Lecture: Dr. Glenn C. Arbery, “The Mantle of Eumaios”

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By Dr. Glenn C. Arbery
President
Wyoming Catholic College
November 17, 2021

 

At the risk of undercutting my ethos, I want to recommend a reason to read Homer that might at first sound shallow or unimportant: the pleasure of it, even in translation several millennia after the original composition — the pleasure of experiencing the ennobling lucidity of the Homeric world. William Wordsworth writes in his “Preface to Lyrical Ballads” that the one necessary thing for a poet is “giving immediate pleasure to a human Being possessed of that information which may be expected from him, not as a lawyer, a physician, a mariner, an astronomer or a natural philosopher, but as a Man.” Wordsworth surely knows that it would sound more respectable to say that the poet’s first task is to reveal the truth, but he goes on to defend his argument: “Nor let this necessity of producing immediate pleasure be considered as a degradation of the Poet’s art. It is far otherwise. It is an acknowledgment of the beauty of the universe, an acknowledgment the more sincere because it is not formal, but indirect; it is a task light and easy to him who looks at the world in the spirit of love: further, it is an homage paid to the native and naked dignity of man, to the grand elementary principle of pleasure, by which he knows, and feels, and lives, and moves. We have no sympathy but what is propagated by pleasure.”

By pleasure, Wordsworth obviously means more than mere sensation, because the pleasure of poetry comes from the complex satisfactions of experiencing the world remade and re-presented in language for the enjoyment of the imagination. Homer surely sets the standard, because he pleases everywhere — certainly, in his famous similes — but also in his way of giving us the world we inhabit, the well-furnished palaces of kings or the shelters of soldiers at war, the lions and wild boars, the attention to clothing and language, the young people in their games and dances, the old men in their quarrels and judgments, the fields being plowed, the mountains, the unpredictable seas, the rootedness of real marriage and the ancient ritual. He focuses our attention on central actions in human life: in the Iliad, on the terrible cost of avenging insulted pride, especially the ultimate insult of being mortal, and in the Odyssey, on the difficulty of truly getting back to the home once possessed and now lost.

Homer’s world feels spacious, elemental, charged with presence. It is the opposite of what the philosopher Charles Taylor has called the “disenchanted cosmos.” In Dante’s Inferno, Virgil calls the pagan world the time of “the false and lying gods,” and of course we know what he means, but poetically, the presence of the gods provides what Wallace Stevens calls the “necessary angel,” a divine perspective on human things, a focus of importance. In Stevens’ poem, which is really about poetry, the angel says, “I am the necessary angel of earth,/Since, in my sight, you see the earth again,/Cleared of its stiff and stubborn, man-locked set.” In order to clear our own vision of our habitual perspective, we need to imagine the angel seeing the same thing we see. Male students might get some of this effect if their mothers unexpectedly visit their dorm rooms, but that’s not quite what Stevens means.

Homer accomplishes this clearing of sight with the intervention of gods — particularly Athena. For example, when the goddess, disguised as Mentes, stands in the threshold of Odysseus’ house in Ithaka at the beginning of the Odyssey, Telemachos looks up and welcomes the stranger, and everything hopeless about his situation begins to change in the conversation that follows. The presence of Athena, whom he recognizes afterward, alters the way everything in the household appears to him — the maids, the suitors, the furnishings of the house. Stevens might even have this moment in mind in his own poem, because the angel says, “I am the angel of reality,/Seen for the moment standing in the door.”

One of the pleasures of the Odyssey is seeing ordinary things and people revealed as part of the larger weave of divine importance. Tonight, I want to take a minor episode from Book 14 as an example and give it what might seem undue attention. I think it reveals a good deal about the ways that Homer pleases by teaching us to see the ordinary things of our lives again. First, though, a word about Athena as the “necessary angel” of the Odyssey. From the very beginning of the poem, she is the advocate of Odysseus, interceding with Zeus to release him from his long exile from home because of the enmity of Poseidon. As you recall, her plan has several parts: first, to prod Telemachos to go in search of news about his father; then to get Odysseus from Kalypso’s island to the Phaiakians and safely home; and finally, in the action that comprises the second half of the epic, to complete the homecoming by uniting father and son and then providing for the slaughter of the suitors and the reunion of Odysseus and Penelope.

After telling his story to the Phaiakians and receiving abundant gifts, Odysseus falls asleep on the ship that takes him home. The sailors set him down, bedding and all, in Ithaka, and he when he awakens, Athena makes his own homeland look unrecognizable to him. She appears to him twice, first as a “young man, a herdsman/of sheep, a delicate boy, such as the children of kings are.” In this guise, she reveals to him that he is at home on Ithaka. When Odysseus launches one of his elaborate lies about how he got there, Athena, you will recall, smiles on him and takes on the shape “of a woman/both beautiful and tall, and well-versed in glorious handiworks.” This too is a disguise, but one closer to her own nature. The two have a poignant exchange, and Odysseus reprimands the goddess:

                        there was a time when you were kind to me
in the days when we sons of the Achaians were fighting in Troy land.
But after we had sacked the sheer citadel of Priam,
and went away in our ships, and the gods scattered the Achaians,
I never saw you, daughter of Zeus, after that, nor did I
know of your visiting my ship to beat off some trouble
from me, but always with my heart torn inside its coverings,
I wandered, until the gods set me free from unhappiness, until
in the rich territory of the Phaiakian men you cheered me
with words, then led me, yourself in person, into their city.

In other words, Odysseus did not experience the presence of Athena even once during the entire decade of his wanderings. But now, back on Ithaka, as they plot against the suitors, she taps him with her wand and transforms him.

[She] withered the handsome flash that was upon his flexible
limbs, and ruined the brown hair on his head, and about him,
to cover all his body, she put the skin of an ancient
old man, and then she dimmed those eyes that had been so handsome.
Then she put another vile rag on him, and a tunic,
tattered, squalid, blackened with the foul smoke….

He follows her advice not to go directly to his own palace but to go in disguise to the hut of the swineherd Eumaios.

Should it strike us as remarkable that the goddess Athena knows a swineherd on the island of Ithaka? Athena clearly knows the habits of Eumaios and the way he leads the pigs “near the Rock of the Raven and beside the spring Arethousa,/to eat the acorns that stay their strength, and drink of the darkling/water.” For at least three books of the Odyssey, Eumaios is at the center of the poem. He’s the first one to welcome his old master when he returns to Ithaca, although he does not recognize him. Eumaios protects Odysseus from the beginning, starting with the episode when he rescues the old beggar from his vicious guard dogs. Eumaios must call them off — in fact, even throw stones at them to keep them from attacking the unrecognized master. The swineherd’s disciplined vigilance might remind us of parables in the Gospels about staying awake for the return of the bridegroom. As a steward of Odysseus’ property, he has not faltered in his virtuous work even though he has had no one supervising him for 20 years. At one point, he comments casually that a man loses half his virtue on the day he becomes a slave, but he is a figure of almost startling fidelity, corresponding to Penelope, whose similar fidelity keeps the possibility of restoration intact. Thinking of his excellence, one of my students last year pointed out that Achilles could be thinking of Eumaios when he complains in the underworld about preferring life to glory in death: “I would rather follow the plow as thrall to another/man, one with no land allotted him and not much to live on,/than be a king over all the perished dead” (11.489-91).

In Book 14, Eumaios invites the stranger into his hut and asks him his story. Odysseus claims to be from Crete, a son of Kastor who fought in the Trojan War and had many misadventures afterward. In its way, the evening recalls in a humble way what Odysseus says to the Phaiakians: “I think there is not occasion accomplished that is more pleasant/than when festivity hold sway among all the populace,/and the feasters up and down the houses are sitting in order/and listening to the singer.” Here Odysseus tells his elaborate and entertaining story, and Eumaois makes sacrifices and gives his guest the choice cut of the meat and pours his wine. Afterwards, it’s a cold, damp night and Odysseus in his rags wants to see if he can get some extra clothing from his host. He tells another story about how he was on an ambush detail in Troy led by Odysseus and Menelaus. The night got very cold:

I, in my carelessness when I started with my companions,
had left my mantle; I never thought I would be so cold,
but went along with only my shield and my shining waist guard. (480-82)

The old beggar claims that he spoke to Odysseus about his situation and that Odysseus hushed him and then came up with a ruse, pretending that he had had a prophetic dream that they were too exposed and that Agamemnon should send more men to them.

So he spoke, and Thoas sprang up, the son of Andraimon,
quickly, and took off and laid aside his red mantle,
and went on the run for the ships, and I lay down in his clothes,
happily, and rested until Dawn of the golden throne came. (499-502)

Using this story, Odysseus then asks if one of the swineherds will give him a mantle for the night, and Eumaios tells him that he can have one, though he must wear his rags again in the morning. “There are not many extra mantles and extra tunics/here to change into. There is only one set for each man.” (513-14) He promises greater generosity if Odysseus returns, but in the meantime, he does what he can for his guest.

So he spoke, and sprang up, and laid a bed for him next to
the fire, and threw the fleeces of sheep and goats over it.
There Odysseus laid down, and [Eumaios] threw over him a mantle
that was great and thick, which he kept by him as an extra covering
to wrap in when winter weather came on and was too rigorous.

We could unpack this story a little in its ironies. The real Odysseus disguised as a beggar makes up a story about the way that Odysseus tricked someone else into helping him out. The story obviously reminds Eumaios of the cleverness of his master Odysseus, which Odysseus exhibits for Homer’s readers in this very scene. What’s so clever about it? As a beggar, he does not simply whine that he is cold and ask for a mantle, but he gives the swineherds a good story that praises their master and thus respects the good order of their household. When Eumaios gives Odysseus his own mantle to cover him, the gift tells us a great deal about the understanding of disciplined virtue that radiates with such warmth from the Odyssey. Odysseus accepts the gift of his slave, a temporary gift that very quietly brings together a number of meanings important to the poem.

To understand the mantle of Eumaios, we might think about what Odysseus wears or does not wear elsewhere in the Odyssey. Clothing is important in the Homeric world, where weaving is a major part of what we see going on with all the female characters — Penelope, of course, but also Circe, Kalypso, and Arete; Athena is the goddess of weaving. Every piece of clothing is handmade. In the Iliad, Helen is first seen at her loom, “weaving a great web,/a red folding robe, and working into it the numerous struggles/of Trojans, breakers of horses, and bronze-armored Achaians.” Penelope, of course, weaves and unweaves the shroud of Laertes. In other words, clothing might well involve high art and thoughtful meditation on patterns and meanings. Clothing can reveal who you are, or it can conceal who you are. In Eumaios’ hut, Odysseus says that the swineherds “slight me because I wear vile clothing upon me.” Much earlier in the poem, Helen has told Telemachos about how Odysseus came into Troy dressed as a beggar to spy on the city, and of course he will use vile clothing as his ruse against the suitors. If he appeared to them in his proper garments, he would obviously be more easily respected but also more easily recognized and killed. On the other hand, having no clothes at all poses its own challenges, and in this regard, the most revealing preparation for understanding the mantle of Eumaios is the sequence when Odysseus leaves the island of Kalypso, sails to Scheria, the land of the Phaiakians, meets Nausikaa, and then finds his way into the palace of Arete and Alkinoos.

Kalypso could rightly be called the anti-Athena. Athena is the goddess of heroes, the one who brings their natures forward most fully, as she does with Diomedes in Book 5 of the Iliad. She offers fame and glory, whereas Kalypso is by her very nature the opposite. Whereas Athena brings out of hiding, out of forgetfulness, Kalypso holds in and immobilizes Odysseus. Her name means concealment or hiding. She is eclipse and obscurity. Given the Greek word for truth, a-letheia, she could almost be characterized as Lethe and forgottenness. She takes in Odysseus after he washes up on her island, and after seven years with her, Odysseus describes her to Arete and Alkinoos in Scheria as a “dread goddess.” This is something we need to bear in mind, I think, when we consider who she is. She is not, as one of my teachers amusingly described her, an aerobics instructor, but someone who inspires terror and dread. What is dreadful comes in part from her beauty — she says herself that Penelope is no match for her — but this beauty obscures and consumes this hero who has come into her power. She holds Odysseus as a kind of erotic captive. She clothes him in the immortal — ambrosial — clothing that she weaves on her loom, but he soaks it daily with his tears, as he later tells Arete and Alkinoos.

Athena negotiates the release of Odysseus with Zeus, who sends Hermes to this island far from any other, as Hermes complains when he arrives there and finds Kalypso singing in her cave as she works at her loom. She has repeatedly offered to make Odysseus immortal by giving him nectar and ambrosia, which he has refused, but when Odysseus leaves her island, he wears the ambrosial garments of Kalypso. He does not want immortal eclipse in her presence, but he wears her concealing immortality, so to speak, when he leaves the island. You remember the story. For 17 days, he sails with a good following wind until Poseidon spots him out in the ocean and sends the storm that wrecks the raft and hurls Odysseus overboard. Even though it weighs him down, Odysseus wears the clothing of Kalypso until the last minute. It is the last thing that he must strip away before he puts on the veil of Ino and leaps into the sea to swim his way to Scheria. Kalypso’s ambrosial garments almost drown him. Kalypso is death at sea, that nameless and ignoble end that warriors fear — again, the opposite of Athena.

Having stripped off this obscuring allurement, Odysseus swims for two days and finally crawls exhausted onto the land at Scheria. One of the lightest comic scenes in the whole of the Odyssey comes the next morning, which is all about clothing. As Odysseus sleeps beneath a pile of leaves, Athena sends a dream to the Princess Nausicaa to take the dirty garments of her household down to the river mouth and the beach to wash them in preparation for her anticipated day of wedding. “The shining clothes are lying away uncared for, while your/marriage is not far off, when you should be in your glory/for clothes to wear, and provide too for those who attend you” (6. 26-28). That day, Nausikaa and the other girls wash the clothes in the river and lay them out to dry on the beach and then play a game until the ball goes in the water and their shout wakes up Odysseus under his olive tree. Naked and still swollen with salt, not having eaten for since before the raft was destroyed, he breaks off a branch to hold before him and goes

            in the confidence of his strength, like some hill-kept lion,
who advances, though he is rained on and blown by the wind, and both eyes
kindle; he goes out after cattle or sheep, or it may be
deer in the wilderness, and his belly is urgent upon him
to get inside of a close steading and go for the sheepflocks.
So Odysseus was ready to face young girls with well-ordered
hair, naked though he was, for the need was on him. (6.130-36)

The more we think about the simile, the funnier it gets. Odysseus immediately clothes himself with language in his immensely flattering appeal to Nausicaa:

‘I am at your knees, O Queen. But are you mortal or goddess?
If indeed you are one of the gods who hold wide heaven,
then I must find in you the nearest likeness to Artemis
the daughter of great Zeus, for beauty, figure, and stature.’

Anyone else in this situation, naked and starving, might be tempted to go straight for the picnic baskets, but Odysseus tells her, “Wonder takes me as I look on you.” He tells her a story about a a palm tree he once saw on Delos near Apollo’s altar — all this before he ever mentions his own need and asks her to pity him and give him a rag to wear. Already taken with him, Nausicaa allows him to bathe in a secluded place, where he scrapes off “the scurf of brine from the barren salt sea” and anoints himself with olive oil and puts on the clothing that Nausicaa has given him. Then Athena accomplishes one of her cosmetic transformations: she makes him “seem taller/for the eye to behold, and thicker, and on his head she arrange[s]/the curling locks that [hang] down like hyacinthine petals” (229-31). Suitably impressed, Nausicaa soon guilelessly offers to marry him, surely thinking that this is what her dream meant, but the emphasis here should once again fall on the clothing. He has on one of the garments that Nausicaa brought from her palace. You recall that Athena herself leads him into town and he goes unnoticed into the palace, where “white-armed Arete,” Nausikaa’s mother, recognizes “the mantle and tunic when she [sees] them, splendid/clothes which she herself had made, with her serving women” (234-35). In other words, Odysseus, still a stranger, appears in the palace clothed as one of her own, wearing her own handiwork, and these clothes are the first he wears since stripping off the ambrosial clothing of Calypso. It’s interesting to think that no other mortal — in fact, not even the god Hermes — ever saw Odysseus clothed in Kalypso’s ambrosial beauty. This appearance in the clothing of Arete begins to reveal his identity in keeping with Athena’s plan, especially when he announces his name at the beginning of Book 9 and tells the story of his Great Wanderings.

In the story that Odysseus tells the Phaiakians, from the first encounter with the Kikonians until the destruction of his ship before he washes ashore on the island of Kalypso, there is not a single episode where clothing plays an important part, as it clearly does in the scenes leading up to this narration and the scenes following it on Ithaka. Or is there perhaps one such episode? Circe is the beguiling sorceress of the poem, not so much an anti-Athena as a dark double of the Olympian goddess. When Odysseus sends the others to explore the middle of the island of Aiaia, the men draw close to the house, and wolves and lions come fawning upon them like dogs that expect some treat from their master.

[The men] stood there in the forecourt of the goddess with the glorious
hair, and heard Circe inside singing in a sweet voice
as she went up and down with a great design on a loom, immortal
such as goddesses have, delicate and lovely and glorious
their work. (10. 220-24)

Odysseus mentions that Circe gave him a mantle and tunic to wear after he resisted her magic. But what does Circe have to do with clothing, otherwise? Perhaps we should focus on what happens when Circe welcomes Odysseus’ men into her home. She mixes “malignant drugs” into their wine

                        to make them forgetful of their own country.
When she had given them this and they had drunk it down, next thing
she struck them with her wand and drove them into her pig pens,
and they took on the look of pigs, with the heads and voices
and bristles of pigs, but the minds within them stayed as they had been
before. So crying they went in, and before them Circe
through down acorns for them to eat, and ilex and cornel
buds, such food as pigs who sleep on the ground always feed on. (10.236-43)

When Odysseus finds them later, he describes them as looking like “nine-year-old porkers.” Suppose we think of their transformation as a kind of anti-clothing, a more intense mode of concealment than Kalypso’s. At the same time, though, Circe reveals their inner simile, so to speak, by turning them into pigs. Odysseus approaching Nausicaa was “like some hill-kept lion,” and perhaps, if Circe had succeeded with her magic, he would have become another of the fawning lions in her courtyard. His men turn

Circe resembles Athena in her capacity to transform others. Athena, too, manipulates shapes and appearances, making Odysseus either handsome or ugly, and she is the one who guides Odysseus to the man of pigs, a man unlike anyone he has met on his travels. The scene with Circe anticipates the Eumaios episodes that follow it within a few books in the Odyssey, where the pigs in their orderly pens surely remind Odysseus of his own men before Circe released them “back once more into men, younger than they had been/and taller for the eye to behold and handsome are by far” (10. 395-96). A shimmer of likeness begins in the mind of Homer’s reader: his men sound more than a little like the well-fed suitors of Penelope who have the minds of pigs, and the pigs of Eumaios remind us of Circe’s pigs who have the minds of men.

So, we return to the hut of Eumaios where Odysseus tells his stories in the divinely fashioned vile clothing of Athena, the loose old man’s skin, the dulled eyes, all these directly provided by the goddess, who has tapped him with her wand. Clothing per se was not a major theme in the wanderings, and neither was Athena, but now paying attention to the presence of Athena as a guide and intercessor means being aware of the texture, the textile, of events that becomes a coherent narrative: the weave, the text. As Odysseus says to her in Book 13 once she has assured him of her presence and support in overthrowing the suitors, “Come on then, weave the design, the way I shall take my vengeance/upon them” (13.386-87). Literally, come on, weave the mêtis — the skill, the wisdom, the craft. Embedded in the Odyssey is Odysseus’ decade of unraveling, of being beguiled and kalypsoed, the godless years of Poseidon’s curse characterized by loss and futility. But when Athena reassumes her active role, the pattern begins to emerge, and the pattern reveals the meanings that quietly accumulate in the mantle of Eumaios as part of the meaning of his homecoming.

Let’s return to the image itself: after a night of drinking wine and telling stories, Eumaios makes a bed by the fire for this Cretan stranger. He lays down the fleeces of sheep and goats to make it comfortable:

There Odysseus laid down, and [Eumaios] threw over him a mantle
that was great and thick, which he kept by him as an extra covering
to wrap in when winter weather came on and was too rigorous. (14.520-22)

This is the man clothed by goddesses and queens, the hero whose fame goes up to the heavens, who admits his need and happily accepts the gift of his own slave. Eumaios is the man whose piety toward the gods and whose strong practice of virtue, despite the circumstances of his enslavement, in many ways reintroduce Odysseus to the discipline he once fostered in others. Characteristically, Odysseus tricks his way into getting the mantle, but in doing so he reveals the underlying integrity that remains in his estate. Eumaios covers him with it, not knowing who he is. We might think of the mantle next to the shroud of Laertes that Penelope wove and unwove for three years as she was putting off a decision to marry one of her suitors. The shroud was a ruse, true, but the ruse involved a pious way of honoring the old man, her husband’s father. She wanted to put into the weave the story of his accomplishments, so that the literalness of his dead body would be covered and hidden by this record of his importance.

The mantle of Eumaeus does not have the same elegance, and it has no design woven into it, but it has its analogies. It covers the greatness of Odysseus with plain goodness in the most literal way. Odysseus, the master of the household, has come back unrecognized. He goes into the house of a servant whose every act and word reveals his continuing loyalty to a master whom he reveres. Without knowing it, he treats that very master with the respect he deserves, not because he recognizes him, but because of his piety toward Zeus and the discipline of his own virtue. He clothes his master, we might say, in that generosity and virtue, and so prepares him for his full return to responsibility for his own household. Odysseus is protected by the garment of a slave, and yet the slave possesses the daily virtues which he himself needs to recover. This is Athena’s doing. Suppose that, without her guidance, he had ignorantly gone directly to his own household without this interlude with Eumaios.

For this moment of the poem, then, we simply enjoy the image of Odysseus after his travels, warm in the literal mantle and in the trust that it signifies. We might think of Telemachos as a boy coming out to the hut of Eumaios, that sense of being at home here, without the full responsibility he will soon need to assume. It’s not an idea we’re looking at, I hope, but a more attentive and intense experience of an image. I always like to quote John Crowe Ransom’s description of the poetic image in his essay “Poetry: A Note in Ontology,” where writes that

[The image] cannot be dispossessed of a primordial freshness, which idea can never claim. An idea is derivative and tamed. The image is in the natural or wild, state, and it has to be discovered there, not put there, obeying its own law and none of ours. We think we can lay hold of image and take it captive, but the docile captive is not the real image, but only the idea, which is the image with its character beaten out of it.

Images like this one of Odysseus beneath the mantle of Eumaios become part of the weave of the poem, and meanings accumulate in them, perhaps not so much thought out at first as felt out uncritically through the experience of the pleasure of the poem. I suppose I am making an argument about the right way to read Homer — that is, not to beat the character out of his images by turning them too quickly into docile ideas. First, we need to take pleasure in them. The good reader enters a mythical imagination outside of history but also deeply interior to the nature of time as we actually live it, the texture of our earthliness. The Odyssey draws upon the permanence of relations and natures, but also upon the experience of change, and the more attentively the reader imagines what the poem gives in all its texture, the more fully he or she enters what Heidegger calls “a presence sheltered by absence.” We are never literally in a swineherd’s hut in Ithaka 3000 years ago, but when we enter it imaginatively, it saves us from the limitation of circumstance and frees us momentarily from the burden of our own roles and identities, which are part of that “stiff and stubborn, man-locked set” that the angel of reality can help dispel.

Many of the most memorable scenes of the poem follow the quiet episode of the mantle of Eumaios — the return of Telemachus, Odysseus’ entrance into his own home as a beggar, and Odysseus’ meeting in disguise with Penelope. You might remember how she tests the stranger: “Tell me what sort of clothing he wore on his body.” His answer is very exact: “a woolen mantle of purple, with two folds” and a “shining tunic … like the dried-out skin of an onion,/so sheer it was and soft, and shining bright as the sun shines.” A few books later, after the contest of the bow, Odysseus strips his rags from him to begin the slaughter of the suitors. Each scene, to return to my original point, is suspended in the medium of poetic pleasure that comes through the rhythms of language, the protean play of the mind on comparisons, the many recognitions of familiar things re-presented in poetry, and most of all, the pleasure of the unfolding action, from Athena’s first intervention in Book 1 all the way through Odysseus’ reconciliation with the offended townsmen at the very end of the poem.

Why is it, we might ask, that the Odyssey ultimately feels so consonant with the Old Testament in its depiction of the punishments of sensuality and perfidy, and so profoundly pre-Christian in its elevation of simple, hidden people into rewards they could never have expected? I said at the beginning that the poem is about the difficulty of getting back to a home once possessed and now lost. Odysseus could not do it on his own. He needs a saving intervention, a cooperation with Athena, which seems to be an image of the gift of grace that might be hoped for but cannot simply be seized by an act of will. When Wordsworth writes of poetic pleasure as “a task light and easy to him who looks at the world in the spirit of love,” he might be talking about the grace that we recognize in reading Homer.

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