The Authoress of the Odyssey

25

Ulysses was to appease Neptune's anger by going as a missionary to preach his name among a people that did not know him.

26

The want of coherence here is obvions, but as it is repeated when Ulysses ought to come to the wandering cliffs (which he never does) it must be referred to a lacuna not in the text, but in the writer's sources of information – of which she seems fully aware.

27

I suppose this line to have been added when lines 426 – 446 of this book were added.

28

The wandering cliffs are certainly intended, for when Ulysses is recapitulating his adventures in Book xxiii. he expressly mentions having reached the πλαγκτὰς πέτρας, just after the Sirens, and before Scylla and Charybdis (xxiii. 327). The writer is determined to have them in her story however little she may know about them.

29

I incline to think that these lines are an after thought, added by the writer herself.

30

σὺν ἀρτεμέεσσι φίλοισιν.

31

Minerva, in her desire to minimise the time during which the suitors had been at Ulysses' house, seems to have forgotten that they had been there ever since Telemachus was quite a child (Od. ii. 312-14).

32

i. e. which seemed to fly past them.

33

According to tradition, she had hanged herself on hearing a report of the death of her son.

34

See Chapter XII (#Page_210), near the beginning.

35

In almost all other places he is called Melanthius.

36

All this might very well be, if the scene is laid in an open court, but hardly if it was in a hall inside a house.

37

ἐς μέσσον (line 447).

38

They might very well fight in the middle of an open court, but hardly in a covered hall. They would go outside.

39

ἐν μεγάροισιν, but not ἐν μεγάροισι σκιόεσσι.

40

There is no indication as though they went out to do this; they seem to have emptied the ashes on to the open part of the court.

41

I have repeatedly seen geese so feeding at Trapani and in the neighbourhood. In summer the grass is all burned up so that they cannot graze as in England.

42

This is the only reference to Sardinia in either Iliad or Odyssey.

43

If Telemachus had never seen anything of the kind before, so probably, neither had the writer of the Odyssey– at any rate no commentator has yet been able to understand her description, and I doubt whether she understood it herself. It looks as though the axe heads must have been wedged into the handles or so bound on to them as to let the hole be visible through which the handle would go when the axe was in use. The trial is evidently a double one, of strength as regards the bending of the bow, and accuracy of aim as regards shooting through a row of rings.

44

It is not expressly stated that the "stone pavement" is here intended. The Greek has simply ἆλτο δ᾽ ἐπὶ μέγαν οὐδόν, but I do not doubt that the stone pavement is intended.

45

This again suggests, though it does not prove, that we are in an open court surrounded by a cloister, on the rafters of which swallows would often perch. Line 297 suggests this even more strongly, "the roof" being, no doubt, the roof of the cloister, on to which Minerva flew from the rafter, that her ægis might better command the whole court.

46

Probably the hide of the heifer that Philœtius had brought in that morning (xx. 186).

47

This room was apparently not within the body of the house. It was certainly on the ground floor, for the bed was fixed on to the stump of a tree; I strongly suspect it to be the vaulted room, round the outside of which the bodies of the guilty maids were still hanging, and I also suspect it was in order to thus festoon the room that Telemachus hanged the women instead of stabbing them, but this is treading on that perilous kind of speculation which I so strongly deprecate in others. If it were not for the gruesome horror of the dance, in lines 129 – 151, I should not have entertained it.

48

Select Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, edited by Richard Garnett, Kegan Paul Trench & Co., 1882, p. 149.

49

Od. x. 278, 279; cf. Il. XXIV. 347, 348.