The feast and the bard's song

Alcinous holds a great feast for his guest. The blind bard Demodocus sings — and his first song is the quarrel of Odysseus and Achilles before the walls of Troy, a quarrel the audience does not know but the listening stranger remembers exactly. Odysseus pulls his cloak over his head and weeps; only Alcinous, watching, sees him do it. Tactfully, the king calls a halt to the singing and proposes athletic games instead. The Phaeacian princes excel at running, wrestling, jumping, and the long jump, and they invite the stranger to compete.

Odysseus refuses; he has been at sea too long. One of them, a boy named Euryalus, mocks him as a sailor, a merchant — not a man of action, no athlete. Odysseus, stung, picks up the heaviest discus on the field and throws it twice as far as anyone else. The discus whistles overhead; a Phaeacian elder marks the place where it lands. He then invites the princes to compete with him at any other event — boxing, wrestling, archery, the spear. They decline. Euryalus, abashed, gives him a bronze sword in apology. The matter is closed.

Demodocus sings again — first the comic story of the affair of Ares and Aphrodite, then, at Odysseus's own request, the story of the wooden horse and the fall of Troy. Odysseus weeps a second time. Alcinous, gentle and certain now that this is no ordinary man, finally asks him to say his name and tell his own story. The next four chapters are Odysseus's reply, told as flashback by the man himself, in his own voice — the most famous tale-within-a-tale in Western literature.