history and it exists to this day. for the trojan war is the conflict between orient and occident, starting in the twilight of time, and not yet concluded by any means. the conflict between orient and occident runs through all greek mythology, is indeed just the deepest, tone-giving element thereof. it also runs through all greek history from the persian war to the conquests of alexander, and lurks still in the present struggle between greek and turk. the true mythus gives in an image or event the events of all time; it is an ideal symbol which is realized in history. we have above said that the trojan war was a complete cycle, of which the two poems portray the two halves. still further can the matter be carried. the trojan cycle, complete in itself as a phase of greek consciousness, is but a fragment, a half of a still larger cycle of human development. the iliad and the odyssey give the greek half of the grand world-movement of the trojan epoch; there is also an oriental half which these poems presuppose and from which they separate. thus the grand homeric cycle, while a unit in itself, is really a separation from the east, a separation which rendered the occident possible; the woes before troy were the birth-pangs of the new-born child, europe, now also grown a little old. the reader naturally asks, will there be any return to the orient after the grand greek separation, first heralded on the plains of ilium? it may be answered that europe has often returned to the east in the course of history--alexander, rome, the crusades; at present, western europe seems bent on getting to the far east. but the true return of the occident to the orient will be round the globe, by way of america, and that will be complete. the recent war between japan and china is really a stage of the great new epoch in the world-historical return to the orient. such is the more external, the historical phase of the iliad and odyssey. but they have also a deep internal ethical phase, they show two sides of one grand process of the human soul which has been called self-alienation, the sacrifice of the immediate self in order to gain true self-hood. the greeks had to immolate their dearest ties, those of home and country, in order to preserve home and country, which had been assailed to the very heart by the rape of helen. they had to educate themselves to a life of violence, killing men, women, even children, destroying home and country. for troy also has family and state, though it be a complete contradiction of family and state by supporting paris. but when the greeks had taken troy, they were trained destroyers of home and country, they were destruction organized and victorious, yet their whole purpose was to save home and country. thus their self-alienation has deepened into absolute self-contradiction, the complete scission of the soul. now this is the spiritual condition of which they are to get rid, out of which they are to return to home and country. as before said it may be deemed a harder problem than the taking of troy, which was simply a negative act, the destroying the destroyers of home and country. but the great positive act of the trojan heroes is the restoration, not merely the outer but the inner restoration, to home and country. with these considerations before the mind of the reader, he is now ready to grasp the full sweep of the odyssey and understand its conflict. it springs from the separation caused by a war, here the trojan war. the man is removed from his institutional life and thrown into a world of violence and destruction. let us summarize the leading points of the process. i. the absence of ulysses leaves his family without a head, his country without a ruler, and his property without an owner. all these relations begin to loosen and go to pieces; destructive forces assail the decaying organism; the suitors appear, who consume his property, woo his queen, and seek to usurp his kingly authority. such are the dissolving energies at work in ithaca. also his son telemachus is left without paternal training. ii. next let us glance at the individual. ulysses, released from domestic life and civil order, gives himself up to destroying domestic life and civil order, though they be those of the enemy. for ten years he pays no respect to property, family and state in troy; he is trained into their annihilation, and finally does annihilate them. yet his object is to restore helen, to vindicate family and state, and even property. iii. troy is destroyed because it was itself destructive; it assailed the greek domestic and civil institutions in the rape of helen. so the destroying city itself is destroyed, but this leaves ulysses a destroyer in deed and in spirit; home and country he is not only separated from but is destructive of--he is a negative man. the previous three paragraphs contain the leading presuppositions of the odyssey, and show the first half of the life of ulysses. they indicate three phases of the working of the negative--in ithaca, in troy, and in ulysses. but now that troy is destroyed, how will ulysses return to institutional life, which he has destroyed in troy, in himself, and, through his absence, in ithaca? iv. the return must in the first place be within himself, he must get rid of the destructive spirit begotten of war. for this purpose he has the grand training told in his adventures; he must put down the monsters of fableland, polyphemus, circe, charybdis; he must endure the long servitude under calypso; he must see phæacia. when he is internally ready, he can go forth and destroy the suitors, destroy them without becoming destructive himself, which was his outcome at troy. for the destruction of troy left him quite as negative as the suitors, of which condition he is to rid himself ere he can rid ithaca of the suitors. this destruction thus becomes a great positive act, now he restores family and state, and brings peace and harmony. one result of separating from the family is that the son telemachus has not the training given by the father. but the son shows his blood; he goes forth and gets his own training, the best of the time. this is told in the telemachiad. thus he can co-operate with his father. _the movement overarching the odyssey._ the reader will note that in the preceding account we have tried to unfold the movement of the odyssey as the return from the trojan war. but as already stated, it is itself but a part of a larger movement, a segment of a great cycle, which cycle again suggests a still greater cycle, which last is the movement of the world's history. recall, then, that the odyssey by itself is a complete cycle as far as the experience of its hero is concerned; but as belonging to an epoch, it is but half of the total cycle of the trojan war. then again this trojan war is but a fragment of a movement which is the total world's history. now can this be set forth in a summary which will suggest the movement not of the odyssey alone, but also the movement underlying and overlying the poem? let us make the trial, for a world-poem must take its place in the world's history, which fact gives the final judgment of its worth. i. in the prehistoric time before homer, there was an orient, but no occident; the spiritual day of the latter had not yet dawned. very early began the movement toward separation, which had one of its greatest epochs in the trojan war. 1. greece in those old ages was full of the throes of birth, but was not yet born. it was still essentially oriental, it had no independent development of its own, though it was moving toward independence. the earliest objects dug out of the long buried cities of greece show an oriental connection; the famous sculptured lions over the gate of mycenæ last to this day as a reminder of the early hellenic connection of european greece with the orient, not to speak of cyprus, crete, and the lesser islands of the ægean. 2. then came the great separation of greece from the orient, which is the fundamental fact of the trojan war, and of which the homeric poems are the mighty announcement to the future. troy, an orientalizing hellenic city in asia, seizes and keeps greek helen, who is of europe; it tears her away from home and country, and through its deed destroys family and state. greek europe restores her, must restore her, if its people be true to their institutional principles; hence their great word is restoration, first of their ideal helen, and secondly of themselves. so all the greeks, in order to make the separation from the orient and restore helen, have to march forth to war and thus be separated themselves from home and country, till they bring back helen to home and country. the deed done to helen strikes every greek man till he undoes it. the stages of this movement may be set down separately. (_a_) the leaving home for troy--achilles, agamemnon, ulysses; all the heroes had their special story of departure. ulysses had to quit a young wife, penelope, and an infant son, telemachus. for if helen can be abducted, no greek family is safe. (_b_) stay at troy for 10 years. this is also a long training to destruction. ulysses is an important man, but not the hero. here lies the sphere of the iliad. (_c_) destruction of the city and the restoration of helen to her husband, both of which are not told in the iliad but are given subordinately in the odyssey. thus is the separation from the orient completed on its negative side, that is, as far as destruction can complete it. 3. the return to greece of the survivors. the question is, how can they truly get back after so long a period of violence? the odyssey has this as its theme, and will give an account of all the returns. here, too, we observe various stages. (_a_) leaving troy for home. this means a complete facing about and a going the other way, not only in geography, but also in conduct. the greeks must now quit destruction and become constructive. (_b_) it is no wonder that the journey home was very difficult. quarrels arose at the start (see nestor's account book iii., and that of menelaus book iv.). many perished on the way; some were lost in a storm at sea, agamemnon was slain on the threshold of his own palace. (_c_) those who reached home, the successful returners, were of three main kinds, represented by nestor, by menelaus, and by ulysses. these were restored to home and family, and brought peace and harmony. such is the positive outcome of the trojan war, and the completion of its cycle. ii. but this rounding-off of the trojan cycle is, on the other hand, a final separation from the orient; the scission is now unfolded, explicit, quite conscious. when ulysses comes back to ithaca, and re-establishes family and state, greek life is independent, distinct, self-determined. the hellenic world rises and fulfills its destiny in its own way; it creates the fine arts, literature, science; it is the beginning of the occident. still the thought must come up that the orient is also a part of the grand movement of the world's history, whose cycle embraces both occident and orient. the odyssey has many glimpses of this higher view. the first 12 books move westward and have their outlook in that direction, the last 12 books have their outlook eastward toward egypt, phoenicia, and the oriental borderland. the earlier fairy tales of ulysses have their scene in the west, while the later romances or novelettes interwoven in the last 12 books have their scene in the east, with one exception possibly. the main fact, however, of the trojan cycle is the great separation, deepest in history, between orient and occident, through the instrumentality of greece. the civilization of europe and the west is the offspring of that separation, which is still going on, is a living fact, and is the source of the vexed eastern question of european politics. iii. we are living to-day in that separation; our art, science, education, poetic forms, our secular life largely come from ancient greece. oriental art, customs, domestic life, government, we do not as a rule fraternize with; the greek diremption is in us still; only in one way, in our religious life, do we keep a connection with an oriental people. but is this separation never to be overcome? is there to be no return to the east and completion of the world's cycle? _the cycle._ we have often used this word, and some may think that we have abused it; still our object is to restore the greek conception of these poems, as they were looked at and spoken of by hellas herself. the idea of the cycle was fundamental in grasping the epics which related to the trojan war, and this war itself was regarded as a cycle of events and deeds, which the poets sang and put into their poetic cycle. let us briefly trace this thought of the cycle as developed in old greece. i. in two different passages of his _organon_, aristotle calls the epic a cycle and the poetry of homer a cycle. now both passages are employed by him to illustrate a defective syllogism, hence are purely incidental. but no instance could better show the prevalence of the idea of a cycle as applied to homer and epic poetry, for the philosopher evidently draws his illustration from something familiar to everybody. it had become a greek common-place 350 b.c., and probably long before, that an epic poem, such as the iliad or odyssey, is cyclical, and that both together make a cycle. ii. but this idea develops, and expands beyond the iliad and odyssey, which are found to leave out many events of the trojan cycle. indeed the myth-making spirit of greece unfolds new incidents, deeds, and characters. the result is that many poets, after homer had completed his cycle, began filling the old gaps, or really making new ones that these might be filled by a fresh poem. hence arose the famous epic cycle, which has been preserved in a kind of summary supposed to have been written by proclus, not the philosopher, but a grammarian of the time of the emperor marcus aurelius. meantime, let us carefully distinguish some of our cycles. the trojan cycle is one of events and deeds, in general is the going to and the returning from troy. the homeric cycle is homer's account, in his two poems, of this trojan cycle. finally the epic cycle is the expansion of homer and includes a number of epics, which fill out to ultimate completeness the trojan cycle. the latter, according to proclus, is made up of six epics beside the iliad and odyssey, to which they stand in the following relations. 1. the _cypria_, which deals with events antecedent to the iliad, such as the apple of discord, the visit of paris at sparta and the taking of helen, the mustering at aulis, the sacrifice of iphigeneia, and many incidents at troy. ulysses, to avoid going to the war, feigns madness (his first disguise) and ploughs the sea-sand; but he is detected by palamedes who lays his infant telemachus in the track of the plough. the name _cypria_ comes from kypris, venus, who caused the infatuation which led to the war. 2. four different epics fill in between the iliad and the odyssey. the _æthiopis_ takes up the thread after the death of hector, introducing penthesilea, queen of the amazons, and memnon, son of the dawn, both of whom are slain by achilles who is himself slain and is buried with funeral games. after the death of achilles, the _little iliad_ continues the story, installing ulysses as hero over ajax in the contest for the arms of achilles. this is the grand transition from brawn to brain in the conduct of the war. the wooden horse is made, and the palladium is carried out of troy--both deeds being the product of the brain, if not of the hand, of ulysses. next comes the _sack of troy_, whose name indicates its character. laocoon and sinon appear in it, but the main thing is the grand slaughter (like that of the suitors) and the dragging of women and children into captivity; the city is burned. then follows the epic called the _nostoi_ or the returns, really an elaboration of the odyssey, specially of the third book, which tells of these antecedent returns. then comes the great return, which is the odyssey. 3. after the odyssey follows the _telegonia_ written by eugammon of cyrene in two books. it continues the life of ulysses; he now goes to that people who take an oar for winnowing fan, and there he makes the offering to neptune, enjoined by tiresias in hades. other incidents are narrated; the final winding-up is that ulysses is unwittingly slain by telegonus, his and circe's son, who appears in ithaca and takes telemachus and penelope to circe, who makes them immortal. the grand epic cycle concludes with the strangest set of marriages on record: telegonus marries penelope, his step-mother, and telemachus marries circe who is also a kind of step-mother. iii. after such a literary bankruptcy, it is no wonder that we find the later greek and roman writers using the words _cyclic_ and _cyclic poet_ as terms of disparagement. the great mythus of troy had run its course and exhausted itself; the age of imitation, formalism, erudition had come, while that of creation had passed away. still it has preserved for us the idea of the cycle, which is necessary for the adequate comprehension of homer, and which the greeks themselves conceived and employed. _structure of the odyssey._ a brief summary of the structural elements of the poem may now be set forth. it falls into two grand divisions, both of which are planned by pallas in book i and xiii respectively. in the main these divisions are the following:- i. the first takes up about one-half of the odyssey--twelve books, which have as their chief object instruction and discipline--the training for the deed. this training has two very distinct portions, as it pertains to a young man and a middle-aged man--telemachiad and ulyssiad. 1. the telemachiad, or the education of telemachus, who has been left without the influence of his father, when the latter went to troy. but he has his father's spirit, hence he must know; from ithaca he goes to nestor and menelaus for instruction. four books. 2. the ulyssiad, or the discipline of ulysses, who must have been a man over 40 years old. he is to be trained out of the negative spirit which he imbibed from the trojan war. herein lies his analogy to faust, who is also a middle-aged man, and negative, but from study and thought. both the telemachiad and the ulyssiad are essentially one great movement in two phases, showing the bud and the flower, the young and the mature man. father and son reveal an overcoming of limitation; telemachus overcomes his limit of ignorance, ulysses overcomes his limit of negation--the one by the instruction of the wise, the other by the experience of life. both are trained to a belief in an ethical order which rules the world; therein both are made internally ready for the great act of delivering their country. the training of both reaches forward to a supreme practical end--the destruction of the suitors and the purification of ithaca. (for the further structure of these two parts--the telemachiad and the ulyssiad--see preceding commentary under these titles.) ii. the second grand division of the odyssey is the last twelve books. the scene is laid in ithaca, where the great deed, to which the poem hitherto has looked forward, is to be done. the wanderings of the father have ceased, the son returns from his schooling; every movement is now directed toward action. again pallas (xiii. 393-415) plans two subdivisions, without the council of the gods however. 1. the hut of the swineherd. here the forces hostile to the suitors gather in secret and lay their plan. ulysses, telemachus, eumæus, the gallant army of three, get ready for the execution of the deed. four books. 2. the palace of the king. ulysses in disguise beholds the suitors in their negative acts; they are as bad as the trojans, assailing property, family, state, the gods; they are really in their way re-enacting the rape of helen. ulysses, as he destroyed troy, must destroy them, yet not become merely destructive himself. eight books, in which we can discern the following movement: (1) suitors as destroyers--five books; (2) ulysses as destroyer--one book; (3) ulysses as restorer--two books. thus the outcome is positive.. the career of ulysses is now complete, and with it the homeric cycle has rounded itself out to fullness. the epic cycle in the _telegonia_ will expand this conclusion, but will deeply mar its idea. note that the structure of the two grand divisions of the odyssey are symmetrical, each a half of the poem; then each half subdivides into two parts, and each of those parts is symmetrical, being composed of four and eight books each. to be sure, the joint is not so plain in the second division as in the first, which has the telemachiad and the ulyssiad. pallas is the orderer of both divisions, and she orders them in a symmetrical manner. for both divisions the grand horizon is the trojan war, yet both reach beyond it, the one toward the west, the other toward the east. the one weaves into its regular narrative the fairy tale, the other takes up into its text what we have called the romantic novelette. the former looks toward the west and the future, the latter looks back at the east and the past. hence the fairy tale is prophetic and has supernatural beings, the novelette is retrospective, giving the experiences of life without supernatural agencies. in scenery also the contrast is great: the one is largely a sea poem, the other is a land poem. _structural analogy between iliad and odyssey._ we have before said, and we may repeat here at the end, that the final fruit of homeric study is to see and to fully realize that the iliad and odyssey are one work, showing national consciousness, and unfolding one great epoch of the world's history. just here we may note the fundamental analogies of structure between the two poems. i. both poems have the dual division, separating into two symmetrical portions. the iliad has two wraths of achilles, and also two reconciliations; thus each division is subdivided: 1. his first attitude or cycle of conduct toward the greeks. (_a_) his wrath--both rightful and wrongful. (_b_) his reconciliation with agamemnon and his own people. 2. his second attitude, or cycle of conduct toward the trojans. (_a_) his wrath--both rightful and wrongful. (_b_) his reconciliation with priam and the trojans. such is the general organism of the iliad which is seen to be perfectly symmetrical within itself. (for a fuller account see author's commentary on the iliad, pp. 36-8.) note that the negative attitude of achilles is that of wrath; in his anger he will destroy his people and his cause, and finally, in the dragging of hector's corpse, he disregards the gods. yet be overcomes both these negative attitudes in himself and becomes reconciled. ii. the odyssey has two phases of negation, both of which the heroes (father and son) must overcome. 1. the negative spirit caused by the trojan war and its overcoming. (_a_) the ignorance of the son and its overcoming. (_b_) the destructive tendency of the father and its overcoming. 2. the negative spirit abroad in ithaca (suitors) and its overcoming. (_a_) the hut of the swineherd (preparation). (_b_) the palace of the king (execution). that is, ulysses and telemachus have the double problem, which organizes the odyssey: they must conquer their own internal negation, then proceed to conquer that of the suitors. both poems divide alike; both have the same fundamental thought: the individual as hero is to master his own negative spirit and that of the world, and then be reconciled with himself and the world. the iliad has essentially but one thread of movement, that of achilles; the odyssey has two such threads, if not three--father, son, and perchance wife, making the total family as the unit of movement. thus the iliad and odyssey are one poem fundamentally, showing unity in thought and structure, and portraying one complete cycle of national consciousness, as well as one great phase of the world's history. * * * * * books by denton j. snider published by sigma publishing company 210 pine street, st. louis, mo. i. commentary on the literary bibles, in 9 vols. 1. shakespeare's dramas, 3 vols. tragedies (new edition) $1.50 comedies (new edition) 1.50 histories (new edition) 1.50 2. goethe's faust. first part (new edition) 1.50 second part (new edition) 1.50 3. homer's iliad (new edition) 1.50 homer's odyssey 1.50 4. dante's inferno 1.50 dante's purgatory and paradise 1.50 ii. psychology, system of, in 16 vols. 1. organic psychology. 1. intellect 1.50 2. will 1.50 3. feeling 1.50 2. psychology of philosophy. 1. ancient european philosophy 1.50 2. modern european philosophy 1.50 3. psychology of nature. 1. cosmos and diacosmos 1.50 2. biocosmos 1.50 4. psychology of art. 1. architecture 1.50 2. music and fine arts 1.50 5. psychology of institutions. 1. social institutions 1.50 2. the state 1.50 6. psychology of history. 1. european history 1.50 2. the father of history 1.50 3. the american ten years' war 1.50 7. psychology of biography. 1. abraham lincoln 1.50 2. frederick froebel 1.25 iii. poems in 5 vols. 1. homer in chios 1.00 2. delphie days 1.00 3. agamemnon's daughter 1.00 4. prorsus retrorsus 1.00 5. johnny appleseed's rhymes 1.25 iv. the lincoln tetralogy an epos. 1. lincoln in the black hawk war 1.50 2. lincoln and ann rutledge 1.50 3. lincoln in the white house 1.50 4. lincoln at richmond 1.50 v. kindergarten. 1. commentary on froebel's mother play-songs 1.25 2. the psychology of froebel's play-gifts 1.25 3. the life of frederick froebel 1.25 vi. miscellaneous. 1. a walk in hellas 1.25 2. the freeburgers (a novel) 1.25 3. world's fair studies 1.25 4. a tour in europe 1.50 5. a writer of books in his genesis 1.50 for sale by a. g. mcclurg & co., chicago, ill. 