Snider, A Commentary on the Odyssey of Homer - II

From, Homer's Odyssey: A commentary
[Please note that the Table of Contents here published, is created by Elpenor and is not to be found in the print version]

Fault has often been found with this duplication of the alternative, but when rightly seen into, it will show itself as the central fact of the entire description. It casts an image of the never-ceasing differentiation both in the mind and in the world; it hints the recurring contradiction in all thought and in all conduct, always to be solved, yet never quite solved. What else indeed has man to do? To master the contradiction gives him life, movement, energy, and it must be mastered every day. The old poet is going to the bottom of the matter. The above mentioned repetition of the alternative has its correspondence with the repetition which we have seen to be the fundamental form into which the whole Book is cast.

Plainly the Double Alternative here mythically set forth, springs out of the conflict with the Sirens, and is a deepening of the same to the very bottom. Indulgence kills, abstinence kills, in their excess; and the middle path bifurcates into two new extremes with their problem. Prophetic Circe can tell all this, for does it not lie just in the domain of her experience, which has also been twofold? Pure forms of spirit, wholly non-natural, are these figures representing the Double Alternative, created by the Imagination to express Thought.

3. The final warning of Circe is mainly a repetition of what Tiresias had told Ulysses already in the Underworld; from the latter she heard it and puts it here into its place. Beware of slaying the cattle of the Sun, oxen and sheep in two flocks, over which two bright nymphs keep guard. There can scarcely be a doubt concerning the physical basis of this myth. The seven herds of oxen, fifty to the herd, suggest the number of days in the lunar year (really 354); the seven herds of sheep suggest the corresponding nights. Lampelia (the Moon or Lamp of Night) is the keeper of the one; Phaethusa (the Radiant one) is the keeper of the other—namely the Sun as the day-bringer. Seldom has the old Aryan form of the myth been so well preserved; the whole reads like a transcript out of the Vedas.

Still stronger than the physical side is the spiritual suggestion. The slaughter of these cattle of the Sun points to the supreme act of negation in the intellectual man, to the sin against light. Ulysses and his companions now know the way to reach home, having had the grand experience with the Sirens and then with the Double Alternative; moreover the leader has heard the warning twice. If they now do wrong, it will be a wrong against the Sun, against Intelligence itself.

A certain critic finds fault with Circe because she repeats the warning of Tiresias, and he holds that some botcher or editor, not Homer, transferred the passage from one place to the other. Yet this repetition is not only an organic necessity of the poem, but gives an insight into the character of Circe: she cannot foresee of herself the great intellectual transgression, but Tiresias can; the Sirens and the Double Alternative, however, lie within her own experience. So she copies where she cannot originate, and in this way she is decidedly distinguished from Tiresias, though both are prophetic.

Such is the outlook upon the Future given by Circe, in the way of warning, whereby the warned know what is coming. In the three adventures we feel a certain connection, in fact an unfolding of one out of the other, beginning with the primary conflict of the Senses, which soon rises into the Understanding, and finally ends in a revolt against Reason itself, the source of Light. They have the character of typical forms, derived from the Past, yet they are certain to recur again, and hence can be foretold.

D. Snider
A Commentary on the Odyssey of Homer - Part II

Learned Freeware

D. Snider A Commentary on the Odyssey of Homer - Part II

Learned Freeware

D. Snider
A Commentary on the Odyssey of Homer - Part II