Homer: The Odyssey/Chapter 1
THE ODYSSEY.
CHAPTER I.
PENELOPE AND HER SUITORS.
The surviving heroes of the great expedition against Troy, after long wanderings, have at length reached their homes, with one exception—Ulysses has not been heard of in his island-kingdom of Ithaca. Ten years have nearly passed since the fall of Troy, and still his wife Penelope, and his aged father Laertes, and his young son Telemachus, now growing up to manhood, keep weary watch for the hero's return. There is, moreover, a twofold trouble in the house. It is not only anxiety for an absent husband, but the perplexity caused by a crowd of importunate suitors for her hand, which vexes the soul of Penelope from day to day. The young nobles of Ithaca and its dependent islands have for many years flocked to the palace to seek the hand of her whom they consider as virtually a widowed queen. It is to no purpose that she professes her own firm belief that Ulysses still survives: she has no kind of proof of his existence, and the suitors demand of her that—in accordance with what would appear the custom of the country—she shall make choice of some one among them to take the lost hero's place, and enjoy all the rights of sovereignty. How far the lovers were attracted by the wealth and position of the lady, and how far by the force of her personal charms, is a point somewhat hard to decide. The Roman poet Horace imputes to them the less romantic motive. They were, he says, of that class of prudent wooers—
"Who prized good living more than ladies' love;"
and he even hints that Penelope's knowledge of their real sentiments helped to account for her obduracy. But Horace, we must remember, was a satirist by trade. A mere prosaic reader might be tempted to raise the question whether the personal charms of Penelope, irresistible as they might have been when Ulysses first left her for the war, must not have been somewhat impaired during the twenty years of his absence; and whether it was possible for a widow of that date (especially with a grown-up son continually present as a memento) to inspire such very ardent admiration. These arithmetical critics have always been the pests of poetry. One very painstaking antiquarian—Jacob Bryant—in the course of his studies on the Iliad, made the discovery, by a comparison of mythological dates, that Helen herself must have been nearly a hundred years old at the taking of Troy. But the question of age has been unanimously voted impertinent by all her modern admirers: she still shines in our fancy with
"The starlike beauty of immortal eyes”
which the Laureate saw in his 'Dream of Fair Women.' The heroic legends take no count of years. Woman is there beautiful by divine right of sex, unless in those few special instances in which, for the purposes of the story, particular persons are necessarily represented as old and decrepit. Nor is there any ground for supposing that the suitors of Penelope, like the courtiers of Queen Elizabeth, persisted in attributing to her fictitious charms. She is evidently not less beautiful in the poet's eyes than in theirs. As beauty has been happily said to be, after all, "the lover's gift," so also the bestowal of it upon whom he will must be allowed to be the privilege of the poet. The island-queen herself says, indeed, that her beauty had fled when Ulysses left her, and could only be restored by his return ; but this disclaimer from the lips of a loving and mourning wife only makes her more charming, and she is not the only woman, ancient or modern, who has borrowed an additional fascination from her tears.
The suitors of Penelope, strange to say, are living at free quarters in the palace of the absent Ulysses. Telemachus is too young, apparently, to assert his rights as master of the house on his own or his mother's behalf. If the picture be true to the life—and there is no good reason to suppose it otherwise— we must assume an age of rude licence even in the midst of considerable civilisation, when, unless a king or chief could hold his own by the strong hand, there was small chance of his rights being respected. A partial explanation may also lie in the fact that the wealth of the king was regarded as in some sort public property, and that to keep open house for all whose rank entitled them to sit at his table was probably a popular branch of the royal prerogative. Telemachus is an only son, and he and his mother have apparently no near kinsmen to avenge any wrong or insult that may be offered. There is, besides, somewhat of weakness and tameness in his character, more than befits the son of such a father. He is a home nurtured youth, of a gentle and kindly nature, a dutiful and affectionate son; but his temperament is far too easy for the rude and troublous times in which his lot is cast, and the roystering crew who profess at least to be the wooers of Penelope have not been slow to find it out. Some kindly critics ("Christopher North" among the number) have refused to see any of these shortcomings in the young prince's character; but his father Ulysses saw them plainly. For thus it is he speaks, at a later period of the tale, under his disguise of a mendicant:—
The blameless brave Ulysses, or his son,
Then let a stranger strike me headless there,
If against any I leave revenge undone!"
But this is anticipating somewhat too much. We must return to the opening of the poem.
The fate of Ulysses, so far as any knowledge of it has reached his wife and son, lies yet in mystery. Only the gods know—and perhaps it were as well for Penelope not to know—in what unworthy thraldom he is held. He has incurred the anger of the great Sea-god, and therefore he is still forbidden to reach his home. He has lain captive now for seven long years in Ogygia, the enchanted realm of Calypso—
An island clothed with trees, the navel of the deep.
All seas, and eke doth hold the pillars tall
Which keep the skies asunder from the ground.
There him, still sorrowing, she doth aye enthral,
Weaving serene enticements to forestal
The memory of his island-realm."
But the goddess of wisdom, who was his protecting genius throughout the perils of the great siege, and by whose aid, as we have seen in the Iliad, he has distanced so many formidable competitors in the race for glory, has not forgotten her favourite. The opening scene of the Odyssey shows us the gods in council on Olympus. Neptune alone is absent; he is gone to feast, like Jupiter in the Iliad, with those mysterious people, the far-off Æthiopians—
Some to the setting, some the rising sun."
Minerva takes the opportunity of his absence to remind the Father of the gods of the hard fate of Ulysses, so unworthy of a hero who has deserved so well both of gods and men. It is agreed to send Mercury, the messenger of the Immortals, to the island where Calypso holds Ulysses captive in her toils, to announce to him that the day of his return draws near. Minerva herself, meanwhile, will go to Ithaca, and put strength into the heart of his son Telemachus, that he may rid his house of this hateful brood of revellers, and set forth to make search for his father. The passage in which the poet describes her visit is a fine one, and it has been finely rendered by Mr Worsley:—
Her faery sandals of ambrosial gold,
Which o'er the waters and the solid ground
Swifter than wind have borne her from of old;
Then on the iron-pointed spear laid hold,
Heavy and tall, wherewith she smites the brood
Of heroes till her anger waxes cold;
Then from Olympus swept in eager mood,
And with the island-people in the court she stood
Of brave Odysseus: in her hand she bore
The iron-pointed spear, heavy and great,
And, waiting as a guest-friend at the door,
Of Mentes, Taphian chief, the likeness wore;
There found the suitors, who beguiled with play
The hours, and sat the palace-gates before
On hides of oxen which themselves did slay—
Haughty of mien they sat, and girt with proud array."
As the young prince sits thus, an unwilling host in his father's hall, meditating, says the poet, whether or no some day that father may return suddenly and take vengeance on these invaders of his rights, against whom he himself seems powerless, he lifts his eyes and sees a stranger standing at the gate. With simple and high-bred courtesy—the courtesy of the old Bible patriarchs, and even now practised by the Orientals, though the march of modern civilisation has left little remnant of it in our western isles—he hastes to bid the stranger welcome, on the simple ground that he is a stranger, and will hear no word of his errand until the rights of hospitality have been paid. Eager as he is to hear possible news of his father, he restrains his anxiety to question his guest. Not until the handmaidens have brought water in the silver ewers, and the herald, and the carver, and the dame of the pantry (it is a right royal establishment, if somewhat rude) have each done their office to supply the stranger's wants, does Telemachus ask him a single question. But when the suitors have ended their feast, they call for music and song. They compel Phemius, the household bard, to make mirth for them. Then, while he plies his voice and lyre for their entertainment, the son of Ulysses whispers aside with his visitor. Who is he, and whence does he come? Is he a friend of his father's? For many a guest, and none unwelcome, had come to those halls, as the son well knows, in his day. Above all, does he bring news of him? Then the disguised goddess tells her story, with a circumstantial minuteness of invention which befits wisdom when she condescends to falsehood:—
Mentes, the son of brave Anchialus,
And sea-famed Taphos is my regal right;
And with my comrades am I come to-night
Hither, in sailing o'er the wine-dark sea
To men far off, who stranger tongues indite.
For copper am I bound to Temesè,
And in my bark I bring sword-steel along with me.
Under the wooded cape, within the bay.
We twain do boast, each in the other's halls,
Our fathers' friendship from an ancient day.
Hero Laertes ask, and he will say."
But of Ulysses' present fate the guest declares he knows nothing; only he has a presentiment that he is detained somewhere in an unwilling captivity, but that, "though he be bound with chains of iron," he will surely find his way home again. But in any case, as his father's friend, the supposed Mentes bids Telemachus take heart and courage, and act manfully for himself. Let him give this train of riotous suitors fair warning to quit the palace, and waste his substance no more; let his mother Penelope go back to her own father's house (if she desires to wed again), and make her choice and hold her wedding-banquet there; and for his own part, let him at once set sail and make inquiry for his father round the coasts of Greece. It may be that Nestor of Pylos, or Menelaus of Sparta—the last returned of the chiefs of the expedition—can give him some tidings. If he can only hear that Ulysses is yet alive, then he may well endure to wait his return with patience; if assured of his death, it will befit him to take due vengeance on these his enemies. The divine visitor even hints a reproach of Telemachus' present inactivity:—
Hast thou not heard divine Orestes' fame,
Who slew the secret slayer of the king
His father, and achieved a noble name?
Thou also, friend, to thine own strength lay claim—
Comely thou art and tall—that men may speak
Thy prowess, and their children speak the same."
The young prince duteously accepts the counsel, as from his father's friend, and prays his guest to tarry a while. But Minerva, her mission accomplished, suddenly changes her shape, spreads wings, and vanishes. Then Telemachus recognises the goddess, and feels a new life and spirit born within him. If we choose to admit an allegorical interpretation—more than commonly tempting, as must be confessed, in this particular case—it is the advent of Wisdom and Discretion to the conscious heart of the youth, hitherto too little awakened to its responsibilities.
Telemachus returns to his place among the revellers a new man. They are still listening to the minstrel, Phemius, who chants a lay of the return of the Greek chiefs from Troy, and the sufferings inflicted on them during their homeward voyage by the vengeance of the gods. The sound reaches Penelope where she sits apart with her wise maidens, like the mother of Sisera, in her "upper chamber"—the "bower" of the ladies of mediæval chivalry. She comes down the stair, and stands on the threshold of the banqueting-hall, attracted by the song. But the subject is too painful. She calls the bard to her, and begs him, for her sake, to choose some other theme. We must not be too angry with Telemachus because, in the first flush of his newly-awakened sense of the responsibilities of his position, he uses language, in addressing his mother, which to our ears has a sound of harshness and reproach. He bids her not presume to set limits to the inspiration of the bard—the noblest theme is ever the best. Here minds her that woman's kingdom is the loom and the distaff, and that the rule over men in his father's house now belongs to him. Viewed with reference to the tone of the age as regarded the duties of women,—compared with the parting charge of Hector in the Iliad to the wife he loved so tenderly, and even with a higher example in Scripture,—there is nothing start-ling or repulsive in such language from a son to his mother. To the young prince in his new mood, while the counsels of Minerva were yet ringing in his ears, the absence and the sufferings of his father might well seem the only theme on which he could endure to hear the minstrel descant; it was of this, he feels, that he needed to be continually reminded. And if hitherto he has allowed this riotous company to assume that, in the absence of Ulysses, the government of his house has rested in the weak hands of a woman, it shall be so no longer. He will take his father's place.
The mother sees the change in her son's temper with some surprise—we may suppose, with somewhat mingled feelings of approval and mortification. The boy has grown into a man on the sudden. The poet gives us but a single word as any clue to the effect upon Penelope of this evidently unaccustomed out-burst of self-assertion on the part of Telemachus. "Astonished," he says, she withdraws at once to her upper chamber, and there weeps her sorrows to sleep. Telemachus himself addresses the assembled company in a tone which is evidently as new to their ears as to those of his mother. He bids them, with a haughty courtesy, feast their fill to-night; to-morrow he will summon (as is the custom of the Homeric princes) a council of the heads of the people, and there he will give them all public warning to quit his father's house, and feast—if they needs must feast—in each other's houses, at their own cost. If they refuse, and still make this riot of an absent man's wealth, he appeals from men to "the gods who live for ever" for a sure and speedy vengeance.
The careless revellers mark the change in the young man as instantly as Penelope. For a few moments they bite their lips in silence—"wondering that he spake so bold." The first to answer him is Antinous, the most prominent ringleader of the confraternity of suitors. His character is very like that of the worst stamp of the "Cavalier" of the days of our own Charles II. Brave, bold, and insolent, there is yet a reckless gaiety and a ready wit about him which would have made him at once a favourite in that unprincipled court. He adds to these characteristics a quality of which he might, unhappily, have also found a high example there—that of ingratitude. He is bound by strong ties of obligation to the house of Ulysses; his father had come in former days to seek an asylum with the Chief of Ithaca from the vengeance of the Thesprotians, and had been kindly entertained by him until his death. The son now answers Telemachus with a taunting compliment upon the new character in which he has just come out. "He means to claim for himself the sovereignty of the island, as his father's heir, no doubt; but the gods forbid that Ithaca should ever come under the rule of so fierce a despot!" Telemachus makes answer that he will at all events rule his father's house. Upon this, Eurynomus, another leading spirit among the rivals—a smoother-tongued and more cautious individual—soothes the angry youth with what seems a plausible recognition of his rights, in order that he may get an answer to a question on which he feels an interest not unmixed, as we may easily understand, with some secret apprehension. "Who was this traveller from over sea? and—did he happen to bring any news of Ulysses?" But Telemachus has learnt subtlety as well as wisdom from the disguised goddess. He gives the name assumed by his visitor, Mentes, an old friend of the house. But as to his father's return, the oracles of the gods and the reports of men all agree in pronouncing it to have now become hopeless. So the revel is renewed till nightfall; and while the feasters go off to their own quarters somewhere near at hand, Telemachus retires to his chamber (separate, apparently, from the main building), where his old nurse Eurycleia tends him with a careful affection, as though he were still a child, folding and hanging up the vest of fine linen which he takes off when he lies down to sleep, and drawing the bolt of the chamber door through its silver ring when she leaves him.
The council of notables is summoned for the morrow. No such meeting has been held since the departure of Ulysses for Troy. As Telemachus passes to take his place there, all men remark a new majesty in his looks.
He lifted in his hand the steely spear,
And to the council moved, but not alone,
For as he walked his swift dogs followed near.
Also Minerva did with grace endear
His form, that all the people gazed intent
And wondered, while he passed without a peer.
Straight to his father's seat his course he bent,
And the old men gave way in reverence as he went."
He makes his passionate protest before them all against the insufferable waste of his household by this crew of revellers, and against their own supineness in offering him no aid to dislodge them. Antinous rises to answer him, beginning, as before, with an ironical compliment—"the young orator's language is as sublime as his spirit." But the fault, he begs to assure him, lies not with the suitors, but with the queen herself. She has been playing fast and loose with her lovers, deluding them, for these three years past, with vain hopes and false promises. She had, indeed, been practising a kind of pious fraud upon them. She had set up a mighty loom, in which she wrought diligently to complete, as she professed, a winding-sheet of delicate texture for her husband's father, the aged Laertes, against the day of his death. Not until this sad task was finished, she entreated of them, let her be asked to choose a new bridegroom. To so much forbearance they had all assented; but lo! they had lately discovered that what she wrought by day she carefully unwound by night, so that the task promised to be an endless one. Some of the handmaidens (who had found their own lovers, too, amongst their royal mistress's many suitors) had betrayed her secret. Antinous is gallant enough to add to this recital of Penelope's craft warm praises of the queen herself, even giving her full credit for the bright woman's wit which had so long baffled them all.
To weave the splendid web; sagacious thought,
And shrewdness such as never fame ascribed
To any beauteous Greek of ancient days,
Tyro, Mycene, or Alcmene, loved
Of Jove himself, all whom th' accomplished queen
Transcends in knowledge—ignorant alone
That, wooed long time, she should at last be won."—(Cowper.)
But they will now be put off no longer—she must make her choice, or they will never leave the house so long as she remains there unespoused. Telemachus indignantly refuses to send his mother home to her father; and repeats his passionate appeal to the gods for vengeance against the wrongs which he is himself helpless to deal with. At once an omen from heaven seems to betoken that the appeal is heard and accepted. Two eagles are seen flying over the heads of the crowd assembled in the marketplace, where they suddenly wheel round, and tear each other furiously with beak and talons. The soothsayer is at hand to interpret; the aged Halitherses, who reminds them all how he had foretold, when Ulysses first left his own shores for Troy, the twenty years that would elapse before his return. Now, he sees by this portent, the happy day is near at hand; nay, in his zeal for his master's house he goes so far as to urge the assembled people to take upon themselves at once the punishment of these traitors. One of the suitors mocks at the old man's auguries, and threatens him for his interference. The prophet is silenced; and Telemachus, finding no support from the assembly, asks but for a ship and crew to be furnished him, that he may set forth in search of his father. One indignant voice, among the apathetic crowd, is raised in the young prince's defence: it is that of Mentor, to whom Ulysses had intrusted the guardianship of his rights in his absence. His name has passed into a synonym for all prudent guardians and moral counsellors, chiefly in consequence of Fénélon's didactic tale of 'Télémaque,' already mentioned, in which the adventures of the son of Ulysses were "improved," with elaborate morals, for the benefit of youth; and in which Mentor, as the young prince's travelling tutor, played a conspicuous part. He vents his indignation here in a very striking protest against popular ingratitude:—
From this time forth benevolent, humane,
Or righteous; but let every sceptred hand
Rule merciless, and deal in wrong alone;
Since none of all his people, whom he swayed
With such paternal gentleness and love,
Remembers the divine Ulysses more."—(Cowper.)
He, too, meets with jeers and mockery from the insolent nobles, and Telemachus quits the assembly to wander in melancholy mood along the sea-shore—the usual resort, it will be remarked, of the Homeric heroes, when they seek to calm the tumult of grief or anger. Such appeal to the soothing influence of what Homer calls the "illimitable" ocean is not less true to nature than it is characteristic of the poetical and imaginative temperament. Bathing his hands in the sea waves—for prayer, to the Greek as to the Hebrew mind, demanded a preparatory purification—Telemachus lifts his cry to his guardian goddess, Minerva. At once she stands before him there in the likeness of Mentor. She speaks to him words of encouragement and counsel. Evil men may mock at him now; but if he be determined to prove himself the true son of such a father, he shall not lack honour in the end. She will provide him ship and crew for his voyage. Thus encouraged by the divine Wisdom which speaks in the person of Mentor, he returns to the banquet-hall, to avoid suspicion. Yet, when Antinous greets him there with a mocking show of friendship, he wrenches his hand roughly from his grasp, and quits the company. Taking into his counsels his nurse Eurycleia—who is the palace housekeeper also—he bids her make ready good store of provisions for his voyage: twelve capacious vessels filled with the ripest wine, twenty measures of fine meal, and grain besides, carefully sewn up in wallets. In the dusk of this very evening, unknown to his mother, he will embark; for the goddess (still in Mentor's likeness) has chartered for him a galley with twenty stout rowers, which is to lie ready launched for him in the harbour at nightfall. Eurycleia vainly remonstrates with her nursling on his dangerous purpose—
There is no call to suffer useless pain,
Wandering always on the barren seas.'
But he: 'Good nurse, prithee take heart again,
These things are not without a god nor vain.
Swear only that my mother shall not know
Till twelve days pass, or she herself be fain
To ask thee, or some other the tidings show,
Lest her salt tears despoil such loveliness with woe.'"
Telemachus's resolve is fixed. As soon as the shadows of evening fall, Minerva sends a strange drowsiness on the assembled revellers in the hall of Ulysses, so that the wine-cups drop from their hands, and they stagger off early to their couches. Then, in the person of Mentor, she summons Telemachus to where the galley lies waiting for him, guides him on board, and takes her place beside him in the stern.
Sang the bluff Zephyr o'er the wine-dark mere
Behind them. By Athene's best he blew.
Telemachus his comrades on did cheer
To set the tackling. With good hearts the crew
Heard him, and all things ranged in goodly order true.
With ropes, the white sails stretch on twisted hide,
And brace the mainsail to the bellying wind.
Loudly the keel rushed through the seething tide.
Soon as the good ship's gear was all applied,
They ranged forth bowls crowned with dark wine, and poured
To gods who everlastingly abide,
Most to the stern-eyed child of heaven's great lord.
All night the ship clave onward till the Dawn upsoared."