“Oh had this stranger sunk to realms beneath,

To the black realms of darkness and of death,

Ere yet he trod these shores! to strife he draws

Peer against peer; and what the weighty cause?

A vagabond! for him the great destroy,

In vile ignoble jars, the feast of joy.”


To whom the stern Telemachus uprose;

“Gods! what wild folly from the goblet flows!

Whence this unguarded openness of soul,

But from the license of the copious bowl?

Or Heaven delusion sends: but hence away!

Force I forbear, and without force obey.”


Silent, abash’d, they hear the stern rebuke,

Till thus Amphinomus the silence broke:


“True are his words, and he whom truth offends,

Not with Telemachus, but truth contends;

Let not the hand of violence invade

The reverend stranger, or the spotless maid;

Retire we hence, but crown with rosy wine

The flowing goblet to the powers divine!

Guard he his guest beneath whose roof he stands:

This justice, this the social rite demands.”


The peers assent: the goblet Mulius crown’d

With purple juice, and bore in order round:

Each peer successive his libation pours

To the blest gods who fill’d the ethereal bowers:

Then swill’d with wine, with noise the crowds obey,

And rushing forth, tumultuous reel away.


BOOK XIX.


ARGUMENT.

THE DISCOVERY OF ULYSSES TO EURYCLEA.


Ulysses and his son remove the weapons out of the armoury. Ulysses, in

conversation with Penelope, gives a fictitious account of his adventures; then

assures her he had formerly entertained her husband in Crete; and describes

exactly his person and dress; affirms to have heard of him in Phæacia and

Thesprotia, and that his return is certain, and within a month. He then goes to

bathe, and is attended by Euryclea, who discovers him to be Ulysses by the scar

upon his leg, which he formerly received in hunting the wild boar on Parnassus.

The poet inserts a digression relating that accident, with all its particulars.