n Achilles, who could never have
captured the hostile city. The incident took place after the action of
the Iliad, and after the death of Achilles, who, heroic in courage,
stood in the way of intelligence. When he is gone, the city falls,
overthrown by the brain of Ulysses.

Homer does not pretend to give the song of Demodocus in full, but a
brief summary of what he sang before the Phaeacians. A later poet,
Arctinus, took up the legend here alluded to, and developed it in a
separate epic, called the Iliou-persis or Sack of Troy. Indeed a vast
number of legends and lays about the Trojan War bloomed into epics,
which were in later times joined together and called the Epic Cycle.
Thus we distinguish two very different stages of consciousness in early
Greek poetry: the ballad-making and the epical, Homer being the supreme
example of the latter, and Demodocus an instance of the former.

Looking back at the three lays of the bard in the present Book we find
that they all are connected together in a common theme of which they
show different phases, beginning, middle and end--the conflict before
the Iliad, the conflict of the Iliad, and the conflict after the Iliad,
all hovering around the great national enterprise of the Greeks, namely
the Trojan War, in which the deepest principle of the Hellenic world,
indeed of the entire Occident, was at stake.

But Homer, in distinction from Demodocus, weaves into his poem not only
the past but the present, not only Troy but Phaeacia, not only the
movement against the East but also the movement toward the West, of
which Phaeacia is simply one stage. The Hero who unites these two great
movements of Greek spirit is now brought before us again.

2. Ulysses weeps at the song of the bard which recalls so many memories
of friends departed and of dire calamities. These tears connect him
deeply with Troy and its conflict; the Phaeacians listen intently, but
are outside of the great struggle, they shed no tears. Thus does
Ulysses in his strongest emotions unite himself with the Trojan
enterprise of aforetime. He is not simply a wanderer over the sea
seeking to get home, but a returner from Troy; he has revealed himself
through his feelings. He personally shares in the woes sung by the
bard, because he has experienced them. Indeed the very image which the
poet here employs to express sorrow, taken from the woman whose husband
has been slain fighting for his city, and for his wife and his
childr