Page 433 - the-odyssey

when he was a boy that if he would drop exactly three drops
of oil on to the water near the rock, he would see the ship
still at the bottom. The legend is evidently a Christianised
version of the Odyssean story, while the name supplies the
additional detail that the disaster happened in consequence
of an evil counsel.
{118} It would seem then that the ship had got all the way
back from Ithaca in about a quarter of an hour.
{119} And may we not add ‘and also to prevent his recog-
nising that he was only in the place where he had met
Nausicaa two days earlier.’
{120} All this is to excuse the entire absence of Miner-
va from books ix.-xii., which I suppose had been written
already, before the authoress had determined on making
Minerva so prominent a character.
{121} We have met with this somewhat lame attempt to
cover the writer’s change of scheme at the end of bk. vi.
{122} I take the following from The Authoress of the Od-
yssey, p. 167. ‘It is clear from the text that there were two
[caves] not one, but some one has enclosed in brackets the
two lines in which the second cave is mentioned, I presume
because he found himself puzzled by having a second cave
sprung upon him when up to this point he had only been
told of one.
‘I venture to think that if he had known the ground he
would not have been puzzled, for there are two caves, distant
about 80 or 100 yards from one another.’ The cave in which
Ulysses hid his treasure is, as I have already said, identifi-
able with singular completeness. The other cave presents no

The Odyssey