bors. Such is the glimpse here of the Greek Hades
of eternal punishment. Now comes the curious fact that the heroic man
through labor and suffering can rise out of this Hades of finitude; he
can satisfy the demand of world-justice, and rise to Olympus among the
blessed Gods. Such was Hercules, and such is to be Ulysses, who now
having seen the culmination of Hades and heard its prophecy of his
future state, leaves it and returns to the Upperworld.

Undoubtedly these thoughts of future punishment and reward are very dim
and shadowy in Homer; still they are here in this Eleventh Book of the
Odyssey, and find their true interpretation in that view of the life to
come into which they unfolded with time. The best commentary on this
Book, we repeat, is the _Divine Comedy_ of Dante, the grand poem of
futurity, which carries out to fullness the order, of which we here
catch a little glimpse.

_BOOK TWELFTH._

Ulysses flees from the Underworld, there is something down there which
he feels he cannot master, something which he has not seen but of which
he has a vague presentiment. The Gorgon stands for much, dimly
foreshadowing a Hades beyond or below the Greek Hades, with which,
however, it is not his call to grapple. Hence the poet puts upon his
Hero a limitation at this point, strangely prophetic, and sends him in
haste back to the terrestrial Upperworld. The bark crossed the stream
of the "river Oceanus," then it entered "the wide-wayed Sea" in which
lay the island of Circe, "where are the houses of the Dawn, and her
dances, and the risings of the Sun." Verily the Hero has got back to
the beginning of the world of light, in which he is now to have a new
span of existence after his experience in the supersensible realm.

From the brief geographical glances which we catch up from the voyage,
as well as from a number of hints scattered throughout the Odyssey (for
instance, from what is said of the Ethiopians in the First Book), we
are inclined to believe that Homer held the earth to be round. We like
to think of the old Poet seeing this fact, not as a deduction of
science, not even as a misty tradition from some other land, but as an
immediate act of poetic insight, which beholds the law of the physical
world rising out of the spiritual by the original creative fiat; the
Poet witnesses the necessity by which nature conforms to mind. Homer
knew the spiritual Return, this whole Odyssey is such a Return, whereby
the soul