The Odyssey--The must-have illustrated edition of Homer's Odyssey by Gillian Cross

Author:Gillian Cross [Cross, Gillian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Walker Books
Published: 2025-10-02T00:00:00+00:00

FOR nine days, Odysseus was on his own in the ocean, drifting without food or fresh water. On the tenth day, he was washed up, like a piece of flotsam, on the shore of a lonely island.

He had landed on Ogygia, the home of the goddess Calypso. She found him lying weak and exhausted on the beach, and she treated him kindly. Taking him into her house, she fed him and nursed him back to health. It might have been the end of all his troubles, except for one thing.

Calypso fell in love with him.

Her love was relentless. She prepared great feasts for him, gave him sumptuous robes and arranged spectacular entertainments to amuse him. Every day she offered to give him anything his heart desired – except the one thing he really wanted.

She wouldn’t let him leave her island.

Odysseus was wretched. He pined for his home, for his wife and son and his own rocky island of Ithaca. He wasn’t interested in any of Calypso’s gifts. Day after day, he went down to the seashore and looked out over the ocean, longing to sail away. But what can a mortal man do against a goddess? All he could do was dream of going home.

Day after day.

Year after year after year…

IN ITHACA, TOO, the years were passing by. Telemachus grew older and taller, until he was almost as strong as his father. Penelope was proud of him, but soon he would be a man – and then what would happen to her?

Other people were watching Telemachus. When he was seventeen, men began visiting the palace as suitors, urging Penelope to choose a new husband. She did not want to marry any of them, but they were guests and she had a duty to entertain them.

They exploited her hospitality. Day after day they feasted and drank at her expense, flirting with her maids and insulting her menservants.More and more suitors came, until there were over a hundred of them. They took over her house.

“Telemachus has grown up,” they kept saying, “and it’s obvious that Odysseus will never return. You must marry one of us.”

Desperately, Penelope found another excuse. “I can’t marry yet,” she said. “Odysseus’ father is an old man and he’ll die soon. But I haven’t woven a shroud fit to wrap his body in. I can’t marry anyone until I’ve done that.”

Grudgingly the suitors accepted her excuse. But they made her promise, solemnly, that once the shroud was finished she would choose a new husband.

So Penelope began to weave, watching the sea as she sat at her loom and straining her eyes for a glimpse of Odysseus’ ship. She was determined not to finish the shroud before he came home.

So she wove all day, but night after night, when the suitors had gone home, she crept out of bed and went back to her loom. Carefully she unpicked everything she had woven that day.

But how long could she keep that up before they discovered her trick?

Where was Odysseus?

THE GODS WERE WATCHING HIM.

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