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Updated: May 5, 2025
As to the passages in which he discovers "borrowing or close imitation of passages" in the Iliad by the poet of the Odyssey, we shall not dwell on the matter, because we know so little about the laws regulating the repetition of epic formulae. It is tempting, indeed, to criticise Mr. Monro's list of twenty-four Odyssean "borrowings," and we might arrive at some curious results.
Unless we are able to suppose that all the gentry of the Iliad held no "rich fields remote from towns," each having but one rotatory lot apiece, there is no difference in Iliadic and Odyssean land tenure, though we get clearer lights on it in the Odyssey.
The minuteness of these inquiries is tedious! In Iliad, III. 125, Iris finds Helen "in the hall" weaving. She summons her to come to Priam on the gate. The gods, of course, are lodged like men. Mr. Leaf, who has a high opinion of this scene, "the Beguiling of Zeus," places it in the "second expansions"; he finds no "late Odyssean" elements in the language.
Tricoupi, who was the chief of the opposition at the time, was an abler man, and a statesman of wider views, on the whole, the greatest statesman of modern Greece, me judice; but in intrigue and Odyssean craft, which is necessary in the Levant, Comoundouros was his master.
These opinions of grammarians are not compatible with the hypothesis that all of the Iliad, even the "earliest" parts, are loaded with interpolations, forced in at different places and in any age from 1000 B.C. to 540 B.C.; for if that theory were true, the whole of the Iliad would equally be infected with the later Odyssean grammar. According to Mr. Monro and Sir Richard Jebb, it is not.
The huge snow-capped range gliding slowly up, "the way of grand, dull, Odyssean ghosts," was impressive, and splendid, and majestic beyond anything I have known in a life which has been rich in travel; but if I want, at a fatigued or dispirited hour, to bathe my spirit clear in the memory of beautiful things seen, I go back, because I cannot help it, to that tender little fern-frond in a lane on the edge of the Black Country, which brought to me, first of all, the message that there is such a thing as beauty in the world.
Butler's health had already begun to fail, and when he started for Sicily on Good Friday, 1902, it was for the last time: he knew he was unfit to travel, but was determined to go, and was looking forward to meeting Mr. and Mrs. J. A. Fuller Maitland, whom he was to accompany over the Odyssean scenes at Trapani and Mount Eryx.
In reading Hakluyt's Voyages, we are almost startled now and then to find that even common sailors could not tell the story of their wanderings without rising to an almost Odyssean strain, and habitually used a diction that we should be glad to buy back from desuetude at any cost.
But whosoever has pored over early European land tenures knows how dim our knowledge is, and will not rush to employ his lore in discriminating between the date of the Iliad and the date of the Odyssey. Not much proof of change in institutions between Iliadic and Odyssean times can be extracted from two passages about the ethna, or bride-price of Penelope.
Those links of connection with the Odyssean cycle, which we subsequently meet with in the legends of the foundation of Tusculum, Praeneste, Antium, Ardea, and Cortona, must probably have been already concocted at this period; and even the belief in the descent of the Romans from Trojan men or Trojan women must have been established at the close of this epoch in Rome, for the first demonstrable contact between Rome and the Greek east is the intercession of the senate on behalf of the "kindre" Ilians in 472.
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