Samuel Butler

“ The only part of the foregoing plan and explanatory notes that forces the text is in respect of the main gateway, which I place too far from the mouth of the λαύρα for one man to be able to keep out all who would bring help to the suitors; but considering how much other impossibility we have to accept, I think this may be allowed to go with the rest. A young woman, such as I suppose the writer of the "Odyssey" to have been, would not stick at such a trifle as shifting the gates a little nearer the λαύρα if it suited her purpose. ”

“ Where the writer is trying to make us believe impossibilities, I have shown that she is doing so, and have also shown why she wanted us to believe them; but until a single passage is pointed out to me in which I have altered the intention of the original, I shall continue to hold that the conception of the poem which I lay before the reader in the following pages is a juster one than any that, so far as I know, has been made public hitherto; and, moreover, that it makes both the work and the writer a hundred times more interesting than any other conception can do. ”

“ In passing, I may say that Agamemnon appears to have been killed ("Od." iv. 530, 531) in much such a cloistered court as above supposed for the house of Ulysses. A banquet seems to have been prepared in the cloister on one side the court, while men were ambuscaded in the one on the opposite side.
Lastly, for what it may be worth, I would remind the reader that there is not a hint of windows in the part of Ulysses’ house frequented by the suitors.
After this introduction, Butler presents an abridged version of his prose translation of the Odyssey. ”