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 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 with them; they have been left in the yards, so they have had nothing to eat.  When he has milked the ewes, the giant lets each one of them have her lamb—­to get, I suppose, what strippings it can, and beyond