Laudator Temporis Acti

M.L. West, The Making of the Odyssey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), p. 52:

Q dwells lovingly on details of rustic living. We have the feeling that this is more than the townsman’s romantic taste for the bucolic, that this is a man who has lived on the land and knows it at first hand.⁹ He gives a graphic picture of the interior of Polyphemos’ cave with its racks of cheeses, its pails of whey, and its ordered sheep-pens, with the technical terms for the three age-classes of lamb (ι 219-23); the whole episode presents a professional picture of the ogre’s pasturing and milking routines. When Odysseus approaches Eumaios’ piggery we get an expansive account of what he finds there, of how the place is constructed and run (ξ 5-22). As with the scene paintings cited above, the picture is deftly enhanced by subsequent details in the narrative. Eumaios is found making sandals for himself from cowhide (23 f.). He puts down brushwood and a shaggy goat-skin for his visitor to sit on (49-51, cf. π 47). He lights a fire in the morning to prepare breakfast (π 2), and when Telemachos arrives unexpectedly, he serves up some of the previous night’s leftovers (π 49 f.). Again when Odysseus goes to find his father, Laertes’ house-hold arrangements are first described (ω 205-12), and then, as the old man is not at home, further picturesque images are evoked as Odysseus goes to look for him: the dry-stone wall that Dolios and his sons have gone to make (223-5), and then Laertes himself found digging round a plant in his old mended smock and his leather leggings, gloves, and hat (226-33). This is followed up by references to the various fruit trees in the orchard (234, 246 f., 336-44).

⁹ Cf. Wilamowitz 1927: 160, ‘Ihn reizte das Leben, auch das der niederen Stände, das Bukolische; der späte Kunstausdruck wird es am kürzesten sagen. . . . Die Darstellung ist so breit, das die Handlung in dem ξ, das einen Tag füllt, keinen Schritt weiter kommt’; Merkelbach 235 f.