Page 416 - the-odyssey

{32} cf. ‘Il.’ i.458, ii. 421. The writer here interrupts an
Iliadic passage (to which she returns immediately) for the
double purpose of dwelling upon the slaughter of the heif-
er, and of letting Nestor’s wife and daughter enjoy it also.
A male writer, if he was borrowing from the ‘Iliad,’ would
have stuck to his borrowing.
{33} cf. ‘Il.’ xxiv. 587,588 where the lines refer to the wash-
ing the dead body of Hector.
{34} See illustration on opposite page. The yard is typical
of many that may be seen in Sicily. The existing ground-
plan is probably unmodified from Odyssean, and indeed
long pre-Odyssean times, but the earlier buildings would
have no arches, and would, one would suppose, be main-
ly timber. The Odyssean [Greek] were the sheds that ran
round the yard as the arches do now. The [Greek] was the
one through which the main entrance passed, and which
was hence ‘noisy,’ or reverberating. It had an upper story in
which visitors were often lodged.
{35} This journey is an impossible one. Telemachus and
Pisistratus would have been obliged to drive over the Tay-
getus range, over which there has never yet been a road for
wheeled vehicles. It is plain therefore that the audience for
whom the ‘Odyssey’ was written was one that would be
unlikely to know anything about the topography of the
Peloponnese, so that the writer might take what liberties
she chose.
{36} The lines which I have enclosed in brackets are
evidently an afterthought—added probably by the writ-
er herself—for they evince the same instinctively greater

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