Page:A History of Ancient Greek Literature.djvu/61

Rh heaven is o'er the earth" (, I6) is an imitation 'going one better.'

Yet, as a matter of fact, Calypso (Celatrix, 'She who hides') is probably original in the Odysseus-saga, and Kirkê secondary. There were other legends where Kirkê had an independent existence; and she had turned the Argonauts into bears and tigers before she was impressed to turn Odysseus' companions into pigs. And the Theogony, which is here quoted by the Iliad, itself quotes almost every part of both Iliad and Odyssey. The use of this criterion of quotation is affected by two things—first, all the passages in question may go back to an original which is now lost, sometimes to a definite passage in a lost epic, sometimes to a mere stock-in-trade formula; secondly, the big epics were so long in process of active growth that they all had plenty of time to quote one another. We have mentioned the Odyssean and Hesiodic phrases in the slaying of Patroclus (, 380-480). But the most striking instance of all is that the Hades scene in, the very latest rag of the Odyssey, gives an account of the Suitor-slaying which agrees not with our version, but with the earlier account which our version has supplanted (p. 40).

Besides verbal imitations, we have more general references. For instance, the great catalogues in Homer, that of ships in, of myrmidons in , of women in , are almost without question extracts from a Bœotian or 'Hesiodic' source. Again, much of consists of abridged and incomplete stories about the Nostoi or Homecomings of Agamemnon, Aias the Less, and Menelaus. They seem to imply a reference to some fuller and more detailed original—in all probability to the series of lays called the Nostoi, which formed