gly,
gives soul to the Book. He is so near the world of the Gods in the
present life, that he seems already to dwell with them; age brings this
serene piety.

No accident is it that this Book of Nestor begins and ends with a
festival of sacrifice and prayer; that is the true setting of his
character. What he says to the visitors will take color and meaning
from his fundamental trait; we may expect in his words a full
recognition of divinity in the events of the world.

But he has been a stout fighter in his time, he was in the Trojan War,
though old already at that period. He will give the lesson of his life,
not during that war, but afterwards. He was one of the heroes of the
Iliad, which poem the Odyssey not only does not repeat, but goes out of
its way to avoid any repetition thereof. Moreover he was one of those
who returned home successfully, can he tell how it was done? This is
the question of special interest to Telemachus, as his father, after
ten years, has not yet reached home.

Herewith the theme of the Book is suggested: the Return. Physically
this was a return from the Trojan War, which is the pre-supposition of
the whole Odyssey; all the heroes who have not perished, have to get
back to Hellas in some way. These ways are very diverse, according to
the character of the persons and the circumstances. Thus we touch the
second grand Homeric subject, and, indeed, the second grand fact of the
Greek consciousness, which lies imbedded in the Return (_Nostos_). A
short survey of this subject must here be given. We have in the present
Book several phases of the Return; Nestor, Menelaus, Ulysses are all
Returners, to use a necessary word for the thought; each man solves the
problem in his own manner.

Now what is this problem? Let us see. The expedition to Troy involved a
long separation from home and country on the part of every man who went
with it; still this separation had to be made for the sake of Helen,
that she, the wife and queen, return to home and country, from which
she had been taken. Her Return, indeed, is the essence of all their
Returns. We see that through the war they were severed from Family and
State, were compelled to give up for the time being their whole
institutional life. This long absence deepens into alienation, into a
spiritual scission, from mere habit in the first place; then, in the
second place, they are seeking to destroy a home and a country; though
it be that of the enemy, and