Hello, this is Let's Talk About Myths Baby and I am live here with the Odyssey.

I feel like if I was going to do this, I should have done in every episode and I haven't,

but still, hey, if you're just starting the podcast with this episode, don't.

This is not a regular episode of the podcast, it's a bonus episode where every Friday,

I just read a book of Homer because why the hell not?

And also, it's good for downloads.

So this is a reading of Homer and you can head on over to any one of the Roman New World episodes

for a regular episode of this podcast because this is about Odysseus.

This is Homer's Odyssey, translated by Samuel Butler, book 20.

Odysseus slept in the cloister upon an undressed Bullock's hide on the top of which he threw several skins of the sheep the suitors had eaten

and your enemy threw a cloak over him after he laid himself down.

There, then Odysseus lay wakefully brooding upon the way in which he should kill the suitors,

and by and by the women who had been in the habit of misconducting themselves with them,

left the house giggling and laughing with one another.

This made Odysseus angry, and he doubted whether to get up and kill every single one of them then and there

or to let them sleep once more the last time with the suitors.

His heart growled within him and as a bitch with puppies growls and shows her teeth when she sees a stranger,

so did his heart growl with anger at the evil deeds that were being done.

But he beat his breast and said,

heart, be still, you had worse than this to bear on the day when the terrible cyclops ate your brave companions, yet you bore it in silence till your cunning got you safe out of the cave, though you made sure of being killed.

Thus he chided with his heart and checked it into endurance, but he tossed about as one who turns a punch full of blood and fat in front of a hot fire,

doing it first on one side and then on the other, that he may get it cooked as soon as possible.

...