Word: odysseus
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...Story of The Odyssey, as every schoolboy used to know, is the tale of wily Odysseus' wanderings after the fall of Troy. Ten long years he and his comrades were buffeted about from disaster to disaster before hostile Poseidon, god of the sea, would...
...accidental." Though some modern scholars agree with him that The Odyssey is a much later work than The Iliad, most will think Shaw goes too far in saying "this Homer lived too long after the heroic age to feel assured and large." Penelope is "the sly cattish wife," Odysseus "that cold-blooded egotist," Telemachus "the priggish son who yet met his master-prig in Menelaus...
...Odysseus return to his native island of Ithaca and his faithful wife Penelope who, besieged by unruly suitors, still hoped for his coming. Because they had killed and eaten the sacred oxen of the Sun, all his ship's men perished on the way. But Odysseus finally got there, straightened up his house, convinced his wife it was really he behind the wanderer's rags...
...Odyssey's purple passages one of the most famed describes Odysseus' meeting with his old dog Argos. Shaw's version: "As they talked a dog lying there lifted head and pricked his ears. This was Argos whom Odysseus had bred but never worked, because he left for Ilium too soon. On a time the young fellows used to take him out to course the wild goats, the deer, the hares: but now ?he lay derelict and masterless on the dung-heap before the gates, on the deep bed of mule-droppings and cow-dung which collected there till...
Translator Shaw may well have been reminded more than once of another war, when Arabs, counseled by a stranger as wily, energetic and heroic as Odysseus, fought against the Turks for an idea as beautiful to him as Helen; may well have remembered some of his banished names when he wrote Odysseus' words to the shade of Agamemnon: "What an army of us died for Helen...