Page:Homer. The Odyssey (IA homerodyssey00collrich).pdf/86

76 out of the story of the Odyssey confess to having found a stumbling-block in this point of the narrative. It sounds very plausible to say that in Circe is personified sensual pleasure; that those who partake of her cup, and are turned into swine, are those who brutalise themselves by such indulgences; that the herb Moly—black at the root, but white and beautiful in the blossom—symbolises "instruction" or "temperance," by which the temptations of sense are to be resisted. But Ulysses' victory over the enchantress, and his subsequent relations to her, fall in but awkwardly with any moral of any kind. To say that Ulysses knows how to indulge his appetites with moderation, and therefore escapes the penalties of excess—that he is the master of Pleasure, while his companions become its slaves—is to make the parable teach a very questionable form of morality indeed, since it represents self-indulgence as praiseworthy, if we can only manage to escape the consequences.

But it was not until Ulysses had been reminded by his companions that he was forgetting his fatherland, that he besought his fair entertainer to let him go. Reluctantly she consented, bound by her oath—warning him, as they parted, that toil and peril lay before him, and that if he would learn his future fate, he must visit the Regions of the Dead, and there consult the shade of the great prophet Tiresias.

Ulysses goes on to describe to the king of the Phæacians his voyage on from the island of Ææa, under the favouring gales which Circe sends him:—