{99} Off the coast of Sicily and South Italy, in the month of May, I have seen men fastened half way up a boat’s mast with their feet resting on a crosspiece, just large enough to support them.  From this point of vantage they spear sword-fish.  When I saw men thus employed I could hardly doubt that the writer of the “Odyssey” had seen others like them, and had them in her mind when describing the binding of Ulysses.  I have therefore with some diffidence ventured to depart from the received translation of [Greek] (cf.  Alcaeus frag. 18, where, however, it is very hard to say what [Greek] means).  In Sophocles’ Lexicon I find a reference to Chrysostom (l, 242, A. Ed. Benedictine Paris 1834-1839) for the word [Greek], which is probably the same as [Greek], but I have looked for the passage in vain.

{100} The writer is at fault here and tries to put it off on Circe.  When Ulysses comes to take the route prescribed by Circe, he ought to pass either the Wanderers or some other difficulty of which we are not told, but he does not do so.  The Planctae, or Wanderers, merge into Scylla and Charybdis, and the alternative between them and something untold merges into the alternative whether Ulysses had better choose Scylla or Charybdis.  Yet from line 260, it seems we are to consider the Wanderers as having been passed by Ulysses; this appears even more plainly from xxiii. 327, in which Ulysses expressly mentions the Wandering rocks as having been between the Sirens and Scylla and Charybdis.  The writer, however, is evidently unaware that she does not quite understand her own story; her difficulty was perhaps due to the fact that though Trapanese sailors had given her a fair idea as to where all her other localities really were, no one in those days more than in our own could localise the Planctae, which in fact, as Buttmann has argued, were derived not from any particular spot, but from sailors’ tales about the difficulties of navigating the group of the Aeolian islands as a whole (see note on “Od.” x. 3).  Still the matter of the poor doves caught her fancy, so she would not forgo them.  The whirlwinds of fire and the smoke that hangs on Scylla suggests allusion to Stromboli and perhaps even Etna.  Scylla is on the Italian side, and therefore may be said to look West.  It is about 8 miles thence to the Sicilian coast, so Ulysses may be perfectly well told that after passing Scylla he will come to the Thrinacian island or Sicily.  Charybdis is transposed to a site some few miles to the north of its actual position.

{101} I suppose this line to have been intercalated by the author when lines 426-446 were added.

{102} For the reasons which enable us to identify the island of the two Sirens with the Lipari island now Salinas—­the ancient Didyme, or “twin” island—­see The Authoress of the Odyssey, pp. 195, 196.  The two Sirens doubtless were, as their name suggests, the whistling gusts, or avalanches of air that at times descend without a moment’s warning from the two lofty mountains of Salinas—­as also from all high points in the neighbourhood.