Page:History of the Literature of Ancient Greece (Müller) 2ed.djvu/82

60 60 HISTORY OF THE raneous festival of Apollo (who fully grants the prayer of Ulysses to secure him glory in the battle with the bow *), in order to heighten the marvellous and inspiriting parts of the scene. § 12. It is plain that the plan of the Odyssey, as well as of the Iliad, offered many opportunities for enlargement, by the insertion of new passages; and many irregularities in the course of the narration and its occasional diffuseness may be explained in this manner. The latter, for example, is observable in the amusements offered to Ulysses when en- tertained by the Phaeaeians ; and even some of the ancients questioned the genuineness of the passage about the dance of the Phaeaeians and the song of Demodocus on the loves of Ares and Aphrodite, although this part of the Odyssey appears to have been at least extant in the 50th Olympiad, when the chorus of the Phaeaeians was represented on the throne of the Amyclsean Apollo -f*. So likewise Ulysses' account of his adventures contains many interpolations, particularly in the nekyia, or invocation of the dead, where the ancients had already attributed an important passage (which, in fact, destroys the unity and connexion of the narrative) to the diaskeuastce, or interpolators, among others, to the Orphic Onomacritus, who, in the time of the Pisistratids, was employed in collecting the poems of Homer J. Moreover, the Alexandrine critics, Aristophanes and Aristarchus, considered the whole of the last part from the recognition of Penelope, as added at a later period §. Nor can it be denied that it has great defects ; in particular, the description of the arrival of the suitors in the infernal regions is only a second and feebler nekyia, which does not precisely accord with the first, and is introduced in this place without sufficient reason. At the same time, the Odyssey could never have been considered as concluded, until Ulysses had embraced his father Laertes, who is so often mentioned in the course of the poem, and until a peaceful state of things had been restored, or began to be restored, in Ithaca. It is not therefore likely that the original Odyssey altogether wanted some passage of this kind ; but it was pro- bably much altered by the Homerids, until it assumed the form in which we now possess it. § 13. That the Odyssey was written after the Iliad, and that many differences are apparent in the character and manners both of men and gods, as well as in the management of the language, is quite clear ; but 25S. Comp. xxi. 267 ; xxii. 7. Pausan. iii. 18, 7. I See Schol. Od. xi. 104. The entire passage, from xi. 508-626, was rejected hy the ancients, and with good reason. For whereas Ulysses elsewhere is represented as merely, by means of his libation of blood, enticing the shades from their dark abodes to llie asphodel-meadow, where he is standing, as it were, at the gate of Hades ; in this passage he appears m the midst of the dead, who are firmly bound to certain spots in the infernal regions. The same more recent conception prevails in Od. xxiv. 13, where the dead dwell on the asphodel-meadow. § From Od. xxiii. 296, to the end.
 * The festival of Apollo (the nopiwi) is alluded to. Od. xx. 156, 250, 278; xxi.