Dramatic Interpretation:  The Cattle of Helios

But, when supplies from Circe had all run dry,
hunger racked their bellies, and we faced starvation.

Then Eurylochus opened up his fatal plan to friends:
’Listen to me, my comrades, brothers in hardship.
All ways of dying are hateful to us poor mortals,
true, but to die of hunger, to starve to death -
that's the worst of all. So up with you now,

let's drive off the pick of Helios' fat cattle,    
let’s slaughter them to the gods who rule the skies up there.
If we ever make it home to Ithaca, our native ground,

we will erect at once a glorious temple to the Sungod Helios!

But if Helios, enraged, means to wreck our ship,

I'd rather die at sea, with one deep gulp of death,

than die by inches on this desolate island here!'

So he urged, and his shipmates cheered his plan.

At once they drove off the Sungod's finest cattle -

splendid beasts, with their broad brows and curving horns.

They quickly slaughtered and skinned the cattle,

pierced the raw meat with sticks, and roasted them over a fire.

At that very moment, soothing slumber fell from my eyes

and down I went to our ship at the water's edge.

But on my way, nearing the long beaked craft,

the smoky savor of roasts came floating up around me . . .

I groaned in anguish, crying out to the deathless gods:

‘Father Zeus! The rest of you blissful gods who never die!

You with your fatal sleep, you lulled me into disaster.

Left on their own, look what a monstrous thing my crew concocted!'

Helios - the sun god who sees all things -

burst out in rage to all the immortal gods:

‘Father Zeus!  The rest of you blissful gods who never die!

Punish them all, that crew of Laertes' son Odysseus!

What an outrage!  They, they killed my cattle!

The herd is the great joy of my heart, day in, day out,

when I climb the starry skies and when I wheel

back down from the heights to touch the earth once more.         

Unless they pay me back in blood for the butchery of my herds,

down I will go to the Underworld and blaze among the dead!’

But Zeus who marshals the thunderheads insisted,

‘Helios, keep on shining across the good green earth.

And as for the guilty ones, the crew of Odysseus,

why, soon enough on the wine-dark sea

I'll hit their racing ship with a white-hot bolt of lightning,

I'll tear it into splinters!’

When I returned to our ship at the water's edge,

I took the men to task, scolding each man in turn.

But how could they set things right? We couldn't find a way.

The cattle were dead already ...

And the gods soon showed us all some awful, terrible omens:

the hides of the slaughtered cattle began to crawl,

the meat bellowed out on the sticks,

and we heard a noise like the moan of lowing oxen.