Antiphates+(King+of+Laestrygonia)

Antiphates (King of Laestrygonia)
The Civilized Barbarian

As the mild mannered Grendel was falsely accused and attacked by Beowulf and his companions, I too, was unconditionally attacked and damned in history as a monster by the insolent Odysseus when, in fact, I was a civilized and cultured individual simply enjoying an easy meal that had walked to my front door. The pirate Odysseus came to my front door seeking to rob me of my supplies and rations that I had painstaking assembled to distribute to my people in times of need. This aggravating young fool actually believed that he could, after losing all of his provisions, come to my front door and demand that I make extreme sacrifices on my part and to the detriment of the well being of my people simply to appease him and his crew even after I had invited him to an extravagant banquet. The food we put out to him was disagreeable to his ideas of a decent meal. The ruffian promptly spurned our delectable diner and rudely turned away from our spread, left for his ships as we continued to gather appetizers for our meal. Odysseus did not honor the guest-host relationship as I would have if our positions had been reversed.

That little wisp of a man bashed into our hall and screamed: “I am the great hero Odysseus! I have fought in many more wars than your bards have ever sung of! I come with two choices, an ultimatum if you will. Either give me enough supplies to last my crew and me for the next three years along with wondrous presents, the finest that your puny barbarous civilization can provide a great hero such as myself, or I will proceed to pillage and burn your land to the ground!"

All of my vassals jumped to their feet and prompted, “Who are you to make such disrespectful demands of us? Do you not realize that you are in the presence of our honored and esteemed king?”

At that moment our royal guards fell upon their rear and hurtled them into the middle of our court where we then proceeded to devour these puny men. The cowards squealed like pigs at a slaughter, their wails knifing through the halls like our teeth through their flesh. They broke ranks and fled for their lives. Lucky Odysseus managed to escape our wrath.

Now he has proceeded to retell the story in a way that portrays us as a cannibalistic cult of man-eating creatures. We do not eat fellow man. Those that we ate were not men. They were to us as sheep are to them: food raised for slaughter.