And so I was handed over to Odysseus, like a package of meat. A package of meat in a wrapping of gold, mind you. A sort of gilded blood pudding.

But perhaps that is too crude a simile for you.

Let me add that meat was highly valued among us - the aristocracy ate lots of it, meat, meat, meat, and all they ever did was roast it: ours was not an age of Haute cuisine. Oh, I forgot: there was also bread, flatbread that is, bread, bread, bread, and wine, wine, wine. We did have the odd fruit or vegetable, but you’ve probably never heard of these because no one put them into the songs much.

The gods wanted meat as much as we did, but all they ever got from us was the bones and fat, thanks to a bit of rudimentary sleight of hand by Prometheus: only an idiot would have been deceived by a bag of bad cow parts disguised as good ones, and Zeus was deceived; which goes to show that the gods were not always as intelligent as they wanted us to believe.

I can say this now because I’m dead. I wouldn’t have dared to say it earlier. You could never tell when one of the gods might be listening, disguised as a beggar or an old friend or a stranger. It’s true that I sometimes doubted their existence, these gods. But during my lifetime I considered it prudent not to take any risks.

There was lots of everything at my wedding feast—great glistening hunks of meat, great wads of fragrant bread, great flagons of mellow wine. It was amazing that the guests didn’t burst on the spot, they stuffed themselves so full. Nothing helps gluttony along so well as eating food you don’t have to pay for yourself, as I learned from later experience.