Tales of Troy and Greece

E-text prepared by Peter Vickers, Suzanne Shell, and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net)

Bibliographical Note
This Dover edition, first published in 2006, is an unabridged republication of the 1941 printing of the work originally published by Longmans, Green and Co., London and New York, in 1907. We have slightly repositioned a few of the illustrations.
Manufactured in the United States of America Dover Publications, Inc., 31 East 2nd Street, Mineola, N.Y. 11501


GREECE

THE BOYHOOD AND PARENTS OF ULYSSES
Long ago, in a little island called Ithaca, on the west coast of Greece, there lived a king named Laertes. His kingdom was small and mountainous. People used to say that Ithaca 'lay like a shield upon the sea,' which sounds as if it were a flat country. But in those times shields were very large, and rose at the middle into two peaks with a hollow between them, so that Ithaca, seen far off in the sea, with her two chief mountain peaks, and a cloven valley between them, looked exactly like a shield. The country was so rough that men kept no horses, for, at that time, people drove, standing up in little light chariots with two horses; they never rode, and there was no cavalry in battle: men fought from chariots. When Ulysses, the son of Laertes, King of Ithaca grew up, he never fought from a chariot, for he had none, but always on foot.
If there were no horses in Ithaca, there was plenty of cattle. The father of Ulysses had flocks of sheep, and herds of swine, and wild goats, deer, and hares lived in the hills and in the plains. The sea was full of fish of many sorts, which men caught with nets, and with rod and line and hook.