Page:History of the Literature of Ancient Greece (Müller) 2ed.djvu/92

70 70 HISTORY OF THE and his murder and the other fortunes of his family were described up to the period when Menelaus arrives after the vengeance of Orestes had been consummated*; with which event the poem properly concluded. Artfully interwoven with the above narrative were the voyages and wanderings of the other heroes, Diomed, Nestor, Calchas, Leonteus and Polypoetes, Neoptolemus, and the death of the Locrian Ajax on the Capherian rocks, so that the whole formed a connected picture of the Achaean heroes at variance with each other, hastening homewards by different routes, but almost universally contending with misfortunes and difficulties. Ulysses alone was left for the Odysseyf. § 6. The continuation of the Odyssey was the Telegonia, of which poem only two books were introduced into the collection used by Proclus j. Eugammon of Cyrene, who did not live before the 53d Olympiad, is named as the author. The Telegonia opened with the burial of the suitors by their kinsmen. The want of this part renders the Odyssey incomplete as a narrative ; although, for the internal unity, it is un- necessary, since the suitors are no longer a subject of interest after Ulysses had rid his house of them. The poem then related a voyage of Ulysses to Polyxenus at Elis, the motives for which are not suf- ficiently known to us ; and afterwards the completion of the sacrifices offered by Tiresias ; upon which Ulysses (in all probability in compliance with the prophecy of Tiresias, in order to reach the country where the inhabitants were neither acquainted with the sea nor with salt, the pro- duct of the sea) goes to Thesprotia, and there rules victoriously and happily, till he returns a second time to Ithaca, where, not being re- cognised, he is slain by Telegonus, his son by Circe, who had come to seek his father. § 7. With the exception of the events of the Trojan war, and the return of the Greeks, nothing was so closely connected with the Iliad and Odyssey as the War of the Argives against Thebes ; since many of the principal heroes of Greece, particularly Diomed and Sthenelus, were f In what part of the Nostoi the Nekyia, or description of the infernal regions, which belonged to it, was introduced, we are not indeed informed ; but there can scarcely be any doubt that it was connected with the funeral of Tiresias, which Calchas, in the Nostoi, celebrated ai Colophon. Tiresias, in the Odyssey, is the only shade in the infernal regions who is endowed with memory and understanding, for whose sake Ulysses ventures as far as the entrance of Hades: would not then the poet, whose object it was to make his work an introduction to the Odyssey, have seized this opportunity to introduce the spirit of the seer into the realm of shades, and by his reception by Hades and Persephone to explain the privileges which, according to the Odyssey, he there enjoys ? The questioning of Tiresias invites to a preparatory explanation more perhaps than any other part of the Odyssey, since, taken by itself, it has something enigmatical. % These two books were evidently only an epitome of the poem ; for even all that Proclus states from them has scarcely sufficient space : to say nothing of the poem on the Thesprotians in a mystic tone, which Clemens of Alexandria (Strom, vi. 277) attributes to Eugammon, and which was manifestly in its original form a part of the Telegonia.
 * See Od. iii. 31 1 ; iv. 547.