Page:Homer. The Odyssey (IA homerodyssey00collrich).pdf/73

Rh The Greek historian Plutarch chivalrously defends the young princess from the charge of forwardness, which ungallant critics brought against her as early as his day. It was no marvel, he says, that she knew and valued a hero when she saw him, and preferred him to the carpet-knights of her own country, who were good only at the dance and the banquet. But with her it was, after all, a sentiment, and no more; but which might have ripened into love, under other circumstances, had the hero of her maiden fancy been as free to choose as she was.

So vanishes from the page one of the sweetest creations of Greek fiction—the more charming to us, as coming nearest, perhaps, of all to the modern type of feeling. The farewell to Nausicaa is briefly said; and Ulysses, sitting by King Alcinous at the banquet, pays a high compliment to the blind minstrel, and gives him a new theme for song. Since he knows so well the story of the great Siego, let him now take his lyre, and sing to them of the wondrous Horse. Demodocus obeys. He sings how the Greeks, hopeless of taking Troy by force of arms, had recourse at last to stratagem: how they constructed a huge framework in the shape of a horse, ostensibly an offering to the gods, and then set fire to their sea-camp, and sailed away—for home, to all appearance—leaving an armed company hidden in the womb of the wooden monster; how the Trojans, after much doubt, dragged it inside their walls, and how, in the night-time, the Greeks issued from their strange ambush, and spread fire and sword through the devoted city. And all along Ulysses