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

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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 

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