Samuel But­ler appears to have trans­lated The Odyssey expressly for the pur­pose of “sug­gest­ing” Homer was female in the foot­notes through­out, by way of build­ing on (and sub­stan­ti­at­ing) his ear­lier work, The Authoress of the Odyssey. Heh. What a shame his friend Lord Grimthorpe utterly mis-read the nature of the exe­cu­tion of the twelve maids, and But­ler blindly accepted this mis-interpretation as more ‘evi­dence’ for his (pos­si­bly true) claim.

Accord­ing to my read­ing of it, at least, the maids were hung with indi­vid­ual ropes sus­pended from a ship’s cable, hauled into place prior to any weight rest­ing upon it. There is no imprac­ti­cal­ity to using a pil­lar as a pul­ley, for the ship’s cable’s weight would not be pro­hib­i­tive before fur­ther bur­dens were placed upon it. Lord Grimthorpe, con­sider your under­stand­ing eas­ily imposed upon. (Nev­er­mind that both he and But­ler have been dead for the bet­ter part of a century.)