So, when at last I had mounted the isle and avoided my comrades,

Cleansing with water my hands, where 'gainst all winds was a covert.
All the immortals with vows I invoked who inhabit Olympus.
Straight, as an answer they poured a delicious sleep on my eyelids.
Meanwhile Eurylochus ill counsels gave to his shipmates :

' Listen, I pray, to my words, though suffering sorely, my comrades !.
Every manner of death for unfortunate mortals is hateful ;

Death most hateful is this — to be doomed through hunger to perish.
Come, let us forth, and catching the best of the kine of the sun-god

Offerings make to the gods who inhabit the infinite heaven.
Yea and if haply at last we arrive at the Ithacan homeland,

Then to the god of the sun, Hyperion, a rich-wrought temple

Straight will we rear, and adorn it with gifts full many and precious.
Nay, if he even, in wrath maybe for his straight-horned cattle.
Strive to destroy our vessel, and other immortals abet him,

169



Odyssey. Sooner with one last gulp at a wave will I sink to the bottom
XII Rather than thus stay starving to death on a desolate island.'



360. S87



Thus spake Eurylochus, and all of the others assented.
Straight they uprose and they lifted the best of the kine of the sun-god.
Going not far ; for anigh to the blue-prow'd vessel they found them

Feeding — the shambling kine — those beautiful broad-brow'd cattle.
Then in a circle surrounding the beasts they invoked the immortals.
Plucking the soft green leaves of the oak which spreadeth to heaven.
Since white groats no longer remained in the well-decked vessel.
Now so soon they had prayed and had slaughtered the cattle and flayed them.
