From the lips of Tiresias Ulysses has learnt the future which awaits him. On the coast of Sicily he should find pasturing the herds and flocks of the Sun: if he and his comrades left them uninjured, they should soon see again their native Ithaca; if they laid sacrilegious hands on them, he alone should escape, and reach home after long suffering.
The shade of his mother has been sitting meanwhile in gloomy silence, eyeing the coveted blood. Not until she had drank of it might she open her lips to speak, or have power to recognise her son. To his eager inquiries as to her own fate and that of his father Laertes she made answer that she herself had died of grief, and that the old man was wearing out a joyless life in bitter anxiety.
Urged me to clasp the spirit of the dead,
And fold a phantom to my yearning breast.
Thrice I essayed, with eager hands out-spread
Thrice like a shadow or a dream she fled,
And my hands closed on unsubstantial air."
As they talked together, there swept forth out of the gloom a crowd of female shapes—the mothers of the mighty men of old. There came Tyro, beloved by the sea-god Neptune, from whom sprang Neleus, father of Nestor: next followed Antiope, who bore to Jupiter Amphion and Zethus, who built the seven-gated Thebes; Iphimedeia, mother of the giants Otus and Ephialtes, who strove to take heaven itself by storm; Alcmena, Leda, Ariadne, and a crowd of the heroines of Greek romance, who had found the loves of the gods
