Read Ebook: The Authoress of the Odyssey Where and when she wrote who she was the use she made of the Iliad and how the poem grew under her hands by Butler Samuel Jones Henry Festing Commentator

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THE MASSENA OR MONTEZUMA QUAIL

The Massena, or Montezuma quail, is a distinct genus from the blue quail family. In many respects it resembles the bobwhite in color, though far more fancifully marked. It is also nearly one-half larger, though in some parts of Arizona and in New Mexico there is a smaller species of the same genus known as fool quail. The Mexican bird is far from a fool, and although it roosts on the ground like the bobwhite, it is resourceful enough to take care of itself in a country where vermin of all kinds are very plentiful. Its range is from near the northern boundary south through the larger portion of Mexico.

The Montezuma quail is emphatically a grass bird and inhabits the grassy foothills and the cultivated fields, where it affords fine sport with a dog. It is very cosmopolitan as to climate, for it is found at altitudes of from five to six thousand feet, where considerable snow falls, as well as in the foothills of the hot, tropical valleys of the lowlands, and thrives equally well in all sections. It is a bird of peculiar habits. When startled by the approach of an enemy the bevy at once huddles together, where the birds remain motionless until they arxx. Ulysses converses with Eumaeus, and with his herdsman Philoetius--The suitors again maltreat him--Theoclymenus foretells their doom and leaves the house Book xxi. The trial of the bow and of the axes Book xxii. The killing of the suitors Book xxiii. Penelope comes down to see Ulysses, and being at last convinced that he is her husband, retires with him to their own old room--In the morning Ulysses, Telemachus, Philoetius, and Eumaeus go to the house of Laertes 96 Book xxiv. The Ghosts of the suitors in Hades--Ulysses sees his father--is attacked by the friends of the suitors --Laertes kills Eupeithes--Peace is made between him and the people of Ithaca

THE PREPONDERANCE OF WOMAN IN THE ODYSSEY 105

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

ON THE QUESTION WHETHER OR NO PENELOPE IS BEING WHITEWASHED

FURTHER CONSIDERATIONS REGARDING THE CHARACTER OF PENELOPE--THE JOURNEY OF TELEMACHUS TO LACEDAEMON 134

FURTHER INDICATIONS THAT THE WRITER IS A WOMAN--YOUNG --HEADSTRONG--AND UNMARRIED

THAT ITHACA AND SCHERIA ARE BOTH OF THEM DRAWN FROM TRAPANI AND ITS IMMEDIATE NEIGHBOURHOOD

THE IONIAN AND THE AEGADEAN ISLANDS--THE VOYAGES OF ULYSSES SHOWN TO BE PRACTICALLY A SAIL ROUND SICILY FROM TRAPANI TO TRAPANI

FURTHER DETAILS REGARDING THE VOYAGES OF ULYSSES, TO CONFIRM THE VIEW THAT THEY WERE A SAIL ROUND SICILY, BEGINNING AND ENDING WITH MT. ERYX AND TRAPANI

WHO WAS THE WRITER?

THE DATE OF THE POEM, AND A COMPARISON OF THE STATE OF THE NORTH WESTERN PART OF SICILY AS REVEALED TO US IN THE ODYSSEY, WITH THE ACCOUNT GIVEN BY THUCYDIDES OF THE SAME TERRITORY IN THE EARLIEST KNOWN TIMES

FURTHER EVIDENCE IN SUPPORT OF AN EARLY IONIAN SETTLEMENT AT OR CLOSE TO TRAPANI

THAT THE ILIAD WHICH THE WRITER OF THE ODYSSEY KNEW WAS THE SAME AS WHAT WE NOW HAVE

CONCLUSION

Frontispiece, Nausicaa.

The house of Ulysses The cave of Polyphemus Signor Sugameli and the author in the cave of Polyphemus Map of Trapani and Mt. Eryx The harbour Rheithron, now salt works of S. Cusumano Mouth of the harbour Rheithron, now silted up Map of the Ionian Islands Map of the AEgadean Islands Trapani from Mt. Eryx, showing Marettimo "all highest up in the sea" Map of the voyage of Ulysses Wall at Cefal?, rising from the sea Megalithic remains on the mountain behind Cefal? H. Festing Jones, Esq., in flute of column at Selinunte Remains of megalithic wall on Mt. Eryx Wall at Hissarlik, showing the effects of weathering The Iliadic wall A coin bearing the legend Iakin, and also showing the brooch of Ulysses.

That the finest poem of the world was created out of the contributions of a multitude of poets revolts all our literary instincts.

Of course it does, but the Wolfian heresy, more or less modified, is still so generally accepted both on the continent and in England that it will not be easy to exterminate it.

Easy or no this is a task well worth attempting, for Wolf's theory has been pregnant of harm in more ways than are immediately apparent. Who would have thought of attacking Shakspeare's existence--for if Shakspeare did not write his plays he is no longer Shakspeare--unless men's minds had been unsettled by Wolf's virtual denial of Homer's? Who would have reascribed picture after picture in half the galleries of Europe, often wantonly, and sometimes in defiance of the clearest evidence, if the unsettling of questions concerning authorship had not been found to be an easy road to reputation as a critic? Nor does there appear to be any end to it, for each succeeding generation seems bent on trying to surpass the recklessness of its predecessor.

And more than this, the following pages will read a lesson of another kind, which I will leave the reader to guess at, to men whom I will not name, but some of whom he may perhaps know, for there are many of them. Indeed I have sometimes thought that the sharpness of this lesson may be a more useful service than either the establishment of the points which I have set myself to prove, or the dispelling of the nightmares of Homeric extravagance which German professors have evolved out of their own inner consciousness.

How came so great a man as Bentley not to see what is so obvious? Truly, as has been said by Mr. Gladstone, if Homer is old, the systematic and comprehensive study of him is still young.

It is an old saying that no man can do better for another than he can for himself, I may perhaps therefore best succeed in convincing the reader if I retrace the steps by which I arrived at the conclusions I ask him to adopt.

The Greek being easy, I had little difficulty in understanding what I read, and I had the great advantage of coming to the poem with fresh eyes. Also, I read it all through from end to end, as I have since many times done.

Fascinated, however, as I at once was by its amazing interest and beauty, I had an ever-present sense of a something wrong, of a something that was eluding me, and of a riddle which I could not read. The more I reflected upon the words, so luminous and so transparent, the more I felt a darkness behind them, that I must pierce before I could see the heart of the writer--and this was what I wanted; for art is only interesting in so far as it reveals an artist.

The view that the writer might have lived more in the steward's room than with the great people of the house served to quiet me for a time, but by and by it struck me that though the men often both said and did things that no man would say or do, the women were always ladies when the writer chose to make them so. How could it be that a servant's hall bard should so often go hopelessly wrong with his men, and yet be so exquisitively right with every single one of his women? But still I did not catch it. It was not till I got to Circe that it flashed upon me that I was reading the work, not of an old man, but of a young woman--and of one who knew not much more about what men can and cannot do than I had found her know about the milking of ewes in the cave of Polyphemus.

I see that Messrs. Butcher and Lang omit ix. 483 in which the rudder is placed in the bows of a ship, but it is found in the text, and is the last kind of statement a copyist would be inclined to intercalate. Yet I could have found it in my heart to conceive the text in fault, had I not also found the writer explaining in Book v. 255 that Ulysses gave his raft a rudder "in order that he might be able to steer it." People whose ideas about rudders have become well defined will let the fact that a ship is steered by means of its rudder go without saying. Furthermore, not only does she explain that Ulysses would want a rudder to steer with, but later on she tells us that he actually did use the rudder when he had made it, and, moreover, that he used it ??????????, or skilfully.

The sex difference is the profoundest and most far-reaching that exists among human beings.... Women may or may not be the equals of men in intelligence;... but women in the mass will act after the manner of women, which is not and never can be the manner of men.

And as they will act, so will they write. This, however, does not make their work any the less charming when it is good of its kind; on the contrary, it makes it more so.

We have no reason to think that men found the use of their tongue sooner than women did; why then should we suppose that women lagged behind men when the use of the pen had become familiar? If a woman could work pictures with her needle as Helen did, and as the wife of William the Conqueror did in a very similiar civilisation, she could write stories with her pen if she had a mind to do so.

Shakespeare, of course, is the whole chain of the Alps, comprising both Mont Blanc and Monte Rosa.

THE STORY OF THE ODYSSEY.

As regards its closeness to the text, the references to the poem which will be found at the beginning of each paragraph will show where the abridgement has been greatest, and will also enable the reader to verify the fidelity of the rendering either with the Greek or with Messrs. Butcher and Lang's translation. I affirm with confidence that if the reader is good enough to thus verify any passages that may strike him as impossibly modern, he will find that I have adhered as severely to the intention of the original as it was possible for me to do while telling the story in my own words and abridging it.

I preface my abridgement with a plan of Ulysses' house, so far as I have been able to make it out from the poem. The reader will find that he understands the story much better if he will study the plan of the house here given with some attention.

All the four sides of the cloisters were filled with small tables at which the suitors dined. A man could hold one of these tables before him as a shield .

In the cloisters there were also

In passing, I may say that Agamemnon appears to have been killed in much such a cloistered court as above supposed for the house of Ulysses. A banquet seems to have been prepared in the cloister on one side the court, while men were ambuscaded in the one on the opposite side.

Lastly, for what it may be worth. I would remind the reader that there is not a hint of windows in the part of Ulysses' house frequented by the suitors.

THE STORY OF THE ODYSSEY.

Tell me, oh Muse, of that ingenious hero who met with many adventures while trying to bring his men home after the Sack of Troy. He failed in this, for the men perished through their own sheer folly in eating the cattle of the Sun, and he himself, though he was longing to get back to his wife, was now languishing in a lonely island, the abode of the nymph Calypso. Calypso wanted him to marry her, and kept him with her for many years, till at last all the gods took pity upon him except Neptune, whose son Polyphemus he had blinded.

Now it so fell out that Neptune had gone to pay a visit 21 to the Ethiopians, who lie in two halves, one half looking on to the Atlantic and the other on to the Indian Ocean. The other gods, therefore, held a council, and Jove made them a speech about the folly of AEgisthus in 35 wooing Clytemnestra and murdering Agamemnon: finally, yielding to Minerva, he consented that Ulysses should return to Ithaca.

"In that case," said Minerva, "we should send Mercury to 80 Calypso to tell her what, we have settled. I will also go to Ithaca and embolden Ulysses' son Telemachus to dismiss the suitors of his mother Penelope, who are ruining him by their extravagance. Furthermore, I will send him to Sparta and Pylos to seek news of his father, for this will get him a good name."

The goddess then winged her way to the gates of Ulysses' 96 house, disguised as an old family friend, and found the suitors playing draughts in front of the house and lording it in great style. Telemachus, seeing her standing at the gate, went up to her, led her within, placed her spear in the spear-stand against a strong bearing-post, brought her a seat, and set refreshments before her.

Meanwhile the suitors came trooping into the sheltered 114 cloisters that ran round the inner court; here, according to their wont, they feasted: and when they had done eating they compelled Phemius, a famous bard, to sing to them. On this Telemachus began talking quietly to Minerva: he told her how his father's return seemed now quite hopeless, and concluded by asking her name and country.

Minerva said she was Mentes, chief of the Taphians, and 178 was on her way to Temesa with a cargo of iron, which she should exchange for copper. She told Telemachus that her ship was lying outside the town, under Mt. 186 Neritum, in the harbour that was called Rheithron. "Go," she added, "and ask old Laertes, who I hear is now 189 living but poorly in the country and never comes into the town; he will tell you that I am an old friend of your father's."

She then said, "But who are all these people whom I 224 see behaving so atrociously about your house? What is it all about? Their conduct is enough to disgust any right-minded person."

"They are my mother's suitors," answered Telemachus, and 230 come from the neighbouring islands of Dulichium, Same, and Zacynthus, as well as from Ithaca itself. My mother does not say she will not marry again and cannot bring her courtship to an end. So they are ruining me."

Minerva was very indignant, and advised him to fit out 252 a ship and go to Pylos and Sparta, seeking news of his father. "If," she said, "you hear of his being alive, you can put up with all this extravagance for yet another twelve months. If on the other hand you hear of his death, return at once, send your mother to her father's, 276 and by fair means or foul kill the suitors."

Telemachus thanked her for her advice, promised to take 306 it, and pressed her to prolong her visit. She explained that she could not possibly do so, and then flew off into the air, like an eagle.

Phemius was still singing: he had chosen for his subject 325 the disastrous return of the Achaeans from Troy. Penelope could hear him from her room upstairs, and came down into the presence of the suitors holding a veil before her face, and waited upon by two of her handmaids, one of whom stood on either side of her. She stood by one of the bearing-posts that supported the roof of the cloisters, and bade Phemius change his theme, which she found too painful as reminding her of her lost husband.

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