nobodypainlaughtername
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.Here are the means I thought would serve my turn:a club, or staff, lay there along the fold—an olive tree, felled green and left to season for Cyclops' hand. And it was like a mast a lugger of twenty oars, broad in the beam—a deep-sea-going craft—might carry: so long, so big around, it seemed.
Read the excerpt from The Odyssey.My heart beat high now at the chance of action,and drawing the sharp sword from my hip I wentalong his flank to stab him where the midriffholds the liver. I had touched the spotwhen sudden fear stayed me: if I killed him we perished there as well, for we could nevermove his ponderous doorway slab aside.So we were left to groan and wait for morning.
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.
Read the excerpt from The Odyssey.but Cyclops went on filling up his bellywith manflesh and great gulps of whey,then lay down like a mast among his sheep.
Read the excerpt from The Odyssey.'My ship?Poseidon Lord, who sets the earth a-tremble, broke it up on the rocks at your land's end. A wind from seaward served him, drove us there. We are survivors, these good men and I.'
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.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.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.
Did you find these answers helpful?