Tonight is the night the two halves of this story start moving toward each other. Odysseus is up in the hills, sitting by a fire in a borrowed cloak, listening to the man who keeps his pigs tell the story of how he was carried off as a small boy and sold. And out on the black water, his son is sailing home through the dark, past men who are waiting to kill him.
0:00 Welcome
3:17 Athena Wakes Telemachus in Sparta
10:03 Farewell to Menelaus and Helen
18:18 The Eagle and the White Goose
21:44 The Road to Pylos
26:02 A Stranger Comes to the Ship
30:15 Sailing Toward the Strait
32:13 The Beggar Tests the Swineherd
37:35 News of Laertes
40:24 The Woman Who Raised Him
43:07 The Nights at Their Longest
45:51 The Island of Syra
47:26 The Phoenician Traders
52:25 The Necklace and the Signal
54:17 Six Days at Sea
57:35 Telemachus Comes Ashore
61:20 The Hawk and the Dove
64:57 The Road Up the Mountain
66:34 Sleep Sounds
Neither one of them knows about the other. They are both going to end up at the same door before morning.
There is a line in this episode that has stayed with me. Eumaeus tells the stranger by his fire that the nights are at their longest now, that there is plenty of night for sleeping and plenty left over for talking, and that a man who has been knocked around hard enough in the world gets a kind of pleasure, later on, out of remembering sorrows that are well behind him.
That is what this whole episode is. Two men who have lost almost everything, staying up too late by a fire, telling each other about it, and finding it warmer than sleeping.
Rest well tonight.
The Odyssey, Episode 9: The Longest Night — a calm, slow bedtime reading of Book XV of Homer's Odyssey, adapted from Samuel Butler's public-domain 1900 prose translation for sleep.
What happens in this episode: In Sparta, the goddess Athena wakes Telemachus in the night and tells him to sail for home at once — his mother is being pressed to remarry, and the suitors have set an ambush for him in the strait between Ithaca and Samos. Menelaus and Helen send him off with gifts, and an eagle carrying a white goose crosses the road in front of his chariot, which Helen reads as an omen of his father's return. On the way home Telemachus takes on board Theoclymenus, a fugitive seer. Meanwhile, in the hills above Ithaca, the disguised Odysseus tests the loyalty of his swineherd Eumaeus, learns from him that his own mother died of grief, and listens all night as Eumaeus tells the story of his childhood on the island of Syra — how a Phoenician nurse stole him from his father's house and sold him into slavery. At dawn, Telemachus lands and starts walking up the mountain toward the swineherd's hut.
Who this is for: anyone who falls asleep to audiobooks, classical mythology, Greek epic poetry, long-form sleep stories, or a calm reading voice with no sudden loud moments.
Series: The Odyssey, read in full as a sleep series on Dream With Jacob. New episode every Wednesday.
Previous episode: Episode 8 — The Swineherd's Hearth (Book XIV)
Next episode: Episode 10 — Book XVI, the reunion of Odysseus and Telemachus
Source: Homer, The Odyssey, translated by Samuel Butler (1900), in the public domain. Roman god names restored to their Greek forms (Athena, Zeus, Hermes, Artemis, Hephaestus). Adapted and abridged for sleep listening.
Some of what I use for sleep, if you're curious:
Sound machine → https://amzn.to/4b4fWeY
Essential oil diffuser → https://amzn.to/4gmcksq
Humidifier → https://amzn.to/4aBjOE8
Sleep mask + headphones → https://amzn.to/44go88b
Cooling bamboo sheets → https://amzn.to/4eY0ylE
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With warmth and gentleness,
May your sleep be deep, your breath steady, and your dreams kind.
— Jacob Evans 🌙✨
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