The Odyssey: Book 13

Then recover our costs with levies on the people:
it's hard to afford such bounty man by man.

As a man aches for his evening meal when all day long
his brace of wine-dark oxen have dragged the bolted plowshare
down a fallow field—how welcome the setting sun to him,
the going home to supper, yes, though his knees buckle,
struggling home at last.

May I find an unswerving wife when I reach home,
and loved ones hale, unharmed!

May I find an unswerving wife when I reach home,
and loved ones hale, unharmed!

And the ship like a four-horse team careering down the plain,
all breaking as one with the whiplash cracking smartly,
leaping with hoofs high to run the course in no time—

...so the stern hove high and plunged with the seething rollers
crashing dark in her wake as on she surged, unwavering,
never flagging...

...so the stern hove high and plunged with the seething rollers
crashing dark in her wake as on she surged, unwavering,
never flagging...

At the harbor's head a branching olive stands
with a welcome cave nearby it, dank with sea-mist,
sacred to nymphs of the springs we call the Naiads.

They will learn at last
to cease and desist from escorting every man alive—
I'll pile a huge mountain round about their port!

So all of Phaeacia's island lords and captains,
milling round the altar, lifted prayers
to Poseidon, master of the sea.

Zeus of the Suppliants
pay them back—he keeps an eye on the world of men
and punishes all transgressors!

But still
he wept for his native country, trailing down the shore
where the wash of sea on shingle ebbs and flows,
his homesick heart in turmoil.

But still
he wept for his native country, trailing down the shore
where the wash of sea on shingle ebbs and flows,
his homesick heart in turmoil.

I killed him just loping in from the fields—
with one quick stroke of my bronze spear
in the dead of night, the heavens pitch-black...
no one could see us, spot me tearing out his life
with a weapon honed for action.

But once we'd sacked King Priam's craggy city,
boarded ship, and a god dispersed the fleet,
from then on, daughter of Zeus, I never saw you,
never glimpsed you striding along my decks
to ward off some disaster.

That's why I can't forsake you in your troubles—
you are so winning, so worldly-wise, so self-possessed!

Clearly I might have died the same ignoble death
as Agamemnon, bled white in my own house too,
if you had never revealed this to me now,
goddess, point by point.

You'll find him posted beside his swine, grubbing round
by Raven's Rock and the spring called Arethusa,
rooting for feed that makes pigs sleek and fat,
the nuts they love, the dark pools they drink.

Or is he too—like father, like son—condemned
to hardship, roving over the barren salt sea
while strangers devour our livelihood right here?

She turned his shirt and cloak into squalid rags,
ripped and filthy, smeared with grime and soot.