Page:Homer. The Odyssey (IA homerodyssey00collrich).pdf/76

critics have been very confident in doing both.^[1] The effect of the seductive food on the companions of Ulysses is thus described:—

 ⁠"And whose tasted of their flowery meat
 Cared not with tidings to return, but clave
 Fast to that tribe, for ever fain to eat,
Reckless of home-return, the tender Lotus sweet."

Those who ate of it had to be dragged back by main force to their galleys, and bound fast with thongs, so loath were they to leave that shore of peaceful rest and forgetfulness. In the words of our own poet, who has founded one of the most imaginative of his poems on this incident of Ulysses' voyage, so briefly told by Homer—

"Most weary seemed the sea, weary the oar,
Weary the wandering fields of barren foam.
Then some one said—'We will return no more:'
And all at once they sang—'Our island-home
Is far beyond the wave; we will no longer roam.'"^[2]

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1. The Greek historian Herodotus places a tribe of lotus eaters, "who live by eating nothing but the fruit of the lotus," on the coast of Africa, somewhere near Tripoli. Pliny and other ancient writers on natural history speak of this fruit as in shape like an olive, with a flavour like that of figs or dates, not only pleasant to eat fresh, but which, when dry, was made into a kind of meal. The English travellers Shaw and Park found (in the close neighbourhood of Herodotus' lotus-eaters) what they thought to be the true lotus—a shrub bearing "small farinaceous berries, of a yellow colour and delicious taste." Park says—"An army may very well have been fed with the bread I have tasted made of the meal of the fruit, as is said by Pliny to have been done in Libya." There is also a water-plant in Egypt mentioned by Herodotus under the name of lotus—probably Nymphæa lotus of Linnæus.
2. Tennyson, "The Lotus-Eaters."