The Odyssey
it not immediately easy to make Euryclea scan in xvii. 495, she hastily
called her Eurynome, intending either to alter this name later or to
change the earlier Euryclea’s into Eurynome. She then drifted in to
Eurynome as convenience further directed, still nevertheless hankering
after Euryclea, till at last she found that the path of least
resistance would lie in the direction of making Eurynome and Euryclea
two persons. Therefore in xxiii. 289-292 both Eurynome and “the nurse”
(who can be none other than Euryclea) come on together. I do not say
that this is feminine, but it is not unfeminine.]
[157] [ See note [156]]
[158] [ This, I take it, was immediately in front of the main entrance
of the inner courtyard into the body of the house.]
[159] [ This is the only allusion to Sardinia in either “Iliad” or
“Odyssey.”]
[160] [ The normal translation of the Greek word would be “holding
back,” “curbing,” “restraining,” but I cannot think that the writer
meant this—she must have been using the word in its other sense of
“having,” “holding,” “keeping,” “maintaining.”]
[161] [ I have vainly tried to realise the construction of the
fastening here described.]
[162] [ See plan of Ulysses’ house in the appendix. It is evident that
the open part of the court had no flooring but the natural soil.]
[163] [ See plan of Ulysses’ house, and note [175].]
[164] [ i.e. the door that led into the body of the house.]
[165] [ This was, no doubt, the little table that was set for Ulysses,
“Od.” xx. 259.
Surely the difficulty of this passage has been overrated. I suppose the
iron part of the axe to have been wedged into the handle, or bound
securely to it—the handle being half buried in the ground. The axe
would be placed edgeways towards the archer, and he would have to shoot
his arrow through the hole into which the handle was fitted when the
axe was in use. Twelve axes were placed in a row all at the same
height, all exactly in front of one another, all edgeways to Ulysses
whose arrow passed through all the holes from the first onward. I
cannot see how the Greek can bear any other interpretation, the words
being, {Greek}
“He did not miss a single hole from the first onwards.” {Greek}
according to Liddell and Scott being “the hole for the handle of an
axe, etc.,” while {Greek} (“Od.” v. 236) is, according to the same
authorities, the handle itself. The feat is absurdly impossible, but
our authoress sometimes has a soul above impossibilities.]
[166] [ The reader will note how the spoiling of good food distresses
the writer even in such a supreme moment as this.]
[167] [ Here we have it again. Waste of substance comes first.]
[168] [ cf. “Il.” iii. 337 and three other places. It is strange that
the author of the “Iliad” should find a little horse-hair so alarming.
Possibly enough she was merely borrowing a common form line from some
earlier poet—or poetess—for this is a woman’s line rather than a
man’s.]
[169] [ Or perhaps simply “window.” See plan in the appendix.]
[170] [ i.e. the pavement on which Ulysses was standing.]
[171] [ The interpretation of lines 126-143 is most dubious, and at
best we are in a region of melodrama: cf., however, i. 425, etc. from
which it appears that there was a tower in the outer court, and that
Telemachus used to sleep in it. The ὀρσοθύρα I take to be a door, or
trap door, leading on to the roof above Telemachus’s bed room, which we
are told was in a place that could be seen from all round—or it might
be simply a window in Telemachus’s room looking out into the street.
From the top of the tower the outer world was to be told what was going
on, but people could not get in by the ὀρσοθύρα: they would have to
come in by the main entrance, and Melanthius explains that the mouth of
the narrow passage (which was in the lands of Ulysses and his friends)
commanded the only entrance by which help could come, so that there
would be nothing gained by raising an alarm.
As for the ῥῶγες of line 143, no commentator ancient or modern has
been able to say what was intended—but whatever they were,
Melanthius could never carry twelve shields, twelve helmets, and
twelve spears. Moreover, where he could go the others could go
also. If a dozen suitors had followed Melanthius into the house
they could have attacked Ulysses in the rear, in which case, unless
Minerva had intervened promptly, the “Odyssey” would have had a
different ending. But throughout the scene we are in a region of
extravagance rather than of true fiction—it cannot be taken
seriously by any but the very serious, until we come to the episode
of Phemius and Medon, where the writer begins to be at home again.]
[172] [ I presume it was intended that there should be a hook driven
into the bearing-post.]
[173] [ What for?]
[174] [ Gr: {Greek}. This is not {Greek}.]
[175] [ From lines 333 and 341 of this book, and lines 145 and 146 of
bk. xxi we can locate the approach to the {Greek} with some certainty.]
[176] [ But in xix. 500-502 Ulysses scolded Euryclea for offering
information on this very point, and declared himself quite able to
settle it for himself.]
[177] [ There were a hundred and eight Suitors.]
[178] [ Lord Grimthorpe, whose understanding does not lend itself to
easy imposition, has been good enough to write to me about my
conviction that the “Odyssey” was written by a woman, and to send me
remarks upon the gross absurdity of the incident here recorded. It is
plain that all the authoress cared about was that the women should be
hanged: as for attempting to realise, or to make her readers realise,
how the hanging was done, this was of no consequence. The reader must
take her word for it and ask no questions. Lord Grimthorpe wrote:
“I had better send you my ideas about Nausicaa’s hanging of the maids
(not ‘maidens,’ of whom Froude wrote so well in his ‘Science of
History’) before I forget it all. Luckily for me Liddell & Scott have
specially translated most of the doubtful words, referring to this very
place.
“A ship’s cable. I don’t know how big a ship she meant, but it must
have been a very small one indeed if its ‘cable’ could be used to tie
tightly round a woman’s neck, and still more round a dozen of them ‘in
a row,’ besides being strong enough to hold them and pull them all up.
“A dozen average women would need the weight and strength of more than
a dozen strong heavy men even over the best pulley hung to the roof
over them; and the idea of pulling them up by a rope hung anyhow round
a pillar {Greek} is absurdly impossible; and how a dozen of them could
be hung dangling round one post is a problem which a senior wrangler
would be puzzled to answer... She had better have let Telemachus use
his sword as he had intended till she changed his mind for him.”]
[179] [ Then they had all been in Ulysses’ service over twenty years;
perhaps the twelve guilty ones had been engaged more recently.]
[180] [ Translation very doubtful—cf. “It.” xxiv. 598.]
[181] [ But why could she not at once ask to see the scar, of which
Euryclea had told her, or why could not Ulysses have shown it to her?]
[182] [ The people of Ithaca seem to have been as fond of carping as
the Phaeacians were in vi. 273, etc.]
[183] [ See note [156]. Ulysses’s bed room does not appear to have been
upstairs, nor yet quite within the house. Is it possible that it was
“the domed room” round the outside of which the erring maids were, for
aught we have heard to the contrary, still hanging?]
[184] [ Ulysses bedroom in the mind of the writer is here too
apparently down stairs.]
[185] [ Penelope having been now sufficiently whitewashed, disappears
from the poem.]
[186] [ So practised a washerwoman as our authoress doubtless knew that
by this time the web must have become such a wreck that it would have
gone to pieces in the wash.]
A lady points out to me, just as these sheets are leaving my hands,
that no really good needlewoman—no one, indeed, whose work or character
was worth consideration—could have endured, no matter for what reason,
the unpicking of her day’s work, day after day for between three and
four years.]
[187] [ We must suppose Dolius not yet to know that his son Melanthius
had been tortured, mutilated, and left to die by Ulysses’ orders on the
preceding day, and that his daughter Melantho had been hanged. Dolius
was probably exceptionally simple-minded, and his name was ironical. So
on Mt. Eryx I was shown a man who was always called Sonza Malizia or
“Guileless”—he being held exceptionally cunning.]