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Leaf, as a champion of the theory of ages of "expansion," answers that "the Iliad and Odyssey are essentially, and above all, Court poems. "It is now generally recognised that this conception is radically false." These opinions, in which we heartily agree there never was such a thing as a "popular" Epic were published fourteen years ago. Mr.
The story of the Odyssey charmed me, of course, and I had moments of being intimate friends with Ulysses, but I was passing out of that phase, and was coming to read more with a sense of the author, and less with a sense of his characters as real persons; that is, I was growing more literary, and less human.
"I forgot, we had not ended our discussion. You almost convinced me with regard to the superior merits of the Odyssey, but not quite. Shall we renew the subject now?" "No, please don't. That's not why I'm glad to see you. It's for something quite, quite different. I want to say something to you, and it's most important. Can't we just keep back a little from the others?
Livius Andronicus, a Greek slave, 240 B.C., rudely translated the Odyssey into Latin, and was the author of various plays, all of which have perished, and none of which, according to Cicero, were worth a second perusal. Still, Andronicus was the first to substitute the Greek drama for the old lyrical stage poetry. One year after the first Punic War, he exhibited the first Roman play.
In the "Iliad" he first declares that he is about to say how many evils happened to the Achaeans through the wrath of Achilles and the high-handed conduct of Agamemnon; and in the "Odyssey" how many labors and dangers Odysseus encountered and surmounted all of them by the judgment and perseverance of his soul.
Could it be supposed that at the very dawn of history there was a group, as it were, of men each in the highest degree gifted with "the vision and the faculty divine"? Then as to the Iliad and Odyssey being both the production of Homer: if we admitted one to be, that the other was would follow as a matter of course.
I fancy, also, that I must by this time have read the Odyssey, for the "Battle of the Frogs and Mice" was in the second volume, and it took me so much that I paid it the tribute of a bald imitation in a mock-heroic epic of a cat fight, studied from the cat fights in our back yard, with the wonted invocation to the Muse, and the machinery of partisan gods and goddesses.
She studied Pope's translation of the Iliad and Odyssey indoors, and she also took the little volume out under her arm; but this was a pose, for she could not read out of doors, there were always so many other interests to occupy her attention birds and beasts, men and women, trees and flowers, land and water; all much more entrancing than the Iliad or Odyssey.
In our opinion these passages are traditional formulae, as in our own old ballads and in the Chansons de Geste, and Noack also takes this view every now and then. They may well be older, in many cases, than Iliad and Odyssey; or the poet, having found his own formula, economically used it wherever similar circumstances occurred.
The London loafer has little wit or imagination, and their comments did not rise above the stale inquiry as to where we kept our bombs, and the equally original advice bestowed upon Kosinksi to get 'is 'air cut. A half-hour's walk brought us to our destination, but our Odyssey was not so soon to end.
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