t was better to be the servant of a poor
farmer on earth than to rule over all the ghosts of the dead in the
still grey land where the sun never shone, and no flowers grew but the
mournful asphodel. Many other spirits of Greeks slain at Troy came and
asked for news about their friends, but Aias stood apart and silent,
still in anger because the arms of Achilles had been given to Ulysses.
In vain Ulysses told him that the Greeks had mourned as much for him as
for Achilles; he passed silently away into the House of Hades. At last
the legions of the innumerable dead, all that have died since the world
began, flocked, and filled the air with their low wailing cries, and
fear fell on Ulysses, and he went back along that sad last shore of the
world's end to his ship, and sailed again out of the darkness into the
sunlight, and to the isle of Circe. There they burned the body of
Elpenor, and piled a mound over it, and on the mound set the oar of the
dead man, and so went to the palace of Circe.

Ulysses told Circe all his adventures, and then she warned him of
dangers yet to come, and showed him how he might escape them. He
listened, and remembered all that she spoke, and these two said good-bye
for ever. Circe wandered away alone into the woods, and Ulysses and his
men set sail and crossed the unknown seas. Presently the wind fell, and
the sea was calm, and they saw a beautiful island from which came the
sound of sweet singing. Ulysses knew who the singers were, for Circe
had told him that they were the Sirens, a kind of beautiful Mermaids,
deadly to men. Among the flowers they sit and sing, but the flowers hide
the bones of men who have listened and landed on the island, and died of
that strange music, which carries the soul away.

Ulysses now took a great cake of bees' wax and cut it up into small
pieces, which he bade his men soften and place in their ears, that they
might not hear that singing. But, as he desired to hear it and yet live,
he bade the sailors bind him tightly to the mast with ropes, and they
must not unbind him, however much he might implore them to set him free.
When all this was done the men sat down on the benches, all orderly, and
smote the grey sea with their oars, and the ship rushed along through
the clear still water, and came opposite the island.

Then the sweet singing of the Sirens was borne over the sea,

'Hither, come hither, renowned Ulysses,
Great glory of the Achaean name.
Here stay