The Tactics of Odysseus

Extract

Odysseus had heard long ago from the shade of Tiresias that in Ithaca he would find insolent men devouring his goods and wooing his wife, and from the shade of Agamemnon that he should arrive there in secret; and now Athene, when she found him on that April morning wandering by the shore that he had forgotten, told him that for three years past the suitors had been lording it in his house, and she at once changed him to an old man in whom no one would recognize Odysseus, sacker of cities. He knew then of his enemies and had been given the advantages of disguise and secrecy and the possibility of surprise that would go with them.