|
From, Homer's Odyssey: A commentary
[Please note that the Table of Contents here published, is created by Elpenor and is not to be found in the print version]
Page 116
II. Next is the city of the Laestrigonians, where is a civil life, a State, to which Ulysses can come after subjecting the Cyclops, who had no polity of the sort. But the State is verily a giant, a cannibal to him now, with all the winds loose. Hence he has to flee for his life. Whither now does he go?
III. Not to Penelope and Ithaca, but to Circe, and her isle. She is the form which next rises before Ulysses, banished from the domestic world of Aeolus, and fleeing from the civil life of the Laestrigonians.
We shall try to bring the threads of connection to light, for it is our emphatic opinion that these three islands with their shapes are spiritually bound and wound together. Still further, they reach back and interlink with the forms of the previous Book, which furnish antecedent stages of the grand total movement of Fairyland. Separated in image are these islands and their inhabitants, but they have to be united in thought. Not a more accident is the sequence, but a necessity, a strict evolution. The work here, according our best belief, is organic, and the reader must not rest contented with his understanding of it, till he moves with the poet from place to place by the interior path of the spirit.
Cf.
Pharr, Homer and the study of Greek * Odyssey Complete Text
Iliad Complete Text * Homer Bilingual Anthology and Resources * Livingstone, On the Ancient Greek Literature
More OnLine Resources on Greek History, Places, Texts, Language
Reference address : https://ellopos.net/elpenor/greek-texts/ancient-greece/snider-odyssey.asp?pg=116