Page 336 - the-odyssey

sheep the suitors had eaten, and Eurynome {156} threw a
cloak over him after he had laid himself down. There, then,
Ulysses lay wakefully brooding upon the way in which he
should kill the suitors; and by and by, the women who had
been in the habit of misconducting themselves with them,
left the house giggling and laughing with one another. This
made Ulysses very angry, and he doubted whether to get
up and kill every single one of them then and there, or
to let them sleep one more and last time with the suitors.
His heart growled within him, and as a bitch with puppies
growls and shows her teeth when she sees a stranger, so did
his heart growl with anger at the evil deeds that were being
done: but he beat his breast and said, ‘Heart, be still, you
had worse than this to bear on the day when the terrible Cy-
clops ate your brave companions; yet you bore it in silence
till your cunning got you safe out of the cave, though you
made sure of being killed.’
Thus he chided with his heart, and checked it into en-
durance, but he tossed about as one who turns a paunch full
of blood and fat in front of a hot fire, doing it first on one
side and then on the other, that he may get it cooked as soon
as possible, even so did he turn himself about from side to
side, thinking all the time how, single handed as he was, he
should contrive to kill so large a body of men as the wicked
suitors. But by and by Minerva came down from heaven in
the likeness of a woman, and hovered over his head say-
ing, ‘My poor unhappy man, why do you lie awake in this
way? This is your house: your wife is safe inside it, and so
is your son who is just such a young man as any father may