Let us now speed Hermes, the guide, the slayer of Argos, toward Ogigia Island,
so that he can speedily announce your steadfast decision to the nymph of the beautiful braids,
that Odysseus, whose mind stands fast, shall make his journey home.
For my part, I will embark for Ithaca, there to breathe purpose into his son,
that I might instill a man's courage within his heart,
and to make him call an assembly of the long-haired Ithacans and tell all the suitors to go,
those men who never leave off slaughtering throngs of his sheep and his lumbering twisty-horned cattle.
To Sparta I shall send him, and to Sandy Pylos too, to learn whatever he can of his dear father's journey home,
and to help him as well to earn a noble renown among men.
So that was Dame Edna Reveridge playing the goddess Athena.
And Athena is talking to her father Zeus, king of the gods.
And this is in the first of the 24 books that constitute Homer's great epic, the Odyssey.
And as we were saying in our first episode, there is something very Australian about the expedition of Odysseus
and his men across the Aegean, barbecuing on the beach, drinking unnecessarily, behaving badly,
and basically comporting themselves like Australians on the beaches of the Dardanelles.
And so we felt that Australian voices, Russell Crowe in the last episode,
a cross between Kylie Minogue and Dame Edna and this one were the most appropriate.
I was imagining Kylie, I have to say.
Really?
It turned into Dame Edna.