COLOUR PLATES

The Judgement of Paris Frontispiece

Facingpage
The Fair Helen 30

Achilles Victorious 106

The Princess Threw the Ball 138

The Sorrowing Odysseus 148

Circe 170

The Sirens 176

Penelope Unravelling the Web 221

PART I

HOW TELEMACHUS THE SON OF ODYSSEUS WAS MOVED TO GO ON A VOYAGE IN SEARCH OF HIS FATHER AND HOW HE HEARD FROM MENELAUS AND HELEN THE TALE OF TROY

[Illustration]

[Illustration]

I

This is the story of Odysseus, the most renowned of all the heroes the
Greek poets have told us of—­of Odysseus, his wars and his wanderings. 
And this story of Odysseus begins with his son, the youth who was called
Telemachus.

It was when Telemachus was a child of a month old that a messenger came from Agamemnon, the Great King, bidding Odysseus betake himself to the war against Troy that the Kings and Princes of Greece were about to wage.  The wise Odysseus, foreseeing the disasters that would befall all that entered that war, was loth to go.  And so when Agamemnon’s messenger came to the island of Ithaka where he was King, Odysseus pretended to be mad.  And that the messenger, Palamedes, might believe he was mad indeed, he did a thing that no man ever saw being done before—­he took an ass and an ox and yoked them together to the same plough and began to plough a field.  And when he had ploughed a furrow he sowed it, not with seeds that would grow, but with salt.  When Palamedes saw him doing this he was nearly persuaded that Odysseus was mad.  But to test him he took the child Telemachus and laid him down in the field in the way of the plough.  Odysseus, when he came near to where the child lay, turned the plough aside and thereby showed that he was not a mad man.  Then had he to take King Agamemnon’s summons.  And Agamemnon’s word was that Odysseus should go to Aulis where the ships of the Kings and Princes of Greece were being gathered.  But first he was to go into another country to seek the hero Achilles and persuade him also to enter the war against Troy.