When Telemachus arrived, Odysseus and the worthy swineherd were preparing
their breakfast in the hut by the light of dawn, after stirring up the fire and sending
the herdsmen off with the pigs to the pastures. The dogs, usually so obstreperous,
not only did not bark at the newcomer but greeted him with wagging tails.
Odysseus heard footsteps and at the same moment observed the dogs’ friendly
behaviour. Immediately alert, he turned to his companion and said: ‘Eumaeus, you
have a visitor: I can hear his steps. He must be a friend of yours or someone familiar
here, for the dogs are wagging their tails instead of barking.’The prose version bears out what Dionysius has to say. The beauty of the poetry
derives from the metrical order of its composition. Unfortunately, it is not possible to
find any verse translation that is able to convey the poetic effect of Homer’s Greek
in passages of plain and simple description such as this. However, Homer’s stylistic
range is as varied as his subject matter, and translators have been inspired to poetic
heights in passages of pathos and grandeur.
In the treatise On the Sublime, probably written in the first century ADand usually
attributed to the Greek rhetorician Longinus, the author cites many passages from
Homer, often in connection with the gods, to illustrate Homeric grandeur, for he
regards Homer as a poet who works pre-eminently in the grand manner. By sublimity
‘Longinus’ does not merely mean grandeur. He defines the true sublime as any literary
passage that has the power to elevate the reader and take him out of himself. The
truly beautiful and sublime is what can be seen to have this effect on diverse people
in different times (On the Sublime, 7). One such passage that has been much admired
is the moment when Hector takes his farewell of Andromache in Book Six of the Iliad.
There is the grandeur of Hector’s prayer for a heroic future for his child, which is full
of pathos and irony because of Hector’s foreboding and the reader’s knowledge that
Troy will fall (when the child is cruelly thrown off the battlements). This is admirably
rendered in the heroic couplet by the seventeenth-century translator, John Dryden.
‘Parent of Gods and men, propitious Jove,
And you bright synod of the powers above;
On this my son your gracious powers bestow;
Grant him to live, and great in arms to grow;
To reign in Troy, to govern with renown,
To shield the people, and assert the crown:
That, when hereafter he from war shall come,
And bring his Trojans peace and triumph home,
Some aged man, who lives this act to see,
And who in former times remembered me,
May say the son in fortitude and fameEARLY GREECE: HOMER AND HESIOD 31