senses in the nether-world, told his ship-borne client that his end, after many opulent years, should come gently from the sea. Presumably, when he still governed Ithaca: but this point being left in oracular obscurity, there remained a loophole of escape from that narrow plot of ground' to the open sea of song and fable.

In those days it was easily reached. The survey of our planet had not been carried far. Geographers, such of them as made maps at all, should have very freely filled the blanks in them with elephants for want of towns.' The everyday habitable world was closely fenced round with the fearsome abodes of superhuman or semi-human beings, of formidable powers and proclivities. Elf-land might loom up above the waters after a couple of days' sail in any direction. Every enterprising mariner was traditionally prepared to touch at a magic isle, and find himself sublimated into a myth. A hero in retreat might then quite naturally and honourably disappear when his functions were fulfilled. There was little chance of his being pursued and brought back. Now-a-days, after the lapse of three thousand years, things are considerably different. The Cimmerians themselves are within easy reach of communication by wire or ether. The Unknown has no longer a foothold, except at its frozen poles, on our explored and improved globe. Its roundness has been surely ascertained, and a circular voyage has ceased to be a startling novelty. The Warings of our time, accordingly, do not usually vanish into trackless space. They are apt to re-emerge at the antipodes, where, their advent having been proclaimed, instead of by 'hordes 'grown European-hearted,' by a concourse of voters at the polling-booths, they enter legislative assemblies, perhaps rise to be prime ministers, and obtain their apotheosis in the Order of Saints Michael and George.

'Oh, never star

Was lost here, but it rose afar!'

Speaking poetically, that is to say, not by the card.' Never is a long time. Ulysses, for instance, crossed the Bar in earnest. The persuasion that Ithaca did not possess his grave seems gradually and inevitably to have laid hold of the popular consciousness. Thus Strabo knew, through some obscure channel of information, of an Iberian city named after him, in which was a temple to Athene containing Odyssean relics. Their authenticity was not questioned, although their nature was not described. Possibly

they included the gifts of Alcinous, or the brooch which Penelope carefully packed with her lord's state-mantle as part of his outfit for the siege of Troy. Later geographers

6

notably Solinus and Martianus Capella - confounded • Odusseia' in the Sierra Nevada* with the Lusitanian Olysippo,' † and so started the tradition, perpetuated by Camoens, of Lisbon's eponymous connexion with the wanderer. In actual fact, the Atlantic city of the Seven Hills was a Phoenician settlement, entitled Alis ubbo (delicious 'bay '), easily contracted into 'Lisboa.' But this signified little to mediæval etymologists, capable of the tour de force of transmuting Guelfs and Ghibellines into elves and goblins. The blundering derivation of Lisbon' from 'Ulysses' flattered local vanity, and licensed a provincial metropolis to claim a share in the boasted rise of Rome through the destruction of Ilium.

It prescribed, too, the ultimate form taken by the legend of Ulysses. In his new character of a Lusitanian colonist, he broke forth from the inland sea, and confronted the illimitable western waste of heaving billows. The upshot of the adventure Dante undertook to determine. On climbing the summit of one of the overhanging iron-grey rockcornices in the Malebolge, he saw, in the trench beneath, flames that wandered and glimmered like fire-flies at night in a ripening cornfield. Each, Virgil explained, concealed and tormented a fraudulent counsellor; but the Florentine's eager eyes were promptly attracted by one showing the peculiarity of being divided at the summit, for it reminded him of the pyre of Eteocles and Polynices as described by Statius. Not the Theban brothers, however, but sacrilegious Greek confederates, were thus penally swathed. United in past crime, Ulysses and Diomed were for ever united in punishment. They suffered together for the widowing of Deidamia, whose goddess-born spouse they inveigled away from Scyros; for the theft of the Palladium; for the ambush in the Wooden Horse. This, we must remember, was on the showing of a Trojan partisan. Medieval sympathies in the prehistoric Hellespontine struggle were irresistibly swayed by the Æneid. The pious son of Anchises was the native god' of Latium, the man of destiny, from the seed

* Situated near the modern seaport town Adra, anciently Abdera. Roscher, 'Lexikon der griechischen Mythologie,' 40ste Lieferung, art. Odysseus.'

Longman's Gazetteer.

of whose tribulations sprang the fateful power of Rome. Ulysses represented the adverse principle, an inventor of heinous devices for destruction, which the intrepidity of ' impious Tydides' aided him to execute. From one point of view he might be regarded as the quintessence of guile, the dog-fox' of the Shakespearian Thersites; and even to Dante, who discerned, as few could, the far horizons of his character, he was still dirus Ulysses,' the subverter of Ilium, the author of the 'nefandus dolor' of Eneas, of Priam's ghastly end, and of his dynasty's extinction. No wonder, then, that the grim singer of the Malebolge was consumed with keen longing to learn the actual mode of exit from life's stage of so strange and memorable an actor upon it. He addressed, accordingly, these words of passionate entreaty to the Mantuan Shade at his side :

'O master! Think my prayer a thousandfold
In repetition urged, that thou vouchsafe
till here the horned flame arrive.
See how toward it with desire I bend.'*

То

pause

Whereupon, Virgil, fitting his phrases to soothe remembered susceptibilities, adjured the ancient flame' to pause in its progress, and communicate its long-kept secret. And his speech took effect. The more aspiring of the twinsummits began to waver, and lick and murmur, as if agitated by a gusty wind; then at last it became articulate as follows:

'Nor fondness for my son, nor reverence

Of my old father, nor return of love,

That should have crown'd Penelope with joy,

Could overcome in me the zeal I had

To explore the world, and search the ways of life,
Man's evil and his virtue. Forth I sail'd

Into the deep illimitable main,

With but one bark, and the small faithful band,

That yet cleaved to me. As Iberia far,

Far as Marocco, either shore I saw,

And the Sardinian and each isle beside,

Which round that ocean bathes. Tardy with age
Were I and my companions, when we came
To the strait pass, where Hercules ordain'd
The boundaries not to be o'erstepp'd by man.
The walls of Seville to my right I left,
On the other hand already Ceuta past.

* Inferno, xxvi. 65-69. Cary's translation.

"O brothers," I began, "who to the west
Through perils without number now have reach'd;
To this the short remaining watch, that yet
Our senses have to wake, refuse not proof
Of the unpeopled world, following the track
Of Phoebus. Call to mind from whence ye sprang ;
Ye were not formed to live the life of brutes,
But virtue to pursue and knowledge high."
With these few words I sharpen'd for the voyage
The mind of my associates, that I then
Could scarcely have withheld them. To the dawn
Our poop we turned, and for the witless flight
Made our oars wings, still gaining on the left.
Each star of the other pole night now beheld.
And ours so low, that from the ocean-floor
It rose not. Five times re-illumed, as oft
Vanish'd the light from underneath the moon,
Since the deep way we enter'd, when from far
Appear'd a mountain dim, loftiest methought
Of all I e'er beheld. Joy seized us straight;
But soon to mourning changed. From the new land
A whirlwind sprung, and at her foremost side
Did strike the vessel. Thrice it whirl'd her round
With all the waves; the fourth time lifted up
The poop, and sank the prow; so fate decreed;
And over us the booming billow closed.'

The ocean voyage thus abruptly terminated extended over about one-quarter of the earth's circumference.* It took a south-westerly direction, for Dante located the Purgatorial Mount at the antipodes of Jerusalem: and it was hence that the typhoon proceeded which swept from the sea mortals bold enough to approach a shore decreed to be accessible only to the dead. The lines describing the shipwreck are imitated from Virgil's account of the submergence off Lilybæum of the Lycian galley in the flotilla of Æneas. 'Ast illam ter fluctus ibidem

Torquet agens circum, et rapidus vorat æquore vortex.' Such loans were meant for compliments; they were by no means regarded as thefts.

Fundamentally, however, the story of Ulysses, as told by Dante, appears to have been an original invention. There is no trace of it in Homer: nor, even if there were, would it have been of any avail to an Italian ignorant of Greek. For as yet no Latin translation of the Epics had been executed.

Toynbee, 'Dante Dictionary,' art. 'Ulisse.'

Homeric echoes, it is true, haunt the ear in the terza rima of the Divine Comedy; but they are caught at second hand from the hexameters of Virgil or Statius. Numerous examples might be cited; two must suffice. One of the most mellifluous episodes in the 'Purgatorio' recounts the meeting of Dante with the musician Casella, just set ashore from an angel-piloted skiff. Disembodied, he could still sing in a manner to ravish all within ear-shot; but a thrice-renewed attempt to embrace him left the living poet's arms empty, and his countenance crestfallen :

'Perchè l'ombra sorrise e si ritrasse.'

The similar experience of Ulysses, when he meets his mother Anticleia in Hades, inevitably comes to mind. Having drunk of the sacrificial blood, she regains consciousness and recognises him. They have a colloquy; he strives to clasp her to his breast, with futile result:

'Thrice I essayed with eager hands outspread,
Thrice like a shadow or a dream she fled,
And my palms closed on unsubstantial air.'*

The imitation is palpable; yet it is not immediate. The Æneid served as an intermediary. Virgil copied Homer, and was copied by Dante. The son of Anchises, too, ascertained the ghostly consistence of his deceased parent by just the same triplicate experiment tried by Ulysses with Anticleia, and by the Florentine with Casella. The Florentine, moreover, was entirely unconscious that he was repeating what had originally been said in Greek.

Again, the Virgilian

'Infandum, regina, jubes renovare dolorem,'

was an Odyssean reminiscence, since Ulysses expressed to Alcinous the precise sentiment long afterwards uttered by Eneas in commencing his narrative to Dido. Borrowed finally by Dante, it was made to glow red-hot in the fire of his passion. We feel that the reluctance of Ulysses and Eneas to communicate their astonishing experiences was scarcely more than conventional; either would doubtless have been happy to print and circulate them on favourable terms. But it is not so with Ugolino. The tense horror of the scene is almost unbearable when he pauses in his loath