And now the sheep began to issue forth very fast, the males went first, the females unmilked stood by, bleating and requiring the hand of their shepherd in vain to milk them, their full bags sore with being unemptied, but he much sorer with the loss of sight.  Still as the males passed, he felt the backs of those fleecy fools, never dreaming, that they carried his enemies under their bellies:  so they passed on till the last ram came loaded with his wool and Ulysses together.  He stopped that ram and felt him, and had his hand once in the hair of Ulysses, yet knew it not, and he chid the ram for being last, and spoke to it as if it understood him, and asked it whether it did not wish that its master had his eye again, which that abominable Noman with his execrable rout had put out, when they had got him down with wine; and he willed the ram to tell him whereabouts in the cave his enemy lurked, that he might dash his brains and strew them about, to ease his heart of that tormenting revenge which rankled in it.  After a deal of such foolish talk to the beast he let it go.  When Ulysses found himself free, he let go his hold, and assisted in disengaging his friends.  The rams which had befriended them they carried off with them to the ships, where their companions with tears in their eyes received them, as men escaped from death.  They plied their oars, and set their sails, and when they were got as far off from shore as a voice would reach, Ulysses cried out to the Cyclop:  “Cyclop, thou should’st not have so much abused thy monstrous strength, as to devour thy guests.  Jove by my hand sends thee requital to pay thy savage inhumanity.”  The Cyclop heard, and came forth enraged, and in his anger he plucked a fragment of a rock, and threw it with blind fury at the ships.  It narrowly escaped lighting upon the bark in which Ulysses sat, but with the fall it raised so fierce an ebb, as bore back the ship till it almost touched the shore.  “Cyclop,” said Ulysses, “if any ask thee who imposed on thee that unsightly blemish in thine eye, say it was Ulysses, son of Laertes:  the king of Ithaca am I called, the waster of cities.”  Then they crowded sail, and beat the old sea, and forth they went with a forward gale; sad for fore-past losses, yet glad to have escaped at any rate; till they came to the isle where AEolus reigned, who is god of the winds.

Here Ulysses and his men were courteously received by the monarch, who shewed him his twelve children which have rule over the twelve winds.  A month they staid and feasted with him, and at the end of the month he dismissed them with many presents, and gave to Ulysses at parting an ox’s hide, in which were inclosed all the winds:  only he left abroad the western wind, to play upon their sails and waft them gently home to Ithaca.  This bag bound in a glittering silver band, so close that no breath could escape, Ulysses hung up at the mast.  His companions did not know its contents, but guessed that the monarch had given to him some treasures of gold or silver.