r an exact
science of mind, had not been elaborated to any extent in Homer's day.
Reflective language is a later product of Greek spirit. Still the
philosopher is anticipated and prophesied in the poet, and it certainly
cannot be amiss to trace vague premonitions and promises of the coming
Plato and Aristotle in the old poet. Homer has in him the germ of the
whole Greek world, and for that matter, much of the modern world also;
the best commentary upon him is the 2500 years since his time.

IV. The slaying of the Oxen of the Sun has also its searching
suggestiveness, and is found in one form or other in the World's
greatest Books. Mind destroying mind may be shown as light
extinguishing its own luminary; some such hint lies in the symbolism
both of the act and its punishment. It is indeed the culminating point
of negation--spirit denying spirit. This is the real sin against the
Holy Spirit, unpardonable because repentance, all possibility of pardon
is denied by the doer of the deed. As I understand him, this is the
essence of the sin of Dante against Beatrice, with which she reproaches
him in the last part of the Purgatorio. Suggestions of the same kind of
guilt may be found in the characters of Shakespeare's Hamlet and
Banquo, in whose cases the violation brings on a tragic fate; indeed
every true tragedy has some touches of the light-denying or
light-defying deed and its penalty. Above all rises in this respect the
Faust of Goethe, the theme of which is explicitly intelligence denying
intelligence, whereby the human mind becomes utterly negative, begets
the Devil, and enters into compact with him for a life of indulgence.
While such a state lasts, repentance is impossible.

Some such intimation ancient Homer must have had, and shadowed it forth
in this strange symbolic deed. Ulysses having disregarded all he had
learned by his long and bitter experience, leaving unheeded the
warnings and prophecies of the Supersensible and the Sensible World
(Tiresias and Circe), drops back into the sphere of Calypso, and has to
serve the senses seven years till will and aspiration lift him again.
Such a servitude was not uncommon in Greek legend, Hercules is the very
embodiment thereof; even a God, Apollo, Light itself, has to serve
Admetus, a mortal, in expiation of undivine guilt.

An important element of structure is to be noted at this point: the
poem bifurcates and the reader has to move in two directions. If he
wishes to fol