by Peter Wright

Page 168, Lines 1-2. the isle ... Aeolian … Aeolus ... Hippotas’ son. Aeolus, son of Hippotas, keeper of the winds,(apparently for Homer a mortal), to be distinguished from Aeolus, ‘son of Hellen’, eponymous ancestor of the Aeolian branch of the Hellenic race whose legendary offspring were mostly associated with Northern Greece, especially Thessaly; cf. Book xi, lines 235-59.

Page 168, Line 7. unto his sons in wedlock his daughters did he give. Hellenic custom did not usually allow of such unions between brothers and sisters, but perhaps that of Aeolus’ children was explained by their isolation.

Page 169, Line 21. the master of the wind. Tr. ‘tamies’: manager or disposer.

Page 169, Line 25. the South-west. Tr. simply 'Zephyros': the west wind.

Possibly 169, Line 28. nine days and nights thereafter. Possibly a conventional period; but cf. Book ix, line 85.

Page 169, Line 30. men lighting the beacons. Tr. ‘purpoleontes’, meaning ‘making or watching fires’. Morris may have imagined that the people of Ithaca suspected that Odysseus’ approaching fleet consisted of pirates.

Page 169, Line 32. the sheet. Tr. ‘podas neos’: here meaning the rope(s) controlling the sail.

Page 170, Line 62. and sat us ‘twixt the doorposts on the ground. A conventional posture of supplication.

Page 170, Line 64. what ill-God. Tr. ‘kakos daimon‘.

Page 171, Line 86. For there anigh to ... each other are the ways of day and night. Assumed to show an awareness of the short nights of lands close to the Arctic Circle.

Page 173, Lines 135-9. the isle Aeaea ... Circe ... the very sister is she of Aeaetes … they both of the Sun were begotten. When, in Book xii, line 70, we hear that the Argo returning towards Greece from the land of ‘the man of Aeaea’ (usually supposed to be Colchis in the far east),  guardian of the Fleece which Jason has won, has been the only ship to pass safely through the ’Strayers’, which Circe advises Odysseus to avoid, though they lie on a possible, but dangerous, route home for him, it seems that the poet is uncertain whether her isle, as Aeaetes’ sister and a child of the (rising) Sun, might not also be in the distant East rather than the West; or else the legends on which he was drawing were ambiguous. Lines 190-2 suggest that the sun’s daily movement was no longer visible to them on the island where they had landed, despite the mention of dawn just before.

Page 175, Line 188. the Meeting of Menfolk. Tr. ‘agoren’: even for a ship’s crew.

Page 175, Lines 203-09. into two companies, And a leader ... to be o’er each of these ... with him were fellows twenty and two. In Book ix Odysseus’ ship had lost six men to the Cicones and six devoured by the Cyclops, so its crew would apparently have originally numbered 58, rather more than a fifty-oar penteconter; or else Homer has forgotten one or other loss.

Page 176, Lines 212-4. wolves of the mountain, and lions ... And she herself had tamed them with ... herbs of ill. Not until line 433 is it suggested that these ‘fawning’ beasts may have been transformed from earlier guests of Circe. The ‘herbs of ill’ tr. ‘kaka pharmaka’: evil drugs. 

Page 178, Lines 233-4. a mess of cheese and meal and honey ... With Pramneian wine. Substantially the same meal (except for the honey) which Nestor, in Iliad, Book XI,  637-9, has prepared for a wounded comrade. The origin of the Pramneian wine does not seem to be known.

Page 178, Line 278-80. as a young man shapen fair. Hermes is in an assumed form as he was, when in Iliad,  Book XXIV, 347-8 (very similar lines), he came to guide Priam to Achilles’ hut. His usual appearance, as himself, in Archaic art down to about 450, is as a strong young man with a vigorously jutting beard.

Page 178, Lines 287, 290. Both the ‘herb full crafty’ and the ‘venom’ (as also in lines 317, 326) are ‘pharmaka’.

Page 179, Line 299. the oath of the happy Gods, the Great Oath. (cf. line 343) Presumably the one by the Styx which Calypso took: Book v, 278-86.

Page 179, Line 305. And Moly the Godfolk call it. Sometimes in the Iliad we hear of persons and things which have one name in the language of gods and another in that of men: e.g. Books I, 403-4; 814-5; XIV, 290-1. The significance of this is unclear: possibly the ‘divine’ name was left over from the speech in use in Greece before the arrival of Hellene-speaking peoples: many place-names, ending for instance in -nthos and -ssos (such as Erymanthos; Sagalassos; Cnossos), and even common words such as 'thalassa' (sea) are believed to derive from such an earlier language; and about half the names of the Olympian gods and several of heroes, including ‘Achilleus’ and perhaps Odysseus himself, cannot easily be resolved into standard Hellenic elements.

Page 180, Lines 347-9. the handmaids … their race is of the wellsprings, of the grassy groves they come ... And of the holy rivers …. In Homer Circe’s servants are simply nymphs, not the ‘languid’ ‘heavy-eyed’ ‘damsels’, described in Morris’s Jason, Book XIII, apparently ‘void of soul’, and indeed made by Circe to injure human visitors. With their unresponsive beauty they allure and transform into beasts, ’lions and pards’, bears and boars, the ‘browned sea-farers’ who rashly enter Circe’s enchanted garden with its ‘deadly air’, from which there is no deliverance for those once entrapped by the ‘sweet poison’ of their ‘longing’. Morris’s ‘undying sorceress’ herself is, too, a much more sinister and perilous figure than Homer’s, conscious of the burden of her knowledge, and one from whom even Medea, though herself skilled in magic, and protected by wearing a withered garland of ‘Pontic Moly’, finds it wise to hasten away.

Page 186, Line 492-3. the Theban Tiresias. For whom see Note on Book xi, 89-90.

Page 186, Lines 507-11. the wind of the  Northward through the stream of Ocean. The way to the Land of the Dead is not westwards towards the sun-setting, but southwards and across the river Ocean (for which see Note on Book xi, 13). 

Page 186, Line 510. the fruitless willows. Tr. ’olesikarpoi’: willows that shed their fruit before it is ripe.

Pages 186-7, Lines 512-3. Where the stream of Flaming Fire into Grief-River goes ... And the Water of the Wailing, a rill that from Hate-Stream flows. Translating respectively, 'Pyriphlegethon'; 'Acheron'; 'Kokutos'; 'Styx'.

Page 187, Lines 525, 527. The dead prophet requires black victims for his sacrifice. 

Page 187, Line 528. the Nether Dusk. Tr. ‘Erebos’: a place of darkness.