I am reading from the start The Odyssey, for the second or third time, this being the 1961 translation by Robert Fitzgerald. This scene from the first pages crept upon me with delight.
QuoteShe bent to tie her beautiful sandals on, ambrosial, golden, that carry her over water or endless land on the wings of the wind, and took the great haft of her spear in hand--that bronzeshod spear this child of Power can use to break in wrath long battle lines of fighters.
Flashing down from Olympos' height she went to stand in Ithaka, before the Manor, just at the doorsill of the court. She seemed a family friend, the Taphian captain, Mentês, waiting, with a light hand on her spear. Before her eyes she found the lusty suitors casting dice inside the gate, at ease on hides of oxen--oxen they had killed. Their own retainers made a busy sight with houseboys, mixing bowls of water and wine, or sopping water up in sponges, wiping tables to be placed about in the hall, or butchering whole carcasses for roasting.
Long before anyone else, the prince Telémakhos now caught sight of Athena--for he, too, was sitting there, unhappy among the suitors, a boy, daydreaming. What if his great father came from the unknown world and drove these men like dead leaves through the place, recovering honor and lordship in his own domains? Then he who dreamed in the crowd gazed out at Athena.
Straight to the door he came, irked with himself to think a visitor had been kept there waiting, and took her right hand, grasping with his left her tall bronze-bladed spear. Then he said warmly:
"Greetings, stranger! Welcome to our feast. There will be time to tell your errand later."
He led the way, and Pallas Athena followed into the lofty hall. The boy reached up and thrust her spear high in a polished rack against a pillar, where tough spear on spear of the old soldier, his father, stood in order. Then, shaking out a splendid coverlet, he seated her on a throne with footrest--all finely carved--and drew his painted armchair near her, at a distance from the rest. To be amid the din, the suitors' riot would ruin his guest's appetite, he thought, and he wished privacy to ask for news about his father, gone for years.