The Authoress of the Odyssey, by Samuel Butler

Chapter xvi


Before I quit my subject, I should perhaps answer a question which the reader has probably long since asked himself. I mean, how it is conceivable that considerations so obvious as those urged in the foregoing Chapters should have been overlooked by so many capable students for so many hundreds of years, if there were any truth in them. For they lie all of them upon the surface; they are a mere washing in the Jordan and being clean; they require nothing but that a person should read the “Odyssey” as he would any other book, noting the physical characters described in the Scherian and Ithacan scenes, and looking for them on some West coast of the Mediterranean to the West of Greece.

The answer is that the considerations which I have urged have been overlooked because, for very obvious reasons, it never occurred to any one to look for them. “Do you suppose, then,” more than one eminent scholar has said to me directly or indirectly, “that no one has ever read the ‘Odyssey’ except yourself?” I suppose nothing of the kind, and know that it was only possible for the truth when once lost (as it soon would be on the establishment of the Phœnicians at Drepanum) to be rediscovered, when people had become convinced that the “Odyssey” was not written by the writer of the “Iliad.” This idea has not yet been generally accepted for more than a hundred years, * if so long, but until it was seized and held firmly, no one was likely to suspect that the “Odyssey” could have come from Sicily, much less that it could have been written by a woman, for there is not one line in the “Iliad” which even hints at the existence of Sicily, or makes the reader suspect the author to have been a woman, while there are any number of passages which seem absolutely prohibitive of any other opinion than that the writer was a man, and a very strong one.

Stolberg in the last century, and Colonel Mure in this, had the key in the lock when they visited Trapani, each of them with the full conviction that the Cyclops incident, and the hunting the goats, should be placed on Mt. Eryx and the island of Favognana — but they did not turn it. Professor Freeman, Schliemann, and Sir H. Layard, all of them visited Trapani and its immediate neighbourhood either as students or excavators, and failed to see that there was as splendid a prize to be unburied there without pick and shovel, outlay, or trouble of any kind, as those of Nineveh, Mycene, and Hissarlik — and why? Because they were still hampered by the long association of the “Iliad” and “Odyssey” as the work of the same person. Knowing that the “Iliad” could hardly have been written elsewhere than in the Northern half of the West coast of Asia Minor, if would never occur to them to look for the “Odyssey” in a spot so remote as Trapani. They probably held it to be the work of some prehistoric Herodotus, who would go on from scene to scene without staying longer than he could help in any one place, instead of feeling sure, as I believe they should have done, that it was the work of one who was little likely to have travelled more than a very few miles from her own home. Moreover, Admiralty charts are things of comparatively recent date, and I do not think any one would have been likely to have run the “Odyssey” to ground without their help.

But however this may be, I do not doubt that the habit of ascribing the “Odyssey” to Homer has been the main reason of the failure to see the obvious in connection with it. Surely it is time our eminent Iliadic and Odyssean scholars left off misleading themselves and other people by including the “Odyssey” in their “Introductions” to the work of “Homer.” It was permissible to do this till within recent years; anything else, indeed, would have been pedantic, but what would have been pedantic a hundred years ago, is slovenly and unscholarly now.

Turning from her commentators to the authoress herself, I am tempted to wonder whether she would be more pleased or angry could she know that she had been so long mistaken for a man — and that man Homer. It would afford her an excellent opportunity for laughing at the dullness of man. Angry, however, as she would no doubt be, she could hardly at the same time help being flattered, and would perhaps console herself by reflecting that poets as great as she was are bound to pay the penalty of greatness in being misunderstood.

Horace tells us that mediocrity in a poet is forbidden alike by gods, men, and publishers, but, whether forbidden or no, there are a good many mediocre poets who are doing fairly well. So far as I can see, indeed, gods, men, and more particularly publishers, will tolerate nothing in a poet except mediocrity, and if a true poet by some rare accident slips in among the others, it is because gods and publishers’ readers did not find him out until it was too late to stop him. Horace must have known perfectly well that he was talking nonsense.

And after all it is well that things are as they are; for the mediocre poet, though he may hang about for many years, does in the end die, or at any rate become such a mere literary Struldbrug as to give plain people no trouble, whereas the true poet will possess himself of us, and live on in us whether we will or no, and unless the numbers of such people were severely kept in check they would clog the wheels of the world. Half a dozen first-class poets in prose or verse are as many as the world can carry in any comfort; twenty Shakespeares, twenty Homers, twenty Nausicaas would make literature impossible, yet we may be sure that every country in every century could yield two or three first-class writers, if genius were to be known at once, and fostered by those who alone know how to foster it. Genius is an offence; like all other offences it must needs come, but woe to that man or woman through whom it comes, for he or she must pass through the Scylla and Charybdis of being either torn in pieces on the one hand, or so misunderstood on the other as to make the slipping through with life in virtue of such misrepresentation more mortifying than death itself.

Do what we may we cannot help it. Dead mind like dead body must, after a decent interval, be buried out of our sight if living mind is to have fair play, and it might perhaps not be a bad thing if our great educational establishments had more of the crematorium and less of the catacomb about them than they have at present. Our notions of intellectual sanitation are deplorably imperfect, and unless the living become more jealous of letting dead mind remain unconsumed in their system, a fit of intellectual gout must ere long supervene, which, if not fatal, will still be excruciatingly painful. Since, therefore, there are such insuperable difficulties in the way of eliminating geniuses when we have once absorbed them, and since also, do what we may, we can no more detect the one genius who may be born among a multitude of good average children, than Herod could detect the King of the Jews among the babes of Bethlehem, we have no course but to do much as Herod did, and lay violent hands upon all young people till we have reduced every single one of them to such mediocrity as may be trusted to take itself off sooner or later. To this end we have established schools and schoolmen; nor is it easy to see how we could more effectually foster that self-sufficiency which does so much towards helping us through the world, and yet repress any exuberance of originality or independence of thought which may be prejudicial to its possessor during his own life, and burdensome to posterity when he is dead and gone.

Obviously wise, however, and necessary as our present system is, we nevertheless grumble at it. We would have any number of first-class geniuses in art, literature and music, and yet have plenty of elbow room for ourselves. Our children too; they cannot show too many signs of genius, but at the same time we blame them if they do not get on in the world and make money as genius next to never does. Like the authoress of the “Odyssey” we are always wanting to have things both ways; we would have others be forgotten, and yet not be forgotten ourselves; when we have shuffled off this mortal coil, we would fain shuffle on another that shall be at once less coil and less mortal, in the good thoughts of coming generations, but if this desire is so universal as to be called natural, it is one which the best and sanest of us will fight against rather than encourage; such people will do their work as well and cheerfully as they can, and make room for others with as little fuss as possible when they have had their day.

If, however, any man resents the common course of nature and sets himself to looking upon himself and cursing his fate that he was not born to be of the number of them that enter into life eternal even in this world, let him console himself by reflecting that until he is long dead, there is no certain knowing whether he is in life or no, and also that though he prove to be an immortal after all, he cannot escape the treatment which he is the more sure to meet with according as he is the more immortal — let alone the untold misery which his works will inflict upon young people.

If ever a great classic could have been deterred from writing by a knowledge of how posterity would treat her, the writer of the “Odyssey” should have been so, for never has poem more easy to understand failed more completely of being understood. If she was as lovely as I should like to think her, was ever sleeping beauty hidden behind a more impenetrable hedge of scholasticism? How could it be otherwise? The “Odyssey,” like the “Iliad,” has been a school book for nearly 3000 years, and what more cruel revenge could dullness take on genius? What has the erudition of the last 2500 years done for the “Iliad” and the “Odyssey” but to emend the letter in small things and to obscure the spirit in great ones?

There was indeed, as I said in my opening Chapter, a band of scholars a century or two before the birth of Christ who refused to see the “Iliad” and “Odyssey” as the work of the same person, but erudition snubbed them and snuffed them out so effectually that for some 2000 years they were held to have been finally refuted. Can there be any more scathing satire on the value of scholastic criticism? It seems as though Minerva had shed the same darkness over both the poems that she shed over Ulysses, that they might go in and out among eminent Homeric scholars from generation to generation, and none should see them.

The world does indeed know little of its greatest men and women, and bitterly has it been reproached for its want of penetration, but there are always two sides, and it should be remembered that its greatest men and women commonly know very little of the world in its more conventional aspects. They are continually flying in the face of all that we expect of greatness, and they never tell us what they are; they do not even think that they are great; if they do we may be sure that they are mistaken; how then can we be expected to appreciate people correctly till we have had plenty of time to think them over?

And when we have thought them over, how little have our canons of criticism to do with the verdict which we in the end arrive at. Look at the “Odyssey.” Here is a poem in which the hero and heroine have been already married many years before it opens; from the first page to the last there is no young couple in love with one another, there is in fact nothing amatory in the poem, for though the suitors are supposed to be madly in love with Penelope, they never say or do anything that carries conviction as to their being so. We accept the fact, as we do the sagacity of Ulysses, because we are told it, not because we see it. The interest of the poem ostensibly turns mainly on the revenge taken by a bald middle-aged gentleman, whose little remaining hair is red, on a number of young men who have been eating him out of house and home, while courting his supposed widow.

Moreover, this subject, so initially faulty, is treated with a carelessness in respect of consistency and plausibility, an ignorance of commonly known details, and a disregard of ordinary canons which it would not be easy to surpass, and yet, such is the irony of art that it is not too much to say that there is only one poem which can be decisively placed above it. If the “Odyssey” enforces one artistic truth more than another, it is that living permanent work in literature (and the same holds good for art and music) can only be done by those who are either above, or below, conscious reference to any rules or canons whatsoever — and in spite of Shakespeare, Handel, and Rembrandt, I should say that on the whole it is more blessed to be below than above. For after all it is not the outward and visible signs of what we read, see, or hear, in any work, that bring us to its feet in prostration of gratitude and affection; what really stirs us is the communion with the still living mind of the man or woman to whom we owe it, and the conviction that that mind is as we would have our own to be. All else is mere clothes and grammar.

As regards the mind of the writer of the “Odyssey” there is nothing in her work which impresses me more profoundly than the undercurrent of melancholy which I feel throughout it. I do not mean that the writer was always, or indeed generally, unhappy; she was often, at any rate let us hope so, supremely happy; nevertheless there is throughout her work a sense as though the world for all its joyousness was nevertheless out of joint — an inarticulate indefinable half pathos, half baffled fury, which even when lost sight of for a time soon re-asserts itself. If the “Odyssey” was not written without laughter, so neither was it without tears. Now that I know the writer to have been a woman, I am ashamed of myself for not having been guided to my conclusion by the exquisitely subtle sense of weakness as well as of strength that pervades the poem, rather than by the considerations that actually guided me.

The only approach to argument which I have seen brought forward to show that the “Odyssey” must have been written by a man, consists in maintaining that no woman could have written the scene in which Ulysses kills the suitors. I cannot see this; to me it seems rather that no man could have brought himself to disregard probability with so little compunction; moreover a woman can kill a man on paper as well as a man can, and with the exception of the delightful episode in which Ulysses spares the lives of Phemius and Medon, the scene, I confess, appears to me to be the most mechanical and least satisfactory in the whole poem. The real obstacle to a general belief that the “Odyssey” was written by a woman is not anything that can be found in the poem, but lies, as I have already said, in the long prevalence of an opinion that it was written by the same person as the “Iliad” was. The age and respectability of this opinion, even though we have at length discarded it, will not allow us to go beyond ascribing the “Odyssey” to another man — we cannot jump all at once to the view that it was not by a man at all. A certain invincible scholasticism prevents us from being able to see what we should see at once if we would only read the poem slowly and without considering anything that critics have said concerning it.

This, however, is not an easy thing to do. I know very well that I should never have succeeded in doing it if I had not passed some five-and-thirty rebellious years during which I never gave the “Odyssey” so much as a thought. The poem is so august: it is hallowed by the veneration of so many ages; it is like my frontispiece, so mysterious, so imperfect, and yet so divinely beyond all perfection; it has been so long associated with the epic poem which stands supreme — for if the “Odyssey” be the Monte Rosa of literature, the “Iliad” must, I suppose, for ever remain as the Mont Blanc; who can lightly vivisect a work of such ineffable prestige as though it were an overlooked parvenu book picked up for a few pence at a second hand book stall? Lightly, no, but inexorably, yes, if its natural health and beauty are to be restored by doing so.

One of our most accomplished living scholars chided with me in this sense a year or two ago. He said I was ruthless. “I confess,” he said, “I do not give much heed to the details on which you lay so much stress: I read the poem not to theorise about it, but to revel in its amazing beauty.”

It would shock me to think that I have done anything to impair the sense of that beauty which I trust I share in even measure with himself, but surely if the “Odyssey” has charmed us as a man’s work, its charm and wonder are infinitely increased when we see it as a woman’s. Still more must it charm us when we find the writer to be an old friend, and see no inconsiderable part of her work as a reflection of her own surroundings.

Have we, then, a right in sober seriousness so to find her? I have shown that in the earliest known ages of Greek literature poetesses abounded, and gained a high reputation. I have shown that by universal consent the domestic and female interest in the “Odyssey” predominates greatly over the male. I have shown that it was all written in one place, and if so — even were there no further reasons for thinking so — presumably by one hand: I have shown that the writer was extremely jealous for the honour of woman, so much so as to be daunted by no impossibilities when trying to get rid of a story that she held to be an insult to her sex. These things being so, is it too much to ask the reader to believe that the poem was not written, as Bentley held, by a man for women, but for both men and women, by one who was herself a woman?

And now as I take leave of the reader, I would say that if when I began this work I was oppressed with a sense of the hopelessness of getting Homeric scholars to take it seriously and consider it, I am even more oppressed and dismayed when I turn over its pages and see how certain they are to displease many whom I would far rather conciliate than offend. What can it matter to me where the “Odyssey” was written, or whether it was written by a man or a woman? From the bottom of my heart I can say truly that I do not care about the way in which these points are decided, but I do care, and very greatly, about knowing which way they are decided by sensible people who have considered what I have urged in this book. I believe I have settled both points sufficiently, but come what may I know that my case in respect of them is amply strong enough to justify me in having stated it. And so I leave it.

262:* I see that my grandfather, Dr. Butler, of Shrewsbury, accepts it in his Antient Geography, published in 1813, but I do not know where he got if from.


Nothing will be Indexed which can be found readily by referring to the Table of Contents.

Acitrezza, the island of, 43

Æolian-Ionic dialect of the “Iliad” and “Odyssey,” 219

Æolus, his island did not move about, 183

Agamemnon, killed in a covered cloister, 18

Alcinous, and Arēte, their family history, 34, 35; proposes that Ulysses should stay and marry Nausicaa, 37; promises to give Ulysses a gold cup, but never gives it, nor yet his talent of gold, 40; tells the Phæacians of Neptune’s threat, 41, 58; Alcinous, Ulysses, Menelaus and Nestor, all drawn from the same person, 115

Amber, Sicilian, 260

Amphinomus, Ulysses warns, 76

Anticlea, tradition that she hanged herself, 65; in Hades, on the situation, 132, 133

Antinous, never really wanted to marry Penelope, 91; his death throes and the good meat that was spoiled, 154

Argenteria, the, near Trapani, 230

Argus, Ulysses and, 151

Aristarchus, made most use of the Marseilles edition of “Iliad” and “Odyssey,” 219

Armour, removal of the, 155

Art, only interesting in so far as it reveals an artist, 6; the canons of, it is better to be below than above, 267

Arthurian legends, the, and Tennyson, 123

Asinelli, the islet, 189

Athenæum, the author’s two letters to the, p. xvii

Atreus, treasury of, 193

Autolycus, an accomplished thief and perjurer, 81

Axe, Calypso’s, had a handle, 10

Axes, the, why did not the suitors snatch them up? 153, 154


Balaclava, said to resemble Trapani, 5

Bayeux tapestry, 11, 13

Bear, the great, Ulysses told to steer by the, 29, 181, 182, 187, 197

Bentley, saying the “Odyssey” was written for women, 4; not perceiving that the “Odyssey” is of later date than the “Iliad,” 5

Biaggini, the late E., ix, 195

Blind, how commentators came to think that Homer was, 7

Brigands, modern, and Cyclopes, 193

Brooch, the, of Ulysses, 80, 227

Bunyan, 110, 111

Butcher and Lang, Messrs., their translation of the “Odyssey,” 7

Buttmann, on the Wandering Cliffs, 196


Calypso kept no man-servant, 107; her sailing directions to Ulysses, 181, 182, 187, 197

Catalogues, the Iliadic known to the writer of the “Odyssey,” 174, 237

Cave, forms of the word, much more common in “Odyssey” than “Iliad,” 194

Caves, the two near the place where Ulysses landed in Ithaca, 165-170

Cave-dwellers near Trapani, 193, 194

Cefalù, megalithic remains at, 185; called Portazza, 185; relays of fresh milk at, 186

Charybdis and the Galofaro, 197

Chorizontes, the, 5, 266

Circe, kept no man-servant, 107; as good a prophet as Tiresias, 149; her house and Eumæus’s pig-farm, 195

Clergyman, doctor, carpenter, bard, 152

Clytemnestra, naturally of a good disposition, 24, 116

Coleridge saw no burlesque in the speeches of the players in Hamlet, 259

Collesano, Byzantine (?) remains at, 185

Conturràno and his development since the “Odyssey,” 192

Corfu, anciently called Drepane and then Scheria, 225, 226

Cyclopes, and Læstrygonians, one race, 184; the, had two eyes, 191; still near neighbours of the Phæacians, 190; and modern Brigands, as per Mr. Stigand’s report in the Times, 193

Cyclops means round-faced asμήλωψ, apple-faced, 190; Parmenides called the moon Cyclops, 190


Dante, the people whom he meets in another world, 112; è un falso idolo, 113

Darknesses, the two most notable of the “Odyssey,” 188, 189, 198

Defoe, sends Robinson Crusoe a man, not a woman, 114

Didyme, and the island of the Sirens, 195, 196

Disc, Ulysses throws a, 39, 146

Dobree and Φωκέων, 223

Doerpfeld, Dr., and the Iliadic wall, 217, 218

Dolius, and Ulysses, in the house of Laertes, 102, 156

Door, bedroom at Trapani fastened in the Odyssean manner, 141

Drepane and Drepanum, 225

Dulichium, the most important of the Odyssean islands, 176, 177


Elpenor, and Ulysses in Hades, 110; his strange fall, 195

Elymi, Thucydides on the, 223

Epic cycle, the Trojan books of the, known to the writer of the “Odyssey,” 249, 250

Eryx the Sican city on the top of, not abandoned, 221

Eteoneus, only a char-butler, 140

Ethiopians, the, known as stretching all across Africa, 18.

Eubœa, assumed by Alcinous to be more distant from Scheria than Ithaca, 37

Eumæus, a male writer would have killed him, 156; a native of Syracuse, 210-212; perhaps a Greek, 214

Eurybates, why hunched in the shoulders, 235, 236

Euryclea, becomes Eurynome, 74, 76, 79; the price paid for her, a rejoinder to the “Iliad,” 143; and Eurynome the same person, 150, 151

Eurymachus, his death throes, and the good meat that was spoiled, 154

Eurymedon, his overthrow, 34, 219, 220

Eurynome, see Euryclea

Ewes, and lambs, the present practice in Sicily, 148

Favognana, derived from Favonius, 180; why Ulysses was not allowed to see, 197, 198

Fielding, his journey to the next world, 113; on Homer, 114

Fifths and Octaves, consecutive, forbidden, 119

Four main lines of the argument, 163

Freeman, Prof., his map of the West coast of Sicily, 176; visited Trapani, 263


Geese, Penelope’s dream about the, 82

Genius, an offence, &c., 264; to be stamped out while young, 265

Giacalone-Patti, Prof., ix.

Gladstone, the Right Hon. W. E., his canons as regards the text of “Iliad” and “Odyssey,” xi; the “systematic and comprehensive” study of Homer still young, 5, 6; contrasts the “Iliad” and “Odyssey,” 106; on Clytemnestra, 117; on the time when Homer wrote, 216

Grammerton and Shrewsbury, 160

Greatheart, Mr., 109

Grotta del Toro, the, 167-170


Hades, the writer’s attitude towards women, in, 109112

Harbour, Rheithron, used five times in the “Odyssey,” 167; of Trapani, boatmen plying for hire, 172

Hawk, tearing its prey, while still on the wing, 9, 66

Helen, coming down to dinner at the house of Menelaus, 25; mixes Nepenthe in the wine, 26, 144; outside the wooden horse, 144; her penitence for the wrong that Venus had done her, 144; her present of a bridal dress to Telemachus, 150

Heraclidæ, return of, undateable, 215

Hermione, her marriage found more interesting than that of Megapenthes, 136; her marriage interpolated, 137

Hesiod, records a time when iron was not known, 193

Homer, his infinite subtlety, 216; the authoress of the “Odyssey” was angry with him, 247; why the writer of the “Odyssey” let him so severely alone, 250, 251; protest against Introductions to Homer, which include the “Odyssey.” 263

Horace, and mediocribus esse poetis, 264

Horse the Trojan, story of the, shows that the Greeks did not know how Troy fell, 217

Hotel, man no use in a, 107

House of Ulysses, the, 16, 17, 18

Hypereia, near the Cyclopes, 31; probable remains of its wall, 190; not completely abandoned, 221


Iacenses, the, 231

Iakin, the coin, and the British Museum catalogue of Sicilian coins, 227, 228

Ιακὀς, means Ionian, 213

“Iliad,” catalogues of the, 174; date of, 215-219; the, refers to no event known to have been later than B.C. 1100, 218

Ingroia, Cav. Prof. of Calatafimi, ix

Invention, not the authoress’s strong point, 202-204

Ionian Settlements on East Sicilian shores, 213

Irus, and Iris, 116

Ismarus, and its wine, 180

Italia, and Œnotria, 184

Ithaca, drawn from Trapani and its neighbourhood, 165 drawn from the island of Marettimo as well as from Trapani, 172; “all highest up in the sea,” sketch of, 178

Jebb, Prof., the 1892 edition of his Introduction to Homer, xviii; his Introduction to Homer, 3; his quotation from Bentley, 4; on Bentley’s not seeing that the “Odyssey” was of later date than the “Iliad,” 5; on the house of Ulysses, 15, 16; and the date of the “Odyssey,” 210; mentioned, 219, 233, 234, 249, 252

Jews, their prayers, for men and for women, 114

Jones, H. Festing, xxi; his, and the author’s, joint oratorio Ulysses, 6; mentioned, 169, 186, 193


Kirchhoff, on the first 87 lines of “Od.” i., 252


Laertes, why he left off calling on Penelope and coming to town, 131; not poor, 132

Læstrygonians, derivation of the word, and lastricare, 184; and Cyclopes one race, 184; their relays of fresh milk, 184

Lambs, living on two pulls a day at a milked ewe, 9, 44; and ewes-the present practice, 148

Lang, Mr. Andrew, on the house of Ulysses, 15, 16

Latin names, the use of for Greek gods and heroes defended, xi, p. xii, xiii

Layard, Sir H., visited Trapani, 263

List of points necessary for the identification of Scheria, 158, 159

Lubbock, Sir John, his hundred books, 113

Lucian, the most ungallant of all, 113


Magistrate, a hungry, Ulysses compared to, 56, 150

Malconsiglio, legends concerning, 165

Malta, not Calypso’s island, 181, 187

Man, and woman, never fully understand one another, 105; can caricature each other, but not draw, 106

Marettimo, the island, had a wall all round it, 194

Marseilles, the civic edition of “Iliad” and “Odyssey” used most largely by Aristarchus, 219

Mediocribus esse poetis, &c., 264

Megalithicism, the two kinds of, 193

Megapenthes, only married because his sister was, 138

Melanthius and the store-room, 154, 155

Menelaus, Ulysses, Alcinous, and Nestor, all from the same person, 115; the collapse of his splendour in Book xv., 139; he used to sell wine, 139; his frank bourgeoisie, 139; his fussiness, 139; why made to come back on the day of Ægisthus’s funeral feast, 236

Mentor, his name coined from Nestor’s, 235

Milk rarely to be had fresh except in the morning in Sicily and S. Italy, 186

Milking ewes, what Sicilian shepherds now do, 148

Minerva, not an easy person to recognise, and had deserted Ulysses for a long time, 59, 257, 258; Ulysses upbraids her for not telling Telemachus about his return, 60; her opinion of Penelope, 134, 135; her singular arrangements for Telemachus, 140; Ulysses remonstrates with her, 141; sending Telemachus a West wind to take him from Ithaca to Pylos, 199; her total absence in Books ix.-xii. apologised for, 257, 258

Mixing-bowl, the, in an angle of the cloisters, 88; Phemius lays his lyre down near the, and near the approach to the trap-door, 94

Motya, 177

Mure, Colonel, on the Phæacian episode, 7, 258; visited Trapani, 263


Narcissus, a cantata by H. Festing Jones, Esq., and the author, 259

Nausicaa, her dream, and going to the wash, 31, 32; her meeting with Ulysses, 32-34; the ill-natured gossip of her fellow townspeople, 33; her farewell to Ulysses, 41; the most probable authoress, 206208

Nepenthe, the order in which its virtues are recorded, 144

Neptune, turns the Phæacian ship into stone, 58

Nestor, Alcinous, Menelaus, and Ulysses, all drawn from the same person, 115


Occasional notes, to show that the writer is a woman, 142-157

Octaves consecutive, 119, 204

“Odyssey,” the examples of feminine mistakes, 9; refers to nothing of later date than B.C. 1100, 218

Œnotria, and Italia, 184

Olympia, apparently unknown to the writer, 218

Orsi, Dr., mentioned, 185, 186; and pre-Corinthian cemeteries near Syracuse, 213

ὀρσοθύρα, the, 17, 92; the way towards was in the corner of the cloister, near the mixing-bowl, 94

Ortygia, and Syra, 65, 211


Pagoto, Signor Giuseppe, 148

Pantellaria, rightly placed as regards Scheria, 187; still a prison-island, 203

Parmenides, calls the moon Cyclops, 190

Penelope, her web, 21, 129; gets presents out of the suitors, 77; scandalous versions of her conduct in ancient writers, 125; she protests too much, 126; did she ever try snubbing or boring, 130; Minerva’s opinion of her, 134, 135; and the upset bath, 152; gloating over the luxury of woe, 152; not a satisfactory guardian of the estate, 153; tells her story to Ulysses before Ulysses tells his to her, 157

Perseus, does not rescue Andromeda, 109

Phæacian women, their skill in weaving, and general intelligence, 35

Phæacians, the, making drink offerings to Mercury (covert satire), 36; Ulysses’ farewell to the, 108; a thin disguise for Phocæans, 219; used 50-oared vessels like the Phocæans, 220

Phemius, begs for mercy, 94

Phocæ and Phocæans, 218

Phocæa, an Ionian city surrounded by Æolians, 219

Phocæans, the, used 50-oared vessels, 220; and Phocians, 4, 222, 223

Phœnician quarrymen’s marks on walls of Eryx, 192

Phœnicians, the, distrusted, but not much known about Phoenicia, 218

Piacus, 228

Pic-nic, a, to Polyphemus’s cave, 147, 148

Pisistratus, accompanies Telemachus to Sparta, 24; does not like crying during dinner, 25; gets no present, 150

Platt, Mr. Arthur, on the house of Ulysses, 15, 16

Poetesses, early Greek, abundant, 11, 12

Policeman, identifying prisoner, 160

Polyphemus, and his cave, drawn from life, 147, 148; his system of milking, 148; his cave still called la grotto di Polifemo, 188; the rocks he threw, Asinelli and Formiche, 189; had two eyes, 191: and Conturràno, 191, 192

Portazza, and Telepylus, 185


Quarry, called Dacinoi, 231


Raft, Ulysses’, 29

Raven rock, the, 165, 171

Rheithron, the harbour, used five times in “Odyssey,” 167

Rudder, the poetess’s ideas about a, 9, 10

“Ruler,” a two foot, betraying a writer as a woman, 10


Salt works of S. Cusumano, 166

Sappho, and other early Greek poetesses, 11, 12

Sardinian smile, a, 203

Scheria, means Jutland, 31; and Drepane, ancient names of Corfu, 225, 226

Schliemann, visited Trapani, 263

Seals, the intolerable smell of, 144; or Phocæ, malicious allusion to Phocæans, 220

Segesta, later than the “Odyssey,” 185

Selborne, Lord, his reminiscences, 172

Servants, like being told to eat and drink, 65

Shelley, on the sweetness of the “Odyssey,” 106

Shield of Achilles, the, its genuineness defended, 243-246

Shipwreck, and loss of Ulysses’ ship, 56

Shirt, a clean, Alcinous’ and his sons’ views concerning, 145

Shrewsbury, and Grammerton, 160

Sicels, in the “Odyssey,” 214-215

Σικανίης, not corrupted into, Σικελίης, 214

Sirens, the, and Didyme, 195, 196

Sleep, the, of Ulysses, 173, 253, 254.

Smyth, Admiral, on the Æolian islands and on Charybdis, 196, 197

Snow, frequent in the “Iliad,” but hardly even named in the “Odyssey,” 260

Spadaro, Prof., of Marettimo, 194

Sugameli, Signor, p. ix, 166, 169, 230, 231

Suitors, the, how many from each island, 68; they are also the people who were sponging on Alcinous, 122; they cannot be perfect lovers and perfect spongers at the same time, 127; their version of Penelope’s conduct, 128, 129

Sun, turnings of the, 211, 212

Sun-god, the, leaving his sheep and cattle in charge of two nymphs, 149

Swallow, Ulysses bowstring sings like a, 90; Minerva flies out to the rafters like a, 154

Syracuse, pre-Corinthian, 211, 212


Tarragona, the walls of, 222

Taygetus range, still roadless, 198

Tedesco, Signor, of Marettimo, 194

Telegony, the, and the “Odyssey,” 125

Telemachus, lectured by Minerva, 120; and by Penelope, 121; the two great evils that have fallen on his house, 122; only twelve years old when Ulysses went to Hades, 133; his alarm about his property, 135, 136; did not tip Eteoneus, 150

Telepylus, a fictitious name, 184

Temesa, copper mines of, 19; its people did not speak Greek, 214

Tennyson, and the Arthurian legends, 123

Theoclymenus sees the doom that overhangs the suitors and leaves the house, 86; his presence in the poem, strange, 201

Thersites, and Eurybates, 235, 236

Tholus, the, 17, 95, 98

Thucydides, and “Phocians of those from Troy,” 4, 5, 222, 223; on the Cyclopes and Læstrygonians, 184; substantially in accord with the writer of the “Odyssey,” 221; biassed in favour of the Corfu Drepane rather than the Sicilian Drepanum, 226

Tiresias, his prophecy, and warning about the cattle of the Sun, 49, 50, 254, 255, 256

Toro, grotta del, 167-170

Trapdoor, the, 92; the way towards was in the corner of the cloisters near the mixing bowl, 94

Trapani, what any rival site has got to show before claiming much consideration, 162

Trapani and Ægadean islands from Mt. Eryx, sketch of, 178

Troy, date of its real or supposed fall, 215-218


Ulysses, H. Festing Jones’s, and S. Butler’s oratorio, 6

Ulysses, fastens his chest with a knot that Circe had taught him, 258; his deep sleep, 173, 253, 254; upbraids Minerva for not telling Telemachus about his impending return, 60, 141; and Argus, 72, 151; warns Amphinomus, 76; rebukes Eurymachus, 78; he and Telemachus remove the armour, 79, 155; his brooch, 80, 227; having his feet washed by Euryclea, 81, 152; compared to a paunch cooking before a fire, 83, 153; his bedroom, surmise that the maids were hanged all round it, 98; interview with Laertes in the garden, 101, 102; eating with Dolius, 102, 156; his farewell speeches to the Phæacians, and to Queen Arēte, 108; his main grievance a money one, 109; he, Alcinous, Menelaus, and Nestor, all drawn from the same person, x15; always thankless, 150; why not allowed to see either Favognana or the Scherian coast, 188, 197, 198; house of, and that of Alcinous, 205, 206

Unconscious cerebration, examples of, 236, 237, 238, 239

Ustica, as the island of Æolus, 183


Vaulted room, the, 17, 95, 98

Virgil, and Æneas in Hades, 113; gives the Cyclopes only one eye, 191; and Drepanum, 224


Wall, the Iliadic, date of, 217, 218

Wandering cliffs, the, 53, 54, 55, 196

Wolf, his theory baseless and mischievous, 2, 3

Woman and man, never fully understand one another, 105; can caricature each other, but not draw, 106

Women, single, will not have a man in the house if they can help it, 107; in Hades, the writer’s attitude towards, 110, 111; treatment of the guilty, in the house of Ulysses, 117-119

World, its greatest men know little of the, 267


York, the Duke of, and his marriage, 108

Young people, apt to be thoughtless, 37, 146


Zimmern, Miss Helen, p. ix

Zummari, la Caletta dei, 195

This web edition published by:

The University of Adelaide Library
University of Adelaide
South Australia 5005

Last updated Monday, December 22, 2014 at 10:48