170 HISTORY OF GREECE. final triumph. But though either of these two subjects might have been adequate to furnish out a separate poem, it is never- theless certain that, as they are presented in the Odyssey, the former cannot be divorced from the latter. The simple return of Odysseus, as it now stands in the poem, could satisfy no one as a final close, so long as the suitoi's remain in possession of his house, and forbid his reunion with his wife. Any poem which treated his wanderings and return separately, must have repre- sented his reunion with Penelope and restoration to his house, as following naturally upon his arrival in Ithaka, thus taking little or no notice of the suitors. But this would be a capital mutilation of the actual epical narrative, which considers the suitors at home as an essential portion of the destiny of the much-suffering hero, not less than his shipwrecks and trials at sea. His return (sepa- rately taken) is foredoomed, according to the curse of Polyphe- mus, executed by Poseidon, to be long deferred, miserable, solitary, and ending with destruction in his house to greet him j 1 and the ground is thus laid, in the very recital of his wanderings, for a new series of events which are to happen to him after his arrival in Ithaka. There is no tenable halting-place between the depar- ture of Odysseus from Troy, and the final restoration to his house and his wife. The distance between these two events may, indeed, be widened, by accumulating new distresses and impedi- ments, but any separate portion of it cannot be otherwise treated than as a fraction of the whole. The beginning and the end are here the data in respect to epical genesis, though the intermediate events admit of being conceived as variables, more or less numerous : so that the conception of the whole may be said without impropriety both to precede and to govern that of the constituent parts. The general result of a study of the Odyssey may be set down as follows: 1. The poem, as it now stands, exhibits unequivocally adaptation of parts and continuity of structure, whether by one or by several consentient hands : it may, perhaps, 1 Odyss, ix. 534. 'O^ KOKUf eh&Ol, WcffOf UTTO TTUVTOf iTUlpOVf, firjdf TT' <l?.Aorp7f, evpoi J' tv rc^fiara olau 'Of ^ar' d'xofievof (the Cjclops to Poseidon) rov 6' e
