The Iliad and the Odyssey (Classics of World Literature) (70 page)

His ransom’d person. Then his worth was all your city’s joy,

Now do it honour.’ Out all rush’d, woman nor man in Troy

Was left: a most unmeasur’d cry took up their voices. Close

To Scaea’s ports they met the corse, and to it headlong goes

The reverend mother, the dear wife, upon it strow their hair,

And he entranced. Round about the people broke the air

In lamentations, and all day had stay’d the people there,

If Priam had not cried: ‘Give way, give me but leave to bear

The body home, and mourn your fills.’ Then cleft the press, and gave

Way to the chariot. To the court herald Idaeus drave,

Where on a rich bed they bestow’d the honour’d person, round

Girt it with singers that the woe with skilful voices crown’d.

A woeful elegy they sung, wept singing, and the dames

Sigh’d as they sung. Andromache the downright prose exclaims

Began to all; she on the neck of slaughter’d Hector fell,

And cried out: ‘O my husband! Thou in youth bad’st youth farewell,

Left’st me a widow, thy sole son an infant. Ourselves curs’d

In our birth, made him right our child, for all my care that nurs’d

His infancy will never give life to his youth; ere that

Troy from her top will be destroy’d. Thou guardian of our state,

Thou ev’n of all her strength the strength, thou that in care wert past

Her careful mothers of their babes, being gone, how can she last?

Soon will the swoln fleet fill her womb with all their servitude,

Myself with them, and thou with me (dear son) in labours rude

Shalt be employ’d, sternly survey’d by cruel conquerors,

Or, rage not suffering life so long, some one whose hate abhors

Thy presence (putting him in mind of his sire slain by thine,

His brother, son, or friend) shall work thy ruin before mine,

Toss’d from some tow’r, for many Greeks have eat earth from the hand

Of thy strong father: in sad fight his spirit was too much mann’d,

And therefore mourn his people – we, thy parents (my dear lord)

For that thou mak’st endure a woe, black and to be abhorr’d.

Of all yet thou hast left me worst, not dying in thy bed,

And reaching me thy last-rais’d hand, in nothing counselled,

Nothing commanded by that pow’r thou hadst of me, to do

Some deed for thy sake: O for these will never end my woe,

Never my tears cease.’ Thus wept she, and all the ladies clos’d

Her passion with a general shriek. Then Hecuba dispos’d

Her thoughts in like words: ‘O my son, of all mine much most dear;

Dear while thou liv’st too even to gods: and after death they were

Careful to save thee. Being best, thou most wert envied;

My other sons Achilles sold; but thee he left not, dead.

Imber and Samos, the false ports of Lemnos, entertain’d

Their persons; thine, no port but death, nor there in rest remain’d

Thy violated corse, the tomb of his great friend was spher’d

With thy dragg’d person; yet from death he was not therefore rear’d.

But (all his rage us’d) so the gods have tender’d thy dead state;

Thou liest as living, sweet and fresh as he that felt the fate

Of Phoebus’ holy shafts.’ These words the queen us’d for her moan,

And next her, Helen held that state of speech and passion.

‘O Hector, all my brothers more were not so lov’d of me

As thy most virtues. Not my lord I held so dear as thee,

That brought me hither; before which, I would I had been brought

To ruin, for what breeds that wish (which is the mischief wrought

By my access) yet never found one harsh taunt, one word’s ill

From thy sweet carriage. Twenty years do now their circles fill

Since my arrival, all which time thou didst not only bear

Thyself without check, but all else, that my lord’s brothers were,

Their sisters’ lords, sisters themselves, the queen my mother-in-law

(The king being never but most mild), when thy man’s spirit saw

Sour and reproachful, it would still reprove their bitterness

With sweet words and thy gentle soul. And therefore thy decease

I truly mourn for, and myself curse as the wretched cause,

All broad Troy yielding me not one that any human laws

Of pity or forgiveness mov’d t’ entreat me humanly,

But only thee; all else abhorr’d me for my destiny.’

These words made ev’n the commons mourn, to whom the king said: ‘Friends,

Now fetch wood for our funeral fire, nor fear the foe intends

Ambush, or any violence; Achilles gave his word

At my dismission, that twelve days he would keep sheath’d his sword,

And all men’s else. Thus oxen, mules, in chariots straight they put,

Went forth, and an unmeasur’d pile of sylvan matter cut,

Nine days employ’d in carriage, but when the tenth morn shin’d

On wretched mortals, then they brought the fit-to-be-divin’d

Forth to be burn’d: Troy swum in tears. Upon the pile’s most height

They laid the person, and gave fire: all day it burn’d, all night;

But when th’ eleventh morn let on earth her rosy fingers shine,

The people flock’d about the pile, and first with blackish wine

Quench’d all the flames. His brothers then and friends the snowy bones

Gather’d into an urn of gold, still pouring on their moans.

Then wrapt they in soft purple veils the rich urn; digg’d a pit,

Grav’d it; ramm’d up the grave with stones; and quickly built to it

A sepulchre. But while that work and all the funeral rites

Were in performance, guards were held at all parts, days and nights,

For fear of false surprise before they had impos’d the crown

To these solemnities. The tomb advanc’d once, all the town

In Jove-nurs’d Priam’s court partook a passing sumptuous feast;

And so horse-taming Hector’s rites gave up his soul to rest.

Thus far the Ilian ruins I have laid

Open to English eyes. In which (repaid

With thine own value) go, unvalued book,

Live, and be lov’d. If any envious look

Hurt thy clear fame, learn that no state more high

Attends on virtue than pin’d envy’s eye.

Would thou wert worth it that the best doth wound

Which this age feeds, and which the last shall bound.

Thus, with labour enough (though with more comfort in the merits of my divine author), I have brought my translation of his
Iliads
to an end. If, either therein, or in the harsh utterance or matter of my Comment before, I have, for haste, scattered with my burthen (less than fifteen weeks being the whole time that the last twelve books translation stood me in), I desire my present will and (I doubt not) ability (if God give life) to reform and perfect all hereafter, may be ingenuously accepted for the absolute work – the rather, considering the most learned, with all their helps and time, have been so often, and unanswerably, miserably taken halting. In the mean time, that most assistful and unspeakable spirit, by whose thrice sacred conduct and inspiration I have finished this labour, diffuse the fruitful horn of his blessings through these goodness-thirsting watchings: without which, utterly dry and bloodless is whatsoever mortality soweth.

But where our most diligent Spondanus ends his work with a prayer to be taken out of these Maeanders and Euripian rivers (as he terms them) of ethnic and profane writers (being quite contrary to himself at the beginning), I thrice humbly beseech the most dear and divine mercy (ever most incomparably preferring the great light of his truth in his direct and infallible Scriptures) I may ever be enabled, by resting wondering in his right comfortable shadows in these, to magnify the clearness of his almighty appearance in the other.

And with this salutation of Poesy given by our Spondanus in his Preface to these
Iliads
– (“All hail saint-sacred Poesy, that, under so much gall of fiction, such abundance of honey doctrine, hast hidden, not revealing them to the unworthy worldly, wouldst thou but so much make me that amongst thy novices I might be numbered, no time should ever come near my life that could make me forsake thee”) I will conclude with this my daily and nightly prayer, learned of the most learned Simplicius: –

Supplico tibi, Domine, Pater, et dux rationis nostrae, ut nostrae nobilitatis recordemur qua tu nos ornasti; et ut tu nobis praesto sis ut iis qui per sese moventur; ut et a corporis contagio brutorumque affectuum repurgemur, eosque superemus et regamus, et, sicut decet, pro instrumentis iis utamur. Deinde ut nobis adjumento sis, ad accuratam rationis nostrae correctionem, et conjunctionem cum iis qui vere sunt per lucem veritatis. Et tertium, Salvatori supplex oro, ut ab oculis animorum nostrorum caliginem prorsus abstergas, ut (quod apud Homerum est) norimus bene qui Deus, aut mortalis, habendus. Amen.

FINIS

The Odyssey

The Epistle Dedicatory

To the most worthily honoured, my singular good Lord, Robert,Earl of Somerset, Lord Chamberlain, etc.

I have adventured, right noble Earl, out of my utmost and ever-vowed service to your virtues, to entitle their merits to the patronage of Homer’s English life, whose wished natural life the great Macedon would have protected as the spirit of his empire,

That he to his unmeasur’d mighty acts

Might add a fame as vast; and their extracts,

In fires as bright and endless as the stars,

His breast might breathe and thunder out his wars.

But that great monarch’s love of fame and praise

Receives an envious cloud in our foul days;

For since our great ones cease themselves to do

Deeds worth their praise, they hold it folly too

To feed their praise in others. But what can,

Of all the gifts that are, be given to man

More precious than Eternity and Glory,

Singing their praises in unsilenced story?

Which no black day, no nation, nor no age,

No change of time or fortune, force nor rage,

Shall ever rase ? All which the monarch knew,

Where
Homer l
ived entitled, would ensue:

Cujus de gurgite vivo

Combibit arcanos vatum omnis turba furores, &c.

From whose deep fount of life the thirsty rout

Of Thespian prophets have lien sucking out

Their sacred rages. And as th’influent stone

Of Father Jove’s great and laborious son

Lifts high the heavy irons and far implies

The wide orbs that the needle rectifies,

In virtuous guide of every sea-driven course,

To all aspiring his one boundless force:

So from one
Homer
all the holy fire

That ever did the hidden heat inspire

In each the Muse came clearly sparkling down,

And must for him compose one flaming crown.

He, at Jove’s table set, fills out to us

Cups that repair age sad and ruinous,

And gives it built of an eternal stand

With his all-sinewy Odyssean hand,

Shifts time and fate, puts death in life’s free state,

And life doth into ages propagate.

He doth in men the Gods’ affects inflame,

His fuel Virtue blown by Praise and Fame;

And, with the high soul’s first impression driv’n,

Breaks through rude chaos, earth, the seas, and heav’n,

The nerves of all things hid in nature lie

Naked before him, all their harmony

Tun’d to his accents, that in beasts breathe minds.

What fowls, what floods, what earth, what air, what winds,

What fires ethereal, what the Gods conclude

In all their counsels, his Muse makes indued

With varied voices that even rocks have moved.

And yet for all this, naked Virtue loved,

Honours without her he as abject prizes,

And foolish Fame, derived from thence, despises.

When from the vulgar taking glorious bound

Up to the mountain where the Muse is crown’d,

He sits and laughs to see the jaded rabble

Toil to his hard heights, t’all access unable, &c

And that your Lordship may in his face take view of his mind, the first words of his
Iliads
is
menin
, wrath; the first word of his
Odysseys
,
andra
, man: contracting in either word his each work’s proposition. In one
predominant perturbation
; in the other
overruling wisdom
. In one the body’s fervour and fashion of outward fortitude to all possible height of heroical action; in the other the mind’s inward, constant, and unconquered empire, unbroken, unaltered, with any most insolent and tyrannous infliction. To many most sovereign praises is this poem entitled; but to that grace, in chief, which sets on the crown both of poets and orators;
to ta mikra megalos, kai ta koina kainos
; that is,
Parva magne dicere; pervulgata nove; jejuna plene
– To speak things little greatly; things common rarely; things barren and empty fruitfully and fully. The return of a man into his country is his whole scope and object; which in itself, your Lordship may well say, is jejune and fruitless enough, affording nothing feastful, nothing magnificent. And yet even this doth the divine inspiration render vast, illustrious, and of miraculous composure. And for this, my Lord, is this poem preferred to his
Iliads
; for therein much magnificence, both of person and action, gives great aid to his industry; but in this are these helps exceeding sparing or nothing; and yet is the structure so elaborate and pompous that the poor plain groundwork, considered together, may seem the naturally rich womb to it, and produce it needfully. Much wondered at, therefore, is the censure of Dionysius Longinus (a man otherwise affirmed grave and of elegant judgment), comparing
Homer
in his
Iliads
to the Sun rising, in his
Odysseys
to his descent or setting, or to the ocean robbed of his æsture, many tributary floods and rivers of excellent ornament withheld from their observance. When this his work so far exceeds the ocean, with all his court and concourse, that all his sea is only a serviceable stream to it. Nor can it be compared to any one power to be named in nature, being an entirely well-sorted and digested confluence of all; where the most solid and grave is made as nimble and fluent as the most airy and fiery, the nimble and fluent as firm and well-bounded as the most grave and solid. And, taking all together, of so tender impression, and of such command to the voice of the Muse, that they knock heaven with her breath, and discover their foundations as low as hell. Nor is this all-comprising Poesy fantastic or mere fictive; but the most material and doctrinal illations of truth, both for all manly information of manners in the young, all prescription of justice, and even Christian piety, in the most grave and high governed. To illustrate both which, in both kinds, with all height of expression, the Poet creates both a body and a soul in them. Wherein, if the body (being the letter or history) seems fictive, and beyond possibility to bring into act, the sense then and allegory, which is the soul, is to be sought, which intends a more eminent expressure of Virtue for her loveliness, and of Vice for her ugliness, in their several effects, going beyond the life, than my art within life can possibly delineate. Why then is fiction to this end so hateful to our true ignorants? Or why should a poor chronicler of a Lord Mayor’s naked truth (that peradventure will last his year) include more worth with our modern wizards than
Homer
for his naked Ulysses clad in eternal fiction? But this proser Dionysius, and the rest of these grave and reputatively learned – that dare undertake for their gravities the headstrong censure of all things, and challenge the understanding of these toys in their childhoods; when even these childish vanities retain deep and most necessary learning enough in them to make them children in their ages, and teach them while they live – are not in these absolute divine infusions allowed either voice or relish: for
Qui poeticas ad
fores accedit, &c.
(says the divine philosopher), he that knocks at the gates of the Muses,
sine Musarum furore
, is neither to be admitted entry, nor a touch at their thresholds: his opinion of entry ridiculous, and his presumption impious. Nor must Poets themselves (might I a little insist on these contempts, not tempting too far your Lordship’s Ulyssean patience) presume to these doors without the truly genuine and peculiar induction. There being in poesy a twofold rapture – or alienation of soul, as the above-said teacher terms it – one
insania,
a disease of the mind, and a mere madness, by which the infected is thrust beneath all the degrees of humanity: et
ex homine, brutum quodammodo redditur
(for which poor Poesy, in this diseased and impostorous age, is so barbarously vilified) – the other is,
divinus furor
, by which the sound and divinely healthful
supra hominis naturam erigitur, et in Deum transit.
One a perfection directly infused from God; the other an infection obliquely and degenerately proceeding from man. Of the divine fury, my Lord, your
Homer
hath ever been both first and last instance; being pronounced absolutely,
ton sophotaton, kai ton theiotaton poieten
, ‘the most wise and most divine poet’. Against whom whosoever shall open his profane mouth may worthily receive answer with this of his divine defender – Empedocles, Heraclitus, Protagoras, Epicharmus, &c. being of
Homer
’s part – tis oun, &c.; who against such an army, and the general
Homer
, dares attempt the assault but he must be reputed ridiculous? And yet against this host, and this invincible commander, shall we have every
besogne
and fool a leader. The common herd, I assure
myself, ready to receive it on their horns, Their infected leaders,

Such men as sideling ride the ambling Muse,

Whose saddle is as frequent as the stews.

Whose raptures are in every pageant seen,

In every wassail-rhyme and dancing green;

When he that writes by any beam of truth

Must dive as deep as he, past shallow youth.

Truth dwells in gulfs, whose deeps hide shades so rich

That Night sits muffled there in clouds of pitch,

More dark than Nature made her, and requires,

To clear her tough mists, heaven’s great fire of fires,

To whom the sun itself is but a beam.

For sick souls then – but rapt in foolish dream –

To wrestle with these heaven-strong mysteries,

What madness is it? When their light serves eyes

That are not worldly in their least aspect,

But truly pure, and aim at heaven direct.

Yet these none like but what the brazen head

Blatters abroad, no sooner born but dead.

Holding, then, in eternal contempt, my Lord, those short-lived bubbles, eternize your virtue and judgment with the Grecian monarch; esteeming, not as the least of your new-year’s presents,

Homer, three thousand years dead, now reviv’d,

Even from that dull death that in life he liv’d;

When none conceited him, none understood

That so much life in so much death as blood

Conveys about it could mix. But when death

Drunk up the bloody mist that human breath

Pour’d round about him – poverty and spite

Thick’ning the hapless vapour – then truth’s light

Glimmer’d about his poem; the pinch’d soul

(Amidst the mysteries it did enrol)

Brake powerfully abroad. And as we see

The sun all hid in clouds, at length got free,

Through some forced covert, over all the ways,

Near and beneath him, shoots his vented rays

Far off, and sticks them in some little glade,

All woods, fields, rivers, left besides in shade;

So your Apollo, from that world of light

Closed in his poem’s body, shot to sight

Some few forced beams, which near him were not seen,

(As in his life or country) Fate and spleen

Clouding their radiance; which when Death had clear’d,

To far-off regions his free beams appear’d;

In which all stood and wonder’d, striving which

His birth and rapture should in right enrich.

Twelve labours of your Thespian Hercules

I now present your Lordship; do but please

To lend life means till th’ other twelve receive

Equal achievement; and let Death then reave

My life now lost in our patrician loves,

That knock heads with the herd; in whom there moves

One blood, one soul, both drown’d in one set height

Of stupid envy and mere popular spite.

Whose loves with no good did my least vein fill;

And from their hates I fear as little ill.

Their bounties nourish not when most they feed,

But, where there is no merit or no need

Rain into rivers still, and are such show’rs

As bubbles spring and overflow the flow’rs.

Their worse parts and worst men their best suborns,

Like winter cows whose milk runs to their horns.

And as litigious clients’ books of law

Cost infinitely; taste of all the awe

Bench’d in our kingdom’s policy, piety, state;

Earn all their deep explorings; satiate

All sorts there thrust together by the heart

With thirst of wisdom spent on either part;

Horrid examples made of Life and Death

From their fine stuff woven; yet when once the breath

Of sentence leaves them, all their worth is drawn

As dry as dust, and wears like cobweb lawn:

So these men set a price upon their worth,

That no man gives but those that trot it forth

Through Need’s foul ways, feed Humours with all cost

Though Judgment starves in them; rout, State engrost

(At all tobacco benches, solemn tables,

Where all that cross their envies are their fables)

In their rank faction; shame and death approved

Fit penance for their opposites; none loved

But those that rub them; not a reason heard

That doth not soothe and glorify their preferr’d

Bitter opinions. When, would Truth resume

The cause to his hands, all would fly in fume

Before his sentence; since the innocent mind

Just God makes good, to whom their worst is wind.

For, that I freely all my thoughts express,

My conscience is my thousand witnesses;

And to this stay my constant comforts vow,

You for the world I have, or God for you.