by Peter Wright

Page 381, Line 3. the grey steel is in Greek just ‘sideron’: iron; so tr. in lines 10, 62, etc.

Page 381, Lines 14-18. Lacedaemon … Iphitus … Eurytus … Messene … Orsilochus. Lacedaemon was the chief city of the Spartan state.

For Eurytus, see Note on Book viii, lines 224-8; for Iphitus, the following note.

Messene is the region covering the South-west Peloponnese.

Ortilochus was presumably the father of the Messenian Diores who was Telemachus’ host on his way to and from Sparta, in Books iii and xv.

Pages 381-2, Lines 22-30. Iphitus sought his horses … Heracles … nor the table he spread for the guest. The mares were stolen from Iphitus by Heracles, or, in another version of the story, by Autolycus and then sold by him, with their appearance disguised, to Heracles. When Iphitus, following their trail, came to Heracles’ home, and suspected that hero of having taken them in retaliation for Eurytus refusing to give him his daughter Iole, Heracles, maddened at his suspicion, killed his guest, in violation of the laws of hospitality.

Page 384, Line 109. There is no ‘folkland’ in the Greek here, or in line 252.

Page 385, Line 133. ‘the man who preventeth’ means a man who challenges him.

Page 386, Line 145. the seer. tr. ’thuoskoos’: rather, the man who offered sacrifice for them; cf.  Book xxii, lines 318-21.

Page 386, Line 159. ‘proven’ means 'tested'.

Page 388, Line 209. the ‘homemen’. tr. ‘dmoes’: slaves, as in line 244.

Page 388, Line 212. ‘how’ should mean ’however’.

Page 388, Lines 214-216. Odysseus does not directly promise to free them; but this may be implied in their becoming ‘brothers’ to his son.

Page 389, Line 245. the doors between the hall and the women’s quarters.

Page 391, Line 275. a rightful word. A word ‘kata moiran’: according to the right part.

Page 391-392, Lines 295-302. the centaur Eurytion … Peirithous ... the Lapithae. This punishment of one centaur, transgressing through drunkenness, is a prelude to, if not a portion of, the great battle, mentioned in line 303, between the Centaurs and the Lapiths, a Thessalian people. It happened when, at the Lapith king Pirithous‘ wedding, the Centaurs, inflamed with wine, began to outrage the Lapith women. Of that battle, briefly mentioned in the Iliad, Book I, lines 264-72, and much illustrated in sculpture and painting, the fullest literary account is in Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book 12.

The image of Centaurs may not have been, for the epic’s original audience, the same as that for modern readers whose imagination of them is probably derived from the metopes of the Parthenon and of the west pediment of Zeus’ temple at Olympia, where such creatures have a male torso rising out of a four-legged horse’s body where its neck would be. Earlier Centaurs were usually portrayed with a human body from head to feet, with a horse’s two-legged hindquarters attached behind, below the waist.

Page 392, Line 308. King Echetus. See Note on Book xviii, line 85.

Page 395, Line 395. Lest the worms the horn (‘kera’) should have eaten. This phrase suggests that the bow might have been a composite one in the Oriental fashion, with strips of horn interleaved within its wood to improve its tensile strength. The reference in line 138 to its 'well-wrought horn-tip' only tr. ’korone’: the tip over which the bowstring is hooked.

Page 396, Line 415. It is Cronos, not Zeus, who is ’crooked-counselled’.

Page 396, Line 434. crested with the … brazen gear. Tr. ‘kekoruthmenos … chalko’: literally bronze-helmeted; but cf. Book xxii, 201-13, where four helmets are fetched for four fighters.