11.690. Heracles: The greatest of the Greek heroes, Heracles eventually, after his death, became an immortal god. He was the son of Zeus and a mortal woman, Alcmena. Zeus intended that he should lord it over all who dwell around him, but Zeus’s jealous wife, Hera, contrived to have that destiny conferred on Eurystheus, king of Argos, to whom Heracles was to be subject. At Eurystheus’ command, Heracles performed the famous twelve labors: among them was the capture of the three-headed dog, Cerberus, the guardian of the entrance to the underworld. Homer attributes Heracles’ death to Hera’s anger, but in other poets’ versions of his death Hera plays no part. See notes ref, ref.
12.68. Clashing Rocks: The Greek word Homer uses means something like “Wandering Rocks” but clearly he is drawing on the story of the Symplegades (a word which does mean Clashing Rocks), between which even the doves bringing ambrosia to Zeus could get caught. They are a prominent feature of the story of Jason and the Argonauts, which is mentioned as a well-known theme for song at ref. See Introduction, p. ref.
12.285. Hyperion: A name which, whatever its true etymology, suggests the meaning “the one who goes above,” and is another name of Helios, the sun.
12.337. the night’s third watch: The night was divided into three parts, each approximately four hours long.
12.384. fresh green leaves . . . for the rite: A substitute for the barley scattered over the sacrificial animal. Later, lacking wine, they made libations with water. It is appropriate that, since the slaughter of the cattle is an offense to the god, the ritual should fall far short of proper procedure.
13.180. Then pile your huge mountain round about their port: For Zeus’s encouragement of Poseidon here, see Introduction, pp. ref.
14.63. And you replied, Eumaeus, loyal swineherd: Homer is fond of introducing Eumaeus in the second person, as he often does Patroclus and Menelaus in the Iliad. In the Odyssey it may be the result of a metrical convenience or a vestige of older, bardic practice or, as Stanford (his note 14.55) and other commentators, following the lead of Eustathius, suggest, “a mark of the poet’s special affection for Eumaeus.”
14.494. the forest nymphs and Hermes: One share of Eumaeus’ supper is set aside for a local cult of the wood nymphs, another share for Hermes, in his role as patron god of herdsmen.
15.21. bride-price: See ref and Introduction, pp. ref, ref.
15.80. you know, / ‘Welcome the coming, speed the parting guest!’: This is Pope’s translation of the line, adopted here but enclosed in quotation marks as if, by a spin of reverse English, it had become proverbial in our language, even though spoken by Menelaus centuries before. Pope in his Horatian Imitations (Satires II.ii.160), introducing it as “sage Homer’s rule,” later revised the line to read “welcome the coming, speed the going guest.” This translator prefers the Odyssean version. See Introduction, p. ref.
15.250. Melampus’ line of seers: A different version of the story told at ref. Here Neleus drives Melampus out and confiscates his property. We do not know why Phylacus (Iphiclus in the other version) imprisoned Melampus, nor why he was persecuted by the Furies, nor how he avenged himself on Neleus. In this version he wins Neleus’ daughter Pero not for himself but for his brother. Homer does not mention it, but we learn from Hesiod that Melampus, who could understand the speech of birds and animals, was released from prison because he had heard worms in the palace roofbeams discussing how thoroughly they had undermined the structure, and so Melampus warned his captor that the building would soon collapse. See Genealogies, pp. ref, ref, and note ref.
15.276. undone by a bribe his wife accepted: See note ref.
16.131. Zeus made our line a line of only sons: See Genealogy, p. ref.
17.602. Telemachus shook with a lusty sneeze: Ancient Greeks regarded a sneeze as an omen, since it is something a human being can neither produce at will nor control when it arrives. Hence it must be the work of a god.
18.6. Arnaeus . . . Irus: Arnaeus is called Irus presumably because, like Iris the messenger of the gods, he runs errands for the suitors.
18.277. Ionian Argos: The adjective usually designates Greek settlements on the Aegean islands and what is now the western coast of Turkey, whose inhabitants spoke a dialect known as Ionian. Argos is in the Peloponnese, but there is good evidence for an Ionian presence there in very early times.
19.94. thanks to god Apollo: In his aspect of Apollo kourotrophos, the rearer of young men.
19.203. Minos: The legendary king of Crete, whose name has been given to the civilization unearthed by archaeologists in the early years of our century. Minos ruled Crete either in nine-year cycles or, as Plato understood the Homeric line, went every ninth year to the cave of Zeus to confer with the god and bring back laws for his people. Together with another Cretan king, Rhadamanthys, he is sometimes mentioned as one of the judges in the world of the dead. See ref.
19.299. Destroy, I call it —I hate to say its name: “desTroy” is T.E. Lawrence’s rendering of a remarkable turn of phrase in Penelope’s speech: she calls the city she does not wish to mention kakoilion, combining the Greek word for evil —kakos — with the name Ilion, an alternative name for Troy. See ref, ref.
19.407. your master’s . . . equal in years: The pause indicated in the translation, allowing the reader to imagine for a second that Penelope has penetrated Odysseus’ disguise, attempts to reproduce a similar effect that Homer produced for the ears of his audience, but through Greek word order rather than a pause.
19.463. Odysseus . . . / the Son of Pain, a name he’ll earn in full: The name “Odysseus” may be associated with the Greek verb odussomai —to feel anger toward, to rage or hate. The verb, however, appears to function in the middle voice, a cross between the active and the passive, implying that Odysseus is not only an agent of rage or hatred but its target too. Particularly to the point are the discussions by John Peradotto (pp. 129–34) and George Dimock (pp. 257–63), who suggest that Odysseus suffers for making others suffer, not as an end in itself but, insofar as odussomai brings to mind the verb ôdinô —to suffer pain, especially the pain of labor —as the rigors by which the hero brings his identity to life. Consequently Dimock proposes that we translate “Odysseus” as “man of pain” — active and passive, doing and done to, agent and victim both, inflicting and bearing pain yet somehow born himself in the process. That is the version which this translator adopts and adapts throughout his work. Yet when Homer intends a pun between the root of the hero’s name and the hostility he arouses in others, the translator tries to develop some wordplay, wherever possible, between “Odysseus” and those “dead set” against him. See ref, ref, ref; and, as variations on the theme, ref, ref, ref, ref, ref.
19.585. Pandareus’ daughter, the nightingale: Her name was Aedon (which is the Greek word for nightingale). She had only one son, but her sister-in-law Niobe had many; in a fit of jealous rage, she tried to kill Niobe’s eldest son but by mistake killed her own son, Itylus. Zeus turned her into a nightingale, mourning her son in song forever. There is a different version of the story that is familiar to us from the Latin and our own poets, in which Procne, an Athenian princess, married Tereus, a Thracian king. Tereus raped Procne’s sister, Philomela, and then cut out her tongue to prevent her from denouncing him to her sister. But Philomela wove the story into a tapestry to show Procne, who then killed Itys, her son by Tereus, cooked the flesh and served it to her husband, who ate it. When told what he had eaten, Tereus tried to kill both sisters, but Zeus turned them all into birds: Procne became the nightingale, eternally mourning Itys, Philomela the swallow and Tereus the hoopoe.
19.633. Two gates . . . for our evanescent dreams: Why the ivory gate should be the exit for false dreams and the gate of horn for true has never been satisfactorily explained.
19.644. a contest with those axes: There has been much controversy about the axes and still no agreement. When in ref Telemachus sets them up for the contest, he digs a trench in the dirt floor of the hall, plants them in it in a straight l
ine and stamps the earth down to hold them firm. Many editors have assumed that what he planted in the trench were the ax blades, with the holes for the helves lined up. But to shoot an arrow through such a lineup, the archer would have to be lying on the floor, an impossible position from which to draw the bow, not to mention making such a difficult shot. In any case, we are told (ref) that when Odysseus does shoot an arrow through the axes he is sitting on a stool. So the holes the arrow goes through must be at least two feet off the ground. The only possible solution seems to be that the axes all have a metal ring on the end of the helve, presumably so that the ax could be hung on a nail in the wall.
20.73. the whirlwinds swept away Pandareus’ daughters: This story of the death of Pandareus’ daughters, none of them named, seems to have no connection with the tale of the nightingale. See ref and note ad loc.
20.307. Apollo’s grand festal day: It is a significant coincidence that the archery contest, which will bring about the deaths of the suitors and Odysseus’ reinstatement in his own home, is to take place on the festival day of Apollo, the archer god. See ref and note ref.
20.395. Ghosts, look: Presumably those of the suitors, glimpsed here in a visionary, prophetic way but clearly present, following their slaughter in Book 22, at the beginning of Book 24.
21.16. Eurytus: One of the great archers Odysseus mentions when he claims mastery of the bow among the Phaeacians (ref). Eurytus had even challenged Apollo to a contest, an insult for which the god killed him. According to later sources, Apollo had given him a bow and trained him in its use; if so, the bow Iphitus gave Odysseus comes from the hand of the archer god himself, to be used against the suitors on Apollo’s feast day. See note ref.
21.55. inserted the key and aiming straight and true, / shot back the bolts: The mechanism of Homeric doorlocks is so mysterious that Joyce’s parody in Ulysses may be the best commentary on this passage:
How did the centripetal remainer afford egress to the centrifugal departer?
By inserting the barrel of an arruginated male key in the hole of an unstable female lock, obtaining a purchase on the bow of the key and turning its wards from right to left, withdrawing a bolt from its staple, pulling inward spasmodically an obsolescent unhinged door and revealing an aperture for free egress and free ingress.
21.331. Pirithous: A friend of Theseus and his companion on many of his exploits, he was king of the Lapiths, a tribe living in Thessaly, a country famous for its horses. He invited to his wedding with Hippodameia the Centaurs, who were later visualized as half man and half horse but whom Homer describes in the Iliad (1.312) as “wild brutes of the mountains.” Their leader, Eurytion, got drunk at the feast and tried to rape the bride (whose name, incidentally, means “tamer of horses”). The resultant battle was a favorite theme for temple sculpture (it is featured, for example, on the west pediment of the temple of Zeus at Olympia); it symbolized the fight between civilized Greeks and savage barbarians.
22.134. a side-door was fitted into the main wall: Commentators have puzzled over the architectural details of the palace in vain. The confusion is probably the result of a combination of different bardic formulas over time, which became the standard version. In any case, the original audience, swept along by the performance, would not have worried too much about the details. See Introduction, p. ref.
22.241. your fine strategic stroke: Odysseus’ stratagem of the Trojan Horse, which held the Achaean force that leveled Troy. See note ref.
24.126. to urge Odysseus to sail: In a later epic poem, the Cypria, we are told that Odysseus, unwilling to leave his wife and baby son, feigned madness to escape the summons to the war against Troy. He drove his plow, harnessed to an ass and an ox, sowing salt in the furrows. Palamedes, the cleverest of the chiefs assembled for the expedition, put Odysseus’ baby son in the path of the plow; Odysseus reined it in, his deceit exposed. “But once at the war,” as Joyce reminded Frank Budgen, “the conscientious objector became a jusqu’ auboutist.”
24.341. my father’s Unsparing, son of old King Pain, / and my name’s Man of Strife . . . : See note ref.
SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
I. Texts and Commentaries
Homeri Opera. Ed. by T. W. Allen. 2d ed., Vols. III and IV. Oxford Classical Texts. London and New York, 1917.
The Odyssey. Ed. with Introduction, Commentary and Indexes by W. B. Stanford. 2d ed., 2 vols. London and New York, reprinted with alterations and additions, 1967.
A Commentary on Homer’s Odyssey. Vol. I: Books I–VIII, A. Heubeck, S. West, J. B. Hainsworth. Vol. II: Books IX–XVI, A. Heubeck, A. Hoekstra. Vol. III: Books XVII–XXIV, J. Russo, M. Fernández-Galiano, A. Heubeck. New York and Oxford, 1988–92.
Homer, Odyssey: Books XIX and XX. Ed. R. B. Rutherford. Cambridge Greek and Latin Classics. Cambridge, England, 1992.
Homer, Odyssey: Books VI–VIII. Ed. A. F. Garvie. Cambridge Greek and Latin Classics. Cambridge, England, 1994.
Homer, The Odyssey. Ed. with English translation by A. T. Murray, revised by George E. Dimock. 2 vols. The Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1995.
II. Critical Works
Ahl, Frederick, and Hanna M. Roisman. The Odyssey Re-Formed. Ithaca, 1996.
Arnold, Matthew. “On Translating Homer.” In On the Classical Tradition, ed. R. H. Super. Ann Arbor and London, 1960.
Atchity, Kenneth, ed. Critical Essays on Homer. Boston, 1987.
Auerbach, Erich. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Trans. Willard Trask. Chapter 1, “Odysseus’ Scar.” Princeton, 1953.
Austin, Norman. Archery at the Dark of the Moon: Poetic Problems in Homer’s Odyssey. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, 1975.
Bakker, Egbert, and Ahuvia Kahane, eds. Written Voices, Spoken Signs: Tradition, Performance, and the Epic Text. Cambridge, Mass., 2000.
Beissinger, Margaret, Jane Tylus, and Susanne Wofford, eds. Epic Traditions in the Contemporary World: The Poetics of Community. Berkeley, 1999.
Benardete, Seth. The Bow and the Lyre: A Platonic Reading of the Odyssey. New York and London, 1997.
Beye, Charles R. The Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Epic Tradition. New York and London, 1966.
Bloom, Harold, ed. Homer’s Odyssey. New York, 1996.
Bremer, J. M., I. J. F. de Jong, and J. Kalff, eds. Homer: Beyond Oral Poetry. Recent Trends in Homeric Interpretation. Amsterdam, 1987.
Buitron, Diana, and Beth Cohen, eds. The Odyssey and Ancient Art: An Epic in Word and Image. The Edith C. Blum Art Institute, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, 1992.
Camps, W. A. An Introduction to Homer. Oxford, 1980.
Carpenter, Rhys. Folk Tale, Fiction, and Saga in the Homeric Epics. Berkeley, 1946.
Carter, Jane B., and Sarah P. Morris, eds. The Ages of Homer: A Tribute to Emily Townsend Vermeule. Austin, 1995.
Chadwick, John. The Mycenaean World. London and New York, 1976.
Clarke, Howard. Homer’s Readers: A Historical Introduction to the Iliad and the Odyssey. Newark, Del., 1981.
Clay, Jenny Strauss. The Wrath of Athena: Gods and Men in the Odyssey. Princeton, 1983.
Cohen, Beth, ed. The Distaff Side: Representing the Female in Homer’s Odyssey. New York and London, 1995.
Cook, Erwin F. The “Odyssey” in Athens: Myths of Cultural Origins. Ithaca and London, 1996.
Crotty, Kevin. The Poetics of Supplication: Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. Ithaca and London, 1994.
Dawe, R. D. The Odyssey: Translation and Analysis. Sussex, 1993.
Dimock, George E. The Unity of the Odyssey. Amherst, 1989.
Edwards, Mark W. Homer: Poet of the Iliad. Baltimore and London, 1987.
Felson-Rubin, Nancy. Regarding Penelope: From Character to Poetics. Princeton, 1994.
Fenik, Bernard. Studies in the Odyssey. Hermes Einzelschrift 30. Wiesbaden, 1974.
Ferrucci, Franco. The Poetics of Disguise: The Autobiography of the Work in Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare. Trans. A. Dunnigan. Ithaca, 1980.
Finley, John H., Jr. Homer’s Odyssey. Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1978.
Finley, Sir Moses. The World of Odysseus. 2d rev. ed. Harmondsworth, 1979.
Finnegan, Ruth. Oral Poetry: Its Nature, Significance, and Social Context. Cambridge, England, 1977.
Ford, Andrew. Homer: The Poetry of the Past. Ithaca and London, 1992.
Frame, Douglas. The Myth of Return in Early Greek Epic. New Haven, 1978.
Greene, Thomas M. The Descent from Heaven: A Study in Epic Continuity. Chapter 4, “Form and Craft in the Odyssey.” New Haven, 1963.
Griffin, Jasper. Homer on Life and Death. Oxford, 1980.
____. Homer: The Odyssey. Landmarks of World Literature. Cambridge, England, and New York, 1987.
Guthrie, W. K. C. The Greeks and Their Gods. London, 1949; repr. Boston, 1950.
Hexter, Ralph. A Guide to the Odyssey: A Commentary on the English Translation of Robert Fitzgerald. New York, 1993.
Jenkyns, Richard. Classical Epic: Homer and Virgil. Bristol Classical World series. London, 1992.
Jones, Peter V. Homer’s Odyssey: A Companion to the Translation of Richmond Lattimore. Carbondale and Bristol, 1988.
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