Since the first source, greatness of natural endowment, holds the chief place above the others, here too, even if it is rather a gift than a possession, we must so far as possible nurture our souls toward greatness, and, as it were, keep them ever pregnant with noble bearing. §1
How, you will say? I have written elsewhere as follows: sublimity is the echo of greatness of mind. So even without utterance a bare thought is sometimes admired by itself for its great-mindedness; thus the silence of Ajax in the Underworld is great, and loftier than any speech. §2
First, then, we must lay it down absolutely as the source of sublimity that the true orator must have no mean or ignoble spirit. It is impossible for those who think and pursue mean and slavish things all their lives to bring forth anything wonderful or worthy of all eternity. Great words come naturally from those whose thoughts are weighty. §3
So sublimities fall to the share of the most high-minded men. When Parmenio said ‘I would have been content,’ […] there is the distance between earth and heaven; and one might call this not so much the measure of Eris as of Homer. §4
Quite unlike this is the Hesiodic line about Mist, if the Shield of Heracles be Hesiod's: ‘from her nostrils flowed mucus.’ He has not made the figure terrible, but loathsome. How, by contrast, does Homer magnify the divine? ‘As far as a man's gaze reaches into the hazy distance, sitting on a watch-tower and looking out over the wine-dark sea, so far at one bound do the high-neighing horses of the gods leap.’ He measures their stride by the spaces of the cosmos. Who would not, with reason, exclaim at the excess of the magnitude that, if the horses of the gods should make even two such leaps in succession, they would no longer find room within the world? §5
Lofty, too, are the images of the Battle of the Gods: ‘And great heaven and Olympus echoed with trumpet-blast. Aïdoneus, lord of those below, took fright; and in fear leapt from his throne and shouted aloud, lest above him Poseidon, shaker of earth, should burst the ground apart, and his halls be revealed to mortals and immortals, dread, mouldering, that even the gods abhor.’ Do you see, my friend, how the earth is rent open from its foundations, Tartarus laid bare, the whole world turning over and pulling apart, while everything together, heaven and Hades, mortal and immortal, takes its share in the war and danger of that hour? §6
Yet such things, fearful as they are, are altogether impious and not safe-guarding of fitness, unless they be taken allegorically. Homer, it seems to me, when he records the wounds, factions, vengeances, tears, bonds and tangled passions of the gods, has, so far as he could, made the men of the Iliad gods and the gods men. For us in our wretchedness death lies open as a harbour from our ills; the gods, by his account, have a misery whose nature is not eternal, but only an everlasting misfortune. §7
Far better, however, than the passages on the Theomachy are those that present the divine as something pure and great and unmixed, in truth divine; such are, to take an example which others before us have worked over, the lines on Poseidon: ‘And the long mountains shook, and the woodland, and the peaks and the city of the Trojans and the ships of the Achaeans, beneath the immortal feet of Poseidon as he came. And he set off to drive across the waves, and the sea-creatures sported on every side from their dens beneath, nor failed to know their lord; and the sea parted for joy, and the horses sped on.’ §8
In this same way the lawgiver of the Jews, no ordinary man, since he had grasped the power of the divine to its true measure and made it manifest, wrote at the very opening of his Laws: ‘And God said,’ — what? — ‘Let there be light, and there was; let there be earth, and there was.’ §9
I shall not, perhaps, weary you, my friend, by setting beside these one passage from the poet about a human matter, that you may see how he is wont to enter with us into the greatness of heroes. A sudden mist and impassable night cover the Greeks' battle for him; whereupon Ajax, at his wits' end, says, ‘Father Zeus, deliver the sons of the Achaeans from the gloom; make clear the air, grant our eyes to see, and in the light slay us, if slay us thou must.’ This is in truth the passion of an Ajax. He does not pray for life — that would have been too low a request for the hero — but, since in the lightless dark his courage could find no noble use, he indignantly demands light, that, come what may, he may find a death worthy of his valour, even though Zeus stand against him. §10
Now in the Iliad Homer is borne onward like a fair wind into the heat of the action; he himself shares the warriors' frenzy, like a swung Ares or a destroying fire that ‘rages over the high mountains, in the depths of a deep wood, and foam comes up about its mouth.’ Yet the Odyssey shows, on much of which we ought to remark, that as a great nature wanes age has its mark, the love of story. §11
Plain it is from many things that he composed this poem second; among them the way the surviving figures of the sufferings at Troy are brought, like episodes of the Trojan war, into the Odyssey, and the laments and pities are paid out there, as if known of old to the heroes. The Odyssey is nothing else than the epilogue of the Iliad: ‘There lies Ajax the warlike, there Achilles, there Patroclus, counsellor godlike, there my own dear son.’ §12
From the same cause, I think, while the Iliad, written in the height of his power, has the whole little body of it dramatic and full of contest, in the Odyssey the narrative element predominates, which belongs to old age. So in the Odyssey one may compare Homer to the setting sun, whose magnitude remains, but without the violence. He no longer keeps that equal pitch of the Iliadic poems, no, nor sublimities everywhere on a level without sinking, nor that same outpouring of crowded passions, nor the rapid turn and the political and the close-packed imagery from real life: he is like Ocean withdrawn into himself and lonely about his own banks; what now appear are the ebbs of his greatness, and a wandering among the fabulous and the incredible. §13
In saying this I have not forgotten the storms in the Odyssey, the adventures with the Cyclops, and certain others; I am describing old age, but Homer's old age. Throughout these last works the fabulous prevails over the practical. I have digressed thus, as I said, in order to show how easily, in their decline, great natures slide into trifling, as in the affair of the wineskin, the men turned by Circe into swine, whom Zoilus called ‘weeping piglets,’ the dove-fed Zeus reared as a nestling, the ten-day fast on the wreckage, and the improbabilities of the slaying of the suitors. What can we call these but, in very truth, the dreams of Zeus? §14
There is a second reason for noticing the Odyssey too: that you may see how, in great writers and poets, the decline of passion turns into character. Such, for instance, are the descriptions of the household of Odysseus, which are rendered with strokes of character, as it were a kind of comedy of manners. §15