Forerunners of Dante; An Account of Some of the More Important Visions of the Unseen World, from the Earliest Times (Paperback)

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 II. GREEK AND ROMAN LITERATURE OF THE CLASSICAL PERIOD. Odysseus. The Eleventh Book of the Odyssey bears unmistakable signs?only to speak of internal evidence ?of being earlier than the vision just recorded. The most obvious of these is that there are no divisions in the Homeric Hades: good, bad, and indifferent alike are herded together in the bowels of the earth.1 The heaven and hell of the demotic text are necessarily a later development. But, on the other hand, how infinitely more human is the Odyssey. Here, for the first time, does a living man hold converse with his dead: he weeps with his mother, and appeals to his sulky rival to forget his fancied wrong. The Homeric poem is essentially and in the first place human, and herein lies a large part of its greatness. What is to be said of the pageantry of the book ? Of the gorgeous procession of heroes and heroines who drink the blood in turn, and acquaint Odysseus with their deeds, or ask him of their living friends ? Whatof the arrangement and sequence of the drama that is enacted on the further shore of Okeanos ? What must one think of the conception of the whole, the growth of centuries, perhaps, but already so perfect, or of the imagination which has already so vividly realised the unseen ? 1 itirb Kfbdeai yalris. To weld the work as a link in the chain we are attempting to forge, a short examination of Odysseus' story will be necessary. When Circe sends off the traveller of many devices from her island, she bids him seek the spirit of Teiresias in Hades and hear from him of his home-coming. " To him," she says,1 " Persephone hath given judgment, even in his death, that he alone should have understanding; but the other souls sweep shadow- like around !" And so, indeed, does Odysseus find them. Thes...