i
- The narrator's wanderings naturally bring him to Greece. He skips through his imagination to see Odysseus standing on his ship, listening to the music from the towns.
- He describes Odysseus's internal terror by imagining his heart thudding like galley-slaves' drums.
ii
- The narrative of Odysseus's crew bleeds into the story of the galley-slaves in the service of a European master.
- The narrator imagines Odysseus's crew's mutinous response after ten years of looking for home, returning from a war that wasn't theirs.
- The narrative turns again—hang on—to muse on the uncertainty of navigation, and how both galley-slave and captain alike yearn for land… even if it isn't theirs.
iii
- Now we've reached Istanbul and Venice on our whirlwind tour of World Classics destinations.
- He tires of the statues and their histories; he is only really interested in the distractions, like the birds on their heads.
- He finds that art makes up for the fatigue of history and realizes that his father's enthusiasm was for the Europe that you can find in museums, not for the history that makes up its reality.
- But he can see that such power in art would be totally lost to a slave pining away on the edges of a decaying empire.