The Authoress of the Odyssey

These lines are found Od. ix. 54, 55 with παρὰ νηυσὶ θοῆσιν instead of ποταμοῖο παρ' ὄχθας.

Il. XVIII. 604-606,

τερπόμενοι· μετὰ δέ σφιν ἐμέλπετο Θεῖος ἀοιδὸς
φορμίζων· δοίω δὲ κυβερνιστῆρε κατ' αὐτοὺς
μολπῆς ἐξάρχοντος ἐδίνευον κατὰ μέσον.

These lines occur Od. iv. 17-19.

To meet the possible objection that Il. XVIII. was written later than the Odyssey, and might therefore have borrowed from it, I will quote the context of line 108 as well as the line itself. The passage runs (XVIII. 107-110): —

ὦς ἔρις ἔκ τε θεῶν ἔκ τ' ἀνθρώπων άπόλοιτο
καὶ χόλος ὅς τ' ἐφέηκε πολύφρονά περ χαλεπῆναι,
ὅς τε πολὺ γλυκίων μέλιτος καταλειβόμενοιο
ἀνδρῶν ἐν στήθεσσιν ἀέξεται ἠύτε καπνός.

The context of the Odyssean line which I suppose to be derived from this noble passage is as follows (xiv. 462-465): —

κέκλυθι νῦν Ἐύμαιε, καὶ ἄλλοι πάντες εταῖροι·
εὐξάμενός τι ἔπος ἐρέω· οἶνος γὰρ ἀνώγει
ἠλεός, ὅς τ' ἐφέηκε πολύφρονά περ μάλ' ἀεȋσαι
καὶ θ' ἁπαλόν γελάσαι, καί τ' ὀρχήσαθαι ἀνῆκεν,

Which is the most likely – that the magnificent Iliadic lines were developed from Od. xiv. 464, or that this line is an unconscious adaptation from Il. XVIII. 108? For that the two lines are father and son will hardly be disputed.

Which again commends itself best – that the writer of Il. XVIII. took the heating of Ulysses' bath water to heat water for Patroclus, or that the writer of the Odyssey omitted the line about Patroclus, and used the rest of the passage to heat water for Ulysses' bath?

As regards the two salutations to Thetis (Il. XVIII. 385-387, and 424-427), is it more likely that the writer of Il. XVIII. made two bites of the Odyssean cherry of v. 87-91, or that the writer of the Odyssey, wanting but a single salutation, combined the two Iliadic ones as in the passage above given?

Lastly, is the list of constellations which Vulcan put on to the shield of Achilles more likely to have been amplified from Od. v. 272-275, or these last-named lines to have been taken, with such modification as was necessary, from Il. XVIII. 486-489? Whatever may be the date of the Odyssey, I cannot doubt that Il. XVIII. must be dated earlier; and yet there is no Book of the Iliad about which our eminent Homeric scholars are more full of small complaints, or more unanimous in regarding as an interpolation. If there is one part of the Iliad rather than another in which Homer shows himself unapproachable, it is in his description of the shield of Achilles.

I will again assure the reader that all the Books of the Iliad seem drawn from with the same freedom as that shown in those which I have now dealt with in detail, and also that I can find no part of the Odyssey which borrows any less freely from the Iliad than the rest of the poem; here and there difference of subject leads the writer to go three or four pages without a single Iliadic cento, but this is rare. One or two, or even sometimes three or four, Iliadic passages in a page is nearer the average, but of these some will be what may be called common form.

Their frequency raises no suggestion of plagiarism any more than the Biblical quotations in Pilgrim's Progress would do if the references were cut out. They are so built into the context as to be structural, not ornamental; and to preclude the idea of their having been added by copyists or editors. They seem to be the spontaneous outcome of the fullness of the writer's knowledge of the Iliad. It is also evident that she is not making a resumé of other people's works; she is telling the story de novo from the point of view of herself, her home, her countrymen, and the whole island of Sicily. Other peoples and places may be tolerated, but they raise no enthusiasm in her mind.

Nevertheless, a certain similarity of style and feeling between the Odyssey and all the poems of the Epic cycle is certain to have existed, and indeed can be proved to have existed from the fragments of the lost poems that still remain. In all art, whether literary, pictorial, musical, or architectural, a certain character will be common to a certain age and country. Every age has its stock subjects for artistic treatment; the reason for this is that it is convenient for the reader, spectator, or listener, to be familiar with the main outlines of the story. Written literature is freer in this respect than painting or sculpture, for it can explain and prepare the reader better for what is coming. Literature which, though written, is intended mainly for recitation before an audience few of whom can read, exists only on condition of its appealing instantly to the understanding, and will, therefore, deal only with what the hearer is supposed already to know in outline. The writer may take any part of the stock national subjects that he or she likes, and within reasonable limits may treat it according to his or her fancy, but it must hitch on to the old familiar story, and hence will arise a certain similarity of style between all poems of the same class that belong to the same age, language, and people. This holds just as good for the medieval Italian painters as it does for the Epic cycle. They offer us a similarity in dissimilarity and a dissimilarity in similarity.

When we remember, however, that the style of the Odyssey must not only perforce gravitate towards that of all the other then existing epic poems, but also that the writer's mind is as strongly leavened with the mind of Homer, let alone the other Cyclic poets, as we have seen it to be, it is not surprising that the veneer of virility thus given to a woman's work should have concealed the less patent, but far more conclusive, evidence that the writer was not of the same sex as the man, or men, from whom she was borrowing.

At the same time, in spite of the use she makes of Homer, I think she was angry with him, and perhaps jealous; on which head I will say more in my next Chapter. Possibly the way he laughs at women and teases them, not because he dislikes them, but because he enjoys playing with them, irritates her; she was not disposed to play on such a serious subject. We have seen how she retorts on him for having made a tripod worth three times as much as a good serviceable woman of all work. His utter contempt, again, for the gods, which he is at no pains to conceal, would be offensive to a writer who never permits herself to go beyond the occasional mild irreverence of the Vicar's daughter. Therefore, she treats Homer, as its seems to me, not without a certain hardness; and this is the only serious fault I have to find with her.

For example, she takes the concluding lines of Hector's farewell to Andromache, a passage which one would have thought she would have shrunk from turning to common uses, and puts it into the mouth of Telemachus when he is simply telling his mother to take herself off. She does this in i. 356-359 and again in xxi. 350-353. This is not as it should be. Nor yet again is her taking the water that was heated to wash the blood from the body of poor Patroclus (Il. XVIII. 344 &c.) and using it for Ulysses' bath (Od. viii. 434-437). Surely the disrespect here is deeper than any that can be found in Homer towards the gods.

But, whatever the spirit may have been in which the writer of the Odyssey has treated the Iliad, I cannot doubt that that she knew this poem exceedingly well in the shape in which we have it, and this is the point which I have thought it worth while to endeavour to substantiate at such length in the foregoing Chapter.

CHAPTER XV

THE ODYSSEY IN ITS RELATION TO THE OTHER POEMS OF THE TROJAN CYCLE, AND ITS DEVELOPMENT IN THE HANDS OF THE AUTHORESS

The writer of the Odyssey appears to have known most of those lost poems of the Epic cycle – eight in number – that relate to Troy, but as all we know about them is from the summaries given in the fragment of Proclus, and from a few lines here and there quoted in later authors, we can have no irrefragable certainty that she had the poems before her even when she alludes to incidents mentioned by Proclus as being dealt with in any given one of them. Nevertheless, passages in Od. i. and iii. make it probable that she knew the Nosti or the Return of the Achæans from Troy, and we may suppose that Nestor's long speeches (Od. iii. 102-200 and 253-328) are derived mainly from this source, for they contain particulars that correspond closely with the epitome of the Nosti given by Proclus.

We can thus explain the correctness of the topography of the Ægæan sea that is manifested in Nestor's speeches, but no where else in the poem beyond a bare knowledge of the existence of Apollo's shrine in Delos (Od. vi. 162) and an occasional mention of Crete. I see Professor Jebb says that the Odyssey "shows a familiar knowledge of Delos;"[89 - Introduction to Homer, Macmillan, 1888, p. 172.] but there is no warrant for this assertion from anything in the poem.

The writer of the Odyssey seems, in Book iv., to have also known the Cypria, which dealt with the events that led up to the Trojan war.

Book xxiv. of the Odyssey (35-97) suggests a knowledge of the Æthiopis. So also does the mention of Memnon (Od. xi. 522).

Knowledge of the Little Iliad may be suspected from Od. iv. 271-283, where Helen seems to be now married to Deiphobus, and from xi. 543-562; as also from xi. 508, 509, where Ulysses says that he took Neoptolemus to Scyrus. Ulysses entering Troy as a spy (Od. iv. 242-256) is also given by Proclus as one of the incidents in the Little Iliad. I do not see, therefore, that there can be much doubt about the writer of the Odyssey having been acquainted with the Little Iliad, a poem which was apparently of no great length, being only in four Books.

From the two Books of the Sack of Troy we get the account of the council held by the Trojans over the wooden horse (Od. viii. 492-517).

We have seen how familiar the authoress of the Odyssey was with the Iliad; there only remains, therefore, one of the eight Trojan poems which she does not appear to have known – I mean the Telegony, which is generally, and one would say correctly, placed later than the Odyssey; but even though it were earlier we may be sure that the writer of the Odyssey would have ignored it, for it will hardly bear her out in the character she has given of Penelope.

In passing I may say that though Homer (meaning, of course, the writer of the Iliad) occasionally says things that suggest the Cypria, there is not a line that even suggests knowledge of a single one of the incidents given by Proclus as forming the subjects of the other Books of the Trojan cycle; the inference, therefore, would seem to be that none of them, except possibly, though very uncertainly, the Cypria, had appeared before he wrote. Nevertheless we cannot be sure that this was so.

The curious question now arises why the writer of the Odyssey should have avoided referring to a single Iliadic incident, while showing no unwillingness to treat more or less fully of almost all those mentioned by Proclus as dealt with in the other poems of the Trojan cycle, and also while laying the Iliad under such frequent contributions.

I remember saying to a great publisher that a certain book was obviously much indebted to a certain other book to which no reference was made. "Has the writer," said the publisher in question, "referred to other modern books on the same subject?" I answered, "Certainly." "Then," said he, "let me tell you that it is our almost unvaried experience that when a writer mentions a number of other books, and omits one which he has evidently borrowed from, the omitted book is the one which has most largely suggested his own." His words seemed to explain my difficulty about the way in which the writer of the Odyssey lets the incidents of the Iliad so severely alone. It was the poem she was trying to rival, if not to supersede. She knew it to be far the finest of the Trojan cycle; she was so familiar with it that appropriate lines from it were continually suggesting themselves to her – and what is an appropriate line good for if it is not to be appropriated? She knew she could hold her own against the other poems, but she did not feel so sure about the Iliad, and she would not cover any of the ground which it had already occupied.

Of course there is always this other explanation possible, I mean that traditions about Homer's private life may have been known to the writer of the Odyssey, which displeased her. He may have beaten his wife, or run away with somebody else's, or both, or done a hundred things which made him not exactly the kind of person whom Arete would like her daughter to countenance more than was absolutely necessary. I believe, however, that the explanation given in the preceding paragraph is the most reasonable.

And now let me explain what I consider to have been the development of the Odyssey in the hands of the poetess. I cannot think that she deliberately set herself to write an epic poem of great length. The work appears to have grown on her hands piecemeal from small beginnings, each additional effort opening the door for further development, till at last there the Odyssey was – a spontaneous growth rather than a thing done by observation. Had it come by observation, no doubt it would have been freer from the anomalies, inconsistencies, absurdities, and small slovenlinesses which are inseparable from the development of any long work, the plan of which has not been fully thought out beforehand. But surely in losing these it would have lost not a little of its charm.

From Professor Jebb's Introduction to Homer, Ed. 1888, p. 131, I see that he agrees with Kirchhoff in holding that the Odyssey contains "distinct strata of poetical material from different sources and periods," and also that the poem owes its present unity of form to one man; he continues: —

But under this unity of form there are perceptible traces of a process by which different compositions were adapted to one another.

In a note on the preceding page he tells us that Kirchhoff regards the first 87 verses of Book i. as having formed the exordium of the original Return of Ulysses.

My own conclusions, arrived at to the best of my belief before I had read a word of Professor Jebb's Introduction, agree in great part with the foregoing. I found the Odyssey to consist of two distinct poems, with widely different aims, and united into a single work, not unskilfully, but still not so skilfully as to conceal a change of scheme. The two poems are: 1. The visit of Ulysses to the Phæacians, with the story of his adventures as related by himself. 2. The story of Penelope and the suitors, with the episode of Telemachus's voyage to Pylos. Of these two, the first was written before the writer had any intention of dealing with the second, while the second in the end became more important than the first.

I cordially agree with Kirchhoff that the present exordium belongs to the earlier poem, but I would break it off at line 79, and not at 87. It is a perfect introduction to the Return of Ulysses, but it is no fit opening for the Odyssey as it stands. I had better perhaps give it more fully than I have done in my abridgement. It runs: —

Tell me, oh Muse, of that ingenious hero who travelled far and wide after he had sacked the strong citadel of Troy. He saw many cities and learned the manners of many nations; moreover, he suffered much by sea while trying to save his own life and bring his men safely home; but do what he might he could not save his men, for they perished through their own sheer folly in eating the cattle of the Sun-god Hyperion; so the god prevented them from ever getting home. Tell me too about all these things, oh daughter of Jove, from whatever source you may know them (i. 1-10).

Then follows the statement that Ulysses was with the nymph Calypso, unable to escape, and that his enemy, Neptune, had gone to the Ethiopians (i. 11-21). The gods meet in council and Jove makes a speech about the revenge taken by Orestes on Ægisthus (i. 26-43); Minerva checks him, turns the subjects on to Ulysses, and upbraids Jove with neglecting him (i. 44-62). Jove answers that he had not forgotten him, and continues: —

"Bear in mind that Neptune is still furious with Ulysses for having blinded an eye of Polyphemus, king of the Cyclopes. Polyphemus is son to Neptune by the nymph Thoösa, daughter to the sea-king Phoreys, but instead of killing him outright he torments him by preventing him from getting home. Still, let us lay our heads together and see how we can help him to return. Neptune will then be pacified, for if we are all of a mind he can hardly hold out against us unsupported" (i. 68-79).

Let us now omit the rest of Book i., Books ii. iii. and iv. and go on with line 28 of Book v., which follows after a very similar council to the one that now stands at the beginning of Book i. Continuing with line 28 of Book v. we read: —

When he had thus spoken he said to his son Mercury: "Mercury, you are our messenger, go therefore and tell Calypso we have decreed that poor Ulysses is to return home. He is to be conveyed neither by gods nor men, but after a perilous voyage of twenty days upon a raft he is to reach fertile Scheria, &c." (v. 28-34).

From this point the poem continues with only one certain, and another doubtful, reference to the suitors and Penelope, until (according to Kirchhoff) line 184 of Book xiii. I had thought that the point of juncture between the two poems was in the middle of line 187, and that the ἔγρετο in the second half of the line had perhaps been originally εὖδεν; but it must be somewhere close about this line, and I am quite ready to adopt Kirchhoff's opinion now that I have come to see why Ulysses was made to sleep so profoundly on leaving Scheria.

Till I had got hold of the explanation given on page 173, I naturally thought that the strange sleep of Ulysses had been intended to lead up to something that was to happen in Ithaca, and which had been cancelled when the scheme was enlarged and altered; for without this explanation it is pointless as the poem now stands.

I do not now think that there was ever any account of what happened to Ulysses on his waking up in Ithaca, other than what we now have, but rather that the writer was led to adopt a new scheme at the very point where it became incumbent upon her to complete an old one. For at this point she would first find herself face to face with the difficulty of knowing what to do with Ulysses in Ithaca after she had got him there.