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throughout, and which perpetually "rob us of our emotional free–
dom"-which power Schiller will grant only to the tragic poet. And
besides it seems to me undemonstrable and improbable that this
procedure of Homeric poetry was directed by aesthetic considerations
or even by an aesthetic feeling of the sort postulated by Goethe and
Schiller. The effect, to be sure, is precisely that which they describe,
and is, furthermore, the actual source of the conception of epic
which they themselves hold, and with them all writers decisively
influenced by classical antiquity. But the true cause of the impression
of "retardation" appears to me to lie elsewhere-namely, in the
need of the Homeric style to leave nothing which it mentions half in
darkness and unrealized.
The excursus upon the origin of Ulysses' scar is not basically dif–
ferent from the many passages in which a newly introduced char–
acter, or even a newly appearing object or implement, though it be
in the thick of a battle, is described as to its nature and its origin; or
in which, upon the appearance of a god, we are told where he last
was, what he was doing there, and by what road he arrived on the
scene; indeed, even the Homeric epithets seem to me in the final
analysis to be traceable to the same need for an externalization of
phenomena in terms perceptible to the senses. Here is the scar,
which comes up in the course of the narrative; and Homer's feeling
simply will not permit him to see it appear out of the darkness of
an unilluminated past; it must be set in full light, and with it a
portion of the hero's boyhood- just as, in the Iliad, when the first
ship is already burning and the Myrmidons finally arm that they may
hasten to help, there is still time not only for the wonderful simile of
the wolf, not only for the order of the Myrmidon host, but also for
a detailed account of the lineage of several secondary captains (II. 16,
155 ff.). To be sure, the aesthetic effect thus produced was soon
noticed and thereafter consciously sought out; but the more original
cause must have lain in the basic impulse of the Homeric style: to
represent phenomena in a fully externalized form, visible and palpable
in all their parts, and completely fixed in their spatial and temporal
relations. Nor do psychological processes receive any other treatment:
of them, too, nothing must remain hidden and unexpressed. With
the utmost fullness, with an orderliness which even passion does not
disturb, Homer's personages vent their innermost hearts in speech;
