Part 5

But he has been a stout fighter in his time, he was in the Trojan War, though old already at that period. He will give the lesson of his life, not during that war, but afterwards. He was one of the heroes of the Iliad, which poem the Odyssey not only does not repeat, but goes out of its way to avoid any repetition thereof. Moreover he was one of those who returned home successfully, can he tell how it was done? This is the question of special interest to Telemachus, as his father, after ten years, has not yet reached home.

Herewith the theme of the Book is suggested: the Return. Physically this was a return from the Trojan War, which is the pre-supposition of the whole Odyssey; all the heroes who have not perished, have to get back to Hellas in some way. These ways are very diverse, according to the character of the persons and the circumstances. Thus we touch the second grand Homeric subject, and, indeed, the second grand fact of the Greek consciousness, which lies imbedded in the Return (Nostos). A short survey of this subject must here be given. We have in the present Book several phases of the Return; Nestor, Menelaus, Ulysses are all Returners, to use a necessary word for the thought; each man solves the problem in his own manner.

Now what is this problem? Let us see. The expedition to Troy involved a long separation from home and country on the part of every man who went with it; still this separation had to be made for the sake of Helen, that she, the wife and queen, return to home and country, from which she had been taken. Her Return, indeed, is the essence of all their Returns. We see that through the war they were severed from Family and State, were compelled to give up for the time being their whole institutional life. This long absence deepens into alienation, into a spiritual scission, from mere habit in the first place; then, in the second place, they are seeking to destroy a home and a country; though it be that of the enemy, and the act, even if necessary, brings its penalty. It begets a spirit of violence, a disregard of human life, a destruction of institutional order. Such is the training of the Greeks before Troy. The wanton attack of Ulysses and his companions upon the city of the Ciconians (Book Ninth) is an indication of the spirit engendered in this long period of violence, among the best and wisest Greeks.

Still, in spite of the grand estrangement, they have the aspiration for return, and for healing the breach which had sunk so deep into their souls. Did they not undergo all this severing of the dearest ties for the sake of Helen, for the integrity of the family, and of their civil life also? What he has done for Helen, every Greek must be ready to do for himself, when the war is over; he must long for the restoration of the broken relations; he cannot remain in Asia and continue a true Greek. Such is his conflict; in maintaining Family and State, he has been forced to sacrifice Family and State. Then when he has accomplished the deed of sacrifice, he must restore himself to what he has immolated. A hard task, a deeply contradictory process, whose end is, however, harmony; many will not be able to reach the latter stage, but will perish by the way. The Return is this great process of restoration after the estrangement.

Many are the Returners, successful and unsuccessful in many different ways. But they all are resumed in the one long desperate Return of Ulysses, the wise and much-enduring man. In space as well as in time his Return is the longest; in spirit it is the deepest and severest by all odds. The present poem, therefore, is a kind of resumption and summary of the entire series of Returns (Nostoi). In the old Greek epical ages, the subject gave rise to many poems, which are, however, at bottom but one, and this we still possess, while the others are lost. Spirit takes care of its own verily.

The true Returner, accordingly, gets back to the institutions from which he once separated; he knows them now, previously he only felt them. His institutional world must become thus a conscious possession; he has gone through the alienation, and has been restored; his restoration has been reached through denial, through skepticism, we may say, using the modern term. The old unconscious period before the Trojan war is gone forever; that was the Paradise from which the Greek Adam has been expelled. But the new man after the restoration is the image of the complete self-conscious being, who has taken the negative period into himself and digested it. Fortunate person! he cannot now be made the subject of a poem, for he has no conflict.

But the young man beginning life, the son Telemachus, is to obtain the same kind of knowledge, not through experience but through inquiry. Oral tradition is to give him the treasures of wisdom without the bitter personal trial. It is for this reason that Pallas sends him to find out what his father did, and to make the experience of the parent his own by education; it is, indeed, the true education--to master the accumulated knowledge and wisdom of the race up to date. So we are now to have the school period of the son, who is thereby not merely the physical son (which, he remarks, is always a matter of doubt), but the spiritual son of his father, whereof there can be no doubt.

The Odyssey proper, toward which we may now cast a glance, contains the wanderings of Ulysses, and is the work of the grown man who has to meet the world face to face and conquer it; thus he obtains the experience of life. The two parts are always to be placed together--the education of the young man and the experience of the mature man; they constitute a complete history of a human soul. Both are, indeed one--bud and flower; at bottom, too, both mean the same thing--the elevation of the individual into an ethical life in which he is in harmony with himself and with the divine order. True learning and true experience reach this end, which may be rightfully called wisdom.

So Telemachus the youth is to listen to the great and impressive fact of his time, containing the deep spiritual problem which is designated as the Return. Nestor is the first and simplest of these Returners; he is an old man, he has prudence, he is without passion; moreover he has not the spirit of inquiry or the searching into the Beyond; he accepts the transmitted religion and opinions without question, through the conservatism of age as well as of character. It is clear that the spiritual scission of the time could not enter deep into his nature; his long absence from home and country produced no alienation; he went home direct after the fall of Troy, the winds and the waters were favorable, no tempest, no upheaval, no signs of divine anger. But he foresaw the wrath of the Gods and fled across the wave in all speed, the wrestle with the deity lay not in him.

It is worth our while to make a little summary of these Returners in classes, since in this way the thought of the present Book as well as its place in the entire Odyssey can be seen best. First are those who never succeeded in returning, but perished in the process of it; of this class the great example is the leader himself, Agamemnon, who was slain by his own wife and her paramour. Second are those who succeeded in returning; of this class there are three well-marked divisions, which are to be sharply designated in the mind of the reader.

(1). The immediate Returners, those who went straight home, without internal scission or external trouble; unimportant they are in this peaceful aspect though they were formerly heroes in the war. Four such are passingly mentioned by Nestor in his talk: Diomed, Neoptolemus the son of Achilles, Philoctetes, and Idomeneus. Nestor himself is the most prominent and the typical one of this set who are the Returners through Hellas.

(2). The second one of those who have succeeded in getting home is Menelaus, whose sweep is far beyond that of Nestor and the immediate Greek world, taking in Egypt and the East. He was separated from Nestor, having delayed to bury his steersman; then a storm struck him, bore him to Crete and beyond, the wind and wave carried him to the land of the Nile. He is the Returner through the Orient.

(3). Finally is Ulysses, not yet returned, but whose time has nearly arrived. In comparison with the others he is the Returner through the Occident. But his Return gives name to the poem, of which it is the greater portion.

Still the universal poem is to embrace all these phases of the Return, and the son, through education, is to know them all, not by experience but by information. Thus his training is to reach beyond what the life of his father can give him; it must be universal, and in this way it becomes a true discipline. We must note too, that this poem reaches beyond the Return of Ulysses, beyond what its title suggests, and embraces all the Returns, Hellenic, Oriental, Occidental, as well as the grand failure to return.

Such are some of the thoughts which gleam out the present Book and illuminate the whole Odyssey. We can now consider structure of the Book, which falls into two distinct parts, determined by the Goddess. When she makes ready to quit Telemachus, we enter the second portion of the Book, and Telemachus continues his journey without direct divine supervision. As the previous Book was marked by the coming of the Goddess, the present Book is marked by her going. The intercourse of the youth with Nestor is the extent of her immediate guardianship; after such an experience, he must learn to make the rest of the journey through his own resources. Even the deity teaches that there must not be too much reliance upon the deity. The first portion of the Book extends to line 328, where Nestor ends his story of the Returns and suggests the journey to Menelaus for another phase thereof: "the sun set and darkness came on." The second portion embraces the rest of the Book. Again we must note that the fundamental Homeric division into the Upper and Lower Worlds is what divides the Book, thus giving to the same its organic principle.

The religious setting of Nestor's world has been noticed already. Into it Telemachus comes, out of a realm of violence; it must indicate some cure for the ills of Ithaca. But he is now to show himself a man. Pallas orders him to put aside his youthful modesty, and boldly make the inquiry concerning his father. And here the Goddess utters a remark which the student may well ponder: "Some things thou wilt think of in thine own mind, but a God will suggest others." Again the Homeric dualism--the human and the divine--and also their harmony; the two elements must come together in every high thought or action. The double relation of the individual--to himself and to the God--is necessary for all worthy speech; his own activity and that of the deity run together in true discourse as well as in true action. So the whole poem is made up of man's self-determined energy and the interference of the Gods; yet both are to be seen as ultimately one in the deed.

The new-comers are asked to pray, and we hear the famous utterance, which is characteristic of Nestor's world, "All men have need of the Gods." This is said by one of his sons. Pallas makes the prayer, a happy one, which brings forth a feeling of harmony between the strangers and all the People. The sympathy is complete, and Telemachus can proceed to ask concerning his father, after he has told who he himself is, and whence he has come. In response, Nestor begins to tell the fateful story of the Returns after the fall of Troy. In his narrative we behold the starting-point of the calamities, the difference between Agamemnon and Menelaus, followed by a series of separations in succession. "Zeus planned for them a sad Return," which, however, was their own fault, "for all were neither wise nor just." It is clear that the Greek unity is utterly broken, a spiritual disruption sets in after the capture of the city. It is, indeed, the new problem, this Return to peace and institutional order after ten years' training to violence. Such is the penalty of all war, however just and necessary; after it is over, the fighting cannot stop at once, and so the victors divide into two camps and continue the fight. Nestor gives the picture of these repeated divisions; once, twice, thrice the breach occurs; first he separates from Agamemnon, the second time from Ulysses, the third time from Menelaus. He will go directly home, and thus he has to leave the others behind; the scission is not in him as in them; he can be restored, in fact he restores himself. He has the instinctive pre-Trojan character still, being an old man; but Ulysses has lost that, and so separates from Nestor, though never before had they differed "in the Council of the Chiefs or in the Assembly of the People." But Ulysses has to return by a far different road, and now each of the two wise men takes his own way, though both have to return.

Aged Nestor manifestly does not belong to the new epoch, he seems to have no sense of the deep spiritual struggle involved. He instinctively went home, shunning the conflict; the others could not. In the Iliad the relation between the two wise men, Nestor and Ulysses, is subtly yet clearly drawn; the one--the younger man--has creative intelligence, the other--the older man--has appreciative intelligence. In the Odyssey, the relation is plainly evolved out of that described in the Iliad; the one is the boundless striver, the other rests in the established order of things.

Nestor, therefore, cannot tell much about Ulysses, who lies quite out of his horizon, at least in the Odyssey. He can only give hope that the man of wisdom will yet return. This Telemachus doubts, dropping into one of his low human moods, even in the presence of Pallas, who rebukes him sharply. It is, indeed, the great lesson; he must have faith in the reality of the Gods, this is the basis of all his future progress, the chief attainment of wisdom. The young man must not fall away into denial, he must be taught that there is a divine order in the world. Old Homer, too, had his notions about religion in education, and the Goddess herself is here introduced giving a lesson.

Nestor, though unable himself to give much information about the Return, can point to the second grand Returner, Menelaus, who has lately come from a distant land, and may have something to say. In fact Menelaus was the last to separate from Nestor, Ulysses had separated long before.

One other story Nestor tells with great sympathy, that of Agamemnon, who represents a still different form of the Return. The great leader of the Greeks can master the Trojan difficulty, can even get back to home and country, but these are ultimately lost to him by his faithless spouse. Still, after the father's death, the son Orestes restores Family and State. Therein Telemachus sees an image of himself, the son, who is to slay his mother's suitors; he sees, too, the possible fate of his father. Ulysses has essentially the same problem as Agamemnon, though he has not the faithless wife in addition; Telemachus beholds his duty in the deed of Orestes, according to Greek consciousness. We shall see hereafter how Ulysses takes due precaution not to be slain in his own land, as Agamemnon was. In disguise he will go to his own palace and carefully note the situation in advance, and then strike the blow of deliverance.

Several times Homer repeats in the Odyssey the tragic story of Agamemnon, the great Leader of the Greeks at Troy. An awe-inspiring tale of destiny; out of it Æschylus will develop his great tragedy, the Oresteia. Indeed the epos develops into tragedy with the full mythical unfolding of this story. Æschylus will deepen the motives into internal collisions; he will show the right and the wrong in Agamemnon, and even in Clytemnestra. Orestes, however beneficent his deed in avenging his father, will not escape the counterstroke; Æschylus will send after him the Furies for the guilt of having murdered his mother. Thus the double nature of the deed, its reward and its penalty, unfolds out of Homer into Æschylus, and creates the Greek drama as we know it at present.

Nestor has now told what lay in the immediate circle of his experience: the Return direct through Hellas. Again he mentions the last separation; it was that of himself from Menelaus, when the latter was swept beyond the limit of Hellas into Egypt, from which he has now returned. What next? Evidently the young man must be sent to him at Sparta in order to share in this larger circle of experience, extending to the Orient. So Greece points to the East in many ways; Nestor, the purely Hellenic soul, knows of that wider knowledge, though it be not his, and he knows that it should be possessed.

In this Book as elsewhere in the Odyssey the grand background is the Trojan war. The incidents of the Iliad are hardly alluded to, but are certainly taken for granted; the Post-Iliad is the field of interest, for in it the Returns take place. Thus the two great poems of Homer join together and show themselves as complements of each other.

II.

Now comes the separation which marks the second portion of the Book. Pallas, in the guise of Mentor, coincides with Nestor in advising Telemachus to pay a visit to Menelaus, and then she departs, "sailing off like a sea-eagle," whereat great astonishment from all present. That is, she reveals herself; all recognize the Goddess, and probably that is the reason why she can no longer stay. She has become internal. Telemachus is now conscious, as she disappears, and he has his own wisdom; he has seen Pallas, and so he must go without her to Sparta. Hardly does he need her longer, being started upon the path of wisdom to know wisdom. At the court of Nestor, with its deeply religious atmosphere, she can appear; but she declines to go with him in person to Menelaus, though she advises the journey. All of which, to the sympathetic reader, has its significance. Still Pallas has by no means vanished out of the career of Telemachus; she at present, however, leaves him to himself, as she often does.

Nestor, too, responds to the marvelous incident in true accord with his character; he invokes her with prayer and institutes a grand sacrifice, which is now described in a good deal of detail. Just as the Book opens with a sacrifice to a deity, so it closes with one--the two form the setting of the whole description. Thus the recognition of the Gods is everywhere set forth in Nestor's world; he is the man of faith, of primitive, immediate faith, which has never felt the doubt.

It is well that Telemachus meets with such a man at the start, and gets a breath out of such an atmosphere. He has seen the ills of Ithaca from his boyhood; he may well question at times the superintendence of the Gods. His own experience of life would lead him to doubt the existence of a Divine Order. Even here in Pylos he challenges the supremacy of the Olympians. When Nestor intimates that his father will yet return and punish the Suitors, with the help of Pallas, or that he himself may possibly do so with the aid of the same Goddess, Telemachus replies: "Never will that come to pass, I think, though I hope for it; no, not even if the Gods should so will." Assuredly a young skeptic he shows himself, probably in a fit of despondency; sharp is the reproof of the Goddess: "O Telemachus, what kind of talk is that? Easily can a God, if he wills it, save a man even at a distance." Thus she, a Goddess, asserts the supremacy of the Gods, even though they cannot avert death. But the youth persists at present: "let us talk no more of this; my father never will return." But when Nestor has told the story of Ægisthus punished by the son Orestes, the impression is strong that there is a divine justice which overtakes the guilty man at last; such is the old man's lesson to the juvenile doubter. The lesson is imparted in the form of a tale, but it has its meaning, and Telemachus cannot help putting himself into the place of Orestes.