neither at
gods nor woman, but with one single and perhaps intercalated
exception, at man. Gods and women may sometimes do wrong things,
but, except as regards the intrigue between Mars and Venus just
referred to, they are never laughed at. The scepticism of the Iliad
is that of Hume or Gibbon; that of the Odyssey (if any) is like the
occasional mild irreverence of the Vicar's daughter. When Jove says
he will do a thing, there is no uncertainty about his doing it.
Juno hardly appears at all, and when she does she never quarrels
with her husband. Minerva has more to do than any of the other gods
or goddesses, but she has nothing in common with the Minerva whom we
have already seen in the Iliad. In the Odyssey she is the fairy
god-mother who seems to have no object in life but to protect
Ulysses and Telemachus, and keep them straight at any touch and turn
of difficulty. If she has any other function, it is to be patroness
of the arts and of all intellectual development. The Minerva of the
Odyssey may indeed sit on a rafter like a swallow and hold up her
aegis to strike panic into the suitors while Ulysses kills them; but
she is a perfect lady, and would no more knock Mars and Venus down
one after the other than she would stand on her head. She is, in
fact, a distinct person in all respects from the Minerva of the
Iliad. Of the remaining gods Neptune, as the persecutor of the
hero, comes worst off; but even he is treated as though he were a
very important person.

In the Odyssey the gods no longer live in houses and sleep in four-
post bedsteads, but the conception of their abode, like that of
their existence altogether, is far more spiritual. Nobody knows
exactly where they live, but they say it is in Olympus, where there
is neither rain nor hail nor snow, and the wind never beats roughly;
but it abides in everlasting sunshine, and in great peacefulness of
light wherein the blessed gods are illumined for ever and ever. It
is hardly possible to conceive anything more different from the
Olympus of the Iliad.

Another very material point of difference between the Iliad and the
Odyssey lies in the fact that the Homer of the Iliad always knows
what he is talking about, while the supposed Homer of the Odyssey
often makes mistakes that betray an almost incredible ignorance of
detail. Thus the giant Polyphemus drives in his ewes home from
their pasture, and milks them. The lambs of course have not been
running w