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IV FROM GREEK AND LATIN Odyssey* BOOK ONE Sing to me, Muse, of the man many-counselled who far through the world’s ways Wandering, was tossed after Troya he sacked, the divine stronghold, Many cities of men he beheld, learned the minds of their dwellers, Many the woes in his soul he suffered driven on the waters, Fending from fate his life and the homeward course of his comrades. Them even so he saved not for all his desire and his striving; Who by their own infatuate madness piteously perished, Fools in their hearts! for they slew the herds the deity pastured, Helios high-climbing; but he from them reft their return and the daylight. Sing to us also of these things, goddess, daughter of heaven. Now all the rest who had fled from death and sudden destruction Safe dwell at home, from the war escaped and the swallowing ocean: He alone far was kept from his fatherland, far from his consort, Long by the nymph divine, the sea-born goddess Calypso, Stayed in her hollow caves, for she yearned to keep him her husband. Yet when the year came at last in the rolling gyre of the seasons When in the web of their wills the gods spun out his returning Homeward to Ithaca, — there too he found not release from his labour, In his own land with his loved ones — all the immortals had pity Save Poseidon alone; but he with implacable anger Moved against godlike Odysseus before his return to his country. Now was he gone to the land of the Aethiopes, nations far-distant, — They who to either hand divided, remotest of mortals, Dwell where the high-climbing Helios sets and where he arises; There of bulls and of rams the slaughtered hecatomb tasting He by the banquet seated rejoiced; but the other immortals Sat in the halls of Zeus Olympian, the throng of them gathered, First led the word the father divine of men and immortals; For in his heart had the memory risen of noble Aegisthus Whom in his halls Orestes, the famed Agamemnonid, slaughtered; Him in his heart recalling he spoke mid the assembled immortals: "Out on it! how are the gods ever vainly accused by earth’s creatures! *Homer Page – 409 Still they say that from us they have miseries; they rather always By their own folly and madness draw on them woes we have willed not. Even as now Aegisthus, violating Fate from Atndes Took his wedded wife and slew her husband returning, Knowing their1 violent end; for we warned him before, we sent him Hefees charged with our message, the far-scanning slayer of Arias,. Neither the hero to smite nor wed the wife of Atrides, Since from Orestes a vengeance shall be, the Atreid offspring, When to his youth he shall come and desire the soil2 of his country. Yet not for all his voice, would the infatuate heart of Aegisthus.. Heed that friendly counsellor; now all in a mass has been paid for." Answered then to Zeus the goddess grey-eyed Athene. "Father of ours, thou son of Cronus, highest of the regnant, He indeed and utterly fell by a fitting destruction: So too perish all who dare like deeds among mortals. But for a far better man my heart burns, clear-eyed Odysseus Who, ill-fated, far from his loved ones suffers and sorrows Hemmed in the island girt by the waves, in the navel of ocean, Where mid the woods her home a goddess has made and inhabits, Daughter of Atlas whose baleful heart knows all the abysses Fathomless, vast of the sea and the pillars high on his shoulders In his huge strength he upbears, that divide the earth and the heavens; Atlas’ daughter keeps in that island the unhappy Odysseus …. 1 the 2 soul Page - 410 |
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