on getting to the far East. But the true return of
the Occident to the Orient will be round the globe, by way of America,
and that will be complete. The recent war between Japan and China is
really a stage of the great new epoch in the world-historical return to
the Orient.

Such is the more external, the historical phase of the Iliad and
Odyssey. But they have also a deep internal ethical phase, they show
two sides of one grand process of the human soul which has been called
self-alienation, the sacrifice of the immediate self in order to gain
true self-hood. The Greeks had to immolate their dearest ties, those of
home and country, in order to preserve home and country, which had been
assailed to the very heart by the rape of Helen. They had to educate
themselves to a life of violence, killing men, women, even children,
destroying home and country. For Troy also has Family and State, though
it be a complete contradiction of Family and State by supporting Paris.
But when the Greeks had taken Troy, they were trained destroyers of
home and country, they were destruction organized and victorious, yet
their whole purpose was to save home and country. Thus their
self-alienation has deepened into absolute self-contradiction, the
complete scission of the soul.

Now this is the spiritual condition of which they are to get rid, out
of which they are to return to home and country. As before said it may
be deemed a harder problem than the taking of Troy, which was simply a
negative act, the destroying the destroyers of home and country. But
the great positive act of the Trojan heroes is the restoration, not
merely the outer but the inner restoration, to home and country.

With these considerations before the mind of the reader, he is now
ready to grasp the full sweep of the Odyssey and understand its
conflict. It springs from the separation caused by a war, here the
Trojan War. The man is removed from his institutional life and thrown
into a world of violence and destruction. Let us summarize the leading
points of the process.

I. The absence of Ulysses leaves his family without a head, his country
without a ruler, and his property without an owner. All these relations
begin to loosen and go to pieces; destructive forces assail the
decaying organism; the Suitors appear, who consume his property, woo
his queen, and seek to usurp his kingly authority. Such are the
dissolving energies at work in Ithaca. Also his son Telemachus i