Homer: The Iliad; The Odyssey

Agamemnon, for his part, magnanimously admits his error; laying the chief blame, however, upon Jupiter and Fate, who blinded the eyes of his understanding. The peace-offerings are produced and accepted, though Achilles only chafes at anything which can delay his vengeance. Ulysses strongly urges the necessity of a substantial meal for the whole army;

Achilles schools himself into patience while the rest act upon this prosaic but prudent counsel; but for himself, he will neither eat nor drink, nor wash his blood-stained hands, till he has avenged the death of his comrade. So he sits apart in his grief, while the rest are at the banquet: Minerva, by Jupiter’s command, infusing into his body ambrosia and nectar, to sustain his strength. Another true mourner is Briseis. The first sight which meets the captive princess on her return to the Myrmidon camp is the bloody corpse of Patroclus. She throws herself upon it in an agony of tears. He, in the early days of her captivity, had spoken kind and cheering words, and had been a friend in time of trouble. So, too, Menelaus briefly says of him—“He knew how to be kind to all men.” This glimpse which the poet gives us of the gentler features of the dead warrior’s character is touching enough, when we remember the utter disregard of an enemy’s or a captive’s feelings shown not only by Homer’s heroes, but by those of the older Jewish Scriptures.

When all is ready for the battle, Achilles dons the armour of Vulcan, and draws from its case the Centaur’s gift,—the ashen spear of Mount Pelion, which even Patroclus, it will be remembered, had not ventured to take in hand. Thus armed, he mounts his chariot, drawn by the two immortal steeds, Xanthus and Balius—for their mortal yoke-fellow had been slain in the battle in which Patroclus fell. As he mounts, in the bitter spirit which leads him to blame the whole world for the death of his friend, he cannot forbear a taunt to his horses—he trusts they will not leave him on the field, as they left Patroclus. Then the chestnut, inspired by Juno, for once finds a human voice, and exculpates himself and his comrade. It was no fault of theirs; it was the doom of Patroclus, and Achilles’ own doom draws nigh. This day they will bring him back in safety; but the end is at hand.

Unlike Hector, Achilles knows and foresees his doom clearly; but, like Hector, he will meet it unflinchingly. Pope’s version of his reply is deservedly admired. Xanthus has uttered his warning;

In the renewed battle which ensues, the gods, by express permission of their sovereign, take part. Juno, Neptune, Minerva, Mercury, and Vulcan assist the Greeks: Mars, Venus, Apollo, Latona, and Diana join the Trojans. Their interference seems, at least to our modern taste, to assist in no way the action of the poem, and merely tends to weaken for the time the human interest. We must be content to assume that upon a Greek audience the impression was different. The only effect which these immortal allies produce upon the fortunes of the day is a negative one; Apollo incites Æneas to encounter Achilles, and when he is in imminent danger, Neptune conveys him away in a mist. Apollo performs the same office for Hector, who also engages the same terrible adversary, in the hope of avenging upon him the death of his young brother Polydorus. Disappointed in both his greater antagonists, Achilles vents his wrath in indiscriminate slaughter. Driving through the disordered host of the Trojans, his chariot wheels and axle steeped in blood, he cuts the mass of fugitives in two, and drives part of them into the shallows of the river Scamander. Leaping down from his chariot, he wades into the river, and there continues his career of slaughter, sword in hand. Twelve Trojan youths he takes alive and hands them over to his followers; sparing them for the present only to slay them hereafter as victims at the funeral-pile to appease the shade of Patroclus. Another suppliant for his mercy has a singular history. The young Lycaon, one of the many sons of Priam, had been taken prisoner by him in one of his raids upon Trojan territory, and sold as a slave in Lemnos. He had been ransomed there and sent home to Troy, only twelve days before he fell into his enemy’s hands again here in the bed of the Scamander. Achilles recognises him, and cruelly taunts him with his reappearance: the dead Trojans whom he has slain will surely next come to life again, if the captives thus cross the seas to swell the ranks of his enemies. In vain Lycaon pleads for his life, that he is not the son of the same mother as Hector—that his brother Polydorus has just been slain, which may well content the Greek’s vengeance. There is a gloomy irony in the words with which Achilles rejects his prayer. Before Patroclus fell, he had spared many a Trojan; but henceforth, all appeal to his mercy is vain—most of all from a son of Priam. But, in fact, the wish to escape one’s fate he holds to be utterly unreasonable;

At last the great river-god—whom the gods call Xanthus, but men Scamander—rises in his might, indignant at seeing his stream choked with corpses, and stained with blood. He hurls the whole force of his waves against Achilles, and the hero is fain to save himself by grasping an elm that overhangs the bank, and so swinging himself to land. But here Scamander pursues him, and, issuing from his banks, rolls in a deluge over the plain. Even the soul of Achilles is terror-stricken at this new aspect of death. Is he to die thus, like some vile churl—

Neptune and Minerva appear to encourage him, and give him strength to battle with the flood: and when Scamander summons his brother-river Simois to his aid, Vulcan sends flames that scorch all the river-banks, consuming the trees and shrubs that clothe them, and threatening to dry up the very streams themselves. The river yields, and retires to his banks, leaving Achilles free to pursue his victories. He drives the Trojans inside their walls, and but that Apollo guards the gates, would have entered the city in hot pursuit. Hector alone remains without—his doom is upon him.

The gods, meanwhile, have entered the field of battle on their own account, and contributed, as before, a ludicrous element to the action of the poem. Minerva fells Mars the war-god to the ground with a huge mass of rock, an ancient landmark, which she hurls against him; and he lies covering “above seven hundred feet,” till Venus comes to his aid to lead him from the field, when the terrible goddess strikes her to the earth beside him. Juno shows the strength of those “white arms” which the poet always assigns to her, by a terrible buffet which she bestows, for no particular reason apparently, upon Diana, who drops her bow and loses her arrows, and flies weeping to her father Jupiter. He, for his part, has been watching the quarrels of his court and family with a dignified amusement;—

Those philosophers who see a moral allegory in the whole of the Homeric story, have supplied us with a key to the conduct and feelings of Jupiter during this curious combat. “Jupiter, as the lord of nature, is well pleased with the war of the gods—that is, of earth, sea, air, &c.—because the harmony of all beings arises from that discord. Thus heat and cold, moist and dry, are in a continual war, yet upon this depends the fertility of the earth and the beauty of the creation. So that Jupiter, who, according to the Greeks, is the soul of all, may well be said to smile at this contention.”[20] Those readers who may not be satisfied with this solution must be content to take the burlesque as it stands.

CHAPTER X.

THE DEATH OF HECTOR.

Achilles draws near. The courage which has never failed Hector before, wholly deserts him now; he turns and flies, “like a dove from the falcon.” Judged by any theory of modern heroism, his conduct is simply indefensible. Critics tell us that the poet, in order to enhance the glory of his chief hero, makes even the champion of Troy fear to face him. But it is no compliment, in our modern eyes, to a victorious warrior, to have it explained that his crowning victory was won over a coward. Yet perhaps there was something of this feeling maintained even by Englishmen in days not so very long gone by, when it was the popular fashion to represent Frenchmen generally, and the great French general in particular, as always running away from the English bayonets. However, to Homer’s public it was evidently not incongruous or derogatory to the heroic type of character, that sudden panic should seize even the bravest in the presence of superior force. Hector, as has been said, turns and flies for his life.

Thrice round the walls of the city, his friends looking on in horror at the terrible race, he flies, with Achilles in pursuit. In each course he tries to reach the gates, that his comrades may either open to him, or at least cover him by launching their missiles from the walls against his enemy. But still Achilles turns him back towards the plain, signing to the Greeks to hurl no spear, nor to interfere in any way with his single vengeance. The gods look down from Olympus with divided interest. Jupiter longs to save him; but Minerva sternly reminds him of the dread destiny—the Eternal Law—which even the Ruler of Olympus is bound to reverence. Once more he lifts in heaven the golden scales, and finds that Hector’s fate weighs down the balance. Then, at last, his guardian Apollo leaves him. Minerva, on her part, comes to the aid of her favourite Achilles with a stratagem, as little worthy of his renown (to our view) as the sudden panic of Hector. She appears by the side of the Trojan hero in the likeness of his brother Deiphobus, and bids him stand and fight; they two, together, must surely be a match for Achilles. Hector turns and challenges his adversary. One compact he tries to make, in a few hurried words, before they encounter; let each promise, since one must fall, to restore the dead body of his enemy in all honour to his kindred. Achilles makes no reply but this:—

The spear launched with these words misses its mark: that of Hector strikes full in the centre of his enemy’s shield, but it glances harmlessly off from the fire-god’s workmanship. He looks round for Deiphobus to hand him another; but the false Deiphobus has vanished, and, too late, Hector detects the cruel deceit of the goddess. He will die at least as a hero should. He draws his sword, and rushes on Achilles. The wary Greek eyes him carefully as he comes on, and spies the joint in his harness where the breastplate meets the throat. Through that fatal spot he drives his spear, and the Trojan falls to the ground mortally wounded, but yet preserving the power of speech. As his conqueror stands over him cruelly vaunting, and vowing to give his body to the dogs and to the vultures, he makes a last appeal to his mercy. “By the heads of his parents” he beseeches him to spare this last indignity; the ransom which his father Priam will offer shall be ample for one poor corpse. But the wrath of Achilles has become for the present mere savage madness. Neither prayer nor ransom shall avail in this matter. Hector’s last words are prophetic:—

The only glimpse of nobility which Achilles shows throughout the whole scene is in his stoical answer:—

What follows is mere brutality. The Greeks crowd round, and drive their weapons into the senseless body.

Does it need here to do more than recall the too well remembered sequel—how the savage victor pierced the heels of his dead enemy, and so fastened the body to his chariot, and dragged him off to his ships, in full sight of his agonised parents? how

Or how the miserable Priam, grovelling on the floor of his palace, besought his weeping friends to suffer him to rush out of the gates, and implore the mercy of the merciless Achilles? Less horrible, if not less piteous, is the picture of Andromache:—

The body is dragged off to the ships, and flung in the dust in front of the bier on which Patroclus lies. And now, at last, when he has been fully avenged, the due honours shall be paid to his beloved remains, while the dogs and vultures feast on those of Hector. Thrice in slow procession, with a mournful chant, the Myrmidons lead their horses round the bier. While Achilles sleeps the deep sleep of exhaustion after the long day’s battle, the shade of his dead friend appears to him, and chides him for leaving him so long unburied, a wandering ghost in the gloom below.

As eager now to do honour to Achilles as he was before to insult him, Agamemnon has despatched a strong force at early dawn to cut down wood for a huge funeral pile. The burial rites are grandly savage. In long procession and in full panoply the Myrmidons bear the dead hero to the pile, and the corpse is covered with the long locks of hair which every warrior in turn, Achilles first, cuts off as an offering to the gods below. Four chariot-horses, and two dogs “that had fed at their master’s board,” are slain upon the pile, to follow him, in case he should have need of them, into the dark and unknown country: and last, the twelve Trojan captives, according to his barbarous vow, are slaughtered by Achilles in person, and laid upon the pile. The winds of heaven are solemnly invoked to fan the flames, which roar and blaze all night; and all night Achilles pours copious libations of wine from a golden goblet. With wine also the embers are quenched in the morning, and the bones of Patroclus are carefully collected and placed in a golden urn, to await the day, which Achilles foresees close at hand, when they shall be buried under one mound with his own.

There follow the funeral games. First, the chariot-race, in which Diomed carries off an easy victory with the Trojan horses which he captured from Æneas. An easy victory, because the goddess Minerva not only breaks the pole of Eumelus, his most formidable rival, but hands Diomed back his whip when he drops it: interpreted by our realistic critics to mean, that prudence bids him take a second whip as a reserve. The old “horse-tamer,” Nestor, gives his son Antilochus such cunning directions, that he comes in second, though his horses are confessedly the slowest of the whole field. Next comes the battle with the cœstus—that barbarous form of boxing-glove, which, far from deadening the force of the blow delivered, made it more damaging and dangerous, inasmuch as the padding consisted of thongs of raw ox-hide well hardened. The combat in this case is very unequal, since the giant Epeius speedily fells his younger and lighter antagonist, who is carried almost senseless from the lists. The wrestlers are better matched; the skill and subtlety of Ulysses are a counterpoise to the huge bulk and somewhat inactive strength of Ajax, who lifts his opponent off his feet with ease, but is brought to the ground himself by a dexterous kick upon the ancle-joint. Another fall, in which neither has the advantage, leads to the dividing of the prize—though how it was to be divided practically is not so clear, since the first prize was a tripod valued at twelve oxen, and the second a female captive, reckoned to be worth four.[21] The foot-race is won by Ulysses, Minerva interfering for the second time to secure the victory for her favourite, by tripping up the lesser Ajax (son of Oileus), who was leading. The Greek poet does but refer what we should call an unlucky accident to the agency of heaven. A single combat on foot, with shield and spear, succeeds, the prize for which is the rich armour of which Patroclus had spoiled Sarpedon. He who first draws blood is to be the winner. Diomed and Ajax Telamon step into the lists, and the combat between the two great champions grows so fierce and hot, that the spectators insist on their being separated, and again the honours are adjudged to be equal; although Diomed, who was clearly getting the advantage, receives the chief portion of the divided prize. In the quoit-throwing Ajax is beaten easily; and critics have remarked that in no single contest does the poet allow him, though a favourite with the army, to be successful. Those who insist upon the allegorical view of the poem, tell us that the lesson is, that brute force is of little avail without counsel. The archers’ prizes are next contended for, and we have the original of the story which has been borrowed, with some modifications, by many imitators from Virgil’s time downwards, and figures in the history of the English ‘Clym of the Clough,’ and Tell of Switzerland. Teucer, reputed the most skilful bowman in the whole host, only shoots near enough to cut the cord which ties the dove to the mast, while Meriones follows the bird with his aim as she soars far into the air, and brings her down, pierced through and through, with his arrow. But Meriones had vowed an offering to Apollo “of the silver bow,” which Teucer, in the pride of his heart, had neglected. The games are closed with hurling the spear, when the king Agamemnon himself, desirous to pay all honour to his great rival’s grief, steps into the arena as a competitor. With no less grace and dignity Achilles accepts the compliment, but forbids the contest. “O son of Atreus, we know thou dost far surpass us all”—and he hands the prize for his acceptance.

The anger against Agamemnon is past: but not so the savage wrath against Hector. Combined with his passionate grief for Patroclus, it amounts to madness. Morning after morning he rises from the restless couch where he has lain thinking of his friend, and lashing the dead corpse afresh to his chariot, drags it furiously thrice round the mound that covers Patroclus’ ashes. Twelve days has the body now lain unburied; but Venus and Apollo preserve it from decay. Venus sheds over it ambrosial roseate unguents, and Apollo covers it with a dark cool cloud. In less mythological language, the loathliness of death may not mar its beauty, nor the sunbeams breed in it corruption. Even the Olympians are seized with horror and pity. In spite of the remonstrances of his still implacable queen, Jupiter instructs Thetis to visit her son. and soften his cruel obduracy. At the same time he sends Iris to Priam, and persuades him to implore Achilles in person to restore the body of his son. Accompanied by a single herald, and bearing a rich ransom, the aged king passes the Greek lines by night (for Mercury himself becomes his guide, disguised in the form of a Greek straggler, and casts a deep sleep upon the sentinels). He reaches the tent of Achilles, who has just ended his evening meal, throws himself at his feet, and kisses “the dreadful murderous hands by which so many of his sons have fallen,” in an agony of supplication. He adjures the conqueror, by the thought of his own aged father Peleus—now looking and longing for his return—to have some pity on a bereaved old man, whose son can never return to him alive; and at least to give him back the body.

With the impulsive suddenness which is a part of his character, Achilles gives way at once—prepared, indeed, to yield, by his mother’s remonstrances. He gives orders to have the body clothed in costly raiment, and washed and anointed by the handmaidens; nay, even lifts his dead enemy with his own hands, and lays him on a couch. Yet he will not let Priam as yet look upon the corpse, lest at the sight of his grief his own passion should break out afresh. The father spends the night in the tent of his son’s slayer, and there he closes his eyes in sleep for the first time since the day of Hector’s death. In the morning he returns to Troy with his mournful burden, and the funeral rites of Hector close the poem. The boon which Achilles has granted he makes complete by the spontaneous offer of twelve days’ truce, that so Troy may bury her dead hero with his rightful honours. The wailings of Priam and Hecuba, though naturally expressed, are but commonplace compared with the last tribute of the remorseful Helen:—

CHAPTER XI.

CONCLUDING REMARKS.

The character of Hector has been very differently estimated. Modern writers upon Homer generally assume that the ancient bard had, as it were, a mental picture of all his great heroes before him, of their inner as well as of their outer man, and worked from this in the various acts and speeches which he has assigned to each. Probably nothing could be further from the truth. If the poet could be questioned as to his immortal work, and required to give a detailed character of each of his chief personages, such as his modern admirers present us with, he would most likely confess that such character as his heroes possess was built up by degrees, as occasion called for them to act and speak, and that his own portraits (where they were not derived from the current traditions) rested but little upon any preconceived ideal. It is very difficult to estimate character at all in a work of fiction in which the principles of conduct are in many respects so different from those of our own age. How far even the ablest critics have succeeded in the attempt in the case of Hector may be judged from this; that whereas Colonel Mure speaks of “a turn for vainglorious boasting” as his characteristic defect,[22] Mr Froude remarks that “while Achilles is all pride, Hector is all modesty.”[23] Both criticisms are from writers of competent taste and judgment; but both cannot possibly be true. There can be no doubt that Hector makes a considerable number of vaunting speeches in the course of the poem—vaunts which he does not always carry out; but in this respect he differs rather in degree than in principle from most of the other warriors, Greek as well as Trojan; and if the boasts of Achilles are always made good, while Hector’s often come to nothing, that follows almost necessarily from the fact that Achilles is the hero of the tale. A boastful tongue and a merciless spirit are attributes of the heroic character in Homer: his heroes bear a singular resemblance in these two points to the “braves” of the American Indians; while they are utterly unlike them in their sensitiveness to physical pain, their undisguised horror of death, and their proneness to give loud expression to both feelings. Without attempting to sketch a full-length portrait, which probably Homer himself would not recognise, it may be said that Hector interests us chiefly because he is far more human than Achilles, in his weakness as well as in his strength; his honest love for his wife and child, his pitying condonation of Helen, his half-contemptuous kindness to his weak brother Paris, his hearty and unselfish devotion to his country. Achilles is the “hero,” indeed, in the classical sense—i.e., he is the demi-god, superior to many of the mortal weaknesses which are palpable enough in the character of his antagonist: as little susceptible to Hector’s alternations of confidence and panic, as to his tender anxieties about his wife and child. The contrast between the two is very remarkable; as strong, though of quite a different kind, as that between the two chief female characters in the poem—Helen, charming even in her frailty, attracting us and compelling our admiration in spite of our moral judgment; Andromache, the blameless wife and mother, whose charm is the beauty of true womanhood, and whose portrait, as drawn by the poet, bears strong witness by its sweetness and purity to the essential soundness of the domestic relations in the age which he depicts.

The poem, as we have seen, ends somewhat abruptly. We learn nothing from it of the fate of Troy, except so far as we have been taught throughout the tale that the fortunes of the city and people depended wholly upon Hector. “Achilles’ wrath” was the theme of the song, and now that this has been appeased, we wait for no further catastrophe. Yet, if Achilles has been the hero, it is remarkable that the poet’s parting sympathies appear to rest, as those of the reader almost certainly will, with Hector. It would seem that Homer himself felt something of what he makes Jupiter express with regard to the Trojans—“They interest me, though they must needs perish.” The Trojan hero must fall, or the glory of the Greek could not be consummated; but the last words of the poem, as they record his funeral honours, so they express the poet’s regretful eulogy:—

Virgil, in his Æneid, naturally exalts the glory of Hector, because it was his purpose to trace the origin of the Romans from Troy; but we need not wonder that in later days, when the Homeric legends were worked up into tales of Christian chivalry, Hector, and not Achilles, became the model of a Christian knight. When the great Italian poet drew his character of Orlando, as a type of chivalry, he had the Trojan hero in his mind.

One of the earliest and most curious travesties of the Iliad—for it is hardly more, though made in all good faith, according to the taste of the times—was the work of an English troubadour, Benedict de St Maur, of the time of Henry II. It was reproduced, as a prose romance, in Latin, by Guido de Colonna, a Sicilian; but is better known—so far as it can be said to be known at all—as the ‘History of the Warres of the Greeks and Trojans,’ by John Lydgate, monk of Bury St Edmunds, first printed in 1513. The writer professedly takes Colonna as his original. The heroes of the Iliad reappear as the knights of modern chivalry; they fight on horseback, observe all the rules of medieval courtesy, and “fewtre their speres” at each other exactly in the style of the Companions of the Round Table. Agamemnon is very like Arthur, and Achilles Sir Lancelot, under other names. But Hector is here also plainly the favourite hero. Thersites figures as a dwarf, with all the malice and mischief peculiar, and in some degree permitted, to those imaginary types of humanity. The closing lines of Lydgate’s third book will give some idea of the strange transformation which Homer’s story undergoes in the hands of our medieval poet, and is a curious instance of the way in which the zealous churchman “improves” his pagan subject. He is describing the funeral rites of Hector:—

The way in which the Homeric characters are modernised in Chaucer and Dryden, and even in Shakspeare’s ‘Troilus and Cressida,’ is a deviation from their originals hardly more excusable, though less absurd, than this of Lydgate’s. They copied, in fact, not from the original at all, but from the medieval corruptions of it. Racine’s tragedies are in a higher vein, and his Iphigenia, though not Homer’s story, does more justice to some of Homer’s characters: but after all, as has been well observed, “they are dressed in the Parisian fashions, with speech and action accordingly.”[25]

The Iliad, as has been already remarked, closes more abruptly than its modern title would seem to justify, for the Tale of Troy is left half untold. Imitators of the great bard followed him, and though their works are lost to us, the legends upon which they worked have been reproduced by later writers. The poems once known as the ‘Little Iliad’ and the ‘Sacking of Troy’ have left little more than their names, and some few fragments which, do not raise much regret for the loss of the remainder; but the leading events of which they treated are preserved in the works of the Greek dramatists and of Virgil. It may not be out of place here to sketch briefly the sequel to Homer’s story.

Troy fell in that tenth year of the siege, though new and remarkable allies came to the aid of Priam. From the far north of Thrace came a band of Amazons—women-warriors who, in spite of their weaker sex, proved more than a match in battle for the men of Greece. Their queen Penthesilea was said to be the daughter of the War-god; and under her leading, once more the Trojans tried their fortune in the open field, not unsuccessfully, until she too fell by the spear of Achilles. Proceeding to possess himself of her helmet, as the conqueror’s spoil, he was struck with her remarkable beauty, and stood entranced for some moments in sorrow and admiration. It is the scene from which Tasso borrows his story of Clorinda, and which Spenser had in his mind when he makes Sir Artegal, after having unhelmed the fair Britomart in combat, let fall his sword at the sight of her “angel-face”—

Thersites—who had by this time forgotten the chastisement inflicted on him by Ulysses for his scurrilous tongue—ventured a jest upon Achilles’ sensibility, and was struck dead by a blow from the hero’s unarmed hand. Next came upon the scene the tall Ethiopian Memnon, son of the Dawn, a warrior of more than mortal beauty, sent either from Egypt or from the king of Assyria (for the legends vary), with a contingent of fierce negro warriors, who carried slaughter into the Greek ranks, until Memnon too fell by the hand of the same irresistible antagonist. These were only brief respites for the doomed city. But it was not to fall by the hand of Achilles. Before its day of destruction came, the Greek hero had met with the fate which he himself foresaw—which had been prophesied for him alike by his mother the sea-goddess, by the wondrous utterance of his horse Xanthus, and by the dying words of Hector. An arrow from Paris found the single vulnerable spot in his right heel, and stretched him where he had slain his Trojan enemy—before the Scæan gate. But his death, according to the legends, was no more like that of common mortals than his life had been. He does not go down into those gloomy regions where the ghosts of his friend Patroclus and his enemy Hector wander. It was not death, but a translation. The Greeks had prepared for him a magnificent funeral pile, but the body of the hero suddenly disappeared. His mother Thetis conveyed it away to the island of Leukè in the Euxine Sea, to enjoy in that seclusion a new and perpetual life. So early is the legend which the romance of Christendom adopted for so many of its favourites—notably for the English Arthur, borne by the three mysterious queens to

where, it was long said and believed, he lay either in a charmed sleep or a passionless immortality. One legend ran that the Greek hero, in his happy island, was favoured with the society of Helen, whose matchless beauty he had much desired to see.

His wondrous shield and armour—the masterpieces of Vulcan—were left by Thetis as a prize for “the bravest of the Greeks,” and became almost as fatal a source of discord as the golden apple which had been labelled for “the fairest.” Ulysses and Ajax were the most distinguished claimants, and when, as before, counsel was preferred to strength, Ajax went mad with vexation, and fell upon his own sword. Ulysses handed on the coveted armour to its rightful inheritor, the young Neoptolemus, son of Achilles, who, in accordance with an oracle, had been sent for to take Troy. Still the city held out, secure so long as the sacred image of Minerva, the “Palladium,” a gift from Jupiter himself, remained in the citadel: until Ulysses broke the spell by entering within the walls in disguise, and carrying it off. One quick eye discovered the venturous Greek, through his rags and self-inflicted wounds: Helen recognised him; but she was weary of her guilty life, and became an excusable traitress in favour of her lawful husband. It was again the fertile brain of Ulysses which conceived the stratagem of the wooden horse; and when the curiosity of the Trojans (against all ordinary probabilities, it must be confessed) dragged it inside the walls, the armed warriors whom it contained issued forth in the night, and opened the gates to their comrades.

The details of the sack of the city are neither more nor less horrible than similar scenes which are unhappily too historical. Priam is slain at the altar of his house; his family either share his fate, or are carried into captivity. Of the contradictory legends as to the fate of “Hector’s Andromache”—as in Virgil’s great poem she pathetically calls herself—the reader will gladly choose, with that poet, the least painful version, which leaves her settled at Buthrotus in Epirus, in a peaceful retirement full of gentle regrets, as the wife of Hector’s brother Helenus.

Of Helen and Menelaus we shall hear more in Homer’s tale of the Wanderings of Ulysses. He says nothing of the scene which the later dramatists give us, by no means inconsistent with his own portrait of the pair, when at the taking of the city the outraged husband rushes upon the adulteress with uplifted sword, and drops his weapon at the sight of her well-remembered and matchless beauty. For the miserable sequel of Agamemnon’s story we may refer also to the Odyssey. Few of the Greek heroes returned home in peace. They had insulted the gods of Troy, and they were cursed with toilsome wanderings and long banishment like Ulysses, or met with a worse fate still. Diomed did not indeed leave his wife Ægiale a heart-broken widow, as Dione in her anger had predicted, but found on his return that she had consoled herself with another lover in his absence, and narrowly escaped assassination by her hand. Teucer was refused a home by his father, because he did not bring his brother Ajax back with him to the old man. The lesser Ajax was wrecked and drowned on his homeward voyage. Fate spared Nestor, old as he was, to return to his stronghold at Pylos; but his son Antilochus had fallen in the flower of his age on the plains of Troy. The names of many of the wanderers were preserved in the colonies which they founded along the coasts of Greece and Italy, and the heroes of the great Siege of Troy spread its fame over all the then known world.

END OF THE ILIAD.


PRINTED BY WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS, EDINBURGH.

HOMER
———
THE ODYSSEY

CONTENTS.

It has been thought desirable in these pages to use the Latin names of the Homeric deities and heroes, as more familiar to English ears. As, however, most modern translators have followed Homer’s Greek nomenclature, it may be convenient here to give both.

The passages quoted, unless otherwise specified, are from the admirable translation of Mr Worsley.

INTRODUCTION.

The poem of the Odyssey is treated in these pages as the work of a single author, and that author the same as the composer of the Iliad. It would be manifestly out of place, in a volume which does not profess to be written for critical scholars, to discuss a question on which they are so far from being agreed. But it may be satisfactory to assure the reader who has neither leisure nor inclination to enter into the controversy, that in accepting, as we do, the Odyssey as from the same “Homer” to whom we owe the Tale of Troy, he may fortify himself by the authority of many accomplished scholars who have carefully examined the question. Though none of the incidents related in the Iliad are distinctly referred to in the Odyssey—a point strongly urged by those who would assign the poems to different authors—and therefore the one cannot fairly be regarded as a sequel to the other, yet there is no important discrepancy, either in the facts previously assumed, or in the treatment of such characters as appear upon the scene in both.

The character of the two poems is, indeed, essentially different. The Iliad is a tale of the camp and the battle-field: the Odyssey combines the romance of travel with that of domestic life. The key-note of the Iliad is glory: that of the Odyssey is rest. This was amongst the reasons which led one of the earliest of Homer’s critics to the conclusion that the Odyssey was the work of his old age. In both poems the interest lies in the situations and the descriptions, rather than in what we moderns call the “plot.” This latter is not a main consideration with the poet, and he has no hesitation in disclosing his catastrophe beforehand. The interest, so far as this point is concerned, is also weakened for the modern reader by the intervention throughout of supernatural agents, who, at the most critical turns of the story, throw their irresistible weight into the scale. Yet, in spite of this, the interest of the Odyssey is intensely human. Greek mythology and Oriental romance are large ingredients in the poem, but its men and women are drawn by a master’s hand from the actual life; and, since in the two thousand years between our own and Homer’s day nothing has changed so little as human nature, therefore very much of it is still a story of to-day.

The poem before us is the tale of the wanderings and adventures of Odysseus—or Ulysses, as the softer tongue of the Latins preferred to call him—on his way home from the siege of Troy to his island-kingdom of Ithaca. The name Odysseus has been variously interpreted. Homer himself, who should be the best authority, tells us that it was given to him by his grandfather Autolycus to signify “the child of hate.” Others have interpreted it to mean “suffering;” and some ingenious scholars see in it only the ancient form of a familiar sobriquet by which the hero was known, “the little one,” or “the dwarf,”—a conjecture which derives some support from the fact that the Tyrrhenians knew him under that designation. It may be remembered that in the Iliad he is described as bearing no comparison in stature with the stalwart forms of Agamemnon and Menelaus; and it is implied in the description that there was some want of proportion in his figure, since he appeared nobler than Menelaus when both sat down. But in the Odyssey itself there appears no reference to any natural defect of any kind. His character in this poem corresponds perfectly with that which is disclosed in the Iliad. There, he is the leading spirit of the Greeks when in council. Scarcely second to Achilles or Diomed in personal prowess, his advice and opinion are listened to with as much respect as those of the veteran Nestor. In the Iliad, too, he is, as he is called in the present poem, “the man of many devices.” His accomplishments cover a larger field than those of any other hero. Achilles only can beat him in speed of foot; he is as good an archer as Ajax Oileus or Teucer; he throws Ajax the Great in the wrestling-match, in spite of his superior strength, by a happy use of science, and divides with him the prize of victory. To him, as the worthiest successor of Achilles—on the testimony of the Trojan prisoners, who declared that he had wrought them most harm of any—the armour of that great hero was awarded at his death. He is not tragic enough to fill the first place in the Iliad, but we are quite prepared to find him the hero of a story of travel and adventure like the Odyssey, in which the grand figure of Achilles would be entirely out of place.

The Odyssey has been pronounced, by a high classical authority, to be emphatically a lady’s book. “The Iliad,” says the great Bentley, “Homer made for men, and the Odyssey for the other sex.” This opinion somewhat contradicts the criticism of an older and greater master—Aristotle—who defines the Odyssey as being “ethic and complex,” while the Iliad is “pathetic and simple.” Yet it was perhaps some such notion of the fitness of things which made Fénélon’s adaptation of Homer’s story, ‘The Adventures of Telemachus in search of Ulysses,’ so popular a French text-book in ladies’ schools a century ago. It is certain, also, that the allusions in our modern literature, and the subjects of modern pictures, are drawn from the Odyssey even more frequently than from the Iliad, although the former has never been so generally read in our schools and colleges. Circe and the Sirens, Scylla and Charybdis, have pointed more morals than any incidents in the Siege of Troy. Turner’s pictures of Nausicaa and her Maidens, the Gardens of Alcinous, the Cyclops addressed by Ulysses, the Song of the Sirens—all amongst our national heirlooms of art—assume a fair acquaintance with the later Homeric fable on the part of the public for whom they were painted. The secret of this greater popularity may lie in the fact, that while the adventures in the Odyssey have more of the romantic and the imaginative, the heroes are less heroic—have more of the common human type about them—than those of the Iliad. The colossal figure of Achilles in his wrath does not affect us so nearly as the wandering voyager with his strange adventures, his hairbreadth escapes, and his not over-scrupulous devices.

To our English sympathies the Odyssey appeals strongly for another reason—it is a tale of voyage and discovery. “It is,” as Dean Alford says, “of all poems a poem of the sea.” In the Iliad the poet never missed an opportunity of letting us know that—whoever he was and wherever he was born—he knew the sea well, and had a seaman’s tastes. But there his tale confined him chiefly to the plain before Troy, and such opportunities presented themselves but rarely. In the Odyssey we roam from sea to sea throughout the narrative, and the restless hero seems never so much at home as when he is on shipboard. It is not without reason that the most ancient works of art which bear the figure of Ulysses represent him not as a warrior but as a sailor.

The Tale of Troy, as has been already said, embraces in its whole range three decades of years. It is with the last ten that the Odyssey has to do; and as in the Iliad, though the siege itself had consumed ten years, it is with the last year only that the poet deals; so in this second great poem also, the main action occupies no more than the last six weeks of the third and concluding decade.

Between the Iliad and the Odyssey there is an interval of events, not related in either poem, but which a Greek audience of the poet’s own day would readily supply for themselves out of a store of current legend quite familiar to their minds, and embodied in more than one ancient poem now lost to us.[26] Troy, after the long siege, had fallen at last; but not to Achilles. For him the dying prophecy of Hector had been soon fulfilled, and an arrow from the bow of Paris had stretched him in death, like his noble enemy, “before the Scæan gates.” It was his son Neoptolemus, “the red-haired,” to whom the oracles pointed as the destined captor of the city. Ulysses went back to Greece to fetch him, and even handed over to the young hero, on his arrival, the armour of his father—his own much-valued prize. In that armour Neoptolemus led the Greeks to the storm and sack of the city by night, while the Trojans were either asleep or holding deep carousal.

It has been conjectured by some that, under the name of Ulysses, the poet has but described, with more or less of that licence to which he had a double claim as poet and as traveller, his own wanderings and adventures by land and sea. It has been argued, in a treatise of some ingenuity,[27] that the poet, whoever he was, was himself a native of the island in which he places the home of his hero. There is certainly one passage which reads very much like the circumstantial and loving description which a poet would give of his sea-girt birthplace, with every nook of which he would have been familiar from his childhood. It occurs in the scene where Ulysses is at last landed on the coast of Ithaca, which he is slow to recognise until his divine guide points out to him the different localities within sight:—