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Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken
Many heroic liars existed before the many-wiled Odysseus was saved by his dog from everlasting night.
The thought-wanderings of Oedipus in his search to know himself—to find the symbol of his identity—had their literary origin three hundred years earlier in the story of the homecoming of Odysseus, sung in the “shadowy halls” of the Achaean kings by the blind bard known as Homer, and his followers. This “song for our time” emerged at the crucial, fluid point in history when the rhetorical patterning and acute audience-sensitivity associated with the oral tradition was enhanced, rather than replaced by, the new potential of the