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Book Four:
Eidothea helps Menelaos capture the Old Man of the Sea:
Meanwhile she had dived down into the sea's great cavern
and brought back the skins of four seals out of the water.
All were newly skinned. She was planning a trick on her father.
And hollowing out four beds in the sand of the sea, she sat there
waiting for us, and we came close up to her. Thereupon
she bedded us down in order, and spread a skin over each man.
That was a most awful ambush, for the pernicious
smell of those seals, bred in the salt water, oppressed us terribly.
Who would want to lie down by a sea-bred monster?
But she herself came to our rescue and devised a great help.
She brough ambrosia, and put it under the nose of each man,
and it smelled very sweet, and did away with the stench of the monster.
All that morning we waited there, with enduring spirit,
and the seals came crowding out of the sea, and when they came out
they lay down to sleep in order along the break of the sea beach.
At noon the Old Man came out of the sea and found his well-fed
seals, and went about to them all, and counted their number,
and we were among the first he counted; he had no idea
of any treachery.
The Old Man of the Sea tells Menelaos about Ajax
Aias was lost, and his long-oared vessels with him.
First of all Poseidon drove him against the great rocks
of Gyrai, and yet he saved him out of the water,
and Aias would have escaped his doom, though Athene hated him,
had he not gone wildly mad and tossed out a word of defiance;
for he said tht in despite of the gods he escaped the great gulf
of the sea, and Poseidon heard him, loudly vaunting,
and at once with his ponderous hands catching up the trident
he drove it against the Gyrean rock, and split a piece off it,
and part of it stayed where it was, but a splinter crashed in the water,
and this was where Aias had been perched when he raved so madly.
It carried him down to the depths of the endless and tossing main sea.
So Aias died, when he had swallowed down the salt water.
Athene comforts Penelope in a dream:
Then the grey-eyed goddess Athene thought what to do next.
She made an image, and likened it to Penelope's sister
Iphthime, the daughter of great-hearted Ikarios,
whose husband was Eumelos, and he lived in his home at Pherai.
She sent her now into the house of godlike Odysseus
in order to stop Penelope, who was grieving, lamenting,
from her crying and tearful lamentation. The dream figure
went into her bedchamber passing the thong of the door bar,
and came and stood above her head and spoke a word to her:
"Penelope, why are you sleeping so sorrowful in the inward
heart? But the gods who live at their ease do not suffer you
to weep and to be troubled, since your son will have his homecoming
even yet, since he has done no wrong in the gods' sight." |
