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Each household is provided with an enormous quantity of linen, which when dirty is just soaked and rinsed, and then put aside till the great washing day of the year. This is why Nausicaa wants a waggon, and has to go so far afield. If it was only a few collars and a pocket-handkerchief or two she could no doubt have found water enough near at hand.
Not three ships’ lengths behind the Halicarnassian raced the ship of the son of Miltiades. They knew now why Artemisia had veered. Well she might; had she struck the Nausicaä down, her own broadside would have swung defenceless to the fleet pursuer. The Perseus sped past her consort at full speed, Athenian cheering Athenian as she went.
We, the civilised, need physiologists to remind us of these simple facts, and even then do not act on them. Those old half-barbarous Greeks had found them out for themselves, and, moreover, acted on them. But fair Nausicaa must have been some will say surely a mere child of nature, and an uncultivated person?
Odysseus made fast the cord, securing it with an intricate and cunning knot, which he had learnt from the great sorceress Circe; and when he had finished he was summoned by the eldest of the handmaids to the bath. When he had bathed and put on fresh raiment he came back to the dining-hall; and as he entered he saw Nausicaä leaning against a pillar.
"Straightway the godlike Odysseus spake these cunning words to the fair Nausicaa: 'Be thou goddess or mortal, O queen, I bow myself before thee! If thou art one of the deities who dwell in boundless heaven, by thy loveliness and grace and height I guess thee to be Artemis, daughter of high Zeus.
It is a striking feature of the easy unconstrained character of life among the Greeks, of its gladsome joyousness of disposition, which knew nothing of a starched and stately dignity, but artist-like admired aptness and gracefulness, even in the most insignificant trifles, that in this drama called Nausicaa, or "The Washerwomen," in which, after Homer, the princess at the end of the washing, amuses herself at a game of ball with her maids, Sophocles himself played at ball, and by his grace in this exercise acquired much applause.
Then the young woman behaved like a trump, or like a Highland Nausicaa, for students of the "Odyssey" will remember how Odysseus, simply clad in a leafy bough of a tree, made supplication to the sea-king's daughter, and how she befriended him.
In Homer they were used for drawing wagons: thus Nausicaa drove a mule team to haul out the family wash, and Priam made his visit to Achilles in a mule litter. Homer professes to prefer mules to oxen for ploughing. There were mule races at the Greek games.
To be ashamed of one's immorality is a step on the ladder at the end of which one is ashamed also of one's morality. One should part from life as Ulysses parted from Nausicaa blessing it rather than in love with it. What? A great man? I always see merely the play-actor of his own ideal. When one trains one's conscience, it kisses one while it bites.
Here an Æginetan galley dropped behind, yonder a Corinthian navarch suffered his men to back water. Even the keleustes of the Nausicaä slackened his beating on the sounding-board.
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