What remained for him but to fly to a third corner and then to a fourth?
An analogy for how life is ephemeral, and often very linear, not giving one the chance to make a "unique" decision. Woolf visits this topic often, giving the essay a depressing feeling.
and therefore people think that, if his name is mentioned many times, many things have been said about him. So that Homer, by means of this illusion, has made a great deal of though he has mentioned him only in this one passage, and has preserved his memory, though he nowhere says a word about him afterwards.