Page 429 - the-odyssey

of May, I have seen men fastened half way up a boat’s mast
with their feet resting on a crosspiece, just large enough to
support them. From this point of vantage they spear sword-
fish. When I saw men thus employed I could hardly doubt
that the writer of the ‘Odyssey’ had seen others like them,
and had them in her mind when describing the binding of
Ulysses. I have therefore with some diffidence ventured to
depart from the received translation of [Greek] (cf. Alcaeus
frag. 18, where, however, it is very hard to say what [Greek]
means). In Sophocles’ Lexicon I find a reference to Chrys-
ostom (l, 242, A. Ed. Benedictine Paris 1834-1839) for the
word [Greek], which is probably the same as [Greek], but I
have looked for the passage in vain.
{100} The writer is at fault here and tries to put it off on
Circe. When Ulysses comes to take the route prescribed by
Circe, he ought to pass either the Wanderers or some oth-
er difficulty of which we are not told, but he does not do
so. The Planctae, or Wanderers, merge into Scylla and Cha-
rybdis, and the alternative between them and something
untold merges into the alternative whether Ulysses had bet-
ter choose Scylla or Charybdis. Yet from line 260, it seems
we are to consider the Wanderers as having been passed by
Ulysses; this appears even more plainly from xxiii. 327, in
which Ulysses expressly mentions the Wandering rocks as
having been between the Sirens and Scylla and Charybdis.
The writer, however, is evidently unaware that she does not
quite understand her own story; her difficulty was perhaps
due to the fact that though Trapanese sailors had given her
a fair idea as to where all her other localities really were, no

The Odyssey