Page:Homer. The Odyssey (IA homerodyssey00collrich).pdf/14

4 fill the first place in the Iliad, but we are quite prepared to find him the hero of a story of travel and adventure like the Odyssey, in which the grand figure of Achilles would be entirely out of place.

The Odyssey has been pronounced, by a high classical authority, to be emphatically a lady's book. "The Iliad," says the great Bentley, "Homer made for men, and the Odyssey for the other sex." This opinion somewhat contradicts the criticism of an older and greater master—Aristotle—who defines the Odyssey as being "ethic and complex," while the Iliad is "pathetic and simple." Yet it was perhaps some such notion of the fitness of things which made Fénélon's adaptation of Homer's story, 'The Adventures of Telemachus in search of Ulysses,' so popular a French text-book in ladies' schools a century ago. It is certain, also, that the allusions in our modern literature, and the subjects of modern pictures, are drawn from the Odyssey even more frequently than from the Iliad, although the former has never been so generally read in our schools and colleges. Circe and the Sirens, Scylla and Charybdis, have pointed more morals than any incidents in the Siege of Troy. Turner's pictures of Nausicaa and her Maidens, the Gardens of Alcinous, the Cyclops addressed by Ulysses, the Song of the Sirens—all amongst our national heirlooms of art—assume a fair acquaintance with the later Homeric fable on the part of the public for whom they were painted. The secret of this greater popularity may lie in the fact, that while the adventures in the Odyssey have more of the romantic and the imaginative, the heroes are less heroic—have more of