in which a more detailed picture of some of the events between the Iliad and the Odyssey might be given. Demodokos, the Phæacian bard, is made to recount (in abbreviated form) two adventures that had occurred to the great chieftain. Even when such stories did not immediately add to the picture of Odysseus' deeds or character, they served to point to the great background from which the adventures of the much-enduring wanderer, now completely isolated, should stand out; and to set these in the ideal framework which could alone give them their full significance. This natural creative instinct of legendary poetry also inspired the poet of the "Journey to Hades". He, too, saw the adventures of Odysseus not in isolation but in lively and vital connexion with all the other adventures that took their origin from Troy. He conceived the idea of bringing once more, for the last time, the chieftain famed in council and war, into communication with the mightiest king and the noblest {35} hero of that famous expedition; and to do that he had to take him to the realm of the shadows which had long contained them. Nor could he well avoid the tone of pathos which is natural to this interview on the borders of the realm of nothingness to which all the desire and the strength of life must eventually come. The questioning of Teiresias is merely, as has been said, the poet's pretext for confronting Odysseus with his mother and his former companions, and this meeting was his prime motive. Probably this particular device was suggested by the recollection of the story which Menelaos tells of his meeting with Proteus, the Old Man of the Sea (_Od._ iv, 351 ff.),[63\1] where the inquiry from the seer as to the means of reaching home again is also a mere pretext for the narration of Return adventures--those of Aias, Agamemnon, and Odysseus. § 2