the household. In the present case, however,
it was part of the scheme of stealing the child.

Eumaeus says that his father ruled a city in the island of Syria. But
where is this Syria? Some think it is conceived by Homer as lying in
the extreme West, "where the Sun turns;" but the Sun turns anywhere.
Rather is its position eastward toward Phoenicia; the Taphian pirates
who stole the Sidonian woman and sold her into Syria, dwelt not far
from Ithaca and preyed upon Phoenician commerce, stealing and selling
in the Eastern Mediterranean. Certainly they could find little business
of their kind in the West. Some vague idea of the actual land of Syria
must have flashed in Homer's mind; no more definite description is
possible.

It is plain, however, that the poet makes Eumaeus a foreigner, not a
Greek, whose birth-land lies beyond the Hellenic boundary to the East.
But he is not a Phoenician, his character is different, and his
people seem not to have been sea-faring. His fundamental trait is
religiosity; he lives in the eternal presence of the Divine Ruler of
the World. His character is that of the Old Testament; some of his
utterances are strong reminders of the Psalms. We cannot help reading
in him something of David and of Job; misfortune he here has had, but
he retains an unshaken faith in the deity; intense wrestling he shows,
but it has been with him the process of purification. He is not a Greek
at all; he has a Hebrew character, not of the modern mercantile type,
which resembles more the Phoenician, but of the old Hebrew strain. In
those times of man-stealing, Homer could easily have met him in one of
the Greek islands, a slave yet a spiritual prince, have drawn his
portrait, and have heard his story substantially as here given.

Indeed we think we can trace in the swineherd's thoughts and sometimes
in his expressions a marked monotheistic tendency. Undoubtedly Eumaeus
speaks fluently of the Greek Gods, as Diana and Apollo; especially does
he mention and honor Zeus, the supreme God; still he is prone to employ
the word Gods in the unitary sense of Providence, and he repeatedly
uses the singular _God_ without the article, as in the passage: "God
grants some things and withholds others at his will, for he is
all-powerful" (XIV. 444). And it is characteristic that he does not
like Helen, for thus he says in an outburst of anti-Greek spirit: "O
would that Helen and her tribe had utterly perished, for whose sake so
ma