m away.

[Picture: Ulysses tied to the mast]

The isle of Trinacria was pasture for the 360 cattle of Helios, and both
Tiresias and Circe had warned Ulysses that they must not be touched. He
would fain have passed it by, but his crew insisted on landing for the
night, making oath not to touch the herds. At dawn such a wind arose
that they could not put to sea for a month, and after eating up the
stores, and living on birds and fish, they took some of the oxen when
Ulysses was asleep, vowing to build a temple to Helios in recompense.
They were dismayed at seeing the hides of the slain beasts creep on the
ground, and at hearing their flesh low as it boiled in the cauldron.
Indeed, Helios had gone to Jupiter, and threatened to stop his chariot
unless he had his revenge; so as soon as the wretched crew embarked again
a storm arose, the ship was struck by lightning, and Ulysses alone was
saved from the wreck, floating on the mast. He came back past Scylla and
Charybdis, and, clinging to the fig tree which hung over the latter,
avoided being sucked into the whirlpool, and by-and-by came to land in
the island of the nymph Calypso, who kept him eight years, but he pined
for home all the time, and at last built a raft on which to return.
Neptune was not weary of persecuting him, and raised another storm, which
shattered the raft, and threw Ulysses on the island of Scheria. Here the
king's fair daughter Nausicaa, going down to the stream with her maidens
to wash their robes, met the shipwrecked stranger, and took him home.
Her father feasted him hospitably, and sent him home in a ship, which
landed him on the coast of Ithaca fast asleep, and left him there. He
had been absent twenty years; and Pallas further disguised his aspect, so
that he looked like a beggar, when, in order to see how matters stood, he
made his way first to the hut of his trusty old swineherd Eumaeus.

[Picture: Port of Ithaca]

Nothing could be worse than things were. More than a hundred powerful
young chiefs of the Ionian isles had taken possession of his palace, and
were daily revelling there, thrusting his son Telemachus aside, and
insisting that Penelope should choose one of them as her husband. She
could only put them off by declaring she could wed no one till she had
finished the winding-sheet she was making for old Laertes, her
father-in-law; while to prevent its coming to an end she undid by night
w