#epicsposting

in the introduction wilson listed some old plays and poems and other texts that featured different interpretations of odysseus/ulysses as a character (e.g. sophocles's tragedy ajax). i have been VERY interested in reading some of this kinda stuff—for instance i plan on reading/watching shakespeare's troilus and cressida, in which ulysses is evidently kind of a villain!—so i started taking notes.

after years and years and years away from home, after the Trojan war, after sirens, cyclopes, cannibals, capture by the goddesses Calypso and Circe, a trip through the underworld, Odysseus finally finds passage to Ithaca his homeland and is dropped off in his sleep. a shepherd approaches him to tell him where he is. his immediate response is to lie and say 'oh, yeah, ithaca, ive heard of that, im from crete' and spend an entire page weaving a yarn about how he came from crete and was in a war etc etc.

and then the shepherd transforms into Athena, who calls him out, saying "You! You chameleon! / Bottomless bag of tricks! Here in your own country / would you not give your stratagems a rest / or stop spellbinding for an instant?"

and THEN odysseus's response is 'ok is this a trick? how do i know youre athena'

YOUR MIND....theyre calling him the genius of earth...peer of zeus in stratagems, even........

and then in book 5, when we finally meet odysseus, he's completely miserable because he's being held captive by a goddess who doesn't want to let him go home, and then when he can finally leave, he has to make his own raft and sail it to another island, only for his raft to capsize in a storm and for him to nearly drown, and when he finally swims to shore he realizes that it's all rocks and cliffs and he can't get ashore safely and he has to beg the god of a nearby river for aid in getting to the island, and then he washes up on the beach and lies there for a while with "brine pouring from his nose and mouth", and then he has to sleep naked in a bush for the night.