Page:Homer. The Odyssey (IA homerodyssey00collrich).pdf/15

Rh the common human type about them—than those of the Iliad. The colossal figure of Achilles in his wrath does not affect us so nearly as the wandering voyager with his strange adventures, his hairbreadth escapes, and his not over-scrupulous devices.

To our English sympathies the Odyssey appeals strongly for another reason—it is a tale of voyage and discovery. "It is," as Dean Alford says, "of all poems a poem of the sea." In the Iliad the poet never missed an opportunity of letting us know that—whoever he was and wherever he was born—he knew the sea well, and had a seaman's tastes. But there his tale confined him chiefly to the plain before Troy, and such opportunities presented themselves but rarely. In the Odyssey we roam from sea to sea throughout the narrative, and the restless hero seems never so much at home as when he is on shipboard. It is not without reason that the most ancient works of art which bear the figure of Ulysses represent him not as a warrior but as a sailor.

The Tale of Troy, as has been already said, embraces in its whole range three decades of years. It is with the last ten that the Odyssey has to do; and as in the Iliad, though the siege itself had consumed ten years, it is with the last year only that the poet deals; so in this second great poem also, the main action occupies no more than the last six weeks of the third and concluding decade.

Between the Iliad and the Odyssey there is an interval of events, not related in either poem, but which a Greek audience of the poet's own day would readily supply for themselves out of a store of current legend