Some scholars claim it was here Odysseus dallied for seven years with the goddess Calypso.
But it is also Odysseus himself, by his very example, who has seduced them into showing him such favours.
Odysseus eventually made it through the narrow straits between the two monsters, but not without losing six of his best sailors.
Mr Armitage has penned a version of Homer's second epic which deals with the long-delayed homecoming of Odysseus from the Trojan wars.
"There is a second territory ... and that is secondary traumatic stress injury, " says Shay, the author of Odysseus in America and Achilles in Vietnam.
Scott Huler retraces the travels of his literary inspiration, Homer's Odysseus.
Just over a year later, the good ship Hellas is not faring much better than Odysseus and his crew, veering from one near-disaster to the next.
Local legend has it that Odysseus loitered here for seven years before he decided he really ought to be getting back to his family on Ithaca.
It's a way of binding ourselves, much as, in The Odyssey, Odysseus asks his men to lash him to the mast so he can guide the ship past the Sirens.
Among this year's MacArthur fellowships sometimes called the "genius grant" is a half-million dollar award to a psychiatrist who helps heal combat veterans with post traumatic stress disorder by talking about the mythological Greek warriors Achilles and Odysseus.
The fact is that Odysseus is befriended by gods who want him, in the end, to succeed, in order that he may return home to his beloved wife Penelope, so long neglected, and surrounded by such a crowd of baying, bestial suitors.
First he must reveal himself to his son Telemachos, who has been vainly searching for him, and convince him that he is, indeed, his father a tough act since the goddess Athena has just turned Odysseus into a younger, god-like man, and recognition hangs on disbelieving your eyes.
As he slowly recovered, he took what he figured would be a temporary gig counseling Vietnam veterans at the Boston VA. He told them stories of Achilles and Odysseus and those tales of betrayal by leaders and of guilt and loss among soldiers resonated with the Vietnam veterans.
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