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Ulysses. This led the Scholiast on iii. 97 to suggest a second sense for the word, from ora, voice! founding error on error. In xi. 583, where OTEUTO (engaged, promised) is improperly used for stood, the Scholiast throws the blame on some editor (diaσkevaσris) of the poem. 'Arpárny, (διασκευαστής) ̓Απριάτην, unbought, is in Il. i. 99 a feminine accusative; but the poet of the Odyssey has mistaken it in that passage for an adverb, and has used it in a masculine connection. Oɛov iórnr ought to mean, by will of the gods; but, as Professor Malden has remarked, it is perverted into the sense, on account of the gods;' first in the Odyssey, then in after poets. 'ApapάKETOS, whatever it means, is shown by the use of all the poets to have nothing to do with length. In the Iliad it is an epithet of the dreadful Chimera. But in the Odyssey it is applied to a mast, and apparently means very long. 'Any's in the Iliad probably means noisy, shrieking; but the poet of the Odyssey seems to have interpreted it vehement, and says anxès payéμer, to eat greedily. Is any reader incredulous that so powerful a poet can have made errors in Greek? Then here is an unanswerable fact. He did not know the derivation of ßporòs, nor that it means mortal; else he could not have used the tautology Ovnroia Sporoia (vii. 210), mortal mortals, for mortal men.

The writer of this article naturally has taken much pains in the verbal enquiry, and wishes that his rouble could save the trouble of others; but to exhibit further the vocabulary of the Odyssey, does not suit the pages of this Magazine.

We must finally consider the tragedy by which the poem is wound ip. The suitors came not only from Ulysses's own realm, but fiftytwo choice youths' from the greater island of Dulichium (xvi. 247), a foreign kingdom, so that their slaughter was an act of the greatest

rashness. And a still greater moral anomaly is the treatment of the wretched maid servants, whom Ulysses reproaches the suitors for taking as bedfellows against their will (apevvážeσde ẞiaiwe), xxii. 37. (παρευνάζεσθε βιαίως), But suppose it was with their will: what other Greek ever thought that women deserved to be hanged for feminine weakness? or for pert language? for that is imputed also. Ulysses indeed orders them to be hewn in pieces, and Telemachus improves it into hanging them. The whole idea is so barbarous, and told so barbarously, as to take away one's breath. Indeed the ferocity, as well as the craft, imputed to Ulysses, seems to belong to the era of the cruel tyrants, who extirpated the aristocracy to the utmost of their power; not to that of the age which we call Homeric, when a king rested on the military support of his subordinate chieftains, themselves entitled 'kings.' In the hands of such chieftains (Telemachus himself is made to inform us) rested the election to the royalty of Ithaca, if Ulysses were dead.

The poet himself thus describes the death of Antinous: 'He was about to lift a beautiful golden tankard to his lips, nor did any thought of being slaughtered cause him anxiety: who could imagine that in a company of guests a solitary man, however hardy, should bring on him evil death and black fate?' When the first victim has fallen, the suitors suppose that the shot has been accidental; but Ulysses reveals himself, and fiercely denounces them all, for courting his wife while he was alive, thus defying the gods and eating up his substance. Hereupon the bravest of them, Eurymachus, whom the people had expected Penelope to accept, makes a very temperate reply, nearly as follows: 'If you are really Ulysses, you have slain the man who to you was most

guilty; who indeed plotted against your son's life. Be satisfied with this victim, and spare your own people. We have sinned against your property, and you may justly be angry with us, until we have repaid it all to you; this we will do, amply and voluntarily, until your heart is gladdened.' Ulysses replies, that if he could get the whole of their substance, and much beside, nothing should induce him to spare the life of any of them: so let them prepare to fight it out with him. Eury machus has a sword at his side, but is slain before he can use it. The poet thereupon felt it necessary to allow the suitors to get at some armour, lest the massacre of the defenceless excite pity; though he has hereby made the story surpass poetical credibility. But the moral phenomena alone are here pressed, as coming from a different mind and soul from the Iliad.

How the argument between the suitors and Ulysses stood, our poet well knew; for he puts into the mouth of Antinous's father Eupeithes (xxiv. 425) the complaint, that Ulysses carried away ships and men to Troy and lost them, one and all; then, after twenty years' absence, comes back to slaughter his own people. Laertes was superannuated before Ulysses could become king. No king is free to leave his people to simple anarchy, and not even appoint a regent; much less to expect them for ever to believe him alive when he has not been heard of for ten years. Eumæus firmly believed Ulysses to be dead: why might not Antinous? In modern England, if a widow had heard nothing of her husband for seven years, no judge in the land and no moralist would censure her re-marriage. It is incredible that the poet could seriously disapprove of it: nay, he twice tells us that Telemachus had exhorted his mother to choose a husband,

and expresses no condemnation; as though the reason assigned, that he hopes thereby to save his remaining substance, were quite sufficient. And here we have the real grievance, the suitors were offenders against Ulysses' property, by living at his expense against the customs of Greece: and Eurymachus confesses this. But property can be replaced, and the poet makes Eurymachus undertake that they will more than replace it, until the heart of Ulysses is gladdened ;' yet, marvellous to say, in spite of this humiliation, he thinks to glorify his hero by making him cruelly implacable towards every one of the suitors, without discrimination either of Amphinomus, to whom the poet ascribes right-mindedness (pperir àуaña), or of the timid and gentle priest Leiodes, who (says he) abhorred the rudeness of the suitors, and was ever indignant with them. When he falls at the feet of Ulysses, and declares that the very women will testify to his uniform good conduct, and implores his mercy, Ulysses brutally replies, that, 'no doubt, as a priest, he often prayed that Ulysses might never come home; so, with the word, he cuts off the suppliant's head. Since neither Amphinomus nor Leiodes are imagined to have been in the alleged plot for killing Telemachus, that evidently is not the poet's justification of the massacre. Indeed he makes the goddess Athena suggest it to Telemachus before the plot, and gives as a sufficient reason for it, the expensiveness of their entertainment.

At the same time, oddly enough, he makes the faithful Eumæus most wasteful of all; for when Ulysses comes to him in garb of an old beggar, Eumæus kills two pigs (Od. xiv. 74) to furnish him with a single dinner, and a third, the best of the swine' (xiv. 414), for the supper. According to common sense and prudence, as

well as sound morals, if many had sinned in very various degrees, it was wise to wink at the possible greater guilt of some, and to accept the theory of Eurymachus that Antinous's life was a full atonement. To ordinary minds, Ulysses would seem to have been sufficiently glorified by the humble submission of the suitors and their ample repayment of damages. Since the poet on the contrary is bent on killing them all, the choice youth and flower of the chieftains, this seems to be part of the thought of an age in which whole aristocracies were exterminated by successful tyrants; who acted as did Lucius Sulla to the opposite party according to Cicero: 'quos voluit, expulit; quos potuit, occidit.'

It is in vain that one tries to parallel this with the deeds of Achilles. In his wildest fury, nothing so monstrous is imputed to him.

His ferocities are against the public enemy; his signal malignity against the slayer of his friend. But, what is most cardinal, his evil deeds and evil temper are repudiated by the poet; while the poet of the Odyssey, himself and his goddess Athena, approve of Ulysses and sympathise with him. It is not duly observed how signally in the Iliad the raw pride and implacability of Achilles are held up to the reader's condemnation. Nestor in the second book strongly condemns him, though thinking Agamemnon also wrong. His outrageous refusal to accept Agamemnon's humble submission is exposed in the narrative itself, and with blunt warmth is rebuked by Ajax to his face, as afterwards tenderly yet faithfully by Patroclus: and after Patroclus's death, Achilles in agony of soul confesses his folly, which indeed in Il. xvi. 97-100 is represented as actually childish. His sacrifice of the twelve Trojan youths, the poet gravely rebukes; his senseless barbarity to Hector is scourged by VOL. VIII.-NO. XLVII. NEW SERIES.

Apollo's invective, with whom the gods in general, and Jupiter in particular, sympathise.

But in the Odyssey Ulysses makes war on helpless and worthless women, as well as on men. After the suitors have been despatched, and the doomed maid-servants have been forced to wipe up the blood, Telemachus reflects that for these so honourable a death as that by the sword (which he calls кaðapòç Bávaros, a clean death) is too good: so he hangs them all, 'like birds on a string.' Then to crown the exploits comes the bright device of Ulysses, which is to hinder the people from driving him and his son into banishment as murderers, xxiii. 120. He bids his wife and son to bathe, and dress in their best garments, and give fine clothes to all the servants, and bring the divine bard' to play on the lyre, and get up 'a sportive dance as if for a wedding.' They obeyed him : the feet of dancers made a thundering noise,' and the passers-by believed that all was jollity, and knew nothing of the slaughter! Yet somehow this device did not succeed: 'murder will out.' Old Eupeithes tries to revenge the death of his son, and has to be slain by the old Laertes. The goddess Athena, who has prompted Ulysses all along, then forbids more slaughter, reconciles the combatants by a solemn treaty, and so the poem ends.

Yet in closing, the Odyssey lays the foundation of a new epic, as in the tales of the Arabian Nights. A prophecy of Teiresias commanded Ulysses, after regaining his royal power, to wander over the continent with an oar on his shoulder, until he should reach a people who knew nothing of the sea, and eat no salt in their food, and mistake his oar for a winnowing shovel. Then he is to fix the oar in the ground, and offer sacrifices to Neptune; after this, he is to return home, and will

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ive into opulent old age, until 0áraτος ἐξ ἁλὸς, οι θάνατος ἔξαλος (for oracles are ambiguous), whether death from the sea, or death out of the sea, or death from salt, should carry him off. It is curious, that in the Iliad, we have not only the hint of an Eneid, but in the mouth of Ulysses words which imply that some tale about Telemachus was already current. In Iliad ii. 260, threatening Thersites, he says: 'May I no longer be called father of Telemachus, if . .'; and in proudly justifying his own bravery to Agamemnon, iv. 354: Shortly shalt thou see the fond father of Telemachus mingled in the foremost ranks.' No other hero in the Iliad thus seeks for honour from the name of his young son. It reminds us of the Syrian or Arabian tendency of fathers to name themselves from their sons (a hyionymic?) when the son is grown to man's estate; as a man who was Yusuf becoines 'Abu Jorji,' father of George.

Our business has been to contrast the Odyssey to the Iliad, and in so doing we have had to disparage it morally. This has little to do with

its occasional power as poetry. If it had been our business simply to extol the Odyssey, it would have been pleasant to point at its many beauties, without which indeed it never could have passed as the work of the same Homer with the Iliad. It is finest when it owes least to the other poem. The rhythm in the careless parts is very rough, and its plagiarism on the Iliad often quite offensive; but it rises into a vigour of its own, when the poetry otherwise improves. It is no slight praise to say, that many of Virgil's much admired passages are inspired by or are even translations of the Odyssey, to which he owed more than to the Iliad. In the description of scenery the poet has a richness of his own and somewhat of our modern enthusiasm. Many of his similes are in a style equal to those of the iliad. Great as is the moral weakness of his plot, he has passages of great tenderness; and the devoted love of Ulysses for his native land, of Penelope for her Ulysses, have led readers to overlook that side of the poem on which it has been necessary to dwell.