Trying something slightly different for this Thursday’s myth. Hopefully it’ll work. (Can’t be worse than last week’s!)
When he was little more than a boy, just barely into his first beard, Odysseus, the young son of Laertes, went to visit his grandfather, Autolycos, at his home near Mount Parnassus. During a hunting trip on his visit, Odysseus was badly wounded in the leg by a wild boar.
His grandfather poured him a healing drought out of a small vial, and told him to drink it up. “May smell bitter, but it’ll work. I stole that from Asclepios himself.”
Odysseus sighed sadly. “I’m not sure you should admit that, grandfather,” he said, before drinking the foul-tasting elixir. “It tastes terrible!” he shouted, reflexively.
“I’ll make it up to you,” Autolycos laughed, slapping his grandson on the shoulder. “I’ll hold a banquet tonight, with all the finest men in the land. The ones who aren’t out to get me, anyway. That’s a much shorter list, but…”
“Will there be girls there?”
“You little scamp!” Autolycos let out a full guffaw, then shook his head. “I doubt you’ll be healed enough for that sort of thing, my boy. But we’ll see. I’ve got plenty enough of slave girls for you, I’m sure.”
Odysseus didn’t seem to want slave girls, but he didn’t complain, and his grandfather went about the preparations for the night’s banquet. There weren’t actually very many guests at all; Autolycos had far more enemies than he cared to admit to his young grandson, as a life of banditry tended to produce more enemies than friends. Most of the guests were announced, or at least introduced to young Odysseus, but one old fellow in a traveler’s cloak and hat simply slipped in through a side door and took up a seat on a low bench against a side wall, idly strumming his tortoise-shell lyre, without saying a word to anyone, or anyone saying a word to him.
We're All Mad Here! 