by Roger Green
Then, while the great bow sang and the swift shafts hummed, the Suitors strove vainly to get at him and pull him down. First they sought for weapons, but these were not in the usual places on the walls. Then such as carried swords attacked him, using tables as shields; but Telemachus brought helmets, spears and shields for himself and faithful Eumaeus and Philoetius, and armour for Odysseus also, and the battle raged furiously.
Once it was almost lost, for false Melanthius the goatherd slipped into the store-room and brought out several weapons for the Suitors: but Telemachus caught him in time and tied him up, to be punished afterwards.
On and on shot Odysseus, and Athena spread panic among the Suitors so that they did not rush the four all in a single body as they might have done. When his arrows were exhausted, Odysseus took up the spears which had been flung at him and returned them to the Suitors with deadly aim; and drawing his sword he leapt among them, crying his terrible war-cry. At his side fought brave young Telemachus, and Eumaeus the faithful swineherd, and Philoetius the cowherd; and all of them were wounded in that terrible fray.
At length the Suitors lay dead, every man of them: but Odysseus spared Phemius the minstrel who had done no harm, and a slave who chanced to be in the hall and hid under an ox-hide.
Then Odysseus called for Euryclea, and she brought the handmaidens, and together they carried the bodies out of the palace, and cleansed the hall, and set all in order.
When this was done, Euryclea went to fetch Penelope who all the while had been sleeping peacefully in her inner chamber.
‘Awake, dear child!’ cried the old nurse. ‘Awake and see the day for which you have prayed so long! For Odysseus has come – he is here in his own house, and has slain the proud Suitors who troubled you so and devoured all his substance!’
But Penelope would not believe the good news, not even when she came into the hall and found Odysseus waiting for her.
‘I have heard it said,’ she replied when Telemachus reproached her, ‘that traitor Paris put on the form of Menelaus and so beguiled fair Helen my cousin. And well I know that the Immortals can wear what shape they will!’
Then Odysseus said to Telemachus: ‘Son, your mother speaks wisely: for we have tokens that we twain know, secret from all others.’
Then Odysseus was bathed and clad in fair garments, and Penelope felt almost sure that he was indeed her husband. But still she doubted, and as a test she said:
‘Noble sir, let us wait until tomorrow before we test one another further. But now I will command my maidens to bring forth the bed of Odysseus, whom you swear that you are – even his bridal bed and mine, which stands in the innermost chamber.’
Then Odysseus turned upon her, saying:
‘This is a bitter word that you speak! Who has been interfering with my bed? For there is no man living, however strong, who could lift it and bring it here. And I will tell you why: when I married you, and built on our chamber to the palace, there stood an olive tree as thick as a pillar; round this I built the room, and roofed it over, but the lower branches of the tree I lopped off, and used the tree, still growing, as one of the corner posts of the bed. Lady, here is a token for you! I say that the bed cannot be brought out to me, unless some man has cut away the stem of the olive tree.’
When she heard this, Penelope's last doubt was gone. She broke into weeping, and ran up to him, cast her arms about his neck and kissed him, saying:
‘Odysseus, my husband! None but you and I knew of the olive tree that is part of the bed in our secret bridal chamber. Now I know you indeed, and now I am truly happy once more!’
Then Odysseus held her in his arms; and in the happiness of that moment it seemed that all his toils and all his wanderings were but little things compared with so great and true a joy.
CHAPTER 16
THE LAST OF THE HEROES
*
... My purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down;
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles.
TENNYSON
Ulysses
16
And that is where the old tales come to an end, for Odysseus was really the last of the Heroes. There were no stories about Telemachus or his children: the old books say that he had a son called Perseptolis – but that is only because doubtless some Greek family claimed descent from him. In his lifetime the great grandsons of Heracles came back to Greece and conquered most of it – but that is where history begins and legend ends.
For the Heroic Age ended when Odysseus died: its brief, golden gleam lasted only a little while – the triple lifetime of Tiresias – and then the Immortals ceased to mingle visibly with mankind, and neither Zeus nor any of them married mortals nor had mortal children: Helen was the youngest child of Zeus.
When Homer wrote his two wonderful epic poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey, nearly three thousand years ago, he looked back less than two centuries to events which had already become legends, and wove them into immortal works which were the centre of all later poems and plays about the Immortals and the Heroes. All other tales of Troy fit into what Homer had already written.
The Tales end with Odysseus, but how did Odysseus end? The Greeks asked this question very early, and a poet made a short poem which is now lost. But what we know of it is very slight, and it was simply made to fit what Homer tells us.
For when Odysseus called up the ghost of Tiresias he received instructions as to his future course, and a veiled prophecy that, in his old age, death would come to him ‘from the sea’.
When the Suitors were dead, their friends and relations wanted to kill Odysseus, and he was only saved by Athena who came from Zeus to make peace and send Odysseus on his last voyage to seek for the palace of sacrifice of which Tiresias had told him. So Odysseus set sail for the mainland, and when he reached the shore he went into the interior on foot, carrying an oar over his shoulder.
For weeks and weeks he went on, until at last he came to the land of the Thresprotians. And one day he passed two men working in a field, and one said to the other:
‘Whatever is that stranger carrying on his shoulder?’ And the other replied:
‘It must be a winnowing fan for separating chaff from corn. I'm sure I can't think of any other use for it!’
Then Odysseus knew that he had reached a country where men had never heard of the salt sea, and thankfully he set the oar in the earth and
offered the necessary sacrifice to Poseidon whom he had offended long ago when he blinded Polyphemus the Cyclops.
On his way home Odysseus tarried for a while with Queen Callidice and helped her to overcome the Brygians who were invading her country. Then he returned home and lived happily with Penelope and a son who was born to them after his return from Troy called Poliporthes, while Telemachus he made King of Ithaca.
But Odysseus had another son of whom he knew nothing. His name was Telegonus, and his mother was Circe the enchantress.
When he was grownup, Telegonus set out to seek for his father, and he sailed in vain to many lands. At last a storm drove him to Ithaca, and he landed without knowing where he was, and his men killed some of the cattle and began to drive off the rest.
Then old Odysseus set out to chase away these thieves. But as Telegonus entered his ship he turned and flung a spear tipped with the poisonous spine of the sting-ray. And, as was decreed, this wounded Odysseus, who never recovered but fell quietly asleep.
Then the Immortals carried him away to the Elysian Fields at the World's End, there to live happily for ever with the other Heroes:
No snow is there, nor yet great storm, nor any rain; but always ocean sendeth forth the breeze of the shrill West to blow cool – where life is easiest for men.
ENVOI
Pass with a ringing laugh, a friendly word,
Thinking of Rhintho resting here alone:
The Muses' small
est, least-remembered bird
Plucked from their hill this garland of his own.
From the Greek of Nossis
AUTHOR'S NOTE
The Tale of Troy forms a natural sequel to Tales of the Greek Heroes, though the story is complete in itself. It is, indeed, the last great adventure of the Heroic Age, the culmination of the myths and legends which went before it, and the prelude to the real history of Greece – just as the Iliad and the Odyssey, the first and greatest surviving poems of ancient Greece, were the starting point for all later Greek literature.
The parts which make up the Tale of Troy have been told often before in one form or another, but usually as simple versions of the Iliad and the Odyssey, as by Charles Lamb in The Adventures of Ulysses or A. J. Church in The Children's Iliad. Books of stories from Greek myth and legend besides the tales from Homer occasionally include an incident or two from the rest of the Trojan cycle and the story of the Wooden Horse makes a part of any re-telling of Virgil's Aeneid. But the whole tale has seldom been re-told: perhaps the most memorable version is that by Andrew Lang included fifty years ago in his Tales of Troy and Greece, though the account of the Trojan War is there told as the adventures of Odysseus, dwelling on his exploits and passing over much that is part of the story if taken as a whole.
Lang based his story on the obvious sources, the Iliad, the Odyssey and the Posthomerica of Quintus Smyrnaeus: but he admitted privately in a letter to his brother that he had not scrupled to invent where there were gaps in his originals.
The three epics have, naturally, been my main sources likewise, but I have refrained firmly from taking any liberties whatsoever with my authorities; and it chanced that I had not read Lang's version – and refrained from doing so until my own was written. As my story treats of the whole Adventure of Troy, I have cast my net far wider than Lang ever dreamed of doing – ranging from fragments and summaries of the lost Epic Cycle to the minor narrative poems of Colluthus and Tryphiodorus, from plays like the Aias or Philoctetes of Sophocles, the Oresteia of Aeschylus and a good ten by Euripides, to the death of Castor and Polydeuces as described by Theocritus or the tragedy of Corythus as sketched by Parthenius. But any full list of my authorities would be tedious and out of place. I want to say, however, that I have played fair with them: I hope that I have never falsified, and as far as I know I have not added a single incident, nor altered any legend, though I have sometimes omitted or toned down where desirable.
To this statement I must add a confession of my one and only conscious variation: I have suggested (without authority) that Helen became separated from Menelaus on the return from Troy, and so was able to be in Egypt before him. This allows the introduction of the adventures described by Euripides in his Helena, without having recourse to the ‘eidolon’ or double-Helen story invented by Stesichorus.
Apart from a reference to the medieval story of Troilus, I have otherwise full Classical authority for everything in this book. Indeed I have ancient Greek authority for all but the wanderings of Aeneas which, with a few minor details about the fall of Troy, are based on the Aeneid. I have sternly repressed the temptation to use that beautiful and moving romance The World's Desire, produced in 1890 by Rider Haggard and Andrew Lang as a sequel to the Odyssey, in place of the unsatisfactory summaries by Proclus and Apollodorus of the last adventures and death of Odysseus which are all that have come down to us. But I recommend that book to my readers.
At this date it is hardly necessary to make any remark about the use of the correct Greek names for the Gods and Heroes of Ancient Greece; I have added a list of the Greek and Roman equivalents. In deference to the general literary tradition I have used the Latinized spellings such as Phoebus Apollo for Phoibos Apollon and Circe for Kirke. I have used the Latin form, Ajax, for the son of Telamon merely to distinguish him from Aias the son of Oileus, and it has seemed better to retain such universally recognized variations as Priam, Hecuba and Helen for Priamos, Hekabe and Helena. But against Ulysses I have set my face firmly: he is as different from Odysseus as Jove and Juno are from Zeus and Hera. The Roman names are apt to suggest the artificial epic and the literary conventions of Virgil, Ovid and their tradition; the true Greek names fling wide the magic casements on the instant. Led by them we step directly back into the Heroic Age, into the bright, misty morning of legend and literature,
And hear, like ocean on a western beach,
The surge and thunder of the Odyssey.
ROGER LANCELYN GREEN
THE GODS AND GODDESSES OF ANCIENT GREECE
Greek
Latin
CRONOS SATURN
RHEA CYBELE
HELIOS SOL (The Sun)
Eos Aurora (The Dawn)
SELENE LUNA (The Moon)
Zeus Jupiter or Jove
Poseidon Neptune
HADES Pluto or Dis
DEMETER Ceres
HESTIA Vesta
HERA Juno
PERSEPHONE Proserpine
ARES MARS
Dionysus BACCHUS
Hermes Mercury
HEPHAESTUS VULCAN
ATHENA Minerva
ARTEMIS Diana
Aphrodite VENUS
ASCLEPIUS Aesculapius
HERACLES HERCULES or ALCIDES
APOLLO, PAN and HECATE are the same in both.
* See Tales of the Greek Heroes by Roger Lancelyn Green (Puffin Books, 036683 0).