befel Odysseus.  The cannibals destroyed all his fleet, save one ship, with which he made his escape to the Isle of Circe.  Here the enchantress turned part of the crew into swine, but Odysseus, by aid of the god Hermes, redeemed them, and became the lover of Circe.  This adventure, like the story of the Cyclops, is a fairy tale of great antiquity.  Dr. Gerland, in his Alt Griechische Marchen in der Odyssee, his shown that the story makes part of the collection of Somadeva, a store of Indian tales, of which 1200 A.D. is the approximate date.  Circe appears as a Yackshini, and is conquered when an adventurer seizes her flute whose magic music turns men into beasts.  The Indian Circe had the habit of eating the animals into which she transformed men.

We must suppose that the affairs with the Cicones, the Lotus-eaters, the Cyclops, Aeolus, and the Laestrygonians, occupied most of the first year after the fall of Troy.  A year was then spent in the Isle of Circe, after which the sailors were eager to make for home.  Circe commanded them to go down to Hades, to learn the homeward way from the ghost of the Theban prophet Teiresias.  The descent into hell, for some similar purpose, is common in the epics of other races, such as the Finns, and the South-Sea Islanders.  The narrative of Odysseus’s visit to the dead (book xi) is one of the most moving passages in the whole poem.

From Teiresias Odysseus learned that, if he would bring his companions home, he must avoid injuring the sacred cattle of the Sun, which pastured in the Isle of Thrinacia.  If these were harmed, he would arrive in Ithaca alone, or in the words of the Cyclops’s prayer, I in evil plight, with loss of all his company, on board the ship of strangers, to find sorrow in his house.’  On returning to the Isle Aeaean, Odysseus was warned by Circe of the dangers he would encounter.  He and his friends set forth, escaped the Sirens (a sort of mermaidens), evaded the Clashing Rocks, which close on ships (a fable known to the Aztecs), passed Scylla (the pieuvre of antiquity) with loss of some of the company, and reached Thrinacia, the Isle of the Sun.  Here the company of Odysseus, constrained by hunger, devoured the sacred kine of the Sun, for which offence they were punished by a shipwreck, when all were lost save Odysseus.  He floated ten days on a raft, and then reached the isle of the goddess Calypso, who kept him as her lover for eight years.

The first two years after the fall of Troy are now accounted for.  They were occupied, as we have seen, by adventures with the Cicones, the Lotus-eaters, the Cyclops, Aeolus, the Laestrygonians, by a year’s residence with Circe, by the descent into Hades, the encounters with the Sirens, and Scylla, and the fatal sojourn in the isle of Thrinacia.  We leave Odysseus alone, for eight years, consuming his own heart, in the island paradise of Calypso.