Page 418 - the-odyssey

{40} Amber is never mentioned in the ‘Iliad.’ Sicily,
where I suppose the ‘Odyssey’ to have been written, has al-
ways been, and still is, one of the principal amber producing
countries. It was probably the only one known in the Odys-
sean age. See ‘The Authoress of the Odyssey’, p260.
{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.
{43} In the Italian insurrection of 1848, eight young men
who were being hotly pursued by the Austrian police hid
themselves inside Donatello’s colossal wooden horse in the
Salone at Padua, and remained there for a week being fed
by their confederates. In 1898 the last survivor was carried
round Padua in triumph.
{44} The Greek is [Greek]. Is it unfair to argue that the
writer is a person of somewhat delicate sensibility, to whom
a strong smell of fish is distasteful?
{45} The Greek is [Greek]. I believe this to be a hit at the
writer’s own countrymen who were of Phocaean descent,
and the next following line to be a rejoinder to complaints
made against her in bk. vi. 273-288, to the effect that she
gave herself airs and would marry none of her own people.
For that the writer of the ‘Odyssey’ was the person who has
been introduced into the poem under the name of Nausicaa,

1