Page:The American Cyclopædia (1879) Volume VIII.djvu/797

 HOMER 779 angered with all the Greeks, he no longer takes part in the battles with the Trojans. But the misfortunes of his comrades touch his heart, and he at length permits his friend Patroclus to borrow his armor and go out to battle at the head of his Myrmidons. Patroclus is slain by Hector. This event is the central and turn- ing point of the whole epic. The progress to- ward it is very gradual and artistic. The cause of the anger is told first. Then, while Achilles is lying in his tent, several scenes of battle are described, which afford an opportunity for in- troducing the principal heroes of the Greeks, and especially for bringing Diomedes into prominence. The fruitlessness of their efforts and valor heightens their desire for the aid of Achilles. This furnishes the opportunity for introducing and praising the hero. At last he comes. He has suppressed his anger against the Greeks, and turned it against the Trojans, who have killed his friend. He turns the for- tunes of war, and avenges the death of Patro- clus by slaying Hector. This portion of the Soem has a rapid movement. But Hector's eath does not end the Iliad. His body is given up to the Trojans and interred, and Achilles' wrath is turned to pity for Priam, the aged father of the dead hero ; and the poem is thus brought to a peaceful conclusion. The Odyssey describes the return of Ulysses (Odys- seus) to his island home. It is a story of 40 days ; but within this short period is compress- ed a mass of events. It is composed of four main divisions. In the first Ulysses dwells with Calypso on the isle of Ogygia, far from his home, where the suitors of his wife Pe- nelope threaten the ruin of his fortune. Tele- machus, his son, now on the threshold of man- hood, resolves to oppose their designs, and, counselled by Minerva, undertakes a journey to Pylos and Sparta to seek his father. In the second part Ulysses leaves Ogygia, arrives in the land of the Phasacians, to whom he nar- rates his adventures, and goes to Ithaca. The third part details the plan of vengeance which Ulysses and his son resolved upon in the house of a faithful servant, the shepherd Eumseus, and which is executed in the fourth and last division. The Odyssey, like the Iliad, is centred in one person and one event Ulysses and his return and vengeance. Its action, however, is more complicated, through Telemachus's journey. Two views are held by modern scholars on the nature of the contents of the Iliad and Odyssey. One is that the destruction of Troy (Ilium) was an actual historical event, which took place either before the vEolian migration, or in connection with it. The first to give a scientific basis to this view was .Volcker, in Die Wanderungen der aiolischen Kolonien nach Asien als Veranlassung und Orundlage der Geschichte des trojanischen Krieges (1831). The other, which has found a defender in E. Curtius, makes the narrative of the Iliad not that of the legendary destruction of a certain town, but the recollection of the deeds of the Achasans, who were descendants of Pelops, Agamemnon, and Achilles, who contended with the Dardanians, from whom they con- quered a new territory. Blackie, a recent and strenuous advocate of the traditional the- ory, in his " Homer and the Iliad " (1866), ex- presses his belief " that there was a kingdom of Priam, wealthy and powerful, on the coast of the Dardanelles; that there was a great naval expedition undertaken against this Asiat- ic dynasty by the combined forces of the Euro- pean Greeks and some of the Asiatic islanders, under the leadership of the king of Mycen ; that there was a real Achilles, chief of a war- like clan in the Thessalian Phthiotis, and a real quarrel between him and the general-in- chief of the Hellenic armament ; that this quar- rel brought about the most disastrous results to the Greek host, in the first place, and had nearly caused the failure of the expedition; but that afterward, a reconciliation having been effected, ar series of brilliant achievements fol- lowed, which issued soon after in the capture of the great Asiatic capital." Bishop Thirlwall in his " History of Greece " rejects all belief in the detailed narratives of the Iliad and the Odyssey, while he affirms that " the incidents cursorily noticed in these poems were exhibited in full mythical garb in other epics." Grote says in regard to the Trojan war that, " as the possibility of it cannot be denied, so neither can the reality of it be affirmed." Max Muller says that "it would be mere waste of time to construct out of such elements a systematic history, only to be destroyed again sooner or later by some Niebuhr, Grote, or Lewis." The theory in his "Lectures on the Science of Language," second series (1864), that "the siege of Troy is a repetition of the daily siege of the east by the solar powers, that every evening are robbed of their brightest treasures in the west," has found an exhaustive com- mentary in the "Mythology of the Aryan Na- tions," by G. W. Cox (1870), in whose "His- tory of Greece " (1874) the subject is treated in the same spirit. While the Trojan war is thus divested of all historical character, Gladstone reiterates in his "Juventus Mundi " (1869) what he said in his "Studies on Homer and the Homeric Age" (1858), namely, that the Iliad and the Odyssey are emphatically histori- cal poems ; and in his " Homer's Place in His- tory" (1874), building on Egyptological re- searches, as Chabas's chapter on Les nations connues aux figyptiens en Vantiquite historique (1873), and Lenormant's Les premieres civilisa- tions (1874), he thinks there is room for the presumption that the capture of Troy occurred in the 14th century B. C. For the attempts made to identify the site of Troy, including the recent excavations by Dr. Schliemann, see TROY. The discussion of the origin of the Ho- meric poems turns principally on the theory which, since the publication of Wolf's famous Prolegomena (1795), is known as the Wolfian theory. It maintains that the Iliad is made up