heart, who is it that can have rooted the ship in the sea just as she was getting into port? We could see the whole of her only a moment ago."
170This was how they talked, but they knew nothing about it; and Alcinous said, "I remember now the old prophecy of my father. He said that Neptune would be angry with us for taking every one so safely over the sea, and would one day wreck a Phæacian ship as it was returning from an escort, and bury our city under a high mountain. This was what my old father used to say, and now it is all coming true.[1] Now therefore let us all do as I say; in the first place we must leave off giving people escorts when they come here, and in the next let us sacrifice twelve picked bulls to Neptune that he may have mercy upon us, and not bury our city under the high mountain." When the people heard this they were afraid and got ready the bulls.
185Thus did the chiefs and rulers of the Phæacians pray to king Neptune, standing round his altar; and at the same time[2] Ulysses woke up once more upon his own soil. He had been so long away that he did not know it again; moreover, Jove's daughter Minerva had made it a foggy day, so that people might not know of his having come, and that she might tell him everything without either his wife or his fellow citizens
- ↑ The rock at the end of the Northern harbour of Trapani, to which I suppose the writer of the Odyssey to be here referring, still bears the name Malconsiglio—"the rock of evil counsel." There is a legend that it was a ship of Turkish pirates who were intending to attack Trapani, but the "Madonna di Trapani" crushed them under this rock just as they were coming into port. My friend Cavaliere Giannitrapani of Trapani told me that his father used to tell him when he was a boy that if he would drop exactly three drops of oil on to the water near the rock, he would see the ship still at the bottom. The legend is evidently a Christianised version of the Odyssean story, while the name supplies the additional detail that the disaster happened in consequence of an evil counsel.
- ↑ It would seem then that the ship had got all the way back from Ithaca in about a quarter of an hour.
