Read the excerpt from The Odyssey.'O Cyclops! Would you feast on my companions? Puny, am I, in a Caveman's hands?How do you like the beating that we gave you,you damned cannibal? Eater of guestsunder your roof! Zeus and the gods have paid you!'
Read the excerpt from The Odyssey.Neither reply nor pity came from him, but in one stride he clutched at my companions and caught two in his hands like squirming puppies to beat their brains out, spattering the floor. Then he dismembered them and made his meal, gaping and crunching like a mountain lion—everything: innards, flesh, and marrow bones.
Read the excerpt from The Odyssey.'AyeHe'll smash our timbers and our heads together!'I would not heed them in my glorying spirit, but let my anger flare and yelled:'Cyclops,if ever mortal man inquirehow you were put to shame and blinded, tell him Odysseus, raider of cities, took your eye: Laertes' son, whose home's on Ithaca!'
Read the excerpt from The Odyssey.At this he gave a mighty sob and rumbled: 'Now comes the weird upon me, spoken of old.A wizard, grand and wondrous, lived here—Telemus,a son of Euryinus; great length of dayshe had in wizardry among the Cyclopes,and these things he foretold for time to come: my great eye lost, and at Odysseus' hands.Always I had in mind some giant, armed in giant force, would come against me here.But this, but you—small, pitiful and twiggy—you put me down with wine, you blinded me. Come back, Odysseus, and I'll treat you well, praying the god of earthquake to befriend you—his son I am, for he by his avowalfathered me, and if he will, he mayheal me of this black wound—he and no other of all the happy gods or mortal men.’
Read the excerpt from The Odyssey.Why nottake these cheeses, get them stowed, come back,throw open all the pens, and make a run for it?We'll drive the kids and lambs aboard. We sayput out again on good salt water!'Ah,how sound that was! Yet I refused. I wished to see the caveman, what he had to offer—no pretty sight, it turned out, for my friends.
Read the excerpt from The Odyssey.Neither reply nor pity came from him, but in one stride he clutched at my companions and caught two in his hands like squirming puppies to beat their brains out, spattering the floor.
Read the excerpt from The Odyssey.As in a smithyone sees a white-hot axehead or an adzeplunged and wrung in a cold tub, screeching steam–the way they make soft iron hale and hard—:just so that eyeball hissed around the spike.
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Read the excerpt from The Odyssey.Then,his chores being all dispatched, he caught another brace of men to make his breakfast, and whisked away his great door slab to let his sheep go through—but he, behind,reset the stone as one would cap a quiver.
Read the excerpt from The Odyssey.'We are from Troy, Achaeans, blown off courseby shifting gales on the Great South Sea;homeward bound, but taking routes and ways uncommon; so the will of Zeus would have it.We served under Agamemnon, son of Atreus—the whole world knows what cityhe laid waste, what armies he destroyed.It was our luck to come here; here we stand, beholden for your help, or any giftsyou give—as custom is to honor strangers.We would entreat you, great Sir, have a carefor the gods' courtesy; Zeus will avenge the unoffending guest.'He answered thisfrom his brute chest, unmoved:'You are a ninny,or else you come from the other end of nowhere,telling me, mind the gods! We Cyclopes care not a whistle for your thundering Zeusor all the gods in bliss; we have more force by far.I would not let you go for fear of Zeus—you or your friends—unless I had a whim to.
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