Page 443 - the-odyssey

of pulling them up by a rope hung anyhow round a pillar
[Greek] is absurdly impossible; and how a dozen of them
could be hung dangling round one post is a problem which
a senior wrangler would be puzzled to answer … She had
better have let Telemachus use his sword as he had intended
till she changed his mind for him.’
{179} Then they had all been in Ulysses’ service over
twenty years; perhaps the twelve guilty ones had been en-
gaged more recently.
{180} Translation very doubtful—cf. ‘It.’ xxiv. 598.
{181} But why could she not at once ask to see the scar, of
which Euryclea had told her, or why could not Ulysses have
shown it to her?
{182} The people of Ithaca seem to have been as fond of
carping as the Phaeacians were in vi. 273, etc.
{183} See note {156}. Ulysses’s bed room does not appear
to have been upstairs, nor yet quite within the house. Is it
possible that it was ‘the domed room’ round the outside of
which the erring maids were, for aught we have heard to the
contrary, still hanging?
{184} Ulysses bedroom in the mind of the writer is here
too apparently down stairs.
{185} Penelope having been now sufficiently white-
washed, disappears from the poem.
{186} So practised a washerwoman as our authoress
doubtless knew that by this time the web must have become
such a wreck that it would have gone to pieces in the wash.
A lady points out to me, just as these sheets are leav-
ing my hands, that no really good needlewoman—no one,

The Odyssey