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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 December 2013
The object of this paper is to examine some of the arguments which have been used to support current reconstructions of the Homeric House, and in particular of the House of Odysseus, as it is described in the Odyssey; and to add a few points of interpretation and of criticism which I have not succeeded in finding already in print. In order to make these latter intelligible, it will be necessary to recapitulate much that has been stated by previous writers on a subject which is ‘always with us’; and not a little that has been established with some degree of certainty. It is perhaps necessary also to add, that the interpretation which I propose is intended to apply, almost without exception, to the Homeric poems in their present state; and to determine the domestic architecture and domestic habits which were familiar both to rhapsodists and to their audiences at the time when the poems, and the ‘Vengeance of Odysseus’ in particular, were being reduced to the form in which, with but slight aberrations, they have survived. It is difficult to believe that men who were endowed with so keen a visualizing faculty as the rhapsodists and their patrons really tolerated unintelligible archaism in the domestic topography of their ballads; and we may fairly assume that the movements of the personages implicated in the ‘Vengeance,’ into and out of the House of Odysseus, were still intelligible, and even familiar, to both singers and listeners. That this was so in the Homeric Age, and that anachronisms in the description were currently corrected, as one custom and another became obsolete in daily life, is made very probable, if not certain, by the analogous case of Homeric armour; where, as Dr. Reichel has argued in his Homerische Waffen, the introduction of the θώρηξ and the consequent changes of drill and fence, are reflected in the poems by interpolated passages, introduced by θώρηξwearing rhapsodists to meet the critisisms of a θώρηξwearing public.
page 129 note 1 For earlier, and for the most part foreign, versions see the bibliography in Jebb, , J.H.S. vii. 170Google Scholar, n.
page 129 note 2 New Chapters in Greek History, p. 103 ff.
page 129 note 3 ‘This general feature is common to all plans of the Homeric house hitherto given.’—Jebb, , J.H.S. vii. 172Google Scholar, n.
page 132 note 1 It may be admitted at once that this is not in itself improbable; though as we shall see presently, there is another possible view.
page 135 note 1 ἀναχωρήσας, xvii. 453; ἂψ ἀναχωρήσϵιν, xvii. 462; cf. below, p. 142.
page 138 note 1 E.g. Gardner, , J.H.S. iii. 266Google Scholar; Jebb, , J.H.S. vii. 173Google Scholar.
page 138 note 2 See below, p. 146.
page 139 note 1 Schliemann, in Tiryns, p. 216Google Scholar, concluded from the absence of sockets here, ‘that the doorway was only closed by drawing a curtain’: faithless for a moment to the Homeric clue which elsewhere had served him so well.
page 139 note 2 See especially xxi. 378–9, xxiv. 420, xxii. 2, xxii. 99, xxii. 107.
page 140 note 1 E.g. the plans of Prof. Gardner and Prof. Jebb, on p. 130.
page 143 note 1 Prof. E. A. Gardner points out to me that ἀνὰ means seawards and κατὰ landwards, though the shore is on a higher level than the sea. But here, besides the fact that ἀνὰ is ‘to put out’ and κατὰ ‘to put in’ (which exactly confirms my interpretation here), it is apparently the sea which slopes up from the shore-line; and it slopes up the more, the higher the cliff you are on.
page 149 note 1 Schuchhardt, Schliemann's Excavations, Pl. II.; Dörpfeld, , Troja, 1893Google Scholar, Pl. I.
page 149 note 2 Ἐφ. Ἀρχ. 1899, p. 118, Fig. 32 ζ.
page 149 note 3 British School Annual, ii. p. 183, Figs. 8, 9, and the Map, Plate V.
