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.{v.ii-2}
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 autoly{v.i-5003}cus 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{v.ii-4} 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{v.ii-5} 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{v.ii-6} 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 sc?an 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{v.ii-7} of ithaca, which he is slow to recognise until his divine guide points out to him the different localities within sight:—
“this is the port of sea-king phorcys old,
and this the olive at the haven’s brow.
yonder the deep dark lovely cave behold,
shrine of the na?ad-nymphs! these shades enfold
the stone-roofed bower, wherein thou oft hast stood,
while to the nymphs thy frequent vows uprolled,
steam of choice hecatombs and offerings good.
neritus hill stands there, high-crowned with waving wood.”[28]
as conjecture only all such theories must remain; but it may at least be safely believed that the author had himself visited some of the strange lands which he describes, with whatever amount of fabulous ornament he may have enriched his tale, and it has a certain interest for the reader to entertain the possibility of a personal narrative thus underlying the romance.
