Sing to me the story of that
Wanderer who sacked Troy and sundered her
Heaven-built walls, only to be forced to roam
Uncharted seas and visit strange lands
Where he faced many grueling trials.
Sing to me of his great adventures among nations
Of all manners, minds, fashions, and traditions.
Sing to me of a man, abandoned by the gods
After his men slew the sun god’s sacred cattle,
Who still proves himself worthy of song and story.
Sing, O Muse, of him in his glory.
‘Ah, young men! Please forgive me if I do not marry one of you until I have finished this cloth which is prone to unravel if I cease. Without a winding sheet, Laertes—who has won such honors—is dishonored. At least in the eyes of Ithaca’s women.’ And so we stood by as she laid a great warp up and down her loom and wove throughout the day, but”—and here his voice dropped ominously—“during the night by torchlight she unraveled the shroud she wove by day, halving, then halving again her work so that it proceeded painfully slow. Yes! This your mother did while we waited upon her pleasure, while Ithaca waited upon her pleasure. For three whole years she plied her woman’s wiles against us—mocking us, if you will. But then, in the fourth year, through a servant sick of her deceit, we learned of her deception.
You hard-hearted gods are jealous because I have chosen to take a mortal to bed and play with him as a wife will her husband. No, it is not his fate that you are concerned with, but the fact that I have chosen a mortal over one of you. No, don’t deny it. It is true. It is all right for you and the other gods to dally with mortal women—how many sons and daughters has Zeus sired away from the watchful eye of Hera?—but when a goddess takes a mortal man as her lover, why then, suddenly we hear pompous postulations that we are degrading our standing in the godlike community.
“I know what you gods are like. You punished rosy-fingered Dawn when she embraced Orion. You were outraged when she chose him as her husband. In the end, you had Artemis of the golden throne hunt him down in Delos and kill him with her arrows. She prefers women to men, anyway. And when blond-haired Demeter gave way to her passion and made love to Iasion in the three-furrowed field during the seeding ceremony, Zeus quickly punished him with a fiery thunderbolt. You gods have always denied the goose what the gander likes.
“And now you come here and tell me that Zeus has determined that Odysseus’s fate is not to remain in my bed. Yet when Zeus sent his terrible thunderbolts and smashed his ship on the wine-dark sea and Odysseus rode the heavy seas with his arms wrapped around the mast-spar of his ship, the favorable winds blew him up on my coast.
brave Odysseus, the man of masquerades, sat wet-eyed, staring across the empty sea. For a moment, she lingered, studying his bold profile, the heavy muscles along his shoulders, then she felt the ache in his heart, the loneliness of his spirit yearning to be united with another’s, and realized with a pang that the mighty god was right. It was time for Odysseus to leave. At night they would still lie together and lust would drive thought temporarily from their minds, but when day rolled night’s covers away, he would sit once again on the rocks and sands, staring out across boundless seas, his eyes set unfocused on the watery wilderness.
He rose and remembered his nakedness. He reached out a broad hand and snapped an olive branch from a tree and held it in front of his naked manhood. Then he slipped from the bushes, gliding like a lion upwind through heavy mist in search of oxen and sheep, his eyes burning like Hades’s fires. Naked Odysseus came upon the maidens like an empty-bellied lion as they lounged, braiding their hair. Dry salt clung to him, his hair flew wildly around his face, his beard uncombed and tangled like a mat of vines. The girls screamed at his mad appearance and scattered in each direction among the sand spits.
But Alcinoüs’s daughter Nausicaa stood fast as Athene slipped courage into her heart and boldness into her limbs.
And while he sang, Odysseus’s heart swelled with pride and then melted with grief, and hot tears ran down his cheeks as he remembered the old deaths and his own cruelty in the burning streets when he ruthlessly slaughtered the Trojans with his terrible sword. Tears flooded his eyes and fell to the ground, and he wept as a woman weeps when she clasps her slain husband or son to her breast on the battlefield and wails her loss to the heavens while around her swords flash and crash upon bronze shields and she shrieks her loss like a wind demon. Equally pitiful were the tears that welled up in mighty Odysseus’s eyes,
“He didn’t answer my words but rushed in among us and seized two of my mates by their ankles, swung them high, and dashed their brains out against the rock-hard earth of the cavern floor as easily as if they had been puppies. Their brains splattered out and soaked into the earth. Then, like a lion among two lambs, he tore the flesh from the bodies and stuffed the raw meat and unclean guts into his mouth, wiping the dripping gore and blood from his thick lips with the back of his hand. He smacked his lips and rolled his eye merrily, murderously, at us, and we wept and raised our hands in prayer to Zeus at the horrid sight before us. He roared with laughter and rocked back on his heels at our pitiful prayers, belched, worried a piece of meat from a tooth with a dirty forefinger, then lifted a heavy bowl of unwatered milk and drained it. He belched again and laughed at our prayers, then yawned and stretched out over the floor among his flock.
‘Cyclops! Remember your words and promise. As to
my name, why, I am called No-Man by my parents and friends.”
“‘No-Man,’ he said, slurring the words. He yawned, his great maw belching forth foul odors, and smacked his lips contentedly. He scratched his oily locks with a dirty finger and laughed. ‘No-Man! A rich name, indeed,’ he said mockingly. ‘Very well, No-Man, your reward: I’ll eat you last after I have dined on your friends!’
“‘What—what are you going to do?’ she asked. ‘And who are you? Where do you come from that you could escape my witchery? Who are your parents? Ah, but I have never known anyone able to drink that potion from this cup and resist the drug. Your heart must be strong indeed to escape that! You must be the mighty Odysseus, the man of masquerades, the man sly Hermes of the golden wand told me would land on my island in his black ship on his return from Troy. Now I remember,’ she said slyly. Her hands moved upon my waist. ‘And I also remember that I have heard about your powers in lovemaking.’ Here her voice turned sultry and low. ‘Put that sword up, Odysseus, and ready your other. Come with me to bed so that I may enjoy such a man as yourself and where we can prove that we believe in the love of each other.’
“At these words, I gave a strangled cry and leaped across the ditch to embrace her. But her shade slipped through my arms. Three times I tried to clasp her to my breast and three times she slipped away from me, leaving my heart aching.
“‘Mother!’ I cried. ‘Come back! Why do you go away from me? Why does Persephone, that grim queen, not give you form that our arms might hold each other one last time?’
‘Ah, do not speak lightly of death, Odysseus, and do not rub salt into the wound of my own. Note this: I would rather be the most common slave in the fields for some landless peasant than rule these lifeless dead as their king. No wonder Hades wears such a gloomy look. There is nothing to them but hollow moanings and aimless ramblings. But enough of this melancholy. Give me word about that son of mine. Tell me: Did he follow me to Troy and take a hand in tumbling those topless towers? Do the Myrmidons hold him in such esteem as they did, or is he sneered at in Hellas and Phthie now that age may have twisted his bones and withered his flesh? (For such is the way of mortals that the heroes of today become the forgotten of tomorrow.) I fear for him since I no longer walk in the sunlight to protect him as I once did whole armies, yes, even to laying low the champion of the enemy upon the fields of Troy.
‘Ah, there you are, man of masquerades!
Come! Many men have visited us and stayed
Here on our verdant shores. Beach your ship
And listen to the songs from our lips
That you most want to hear. No man sails
Past this point without hearing the tales
He most wants to hear. We know how
Armies fought at Troy and how men plow
The fruitful earth. Our songs will delight
All and leave the listener with greater sight
Than he had before. So pause and pay
Attention to our words. Hear what we say!’
‘Friends, all forms of death are abominable to men, but the worst of them all is to die with empty bellies and dry throats. Now, we can see the fat cattle and sheep around us and have only Odysseus’s word that they belong to the sun god. But what if he is wrong? Eh? What then? Why, we will have sat on this miserable island for a month or two—the last with empty bellies—while relief was only a spear-cast away. Now, I say let’s round them up, all these cattle and sheep, and offer them to the gods all, and just in case these are the cattle of the sun god, why, let’s promise Helios that if we should reach Ithaca safely we will build him a temple in thanks for the food that he has provided. That should soothe his ruffled feelings, I would think. But if he is too angry to take our trade in part, why then, I’d sooner drown in the seas than waste away from hunger. What do you say?’
And Eumaeus left Odysseus standing there and entered the courtyard, crossing into the men’s hall⁶ where the suitors shouted and feasted. At that instant, death and darkness came on Argus, who had waited twenty long years to gain one last glimpse of his master before he died.
like a cook turning a bloody and fat sausage on the fire, rolling it left and right to keep it from burning. And so Odysseus tossed and turned, searching for a means to defeat the suitors.
Suddenly Athene appeared beside him in the form of a lovely mortal woman. She said, “What, again, Odysseus? Why are you still sleepless? True, you are among the most sorrowful of men,
And so they babbled among themselves while the man of masquerades finished his inspection. Then as a minstrel skilled at the harp tunes the strings easily with the pegs, he effortlessly bent the bow under and over his leg and pushed the twisted cord over the tip of the bow and plucked the cord. A high, clear note sang a swallow’s song in the room and all fell still in wonder.
Odysseus shrugged off the rags that hid his warrior’s body
From the others and leaped to stand on the great threshold.
His bid to reclaim Penelope, his lands, and his house had begun.
Flickering lights glinted from his heavy muscles. A glow lifted
Upward from his face. He dumped the quiver of swift shafts
At his feet. A shiver raced through the suitors at his grim smile.
“That game is over, lads,” he said. “Now, for another mark I’ve had
Yet to hit—which, with Apollo’s help and Zeus’s will, I shall!”
Instead, he took a long rope that had seen service on one of the great sailing ships and tied one end to a pillar and threw the other over a beam. Then he passed a noose around their necks and raised them until their toes did not touch the ground. He left them there, dancing and dangling, caught as certainly as thrushes in a snare set in a thicket. And then their feet ceased to twitch and jump.
Odysseus’s eyes flashed at this and he stood up, looking down at her, anger spilling from him as greatly as the anger that ravaged the great hall earlier. “What’s this? By the gods, woman, you’ve goaded me strongly, now! Who has moved my bed? What man dared? No one had the art for that—unless a god whispered secretly into his ear. No mortal could move that bed with a rock and lever unless he knew the secret that we kept between us and built into that bed.
And great tears flooded Odysseus’s eyes as he wrapped his huge arms around her and held her to him as would a sailor who wrapped his arms around a spar and held tightly in a tempest-tossed sea until he spied warm earth on the horizon.
Many men would have gone down before Poseidon’s buffeting, and so he held Penelope while she cried with joy, her white arms wrapped around her husband’s sturdy neck.