404But Ulysses, when he had taken it up and examined it all over, strung it as easily as a skilled bard strings a new peg of his lyre and makes the twisted gut fast at both ends. Then he took it in his right hand to prove the string, and it sang sweetly under his touch like the twittering of a swallow. The suitors were dismayed, and turned colour as they heard it; at that moment, moreover, Jove thundered loudly as a sign, and the heart of Ulysses rejoiced as he heard the omen that the son of scheming Saturn had sent him.
416He took an arrow that was lying upon the table[1]—for those which the Achæans were so shortly about to taste were all inside the quiver—he laid it on the centre-piece of the bow, and drew the notch of the arrow and the string towards him, still seated on his seat. When he had taken aim he let fly, and his arrow pierced every one of the handle-holes of the axes from the first onwards till it had gone right through them,[2] and into the outer courtyard. Then he said to Telemachus:—
425"Your guest has not disgraced you, Telemachus. I did not miss what I aimed at, and I was not long in stringing my
- ↑ This was, no doubt, the little table that was set for Ulysses, Od. xx. 259.
- ↑ Surely the difficulty of this passage has been overrated. I suppose the iron part of the axe to have been wedged into the handle, or bound securely to it—the handle being half buried in the ground. The axe would be placed edgeways towards the archer, and he would have to shoot his arrow through the hole into which the handle was fitted when the axe was in use. Twelve axes were placed in a row all at the same height, all exactly in front of one another, all edgeways to Ulysses whose arrow passed through all the holes from the first onward. I cannot see how the Greek can bear any other interpretation, the words being,
οὐδ᾽ ἤμβροτε πάντων
πρώτης στειλειῆς."He did not miss a single hole from the first onwards." στειλειή according to Liddell and Scott being "the hole for the handle of an axe, &c.," while στειλειόν (Od. v. 236) is, according to the same authorities, the handle itself. The feat is absurdly impossible, but our authoress sometimes has a soul above impossibilities.
