oem. He hears of the awful death of
Ajax, son of Oileus, he hears of the sad fate of his brother Agamemnon;
also the Old Man of the Sea tells him a few words concerning Ulysses,
who is still alive but cannot get away from the isle of Calypso. News
just good enough to give hope to the son who is eagerly listening, and
hears that his father still lives.

Finally, Menelaus learns of his own future existence from the Old Man,
who is in person the very embodiment of what lies beyond the senses, of
immortality. "The Gods have decreed thou shalt not die, O Menelaus, but
shalt dwell in the Elysian Plain, at the ends of the earth." He is the
husband of Helen, and coupled forever with her destiny; he is, through
her, of the divine family of Zeus. Such is the promise, has it not been
fulfilled?

The poet thus brings to an end his Fairy Tale, with its deep-reaching
glances into Egypt as one of the antecedent sources of Hellenic
civilization. We find therein hinted a double relation: first, Egypt
was the giver of much wisdom to Greece especially the distinction into
Appearance and the one First Principle; secondly, it was hostile to
Greek spirit, which had to pass through the Egyptian stage to reach its
own destiny. Homer spins, in this Book, a thread which connects the
culture of Hellas with that of Egypt, So much we dare find in the
present legend without much straining. The distant background of this
entire visit of Telemachus to Sparta is Egyptian and Oriental, as we
see from the talk of both Helen and Menelaus.

We may now be certain that Homer, the poet, had before him a thought of
this kind: the inner soul of things and the outward manifestation. The
story of Proteus we may call not merely a Fairy Tale, but the Fairy
Tale, which images its universal self in setting forth its special
theme; it has the one meaning, which, however, takes on many varieties
of external shape; it is the essence of all Fairy Tales. Still you have
to catch the Proteus and make him tell his secret; I can only advise
you to hold fast, and finally the true form of the Old Man will reveal
itself, and speak the truth of many appearances, nay, of all. In
reading this poem of Homer we are only following the poet, if we seek
to lay hold of its essence under its varied manifestations. The whole
Odyssey is a Proteus, ever changing, assuming new forms, which will
utterly bewilder the reader until he reaches its first principle. Homer
probably suggests that h