defy the
established right. Zeus has them in mind when he speaks of AEgisthus,
who is an example of the same sort of characters, and his fate is their
fate according to the Olympian lawgiver. They too are going to
destruction through their own folly, yet after many an admonition. Just
now Telemachus has spoken an impressive warning: "I shall invoke the
ever-living Gods, that Zeus may grant deeds requiting yours."

Still their insolence goes on; the ethical world of justice and
institutions has to be cleared of such men, if it continue to exist.
Who does not love this fealty of the old bard to the highest order of
things? The suitors are indeed blind; they have not recognized the
presence of the Goddess, yet there is a slight suspicion after she is
gone; one of the suitors asks who that stranger was. Telemachus, to
lull inquiry, gives the outer assumed form of the divine visitor, "an
ancestral guest, Mentes of Taphos;" the poet however, is careful to
add: "But he (Telemachus) knew the immortal Goddess in his mind."

The conflict with the suitors is the framework of the entire poem. The
education of Telemachus as well as the discipline of Ulysses reach
forward to this practical end--the destruction of the wrong-doers,
which is the purification of the country, and the re-establishment of
the ethical order. All training is to bring forth the heroic act. The
next Book will unfold the conflict in greater detail.

_Appendix._ The reader will have observed that, in the preceding
account of Book First, it is regarded as setting forth three unities,
that of the total Odyssey, that of the Telemachiad, and that of the
Book itself. We see them all gradually unfolding in due order under the
hand of the poet, from the largest to the least. Now the reader should
be informed that every one of these unities has been violently attacked
and proclaimed to be a sheer phantasm. Chiefly in Germany has the
assault taken place. What we have above considered as the joints in the
organism of the poem, have been cut into, pried apart, and declared to
make so many separate poems or passages, which different authors have
written. Thus the one great Homer vanishes into many little Homers, and
this is claimed to be the only true way of appreciating Homer.

The most celebrated of these dissectors is probably the German
Professor, Kirchhoff, some of whose opinions we shall cite in this
appendix. His psychological tendency is that of analysis, separat