a meanwhile flies up to the knees of her father Jove,
sobbing and sighing till her ambrosial robe trembles all around her.

"Jove drew her towards him, and smiling pleasantly exclaimed, 'My
dear child, which of the heavenly beings has been wicked enough to
behave in this way to you, as though you had been doing something
naughty?'

"'Your wife, Juno,' answered Diana, 'has been ill-treating me; all
our quarrels always begin with her.'"

* * * * *

The above extracts must suffice as examples of the kind of divine
comedy in which Homer brings the gods and goddesses upon the scene.
Among mortals the humour, what there is of it, is confined mainly to
the grim taunts which the heroes fling at one another when they are
fighting, and more especially to crowing over a fallen foe. The
most subtle passage is the one in which Briseis, the captive woman
about whom Achilles and Agamemnon have quarrelled, is restored by
Agamemnon to Achilles. Briseis on her return to the tent of
Achilles finds that while she has been with Agamemnon, Patroclus has
been killed by Hector, and his dead body is now lying in state. She
flings herself upon the corpse and exclaims--

"How one misfortune does keep falling upon me after another! I saw
the man to whom my father and mother had married me killed before my
eyes, and my three own dear brothers perished along with him; but
you, Patroclus, even when Achilles was sacking our city and killing
my husband, told me that I was not to cry; for you said that
Achilles himself should marry me, and take me back with him to
Phthia, where we should have a wedding feast among the Myrmidons.
You were always kind to me, and I should never cease to grieve for
you."

This may of course be seriously intended, but Homer was an acute
writer, and if we had met with such a passage in Thackeray we should
have taken him to mean that so long as a woman can get a new
husband, she does not much care about losing the old one--a
sentiment which I hope no one will imagine that I for one moment
endorse or approve of, and which I can only explain as a piece of
sarcasm aimed possibly at Mrs. Homer.

* * * * *

And now let us turn to the Odyssey, a work which I myself think of
as the Iliad's better half or wife. Here we have a poem of more
varied interest, instinct with not less genius, and on the whole I
should say, if less robust, nevertheless of still greater
fascination--one, moreover, the irony of which is pointed