Chapter 13
The Wooden Horse is not employed in the Iliad, but is one of the striking details of the later epics, which recounted the destruction of Troy. The song of Demodocus carries the incident back to the time of Homer, and before Homer, for it suggests antecedent ballads or rhapsodies which Homer knew, but did not use, and which poets after him developed. The Odyssey takes for granted that its hearers knew the Lay of the Wooden Horse, and also the Lay of the Strife between Ulysses and Achilles, "the fame of which had reached the broad Heavens." Thus we get a peep into the workshop of Homer and catch a glimpse of his materials, which he did not invent, but found at hand. Homer is the builder, the architectonic genius; he organizes the floating, disparate songs of his age into a great totality, into a Greek Temple of which they are the stones. Note what he does with this lay of Demodocus; he puts it into its place in the total structure of the Odyssey, and thus preserves it forever. So he has done with all his materials doubtless.
We may now see that those who cut up the Homeric poems into so many different songs or ballads simply destroy the distinctive work of Homer. They pry asunder the beautiful Greek Temple, lay its stones alongside of one another, and say: behold the poet. But this is just what he is not, and in the present Book we may see him unfolding his own process. Homer is not Demodocus, but the latter's lay he takes up and then weaves what he wants of it into the texture of the total poem. He is thus a contrast to the bard, whom, however, he fully recognizes and makes a part of his own work. Thus Homer himself really answers the Wolfian theory, which seeks to reduce him to a Demodocus, singing fragmentary lays about the Trojan War.
From the Greek poets the Wooden Horse passed to Virgil, who has made it the best-known incident of the Trojan War. It is probably the most famous stratagem of all time, due to the skill of Ulysses. Herein lies the answer to the first lay of Demodocus; in the dispute Ulysses is right, indeed he is a greater hero than Achilles, who could never have captured the hostile city. The incident took place after the action of the Iliad, and after the death of Achilles, who, heroic in courage, stood in the way of intelligence. When he is gone, the city falls, overthrown by the brain of Ulysses.
Homer does not pretend to give the song of Demodocus in full, but a brief summary of what he sang before the Phaeacians. A later poet, Arctinus, took up the legend here alluded to, and developed it in a separate epic, called the Iliou-persis or Sack of Troy. Indeed a vast number of legends and lays about the Trojan War bloomed into epics, which were in later times joined together and called the Epic Cycle. Thus we distinguish two very different stages of consciousness in early Greek poetry: the ballad-making and the epical, Homer being the supreme example of the latter, and Demodocus an instance of the former.
Looking back at the three lays of the bard in the present Book we find that they all are connected together in a common theme of which they show different phases, beginning, middle and end--the conflict before the Iliad, the conflict of the Iliad, and the conflict after the Iliad, all hovering around the great national enterprise of the Greeks, namely the Trojan War, in which the deepest principle of the Hellenic world, indeed of the entire Occident, was at stake.
But Homer, in distinction from Demodocus, weaves into his poem not only the past but the present, not only Troy but Phaeacia, not only the movement against the East but also the movement toward the West, of which Phaeacia is simply one stage. The Hero who unites these two great movements of Greek spirit is now brought before us again.
2. Ulysses weeps at the song of the bard which recalls so many memories of friends departed and of dire calamities. These tears connect him deeply with Troy and its conflict; the Phaeacians listen intently, but are outside of the great struggle, they shed no tears. Thus does Ulysses in his strongest emotions unite himself with the Trojan enterprise of aforetime. He is not simply a wanderer over the sea seeking to get home, but a returner from Troy; he has revealed himself through his feelings. He personally shares in the woes sung by the bard, because he has experienced them. Indeed the very image which the poet here employs to express sorrow, taken from the woman whose husband has been slain fighting for his city, and for his wife and his children, recalls Hector, Andromache and Astyanax as they appear in the Sixth Book of the Iliad. Ulysses is like such a woman, without home or family, alone among strangers, shedding tears. Thus he connects himself with the fateful story of Ilium.
Previously Ulysses wept at the first lay of Demodocus, now he emphasizes his sorrow by repetition. Whenever the theme of Troy is touched, he has to respond with tears; the second time of weeping at the Trojan tale is necessary in order to fix his character and identify him as a returner. Yet this repetition so vitally organic is questioned by many critics, some of whom resort to excision. It is hardly worth the while to notice them in their various attempts at destruction and construction; when we once catch the underlying motive all becomes plain. The first and last scenes of weeping unifies the Book, the bond of tears holds its parts indissolubly together in the emotions.
Alcinous has observed the stranger both times, sitting near him, while we may suppose that the other Phaeacians, not noticing him, to be further off. The king sees his distress and even hears his sobs; in the first case the royal host refrained from inquiry, that being the duty of hospitality; but now the time for interrogation has arrived. The speech of Alcinous is characteristic; full of humanity, full of sympathy is the tone: "a guest, a suppliant stands for a brother even to the man of little feeling." A touch of prophetic boastfulness he shows here and elsewhere; the ships of the Phaeacians he endows with supernatural powers, which fact, however, is not without meaning: "We have no pilots, no rudders even, our boats obey our thoughts, and know the cities and lands to which they come; very quickly do they shoot across the wave, hid in fog and cloud." Truly an ideal ship, which time has not yet realized, though recent navigation, with its present steam and its future electricity, is on the way thereto. Still angry Neptune threatens danger and may work damage, "smiting the ship on the dark deep." This speech of Alcinous with its miraculous, prophetic tinge, with its far-seeing hints of coming realities, almost foretelling our modern humanity and our modern mastery of the sea through science, and putting the two side by side, has given much trouble to the critics, whom we again shall have to pass by, as they simply darken the poet.
Finally comes the demand: who art thou and why didst thou weep? What is thy relation to Troy? Such is the culminating question; Ulysses has been unfolding himself more and more throughout the present Book before the king and people. The games showed his heroic strength; the dances brought out his recognizing and harmonious spirit; the lays of Demodocus have developed his connection with Troy. He clearly belongs to the past and to the present, possibly he is a bridge spanning them, which bridge he may be induced to build in wondrous rainbow colors before the eyes of the Phaeacians.
_Appendix._ It seems never to have been noticed what an important relation the present Book sustains toward the Wolfian theory concerning the Homeric poems. The picture of Demodocus here given doubtless suggested to Wolf the first outline of his view, and has influenced other commentators who lean toward similar opinions. It is well known that Wolf in his famous _Prolegomena_ maintains that the Iliad and Odyssey were originally a string of ballads more or less disconnected, and that Homer was only one of the many balladists, probably the best; furthermore he holds that these ballads were brought together, edited and put into their present shape by certain literary men called _diaskeuastoe_--revisers, redactors, professors of poetry and philology at the court of Peisistratus, about 500 B.C.
That is, Wolf regards Homer as a Demodocus, a singer and also a maker of disjointed ballads and war-songs, the latter pertaining mostly to the heroes of the Trojan War. These were sung at the festivals of the people, at the houses of the nobility, and at the courts of kings, quite as we see the bard singing here in Phaeacia. This fact we may accept; but the question comes up: Is Homer such a balladist and nothing more?
Now it is clear that Homer is not a Demodocus, since the latter is not an epical builder, but a simple singer of separate lays for the occasion. Mark well that Homer in this book does not unfold the themes, "Strife between Ulysses and Achilles," and "The Wooden Horse," but simply alludes to them as well-known; he barely gives the title and a little of the argument, then drops the matter, leaving us to suppose that the Bard sang a somewhat lengthy lay, of which the effect upon the hearers and specially upon Ulysses is duly noted.
Homer, therefore, in this Book as well as in the First Book where Phemius is introduced, makes the Bard or Balladist merely one of his figures, and the song one of his incidents, while he, the veritable Homer, portrays the total environment, showing the court, the games, the household, the complete Phaeacian world. Here we come upon the main distinction: Homer's eye is upon the totality of which the ballad-singer is but a small fragment; Demodocus appears in but one Phaeacian Book, and is by no means all of that, though for once the leading figure.
A step further we may carry the thought. Homer is not only not a Demodocus, but he very distinctly contrasts himself with Demodocus by his poetic procedure. If he is at such pains to show himself a world-builder, and then puts into his world a ballad-singer as a passing character, he certainly emphasizes the difference between himself and the latter. It is also to be noticed that Demodocus does not sing an Iliad, though he chants lays of Troy; the Iliad is an organized work, not a collection of ballads strung together. Everything about Demodocus indicates separate songs; everything about Homer (the Iliad and the Odyssey) indicates unity of song. Hence with the separatists, dissectors, anatomizers, Demodocus is a greater favorite than Homer, indeed he has taken the place of Homer.
Moreover the poet has plainly marked another stage, a stage between himself and Demodocus. In the next Book Ulysses will begin singing and continue through four Books, giving his adventures in Fableland, which by itself possesses a certain completeness. Still it is but an organic part of the total Odyssey, whose poetical architect is Homer. Ulysses as singer is clearly higher than Demodocus; but Homer is above both, for he takes both of them up into his unity, which is the all-embracing poem.
Most emphatically, therefore, Homer shows himself not to be a Demodocus, not to be a ballad-singer, which is an essential point in the Wolfian argument. Homer himself refutes Wolf some 2,500 years beforehand, and his is still the best refutation. A careful study of this Eighth Book settles the relation between balladist and poet by a simple presentation of the facts in their proper co-ordination, and also puts the alert reader on the track of the genesis of the Wolfian _Prolegomena_. For there can hardly be a doubt that Wolf, consciously or unconsciously, directly or indirectly, derived his main conception of Homer from the present Book and from the part that Demodocus, the bard, plays in it. To be sure, the idea that Demodocus, in a general way, is Homer, is old, coming down from antiquity and suggesting itself to the modern reader, who very naturally thinks that Homer is giving some traits of himself in his picture of the blind singer. So much we may grant: some traits of himself, but not all by any means; Homer doubtless upon occasion could sing a short lay of Troy for the amusement of his audience, like Demodocus; but in such a part he is only a wee fragment of the author of those magnificent works, the Iliad and the Odyssey. The total Homer builds totalities, by the very necessity of his genius.
Who, then, according to the theory, put these ballads together? Wolf, fully possessed of the notion that Demodocus is Homer, starts to account for the present form of the poems, which he assigns to the shaping hand of Peisistratus and his college of editors, critics, and poetasters. That is, the grand marvel of Homeric poetry, the mighty constructive act thereof, he ascribes to a set of men essentially barren and uncreative, for all of which he cites some very dubious and inadequate ancient authority.
Here again we may be permitted to trace the Wolfian consciousness to its origin, for origin it has in time and circumstance. Wolf was a professor in a University, and his department was philology; his ideas on Homer are really drawn from his vocation and his surroundings. Why should he not make a philologer and a professor the author of the Homeric poems? So he came to imagine that the tyrant Peisistratus 500 B.C. had under his patronage a kind of German University, or at least a philological seminary, whose professors really constructed Homer as we now have him, having put him together out of antecedent ballads which the actual Homer and many others may have made ages before. Wolf, therefore, is the founder of two philological seminaries; one at the University of Berlin, and the other at the court of Peisistratus. Great is the professor in smelling out the professor anywhere; still we cannot help thinking that what Wolf ascribed to the old Greek seminary, was done only at his German seminary, namely, the patching together of Homer out of ballads.
_FABLELAND._
The movement of the second grand division of the poem, the Ulyssiad, has passed through two of its stages, which have been already considered; the third is now reached which we have called Fableland, though it may be said that the two previous lands are also fabulous. Let it then be named the Fairy World, though this term also does not state or suggest the fact with precision. Without troubling ourselves further about names, we shall proceed to seize the meaning by an exposition given in some detail.
No careful reader can doubt that the poem changes decidedly at the present juncture in color, style, environment and purpose. What reason for it? And what is the connection with the preceding portion of the poem? Four Books (IX-XII) of the same character essentially, unfold themselves before us and demand a new kind of appreciation; they are not idyllic, not epical; they form a class of a peculiar sort, which class, however, we have before noticed in the Odyssey, showing itself in short but suggestive interludes.
We shall, accordingly, first grapple with the leading facts of this new poetic order and seek to interpret them, or rather let them interpret themselves. Phaeacia, which we have just seen, lies before Fableland, though the story of the latter is now told in Phaeacia.
1. The first fact which strikes us is the decided contrast between the two realms. Phaeacia is the land of pure idyllic delight, its supreme characteristic is peace, its happy people seem to have no conflict; Fableland, on the contrary, is one incessant course of strife, struggle and calamity, beginning with the unprovoked attack on the Ciconians. Polyphemus the savage Cyclops is the opposite of the civil ruler Alcinous; Circe, the enchantress, is the insidious foe to domestic life represented by Arete; State and Family in Phaeacia are counterbalanced by an anti-State and an anti-Family in Fableland. Thus man and woman are shown in the two different places as institutional and anti-institutional. Still deeper does the opposition reach; Phaeacia lies wholly in the Upperworld, with its sweet sunlight, while Fableland has a dim Underworld, beyond the sunlight, the realm of the Supersensible; finally Fableland witnesses the supreme negative act of man, typified in the slaying of the Oxen of the Sun. We may, therefore, affirm that Fableland, as compared with Phaeacia, shadows forth the realm of negation; the one stands for the ideal Greek world of ethical order and harmony; the other is the denial and destruction of the same.
But we must not omit the reverse side of the contrast. In Fableland there is one continued striving of the human soul, a chafing against all limits, a moving forward from one stage to another; the spirit of man is shown transcending its bounds everywhere. In Phaeacia, however, there is no striving apparently, it is contented with itself and stays with itself, seeking no neighbors; it is the land of rest, of cessation from conflict, possibly of stagnation, unless it is stirred by inner scission.
The transition from Phaeacia to Fableland is, therefore, full of meaning. It is possible that Ulysses or the poet wished to show these people the struggles which were slumbering in their society, for all civilized order has the possibility of them. The negative spirit will rise hereafter in their midst; so it rose in legendary Greece after the Trojan War, so it rose in historical Greece after the Persian War. Thus we may catch a prophetic tinge in this web of marvelous tales. On the other hand, we should note also that Ulysses has reached the land of peace just through the realm of strife and negation.
2. The next important thing is to observe how the poet is going to locate, and environ this negative world. As it is the opposite of the civilized order of Hellas, he throws it outside of Hellenic boundaries. Over the Greek border somewhere it has to be placed; thus it passes easily from the known to the unknown, out of the civilized to the barbarous, out of the natural, to the supernatural.
All this we feel at once in the narrative. It is true that the first destructive deed, the attack upon the Ciconians, occurs within the limits of historical Hellas, in a region well known; but this act is the prelude and the example, the offenders are at once borne to the Lotus-eaters, who have the faintest touch of historical reality, and thence to Polyphemus who is wholly fabulous. In this realm of pure fable they stay till the end, having been cast out of Greece by the poet on account of their hostile spirit.
Moreover we should note that they move about on the sea, that most unstable element, in contrast to the fixed land; on the one there is order and law, on the other caprice and violence. Yet certain fixed points are set in this uncertain domain, namely the islands, which however, are wholly separated from Hellas and her life, and have inhabitants of their own, strangers to Hellenic influence. Ulysses and his crew will pass from island to island, each of which will show its meaning in some way antagonistic to Greek spirit. Out of the pale they all lie in the boundless billowy waters; thus the Odyssey in this part becomes a sea poem, while in the other two parts it is essentially a land poem. The Greek was and still is a native of both sea and land which are physically interwined and bound together in Greece as in no other portion of the globe. His great poetical book envisages his country as well as himself.
The main point, however, is that Fableland being negative to the Greek world is put outside of all of its known geographical limits, and thus becomes the setting for the marvelous story. It may here be added that Grimm's Tales have a similar border which lies between civilized life and the forest, since the forest was, for our Teutonic ancestors, the fairy realm, in which their supernatural beings dwelt for the most part. Out of culture back to nature the human being sometimes has to go and have strange communings with the spirits there; such is often the movement of the Fairy Tale. But who are these spirits or weird powers dwelling in the lone island or in the solitary wood?
3. This question brings us to the pivotal fact of all Fableland: it is ruled over by a new order of deities, not Olympians; the poet, throwing it out of Hellas below, throws it out of Olympus above. Indeed what else could he do? The Gods of Greece are the protectors of its institutions, State and Family; they are the embodiment of its spirit, of its civilization. But a spirit is now portrayed which is negative to Greek spirit, which denies and defies it in its very essence; the result is a new set of supernatural shapes which dominate the separated world. The negation also must be seen taking on a plastic form, and appearing before the Greek imagination.
The deities of Fableland, or its supernatural powers, are therefore opposite to the deities of Olympus. Hence their shape is changed, they can be even monstrosities, such as Polyphemus, the Laestrigonians, Scylla and Charybdis. Circe and Calypso are beautiful women, yet not natural women, in spite of their beauty; there is something superhuman about them, divine, though they be not Olympians. Shapes of wonder they all seem, unreal, yet in intimate connection with mankind. Moreover they are local, attached to a given spot, or island; they are not universal, they have no general sway like the Olympians; limited, confined, particular is their authority, which the human being can and must transcend.
At this point Olympus can descend into their world and give command. So, after all, the Greek Gods rule over the realm which is negative to them, must do so, else they were not Gods. But they are in a far-off background, namely, in civilized Hellas, beyond whose border Ulysses passes in these Books. Still Zeus, the supreme Greek God, sends his decree to Calypso, when Ulysses is ready to leave the Dark Island. Thus the Olympians exercise a final jurisdiction even here. It is to be noticed, however, that Pallas has little to do with Ulysses in Fableland; for is she not substantially negated? But when he touches Greece again, and even in Phaeacia, she will not fail to be at his side. She belongs not to Wonderland, but to the clear rational realm of light and order; she cannot follow even her darling mortal through these dark mazy wanderings.
It is manifest that the epical Upper World of the Gods has receded from the place it occupies in the Iliad and in the other portions of the Odyssey; in fact, it has been largely but not wholly supplanted. A new order of deities is portrayed, subordinate, yet authoritative in their limited domain, which is cut off by the vast sea from united Hellas, and is thus made merely individual and anti-social by its situation.
What are these shapes and why? Man has created them that he may indicate his own spiritual state when he has fallen out with the established order. Really they are phases of the development of the hero, who is reaching out through disbelief, denial, defiance, toward a restoration. He is negative to the Greek consciousness, and this negation takes shape by mind, yet has to be put down by mind. The whole process he projects out of himself into two lines of movement: the first is the row of preternatural forms arranged as if in a gallery of antique sculpture, the second is himself passing through these forms, grappling with them, mastering them, or fleeing from them.
Such is this Fairy World which has crept in under the grand Olympian order in response to a true necessity. Its beings are not natural, its events are not probable; thus the poet forces us to look inward if we would see his meaning. Spirit is portraying spirit, and not externality, which is here made absurd; in this manner we are driven out of the real into ideal, or we drop by the way in reading those four Books.