Notes

Another Student --->““Heaven-born son of Laertes,” [Circe] said, “I know as well as you all you have gone through on the teeming seas and suffered at the hands of savages on land. But now eat your food and drink your wine, till you are once more the men you were when you first sailed from your homes in rugged Ithaca. You are worn out and dispirited, always brooding on the hardships of your travels. Your sufferings have been so continuous that you have lost all pleasure in living.”
“My gallant company were not difficult to persuade. We stayed on day after day for a whole year, feasting on lavish quantities of meat and mellow wine. But as the months went by and the seasons passed and the long days returned, my loyal companions called me aside one day and said: “What possesses you to stay on here? It’s time you thought of Ithaca, if the gods mean you to escape and get back to your ancestral home in your own country.” This was enough: my proud heart was convinced.”







Mine ----> “As she spoke, Athene touched him with her golden wand. First she clothed him in a fresh cloak and tunic, then restored his statue and his youthful vigour. His bronze tan returned; his jaw filled out; and the beard grew dark on his chin. Her work done, Athene disappeared, and Odysseus went back into the hut. His son gave him a look of amazement, then withdrew his eyes for the fear that he might be a god, and said with words that were winged: ‘Stranger, you are not the same now as before. Your clothes are different; your complexion is changed, Surely you are one of the gods who live in the broad sky. Be gracious to us, and we will make you pleasing sacrifices and offerings of wrought fold. Have mercy on us.’
‘I am no god,’ said the patient, good Odysseus. ‘Why do you take me for an immortal? But I am your father, on whose account you have endured so much sorrow and trouble and suffered persecution at men’s hands.’
With that he kissed his son and tears ran down his cheeks to the ground; till then he had kept a firm control on his feelings. But Telemachus could not yet accept that it was his father, and said, ‘You are not my father, you are not Odysseus; some divine power is playing a trick on me to make my grief all the more bitter. No mortal man could do such a thing by design, though I know that any god who wished could easily make a man young or old. Only a moment ago you were an old man in shabby clothes, and now you look like on of the gods who live in the wide heavens.’
‘Telemachus,’ replied the resourceful Odysseus, ‘you ought not to feel any excessive surprise at your father’s home-coming, or be so taken aback. Be quite certain of this, no second Odysseus will return. No, I am the man, just as you see me, back in my own country in the twentieth year of misfortune and wandering. As for these changes in me, they are the work of the warrior goddess Athene, who can do anything, and make me look as she wishes, at one moment a beggar and at the next like a young man finely dressed, It is easy for the gods in heaven to glorify or debase a man.’
Odysseus sat down, and Telemachus flung his arms round his noble father’s neck and burst into tears. And now a passionate longing for tears arose in them both and they cried aloud piercingly and more convulsively than birds of prey, vultures or crooked-clawed eagles, bereaved when villagers have robbed the nest of their unfledged young, So did these two let the piteous tears run streaming from their eyes. And sunset would have found them still weeping, if Telemachus had not suddenly asked his father a question. ‘But, my dear father,’ he said, ‘what ship can have brought you to Ithaca at this time, and who were the men on board? It is obvious that you did not come on foot.’
‘My son,’ said the patient, noble Odysseus, ‘I will tell you exactly how it was. The Phaeacians brought me here, those renowned sailors who provided any stranger who lands on their coast with his passage home. Well, they brought me across the sea on one of their fastest ships and landed me in Ithaca - I was asleep the whole time. They gave me splendid presents too, bronze and vast quantities of gold and woven cloth, all of which, with help from the gods , lie hidden in a cave. Finally I came up here at athene’s prompting so that we could plan the destruction of our enemies