But in the Odyssey it is more advanced and developed. In the matter of the intrigue of Mars with Venus, he acts as informer to the husband, and subsequently assumes the part of spy[499]. Although thus able, however, to discern what is passing even in the secret chambers of Olympus, when set on guard for the purpose, he cannot see so far as to Thrinacia, any more than he can penetrate the cloud which envelopes Jupiter and Juno[500].
It is from the Nymphs, Phaethusa and Lampetie, whom he had set to watch, that he receives the intelligence of the slaughter of his oxen by the companions of Ulysses in their hunger. He immediately addresses Jupiter and the assembled gods, in a passage which proves that Homer meant to represent him as having a place in Olympus, for only if there could he speak to them without undertaking a journey for the purpose[501]. He makes his appeal to them for retribution; and he backs his application with the threat that, unless it is granted, he will go down to the Shades, and shine there. A menace which to our ears may sound ludicrous enough; but it is perhaps well conceived in the case of a chrysalis deity, not yet really worshipped by the Greeks: and there is a certain propriety in it, when we recollect that on the way to the descent into the Shades lay his place of rest. He is the father of the Nymphs, who watch on his behalf in Thrinacia; he is also the father of Circe and Æetes, and his couch is at Ææa[502].
During the time when the slaughter of the oxen is effected, Ulysses is asleep: and it seems just possible that Homer may by this circumstance have meant to signify that it was night when the catastrophe occurred, which would save the dignity of this deity in respect to vision.
The Olympian rank of the Sun is clear; but there seem to be ascriptions made to him, which can only be reconciled by the supposition, in itself far from improbable, that he was separately known of, as an object of worship, through two different sets of traditions; one of them referable to Pelasgian sources, and entailing Trojan sympathies, the other of an Hellenic, or very probably a Phœnician, cast, and tending to rank him with the Hellenes. For in the Iliad his unwillingness to set, when his setting was to bring the glories of the Trojans to an end, seems very strongly to imply that he had a Pelasgian origin. In the Odyssey, his siding with Vulcan against Mars and Venus would show, so far as it goes, a Hellenizing turn; but what is more important is this, that, as the father of Circe and Æetes, of whom the latter bears the exclusively Phœnician epithet ὀλοόφρων, and the former has her abode close by his ἀντολαὶ, or point of rising, he is at once thrown into the Phœnician or the Persian connection. As the Sun-worship was so general in the East, it seems quite possible that it might come into Greece by more channels than one: and as the process of personification might in one set of traditions be more, and in another less complete, we may here find a possible clue to Homer’s reason for treating it differently in the two poems. Particularly as the poem where he is least personal, the Iliad, is also that where he is most Pelasgian: for we have found reason to ascribe to the Pelasgians less of lively and creative power in the realms of the imagination, than to the Hellenes, and to such races as had stronger affinities with them.