Noack, in any case, maintains that Paris has but one place to live in by day and to sleep in by night--his [Greek: talamos]. There he sleeps, eats, and polishes his weapons and armour. There Hector finds him looking to his gear; Helen and the maids are all there (_Iliad,_ VI. 321-323). Is this quite certain? Are Helen and the maids in the [Greek: talamos], where Paris is polishing his corslet and looking to his bow, or in an adjacent room? If not in another room, why, when Hector is in the room talking to Paris, does Helen ask him to "come in"? (_Iliad,_ VI. 354). He is in, is there another room whence she can hear him?
The minuteness of these inquiries is tedious!
In _Iliad,_ III. 125, Iris finds Helen "in the hall" weaving. She summons her to come to Priam on the gate. Helen dresses in outdoor costume, and goes forth "from the chamber," [Greek: talamos] (III. 141-142). Are hall and chamber the same room, or did not Helen dress "in the chamber"? In the same Book (III. 174) she repents having left the [Greek: talamos] of Menelaus, not his hall: the passage is not a repetition in words of her speech in the Odyssey.
The gods, of course, are lodged like men. When we find that Zeus has really a separate sleeping chamber, built by Hephaestus, as Odysseus has (_Iliad,_ XIV. 166-167), we are told that this is a late interpolation. Mr. Leaf, who has a high opinion of this scene, "the Beguiling of Zeus," places it in the "second expansions"; he finds no "late Odyssean" elements in the language. In _Iliad,_ I. 608-611, Zeus "departed to his couch"; he seems not to have stayed and slept in the hall.
Here a quaint problem occurs. Of all late things in the Odyssey the latest is said to be the song of Demodocus about the loves of Ares and Aphrodite in the house of Hephaestus. [Footnote: Odyssey, VIII. 266-300.] We shall show that this opinion is far from certainly correct. Hephaestus sets a snare round the bed in his [Greek: talamos] and catches the guilty lovers. _Now_, was his [Greek: talamos] or bedroom, also his dining-room? If so, the author of the song, though so "late," knows what Noack knows, and what the poets who assign sleeping chambers to wedded folks do not know, namely, that neither married gods nor married men have separate bedrooms. This is plain, for he makes Hephaestus stand at the front door of his house, and shout to the gods to come and see the sinful lovers. [Footnote: Ibid., VI. 304-305] They all come and look on _from the front door_ (_Odyssey_, VII. 325), which leads into the [Greek: megaron], the hall. If the lovers are in bed in the hall, then hall and bedroom are all one, and the terribly late poet who made this lay knows it, though the late poets of the _Odyssey_ and _Iliad_ do not.