Page 82 - the-odyssey

suitors.’
She cried aloud as she spoke, and the goddess heard her
prayer; meanwhile the suitors were clamorous throughout
the covered cloister, and one of them said:
‘The queen is preparing for her marriage with one or
other of us. Little does she dream that her son has now been
doomed to die.’
This was what they said, but they did not know what was
going to happen. Then Antinous said, ‘Comrades, let there
be no loud talking, lest some of it get carried inside. Let us
be up and do that in silence, about which we are all of a
mind.’
He then chose twenty men, and they went down to their
ship and to the sea side; they drew the vessel into the water
and got her mast and sails inside her; they bound the oars
to the thole-pins with twisted thongs of leather, all in due
course, and spread the white sails aloft, while their fine ser-
vants brought them their armour. Then they made the ship
fast a little way out, came on shore again, got their suppers,
and waited till night should fall.
But Penelope lay in her own room upstairs unable to eat
or drink, and wondering whether her brave son would es-
cape, or be overpowered by the wicked suitors. Like a lioness
caught in the toils with huntsmen hemming her in on every
side she thought and thought till she sank into a slumber,
and lay on her bed bereft of thought and motion.
Then Minerva bethought her of another matter, and
made a vision in the likeness of Penelope’s sister Iphthime
daughter of Icarius who had married Eumelus and lived in

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