lift the veil of Space and Time from the
visage of Truth. But unquestionably the man in his desperate struggle
must never forget the injunction. Hold fast to old Proteus.

We must note, too, that the poet has shown Menelaus as prepared to
receive this divine revelation; the Greek wanderer has been brought to
contrition by manifold sufferings. "I surely must have sinned against
the Immortals," is his penitent outcry. Thus he is ready for the new
truth, and the voice of the Goddess speaks, when he is internally in
condition to hear it. The divine word is not forced upon him; he must
do his share even toward creating the same within himself. Now, along
the shore of the sea, "he prays the Gods fervently," ere he goes to his
task. Egyptian Proteus he seeks to catch and to hold, for it is Proteus
who is to point out to him the way of reconciliation with Zeus and the
Olympian Gods.

Stress is strongly laid by the poet upon the fact that Proteus is of
Egypt. Evidently, in the mind of Homer, the thought of this Fourth Book
connects with the land of the Nile. What hint lies in that? The highest
wisdom of Egypt, indeed, of the Orient, is just this grand distinction
between Appearance and Substance, the Transitory and the Eternal, the
Many and the One. What Egypt gave to Hellas is here suggested, nay,
said directly. In fact, the first great step in wisdom, is still to
make the above distinction, which in many ways has been handed down to
us from the East.

But the Greeks united the two sides--that which appears and that which
is, or the world of sense, and the world of spirit--and thereby
produced art, the plastic forms of Gods and Men. Hellas brought forth
to the sunlight Beauty, which Egypt never could. Even here Egyptian
Proteus leads Menelaus to the Greek Gods, and becomes himself a kind of
antecedent Hellenic deity. Egypt means to Greek Menelaus two things:
first, it is a land of error, of alienation, of darkness; secondly, it
has its light, its wisdom, which, when he finds, points him homeward to
Hellas, to his own Gods.

Deeply suggestive become all these mythical hints, when we once are in
touch with their spirit. We naturally pass to the Hebrew parallel,
since that other great world-historical people of antiquity, the
Israelites, had their experience also with Egypt. For them, too, it was
a land of darkness, slavery, divine estrangement. They also sought a
Return, not dissimilar to the Greek Return, to their true home.