William Morris Archive

by Peter Wright

Page 51, Lines 2-14. to the son … of Achilles ... Megapenthes … Hermione. Menelaus had no male children by Helen, but only one born to a slave concubine, for whom he is now finding a bride locally, presumably well-born. Hermione, the daughter whom Helen left at Sparta when she departed with Paris (cf. below, line 261), is, as her father agreed during the war, to go to Thessaly to wed Achilles’ son Neoptolemus. Homer seems unaware of the disastrous sequel to this marriage. Later legend told how Hermione had been betrothed in childhood to her cousin Orestes, and how Neoptolemus fell in love with his captive, Hector’s widow, Andromache, and, removing west over the mountains into Epirus, had by her a son, Molossus, ancestor of the dynasty that later reigned there until the 3rd century. Hermione, outraged, tried to have mother and child killed, as is told in Euripides’ Andromache, and, failing, induced Orestes to procure Neoptolemus’ assassination at Delphi. Andromache then wedded her fellow captive, Hector’s brother Helenus, allowing Virgil to have Aeneas meet them ruling on that coast on his way to Italy, in Aeneid, Book 3, 294-355.

Page 52, Line 30. the yellow Menelaus. i.e. not yellow-skinned, but yellow-haired, as in Book iii, line 168. Morris is translating ‘xanthos’, meaning with golden hair, so standing out amongst the mostly black-haired Greeks: Aristophanes’ comedies have some slaves called ’Xanthias’, presumably imported from the relatively fairer-haired peoples of more northerly lands, and their hard-to-pronounce ‘barbarian’ names replaced with one meaning, roughly, ’Blondy’.

Page 53, Line 63. [HO 64] mace-wielding. Holding kingly sceptres.

Page 53, Line 73. amber. ‘electron’; Not actually the substance later imported, over a great distance, from the south coast of the Baltic, but rather a compound of gold and silver. It was from that ‘electron’, naturally occurring in their land, that Lydian kings made the first coins to be minted.

Page 54, Line 84. Aethiopia. See Note on Book i, line 25.

Erembian land. Herodotus, in his survey of the peoples inhabiting the coasts and interior of North Africa, to the Greeks Libya, from west of Egypt to the ocean, in Book 4 of his History, ch. 168-199, does not mention any Erembians: possibly, given their position in Menelaus’ speech, they should be sought east of Egypt, in northern Arabia.

Page 54, Lines 86-7. the lambs … full-horned …  thrice ... the sheepkind … yeaning in ... one year. Herodotus, though not reporting these prodigies, notes (Book 4, ch. 172, 186) Libyan peoples who keep sheep.

Page 55, Lines 126-7. in Thebes of Egypt … of all the world most treasure the houses ... have. Alluding to the wealth of the great southern Egyptian city of temples, before it was sacked by invading Assyrians in the late 660s. 

Page 57, Line 176. wasted clean. Tr. ‘exalapaxas’: emptied out.

Page 57, Line 186. For Anilochus, see Note on Book iii, 111.

Page 57, Line 196. [HO 198] the clipping the hair. Hellenes usually cut off at least a lock of their hair when mourning kindred or friends; cf. Iliad, Book XXIII, 140-51.

Page 59, Lines 229-30. [HO 231-2] the leeches ... Paaaeon’s seed. Paaeon was the physician who on Olympus healed injuries suffered by the gods: Iliad, Book V, 401-2, 899-904. Later his name became a title for Apollo as a healing god.

Page 60, Lines 258-9. [HO 260-1] was my mind and my mood to get me home again ... And now I loathed the blindness from Aphrodite’s hand. In Helen’s most substantial appearance in the Iliad (Book III, 121-244, and 383-454) she wishes (lines 173-6; cf. Book XXIV, lines 764-5) she had died before she followed Paris to Troy, and is very reluctant to return to his bed.

Page 60, Lines 270-88. [HO 271-90] the Horse well shapen ... Deiphobus. The first appearance in the epic of the Wooden Horse through which Troy was captured after so long and its crew of crack Achaean warriors. (The Iliad frequently foretells that the city will fall, but never explains how.) The Achaeans’ simulated withdrawal, the Trojans’ reception of the Horse, and the result, are reported, later: Book viii, lines 499-520.  Deiphobus was the son of Priam who briefly became spouse to Helen after Paris was killed. Book viii, 517, shows Menelaus and Odysseus about to assail his house. (Anticlus is not recorded elsewhere.) Helen’s motive for seeking to get the heroes inside the Horse to betray themselves, given that the preceding episode has shown her sympathetic to the enemies of Troy, remains a mystery.

Page 61, line 299. [HO 301] the marshal. Tr. ‘kerux’: cf. Note to Book i, line 150.

Page 62, Line 316. [HO 318] the fat lands to fallow fail. Tr. ‘olole de piona ergo’: the rich farmland is ruined. Not referring to the fallowing of fields to restore fertility.

Page 63, Lines 332-7. [HO 335-9] a mighty lion’s lair. The Odyssey, with less fighting, has fewer similes than the Iliad drawn from lions, their pursuit of their prey, and their combats with herdsmen and hunters. (Others in lines 789-90; Book vi, 130-4). But there were still in the 7th century, as Assyrian palace reliefs show, lions in Mesopotamia for kings to fight (in controlled conditions), and Herodotus reports in his History (Book 7, ch. 125-6) that about 480 there were still many lions, who attacked King Xerxes’ baggage train, in the more northerly parts of Greece: so such similes may have been, when the epics were being composed, not entirely conventional, but founded on occasional experience.

Page 63, Lines 340-2. [HO 342-4] the strife of wrestling. In the Iliad (Book XXIII), Odysseus, besides winning the foot-race in Patroclus’ funeral games, draws with the massive Ajax at wrestling; cf. Odyssey, Book viii, 202-14.

Page 63, lines 352-5. [HO 354-7] Pharos …  from Egypt ... As far as in one day’s sailing a hollow ship may fare. The poet has exaggerated the distance from the coast of the island on which in the 3rd century was built the famous lighthouse which showed the way to the harbour of the newly founded city of Alexandria.

Page 64, Lines 366-7. [HO 368-9] Who ... fished on with angles. Homeric epics provide some of the earliest references to fishing with rod-and-line, instead of with nets, but in the sea, not freshwater, and for need, not for sport: cf. Book xiii, 251-5, 332; Iliad, Book XVI, 405-7.

Page 64, Line 382 [HO 385] Proteus the deathless of Egypt. Later Hellene writers, e.g. Herodotus, History, Book 2, ch. 112-20; Euripides, Helen; converted Proteus into an Egyptian king who kept the real Helen, rescued from her abductor Paris, safe in his land, while Achaeans and Trojans fought about the phantasm of her which had been taken to Troy.

Page 65, Line 402. [HO 404] sea-calves. Tr. ‘phokai’: seals

Page 65, Line 416. he will turn into all things. A usual means of escape for sea-deities when men try to capture them, as with Thetis when Peleus sought her as his bride, or Nereus, in Morris’s ’Golden Apples’ in The Earthly Paradise, when Hercules seized on him as a guide to the Hesperides’ garden.

Page 66, Line 443. [HO 445] the deathless sweet-breathed flavour. Ambrosia.

Page 67, Line 473. [HO 475] not meeted. Not fated, from ‘moira’.

Page 68, Lines 497-8. [HO 4999-500] Ajax. The rough-tempered leader of the Locrians.

Gyrae. Of uncertain position; possibly a cape of Euboea.

Page 69, Line 525. [HO 526] Two talents weight. A talent weighed almost 60 lb. avoirdupois.

Page 70, Lines 559-68. [HO 561-69] to thee it shall not come. In … Argos to meet thy death and doom … But unto the fields Elysian … Wherein are the softest life-days ... No snow and no ill weather … Because thou hast wedded Helen … The first appearance in the Hellenic imagination of a paradise, far in the west by the River of Ocean, for selected mortals, instead of the empty land of the Dead in Hades. Menelaus, apparently to be translated thither bodily rather than dying, is privileged to enjoy it simply as a son-in-law through Helen of Zeus. When such a paradise, in the ’isles of the blessed’, reappears, more intensely described, in Pindar’s Olympian Odes, no. vi, 56-80, it must be achieved by righteousness, though its named inmates are still of heroic nature. (Tennyson admitted borrowing from this passage’s peaceful weather that of the Avilion to which in his Morte d’Arthur (lines 260-3) that king was to be taken to heal his wounds.)

Page 70, Line 562. [HO 564] Rhadamanthus. This brother (also mentioned in Pindar’s Ode) of the Cretan king Minos was, on account of his just nature, appointed by his father Zeus to be a judge among the Dead.

Page 73, Line 625. [HO 626] the quoits and the goat-spear. Discuses and hunting spears (‘aiganees‘).

Page 73, Line 628. [HO 630] Noemon son of Phronius. ‘Mindful’ son of ‘Thoughtful’.

Page 73, Line 635. [HO 637] Mules. In Greek, ‘hemionoi’, half-asses, probably bred as draught-beasts. In Book vi mules pull the ‘wain’ driven by Nausicaa that takes her family’s clothes out to the river for washing.

In the Iliad mules draw the waggon bearing the treasures to ransom Hector’s body, but even older men, such as  King Priam, ride in, and drive, horse-drawn chariots: see Book XXIV, 265-82, 322-8; cf. ibid. III, 261-3.

Page 74, Line 666. [HO 669] Antinous’ ship is to be the same size as that Telemachus had sailed in; cf. line 767; perhaps a standard one.

Page 77, Lines 733-4. [HO 735-6] Dolius The thrall that my father gave me. Penelope’s dowry from Icarius at Sparta had included serving men.

Page 77, Line 749. [HO 751] thy bower aloft. Tr. ‘eis upero‘ anabasa‘: going upstairs.

Page 78, Line 761. [HO 763] the shifty. Tr.  ‘polumetis’: of many counsels.

Page 79, Line 796. Eumelus. Son of Admetus, and his successor at Pherae. Though he came with the Achaeans to Troy, he was not mentioned in battle in the Iliad, and though he had good horses, given by his father’s patron Apollo, (Book II, 711-5, 763-7), he ended ignominiously, by divine intervention,  in the chariot race in Book XXIII, 289-90, 375-97, 532-9.

Page 79, Line 800. [HO 802] by the thong of the latch. The leather thong with which the door-bolt was pulled into place. Homeric dreams are solid enough, though shrinkable, to need to approach their targets through the equivalent of a keyhole.

Page 81, Line 843. [HO 845] Samos. i.e. same; cf. line 669.