Phaeacians

He is to be convoyed neither by gods nor men, but after a perilous voyage of twenty days upon a raft he is to reach fertile Scheria, the land of the Phaeacians, who are near of kin to the gods, and will honor him as though he were one of ourselves.

He could see him sailing upon the sea, and it made him very angry, so he wagged his head and muttered to himself, saying, heavens, so the gods have been changing their minds about Odysseus while I was away in Ethiopia, and now he is close to the land of the Phaeacians, where it is decreed that he shall escape from the calamities that have befallen him.

"Aldermen and town councilors of the Phaeacians, hear my words.

"You must take care for virtue, O men—virtue which swims out with a man even from shipwreck, and, when he reaches dry land naked, will show him more honourable than the prosperous Phaeacians.

As I once heard from a man skilled in discerning a poet's meaning, the whole poetry of Homer is a praise of virtue, and everything in it bears toward this, except what is by-work—and not least in those passages where he has portrayed the leader of the Cephallenians, saved naked from the shipwreck.

And then he was judged of such worth by the rest of the Phaeacians too, that, forsaking the luxury in which they lived, they all looked to him and emulated him, and there was at that time no Phaeacian who would have prayed for anything sooner than to become Odysseus—and that a man saved from a shipwreck.