the act, even if necessary, brings its
penalty. It begets a spirit of violence, a disregard of human life, a
destruction of institutional order. Such is the training of the Greeks
before Troy. The wanton attack of Ulysses and his companions upon the
city of the Ciconians (Book Ninth) is an indication of the spirit
engendered in this long period of violence, among the best and wisest
Greeks.

Still, in spite of the grand estrangement, they have the aspiration for
return, and for healing the breach which had sunk so deep into their
souls. Did they not undergo all this severing of the dearest ties for
the sake of Helen, for the integrity of the family, and of their civil
life also? What he has done for Helen, every Greek must be ready to do
for himself, when the war is over; he must long for the restoration of
the broken relations; he cannot remain in Asia and continue a true
Greek. Such is his conflict; in maintaining Family and State, he has
been forced to sacrifice Family and State. Then when he has
accomplished the deed of sacrifice, he must restore himself to what he
has immolated. A hard task, a deeply contradictory process, whose end
is, however, harmony; many will not be able to reach the latter stage,
but will perish by the way. The Return is this great process of
restoration after the estrangement.

Many are the Returners, successful and unsuccessful in many different
ways. But they all are resumed in the one long desperate Return of
Ulysses, the wise and much-enduring man. In space as well as in time
his Return is the longest; in spirit it is the deepest and severest by
all odds. The present poem, therefore, is a kind of resumption and
summary of the entire series of Returns (_Nostoi_). In the old Greek
epical ages, the subject gave rise to many poems, which are, however,
at bottom but one, and this we still possess, while the others are
lost. Spirit takes care of its own verily.

The true Returner, accordingly, gets back to the institutions from
which he once separated; he knows them now, previously he only felt
them. His institutional world must become thus a conscious possession;
he has gone through the alienation, and has been restored; his
restoration has been reached through denial, through skepticism, we may
say, using the modern term. The old unconscious period before the
Trojan war is gone forever; that was the Paradise from which the Greek
Adam has been expelled. But the new man after the restoratio