Page:Homer. The Odyssey (IA homerodyssey00collrich).pdf/139

Rh sents. To trace the many points of resemblance between these two great poems and the sacred records as fully as they might be traced would require a volume in itself. It may be enough in these pages shortly to point out some few of the many instances in which Homer will be found one of the most interesting, because assuredly one of the most unconscious, commentators on the Bible.

The Homeric kings, like those of Israel and Judah, lead the battle in their chariots; Priam sits "in the gate," like David or Solomon; Ulysses, when he would assert his royalty, stands by a pillar, as stood Joash and Josiah. Their riches consist chiefly in "sheep and oxen, men-servants and maid-servants." When Ulysses, in the Iliad, finds Diomed sleeping outside his tent,—"and his comrades lay sleeping around him, and under their heads they had their shields, and their spears were fixed in the ground by the butt-end" —we have the picture, almost word for word, of Saul's night-bivouac when he was surprised by David: "And behold, Saul lay sleeping within the trench, and his spear stuck in the ground at his bolster, and the people lay round about him." Ulysses and Diomed think it not beneath their dignity, as kings or chiefs, to act what we should consider the part of a spy, like Gideon in the camp of the Midianites. Lycurgus the Thracian slays with an ox-goad, like Shamgar in the Book of Judges. The very cruelties of warfare are the same—the insults too frequently