The Odyssey being essentially a sea-story, the prevalence in its fauna of marine species is not surprising. Seals frequently present themselves; coots and cormorants, laughing gulls and sea-mews, dive and play amid the surges that beat upon its magic shores; ospreys call and cry; a cuttle-fish is limned to the life; Scylla has been supposed to represent a magnified and monstrous cephalopod. Dolphins are common to the Iliad and Odyssey, and frequent the Ægean nowadays as of old.[187] Their mythical associations in post-Homeric literature are, indeed, forgotten; but the direction in which they travel, collected into shoals, helps the fishermen of Syra and Melos to a rude forecast of the set of impending winds.
The only significant zoological novelty, then, in the Odyssey may be said to lie in its recognition of the goose as a domesticated bird. The prominence given by it to swine-keeping, only incidentally mentioned in the Iliad, is also noteworthy. A dissimilarity, on the other hand, in the ethical sentiment towards animals displayed in the two poems—above all, as regards the horse and dog—cannot fail to strike a dispassionate reader; but this has been sufficiently dwelt upon in a separate chapter. The remark need only here be added that the conception of the dog Argos seems no less thoroughly European than that of the horses of Rhesus is Asiatic. Both, it is true, may have had a local origin on the same side of the Hellespont, but, from the point of view of moral geography, they undoubtedly belong to different continents.
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IF we can accept as tolerably complete the view of early Achæan beliefs presented to us in the Iliad and Odyssey, they included but few legendary associations with vegetable growths. The treatment of the Homeric flora, like that of the Homeric fauna, is essentially simple and direct. One magic herb has a place in it, and the ‘enchanted stem’ of the lotus bears fruit of inexplicable potency over the subtly compounded human organism; but tree-worship is as remote from the poet’s thoughts as animal-worship, and flower-myths seem equally beyond his ken. He knew of no ‘love-lies-bleeding’ stories interpreting the passionate glow of scarlet petals; nor of ‘forget-me-not’ stories fitted to the more tender sentiment of azure blooms; nor of delicate calyxes nurtured by goddesses’ tears; nor of any other of the wistful human fancies endlessly intertwined with the beautiful starry apparitions of spring-tide on the blossoming earth. The simplicity of his admiration for them might, indeed, almost have incurred the disapprobation of ultra-Wordsworthians. With the ‘yellow primrose’ he never had an opportunity of making acquaintance, by ‘the river’s brim’ or elsewhere; but crocuses or hyacinths, violets or poppies, drew him into no reveries; no mystical meanings clung about the images of them in his mind; he looked at them with open eyes of delight, and went his way.