"How one misfortune does keep falling upon me after another! I saw
the man to whom my father and mother had married me killed before my
eyes, and my three own dear brothers perished along with him; but
you, Patroclus, even when Achilles was sacking our city and killing
my husband, told me that I was not to cry; for you said that
Achilles himself should marry me, and take me back with him to
Phthia, where we should have a wedding feast among the Myrmidons.
You were always kind to me, and I should never cease to grieve for
you."

This may of course be seriously intended, but Homer was an acute
writer, and if we had met with such a passage in Thackeray we should
have taken him to mean that so long as a woman can get a new
husband, she does not much care about losing the old one--a
sentiment which I hope no one will imagine that I for one moment
endorse or approve of, and which I can only explain as a piece of
sarcasm aimed possibly at Mrs. Homer.

* * * * *

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