Mythical figures are Houdinis. No sooner have they been padlocked inside some airtight text than they wriggle free. Achilles, Hector, Helen of Troy and even such later creations as Hamlet or Don Quixote live and move in our imaginations as much as in books. Of these immemorial escape-artists, none is more slippery than Odysseus. His peregrinations after the fall of Troy pale beside his posthumous wanderings through western…
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