"After we were clear of the river
Okeanos, and had got out into the open sea, we went on till we
reached the Aeaean island where there is dawn and sunrise as in other
places. We then drew our ship on to the sands and disembarked onto
the shore, where we went to sleep and waited till day should
break.
"Then, when the child of morning,
rosy-fingered Dawn, appeared, I sent some men to Circe's house
to fetch the body of Elpenor. We cut firewood from a wood where the
headland jutted out into the sea, and after we had wept over him and
lamented him we performed his funeral rites. When his body and armor
had been burned to ashes, we raised a cairn, set a stone over it, and
at the top of the cairn we fixed the oar that he had been used to row
with.
"While we were doing all this,
Circe, who knew that we had got back from the house of Hades, dressed
herself and came to us as fast as she could; and her maid servants
came with her bringing us bread, meat, and wine. Then she stood in
the midst of us and said, ‘You have done a bold thing in going
down alive to the house of Hades, and you will have died twice, to
other people's once; now, then, stay here for the rest of the
day, feast your fill, and go on with your voyage at daybreak tomorrow
morning. In the meantime I will tell Odysseus about your course, and
will explain everything to him so as to prevent your suffering from
misadventure either by land or sea.’
"We agreed to do as she had said,
and feasted through the livelong day to the going down of the sun,
but when the sun had set and it came on dark, the men laid themselves
down to sleep by the stern cables of the ship. Then Circe took me by
the hand and bade me be seated away from the others, while she
reclined by my side and asked me all about our adventures.
Homer. The Odyssey. Rendered into English prose for the use of those who cannot read the original. Samuel Butler. Based on public domain edition, revised by Timothy Power and Gregory Nagy. A. C. Fifield, London. 1900 (?).
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.