By Peter Wright

Page 148, Lines 21-7. Ithaca … Neritus … Dulichium … Same ... Zacynthus. For the names and geographical position of these islands, and the apparent error in that of Ithaca, see Note on Book i, lines 248-9; also Appendix on Homeric Geography. Neritus is the mountain in the northern half of Ithaca.

Page 148, Line 30. for lord. Tr. ’posis’: as husband.

Page 148, Lines 39-40. Ismarus ... Of the Cicones. These Thracian people had fought for the Trojans, and one of their leaders (Apollo in disguise) had urged on Hector after he had killed Patroclus: Iliad, Books II, 846-7; XVII, 73-81; so Odysseus could reckon them a legitimate object of attack. Ismarus stood by a lake which shared its name halfway from east to west in Thrace: Herodotus, History, Book 7, ch. 109.

Page 148, Lines 40-1. the men we slew, And their wives we had from the city. A not uncommon practice of victorious Hellenes. Even in the late 5^th century the Athenians planned to inflict such a fate on the rebellious people of Mitylene in Lesbos, but were narrowly dissuaded, and within a dozen years did so with the people of Scione and of Melos: Thucydides, History, Books 3, ch. 36-50; 5, ch. 32, 116: ‘They killed the grown men, and sold into slavery the children and women.’

Page 148, Line 44. the stark fools in their folly ... in nowise heeded me. Not the last time that Odysseus had to complain of his followers’ lack of discipline.

Page 149, Line 49. well wotting of the battle from the steed. Tr. ‘aph ... hippon ... marnasthai’: More likely from chariots than on horseback, a way of fighting not practiced in warfare in the epics, but perhaps coming into use when the epics were being composed.

Page 149, Line 65. for our hapless fellows ... we cried. Presumably a minimal funeral rite when their corpses could not be recovered.

Page 150, Lines 80-1. For Cape Malea, see Note on Book iii, 287; and for Cyjthera, Note on Book viii, 288.

Page 150, Lines 90-102. the Lotus-eaters … the Lotus meat. Herodotus, in his survey of the coast of Libya in his History, Book 7, reports, in ch. 177, a people of ‘Lotophagi’ dwelling on a cape within the Syrtis (the shallow gulf between Cyrenaica and Tunisia), who lived on a fruit tasting like dates. For speculations on their position, and on the nature of that fruit, see his History, ed. & tr. G. Rawlinson (John Murray, 1859), vol. iii, p. 153 and notes, which suggest that the fruit produced a sweet drink. (Soon after that passage, Herodotus mentions, in ch. 179, a ship driven fast by a north wind from Malea to the Libyan coast.)

Page 151, Line 107. the Cyclops. The original Cyclopes, offspring of Heaven and Earth, mentioned in Hesiod, Theogony, lines 139-46, were probably the ‘round-eyed’ three who made Zeus’ thunderbolts, god-like, save for having ‘one orbed eye in … their foreheads’. Homer has adopted their name for his savage giant herdsmen, since their one-eyedness, not actually specified until line 333, is necessary for his being easily blinded.  The classical appearance of such a Cyclops’ head in Greek art had one eye (unanatomically) in the middle of his forehead with blank eys-sockets underneath. 

Page 151, Lines 108-15. They plant no plant … nor afield the plough do they drive ... But all unsown and untilled are all things springing there ... But with them are no Wise men ... Meetings ... But each the law gives out ... To his own wives and his children. Given the development of human societies around the northern and eastern sides of the Mediterranean, it seems unlikely that the audience of the epic had any direct experience, or recent tradition, of peoples with no practice of farming and no communal life above the level of an individual family. They may have had some dim awareness of the pastoral folks of Scythia, and perhaps of Libya: cf. Iliad, Book XIII, line 5; Odyssey,  Book iv, lines 85-9; but such peoples would not, on their open plains, have enjoyed the .abundance of unsown crops and vines portrayed in lines 110-11. Rather this description of the Cyclopes’ land may represent, in the form of myth, some early speculations, like that in Hesiod’s legend of the four Ages of Metals of declining worth (Works and Days, lines 109-201), about a possible succession of mortal societies. But here such a myth embodies a monstrous paradox: whereas Hesiod’s Golden Race, for whom also "the fruitful earth unforced bare ..fruit abundantly and without stint," were innocent and kindly, the Cyclopes, though also possessing such natural abundance, are godless, rejecting scornfully any appeal to common human fellowship (cf. lines 266-80), and willing to indulge in that most inhuman extremity of conduct, cannibalism. Only in his method of herding and milking his sheep and goats, with their massy stone-built enclosure, does Polyphemus show any evidence of human skills.

Page 151, Line 125. But no ships have the folk of the Cyclops with cheeks of cinnabar. It is not the potential ship-owners who would have red cheeks, but their ships which would have red-painted prows.

Page 151, Lines 130-41. The poet, after noting, perhaps contemptuously, that these ‘natives’ have no sea-going vessels to trade with, emphasizes how suitable this island would be for colonization. By the 7^th century Hellas, with a growing population and much of its mountain-narrowed landscape possessed by aristocratic minorities, had numerous poorer freemen willing to seek overseas, not for harbors to trade from, but just for soil to plough.

Page 152, Line 159. Twelve ships my leading followed. The same number of ships as Odysseus had under his command from the Cephallenian islands in the Catalogue of Ships in Iliad, Book II, 631-7.

Page 153, Line 158. we saw the smoke. Odysseus and his comrades regularly assume smoke from fires as evidence of human habitation: cf. Book x, lines 99, 149; even if no other appears.

Page 154, Line 197. The gift of Maron the son of Euanthes. ‘Fair-Flowering’; Maron’s name was borrowed for (or possibly from) Maroneia, an early Ionian settlement, from Chios, on the north coast of the Aegean, a little southeast of Ismarus. 

Page 154, Lines 221-2. firstlings … mid-born ... younglings. Tr. ‘progonoi’, 'metassai', 'hersai'; lambs of three different ages, the last being the oldest.

Page 156, Lines 254-5. the strong-thieves over the waters. The same question as Pisistratus asked of Telemachus’ comrades in Book iii, 73-4.

Page 156, Lines 266-71. For the appeal to Zeus the Guester. 'Xenios', cf. Book vi, 207-8

Page 158, Lines 322-3. with twenty oars at play. The cargo ship has no more oars than that of Telemachus in Books ii & iii.

Page 159, Lines 352-4, 361. he … became exceeding fain ... Of that sweet drink that I gave him … the fool thrice drank it out …. Polyphemus’ downfall results from his uncivilized ignorance (possibly anticipated: cf. lines 212-5), of which Odysseus takes full advantage, of Hellenic customs for wine drinking: it was usual to mix the wine with so many measures of water in a ‘krater’, mixing bowl (cf. lines 9, 202). The strong, sweet Thracian wine of Maron’s gift requires, as we have been told, twenty measures of water to one of wine to be taken safely: lines 209-10. The Cyclops drinks it neat, and three or four cupfuls lay him out.

Page 159, Line 359. handsel. (tr. ’aporrox’: outflowing) of the meat and drink divine  Ambrosia and nectar.

Page 160, Line 377. Noman. Tr. 'Outis': Nobody.

Page 160, Line 381. the God. Tr. ’mega daimon’. 

Page 160, Lines 382-3. And they took up the shaft of olive … And into his eye they thrust it. The blinding of the drunken Polyphemus was one of the earliest episodes of epic to be illustrated on painted pottery, probably by the mid-7th century, and well into the Archaic period of such paintings. Usually, Odysseus and some comrades are shown thrusting the shaft overarm against the forehead of the seated giant, sometimes depicted as dropping his cup. 

Page 160, Line 385. the wimble. A gimlet; cf. Book v, 246.

Page 161, Line 403. the deathless night. Tr. ‘nukta ambrosien’.

Page 161, Line 408. by guile and not by main. Presumably by ‘main force’, as guessed by |Andrew Lang, in a parody, ’Jubilee before Revolution’, provoked by the appearance of Morris’s ’epic in saga slang’ in 1887, the year of Victoria’s Golden Jubilee, when Morris, despite his immersion in Socialist activity was already being, perhaps, talked of as a successor as Poet Laureate to the aged Tennyson. The parody, reprinted in Apes and Parrots, ed. J. C. Squire (Herbert Jenkins, n.d.), makes much play with quotations from this episode of Polyphemus.

Page 162, Line 430. For ‘wan’, read ‘won’.

Page 162, Line  435. the reins. The loins.

Page 163, Line 453. the losel. the rascal. Tr. simply ‘aner kakos’: bad man.

Page 163, Lines 459-60. some solace should I have. Tr.  ‘ker lopheseie’:  my [ill] fate would be abated.

Page 164-5. This episode of Odysseus’ (unwisely) twice challenging the Cyclops is that depicted in Turner’s well-known painting of ‘Ulysses defying Polyphemus’, with its colorful galley and exuberant sunrise.

Page 164, Lines 485-6. Here Morris has omitted to translate words that, when repeated in line 539 he has rendered ’but little it lacked but the outmost of the helm it lighted on’; possibly thinking the two passages contradictory.  The ‘helm’ being at the rear end of the ship, if the first stone cast reached its extremity, the ship would have been under steerage back towards the Cyclops’ shore; which does not make sense. Two modern prose translations, by E. V. Rieu, for Penguin Classics, and by Walter Shewring for Oxford World’s Classics, also omit the phrase on its first occurrence. Probably the poet has been careless in his management of repeated formulas: cf. Horace, Ars Poetica, line 358-60.

Page 165, Line 527. [HO 528] thou Girdle of the Earth. Tr. ’gaieoche’; ‘earth-holding’ is usually rendered as ’girdler of the earth’.

Page 166, Line 538. [HO 539] Here the ship’s bows have turned from ‘blue’ to ‘black’: both times tr. ‘kuanos’.

Page 166, Line 552. [HO 553] ‘meri[a]; usually tr. [upper] ‘thigh-bones’, not ‘buttocks’; cf. the account of a sacrifice in Book iii, lines 456, 461.