C. The cave appears to have housed a cult of Odysseus, which must have been inspired by the story of the
hero's return home as told in the Odyssey, where he brings thirteen tripods (at least twelve were found)
from Phaeacia and hides them in a cave near his landing place.
We first find Odysseus in Book 5 'suffering' the hospitality of the mysterious island-nymph Calypso. She
has kept him as her lover for all the years since he lost his ships and men. Her island is paradisiacal (see
the description at 5. 55-74) but it does not satisfy Odysseus: he is a man and longs for a proper home
among men, and he longs for his mortal wife. After a vast and terrifying journey alone across the sea,
Odysseus makes his vital landfall on Phaeacia. He kisses the soil and beds down under cover of a thicket
of wild and cultivated olive (5.463, 476 ff.) Phaeacia is a land which is in several ways half-way between
the real world and 'fairyland'. Demodocus, the bard at the court of King Alcinous, sings of one end of that
world, the great deeds at Troy. Troy is Odysseus' departure point when he himself tells of his travels, and
he is almost home (9.79) when he is driven away into the world of the 'traveller's tales'-the wanderings
which may have made the word 'Odyssey' part of our everyday vocabulary. The lotus-eaters, the Cyclops,
Circe, the Sirens, Scylla and Charybdis, and finally the cattle of the Sun-these are the archetypal
adventures of the European consciousness, material for the imaginations of poets, painters, and children
ever since.
By the time Odysseus leaves Phaeacia the Odyssey is just over half-way through, and Odysseus is about
half-way from the fringe world of Polyphemus and Circe towards a homecoming. While he makes this
last marine transition he sleeps (13. 78-80):
They bent to their rowing, and with their oars tossed up the sea spray,
and upon the eyes of Odysseus there fell a sleep, gentle,
the sweetest kind of sleep with no awakening, most like death ...On land Odysseus sleeps by an olive tree with his treasures, and when he realizes that this is Ithaca he
kisses its soil (13. 102 ff., 120 ff., 354). So the threads of the vast journey of Odysseus and the lesser
apprentice voyage of Telemachus (with a last view of Sparta and Pylos at 15. 1-300) are drawn together at
the remote, yet very real, farmstead of the loyal swineherd Eumaeus, a straightforward dwelling free from
strangeness, danger, and deceit.
The time conies for Odysseus to make his way from this outpost to his own palace in the town. It is a
significant journey which culminates with the recognition by the old dog Argus (17. 182-327).
The doom of dark death now closed over the dog, Argus,
when, after nineteen years had gone by, he had seen Odysseus.The palace is the setting of the next six-and-a-half books, and attention is lavished on this setting, its
rooms, corridors, stairways, and courtyards. But two rooms are given special significance: the great hall,
which is the battlefield where the suitors feast and where they spill their blood in recompense; and the