"
He did as great Circe had appointed. He raised his mast, and hoisted his
white sails, and sat in his ship in peace. The north wind wafted him
through the seas, till he crossed the ocean, and came to the sacred woods
of Proserpine. He stood at the confluence of the three floods, and digged
a pit, as she had given directions, and poured in his offering--the blood
of a ram, and the blood of a black ewe, milk, and honey, and wine; and the
dead came to his banquet; aged men, and women, and youths, and children
who died in infancy. But none of them would he suffer to approach, and dip
their thin lips in the offering, till Tiresias was served, not though his
own mother was among the number, whom now for the first time he knew to be
dead, for he had left her living when he went to Troy, and she had died
since his departure, and the tidings never reached him; though it irked
his soul to use constraint upon her, yet in compliance with the injunction
of great Circe he forced her to retire along with the other ghosts. Then
Tiresias, who bore a golden sceptre, came and lapped of the offering, and
immediately he knew Ulysses, and began to prophesy: _be denounced woe to
Ulysses--woe, woe, and many sufferings--through the anger of Neptune for
the putting out of the eye of the sea-god's son. Yet there was safety
after suffering, if they could abstain from slaughtering the oxen of the
Sun after they landed in the Triangular island. For Ulysses, the gods had
destined him from a king to become a beggar, and to perish by his own
guests, unless he slew those who knew him not_.
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