[19] Ulysses was to appease Neptune's anger by going as a missionary to preach his name among a people that did not know him.
[20] The want of coherence here is obvions, but as it is repeated when Ulysses ought to come to the wandering cliffs (which he never does) it must be referred to a lacuna not in the text, but in the writer's sources of information—of which she seems fully aware.
[21] I suppose this line to have been added when lines 426—446 of this book were added.
[22] The wandering cliffs are certainly intended, for when Ulysses is recapitulating his adventures in Book xxiii. he expressly mentions having reached the πλαγκτὰς πέτρας, just after the Sirens, and before Scylla and Charybdis (xxiii. 327). The writer is determined to have them in her story however little she may know about them.
[23] I incline to think that these lines are an after thought, added by the writer herself.
[24] σὺν ἀρτεμέεσσι φίλοισιν.
[25] Minerva, in her desire to minimise the time during which the suitors had been at Ulysses' house, seems to have forgotten that they had been there ever since Telemachus was quite a child (Od. ii. 312-14).
[26] i.e. which seemed to fly past them.
[27] According to tradition, she had hanged herself on hearing a report of the death of her son.
[28] See [Chapter XII], near the beginning.