“. . . try what speed the gods may give thee.”
δαίμονος πειρῶμενος. Literally trying your god—the dependence of fortune upon God being a truth so vividly before the Greek mind that the term δαίμων came to be used for both in a manner quite foreign to the use of the English language, and which can only be fully expressed by giving both the elements of the word in a sort of paraphrase.
“. . . this whole house with ills
Is sheer possessed.”
δαὶμονᾷ δόμος κακοῖς. Literally, “the house is godded with ills,” that is, so beset with evil that we can attribute it only to a special superhuman power—to a god, as the Greeks expressed it, to the devil, as we say.
“. . . Sirs, why dare ye shut
Inhospitable doors against the stranger?”
To shut the door upon a stranger or a beggar, seems, in Homer’s days, to have been accounted as great a sin, as it is now, from change of circumstances, necessarily looked on as almost a virtue. Every book of the Odyssey has some testimony to this; suffice it to quote the maxim—