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:  he 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.

This prophecy, ambiguously delivered, was all that Tiresias was empowered to unfold, or else there was no longer place for him; for now the souls of the other dead came flocking in such numbers, tumultuously demanding the blood, that freezing horror seized the limbs of the living Ulysses, to see so many, and all dead, and he the only one alive in that region.  Now his mother came and lapped the blood, without restraint from her son, and now she knew him to be her son, and enquired of him why he had come alive to their comfortless habitations.  And she said, that affliction for Ulysses’s long absence had preyed upon her spirits, and brought her to the grave.

Ulysses’s soul melted at her moving narration, and forgetting the state of the dead, and that the airy texture of disembodied spirits does not admit of the embraces of flesh and blood, he threw his arms about her to clasp her:  the poor ghost melted from his embrace, and looking mournfully upon him vanished away.

Then saw he other females.—­Tyro, who when she lived was the paramour of Neptune, and by him had Pelias, and Neleus.  Antiope, who bore two like sons to Jove, Amphion and Zethus, founders of Thebes.  Alcmena, the mother of Hercules, with her fair daughter, afterwards her daughter-in-law, Megara.  There also Ulysses saw Jocasta, the unfortunate mother and wife of Oedipus; who ignorant of kin wedded