Then, on the tenth day, we came uponĨ4 the land of the Lotus-Eaters, the ones who feed on a flowery plant forĨ5 There we landed and got a supply of water.Ĩ6 Right away, a meal was made ready, next to the beached ships, byĨ7 and after they had consumed their share of food and drinkĨ8 I sent off some of my companions on an errand to go and find outĨ9 what kinds of men were in this land who were eating the food theyĩ0 I chose two men, and I added a third one, a herald, toĩ1 No sooner had they gone off when they met up with the lotus-eatingĩ2 Now the Lotus-Eaters, you know, really had no plans to cause anyĩ3 of mine. I quote here the Greek text, verses 82–104 of Rhapsody 9 in the Homeric Odyssey, followed by my working translation: No, this time it is the pleasure of tasting, brought to life in the sweetness of the forbidden fruit produced by the Lotus. It is not the pleasure of seeing something that enchants, as highlighted in Rick’s playful references to video games-and even in the painting about the art-seller. In the Homeric story, however, there is another kind of sensory pleasure that dominates. A traveling art dealer displays his wares for a mesmerized crowd, who are oblivious to the beauty of the garden setting as they gaze longingly at the statuette he shows them. Sir James Dromgole Linton, The Lotus Eaters (1874). As we will see, such forgetfulness is at the core of the Homeric story about Odysseus and the Lotus-Eaters. In this picture, we see an art-seller who is selling the beauty of his art to beautiful people who are forgetting about their own beauty.

I see a comparable highlighting in the picture that I show here as the main illustration for my essay. What caught my eye in Rick’s version of the story was his perceptive highlighting of visual pleasures- like the sweet delights of video-games. That something is a detail in Rick’s retelling that made me rethink the original passage in the Odyssey. But I have something to add here about this Odyssean story, viewed through a Homeric lens. In both versions of the story, let’s call them Homer’s version and Rick’s version, there is a pleasurable forgetting of the present, and this forgetfulness leads to the danger of eternally postponing the future. What we see here is a deft retelling of the story of Odysseus and the Lotus-Eaters. I am sure that countless readers before me have thought what I am thinking about the story told by Rick. As I was reading through the first volume of Rick Riordan’s five-volume series, Percy Jackson and the Olympians, Lightning Thief (2005), the story that is told there about a visit to “Lotus Hotel” by Percy and his companions Annabeth and Grover (pages 257–265) made me think of the passage in the Homeric Odyssey, Rhapsody 9 verses 82–104, where Odysseus and his companions visit the Land of the Lotus-Eaters.

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