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In the Odyssey the gods no longer live in houses and sleep in four- post bedsteads, but the conception of their abode, like that of their existence altogether, is far more spiritual. Nobody knows exactly where they live, but they say it is in Olympus, where there is neither rain nor hail nor snow, and the wind never beats roughly; but it abides in everlasting sunshine, and in great peacefulness of light wherein the blessed gods are illumined for ever and ever. It is hardly possible to conceive anything more different from the Olympus of the Iliad.

Another very material point of difference between the Iliad and the Odyssey lies in the fact that the Homer of the Iliad always knows what he is talking about, while the supposed Homer of the Odyssey often makes mistakes that betray an almost incredible ignorance of detail. Thus the giant Polyphemus drives in his ewes home from their pasture, and milks them. The lambs of course have not been running with them; they have been left in the yards, so they have had nothing to eat. When he has milked the ewes, the giant lets each one of them have her lamb–to get, I suppose, what strippings it can, and beyond this what milk the ewe may yield during the night. In the morning, however, Polyphemus milks the ewes again. Hence it is plain either that he expected his lambs to thrive on one pull per diem at a milked ewe, and to be kind enough not to suck their mothers, though left with them all night through, or else that the writer of the Odyssey had very hazy notions about the relations between lambs and ewes, and of the ordinary methods of procedure on an upland dairy-farm.

In nautical matters the same inexperience is betrayed. The writer knows all about the corn and wine that must be put on board; the store-room in which these are kept and the getting of them are described inimitably, but there the knowledge ends; the other things put on board are “the things that are generally taken on board ships.” So on a voyage we are told that the sailors do whatever is wanted doing, but we have no details. There is a shipwreck, which does duty more than once without the alteration of a word. I have seen such a shipwreck at Drury Lane. Anyone, moreover, who reads any authentic account of actual adventures will perceive at once that those of the Odyssey are the creation of one who has had no history. Ulysses has to make a raft; he makes it about as broad as they generally make a good big ship, but we do not seem to have been at the pains to measure a good big ship.

I will add no more however on this head. The leading characteristics of the Iliad, as we saw, were love, war, and plunder. The leading idea of the Odyssey is the infatuation of man, and the key-note is struck in the opening paragraph, where we are told how the sailors of Ulysses must needs, in spite of every warning, kill and eat the cattle of the sun-god, and perished accordingly.

A few lines lower down the same note is struck with even greater emphasis. The gods have met in council, and Jove happens at the moment to be thinking of AEgisthus, who had met his death at the hand of Agamemnon’s son Orestes, in spite of the solemn warning that Jove had sent him through the mouth of Mercury. It does not seem necessary for Jove to turn his attention to Clytemnestra, the partner of AEgisthus’s guilt. Of this lady we are presently told that she was naturally of an excellent disposition, and would never have gone wrong but for the loss of the protector in whose charge Agamemnon had left her. When she was left alone without an adviser– well, if a base designing man took to flattering and misleading her–what else could be expected? The infatuation of man, with its corollary, the superior excellence of woman, is the leading theme; next to this come art, religion, and, I am almost ashamed to add, money. There is no love-business in the Odyssey except the return of a bald elderly married man to his elderly wife and grown-up son after an absence of twenty years, and furious at having been robbed of so much money in the meantime. But this can hardly be called love-business; it is at the utmost domesticity. There is a charming young princess, Nausicaa, but though she affects a passing tenderness for the elderly hero of her creation as soon as Minerva has curled his bald old hair for him and tittivated him up all over, she makes it abundantly plain that she will not look at a single one of her actual flesh and blood admirers. There is a leading young gentleman, Telemachus, who is nothing if he is not [Greek], or canny, well-principled, and discreet; he has an amiable and most sensible young male friend who says that he does not like crying at meal times–he will cry in the forenoon on an empty stomach as much as anyone pleases, but he cannot attend properly to his dinner and cry at the same time. Well, there is no lady provided either for this nice young man or for Telemachus. They are left high and dry as bachelors. Two goddesses indeed, Circe and Calypso, do one after the other take possession of Ulysses, but the way in which he accepts a situation which after all was none of his seeking, and which it is plain he does not care two straws about, is, I believe, dictated solely by a desire to exhibit the easy infidelity of Ulysses himself in contrast with the unswerving constancy and fidelity of his wife Penelope. Throughout the Odyssey the men do not really care for women, nor the women for men; they have to pretend to do so now and again, but it is a got-up thing, and the general attitude of the sexes towards one another is very much that of Helen, who says that her husband Menelaus is really not deficient in person or understanding: or again of Penelope herself, who, on being asked by Ulysses on his return what she thought of him, said that she did not think very much of him nor very little of him; in fact, she did not think much about him one way or the other. True, later on she relents and becomes more effusive; in fact, when she and Ulysses sat up talking in bed and Ulysses told her the story of his adventures, she never went to sleep once. Ulysses never had to nudge her with his elbow and say, “Come, wake up, Penelope, you are not listening”; but, in spite of the devotion exhibited here, the love-business in the Odyssey is artificial and described by one who had never felt it, whereas in the Iliad it is spontaneous and obviously genuine, as by one who knows all about it perfectly well. The love-business in fact of the Odyssey is turned on as we turn on the gas–when we cannot get on without it, but not otherwise.