Epitaphs always fascinated him, and formerly he used to say he should like to be buried at Langar and to have on his tombstone the subject of the last of Handel’s Six Great Fugues.  He called this “The Old Man Fugue,” and said it was like an epitaph composed for himself by one who was very old and tired and sorry for things; and he made young Ernest Pontifex in The Way of all Flesh offer it to Edward Overton as an epitaph for his Aunt Alethea.  Butler, however, left off wanting any tombstone long before he died.  In accordance with his wish his body was cremated, and a week later Alfred and I returned to Woking and buried his ashes under the shrubs in the garden of the crematorium, with nothing to mark the spot.

The Humour of Homer {59}

The first of the two great poems commonly ascribed to Homer is called the Iliad—­a title which we may be sure was not given it by the author.  It professes to treat of a quarrel between Agamemnon and Achilles that broke out while the Greeks were besieging the city of Troy, and it does, indeed, deal largely with the consequences of this quarrel; whether, however, the ostensible subject did not conceal another that was nearer the poet’s heart—­I mean the last days, death, and burial of Hector—­is a point that I cannot determine.  Nor yet can I determine how much of the Iliad as we now have it is by Homer, and how much by a later writer or writers.  This is a very vexed question, but I myself believe the Iliad to be entirely by a single poet.

The second poem commonly ascribed to the same author is called the Odyssey.  It deals with the adventures of Ulysses during his ten years of wandering after Troy had fallen.  These two works have of late years been believed to be by different authors.  The Iliad is now generally held to be the older work by some one or two hundred years.

The leading ideas of the Iliad are love, war, and plunder, though this last is less insisted on than the other two.  The key-note is struck with a woman’s charms, and a quarrel among men for their possession.  It is a woman who is at the bottom of the Trojan war itself.  Woman throughout the Iliad is a being to be loved, teased, laughed at, and if necessary carried off.  We are told in one place of a fine bronze cauldron for heating water which was worth twenty oxen, whereas a few lines lower down a good serviceable maid-of-all-work is valued at four oxen.  I think there is a spice of malicious humour in this valuation, and am confirmed in this opinion by noting that though woman in the Iliad is on one occasion depicted as a wife so faithful and affectionate that nothing more perfect can be found either in real life or fiction, yet as a general rule she is drawn as teasing, scolding, thwarting, contradicting, and hoodwinking the sex that has the effrontery to deem itself her lord and master.  Whether or no this view may have arisen from any domestic difficulties between Homer and his wife is a point which again I find it impossible to determine.