The Homecoming Deception — The Odyssey

After the tale the cloister is silent. Alcinous asks each of the twelve kings for a tripod and a cauldron, and says he will recoup the cost from the people. At dawn they stow the gifts under the benches so nothing can break adrift. Alcinous sacrifices a bull to Jove. Demodocus sings while Odysseus watches the sun, impatient as a ploughman waiting for supper. They spread a rug and linen in the stern. He falls into a sleep like death. The ship knows the harbour of Phorcys, runs half her length onto the sand at dawn, and the crew lay him sleeping by an olive tree with the bronze and clothes, away from the road, then turn for home.

Neptune takes counsel with Zeus. The Phaeacians are his own kin, and they have brought Odysseus home asleep under more treasure than he would have taken from Troy. Zeus tells him to turn the ship into a rock as the city watches, looking like a ship, and then he may bury Scheria under a mountain. Neptune drives the ship down with the flat of his hand. Alcinous remembers his father's prophecy, stops all future escorts, and orders twelve picked bulls, hoping the mountain will not come.

Odysseus wakes in fog Athena has laid so neither wife nor townsmen will know him until he has his revenge. The long tracks, harbours, precipices, and trees look wrong. He smites his thighs and thinks the Phaeacians dumped him in the wrong country. He counts every cauldron. Nothing is missing. He still grieves along the sounding sea. Athena meets him as a young shepherd with a cloak folded double and a javelin. He answers with a Cretan lie: he killed Orsilochus, the fleetest runner, son of Idomeneus, in the dark, and fled with Phoenicians.

She smiles, takes the form of a tall woman, and calls him shifty even on his own shore. They can both deceive. She has been with him at Troy and among the Phaeacians, and now she will help him hide what she made them give. They stow the gold and bronze in the nymphs' cave and she sets a stone against the door. They sit by the olive root and plan the suitors. She wrinkles him, blears his fine eyes, throws on a filthy wrap and an undressed deer skin, and gives him a staff and a wallet of holes. Go to Eumaeus, she says, feeding pigs by the rock Raven and the fountain Arethusa, always well affected to Penelope and the boy. She herself goes straight to Lacedaemon to fetch Telemachus.