58 HISTORY OP THE where the hero is considered to be farthest from his home, in the island of Ogygia*, at the navel, that is, the central point of the sea ; where the nymph Calypso f has kept him hidden from all mankind for seven years ; thence having, by the help of the gods, who pity his misfortunes, passed through the dangers prepared for him by his implacable enemy, Poseidon, he gains the land of the Phseacians, a careless, peaceable, and effeminate nation on the confines of the earth, to whom war is only known by means of poetry ; borne by a marvellous Phseacian vessel, he reaches Ithaca sleeping ; here he is entertained by the honest swine- herd Eumseus, and having been introduced into his own house as a beg- gar, he is there made to surfer the harshest treatment from the suitors, in order that he may afterwards appear with the stronger right as a terri- ble avenger. With this simple story a poet might have been satisfied ; and we should even in this form, notwithstanding its smailer extent, have placed the poem almost on an equality with the Iliad. But the poet, to whom we are indebted for the Odyssey in its complete form, has interwoven a second story, by which the poem is rendered much richer and more complete ; although, indeed, from the union of two actions, some roughnesses have been produced, which perhaps with a plan of this kind could scarcely be avoided J. For while the poet represents the son of Ulysses, stimulated by Athena, coming forward in Ithaca with newly excited courage, and calling the suitors to account before the people; and then afterwards describes him as travelling to Pylos and Sparta to obtain intelligence of his lost father ; he gives us a picture of Ithaca and its anarchical con- dition, and of the rest of Greece in its state of peace after the return of the princes, which produces the finest contrast; and, at the same time, prepares Telemachus for playing an energetic part in the work of vengeance, which by this means becomes more probable. Although these remarks show that the anangement of the Odyssey is essentially different from that of the Iliad, and bears marks of a more artificial and more fully developed state of the epos, yet there is much that is common to the two poems in this respect; particularly that pro- found comprehension of the means of straining the curiosity, and of keeping up the interest by new and unexpected turns of the narrative. The decree of Zeus is as much delayed in its execution in the Odyssey as it is in the Iliad : as, in the latter poem, it is not till after the building of the walls that Zeus, at the request of Thetis, takes an active part
- 'Clyvyia. from 'Slyvym, who was originally a deity of the watery expanse which
covers all things.
KaXv^&i, the Concealer.
I There would be nothing abrupt in the transition from Menelaus to the suitors in Od. iv. 624, if it fell at the beginning of a new book ; and, yet this division into books is a mere contrivance of the Alexandrine grammarians. The four verses 620-4, which are unquestionably spurious, are a mere useless interpolation ; as they contri- bute nothing to the junction of the parts.
