till the waves ran mountains high. Here he divided his fleet and took the one half towards Crete where the Cydonians dwell round about the waters of the river Iardanus. There is a high headland hereabouts stretching out into the sea from a place called Gortyn, and all along this part of the coast as far as Phæstus the sea runs high when there is a south wind blowing, but after Phæstus the coast is more protected, for a small headland can make a great shelter. Here this part of the fleet was driven on to the rocks and wrecked; but the crews just managed to save themselves. As for the other five ships, they were taken by winds and seas to Egypt, where Menelaus gathered much gold and substance among people of an alien speech. Meanwhile Ægisthus here at home plotted his evil deed. For seven years after he had killed Agamemnon he ruled in Mycene, and the people were obedient under him, but in the eighth year Orestes came back from Athens to be his bane, and killed the murderer of his father. Then he celebrated the funeral rites of his mother and of false Ægisthus by a banquet to the people of Argos, and on that very day Menelaus came home,[1] with as much treasure as his ships could carry.
313"Take my advice then, and do not go travelling about for long so far from home, nor leave your property with such dangerous people in your house; they will eat up everything
- ↑ The Greek is
αὐτῆμαρ δέ οἱ ἦλθε βοὴν ἀγαθὸς Μενέλαος.
cf. Iliad II. 408
αὐτόματος δέ οἱ ἦλθε βοὴν ἀγαθὸς Μενέλαος.Surely the αὐτῆμαρ of the Odyssean passage was due to the αὐτόματος of the Iliad. No other reason suggests itself for the making Menelaus return on the very day of the feast given by Orestes. The fact that in the Iliad Menelaus came to a banquet without waiting for an invitation, determines the writer of the Odyssey to make him come to a banquet, also uninvited, but as circumstances did not permit of his having been invited, his coming uninvited is shown to have been due to chance. I do not think the authoress thought all this out, but attribute the strangeness of the coincidence to unconscious cerebration and saturation.
