Note 171
BOOK XXII

[ The interpretation of lines 126-143 is most dubious, and at best we are in a region of melodrama: cf., however, i. 425, etc. from which it appears that there was a tower in the outer court, and that Telemachus used to sleep in it. The ὀρσοθύρα I take to be a door, or trap door, leading on to the roof above Telemachus’s bed room, which we are told was in a place that could be seen from all round—or it might be simply a window in Telemachus’s room looking out into the street. From the top of the tower the outer world was to be told what was going on, but people could not get in by the ὀρσοθύρα: they would have to come in by the main entrance, and Melanthius explains that the mouth of the narrow passage (which was in the lands of Ulysses and his friends) commanded the only entrance by which help could come, so that there would be nothing gained by raising an alarm. As for the ῥῶγες of line 143, no commentator ancient or modern has been able to say what was intended—but whatever they were, Melanthius could never carry twelve shields, twelve helmets, and twelve spears. Moreover, where he could go the others could go also. If a dozen suitors had followed Melanthius into the house they could have attacked Ulysses in the rear, in which case, unless Minerva had intervened promptly, the “Odyssey” would have had a different ending. But throughout the scene we are in a region of extravagance rather than of true fiction—it cannot be taken seriously by any but the very serious, until we come to the episode of Phemius and Medon, where the writer begins to be at home again.]