Reading Notes: Homer's Odyssey, Part B

Notes for Homer's The Odyssey 

This work depicts Circe, the seductive enchantress from Homer's Odyssey This work was exhibited at the Chicago World Art Fair 1893; Royal Commission for the Chicago World Exhibition - Department K Britannica from the Ger Eenens Collection The Netherlands (Source: Wikimedia).

• Circe
• Helps the men on their mission by powering their ship with wind 
• Cimmerians 
• "Wretched people"
• Require an offering of milk, honey, wine, water, white barley meal, and sheep 
• Elpenor 
• First ghost to appear in front of Odysseus 
• Asks to never be forgotten by the men 
• Anticelia 
• Second ghost to appear 
• Was alive when Odysseus left for Troy 
• Tells Odysseus that his father is living in sorrow and squalor 
• Attributes her death to missing Odysseus 
• Teiresias 
• Odysseus could not let other ghosts near the sheeps' blood until he arrived 
• Tells Odysseus that he angered Poseidon when he blinded the Cyclops 
• Warns Odysseus that he may survive and reach the island of Thrinacia if they are not greedy
• Tells Odysseus he must sacrifice a bull, ram, and breeding-boar to Poseidon 
• Tells Odysseus he could live a long life with a gentle death 
• Ghosts cannot drink from the blood until Odysseus allows them to 
• All that drink talk to him
• Persephone sends female spirits down  
• "...then the women, the wives and daughters of heroes came, sent by royal Persephone. A crowd they thronged around the black blood, and I considered how best to question them, and this was my idea: to draw my long sword from its sheath, and prevent them drinking of the blood together. Then each came forward, one by one, and declared her lineage, and I questioned all."
• Most women slept with Zeus and bore his children 
• Jocasta married her son Oedipus
• Iphimedeia slept with Poseidon and gave birth to Otus and Ephialtes, both of whom were giants killed by Apollo 
• Men visit after 
• Agamemnon visits 
• Murdered by his wife and Aegisthus
• Implores Odysseus to not trust women 
• Achilles, Patroclus, Antilochus, and Ajax visit 
• Achilles asks after his son 
• Ajax is mad about a contest he lost to Odysseus
• "After obtaining the information he needed from Teiresias in the land of the dead, Odysseus returns to Circe's island, and she gives him advice for how to evade the danger posed by the Sirens and then by Scylla and Charybdis."
• Sirens
• Odysseus hears their song 
• Scylla destroys many men