it all round the building, at a good height, lest any of the women's feet should touch the ground; and as thrushes or doves beat against a net that has been set for them in a thicket just as they were getting to their nests, and a terrible fate awaits them, even so did the women have to put their heads in nooses one after the other and die most miserably.[1] Their feet moved convulsively for a while, but not for very long.
474As for Melanthius, they took him through the cloister into the inner court. There they cut off his nose and his ears; they drew out his vitals and gave them to the dogs raw, and then in their fury they cut off his hands and his feet.
- ↑ Lord Grimthorpe, whose understanding does not lend itself to easy imposition, has been good enough to write to me about my conviction that the Odyssey was written by a woman, and to send me some remarks upon the gross absurdity of the incident here recorded. It is plain that all the authoress cared about was that the women should be hanged: as for attempting to realise, or to make her readers realise, how the hanging was done, this was of no consequence. The reader must take her word for it and ask no questions. Lord Grimthorpe wrote:—
"I had better send you my ideas about Nausicaa's hanging of the maids (not 'maidens,' of whom Froude wrote so well in his 'Science of History') before I forget it all. Luckily for me Liddell & Scott have specially translated most of the doubtful words, referring to this very place.
"A ship's cable. I don't know how big a ship she meant, but it must have been a very small one indeed if its 'cable' could be used to tie tightly round a woman's neck, and still more round a dozen of them 'in a row,' besides being strong enough to hold them and pull them all up.
"A dozen average women would need the weight and strength of more than a dozen strong heavy men even over the best pulley hung to the roof over them; and the idea of pulling them up by a rope going anyhow round a pillar (κίονος) is absurdly impossible; and how a dozen of them could be hung dangling round one post is a problem which a senior wrangler would be puzzled to answer . . . She had better have let Telemachus use his sword as he had intended till she changed his mind for him."
