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[515] νύκτας. The night is regularly put first, as in the phrase “νύκτας τε καὶ ἦμαρ”, and the later “νυχθήμερον”.

The chronology is open to some doubt. If the homeward journey of Telemachus did not begin till the morning after Ulysses landed in Ithaca (as we have assumed, see the note on 15. 1), Ulysses must have spent four nights in the hut of Eumaeus, viz. (1) the night after his landing; (2) the night which Telemachus passed at Pherae, 15. 188; (3) the night of the voyage from Pylos; and (4) the night after the return of Telemachus. This is the reckoning of Kirchhoff, who observes that ‘in this and similar things it is advisable not to demand too scrupulous an exactness from the poet’ (Die homerische Odyssee, p. 516). The ancients got rid of the discrepancy by making Telemachus start on his journey on the same day as that on which his father reached Ithaca. On this view (if a prosaic accuracy is insisted on) Athene reached Sparta before she left Ulysses in Ithaca (so Dr. Hayman, vol. III. app. H 2). And in any case, when one book ends with the end of a day (14. 523 ff.), and the next begins with an early morning scene (15. 1-55), the days are surely meant to be successive. On the other hand, the miscalculation— if such a word may be applied to it— becomes intelligible when we consider that only three evenings in the hut of Eumaeus are actually described—one in each of the three books 14-16. The rest of the time spent there—the second and early part of the third day—is a blank in respect of incident, and naturally passed even from the poet's own mind.

Homer's Odyssey. W. Walter Merry. James Riddell. D. B. Monro. Oxford. Clarendon Press. 1886-1901.

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