第 97 节

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.]