1G6 HISTORY OF GREECE. aggregate, the Odyssey is more simple and easily understood, and, therefore, ought to come first in the order of analysis. Now, looking at the Odyssey by itself, the proofs of an unity of design seem unequivocal and everywhere to be found. A premeditated structure, and a concentration of interest upon one prime hero, under well-defined circumstances, may be traced from the first book to the twenty-third. Odysseus is always either directly or indirectly kept before the reader, as a warrior return- ing from the fulness of glory at Troy, exposed to manifold and protracted calamities during his return home, on which his whole soul is so bent that he refuses even the immortality offered by Calypso ; a victim, moreover, even after his return, to mingled injury and insult from the suitors, who have long been plundering his property, and dishonoring his house ; but at length obtaining, by valor and cunning united, a signal revenge, which restores him to all that he had lost. All the persons and all the events in the poem are subsidiary to this main plot : and the divine agency, necessary to satisfy the feeling of the Homeric man, is put forth by Poseidon and Athene, in both cases from dispositions directly bearing upon Odysseus. To appreciate the unity of the Odyssey, we have only to read the objections taken against that of the Iliad, especially in regard to the long withdrawal of Achilles, not only from the scene, but from the memory, together with the independent prominence of Ajax, Diomedes, and other heroes. How far we are entitled from hence to infer the want of premed- itated unity in the Iliad, will be presently considered; but it is certain that the constitution of the Odyssey, in this respect, everywhere demonstrates the presence of such unity. Whatever may be the interest attached to Penelope, Telemachus, or Eumaeus, we never disconnect them from their association with Odysseus. The present is not the place for collecting the many marks of artistical structure dispersed throughout this poem ; but it may be worth while to remark, that the final catastrophe realized in the twenty-second book, the slaughter of the suitors in the very house which they were profaning, is distinctly and promi- nently marked out in the first and second books, promised by Teiresias in the eleventh, by Athene in the thirteenth, and by Helen in the fifteenth, and gradually matured by a series of
