The study guide SparkNotes describes these women as “disloyal women servants” who must be “executed,” while CliffsNotes calls them “maidservants” who were “disloyal,” and claims that their murder has a “macabre beauty.” In the poem’s original language, Telemachus refers to them only with hai, the feminine article—“those female people who . . . slept beside the suitors.” In my translation, I call them “these girls,” and hope to convey the scene in both its gruesome inhumanity and its pathos: “their heads all in a row, / were strung up with the noose around their necks / to make their death an agony. They gasped, / feet twitching for a while, but not for long.”
By the way, this is only a few dozen lines after Odysseus gives Eurycleia a civility lecture about how it’s a major faux pas to celebrate someone’s death. (In that case, the someones are all of the suitors, and he brings Eurycleia in to mop up the blood.)
This is also perhaps the best opportunity I’ll have to talk about how hilarious 19th century commentaries on Greek and Latin texts can be. In a commentary on Xenophon’s Cyropaedia, set in Persia during the childhood of Cyrus the Great, the Victorian commentator footnotes a mention of mascara to say that “In the East, women paint their eyes to this day.” My monocle fell into my soup when I heard that one.
Here’s her essay talking about her translation:
By the way, this is only a few dozen lines after Odysseus gives Eurycleia a civility lecture about how it’s a major faux pas to celebrate someone’s death. (In that case, the someones are all of the suitors, and he brings Eurycleia in to mop up the blood.)
This is also perhaps the best opportunity I’ll have to talk about how hilarious 19th century commentaries on Greek and Latin texts can be. In a commentary on Xenophon’s Cyropaedia, set in Persia during the childhood of Cyrus the Great, the Victorian commentator footnotes a mention of mascara to say that “In the East, women paint their eyes to this day.” My monocle fell into my soup when I heard that one.
Is this motherfucker just talking about eyeshadow and mascara?
Yes