We might also urge that "to send a spear through the back of a stag" is not, as Mr. Monro thought, "an improbable feat," and that a man wounded to death as Leiocritus was wounded, would not, as Mr. Monro argued, fall backwards. He supposes that the poet of the _Odyssey_ borrowed the forward fall from a passage in the _Iliad_, where the fall is in keeping. But, to make good our proof, it might be necessary to spear a human being in the same way as Leiocritus was speared. [Footnote: Monro, odyssey, vol. ii. pp. 239, 230.]
The repetitions of the Epic, at all events, are not the result of the weakness of a poet who had to steal his expressions like a schoolboy. They have some other cause than the indolence or inefficiency of a _cento_--making undergraduate. Indeed, a poet who used the many terms in the _Odyssey_ which do not occur in the _Iliad_ was not constrained to borrow from any predecessor.
It is needless to dwell on the Odyssean novelties in vocabulary, which were naturally employed by a poet who had to sing of peace, not of war, and whose epic, as Aristotle says, is "ethical," not military. The poet's rich vocabulary is appropriate to his novel subject, that is all.
Coming to Religion (I) we find Mr. Leaf assigning to his original _Achilleis_--"the kernel"--the very same religious ideas as Mr. Monro takes to be marks of "lateness" and of advance when he finds them in the Odyssey!
In the original oldest part of the _Iliad_, says Mr. Leaf, "the gods show themselves just so much as to let us know what are the powers which control mankind from heaven.... Their interference is such as becomes the rulers of the world, not partisans in the battle." [Footnote: Leaf, _Iliad_, vol. ii. pp. xii., xiii.] It is the later poets of the _Iliad_, in Mr. Leaf's view, who introduce the meddlesome, undignified, and extremely unsportsmanlike gods. The original early poet of the _Iliad_ had the nobler religious conceptions.
In that case--the _Odyssey_ being later than the original kernel of the Iliad--the _Odyssey_ ought to give us gods as undignified and unworthy as those exhibited by the later continuators of the _Iliad_.
But the reverse is the case. The gods behave fairly well in Book XXIV. of the _Iliad_, which, we are to believe, is the latest, or nearly the latest, portion. They are all wroth with the abominable behaviour of Achilles to dead Hector (XXIV. 134). They console and protect Priam. As for the _Odyssey_, Mr. Monro finds that in this late Epic the gods are just what Mr. Leaf proclaims them to have been in his old original kernel. "There is now an Olympian concert that carries on something like a moral government of the world. It is very different in the _Iliad_...." [Footnote: Monro, _Odyssey_, ii. 335.]