The Odyssey · Homer
FOOTNOTES:
I have dealt with this passage somewhat more fully in my “Authoress of the Odyssey”, p. 136-138. See also p. 256 of the same book.] [37] [ Sparta and Lacedaemon are here treated as two different places, though in other parts of the poem it is clear that the writer understands them as one. The catalogue in the “Iliad,” which the writer is here presumably following, makes the same mistake (“Il.” ii. 581, 582)] [38] [ These last three lines are identical with “Il.” vxiii. 604-606.] [39] [ From the Greek {Greek} it is plain that Menelaus took up the piece of meat with his fingers.] [40] [ Amber is never mentioned in the “Iliad.” Sicily, where I suppose the “Odyssey” to have been written, has always been, and still is, one of the principal amber producing countries. It was probably the only one known in the Odyssean age. See “The Authoress of the Odyssey,” Longmans 1898, p. 186.] [41] [ This no doubt refers to the story told in the last poem of the Cypria about Paris and Helen robbing Menelaus of the greater part of his treasures, when they sailed together for Troy.] [42] [ It is inconceivable that Helen should enter thus, in the middle of supper, intending to work with her distaff, if great festivities were going on. Telemachus and Pisistratus are evidently dining en famille.]
This would be sure to baffle the Alexandrian editors. “How,” they would ask themselves, “could an island be a horseman?” and they would cast about for an emendation. A visit to the top of Mt. Eryx might perhaps make the meaning intelligible, and suggest my proposed restoration of the text to the reader as readily as it did to myself. I have elsewhere stated my conviction that the writer of the “Odyssey” was familiar with the old Sican city at the top of Mt. Eryx, and that the Aegadean islands which are so striking when seen thence did duty with her for the Ionian islands—Marettimo, the highest and most westerly of the group, standing for Ithaca. When seen from the top of Mt. Eryx Marettimo shows as it should do according to “Od.” ix. 25, 26, “on the horizon, all highest up in the sea towards the West,” while the other islands lie “some way off it to the East.” As we descend to Trapani, Marettimo appears to sink on to the top of the island of Levanzo, behind which it disappears. My friend, the late Signor E. Biaggini, pointed to it once as it was just standing on the top of Levanzo, and said to me “Come cavalca bene” (“How well it rides”), and this immediately suggested my emendation to me. Later on I found in the hymn to the Pythian Apollo (which abounds with tags taken from the “Odyssey”) a line ending {Greek} which strengthened my suspicion that this was the original ending of the second of the two lines above under consideration.]
“On their return they declared—I for my part do not believe them, but perhaps others may—that in sailing round Libya [i.e. Africa] they had the sun upon their right hand. In this way was the extent of Libya first discovered. “I take it that Eumaeus was made to have come from Syracuse because the writer thought she rather ought to have made something happen at Syracuse during her account of the voyages of Ulysses. She could not, however, break his long drift from Charybdis to the island of Pantellaria; she therefore resolved to make it up to Syracuse in another way.” Modern excavations establish the existence of two and only two pre-Dorian communities at Syracuse; they were, so Dr. Orsi informed me, at Plemmirio and Cozzo Pantano. See The Authoress of the Odyssey, pp. 211-213.] [136] [ This harbour is again evidently the harbour in which Ulysses had landed, i.e. the harbour that is now the salt works of S. Cusumano.] [137] [ This never can have been anything but very niggardly pay for some eight or nine days’ service. I suppose the crew were to consider the pleasure of having had a trip to Pylos as a set off. There is no trace of the dinner as having been actually given, either on the following or any other morning.]
“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.]
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