The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Odysseys of Homer, by Homer

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Title: The Odysseys of Homer Together with the shorter poems

Author: Homer

Translator: George Chapman

Release Date: May 8, 2015 [EBook #48895] Last updated: November 11, 2015

Language: English

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ODYSSEYS OF HOMER ***

Produced by Phil Schempf

THE ODYSSEYS OF HOMER
Together with the shorter poems

Translated according to the Greek by
George Chapman

London: Published by
George Newnes Limited
Southhampton Street Strand W.C.

New York: Published by
Charles Scribner’s Sons

TO THE MOST WORTHILY HONOURED, MY SINGULAR GOOD LORD, ROBERT, EARL OF SOMERSET, LORD CHAMBERLAIN, ETC.

I have adventured, right noble Earl, out of my utmost and ever-vowed service to your virtues, to entitle their merits to the patronage of Homer’s English life, whose wished natural life the great Macedon would have protected as the spirit of his empire,

     That he to his unmeasur’d mighty acts
  Might add a fame as vast; and their extracts,
  In fires as bright and endless as the stars,
  His breast might breathe and thunder out his wars.
  But that great monarch’s love of fame and praise
  Receives an envious cloud in our foul days;
  For since our great ones ceased themselves to do,
  Deeds worth their praise, they hold it folly too
  To feed their praise in others. But what can,
  Of all the gifts that are, be giv’n to man
  More precious than Eternity and Glory,
  Singing their praises in unsilenc’d story?
  Which no black day, no nation, nor no age,
  No change of time or fortune, force nor rage,
  Shall ever rase? All which the monarch knew,
  Where Homer liv’d entitled, would ensue:
  Cujus de gurgite vivo
  Combibit arcanos vatum omnis turba furores, etc.
  From whose deep fount of life the thirsty rout
  Of Thespian prophets have lien sucking out
  Their sacred rages. And as th’ influent stone
  Of Father Jove’s great and laborious son
  Lifts high the heavy iron, and far implies
  The wide orbs that the needle rectifies,
  In virtuous guide of ev’ry sea-driv’n course,
  To all aspiring his one boundless force;
  So from one Homer all the holy fire
  That ever did the hidden heat inspire
  In each true Muse came clearly sparkling down,
  And must for him compose one flaming crown.
     He, at Jove’s table set, fills out to us
  Cups that repair age sad and ruinous,
  And gives it built of an eternal stand
  With his all-sinewy Odyssæan hand,
  Shifts time and fate, puts death in life’s free state,
  And life doth into ages propagate.
  He doth in men the Gods’ affects inflame,
  His fuel Virtue blown by Praise and Fame;
  And, with the high soul’s first impression driv’n,
  Breaks through rude chaos, earth, the seas, and heav’n.
  The nerves of all things hid in nature lie
  Naked before him; all their harmony
  Tun’d to his accents, that in beasts breathe minds.
  What fowls, what floods, what earth, what air, what winds,
  What fires ethereal, what the Gods conclude
  In all their counsels, his Muse makes indued
  With varied voices that ev’n rocks have mov’d.
  And yet for all this, naked Virtue lov’d,
  Honours without her he as abject prizes,
  And foolish Fame, deriv’d from thence, despises.
  When from the vulgar taking glorious bound
  Up to the mountain where the Muse is crown’d,
  He sits and laughs to see the jaded rabble
  Toil to his hard heights, t’ all access unable, etc.

And that your Lordship may in his face take view of his mind, the first words of his Iliads is μη̑νιν, wrath; the first word of his Odysseys, ἄνδρα man: contracting in either word his each work’s proposition. In one predominant perturbation; in the other over-ruling wisdom. In one the body’s fervour and fashion of outward fortitude to all possible height of heroical action; in the other the mind’s inward, constant, and unconquered empire, unbroken, unaltered, with any most insolent, and tyrannous infliction. To many most sovereign praises is this poem entitled; but to that grace, in chief, which sets on the crown both of poets and orators; τὸ‭ τὰ μικρὰ μεγάλως, καὶ τὰ κοινὰ καιίνως: that is, ‭Parva magnè dicere; pervulgata novè; jejuna plenè.—To speak ‭things little greatly; things common rarely; things barren and empty ‭fruitfully and fully. The return of a man into his country is his ‭whole scope and object; which in itself, your Lordship may well ‭say, is jejune and fruitless enough, affording nothing feastful, ‭nothing magnificent. And yet even this doth the divine inspiration ‭render vast, illustrious, and of miraculous composure. And for ‭this, my Lord, is this poem preferred to his lliads; for therein much ‭magnificence, both of person and action, gives great aid to his ‭industry; but in this are these helps exceeding sparing, or nothing; ‭and yet is the structure so elaborate and pompous that the poor ‭plain ground-work, considered together, may seem the naturally ‭rich womb to it, and produce it needfully. Much wondered at, ‭therefore, is the censure of Dionysius Longinus, (a man otherwise ‭affirmed grave and of elegant judgment,) comparing Homer in his ‭Iliads to the Sun rising, in his Odysseys to his descent or setting, ‭or to the ocean robbed of his æsture, many tributary floods and ‭rivers of excellent ornament withheld from their observance. When ‭this his work so far exceeds the ocean, with all his court and ‭concourse, that all his sea is only a serviceable stream to it. ‭Nor can it be compared to any one power to be named in nature, ‭being an entirely well-sorted and digested confluence of all; ‭where the most solid and grave is made as nimble and fluent as the ‭most airy and fiery, the nimble and fluent as firm and ‭well-bounded as the most grave and solid. And, taking all ‭together, of so tender impression, and of such command to the ‭voice of the Muse, that they knock heaven with her breath, and ‭discover their foundations as low as hell. Nor is this ‭all-comprising Poesy fantastic or mere fictive; but the most ‭material and doctrinal illations of truth, both for all manly ‭information of manners in the young, all prescription of justice, ‭and even Christian piety, in the most grave and high governed. To ‭illustrate both which, in both kinds, with all heightof expression, ‭the Poet creates both a body and a soul in them. Wherein, if the ‭body (being the letter or history) seems fictive, and beyond ‭possibility to bring into act, the sense then and allegory, which ‭is the soul, is to be sought, which intends