A History of Greek Literature - 1894 Author:Frank Byron Jevons Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER IL THE ODYSSEY. The Odyssey has teen more popular in modern times than the Iliad. This is doubtless partly due to its being domestic and not milita... more »ry in its subject. Descriptions of righting done with obsolete weapons have mainly but an antiquarian interest; and the various kinds of wounds and various modes of shedding blood have less charm for an industrial and domestic society than have the sufferings of a faithful wife. The domestic interest is indeed present in the Iliad, and Hector and Andromache, for that reason, tended in the Middle Ages to come to be regarded as the leading characters and the central interest of the Iliad—a wholly false conception of the epic. Another reason for the popularity in modern times of the Odyssey is that the poem contains fairy tales. Ogres and ogresses, the floating island of Eolus, the marvellous bag containing the winds, Scylla and Charybdis, the descent into the realms of the dead, the enchanted isles of Circe and Calypso, the one-eyed giant, are all tales which exercise now, as they seem to have done from the earliest Aryan times, an inexhaustible influence over the popular fancy. A third reason for the popularity of the Odyssey is that, in addition to the poetry with which all these tales are invested, they are woven with consummate artistic skill into a single whole. Let us now see wherein the unity of the Odyssey, as we have it, consists; for that it possesses unity is universally admitted, though it is disputed whether this unity is the deliberate design of one artist, or the result of the labours of successive generations of poets working at the same subject. The theme of the Odyssey is as simple as that of the Iliad: the one is the wrath of Achilles and its consequences, the other is the return of Odysseus home. As Ar...« less