I asked Ignazio Giacalone: “What are they singing?”
He replied that it was a favourite song among the popolino of Trapani about a girl who did not want to be seen going about with a man. “The people in this place,” says the song, “are very ill-natured, and if they see you and me together, they will talk,” &c.
I do not say that there was any descent here from Nausicaa’s speech to Ulysses, but I felt as though that speech was still in the air. [Od. VI. 273.]
I reckon Gadshill and Trapani as perhaps the two most classic grounds that I frequent familiarly, and at each I have seemed to hear echoes of the scenes that have made them famous. Not that what I heard at Gadshill is like any particular passage in Shakespeare.
Waiting to be Hired
At Castelvetrano (about thirty miles from Trapani) I had to start the next morning at 4 a.m. to see the ruins of Selinunte, and slept lightly with my window open. About two o’clock I began to hear a buzz of conversation in the piazza outside and it kept me awake, so I got up to shut the window and see what it was. I found it came from a long knot of men standing about, two deep, but not strictly marshalled. When I got up at half-past three, it was still dark and the men were still there, though perhaps not so many. I enquired and found they were standing to be hired for the day, any one wanting labourers would come there, engage as many as he wanted and go off with them, others would come up, and so on till about four o’clock, after which no one would hire, the day being regarded as short in weight after that hour. Being so collected the men gossip over their own and other people’s affairs—wonder who was that fine-looking stranger going about yesterday with Nausicaa, and so on. [Od. VI. 273.] This, in fact, is their club and the place where the public opinion of the district is formed.
Ilium and Padua
The story of the Trojan horse is more nearly within possibility than we should readily suppose. In 1848, during the rebellion of the North Italians against the Austrians, eight or nine young men, for whom the authorities were hunting, hid themselves inside Donatello’s wooden horse in the Salone at Padua and lay there for five days, being fed through the trap door on the back of the horse with the connivance of the custode of the Salone. No doubt they were let out for a time at night. When pursuit had become less hot, their friends smuggled them away. One of those who had been shut up was still living in 1898 and, on the occasion of the jubilee festivities, was carried round the town in triumph.
Eumaeus and Lord Burleigh
The inference which Arthur Platt (Journal of Philology, Vol. 24, No. 47) wishes to draw from Eumaeus being told to bring Ulysses’ bow ἀνὰ δώματα (Od. XXI. 234) suggests to met to me the difference which some people in future ages may wish to draw between the character of Lord Burleigh’s steps in Tennyson’s poem, according as he was walking up or pacing down. Wherefrom also the critic will argue that the scene of Lord Burleigh’s weeping must have been on an inclined plane.