vement of ancient civilization. Menelaus in his voyage transcends the
Greek world of the Trojan epoch, and brings back the story thereof to
his country. The tale of Proteus is said to have been carried back to
Egypt, where Herodotus, several hundred years after Homer, found it in
a new transformation, Proteus being a king of Egypt, who took Helen
from Paris and kept her till Menelaus arrived and received her from the
Egyptian ruler. Thus the Fairy Tale raised the Old Man of the Sea to
the royal dignity, changing sovereignty from water to land. (_Herodotus_,
II. 112-20.) Plato makes him typical of a sophist, Schlegel of a poet,
Lucian of a dancer.

We shall now take a glance backwards and give a short summary of the
story, that its inner development in the hands of the poet may be more
fully seen.

1. The desolation of Menelaus and his companions on the island of
Pharos; no Return possible, death from hunger imminent. Moreover,
disregard of the Gods, internal estrangement, a condition of separation
from the Divine, truly an Egyptian condition.

2. Eidothea appears to him, just the Goddess of Appearance, and points
him to a power beyond herself. Hitherto he was lost in the world of
Appearance; but when he thinks of it, he separates himself from it, and
sees its nullity. So the Finite points to the Infinite, the Fleeting to
the Permanent, the Sensible to the Supersensible, Eidothea to Proteus,
who is the First One, or the First Principle underlying all Appearance,
hence her father.

3. She tells also how to catch him. When he emerges from the water,
source of all Forms, indeed just the Formable (see Goethe's Faust, Part
II. in the _Classical Walpurgisnight_), he will count by fives all his
sea-calves, or sea-forms, offspring of the sea (Halosydna). This
counting by fives, is significant, hinting the earliest abstraction
from the sensuous through number, specially by means of the five-system,
though Homer knew well the decimal system (see _Od._ XVI, 245. _Iliad_
II. 126). Menelaus with his companions is to take on this sea-form, and
be counted with the rest, though in disguise; then when Proteus lies
down to sleep with his herds or Forms, he is to be seized; that is,
seized in repose, as he is himself, not in relation to his shapes. They
must continue to hold fast to this primal Form of Proteus, or the
archetype, through all his changes, till he resumes his first shape,
"the one in which thou sawest him in repose." Then