Gambar halaman
PDF
ePub

hall to the armory by night, Telemachus suddenly cries: "Father, this is a great marvel that I see with mine eyes; yes, the walls of the hall, and the fair spaces between the pillars, and the beams of pine, and the pillars that run aloft, are bright as it were with flaming fire.

Verily some god is within, of those that hold the high heaven."

One other example may be given. When Odysseus is about to enter the palace of the Phaeacian king, Athena throws a cloud around him, to shroud him from the eyes of those who might forbid him to enter. Going onward unseen, he comes at last into the presence of King Alcinous and Queen Arêté. He throws himself in supplication before the queen. At that moment the wondrous mist melts away from him, and silence falls on the Phaeacians, as they marvel at the suppliant. This instinct for the picturesque, into which color and grouping enter, is akin to the dramatic sense, yet distinct from it, and also from the Hellenic sense of clear and beautiful outline. In both the examples just given, one condition is suddenness; the fancy to which such impressions come with a bright surprise is nimble and open, — quick to see the supernatural around it.

Thoroughly congenial to it is that strain of

Magical or fairy lore.

magical or fairy lore which pervades the Odyssey. This element is not wholly absent from the Iliad; there is the horse Xanthus, speaking with a human voice; there are the self-moving tripods of Hephaestus, and his golden

MAGICAL LORE

69

handmaids who can move, think, and speak. In the Iliad, however, such things are rare and incidental, whereas they belong to the very texture of the other epic. The magical herb "moly" given by Hermes to Odysseus; Ino's magical veil which saves him from drowning; the portents in Thrinacria, when the flesh of the oxen bellowed on the spits, and the hides stripped from them began to move; the Phaeacian ship turned to stone; the second-sight of the seer Theoclymenus, these are instances which occur at once. Such marvels, it may be remarked, express a side of the Ionian fancy which had been developed by maritime adventure, as other aspects of Ionian character are seen in the sensuous tendencies of the hero's comrades, or, again, in the graces of social intercourse which give such a charm to the epic. Both as a story of voyages and as a picture of civilization, the Odyssey bears, more strongly than the Iliad, the stamp of Ionia.

[ocr errors]

The divine

Another trait which pervades the narratives of the Odyssey, further distinguishing it from the Iliad, is the mode of conceiv- agency. ing that divine agency which is blended with the human. In the Iliad, Olympus is a mountain from whose heights the gods descend; the peaks of Ida or of Samothrace are stations from which the gods observe men; an Olympian debate has all the reality of a debate on the earth; the divine action upon men either is physical, or consists in the transmission of commands to them by

a divine messenger who appears in visible shape. In the Odyssey a spiritual element enters more largely into the dealing of the deities with mortals. Thus Odysseus says to his son, "When Athena of deep counsel shall put it into my heart, I will give thee a sign;" and faith in the gods has become a more spiritual feeling. Telemachus says that Zeus and Athena are the best of allies, "though their seat is in the clouds on high." And the image of Olympus itself has become more ethereal: it is a far-off place, "where, as men say, is the seat of the gods that standeth fast forever. Not by winds is it shaken, nor ever wet with rain, nor doth the snow come nigh thereto, but the clearest air is spread around it, without a cloud, and a pure light floats over it; therein the blessed gods are glad eternally." A good instance of this difference between the two epics may be found in the twelfth book of the Odyssey. When Odysseus discovers that, while he slept, his companions have slain the oxen of the Sun-god, he cries aloud to father Zeus in his anguish. And then he relates a short scene among the gods: the nymph Lampetie goes swiftly to Helios, the Sun-god, and tells him that his oxen have been slain. Helios then addresses Zeus and the assembled gods, declaring that, unless he is compensated for his oxen, he will shine no more over the earth; he will go down to Hades, and shine among the dead. Zeus, in reply to this threat, promises that he will wreck the

THE GODS OF THE ODYSSEY

71

ship of the offenders. The whole scene occupies only thirteen lines. If it is compared with a parallel incident of the Iliad, the scene between Zeus and Athena in the twenty-second book, which, like this, precedes a catastrophe on earth, it will be felt how much less of human-like realism there is in the passage of the Odyssey. There is a further difference; Odysseus feels bound to ex plain how he came by this knowledge; and so he adds that he had heard it from the nymph Calypso, who herself had heard it from Hermes, the messenger of the gods. Now in the Iliad there is no example of such a reply to anticipated skepticism; when deeds done, or words spoken, among the gods are related in the Iliad, the narrator is the poet himself, who is supposed to know them by inspiration. The only exception is Agamemnon's narrative, in the nineteenth book (95-136), of the discussion in Olympus before the birth of Heracles, a passage which seems to have been interpolated in the Iliad from an epic Heracleia.

[ocr errors]

The last distinctive trait of narrative in the Odyssey which we shall notice is an Traits verging occasional approach of the tone of com- on comedy. edy, as moderns would deem it. Thus Odysseus says, after relating how he had warned his comrades against Charybdis, "I did not go on to speak of Scylla, lest haply they should give up rowing, and hide themselves in the hold." This savors to us of comedy, because it is so opposite

to the heroic; but the poet did not intend it to be comic; the quality in him which it indicates is naïveté. So, again, when the men snatched by Scylla are compared to fish wriggling at the end of an angler's line, the comparison is to us grimly grotesque; but the poet's aim was simply to make the horror vivid. And everywhere, even in such touches, the style of the Odyssey preserves its Homeric nobleness.

Pictures of social life.

Let us turn now to that other source, besides, narrative of adventure, to which the Odyssey owes its peculiar charm, namely, the descriptions of social life. Here the key-note is given by the position of women in the Homeric age; and that position, as exhibited in the Odys sey, is essentially the same of which the Iliad affords glimpses. But the Iliad, an episode of warfare, can give glimpses only; it is reserved for the Odyssey to furnish more complete pictures. The central point is the sanctity of marriage, which is not merely the Homeric rule, but a rule with few and narrowly limited exceptions. The position of the Homeric wife in her own home may be best stated by saying that it is essentially the same as it is in Christian countries to-day, and totally unlike the position ordinarily held by the Athenian wife in the fifth and fourth centuries B. C. If Odysseus and Penelope were the only wedded couple whose relations were portrayed in the Odyssey, it might be argued that they could not be taken as a nor

Position of women.

« SebelumnyaLanjutkan »