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Grade 9

The Odyssey

Supplemental Texts for Students

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Table of Contents

“Half a Day” 3

“A Worn Path” 6

“Siren Song” 14

Ulysses and the Sirens (Art) 15

“Ulysses” 16

Excerpt from No Man’s Lands: On Man’s Odyssey through The Odyssey

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“The Truth about Being a Hero” 24

“Back from War, but Not Really Home” 29

Excerpt from Book VI of The Iliad 32

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Half a DayWritten by Naguib Mahfouz

Translated by Denys Johnson-Davies

I proceeded alongside my father, clutching his right hand, running to keep up with the long strides he was taking. All my clothes were new: the black shoes, the green school uniform, and the red tarboosh1. My delight in my new clothes, however, was not altogether unmarred, for this was no feast day but the day on which I was to be cast into school for the first time.

My mother stood at the window watching our progress, and I would turn toward her from time to time, as though appealing for help. We walked along a street lined with gardens; on both sides were extensive fields planted with crops, prickly pears, henna trees, and a few date palms.

“Why school?” I challenged my father openly. “I shall never do anything to annoy you.”

“I’m not punishing you,” he said, laughing. “School’s not a punishment. It’s the factory that makes useful men out of boys. Don’t you want to be like your father and brothers?”

I was not convinced. I did not believe there was really any good to be had in tearing me away from the intimacy of my home and throwing me into this building that stood at the end of the road like some huge, high-walled fortress, exceedingly stern and grim.

When we arrived at the gate we could see the courtyard, vast and crammed full of boys and girls. “Go in by yourself,” said my father, “and join them. Put a smile on your face and be a good example to others.”

I hesitated and clung to his hand, but he gently pushed me from him. “Be a man,” he said. “Today you truly begin life. You will find me waiting for you when it’s time to leave.”

I took a few steps, then stopped and looked but saw nothing. Then the faces of boys and girls came into view. I did not know a single one of them, and none of them knew me. I felt I was a stranger who had lost his way. But glances of curiosity were directed toward me, and one boy approached and asked, “Who brought you?”

“My father,” I whispered.

“My father’s dead,” he said simply.

________________tarboosh1 a felt or cloth brimless cap resembling a fez, usually red and often with a silk tassel

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I did not know what to say. The gate was closed, letting out a pitiable screech. Some of the children burst into tears. The bell rang. A lady came along, followed by a group of men. The men began sorting us into ranks. We were formed into an intricate pattern in the great courtyard surrounded by on three sides by high buildings of several floors; from each floor we were overlooked by a long balcony roofed in wood.

“This is your new home,” said the woman. “Here too there are mothers and fathers. Here there is everything that is enjoyable and beneficial to knowledge and religion. Dry your tears and face life joyfully.”

We submitted to the facts, and this submission brought a sort of contentment. Living beings were drawn to other living beings, and from the first moments my heart made friends with such boys as were to be my friends and fell in love with such girls as I was to be in love with, so that it seemed my misgivings had had no basis. I had never imagined school would have this rich variety. We played all sorts of different games: swings, the vaulting horse, ball games. In the music room we chanted our first songs. We also had our first introduction to language. We saw a globe of the Earth, which revolved and showed the various continents and countries. We started learning the numbers. The story of the Creator of the read to us, we were told of His present world and of His Hereafter, and heard examples of what He said. We ate delicious food, took a little nap, and woke up to go on with friendship and love, play and learning.

As our path revealed itself to us, however, we did not find it as totally sweet and unclouded as we had presumed. Dust-laden winds and unexpected accidents came about suddenly, so had to be watchful, at the ready, and very patient. It was not all a matter of playing and fooling around. Rivalries could bring about pain and hatred or give rise to fighting. And while the lady would sometimes smile, she would often scowl and scold. Even more frequently she would resort to physical punishment.

In addition, the time for changing one’s mind was over and gone and there was no question of ever returning to the paradise of home. Nothing lay ahead of us but exertion, struggle, and perseverance. Those who were able took advantage of the opportunities for success and happiness that presented themselves amid the worries.

The bell rang announcing the passing of the day and the end of work. The throngs of children rushed toward the gate, which was opened again. I bade farewell to friends and sweethearts and passed through the gate. I peered around but found no trace of my father, who had promised to be there. I stepped aside to wait. When I had waited for a long time without avail, I decided to return home on my own. After I had taken a few steps, a middle-aged man passed by, and I realized at once that I knew him. He came toward me, smiling, and shook me by the hand, saying, “It’s a long time since we last met—how are you?”

With a nod of my head, I agreed with him and in turn asked, “And you, how are you?”

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“As you can see, not all that good, the Almighty be praised!”

Again he shook me by the hand and went off. I proceeded a few steps, then came to a startled halt. Good Lord! Where was the street lined with gardens? Where had it disappeared to? When did all these vehicles invade it? And when did all these hordes of humanity come to rest upon its surface? How did these hills of refuse2 come to cover its sides? And where were the fields that bordered it? High buildings had taken over, the street surged with children, and disturbing noises shook the air. At various points stood conjurers showing off their tricks and making snakes appear from baskets. Then there was a band announcing the opening of a circus, with clowns and weight lifters walking in front. A line of trucks carrying central security troops crawled majestically by. The siren of a fire engine shrieked, and it was not clear how the vehicle would cleave its way to reach the blazing fire. A battle raged between a taxi driver and his passenger, while the passenger’s wife called out for help and no one answered. Good God! I was in a daze. My head spun. I almost went crazy. How could all this have happened in half a day, between early morning and sunset? I would find the answer at home with my father. But where was my home? I could see only tall buildings and hordes of people. I hastened on to the crossroads between the gardens and Abu Khoda. I had to cross Abu Khoda to reach my house, but the stream of cars would not let up. The fire engine’s siren was shrieking at full pitch as I moved at a snail’s pace, and I said to myself, “Let the fire take its pleasure in what it consumes.” Extremely irritated, I wondered when I would be able to cross. I stood there a long time, until the young lad employed at the ironing shop on the corner came up to me. He stretched out his arm and said, “Grandpa, let me take you across.”

________________refuse2 rubbish, garbage

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A Worn PathBy Eudora Welty

It was December—a bright frozen day in the early morning. Far out in the country there was an old Negro woman with her head tied in a red rag, coming along a path through the pinewoods. Her name was Phoenix Jackson. She was very old and small and she walked slowly in the dark pine shadows, moving a little from side to side in her steps, with the balanced heaviness and lightness of a pendulum in a grandfather clock. She carried a thin, small cane made from an umbrella, and with this she kept tapping the frozen earth in front of her. This made a grave and persistent noise in the still air that seemed meditative, like the chirping of a solitary little bird.

She wore a dark striped dress reaching down to her shoe tops, and an equally long apron of bleached sugar sacks, with a full pocket: all neat and tidy, but every time she took a step she might have fallen over her shoelaces, which dragged from her unlaced shoes. She looked straight ahead. Her eyes were blue with age. Her skin had a pattern all its own of numberless branching wrinkles and as though a whole little tree stood in the middle of her forehead, but a golden color ran underneath, and the two knobs of her cheeks were illumined by a yellow burning under the dark. Under the red rag her hair came down on her neck in the frailest of ringlets, still black, and with an odor like copper.

Now and then there was a quivering in the thicket. Old Phoenix said, “Out of my way, all you foxes, owls, beetles, jack rabbits, coons and wild animals! ... Keep out from under these feet, little bob-whites ... Keep the big wild hogs out of my path. Don't let none of those come running my direction. I got a long way.” Under her small black-freckled hand her cane, limber as a buggy whip, would switch at the brush as if to rouse up any hiding things.

On she went. The woods were deep and still. The sun made the pine needles almost too bright to look at, up where the wind rocked. The cones dropped as light as feathers. Down in the hollow was the mourning dove—it was not too late for him.

The path ran up a hill. “Seem like there is chains about my feet, time I get this far,” she said, in the voice of argument old people keep to use with themselves. “Something always take a hold of me on this hill—pleads I should stay.”

After she got to the top, she turned and gave a full, severe look behind her where she had come. “Up through pines,” she said at length. “Now down through oaks.”

Her eyes opened their widest, and she started down gently. But before she got to the bottom of the hill a bush caught her dress.

Her fingers were busy and intent, but her skirts were full and long, so that before she could pull them free in one place they were caught in another. It was not possible to allow the dress to tear. “I in the thorny bush,” she said. “Thorns, you doing your appointed work. Never want to let folks pass—no, sir. Old eyes thought you was a pretty little green bush.”

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Finally, trembling all over, she stood free, and after a moment dared to stoop for her cane.

“Sun so high!” she cried, leaning back and looking, while the thick tears went over her eyes. “The time getting all gone here.”

At the foot of this hill was a place where a log was laid across the creek.

“Now comes the trial,” said Phoenix. Putting her right foot out, she mounted the log and shut her eyes. Lifting her skirt, leveling her cane fiercely before her like a festival figure in some parade, she began to march across. Then she opened her eyes and she was safe on the other side.

“I wasn't as old as I thought,” she said.

But she sat down to rest. She spread her skirts on the bank around her and folded her hands over her knees. Up above her was a tree in a pearly cloud of mistletoe. She did not dare to close her eyes, and when a little boy brought her a plate with a slice of marble-cake on it she spoke to him. “That would be acceptable,” she said. But when she went to take it there was just her own hand in the air.

So she left that tree, and had to go through a barbed-wire fence. There she had to creep and crawl, spreading her knees and stretching her fingers like a baby trying to climb the steps. But she talked loudly to herself: she could not let her dress be torn now, so late in the day, and she could not pay for having her arm or her leg sawed off if she got caught fast where she was.

At last she was safe through the fence and risen up out in the clearing. Big dead trees, like black men with one arm, were standing in the purple stalks of the withered cotton field. There sat a buzzard.

“Who you watching?”

In the furrow she made her way along.

“Glad this not the season for bulls,” she said, looking sideways, “and the good Lord made his snakes to curl up and sleep in the winter. A pleasure I don't see no two-headed snake coming around that tree, where it come once. It took a while to get by him, back in the summer.”

She passed through the old cotton and went into a field of dead corn. It whispered and shook, and was taller than her head. “Through the maze now,” she said, for there was no path.

Then there was something tall, black, and skinny there, moving before her.

At first she took it for a man. It could have been a man dancing in the field. But she stood still and listened, and it did not make a sound. It was as silent as a ghost.

“Ghost,” she said sharply, “who be you the ghost of? For I have heard of nary death close by.”

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But there was no answer, only the ragged dancing in the wind.

She shut her eyes, reached out her hand, and touched a sleeve. She found a coat and inside that an emptiness, cold as ice.

“You scarecrow,” she said. Her face lighted. “I ought to be shut up for good,” she said with laughter. “My senses is gone. I too old. I the oldest people I ever know. Dance, old scarecrow,” she said, “while I dancing with you.”

She kicked her foot over the furrow, and with mouth drawn down shook her head once or twice in a little strutting way. Some husks blew down and whirled in streamers about her skirts.

Then she went on, parting her way from side to side with the cane, through the whispering field. At last she came to the end, to a wagon track where the silver grass blew between the red ruts. The quail were walking around like pullets, seeming all dainty and unseen.

“Walk pretty,” she said. “This the easy place. This the easy going.” She followed the track, swaying through the quiet bare fields, through the little strings of trees silver in their dead leaves, past cabins silver from weather, with the doors and windows boarded shut, all like old women under a spell sitting there. “I walking in their sleep,” she said, nodding her head vigorously.

In a ravine she went where a spring was silently flowing through a hollow log. Old Phoenix bent and drank. “Sweet gum makes the water sweet,” she said, and drank more. “Nobody know who made this well, for it was here when I was born.”

The track crossed a swampy part where the moss hung as white as lace from every limb. “Sleep on, alligators, and blow your bubbles.” Then the cypress trees went into the road. Deep, deep it went down between the high green-colored banks. Overhead the live oaks met, and it was as dark as a cave.

A big black dog with a lolling tongue came up out of the weeds by the ditch. She was meditating, and not ready, and when he came at her she only hit him a little with her cane. Over she went in the ditch, like a little puff of milkweed.

Down there, her senses drifted away. A dream visited her, and she reached her hand up, but nothing reached down and gave her a pull. So she lay there and presently went to talking. “Old woman,” she said to herself, “that black dog come up out of the weeds to stall you off, and now there he sitting on his fine tail, smiling at you.”

A white man finally came along and found her—a hunter, a young man, with his dog on a chain.

“Well, Granny!” he laughed. “What are you doing there?”

“Lying on my back like a June bug waiting to be turned over, mister,” she said, reaching up her hand.

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He lifted her up, gave her a swing in the air, and set her down. “Anything broken, Granny?”

“No sir, them old dead weeds is springy enough,” said Phoenix, when she had got her breath. “I thank you for your trouble.”

“Where do you live, Granny?” he asked, while the two dogs were growling at each other.

“Away back yonder, sir, behind the ridge. You can't even see it from here.”

“On your way home?”

“No sir, I going to town.”

“Why, that's too far! That's as far as I walk when I come out myself, and I get something for my trouble.” He patted the stuffed bag he carried, and there hung down a little closed claw. It was one of the bobwhites, with its beak hooked bitterly to show it was dead. “Now you go on home, Granny!”

“I bound to go to town, mister,” said Phoenix. “The time come around.”

He gave another laugh, filling the whole landscape. “I know you old colored people! Wouldn't miss going to town to see Santa Claus!”

But something held Old Phoenix very still. The deep lines in her face went into a fierce and different radiation. Without warning, she had seen with her own eyes a flashing nickel fall out of the man's pocket onto the ground.

“How old are you, Granny?” he was saying.

“There is no telling, mister,” she said, “no telling.”

Then she gave a little cry and clapped her hands and said, “Git on away from here, dog! Look! Look at that dog!” She laughed as if in admiration. “He ain't scared of nobody. He a big black dog.” She whispered, “Sic him!”

“Watch me get rid of that cur,” said the man. “Sic him, Pete! Sic him!”

Phoenix heard the dogs fighting, and heard the man running and throwing sticks. She even heard a gunshot. But she was slowly bending forward by that time, further and further forward, the lids stretched down over her eyes, as if she were doing this in her sleep. Her chin was lowered almost to her knees. The yellow palm of her hand came out from the fold of her apron. Her fingers slid down and along the ground under the piece of money with the grace and care they would have in lifting an egg from under a setting hen. Then she slowly straightened up; she stood erect, and the nickel was in her apron pocket. A bird flew by. Her lips moved. “God watching me the whole time. I come to stealing.”

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The man came back, and his own dog panted about them. “Well, I scared him off that time,” he said, and then he laughed and lifted his gun and pointed it at Phoenix.

She stood straight and faced him.

“Doesn't the gun scare you?” he said, still pointing it.

“No, sir, I seen plenty go off closer by, in my day, and for less than what I done,” she said, holding utterly still.

He smiled, and shouldered the gun. “Well, Granny,” he said, “you must be a hundred years old, and scared of nothing. I'd give you a dime if I had any money with me. But you take my advice and stay home, and nothing will happen to you.”

“I bound to go on my way, mister,” said Phoenix. She inclined her head in the red rag. Then they went in different directions, but she could hear the gun shooting again and again over the hill.

She walked on. The shadows hung from the oak trees to the road like curtains. Then she smelled wood smoke, and smelled the river, and she saw a steeple and the cabins on their steep steps. Dozens of little black children whirled around her. There ahead was Natchez shining. Bells were ringing. She walked on.

In the paved city it was Christmas time. There were red and green electric lights strung and crisscrossed everywhere, and all turned on in the daytime. Old Phoenix would have been lost if she had not distrusted her eyesight and depended on her feet to know where to take her.

She paused quietly on the sidewalk, where people were passing by. A lady came along in the crowd, carrying an armful of red, green, and silver-wrapped presents; she gave off perfume like the red roses in hot summer, and Phoenix stopped her.

“Please, missy, will you lace up my shoe?” She held up her foot.

“What do you want, Grandma?”

“See my shoe,” said Phoenix. “Do all right for out in the country, but wouldn't look right to go in a big building.”

“Stand still then, Grandma,” said the lady. She put her packages down on the sidewalk beside her and laced and tied both shoes tightly.

“Can't lace 'em with a cane,” said Phoenix. “Thank you, missy. I doesn't mind asking a nice lady to tie up my shoe, when I gets out on the street.”

Moving slowly and from side to side, she went into the big building, and into a tower of steps, where she walked up and around and around until her feet knew to stop.

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She entered a door, and there she saw nailed up on the wall the document that had been stamped with the gold seal and framed in the gold frame, which matched the dream that was hung up in her head.

“Here I be,” she said. There was a fixed and ceremonial stiffness over her body.

“A charity case, I suppose,” said an attendant who sat at the desk before her.

But Phoenix only looked above her head. There was sweat on her face, the wrinkles in her skin shone like a bright net.

“Speak up, Grandma,” the woman said. “What's your name? We must have your history, you know. Have you been here before? What seems to be the trouble with you?”

Old Phoenix only gave a twitch to her face as if a fly were bothering her.

“Are you deaf?” cried the attendant.

But then the nurse came in.

“Oh, that's just old Aunt Phoenix,” she said. “She doesn't come for herself—she has a little grandson. She makes these trips just as regular as clockwork. She lives away back off the Old Natchez Trace.” She bent down. “Well, Aunt Phoenix, why don't you just take a seat? We won't keep you standing after your long trip.” She pointed.

The old woman sat down, bolt upright in the chair.

“Now, how is the boy?” asked the nurse.

Old Phoenix did not speak.

“I said, how is the boy?”

But Phoenix only waited and stared straight ahead, her face very solemn and withdrawn into rigidity.

“Is his throat any better?” asked the nurse. “Aunt Phoenix, don't you hear me? Is your grandson's throat any better since the last time you came for the medicine?”

With her hands on her knees, the old woman waited, silent, erect and motionless, just as if she were in armor.

“You mustn't take up our time this way, Aunt Phoenix,” the nurse said. “Tell us quickly about your grandson, and get it over. He isn't dead, is he?”

At last there came a flicker and then a flame of comprehension across her face, and she spoke.

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“My grandson. It was my memory had left me. There I sat and forgot why I made my long trip.”

“Forgot?” The nurse frowned. “After you came so far?”

Then Phoenix was like an old woman begging a dignified forgiveness for waking up frightened in the night. “I never did go to school—I was too old at the Surrender,” she said in a soft voice. “I'm an old woman without an education. It was my memory fail me. My little grandson, he is just the same, and I forgot it in the coming.”

“Throat never heals, does it?” said the nurse, speaking in a loud, sure voice to Old Phoenix. By now she had a card with something written on it, a little list. “Yes. Swallowed lye. When was it?—January—two—three years ago—“

Phoenix spoke unasked now. “No, missy, he not dead, he just the same. Every little while his throat begin to close up again, and he not able to swallow. He not get his breath. He not able to help himself. So the time come around, and I go on another trip for the soothing-medicine.”

“All right. The doctor said as long as you came to get it, you could have it,” said the nurse. “But it's an obstinate case.”

“My little grandson, he sit up there in the house all wrapped up, waiting by himself,” Phoenix went on. “We is the only two left in the world. He suffer and it don't seem to put him back at all. He got a sweet look. He going to last. He wear a little patch-quilt and peep out, holding his mouth open like a little bird. I remembers so plain now. I not going to forget him again, no, the whole enduring time. I could tell him from all the others in creation.”

“All right.” The nurse was trying to hush her now. She brought her a bottle of medicine. “Charity,” she said, making a check mark in a book.

Old Phoenix held the bottle close to her eyes, and then carefully put it into her pocket.

“I thank you,” she said.

“It's Christmas time, Grandma,” said the attendant. “Could I give you a few pennies out of my purse?”

“Five pennies is a nickel,” said Phoenix stiffly.

“Here's a nickel,” said the attendant.

Phoenix rose carefully and held out her hand. She received the nickel and then fished the other nickel out of her pocket and laid it beside the new one. She stared at her palm closely, with her head on one side.

Then she gave a tap with her cane on the floor. “This is what come to me to do,” she said. “I going to the

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store and buy my child a little windmill they sells, made out of paper. He going to find it hard to believe there such a thing in the world. I'll march myself back where he waiting, holding it straight up in this hand.”

She lifted her free hand, gave a little nod, turned around, and walked out of the doctor's office. Then her slow step began on the stairs, going down.

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Siren SongBY MARGARET ATWOOD

This is the one song everyone would like to learn: the song that is irresistible:

the song that forces men to leap overboard in squadrons even though they see the beached skulls

the song nobody knows because anyone who has heard it is dead, and the others can’t remember.

Shall I tell you the secret and if I do, will you get me out of this bird suit?

I don’t enjoy it here squatting on this island looking picturesque and mythical

with these two feathery maniacs,I don’t enjoy singingthis trio, fatal and valuable.

I will tell the secret to you,to you, only to you.Come closer. This song

is a cry for help: Help me!Only you, only you can,you are unique

at last. Alasit is a boring songbut works every time.

From Poetry Foundation (http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poem/21988)

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Ulysses and the Sirens (1891)John William Waterhouse

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ULYSSESAlfred, Lord Tennyson

It little profits that an idle king, By this still hearth, among these barren crags, Matched with an aged wife, I mete and dole Unequal laws unto a savage race, That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me. I cannot rest from travel; I will drink life to the lees. All times I have enjoyed Greatly, have suffered greatly, both with those that loved me, and alone; on shore, and when Through scudding drifts the rainy Hyades Vexed the dim sea. I am become a name; For always roaming with a hungry heart Much have I seen and known---cities of men And manners, climates, councils, governments, Myself not least, but honored of them all--- And drunk delight of battle with my peers, Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy. I am part of all that I have met; Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough Gleams that untraveled world whose margin fades Forever and forever when I move. How dull it is to pause, to make an end. To rust unburnished, not to shine in use! As though to breathe were life! Life piled on life Were all too little, and of one to me Little remains; but every hour is saved From that eternal silence, something more, A bringer of new things; and vile it were For some three suns to store and hoard myself, And this gray spirit yearning in desire To follow knowledge like a sinking star, Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.

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No Man’s Lands:One Man’s Odyssey through The Odyssey

EXCERPT

IntroductionA Long Story

Of that versatile man, O Muse, tell me the story, how he wandered both long and far after sacking the city of holy Troy. Many were the towns he saw and many the men whose minds he knew, and many were the woes his stout heart suffered at sea as he fought to return alive with living comrades. Them he could not save, though much he longed to, for through their own thoughtless greed they died - blind fools who slaughtered the Sun's own cattle, Hyperion's herd, for food, and so by him were kept from returning. Of all these things, O goddess, daughter of Zeus, beginning wherever you wish, tell even us.

Odyssey, Book I.

THINGS GO WRONG, PLANS FAIL, fate makes sport of our best intentions. We say one thing and do another; nothing turns out as we expect. It's an unpredictable life, and we comfort ourselves by blaming greater powers: "If you want to make God laugh," we say, "tell him your plans," and most modern westerners can be grateful to at least have only the one God whose laughter concerns us. Think, though, of the ancient Greeks. The Greeks had an entire pantheon of gods; the Greeks had gods like we have siblings, cousins, in-laws - and just as busy, just as nosy, too. So the ancient Greeks knew their plans could elicit laughter - and expect trouble - from not just one source but a dozen. That was the gods' favorite thing, interfering with people's plans. Or more accurately, helping people interfere with their own.

It still is, I think. So not long ago, when I briefly took to making plans, I should have been listening for that laughter. You could say I went looking for it. It began after all with a public promise - which the gods made sure I broke, almost instantly. Afterwards came a headlong journey, filled with discovery, wonder, and adventure, which seems like their kind of joke too - at least, they've been using it for a while. In the end, of course, it's a long story. You can start almost anywhere.

So start with James Joyce.

ON JUNE 15, 2001, I swore, out loud and on the radio, that I would never, ever read Ulysses.

Joyce's Ulysses is regularly crowned the most important novel of the twentieth century. Nearly eight hundred pages long, filled with thousand-word stream-of-consciousness run-on sentences, classical references, and asides in various languages, Ulysses(the Romanized name, of course, of the Greek hero Odysseus) is considered the birth of modern literature. A modern retelling of the ten years of adventure described in the Odyssey of Homer, Ulysses takes place all on one day - June 16, 1904, in Dublin. Advertising salesman Leopold Bloom stands in for Odysseus, and the book's episodes have their origins

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in Homer: there's a Cyclops episode and a Sirens episode and much more, all complex and modern and hard to follow. Friends and experts had been pressing Ulysses on me for decades, but despite countless frustrating attempts I had never been able to get very far in it.

Then came the early summer of 2001, which seemed to bring an Odyssey onslaught. The movie "O Brother Where Art Thou?," the Coen brothers' free retelling of the Odyssey story, came out on DVD. Cold Mountain, the Charles Frazier novel of a reluctant soldier making his adventurous way home from a horrific war, sat on every night table and was in development as a film. When my oldest friend asked me to read something at his wedding, I was almost unsurprised when another friend recommended "Ithaca," a lovely reconsideration of the wanderings of Odysseus by poet Constantine Cavafy.

And, most especially, Bloomsday approached. Among its devotees Ulysses has become less a book than something of a cult, and the feast day for that cult is June 16, Bloomsday. All over the world on that day people read Ulysses aloud, celebrate it in drama and song, and above all, get drunk. In Dublin, Mecca for Ulysses cultists, thousands of people gather to enact scenes from the book, engage in panel discussions about the book's opacities, and actually retrace the steps of the book's characters. This outpouring of obsession towards a book I found unreadable drove me mad. After all, I'm a writer - I'm a literary guy. And I believe this obsession makes literary guys look like pseudointellectual nitwits. I wanted to distance myself from those nitwits. So in June 2001 I read a brief essay on the radio announcing that after decades of attempts I was officially declaring Joyce's book not worth the trouble: I was using that year's Bloomsday celebration to forever renounce Ulysses. The book ends with Molly Bloom's forever-quoted benedictory, "yes I said yes I will Yes." So on the day its adherents worshipfully followed the footsteps of its fictional characters, I pledged to finally consign the book to my shelf unread, echoing its conclusion: "no I said no I won't No."

I CAN'T SWEAR IT WAS THE WORK OF THE GODS, but I was a liar inside a month.

Someone who heard my essay convinced Matthew, a bookstore manager well-read in Joyciana, to lead a Ulysses reading group. And because I had written the scornful essay that got the group started, they invited me to join. I had just publicly sworn never to read Ulysses as long as I lived; doing exactly the opposite made for a pleasing irony. I joined up. Matthew led us through complex schema and thickets of commentary, and over four months alternated between coaxing and dragging us through Ulysses. Occasionally with Matthew's help I was thrilled by a pun in two languages, a sly classical reference; more often I complained. Challenged and interested, I still rarely doubted the good sense of my original inclination to give the book up.

And for me, most important was that the further we moved along, the less Joyce commanded my attention. Instead, I thought more and more about the Homeric tales behind it all. I grew interested in the Odyssey itself.

I couldn't help thinking: What gives? Everywhere you turn, the Odyssey - and it's not like it's something new. For 3000 years, we've been telling each other the same story. Whether it's Joyce's book or Tennyson's poems, a symphony by Max Bruch or heavy metal by Symphony X, pictures by Matisse or Chagall, we're still finding new ways to tell each other the episodes from that old story. I wondered why.

These are some of the best known episodes in the world: Odysseus defeats the Cyclops; Odysseus agonizes over the terrible decision between Scylla and Charybdis; Odysseus escapes the Sirens, who

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lured unwary sailors onto the rocks. I noticed, though, that I couldn't quite remember, for example, how the Sirens lured those unwary sailors. In fact, I couldn't remember a lot. I knew Odysseus poked out the eye of the Cyclops, but I couldn't say how that fit into the larger picture. Scylla and Charybdis was a hard choice, but between what, and regarding why, I was in the dark. I hadn't read the Odyssey for years, but even so I seemed to have forgotten a great deal.

My wife noticed my increasing interest in the story, and she one day saw at a flea market a little book with a jacket all of blue: a simply drawn sea, and on it, alone, a tiny yellow boat. The Odyssey of Homer, in a 1960 translation by one Ennis Rees, in a nice handbook size. It found a place on my night table, and once our reading group was done with Ulysses, I opened the Odyssey to reread it.

I COULDN'T REREAD IT - which leads to a more embarrassing reversal, though on a more intimate scale. After not very many pages and some honest consideration, I had to acknowledge that the reason I remembered so few specifics about the Odyssey was that I had never read it at all. Unfortunately, I had been brashly claiming to have done so my entire adult life.

I remember the little red version of the book I got in ninth-grade English, and I remember a color lithograph it contained of a bearded guy on a raft in a stormy sea. Seeing it on my reading list, my mother had assured me: "If you can get past the language, it really is just the greatest adventure story." The story of Odysseus, hero of the Trojan War, making his ten-year journey home from the Greek victory at Troy, the Odyssey, by the blind poet Homer, was one of the epic poems that constitute the foundation of Western Civilization. Shipwrecks, storms, monsters, witches, pretty girls, gods and goddesses, archery, treasure, swordfights - all this awaited if I could "get past the language."

No chance. Homer's classical rhythms resisted me in adolescence as fiercely as Joyce's tortured syntax did in adulthood. All I remember now from that English class is a movie we saw of part of the Odyssey, in which a man wanders among stone walls, orating the story of Odysseus and the Cyclops. Odysseus and his men, trapped in a cave by the giant Cyclops, get the Cyclops drunk and blind him, then slip past him by hanging onto the bellies of his sheep as they exit the cave. Describing it, the actor brayed like John Gielgud: "My raaam," he moaned as the Cyclops, "my faaavorite raaam," and as he stood there swaying my momentary flicker of interest - a monster! A big stick in his eye! A daring escape! - vanished beneath the tide of well-meaning dramatization meant to impress ninth-graders.

We cheated on quizzes and dawdled through class, wrote themes and moved on to whatever was next, and that was my junior high school Odyssey experience. A color lithograph, a tiresome movie, a book I didn't read. And though one collegiate summer I filled a hole in my education and read the Iliad, Homer's other masterpiece, I never returned to the Odyssey. It was checked off that giant list of books you are supposed to have read, and I never went back.

Which is too bad, because from somewhere, elements of the Odyssey definitely did become part of my life. Its content creeps into our minds through back channels, like the symphonies we learn by snatches as background music in Bugs Bunny cartoons: half-understood college lectures; popular references to the danger of "siren songs" or being "between Scylla and Charybdis"; hints of the Odyssey in poetry and popular song. The Odyssey is a classic - it's one of those books whose stories we all sort of know, from somewhere, but in most cases don't really know from anywhere.

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That vague understanding can be dangerous. I told people I had read the Odyssey. I deeply believed I had read the Odyssey. I have specific memories, in post-college years, of pontificating about the admiration I had developed for Odysseus; about Athena, the goddess of wisdom who is his special protector, and how one might please her; about traveling, about home, about challenge.

Some of what I said actually made sense. For example, I compared Odysseus to other protagonists in Greek myths and plays. At least one terrible thing happens to almost all of them: Agamemnon kills his own daughter and is killed by his faithless wife; Oedipus kills his father, sleeps with his mother, pokes his eyes out; Hercules goes mad and kills his own wife and children. Theseus causes his father's suicide when he forgets to signal his own safety; Perseus kills his grandfather with a discus; Atreus invites his brother Thyestes to dinner - and feeds Thyestes his own children. That's hardly the worst of it - consider Medea: To help her lover Jason, Medea kills and dismembers her own brother and boils Jason's uncle alive; when Jason then decides - can you blame him? - to marry someone else, Medea kills Jason's bride, Jason's father, and her and Jason's own two children.

Odysseus on the other hand manages to win the decade-long Trojan War (the famous Trojan Horse is his idea). Then, overcoming unimaginable difficulties on his way home, he eventually returns to find his only son healthy and grown, his wife faithful and safe, his father overjoyed. According to at least one version of events, Odysseus lives happily ever after.

That Cyclops episode, probably his most well-known adventure, represents my conception of him perfectly. He can't match the giant bad guy physically, so he outwits him - he calls himself "No-man," so when the fighting starts and the Cyclops shouts that "No-man is killing me," his neighbors figure he

doesn't need their help. The Cyclops, like most of Odysseus's enemies, ends up claiming he was cheated. Odysseus wins, but not because he's biggest; he's just the sneakiest.

Baseball fans might compare Achilles, the vain, arrogant hero of the Iliad, with someone like Ted Williams: undeniably great, but not necessarily good for the team or pleasant to be around; Agamemnon might be Ty Cobb, vicious and dangerous but hard to beat; and Menelaus something like Mickey Mantle: great and useful but something of a blowhard. Odysseus would be Pete Rose: the sneaky little bastard who pulls off some kind of trick that you think is beneath contempt, but carries the day. The guy you call a liar and a cheat - unless he's on your team. Then he's just a guy who does what it takes to win. I began to think - and more than once said out loud - that a good way to live your life was to live it as much like Odysseus as possible. I said it often enough that I began to consider it one of my life's principles.

Thus as we plowed through Ulysses I was embarrassed to notice that I didn't have more than a vague notion of exactly how Odysseus had lived his life. And then, on my night table, that gift from my wife: The Odyssey, and the chance to really read it. Leave it to your wife to make you finally find out whether you really believe what you always say you believe.

IT'S ENOUGH TO MAKE YOU BELIEVE IN THE GODS. Sure, the Odyssey is still a little long, still a little dense, and the epic poetic language does take some getting used to. Nonetheless I read it - on my own - and by the time I finished I felt the book had sought me out, that my need for the Odyssey had manifested itself and brought the book to me - "with the help of some god," as characters in Homer commonly say of remarkable occurrences. I had ignored it in the ninth grade and in my twenties blindly

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claimed to adopt its hero as my model. But when in my 40s I finally actually read it, the Odyssey turned out to be everything I had ignorantly imagined it might be.

First, as my mother promised all those years ago, it's a great story. But there's a lot more, too: those famous stories we all half-know turn out to constitute rather a small portion of the whole - about four chapter-length books out of 24 total. And the remainder, the parts of the Odyssey nobody talks much about - the wanderings of Odysseus's son, Telemachus; the struggles of Odysseus's clever wife, Penelope; the challenges that await Odysseus when he finally returns home - have a resonance I never imagined. A funny thing about the difference between 14 years old and 44: This time the Odyssey spoke to me. This time I got the language. This time I couldn't let it go.

Episodes to which I had been referring for decades suddenly made sense - and stories whose fatuous morals I thought I knew (Rely on your wits, not brute strength! Choose carefully among difficult alternatives! Don't seek to know more than is good for you!) turned out to have unexpected depth and complexity. Moreover, Odysseus spends a lot of time - a lot of time - in this book sleeping with goddesses.

This book got my interest. This was a book worth more than a simple reading. This was a book, at long last, worth the return. I read it again, then again. I came to see the passage of Odysseus from Troy to Ithaca as a metaphor, a series of adventures in which Odysseus demonstrates what he needs to learn - or unlearn - to live his life. The Odyssey became the book I carried around, dipping into in spare moments - while the car got an oil change; in the waiting room for the eye doctor; for a few minutes before sleep. I had a handbook: The oldest lessons in the world were still the lessons I needed to learn - and they were still waiting for me in the Odyssey. During those post-college years when I claimed Odysseus as my role model, I had been right. I hadn't known what I was talking about, but I had been right.

So Joyce's impossible Ulysses had done me a favor: Homer wrote down the Odyssey nearly 3000 years ago, and we've been constantly retelling it ever since, but I had still managed to miss it. Only by squaring off opposite Ulysses did I stumble my way back to the original, central story. It was the Odyssey, not Ulysses, that had something for me.

STILL, I DID PILFER ONE IMPORTANT IDEA from the Ulysses community: pilgrimage. Like opera buffs or "Star Wars" fans at a premiere, members of an entire subculture find in Ulysses a binding element for their lives. Its stories become central to them, known by heart and repeated, studied, appreciated. Ulysses serves as a lodestone text to which they return time and again for understanding.

And Ulysses fans return to more than just their book. Driven by obsession, they return, year after year, to Dublin itself, approaching Dublin as pilgrims, visiting its sites as shrines - going where Bloom went to see what Bloom saw, to learn what Bloom learned. Visiting the sites of the stories in Ulysses brings those stories home, gives them life and substance beyond the book. Through their travel these pilgrims thus go beyond merely reading Ulysses - in this small way they live it, and by connecting it physically to their world make it somehow even more their own.

Thousands of them do this every year.

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Somewhere deep inside my brain, this started a train of thought. I wondered: Why don't I do the same? As I read and reread the Odyssey, as I returned to certain passages over and over, gleaning more each time, the Odyssey began to genuinely occupy the central metaphorical position in my life I had once claimed it did. So I thought: Why shouldn't I visit my sacred sites as the Joyceans do theirs? Whom would I meet? What would I find? Why don't I go to Troy, where Odysseus finished the Trojan War, and make my way to Ithaca, the western Greek island Odysseus called home?

I wanted to go where Odysseus went, to learn what Odysseus learned.

THE MORE I THOUGHT ABOUT IT THE MORE SENSE IT MADE. For one thing, the timing was right. Odysseus leaves for the Trojan War when he's a young father. He stays at Troy for a decade fighting, and after the war spends another decade making his way home, arriving presumably in his mid-forties. That's when the Odyssey is set - Odysseus tells the adventure stories largely in flashback. That is, at the time of the action of the Odyssey, Odysseus is my age.

Since we were the same age, I found comparison natural. Here's Odysseus at around 44: He has a grown son. He has won the greatest war of all time. Then, overcoming unimaginable perils, he has traveled not only the known world but the unknown, outfoxing monsters and bedding goddesses, making his way home to defeat a palace full of murderous rivals, reestablishing command of his island kingdom. Not bad. Okay, here's me: I had paid off my student loans. I had been employed significantly more than I had not. I had a failed marriage, though prospects for the second one looked pretty good. I knew that pouring gas in the carburetor will sometimes get a balky lawnmower to start. I had nursed 14 years out of a pickup truck. I can hang a ceiling fan, build closet shelves, throw darts well enough to win a wall plaque. Interesting, but looking around me I saw no kingdom; in the rearview mirror I saw no enraged monsters, vanquished by my hand, screaming for vengeance; in memory, depressingly few goddesses demanded my sexual favors.

Of course, I blame circumstances; my lack of heroic stature is not entirely my fault. After all, I lack heroic milieu. Despite war, global warming, terrorism, and a host of other troubles, for American suburbanites challenge is generally lacking. A big adventure means going camping and not bringing the cell phone; when we talk about challenge we mean life without cable, a broken air conditioner, going out to get an ink cartridge and having to drive to two stores.

So you can't blame me for wondering: Is that all there is? I mean, worship youth all you want, remain youthful through diet, exercise, surgery, prayer. But whatever you do, by the time you hit your mid-40s, you're slowing down, and you've got to start approaching your life differently, shortening your batting stroke. Looking in the mirror at that guy hitting Odysseus's age and heading for decline, I had to figure: It's now or never. You want adventure? Time is getting short.

So perhaps my most powerful motive as I considered the Odyssey was simple: existential fear. I wasn't ready to be done adventuring, so the idea of retracing the route Odysseus took quickly began to feel inevitable: One last heroic, Joseph Campbell-style adventure to mark the passing of my adventuring years. In fact, Odysseus returns home so exhausted, so sick of war, so weary of travel and excitement that he hopes to never leave home again - a state of mind I couldn't imagine, but that I deeply envied. Wouldn't it be grand to feel so complete, so finished? I aspired to even a tiny piece of Odysseus's weariness, his gladness to be through with adventure, to be home at last. All I needed was a trip all over the known world and beyond.

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OR A JOURNEY AROUND THE MEDITERRANEAN might work. For one thing, after several peripatetic years, my wife, June, and I had returned to our home and were just getting our lives organized; a big trip-sized lacuna could still probably find its way into my schedule. For another, I was no stranger to long journeys. A year abroad in college had taught me the rudiments of unscheduled backpack travel: creativity in sleeping arrangements, reliance on street-vendor food, and a willingness to try and make myself understood in a language unknown to me. Perhaps as a result, a lifetime of semi-planned travel - backpack, floppy hat, hiking boots, and all - has ensued. At 44 and married, I had to figure that kind of travel, too, was unlikely to remain part of my world much longer.

So one more trip sounded like a grand last hurrah. I was owning my middle age. Instead of chasing secretaries or sports cars, I had found a better rite of passage. My old hero Odysseus and I would have a season together, and after that - well, after that I'd worry about what came next. Moreover, a trip is always a trip: You can choose where to begin, but you can't choose where, when, or how it will end and what you will find on the way. That's probably the moral of the Odyssey- as any competent ninth-grader could tell you - but as I pieced together my trip I failed to see it. Maybe I shouldn't have cheated on all those quizzes.

I sketched it out: For several months I'd haunt libraries, finding what I could about the route Odysseus took. In a considered, organized fashion I'd contact classicists, archaeologists, translators. I'd learn a few words of a few languages, make reservations. I'd load up on maps and Euros and then, prepared, I'd set out in the wake of Odysseus. I had a plan.

ANOTHER PLAN - only this wasn't a mere claim about a book, this was an entire campaign, so you know what comes next. In this case it took less than a week.

One morning I mulled things over, lying in a pile of laundry on our bed. For how many months should I explore the libraries? People had been speculating on the route of Odysseus for millennia, with no consensus; from the arguments and suggestions, how ought I to choose my destinations? What experts might be able to help me find my way? What time of year ought I to travel the Mediterranean? How much time ought I to spend? What to bring?

Lost in thought, I cogitated until I became aware of a presence in the doorway. June stood there, a small smile on her lips. In her hand a pink plastic stick about the length of a thermometer, held in a towel. A pregnancy test.

"What do you think?" my wife asked me.

"Do both of those stripes look pink to you?"

WE MADE A BUNCH OF DECISIONS QUICK. June had supported the trip from the start, and she had no interest in saddling our unborn child with the blame for a change in plans: we never even considered canceling the trip. In fact, impending fatherhood made the journey feel even more important. Still - you can't plan for surprise, and nobody wanted me out wandering the planet when June had our baby. The rank of calendar pages for my adventure, stretching gracefully into the limitless future, suddenly accordianed down. I could still retrace Odysseus's adventures of twenty years.

I just had six months to do it.

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Reprinted from NO-MAN'S LANDS: One Man's Odyssey Through The Odyssey, copyright © 2008 by Scott Huler. Published by Crown Publishers, a division of Random House, Inc.

The Truth about Being a HeroBy Karl Marlantes

1968, at age 23, Karl Marlantes shipped off to Vietnam as a second lieutenant in charge of 40 Marines—an experience he later drew on for his novel "Matterhorn." In this excerpt from his forthcoming memoir, "What It Is Like to Go to War," he reflects on the motives and transcendent moments of heroism.

We all want to be special, to stand out; there's nothing wrong with this. The irony is that every human being is special to start with, because we're unique to start with. But we then go through some sort of boot camp from the age of zero to about 18 where we learn everything we can about how not to be unique.

This spawns an unconscious desire to prove yourself special, but now it's special in the eyes of your peers and it comes out in the form of being better than or having power over someone else. In the military I could exercise the power of being automatically respected because of the medals on my chest, not because I had done anything right at the moment to earn that respect. This is pretty nice. It's also a psychological trap that can stop one's growth and allow one to get away with just plain bad behavior.

Looking even deeper, I realize now that I also had very mixed feelings about some of the medals on my chest. I knew many Marines had done brave deeds that no one saw and for which they got no medals at all. I was having a very hard time carrying those medals and didn't have the insight or maturity to know what to do with my combination of guilt and pride.

The best words I've ever heard on the subject of medals come from a fellow lieutenant who'd been my company executive officer when I first arrived in Vietnam. The company came under mortar attack. Tom—all names given here are pseudonyms—then a platoon commander, had found a relatively safe defensive position for himself, but he stood up, exposed to the exploding shells, in order to get a compass bearing on where the shells were being fired from. He then called in and adjusted counterbattery fire, which got the company out of trouble. He was awarded the Bronze Star. When I heard the news and congratulated him, he said, "A lot of people have done a lot more and gotten a lot less, and a lot of people have done a lot less and gotten a lot more."

Medals are all mixed up with hierarchy, politics and even job descriptions. What is considered normal activity for an infantry grunt, and therefore not worthy of a medal, is likely to be viewed as extraordinary for someone who does the same thing but isn't a grunt, so he gets a medal and maybe an article in Stars and Stripes.

I got my medals, in part, because I did brave acts, but also, in part, because the kids liked me and they spent time writing better eyewitness accounts than they would have written if they hadn't liked me. Had I been an unpopular officer and done exactly the same things, few would have bothered, if any. The accounts would have been laconic, at best, and the medals probably of a lower order. The only people who will ever know the value of the ribbons on their chests are the people wearing them—and even they can fool themselves, in both directions.

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* * *

I was eager for medals early on, but after a while I was no longer so anxious to get one of any kind. But the same phenomenon of being taken over by something, or someone, still seemed to operate.

We had moved up in the dark and waited in the jungle, strung out on line as the jets roared in to bomb the enemy defenses at first light. But because of a screw-up the jets dropped their bombs on the wrong hill. I screamed bloody murder over the battalion Forward Air Control net but was told I was out of line and to get off because I couldn't possibly see what was going on.

Going up against bunkers is hard enough, but doing it without any air prep was decidedly unnerving. A huge value of the air prep is the boost to the morale of the attacking infantry. We came out of the jungle onto the exposed earth below the bunkers and were instantly under fire from the untouched machine-gun positions.

Everyone dived for logs and holes. The whole assault ground to a halt, except for one kid named Niemi, who had sprinted forward when we came under the intense fire and disappeared up in front of us somewhere. We figured he was down and dead. I actually don't know how long we all lay there getting pulverized out in the open like that. I knew it would be only a few minutes before the enemy rockets and mortars found us.

Again, I seemed to step aside. I remember surveying the whole scene from someplace in the air above it. I saw the napalm smoke burning uselessly on the wrong hill. The machine guns had us pinned down with well-planned interlocking fire. The North Vietnamese Army were pros. Everyone was strung out in a ragged line hiding behind downed trees and in shell holes—even me, tiny and small, huddled down there below with the rest.

I distinctly remember recalling the words of an instructor at the Basic School, a particularly colorful and popular redheaded major who taught tactics, talking to a group of us about when it was a platoon leader earned his pay. I knew, floating above that mess, that now that time had come. If I didn't get up and lead, we'd get wiped.

I re-entered my body as the hero platoon leader, leaving the rest of everyday me up there in the clouds. It was at this point I started screaming at the wounded machine gunner to crawl up to my log and start that machine-gun duel, which would keep the crew of one of the interlocking machine guns busy. I then got an M-79 man to move up next to me and had him start lobbing shells at the observation slit of an adjacent bunker that was also giving us fits, directly up the hill from us. Then I stood up.

I did a lot of things that day, many of which got written into the commendation, but the one I'm most proud of is that I simply stood up, in the middle of all that flying metal, and started up the hill all by myself.

I'm proud of that act because I did it for the right reasons. I once watched a televised exchange about what dramatists call "the hero's journey," between Bill Moyers and Joseph Campbell. The camera had cut to a boot camp scene with Mr. Campbell saying, "There are some heroic journeys into which you are thrown and pitched." The camera then cut to scenes from Vietnam, helicopters, a young black man

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limping forward in agony. Then, it cut to war protesters, and Mr. Moyers then asked Mr. Campbell, "Doesn't heroism have a moral objective?"

Campbell replied, "The moral objective is that of saving a people, or person, or idea. He is sacrificing himself for something. That is the morality of it. Now, you, from another position, might say that 'something' wasn't worth it, or was downright wrong. That's a judgment from another side. But it doesn't destroy the heroism of what was done. Absolutely not."

I was no more heroic this time than the time I won my first medal—when I went after an injured Marine named Utter, jokingly asking another fellow Marine, "Is it worth a medal if I go get him?" Both times I faced a lot of fire. In fact, both times my actions were an effort to save a person, Utter, or a people, my little tribe exposed and dying on that scourged hillside. But my motives had changed. And because my motives had changed, I feel a lot better about what I did.

I made no heroic gestures or wisecracks this time. I simply ran forward up the steep hill, zigzagging for the bunker, all by myself, hoping the M-79 man wouldn't hit me in the back. It's hard to zigzag while running uphill loaded down with ammunition and grenades. Every bit of my consciousness was focused on just two things, the bunker above me and whether I could keep running and zigzagging with everything I had. Another 400-meter sprint against Death. A long desperate weekend. A time out of time.

I was running in a long arc to get between the machine-gun bunker and the one I was heading for—and to avoid the M-79 shells now exploding against the observation slit, which I hoped were blinding the occupants. As I made that arc I was turned sideways to the hill and I caught movement in my peripheral vision. I hit the deck, turning and rolling, coming up in a position to fire. It was a Marine! He was about 15 meters below me, zigzagging, falling, up and running again. Immediately behind him a long ragged line of Marines came moving and weaving up the hill behind me. Behind the line were spots of crumpled bodies, lying where they'd been hit.

They'd all come with me. I was actually alone only for a matter of seconds. We took the bunker, and the next, and—together with Second Platoon joining up with us on our right flank—broke through the first line of bunkers, only to come under fire from a second, interior line of fighting holes higher on the hill. At this point I saw the missing kid, Niemi, pop his head up. He sprinted across the open top of the hill, all alone. The NVA turned in their positions to fire on him. I watched him climb on top of a bunker and chuck two grenades inside. When they went off I saw him fall to the ground. I assumed that this time he'd been killed for sure.

Being hit from behind by Niemi both unnerved the NVA and encouraged us to hurry to reach him. All semblance of platoon and squad order were gone by now. Everyone was intermingled, weaving, rushing and covering, taking on each hole and bunker one at a time in groups.

It was just about that time I got knocked out and blinded by a hand grenade. I came to, groggy. I could hear my radioman, who seemed very far away, telling the skipper I was down and that he didn't know if I was dead or not. I grunted something to let him know I wasn't dead and tried to sit up, but then went back down. I felt as though I couldn't get my breath.

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Then I panicked, because I knew I'd been hit in the eyes. I started rubbing them, desperate to get them open, but they seemed glued shut. My radioman poured Kool-Aid from his canteen onto my face and into my eyes, and I managed to get one eye to clear. The other eye was a bloody dirt-clogged mess and I thought I'd lost it. (The blindness was temporary, but I later learned that several metal slivers were just microns from my optic nerve.)

We kept scrambling for the top, trying to reach Niemi, trying to win, trying to get it all over with. I got held up by two enemy soldiers in a hole and was attempting to get a shot or two off at them and quickly ducking back down when a kid I knew from Second Platoon, mainly because of his bad reputation, threw himself down beside me, half his clothes blown away. He was begging people for a rifle. His had been blown out of his hands.

He was a black kid, all tangled up in black-power politics, almost always angry and sullen. A troublemaker. Yet here he was, most of his body naked with only flapping rags left of his jungle utilities, begging for a rifle when he had a perfect excuse to just bury his head in the clay and quit. I gave him mine. I still had a pistol. He grabbed the rifle, stood up to his full height, fully exposing himself to all the fire, and simply blasted an entire magazine at the two soldiers in front of us, killing both of them. He then went charging into the fight, leaving me stunned for a moment. Why? Who was he doing this for? What is this thing in young men? We were beyond ourselves, beyond politics, beyond good and evil. This was transcendence.

Many of us had by now worked our way almost to the top of the hill. Fighting was no longer them above and us below. Marines and NVA intermingled. Crashing out of the clouds into this confusion came a flaming, smoking twin-rotor CH-46 helicopter. It was making a much-needed ammunition run to the company waiting in reserve and firing support for us from the hill we'd taken several days before. We think that the bird got hit by a mortar round as it was coming in and, in the confusion and scudding cloud cover, the pilot picked the wrong hill or he did it because he had no choice.

The result was the same. Down it came, right where we were assaulting, and the NVA just tore that bird to pieces. Spinning out of control, it smashed right on the very top of the hill, breaking its rotor blades.

I saw Niemi pop into sight again. He sprinted to the downed chopper. Later we found out he'd spent his time crawling behind holes and bunkers, shooting people from behind. He'd watched aghast as the chopper came screaming out of the sky, nearly hitting him. Later, he told me that it looked as if the thing simply started sprouting holes as the NVA turned their weapons on it.

When he saw the crew bail out and crawl for cover underneath the chopper (aircrews are armed only with pistols, virtually useless in a fight like this), the only thing he could think to do was sprint across the open hilltop to see if he could find a place from which he could lay down fire to protect them. He didn't debate this. He just did it. It was an unconscious, generous and potentially sacrificial act.

Many of us coming up the hill saw Niemi sprint into the open. Knowing now that he was still alive and that he and the chopper crew were dead for sure if we didn't break through to them, we all simply rushed forward to reach them before the NVA killed them. No one gave an order. We, the group, just rushed forward all at once. We couldn't be stopped. Just individuals among us were stopped. Many forever. But we couldn't be. This, too, is a form of transcendence. I was we, no longer me.

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Lance Corporal Steel, 19, who'd been acting platoon commander until I reorganized things and was now acting platoon sergeant, got there first. The crewmen were so grateful and happy they gave their pistols away. I got the pilot's .38 Smith & Wesson.

Niemi got a Navy Cross.

I got a Navy Cross.

The helicopter pilot got a front-page story in Stars and Stripes with the large headline, "Copter 'Crashes' Enemy Party, Takes Hill."

The kid who borrowed my rifle didn't get anything.

From "What It Is Like to Go to War" by Karl Marlantes, to be published Aug. 30 by Atlantic Monthly Press.

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Back From War, but Not Really Home

By CAROLINE ALEXANDERPublished: November 7, 2009 WASHED onto the shores of his island home, after 10 years’ absence in a foreign war and 10 years of hard travel in foreign lands, Odysseus, literature’s most famous veteran, stares around him: “But now brilliant Odysseus awoke from sleep in his own fatherland, and he did not know it,/having been long away.” Additionally, the goddess Athena has cast an obscuring mist over all the familiar landmarks, making “everything look otherwise/than it was.” “Ah me,” groans Odysseus, “what are the people whose land I have come to this time?”

That sense of dislocation has been shared by veterans returning from the field of war since Homer conjured Odysseus’ inauspicious return some 2,800 years ago. Its vexing power was underscored on Thursday, when a military psychiatrist who had been treating the mental scars of soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan went on a shooting rampage at an Army base in Texas.

Who is the veteran, and how does he stand in relation to his native land and people? This question remains relevant to those marching in parades this week for Veterans Day in the United States and Armistice Day in Europe, as well as to the ever-diminishing number of spectators who applaud them. In theory, Veterans Day celebrates an event as starkly unambiguous as victory — survival. In practice, Nov. 11 is clouded with ambiguous symbolism, and has become our most awkward holiday.

The great theme of “The Odyssey” — the return of the war veteran to his home — is the only surviving, and undoubtedly the greatest, epic example of what was evidently a popular theme in ancient times. Another poem, now lost, “Nostoi,” or “Returns,” was an epic of uncertain authorship that was said to have encompassed five books and traced the homecomings of veterans of the Trojan War like the Greek commander in chief, Agamemnon; his brother, Menelaus; the aged counselor Nestor, the priest Calchas, the hero Diomedes and even Achilles’ son, Neoptolemos.

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The Greek word nostos, meaning “return home,” is the root of our English “nostalgia” (along with algos — “pain” or “sorrow”). The content and character of “Nostoi” is now impossible to gauge; all we know of it comes from a late, possibly fifth-century A.D. summary and stray fragments. Some of the most famous of these traditional veterans’ stories, however, have survived in later, non-epic works.

Aeschylus’ towering tragedy “Agamemnon,” staged in 458 B.C., centers on the king’s return from Troy to his palace in Argos, where he is murdered in his bath by his wife, Clytemnestra. Virgil’s “Aeneid” famously relates the travails of the heroic Trojan veteran Aeneas, who, following the destruction of his city by the Greek victors, must make a new home in some other, foreign land.

But it is “The Odyssey” that most directly probes the theme of the war veteran’s return. Threaded through this fairytale saga, amid its historic touchstones, are remarkable scenes addressing aspects of the war veteran’s experience that are disconcertingly familiar to our own age. Odysseus returns home to a place he does not recognize, and then finds his homestead overrun with young men who have no experience of war. Throughout his long voyage back, he has reacted to each stranger with elaborate caginess, concocting stories about who he is and what he has seen and done — the real war he keeps to himself.

Midway through the epic, Odysseus relates to a spellbound audience how, in order to obtain guidance for the voyage ahead, it was necessary to descend to Hades. There, among the thronging souls of men and women dead and past, he confronted his comrades of the war — Agamemnon, Achilles, Patroclus, Antilochus and Ajax — robust heroes of epic tales now reduced to unhappy shades who haunt his story.

Similarly, while Odysseus is lost at sea, his son, Telemachus, embarks on a voyage of discovery, also seeking out his father’s former comrades, but those who lived to return. First of these is old Nestor, a veteran of many campaigns, now at home in sandy Pylos. No mortal man could “tell the whole of it,” says Nestor of the years at Troy, where “all who were our best were killed.” In Sparta, Menelaus, whose wife, Helen, was the cause of the war, is haunted by the losses: “I wish I lived in my house with only a third part of all/these goods, and that the men were alive who died in those days/in wide Troy land.”

Odysseus’ own memories are more potent. Amongst the kindly Phaiakians, who give him hospitality toward the end of his hard voyage, he listens to the court poet sing of the Trojan

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War’s “famous actions/of men on that venture.” Odysseus, taking his mantle in his hands, “drew it over his head and veiled his fine features/shamed for the tears running down his face.”

And most significantly, epic tradition hints at the dilemmas of military commemoration. In “The Iliad,” Achilles must choose between kleos or nostos — glory or a safe return home. By dying at Troy, Achilles was assured of undying fame as the greatest of all heroes. His choice reflects an uneasy awareness that it is far easier to honor the dead soldier than the soldier who returns. Time-tested and time-honored, the commemoration rites we observe each Memorial Day — the parades and speeches and graveside prayers and offerings — represent a satisfying formula of remembrance by the living for the dead that was already referred to as “ancient custom” by Thucydides in the fifth century B.C.

The commemoration of the veteran — the survivor who did not fall on the field of war — is less starkly defined. The returned soldier, it is hoped, will grow old and die among us, like Nestor, in whose time “two generations of mortal men had perished.” In our own times, the generation born in the optimistic aftermath of World War II has already encountered veterans of both world wars, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Persian Gulf war and our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq — and still has several decades of martial possibilities in reserve. As the earlier of those wars recede into the past, their old soldiers fade away; and thus, commemorative rites for the veteran — by definition, the survivor — also tend to end, perversely, at graves.

How to commemorate the living veteran? Again, some guidance can be found in epic, the crucible of heroic mores. Old Nestor, the iconographic veteran, is a teller of many tales of the many battles he once waged. “In my time I have dealt with better men than/you are, and never once did they disregard me,” he tells the entire Greek army in “The Iliad.” “I fought single-handed, yet against such men no one/could do battle.” Although he is a somewhat comic figure, his speeches are deadly earnest; Old Nestor knows that his is the only voice to keep memory of such past campaigns alive.

One suspects such lengthy recitations are rare today. Rarer still is the respectful audience enjoyed by Nestor; impatience with such reminiscences began well before our age. “Menelaus bold/waxed garrulous, and sacked a hundred Troys/’Twixt noon and supper,” wrote Rupert Brooke, cynically, during the years leading up to a later Great War.

Today, veterans’ tales are more likely to be safeguarded in books and replicated in movies than self-narrated to a respectful throng. Detailed knowledge of the experience in which a veteran’s

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memories were forged is thus made common. To learn these stories is both civilian duty and commemoration. Death on the field and the voyage home — both are epic.

The Iliad By Homer

Written 800 B.C.E Translated by Samuel Butler

Book VIThe fight between Trojans and Achaeans was now left to rage as it would, and the tide of war surged hither and thither over the plain as they aimed their bronze-shod spears at one another between the streams of Simois and Xanthus.

First, Ajax son of Telamon, tower of strength to the Achaeans, broke a phalanx of the Trojans, and came to the assistance of his comrades by killing Acamas son of Eussorus, the best man among the Thracians, being both brave and of great stature. The spear struck the projecting peak of his helmet: its bronze point then went through his forehead into the brain, and darkness veiled his eyes.

Then Diomed killed Axylus son of Teuthranus, a rich man who lived in the strong city of Arisbe, and was beloved by all men; for he had a house by the roadside, and entertained every one who passed; howbeit not one of his guests stood before him to save his life, and Diomed killed both him and his squire Calesius, who was then his charioteer- so the pair passed beneath the earth.

Euryalus killed Dresus and Opheltius, and then went in pursuit of Aesepus and Pedasus, whom the naiad nymph Abarbarea had borne to noble Bucolion. Bucolion was eldest son to Laomedon, but he was a bastard. While tending his sheep he had converse with the nymph, and she conceived twin sons; these the son of Mecisteus now slew, and he stripped the armour from their shoulders. Polypoetes then killed Astyalus, Ulysses Pidytes of Percote, and Teucer Aretaon. Ablerus fell by the spear of Nestor's son Antilochus, and Agamemnon, king of men, killed Elatus who dwelt in Pedasus by the banks of the river Satnioeis. Leitus killed Phylacus as he was flying, and Eurypylus slew Melanthus.

Then Menelaus of the loud war-cry took Adrestus alive, for his horses ran into a tamarisk bush, as they were flying wildly over the plain, and broke the pole from the car; they went on towards the city along with the others in full flight, but Adrestus rolled out, and fell in the dust flat on his face by the wheel of his chariot; Menelaus came up to him spear in hand, but Adrestus caught him by the knees begging for his life. "Take me alive," he cried, "son of Atreus, and you shall have a full ransom for me: my father is rich and has much treasure of gold, bronze, and wrought iron laid by in his house. From this store he will give you a large ransom should he hear of my being alive and at the ships of the Achaeans."

Thus did he plead, and Menelaus was for yielding and giving him to a squire to take to the ships of the Achaeans, but Agamemnon came running up to him and rebuked him. "My good Menelaus," said he, "this is no time for giving quarter. Has, then, your house fared so well at the hands of the Trojans? Let us not spare a single one of them- not even the child unborn and in its mother's womb; let not a man of them be left alive, but let all in Ilius perish, unheeded and forgotten."

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Thus did he speak, and his brother was persuaded by him, for his words were just. Menelaus, therefore, thrust Adrestus from him, whereon King Agamemnon struck him in the flank, and he fell: then the son of Atreus planted his foot upon his breast to draw his spear from the body.

Meanwhile Nestor shouted to the Argives, saying, "My friends, Danaan warriors, servants of Mars, let no man lag that he may spoil the dead, and bring back much booty to the ships. Let us kill as many as we can; the bodies will lie upon the plain, and you can despoil them later at your leisure."

With these words he put heart and soul into them all. And now the Trojans would have been routed and driven back into Ilius, had not Priam's son Helenus, wisest of augurs, said to Hector and Aeneas, "Hector and Aeneas, you two are the mainstays of the Trojans and Lycians, for you are foremost at all times, alike in fight and counsel; hold your ground here, and go about among the host to rally them in front of the gates, or they will fling themselves into the arms of their wives, to the great joy of our foes. Then, when you have put heart into all our companies, we will stand firm here and fight the Danaans however hard they press us, for there is nothing else to be done. Meanwhile do you, Hector, go to the city and tell our mother what is happening. Tell her to bid the matrons gather at the temple of Minerva in the acropolis; let her then take her key and open the doors of the sacred building; there, upon the knees of Minerva, let her lay the largest, fairest robe she has in her house- the one she sets most store by; let her, moreover, promise to sacrifice twelve yearling heifers that have never yet felt the goad, in the temple of the goddess, if she will take pity on the town, with the wives and little ones of the Trojans, and keep the son of Tydeus from falling on the goodly city of Ilius; for he fights with fury and fills men's souls with panic. I hold him mightiest of them all; we did not fear even their great champion Achilles, son of a goddess though he be, as we do this man: his rage is beyond all bounds, and there is none can vie with him in prowess"

Hector did as his brother bade him. He sprang from his chariot, and went about everywhere among the host, brandishing his spears, urging the men on to fight, and raising the dread cry of battle. Thereon they rallied and again faced the Achaeans, who gave ground and ceased their murderous onset, for they deemed that some one of the immortals had come down from starry heaven to help the Trojans, so strangely had they rallied. And Hector shouted to the Trojans, "Trojans and allies, be men, my friends, and fight with might and main, while I go to Ilius and tell the old men of our council and our wives to pray to the gods and vow hecatombs in their honour."

With this he went his way, and the black rim of hide that went round his shield beat against his neck and his ancles.

Then Glaucus son of Hippolochus, and the son of Tydeus went into the open space between the hosts to fight in single combat. When they were close up to one another Diomed of the loud war-cry was the first to speak. "Who, my good sir," said he, "who are you among men? I have never seen you in battle until now, but you are daring beyond all others if you abide my onset. Woe to those fathers whose sons face my might. If, however, you are one of the immortals and have come down from heaven, I will not fight you; for even valiant Lycurgus, son of Dryas, did not live long when he took to fighting with the gods. He it was that drove the nursing women who were in charge of frenzied Bacchus through the land of Nysa, and they flung their thyrsi on the ground as murderous Lycurgus beat them with his oxgoad. Bacchus himself plunged terror-stricken into the sea, and Thetis took him to her bosom to comfort him, for he was scared by the fury with which the man reviled him. Thereon the gods who live at ease were angry with Lycurgus and the son of Saturn struck him blind, nor did he live much longer after he had become hateful to the immortals. Therefore I will not fight with the blessed gods; but if you are of them that eat

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the fruit of the ground, draw near and meet your doom."

And the son of Hippolochus answered, son of Tydeus, why ask me of my lineage? Men come and go as leaves year by year upon the trees. Those of autumn the wind sheds upon the ground, but when spring returns the forest buds forth with fresh vines. Even so is it with the generations of mankind, the new spring up as the old are passing away. If, then, you would learn my descent, it is one that is well known to many. There is a city in the heart of Argos, pasture land of horses, called Ephyra, where Sisyphus lived, who was the craftiest of all mankind. He was the son of Aeolus, and had a son named Glaucus, who was father to Bellerophon, whom heaven endowed with the most surpassing comeliness and beauty. But Proetus devised his ruin, and being stronger than he, drove him from the land of the Argives, over which Jove had made him ruler. For Antea, wife of Proetus, lusted after him, and would have had him lie with her in secret; but Bellerophon was an honourable man and would not, so she told lies about him to Proteus. 'Proetus,' said she, 'kill Bellerophon or die, for he would have had converse with me against my will.' The king was angered, but shrank from killing Bellerophon, so he sent him to Lycia with lying letters of introduction, written on a folded tablet, and containing much ill against the bearer. He bade Bellerophon show these letters to his father-in-law, to the end that he might thus perish; Bellerophon therefore went to Lycia, and the gods convoyed him safely.

"When he reached the river Xanthus, which is in Lycia, the king received him with all goodwill, feasted him nine days, and killed nine heifers in his honour, but when rosy-fingered morning appeared upon the tenth day, he questioned him and desired to see the letter from his son-in-law Proetus. When he had received the wicked letter he first commanded Bellerophon to kill that savage monster, the Chimaera, who was not a human being, but a goddess, for she had the head of a lion and the tail of a serpent, while her body was that of a goat, and she breathed forth flames of fire; but Bellerophon slew her, for he was guided by signs from heaven. He next fought the far-famed Solymi, and this, he said, was the hardest of all his battles. Thirdly, he killed the Amazons, women who were the peers of men, and as he was returning thence the king devised yet another plan for his destruction; he picked the bravest warriors in all Lycia, and placed them in ambuscade, but not a man ever came back, for Bellerophon killed every one of them. Then the king knew that he must be the valiant offspring of a god, so he kept him in Lycia, gave him his daughter in marriage, and made him of equal honour in the kingdom with himself; and the Lycians gave him a piece of land, the best in all the country, fair with vineyards and tilled fields, to have and to hold.

"The king's daughter bore Bellerophon three children, Isander, Hippolochus, and Laodameia. Jove, the lord of counsel, lay with Laodameia, and she bore him noble Sarpedon; but when Bellerophon came to be hated by all the gods, he wandered all desolate and dismayed upon the Alean plain, gnawing at his own heart, and shunning the path of man. Mars, insatiate of battle, killed his son Isander while he was fighting the Solymi; his daughter was killed by Diana of the golden reins, for she was angered with her; but Hippolochus was father to myself, and when he sent me to Troy he urged me again and again to fight ever among the foremost and outvie my peers, so as not to shame the blood of my fathers who were the noblest in Ephyra and in all Lycia. This, then, is the descent I claim."

Thus did he speak, and the heart of Diomed was glad. He planted his spear in the ground, and spoke to him with friendly words. "Then," he said, you are an old friend of my father's house. Great Oeneus once entertained Bellerophon for twenty days, and the two exchanged presents. Oeneus gave a belt rich with purple, and Bellerophon a double cup, which I left at home when I set out for Troy. I do not remember Tydeus, for he was taken from us while I was yet a child, when the army of the Achaeans was cut to pieces before Thebes. Henceforth, however, I must be your host in middle Argos, and you mine in Lycia,

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if I should ever go there; let us avoid one another's spears even during a general engagement; there are many noble Trojans and allies whom I can kill, if I overtake them and heaven delivers them into my hand; so again with yourself, there are many Achaeans whose lives you may take if you can; we two, then, will exchange armour, that all present may know of the old ties that subsist between us."

With these words they sprang from their chariots, grasped one another's hands, and plighted friendship. But the son of Saturn made Glaucus take leave of his wits, for he exchanged golden armour for bronze, the worth of a hundred head of cattle for the worth of nine.

Now when Hector reached the Scaean gates and the oak tree, the wives and daughters of the Trojans came running towards him to ask after their sons, brothers, kinsmen, and husbands: he told them to set about praying to the gods, and many were made sorrowful as they heard him.

Presently he reached the splendid palace of King Priam, adorned with colonnades of hewn stone. In it there were fifty bedchambers- all of hewn stone- built near one another, where the sons of Priam slept, each with his wedded wife. Opposite these, on the other side the courtyard, there were twelve upper rooms also of hewn stone for Priam's daughters, built near one another, where his sons-in-law slept with their wives. When Hector got there, his fond mother came up to him with Laodice the fairest of her daughters. She took his hand within her own and said, "My son, why have you left the battle to come hither? Are the Achaeans, woe betide them, pressing you hard about the city that you have thought fit to come and uplift your hands to Jove from the citadel? Wait till I can bring you wine that you may make offering to Jove and to the other immortals, and may then drink and be refreshed. Wine gives a man fresh strength when he is wearied, as you now are with fighting on behalf of your kinsmen."

And Hector answered, "Honoured mother, bring no wine, lest you unman me and I forget my strength. I dare not make a drink-offering to Jove with unwashed hands; one who is bespattered with blood and filth may not pray to the son of Saturn. Get the matrons together, and go with offerings to the temple of Minerva driver of the spoil; there, upon the knees of Minerva, lay the largest and fairest robe you have in your house- the one you set most store by; promise, moreover, to sacrifice twelve yearling heifers that have never yet felt the goad, in the temple of the goddess if she will take pity on the town, with the wives and little ones of the Trojans, and keep the son of Tydeus from off the goodly city of Ilius, for he fights with fury, and fills men's souls with panic. Go, then, to the temple of Minerva, while I seek Paris and exhort him, if he will hear my words. Would that the earth might open her jaws and swallow him, for Jove bred him to be the bane of the Trojans, and of Priam and Priam's sons. Could I but see him go down into the house of Hades, my heart would forget its heaviness."

His mother went into the house and called her waiting-women who gathered the matrons throughout the city. She then went down into her fragrant store-room, where her embroidered robes were kept, the work of Sidonian women, whom Alexandrus had brought over from Sidon when he sailed the seas upon that voyage during which he carried off Helen. Hecuba took out the largest robe, and the one that was most beautifully enriched with embroidery, as an offering to Minerva: it glittered like a star, and lay at the very bottom of the chest. With this she went on her way and many matrons with her.

When they reached the temple of Minerva, lovely Theano, daughter of Cisseus and wife of Antenor, opened the doors, for the Trojans had made her priestess of Minerva. The women lifted up their hands to the goddess with a loud cry, and Theano took the robe to lay it upon the knees of Minerva, praying the while to the daughter of great Jove. "Holy Minerva," she cried, "protectress of our city, mighty goddess, break the spear of Diomed and lay him low before the Scaean gates. Do this, and we will

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sacrifice twelve heifers that have never yet known the goad, in your temple, if you will have pity upon the town, with the wives and little ones If the Trojans." Thus she prayed, but Pallas Minerva granted not her prayer.

While they were thus praying to the daughter of great Jove, Hector went to the fair house of Alexandrus, which he had built for him by the foremost builders in the land. They had built him his house, storehouse, and courtyard near those of Priam and Hector on the acropolis. Here Hector entered, with a spear eleven cubits long in his hand; the bronze point gleamed in front of him, and was fastened to the shaft of the spear by a ring of gold. He found Alexandrus within the house, busied about his armour, his shield and cuirass, and handling his curved bow; there, too, sat Argive Helen with her women, setting them their several tasks; and as Hector saw him he rebuked him with words of scorn. "Sir," said he, "you do ill to nurse this rancour; the people perish fighting round this our town; you would yourself chide one whom you saw shirking his part in the combat. Up then, or ere long the city will be in a blaze."

And Alexandrus answered, "Hector, your rebuke is just; listen therefore, and believe me when I tell you that I am not here so much through rancour or ill-will towards the Trojans, as from a desire to indulge my grief. My wife was even now gently urging me to battle, and I hold it better that I should go, for victory is ever fickle. Wait, then, while I put on my armour, or go first and I will follow. I shall be sure to overtake you."

Hector made no answer, but Helen tried to soothe him. "Brother," said she, "to my abhorred and sinful self, would that a whirlwind had caught me up on the day my mother brought me forth, and had borne me to some mountain or to the waves of the roaring sea that should have swept me away ere this mischief had come about. But, since the gods have devised these evils, would, at any rate, that I had been wife to a better man- to one who could smart under dishonour and men's evil speeches. This fellow was never yet to be depended upon, nor never will be, and he will surely reap what he has sown. Still, brother, come in and rest upon this seat, for it is you who bear the brunt of that toil that has been caused by my hateful self and by the sin of Alexandrus- both of whom Jove has doomed to be a theme of song among those that shall be born hereafter."

And Hector answered, "Bid me not be seated, Helen, for all the goodwill you bear me. I cannot stay. I am in haste to help the Trojans, who miss me greatly when I am not among them; but urge your husband, and of his own self also let him make haste to overtake me before I am out of the city. I must go home to see my household, my wife and my little son, for I know not whether I shall ever again return to them, or whether the gods will cause me to fill by the hands of the Achaeans."

Then Hector left her, and forthwith was at his own house. He did not find Andromache, for she was on the wall with her child and one of her maids, weeping bitterly. Seeing, then, that she was not within, he stood on the threshold of the women's rooms and said, "Women, tell me, and tell me true, where did Andromache go when she left the house? Was it to my sisters, or to my brothers' wives? or is she at the temple of Minerva where the other women are propitiating the awful goddess?"

His good housekeeper answered, "Hector, since you bid me tell you truly, she did not go to your sisters nor to your brothers' wives, nor yet to the temple of Minerva, where the other women are propitiating the awful goddess, but she is on the high wall of Ilius, for she had heard the Trojans were being hard pressed, and that the Achaeans were in great force: she went to the wall in frenzied haste, and the nurse went with her carrying the child."

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Hector hurried from the house when she had done speaking, and went down the streets by the same way that he had come. When he had gone through the city and had reached the Scaean gates through which he would go out on to the plain, his wife came running towards him, Andromache, daughter of great Eetion who ruled in Thebe under the wooded slopes of Mt. Placus, and was king of the Cilicians. His daughter had married Hector, and now came to meet him with a nurse who carried his little child in her bosom- a mere babe. Hector's darling son, and lovely as a star. Hector had named him Scamandrius, but the people called him Astyanax, for his father stood alone as chief guardian of Ilius. Hector smiled as he looked upon the boy, but he did not speak, and Andromache stood by him weeping and taking his hand in her own. "Dear husband," said she, "your valour will bring you to destruction; think on your infant son, and on my hapless self who ere long shall be your widow- for the Achaeans will set upon you in a body and kill you. It would be better for me, should I lose you, to lie dead and buried, for I shall have nothing left to comfort me when you are gone, save only sorrow. I have neither father nor mother now. Achilles slew my father when he sacked Thebe the goodly city of the Cilicians. He slew him, but did not for very shame despoil him; when he had burned him in his wondrous armour, he raised a barrow over his ashes and the mountain nymphs, daughters of aegis-bearing Jove, planted a grove of elms about his tomb. I had seven brothers in my father's house, but on the same day they all went within the house of Hades. Achilles killed them as they were with their sheep and cattle. My mother—her who had been queen of all the land under Mt. Placus—he brought hither with the spoil, and freed her for a great sum, but the archer- queen Diana took her in the house of your father. Nay- Hector- you who to me are father, mother, brother, and dear husband- have mercy upon me; stay here upon this wall; make not your child fatherless, and your wife a widow; as for the host, place them near the fig-tree, where the city can be best scaled, and the wall is weakest. Thrice have the bravest of them come thither and assailed it, under the two Ajaxes, Idomeneus, the sons of Atreus, and the brave son of Tydeus, either of their own bidding, or because some soothsayer had told them."

And Hector answered, "Wife, I too have thought upon all this, but with what face should I look upon the Trojans, men or women, if I shirked battle like a coward? I cannot do so: I know nothing save to fight bravely in the forefront of the Trojan host and win renown alike for my father and myself. Well do I know that the day will surely come when mighty Ilius shall be destroyed with Priam and Priam's people, but I grieve for none of these- not even for Hecuba, nor King Priam, nor for my brothers many and brave who may fall in the dust before their foes- for none of these do I grieve as for yourself when the day shall come on which some one of the Achaeans shall rob you for ever of your freedom, and bear you weeping away. It may be that you will have to ply the loom in Argos at the bidding of a mistress, or to fetch water from the springs Messeis or Hypereia, treated brutally by some cruel task-master; then will one say who sees you weeping, 'She was wife to Hector, the bravest warrior among the Trojans during the war before Ilius.' On this your tears will break forth anew for him who would have put away the day of captivity from you. May I lie dead under the barrow that is heaped over my body ere I hear your cry as they carry you into bondage."

He stretched his arms towards his child, but the boy cried and nestled in his nurse's bosom, scared at the sight of his father's armour, and at the horse-hair plume that nodded fiercely from his helmet. His father and mother laughed to see him, but Hector took the helmet from his head and laid it all gleaming upon the ground. Then he took his darling child, kissed him, and dandled him in his arms, praying over him the while to Jove and to all the gods. "Jove," he cried, "grant that this my child may be even as myself, chief among the Trojans; let him be not less excellent in strength, and let him rule Ilius with his might. Then may one say of him as he comes from battle, 'The son is far better than the father.' May he bring back the blood-stained spoils of him whom he has laid low, and let his mother's heart be glad.'"

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With this he laid the child again in the arms of his wife, who took him to her own soft bosom, smiling through her tears. As her husband watched her his heart yearned towards her and he caressed her fondly, saying, "My own wife, do not take these things too bitterly to heart. No one can hurry me down to Hades before my time, but if a man's hour is come, be he brave or be he coward, there is no escape for him when he has once been born. Go, then, within the house, and busy yourself with your daily duties, your loom, your distaff, and the ordering of your servants; for war is man's matter, and mine above all others of them that have been born in Ilius."

He took his plumed helmet from the ground, and his wife went back again to her house, weeping bitterly and often looking back towards him. When she reached her home she found her maidens within, and bade them all join in her lament; so they mourned Hector in his own house though he was yet alive, for they deemed that they should never see him return safe from battle, and from the furious hands of the Achaeans.

Paris did not remain long in his house. He donned his goodly armour overlaid with bronze, and hasted through the city as fast as his feet could take him. As a horse, stabled and fed, breaks loose and gallops gloriously over the plain to the place where he is wont to bathe in the fair-flowing river- he holds his head high, and his mane streams upon his shoulders as he exults in his strength and flies like the wind to the haunts and feeding ground of the mares- even so went forth Paris from high Pergamus, gleaming like sunlight in his armour, and he laughed aloud as he sped swiftly on his way. Forthwith he came upon his brother Hector, who was then turning away from the place where he had held converse with his wife, and he was himself the first to speak. "Sir," said he, "I fear that I have kept you waiting when you are in haste, and have not come as quickly as you bade me."

"My good brother," answered Hector, you fight bravely, and no man with any justice can make light of your doings in battle. But you are careless and wilfully remiss. It grieves me to the heart to hear the ill that the Trojans speak about you, for they have suffered much on your account. Let us be going, and we will make things right hereafter, should Jove vouchsafe us to set the cup of our deliverance before ever-living gods of heaven in our own homes, when we have chased the Achaeans from Troy."