Homer's Odyssey Part 12

strong opposition has been aroused, shown even in antiquity by the sharp protest of Plato and Lucian. Still this Phaeacian enjoyment is innocent enough; not ascetic is the trait, yet not sensual; to-day good people usually eat and drink without the song of bard or other spiritual entertainment accompanying the material one of gustation.

Now comes the change, Ulysses is to give a song, he is to sing his own deeds, the story of his trials, "which will wake fresh sorrow in me."

Clearly this will be a different song from the preceding one of Demodocus; not now an heroic tale of Troy, but an account of the Return therefrom; a tale in which endurance is the theme rather than action.

The hero is more the sufferer than the doer; he is to meet the hostile blows of Fate and to master it by his ability to bear as well as by his ability to act. A new poetic form will gradually rise out of the theme and in harmony with the same; the present movement runs counter to the Trojan story both in s.p.a.ce and in spirit.

The first act of Ulysses in this novel procedure is to be duly noted: he declares who he is, gives his father's name and utters a hint of his own character. Very great surprise must the announcement have created among those Phaeacians--a veritable sensation, as we say in these times; for Ulysses had been the real hero of the songs of Demodocus just sung; behold, that hero himself is present and has been listening all the while. The dramatic disguise, in which the interest of the hearer has centered hitherto, is thrown off, the concealed man shows himself.

Still deeper must we look into this act of self-revelation. "I am Ulysses," says the bard now, proposing to sing of Ulysses. I am myself, I know what I have done and I am the man to tell it. Really here is a statement of self-consciousness; the singer is no longer a Demodocus singing of another man, of Ulysses, at Troy, but it is Ulysses himself, now singing of himself, of his profoundest experiences, which none other but he can tell. His internal life opens, not that active heroic one; the trials of his spirit are the theme, therewith must follow a new manner of utterance, a poetic form which can express what is within and still remain in the domain of the imagination. A self-conscious art we must now be prepared for, which seeks to express just the self-consciousness of the poet going through his inner experiences, with the counterstroke from the outer world.

What new art-form, then, will Homer, the grand constructive poet, who seizes every object necessary for his temple of song, a.s.sign to Ulysses singing of himself? The Fairy Tale is taken with its strange supernatural shapes, which have no reality, and hence can only have an ideal meaning; we are ushered into the realm of the physically impossible, where we have to see the spiritually actual, if we see anything. Polyphemus is not a man, not an animal, not a direct product of nature; he is a creature of the mind made by the mind in order to express mind. Undoubtedly he has external shape, but that shape is meaningless till we catch the spirit creating him. The Fairy Tale removes the vision from an outer sensuous world, and compels an internal vision, which looks into the soul of things and there beholds the soul.

The Fairy Tale existed long before Homer, it is a genuine product of the people. The stories which here follow have been traced among the remotest races; they spring up of themselves out of the popular heart and imagination. Homer picks them up and puts them into their true place in his grand edifice, polishing, transforming them, by no means creating them; certainly he never created this art-form. His merit is that he saw where they belong and what phase of human experience they express; to this merit must be added his special power, that of poetic transfiguration. Not simply a redactor or putter together externally of odd sc.r.a.ps, but the true architect of the totality; thus he comes before us on the present and on all other occasions.

Ulysses, having told us who he is, proceeds to inform us of a second important fact: his soul's strongest aspiration. He longs to return to home and country. Ithaca, a small, rocky island, is the sweetest spot on earth to him; Circe and then Calypso tried to detain him, each wishing to keep him as husband; "but they could not shake the purpose of my heart." One thinks that he must, while saying this, have cast a sly glance at Arete, for whose approval it must have been intended, for she was no friend of Circe and Calypso.

It is a curious fact that Homer, in this short description, makes two mistakes in reference to the topography of Ithaca. The island can hardly be called low as here stated, nor does it lie westward of Cephallenia, but northeastward. A reasonable inference is that Homer was not an Ithacan, and did not know the island very well, though he may have seen it in a pa.s.sing visit. Anaximander with his first map comes after Homer several hundred years.

The present Book has three plainly marked portions. First comes the wanton attack on the Ciconians, which connects immediately with the Trojan experience of Ulysses. Second is the country of the Lotus-eaters, to which he and his companions are driven by wind and storm. Third is the Land of the Cyclops, especially of Polyphemus, with whom he has his chief adventures. The first two portions are quite brief, are in fact introductory to the third, which takes up more than four-fifths of the Book, and is the Fairy Tale proper. We may observe the gradual transition: the Ciconians are a real people in geography and history; the Lotus-eaters are getting mythical, are but half-way historical; the Cyclops belong wholly to Fableland. Thus there is a movement out of the Trojan background of reality into the Fairy World.

Having marked the dividing lines, the next thing will be to find the connecting links between these three portions. They are not thrown together haphazard or externally joined into one Book; they have an internal thought which unifies them and which must be brought to light.

The poet sees in images which are separate, but the thinker must unite these images by their inner necessity, and thus justify anew the poet.

I.

The first sentence strikes the leading thought: "The wind, bearing me from Troy, brought me to the Ciconians." Troy is the starting-point, the background out of which everything moves. After the fall of the city Nestor gives an account of the disputes of the Greek leaders and their separation (Book III. l. 134 et seq.); Ulysses is driven alone with his contingent across the sea toward Thrace, where he finds a city in peace, though it had been an ally of Troy. "I sacked the city, I destroyed its people;" he treated them as he did the Trojans, "taking as booty their wives and property." Such is the spirit begotten of that ten years' war in the character of Ulysses, a spirit of violence and rapine, totally unfitted for a civilized life, at bottom negative to Family and State. This is the spiritual starting-point from which he is to return to home and country through a long, long, but very needful discipline.

He is well aware that he has done something for which vengeance awaits him, so he urges his companions to flee at once. But they would not obey, they stayed there "drinking much wine and slaughtering sheep and oxen along the sea-sh.o.r.e." Revel and feasting follow, till the Ciconians rouse the outlying neighbors and drive the Greeks to the ships, with the loss of six companions for each ship. Such is the first incident after the Trojan War, showing clearly the destructive phase thereof, which has been drilled into the character by so long a period of bloodshed.

This is not yet Fairyland, but a real people and a real conflict. The Ciconians in the later historic time of Herodotus still dwelt in Thrace. Grotius in his famous book _On the Rights of Peace and War_ cites the present instance as a violation of international justice. The grand positive ground of attacking Troy is not found here; there was no Helen detained in wrongful captivity. The sack of Ismarus pictures the evil results which spring from all war, even the most just. Again we must affirm that this deed of wrongful violence is the start toward the great Return, and hints what has to be overcome internally by the journey through Fairyland.

Later we find a fact, not here mentioned, pertaining to the sack of the city of the Ciconians. Ulysses had saved Maron, the priest of Apollo, who in grat.i.tude gave him the strong wine with which he overcame Polyphemus in the cave. His merciful deed thus helped him conquer the monster of nature. But in general it is plain that Ulysses, though desiring to get back to an inst.i.tutional life, is not ready by any means for such a step; he is in reality hostile to the very essence of inst.i.tutional life. He is too much like the suitors now to be their punisher.

All put to sea again, to be tossed on that unruly element, with their little vessels exposed to wind and wave. "They call thrice by name each one of their dead companions" ere they set out; the meaning of this invocation has been much discussed, but it probably rests upon the belief that they could thus call the souls of the deceased to go along with them to home and country. The fact that just six were lost from each ship was made the ground of an a.s.sault upon Homer in antiquity by Zoilus, famed as the Homeromastix, or Homer's trouncer.

The great sea with its tempests is now before them, heaving and tossing; after the attack upon the Ciconians we can well imagine that this storm has its inner counterpart in the soul of Ulysses. Does he not show within himself a deep scission--between his desire to return and his deed? At any rate he is borne forward; when he sought to round Maleia, the southern point of Greece (now Cape St. Angelo), and sail home to Ithaca, he was carried out to sea by the winds, beyond the Island Cythera, across the main toward the coast of Africa. Thus he is swept outside the boundaries of h.e.l.las proper into a region dimly known, half-mythical; he cannot make the sharp turn at Maleia, inside the Greek world; he must go beyond it and there reach his final experience. Not simply physical is this description, else it would be a mere statement in geography; it is also spiritual and hence rises into poetry.

II.

Next is the land of the Lotus-eaters, where Ulysses and his companions arrive, after being driven helplessly "across the fishy deep" for nine days (this is a favorite number in Homer) by the hostile winds. The Lotus-eaters, "whose food is flowers" use no violence, but reach to the new-comers their plant, the lotus, to satisfy hunger. Whoever has once tasted of that pleasant food, straightway forgets home and the Return, and wishes to live always among the Lotus-eaters. The will is broken, all activity is sapped; the land of idlers it is, relaxed in a sensuous dream life, in which there is a complete collapse of volition.

Now the point is to connect this country with the Ciconians, or rather to see this internal condition evolving itself out of the preceding one. For the line of conjunction must be within, of the spirit; physically the two countries are far enough apart. In the first case, we have noted a state of external violence, which really means a destroying of the will. The Greeks a.s.sailed a quiet people, a.s.sailed its will; then they were beaten and driven off, they had their negative deed served up to themselves. Now what? There follows an internal collapse of the will, a logical result of their own conduct, which is hinted by their being drifted about on the seas, apparently quite helpless. No wonder that, when they touched land again, and obtained some food, they desired to stay there, and eat of the lotus. Yet it is the consequence of their own act; that wanton destruction of the Ciconian will is at bottom the destruction of their own will; they are really a.s.sailing their own principle--a fact which is to be brought home to them by a long and bitter experience.

But there is one man among them, who, though not guiltless by any means, felt the nature of the Ciconian act, and who has still some volition left in the right direction. "By force I led back to the ship those who had tasted of the lotus, and bound them beneath the oar-benches." The rest of the companions were ordered aboard, they obeyed; off they sail again on the h.o.a.ry deep--whitherward? Thus Ulysses shows himself the man of will among the will-less, and solves his part of the problem among the Lotus-eaters, setting out for the new Unknown.

This people probably lived on the coast of Lybia according to Homer's conception, though the land is outside the clear Greek geographical horizon, floating mistily somewhere on its borders, half real, half fabulous, on the way to Fairyland. We enter more distinctly the inner realm of the spirit, as the outer realm of reality becomes less distinct and demonstrable. The Ciconians were an actual people, the conflict with them also actual, quite the Trojan conflict; but the Lotus-eaters form the transition to the Wonderland of the Odyssey.

As regards the lotus, several plants were called by that name; one is mentioned in a previous Book of the Odyssey (IV. 603) which was probably a kind of clover growing in the damp lowlands of Greece and Asia Minor, and utilized for grazing. Another sort was a species of lily which grew in the valley of the Nile. But the lotus of the present pa.s.sage is generally considered to be the fruit of a shrub which yields a reddish berry of the size of a common olive, having somewhat the taste of a fig. This fruit is still highly esteemed in Tripolis, Tunis and Algiers; from the last named country it has pa.s.sed over to France, and is often hawked about the streets of Paris under the name of _Jujube_, where the pa.s.sing traveler will purchase a sample, and eat of the same, testing the truth of Homer's description, but probably not losing thereby his desire for home and country.

The Lotus-eaters have had a famous history; they have caught the fancy of poets and literary men who have sought in various ways to reproduce and embellish them. Among English-speaking peoples the poem of Tennyson on this subject is a prime favorite. But in Homer the Lotus-eaters are not an isolated fact, they are a link in the chain of a grand development; this inner connecting thought is the true thing to grasp.

Let us, then, penetrate the heart of the next movement of Ulysses. The Lotus-eater gave up family and country; "chewing the lotus, he forgot the return." His will vanished into a sensuous oblivion; he was indifferent, and this indifference was a pa.s.sive destruction of the Greek world to which he was returning. But now in due order the active destroyer of that world appears; behold the Cyclops, the wild man of nature, truly a monster to the Greek inst.i.tutional sense, being without domestic and civil order. Thus we mark the inner transition: the active principle of that which was a pa.s.sive Lotus-eater is the Cyclops, a Polyphemus. The Trojan negative result, so deeply lodged in the soul of Ulysses and his companions, cannot remain mere indifference or forgetfulness; it must proceed to action, to virulent destructive action, which is now to be bodied forth in a fabulous shape. Only a few of the weakest companions of Ulysses were ready to become Lotus-eaters, and they were easily thrust under the oar-benches and carried away.

Here there is a fresh conflict, altogether the main one of the present Book.

III.

If then we have seized the matter aright, we have reached a shape in Fairyland, which represents what is hostile, actively hostile, to the Greek inst.i.tutional world, State, Family, Society. Ulysses stands in a double relation to the present condition of things. The Cyclops is really a picture of him in his negative character, a product of his destructive Trojan spirit, yet he is just the man who must put down the Cyclops, he must master his own negation or perish. Ulysses sees the natural man, or rather, he sees himself with all culture taken away, with all inst.i.tutional life eliminated from his existence.

He may well be frightened at the monster, who is very real, though a dweller in Fairyland. Nor should we forget that the Cyclops also undergoes a change, he too is in the process and shows something like development under the severe tuition of Ulysses.

As already said, the present portion is altogether the longest in the Book, it is essentially the entire Book. The other two portions were hardly more than a short introduction and a brief transitional stage; now comes the full and highly elaborated tale, in which both the land and its inhabitants are fabulous, supernatural. There are two distinct divisions treating of the Cyclops: the first describes their race in general, the second gives a description of the particular grand Cyclops, Polyphemus, in his conflict with Ulysses.

I. This time there is no tempest, such as arose after leaving the Ciconians, in order to reach the land of the Cyclops; that collapse of the will seems to have pictured itself in the quiet deep. But who are the Cyclops? A race "without law, addicted to violent deeds;" they have no agriculture, "they plant not, neither do they plow;" they get their products, "trusting to the G.o.ds," that is, trusting to nature, since the Cyclops have small regard for the higher G.o.ds, as we shall soon see. Another mere formula this, showing that the Homeric deity was getting crystallized even for Homer. "They hold no councils" in common, are not a.s.sociated together, but "they dwell in vaulted caves on mountain heights," such as the famous Corycian cavern which is near the top of a mountain on Parna.s.sus. There "each man rules his wives and children," evidently a herding polygamous condition of the family; "nor do they (the Cyclops) care for one another." Still further, "they have no ships with crimson prows," no navigation, no commerce which seeks "the cities of men" and binds them together in the bond of society and humanity. Yet there is an excellent harbor and a good soil, "with copious showers from Zeus;" nature has surely done her part, and is calling loudly for the enterprising colonist to come and plant here his civilized order. This pa.s.sage must have stirred the Greek emigrant to leave his stony h.e.l.las and seek in the West, a new home; it suggests the great h.e.l.lenic movement for the colonization of Italy and Sicily from the 6th to the 9th century B.C. The poet has plainly been with the frontiersman, and seen the latter's giants.

The main thing to be noticed in the present account is the extraordinary number of negatives. No laws, no a.s.semblies, no a.s.sociation; no plows, no ships, no intercourse with other cities; the whole civilized life of man is negated, and man himself is thrown back into a state of nature. It is worth while to search for the purpose of this negative procedure on the part of the poet. He might have given a positive description of nature, telling what it is, and telling what the Cyclops is, not emphasizing so much what he is not. But thus the meaning would not come out so plainly; the Cyclops is just the negation of the whole civilized world of Greece, which fact must be expressly imaged in the very words used in the poem. He is not so much a simple being of nature as a being ant.i.thetic to society.

At this point we can trace his connection with the great Trojan experience, which, as already set forth, has begotten a negative tendency in its partic.i.p.ators. The war at Troy, like all war long-continued, has bred men to be anti-social; they have to destroy State, Family, Commerce, Agriculture, till destruction becomes habit, yea principle, and takes possession of their intellect. The Cyclops was generated at Ilium, and is a colossal phantasm of the spirit which prompted the attack on the Ciconians.

It should be stated here that the Cyclops of Homer are different from those of Hesiod and of other mythographers, inasmuch as the latter were represented as the demons who forged the thunderbolts of Zeus, and were connected with the volcanic agencies chiefly in Sicily and Italy. Mount aetna belching forth its lava streams may have suggested to the Greek imagination the sick giant Polyphemus in its caverns, drunk on the red destructive wine of Ulysses.

First is a small island, "stretching outside the harbor" of the land of the Cyclops, woody, full of wild goats; there the ships of Ulysses drew to the sh.o.r.e. It was bare of human dwellers, the Cyclops had no boats to reach it; a good place for stopping, therefore, quite out of reach of the savages. Nor is the fountain forgotten, "sparkling water flowing from a hollow rock down to the harbor"--an adjunct still necessary to every Greek village or encampment. "Some G.o.d led us through the dark night" without our seeing the island till the boats struck it--surely a providential intervention on our behalf.

Leaving behind the other ships at this point, Ulysses takes only his own and its crew, and goes forth to "test these people, whether just or unjust, hospitable or G.o.dless." He cannot rest in ignorance, he must have the experience and know the unknown. He soon sees "a cave high up the mountain, not far from the sea, overarched with laurel shrubs;" he observes also "an enclosure, made of stones set in the earth;" these stones are not hewn (as some translators say), since the so-called Cyclopean walls so common in Greece were not built by this kind of Cyclops. In the enclosure were resting "many herds of sheep and goats"--just such a scene as can be witnessed in the rural parts of Greece to-day. This is the environment of "the man-monster," who is now to be the theme of song.

II. Polyphemus is a Cyclops but he has characteristics of his own. He has no family in his cave, he lives wholly for himself apparently; he seems to be the largest of his race, "like no man who lives by bread;"

he towers alone "like the peak of a high mountain s.h.a.ggy with woods;"

apart from others "he plans his unjust deeds." A portentous shape with but a single eye in his head, a cave-dweller similar to the primitive man; he has too an evil disposition in his huge bulk.

This is the being with whom Ulysses is now to engage in conflict, which becomes highly dramatic. The conquest of the man of Nature by the man of Intelligence--such is the theme through its various fluctuations.

This man of Nature, however, we are always to consider from his negative side, as hostile to a civilized order; so the poet has carefully represented him. He is to be put down; yet even Polyphemus has his right, he is brought to a gleam of self-knowledge, and Ulysses has to pay the penalty of his deed, which has also its curse. A very deep current runs through the poem in this part, which we shall divide into five different scenes, hoping thus to make its movement and thought somewhat more distinct.

1. Ulysses, taking twelve of his bravest companions from his ship, not forgetting a goatskin of wonderful wine, for he had a presentiment that he would meet a huge wild man, who is wont to succ.u.mb readily to civilized drink, enters the cave while Polyphemus is absent. A vivid picture of that primitive dairy with its cheese, milk, curds; the men fell to and helped themselves, as was natural. Then the companions wished to depart at once, taking what quant.i.ty of cheese they could carry, but Ulysses refused, he must "see the Cyclops and test his hospitality." Just the opposite was the case in the land of the Ciconians; there Ulysses wished to flee but his companions would not.

Why this difference? He must know Polyphemus, must see the giant and subordinate him; that is just his supreme necessity now, he really can no more run away from the monster than from himself. But that attack on the Ciconians was an unjust, violent deed of which the penalty was sure to follow; this Ulysses knew and sought to escape. In the present case, however, no wrong has been done as yet, and he must meet and solve his problem, while his weaker companions would shun the trial.

Polyphemus returns with his herds in due time, and closes the mouth of the cave with a huge rock, "which not two and twenty wains could move from the threshold." Soon by the light of his fire he sees the lurking strangers and asks, "Who are you?" Ulysses replies, stating that they are returning from Troy, but have been driven out of their way by adverse winds; then he makes his human and religious appeal: We come as suppliants, receive us; "revere the G.o.ds," specially Zeus the protector of suppliants. But the Cyclops scoffs at Zeus and the rest of the G.o.ds: "we are their betters." Thus is witnessed in the monster the denial of the Greek religion, and an atheistic turn of mind.

Next follows in logical sequence his supreme negative act, he is a man-eater. "He seized two of my companions and hurled them against the ground as if they were dogs, then he devoured them piecemeal, swallowing all--entrails and flesh and marrowy bones." Surely Ulysses is getting some experience on the line of that Trojan deed.

Now we catch the entire sweep of this particular Cyclops. He has shown himself as the representative of three mighty negations: of civilized life, of religious life, and of human life. He destroys man, feeds on him; so negation, war, revolution, must do in the end. The horrid phantasm is the true image of the destroyer of the race. Nor does he belong to the old Greek world and to the Trojan time only; he is among us, and he can be translated into modern terms quite familiar.

Polyphemus is an anarchist, an atheist, and a cannibal; the ancient poet wraps the three together in one mighty monstrosity. In the morning the Cyclops devoured two more companions for his breakfast, then drove his flocks afield, leaving the rest of the strangers shut up in the cave with the big stone in the opening.

During the day the "man of many shifts" has an opportunity for reflection in that dark recess. He dares not kill the giant outright, "with my sharp sword stubbing him where the midriff holds the liver,"

for how could they then get out? No, the man of nature must be saved and utilized; with all his might he is to be overborne by the man of intelligence, and made to remove the big stone.

2. The plan of Ulysses with its successful execution is the subject of the next phase of the conflict. By this plan three things must be done in order to counteract the giant and to negative his power. He must be deprived of physical vision, which becomes the more easily possible from the fact that he has but one eye; if he had two eyes like the ordinary man, he could still see though one be put out. That this purpose be accomplished, he must somehow be shorn of his physical strength; finally any resistance which might come from the rest of the Cyclops outside must be rendered nugatory. Such are the three chief points of the impending problem, which Ulysses has to meet and does meet with astonishing skill and foresight; the Cyclops is blinded, is made helpless by drink, and is befooled by a pun.

Ulysses burns out the eye of the monster with the charred end of a stick of olive wood, which he prepares beforehand; huge Round-eye (the meaning of the word _Cyclops_) has no eye now. Ulysses by means of that miraculous wine, product of culture, makes the giant drunk, who thus loses his physical superiority. The Ithacan evidently knew, as well as the American, the power of fire-water over the wild man; that the wine had some strength, is shown by the fact that one cup of it had to be diluted with twenty measures of water, when taken by ordinary mortals.