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Homero / Ilíada / Odisseia

  

HOMERO. Ilíada. Tr. Frederico Lourenço. Lisboa: Quetzal Editores, 2019

HOMERO. Odisseia. Tr. Frederico Lourenço. Lisboa: Quetzal Editores, 2018


Porphyry   informs us, in his excellent treatise, De Antro Nymph. [TTS vol. 13] that it was the opinion of Numenius, the Pythagorean, (to which he also assents) that the person of Ulysses, in the Odyssey, represents to us a man, who passes in a regular manner, over the dark and stormy sea of generation; and thus, at length, arrives at that region where tempests and seas are unknown, and finds a nation, who
Ne’er knew salt, or heard the billows roar.

Indeed, he who is conscious of the delusions of the present life, and the enchantments of this material house, in which his soul is detained, like Ulysses in the irriguous cavern of Calypso, will, like him continually bewail his captivity, and inly pine for a return to his native country. Of such a one it may be said as of Ulysses (in the excellent and pathetic translation of Mr Pope,)

But sad Ulysses by himself apart.
Pour’d the big sorrows of his swelling heart;
All on the lonely shore he sate to weep,
And roll’d his eyes around the restless deep:
Tow’rd the lov’d coast, he roll’d his eyes in vain,
Till, dimm’d with rising grief, they stream’d again.
Odyssey book v. 103.

Such a one, too, like Ulysses, will not always wish in vain for a passage over the dark ocean of a corporeal life, but by the assistance of Mercury, who may be considered as the emblem of reason, he will at length be enabled to quit the magic embraces of Calypso, the goddess of Sense, and to return again into the arms of Penelope, or Philosophy, the long lost and proper object of his love. [Thomas Taylor  ]