Hello, this is Let's Talk About Myths Baby

and I am your host, Liv, here with, oh my gosh, book 23 of the Odyssey

I don't know how, it's all moving so quickly, we're almost out of Odysseus

Frankly, I don't totally know what I'm gonna do with these Friday episodes after March

which thank god is planned

A little peek behind the curtain, I do not have my shit together, except this year, for March, it's real thrill

But let's get to why we're really here, Odysseus

This is Homer's Odyssey, translated by Samuel Butler, book 23

Yuriklia now went upstairs laughing to tell her mistress that her dear husband had come home

her aged knees became young again and her feet were nimble for joy as she went up to her mistress

and bent over her head to speak to her

wake up Penelope my dear child, she exclaimed and see with your own eyes something that you have been waiting for this long time past

Odysseus has at last indeed come home again and has killed the suitors who were giving so much trouble in his house, eating up his estate and ill treating his son

My good nurse answered Penelope, you must be mad, the god sometimes send some very sensible people out of their minds and make foolish people become sensible

This is what they must have been doing to you, for you always used to be a reasonable person

Why should you thus mock me when I have trouble enough already, talking such nonsense and waking me up out of a sweet sleep that had taken possession of my eyes and closed them

I have never slept so soundly from the day my poor husband went to that city with the ill-oamant name

Go back again into the women's room, if it had been anyone else who had woke me up to bring me such absurd news, I should have sent her away with a severe scolding

As it is your age, shall protect you

My dear child answered Yuriklia, I am not mocking you, it is quite true as I tell you that Odysseus is come home again

He was the stranger whom they all kept on treating so badly in the cloister, Telemachus knew all the time that he had come back but kept his father's secret that he might have his revenge on all these wicked people

Then Penelope sprang up from her couch through her arms round Yuriklia and wept for joy

...