Book 5
14
But in Homer, in the banquet of Menelaus, they propose to one another questions as in ordinary conversation, and chatting with one another like fellow-citizens, they entertain one another and us too. Accordingly, Menelaus, when Telemachus and his friends come from the bath-room, and when the tables and the dishes are laid, invites them to partake of them, saying— Accept this welcome to the Spartan court; The waste of nature let the feast repair, Then your high lineage and your names declare:Odyss. iv. 60.— and then he helps them to what he has before him, treating them in the most friendly manner— Ceasing, benevolent he straight assigns The royal portion of the choicest chines To each accepted friend; with grateful haste They share the honours of the rich repast. And they, eating in silence, as it becomes young men to do, converse with one another, leaning forwards gently, not about the food, as Homer tells us, nor about the maid-servants of him who had invited them, and by whom they had been washed, but about the riches of their entertainer— Soft whispering thus to Nestor's son, His head reclined, young Ithacus begun: View'st thou unmoved, O ever honour'd most, These prodigies of art and wondrous cost? Such, and not nobler, in the realms above Are the rich treasures in the dome of Jove.The reading is— ζηνός που τοιαῦτα δόμοις ἐν κτήματα κεῖται, for which Aristarchus wished to read— ζηνός που τοίηδέ γ’ ʼολυμπίου ἔνδοθεν αὐλή. I have given here, as elsewhere, Pope's version in the translation. For that, according to Seleucus, is the best reading; and Aristarchus is wrong when he writes— Such is the palace of Olympian Jove. For they are not admiring the beauty of building alone; for how could there be amber, and silver, and ivory in the walls? But they spoke partly about the house, as where they used the expression the sounding house, for that is the character of large and lofty rooms; and they spoke also of the furniture— Above, beneath, around the palace shines The sumless treasure of exhausted mines; The spoils of elephants the roofs inlay, And studded amber darts a golden ray. So that it is a natural addition to say— Such are the treasures in the dome of Jove, Wondrous they are, and awe my heart doth move But the statement, Such is the palace of Olympian Jove, has no connexion with— Wondrous they are . . . . and it would be a pure solecism and a very unusual reading.
