l. The
Aryan race is indeed a separative, self-repellent, distracted race,
always on the move out of itself, without returning into itself. The
Phoenician, on the contrary, in his farthest voyages, came back home
with news and merchandise; the remotest Phoenician settlements kept
up their connection with the mother country. Deep is the idea of the
Return to the parent city in the Semitic consciousness for all time;
the Phoenician returned anciently to Tyre and Sidon; the Arab
Mahommedan returns to-day to Mecca, home of the Prophet; the Jew
experts to return to Jerusalem, the holy city of his fathers. The
entire Odyssey may well be supposed to show a Semitic influence, in
distinction from the Iliad, for the Odyssey is the account of many
returns and of the one all-embracing Return to home and country. It is,
therefore, very suggestive that the Odyssey has this Phoenician
background of a world-commerce, which is only possible for a city whose
people, going forth, come back to it as a center. Moreover this
world-commerce is a kind of unification of the ever-separating Aryan
race, a bond created through the exchange of commodities. Thus the
Semitic character has always shown itself as the unifier and mediator
of Aryan peoples, first through an external tie of trade, which was the
work of Phoenicia, and, secondly, through the far deeper spiritual
tie of religion, which was the later work of Judea. The Semitic mind
has always been necessary to the inherently centrifugal Aryan soul in
order to bring it back to itself from its wanderings, inner and outer,
and to reconcile itself with itself and with the Divine Order. The
Semite has been and still is the priest to all Arya, by the deepest
necessity of the spirit.

Another word we may add in this connection. The Semitic race has also
separated itself, and shown three main branches--Phoenician, Hebrew,
Arab--a sea-people, a land-people, and a sand-people. In all three
cases, however, they have a returning and therewith a mediating
character. In their wildest wanderings, on water, and in the desert,
and in the soul, they have the power of getting back; and that which
they do for themselves, they aid others in doing.

So much by way of tracing the universal relations of this poem with its
Phoenician background of commerce as well as with its Semitic
character of Eumaeus. For, somehow, we cannot help seeing in this latter
certain traits of the old Hebrew.

III. The last part of t