Afleveringen
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Odyssey 8.1-95
The dawn rises now upon the most extraordinary book, Book 8 of Homerâs Odyssey. We finally start to peel the onion. Athena somewhat comically announces Homerâs programme as the town crier, more of a carnival barker: come have a look at the mysterious wanderer whoâs just showed up at Alcinousâ house. Heâs built like the immortals! Itâs said she thus aroused the Phaeaciansâ fighting spirit (ÎŒÎÎœÎżÏ) and heat (ÎžÏ ÎŒÏÏ, âlifeâs breathâ), suggesting a kind of competitive emulation. She sheds grace (ÏÎŹÏÎčÏ) 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 Homerâs 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 âpleasing songâ. One doesnât 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? Homerâs 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 Homerâs own depiction of Demodocus is itself the source and inspiration, when Homerâs ancient hymnodists and late quasi-biographers describe âhimâ 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 Calypsoâs case (if she borrows Daddyâs 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 heâs 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 Homerâs 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, âThe Quarrel of Odysseus and Peleusâ son Achillesâ. How he knows it, isolated as Phaeacia is, remains a mystery. I believe there is something mysterious in general about things âgoing viralâ, 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 âhit songâ in the world of the Odysseyâs 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 âmetaâ? 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 Danteâs Commedia, Shakespeareâs comedies, and (sometimes with gender switches) Austenâs 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 Homerâs 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 polymÄtis 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 Agamemnonâs 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 Homerâs own fantastic innovation? The fact is that the tragedians never forgot the scheming devil. Was it Homer himself who made Odysseus a heroâalbeit a comic oneâjust 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 âbest of the Achaeans,â 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 Apolloâs 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 Agamemnonâs case, he does not see that as king, he is the âbest of the Achaeansâ 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 Odysseusâand Homerâs lines surely read like the proem to such a poemâthe Iliad and its quarrel would trump it, on the very same terms Demodocusâ proem delineates. The Iliad sings Apolloâs prophecy fulfilled, this time with the true duo, paired in strife, who were the âbest of the Achaeansâ.
The simplest meta-reading of Demodocusâ 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 Nestorâs 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 Calypsoâs Isle has already become an icon. One literally does not know whether to laugh or cryâthat is, to feel sympathy or to keep our distance from the crybaby. This time Odysseus hides his âbeautiful faceâ; so cloaked, we can only imagine what is going on within. But that very often is Homerâs 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 Demodocusâ 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 magnetâElvis 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 Menelausâ 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 heâd 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 Menelausâ tears may perhaps be compared to Odysseusâs, 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 playâs 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 Demodocusâ 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 âprocessâ their memories of war, until they saw that movie. For Menelaus, the only remedy for his grief was Helenâs 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.
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Odyssey 7.261-347 (end)
Let me call attention to two moments in the close of Odysseusâ speech to Queen Arete. The first is Odysseusâ comment that Calypso ordered him to return home âbecause of a message from Zeusâor perhaps even her own mind was turned âŠâ The truth is that when Hermes delivered Zeusâs 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 Calypsoâs motivation had been. This could be a moment of rare, unmotivated honesty on Odysseusâ 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 visitedâHomer 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 himselfâand 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 Odysseusâ suspicions) that sheâs not intending him harm, and even offers him sustenance and immortal clothing to protect himâwhich 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 Odysseusâ own big lie comes at the end of his speech. He claims that for all his grief, he has recounted the truth (áŒÎ»Î·ÎžÎ”ÎŻÎ·Îœ ÎșαÏÎλΔΟα). But we know that âin realityâ, Odysseus had been too modest to be naked among Nausicaaâs 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 âmenâ.) But Odysseus tells her own parents that Nausicaa herself bathed him, and then dressed him in the clothes heâs now wearing, which her own mother had made. Whatâs he playing at? Why this lie direct, falsely impugning their Nausicaaâs propriety and judgement, titillating the idea that they had been intimate? Is this to suggest that heâs 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 strangerâs possible marriage to his daughter is very much top of mind.
Odysseus then purports to defend Nausicaaâs 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 whoâs 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 âof the sort you actually areâthinking the things that I myself do,â would settle down in Phaeacia and possess his daughter in marriage. He doesnât even know the strangerâs 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 brotherâs daughter.) Peas in a pod.
Alcinous is quite the braggart. Homerâs 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 Homerâs (and his performerâs) 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 âmythicalâ 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 GötterdĂ€mmerung, 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 Homerâs place names refer, but for a classical audience, Euboea is just over there. Itâs New Jersey. To my mind, it suits the Odyssean humour for Alcinousâ so distant-to-be-legendary Euboea, to be comically local for us. To adapt Monty Pythonâs âNudge Nudgeâ sketch: âEuboea? Euboea! Say no mowah!â
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Zijn er afleveringen die ontbreken?
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Odyssey 7.167-260: PolymÄtis 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 âweighty ladies,â 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 Odysseusâ apparition makes this plausible. In that case, complains Alcinous, the times they are a-changinâ. The gods never used to hide themselves at our parties! Even if you ran into them on the street. Weâre from the world of Cyclopses and Giants, Godâs 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 ÎÏÎșλÏÏÎ”Ï and ÎÎŻÎłÎ±ÎœÏÎ”Ï 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. Odysseusâ characteristic epithet in Homer, from Iliad I on, is ÏολÏΌηÏÎčÏ: âof many counsels or devicesâ. Polu/poly is âmanyâ, mÄtis is âmental acuityâ, âshrewdnessâ, âmindâ, or else the internal object of such faculties: a âcunning planâ. 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. Homerâs embodied imagination is not enslaved to a âmythologyâ, 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 âmanyâ in this epithet in relation to the peri in Penelopeâs characteristic epithet, ÏΔÏÎŻÏÏÏÎœ. The latter is often translated âcircumspectâ, or âprudentâ, without due regard to the mental asset expressed by phrĆn. I think, however, that this is peri in the sense âmoreâ rather than âaroundâ or âaboutâ, and translate âPenelope passing wiseâ. Odysseusâ âmanyâ may be ever so many, in the cognitive department, but it is not as much as Penelopeâs âmoreâ.
We have not yet escaped the American Homeristâs 20th Century dogma, that the epithets in noun-and-epithet phrases in Homer, like ÏολÏΌηÏÎčÏ áœÎŽÏ ÏÏΔÏÏ and ÏΔÏÎŻÏÏÏÎœ ΠηΜΔλÏÏΔÎčα, 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 nightâs 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 thingsâa 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 ÏολÏΌηÏÎčÏ áœÎŽÏ ÏÏΔÏÏ, needed condescending explaining by mid-Century scholars raised on silent reading and âliteratureâ. 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, âone would as soon explain repetition in music, as wetness in water.â More recently: âHow 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 thereâs 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.â
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 storytellerâs foreground. Just as we donât always register the majesty in âYour Majestyâ, or the âgentlemanâ 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 ÏολÏΌηÏÎčÏ ÊŒÎÎŽÏ ÏÏΔÏÏ, 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 âstagingâ 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 Classicistâs ânecessityâ 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 donât generally register the terror when an event in the day is âa terrible tragedyâ; that phrase has become a formula, a noun-and-epithet phrase. In TV news-speak, things never simply go wrong nowadays, invariably they go âhorribly wrong.â But the effect is different when predication is intended, as: âthe tsunami was terrible, the destruction was horrible.â 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 âblameless Aegisthusâ in his opening speech, where he is pointedly singling out Aegisthus (and his fellow humans) for blame. Put most starkly, either âblamelessâ (áŒÎŒÏÎŒÏÎœ) 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 Homerâin part, precisely because its blunt opacity has spawned such small-minded disagreement.
In the case of Odysseus, ÏολÏΌηÏÎčÏ seems intended to be complimentary, but it seems to me Homer means to ring changes on this Odyssean epithetâexplore it, if you willâin 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 âLyinâ Odysseusâ, 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 âcleverâ or âintricate-mindedâ in real life? Why, they describe a liar. Not just a liar, but unlike Trump, a good liar.
Homer thrusts the meaning of Odysseusâ 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 âŠ
The two adjectives, ΎαίÏÏÏÎœ and ÏÎżÎčÎșÎčÎ»ÎżÎŒÎźÏηÏ, are each of them usually used as single epithets, joined together often with Odysseusâ name in an hexameter segment. Here, instead, they are both sounded, and together make up their own half-line, where Odysseusâ name belongs to the lineâs 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 Odysseusâ 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 turnâeven in his genuflection and exhausted supplication. Odysseus is putting on a show. Improvising nervously, perhaps, but not letting on. The Phaeacians, we recallâwith the possible exception of Demodocus the bardâdo not know either his name or his characteristic epithets.
âWhen someone asks you if youâre a god, you say YES!â 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 âbitâ, played to the groundlings. He is keen to dispense with any advantage he might have had in the Phaeaciansâ readiness to see him as a godâhis presence there, having crossed an ocean which they knew to be traversable only by themselves, is a miracle after allâbut no, heâs 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: âMy property, my slaves and the high-roofed big house.â
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 Calypsoâs 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 Nausicaaâs 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 âradiant Odysseusâ, ÎŽáżÎżÏ áœÎŽÏ ÏÏΔÏÏ, 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 polymÄtis. 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 âdread goddessâ (ÎŽÏΔÎčΜᜎ ΞΔÏÏ), 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 ΎολÏΔÏÏα ÎÎ±Î»Ï ÏÏ, 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, Odysseusâ interchange with Calypso, whose sexual relationship moves from Homerâs description, âa man unwilling next a woman all too,â to the moment after they discuss the concept of mortal Penelope, when they become a dual subjectâa 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 Odysseusâ 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 Queenâs 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.
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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,
Lullâd in these flowers with dances and delight âŠ
How do these lines of Oberonâs work? Certainly they evoke images with their colours, and more astoundingly, the sniffed-in aromas of flowersâwords 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. âLusciousâ is a luscious word. âOxlipsâ 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 poetâs 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 rareâin fact there is only oneâand it is unusually elusive.
Homer has engaged in such contemplation already in the Odyssey; more a propos of Oberonâs lines was the description of Calypsoâs eco-cave, as Hermes stood on its threshold in awe and admiration (5.57-74). Earlier than that was Telemachus gaping at Menelausâ interior space, wondering if this was what Zeusâs front room was like (4.74). It is that encounter which most comes to mind now; once again we hear how Alcinousâ house shone âlike the light of the sun ⊠or the moon.â 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 Alcinousâ house combine form and function, true to the spirit of the Odysseyâs 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 âthe leaves on a tall, tapering poplar.â One does not actually know the tree for sure, or, therefore, the intended motion. Now, when it comes to Homerâs 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 âblueâ, unless it is the pigment of Alcinousâ cornice, called cyanus. The Iliadâs sky is âcopperedâ or âbrazenâ. I really donât think that Homerâs 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 âŠ. âKeats
There seems to be no winter in Alcinousâ 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 treeâin the tropics, a region without winter beyond Odysseusâ travels and ken. It is Poseidon who travels among the Aethiopes.
The flowers and new star fruits were on the tree simultaneously with last seasonâs lot. But all the other fruit trees there seemed to have their seasons, though these werenât 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.
ÏÎŹÏÎœ ÎżáœÌ ÏÎżÏΔ ÎșαÏÏÎżÌÏ Î±ÌÏÏÎ»Î»Ï ÏαÎč ÎżÏ ÌÎŽâ αÌÏολΔίÏΔÎč
ÏÎ”ÎŻÎŒÎ±ÏÎżÏ ÎżÏ ÌÎŽÎ”Ì ÎžÎÏÎ”Ï Ï, ΔÌÏΔÏÎźÏÎčÎżÏ Â· αÌÎ»Î»Î±Ì ÎŒÎŹÎ»â αÎčÌΔί
ÎΔÏÏ Ïίη ÏÎœÎ”ÎŻÎżÏ Ïα ÏÎ±Ì ÎŒÎ”ÌÎœ ÏÏΔÎč, áŒÌλλα ÎŽÎ”Ì ÏÎÏÏΔÎč.
áœÌÎłÏΜη ΔÌÏâ áœÌÎłÏΜηÎč γηÏÎŹÏÎșΔÎč, ΌηÍÎ»ÎżÎœ ÎŽâ ΔÌÏÎčÌ ÎŒÎźÎ»ÏÎč,
Î±Ï ÌÏαÌÏ Î”ÌÏÎčÌ ÏÏαÏÏ Î»Î·ÍÎč ÏÏαÏÏ Î»Îź, ÏÏ ÍÎșÎżÎœ ÎŽâ ΔÌÏÎčÌ ÏÏÎșÏÎč. 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 itâs 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 onkhnÄ epâ onkhnÄi, mÄlon epi mÄlĆi, 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, staphulÄi staphulÄ and sĆ«kon epi sĆ«kĆi, creating a complex of rhymes in lines 120-1. It is commonly taught, somewhat proudly following Milton, that the ancients did not âdoâ end rhymes, as so tenderly executed in Oberonâs couplets above. But just look at the emphatic endings of Homerâs lines, 7.117-21. Even if you canât sound them out, you can see the rhyming shapes of the syllables at the linesâ ends, printed in bold: áŒÏολΔίÏΔÎč, Î±áŒ°Î”ÎŻ, ÏÎÏÏΔÎč, followed by ÎŒÎźÎ»ÏÎč, ÏÏÎșÏÎč. 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 âagreementâ, 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 donât have feminine forms, so that feminine nouns have to agree with what look like masculine epithets or predicates. But this classicistâs ethos should not obscure the fact that rhymeâfrom the perspective of a line, âinternalâ rhymeâis 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 presenceâunderlying things neverthelessâthe 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 âround her knees as âdaughter of Rhexenor,â her husbandâs 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 Athenaâs 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 Phaeaciansâ nobility inherit their thingsânot, say, a simple wish for everyoneâs prosperity, and hence slightly puzzlingâtogether with any prizes the demos bestows. Now, we have had only one mention of a prize bestowed by the people, in last timeâs reading; is this a reference to Eurymedousa, the concubine turned Nausicaaâs nurse and chambermaid, whom the Phaeacians had gifted to Areteâs 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 Odysseusâ supplication is meant as a provocation for some reason. Or is the whole thing rather a colossal faux pas, intended for our (the audienceâs) amusement? The quite rapid drama of the moment perhaps detracts from our attention to the substance of Odysseusâ 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 âcity of desireâ 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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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, Homerâs 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 Homerâs Phaeacia. One is called today perhaps âcultural anthropologyâ; the other âpolitical scienceâ, which has its decidedly empirical aspect, and also âpolitical theoryâ, 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 âideal cityâ. The grandest scale of the resulting compositions was surely reached in the mathematics of Platoâs 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, âhow ought one to do things?â
As for the ancient origin of modern cultural anthropology, I think instead of what Herodotus called his âhistoryâ, 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 âcultureâ 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 travelerâs 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 Homerâs 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 erannÄ: a city that arouses erotic desireââravishing and longed forâ. This could mean simply a city that suits Odysseusâ own desire, as a staging ground for his return homeâhis true desire. But Homerâs objective wording and pointed predication of áŒÏÎ±ÎœÎœÎź rather objectify Phaeacia as a singularly beautiful thing, a city to fall in love with. (The word perhaps encourages a notion of Odysseusâ 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 âidealâ city. But Homer has a blueprint: he takes pains, directly or through othersâ voices, to describe the cityâs physical layout and its political and social castes. He mentions Nausithousâ the founderâs communal distribution of ploughland. What should undercut some of this for an audience is the placeâs 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 Helleneâs 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 elsewhereâas though they had been on a raid of their non-existent neighbours! The name of her town, Apeira, means âlimitlessâ; to carry her off from Apeira, as the Phaeacian sailors did, is to carry her off from âThe Infiniteâ. Be that as it may, it is said that she was brought to Alcinous as a âprizeâ. 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 itâs okay, just because itâs a thing invading armies doâto hand out captured women as top prizes to leading warriors in the general distribution of booty? How is Alcinousâ 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, Telemachusâ nurseâwhose name Eurymedousa also recallsâwe are told that Laertes (Odysseusâ father) had bought her with his own money, and honoured her in the house on a level with his own wife. Butâand Homer rather emphasises the pointâhe did not sleep with her (1.433). We may infer that this was unusual behaviour on Laertesâ part, the abstaining from sex with his youthful and comely purchase. But does Homer celebrate a romantic monogamy in Laertesâ and Odysseusâ household? Or are they weird? Are we to think less of Alcinousâ and the Phaeaciansâ 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 Nausicaaâs nurse and now makes her some supper, just as Eurycleia had earlier made Telemachusâ 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 Abrahamâs 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 âinspires erosâ (áŒÏÎ±ÎœÎœÎź). 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 Eurymedonâs daughter, who was impregnated by Poseidon. One presumes this happened after Eurymedon, king of the Giants, âdestroyed his presumptuous people ⊠then himselfâ. âEurymedonâ is the masculine version of the name we have just heard, Eurymedousa, the prize concubine turned Nausicaaâs 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 Athenaâs 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 Homerâs mind as he tells the Odyssey. The figure of the woman of the house (or the cosmos in Calypsoâs case), stationed by the houseâs pillar, has already become a symbolic motif. Even in light of this, Areteâs special significance in Phaeacia is highly marked. Her husband the king âhonoured her, like no woman else is honoured upon the ground, / As many women as there are these days, hold the house beneath their men.â It is several times pointed out how ancillary Alcinous really is, in general but also in Odysseusâ 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 (ÎœÎ”ÎŻÎșΔα) 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 Areteâs authority instead the consummating point in Athenaâs 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 Erechtheusâ close-built house. But Odysseus âŠ
To Alcinousâ 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 Athenaâs journey are bodied forth. But then we see the name of Odysseus, unadorned and lonely. The bounty of the goddessâs 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 Homerâs perspective, it would seem that the rules of his poetry are made to be broken.
In Greek:
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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 Nausicaaâs 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 boarâs lair, sheltered under twinned trees, one of whom is Athenaâs cultivated olive. Hence the riverâs mouth where Odysseus meets Nausicaa is a liminal zone, where civilisation meets the wild and wet, and âliquid mortalsâ may be prowling. The journey home will proceed along past the farms, at whose presence the hybrid bushes on the forestâs edge have already hinted. Here the pilgrim must keep his distance. But the real gauntlet the girlsâ 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 Phaeacianâs names, including Nausicaaâs, 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 undiscovereâd 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 godâs protection must have been much on any marinerâs mind, let alone the Phaeaciansâ, 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 Odysseusâ 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. Alcinousâ house is not at all like any of the others. Nausithous, their founding father, had built the wall and âdistributed the ploughlandsâ. I suppose this portends a jolly sort of Soviet oligarchy. His son Alcinous now enjoys the perks.
At last Alcinousâ 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 youâll find Nausicaaâs mother. There she spins the sea-purple wool, leaning against a pillar. Right nearby, his drinking chair also leaning against the pillarâalthough the single intensive/reflexive αáœÏáżÎč in Greek makes it seem as though heâs leaning against herâsits the tipsy Alcinous, âlike an immortal.â
Everything does lean on her. She is the pillar. Nausicaa owns as much about the father she exalts as âheroâ and âimmortalâ, when she says to Odysseus, in Butlerâs translation, ânever mind him!â Arete, her mother, is the source of power. It is her knees, not Nausicaaâs, 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 houseâs 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 Odysseusâ house. Calypso is Atlasâ 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 Homerâs 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 movesâor movedâand it is possible that it was more than the axis of international politics and warâthough it certainly was thoseâwhich got displaced with her. The Trojan event certainly included a war. Thatâs the part we sing about.
In the midst of his outwardly simple but deceptively anagogical journey, in the train of Nausicaaâs 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? âListen to me this time,â he says, seeing as âbefore you never listened, as I was battered âŠâ Such intimacy between the human and the powers-that-be would seem to be a particular focus and point of Homerâs 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 womenâAthena before her uncle, Nausicaa before her father (who, it turns out, is also her great uncle)âand 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 Odysseusâ prayer to Athena, that he come to the Phaeacians as a friend and a thing to be pitied, needs to take place outside the cityâor 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 Athenaâs 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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Odyssey 6.198-284
âDo 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 âŠâ tr. Butler
âYe 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.â tr. Murray
âDo you really suppose heâs some kind of enemy?
Thereâs no mortal alive, nor could there ever be one,
Whoâd show up in this land of Phaiakian men
With hostile intent, so dear are we to the immortals!â tr. Green
âDo 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.â tr. Wilson
âDo 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 âŠâ 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:
áŒ Í ÎŒÎź ÏÎżÏ ÏÎčΜα ÎŽÏ ÏΌΔΜÎÏÎœ ÏÎŹÏΞâ áŒÌΌΌΔΜαÎč αÌΜΎÏÏÍÎœ;
ÎżÏ ÌÎș áŒÌÏΞâ ÎżáœÍÏÎżÏ Î±ÌΜηÌÏ ÎŽÎčΔÏÎżÌÏ ÎČÏÎżÏÎżÌÏ ÎżÏ ÌÎŽÎ”Ì ÎłÎΜηÏαÎč,
áœÌÏ ÎșΔΜ ΊαÎčÎźÎșÏÎœ αÌΜΎÏÏÍÎœ ΔÌÏ ÎłÎ±ÎčÍαΜ ጱÌÎșηÏαÎč
ΎηÎčÌÎżÏηÍÏα ÏÎÏÏÎœ · ÎŒÎŹÎ»Î± γαÌÏ ÏίλοÎč αÌÎžÎ±ÎœÎŹÏÎżÎčÏÎčÎœ.
Surely you didnât decide he was some enemy man?
This man is not the one, the liquid mortalânor will he be born!â
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 âmortalâ; dieros is variously treated in the translationsâeither ignored completely (by Butler), or translated somehow âlivingâ or âaliveâ or thereabouts, and âslipperyâ 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 âwetâ or âsoakedâ or âfluidâ 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: âThis man (ÎżáœÏÎżÏ áŒÎœáœŽÏ) is not him, the âliquid mortalâ (ÎŽÎčΔÏáœžÏ ÎČÏÎżÏ᜞Ï), nor will he be born, / Who would reach the land of the Phaeacians bringing violence and harm âŠâ 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 Phaeaciaâs well-being. But Nausicaa nevertheless stands up for xenia, guest friendship, with true religion: â ⊠for from Zeus are they all, / The strangers and the beggars, and a gift is both meagre and their own.â
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 Athenaâs magic, as the poet says, comparing her handiwork to that of a skilled goldsmith who overlays gold upon silver; or is this rather Homerâs 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,
âBut now, heâs like the gods who hold wide heaven.
If only, for me, such a man as this would be called âhusbandâ âŠâ
After Odysseus eats and drinks, Homer says Nausicaa âturned her mind to other things.â We first heard this turn of phrase in reference to Athena, when she was planning Telemachusâ journey from behind the scenes at Ithaca. There is something affective about Athenaâs 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 Odysseusâ 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 homeâwherever that is. But the rest of Nausicaaâs wish, expressed only to her handmaids, is quite the opposite: that the anonymous stranger and future husband would settle âin the neighbourhood, and it would please him to remain here.â 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:
âWhoâs this here, trailing Nausicaa, a handsome and a tall
Stranger? Whereâd she find him? Any day now heâs gonna be her husband.
Surely heâs someone driven off course, that sheâs carried off his ship,
Come from far off men, since there arenât any nearby.
Or else itâs some godâcome much prayed for, to the girl prayingâ
Stepped down out of heaven, and sheâll keep him all her days âŠâ
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 heâs a charity case sheâs 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. âGood for her sheâs bagged a foreigner instead.â 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 driverâs 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 rĂŽles 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 donât 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 Menelausâ 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 âall is waterâ, 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 âfluid mortalâ, 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 â like the baseless fabric of this vision â
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.
âProspero
Does Phaeacia exist? Though Thucydides locates its geographical vicinity, it is sometimes said that Phaeacia only exists in Homerâs imagination. The place certainly serves as a halfway house, a vehicle for both Homerâs story and a staging venue for his unfettered and most inspired storytelling. Just in Homerâs 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.
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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 Homerâs total scene-painting and narrative strategy is, once again, a simile. While Odysseus in his words and actions is completely âbeyond reproachâ, 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
Thereâs 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 intercourseâthough he was naked; for the need was on him.
Consider the details: heâs 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 whatâs 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. âJust so was Odysseus ⊠with the girls and their beautiful hair âŠâ What, do you mean to say heâs 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 typeâheâll take on the domesticated ones and the wild ones, with gusto, and then have a go at the snooty princess in the big house!
Homerâs delicate indelicacy is consummated with the enjambment of the uncommon future infinitive ÎŒÎ”ÎŻÎŸÎ”ÏΞαÎč. This means literally âto be mixed withâ, and has all the double entendre of our âto have intercourse withâ. The effect is not subtle, and yet it is plausibly deniable; Odysseus is simply about to âgo mingleâ with these lovely heads of hair.
The surface picture is clear enough: Odysseus is genuinely worried about the people heâs come to, as to whether theyâre 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 personâall us ladies and gentlemenâis 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 doesnât 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 Homerâs 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 expressâbothâthe reality of our nature and condition, one must construct a labyrinth.
On a side note, I wonder if the Homeric words ΎαÎčΎΏλΔοÏ, ÎŽÎ±ÎŻÎŽÎ±Î»ÎżÎœ, and the verb ΎαÎčΎΏλλÏ, âto ornament curiously,â 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 Penelopeâs waxing and waning shroud for Laertes, and Odysseusâ timbered raft and rooted marriage bed. There is no frou-frou. Contrast these with the Iliadâs celebrated artworks: the phantasmagoric Shield of Achilles, and Helenâs 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 poemâs aesthetic vision better represents the legacy of Daedalusâtranscendent 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 âbeforeâ in the sense âaboveâ.
One thing that has long puzzled me about Odysseusâ great speech to Nausicaaâquite as much as it has moved meâis 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 Apolloâ
The phoenix, a young shoot of palm coming upâI 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 Apolloâwho later had an oracle on the Greek island of Delos, among other placesâbefore 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 âspearâ. The name he uses for it is âphoenixâ, which also referred to a prized red-purple dye, as well as the people associated by trade with the dyeâs 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 himâalthough clearly it is known to Homerâs audienceâOdysseus 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 âspearâ come up out of the earth. I suppose this could be a response to seeing oneâs 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.
Odysseusâ speech to Nausicaa has long been indwelling in the psyche. It is hard now to be objective about it. Itâs already almost thirty years since I recited it, in Greek and Englishâthese habits start earlyâat my own sisterâs 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: áœÎŒÎżÏÏÎżÏÏΜη, âoneness of mindâ or âsameness of thinkingâ. 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 Odysseusâ lesson. We still have English remnants of this Indo-European feature, in our use of âbothâ, for example, along with âeitherâ, and âneitherâ, and perhaps in plurals like âoxenâ, or âeyneâ for âeyesâ 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 Odysseusâ 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 âthinking as oneâ they are a dual subject (áœÎŒÎżÏÏÎżÎœÎÎżÎœÏΔ), who in the next line become two singulars: âthe man and the womanâ (áŒÎœáœŽÏ ጠΎáœČ ÎłÏ ÎœÎź). One is reminded of the conundrum in Genesis (1:27): âin the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.â But are âman and womanâ a natural pair, or natural opposites? The same can be asked of other possible translations of áŒÎœáœŽÏ ጠΎáœČ ÎłÏ ÎœÎź, including âmale and femaleâ or âhusband and wifeâ, even âwarriorâ and âmatronâ: 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 áŒÏΔÏÎżÏ Î±áœÏÏÏ, âanother self.â Does Homerâs 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, áŒÎœÎźÏ and ÎłÏ ÎœÎź?
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: âthey hear the story best themselves.â âThey hearâ translates ÎșλÏÎżÎœ, whose internal object is ÎșλÎÎżÏ. The latter wordâs trajectory goes all the way from âthing heardâ to âreputeâ to âgloryâ. 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, oneâs 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 theyâre alone together and thereâs 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 Nausicaaâs opening heart.
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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 âloosen the veilâ 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 arenât 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 âoriginalâ 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. Theyâve been bullied. But outside the walls, what about the wild beasts in their lairs, whom Odysseus was so worried about? As I think weâve 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 menâs 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, ââȘâȘâ, 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 itâs Taygetusâ extended slopes, or down Erymanthus,
Delighting in the wild boar and the speeding deer:
And with her play the Nymphs, Aegis-Holder Zeusâs girls
From the countryside; and she rejoices in her mindâs vessel, Mother Letoâ
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 ÏαÏΞÎÎœÎżÏ áŒÎŽÎŒÎźÏ. We last encountered this word admÄs âunbrokenâ in describing the heifer, who was sacrificed by the sons at Nestorâs house in honour of female Athena, to the ululation of Nestorâs elder wife and the rest of the householdâs women. Nestor asks for a cow who was âA virgin [áŒÎŽÎŒÎźÏηΜ]: who never yet was brought under the yoke by a man.â [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 Letoâs 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 admÄs, 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. Johnâs College in Annapolis, in 2003.]
âAthena enters Nausicaaâs 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.
âThe windâs breath assumes the identity of Nausicaaâs 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 Odysseusâ conveyance home. For Nausicaa, it is hard to sayâshe is a veiled thingâbut if it is not a day that dawns for heartbreak, it is perhaps a day that gets her to a nunnery.â
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 âmanlyâ foreigner, forever to change and to cheat her expectations of the possible.
âAs for Athena, her job done, a seed of turbulence planted in the world of becoming within the heart of a girl, off she goes âŠ
ÎáœÌÎ»Ï ÎŒÏÏΜΎâ, áœÌΞÎč ÏαÏÎčÌ ÎžÎ”ÏÍÎœ áŒÌÎŽÎżÏ Î±ÌÏÏαλΔÌÏ Î±ÎčÌΔί
áŒÌΌΌΔΜαÎč · ÎżáœÌÏâ αÌÎœÎÎŒÎżÎčÏÎč ÏÎčÎœÎŹÏÏΔÏαÎč ÎżáœÌÏΔ ÏÎżÏâ áœÌÎŒÎČÏÏÎč
ΎΔÏΔÏαÎč ÎżáœÌÏΔ ÏÎčÏÌÎœ ΔÌÏÎčÏÎŻÎ»ÎœÎ±ÏαÎč, αÌÎ»Î»Î±Ì ÎŒÎŹÎ»â αጰÌΞÏη
ÏÎÏÏαÏαÎč αÌÎœÎÏΔλοÏ, Î»Î”Ï ÎșÎ·Ì ÎŽâ ΔÌÏÎčÎŽÎÎŽÏÎżÎŒÎ”Îœ αጰÌγλη · 45
ÏÏÍÎč áŒÌÎœÎč ÏÎÏÏÎżÎœÏαÎč ÎŒÎŹÎșαÏÎ”Ï ÎžÎ”ÎżÎčÌ áŒ ÌΌαÏα ÏÎŹÎœÏα.
áŒÌΜΞâ αÌÏÎÎČη ÎÎ»Î±Ï ÎșÏÍÏÎčÏ, ΔÌÏΔÎčÌ ÎŽÎčΔÏÎÏÏαΎΔ ÎșÎżÏÏηÎč.
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.
âNote the enjambment of áŒÌΌΌΔΜαÎč in the second line. It is not always a thing to note in Homer when the infinitive of âbeingâ is enjambed; but in the context of this passage, with Homerâs 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.â
The old philosophers, men after Homer but before Socrates, used to pontificate and fuss about being and motion. ÏÎŹÎœÏα ÏΔῠsaid Heraclitus, âeverything flowsâ or âall is fluxâ. There were a number of these pioneers who struggled to understand how there could be certain knowledge of anythingâparadoxically, like that contained in the phrase panta reiâwhen the whole universe seemed to be constantly in mid-flow. In their face Parmenides asserts áŒÎœ Ï᜞ ÏÎŹÎœ: in fact âthe all is oneâ, or áŒÎœ Ï᜞ áœÎœ, âbeing is oneâ. 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 Athenaâs 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.
âThere are some among usâand what is a community of Greeks, without a Phoenician Philistine to teach it the alphabetâwho can be expected to say that Homer has merely âdressed up,â or âsensualised,â 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 riddleâby direct encounterânot the answer to it, but the enigma itselfâof being and becoming.
âRhythm is being moving through becoming; it is the one moving through the many; it is the singular distended through the plural. áŒÌΌΌΔΜαÎč 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. áŒÌΌΌΔΜαÎč enjambed is âbeingâ rendered.
âIn 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.â
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Odyssey 5.424-93 (end)
When Odysseus escapes the surge and clings to the rugged cliff faceâat Athenaâs prompt!âbut 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 âŠ
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 isnât the octopus! Read it again. This is what Iâm calling an Odyssean simile, which turns things upside down and unsettles as much as it clarifies. If the Odysseyâs 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 surgeonâs knife for some reason fitted with barbs. The pebbles stick to the octopusâs suckers, Odysseusâ 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 heâd have been stripped of his skin, bones broken to pieces,
If she had not put in his mindâs vessel, the goddess, Owl-Eyes Athena:
âRush with both arms and grab at the rock!â
Well, Odysseusâ bones appear to remain intact, but his skin, not so much. The formula, âthen such and such would have happened [beyond fate] unless the god had not suggested to the hero âŠâ, a suspenseful trope in the Iliad, seems here to be somewhat brutally mocked. The goddessâ advice is precisely what leads to one of the narratorâs feared outcomes. We are directly challenged to question the power of Athenaâs protectionâMother Mary, you done me in!âas 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 simileâperhaps 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 deathâs 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. âTwin bushes ⊠planted from the same rootâ: the Greek ΔÌÏÎ±ÎŒÎżÎčÎČαΎίÏ, âintertwined in a give-and-takeâ, filling up the backwards turn in the hexameter dance between caesura and diaeresisâits accent stressing the weakest part of the dactylic footâmimes in the mouth the interlacing of the branches from different directions. The olive is Athenaâs 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 godâs 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 âdualâ 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 (áŒÎ»Î±ÎŻÎ·) 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 Odysseusâ 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 whereâ
So Odysseus hid himself in leaves âŠ
âSaving the seed of fireâ (ÏÏÎÏΌα ÏÏ ÏÏÏ)ââthereâs a double meaning in that!â I was wrong to say there is no other human being present, at least in the vision that the poetry energises. Thereâs 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 morrowâs 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 âkeep hope aliveâ. 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 benedictionâwith 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-halfâ
⊠that he might the soonest rest
From his hard labour and exhaustion, once sheâd covered those dear eyelids round.
âmake it seem like she is treating a corpse newly dead. The closing of the eyelids, by someone else, leaves an impression that canât be erased once it occurs to one.
Yes there is an undertow, even in this scene of hope and refuge. Recall Odysseusâ 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 predatorâs lair, and likely does now. The passage describing the boarâs 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. Itâs even there in Athenaâs cosmic spear left behind in Odysseusâ spear rack. It is the unmentioned unmentionable. A friend describes the affect such a lurking unnoticed presence creates as the âuncannyâ, 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? Itâs an octopusâs bedroom. Hope? Itâs pebbles in your suckers. Yet Odysseus rejoices.
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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: âFinally, a human voice!â This saying does not only occur to us when one is dealing with machines, or âmachine learningâ; 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 hierarchyâa contradiction in termsâwho hold all the levers, look up all the by-laws, and make all the decisions, with authority, in your case. This relief in âthe thick of itâ is what comes to mind as a goddess, Ino, comes to our heroâs aid when his situation is dire. This episode is not the first; earlier, Eidothea, Proteusâ 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: âif it was up to me âŠâ
Now here is Odysseus, in straits and on deathâs 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 sheâs just a petrel who lands on his raft. But either way, she âwas mortal, once upon a time, speaking human language.â 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 Calypsoâs Isle, when they are all alone and intimate, Hermes asserts his office as Zeusâs 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, sheâd 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 donât exactly know what allusions he understands to be entangled in its aura. But he is explicit that, âofficiallyâ as it were, she has ânow in the salt-water depths ⊠got her portion of honour from the gods âŠâ In other words, sheâs 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 weâre 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 poetâs society has vanished, but it must have known intimately the experience one has when assigned a job (a âportionâ) in a bureaucracy, so much so that it defines the experience of what came to be called âfateâ, 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 Inoâs 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 Calypsoâs 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 racehorseâwhat an image!âand strips himself naked, except for Inoâs veil tied beneath his breastbone.
Inoâs veil is áŒÎŒÎČÏÎżÏÎżÎœ, âimmortalâ. 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 Inoâs instructions and throws the powerful object backwards into the brine. Odysseus always chooses mortality, it seems.
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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 Manâmankindâon a raft of his own artifice riding upon the turbulence and violence of nature? The Odyssey may intend all four, but I donât think the last one is quite right, as temptingly romantic and bleak as it is. I canât help but feel that there is something masculine about Homerâs image. The opening word of the poem, áŒÎœÎŽÏα, is decidedly male. But all the same, that picture, of Odysseus braving the stormy sea on a raft, is iconic in the worldâs imagination, like the astronautsâ 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 Manâs situation. The same word, ጱÏÏÏÏ, 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 Odysseusâ 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: Penelopeâs web, Odysseusâ raft, and the coupleâs 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 kindsâfrom 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. Helenâs web (3.125â8) is a Bayeux Tapestry; episodes of the struggle between the Achaeans and the Trojans on her account appear to be embroidered (áŒÎŒÏÎŹÏÏΔÎčÎœ) 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 Aeneasâ 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. Achillesâ lyre is extravagantly silver-bridged; Demodocusâ lyre is merelyâand resonantlyâhollow.
Homerâs evocation of the storm is also vocal miming, of a bravura kind. One thinks of King Learâs 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 poetâs words. The performerâs breath is the breath of the four winds.
The consummation of the vision, to my mind, comes from the godâs view. The gods are Homerâs 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 brotherâs turreted sandcastle, and kicking it to oblivion. From the distance the godâs-eye-view gives us, Odysseusâ vessel of tall treesâ timber proudly jointed, becomes a speck, a tumbleweed upon the immense briny swell. He himself becomes a no-man. Calypsoâs pines become toothpicks, Odysseusâ daysâ long labour and shipwrightâs engineering, so much broken Legoâą and wasted hexameter verses.
As flies to wanton boys are we to thâ gods;
They kill us for their sport.
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Odyssey 5.116-227
Odysseus does not explain himself. He just says it. When Calypso asks him the obvious thingâhow can he choose an ageing Penelope and his own mortality over herselfâand 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: âBut even so, I wish and I long, through all the days, / To get myself home and see my day of restoration.â Athena had been moved to real and felt poetry, outside her own experience, in Book 1: Odysseus, she said, âeager to make out just the hearth-smoke leaping up / From his mother land, longs to die a death.â 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 âhomeâ? 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 ÎżáŒ¶ÎșÎżÏ, more âhouseâ or âhouseholdâ than home. The word âhomeâ, of such peculiar power in English, arises in translation mostly from the notion of ÎœÏÏÏÎżÏ, âreturnâ or ârestorationâ, as being implicit in the latter idea. Is there something to be made of the âseeingâ, in the longing to see the day of oneâs return? We ourselves are certainly drawn to the spectacle when hostages return, or lost siblings are reunited. In Proteusâ 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 Homerâs, the images do not belong to oneâs 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 âthe deep heartâs coreâ:
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 midnightâs all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnetâs 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 heartâs core.
Mind you, what is not at all in Yeatsâs vision is the coupling that seems to define Odysseusâ longing. Yeats will âlive aloneâ. In a sense Odysseus has already found his Innisfree on Calypsoâs isle; perhaps heâd have stayed there if heâd 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. âFor she is mortal, but you âŠâ 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 shipâs keel, has made her want to rescue and protect him. Her very name, Calypso, suggests hiding or concealing; Homerâs Greek for âveilâ 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 âhe who does not want, alongside she who wantsâ (ÏαÏâ ÎżÏ ÌÎș ΔÌΞÎλÏÎœ ΔÌΞΔλοÏÏηÎč). I rendered âa man unwilling next a woman all too.â But at the end of this passage, they do really seem to come together, without any qualification, in her hollowed caveâs deep core. Would we describe Odysseus as âunfaithfulâ?
The conjunction of God and man was a subject Michelangelo attempted on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Homerâs version is Odyssey 5.
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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 weâre getting back to the main plot. Even Zeus expresses his exasperation at Athenaâs posing the question of Odysseus again, and he seems to allude to the fact that theyâd already decided a plan of action. Remember how hush hush and strategic that meeting had been, taking advantage of the absence of Poseidon. Evidently heâs still gone. But in this way Homer rather forces the question: what has the Telemachy, the story of Telemachusâ 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 havenât 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, ÎœáżŠÎœ αᜠÏαáżÎŽâ áŒÎłÎ±ÏηÏ᜞Μ, with three straight circumflexes, occurs twice in Penelopeâs 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 Athenaâs use as a quotation and an evocation, of Penelopeâs 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 Penelopeâs emotive motif surfacing in Athenaâs 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 oneâs 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 Homerâs 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 Calypsoâs 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.
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Odyssey 4.742-847
Homer compares Penelopeâs state of mind, before she falls asleep, to that of a male lion encircled craftily by huntsmen; her thoughts start, it would seem, like the lionâs feints at the menâs shifting perimeter. The comparison of Penelopeâs mind to the lionâs is not the last cross-dressed simile in the Odyssey. We shall note them! Do such similes bear with them a claim or a thesis? That the natures and experiences of the sexes can be compared in such a way as to bring insight and truth? Strange, then, that the famous similes of the Iliad do not explore this transgressive technique. Such cross-comparisons are Odyssean territory.
To ease her mind Athena sends Penelope a phantom in the shape of her sister Iphthime, long since married and moved far away. We are not troubled by the impossibility of ghostly emissaries who can slip through door latches, be conscious and engage in meaningful conversation, and still look like the human beings theyâre supposed to be. Art makes âAIâ look like a joke. Athena does such things, as Iphthime says, âbecause she can!â We indulge this storyteller the power of his wand.
But her reassuring apparition rather makes me focus on what is truly impossible: that Penelope can somehow turn to her own sister in her grief and anxiety. Women, at least of a certain class it seems, do not move, except when they are transported to their wedding and the household they will join and preside over. That is, such women are born, move once forever away, and then become fixed local features of the earth. Helen, by contrast, is the woman who moves, and in so doing becomes the cause of war, separation, chaos, and bereavement. Penelope is only the first of the high-born women in the Odyssey who stays put, and when she appears, she descends and stands by a pillar, like an immovable axis. Calypso the nymph, Odysseusâ concealer, is the daughter of Atlas himself, the Titan who holds the very pillars that keep apart the earth and the heaven. Such pillars, of course, connect the two of them as well.
Once again I am confronted by the predicament of women. I do not suggest that Homer has an agenda other than being a telling observer in his way of telling the tale. But it does seem extraordinarily poignant that so intimate a companionship as that between childhood sisters, something I have had the joy to observe in my mother and daughters, is a companionship routinely sacrificed without acknowledgment in Homerâs society, except perhaps by Homer. Loss and separation are clearly not uniquely feminine experiences, but the appearance of her sister must take Penelope back to the time when they both were unmarried, and âbestiesâ, as they say; everything on Penelopeâs mind now causing her unbearable pain, both her husband and the son they produced, can perhaps still seem to lie in the future, while she is in her sisterâs company. This is a way in which the appearance of Iphthime can be construed to be a Freudian wish-fulfilment by way of the gates of dream. The relief that Iphthime brings her, I would suggest, is not only by her presence, or the opportunity it gives Penelope to vent her frustrationsâroundly taken, replete with a repeat of her anguished, circumflected, tonal motifâbut also the fulfilled wish of the unthinkable thing, that she is virgin again with neither husband to mourn nor foolish son to fret over.
And that is not such an outlandish state of mind for her to be in. Nurse Eurycleia tells her to bathe and freshen up, and Penelope obeys. Eurycleia says, wishfully, âsomewhere there will still be one who can keep / The house of the lofty roof, and in the distance the fatting farms.â It is not altogether clear who this mysterious saviour will be. Thereâs plenty of suitors! A principal motive of Telemachusâ secrecy about his voyage was supposed to be to prevent Penelope from weeping, and thereby marring her beauty. It would seem that both these members of the household see Penelopeâs thirty-something comeliness as a bit of an asset in their predicamentâwhich needs to be preserved. Penelope herself asks her sister about Odysseusâ situation, alive or dead. Of course the ghost (the storyteller) has some fun at our expense, keeping us in suspense. No doubt Penelope needs to know, for her psychic health. But she also needs to know, as a pragmatic fact. There really are suitors for her, control over whom is crucial for the well-being of her house; and therefore whom she needs to keep aroused in their pursuit, whenever she appears to them. Bathing is not optional. Penelope needs to know Odysseusâ fate, so she can see what her options really are. May the best man win, sister.
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Odyssey 4.625-741
Noemonâs charming cameo in Odyssey 4, when he walks in among the suitors who are throwing the discus and hurling javelins, was my first clue that it was okay to laugh at what was being said and what was going on. The notion that this poem of Homerâs is an âepicâ can create obstacles to registering a number of modes that seem very dear to this storyteller, from irony to wistfulness to downright satire. To be sure, the hexameterâs rhythms, inflections, and ethos are a constant and omnipresent enchantment, which do indeed create a modus or state of mind which deserves a name; and âepicâ will do. The Iliad everywhere demonstrates the power of this rhythmic consciousness in depicting war and its wounds, physical or otherwise, achieving a measure of distance from its protagonists and their expressed experience which can only be called sublime. But the Iliad also reminds us in the Catalogue of Ships that this rhythm most originally was the vehicle and setting for memorial lists, like genealogies, danced out in a space that conjured the names of the past to the present. In other words, the epic rhythm was something that proved adaptable to singing such a song as the Iliad; it was not necessarily born for such tragic sublimity. In light of this, I would suggest that comedy also both represents and induces a distinctly felt state of mind, one which profoundly affects oneâs registration of words, people, and events. One can laugh at certain things in comedy, for example, which it would be impossible, or insufferable, to laugh at in tragic circumstances. One fellowâs trip-up is anotherâs calamity. The only argument against the idea that the epic rhythm cannot be adapted to comedy, is perhaps the fact that the Odyssey does not generally register in this way, as a comedyâwhether in the ancient world or the modern. All the same, one does not want to be one of those people who are not in on the joke; thatâs a very awkward place to be. My own experience teaches me to try to help people get in on it, even if theyâre classical scholars, rather than snub them because they donât âget itâ, as one is often tempted to do; because for me the Odyssey came extraordinarily to life when I realised I was sitting at a comedy, rather than an âepicâ. It is very important to know, in ways that are hard to defineâbefore one sits down in oneâs seatâthat one has come to see a comedy, and not a tragedy or a horror show. Are the suitors comic villains, or truly evil ones? Would their deaths count in the same way, one way or the other?
When I began this substack I would post Samuel Butlerâs translation of the Odyssey with my Greek recitations; it is readily available in the public domain. He rendered Homer into English proseâand so do Iâbut that both is and is not the reason for his translationâs greatness. On the one hand, prose does rather break the spell of epic rhythm and music. That can seem a deficit; in my case at least I have kept to Homerâs lines and as much as possible his word order, so you get his lines treated as semantically timed units, if you will, albeit not rhythmic ones. But what Butler captures also is the prosaic quality of what is being said: and this is a revelation. Butler opened my eyes to the fact that comedy was happening, all around. But translation is not decoding. Other prose translations do not achieve what Butlerâs does, for all that they also sidestep the hexameter rhythm and ambience. Most feel they must strike a reverential, King James posture if theyâre going to sound epic in prose. The comic modus, however, requires a peculiar sympathy between poet and audience, and poet and translator. Butler translating the Odyssey is someone who seems like heâs speaking to us from the other side, where Homer is, distilling his authorâs verses and versified speeches back into their original, deadpan, Victorian prose.
That it is Butlerâs sympathy for Homerâs own comic disposition, in the texture and subtext of the Odysseyârather than his skill at decoding the wordsâwhich leads to his translationâs insight, is evidenced by Butlerâs translation of the Iliad. Clearly Butlerâs philological acumen is everywhere the same. But his translation of the Iliad has never seemed anything special to me. There is not the same sympathetic resonance with the ethos of that work.
Noemon is a comic superstar. He comes out of nowhere, asking for his boat back, the one he had lent to Athena in disguise as Telemachus. Noemon (âMinderâ) has been having mules bred across the water, and he wants to fetch one and break him in. So he sidles up to to the mean suitor Antinous (âCounter-Mindâ) and asks after his ship. And so Telemachusâ game is up. But the real nod and wink here is Noemonâs amazement at having seen Mentor locally yesterday morning; because heâd already gone on board ship with Telemachus, as the captain! That, of course, had been Athena playing Mentor. The joke is one for the solo performer to ham up, because itâs he who has been playing all these people, including Athena becoming Mentor. Mentor in particular, I would suggest, is the performerâs special stand-in to break the fourth wall with the audience. You see, Mentor, who will keep turning up, including in the last line of the whole poem, is [wink wink] the performerâs alter ego. Thatâs the joke when Noemon says the man he saw yesterday was either âMentor or a godâhe looked the very same man in every way.â Thatâs a limitation of a solo actor playing all the parts: heâs only got one face and body. Wink wink.
âIn sooth I know not why I am so sad.â Sadness is no stranger to comedy. The constant crying and wailing among the men already, to which Odysseus will make a plentiful contribution, and which Helen resorts to drugging them to curtail, certainly seems a bit funny. But in womenâs tears I think we find a refuge of seriousness which comedy protects. Penelope gets the best poetry, and that is the mark of a heroine. That she could not even sit on a chair, for all that the house had plenty round, and that she sat on her bedroomâs wooden threshold, is an image speaks a thousand words. She is guarded about Odysseus: no âpersonalâ feelings are disclosed, only the outward fact that he was a man and a husband with a tremendous reputation. But when it comes to her son, she bursts out in a way captured by Homerâs art, which has arranged her words to utter three straight circumflexes: ÎœÏ ÍÎœ αáœÍ ÏαÎčÍÎŽâ αÌγαÏηÏÎżÌÎœ αÌΜηÏΔίÏαΜÏÎż ΞÏΔλλαÎč / αÌÎșλÎα ΔÌÎș ÎŒÎ”ÎłÎŹÏÏÎœ, ÎżÏ ÌÎŽâ ÎżÌÏΌηΞÎÎœÏÎżÏ áŒÌÎșÎżÏ Ïα. âBut again now, my son, belovedâtheyâve snatched him up, the storm winds, / An unknown out of these rooms, and I didnât even hear of his setting off.â Rhythm usually arises from the alternation of stressed and unstressed beats. Here we have three straight emphases, three full Greek contonations, like Learâs four cries, âHowl, howl, howl, howl!â This utterance of three straight circumflexes turns out to be a motif of Penelopeâs. The genuineness of her feeling is scripted in the score, as is the bitterness at her apparent betrayal at the hands of her servants, who had kept her in the dark about Telemachusâ adventure.
The Odyssey captures an aching sadness, it seems to me. It is a kind of feeling wholly absent in tragedy, but which seems very much at home in Shakespeareâs comedy, a kind of undertow to the fun that is only hinted at in the notion of âmelancholyâ. Intimations of paradise are full of heartbreak. Am I wrong, or is it unhelpful somehow, to connect this sadness to comedy?
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Odyssey 4.464-624
In the Iliad, Homerâs narrator addresses Menelaus in the second personâhim and Patroclus. The hapless-seeming, cuckolded brother of the Warlord Agamemnon, without whom all the superheroes would not have had a cause to fight, may well have endeared himself to an audience (and the narrator) as someone perhaps relatable amongst the human titans. At any rate, Homer gives him a special sendoff.
When the time comes, says Proteus, the Old Man of the Sea, heâs not going to die in Argos, but the deathless ones will escort him to the Elysian plain, where itâs always summer with a cool breeze. This may mean that he will never die; but it may also just mean that heâll be moved somewhere where the âway of life comes out easiest for mankind.â That is, life will become storm- and winter-free, but it is not clear if that is like moving to Florida, or whether he will actually become immortal as well. But either way, this final journey is due him because heâs got Helen, so that âyouâre Zeusâs son-in-law!â
Menelaus leads a charmed life, it seems. Of course having Helen to wife, has been, and continues to be, a mixed blessing. On his circuitous return with her, Menelaus failed entirely to save his brother from Aegisthusâ treachery, as Proteus again reminds him. Now he lives a life grieving comrades, lost or absent because of the ten-year combat to steal Helen back. Letâs hope she has a decent stash of nepenthe for their happy hours. Proteus also says that in the Elysian plain, there is a âblonde Rhadamanthys.â I do not know if this is an unusual way to describe the Cretan figure, who belongs, for Homer as well, to the realm of what we call âmythâ. Hesiod also uses âblondeâ of Rhadamanthys, but he may have been aping Homer. âBlondeâ, âtawnyâ (ΟαΜΞÏÏ) is, however, a frequent Homeric epithet for Menelaus. There also, perhaps, is a hint of a mixed blessing. The shared epithet may imply some sympathy among gingers; but it seems also to be suggested that in a Rhadamanthys, Menelaus will face his last judgement.
Has Menelaus done anything wrong? When he substitutes the gift of a mixing bowl, because Telemachus and rocky Ithaca have no use for horses, Menelaus says he got the piece from the Sidoniansâ king, when his house protected him on his return there. Apparently Sidon among the Phoenicians had been a kind of base for Menelausâ activities. From whom did he need protection? Other Phoenician operators, or the very Egyptians from whom he managed to source his wealth? âProtectedâ translates ÎŹÎŒÏΔÎșÎŹÎ»Ï ÏΔΜ, âenfoldedâ, âhid [him] on both [or all] sidesâ.
But there are hintsâperhaps comicâof Menelausâ own divinity, not only by marriage. Telemachus, at any rate, seems ready to worship him. When he refuses the gift of horses, he says heâll leave them here as an offering (áŒÎłÎ±Î»ÎŒÎ±) to Menelaus himself. Such a thing, an áŒÎłÎ±Î»ÎŒÎ±, might be dedicated at an altar. Telemachus goes on to describe Menelaus as lord of a wondrous plain, and gives us several lines of real botanical poetry describing its horse-friendly flora. Proteus tell Menelaus that heâs destined for the Elysian plain: Telemachus thinks heâs already there.
Once again Homer takes an interest to portray Telemachusâ wide-eyed inexperience, seemingly at the boyâs expense. He thinks the forecourt of Menelausâ palace must be the sort of fancy digs that Zeus himself has. Heâs never known life beyond Ithaca: he sees the plain of Argos and thinks Menelaus is the king of Elysium. There is a disconnect between the imagination of Telemachus and the suitorsâ generation, and the experience of Helen, Menelaus, Odysseus.
Most uncanny is a kind of future echo in Menelausâ wish for a beautiful cup he means to gift Telemachus: âIâll give you a gorgeous chalice, so you may pour it out to the gods ⊠in memory of me, every day that you do it.â âWhenever you do this, do it in memory of me.â The foreshadowing of the lines from the synoptic gospels, now at the heart of Catholic ritual, is difficult to make sense of. Was the covenant in wine already something for Homer to parody, long before it took its place in Christian sacrament? The pouring of wine is for memory and memorial, it would seem, at least when it is free of nepenthe.
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Odyssey 4.306-463
There is a great non sequitur in Telemachus plea to Menelaus. When he says âthatâs why Iâve come to these your knees,â we expect him to ask for military help to solve the problem of his overrun household. (Peisistratus had earlier made clear his companionâs need for real allies.) At Nestorâs Pylos, there was a whole army camped on the beach, ready to be doing! Yet we never hear this plea from Telemachus, for the aid of manpower, which is surely no more than what the suitors themselves are expecting from Telemachusâ adventure. It will later become clear how pitifully small are the human resources available on Ithaca itself for the scouring of the Shire and the salvation of Toad Hall. No, the plea is for Menelaus to âtell the tale of that manâs grievous obliteration.â He asks for the eyewitness account of his fatherâs death, whose premise in fact precludes any source of aid for Telemachusâ own predicament.
When he hears about Telemachusâ situation at home, Menelaus wishes that Odysseus would appear âin the shape he was once,â when back on the campaign he won a wrestling match in front of everybody. âIn that shape may Odysseus come have a chat with the suitors.â This wish says an awful lot about what is delusional in the human notion of return or restoration or rebirth (ÎœÏÏÏÎżÏ), to which Odysseus and his admirers aspire. If only Joe Biden would tackle Trump the way he did back in 2020. Time, to which Homer never seems to refer abstractly as we do, moves onward inexorably. Everyone and everything move on. Clytemnestra and Helen move on. Is Penelope alone in staying put? No amount of weaving and unweaving can mask the fact of aging, however. Aging is, after all, a motion as well, though not in place. For Odysseus to be of any use nowadays in purging the suitors from his domain, he would therefore have to be, by Menelausâ tacit admission, a shapeshifter.
In his answer to Telemachus, Menelaus gives us the original shapeshifter, the protean Proteus, the Old Man of the Seaâyet another Aegyptian wonder. Again, men of war are put into situations where their strength, prowess, and weaponry are all but useless. Yet Menelaus describes their ambush of Proteus as their âmost terrible ⊠ever.â After all those years of war and lying in wait, this one was the worst: âfor it stressed us dreadfully, / The most deadly smell from the seals fed in the brine.â These manly men, the bravest for âevery mission,â couldnât stomach a fishy odour.
The menâs strength and endurance is expressed by their ability, not to tackle or fight their victim, but to keep on squeezing him (ÏÎčÎζΔÎčÎœ) though he changes form and shape. The verb recalls Odysseus âsqueezingâ (ÏÎčÎζΔÎčÎœ) the throat of the warrior crouched inside the Trojan Horse, who wanted to answer Helenâs seductive call. I suppose it is the strength of a wrestler, to squeeze. But squeezing a throat, or clinging on, are not typical postures of masculine heroism. Although, it must be said, Homer achieves a picture here beyond the reach of Hollywood special effects, or even the logic of the imagination: Proteus turns into water, a liquid incompressible. And yet Menelaus and his men give him a good squeeze, and Proteus does not run through their fingers.
The shape shifter Proteus is a substance shifter; this seems to be one point of his becoming water. And yet he maintains his identity, as something separable from his matter and form. He embodies a germ, a protean germ, for later thinkersâ speculation into ontology and epistemology. Proteus himself performs one action: he counts (áŒÏÎčΞΌΔáżÎœ). Why does he do this? Does counting his seals reassure him in some way? Does counting oneâs things do this generally? I wanna go out tonight, I wanna find out what I gotâBruce Springsteen.
But Proteus the substance shifter is himself tricked by a mere skin. Things must be sorted, as apples and oranges, before they can be counted. In effect, Proteus only counts appearancesâskinsânot substances. Have the men invalidated Proteusâ count, or earned their place in it? They have, after all, through the sacrifice of their briny surrogates, attained an audience with the god.
The four seals, for Menelaus and his three men, have been newly flayed. The otherwise charming Eidothea has apparently gone underwater and dispatched and skinned these poor creatures. I am reminded of our first encounter with the suitors, in Book I (108), where they are described as seated on âthe hides of cattle they themselves killed.â The skins of things are their appearances, but detached they are also substances which clothe and blanket us. We remember also the opening lines of the poem, where Odysseusâ comrades are said to have lost their return home for killing and eating the cattle of the sun. These solar cattle appear to be the days of a year. It does seem that for Homer, the fact of animal sacrifice is not somehow in the cultural background, a given or assumed thing, but rather a matter much within his consciousness and contemplation.
One presumes that Helius likes to count his cattle, and Proteus his seals, just as we count, name and variously number our days. Both would get extremely upset if any go missing. We ourselves quite absurdly believe in all kinds of dating schemes from various self-styled sciences, and would be very upset if this was not actually the 2,024th year CE, or if the world had never had a beginning (in a âbig bangâ!) or was only a few hundred years old. I shall have more to say about counting and storytelling, but does it not seem that Homer is entertaining an idea here about being counted as well as counting; that there is, behind and beneath all the feasting, and the stealing our days and our timeâand our skinsâa cosmic reckoner, and a cosmic reckoning?
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Odyssey 4.155-305
I have translated ΜηÏΔΜΞÎÏ âanti-depressantâ, which is a depressing thing to do. The mere sound of some of Homerâs words conjures sensations and intimations that make semantic translation seem like butchery. But I have gone for a modern medicinal property, rather than to âcease upon the midnight with no pain.â
Helen and Menelaus have lived life on a grand scale. Now they have âcome down to earth,â a multivalent sort of movement in both the Iliad and the Odyssey. They have settled into retirement in the gated suburbs. The inevitable talk of the past leads to uncontrollable tears of regret and longing. Helen has an Aegyptian remedy, her little helper, to fortify the wine. Nepenthe is strong stuff: youâd sit there unmoved even if your mother or father dropped dead in front of you, if your brother or your own child were slaughtered before your eyes. It would seemingly get you through torture. At least, while the drug lasted. But despite the scale of the events this fatefully married couple have set into motion, they are surely not the only couple, or the only people, living into later years haunted by their memories, losses, and regrets. Drug use, even to literal oblivion, pervades modern societies and households. Our euphemism of the âhappy hourâ bespeaks a general need to drown or distract from our predicament, at a certain time of day. Poor Peisistratus says he doesnât like to get all sad around dinner time. Perhaps he speaks for himself. Tell him he buys the next round.
Homer describes Helenâs Aegyptian drugs as ΌηÏÎčÏΔΜÏα, filled with mÄtis, âintelligenceâ, âkenningâ, âcunningâ, the quality for which Odysseus is famous. She chooses the perfect painkiller to heal her parlour evening. But the narrator also describes the Egyptian drugs (pharmaka) as being ÏÎżÎ»Î»áœ° ÎŒáœČÎœ áŒÏΞλᜰ ΌΔΌÎčÎłÎŒÎΜα ÏÎżÎ»Î»áœ° ÎŽáœČ Î»Ï ÎłÏÎŹ, âmany of quality when mixed, but many mischievous.â The perfect balance of the Greek phrasing, however, with âmixedâ in the middle, perhaps suggests that these drugs are both at once, like a number of double-sided objects in the Odyssey. We could certainly testify ourselves that painkillers are a mixed bag.
âShe turned her thought to other things, Helen, Zeusâs begotten âŠâ It was Athena who had earlier âthought of other things,â directing from behind the scenes the preparations for Telemachusâ trip. Here it is Helen who earns the line of the divine directrix. In the nepenthe passage she is twice addressed as Zeusâs daughter, like Athena. But the divine power she exerts over the scene comes from an Egyptian drug, a gift from an Egyptian wife. This is curious.
What is Homerâs (the narratorâs) purpose in his allusions to Aegypt? Talking of coming down to earth, the Achaean world seems well impressed with Menelausâ wealth, but the narrator tells us the very richest houses are actually in Aegypt. That is where Menelaus spent his time acquiring all his stuff somehow, while his brother back home was assassinated. Telemachus gapes in awe at Menelausâ palace, but the narrator makes it clear that he himself knows better. Sparta ainât all that. Itâs no Aegypt.
Helen of course is virtually a goddess among Greek speakers. But here we find her well domesticated. All the best drugs, for good or ill, are to be found over in Aegypt, not here; everyone there is a healer, who understands more than all other men. Helenâs technology, intimating her divine superpower, is borrowed from superiors overseas. Her finest implements, her golden distaff and wheeled silver basket, all hail as gifts from a non-epic, but fabulous, household in the Aegyptian Thebes. Later, at the end of the visit, Telemachus refuses Menelausâ parting gift of horses, because, he says, theyâre no use in Ithaca. The epic, chivalric, noble animal has no place there; sheâs a rocky country best fit for goats.
There is something funny and affecting about this narratorâs perspective on things, amidst the shifting perspectives of his characters, which he delimits and diminishes with his Aegyptian asides. The comedy of the Odyssey often seems to thrive on (gently) cutting the pretensions of Greek-speaking epic, and its protagonists, down to size.
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Odyssey 4.1-154
Just like Helen, the fading beauty queen, there is a sense of expectations cheated as theyâre met, of things being cut down to size in the same breath that they are exalted. Menelaus is supposed to be fabulously wealthy, at least in local terms. His house positively gleams. Nestor had attempted to fob his visitors off on Menelaus, because, it would seem, he had rather more resources at his disposal for taking care of guests. After speaking at them all day, he somewhat rudely insists that they go on to Sparta. But when Mentor (Athena) and Telemachus actually head off to go sleep on board ship, Nestor protests rather too much, and boasts about his blankets and towels. Let us hope Athenaâs late blessing brings some late prosperity to the old man, who came home in such a rush âŠ
Menelaus himself boasts that there may be some other mortal could compete with his acquisitions, but Homer himself lets us know that the richest houses are in Egyptian Thebes, where in fact Menelaus and Helen have mooched their finest stuff. Menelaus was a traveller, all right, but not exactly the man who comes to know the cities and the thought of men (see line 3 of the Odyssey). No, heâs on a mission to accumulate their goods. The bounteous Libyan sheep, born horned, impress him because they erase a key difference between the rich and the poor: over there, the shepherd as well, not just the king, gets all the cheese, mutton and lovely milk he wants.
Meanwhile, Telemachus gawps and gapes at the shine of Menelausâ precious metals, and thinks this must be what Zeusâs front room looks like. The boyâs naĂŻvetĂ© contrasts with Menelausâ worldliness, but both display aggrandisement and self-aggrandisement. One wonders what Homer is up to in shifting the perceived size of things as he changes the beholderâs eyes.
But Menelaus also is clearly racked with regret and loss. Heâd keep a third (!) of his goods if he could get his dead friends back. I suspect weâre supposed to note such a valuation, as one does the â of a man from the U.S. constitution. Menelaus would never lose everything to get his friends back.
And out comes Helen. What a simply awful household. We get a starter course right away: Helen says, in her inimitable way, that all those men died for my sake, the bitch, in their brave little war. âNah,â says Menelaus (to paraphrase): âit was for me.â I bet that sort of exchange gets old pretty fast. Doesnât everything.
In Greek:
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