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]

2. Having seen the Man, Ulysses is next to behold the Famous Women of the Past, which is still Pre-Trojan with one exception. Examples from all the relations of the woman in the Family are given: the mother, the maiden, the wife. Tragic and happy instances are brought before us—ideal forms taken from the ancient Mythus of Hellas, and begetting in later times a prodigious number of works of art, in poetry, sculpture and painting. Here they are put into Hades, the place of the spirit unbodied, which will hereafter take on body in the drama, in the statue, and in the picture. Ulysses witnesses these shapes in advance, and gives their idea, which is to be realized in the coming ages of Hellas. Truly is Homer the primordial Hellenic seer, he who sees and sets forth the archetypal forms of the future of his race. Undoubtedly he drew from mythical stores already existent, but he ordered them, shaped them anew, and breathed into them the breath of eternal life. No wonder the universal Greek hero must go to Hades to see these forms of the Past which are, however, to live afresh in the Future.

We must also consider the audience of the singer. Who are present? First of all, Arete, mother and wife, together with Nausicaa, the maiden, to these he is specially singing. Their importance in the Phaeacian world has been already indicated; naturally they wish to hear of woman in the Family. Accordingly this portion of the Eleventh Book, the catalogue of Famous Women, or Homer's "Legende of Good Women," is organized after the relations of domestic life. Three classes are suggested: the mothers; the maidens and the wives, of the grey aforetime.

But by all means the glory and the stress of the song are given to the mothers; the other two classes are very briefly dismissed, as being essentially described in the first. Arete is indeed the grand center and end of womanhood; Nausicaa as maid is but a transitory phase, and as wife she is to become mother, and then take her supreme place in the chain which upholds and perpetuates humanity. So the old Greek poet must have thought; was he very far from right?

a. The first of these mothers to appear is Anticleia, the mother of the Hero Ulysses, of the Hero who has made this remarkable voyage to the world beyond, of its kind the supreme heroic act done by a living mortal. She, however, belongs to the immediate Past, and thus corresponds to the man, Elpenor, in the previous section, though she of course has been buried. Note, therefore, this mark of symmetrical structure.

It is the beautiful instinct of the mother, that she flits in the ghost-world to her son at once, when the chance is afforded. She has already appeared, even before Tiresias came; now she is the first after that prophet, who gives directions to Ulysses supplicating: "Tell me, O Prophet, how shall my mother recognize me as her son." Ulysses learns much from her about Ithaca, especially about his father Laertes, who now never goes to the town but stays in the fields, "with a great sorrow in his heart, desiring thy return, while old age weighs hard upon him." Such is the father, still living, whom Ulysses may yet see.

The mother died from longing for her son and "the memory of his gentleness;" still her longing brings her to him in the life beyond. The great revelation is concerning the future state: the soul is immortal, this fact Ulysses is to tell in Phaeacia. The strong desire to behold the loved ones who have passed away is indeed the impulse; but they too return, though insubstantial. It is the primary groundwork of faith in immortality—this feeling of the domestic relation affirming that it is eternal and cannot be broken by death. Still the mother is but a ghost and cannot be embraced; this the son has to accept, though he would have her in flesh and blood.

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