The Odyssey

“O race to death devote! with Stygian shade Each destin’d peer impending fates invade; With tears your wan distorted cheeks are drown’d; With sanguine drops the walls are rubied round: Thick swarms the spacious hall with howling ghosts, To people Orcus, and the burning coasts! Nor gives the sun his golden orb to roll, But universal night usurps the pole!”

Yet warn’d in vain, with laughter loud elate The peers reproach the sure divine of Fate; And thus Eurymachus: “The dotard’s mind To every sense is lost, to reason blind; Swift from the dome conduct the slave away; Let him in open air behold the day.”

“Tax not (the heaven-illumined seer rejoin’d) Of rage, or folly, my prophetic mind, No clouds of error dim the ethereal rays, Her equal power each faithful sense obeys. Unguided hence my trembling steps I bend, Far hence, before yon hovering deaths descend; Lest the ripe harvest of revenge begun, I share the doom ye suitors cannot shun.”

This said, to sage Piraeus sped the seer, His honour’d host, a welcome inmate there. O’er the protracted feast the suitors sit, And aim to wound the prince with pointless wit: Cries one, with scornful leer and mimic voice, “Thy charity we praise, but not thy choice; Why such profusion of indulgence shown To this poor, timorous, toil-detesting drone? That others feeds on planetary schemes, And pays his host with hideous noon-day dreams. But, prince! for once at least believe a friend; To some Sicilian mart these courtiers send, Where, if they yield their freight across the main, Dear sell the slaves! demand no greater gain.”

Thus jovial they; but nought the prince replies; Full on his sire he roll’d his ardent eyes: Impatient straight to flesh his virgin-sword; From the wise chief he waits the deathful word. Nigh in her bright alcove, the pensive queen To see the circle sate, of all unseen. Sated at length they rise, and bid prepare An eve-repast, with equal cost and care: But vengeful Pallas, with preventing speed, A feast proportion’d to their crimes decreed; A feast of death, the feasters doom’d to bleed!