for Atrides, when he grows to man's estate, and longs for his country. Thus spoke Mercury: but although he gave good advice, he did not persuade the mind of Ægisthus; but now has he at once atoned for all these things."
The blue-eyed[1] goddess Minerva then answered him: "O father mine, thou son of Saturn, highest of kings, of a truth he has perished by a fitting destruction; so too may another perish who perpetrates such deeds. But my heart burns[2] for the prudent[3] ill-fated Ulysses, who, away from his friends for a long time, is suffering calamities in a sea-girt island, where is the centre[4] of the sea, a woody island: and in her mansion a goddess dwells, the daughter of all-wise Atlas, who kens the depths of the whole sea, and holds up the lofty columns which separate the earth and the heaven; but his daughter detains [Ulysses] unhappy, lamenting: and she continually soothes him with soft and winning words, that he may forget Ithaca. But Ulysses, longing to behold even the smoke leaping up from his own land, desires to die. Nor does thy heart, O Olympian [Jove], at all turn towards him. Did not then Ulysses gratify thee, performing sacrifices in spacious Troy near the ships of the Argives? Why then, O Jove, art thou so angry with him?"
But her the cloud-compelling Jove in answer addressed: "My child, what word has escaped thy lips?[5] How could I forget divine Ulysses, who excels amongst mortals in understanding, and has abundantly given sacrifice to the immortal gods, who possess the wide heaven? But earth-possessing Neptune is for ever immovably angry on account of the Cyclops,[6] whose eye he blinded, the godlike Polyphemus, whose power is greatest amongst all the Cyclops: him the nymph Thöosa brought forth, the daughter of Phorcys, ruler of the barren sea, embraced by Neptune in a hollow cave.
- ↑ This translation is rather conventional than correct. The true meaning of γλαυκοὶ, for which we have no direct equivalent in English, is "cæsii, quales sunt felis, leonis, et noctuæ oculi," according to Plin. H. N. viii. 21. See Loewe.
- ↑ So Virgil, "talia, flammato secum dea corde volutans."
- ↑ I have followed Butmann, p. 211, who says that δαίφρων must bear this sense throughout the Odyssey. In the Iliad it almost always means "warlike."
- ↑ Literally, "navel."
- ↑ Literally, "the enclosure of thy teeth."
- ↑ See Od. IX.
