Help with the odyssey....?

Question

could you give me answers to 1-9 and who is the pearl of women

from this site http://www.leasttern.com/HighSchool/odyssey/SG4.html

thank you

Answer 1

In this context, the "pearl of women" has to be Helen.  As for the study questions, the answers to some seem pretty open and shut, but 4 and 8  caught my fancy.  After running away with Paris and causing the Trojan War, Helen seems to have been amicably reunited with Menelaus and to have settled back into her position as the honored Queen of Sparta, and Menelaus appears to dote on her.  When she remarks that she was so silly to run off with Paris when she had a smarter, handsomer man at home, I can envision Menelaus beaming fatuously at her, once more wrapped around her little finger.  Of course, she has put a drug into their wine to make everyone who drinks it forget any bitter or rancorous feelings, and there IS something a bit unreal abut the atmosphere in their house, so maybe they maintain their harmonious relationship by being constantly a bit drugged.

Telemachus makes these two visits to his father's old comrades-in- arms because Athena sends him, and I think she has several reasons for sending him.  Clealy she wants him to hear about his father, and get an image of him, from another perspective than those of his mother and his nanny.  I think she also wants to get him off that island that's too small to run a horse on (as he tells Nestor) and show him some more of the world--let him meet some famous people.  And I think she wants to get him away from the suitors, who are coming to see him since his address to the council as a potential obstacle to their goals--and who plan, when he's barely gone, to kill him.

Briefly, for some of th other questions, Proteus is a shape-changer (we get the adjective "protean" from his name), and the goddess Leucothea tells Menelaus how to get an answer out of him--grab him and hold on through all the changes until he runs out of them.  Menelaus tells Telemachus what the reader already knows about Odysseus' whereabouts: that he's stranded on Ogygia with Calypso.  And Telemachus and Peisistratus are much better-behaved guests than the suitors!