Chapter 6

[1]Journal of Hellenic Studies, Vol. VII. 170-88, andIntroduction to Homer, 3rd edit. 1888, pp. 57-62, and Appendix, Note 1.

[2]Journal of Philology, Vol. XXIV. p. 39, &c.

[3]Temesa was on the West side of the toe of Italy and was once famous for its copper mines, which, however, were worked out in Strabo's time. SeeSmith's Dictionary of Ancient Geography.

[4]Heading Νηρίτῳ instead of Νηίῳ, cf. Book xiii. 96, &c., and 351, where the same harbour is obviously intended.

[5]i.e."flowing," or with a current in it.

[6]The mountain is singular, as though it were an isolated mountain rather than a range that was in the mind of the writer. It is also singular, not plural, in the parallel cases of xv. 175 and xix. 538.

[7]Reading ὑπονηρίτου for ὑπονηίου,cf.i. 186 and also xiii. 351.

[8]The reader will note that the fact of Orestes having also killed his mother is not expressly stated here, nor in any of the three other passages in which the revenge taken by Orestes is referred to—doubtless as being too horrible. The other passages areOd. i. 40 and 299 (not given in this summary), and xi. 408, &c.

[9]For fuller translation and explanation why I have bracketed the passage, seeChapter VI.

[10]It is curious that the sleeping arrangements made by Helen for Telemachus and Pisistratus, as also those made for Ulysses by Queen Arete (vii. 336, &c.), though taken almost verbatim from those made by Achilles for Priam and Idicus (Il. xxiv. 643-47 and 673-76), should do so well for a building of such a different character as the house of Menelaus must have been from the quarters of Achilles before Troy.

[11]For explanation why I bracket this passage seeChapter VI.

[12]Scheria means "Jutland"—a piece of land jutting out into the sea.

[13]Gr. πάππα φίλ', line 57.

[14]Penelope and Calypso also had gardens: so had Laertes (xxiv. 217). I remember no allusion to them in theIliad.

[15]It is a little odd that this disc should have been brought, considering that none such were used by the Phæacians. We must suppose that Minerva put it in along with the others, and then shed a thick darkness over it, which prevented the attendants from noticing it.

[16]Alcinous never seems to have got beyond saying that he was going to give the cup; he never gives it, nor yet the talent—the familiar ῶς εἰπὼν ἐν χερσὶ τίθει κ.τ.λ. is noticeably absent. He found the chest, and he took a great deal of pains about stowing the presents in the ship that was to take Ulysses to Ithaca (see xiii. 18, &c.), but here his contributions seem to have ended.

[17]Dwellers on the East coast of Sicily believe the island here referred to to be Acitrezza, between Acireale and Catania. I have been all over it and do not believe that it contains more than two acres of land on which any goat could ever have fed. The idea that the writer of theOdysseywould make Ulysses and his large body of men spend half a day in killing over a hundred goats on such a site need not be discussed seriously, I shall therefore pass it over without notice when I come to discuss the voyage of Ulysses. That it should be so confidently believed to be the island off the land of the Cyclopes serves as a warning to myself, inasmuch as it shows how easily people can bring themselves to accept any site for any scene if they make up their minds to do so.

[18]SeeChapter xv. for reasons why I have bracketed lines 115—137.

[19]Ulysses was to appease Neptune's anger by going as a missionary to preach his name among a people that did not know him.

[20]The want of coherence here is obvions, but as it is repeated when Ulysses ought to come to the wandering cliffs (which he never does) it must be referred to alacunanot in the text, but in the writer's sources of information—of which she seems fully aware.

[21]I suppose this line to have been added when lines 426—446 of this book were added.

[22]The wandering cliffs are certainly intended, for when Ulysses is recapitulating his adventures in Book xxiii. he expressly mentions having reached the πλαγκτὰς πέτρας, just after the Sirens, and before Scylla and Charybdis (xxiii. 327). The writer is determined to have them in her story however little she may know about them.

[23]I incline to think that these lines are an after thought, added by the writer herself.

[24]σὺν ἀρτεμέεσσι φίλοισιν.

[25]Minerva, in her desire to minimise the time during which the suitors had been at Ulysses' house, seems to have forgotten that they had been there ever since Telemachus was quite a child (Od. ii. 312-14).

[26]i.e. which seemed to fly past them.

[27]According to tradition, she had hanged herself on hearing a report of the death of her son.

[28]SeeChapter XII, near the beginning.

[29]In almost all other places he is called Melanthius.

[30]All this might very well be, if the scene is laid in an open court, but hardly if it was in a hall inside a house.

[31]ἐς μέσσον (line 447).

[32]They might very well fight in the middle of an open court, but hardly in a covered hall. They would go outside.

[33]ἐν μεγάροισιν, but not ἐν μεγάροισι σκιόεσσι.

[34]There is no indication as though they went out to do this; they seem to have emptied the ashes on to the open part of the court.

[35]I have repeatedly seen geese so feeding at Trapani and in the neighbourhood. In summer the grass is all burned up so that they cannot graze as in England.

[36]This is the only reference to Sardinia in eitherIliadorOdyssey.

[37]If Telemachus had never seen anything of the kind before, so probably, neither had the writer of theOdyssey—at any rate no commentator has yet been able to understand her description, and I doubt whether she understood it herself. It looks as though the axe heads must have been wedged into the handles or so bound on to them as to let the hole be visible through which the handle would go when the axe was in use. The trial is evidently a double one, of strength as regards the bending of the bow, and accuracy of aim as regards shooting through a row of rings.

[38]It is not expressly stated that the "stone pavement" is here intended. The Greek has simply ἆλτο δ᾽ ἐπὶ μέγαν οὐδόν, but I do not doubt that the stone pavement is intended.

[39]This again suggests, though it does not prove, that we are in an open court surrounded by a cloister, on the rafters of which swallows would often perch. Line 297 suggests this even more strongly, "the roof" being, no doubt, the roof of the cloister, on to which Minerva flew from the rafter, that her ægis might better command the whole court.

[40]Probably the hide of the heifer that Philœtius had brought in that morning (xx. 186).

[41]This room was apparently not within the body of the house. It was certainly on the ground floor, for the bed was fixed on to the stump of a tree; I strongly suspect it to be the vaulted room, round the outside of which the bodies of the guilty maids were still hanging, and I also suspect it was in order to thus festoon the room that Telemachus hanged the women instead of stabbing them, but this is treading on that perilous kind of speculation which I so strongly deprecate in others. If it were not for the gruesome horror of the dance, in lines 129—151, I should not have entertained it.

Having in my first chapter met the onlyà prioriobjections to my views concerning the sex of the writer which have yet been presented to me, I now turn to the evidence of female authorship which is furnished by the story which I have just laid before the reader.

What, let me ask, is the most unerring test of female authorship? Surely a preponderance of female interest, and a fuller knowledge of those things which a woman generally has to deal with, than of those that fall more commonly within the province of man. People always write by preference of what they know best, and they know best what they most are, and have most to do with. This extends to ways of thought and to character, even more than to action. If man thinks the noblest study for mankind to be man, woman not less certainly believes it to be woman.

Hence if in any work the women are found to be well and sympathetically drawn, while the men are mechanical and by comparison perfunctorily treated, it is, I imagine, safe to infer that the writer is a woman; and the converse holds good with man. Man and woman never fully understand one another save, perhaps, during courtship and honeymoon, and as a man understands man more fully than a woman can do, so does a woman, woman. Granted, it is the delight of either sex to understand the other as fully as it can, and those who succeed most in this respect are the best and happiest whether men or women; but do what we may the barriers can never be broken down completely, and each sex will dwell mainly, though not, of course, exclusively, within its own separate world. When, moreover, we come to think of it, it is not desirable that they should be broken down, for it is on their existence that much of the attraction of either sex to the other depends.

Men seem unable to draw women at all without either laughing at them or caricaturing them; and so, perhaps, a woman never draws a man so felicitously as when she is making him ridiculous. If she means to make him so she is certain to succeed; if she does not mean it she will succeed more surely still. Either sex, in fact, can caricature the other delightfully, and certainly no writer has ever shown more completely than the writer of theOdysseyhas done that, next to the glorification of woman, she considers man's little ways and weaknesses to be the fittest theme on which her genius can be displayed. But I doubt whether any writer in the whole range of literature (excepting, I suppose, Shakspeare) has succeeded in drawing a full length, life-sized, serious portrait of a member of the sex opposite to the writer's own.

It is admitted on all hands that the preponderance of interest in theIliadis on the side of man, and in theOdysseyon that of woman. Women in theIliadare few in number and rarely occupy the stage. True, the goddesses play important parts, but they are never taken seriously.

Shelley, again, speaking of the "perpetually increasing magnificence of the last seven books" of theIliad, says, "TheOdysseyis sweet, but there is nothing like this."[1]The writer of theOdysseyis fierce as a tigress at times, but the feeling of the poem is on the whole exactly what Shelley says it is. Strength is felt everywhere even in the tenderest passages of theIliad, but it is sweetness rather than strength that fascinates us throughout theOdyssey. It is the charm of a woman not of a man.

So, again, to quote a more recent authority, Mr. Gladstone in his work onHomeralready referred to, says (p. 28):—

It is rarely in theIliadthat grandeur or force give way to allow the exhibition of domestic affection. Conversely, in theOdysseythe family life supplies the tissue into which is woven the thread of the poem.

Any one who is familiar with the two poems must know thatwhat Mr. Gladstone has said is true; and he might have added, not less truly, that when there is any exhibition of domestic life and affection in theIliadthe men are dominant, and the women are under their protection, whereas throughout theOdysseyit is the women who are directing, counselling, and protecting the men.

Who are the women in theOdyssey? There is Minerva, omnipresent at the elbows of Ulysses and Telemachus to keep them straight and alternately scold and flatter them. In theIliadshe is a great warrior but she is no woman: in theOdysseyshe is a great woman but no warrior; we have, of course, Penelope—masterful nearly to the last and tossed off to the wings almost from the moment that she has ceased to be so; Euryclea, the old servant, is quite a match for Telemachus, "do not find fault, child," she says to him, "when there is no one to find fault with" (xx. 135). Who can doubt that Helen is master in the house of Menelaus—of whom all she can say in praise is that he is "not deficient either in person or understanding" (iv. 264)? Idothea in Book iv. treats Menelausde haut en bas, all through the Proteus episode. She is good to him and his men, but they must do exactly what she tells them, and she evidently enjoys "running" them,—for I can think of no apter word. Calypso is the master mind, not Ulysses; and, be it noted, that neither she nor Circe seem to have a manservant on their premises. I was at an inn once and asked the stately landlady if I could see the landlord. She bridled up and answered, "We have no landlord, sir, in this house; I cannot see what use a man is in a hotel except to clean boots and windows." There spoke Circe and Calypso, but neither of them seem to have made even this much exception in man's favour.

Let the reader ask any single ladies of his acquaintance, who live in a house of their own, whether they prefer being waited upon by men or by women, and I shall be much surprised if he does not find that they generally avoid having a man about the house at all—gardeners of course excepted. But then the gardener generally has a wife, and a house of his own.

Take Nausicaa again, delightful as she is, it would not be wise to contradict her; she knows what is good for Ulysses, and all will go well with him so long as he obeys her, but she must be master and he man. I see I have passed over Ino in Book v. She is Idothea over again, just as Circe is Calypso, with very little variation. Who again is master—Queen Arete or King Alcinous? Nausicaa knows well enough how to answer this question. When giving her instructions to Ulysses she says:

"Never mind my father, but go up to my mother and embrace her knees; if she is well disposed towards you there is some chance of your getting home to see your friends again" (vi. 310-315).

Throughout the Phæacian episode Arēte (whose name, by the way, I take to be one of the writer's tolerably transparent disguises, and to be intended to suggest Arĕte, or "Goodness") is a more important person than Alcinous. I do not believe in her myself; I believe Penelope would have been made more amiable if Arete had been as nice a person as the writer says she was; leaving her, however, on one side, so much more important are wives than husbands in the eyes of the author of theOdysseythat when Ulysses makes his farewell speech to the Phæacians, she makes him say that he hopes they may continue to give satisfaction to their wives and children (xiii. 44, 45), instead of hoping that their wives and children will continue to give satisfaction to them. A little lower down he wishes Queen Arete all happiness with her children, her people, and lastly with King Alcinous. As for King Alcinous, it does not matter whether he is happy or no, provided he gives satisfaction to Queen Arete; but he was bound to be happy as the husband of such an admirable woman.

So when the Duke of York was being married I heard women over and over again say they hoped the Princess May would be very happy with him, but I never heard one say that she hoped the Duke would be very happy with the Princess May. Men said they hoped the pair would be very happy, without naming one more than the other.

I have touched briefly on all the more prominent femalecharacters of theOdyssey. The moral in every case seems to be that man knows very little, and cannot be trusted not to make a fool of himself even about the little that he does know, unless he has a woman at hand to tell him what he ought to do. There is not a single case in which a man comes to the rescue of female beauty in distress; it is invariably the other way about.

The only males who give Ulysses any help while he is on his wanderings are Æolus, who does him no real service and refuses to help him a second time, and Mercury, who gives him the herb Moly (x. 305) to protect him against the spells of Circe. In this last case, however, I do not doubt that the writer was tempted by the lovely passage ofIl. XXIV., where Mercury meets Priam to conduct him to the Achæan camp; one pretty line, indeed (and rather more), of the Iliadic passage above referred to is taken bodily by the writer of theOdysseyto describe the youth and beauty of the god.[2]With these exceptions, throughout the poem Andromeda rescues Perseus, not Perseus Andromeda—Christiana is guide and guardian to Mr. Greatheart, not Mr. Greatheart to Christiana.

The case of Penelope may seem to be an exception. It may be urged that Ulysses came to her rescue, and that the whole poem turns on his doing so. But this is not true. Ulysses kills the suitors, firstly, because they had wasted his substance—this from the first to last is the main grievance; secondly, because they had violated the female servants of his house; and only, thirdly, because they had offered marriage to his wife while he was still alive (xxii. 36-38). Never yet was woman better able to hold her own when she chose, and I will show at full length shortly that when she did not hold it it was because she preferred not to do so.

I have dealt so far with the writer's attitude towards women when in the world of the living. Let us now see what her instinct prompts her to consider most interesting in the kingdom of the dead. When Ulysses has reached the abode of Hades, the first ghost he meets is that of his comradeElpenor, who had got drunk and fallen off the roof of Circe's house just as Ulysses and his men were about to set sail. We are expressly told that he was a person of no importance, being remarkable neither for sense nor courage, so that it does not matter about killing him, and it is transparent that the accident is only allowed to happen in order to enable Ulysses to make his little joke when he greets the ghost in Hades to the effect that Elpenor has got there more quickly by land than Ulysses had done by water. Elpenor therefore, does not count.

The order, however, in which the crowd of ghosts approach Ulysses, is noticeable. After the blood of the victims sacrificed by Ulysses had flowed into the trench which he had dug to receive it, the writer says:—

"The ghosts came trooping up from Erebus—brides, young bachelors, old men worn out with toil, maids who had been crossed in love, and brave men who had been killed in battle, with their armour still smirched with blood; they came from every quarter, and flitted round the trench with a strange kind of screaming sound that made me turn pale with fear" (xi. 36-43).

I do not think a male writer would have put the brides first, nor yet the young bachelors second. He would have begun with kings or great warriors or poets, nor do I believe he would make Ulysses turn pale with fear merely because the ghosts screamed a little; they would have had to menace him more seriously.

What does Bunyan do? When Christian tells Pliable what kind of company he will meet in Paradise, he says:—

"There we shall see elders with their golden crowns; there we shall see holy virgins with their golden harps; there we shall see men that by the world were cut in pieces, burnt in flames, eaten of beasts, drowned in the seas, for the love they bore to the Lord of that place; all well and cloathed with immortality as with a garment."

Men present themselves to him instinctively in the first instance, and though he quits them for a moment, he returns to them immediately without even recognising the existence of women among the martyrs.

Moreover, when Christian and Hopeful have passed through the river of death and readied the eternal city, it is none but men who greet them.

True, after having taken Christian to the Eternal City, Bunyan conducts Christiana also, and her children, in his Second Part; but surely if he had been an inspired woman and not an inspired man, and if this woman had been writing as it was borne in upon her by her own instinct, neither aping man nor fearing him, she would have taken Christiana first, and Christian, if she took him at all, in her appendix.

Next to Elpenor the first ghost that Ulysses sees is that of his mother Anticlea, and he is sorely grieved that he may not, by Circe's instructions, speak to her till he has heard what the Theban prophet Tiresias had got to tell him. As soon as he has heard this, he enquires how he can make his mother recognise him, and converse with him. This point being answered there follows the incomparably beautiful scene between him and Anticlea, which occupies some seventy or eighty lines, and concludes by his mother's telling him to get home as fast as he can that he may tell of his adventures in Hades—to whom? To the world at large? To his kinsmen and countrymen? No: it is to his wife that he is to recount them and apparently to nobody else (xi. 223, 224). Very right and proper; but more characteristic of a female than of a male writer.

Who follow immediately on the departure of Anticlea? Proserpine sends up "all the wives and daughters of great princes"—Tyro, daughter of Salmoneus, Antiope daughter of Asopus, Alcmena, Epicaste (better known as Jocasta), Chloris wife of Neleus, Leda, Iphimedeia, Phædra, Procris, Ariadne, Mæra, Clymene, and Eriphyle. Ulysses says that there were many more wives and daughters of heroes whom he conversed with, but that time would not allow him to detail them further; in deference, however, to the urgent request of King Alcinous, he goes on to say how he met Agamemnon, Achilles, and Ajax (who would not speak to him); he touched lightly also on Minos, Orion, Tityus, Tantalus, Sisyphus, and Hercules.

I have heard women say that nothing can be made out of thefact that the women in Hades are introduced before the men, inasmuch as they would themselves have been more likely to put the men before the women, and can understand that a male writer would be attracted in the first instance by the female shades. When women know what I am driving at, they generally tell me this, but when I have got another woman to sound them for me, or when I have stalked them warily, I find that they would rather meet the Virgin Mary, Eve, Queen Elizabeth, Cleopatra, Sappho, Jane Austen, St. Elizabeth of Hungary, Helen of Troy, Zenobia, and other great women than even Homer and Shakspeare. One comfortable homely woman with whom I had taken great pains said she could not think what I meant by asking such questions, but if I wanted to know, she would as lief meet Mrs. Elizabeth Lazenby as Queen Elizabeth or any one of them. For my own part, had I to choose a number of shades whom I would meet, I should include Sappho, Jane Austen, and the authoress of theOdysseyin my list, but I should probably ask first for Homer, Shakspeare, Handel, Schubert, Arcangelo Corelli, Purcell, Giovanni Bellini, Rembrandt, Holbein, De Hooghe, Donatello, Jean de Wespin and many another man—yet the writer of theOdysseyinterests me so profoundly that I am not sure I should not ask to see her before any of the others.

I know of no other women writers who have sent their heroes down to Hades, but when men have done so they deal with men first and women afterwards. Let us turn to Dante. When Virgil tells him whom Christ first saved when he descended into Hell, we find that he first rescued Adam. Not a word is there about Eve. Then are rescued Abel, Noah, Abraham, David, Jacob and his sons—and lastly, just before theet ceteri—one woman, Rachel. When Virgil has finished, Dante begins meeting people on his own account. First come Homer, Horace, Ovid, and Lucan; when these have been disposed of we have Electra, Hector, Æneas, Cæsar, Camilla, Penthesilea, Latinus, Lavinia, Brutus, Cato's wife Marcia, Julia, Cornelia, Saladin, Socrates, Plato, Democritus, Diogenes, Heraclitus, Empedocles, Anaxagoras, Thales, Zeno, Dioscorides, Orpheus, Linus, Cicero, Seneca, Euclid, Ptolemy, Hippocrates,Galen, Avicen, and Averroes. Seven women to twenty-six men. This list reminds me of Sir John Lubbock's hundred books, I shall therefore pursue Dante no further; I have given it in full because I do not like him. So far as I can see the Italians themselves are beginning to have their doubts about him; "Dante è un falso idolo," has been said to me more than once lately by highly competent critics.

Let us now look to theÆneid. When Æneas and the Sibyl approach the river Styx, we read:—

Huc omnis turba ad ripas effusa ruebatMatres atque viri, defunctaque corpora vitâMagnanimûm heroum, pueri, innuptæque puellæ,Impositique rogis juvenes ante ora parentum.Æn. vi. 305-308.

The women indeed come first, but theiinviribeing short Virgil could not help himself, and the first persons whom he recognises as individuals are men—namely two of his captains who had been drowned, Leucaspis and Orontes—and Palinurus. After crossing the Styx he first passes through the region inhabited by those who have died as infants; then that by those who have been unjustly condemned to die; then that by suicides; then that of those who have died for love, where he sees several women, and among them Dido, who treats him as Ajax treated Ulysses. The rest of those whom Æneas sees or converses with in Hades are all men.

Lucian is still more ungallant, for in his dialogues of the dead he does not introduce a single woman.

One other case alone occurs to me among the many that ought to do so; I refer to Fielding'sJourney to the next World. The three first ghosts whom he speaks to in the coach are men. When he gets to his journey's end, after a short but most touching scene with his own little daughter who had died a mere child only a few months before Fielding wrote, and who is therefore nothing to the point, he continues: "The first spirit with whom I entered into discourse, was the famous Leonidas of Sparta." Of course; soldier will greet soldier first. In the next paragraph one line is given toSappho, who we are told was singing to the accompaniment of Orpheus. Then we go on to Homer,[3]Virgil, Addison, Shakspeare, Betterton, Booth, and Milton.

Defoe, again, being an elderly married man, and wanting to comfort Robinson Crusoe, can think of nothing better for him than the companionship of another man, whereon he sends him Friday. A woman would have sent him an amiable and good-looking white girl whom the cannibals had taken prisoner from some shipwrecked vessel. This she would have held as likely to be far more useful to him.

So much to show that the mind of man, unless when he is young and lovesick, turns more instinctively to man than to woman. And I am convinced, as indeed every one else is whether he or she knows it or no, that with the above exception, woman is more interested in woman. This is how the Virgin Mary has come to be Queen of Heaven, and practically of more importance than the Trinity itself in the eyes of the common people in Roman Catholic countries. For the women support the theologians more than the men do. The male Jews, again, so I am told, have a prayer in which the men thank God that they were not born women, and the women, that they were not born men. Each sex believes most firmly in itself, nor till we have done away with individualism altogether can we find the smallest reason to complain of this arrangement. A woman if she attempts an Epic is almost compelled to have a man for her central figure, but she will minimise him, and will maximise his wife and daughters, drawing them with subtler hand. That the writer of theOdysseyhas done this is obvious; and this fact alone should make us incline strongly towards thinking that we are in the hands not of a man but of a woman.

[1]Select Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, edited by Richard Garnett, Kegan Paul Trench & Co., 1882, p. 149.

[2]Od. x. 278, 279; cf.Il. XXIV. 347, 348.

[3]Talking ofHomerFielding says, "I had the curiosity to ask him whether he had really writ that poem [theIliad] in detached pieces and flung it about all over Greece, according to the report that went of him. He smiled at my question, and asked me whether there appeared any connection in the poem; for if there did he thought I might answer for myself." This was first published in 1743, and is no doubt intended as a reply to Bentley. See Jebb'sIntroduction to Homer, ed. 1888, note 1 on p. 106.

JEALOUSY FOR THE HONOUR AND DIGNITY OF WOMAN—SEVERITY AGAINST THOSE WHO HAVE DISGRACED THEIR SEX—LOVE OF SMALL RELIGIOUS OBSERVANCES—OF PREACHING—OF WHITE LIES AND SMALL PLAY-ACTING—OF HAVING THINGS BOTH WAYS—AND OF MONEY.

Not only does the writer shew a markedly greater both interest and knowledge when dealing with women, but she makes it plain that she is exceedingly jealous for the honour of her sex, and by consequence inexorable in her severity against those women who have disgraced it. Goddesses may do what they like, they are not to be judged by mortal codes; but a mortal woman who has fallen must die.

No woman throughout theOdysseyis ever laughed at. Women may be hanged but they must not be laughed at. Men may be laughed at, indeed Alcinous is hardly mentioned at all except to be made more or less ridiculous. One cannot say that Menelaus in Books iv. and xv. is being deliberately made ridiculous, but made ridiculous he certainly is, and he is treated as a person of far less interest and importance than his wife is. Indeed Ulysses, Alcinous, Menelaus, and Nestor are all so like one another that I do not doubt they were drawn from the same person, just as Ithaca and Scheria are from the same place. Who that person was we shall never know; nevertheless I would point out that unless a girl adores her father he is generally, to her, a mysterious powerful being whose ways are not as her ways. He is feared as a dark room is feared by children; and if his wife is at all given to laughing at him, his daughter will not spare him, however much she may cajole and in a way love him.

But, as I have said, though men may be laughed at, the women are never taken other than quite seriously. Venus is indeed, made a little ridiculous in one passage, but she was agoddess, so it does not matter; besides, the brunt of the ridicule was borne by Mars, and Venus was instantly readorned and comforted by the Graces. I cannot remember a single instance of a woman's being made to do anything which she could not do without loss of dignity—I except, of course, slaves, and am speaking of the higher social classes.

It has often been observed that the Messenger of the Gods in theIliadis always Iris, while in theOdysseyhe is no less invariably Mercury. I incline to attribute this to the author's dislike of the idea that so noble a lady as Iris should be made to fetch and carry for anybody. For it is evident Iris was still generally held to have been the messenger of the gods. This appears from the beginning of Book xviii., where we are told that Irus's real name was Arnæus, but that he was called Irus (which is nothing but Iris with a masculine termination) "because he used to carry messages when any one would send him." Writers do not fly in the face of current versions unless for some special reasons of their own.

If, however, a woman has misconducted herself she is to be shewn no mercy. There are only three cases in point, and one of these hardly counts inasmuch as the punishment of the guilty woman, Clytemnestra, was not meted out to her by the authoress herself. The hold, however, which the story of Clytemnestra's guilt has upon her, the manner in which she repeatedly recurs to it, her horror at it, but at the same time her desire to remove as much of the blame as possible from Clytemnestra's shoulders, convinces me that she acutely feels the disgrace which Clytemnestra's treachery has inflicted upon all women "even on the good ones." Why should she be at such pains to tell us that Clytemnestra was a person of good natural disposition (iii. 266), and was irreproachable until death had removed the bard under whose protection Agamemnon had placed her?[1]When she was left alone—without either husband or guardian, and with an insidious wretch like Ægisthus beguiling her with his incessant flattery, she yielded, and there is no more to be said, except that it was very dreadfuland she must be abandoned to her fate. I see Mr. Gladstone has wondered what should have induced Homer (whom he holds to have written theOdysseyas well as theIliad) to tell us that Clytemnestra was a good woman to start with,[2]but with all my respect for his great services to Homeric literature, I cannot think that he has hit upon the right explanation. It should not be forgotten, moreover, that this extenuation of Clytemnestra's guilt belongs to a part of theOdysseythat was engrafted on to the original design—a part in which, as I shall show later, there was another woman's guilt, which was only not extenuated because it was absolutely denied in the face of overwhelming evidence—I mean Penelope's.

The second case in point is that of the woman who stole Eumæus when he was a child. A few days after she has done this, and has gone on board the ship with the Phœnician traders, she is killed by Diana, and thrown overboard to the seals and fishes (xv. 403-484).

The third case is that of the women of Ulysses' household who had misconducted themselves with the suitors during his absence. We are told that there were fifty women servants in the house, of whom twelve alone were guilty. It is curious that the number of servants should be exactly the same as that of the maidservants in the house of king Alcinous, and it should be also noted that twelve is a very small number for the guilty servants, considering that there were over a hundred suitors, and that the maids seem to have been able to leave the house by night when they chose to do so (xx. 6-8)—true, we are elsewhere told that the women had been violated and only yielded under compulsion, but this makes it more wonderful that they should be so few—and I may add, more terribly severe to hang them. I think the laxity of prehistoric times would have prompted a writer who was not particularly jealous for the honour of woman, to have said that there were thirty-eight, or even more, guilty, and only twelve innocent. We must bear in mind on the other hand that when Euryclea brought out the thirty-eight innocent women to see Ulyssesafter he had killed the suitors, Ulysses recognised them all (xxii. 501). The youngest of them therefore can hardly have been under forty, and so me no doubt were older—for Ulysses had been gone twenty years.

Now how are the guilty ones treated? A man who was speaking of my theory that theOdysseywas written by a woman as a meremauvaise plaisanterie, once told me it was absurd, for the first thing a woman would have thought of after the suitors had been killed was the dining room carpet. I said thatmutatis mutandisthis was the very thing she did think of.

As soon as Ulysses has satisfied himself that not a single suitor is left alive, he tells Euryclea to send him the guilty maidservants, and on their arrival he says to Telemachus, Eumæus and Philœtius (xxii. 437-443):—

"Begin to bear away the corpses, and make the women help you. When you have done this, sponge down the seats and tables, till you have set the whole house in order; then take the maids outside....and thrust them through with your swords."

These orders are faithfully obeyed; the maids help in the work of removing the bodies and they sponge the chairs and tables till they are clean—Ulysses standing over them and seeing that they lose no time. This done, Telemachus (whose mother, we are told (xxii. 426-427) had never yet permitted him to give orders to the female servants) takes them outside and hangs them (xxii. 462), as a more dishonourable death than the one his father had prescribed for them—perhaps also he may have thought he should have less blood to clean up than if he stabbed them—but see note on p. 98. The writer tells us in a line which she borrows in great part from theIliad,[3]that their feet move convulsively for a short time though not for very long, but her ideas of the way in which Telemachus hanged them are of the vaguest. No commentator has ever yet been able to understand it; the only explanation seems to be that the writer did not understand it herself, and did not care to do so. Let it suffice that the women were obviously hanged.

No man writing in pre-Christian times would have considered the guilt of the women to require so horrible a punishment. He might have ordered them to be killed, but he would not have carried his indignation to the point of making them first clean up the blood of their paramours. Fierce as the writer is against the suitors, she is far more so against the women. When the suitors are all killed, Euryclea begins to raise a cry of triumph over them, but Ulysses checks her. "Hold your tongue, woman," he says, "it is ill bragging over the bodies of dead men" (xxii. 411). So also it is ill getting the most hideous service out of women up to the very moment when they are to be executed; but the writer seems to have no sense of this; where female honour has been violated by those of woman's own sex, no punishment is too bad for them.

The other chief characteristics of theOdysseywhich incline me to ascribe it to a woman are a kind of art for art's sake love of a small lie, and a determination to have things both ways whenever it suits her purpose. This never seems to trouble her. There the story is, and the reader may take it or leave it. She loves flimsy disguises and mystifications that stultify themselves, and mystify nobody. To go no further than books i. and iii., Minerva in each of these tells plausible stories full of circumstantial details, about her being on her way to Temesa with a cargo of iron and how she meant to bring back copper (i. 184), and again how she was going to the Cauconians on the following morning to recover a large debt that had been long owing to her (iii. 366), and then, before the lies she had been at such pains to concoct are well out of her mouth she reveals herself by flying into the air in the form of an eagle. This, by the way, she could not well do in either case if she was in a roofed hall, but might be conceived as doing if, as I suppose her to have been in both cases, she was in a roofed cloister that ran round an open court.

There is a flavour of consecutive fifths in these flights,[4]ifindeed they are not downright octaves, and I cannot but think that the writer would have found a smoother progression open to her if she had cared to look for one; but letting this pass, the way in which white lies occur from the first book to the last, the punctiliousness, omnipresent, with which small religious observances are insisted upon, coupled with not a little unscrupulousness when these have been attended to, the respect for gods and omens, and for theconvenancesgenerally—all these seem to me to be more characteristic of a woman's writing than a man's.

The seriousness, again, with which Telemachus is taken, the closeness with which he adheres to his programme, the precision with which he invariably does what his father, his mother, Minerva, or any responsible person tells him that he should do, except in one passage which is taken almostverbatimfrom theIliad,[5]the way in which Minerva beautifies him and preaches to him; the unobtrusive but exemplary manner in which he discharges all his religious, moral, and social duties—all seem to me to point in the direction of thinking that the writer is a woman and a young one.

How does Minerva preach to him? When he has washed his hands in the sea he prays that she will help him on his intended voyage in search of news concerning his father. The goddess then comes up to him disguised as Mentor, and speaks as follows:

"Telemachus, if you are made of the same stuff as your father you will be neither fool or coward henceforward, for Ulysses never broke his word nor left his work half done. If, then, you take after him your voyage will not be fruitless, but unless you have the blood of Ulysses and Penelope in your veins I see no likelihood of your succeeding. Sons are seldom as good men as their fathers; they are generally worse not better; still, as you are not going to be either fool or coward henceforward, and are not entirely without some share of your father's wise discernment, I look with hope upon your undertaking" (ii. 270-280).

Hence the grandmotherly reputation which poor Mentor is never likely to lose. It was not Mentor but Minerva. The writer does not make Minerva say that daughters were rarely as good women as their mothers were. I had a very dear kind old aunt who when I was a boy used to talk to me just in this way. "Unstable as water," she would say, "thou shalt not excel." I almost heard her saying it (and more to the same effect) when I was translating the passage above given. My uncles did not talk to me at all in the same way.

I may add parenthetically here, but will deal with the subject more fully in a later chapter, that all the time Minerva was lecturing Telemachus she must have known that his going would be worse than useless, inasmuch as Ulysses was, by her own arrangements, on the very eve of his return; and indeed he was back again in Ithaca before Telemachus got home.

See, again, the manner in which Penelope scolds him in Book xviii. 215 &c., for having let Ulysses and Irus fight. She says:—

"Telemachus, I fear you are no longer so discreet and well conducted as you used to be. When you were younger you had a greater sense of propriety; now, however, that you are grown up, though a stranger to look at you would take you for the son of a well-to-do father as far as size and good looks go, your conduct is by no means what it should have been. What is all this disturbance that has been going on, and how came you to allow a stranger to be so disgracefully ill-treated? What would have happened if he had suffered serious injury while a suppliant in our house? Surely this would have been very discreditable to you."

I do not believe any man could make a mother rebuke her son so femininely.

Again, the fidelity with which people go on crying incessantly for a son who has been lost to them for twenty years, though they have still three sons left,[6]or for a brother whom they have never even seen,[7]is part and parcel of that jealousy for the sanctity of domestic life, in respect of which women are apt to be more exacting than men.

And yet in spite of all this the writer makes Telemachus take no pains to hide the fact that his grievance is not so much the alleged ill-treatment of his mother, nor yet the death of his father, as the hole which the extravagance of the suitors is making in his own pocket. When demanding assistance from his fellow countrymen, he says, of the two great evils that have fallen upon his house:—

"The first of these is the loss of my excellent father, who was chief among all you here present and was like a father to every one of you. The second is much more serious, and ere long will be the utter ruin of my estate. The sons of all the chief men among you are pestering my mother to marry them against her will. They are afraid to go to her father Icarius, asking him to choose the one he likes best, and to provide marriage gifts for his daughter, but day after day they keep hanging about my father's house, sacrificing our oxen, sheep, and fat goats for their banquets, and never giving so much as a thought to the quantity of wine they drink. No estate can stand such recklessness (ii. 46-48)."

Moreover it is clear throughout Books iii. and iv., in which Telemachus is trying to get news of his father, that what he really wants is evidence of his death, not of his being alive, though this may only be because he despairs of the second alternative. The indignation of Telemachus on the score of the extravagance of the suitors is noticeably shared by the writer all through the poem; she is furious about it; perhaps by reason of the waste she saw going on in her father's house. Under all she says on this head we seem to feel the rankling of a private grievance, and it often crosses my mind that in the suitors she also saw the neighbours who night after night came sponging on the reckless good nature of Alcinous, to the probable eventual ruin of his house.

Woman, religion, and money are the three dominant ideas in the mind of the writer of theOdyssey. In theIliadthebelli causais a woman, money is a detail, and man is most in evidence. In theOdysseythebelli causais mainly money, and woman is most in evidence—often when she does not appear to be so—just as in the books of theIliadin which theTrojans are supposed to be most triumphant over the Achæans, it is the Trojans all the time whose slaughter is most dwelt upon.

It is strange that theOdyssey, in which money is so constantly present to the mind of the writer, should show not even the faintest signs of having been written from a business point of view, whereas theIliad, in which money appears but little, abounds with evidence of its having been written to take with a certain audience whom the writer both disliked and despised—and hence of having been written with an eye to money.

I will now proceed to the question whether Penelope is being, if I may say so, whitewashed. Is the version of her conduct that is given us in theOdysseythe then current one, or is the writer manipulating a very different story, and putting another face on it—as all poets are apt to do with any story that they are re-telling? Tennyson, not to mention many earlier writers, has done this with theArthurian Legends, the original form of which takes us into a moral atmosphere as different as can well be conceived from the one we meet with in theIdylls of the King.

There is no improbability (for other instances will occur to the reader so readily that I need not quote them) in the supposition that the writer of theOdysseymight choose to recast a story which she deemed insulting to her sex, as well as disgusting in itself; the question is, has she done so or not? Do traces of an earlier picture show up through the one she has painted over it, so distinctly as to make it obvious what the original picture represented? If they do not, I will give up my case, but if they do, I shall hold it highly improbable that a man in the Homeric age would undertake the impossible task of making Penelope at the same time plausible and virtuous. I am afraid I think he would be likely to make her out blacker than the last poet who had treated the subject, rather than be at any pains to whiten her.

Least of all would Homer himself have been prompted to make Penelope out better than report says she was. He would not have cared whether she was better or worse. He is fond ofwomen, but he is also fond of teasing them, and he shows not the slightest signs of any jealousy for female honour, or of a desire to exalt women generally. He shows no more sign of this than he does of the ferocity with which punishment is inflicted on the women of Ulysses' household—a ferocity which is in itself sufficient to make it inconceivable that theIliadand theOdysseyshould be by the same person.

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