then you may slacken your hold and let him go; and you can ask him which of the gods it is that is angry with you, and what you must do to reach your home over the seas.'
245"Having so said she dived under the waves, whereon I turned back to the place where my ships were ranged upon the shore; and my heart was clouded with care as I went along. When I reached my ship we got supper ready, for night was falling, and camped down upon the beach.
431"When the child of morning rosy-fingered Dawn appeared, I took the three men on whose prowess of all kinds I could most rely, and went along by the sea-side, praying heartily to heaven. Meanwhile the goddess fetched me up four seal skins from the bottom of the sea, all of them just skinned, for she meant playing a trick upon her father. Then she dug four pits for us to lie in, and sat down to wait till we should come up. When we were close to her, she made us lie down in the pits one after the other, and threw a seal skin over each of us. Our ambuscade would have been intolerable, for the stench of the fishy seals was most distressing[1]—who would go to bed with a sea monster if he could help it?—but here, too, the goddess helped us, and thought of something that gave us great relief, for she put some ambrosia under each man's nostrils, which was so fragrant that it killed the smell of the seals.[2]
- ↑ The Greek is,
……τεῖρε γὰρ αἰνῶς
φωκάων ἁλιοτρεφέων ὀλοώτατος ὀδμή.Ι believe this to be a hit at the writer's own countrymen who were of Phocæan descent, and the next following line to be a rejoinder to complaints made against her in bk. vi. 276—225, to the effect that she gave herself airs and would marry none of her own people. For that the writer of the Odyssey was the person who has been introduced into the poem under the name of Nausicaa, I cannot bring myself to question. I may remind English readers that φώκη (i.e. phoca) means "seal." Seals almost always appear on Phocæan coins.
- ↑ Surely here again we are in the hands of a writer of delicate sensibility. It is not as though the seals were stale; they had only just been killed. The writer, however, is obviously laughing at her own countrymen, and insulting them as openly as she dares.
