Singing Homer Podcast

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“She is Widowed of Men”—Homer in English
14 mrt· Singing Homer Podcast
Odyssey 9.105-92
“Next there’s an island”: the ἔπειτα of narration signals what happens next in time. In argument it signals a consequence, which is to use a common temporal metaphor in an otherwise timeless logic: the conclusion follows as the night the day. We use ‘since’ or ‘hence’, for example, in a comparable way. But Odysseus is not here narrating the sequence of their journey, nor observing a consequence; his use here seems more like a ‘what is more’. That is an unusual, non-temporal transition. There is evidently a point he and Homer want to make in describing this small island just opposite the land of the lawless Cyclopes.
She’s neither near nor far; and she’s overrun by goats, who are not constrained by the patter of human feet, nor any hunters with packs of dogs roaming the woodland peaks. There’s trees aplenty. The sense of unrestraint then shifts from the goats to the land herself:
“Nor is she kept down by flocks of sheep, nor by the ploughs,
No; unsown and unploughed all her days,
She is widowed of men, and feeds the bleating goats.”
The final image surprisingly consummates the feminine character of the land in Odysseus’ vision of the isle; previously it had been a sort of lingual fact, at best a latency. Γαῖα (Gaia) is always a feminine noun, but this particular earth is a woman widowed of men—who, one presumes, would have done something about all the goats. Γαῖα appears most often in the Odyssey in the phrase πατρίδα γαῖαν (patrida gaian), ‘fathers’ earth’, the destination of one’s home return (nostos); I render the phrase the ‘mother earth of my fathers.’
It is the following hypotheticals which catch my attention, for the distinctly Odyssean, and dare I say ‘western’, vision they express. In many ways the passage anticipates John Locke, or at least a common invocation of Locke about the use of land, in the name of colonialism and industrial development. The sort of men whom the island is missing are men who make things and transform things. In particular, they build ships, so their energy can literally be transported. The Cyclopes, by contrast, are men, or humanoids, who take things as they are given, “trusting in the gods” rather than their industry. They are blessed with a land that spontaneously grows them not only abundant grapes on the vine, but agriculturally developed crops like wheat and barley—something of a miracle without dedicated, ploughed fields. And it does not occur to the Cyclopes to see any possibilities worth getting organised about, in the abundant yet humanly desolate goat island visible across the water. She is not a woman to arouse a cyclops’ interest. Odysseus’ hypothetical is made with a knowing confidence in the assessment, but also a wistfulness which carries real longing. If only these Cyclopes had had some shipwrights and sailors:
“Those fellows would’ve done them the island as well, made her well-developed.
For it’s not at all bad, and would bear all things in their season.
For there are meadows along the banked shores of the grey salt sea,
Watered and soft; their vines would be virtually imperishable!
And there’s level ploughing: very deep the corn, perpetually
They would harvest season by season, since the soil under is very rich.”
I presently live in the Valley of the Sun, near Phoenix, Arizona. As one drives toward this area, or flies in, it is obvious that one is dangerously in the midst of a blistering desert, where javelinas and antelope roam and rattlesnakes rattle, and the occasional jaguar finds refuge in the surrounding mountains—which from a climatic perspective are considered ‘islands’. There is no visible source of water. No part of my perhaps cyclopean imagination could conceive of human settlement here, let alone a vast grid of plumbed and electrified streets and highways. Yet some Americans, or proto-Americans, saw the same vistas and envisioned this metropolis as within their means and ambition. It has ended up neatly laid out, spaced, and gardened, overseen by planted Australian eucalyptus and spindly avenues of palms, and its interiors are thoroughly air-conditioned. Here I sit, in an apartment of someone else’s ant colony. In place of ships there are cars and trucks for transport, although these means seem designed to isolate; even travel by bus or train in the Western world is generally an anonymous, self-absorbed affair, where one sits in one’s pew. There is none of the labour and camaraderie of the ship’s crew involved in every endeavour, nor indeed the prompts in such company to acts of group violence.
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Odysseus seems purposely vague when he mentions “the many sorts of things / That men manage when they cross to one another by ship on the sea …” Of course there are all kinds of uplifting or erotic human intercourse and trade in the unarticulated list, but also piracy, rape, plunder, and war. But one joins in Odysseus’ genuine feeling for the life of the sea, for the sense of possibility in every port, and for the joy of an exhausted crew finding safe anchor. The harbour of the goat island offers what must be a rare privilege to the sailors, of freedom from chores, and choice of when to resume their journey:
“And there’s a harbour of safe anchor, where there’s no need for mooring,
Neither throwing out anchor stones nor attaching the stern cables—
No, just put into shore and mark time until the sailors’
Life breath urges them, and the winds blow fair in aid …”
His record of attempting to sack and enslave the Cicones does not seem to tarnish Odysseus’ enthusiasm, which I reckon we share, for establishing a functioning, symbiotic community, where there are possibilities of meadows for grazing, vines for the vintage, and level ploughing and rich soil for the corn. The vision of the seaman pulling into land, both desiring to plunder what he sees in the development of others, but also to develop what he sees into full function and vibrancy—truly to land, and land with the prospect of home—are perhaps two sides of the same coin of an opportunistic masculinity. Such a man sees a woman as a field not yet furrowed. Control is expressed in the seemingly reciprocal actions between man and matter, involved in ploughing, reaping, tending the herd, and taking to sea and wind for barter and trade. Whether the relationship is consensual is not clear, but that it is mutually beneficial, to man and matter, is a point that could be argued. Husbandry, like sex, has pleasures and bears fruit. Equally masculine, however, is the isolationist, authoritarian patriarchy and rigid myopia of the Cyclopes. (There is a mention of them having wives and children, to whom they each lay down the domestic law, but there is no sign in the tale of women and kids. If they do exist, Polyphemus is evidently a loner, even among loners.) Thucydides famously contrasts the naval mentality of the Athenians, busily free but always ready to drop tools to evacuate into their boats, and the landed, militarised culture of the Spartans in perpetual readiness for war. Odysseus anticipates the Athenian mentality, it seems to me, as surely as he does the land-bound founders of Greater Phoenix, served by automobiles and planes replete with nautical metaphors in their use.
I sense a kind of sadness in Odysseus looking on this island ‘going to waste’. There is an ocean of moral, political, cultural, physical, and metaphysical judgement loaded into our very concept of ‘wasteland’. But unlike in Locke and the other Enlightenment sophists, there is no way to draw in Homeric language a fundamental distinction between ‘nature’ and ‘civilisation’ or the ‘artificial’. The Cyclopes are not men in the ‘state of nature’, in contrast with men who build ships and maraud. A cyclopean myopia is surely endemic in the business world, for example, if not the human race, and seems to me to typify more the modern, urbane native than any naked savage. The Cyclops is a do-it-yourselfer. That is an American ideal. We speak of blinkers and blind spots. Certainly, Homer the craftsman immerses us in descriptions of craft, and it is fair to say that Odysseus’ very soul is invested in his raft and in his marriage bed, both of which he made. But in Homer the production of artifice, its poetry, seems to be a completely natural process, for lack of a better word—an human process—that leads from the tree, to the timber (Latin materia), to the raft. And in the case of his bed made from an olive tree, it is not clear if the whole construction is not also still alive. Odysseus’ reaction to seeing an island with such potential for richly sustaining human life and industry, and sustaining human life through industry, is consistent, to my mind, with an historical Odysseus/Ulysses who not only visited but founded cities, like Lisbon. The joy is there in discerning the lay of the land and spotting the opportunity; I imagine someone who was not after empire or leaving monuments to himself, but who relished the founding of settlements and farm economies—where there were also harbours and timber to build ships for trading and raiding—all for its own sake.
‘Nature’ is another word that seems to be impossible to translate into Homeric Greek. Nature is Latin-derived and is a form rooted in the idea of birth; the word translated ‘nature’ in later Greek is φύσις (physis), an abstract derived instead from a verb to grow or sprout. It is the root sense of this botanical verb which prevails in Homer. Young Nausicaa is a shoot of palm. The animals which appear in the Odyssey are not ‘biological’, not simply ‘natural’; rather, they all signify humanly in story-land, whether as metaphors or in similes or directly in human interaction. The human being and body are the focus of all interaction with the non-human.
We often hear that the Greek gods were ‘anthropomorphic’. This is of course to put them in a box, to explain them and ‘the Greeks’ away. But anthropomorphism is first of all a needlessly abstract way of naming a fact of storytelling, the way the teller invests himself in and animates all things and people, not only gods. We have seen seals whose skins replace the skins of men; we shall see men who become humanly conscious pigs. There is a wild boar who scars Odysseus for life, a solitary stag, a loyal dog, mortal doves and sea crows and a gaggle of geese at Penelope’s trough. But in the world of the Odyssey, you cannot tell if a pig is a pig or a human being, just by looking at him. Perhaps the protean quality of the performer and the performance extends to an animist view of the world which is humanly projective, and investive of consciousness wherever there are eyes, or a single eye, to see through. I suspect that those who trouble to sift out material which they agglomerate under rubrics, like ‘Homeric psychology’ or even ‘Homeric theology’, would do well to look at the fact and the physics of Homeric solo performance for guidance and inspiration, alongside the many silent written words over which they already pore.
Myths about the planet gods, and ‘myth’ generally, do not live in some abstract cultural repository, or an academic mysterium called ‘mythology’: its point of contact with reality is through a human storyteller who stands (or sits) before you bodily. If he wants to be compelling or even intelligible, he has no option but at some level to ‘anthropomorphise’. One should approach this activity in Homer, however, not as a primitive or cultural necessity, but as a prime opportunity for his artwork—physical, vocal, and verbal. Even academics forget that Greek poetry—embodied in intoned voices gesturing in front of you—along with other visual arts—are the only source of Greek mythology, not the other way around. (There is nothing corresponding to an authoritative Bible which Greek poets consulted for their stories. Often the only exposure for a modern student to ancient poetry is a Mythology class. The reifying delusion engendered by this state of affairs is such that one will overhear students, fresh from an A in their high school Mythology class, say that Homer, or Aeschylus, had ‘got it wrong’.)
There is of course a vivid distinction for Homer between man/male, woman/female, and the ‘human’ (ἀνήρ anēr, γυνή gynē, ἄνθρωπος anthrōpos). The poem’s first word is ‘man’ in the sense of male, husband, warrior. Odysseus, the man uniquely of many turns, is therefore, all the same, immediately an instance of something. In this passage we are led to contrast how Cyclopean men and Odysseus, captaining his male labourers at sea, regard or disregard a fertile, undeveloped island across the water. Again, perhaps the salience of these distinctions stems, in part, from the performer’s reality of expressing masculinity, femininity, and humanity, all through his own single body. This is not to say that abstractions do not exist in the Homeric visions and conceptions, but only that the instinct of such a performer must always be concretising, instantiating, and embodying.
All the description of the island is suddenly upended, when Odysseus goes on to say that they ran aground upon her unaware, in the dark of a moonless night shrouded in mist. It must have been only after dawn rose that Odysseus took the lay of the land, and was struck that next day how the Cyclopes, who had no “ships with vermilion cheeks,” could so neglect such a promising place. I find it a little disorienting, that we get the evocative description of the island first, before learning that the ships had in fact run aground on her in the dark, blind and unaware and in some peril. Such disorientation seems intentional on the storyteller’s part. Certainly it contributes to a growing sense of ominousness, of backing into something. Retrogressions in an orbit, equally characteristic of a dactylic Greek folk dance and the motion of Mars, are also characteristic of Homer’s narrative and narrator at many levels.
I feel I should continue to note the numbers, when Homer or Odysseus does, and I continue to solicit any help about what they might signify. We learn that there are twelve ships in Odysseus’ entourage. Each of them has already lost six men among the Cicones, bewailed three times each. Hence the number of the mourning cries was 216. When they hunt the goats of the island, split up into three parties, they end up apportioning nine goats to each ship—so 72 in total. But Odysseus makes a fuss about them giving his ship a special tenth goat. So 73, a prime.
There is also a curious emphasis when Odysseus proposes that only his ship should make the expedition across the water to the land of the Cyclopes:
‘Now, the rest of you, hang out, my trusty fellows:
Meanwhile with my own ship, and my own crew, I am myself
Going to go and try out these men here, whoever they are,
Whether they’re rapists and savages without a sense of right,
Or they’re friendly to strangers, and their thought is god-fearing.’
The first two lines are a festival of self-reference. For whatever reason, Odysseus seems keen to portray himself to the Phaeacians as self-absorbed, possessive, and vain. Is he perhaps interested in a favourable distribution of the booty, by taking on the Cyclopes’ country with his own ship? The last lines mostly echo the question Alcinous asked (8.575-6) before Odysseus named himself. It seems a question from someone who wants to be entertained by savagery, lawlessness, and exotica in his traveller’s tales; one wouldn’t be so interested in how nice everybody is. It is a question which redounds upon themselves: are Odysseus and his men, a mini-fleet of Achaeans, and by extension the defunct Achaean army at Troy, rapine pirates or civilising justicers? The episode with the Cicones rather suggests the former. Odysseus seems conscious of his dramatic audience, and in repeating Alcinous’ question is perhaps explicitly responding to a request. It is only this self-consciousness that puts Odysseus in a good light, and perhaps also his willingness to sell himself short for the sake of the story.
After mercilessly sacking the Cicones, he initially advised, unsuccessfully, that they run away. Evidently he could not then win the day in argument among twelve ships’ worth of men. Amongst his fleet, it seems he is no Agamemnon or Achilles. Here Odysseus asserts his authority, growing into his position as a privileged captain—now with his prized extra goat!—only to recklessly risk his own ship’s crew against a giant, while the other eleven ships hide in safety behind the isle. But perhaps he only feels confident, so far, in commanding his own ship’s crew. In facing the risks of confrontation and deploying stratagems, a certain nimbleness will be required; perhaps Odysseus cannot risk the insubordination of the larger fleet, already in evidence, which is not constituted as an army with an overlord. Its tendency, after all, is rather to think each ship for itself when it comes to the distribution of booty. So far the fleet-wide respect Odysseus commands, has only one goat to show for it.
There are always different permutations in these adventures, as to whether to send his men ahead to scout the danger, or face it himself, together with how much Odysseus is willing to let on to them about what he knows to expect. I wonder if Freud or Jung ever had a go at interpreting the relationship between Odysseus and his men? In any case, the floridity of his ego—or is it id?—seems to set Odysseus up for a fall, and contributes to the building sense of doom. Upcoming is a cyclopean mountain to climb.
‘For he constituted a wondrous prodigy, nor did he resemble
A man who eats bread, but rather a wooded peak
Among the high mountains, which appears set off alone, away from the rest.’
In Greek:

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“I am Odysseus”—Homer in English
28 feb· Singing Homer Podcast
Odyssey 9.1-104
What’s in a name? Most Greek names are transparent, like ‘Smith’ or ‘Carpenter’. ‘Alcinous’ is a ‘Brave Mind’, ‘Telemachus’ a ‘Battler Afar’. ‘Odysseus’, however, does not look like it’s Greek. Homer has some fun in deriving it from ὀδύσσομαι, ‘to be angry’ or to ‘cause anger against oneself’. More ‘pissed on’ than ‘pissed off’. But this verb is very unlikely to be the source of the hero’s name. The -d- is in the Homeric and the Attic variant; elsewhere in Greece the man can be remembered as Ὀλυσσεύς, Οὐλίξης or other forms with an -l-. Of course from Latin we know him as Ulysses. Etruscan says Uthuze. One theory has it that a Minoan form is the source for all these; a fricative sound not native to either the various types of Greek or Latin or Etruscan, resulted in the different outputs, -d-, -l-, and -th-.
Tacitus passes on reports—incredulously—that Ascibergium in Germany (modern Asberg), once at the confluence of the Ruhr and the Rhine, was founded by Ulixes, and that an altar was found there dedicated to him which mentions also his father Laertes. Classical sources attribute the founding of Ulysippo or Olisippo (modern Lisbon in Portugal!) to the legendary wanderer. Was there a man behind the myth, who really traveled around the world? And not only came to know the towns and the thought of many peoples, but actually founded settlements which became cities?
We don’t even know how to say his name. Homer’s generation likely no longer knew what his name might have meant, against the naming habits of their own culture. But the lingual evidence, that he was known locally in the way that local speakers pronounced his name, from Odysseus to Ulysses, suggests that there is an original, historical reality standing behind these phenomena, a man who was known very widely and locally, a man perhaps known to Minoans by a name which uses a consonant we would not recognise. How these antediluvian Minoans were related to anyone who fought in a Trojan War, is anybody’s guess. But it seems to me that there really once was a wanderer and warrior and founding father who could say, in his own language,
“I am Odysseus, Laertes’ son: with all my cunning deceits
I trouble the attention of humanity; and my repute reaches heaven.”
As he begins his story, Odysseus says,
“What first, what next for you, what the very last shall I recount?”
I would suggest, perhaps perversely, that there is something to note here. A catalogue (καταλέγω, ‘recount’) is a list, and more importantly, a sequence. The counting numbers are the original catalogue. The names we give the numbers cannot be separated from their sequence. In English we start grouping the numbers by tens—after thirteen, at any rate, the first twelve are a dozen who each get a proper name—but changing their sequence would ruin the catalogue, the way that when you’re interrupted at counting pennies, you have to start over. We recall this in our own usage, in the sense that we ‘recount’ a tale, as though its catalogue were like a number. Changing the sequence is not an option, without catastrophic consequences for one’s recall. When a tribal elder recites a genealogy, he must begin at the beginning and follow the sequence. You cannot ask him to skip a bit to get to your ancestor. “[O]ne remembers that one element follows another in a catalogue or list (whether shopping or genealogical) in the way that one remembers that six follows five; and the way that one remembers the latter is lost in the very first functioning of the active memory.”
Hence I would suggest that Homer and Odysseus are innovating here, to some extent. The idea of choosing the sequence of his tale of woes, in something other than their linear, historical order, belongs to art rather than to memory. It rather suggests that we are to pay special attention to the way in which he orders the episodes in his tale, that he is choosing the sequence for a purpose, rather than following the necessity of memory. Once upon a time, some real storyteller invented the ‘flashback’. We remember, stepping back ourselves, that we are finally getting to the tale of Odysseus’ wanderings—the reason we all came here—but that this only happens after four books of a Telemachy, and then four books setting the scene and the stage in Scheria. There have been all the layers peeling the onion, culminating in the extraordinary simile comparing the still hidden Odysseus’ tears to those of a woman widowed by war, collapsed upon her fallen husband while feeling the prod of slavery in her back. There have been several journeys undergone, it would seem, before the journey can begin. Homer’s art has been, in part, re-sequencing the tally of the tale, to set it in a Phaeacian frame. For no less a rationalist than Thucydides, Scheria and the Phaeacians were historical realities. Be that as it may, I think we might all agree that the palace of these painless ferrymen creates an element of fantasy, a fantastic setting in which to frame the Wanderings of Odysseus.
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We also have to go backward in order to go forward. This happens on many levels in Homer’s Odyssey as a whole, but will also happen literally in Odysseus’ wanderings. I remind you that the form of a six-measure syrtós, a round dance with a dactylic foot which I believe may have been the source of the hexameter, involves a rightward circling, punctuated within the third foot of each line by a leftward retrogression, and a resumption rightward at the fifth foot. I suspect this is the dance the Phaeacians were performing during Demodocus’ song about Ares and Aphrodite: the dance of the Muses. The dancers move back leftward as they go forward to the right, like Mars, appearing to retrogress over a couple of months in the night sky, but eventually they come full circle rightward to where they began. The form of such a dance must influence our sense of what can constitute a ‘sequence’.
After the pitch of emotion reached, the stranger in paroxysms of tears after listening to the tale of Odysseus’ exploits in war, the opening episode of his travels is a bit of a let down. The first place they come to immediately after exiting Troy, the land of the Cicones, they set about sacking a city again. Whatever spiritual, moral, practical, or military lessons may have been learnt in the ten years since, and at Alcinous’ court, are not evident at the outset. They kill the men, and divide up the wives and property—equitably! Odysseus claims he wanted to haul ass out of there, with a “fluid foot”, but the men preferred to have a party. This gives time for the locals on the mainland to gather and avenge their kin, assembling a proper army with the modern know-how to fight from chariots. Once again the Achaeans are made to fight by their ships, just like at Troy. Six men from each of Odysseus’ ships are lost. These men are merely numbered, unlike all the victims in the Iliad, who are named. There is a bit of the Keystone Cops in these men of Odysseus.
After escaping a storm, phonically evoked (τριχθά τε καὶ τετραχθὰ, trikhtha te kai tetrhakhtha, ‘thrice and in quarters’ was the sail ripped by the force of the wind), not for the last time they are about to sight home only to be pushed back and aside by wind and tide: backwards on the way to going forwards, orbiting home with retrogressions.
‘Home’ is not a concept that can easily be translated into Greek. It is probably impossible to translate generally, by means of a single foreign word. It is English’s hygge. Realtors nowadays are in the business of selling ‘homes’, but I think their usage can still make us cringe; a house is not a home. The οἶκος in Greek is concretely a house, but also a household, an economic unit. These concrete senses are never far away, but when the suffix -δε is present, of motion towards (οἶκόνδε), it can seem right to translate ‘homeward’. But the word which carries more of the sense of our ‘home’, as well as other things besides, is νόστος (nostos), ‘return’ or ‘going home’. Indeed it seems the idea of return, and the sort of mapless directionality of ‘homing’, very much play their part also in the untranslatable quality of English ‘home’. The sense for home, the longing for it and the happiness, relief, and renewal of arriving there, seem all to be encompassed in Homer’s nostos.
The danger presented by the land of the Lotus-Eaters is precisely that eating the lotus flower causes Odysseus’ men to forget their nostos. The episode of the Lotus-Eaters is brief, barely twenty lines, but it pulls far beyond its weight. It is almost as though each of these episodes is a microcosm, a separate window into the whole enigma of ‘return’, and Odysseus’ return. Odysseus, the narrator, stresses that the Lotus-Eaters did not intend the destruction of his comrades. This is perhaps the most chilling aspect of the peril, that there is no hostile intent. One thinks of all the distractions and addictions that can lead one to forget one’s purpose. Careers could be examples of such distractions. The word ‘career’ suggests the hurtling round a track to preoccupy all one’s strengths and senses, so that one loses the sense and direction of life off the race course. We do not know what plant the lotus is, but evidently it stands for any number of benign-seeming perils to our health and nature, from addictive drugs to lucrative or absorbing careers. The story seems to diagnose a terrifying susceptibility in human nature to forget one’s purpose, or perhaps to forget to seek a purpose, and to that extent to be dead to life and to live on unaware. Odysseus’ hapless men “no longer wished to report back nor return.” His only option (so he thinks) is brute force, to tie these men down to their rowing benches by himself. Which is the freer life, I wonder, chewing the lotus in peace and company, or rowing in the galley, eyes forward to the rear, for Odysseus?
How are the Lotus-Eaters different from the audience Odysseus eulogises at the beginning of his speech?
I tell you this is a beautiful thing, to listen to a singer
Of such a quality as this one is—like the gods in his voice-work.
For to my taste I swear there is no perfection so gratifying
As when good intent prevails in an entire country,
And feasters in their houses listen to the singer
Sitting in rows; by them the dinner trays are full
Of bread and slices of meat, and he draws mead from the mixing bowl
And carries it—the wine bearer—and pours it into their cups:
This, for me, looks the most beautiful thing of all, to my mind’s vessel.
It seems it is a benign intent of the poet and the artist generally, to have his audience eat of his flora and lose themselves in its powers. The audience for art is another group tied to their benches. Odysseus has them sitting in rows. I know very well the experience of chewing over Homer’s poetry for a penniless career. I wonder if the poet of the Odyssey feels this way about his upbringing in the Iliad. The student of Plato would call attention to the last line above: this vision of dinner theatre in peacetime only looks the most beautiful thing of all. It is a vision unexamined, of people perhaps disconnected from other possibilities. Melville has a word for such living death, in Moby Dick:
Only one sweeter end can readily be recalled—the delicious death of an Ohio honey-hunter, who seeking honey in the crotch of a hollow tree, found such exceeding store of it, that leaning too far over, it sucked him in, so that he died embalmed. How many, think ye, have likewise fallen into Plato’s honey head, and sweetly perished there? (Ch.78)
But is Odysseus’ purpose, the destination to which he is slowly circling round, really his homeland? It would seem so. He sings an ode to Ithaca, a rough-and-ready land, than which he is “unable to see any other thing sweeter.” But in an attempt to prove his point, he seems to leak a different possibility. Calypso detained him in her hollowed caves, he says, longing that he be her husband. Circe, the cunning mistress of Aeaea, also held him back, also longing that he be her husband (or so he claims). But neither of these goddesses managed to persuade him, he proudly declares. No, he chooses the country of his birth, and his parents. Really? Don’t his two examples rather point to the woman who lives there, the woman who actually has him as her husband?
Odysseus is once again hiding Penelope from Alcinous, Arete, Nausicaa and the Phaeacians. Why is this? Could it suit him to be single for the sake of his story, so that his temptations not be interpreted as temptations to bigamy, or adultery? Or is it that no-one would take him seriously, if all the resistance to goddesses and subjection to suffering over twenty years, were for the sake of returning to his aging, mortal, and likely estranged wife? Or is it that the bond he shares with the remarkable woman he will not name, is not something he is either willing or adequate to divulge to strangers, or communicate generally?
But never did they win over the life’s breath in my chest;
As nothing sweeter than one’s father’s earth, nor than one’s parents
Comes along—even if, away off in a rich house
In a foreign land one lives far apart from one’s parents.
There may be something to note in that final qualification. It could be read as an excuse for his wanting to return home rather than marry Nausicaa—even though, as we shall learn and Odysseus already knows, at least one of his parents has died. But consider that the experience he evokes, of living apart from one’s parents in a rich house in a foreign land, is precisely the experience of each and every high-born wife. At the beginning of Book 4, we witness the practice renewed for a new generation, in the departure of Hermione, Helen’s only child, to travel far and meet her fate in an arranged marriage to the dead Achilles’ son—a marriage once arranged on a battlefield. On Odysseus’ terms, these wives must make do with a life of permanent exile from what he himself finds sweeter than anything else imaginable. Hence we must allow that there may be behind his mask the sympathy for a woman’s condition that was suggested by the simile describing his tears. The lot of women of different classes, who do not happen to be goddesses, seems to span a spectrum from domestic slavery to exile from home, with no possibility of nostos. It may be that Odysseus, a pissed-on man who pisses people off, feels something in his heart for what he has perpetrated upon the women of Troy, and also upon his abandoned, besieged, long-suffering wife.
In Greek:

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‘But Odysseus began to melt ...’: Homer in English
11 feb· Singing Homer Podcast
Odyssey 8.499-586
ταῦτ’ ἄρ’ ἀϝοιδὸς ἄϝειδε περικλυτός · αὐτὰρ Ὀδυσσεύς
τήκετο, δάκρυ δ’ ἔδευεν ὑπὸ βλεφάροισι παρειάς.
ὡς δὲ γυνὴ κλαίησι φίλον πόσιν ἀμφιπεσοῦσα,
ὅς τε ἑῆς προπάροιθε πόλιος λαϝῶν τε πέσησιν
ϝἄστει καὶ τεκέεσσιν ἀμύνων νηλεὲς ἦμαρ · 525
ἣ μὲν τὸν θνήισκοντα καὶ ἀσπαίροντ’ ἐσϝιδοῦσα
ἀμφ’ αὐτῶι χυμένη λίγα κωκύει, οἳ δέ τ’ ὄπισθεν
κόπτοντες δούρεσσι μετάφρενον ἠδὲ καὶ ὤμους
εἴρερον εἰσανάγουσι, πόνον τ’ ἐχέμεν καὶ ὀϊζύν,
τῆς δ’ ἐλεεινοτάτωι ἄχεϊ φθινύθουσι παρειαί · 530
ὣς Ὀδυσεὺς ἐλεεινὸν ὑπ’ ὀφρύσι δάκρυον εἶβεν.
That’s what the singer sang, a celebrated man: but Odysseus
Began to melt, and a tear beneath his eyebrows wet his cheeks.
And as a woman weeps and sobs, fallen round her dear husband,
Who, right in front of his own city and people, met his fall
Defending the town and its children against the pitiless day—
She had watched him dying, gasping out his last,
And she dissolves around his person and moans a piercing cry; but the men
behind
Keep prodding with their spears her mid-back and her shoulders
As they insert her in the chain gang, to bear hard labour and sorrow:
And with the most piteous grievance the woman’s cheeks waste away …
Just so Odysseus—piteously—began pouring a tear beneath his brows.
When Homer starts a simile with a ὡς clause, ‘as a woman weeps’ for example, the one thing you know will follow, surer than death and taxes, is another ὡς clause, ‘so also …’ Hence the time of a simile is suspended time, like the time in the unfolding of a sonata before the return of the melody: as one experiences this tonal unfolding, and shifts to the dominant, all the while one expects, and increasingly anticipates and longs for the return of the touchstone. Hence one is in thrall to the composer, in the sense that one cannot help the expectation he has created, while on his side he can delay and otherwise exploit our need for resolution and consummation, without in any way diminishing it. What will he try, how far will he go, how weird will his invention be? This most remarkable of Homeric similes spills its banks, over and outward, in a way that waters new ground even in comparison to the inverted, labyrinthine, self-referential and cross-dressed similes we have already encountered in the Odyssey. One could say it stretches the form to the limits of a mind’s ability to balance its elements, and so grasp it aesthetically as a whole thing.
‘As a woman weeps fallen round her dear husband … so Odysseus began pouring a tear.’ There is the skeletal structure. We imagine a noble Andromache bewailing Hector. But what in Odysseus’ case corresponds to the ‘fall around’ ἀμφιπεσοῦσα, and the dead husband? Nothing obvious to the latter, it would seem, unless there is a lost beloved we know nothing about, or Penelope is somehow intimated. But we should still assume that something about mourning the dead warrior resonates with Odysseus, so that he might mourn with the man’s widow. Is it something like mourning his youth and his prowess, as though it had died? Demodocus’ song, however, casts Odysseus as the killer, not as either of the victims, the woman or the husband. For the woman’s collapse, we go back a line, to 521-2: ‘but Odysseus / Began to melt’. The comparison to the collapsed woman perhaps suggests a physical paroxysm of grief in the seated Odysseus. Homer’s usage of τήκομαι sometimes suggests a comparison of the upwelling of tears to melting snow. Odysseus’ cheeks become wet as though they are melting. The conclusion of the vehicle says that the woman’s cheeks ‘waste away.’ Such an identity in tenor and vehicle, cheek to cheek, must be considered unusual and aggressive; it rather forces the question, can a woman’s tears be compared to a man’s? A woman’s cheeks to a man’s gristle?
The vehicle builds and builds before this point, almost losing itself in its own story. The woman actually saw her husband as he was dying, witnessed his last gasp (τὸν θνήισκοντα καὶ ἀσπαίροντ’ ἐσϝιδοῦσα). This witnessing could only happen in a domestic scene, in proximity—as is assumed in the theme of the slaughter of the Trojans inside their own city, by the Danaan soldiers emptied from the belly of the horse. Only there at home, not on a battlefield, could she fall right away upon her husband, killed hot in cold blood, and cry out shrill. But here is the consummating moment in the poet’s staging: the murderous enemies standing around prod her in the back and shoulders. A push in the back is a profoundly disquieting sensation. Patroclus in the Iliad feels the flat of Apollo’s hand shove him in the back, when he is about to meet his doom. One cannot see who pushed you, and they never own up. It is the embodied experience, on the playground or in a nightmare or on the public square, that God is not on your side. I imagine the performer of this simile’s verses poking at the air above the ground with his staff. He is ‘other’, at the far end of the stick from the bereft and savaged woman. But we in the cheap seats feel the prod and the flinch in our backs, with our imagined Andromache.
And is Odysseus also not ‘other’? How is he connected to his victim? The vehicle builds in one way dramatically, another verbally. Its verbal summit is reached in a superlative in its last line: it is with ‘the most piteous grievance’ that the woman’s cheeks waste away in tears. It is as though the successive moving images, the dying gasp, the dissolution and the piercing cry—the beastly prodding in the back—all of these build their pathos and culminate in feeling through this superlative, the most piteous grief that belongs to this witness to her husband’s slaughter, a widow bound for slavery.
Why have I translated ‘grievance’? The ἄχος (akhos, ‘grief, pain, distress’) is a concrete thing. It may even be connected to ‘Achaean’, one name for the set of allies besetting Ilium, the sons of the Achaeans (υἷες Ἀχαιῶν). Perhaps these are ‘sons of woe’, or ‘sons of men of Woe’. But one is on perilous ground when trading in single etymologies, and indeed there is a danger of mystifying words in Homer, in particular in the spurious context of an unknown and unattested oral tradition, under whose umbrella every word in Homer could be seen as some sort of totem of cultural inheritance. But ἄχος is just a word. One best looks to Homer’s usage, and infer what one can from any oppositions induced. It does seem that ἄχος connotes the state of mind induced by grief, not just the grief, which when situated in the mind can be productive, humanly, of resentment or bitterness. We do not generally hear the ‘grief’ in ‘grievance’, but it does seem plausible all the same that acts which cause grief may be at the root of grievances, whether in the political or socio-economic or familial realms. On my reading the buildup of emotion and suffering in the course of the simile’s vehicle is at once a buildup in indignance, moment by excruciating moment, culminating in a superlative knot of human anguish and frustration of impulse, a most piteous ἄχος.
In light of this, the too brief conclusion of the simile resounds most awkwardly:
Just so Odysseus—piteously—began pouring a tear beneath his brows.
The frame of the simile locks into place—the tears, the wet cheeks—but the journey of the woman to its verbal crescendo, in a most piteous superlative, can hardly and only hollowly be matched in the tenor. The same word occurs in response to the vehicle’s concluding line, but decidedly in its non-superlative form: ἐλεεινόν, ‘piteous’ modifying Odysseus’ tear, or adverbially as I take it, ‘piteously’. One wonders if one should instead translate ‘pitiably’. It is as though the already jarring comparison framing the simile itself, of Odysseus’ tears in the audience to the tears of the woman and women widowed into slavery by the likes of Odysseus himself and his men, is being undercut by the juxtaposed comparison of grammatical comparison, between a superlative (ἐλεινότατος) describing her grief, and a positive (ἐλεεινόν) characterising his blubbering.
All the same, when Alcinous describes what seems to have happened to the stranger upon hearing Demodocus’ song, he says “ἄχος from somewhere has bestridden his mind’s vessels.” There is grief, and perhaps grievance, taken hold of Odysseus’ mind as well. What is going on here? What sort of catharsis could Odysseus be undergoing, which could in any way elicit the comparison to the experience of the widow? We remember that Odysseus set this up on purpose. He bribed the singer with choice bits off the back of a hog, and assured us that Demodocus tells the stories of the Trojan war as though he’d been there himself, or heard them from a witness. We should therefore assume that there must be some essential need for Odysseus to hear the story of his actions in war, while he sits in audience, told as accurately and true to life as possible. It seems he wants to witness himself and his actions in the third person, as though on hidden camera.
One reading has it that Odysseus is prescribing his own therapy; on this line he must, through Demodocus’ song, relive the trauma and the guilt of an harrowing action in his life, so that he may ‘process’ the episode in rehabilitation before he can assimilate again into a world at peace. Most pointedly, or so the reading goes, he must see his actions from the perspective of their victims, even to the point of crying with, or as, the woman he has just so bloodily widowed. Does such a reading satisfy, at the end of the day? Surely there must be some therapeutic process undergone before soldiers can reenter society; in the modern world we are all too familiar with the crime, the homelessness and addiction, the suicides of ex-soldiers who cannot adjust to domestic political life. But surely also there must be punishment for war crimes? Art can paint arresting pictures of daring and glory; art can whitewash and beautify; art can heal; art can lie. What does Odysseus need from Demodocus’ art?
We noted how in The Love Affair of Ares and Aphrodite, there seemed to be no difference between the tale reported by Homer and the song sung by Demodocus: the narrator fades into the singer, movie-style, and there is only one set of syllables and words. Demodocus’ last song about the Trojan horse seems also to operate this way, when it tells of the Trojans’ three-way split in council, as to how to deal with the wooden offering. But suddenly the narrator says ‘he continued singing’ (514) and keeps intruding this way (‘he sang’ 516, ‘he said’ 519), so that there is a conscious distance established between Homer’s report of it and the song itself. It seems that this time Homer does not want us to hear the actual song Demodocus sang, which so moves Odysseus root and branch, after all the fuss the man makes about the singer seeming actually to have been there. ‘There it was, he said, he dared the most terrible act of battle …’ What was this most terrible thing Odysseus did—again, a superlative—so terrible, it would seem, that Homer doesn’t want it shown as part of his Odyssey?
A clue from what we’re given is that Odysseus, like Ares the war god, went with godlike Menelaus to the house of Deiphobus. That is where the story breaks off; there is where the terrible act of war occurred. I don’t think they were going to meet and greet. Deiphobus was Helen’s latest Trojan husband, after the demise of Paris. Menelaus surely felt a grudge, an ἄχος. But Odysseus? He was his Iliadic self, the king and his brother’s hatchet man and henchman. What was Deiphobus to him, or he to Deiphobus? Yet he must have slaughtered him in an unforgettable way.
Wait a minute: the convulsive tears and the elaborately top-heavy simile immediately follow. Does that mean the grieving newly-widowed woman is … Helen? (So much for Andromache.) Hasn’t Helen told us her heart had already turned by then, returned, toward Argos and her husband Menelaus? Have all these tears—on both sides of the simile, in point of fact—been crocodile tears?
There’s more to this sauce than can be easily digested. Yes there is the possibility of redemption, or at least cathartic healing, even for a war criminal, through the empathy and sympathy called forth by the artistic representation of trauma. Consciousness can find its home in any number of nooks and crannies within a story or a simile. But this simile does not belong to Demodocus’ song of the horse and the battle inside Ilium, nor does it belong to Odysseus: it belongs to Homer. And among the many veins of light that run through his artwork, are many more of the dark veins of comedy.
Out of the mouth of babes … Homer’s hexameter distillations of simple truths can sometimes take one’s breath away. From Alcinous:
For there’s no one altogether anonymous among mankind,
Not the rubbish and not, mind you, the quality, not when they’re first born;
No, they give all of them names when they get them—the parents.
For all the pie charts and the census, the vote counts and the body counts, we each of us get a name—whether or not our parents keep us. Everyone who dies in the Iliad gets a name and a birthright, not a number. (Not so in the Odyssey!) No-one is called No-One. Odysseus has spent three books among the Phaeacians, starting with Nausicaa, and has never said his name. It is clearly a name well-known to them all in song. When they find out, what will they already know?
Alcinous remembers his father’s pronouncement, that Father Poseidon does not care for the Phaeacians’ painless escorts across the deep for all-comers to their door. Painless passage across the water must break some unwritten rules of Poseidon’s deep. The next petitioner they carry on their magic ships may well be their last: upon their return they risk a mountain burying their city. Yet they remain devoted, these ferrymen, to their savvy and their task. One might think that people with ships capable of travelling wherever their own minds could wish, might know a thing or two about the world. But Alcinous asks all the questions of the stranger a local dreamer might ask a visitor from afar: where have you visited? What are the people like, their cities? Are they savages or civilised? Perhaps the escorts never land or mingle.
As he rather comically prompts him for traveler’s tales, Alcinous wonders out loud why the stranger is so moved and distraught upon hearing a song about the Trojan War—indeed, a tale of brave Ulysses.
Surely there was for you someone, an in-law even, perished before Ilium,
Who was a quality guy, son- or father-in-law, those who become
Most cared for after blood kin and their offspring?
It is striking that there was in fact no one like this for Odysseus. He is an only son of an only son, the father of another one. He had no brother or other kin in the army. Helen was someone else’s wife. So what is his investment? Alcinous goes on to wonder about a comrade, perhaps, a soul brother. Nestor and Menelaus especially have spoken in the warmest terms about their sometime colleague Odysseus, but the latter has so far given no indication that the feelings are reciprocated. So Alcinous’ questions unwittingly reopen the question already raised by Odysseus’ intrusive crying, which I do not find resolved by the astonishing simile: what is it that so moves and even transfixes this stranger about the poetry of the Trojan War, its action and its passion? Why must he re-live it, rather than drink nepenthe? Perhaps this poetry itself represents a hazard to his well-being, or to the prospect of his completing the journey home?
Resolution is for the faint of heart. Open-ended questions, on the other hand, better suit our embarkation, like a favourable wind as his voyage sets sail—or rather, the tale of his odyssey begins—and the stranger earns his name.
In Greek:

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“You *Lifed* Me, Girl”—Homer in English
3 feb· Singing Homer Podcast
Odyssey 8.381-498
We are building inexorably to the telling of Odysseus’ famous tale of his wanderings, which it seems we must already know to some extent before it is told. There is a rather nifty prolepsis when Odysseus, at Queen Arete’s bidding, ties a knot to secure the lid of the chest which is to carry his treasures new-gathered from the high society of Phaeacia. It is a special knot which Circe had taught him. We are reminded that the Odysseus to whom we have just been introduced, naked, shivering and alone on the island of Scheria, is already someone who has seen a bit of the world, perhaps even the underworld, and has come to learn a thing or two of the wise woman’s arts. The whole tale lies in this man’s past and belongs to his inner makeup, although for us, it is still a thing anticipated. One wonders if Arete, when she calls on him to tie a knot, then peeks over his shoulder as he proceeds, as though to confirm a suspicion. She is yet another inscrutable female who knows what’s what.
One advantage of there being such a gulf—not merely a distance—between our reception of Homer’s text and its original ‘concert experience’, is that we can we read its dead letters at our leisure—like studying a score, or reading album lyrics. That is, for all that we are excluded forever from the inner circle, of those privileged to register and respond to Homer’s words in their original dialects and tempo, we can sit down with our dictionaries and grammars and pore over Homer’s lines in our sweet time—all the time that Homer’s artwork appears to deserve. We all know very well, from experience with recordings and paintings and even television series, how much we are prone to miss on a first hearing or viewing. Yet the tiny fraction of Mozart’s contemporaries who ever got to witness one of his operas, only ever took in such a performance once. Once! They couldn’t play the CD. Likely this was true also for the first audiences of performances from Homer’s compositions. It seems crucial for our experience of works of art, however, that we have the opportunity to revisit and deepen our awareness of their riches. Through the apparatuses of grammars and lexica, even our first encounters of Homer today are revisits. Surely many distortions build on each other, like successive prisms upon the transmission of light, in our approach to texts otherwise unreadable except by these means. But surely also, those privileged first auditors of Homer, experiencing the Muse together at a show, must have missed something of the substance and perhaps the skill and wisdom of the art, simply for hearing it virgin and in real time? There is joy in the study that is quite different from joys in the moment.
Consider this business of the knot, for example. It is but a passing detail, as we are carried along in the tide of the storyteller’s momentum, toward the revelation of the stranger’s name among the Phaeacians. But I reckon an artist would take a special interest in such a thing as a knot, however quickly he deals with it. Odysseus’ one is called a ποικίλος δεσμός (poikilos desmos), an ‘intricate bond’. The adjective can describe refinement and design in works of art as well as a complexity of mind (ποικιλομήτης, poikilomētēs, a uniquely Odyssean epithet). The seal on Odysseus’ Phaeacian treasure, both the treasure and the seal, seem to demand an interpretation of symbols. Storytellers are constantly in the business of tying and loosening knots. The loosening of a knot can well describe the experience of the climax of a drama. Paradoxically, the marriage at comedy’s end is once again a tying of the knot, a reinforcing of the social bonds that had risked being unraveled through all the escapades and plot twists. “There’s a double meaning in that.” By contrast, a knot intrinsic, which cannot be untied, speaks more to tragedy. It remains to be seen what a knot contrived by Circe may portend.
All the knot of tension caused by Euryalus the mock giant’s challenge to the stranger, resulting in his explosive and frightening discus throw, is now released. Odysseus initiates this change: sensitive to how embarrassed his host Alcinous has become over his failed boasts—and possibly fearful or hostile, in that he no longer seems to fancy the stranger as a son-in-law—the hero volunteers unsolicited his admiration for the dance display he has just seen. “Wonder owns me as I look on.” Alcinous’ Phaeacians really are the best at singing and dancing (and perhaps also feasting and sex).
Alcinous in grateful response calls for a collection of gifts, a levy upon all the significant oligarchs in the land, and calls out Euryalus in particular, to make it up to the stranger with words and a gift. I do not have any notes in particular on the exchange between Euryalus and Odysseus. Perhaps someone else has seen the drama in it? There is ceremony and cosplayed gentility. The gift is a copper sword with silver hilt, encased in a scabbard of worked ivory, with a whirling pattern on both sides. Swords are phallic things which kill people; I suppose when there’s not a war on, they could also cut knots, and vegetables.
The stranger puts the sword around his shoulders. When does he next take it off? Can he wear it when he sits to dinner? I only ask because a sword will be a useful and much-used prop for Odysseus when he tells the tale of his wanderings. I do believe this text works on a meta-level where its performer, who is of course playing both Euryalus and the stranger in this exchange, might want it made clear how Odysseus could have a sword to draw from its scabbard, when Homer takes on his persona for the four books of the Tale. Of course the performer must use his staff to stand in for all such objects. But when he becomes Odysseus, who is soon to become Odysseus playing Odysseus in his story, I believe it helps if we know that Odysseus the teller in Alcinous’ hall has a sword to draw on, when he plays Odysseus the hero in his adventure story. A concern for this kind of stage logic in Homer—for all that such a concern is as paradoxical as it is pragmatic—seems partly to motivate a line which makes it explicit that the stranger has slung and worn the sword that was gifted him. This visual fact would ultimately serve Homer’s audience, in that it anticipates and puts to bed a question that may annoy the punters: how did Odysseus telling stories in Phaeacia, get hold of a prop sword?
A sense of elegiac ritual comes to enhance the exchanges in this moment. Alcinous recalls the words and the gift of Menelaus to Telemachus (4.591-2) when he offers a gift to the stranger of his own beautiful golden chalice,
… so that in remembrance of me, all the days,
He may pour libation in his hall to Zeus, and the rest of the gods. (8.431-2)
Of course both these benedictions foreshadow the eucharistic prayer over the wine from the synoptic gospels. It is not always clear how lines from the Scriptures become lines in the mass ritual; David Tracy would speak of the ‘sacramental imagination’, not a thing subject in obvious ways to dogma or logic. Likely some lines or scenes originating in Homer came to play a part in Hellenic ritual as well. But the prayer over communion at the Passover supper—really a ‘Last Symposium’, on that quasi-Hellenistic occasion—seems self-aware even in the text of the gospels that it is meant to be reenacted in ritual. (There is no such eucharistic moment, however, in John’s telling of the Last Symposium.) What is extraordinary is to find this ritual feeling fully there in the Homeric voice—which must be considered pre-Greek, let alone pre-Hellenistic—over the pouring of wine from a memorial cup: ‘Whenever you do this, do this in memory of me.’
Most wondrous is the final exchange between Nausicaa and the still anonymous stranger. She is the latest woman in the Odyssey—I should venture, for the first time as herself a grown woman—to take a stand ‘by the pillar of the close-constructed roof.’ She also asks to be remembered, whenever the man she rescued gets home to the mother earth of his fathers:
Remember me: because it’s me first of all you owe your life’s ransom. (8.462)
‘Life’s ransom’ (ζωάγρια, zōagria) is a starkly arresting concept for Nausicaa to invoke. In form it recalls the μοιχάγρια (moikhagria), ‘adulterer’s ransom’, which was expected for the release of Ares in Demodocus’ song. (There was reason to speculate that the adulterer’s price was his castration.) The zōagria is the ransom that must be paid to release a prisoner alive from the enemy, rather than leave him to suffer execution or slavery. I think it permissible to conclude that Nausicaa feels a property in the naked river man; that he owes her something, perhaps even that she has been betrayed of an expectation. Perhaps the last is too much to read into to the tone and import of her diction, but it’s an edgy word, ζωάγρια. It implies the prisoner is her enemy, but that she will show mercy—for a price.
All that Odysseus can offer to pay his debt, is a word. When either Menelaus or Alcinous asked his guest to remember him whenever they poured wine from their gifted chalice, there was no response. But when Nausicaa also asks to be remembered, the stranger invokes Zeus as ‘husband of Hera’, and promises that should he get home, he would worship Nausicaa “continually all the days,” as though to a god:
σὺ γάρ μ’ ἐβιώσαο, κούρη. (8.468)
For you lifed me, girl.
Odysseus has here invented a word, to describe what Nausicaa has done for him. There are two forms for the aorist tense (or aspect) of Greek verbs, called the first and second. The first has a sigma added to the stem, like Odysseus’ ἐβιώσαο above. Usually a verb has only one or the other type of aorist form. βιόω, to live, generally uses a second aorist. When a verb uses both, however, an opposition is set up, where the first aorist, with the -s- sound, becomes transitive in a causative sense, while the second aorist becomes intransitive. One might compare ‘she walks with her dog,’ intransitive, with ‘she walks her dog.’ Odysseus here conjures a first aorist, a causative sense of the verb ‘to live’, which never again appears in Homer. I somewhat haplessly say in translation, ‘you lifed me.’
One must also contrast the sense of ζωός (zōos) ‘alive’, in Nausicaa’s ζωάγρια, to that of βίος (bios), ‘life’. ‘Alive’, zōos, is what we might call (somewhat unhelpfully) ‘biologically’ alive, as in, ‘not dead’. Whereas bios intends what you might call ‘biographical’ life, life lived humanly with its historical series of loves and disappointments, its property and its legacy. Odysseus is therefore saying that Nausicaa has restored him to the possibility of his own life, not just saved him from death. ‘This is your life’ speaks to a somewhat integrated story, not the sort of truncated, fragmented, unrecognised and anonymous thing that must happen if you are a victim of the Gaza onslaught, or a woman sold into slavery. But also disintegrated would be the life of an anonymous stranger settling down with Nausicaa in blissful Scheria. Or Odysseus in stasis with Calypso. Indeed, truncation from one’s childhood home appears to be the regular experience of Homeric wives. A story of ‘return’ could never, therefore, have quite the significance or resonance for Penelope, as for Odysseus. Her home is not the mother earth of her fathers, but her husband’s fathers.
Stories, or individual lives, in order to be held in the imagination as such, nevertheless need to have a sort of arc. I have been in the habit of reading ‘you lifed me’ as deeply, and naively, romantic. It is what some men perhaps feel in the mid-life crisis, towards the object of their distraction. Or their latest wife or ‘hookup’. But I now think the conditional quality of Odysseus’ response is important: were he to reach home and see the day of his return, so would he worship Nausicaa as a god. His bios is this return and restoration. The possibility of this life’s arc for him, more the completion of an orbit, is what Nausicaa has revived. But all she gets in return is a coined word. From the heart, mind you. But Odysseus is what some aggressive Americans call a ‘taker’. There is no return for the gifts of the Phaeacians. There is no requital for the heart of a girl, tall as a shoot of palm, who moves like Artemis. So we now say goodbye to her, forever—as surely as we shall remember her always.
The stranger bribes Demodocus the singer, divvying from the best cut of the back bacon. He praises Demodocus’ uncanny skill in telling the story of Troy—
As though somehow you were there yourself, or heard it of another.
This is not just fawning. For a number of reasons, I think it is important for Odysseus that the story he requests be sung as accurately as possible. The stranger says his own name out loud; he wants the story of ‘radiant Odysseus’, a tale of brave Ulysses, who led in that fateful horse as a trick, to empty its belly full of killers and so devour the Trojans. Why does he set this up, so he can sit secretly and anonymously in the audience, while the grievous tale is told in detail—to his radiant glory? Let’s find out.
In Greek:

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The Over-Thinker: Homer in English
20 jan· Singing Homer Podcast
Odyssey 8.256-380
I’m not one for the ‘god of war’ and ‘god of love’ shtick. Such formulations do not advance any understanding, of either love or war, it seems to me, nor why either one should be something treated as a god—that is, something to be worshipped, and sacrificed to. It is not likely that these ancient people deified anything, let alone abstractions or objects or actions or psychic states; there was no ‘god of fertility’ or ‘rain’. Rather, the sky gods, and perhaps also the chthonic ones, came as they were. They were empirical givens, though their names differed in different languages. It was thought, perhaps wishfully, that various ones among the Olympians, with their different natures, adopted such abstractions or concepts or phenomena, as patrons. Under such guises it became possible for offerings to them to become transactional, in the hopes of returns in the areas of rain, fertility, and so on, or protections, for example, against covenantal violation by Zeus Xenios, the patron saint of guest-friendship. But the Olympian gods themselves were who they were, potent beings displaying in the sky, whose help with regard to fertility or rain, love or war, was entirely derived from that original, empirical potency. Such neo-allegorical ‘god of’ formulations, aping ‘patron saints’, are tastelessly patronising of ancient peoples who evidently felt some level of regard, awe, and fear for the figures of Ares and Aphrodite. I shall assume that such attitudes were deserved, in respect of the beings in question. What might there be in Aphrodite, in particular, to cause terror in the heart when she is sensibly present and active? Even if you psychologise her, merely, there is nevertheless much, sometimes everything, to fear from her power.
There is a lot written about ‘Venus and Mars’ and the ‘Age of Venus and Mars’. I do in fact believe that there was such an age in the earth’s history and ours. But there is reason to believe that the once cometary planet Venus was in fact Athena and/or Hephaestus, who share a number of attributes as gods despite their obvious differences, while of course Ares was the Roman planet Mars. Aphrodite in the love affair was likely the Moon, although her name is also associated with the Great Mother, like the Roman Venus—chthonic as well as astral. One speaker in Plato’s Symposium in fact distinguishes two Aphrodites, one primordial and heavenly and the other, Homer’s, Olympian erotic. But the story of these names, their alter egos, and the beings once inhabiting them takes us beyond any area of certainty. Suffice it to say that with good evidence, Homer’s sky was not the same as ours. Helius our mighty sun, for one, seems to have been a relatively minor and benign player in relation to Zeus and company—a peeping, tattling courtier in Demodocus’ tale. I’ll mention a book which first opened my eyes to the god-planets and our witness of their recent active history: Celestial Sex, Earthly Destruction, and Dramatic Sublimation in Homer’s Odyssey: The Disastrous Love Affair of Moon and Mars, by Alfred de Grazia.
All the same I am a fellow with an open mind. If there are any among you reading who have an idea what a love affair between Aphrodite and Ares, patron saints of sex and war, the erotic goddess and the archetypal warrior, might symbolise in the larger scheme—please write a comment. Comments are welcome and open to all for this one.
About the rôle of Demodocus’ song in the Odyssey, one feels oneself on firmer ground. The adultery of Ares and Aphrodite writes a paradigm quite literally in the sky. The story of Clytemnestra, Aegisthus, and Agamemnon already stands in the background, and in the present of the Odyssey, it is the story everyone already knows. Odysseus has every reason to suspect that during his inexplicable absence, himself cohabiting with other females, that Penelope also has found a successful suitor, her own Aegisthus. In the political vacuum created by the departure of kings and their leading men to Troy, such a move by an abandoned queen would have been, beyond all moral scruples, simply prudent for her safety and position. The rational fear that he might suffer Agamemnon’s fate, walk into a calamitous trap, adds charge and worth to Odysseus’ pursuit of his return home, despite this fear.
A political dimension seems not so relevant to Ares and Aphrodite’s motives, although heavenly politics are certainly at play in the aftermath of the bedroom farce. An anonymous god, a bystander, mentions an ‘adulterer’s ransom’ (μοιχάγρια) that will have to be paid, after his version of the tortoise (lame Hephaestus) who catches the hare (quick-moving Ares, in a few senses). In his rage Hephaestus calls out Aphrodite’s father, the son of Cronus Zeus himself, to whom he had paid copious wedding gifts. Now he wants them all back. Poseidon worriedly steps in, it seems to prevent an astral catastrophe between Hephaestus and Our Father of gods and men, mighty Zeus. This time, Poseidon plays the peacemaker, and guarantees the debt himself. (The Phaeacian audience is Poseidon’s kin.) It is not clear, however, that this repayment of wedding gifts has anything to do with the adulterer’s punishment. Perhaps it is the latter that Poseidon feels he has an obligation to ensure. A student in Chicago once told me that the adulterer’s wages were castration, and that the Areopagus, the famous rock in Athens where the original court for homicide was established, and where St. Paul later preached, was one of Ares’ testicles. I don’t know where he got this account, and I am unable to corroborate it. But all the same, it does seem that the castration of the warrior is a theme that resonates richly through the adventures Odysseus is about to relate. The man-in-arms is presented with situation after situation where his equipment is shown up for useless, as indeed it has always been in the bedroom, and he is made to face the danger naked—in at least one case, with the explicit danger of castration. We shall see.
Ares is clearly conquered by the power of Aphrodite. In the Iliad Zeus detests his son for a lying thug obsessed with violence for its own sake, the “most hateful of all the gods.” Here Ares comes off instead as rather slick and a bit of a snob; he woos with plenty of gifts—he remembers the flowers—and seems to disparage the smith Hephaestus, and the savage-tongued Sintians whom he frequents. This is Ares’ only utterance. Of course the last laugh is on him. But Aphrodite, who, it must be said, remains dreamily silent throughout, seems well-pleased by the contrast of her dashing back door warrior and her limping husband. No deliberation is hinted at by Homer, before they head to bed. There is no stripping, there is no sex scene, but they are clearly naked. This must be one source of the humour for the onlookers, at least at the expense of the mighty Ares. But Aphrodite is able to proceed silently through the scene with her dignity all intact. Indeed, she seems completely to conquer the males who’ve come along for the porn. It is Hermes’ lust which reduces everyone to laughter, not the seriously naked and bound Aphrodite. Her nudity is emphasised not by its description, but by letting our imagination dwell on it while she is dressed in slow syllables upon being freed from her husband’s fetters. We follow her nude to Paphus in Cyprus, where the Graces enrobe her in ‘love-arousing clothes’ (εἵματα ἐπήρατα). The ‘punishment’ seems unequal. But we have been seduced and titillated into compliance.
There seems to be an emphasis on the transactional. Ares brings his love plenty of gifts, Hephaestus had brought her father plenty more. One presumes that paying the father was the more honourable course in human terms; but Hephaestus makes clear that it was Aphrodite’s sexual desirableness that motivated the effort, so that each lover is, in effect, paying for sex. The difference is paying the woman versus paying the pimp. (Hephaestus had been married to one ‘Charis’ in the Iliad.) Herodotus’ survey of peoples and their customs leads one to think that there is always a delicate line between accepting gifts of wooing, and being paid for service. In American culture, a decided ambiguity prevails between the sexes about the obligations incurred by a dinner paid for. Different peoples draw this line in different places, but there is in each group a way to tar a woman, on the far side of the local line on the transactional menu, as a ‘whore’. It is as though the opportunity created for such vilification fulfils a social need. Homer’s Aphrodite, however, seems to float away unsullied. Homer’s Clytemnestra, on the other hand, appeared to stray only when Aegisthus got rid of the hapless poet whom Agamemnon had left her for company and counsel. There is no caveat like this needed in Aphrodite’s case. She is not tarnished! There is no sin, she emerges in her Cyprian grove as beautiful as ever. Both her lovers are johns, but she is no prostitute.
Helen herself, the woman who used to follow her heart, and brought war in her train—once vilified and hardly fertile—became, in due course, a fertility goddess. Herodotus and others posit that Helen was never at Troy, correcting Homer as part of her restitution. But even in her appearances in the Odyssey, there are signs of her rehabilitation and divine status. Homer’s Helen is at times Aphrodite’s protégé, at times her avatar.
Odysseus is clearly a warrior, an Ares who gets people angry—it’s in his name. But to the listener in Greek there is no question with whom Odysseus is associated in Demodocus’ song. Hephaestus is twice given the epithet πολύφρων, which I over-translate ‘over-thinker’. He is a man of many (πολυ-) acts of mind (-φρων). He shares this epithet uniquely in Homer with Odysseus himself. Hence the identification is very obvious and even forced. I have suggested that in Odysseus’ case, we hear his ‘many’ (πολυ-) in relation to Penelope’s ‘more’ (περι in the sense ‘above’), heard in her own characteristic epithet περίφρων (περι- + -φρων). Odysseus’ epithet seems, all the same, generally complimentary, except the irony is rather savage if your cleverness is clever enough only to trap your slippery wife and her watchful lover into proving you’re a cuckold. I spoke too soon: the last, bitter, abject laugh is on Over-Thinker Hephaestus. Even if Odysseus wins his home by the most brilliant stratagem, neither he nor we will ever know the truth. Penelope is as silent on this matter as Aphrodite robed in arousal, a thing ‘amazing to look at.’
All the same, the possibility remains that Odysseus and Penelope embody a union which transcends, or undermines, or is irrelevant to the transactional. This type of union would evidently be a rare treasure, whether in heaven or on earth.
In the Greek I sing a portion of Demodocus’ song in a way that might be danced. I do not attempt to play a phorminx as well. But I revert to what I imagine to be the rhapsodic way of delivery when we get to the speeches. The proof is in the pudding, and the speeches are the pudding. Homer’s Odyssey was composed to be declaimed and embodied solo, for all that its music originated in participatory dance and plucked and chanted catalogue. I shall again append the video of the shouted version we rendered indoors in the Great Hall of St. John’s College, Annapolis in 2002. At the end, two acrobats reenact the closing passage of our reading, playing Halius and Laodamas, to the same Greek verses which describe their ball dance.
In Greek:

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‘The stone boomed and whizzed’: Homer in English
1 jan· Singing Homer Podcast
Odyssey 8.96-255
I continue to be impressed by how fully realised are the dramatic presences in Homer. Most every character who speaks in the Odyssey has at least one angle on what they are saying, often more than one, which serves to give them dramatic life and vulnerability, even to undercut them in comic ways. This is all wonderful fodder for an actor. But it is in a way embarrassing to announce this Homeric thespian realisation as a discovery. I presume many of Homer’s modern readers have already seen the dimensions of Homer’s speeches for themselves. But for better or worse, I have been initiated in the ways of academic Homeric Studies, which means I have been primed to think in terms of ‘epic’ and ‘hero’ and even ‘epic hero’, or other concepts which turn out to be almost completely useless for the empirical engagement with the score for performing Homer which the ancient world has left us. We need not even mention notions of ‘oral theory of composition’ and ‘composition-in-performance’, even more useless for the interpretation of this artefact’s intent. All the oral theories are purely metre-based notions, which I have proved structurally inapplicable to Homer’s tonal poetry, or indeed any melodic composition. The Iliad and the Odyssey are, in point of fact, tonal poems, a point of fact which seems completely lost on the blinkered professionals who make a living in Homeric Studies.
To perform Homer for this project, however, has proved a step in real time beyond a negative theoretical proof, to an immersion in vivid dramatic reality. Aristotle tells us that prior to tragedy and comedy, ‘Homer alone … in particular crafted dramatic imitations (μιμήσεις δραματικὰς ἐποίησεν, Poetics 1448b37).’ Little attention has been paid to this priceless historical observation, as a clue to what rhapsodic performance in a theatre was actually like. The dramatic mimesis most obviously occurs when the narrator becomes one of his protagonists, and speaks a speech in that character’s voice. Something magic happens in these moments, however used we are now to the experience of staged theatre and film. A primary experience of Homeric performance was evidently not of traditional songs sung traditionally, or of improvisation, but of transformation, of the performer before one’s eyes into people and gods, and even horses, of different ages and sexes and voices, all within the hexameter rhythm and diction. And of course there is so much more to Homer’s one-man-show than this becoming other people. So while I apologise for perhaps overreacting to a myopia induced by a number of academic prejudices, I must also testify, to all those who love Greek regardless of their ability or familiarity, that this experience of entering into Homer’s speeches, in the flesh, has been exhilarating!
We begin with Odysseus hiding his sobs behind his cloak. The man is still mostly a cipher. We begin to peel the onion. Alcinous alone knows that the song of Demodocus (about a quarrel between Achilles and Odysseus) has caused the strong reaction in his guest. But he knows nothing more. Could this stranger be a god? Or could he be a fit husband for his daughter, a man of his own heart? His move as a host is to calm things down, to divert and distract from possible discomfort. But he seems a nervous host; despite his isolation, and the irrelevance of other people’s opinions to his status, he is worried what the stranger may think and report of his Phaeacians. The braggart takes over; let’s show this guy, he says, “how much we surpass all comers / At boxing and wrestling, long jumps and foot races.”
Homer warns us that the Phaeacians are going to set Odysseus some testing trials. Why are we on his side? Why should we trust this hidden man, who lies at every turn—whom the Athenian tragedians remembered, after all, as a scheming villain, a Machiavel who would say anything, manipulate the innocent, to serve his and his master’s end? Even now he is actively concealing himself, creating exploitable ambiguities in his hosts’ minds. I think an awful lot of work was done in his brief conversation with Calypso about Penelope. Whatever one makes of his judgement and decision, however much we may falsely invest it with our own romantic fantasies, Odysseus does in fact reject immortality, reject unending sex with a goddess and divine cooking and care on a desert isle, for the chance to reunite with his ageing wife at home. There is a core to this decision which cannot be dissembled, and whose significance cannot be denied—whatever it actually means! And of course through countless epochs, this decision of Odysseus has resonated with audiences who will fill it with any amount of their own sentimentality. Perhaps not knowing why he chose Penelope and mortality is part of his appeal. Hence we readily join Odysseus behind his mask through his scenes of dissembling, in hopes we both ‘get away with it.’
Clark Kent also is a total liar. But we are in complete sympathy with him while he lies his way through life at the Daily Planet, and even through his intimacy with Lois Lane. We know he has a secret power meant for good, which he could not wield effectively if he were to be found out. (James Bond is another whom we join as a secret agent. His revealing of his name is always an anticipated moment. Bond is always working for Her Majesty, like Odysseus for Athena.) I think there is something of watching Clark Kent in the way we watch Odysseus through this episode. There will be a right time and place for his revelation, we feel. A particular quality of Clark Kent, however, is that he resists the temptation to use his power on personal grounds. No amount of direct challenges to his manhood will phase him. He cannot be called out. He bites his lip and pushes up his glasses, until circumstances force him to find a phone booth. Odysseus, by contrast, is made of weaker stuff than Superman, though he sheds a superman’s tears behind his cape.
Homer has a good time with the Phaeacians’ names. There is a bit of Gilbert & Sullivan in the catalogue of nautical pronomens for the athletes. In the Greek reading I even start to intone the lines, often as line segments rather than single breaths. I shall have to have discuss these concrete possibilities for Homeric performance in a separate post, especially as we are about to witness a performance by Demodocus surrounded by dancers. One line, announcing the man who succeeds in calling him out and getting under Odysseus’ skin, sticks out amidst the list:
ἂν δὲ καὶ Εὐρύαλος βροτολοιγῶι ϝἶσος Ἄρηϊ
And up rose Euryalus, the equal of Ares, Bane-of-Mortals, (8.115)
Euryalus’ name, ‘Broad Sea’, fits in with the rest (‘Seagirtus, son of Manyship, son of Carpenterman’), but there is a (no doubt) comic resonance which alerts us to the fact that this fellow will cause trouble. He gets a whole line, for one thing. But ‘Euryalus’ is a name which is known to have belonged to one of the Giants who participated in the Gigantomachy, the war between the Olympians and the mighty Giants of old. This event belongs to a realm which was evidently myth and legend for Homer himself. The line above could easily have once stood, verbatim, in a lost epic poem about that prehistoric contest which shaped the fate of the world. Euryalus the Giant could literally have been a match for Ares, rather than flatteringly. The Phaeacians, now removed to the suburbs, used once to be neighbours and kin of actual Giants and Cyclopses. In Homer’s conceit, they ‘step from’ that time into our dramatic present. If the Phaeacians’ own Euryalus is a sendup of the ancient Giant, then Odysseus, the subject of his challenge—a weather-worn older man—stands in for Ares and the Olympians. The latter group in the contest is the one with God, and history, on its side.
Homer’s narrative is itself therefore suffused with the ambient comedy which also drives the expressions of his speakers. Laodamas, Alcinous’ son, seems a nice sort of chap. It was his seat Odysseus displaced when he first arrived at Alcinous’ house; he was described then as ‘man-friendly’ (ἀγαπήνορα), and that he used to sit closest to his father, who loved him specially. This word expresses a preference for the masculine, not simply a kind of humanist philanthropy. It is not at all clear, however, whether agapēnōr connotes a sexual preference for men, or if anything weird is being suggested about the relationship with his father. (As we shall see, Alcinous is a man who is evidently quite fond of sex, and he has already married his niece.) It is best to acknowledge that we do not have our bearings in the world of Homer’s usage, and that this can be perilous in gauging comedy. But it is also good to check the stifling prudishness that often biases Classicist assessments, which can prevent areas of Homer’s detail from even registering. What is clear from the presentation is that Laodamas is a nice guy—the good cop in the scene, in relation to Euryalus’ bad one—and that he also rather conspicuously checks out Odysseus’ masculine physique. He goes from his thighs and his calves, to dwell on his arms, and then his sturdy neck and great strength. He rhapsodises that Odysseus is not lacking any of his hēbē, his ‘youthful bloom’, despite his suffering. It is not certain whether he means some general healthy glow by ἥβη, or if he is actually looking at another part of Odysseus’ anatomy.
In response, Euryalus encourages Laodamas to literally call Odysseus out (prokalessai). Laodamas, for his part, does this in a most friendly and encouraging way. He’s almost prescribing exercise as a way to relieve stress! And he reminds Odysseus that his escort home is already prepared for afterward, the ship is already drawn up. Odysseus demurs, saying he’s got other things on his mind than track and field. He rather indecorously points out that he’s just sitting there wallowing in limbo, longing for home, while they ponce about at games. (I paraphrase.) Odysseus plays a rôle, and it briefly works to keep him undiscovered. But Euryalus moves in on him: Hello sailor! You’re no man’s man. You’re a merchantman peddling wares, or a petty thief and pirate on the seas. No athlete you. (Again, I paraphrase.) Homer has set up the revealing of his Odysseus in such a way as to force its drama on us internally, if we have been taking his side. No male, unless perhaps he is Clark Kent, can take direct challenges and insults to his manhood, without at least making some attempt to show ‘what he’s really made of.’ What a splendid way to make a man drop his cover! Odysseus takes the bait, not just from Euryalus but from Homer.
The hurl of the discus is highly charged aurally and musically. Homer’s hexameter is capable of ‘special effects’, like the storm on the heath all captured in King Lear’s syllables.
βόμβησεν δὲ λίθος · κατὰ δ’ ἔπτηξαν ποτὶ γαίηι
And the stone boomed and whizzed: they crouched in fear upon the earth! (8.190)
There are two trisyllables (βόμβησεν and ἔπτηξαν), each of whose middle syllable is long and stressed with falling pitch, but each of which lands in between the dactylic downbeats (1 & 2, and 4 & 5 of the 6). This simple, potent syncopation captures the earthquake, and the Phaeacians reduced to cowering creatures. It is in any case impossible to say bombēsen without miming a bomb. There is a sudden change in the mood and the scene. Superman has shown his thighs and his arms, and a real menace is both heard and felt. (It must be said, both of these syncopations, following the law of tonal prominence I have discovered for Greek and Latin, are ignored or unknown to those professionals who now teach Homer in universities.)
Amidst this seriousness and bombast, Homer next turns up as Athena in the lists, out measuring the throws like an Olympic umpire. Why does Homer hint that maybe she cheated for her beloved, nudged his big discus along a bit? Homer’s playfulness in the wake of a scene-changing passage of surround-sound verse, is a striking way to shift the mood. I wonder in particular about Athena saying that even a blind man could tell Odysseus’ mark was far ahead of his competitors, “by feeling his way.” For some reason I think of blind Demodocus feeling for his lyre, hung from a peg on the pillar of Alcinous’ house. Is there a meta-level of exegesis due here?
Odysseus takes on a new rôle now; he makes a long speech in easy confidence of his stature. He’s encouraged he has a buddy somewhere out there, who was Athena the umpire. For the first time we hear him say “we Achaeans” and “in the country of the Trojans.” This begins to identify him. He also, like the Phaeacians, is someone who is going to step out of the story-world they inhabit, and enter into the present of Homer’s stage. His mention of Philoctetes, the famous bowman among the Achaean allies, about whom Sophocles composed a tragedy, is curious. In the play Odysseus plays a typically fiendish rôle, both in marooning Philoctetes and eventually, after ten years, trying to deceive him and steal his bow, which, it turns out, was to be essential to their army’s victory at Troy. Odysseus himself was never noted for his skill with the bow. But this prowess seems to be central to his identity in the Odyssey. Of course we can only speculate about the sense of Odysseus’ allusion here. I have even heard it argued, seriously, that this Odysseus is actually Philoctetes, the true bowman, and that his journey to Ithaca is like The Return of Martin Guerre. I don’t think so. Clearly I must have some bearings, albeit unconscious ones. Note that the poets, Homer and Sophocles et al, are our sources for all these stories. It is a falsifying fantasy that there is some body of Greek Mythology, like a Bible, standing behind the Greek poets, which they consult or cite, or otherwise have any interest in. Neither Homer nor his late descendant Sophocles cares about making their stories consistent with each other. These authors are in fact the authorities for their stories. What works, in the story or the drama, including surprises if need be, determines more than anything else what happens, in the hands of these iconoclastic artists. They should better be understood as founders or sources, rather than any sort of expression, of either religion or ‘mythology’.
The menace continues in Odysseus’ speech, despite that he’s relaxed from the heat of the challenge and the throw. Having been called out, and been made to drop his guard and partly reveal himself, he tells a story about Eurytus, a hero of Heracles’ vintage who challenged Apollo to a contest of the bow. The lesson for Euryalus, Odysseus’ would-be bully, as well as for the crowd present, is delivered in no uncertain terms: Apollo killed him. But as we come to expect, there is some sort of meta-lesson involved. For this Eurytus left his bow to his son Iphitus; and Iphitus gifted it to Odysseus, once upon a time and a place. This is the very bow now hung up in a store room in Ithaca, waiting for the man who can string it to return. Those who dare to call out this Apollo in disguise—and want to sleep with his wife—ought to know what’s coming to them.
Alcinous alone takes up the challenge of breaking the silence after Odysseus’ speech, a man much changed in the tone and the substance of his speech. That throw of the discus really has had almost a percussive, stunning effect on those witnessing it. Alcinous had been impressed enough on a first impression to wonder about the stranger marrying his daughter Nausicaa. Now he seems rather more keen on putting some distance between himself and this possibly dangerous individual. He still cares what the stranger might say about him and his country to others. But note how he now imagines the telling: when “[y]ou take dinner with your wife and with your children.” There’s a wish there now, based on exactly no new evidence, that the stranger already has a wife and family somewhere. That’s telling about poor Alcinous, the ex-would-be father-in-law. Not just the discus itself, the man’s boast about his athletes has exploded in his face. Alcinous reverses himself completely, shamelessly, publicly:
For we’re not fist-fighters, without blame, nor are we wrestlers,
No; but on foot we run right quick, and we’re the very best at ships—
And with us a feast is always welcome, the cithara and the dances,
Changing clothes and cross-dressing; baths that are hot; and sex! (8.246-9)
He still harps on the fact that they’re good runners, because Odysseus himself gave him that out, suggesting he might have lost a step on his journey; but Alcinous actually boasts that the Phaeacians are good at sex! Thankfully, Odysseus does not take that claim as a challenge.
The King calls for a display of dancing and song. Go quickly for Demodocus’ phorminx! It’s lying “somewhere there in my house.” Now, Homer tells us, before the people head to the place for athletics, that the herald had brought Demodocus along; but first, he had hung up Demodocus’ lyre back on its peg, on the pillar of Alcinous’ house (8.105). In other words, we know exactly where that phorminx is in Alcinous’ house. It seems impossible not to read a little heavily here: Alcinous not knowing where the instrument is in his house suggests that he is not aware of the central, axial significance of poetry, song, and music in the structure of his household and the body politic. And with his own pointed, intrusive concern for the location of pillar, woman, and lyre, Homer is suggesting that perhaps, we should be.
In Greek:

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A blind bard and a big purple cloak: Homer in English
17 dec 2024· Singing Homer Podcast
Odyssey 8.1-95
The dawn rises now upon the most extraordinary book, Book 8 of Homer’s Odyssey. We finally start to peel the onion. Athena somewhat comically announces Homer’s programme as the town crier, more of a carnival barker: come have a look at the mysterious wanderer who’s just showed up at Alcinous’ house. He’s built like the immortals! It’s said she thus aroused the Phaeacians’ fighting spirit (μένος) and heat (θυμός, ‘life’s breath’), suggesting a kind of competitive emulation. She sheds grace (χάρις) upon the stranger, however, making him seem taller and more solid, to help him withstand the trials his hosts will make of him. But it turns out it is the inner trials which will take centre stage, as Odysseus undergoes the torture, as we colourfully describe some kinds of emotional torment, simply of hearing his own story in song. We are invited, almost for the first time after seven books, to come along with the Phaeacians and have a good look at the prodigy who clothes in flesh the all-this-time hidden heart of our story.
We also meet Demodocus, since ancient times taken (by some) to be Homer’s alter ego. The Muse loved him wisely and too well, it seems, in that she gave him a good thing and a bad one. She robbed him of sight in his eyes, but granted him ‘pleasing song’. One doesn’t know if the pleasure of song resides in the singer, the audience, or both? Does the loss or lack of sight by itself impregnate the power and meaning of music? Homer’s parataxis simply lays out one bad thing and one good one; we are left to ourselves to synthesise causal connections and conspiracy theories. At any rate, it seems likely that Homer’s own depiction of Demodocus is itself the source and inspiration, when Homer’s ancient hymnodists and late quasi-biographers describe ‘him’ as a blind bard, and we continue to so imagine Homer.
I have called attention to a number of the potent women in the Odyssey, how they appear to express their power and centrality by stationing themselves adjacent to a fixed pillar of the household. Such a pillar connects the earth to the roof, or in Calypso’s case (if she borrows Daddy’s keys) the earth to the heaven. Much is made in this passage that Demodocus also is stationed by the pillar, and that his kithara hangs from a peg on it. He reaches above and behind himself to pluck it down from there to play and sing, once he’s had his fill of the food and wine in front of him. A cosmic source and significance for his singing seems evident, if there is anything to Homer’s symbolism. I am curious what connection might be drawn, however, between the blind bard and an axial feminine power. Or is Homer a woman?
Demodocus sings the latest song on the airwaves, ‘The Quarrel of Odysseus and Peleus’ son Achilles’. How he knows it, isolated as Phaeacia is, remains a mystery. I believe there is something mysterious in general about things ‘going viral’, even if the means of transmission is evident. That is, on Scheria, even if we can solve the problem of how the new songs could reach their distant market, there is still the problem of what makes a hit a hit. There seems to be something galvanising about certain songs or trends or news stories, so that the magnetic metaphor becomes physics: there is in fact an action effected at a distance, sometimes in a sense orthogonal to the direction of the magnetic force.
Let us hypothesise that the Iliad was already a ‘hit song’ in the world of the Odyssey’s composer. It begins with a quarrel between Agamemnon, king of men, and radiant Achilles. This is a quarrel between a King by right, a potency defined somewhat by circumstance, and a male warrior who is supreme by nature. What, by contrast, is a quarrel between two subordinates, while the King looks on approvingly? Is this Homer being ‘meta’? Is this some kind of joke?
The problem with recognising the Odyssey as comedy, is that it makes life perilous for a critic. There are broad, general patterns of action which make the identification secure: the hero begins his journey out of his natural place and merited station, but spends the plot regaining his stature and proving himself worthy of, or at least suited to, the exalted woman he marries at the end. At this level of generality we encompass not only the Odyssey but Dante’s Commedia, Shakespeare’s comedies, and (sometimes with gender switches) Austen’s novels. But scene by scene, detail by detail, we are never on sure ground. Even among contemporaries, a sizeable proportion of any audience is not in on the joke, and there is no shame in having punch lines explained to you. In point of fact, this generally makes the explainer feel very clever. But our grammars and lexica do not even put us in the room with Homer’s crowd. We would not get the vibe, even if we could be there. We are in a lower rung of desolation than the stupid fuck who needs everything explained to them. (He, at least, speaks our language.)
It is possible, for example, that the very idea of Odysseus being a hero worthy of his own epic, was once a joke. If so, it must have been a joke lost on the classical Greek writers we have left, as it is lost on most of us, but the fact remains that polymētis Odysseus was a liar and a schemer who became the machiavel of the Athenian stage. Definitively a subordinate, not the prince but adviser to the prince, he was in the Iliad an enforcer, and Agamemnon’s trusted yes-man and negotiator. The Odyssey poet does of course seem to have great sympathy for his hero. This is nowhere better expressed than by his extraordinary scenes with Athena, who is like a Penelope who can go where she wants, be who she wants, and do what she wants (avoiding Poseidon), with a magic wand in her pocket. It is hard to deny the love there, almost a love triangle or prism, if one includes author and audience among the lovers. But how do we know this plot schematic is not Homer’s own fantastic innovation? The fact is that the tragedians never forgot the scheming devil. Was it Homer himself who made Odysseus a hero—albeit a comic one—just as Plato heroised Socrates?
To cast Achilles as the opponent of Odysseus, while Agamemnon delights in his cabinet of rivals, fulfilling an Apolline oracle, is very much to bring Achilles down to earth. He is a force of nature, in fundamental conflict with any political would-be monarch. It is also very much to elevate Odysseus. Agamemnon may think these two are the “best of the Achaeans,” but there would be a number of other claimants for being the best after Achilles, ahead of Odysseus. Agamemnon may in fact miss entirely the point of Apollo’s riddling oracle, like Croesus in Herodotus. There Croesus was told that if he invaded Persia, a great empire would fall. It did not occur to him that it could be his own one. In Agamemnon’s case, he does not see that as king, he is the ‘best of the Achaeans’ in a way that even Achilles cannot rival. It is that conflict between the best of the Achaeans, between the great king and the greatest warrior, which the oracle is most likely to intend, as to be the beginning of suffering for the Trojans and the Danaans alike. Cf. the Iliad. Hence even if there was a poem there about a real conflict between Achilles and Odysseus—and Homer’s lines surely read like the proem to such a poem—the Iliad and its quarrel would trump it, on the very same terms Demodocus’ proem delineates. The Iliad sings Apollo’s prophecy fulfilled, this time with the true duo, paired in strife, who were the ‘best of the Achaeans’.
The simplest meta-reading of Demodocus’ song is that a quarrel between Achilles and Odysseus is really about a quarrel between the Iliad and the Odyssey, via the proxies of the human subjects at their centres. I have already made a case that there is such a quarrel from the point of view of the later poem. It sometimes seems that the Odyssey means to resolve somehow or atone, even, for a disruption of the cosmic order and the balance between male and female. The first marker for this to catch my eye was the sacrifice of the heifer to Athena, at the hands of Nestor’s sons. The women surrounding ululate for their own sacrifice, as well as for the unfortunate freshly-gilded cow. Something needs to be reconciled, or otherwise dealt with, at this halfway house Phaeacia, before Odysseus returns home.
And of course he cries about it. The sobbing Odysseus from Calypso’s Isle has already become an icon. One literally does not know whether to laugh or cry—that is, to feel sympathy or to keep our distance from the crybaby. This time Odysseus hides his ‘beautiful face’; so cloaked, we can only imagine what is going on within. But that very often is Homer’s art, to delineate quite vividly the exterior, an outside, the sobbing figure enveloped in a purple cloak, so only his physical neighbour could intuit any discomfort, while prompting our own imaginations and projections to fill the space behind the mask. What is it about Demodocus’ song and art that has so infiltrated behind the beautiful face, so that hidden tears stream out the eyeholes like water through a leak?
She pulls the eyes out with a face like a magnet—Elvis Costello
Is it simply the memories that cause pain, about the passage of time, the loss of companions, all of it threaded through by bad decisions? There was plenty of crying at Menelaus’ table, ostensibly prompted by the thought of Odysseus, although Telemachus had never met the man, and his bedmate Peisistratus was crying for the brother he lost to the war (again whom he’d never met). The representation of tears of loss in such cases, as facts of the psyche despite their being no memory of the lost father or brother, seems to me to be psychologically true. But Menelaus’ tears may perhaps be compared to Odysseus’s, while he listens to Demodocus sing. They are both has-been warriors, lonely veterans.
Let me suggest, however, that unlike Menelaus, Odysseus is experiencing something cathartic, something purifying through his tears. We are not privileged with any detail or much context. But the play’s the thing. Demodocus is singing the play within the play, and Odysseus is caught in the conscience. When he is confronted with himself and his words and actions, Odysseus cannot help but weep. It is possible that he only sees these words and actions for what they are, for the first time, through Demodocus’ depiction and art. I remember when a film by Oliver Stone called Platoon came out, there was quite a cultural moment in America, when more than a decade after the end of the Vietnam war, American veterans felt together a kind of public catharsis. Many testified that they had not been able to face or think about or ‘process’ their memories of war, until they saw that movie. For Menelaus, the only remedy for his grief was Helen’s drugs. Drugs were often a first recourse for Vietnam veterans as well. But perhaps for Odysseus, in the fantastic theatre of Phaeacia, there is also the possibility of catharsis and self-awareness through art.
Insight is the inaudible gift of the blind bard. It hides behind a purple cloak. In this growing awareness I am encouraged to imagine that there, perhaps, is a true and final victory for Odysseus, over either splendid Achilles or Agamemnon, lord of warrior-men, or any other would-be rival for him whose acts and words we sing about, or sermonise.
In Greek:

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“We’re a jealous lot on the ground, the tribes of mankind”: Homer in English
7 dec 2024· Singing Homer Podcast
Odyssey 7.261-347 (end)
Let me call attention to two moments in the close of Odysseus’ speech to Queen Arete. The first is Odysseus’ comment that Calypso ordered him to return home “because of a message from Zeus—or perhaps even her own mind was turned …” The truth is that when Hermes delivered Zeus’s message to her island, Odysseus had been alone on a headland, wasting away in tears. He may not have known the visit had happened, and so we are left with him at this point perhaps genuinely unsure what Calypso’s motivation had been. This could be a moment of rare, unmotivated honesty on Odysseus’ part. Perhaps he supposes it possible that she had tired of him, in the way it is said explicitly by the poet that he had tired of her (5.153)? The fact is that Calypso had never let on that Hermes had visited—Homer seems to enjoy pointing out that Odysseus had later sat to dinner in the exact chair on which the Olympian had just been sitting, presumably unbeknownst to himself—and she breathed no word of the fact that Hermes had actually departed with a threat of violence from Zeus if she should disobey (5.146-7). No, Calypso announces the return on a raft as her own idea, swears an oath (to satisfy Odysseus’ suspicions) that she’s not intending him harm, and even offers him sustenance and immortal clothing to protect him—which does not, at the end of the day, do much for the fellow but weigh him down. It seems that when it comes to speakers, this Homer particularly enjoys composing for ones who dissemble, Calypso no exception.
But Odysseus’ own big lie comes at the end of his speech. He claims that for all his grief, he has recounted the truth (ἀληθείην κατέλεξα). But we know that ‘in reality’, Odysseus had been too modest to be naked among Nausicaa’s handmaids, and had asked them to leave the area while he bathed himself in the river. The girls then go off and report this to Nausicaa, who is of course out of the picture. As she later tells the stranger:
… I would be indignant with another, any girl that does this sort of thing,
Who against the will of her own father and mother, yet living,
Would have sex with men, before they go for a public wedding. (Odyssey 6.286-8)
(One notes the plural ‘men’.) But Odysseus tells her own parents that Nausicaa herself bathed him, and then dressed him in the clothes he’s now wearing, which her own mother had made. What’s he playing at? Why this lie direct, falsely impugning their Nausicaa’s propriety and judgement, titillating the idea that they had been intimate? Is this to suggest that he’s now willing to do the honourable thing by their daughter, as a previous one of our generations might have put it?
Alcinous does not acknowledge the possibility of this scandalous impropriety, but deflects to another one: that his daughter and her attendants should have brought the stranger to him themselves, as he came to Nausicaa first as a suppliant. But we shall soon see that the stranger’s possible marriage to his daughter is very much top of mind.
Odysseus then purports to defend Nausicaa’s judgement, after imputing acts to her she had no part in. He then lies and attributes to himself, not to Nausicaa, the decision to separate from their entourage on the way to the town. He claims he wanted to avoid rousing resentment and jealousy. This from a man who’s just made her parents imagine their virginal daughter bathing him herself, a naked old hunk in a river.
In response Alcinous prays to Zeus, Athena, and Apollo that a man “of the sort you actually are—thinking the things that I myself do,” would settle down in Phaeacia and possess his daughter in marriage. He doesn’t even know the stranger’s name! And what is it about the stranger that makes him suppose they think exactly alike, share the same tastes? Well, there is this. If Odysseus did fancy Nausicaa, and want to marry her, as he has given Alcinous ample reason to suppose, the King would have found a buddy who also likes to rob the cradle. (His wife Arete is his brother’s daughter.) Peas in a pod.
Alcinous is quite the braggart. Homer’s dramaturgy is fully developed when it comes to the speeches. (In academic environments, such seemingly obvious things still need to be said.) His speakers have an angle which they leak, to Homer’s (and his performer’s) evident delight. The stranger gives him a rare outside audience to impress, and one gets the sense that his proposed escort is as much a chance to show off the prowess of his shipmen as it is a sacred service to the passenger. There is a fascinating but frustratingly vague allusion to a journey the Phaeacians undertook, to carry Rhadamanthys, the blonde judge in the Elysian Fields where blonde Menelaus is destined to dwell, to see Tityus the Gaian giant. Apparently this Earth-born prodigy was something to go a distance to see, unlike, say, some washed-up hero from the Trojan War. I find no elucidating footnote to give this episode any context, but it certainly serves once again to link the Phaeacians to figures from a past who were ‘mythical’ already to Homer. They are a bridge to an age of giants that has passed, just as, in a slightly different way, Odysseus himself bridges the poetic world of the Iliad, of the berserkers who kill by nines and the Götterdämmerung, and that of the unformed, rudderless, bourgeois youth of Telemachus and the suitors.
The mention of Euboea strikes a particular note. Alcinous is boasting of how vast the sea journeys are, which the Phaeacian seamen can make in a day. Of course one does not at all know to where Homer’s place names refer, but for a classical audience, Euboea is just over there. It’s New Jersey. To my mind, it suits the Odyssean humour for Alcinous’ so distant-to-be-legendary Euboea, to be comically local for us. To adapt Monty Python’s ‘Nudge Nudge’ sketch: “Euboea? Euboea! Say no mowah!”
In Greek:

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‘Odysseus the Clever, the Variegated Plotter’: Homer in English
27 nov 2024· Singing Homer Podcast
Odyssey 7.167-260: Polymētis Odysseus
Alcinous reveals the Phaeacians to be something of a throwback, in the mythic scheme of things. He announces his intent to provide the escort Odysseus seeks, effortless and painless, as seems to be the ancient practice of these ferrymen. But he makes clear that their service ends upon delivery; afterward, the stranger will be subject to the fate spun out for him when the thread was cut at his birth, by those “weighty ladies,” the Spinners. But this also suggests that for the time he is under their care and escort, the presently anonymous Odysseus will be outside of any deterministic bounds signified by the myth of the Spinners at our birth. This is as much as to say that the land of Phaeacia lives as far outside the rules of time and birth and place as mortals doomed to die some time, can be. But then Alcinous wonders out loud if this stranger before him might in fact be one of the deathless ones; evidently something about Odysseus’ apparition makes this plausible. In that case, complains Alcinous, the times they are a-changin’. The gods never used to hide themselves at our parties! Even if you ran into them on the street. We’re from the world of Cyclopses and Giants, God’s neighbours! It may in fact be that Homer intends the arrival of Odysseus to mark a transition in the order of the world, in which the Κύκλωπες and Γίγαντες of old, and the Phaeacians too, will obsolesce. Perhaps heroes, gods, and epic poetry as well.
Even if Alcinous does not actually suspect that Odysseus is a god, it is pretty clear, and rightly so, that he thinks the stranger is nevertheless concealing something.
To be honest, the stranger has so far been concealed from us as well. We are at the beginning of peeling the onion. Odysseus’ characteristic epithet in Homer, from Iliad I on, is πολύμητις: ‘of many counsels or devices’. Polu/poly is ‘many’, mētis is ‘mental acuity’, ‘shrewdness’, ‘mind’, or else the internal object of such faculties: a ‘cunning plan’. Personified, in stories outside Homer, she is the maternal source of Athena, in the sense that Zeus is supposed to have consumed Metis whole and given birth to their fully armed daughter from his head. If this story was common, it is no wonder that for Homer Athena is both cerebral and the source of higher thoughts, thoughts with a view to the big picture, in the minds inhabiting the heroes whom she favours with a visit. But she can also be a maiden fetching from the well, or a Taphian pirate, or Mentor, or a witch with a wand. Homer’s embodied imagination is not enslaved to a ‘mythology’, or any other modern concept which helps make it seem like the ancient Greeks had a religion.
In the context of the Odyssey, I always hear the ‘many’ in this epithet in relation to the peri in Penelope’s characteristic epithet, περίφρων. The latter is often translated ‘circumspect’, or ‘prudent’, without due regard to the mental asset expressed by phrōn. I think, however, that this is peri in the sense ‘more’ rather than ‘around’ or ‘about’, and translate ‘Penelope passing wise’. Odysseus’ ‘many’ may be ever so many, in the cognitive department, but it is not as much as Penelope’s ‘more’.
We have not yet escaped the American Homerist’s 20th Century dogma, that the epithets in noun-and-epithet phrases in Homer, like πολύμητις Ὀδυσσεύς and περίφρων Πηνελόπεια, functioned primarily to fill metrical spots in the hexameter line; in other words, they were thought to be filler, whose meaning did not necessarily register. Such phrases were thought to be part of a formulary, with which a supposed oral tradition of storytelling would allow the night’s improviser to draw on a stock of ready-made phrases to fill up the six measures of his lines, which the professional academics suppose he might otherwise have struggled to do. This dogma, however, views the Homeric verses as purely metrical things—a preposterous notion with no basis in history or text. Homer himself describes his art as singing, and his work as song; there is no such thing as purely metrical song. And the text of Homer we have is replete with a systematic set of tonal accent marks, completely ignored by the theory of oral composition-in-performance, which indicate the melodic contour of phrases and lines, together with the syllables upon which the voice lands in emphasis (rising in pitch or falling, according to a rule). These tonal emphases thereby infuse the otherwise monotonous hexameter drum-beat with both melody and rhythm. You hear them each time in my Greek rendition (below).
Apparently the repetition of phrases and themes in Homer, including the noun-and-epithet phrases like πολύμητις Ὀδυσσεύς, needed condescending explaining by mid-Century scholars raised on silent reading and ‘literature’. For some reason it did not mitigate these deficiencies that these people were also raised in the profound modern musical cultures of Europe and the Americas. I once wrote, ‘one would as soon explain repetition in music, as wetness in water.’ More recently: ‘How does one even approach a question about why there is a repetition of themes in a symphony or dramatic opera? How is it possible that Homeric scholarship can so seriously and sophisticatedly ignore the fact that Homer asks his performer to sing his verses, and act like there’s something that needs explaining or apology, in the typically musical features of the resulting song? … The ignoring of the seemingly irrelevant accent marks in texts seems to have led not to the realisation that all we could know, sadly, about the sound and performance of Greek poetry was its metre, but to the delusion that metre was all there was to know.’
Paolo Vivante first recognised that the function of noun-and-epithet phrases was evocative of their speaker or object, rather than predicating upon them; like summoning titles or names, which bring their referent to the storyteller’s foreground. Just as we don’t always register the majesty in ‘Your Majesty’, or the ‘gentleman’ when addressing a Congressman on the House floor, predication is not the primary function of these epithets. In my work I factored in the circle-dance origin of the hexameter rhythm, a medium of summoning presences, and the simply musical character of Greek verbal composition of all kinds; Greek was a language whose words, even in prose environments, had built-in tonal contours. Hence I compared these evocative Homeric phrases, like πολύμητις ʼΟδυσσεύς, to signature lines in opera, which recur significantly at dramatic moments. In Homer this is usually when he summons a character to make a speech, before delivering it in the first person. These name-and-epithet phrases summon the hero on a number of levels all at once, and hence were an unusual and powerful resource for the evocative ‘staging’ and presence of a singing soloist, playing many parts, rather than a concession to any sort of imagined metrical necessity. (One does not experience this Classicist’s ‘necessity’ in any of the works of Bach or Mozart, which are rigidly quantitative all the same; metre is a necessary condition for music, but a completely insufficient one.)
Vivante pointed out that when the same Homeric epithets, which normally resided in their summoning phrases, were displaced to other parts of the line, and became predicate adjectives, their meaning often became focussed and sometimes oddly different from their assumed sense inside the phrase. We don’t generally register the terror when an event in the day is ‘a terrible tragedy’; that phrase has become a formula, a noun-and-epithet phrase. In TV news-speak, things never simply go wrong nowadays, invariably they go “horribly wrong.” But the effect is different when predication is intended, as: “the tsunami was terrible, the destruction was horrible.” Terror and horror become real when deployed as predicates.
The question of registration then becomes a little delicate. We have already seen this early in Book 1, when Zeus refers to “blameless Aegisthus” in his opening speech, where he is pointedly singling out Aegisthus (and his fellow humans) for blame. Put most starkly, either ‘blameless’ (ἀμύμων) is a meaningless title of nobility, filling up the line, or it is a blunt satire, too on-the-point for irony, of epic norms. Unsurprisingly, I think the truth is more on the side of the latter. And yes, I find his usage in that instance something of an unsuccessful one for Homer—in part, precisely because its blunt opacity has spawned such small-minded disagreement.
In the case of Odysseus, πολύμητις seems intended to be complimentary, but it seems to me Homer means to ring changes on this Odyssean epithet—explore it, if you will—in his Odyssey. You would likely be guarded in your approach to an encounter with someone bearing such a description and reputation. Donald Trump would have probably just called him ‘Lyin’ Odysseus’, or some such, and not in fact be far off the mark if he were looking to run against the guy. What after all are these epithets like ‘clever’ or ‘intricate-minded’ in real life? Why, they describe a liar. Not just a liar, but unlike Trump, a good liar.
Homer thrusts the meaning of Odysseus’ epithets to the foreground in the line where Alcinous moves toward the suppliant, and the narrator says,
He took him by the hand, Odysseus the Clever, the Variegated Plotter,
And raised him from the hearth and sat him on a shining chair …
The two adjectives, δαίφρων and ποικιλομήτης, are each of them usually used as single epithets, joined together often with Odysseus’ name in an hexameter segment. Here, instead, they are both sounded, and together make up their own half-line, where Odysseus’ name belongs to the line’s first half (before the caesura). The effect is to disattach them from name-and-epithet phrases, breaking their musical spell, so to throw their meaning into particular relief as predicates. Because we are so used to treating these two words only as epithets, such a move by Homer makes us pay special attention, I feel, also to Odysseus’ regular epithets employed in their normal rhythmic phrases. So let us do that. The message, I would suggest in advance, is not subtle: not only Alcinous and Arete, but we ourselves are to treat the mysterious stranger with the highest suspicion. The seemingly long-suffering suppliant whom Alcinous takes by the hand, is in fact a schemer of the highest order, a variegated plotter whom we should expect to be manipulating us at every turn—even in his genuflection and exhausted supplication. Odysseus is putting on a show. Improvising nervously, perhaps, but not letting on. The Phaeacians, we recall—with the possible exception of Demodocus the bard—do not know either his name or his characteristic epithets.
“When someone asks you if you’re a god, you say YES!” Odysseus does not follow this advice from Ghostbusters. Instead the Poly-Wily one plays to the crowd, first to elicit sympathy from them for his suffering, then sings a lament about the tyranny of the stomach. The shtick about that bitch the stomach is just that, what the comedians call a ‘bit’, played to the groundlings. He is keen to dispense with any advantage he might have had in the Phaeacians’ readiness to see him as a god—his presence there, having crossed an ocean which they knew to be traversable only by themselves, is a miracle after all—but no, he’s just eaten and drunk ravenously in front of them, and embracing his needy humanity is the better look and the better odds. But at the same time, he does not want to come off himself as a groundling, just to play to them. Odysseus appears conscious of the importance of perceived status with these people, who value their closeness to the gods. Note how at the end of his speech, he claims he could die if he were just to see his native land: “My property, my slaves and the high-roofed big house.”
Note the expressed content of his longing: it is all for his property, his slaves! There is not a breath or a word to hint that a Penelope is anywhere in his thoughts. This is not the open book he seemed on Calypso’s Isle, to Calypso herself. Here he sounds like he might even be single! In the end does he want to seem eligible, for whatever eventuality, to take Nausicaa’s hand? Yes this is a Poly-Wily Odysseus, holding, tossing, and playing different cards at once.
When the guests all leave, there is a moment of silence. Odysseus is left alone with Alcinous and Arete while the servants clean up. Here he is ‘radiant Odysseus’, δῖος Ὀδυσσεύς, which to my mind is an epithet phrase that suggests he is briefly himself. Silence is truth. But of course Arete must ask about the origin of his clothes, which she knows she made herself; and in his response, Odysseus is once again announced as polymētis. He tells the story of his surviving the shipwreck bestriding the keel, and arriving at Ogygia. But Calypso is now, for the first time, a ‘dread goddess’ (δϝεινὴ θεός), a term that applied earlier in Book 7 to Athena herself, when she had shed a mist to hide Odysseus as he made his way to the city. It later applies to the witch Circe. It does seem to imply that Calypso wielded somewhat ominous or sinister powers over him. Odysseus also refers to her as δολόεσσα Καλυψώ, as though she were a creature of snares and tricks. He speaks as if her tendance of him was almost forcible. One remembers vividly, however, Odysseus’ interchange with Calypso, whose sexual relationship moves from Homer’s description, ‘a man unwilling next a woman all too,’ to the moment after they discuss the concept of mortal Penelope, when they become a dual subject—a pair neither singular nor plural:
So they went, the pair of them, into a nook of the hollowed cave
And began making love; and they stayed by one another.
One may presume that Odysseus’ characterisation of the many years under Calypso could be tailored somewhat for the seamstress Queen Arete, who may indeed be measuring up a son-in-law. At the moment we break off from his speech, he has brought up the issue of his clothing, which is on the Queen’s mind, to point out how his tears had continually soaked the clothes Calypso gave him. Ah, but those were immortal, even immortalising clothes (ambrota). Arete is no doubt interested to learn, halfway through his explanation, that the stranger now seated by her has turned down immortality and immortal clothes, before arriving naked on the shore to be clothed in the opportunities before him.
In Greek:

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‘Ripening Fig on Fig’: Homer in English
19 nov 2024· Singing Homer Podcast
Odyssey 7.84-166
I know a bank where the wild thyme blows,
Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows,
Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine,
With sweet musk-roses and with eglantine:
There sleeps Titania sometime of the night,
Lull’d in these flowers with dances and delight …
How do these lines of Oberon’s work? Certainly they evoke images with their colours, and more astoundingly, the sniffed-in aromas of flowers—words do have this power of transport in representation, within or outside of verse, though they do not always seem to exercise it. Prompts to the memory, from words or otherwise, seem to be as unpredictable as they may be galvanising or devastating. But the rhythms of poetry and song seem uncannily able to marshal, and spotlight, the power of words. Beyond sight and smell, there is a virtually tactile miming of these floral beings in the rhythmically engaged structures of tongue, palate, throat, and lips, even the saliva. ‘Luscious’ is a luscious word. ‘Oxlips’ come to life in the slowly sibilant saying of them. The nature of words is therefore more than simply referential: in the rhythm of the poet’s lines they become themselves embodied substances. Poets and songwriters remind us of this substance of words, by revealing it.
Homer of course was the original word musician and evoker of substances. Odysseus has been left standing alone on the threshold of the estate of Alcinous in mysterious Phaeacia, contemplating what is within, and Homer does not resist the temptation to join him in conjuring the rhythm of his vista. No speech occurs in this passage, in which he might immerse as an actor; Homer instead invests himself in the sheer description of things that are very hard to relate to anything normal. Hence similes are rare—in fact there is only one—and it is unusually elusive.
Homer has engaged in such contemplation already in the Odyssey; more a propos of Oberon’s lines was the description of Calypso’s eco-cave, as Hermes stood on its threshold in awe and admiration (5.57-74). Earlier than that was Telemachus gaping at Menelaus’ interior space, wondering if this was what Zeus’s front room was like (4.74). It is that encounter which most comes to mind now; once again we hear how Alcinous’ house shone ‘like the light of the sun … or the moon.’ But Phaeacia outdoes anything that Menelaus may have scrounged from Egypt. The structure is made of shining metals, where humbler folk must settle for timbers. The walls and threshold are made of copper, the doorposts silver, and the doors made of gold. Though they are exceptionally extravagant and high tech, the works of art in Alcinous’ house combine form and function, true to the spirit of the Odyssey’s aesthetic philosophy: the dogs crafted of gold and silver, by Hephaestus, actually keep guard; boys made of gold, do in fact hold the torches needed to light the feast. (At a dramatic moment later on, Odysseus himself becomes such a torch-bearer, in his own dinner hall.)
Everything is in excess; this calls forth not similes but proportions, so that one can use the imagination to project scales rather than contemplate striking comparisons. For example, by as much as the men are superior to all others in their know-how at sea-faring, so also superior are the Phaeacian women in the arts of spinning and textiles: the art of the text.
But the topmost splendour (literally topmost) are the seat coverings, the draperies woven by human women. Immediately following the torch-boys made of gold are fifty real slave women, some grinding at the mill, while others weave at the loom and still others sit and spin the wool. It is these last, the slaves in a heavenly textile factory, who call forth the only brief simile: their motion in their seats as they spin is like ‘the leaves on a tall, tapering poplar.’ One does not actually know the tree for sure, or, therefore, the intended motion. Now, when it comes to Homer’s trees and birds, we can only make guesses. Here is a question that is an instant path to desert island metaphysics: how do we know that we each see the same colour orange, or merely call what we see the same name? Homer has no word for ‘blue’, unless it is the pigment of Alcinous’ cornice, called cyanus. The Iliad’s sky is ‘coppered’ or ‘brazen’. I really don’t think that Homer’s sky was the colour of ours. One can only infer that the rhythm of these spinner-women bobbing at their work waved through them like the familiar rustle through the leaves of a tall and handsome tree. Colours, leaves, winds, and women must all be imagined.
Right alongside the work in progress, we see the finished product: the hung linens drip with olive oil. This is a significant feature of the qualities of Phaeacia, this simultaneity. As in art, so in nature: we move into an extraordinary orchard, where the grapes are in flower, ripening, being harvested, being dried, or being trod into wine all at the same time. On the shield of Achilles (Iliad XVIII), the scenes are depicted in sequence, from spring marriages to communal ploughing to summer wars to harvest songs, in a catalogue, although, to be sure, the framing of the shield itself does suspend the separate vignettes in an ever-present. But one feels the passage of time all the same. In the harvest scene in particular, Homer himself sings a singer, a boy playing a lyre who sings the Linos song as the villagers gather the grapes. The harvest song captures the whole in mid-motion, the predicament of people who live in the temperate zones: its tones look back to the bloom of spring, and call a halt to the wars of the summer season, as it accompanies the reaping of the mature fruit. But reaping is killing; the harvest heralds the coming of winter and death. Without being able to hear or understand a word of it, one knows that awareness of the coming cold and bleak infuses the poignant notes of the Linos song.
Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on …. —Keats
There seems to be no winter in Alcinous’ orchard. Or rather, the fruit trees seem oblivious to it; all the stages of ripening fruit are present at once. I have seen this only once in my life, in what the Kandyans call a kamaranga tree—in the tropics, a region without winter beyond Odysseus’ travels and ken. It is Poseidon who travels among the Aethiopes.
The flowers and new star fruits were on the tree simultaneously with last season’s lot. But all the other fruit trees there seemed to have their seasons, though these weren’t defined by winters. The Phaeacian fantasy is indeed one for the temperate zones which are defined by winter, and so dreams not of no seasons, but for the joys of the other seasons and the absence of that one. Hence in Phaeacia there is none of the looming dearth against which we harvest, but also therefore, none of the beauty of the Linos song unheard.
τάων οὔ ποτε καρπὸς ἀπόλλυται οὐδ’ ἀπολείπει
χείματος οὐδὲ θέρευς, ἐπετήσιος · ἀλλὰ μάλ’ αἰεί
Ζεφυρίη πνείουσα τὰ μὲν φύει, ἄλλα δὲ πέσσει.
ὄγχνη ἐπ’ ὄγχνηι γηράσκει, μῆλον δ’ ἐπὶ μήλωι,
αὐτὰρ ἐπὶ σταφυλῆι σταφυλή, σῦκον δ’ ἐπὶ σύκωι. Odyssey 7.117-21
Of these the fruit never dies, nor even diminishes,
Neither winter nor summer, all year long: no, quite continuously
The Zephyr breathes out of the west, sprouting some, ripening the rest.
Pear grows old upon pear, apple on apple,
But upon a cluster it’s a cluster, and ripening fig on fig.
What in English is pear upon pear, the new upon the ripe, and apple upon apple, is in Greek onkhnē ep’ onkhnēi, mēlon epi mēlōi, nominative upon dative case. Hence there is a change of ending between pear and pear and apple and apple, unlike in English, as well as cluster upon cluster and fig on fig, staphulēi staphulē and sūkon epi sūkōi, creating a complex of rhymes in lines 120-1. It is commonly taught, somewhat proudly following Milton, that the ancients did not ‘do’ end rhymes, as so tenderly executed in Oberon’s couplets above. But just look at the emphatic endings of Homer’s lines, 7.117-21. Even if you can’t sound them out, you can see the rhyming shapes of the syllables at the lines’ ends, printed in bold: ἀπολείπει, αἰεί, πέσσει, followed by μήλωι, σύκωι. There is a song-like quality to these, describing the fecundity of a land that perhaps only exists in song.
Classics students take pride in understanding what they call ‘agreement’, between noun and adjective, which means agreement between case endings. But the audible cue for this agreement is almost always rhyme, rhyming word-endings. The clever ones feel especially clever when they remember that some feminine nouns have masculine declensions, so that the feminine endings on their adjectives do not seem to agree, or that some adjectives don’t have feminine forms, so that feminine nouns have to agree with what look like masculine epithets or predicates. But this classicist’s ethos should not obscure the fact that rhyme—from the perspective of a line, ‘internal’ rhyme—is actually everywhere in Greek and Latin poetry and prose. It is indicative of how tone deaf is the Enlightenment Classics tradition, that it teaches visual written agreement over the aural, oral fact that rhyming endings are the principal cues which connect subjects to intended predicates in its dead languages. And we see here that in literally florid passages, Homer himself likes him a bit of end rhyme.
The avoiding or denying of winter and death only makes their silent presence—underlying things nevertheless—the more ominous. At least that is how it seems to me. There is something too good to be true about Phaeacia. Their ships are quick, like a wing or a thought. Their orchards enjoy all seasons but winter at once, all year-round. Their feast days also are unending. And Arete is married to her drunk uncle: for some reason, clearly intended, Odysseus calls attention to this fact, addressing her at first blush with his arms ’round her knees as “daughter of Rhexenor,” her husband’s only brother. This blue lineage was a tidbit that had been revealed to him by Athena as the virgin carrying a pitcher; perhaps he took her gossip as an instruction for his pitch? Perhaps that was the intent of Athena’s chat, to prep him for this crucial moment of public supplication? In the rest of his short address, he wishes that the children of the Phaeacians’ nobility inherit their things—not, say, a simple wish for everyone’s prosperity, and hence slightly puzzling—together with any prizes the demos bestows. Now, we have had only one mention of a prize bestowed by the people, in last time’s reading; is this a reference to Eurymedousa, the concubine turned Nausicaa’s nurse and chambermaid, whom the Phaeacians had gifted to Arete’s husband Alcinous? That was a perhaps slightly indelicate fact revealed to us by Homer himself, not Athena. (Is there a difference?) Hence one wonders if Odysseus’ supplication is meant as a provocation for some reason. Or is the whole thing rather a colossal faux pas, intended for our (the audience’s) amusement? The quite rapid drama of the moment perhaps detracts from our attention to the substance of Odysseus’ words, but when there is time to reflect on them, the result is more unsettling and unresolved than satisfying.
Is all as it seems to be, or is the ‘city of desire’ a figment of wish-fulfilment and death denial, a modern supermarket of year-round apples, oranges and mangoes? We recall that on his escape from the sea, Odysseus feared that he would die from exposure to the cold, and that the fall of leaves under his chosen twinned olive trees would protect two or three men from a winter storm. Winter and death are there lurking, even in Phaeacia, even if spring is coming and girls think of washing their dancing clothes in the wild wood.
But Odysseus does not die wondering. He penetrates the dream.
In Greek:

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‘The city—ravishing and longed for—’: Homer in English
10 nov 2024· Singing Homer Podcast
Odyssey 7.1-83
Ancient Greek writers were the source of many of the genres of literature, and academic disciplines, that still get sorted into various departments and studies in the modern university. In light of this, Homer’s works become difficult to categorise for a modern academic, in that they are a source of sources and ancient for the ancients. He comes from another world, just as Phaeacia does for himself. However, the perspectives of two modern rubrics, I must admit, colour my registration of Homer’s Phaeacia. One is called today perhaps ‘cultural anthropology’; the other ‘political science’, which has its decidedly empirical aspect, and also ‘political theory’, which sometimes does not. But in the context of post-Homeric Greece, I think of the pre-Socratics and the Socratic philosophers, most of whom at some time or another engaged in speculation about what would be the ‘ideal city’. The grandest scale of the resulting compositions was surely reached in the mathematics of Plato’s Republic and the songs of his Laws. But comparison was very much a part of this partly speculative and partly revolutionary movement: how do they do things in Crete or Sparta as opposed to Ionia, or as we might say, how do they do things in Sweden as opposed to Singapore? Both these questions lead quite naturally to, ‘how ought one to do things?’
As for the ancient origin of modern cultural anthropology, I think instead of what Herodotus called his ‘history’, his inquiry into the great events of the past and the types of the peoples instigating or involved in them. The comparative instinct is again strong here, applied to cultural norms as against political orders. But how apply even a term like ‘culture’ to Homer, a concept which cannot be translated into his language? Herodotus was a traveler, and indeed for an observant and inquisitive traveler, detailed comparison leads very quickly to both cultural anthropology and political theory. Perhaps both these fields of inquiry have their origin in traveler’s tales. Now there is a genre that spans the ages and the globe. No doubt such tales were as old and romantic for Homer as they are for our cartographers. Yet Homer’s Odyssey is somehow both the paradigm and the pioneer. Here be strange creatures. There is very little for modern map makers to say about oceans.
When Odysseus is about to enter her, however, Homer does not speak of Phaeacia as a paradigmatic or perfect city, but rather a polis erannē: a city that arouses erotic desire—‘ravishing and longed for’. This could mean simply a city that suits Odysseus’ own desire, as a staging ground for his return home—his true desire. But Homer’s objective wording and pointed predication of ἐραννή rather objectify Phaeacia as a singularly beautiful thing, a city to fall in love with. (The word perhaps encourages a notion of Odysseus’ entrance as a penetration, as indeed does the image of Athena as a young virgin with a pitcher, which immediately follows [7.18-20].) A desired one is perhaps something quite different from an ‘ideal’ city. But Homer has a blueprint: he takes pains, directly or through others’ voices, to describe the city’s physical layout and its political and social castes. He mentions Nausithous’ the founder’s communal distribution of ploughland. What should undercut some of this for an audience is the place’s isolation: the agricultural self-sufficiency makes excellent sense, but what would be the point of walls and a fleet to such a city? Perhaps these contribute to a real Hellene’s sense of what is either gorgeous or ideal in a polis, so he is inclined to forgive any incongruity in the art.
But there is also incongruity in the comparison of cultures, if Phaeacia is supposed to be idealised. Homer seeds this doubt himself with his digression on the chambermaid, Eurymedousa, whom the Phaeacians had procured from elsewhere—as though they had been on a raid of their non-existent neighbours! The name of her town, Apeira, means ‘limitless’; to carry her off from Apeira, as the Phaeacian sailors did, is to carry her off from ‘The Infinite’. Be that as it may, it is said that she was brought to Alcinous as a ‘prize’. The understanding of this term which we derive from usage in the Iliad, is that Eurymedousa was to be his concubine. Now, does that mean it’s okay, just because it’s a thing invading armies do—to hand out captured women as top prizes to leading warriors in the general distribution of booty? How is Alcinous’ august and revered wife Arete supposed to feel about such arrangements? Homer seems to tease us with such revelations. We recall that when we were introduced to Eurycleia, Telemachus’ nurse—whose name Eurymedousa also recalls—we are told that Laertes (Odysseus’ father) had bought her with his own money, and honoured her in the house on a level with his own wife. But—and Homer rather emphasises the point—he did not sleep with her (1.433). We may infer that this was unusual behaviour on Laertes’ part, the abstaining from sex with his youthful and comely purchase. But does Homer celebrate a romantic monogamy in Laertes’ and Odysseus’ household? Or are they weird? Are we to think less of Alcinous’ and the Phaeacians’ usage, in awarding such a prize and embracing its intent? At the very least, Homer must be telling us these details to prompt some reaction. The comely Eurymedousa ended up Nausicaa’s nurse and now makes her some supper, just as Eurycleia had earlier made Telemachus’ bed and folded his clothes.
Perhaps less ambiguous morally, for all that Homer hints more than he states, are the revelations of Athena as she guides Odysseus to the palace. She appears as a young maiden carrying a pitcher. Does anyone know this figure as a motif? I think of Rebeccah from Genesis carrying a pitcher to the well, only to be spotted by Abraham’s flamboyant emissary in search of a bride for his son. It is wonderfully alluring, this image of the girl on her own with the pitcher, together with the idea that the public water source might be a place to get lucky. Perhaps there is something simply fervid about this city that ‘inspires eros’ (ἐραννή). In any case, the girlish instantiation of Athena is quite the gossip. There are hints in this ideal city of things being too good to be true. We learn that Alcinous and Arete, the royal couple, are in fact uncle and niece. Surely some sort of red flag goes up? Odysseus in his travels will encounter a number of different kinds of marital arrangements, some of them proudly incestuous. Something always ends up being off, dangerously off, with these people and places.
The flirtatious Athena seems to relish the juicy bits: Arete got her name from the very same parents who birthed Alcinous, she chuckles. Nausithous the patriarch was the son of Eurymedon’s daughter, who was impregnated by Poseidon. One presumes this happened after Eurymedon, king of the Giants, “destroyed his presumptuous people … then himself”. ‘Eurymedon’ is the masculine version of the name we have just heard, Eurymedousa, the prize concubine turned Nausicaa’s nurse and maid. Is she perhaps a descendant of Giants?
This undercurrent of strangeness perhaps sets us up for a quandary that is very real for me: what do we finally make of Athena’s admiration for Phaeacian matriarchy? There are many reasons, some of which I have been developing as we proceed, to think that the place of women in the home, in society, and in the political order is something very much in the front of Homer’s mind as he tells the Odyssey. The figure of the woman of the house (or the cosmos in Calypso’s case), stationed by the house’s pillar, has already become a symbolic motif. Even in light of this, Arete’s special significance in Phaeacia is highly marked. Her husband the king “honoured her, like no woman else is honoured upon the ground, / As many women as there are these days, hold the house beneath their men.” It is several times pointed out how ancillary Alcinous really is, in general but also in Odysseus’ particular interests. It is her, Arete, that he has to impress if he is to have a chance to win passage home. She is not merely the power behind the throne; no, she is the pillar around which the whole society is erected and upon which it leans. It is clear that her influence spreads far outside the domicile: unlike the other high-born women we have encountered, including Helen, she goes out on the town, and is hailed like a god by the denizens. We are told that she solves the quarrels and strifes (νείκεα) of men, not only their wives. This is a talent that would have solved the Trojan War.
So is this ultimate centrality of the female to human order, in politics or culture, something the poet of the Odyssey acknowledges and celebrates? Or is her description of Arete’s authority instead the consummating point in Athena’s disclosing the weirdness of Phaeacia?
… off she went, Owl-Eyes Athena
Over the unfruited deep, and she left ravishing Scheria behind;
She arrived in Marathon and the broad streets of Athene,
And entered Erechtheus’ close-built house. But Odysseus …
To Alcinous’ famous house he went: and often was his heart
Troubled as he stood there, before he got to the copper threshold.
From my first book:
Note the almost over-emphatic floridity of the epithets, as the animate locations on Athena’s journey are bodied forth. But then we see the name of Odysseus, unadorned and lonely. The bounty of the goddess’s destinations, as it is expressed in the music of the epithets, seems to underscore the bereavement of the solitary traveller she has left behind with only the syllables of his name. To say that Odysseus is pushed into the background because he has no epithet is to assert the opposite, in this case, of the poetic reality. A more effective means can scarcely be imagined to present the situation of Odysseus in all its poignancy, alone and unknown before a strange and awesome palace, than the solitary name. From Homer’s perspective, it would seem that the rules of his poetry are made to be broken.
In Greek:

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‘She applied the whip with judgement’: Homer in English
17 okt 2024· Singing Homer Podcast
Odyssey 6.285-331 (end)
Off Odysseus goes down the yellow brick road, following the mule car of Nausicaa and a gaggle of her attendants. The passage is mostly the second half of Nausicaa’s speech of instruction to the initiate. That is how the speech should be characterised. This is a journey that begins at the edge of wilderness, in what seems like a boar’s lair, sheltered under twinned trees, one of whom is Athena’s cultivated olive. Hence the river’s mouth where Odysseus meets Nausicaa is a liminal zone, where civilisation meets the wild and wet, and ‘liquid mortals’ may be prowling. The journey home will proceed along past the farms, at whose presence the hybrid bushes on the forest’s edge have already hinted. Here the pilgrim must keep his distance. But the real gauntlet the girls’ party has to run, comes just before the city wall: there lies the dockyard with private slips, where there are ships to trade what the locals cultivate, or to go pirating and take what others make. But Phaeacia is weirdly isolated, so neither of these scenarios makes sense; why after all are these people so bothered, obsessed even, with ships? Almost all the Phaeacian’s names, including Nausicaa’s, seem connected to boats or the sea. There is not a hint of an interest in fishing. What sort of a sailor is it who never deals with foreign ports? We shall need to dig into the nature of these mariners, these dedicated escorts, these ferrymen across to undiscovere’d countries, who also make it back.
The salty seamen whose comments Nausicaa disdains preoccupy themselves in this second liminal zone, between the farms and the city wall. They have their market set up there marked by hauled stones in trenches, like a henge, right next a lovely temple to Poseidon. That god’s protection must have been much on any mariner’s mind, let alone the Phaeacians’, who claim his kinship. Odysseus, not for the first time, is therefore infiltrating enemy territory. Nausicaa instructs him to duck into a grove beforehand, to avoid the spectacle his presence would create before the sailors. This grove is sacred instead to the now friendly Athena. We leave Odysseus praying to her there in her sanctuary.
Nowadays, I understand, we find in Greek towns a shrine to St. Nicholas by the sea, and to the Virgin in town. Of course Poseidon is not St. Nicholas, and the Virgin (parthenos) has been transformed from Athena into Mary. She is thought now to have given birth, once upon a time. But there is surely something awesome in the continuity of the genotype, in the thought of which two archetypes of superhuman power must be instituted there to protect a seagoing city. Phaeacia is a Neverland, an Oz, even to ancient Homer; and yet there is uncanny recognition in her salty idyll.
Yet Odysseus’ final pilgrimage and penetration of the sanctum is still only to begin once he crosses into the city proper. From farmers to sailors, we cross the wall to mingle with the citizens. But once again, we must distinguish qualities. Alcinous’ house is not at all like any of the others. Nausithous, their founding father, had built the wall and ‘distributed the ploughlands’. I suppose this portends a jolly sort of Soviet oligarchy. His son Alcinous now enjoys the perks.
At last Alcinous’ palace itself has to have its layers peeled before one reaches the hearth. The whole journey is a nested labyrinth, mysteries opening upon mysteries. Pass the courtyard, cross the great room until you reach the hearth, the central fire, where you’ll find Nausicaa’s mother. There she spins the sea-purple wool, leaning against a pillar. Right nearby, his drinking chair also leaning against the pillar—although the single intensive/reflexive αὐτῆι in Greek makes it seem as though he’s leaning against her—sits the tipsy Alcinous, “like an immortal.”
Everything does lean on her. She is the pillar. Nausicaa owns as much about the father she exalts as ‘hero’ and ‘immortal’, when she says to Odysseus, in Butler’s translation, ‘never mind him!’ Arete, her mother, is the source of power. It is her knees, not Nausicaa’s, which he must be brave enough actually to clasp. The whole vision of the Phaeacian civilisation can be seen to centre on, to lean against, this house’s pillar, which therefore grows in the imagination to be an axis mundi. In Book 1 Penelope descended the stairs and stood next the pillar of Odysseus’ house. Calypso is Atlas’ daughter, he who keeps the pillars of the cosmos. Women stand at the fixed axis of things in this cosmos. They constitute the central, stabilising power, as well as the hidden treasure encased in the labyrinth, the acquisition most prized within the protection of the city wall, beyond anything a ship can fetch. Only Helen among Homer’s leading women does not descend a stair and stand by a pillar. No, she bursts in upon the scene and drapes herself on a couch. With a footstool. (4.136) She, of course, is the woman who moves—or moved—and it is possible that it was more than the axis of international politics and war—though it certainly was those—which got displaced with her. The Trojan event certainly included a war. That’s the part we sing about.
In the midst of his outwardly simple but deceptively anagogical journey, in the train of Nausicaa’s steerage, Odysseus prays to Athena in the most bluntly human and intimate terms. What can compare to this picture of man talking to god, as though complaining to his mother that she did not protect him from his bullies? “Listen to me this time,” he says, seeing as “before you never listened, as I was battered …” Such intimacy between the human and the powers-that-be would seem to be a particular focus and point of Homer’s depiction. One wonders at the poet who feels this intimacy to be possible. One might think that all the layers of the onion in his pilgrimage to the hearth of Phaeacia have been peeled for the sake of disclosing such a conjunction. But the sense of constraint and containment within this depiction is nevertheless palpable. Even Athena will not yet appear to Odysseus face to face, out of shame before her uncle Poseidon.
What is the connection between the shame felt by women—Athena before her uncle, Nausicaa before her father (who, it turns out, is also her great uncle)—and that central pillar of civilisation by which Queen Arete spins the sea-purple thread? Is there anything at all shameless, by contrast, in Odysseus whining at a goddess? Perhaps it is significant that the intimacy presumed in Odysseus’ prayer to Athena, that he come to the Phaeacians as a friend and a thing to be pitied, needs to take place outside the city—or at least this city. As when he crawled under the olive bushes at the end of Book 5, here at the end of 6 Odysseus is once again safe outside, under Athena’s trees.
In Greek:
N.B. I shall have to travel across the planet next week. No free passage from the Phaeacians. There will sadly be a brief hiatus before Book 7.

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The Liquid Mortal: Homer in English
14 okt 2024· Singing Homer Podcast
Odyssey 6.198-284
“Do you take him for a robber or a murderer? Neither he nor any one else can come here to do us Phaeacians any harm, for we are dear to the gods …” tr. Butler
“Ye do not think, surely, that he is an enemy? That mortal man lives not, or exists nor shall ever be born who shall come to the land of the Phaeacians as a foeman, for we are very dear to the immortals.” tr. Murray
“Do you really suppose he’s some kind of enemy?
There’s no mortal alive, nor could there ever be one,
Who’d show up in this land of Phaiakian men
With hostile intent, so dear are we to the immortals!” tr. Green
“Do you believe he is an enemy?
No living person ever born would come
to our Phaeacia with a hostile mind,
since we are much beloved by the gods.” tr. Wilson
“Do you think he is part of an enemy invasion?
There is no man on earth, nor will there ever be,
Slippery enough to invade Phaeacia,
For we are very dear to the immortal gods …” tr. Lombardo
I line up these translations of a not very famous passage (6.200-3) because I think the Greek is actually saying something pretty odd. Here it is for good measure, from my edition Homer Odysseia:
ἦ μή πού τινα δυσμενέων φάσθ’ ἔμμεναι ἀνδρῶν;
οὐκ ἔσθ’ οὗτος ἀνὴρ διερὸς βροτὸς οὐδὲ γένηται,
ὅς κεν Φαιήκων ἀνδρῶν ἐς γαῖαν ἵκηται
δηϊοτῆτα φέρων · μάλα γὰρ φίλοι ἀθανάτοισιν.
Surely you didn’t decide he was some enemy man?
This man is not the one, the liquid mortal—nor will he be born!—
Who would reach the land of the Phaeacian men
Bringing violence and harm: for we are very dear to the deathless ones.
That second line contains the phrase dieros brotos, filling the retrogression from caesura to diaeresis. Brotos is ‘mortal’; dieros is variously treated in the translations—either ignored completely (by Butler), or translated somehow ‘living’ or ‘alive’ or thereabouts, and ‘slippery’ by Lombardo. The latter is a decent finesse, in that after its only two uses in Homer, only in the Odyssey, this word exclusively means ‘wet’ or ‘soaked’ or ‘fluid’ in Greek. I think these translators ignore their grammar and syntax, for the sake of finding something that makes sense, but here is how I reckon the second line actually runs with its demonstrative predication: “This man (οὗτος ἀνὴρ) is not him, the ‘liquid mortal’ (διερὸς βροτὸς), nor will he be born, / Who would reach the land of the Phaeacians bringing violence and harm …” It is as though these insular Phaeacians have a fear of a peculiar bogey-man, a fluid being. Perhaps it would take such a liquid human, an aquaman, to cross an ocean to attack them. It is as though there is a fear that some sort of swamp creature would come terrorise Phaeacia. Nausicaa is evidently trying to reassure her servants that this naked dude is not that guy, along with the idea that the common fear is irrational, in that the gods love them too much to allow it. The fear of the visitor or xenophobia, however, may not be so irrational after all. The other girls are not wrong that the arrival of Odysseus may be some kind of ominous portent for Phaeacia’s well-being. But Nausicaa nevertheless stands up for xenia, guest friendship, with true religion: “ … for from Zeus are they all, / The strangers and the beggars, and a gift is both meagre and their own.”
Odysseus modestly insists on washing himself alone, rather than being bathed by the girls, and he emerges looking like a god, his locks flowering like hyacinth. Is this Athena’s magic, as the poet says, comparing her handiwork to that of a skilled goldsmith who overlays gold upon silver; or is this rather Homer’s way of speaking about the freshness and vigour one generally feels upon stepping out of the shower? Is the transformation objective or subjective? Either way, Nausicaa most certainly takes notice, and goes a bit weak in her knees. Amongst her servant girls she says the quiet part out loud: at first the naked stranger looked a right loser,
“But now, he’s like the gods who hold wide heaven.
If only, for me, such a man as this would be called ‘husband’ …”
After Odysseus eats and drinks, Homer says Nausicaa ‘turned her mind to other things.’ We first heard this turn of phrase in reference to Athena, when she was planning Telemachus’ journey from behind the scenes at Ithaca. There is something affective about Athena’s mental attention. We next heard it about Helen, when she decided to save the dinner at Lacedaemon from unending tears by slipping something into the wine. Now we hear it of Nausicaa. Homer is constantly shaping scenes in this story around the behind-the-scenes machinations of its leading women. The contrast is pointed as well, however: Nausicaa is not nearly as in control of her stage as she thinks she is, sadly, nor as her counterparts Athena and Helen are.
In this case, Nausicaa plots Odysseus’ entrance and introduction to her parents and the rest of the Phaeacians, ostensibly so he could make a good impression with the right people to win his passage home—wherever that is. But the rest of Nausicaa’s wish, expressed only to her handmaids, is quite the opposite: that the anonymous stranger and future husband would settle “in the neighbourhood, and it would please him to remain here.” Hence the stage is set for a rather hilarious performance, where Nausicaa orders the stranger to keep his distance on the trail toward the city, by warning him what a salty seaman, such as they are likely to meet on the way, might say and be expected to think, when he espies the famous princess leading a foreign hunk of a man into town. In her own evocation of such a mariner:
“Who’s this here, trailing Nausicaa, a handsome and a tall
Stranger? Where’d she find him? Any day now he’s gonna be her husband.
Surely he’s someone driven off course, that she’s carried off his ship,
Come from far off men, since there aren’t any nearby.
Or else it’s some god—come much prayed for, to the girl praying—
Stepped down out of heaven, and she’ll keep him all her days …”
The problem for Nausicaa, such as it is, is that her surrogate salty seaman is an avatar of the truth! Truth gets told in the Odyssey, it seems, via conscious indirection. The only way to bring this guy home to meet Mama is to say, out loud, that he’s a charity case she’s trying to help get home. Nausicaa goes on to point out, rather cannily, again through the eyes of the salty mariner, both how disdainful she has been of the local men, and how very much the best of them have been wooing her. “Good for her she’s bagged a foreigner instead.” Does not this dramatised embarrassment seem intended rather to entice the stranger, by letting on how sought after a prize she is?
Courtship, and couple dancing, are about following and leading, although mostly the leader or follower must make her partner seem the opposite, if things are going to look good. Athena has made Nausicaa think she is in the driver’s seat, but she is only literally so. The poor thing is being used.
When one watches a play, one invests the character in the actor, or vice versa; part of the transport of the theatre or television experience is participating in the fusion of actor and hero. This option is not available to the Homeric performer. His is a one-man show. He must play all the parts, stepping into each of those speaking rôles as he narrates in propria persona between them. Hence he faces a peculiar problem in approaching the rendering: is he, for now, Nausicaa pretending to be a salty seaman, or is his modus more fluid, switching from maiden to mariner and then back? How does he change, if at all, the register of his voice? Of course we don’t know how this was handled. I do hope that in our day, actors who are serious about their craft will try Homer out, and find out. One-man shows are nothing new, nowadays, but I do wonder how often characters are scripted to immerse themselves in their own stories, turning into actors again, nesting illusion within illusion. Perhaps the whole thing is as fluid as can be when it comes off. For long stretches, already in the cases of Menelaus and Nestor, we have seen the character become the narrator, who delivers speeches by others in their own person. Odysseus will later do this for four whole books straight.
In Proteus, from Menelaus’ sojourn in Aegypt, we encountered someone whose shape shifts. The instruction to his captors was to hold on tight, even if he turns into water. This instruction could perhaps work on an audience for the Homeric performer. He too is a Proteus. Thales was known to believe ‘all is water’, in the sense that he thought liquid was the fundamental material principle out of which and into which all the other states of matter could devolve. Perhaps he had had a drink of what Homer had to offer in playing all the parts of gods and human beings, and even sounding out in verbal mime the surging sea and beetling rocks, and stars like fires in the aether. It is the Homeric performer, after all, who is the original ‘fluid mortal’, the dieros brotos. Phaeacians beware! Homer is coming for you.
These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air;
And – like the baseless fabric of this vision –
The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.
—Prospero
Does Phaeacia exist? Though Thucydides locates its geographical vicinity, it is sometimes said that Phaeacia only exists in Homer’s imagination. The place certainly serves as a halfway house, a vehicle for both Homer’s story and a staging venue for his unfettered and most inspired storytelling. Just in Homer’s imagination? Let this land of Phaeacia then join the world within and without us, the great sum of our rhythmically articulable empirical reality, which already lives there.
In Greek:

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“I am at your knees, Milady”: Homer in English
7 okt 2024· Singing Homer Podcast
Odyssey 6.110-197
The thing about Odysseus and Nausicaa, is that nothing happens. They do not touch; he says the words of a suppliant who holds the knee of his benefactor, but her knees are not in play; he chooses to keep his distance, hiding his nakedness with some shrubbery. Yet the whole scene is charged with erotic possibility. An intriguing element in Homer’s total scene-painting and narrative strategy is, once again, a simile. While Odysseus in his words and actions is completely ‘beyond reproach’, he is described upon his emergence in this way:
He walked like a lion raised in the mountains, cocksure strong,
Who goes around rained on and buffeted, but in his eyes
There’s fire: all the same he goes among the cattle, or the sheep,
Or after the wild deer: and it calls him, his stomach,
To try the flocks and approach the close-built house.
Just so was Odysseus on the point, with the girls and their beautiful hair,
Of broaching intercourse—though he was naked; for the need was on him.
Consider the details: he’s weathered like Odysseus, but the lion is not weakened and meek about his nakedness. His hunger is rather more active and opportunistic than desperate. The lion approaches what’s offered like a buffet: cattle followed by sheep, domestically herded and easy pickings, but also the wild deer scavenging off human settlement, as a more difficult and hence challenging and tasty prize. But at the last he turns his attention to the heart of it all, the humans at home in the farm house. ‘Just so was Odysseus … with the girls and their beautiful hair …’ What, do you mean to say he’s not a sheepish embarrassed naked man, humbly approaching these unsuspecting women out of doors, but is actually a lustful orgiast looking forward to a sort of wild girl buffet, savouring the thought of each different type? No girl in particular is his type—he’ll take on the domesticated ones and the wild ones, with gusto, and then have a go at the snooty princess in the big house!
Homer’s delicate indelicacy is consummated with the enjambment of the uncommon future infinitive μείξεσθαι. This means literally ‘to be mixed with’, and has all the double entendre of our ‘to have intercourse with’. The effect is not subtle, and yet it is plausibly deniable; Odysseus is simply about to ‘go mingle’ with these lovely heads of hair.
The surface picture is clear enough: Odysseus is genuinely worried about the people he’s come to, as to whether they’re rapists or savages, and he is as self-controlled under duress as a mortal man might aspire to be. Self-control also distinguishes Nausicaa, and Homer says so directly. But the idea of what is being controlled in a self-controlled person—all us ladies and gentlemen—is deeply and almost subliminally expressed through the vehicle of the simile. We have in fact a strong naked man among scantily clad pubescent girls, one of them a tall and sexually unconquerable Artemis. But Homer both does and doesn’t want to say so. He is like Nausicaa, who does not want to talk about her own marriage before Alcinous and Arete (that is, she is embarrassed to talk about sex with her parents), and makes out that the clothes-washing is for her father and her brothers. But she basically gets it said anyway. Where there is erotic possibility, there is also tremendous erotic force, and Homer’s art captures this sublimated reality in the most unique way, by the slyly indirect promptings of an Odyssean simile.
There are many among us who feel compelled to view Homer as a primitive, even if they do not subscribe to the absurdities of the oral theory of this composition, the Odyssey. For us, there was no great artist before (prior to) Homer. But not for himself. I hope it is becoming clearer that Homer was in fact a Daedalus, his predecessor in the arts, who knew that to contain and to express—both—the reality of our nature and condition, one must construct a labyrinth.
On a side note, I wonder if the Homeric words δαιδάλεος, δαίδαλον, and the verb δαιδάλλω, ‘to ornament curiously,’ point to a Celtic-style labyrinthine geometry. For various reasons, most especially in contrast with an aesthetic celebrated in the Iliad, I expect the poet of the Odyssey to be picky about what sorts of ornamentation would be appropriate for a crafted work. Of course one does not know if the name of Daedalus himself precedes or follows the word formations mentioned above. But rather than a style or motif in design, the Odyssey likes to versify an unadorned marriage of form and function. Think of Penelope’s waxing and waning shroud for Laertes, and Odysseus’ timbered raft and rooted marriage bed. There is no frou-frou. Contrast these with the Iliad’s celebrated artworks: the phantasmagoric Shield of Achilles, and Helen’s web embroidered with images of her war, like a Bayeux Tapestry. Each is a fully functional manufactured thing, shield and web, but their mere use appears transcended by the art work super-adorned upon them. One does not know which poem’s aesthetic vision better represents the legacy of Daedalus—transcendent adornment immortalising an instrument, or the perfect unity of form and function in the design of that instrument.
For the ancients as well, there was also no great artist before Homer, but ‘before’ in the sense ‘above’.
One thing that has long puzzled me about Odysseus’ great speech to Nausicaa—quite as much as it has moved me—is his memory of observing a shoot of palm by the altar at Delos:
In Delos, once, was a kind of a thing, next the altar of Apollo—
The phoenix, a young shoot of palm coming up—I marked it, thought about it;
For I did go, even over there, and a large host followed me;
None of this is mentioned anywhere else. But I imagine Odysseus had gone to this place, wherever it was, to consult Apollo—who later had an oracle on the Greek island of Delos, among other places—before setting out on the journey to Troy:
That journey which was going to be, for me, a shitload of trouble.
There must have been desperate uncertainty about the future, when he caught sight of the shooting plant. What is it about Nausicaa which makes him remember that palm? He calls it a ‘spear’. The name he uses for it is ‘phoenix’, which also referred to a prized red-purple dye, as well as the people associated by trade with the dye’s origin, the Phoenicians. Not in the Homeric picture, it would seem, is the phoenix bird, a symbol of rebirth, which we might have done a lot with here. Perhaps the sight of a palm tree was something incredible for someone who had only known temperate flora. It does grow tall and spindly without branches; the palm is in fact a kind of grass rather than a tree. If the palm was unknown to him—although clearly it is known to Homer’s audience—Odysseus must have grown up far enough north and Delos must have been far enough south for such ignorance to be possible. He says he was mesmerised, because never had such a ‘spear’ come up out of the earth. I suppose this could be a response to seeing one’s first palm, on the understanding that it was supposed to be a tree. (It grows already lopped and smoothed, without bark, like a spear.) But what did it portend, and why should that come to mind when he first sees Nausicaa? Is she also to be the start of big trouble? Or is it purely the vision of exotic new growth, in palm and girl, to a world-wearied man? Please let me know if you have any insights about this Phoenician palm.
Odysseus’ speech to Nausicaa has long been indwelling in the psyche. It is hard now to be objective about it. It’s already almost thirty years since I recited it, in Greek and English—these habits start early—at my own sister’s wedding. Having been divorced myself in the meantime, it is hard to say what I now might wish, for a couple embarking. I suppose everything turns on what is meant by the thing Odysseus particularly celebrates in a couple: ὁμοφροσύνη, ‘oneness of mind’ or ‘sameness of thinking’. What is that? Surely it does not mean simply agreeing all the time.
The resources of the dual number (as opposed to singular or plural) do a lot for Odysseus’ lesson. We still have English remnants of this Indo-European feature, in our use of ‘both’, for example, along with ‘either’, and ‘neither’, and perhaps in plurals like ‘oxen’, or ‘eyne’ for ‘eyes’ in Shakespeare. But the idea that there are natural pairs deserving of special noun and verb forms, which is perhaps supported by nature, rather sets us up for this possibility in human marriages. Perhaps couples of all kinds would use it, if theirselves could be expressed as a dual subject, or even a singular one, rather than a plural. The metaphysics of this is expressed in Odysseus’ theme that same-mindedness is an excellent thing, than which nothing is better or stronger:
When, thinking as one in their plans, the pair keeps house,
The man and the woman: many the pains for their enemies,
But rejoicings for those who mean them well; and they hear the story best themselves.
In ‘thinking as one’ they are a dual subject (ὁμοφρονέοντε), who in the next line become two singulars: ‘the man and the woman’ (ἀνὴρ ἠδὲ γυνή). One is reminded of the conundrum in Genesis (1:27): “in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.” But are ‘man and woman’ a natural pair, or natural opposites? The same can be asked of other possible translations of ἀνὴρ ἠδὲ γυνή, including ‘male and female’ or ‘husband and wife’, even ‘warrior’ and ‘matron’: do these constitute a natural pair or a natural opposition? It would seem that friends or partners of the same sex would constitute a pairing at least equally natural, without any inherent opposition. As Aristotle discusses (I think taking up a common saying), a friend is ἑτερος αὐτός, ‘another self.’ Does Homer’s use of the dual participle then suggest that the realm of thinking and mind is somehow apart or above the distinction between male and female and men and women, which is seemingly emphasised in the very next line by the very different words with very different referents, ἀνήρ and γυνή?
It seems that with a couple the whole can be greater than the parts. Per Odysseus, they become a kind of protective talisman. It is hard to say, however, what that last phrase in his line means: “they hear the story best themselves.” “They hear” translates κλύον, whose internal object is κλέος. The latter word’s trajectory goes all the way from ‘thing heard’ to ‘repute’ to ‘glory’. Perhaps Odysseus means that a couple is best positioned to know its own story; in other words, what is an anxious and stressful concern for others, one’s reputation and its dependence on the opinion of others, is overcome and internalised somehow in the true couple: they become the best audience for their own story. Now that part rings true.
Odysseus and Penelope come to test each other ruthlessly as to their fealty and even their own identity. To this end they hide from each other in plain sight, even at night when they’re alone together and there’s no one else in earshot, as we shall see. But all this seems to stem from an extraordinary oneness or sameness of mind. It takes an iron heart to know one, or to find one out. They do know one another, perhaps as profoundly as a living thing can be known. I wonder; do Odysseus and Penelope ever surprise each other?
It is immensely touching that Odysseus tries to pass on his experience in the form of a wish for the tall young creature before him, and the security of her future. But this teacher is himself the very greatest danger to Nausicaa’s opening heart.
In Greek:

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Being and Becoming Nausicaa: Homer in English
28 sep 2024· Singing Homer Podcast
Odyssey 6.1-109
These lines are about girls bathing and playing naked in the woods. Everything seems meant to arouse. They throw off their veils and play with a ball: taking off her veil is the job for a husband on his wedding night. (It is sometimes a metaphor for the bedroom action that comes after; to ‘loosen the veil’ can also connote rape, however, and in this latter sense is applied to the sacking of a city. We have even heard it used to describe the opening of vintage wine [3.392].) Off they go a-washing in the woods, without a care in the world.
We do come to realise that there aren’t strangers around in Phaeacia to worry about. The city was founded where no men come, to get away from the Cyclopes, their original brutish neighbours. (Everything ‘original’ in the human world of the Iliad and the Odyssey seems only to be two or three generations old.) The city has been walled, like a later, classical Greek polis, though there do not seem to be enemies to threaten her. That makes it an oddly insular move. They’ve been bullied. But outside the walls, what about the wild beasts in their lairs, whom Odysseus was so worried about? As I think we’ve been disclosing in various ways, Homer prefers such questions to hang in the atmosphere, to juice it up, if you will. The detail about unhitching the mules to be set free to feed by the river, is pure scene-painting, but it is of a piece with all the loosening of restrictions on domestic animals and women in this environment free of men and men’s rule. And the most human moment, to my mind, is when the women start competing in the natural washing tubs. They are absorbed in themselves and their activity. Men turn tasks into contests almost by instinct. Left to themselves, Homer seems to say, so do women. Freedom and gamesmanship come to them amidst the necessary drudgery, even when it comes to the glittery ones, of washing clothes.
Nausicaa is a tall girl, evidently, rhythmic and athletic, who takes the lead in the song and dance with a ball; this movement must be something like the rhythmic gymnastics at the modern Olympics. Her very name, which is four syllables in Greek, has a stately dactylic rhythm; the late metricians call this shape a choriamb, —∪∪—, NAU-sik-ah-AH. She is a girl who expresses herself in her rhythm. This calls forth an unusually uncomplicated simile from Homer:
Such an Artemis she goes! Down the mountains, Arrow-Shedder,
Whether it’s Taygetus’ extended slopes, or down Erymanthus,
Delighting in the wild boar and the speeding deer:
And with her play the Nymphs, Aegis-Holder Zeus’s girls
From the countryside; and she rejoices in her mind’s vessel, Mother Leto—
Above all the other girls she holds her head and forehead,
And easily is her daughter known, though all of them are beautiful;
Just so was she conspicuous among her attendants, this unbroken virgin.
The last words translate παρθένος ἀδμής. We last encountered this word admēs ‘unbroken’ in describing the heifer, who was sacrificed by the sons at Nestor’s house in honour of female Athena, to the ululation of Nestor’s elder wife and the rest of the household’s women. Nestor asks for a cow who was “A virgin [ἀδμήτην]: who never yet was brought under the yoke by a man.” [3.383] This is the fate that most contrasts the subjects in the simile: the forever free and roaming Artemis, the joy in her mother Leto’s eye at her transcendence, filling seven lines in the vehicle, and the single anonymous line in the tenor for the human daughter. Each is an unbroken virgin, parthenon admēs, but Nausicaa cannot remain so. Dislocation, impregnation, nostalgia and the pain of loss are to come to her, while the gods live in eternal bliss and being. Even now there is a wild beast lurking in his lair nearby, an epic peeping Tom sleeping naked, waiting for his cue.
[Most of what follows is taken from a lecture I gave at St. John’s College in Annapolis, in 2003.]
‘Athena enters Nausicaa’s bedroom like a breath of wind. The doors are shut, and sleeping by the doorposts are her handmaidens like the Graces. Nausicaa herself is said to be just like the female immortals. The whole tableau is a temple entrance, where the statuary doorposts have fallen asleep, and sleeping also is the goddess in the inner sanctum. Freud must have appreciated this setup for the entrance of the dream wish, although I am not aware of his having written about it.
‘The wind’s breath assumes the identity of Nausicaa’s girlfriend and stands over her head, suggesting to the suggestible one that the day of her wedding is near, and that she had better get her laundry done. Athena the ever-virgin sets into motion a longing in the young girl, who is not after all a goddess but only a virgin, for something she cannot understand in any experiential sense, a chain of becoming that apparently excites her, but that must lead to a subjection of individuality and freedom in body and soul to a husband and to pregnancy. For Athena, Nausicaa is a means of Odysseus’ conveyance home. For Nausicaa, it is hard to say—she is a veiled thing—but if it is not a day that dawns for heartbreak, it is perhaps a day that gets her to a nunnery.’
There is a cruelty, woman to woman, in the way Athena sets the girl up for meeting Odysseus. Athena is a virgin also in the sense that she has never been human. She reminds her that the day of her womanhood is going to be one of these coming, and reminds her of her bourgeois, insular Phaeacian suitors clamouring for a go. But her mind and spirit are awakened to the possibility of a man; and the man she is suddenly going to be presented with is the naked Odysseus. Here is an exotic and mysterious and ‘manly’ foreigner, forever to change and to cheat her expectations of the possible.
‘As for Athena, her job done, a seed of turbulence planted in the world of becoming within the heart of a girl, off she goes …
Οὔλυμπόνδ’, ὅθι φασὶ θεῶν ἕδος ἀσφαλὲς αἰεί
ἔμμεναι · οὔτ’ ἀνέμοισι τινάσσεται οὔτε ποτ’ ὄμβρωι
δεύεται οὔτε χιὼν ἐπιπίλναται, ἀλλὰ μάλ’ αἴθρη
πέπταται ἀνέφελος, λευκὴ δ’ ἐπιδέδρομεν αἴγλη · 45
τῶι ἔνι τέρπονται μάκαρες θεοὶ ἤματα πάντα.
ἔνθ’ ἀπέβη Γλαυκῶπις, ἐπεὶ διεπέφραδε κούρηι.
Toward Olympus, where they say the seat of the gods, untippable always,
Has its being. Neither in the winds does it tremble, nor ever by the rainstorm
Is it moistened, nor does the snow come near it; rather, a prodigious aether
Is spread out cloudless, and a whiteness all over it, a sheen;
In this they delight, the blessed gods, through all the days.
Up she went, Owl-Eyes, once she instructed the pubescent girl.
‘Note the enjambment of ἔμμεναι in the second line. It is not always a thing to note in Homer when the infinitive of ‘being’ is enjambed; but in the context of this passage, with Homer’s longest way of expressing such an infinitive, the conclusion seems inescapable, that he means to describe the radiant weatherless Olympus as a realm of being. Athena has agitated the heart of a girl, having descended like a wind into the world of becoming, and then disappeared carefree, concrete as ever, and pure as ever, into the place of forever and all days. Where philosophers talk about the riddle of being and becoming, Homer renders it.’
The old philosophers, men after Homer but before Socrates, used to pontificate and fuss about being and motion. πάντα ρεῖ said Heraclitus, ‘everything flows’ or ‘all is flux’. There were a number of these pioneers who struggled to understand how there could be certain knowledge of anything—paradoxically, like that contained in the phrase panta rei—when the whole universe seemed to be constantly in mid-flow. In their face Parmenides asserts ἕν τὸ πάν: in fact ‘the all is one’, or ἕν τὸ ὄν, ‘being is one’. Was Homer, a pre-pre-Socratic, also a proto-philosopher? Does the world of the gods stand for the eternal beings and knowable truths, while the world of men and women is the world of coming-to-be and passing away? Artemis, for one, would muddy such generalities. Where would she be without her earthly hunts, her arrows, her wild boar and mountain deer? Even Olympians need to get away, it seems. But Athena’s return to the sheen of Olympus, weather-free for all time, after causing arousal and unnameable stirrings in Nausicaa below, could hardly be more illustrative not only of the separation of being from becoming, but of the intrusion or penetration of the one into the other.
‘There are some among us—and what is a community of Greeks, without a Phoenician Philistine to teach it the alphabet—who can be expected to say that Homer has merely ‘dressed up,’ or ‘sensualised,’ a truth which philosophy understands without the beautiful and seductive trappings. Such people do not know rhythm, and hence they do not know philosophy; because to know rhythm is to know the riddle—by direct encounter—not the answer to it, but the enigma itself—of being and becoming.
‘Rhythm is being moving through becoming; it is the one moving through the many; it is the singular distended through the plural. ἔμμεναι enjambed is a vortex hedged against the pressure of the stream, a stream which would prefer to keep within the banks of the line. Words enjambed in the stream of rhythm are not sugared and sweetened; they are placed and focused, so that their meaning becomes squeezed and clarion. ἔμμεναι enjambed is ‘being’ rendered.
‘In light of such a passage, it is tempting to see the development of philosophy as a kind of abstractive regression in men who were raised on the rhythm of Homer. Whoever he or she was, Homer alone had the imaginative insight to see the problem of being and becoming distilled in the dream of a pubescent girl.’
In Greek:

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An Octopus’s Bedroom: Homer in English
20 sep 2024· Singing Homer Podcast
Odyssey 5.424-93 (end)
When Odysseus escapes the surge and clings to the rugged cliff face—at Athena’s prompt!—but is then ripped off and tossed back by the undertow, Homer sings:
As when from an octopus, dragged out from her bedroom,
The pebbles cling on thickly upon her suckers,
So from the man upon the rocks, off his strong hands
The skin was stripped away …
The first strange thing is the octopus itself. There are of course very many strange life forms in the world, many of whom we cannot imagine being. It must be of some comfort to certain vegetarians that they cannot imagine the consciousness, and breath, of plants. But there is no lack of imagination in children when it comes to the octopus. I think most everyone imagines at some point what it would be like to have the eight arms (or legs). All the same, the octopus must seem like a freak to mammals generally, as well as fish, not to mention their fellow mollusks lugging shells. She combines a tactile relatableness with an otherworldly otherness. An octopus in a simile must therefore be somewhat surreal, for she is about as incomparable as things get.
But Odysseus isn’t the octopus! Read it again. This is what I’m calling an Odyssean simile, which turns things upside down and unsettles as much as it clarifies. If the Odyssey’s Homer is after a peculiar kind of impression or reaction, it is not with the broad brush and canvas of an Iliadic simile, but a surgeon’s knife for some reason fitted with barbs. The pebbles stick to the octopus’s suckers, Odysseus’ skin sticks to the cliff face. The man is the rock, who has his pebbles stripped like so many bits of skin! What on earth (or above it) is the octopus? Once again the simile is slightly dizzying.
Just a few lines earlier, we hear,
There he’d have been stripped of his skin, bones broken to pieces,
If she had not put in his mind’s vessel, the goddess, Owl-Eyes Athena:
‘Rush with both arms and grab at the rock!’
Well, Odysseus’ bones appear to remain intact, but his skin, not so much. The formula, ‘then such and such would have happened [beyond fate] unless the god had not suggested to the hero …’, a suspenseful trope in the Iliad, seems here to be somewhat brutally mocked. The goddess’ advice is precisely what leads to one of the narrator’s feared outcomes. We are directly challenged to question the power of Athena’s protection—Mother Mary, you done me in!—as surely as the octopus may begin to question the safety of her bedroom when the fisherman finds it. Ah, the fisherman. Is he a part of the simile—perhaps the undertow that pulls Odysseus off the rock? In which case Odysseus is the octopus. Or rather, is he unmentioned because he is the unmentionable, who haunts the whole figure like a death’s head wielding a hunting spear?
Similes depend on at least one part of the comparison, tenor or vehicle, being familiar. Often it is the vehicle that is familiar, so that it can illuminate a narrative happening that may be hard to convey vividly to an audience. Such a happening is Odysseus being scraped off the rocks by the receding wave. Hence we may assume an audience would at least be familiar with the vehicle: the difficulties of hunting octopus, of finding the nest in the first place, what the whole thing looks like when you drag the intelligent animal with knowing eyes out of its secret refuge, her boudoir.
The deceptive bedchamber and the doubtful protection of Athena, both energising motifs of the story, seem to set us up for the remarkable scene which closes Book 5.
He walked into the wood, the one he found nearest the water
In a place visible right round: there were twin bushes he came under,
Planted from the same root: one of wild stock, one of olive.
These neither the strength of the winds got through, when they blew wet,
Nor did ever the blazing sun strike them with its rays,
Nor did the thunderstorm use to penetrate right the way through; for tight indeed
To one another did they grow, intertwined in a give-and-take: under these, Odysseus
Entered.
Many have celebrated this passage for its poetry, and claim it for their favourite bit of the Odyssey. ‘Twin bushes … planted from the same root’: the Greek ἐπαμοιβαδίς, ‘intertwined in a give-and-take’, filling up the backwards turn in the hexameter dance between caesura and diaeresis—its accent stressing the weakest part of the dactylic foot—mimes in the mouth the interlacing of the branches from different directions. The olive is Athena’s gift to the Greeks. Ancient Americans credit mysterious redheads from across the sea with the knowledge of agriculture which has given us the potato, the non-poisonous tomato, and the chilli pepper, without whose varieties the world would be absent much of its taste. Similarly, Greek speakers credit the cultivation of the olive to Athena; it seems our ancestors did not feel they could have come up with these things on their own. The fruitful olive in particular is usually grown by graft; a hardy if unfruitful wild root stock provides the security for an abundant scion, cut and pasted to itself. These twinned trees on the edge of nowhere show the hand of human effort, guided by Athena, and it is likely that Odysseus recognises this.
In many ways this is a recognition scene, though there is no other human being present. After all his struggles, even injury from following that god’s advice, Odysseus seems reassured by what he sees in the tableau. Indeed, he rejoices. My question is, what is it that makes him rejoice? In the first instance, the referent seems to be the fall of leaves with which he proceeds to make both bed and blanket. That is referent enough for a man who is naked, freezing, and half dead, a pile of leaves which would do for two or three men caught out in winter.
But it seems the whole vision is inspiring. The twinned trees could be thought of as a symbol of marriage; a couple united in oneness of mind, brains intertwined as though sharing neurons, is a theme Odysseus will later extol to Nausicaa. (Between Odysseus and Penelope, which one is the graft?) Greek allows for a ‘dual’ subject, distinct from singular and plural. They handily exclude what is without, and protect what is within their sphere of domicile, while still drawing nourishment on the sly from the radiant sun and the penetrating rain. The mere presence of the cultivated olive (ἐλαίη) is a sign of humanity somewhere hereabouts, just as for some, pyramidal stones and cyclopean walls are signs that there must have been giants.
And, of course, every room is a womb. This crib of cultivated nature at the edge of the woods is indeed to be the scene of the barely living Odysseus’ rebirth. The closing image surely takes the breath away, whether it is your first encounter or your latest:
As when a fellow hides a firebrand in the black ash,
At the farthest farm, who has no other neighbours by,
Saving the seed of fire, that he need not get a light from who knows where—
So Odysseus hid himself in leaves …
‘Saving the seed of fire’ (σπέρμα πυρός)—“there’s a double meaning in that!” I was wrong to say there is no other human being present, at least in the vision that the poetry energises. There’s the fellow (or two!) who might have shared his leaf-bed. But the predicament of this lonely farmer, managing on the edge of human habitation to preserve a seed for the morrow’s work, so as to avoid the trouble of hunting down a light, must be an image full of sympathy for both Odysseus and his author. Politicians annoy with their “keep hope alive”. In saving the seed of human rekindling, Homer gives us the real thing. In using such an image, the author seems to commit to his hero; there is a promise of something salvific of humanity, it would seem, in the idea of Odysseus. And Athena herself comes in at the end, unannounced but not unexpected, almost to give a benediction—with the impression given somehow that she had been there the whole time. Athena belongs in scenes where mere humans come to recognise something.
She sheds sleep upon his eyes, but the last line-and-a-half—
… that he might the soonest rest
From his hard labour and exhaustion, once she’d covered those dear eyelids round.
—make it seem like she is treating a corpse newly dead. The closing of the eyelids, by someone else, leaves an impression that can’t be erased once it occurs to one.
Yes there is an undertow, even in this scene of hope and refuge. Recall Odysseus’ deliberation at the river bank: either he would risk dying of exposure in the morning chill by the river, or risk becoming prey for some wild animal if he retired to the nearby woods. And what does Homer describe when Odysseus chooses (b)? The image of the twinned trees with an empty pile of leaves within seems very much to suggest that it has functioned as a predator’s lair, and likely does now. The passage describing the boar’s lair, which sprung the fearsome creature who scarred Odysseus for life, is very like this one, and though its description comes many books in the future, there is no question but that it recalls this hallowed moment under the trees at the end of Book 5. This poet has a way, an art, of hinting all around at imminent death. It’s even there in Athena’s cosmic spear left behind in Odysseus’ spear rack. It is the unmentioned unmentionable. A friend describes the affect such a lurking unnoticed presence creates as the ‘uncanny’, which I recognise through a feeling in the pit of my stomach, familiar since childhood, that infuses passage after passage when I read the Odyssey all grown up.
Home? It’s an octopus’s bedroom. Hope? It’s pebbles in your suckers. Yet Odysseus rejoices.
In Greek:

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A Human Voice, Speaking Mortal Language: Homer in English
10 sep 2024· Singing Homer Podcast
Odyssey 5.327-423
We know this experience when dealing with the Department of Motor Vehicles, or on the phone with the cable company, of finding a sympathetic agent on the other end: “Finally, a human voice!” This saying does not only occur to us when one is dealing with machines, or ‘machine learning’; in dealing with any bureaucracy, there is the simple relief of stress when someone talks back. You are a hapless petitioner; they are a chaotically interconnected hierarchy—a contradiction in terms—who hold all the levers, look up all the by-laws, and make all the decisions, with authority, in your case. This relief in ‘the thick of it’ is what comes to mind as a goddess, Ino, comes to our hero’s aid when his situation is dire. This episode is not the first; earlier, Eidothea, Proteus’ daughter, took pity on Menelaus, comes to him when he is alone without his men, and betrays her father by instructing the man how to overpower a shapeshifter. (Hold him tight, even when he turns to water!) It is all too clear that these mid-tier ladies are doing what they can inside the system: “if it was up to me …”
Now here is Odysseus, in straits and on death’s precipice, a tumbleweed on the wind, on a self-made raft, in dark and surging seas. Ino comes to him, a daughter of Cadmus and Harmony. Or else she’s just a petrel who lands on his raft. But either way, she ‘was mortal, once upon a time, speaking human language.’ Odysseus has been completely alone for eighteen days. Finally, a human voice! Someone who can understand and sympathise! Ino was once a mortal, who suffered at the hands of the gods; among other things she was a nurse for her nephew Dionysus, a transformative figure in the development of religion, a son of her sister Semele by Zeus (the Holy Spirit). One does not know if it is a thing to note or ignore about Homer, that Dionysus only receives scant or tangential mention in his poems. But it seems each of the divinities in Homer knows their place. Even as far from Olympus as Calypso’s Isle, when they are all alone and intimate, Hermes asserts his office as Zeus’s message man, and bullies Calypso when she dares to complain. She rescued Odysseus all by herself, when no one else (not even Athena) seemed to care. But no, she’d better not hook up with a human guy.
Ino is also Leucothea, the White Goddess, a saviour of mariners. I suspect that modern mariners still believe in Her, though they are no longer so foolish as to admit it. The White Goddess embodies a highly local and, we might say, superstitious experience of the divine. Homer merely mentions the name, we don’t exactly know what allusions he understands to be entangled in its aura. But he is explicit that, ‘officially’ as it were, she has ‘now in the salt-water depths … got her portion of honour from the gods …’ In other words, she’s been assigned a job in the basement. It seems consonant with this comic world that the gods are in amongst it, plugged into an hierarchy where some of them work the kitchen. It helps make plausible their occasional sympathy, when there is an actual sense in Homer that we’re all in this together, witches, warlocks, angels and saints. Even Zeus often comes across not so much as an omnipotent, as a lame duck still henpecked in office. In the Odyssey, it seems we are always looking forward to retirement.
It helps to know someone inside the system, even if they work in a basement cubicle. It is extraordinary to me that Homer understands this intensely modern and bureaucratic mode of connection, where it becomes salient that one is talking in sympathy to someone who was once a mortal human being, before they became a corporate official. She speaks our language. This poet’s society has vanished, but it must have known intimately the experience one has when assigned a job (a ‘portion’) in a bureaucracy, so much so that it defines the experience of what came to be called ‘fate’, but is also projected onto the imagined life-experience of the gods. We know this condition (and this comedy) from the necessary bureaucracies of modern societies and infrastuctures. How does Homer know this?
A teacher once told me that the most relatable thing Odysseus ever did was ignore Ino’s advice and the gift of her immortal veil, and stick to his raft, until his rational empirical judgement forced the issue. Cling to the protection you yourself have made, the evidence of your own eyes about its sturdiness, and your sighting of the promised land; trust your eyes and hands, before some divine trickery! And trust in Calypso’s clothes to keep you warm and free from harm. But her magic island is now far distant. At the crunch he bestrides a plank like a racehorse—what an image!—and strips himself naked, except for Ino’s veil tied beneath his breastbone.
Ino’s veil is ἄμβροτον, ‘immortal’. One wonders if it may work like ambrosial food, and make him immortal too. If he keeps it he could walk around like Bilbo with his ring, with this veil tied round his sternum, hidden under his shirt. But without a comment about his deliberations or hints at thoughts about the subject, when the time comes, he follows Ino’s instructions and throws the powerful object backwards into the brine. Odysseus always chooses mortality, it seems.
In Greek:

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Man on a Raft: Homer in English
31 aug 2024· Singing Homer Podcast
Odyssey 5.228-326
Is it a man on a raft, or the man on a raft; or is it this man, long-suffering Odysseus, adrift on a raft on the wilful, monstrous, god-driven ocean, or Man—mankind—on a raft of his own artifice riding upon the turbulence and violence of nature? The Odyssey may intend all four, but I don’t think the last one is quite right, as temptingly romantic and bleak as it is. I can’t help but feel that there is something masculine about Homer’s image. The opening word of the poem, ἄνδρα, is decidedly male. But all the same, that picture, of Odysseus braving the stormy sea on a raft, is iconic in the world’s imagination, like the astronauts’ photo of earthrise over the moon, or the crucifix. Penelope at her loom weaving and unpicking a web to keep her options open, by contrast, seems decidedly feminine, but equally tempting to see as an image of Man’s situation. The same word, ἱστός, a thing stood upright, is translated either mast or loom in context.
Much of the present passage is descriptive narrative, Homer going solo rather than filling his mask with speeches or dialogue. He positively immerses in the building of the raft; one feels the connections between segments of his crafted hexameters like the morticing of Odysseus’ craft. I wrote the following in my first book:
… the works of art represented within the Odyssey itself bespeak an aesthetic of construction, wholeness, unity, form, and function. Three wondrous artefacts buttress the story: Penelope’s web, Odysseus’ raft, and the couple’s marriage bed of denatured olive. All three depend upon a frame: all three must therefore be conceived at some level as wholes before they are executed. All three involve transformations of various kinds—from vertical to horizontal (web to shroud, trees to planks, trunk to bed); from raw material to finished, humanly purposive artefact. All three are unadorned: they are each perfect marriages of form and function.
By contrast again, the art works represented in the Iliad point to a different aesthetic. Two exemplars come to mind. Helen’s web (3.125–8) is a Bayeux Tapestry; episodes of the struggle between the Achaeans and the Trojans on her account appear to be embroidered (ἐμπάσσειν) upon a web already woven. In the case of the great shield as well, the artwork is an adornment, superadded upon a highly functional implement. One is made to feel this rather vividly when the shield is penetrated by Aeneas’ spear. A nightmare for the art crowd. In the distinction between art as a perfect marriage of form and purpose, and art as an adornment superadded, gracing the necessary and the useful, and perhaps also transforming them, I believe we have as real a distinction as can be made between the aesthetic sensibilities of the poet of the Odyssey and the poet of the Iliad. Achilles’ lyre is extravagantly silver-bridged; Demodocus’ lyre is merely—and resonantly—hollow.
Homer’s evocation of the storm is also vocal miming, of a bravura kind. One thinks of King Lear’s storm. Much energy is often spent on visual and sonic effects in the staging of that play; but just as in Homer, the storm comes to torrential life in the consonants, vowels, and rhythms of the poet’s words. The performer’s breath is the breath of the four winds.
The consummation of the vision, to my mind, comes from the god’s view. The gods are Homer’s genius and his arsenal. Poseidon is returning from his festival in the land of the Aethiopians, and spots the little man on the limitless sea. Boy is he pissed! Mostly, it seems, at the other gods going behind his back. But one cannot but feel the visceral venal energy of the jealous sibling, stumbling on his useless brother’s turreted sandcastle, and kicking it to oblivion. From the distance the god’s-eye-view gives us, Odysseus’ vessel of tall trees’ timber proudly jointed, becomes a speck, a tumbleweed upon the immense briny swell. He himself becomes a no-man. Calypso’s pines become toothpicks, Odysseus’ days’ long labour and shipwright’s engineering, so much broken Lego™ and wasted hexameter verses.
As flies to wanton boys are we to th’ gods;
They kill us for their sport.
In Greek:

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“For she is mortal, but you are deathless and free from ageing ...”: Homer in English
24 aug 2024· Singing Homer Podcast
Odyssey 5.116-227
Odysseus does not explain himself. He just says it. When Calypso asks him the obvious thing—how can he choose an ageing Penelope and his own mortality over herself—and himself not ageing? With his only job, protecting her isolated house? The man acknowledges the facts of the case, and then just states the facts of his case: “But even so, I wish and I long, through all the days, / To get myself home and see my day of restoration.” Athena had been moved to real and felt poetry, outside her own experience, in Book 1: Odysseus, she said, “eager to make out just the hearth-smoke leaping up / From his mother land, longs to die a death.” I think precisely in not trying to explain or otherwise describe this longing, Odysseus renders it most purely and unfiltered for the rest of us, without psychoanalysis or the special pleading of a moral lesson.
Why does one long to be home? It almost feels a tautological question. What is ‘home’? That is a word which cannot be translated back into the Greek, and yet it dominates the way we experience the pull of the Odyssey in English. The Greek word in its place is οἶκος, more ‘house’ or ‘household’ than home. The word ‘home’, of such peculiar power in English, arises in translation mostly from the notion of νόστος, ‘return’ or ‘restoration’, as being implicit in the latter idea. Is there something to be made of the ‘seeing’, in the longing to see the day of one’s return? We ourselves are certainly drawn to the spectacle when hostages return, or lost siblings are reunited. In Proteus’ story, Agamemnon kissed his native earth in passion, upon his doomed return. There is a concentrated joy in such moments, which overflows even upon its disinterested witnesses. Less interesting are the moments that follow, the being home and doing the dishes.
I think Yeats has perhaps done Homer one better, in capturing this inexplicable longing, although for most of his auditors, as with Homer’s, the images do not belong to one’s own surroundings or experience. To be sure, the Irish poet says he will arise and go, as though away from home. But what he discovers at the lake seems to be a universal human apprehension, that in fact we all are hostages, displaced, with our every step on the pavement, from ‘the deep heart’s core’:
The Lake Isle of Innisfree
by William Butler Yeats
I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.
And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet’s wings.
I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.
Mind you, what is not at all in Yeats’s vision is the coupling that seems to define Odysseus’ longing. Yeats will “live alone”. In a sense Odysseus has already found his Innisfree on Calypso’s isle; perhaps he’d have stayed there if he’d had a copy of Yeats to enchant him. But he wants to return to Penelope, whoever she is nowadays, and he cannot explain this to his jealous interlocutor. “For she is mortal, but you …” All the same, his brief and simple expression of longing seems to have the effect of seducing Calypso. His predicament, from the moment she found him half dead, bestriding a ship’s keel, has made her want to rescue and protect him. Her very name, Calypso, suggests hiding or concealing; Homer’s Greek for ‘veil’ derives from the same root. Her love, perhaps, is driven precisely by his loneliness and longing. And couple they do, goddess and man, as soon as he expresses it. Homer had earlier described their sexual encounters as ‘he who does not want, alongside she who wants’ (παρ’ οὐκ ἐθέλων ἐθελούσηι). I rendered ‘a man unwilling next a woman all too.’ But at the end of this passage, they do really seem to come together, without any qualification, in her hollowed cave’s deep core. Would we describe Odysseus as ‘unfaithful’?
The conjunction of God and man was a subject Michelangelo attempted on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Homer’s version is Odyssey 5.
In Greek:

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‘Singing Long Vowels in a Lovely Voice’: Homer in English
15 aug 2024· Singing Homer Podcast
Odyssey 5.1-115
I suppose the second council of the gods, echoing the opening one in Book 1, is a bit of a concession from Homer. Now we’re getting back to the main plot. Even Zeus expresses his exasperation at Athena’s posing the question of Odysseus again, and he seems to allude to the fact that they’d already decided a plan of action. Remember how hush hush and strategic that meeting had been, taking advantage of the absence of Poseidon. Evidently he’s still gone. But in this way Homer rather forces the question: what has the Telemachy, the story of Telemachus’ journey and the stories told by Nestor and Menelaus and Helen along the way, served the tale he himself means to tell? I for one find immense richness in the encounters we have witnessed, and I cannot imagine being without them. I am still thinking about Proteus counting his seals. But what do you think? We haven’t even heard from Odysseus yet, the man in question from line 1. But we have heard about him, broad strokes and little hints. Does the Odyssey need the Telemachy (Books 1-4)?
The same phrase and prosodic figure, νῦν αὖ παῖδ’ ἀγαπητὸν, with three straight circumflexes, occurs twice in Penelope’s speeches at the end of Book 4, and then again immediately at the beginning of Book 5, this time in the mouth of Athena at the council of the gods (5.18). In such a context it is impossible not to hear Athena’s use as a quotation and an evocation, of Penelope’s recent and peculiar prosodic usage. Athena also is speaking of Telemachus, but makes no further allusion to Penelope. All the same her evocation is unmistakable, not only in her same words but their distinctive prosodic music. It is Penelope’s emotive motif surfacing in Athena’s voice.
Surely the echoing of the consecutive circumflected contonations, the prosodic inflection we observe and register here, reflects a real connection by design between the characters of Penelope and Athena, and indeed the Homeric performer himself. Breath and harmony unite these characters with a tactile immediacy that seems only possible at the musical level of the representation of the psyche. One cannot see bottom for the significance of this signature echoing for one’s assessment of the composer and the composition, and the kind of mimesis they are trying to achieve. The three straight circumflexes take you there, immediately, in the way a distinctive line of melody invokes every time in history that it has ever been sounded or sung. Such unities of representation seem only to be possible through music, and it is essential that Homer’s composition be recognised at last for its musical art and intention.
One could wish for a true Homeric voice, rather than mine, for this passage. Might as well listen to my Greek all the same. The descriptive poetry around Calypso’s cave means to take you there, to hear her singing, to breathe the aromas. Homer has not attempted anything like that in the preceding books. Perhaps as Odysseus finally comes on stage, some effort is needed to transport us and convince us. The world of Telemachus, by contrast, has been altogether too realistic, uncannily familiar, a transactional world that needs no special effects to ring true to our modern, post- (or inter-) catastrophic experience.
In Greek:

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Afleveringen

“She is Widowed of Men”—Homer in English

“I am Odysseus”—Homer in English

‘But Odysseus began to melt ...’: Homer in English

“You Lifed Me, Girl”—Homer in English

The Over-Thinker: Homer in English

‘The stone boomed and whizzed’: Homer in English

A blind bard and a big purple cloak: Homer in English

“We’re a jealous lot on the ground, the tribes of mankind”: Homer in English

‘Odysseus the Clever, the Variegated Plotter’: Homer in English

‘Ripening Fig on Fig’: Homer in English

‘The city—ravishing and longed for—’: Homer in English

‘She applied the whip with judgement’: Homer in English

The Liquid Mortal: Homer in English

“I am at your knees, Milady”: Homer in English

Being and Becoming Nausicaa: Homer in English

An Octopus’s Bedroom: Homer in English

A Human Voice, Speaking Mortal Language: Homer in English

Man on a Raft: Homer in English

“For she is mortal, but you are deathless and free from ageing ...”: Homer in English

‘Singing Long Vowels in a Lovely Voice’: Homer in English

Afleveringen

“She is Widowed of Men”—Homer in English

“I am Odysseus”—Homer in English

‘But Odysseus began to melt ...’: Homer in English

“You *Lifed* Me, Girl”—Homer in English

The Over-Thinker: Homer in English

‘The stone boomed and whizzed’: Homer in English

A blind bard and a big purple cloak: Homer in English

“We’re a jealous lot on the ground, the tribes of mankind”: Homer in English

‘Odysseus the Clever, the Variegated Plotter’: Homer in English

‘Ripening Fig on Fig’: Homer in English

‘The city—ravishing and longed for—’: Homer in English

‘She applied the whip with judgement’: Homer in English

The Liquid Mortal: Homer in English

“I am at your knees, Milady”: Homer in English

Being and Becoming Nausicaa: Homer in English

An Octopus’s Bedroom: Homer in English

A Human Voice, Speaking Mortal Language: Homer in English

Man on a Raft: Homer in English

“For she is mortal, but you are deathless and free from ageing ...”: Homer in English

‘Singing Long Vowels in a Lovely Voice’: Homer in English

“You Lifed Me, Girl”—Homer in English