a pit, as she had given directions, and poured in his offering--the blood
of a ram, and the blood of a black ewe, milk, and honey, and wine; and the
dead came to his banquet; aged men, and women, and youths, and children
who died in infancy. But none of them would he suffer to approach, and dip
their thin lips in the offering, till Tiresias was served, not though his
own mother was among the number, whom now for the first time he knew to be
dead, for he had left her living when he went to Troy, and she had died
since his departure, and the tidings never reached him; though it irked
his soul to use constraint upon her, yet in compliance with the injunction
of great Circe he forced her to retire along with the other ghosts. Then
Tiresias, who bore a golden sceptre, came and lapped of the offering, and
immediately he knew Ulysses, and began to prophesy: _be denounced woe to
Ulysses--woe, woe, and many sufferings--through the anger of Neptune for
the putting out of the eye of the sea-god's son. Yet there was safety
after suffering, if they could abstain from slaughtering the oxen of the
Sun after they landed in the Triangular island. For Ulysses, the gods had
destined him from a king to become a beggar, and to perish by his own
guests, unless he slew those who knew him not_.

[Illustration: _And the dead came to his banquet_.]

This prophecy, ambiguously delivered, was all that Tiresias was empowered
to unfold, or else there was no longer place for him; for now the souls of
the other dead came flocking in such numbers, tumultuously demanding the
blood, that freezing horror seized the limbs of the living Ulysses, to see
so many, and all dead, and he the only one alive in that region. Now his
mother came and lapped the blood, without restraint from her son, and now
she knew him to be her son, and inquired of him why he had come alive to
their comfortless habitations. And she said that affliction for Ulysses's
long absence had preyed upon her spirits, and brought her to the grave.