Beautiful, indeed, is the picture of married life which Homer draws. “There is nothing,” he says,[15] “better and nobler that when husband and wife, being of one mind, rule a household.” And such households he portrays in the halls of Alcinous and Arete, and in the Trojan home of Hector and Andromache[16], but still more marked and beautiful is the constant love of Penelope and Ulysses.[17] Indeed, Homer always represents the married relation as happy and harmonious. In the households of earth there is peace. It is in the halls of Olympus that we find wife quarrelling with husband. But the love of these women to their husbands is the love of mortals to mortals. They do not swear eternal devotion to each other. They have no dream of loving only one, and that one for ever, in this life and the next. They do not look much beyond the present; and, therefore, if a husband or wife were to die, it would be incumbent on the survivor to look out for a successor. Even when a husband is long absent from his wife, it is not expected that he can endure the troubles of life without the company and comfort of one woman’s society. Thus Agamemnon takes to himself the captive Chryseis, and comes to love her better than his wife. Thus Achilles becomes so attached to Briseis as to weep bitterly when she is taken from him; but when she is taken from him, he consoles himself with the beautiful-cheeked Diomede. And Ulysses, though he loves his Penelope best, and longs for her, does not refuse the embraces of the goddesses with whom he is compelled to stay in the course of his wanderings. Homer’s insight into human nature is apparent in the circumstance that it is only in the heart of a true woman that he places resistance to the ordinary modes of thought. The peculiarity of Penelope’s affection is that it will not submit to prevalent ideas; she loves and admires her Ulysses, and she will love no other. Contrary to all custom, she puts off the suitors year after year. The time has arrived when every one expects her to marry again. She has seen her son Telemachus grow to manhood. She has now no excuse. But she still refuses, waiting against hope for the return of him who, in her heart, she believes will return no more.[18]