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In this interval of suspense, nearly a twelvemonth, I returned by a natural impulse to the Greek authors of antiquity; I read with new pleasure the Iliad and the Odyssey, the Histories of Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon, a large portion of the tragic and comic theatre of Athens, and many interesting dialogues of the Socratic school.
As a dramatist he has humour, and vigour, and occasional poetic fire, but is very unequal. His great work by which he lives in literature is his translation of Homer. The Iliad was pub. in 1611, the Odyssey in 1616, and the Hymns, etc., in 1624.
The greatest achievements of art in their kinds have been the capital specimens of a large crop; as the Iliad and Odyssey are the picked lines out of many rhapsodies, and Shakespeare the king of an army of contemporary dramatists. Milton was a survival, felt himself such, and resented it.
"Mamma dear, will you please tell us the story of 'The Three Bears'?" "No, my love, not to-day, I have told it you very often lately and I am busy." "Very well, Mamma dear, then we will tell you the story of 'The Three Bears." The Iliad and the Odyssey are only "The Three Bears" upon a larger scale. Just as the life of a man is only the fission of two amoebas on a larger scale.
Just as Homer has done in the Odyssey, where he speaks of Ulysses 'Having struck his breast, he chid his heart in the following words: Bear up, my heart; ere this thou hast borne far worse. Do you think that he composed this in the belief that the soul was harmony, and capable of being led by the passions of the body, and not rather that it was able to lead and govern them, as being something much more divine than to be compared with harmony?"
The only poems of Homer we possess are the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey," for the Homeric hymns and other productions lose all title to stand in line with these wonderful works, by reason of conflict in a multitude of particulars with the witness of the text, as well as of their poetical inferiority.
Meantime Calypso brought him for a sail Fittest materials, which he also shaped, And to his sail due furniture annexed Of cordage strong, foot-ropes and ropes aloft, Then heaved her down with levers to the deep. Odyssey, B. V. COWPER'S Trans.
the poet is speaking in his own person; he never leads us to suppose that he is any one else. But in what follows he takes the person of Chryses, and then he does all that he can to make us believe that the speaker is not Homer, but the aged priest himself. And in this double form he has cast the entire narrative of the events which occurred at Troy and in Ithaca and throughout the Odyssey. Yes.
We have also an instinct which attracts us towards the pursuit of wisdom; such is the true meaning of the Sirens' voices in the Odyssey, says the philosopher, quoting from the poet of all time: "Turn thy swift keel and listen to our lay; Since never pilgrim to these regions came, But heard our sweet voice ere he sailed away, And in his joy passed on, with ampler mind".
Chapman published his Iliad in 1611, his Odyssey in 1616; Pope's version appeared between 1715 and 1726; Cowper issued his translation in 1791. In the next century the Earl Derby retranslated the Iliad, while an excellent prose version of the Odyssey by Butcher and Lang was followed by a prose version of the Iliad by Lang Myers and Leaf.
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