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10 she professes her own firm belief that Ulysses still survives: she has no kind of proof of his existence, and the suitors demand of her that—in accordance with what would appear the custom of the country—she shall make choice of some one among them to take the lost hero's place, and enjoy all the rights of sovereignty. How far the lovers were attracted by the wealth and position of the lady, and how far by the force of her personal charms, is a point somewhat hard to decide. The Roman poet Horace imputes to them the less romantic motive. They were, he says, of that class of prudent wooers—

and he even hints that Penelope's knowledge of their real sentiments helped to account for her obduracy. But Horace, we must remember, was a satirist by trade. A mere prosaic reader might be tempted to raise the question whether the personal charms of Penelope, irresistible as they might have been when Ulysses first left her for the war, must not have been somewhat impaired during the twenty years of his absence; and whether it was possible for a widow of that date (especially with a grown-up son continually present as a memento) to inspire such very ardent admiration. These arithmetical critics have always been the pests of poetry. One very painstaking antiquarian—Jacob Bryant—in the course of his studies on the Iliad, made the discovery, by a comparison of mythological dates, that Helen herself must have been nearly a hundred years old at the taking of Troy. But the