by Peter Wright

Page 100, Line 4. Hypereia. ‘The land above’; a legendary country.

Page 100, Line 6. The haughty minds and high. Giants, as we learn from Book vii, 59.

Page 100, Lines 9-10. he drew a wall round the city. Probably reflecting the procedures of Hellenic settlers during the period of colonization that was developing while the epic was being composed, first fortifying a new city, then building its houses and temples, finally laying out its farmland.

Page 100, Line 18. The Graces. ‘Charites’, divine maidens embodying and creating charm and beauty, both among men and in the natural world; soon associated with Aphrodite: cf. Book viii, 364-7.

Page 101, Line 38. mantles. Tr. ‘regea’: rugs or blankets.

Page 101, Lines 41-5. to Olympus … by no wind is it shaken … the utter cloudless lift ... Is spread over all, and white splendour runs through it everywhere. C.S. Lewis notes in The Allegory of Love (Oxford U. P. 1936), 83, that these lines are one of very few passages in ancient literature in which ‘pure aesthetic contemplation of [the gods’] eternity, their remoteness, and their peace, for its own sake’ is displayed.

Page 102, Line 59. to the washing amidst the river’s flow. Some ‘Neo-classical’ critics around 1700 considered that a king’s daughter doing her family’s washing in person showed a deplorable lack of dignity, and made Homer seem ‘low’.

Page 102, Line 70. all tilted over. Covered with a canopy of cloth.

Page 103, Line 100. their headgear. Tr. ‘kredemna’: a kind of veil.

the ball-play’s skill. Here hand-ball, see line 115. For ancient ball-games, e.g. S. G. Miller, Ancient Greek Athletics (Yale U. P. 2004), 171-5.

Page 103, Line 103. Erymanthus. A mountain in northern Arcadia.

Taygetus. The mountain range west of Sparta.

Page 103, Line 105. the Woodland Women. Tr. ‘numphai’: as in line 122.

Page 104, Line 129. His man’s unseemly members. The poet assumes that his audience will expect this degree of modesty in his hero: cf. lines 221-2. Presumably the discarding by athletes of all covering (such as the ‘girdles’ which those competing in Patroclus’ funeral games kept on (Iliad, Book XXIII, 683, 710), which tradition later ascribed to runners at Olympia shortly before 700 (Miller, Ancient Greek Athletics, 11-12), had not yet occurred, or become widespread.

Page 105, Lines 161-2. [HO 162-3] at Delos … A fig-sapling waxing aloft by Apollo’s altar-stone. Leto (cf. above, line 106) pregnant of twins by Zeus was driven from fixed land to land by Hera’s jealousy, and finally gave birth on the then supposedly floating isle of Delos to Artemis, then Apollo, upon its ‘mountain’, leaning against a palm-tree (‘phoinix’; not a fig, as tr. by Morris; compare Book vii, 116, where he correctly gives 'figs' for 'sukeai'), long shown near Apollo’s altar there. 

Page 106, Lines 188-9. Zeus … giveth to men folk ... To each ... his share of the happy day. cf. Iliad, Book XXIV, 525-33.

Page 107, Lines 207-8. from Zeus come guest-folk all and suppliants. Zeus ‘Xenios’ is the protector of all such outsiders; cf. Book vii, 165.

Page 108, Line 231. the daffodil. Tr. ‘hyacinthos’: (apparently dark-coloured), not ‘narcissus’.

Page 108, Lines 244-5. Might but such be called my husband. (cf. lines 276-81) The poet has adapted the meeting of Odysseus and Nausicaa from a folk-tale motif under which to a royal house in difficulties comes a stranger, also perhaps unlucky, who saves it from its troubles and earns as a reward the hand of the king’s daughter; cf. Book vii, 312-5. Here Odysseus’ devotion to Penelope excludes such a conclusion, and the hero can only bid his rescuing maiden a brief farewell: Book viii, 457-68. Robert Graves, in his novel, Homer’s Daughter (Cassell, 1955), basing himself on Samuel Butler’s theory that the Odyssey was composed by a woman, has imagined, and ingeniously fitted to the epic’s narrative, a story (set in a relatively realistic archaic Mediterranean society) which his heroine ’Nausicaa’, persecuted by unwelcome suitors in her father‘s absence, is, by means of an archery contest, delivered by, and weds, such a shipwrecked outsider (for whom Graves borrows the name Aethon from one of Odysseus’ ’aliases’, in Book xix), before forcing the family bard, ‘Phemius’ to put her story into hexameters.

Page 109, Line 235. the curving ships. Tr. 'amphielissai': rounded on each side.

Page 109, Line 236. meeted. measured.