Status Updates From Homer's Odyssey 9-12: Greek...

I love how Homer measures distances: as far as you can shout, or, as far you could shoot an arrow.

Completed book 11, the visit to the Underworld. Most moved by the meeting with the ghost of Achilles.

So appropriate to be reading Hell Bent and book 11 of the Odyssey simultaneously.

The episode with Circe is most delightful. Odysseus' liaison with her scarcely counts as unfaithfulness to Penelope, when dealing with the gods, morsels have no free choice. In Comus, John Milton recalled the intervention of Hermes giving moly to Odysseus: "The leaf was darkish, and had prickes on it, / But in another country . . . / Bore a bright golden flower, but not in this soil." Next we go down to Hades.

Odysseus just encountered Hermes who equips him with moly to ward off Circe’s magic.

After a break for Euripides' Cyclops, I've returned to Homehttps://www.goodreads.com/challenges/.... The foolish sailors have just opened the bag of the winds. As Virgil burrowed for the storm in the first book of the Aeneid, by poetic licence winds can blow simultaneously from every direction.

Finished the Cyclops episode. Did Odysseus commit a hamartia by telling the Cyclops his real name and correct address? Now I think not; the heroic code required proclaiming who was enacting revenge.