Episoder
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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 Nausicaa’s speech of instruction to the initiate. That is how the speech should be characterised. This is a journey that begins at the edge of wilderness, in what seems like a boar’s lair, sheltered under twinned trees, one of whom is Athena’s cultivated olive. Hence the river’s mouth where Odysseus meets Nausicaa is a liminal zone, where civilisation meets the wild and wet, and ‘liquid mortals’ may be prowling. The journey home will proceed along past the farms, at whose presence the hybrid bushes on the forest’s edge have already hinted. Here the pilgrim must keep his distance. But the real gauntlet the girls’ party has to run, comes just before the city wall: there lies the dockyard with private slips, where there are ships to trade what the locals cultivate, or to go pirating and take what others make. But Phaeacia is weirdly isolated, so neither of these scenarios makes sense; why after all are these people so bothered, obsessed even, with ships? Almost all the Phaeacian’s names, including Nausicaa’s, seem connected to boats or the sea. There is not a hint of an interest in fishing. What sort of a sailor is it who never deals with foreign ports? We shall need to dig into the nature of these mariners, these dedicated escorts, these ferrymen across to undiscovere’d countries, who also make it back.
The salty seamen whose comments Nausicaa disdains preoccupy themselves in this second liminal zone, between the farms and the city wall. They have their market set up there marked by hauled stones in trenches, like a henge, right next a lovely temple to Poseidon. That god’s protection must have been much on any mariner’s mind, let alone the Phaeacians’, who claim his kinship. Odysseus, not for the first time, is therefore infiltrating enemy territory. Nausicaa instructs him to duck into a grove beforehand, to avoid the spectacle his presence would create before the sailors. This grove is sacred instead to the now friendly Athena. We leave Odysseus praying to her there in her sanctuary.
Nowadays, I understand, we find in Greek towns a shrine to St. Nicholas by the sea, and to the Virgin in town. Of course Poseidon is not St. Nicholas, and the Virgin (parthenos) has been transformed from Athena into Mary. She is thought now to have given birth, once upon a time. But there is surely something awesome in the continuity of the genotype, in the thought of which two archetypes of superhuman power must be instituted there to protect a seagoing city. Phaeacia is a Neverland, an Oz, even to ancient Homer; and yet there is uncanny recognition in her salty idyll.
Yet Odysseus’ final pilgrimage and penetration of the sanctum is still only to begin once he crosses into the city proper. From farmers to sailors, we cross the wall to mingle with the citizens. But once again, we must distinguish qualities. Alcinous’ house is not at all like any of the others. Nausithous, their founding father, had built the wall and ‘distributed the ploughlands’. I suppose this portends a jolly sort of Soviet oligarchy. His son Alcinous now enjoys the perks.
At last Alcinous’ palace itself has to have its layers peeled before one reaches the hearth. The whole journey is a nested labyrinth, mysteries opening upon mysteries. Pass the courtyard, cross the great room until you reach the hearth, the central fire, where you’ll find Nausicaa’s mother. There she spins the sea-purple wool, leaning against a pillar. Right nearby, his drinking chair also leaning against the pillar—although the single intensive/reflexive αὐτῆι in Greek makes it seem as though he’s leaning against her—sits the tipsy Alcinous, “like an immortal.”
Everything does lean on her. She is the pillar. Nausicaa owns as much about the father she exalts as ‘hero’ and ‘immortal’, when she says to Odysseus, in Butler’s translation, ‘never mind him!’ Arete, her mother, is the source of power. It is her knees, not Nausicaa’s, which he must be brave enough actually to clasp. The whole vision of the Phaeacian civilisation can be seen to centre on, to lean against, this house’s pillar, which therefore grows in the imagination to be an axis mundi. In Book 1 Penelope descended the stairs and stood next the pillar of Odysseus’ house. Calypso is Atlas’ daughter, he who keeps the pillars of the cosmos. Women stand at the fixed axis of things in this cosmos. They constitute the central, stabilising power, as well as the hidden treasure encased in the labyrinth, the acquisition most prized within the protection of the city wall, beyond anything a ship can fetch. Only Helen among Homer’s leading women does not descend a stair and stand by a pillar. No, she bursts in upon the scene and drapes herself on a couch. With a footstool. (4.136) She, of course, is the woman who moves—or moved—and it is possible that it was more than the axis of international politics and war—though it certainly was those—which got displaced with her. The Trojan event certainly included a war. That’s the part we sing about.
In the midst of his outwardly simple but deceptively anagogical journey, in the train of Nausicaa’s steerage, Odysseus prays to Athena in the most bluntly human and intimate terms. What can compare to this picture of man talking to god, as though complaining to his mother that she did not protect him from his bullies? “Listen to me this time,” he says, seeing as “before you never listened, as I was battered …” Such intimacy between the human and the powers-that-be would seem to be a particular focus and point of Homer’s depiction. One wonders at the poet who feels this intimacy to be possible. One might think that all the layers of the onion in his pilgrimage to the hearth of Phaeacia have been peeled for the sake of disclosing such a conjunction. But the sense of constraint and containment within this depiction is nevertheless palpable. Even Athena will not yet appear to Odysseus face to face, out of shame before her uncle Poseidon.
What is the connection between the shame felt by women—Athena before her uncle, Nausicaa before her father (who, it turns out, is also her great uncle)—and that central pillar of civilisation by which Queen Arete spins the sea-purple thread? Is there anything at all shameless, by contrast, in Odysseus whining at a goddess? Perhaps it is significant that the intimacy presumed in Odysseus’ prayer to Athena, that he come to the Phaeacians as a friend and a thing to be pitied, needs to take place outside the city—or at least this city. As when he crawled under the olive bushes at the end of Book 5, here at the end of 6 Odysseus is once again safe outside, under Athena’s trees.
In Greek:
N.B. I shall have to travel across the planet next week. No free passage from the Phaeacians. There will sadly be a brief hiatus before Book 7.
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Odyssey 6.198-284
“Do you take him for a robber or a murderer? Neither he nor any one else can come here to do us Phaeacians any harm, for we are dear to the gods …” tr. Butler
“Ye do not think, surely, that he is an enemy? That mortal man lives not, or exists nor shall ever be born who shall come to the land of the Phaeacians as a foeman, for we are very dear to the immortals.” tr. Murray
“Do you really suppose he’s some kind of enemy?
There’s no mortal alive, nor could there ever be one,
Who’d show up in this land of Phaiakian men
With hostile intent, so dear are we to the immortals!” tr. Green
“Do you believe he is an enemy?
No living person ever born would come
to our Phaeacia with a hostile mind,
since we are much beloved by the gods.” tr. Wilson
“Do you think he is part of an enemy invasion?
There is no man on earth, nor will there ever be,
Slippery enough to invade Phaeacia,
For we are very dear to the immortal gods …” tr. Lombardo
I line up these translations of a not very famous passage (6.200-3) because I think the Greek is actually saying something pretty odd. Here it is for good measure, from my edition Homer Odysseia:
ἦ μή πού τινα δυσμενέων φάσθ’ ἔμμεναι ἀνδρῶν;
οὐκ ἔσθ’ οὗτος ἀνὴρ διερὸς βροτὸς οὐδὲ γένηται,
ὅς κεν Φαιήκων ἀνδρῶν ἐς γαῖαν ἵκηται
δηϊοτῆτα φέρων · μάλα γὰρ φίλοι ἀθανάτοισιν.
Surely you didn’t decide he was some enemy man?
This man is not the one, the liquid mortal—nor will he be born!—
Who would reach the land of the Phaeacian men
Bringing violence and harm: for we are very dear to the deathless ones.
That second line contains the phrase dieros brotos, filling the retrogression from caesura to diaeresis. Brotos is ‘mortal’; dieros is variously treated in the translations—either ignored completely (by Butler), or translated somehow ‘living’ or ‘alive’ or thereabouts, and ‘slippery’ by Lombardo. The latter is a decent finesse, in that after its only two uses in Homer, only in the Odyssey, this word exclusively means ‘wet’ or ‘soaked’ or ‘fluid’ in Greek. I think these translators ignore their grammar and syntax, for the sake of finding something that makes sense, but here is how I reckon the second line actually runs with its demonstrative predication: “This man (οὗτος ἀνὴρ) is not him, the ‘liquid mortal’ (διερὸς βροτὸς), nor will he be born, / Who would reach the land of the Phaeacians bringing violence and harm …” It is as though these insular Phaeacians have a fear of a peculiar bogey-man, a fluid being. Perhaps it would take such a liquid human, an aquaman, to cross an ocean to attack them. It is as though there is a fear that some sort of swamp creature would come terrorise Phaeacia. Nausicaa is evidently trying to reassure her servants that this naked dude is not that guy, along with the idea that the common fear is irrational, in that the gods love them too much to allow it. The fear of the visitor or xenophobia, however, may not be so irrational after all. The other girls are not wrong that the arrival of Odysseus may be some kind of ominous portent for Phaeacia’s well-being. But Nausicaa nevertheless stands up for xenia, guest friendship, with true religion: “ … for from Zeus are they all, / The strangers and the beggars, and a gift is both meagre and their own.”
Odysseus modestly insists on washing himself alone, rather than being bathed by the girls, and he emerges looking like a god, his locks flowering like hyacinth. Is this Athena’s magic, as the poet says, comparing her handiwork to that of a skilled goldsmith who overlays gold upon silver; or is this rather Homer’s way of speaking about the freshness and vigour one generally feels upon stepping out of the shower? Is the transformation objective or subjective? Either way, Nausicaa most certainly takes notice, and goes a bit weak in her knees. Amongst her servant girls she says the quiet part out loud: at first the naked stranger looked a right loser,
“But now, he’s like the gods who hold wide heaven.
If only, for me, such a man as this would be called ‘husband’ …”
After Odysseus eats and drinks, Homer says Nausicaa ‘turned her mind to other things.’ We first heard this turn of phrase in reference to Athena, when she was planning Telemachus’ journey from behind the scenes at Ithaca. There is something affective about Athena’s mental attention. We next heard it about Helen, when she decided to save the dinner at Lacedaemon from unending tears by slipping something into the wine. Now we hear it of Nausicaa. Homer is constantly shaping scenes in this story around the behind-the-scenes machinations of its leading women. The contrast is pointed as well, however: Nausicaa is not nearly as in control of her stage as she thinks she is, sadly, nor as her counterparts Athena and Helen are.
In this case, Nausicaa plots Odysseus’ entrance and introduction to her parents and the rest of the Phaeacians, ostensibly so he could make a good impression with the right people to win his passage home—wherever that is. But the rest of Nausicaa’s wish, expressed only to her handmaids, is quite the opposite: that the anonymous stranger and future husband would settle “in the neighbourhood, and it would please him to remain here.” Hence the stage is set for a rather hilarious performance, where Nausicaa orders the stranger to keep his distance on the trail toward the city, by warning him what a salty seaman, such as they are likely to meet on the way, might say and be expected to think, when he espies the famous princess leading a foreign hunk of a man into town. In her own evocation of such a mariner:
“Who’s this here, trailing Nausicaa, a handsome and a tall
Stranger? Where’d she find him? Any day now he’s gonna be her husband.
Surely he’s someone driven off course, that she’s carried off his ship,
Come from far off men, since there aren’t any nearby.
Or else it’s some god—come much prayed for, to the girl praying—
Stepped down out of heaven, and she’ll keep him all her days …”
The problem for Nausicaa, such as it is, is that her surrogate salty seaman is an avatar of the truth! Truth gets told in the Odyssey, it seems, via conscious indirection. The only way to bring this guy home to meet Mama is to say, out loud, that he’s a charity case she’s trying to help get home. Nausicaa goes on to point out, rather cannily, again through the eyes of the salty mariner, both how disdainful she has been of the local men, and how very much the best of them have been wooing her. “Good for her she’s bagged a foreigner instead.” Does not this dramatised embarrassment seem intended rather to entice the stranger, by letting on how sought after a prize she is?
Courtship, and couple dancing, are about following and leading, although mostly the leader or follower must make her partner seem the opposite, if things are going to look good. Athena has made Nausicaa think she is in the driver’s seat, but she is only literally so. The poor thing is being used.
When one watches a play, one invests the character in the actor, or vice versa; part of the transport of the theatre or television experience is participating in the fusion of actor and hero. This option is not available to the Homeric performer. His is a one-man show. He must play all the parts, stepping into each of those speaking rôles as he narrates in propria persona between them. Hence he faces a peculiar problem in approaching the rendering: is he, for now, Nausicaa pretending to be a salty seaman, or is his modus more fluid, switching from maiden to mariner and then back? How does he change, if at all, the register of his voice? Of course we don’t know how this was handled. I do hope that in our day, actors who are serious about their craft will try Homer out, and find out. One-man shows are nothing new, nowadays, but I do wonder how often characters are scripted to immerse themselves in their own stories, turning into actors again, nesting illusion within illusion. Perhaps the whole thing is as fluid as can be when it comes off. For long stretches, already in the cases of Menelaus and Nestor, we have seen the character become the narrator, who delivers speeches by others in their own person. Odysseus will later do this for four whole books straight.
In Proteus, from Menelaus’ sojourn in Aegypt, we encountered someone whose shape shifts. The instruction to his captors was to hold on tight, even if he turns into water. This instruction could perhaps work on an audience for the Homeric performer. He too is a Proteus. Thales was known to believe ‘all is water’, in the sense that he thought liquid was the fundamental material principle out of which and into which all the other states of matter could devolve. Perhaps he had had a drink of what Homer had to offer in playing all the parts of gods and human beings, and even sounding out in verbal mime the surging sea and beetling rocks, and stars like fires in the aether. It is the Homeric performer, after all, who is the original ‘fluid mortal’, the dieros brotos. Phaeacians beware! Homer is coming for you.
These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air;
And – like the baseless fabric of this vision –
The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.
—Prospero
Does Phaeacia exist? Though Thucydides locates its geographical vicinity, it is sometimes said that Phaeacia only exists in Homer’s imagination. The place certainly serves as a halfway house, a vehicle for both Homer’s story and a staging venue for his unfettered and most inspired storytelling. Just in Homer’s imagination? Let this land of Phaeacia then join the world within and without us, the great sum of our rhythmically articulable empirical reality, which already lives there.
In Greek:
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Manglende episoder?
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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 Homer’s total scene-painting and narrative strategy is, once again, a simile. While Odysseus in his words and actions is completely ‘beyond reproach’, he is described upon his emergence in this way:
He walked like a lion raised in the mountains, cocksure strong,
Who goes around rained on and buffeted, but in his eyes
There’s fire: all the same he goes among the cattle, or the sheep,
Or after the wild deer: and it calls him, his stomach,
To try the flocks and approach the close-built house.
Just so was Odysseus on the point, with the girls and their beautiful hair,
Of broaching intercourse—though he was naked; for the need was on him.
Consider the details: he’s weathered like Odysseus, but the lion is not weakened and meek about his nakedness. His hunger is rather more active and opportunistic than desperate. The lion approaches what’s offered like a buffet: cattle followed by sheep, domestically herded and easy pickings, but also the wild deer scavenging off human settlement, as a more difficult and hence challenging and tasty prize. But at the last he turns his attention to the heart of it all, the humans at home in the farm house. ‘Just so was Odysseus … with the girls and their beautiful hair …’ What, do you mean to say he’s not a sheepish embarrassed naked man, humbly approaching these unsuspecting women out of doors, but is actually a lustful orgiast looking forward to a sort of wild girl buffet, savouring the thought of each different type? No girl in particular is his type—he’ll take on the domesticated ones and the wild ones, with gusto, and then have a go at the snooty princess in the big house!
Homer’s delicate indelicacy is consummated with the enjambment of the uncommon future infinitive μείξεσθαι. This means literally ‘to be mixed with’, and has all the double entendre of our ‘to have intercourse with’. The effect is not subtle, and yet it is plausibly deniable; Odysseus is simply about to ‘go mingle’ with these lovely heads of hair.
The surface picture is clear enough: Odysseus is genuinely worried about the people he’s come to, as to whether they’re rapists or savages, and he is as self-controlled under duress as a mortal man might aspire to be. Self-control also distinguishes Nausicaa, and Homer says so directly. But the idea of what is being controlled in a self-controlled person—all us ladies and gentlemen—is deeply and almost subliminally expressed through the vehicle of the simile. We have in fact a strong naked man among scantily clad pubescent girls, one of them a tall and sexually unconquerable Artemis. But Homer both does and doesn’t want to say so. He is like Nausicaa, who does not want to talk about her own marriage before Alcinous and Arete (that is, she is embarrassed to talk about sex with her parents), and makes out that the clothes-washing is for her father and her brothers. But she basically gets it said anyway. Where there is erotic possibility, there is also tremendous erotic force, and Homer’s art captures this sublimated reality in the most unique way, by the slyly indirect promptings of an Odyssean simile.
There are many among us who feel compelled to view Homer as a primitive, even if they do not subscribe to the absurdities of the oral theory of this composition, the Odyssey. For us, there was no great artist before (prior to) Homer. But not for himself. I hope it is becoming clearer that Homer was in fact a Daedalus, his predecessor in the arts, who knew that to contain and to express—both—the reality of our nature and condition, one must construct a labyrinth.
On a side note, I wonder if the Homeric words δαιδάλεος, δαίδαλον, and the verb δαιδάλλω, ‘to ornament curiously,’ point to a Celtic-style labyrinthine geometry. For various reasons, most especially in contrast with an aesthetic celebrated in the Iliad, I expect the poet of the Odyssey to be picky about what sorts of ornamentation would be appropriate for a crafted work. Of course one does not know if the name of Daedalus himself precedes or follows the word formations mentioned above. But rather than a style or motif in design, the Odyssey likes to versify an unadorned marriage of form and function. Think of Penelope’s waxing and waning shroud for Laertes, and Odysseus’ timbered raft and rooted marriage bed. There is no frou-frou. Contrast these with the Iliad’s celebrated artworks: the phantasmagoric Shield of Achilles, and Helen’s web embroidered with images of her war, like a Bayeux Tapestry. Each is a fully functional manufactured thing, shield and web, but their mere use appears transcended by the art work super-adorned upon them. One does not know which poem’s aesthetic vision better represents the legacy of Daedalus—transcendent adornment immortalising an instrument, or the perfect unity of form and function in the design of that instrument.
For the ancients as well, there was also no great artist before Homer, but ‘before’ in the sense ‘above’.
One thing that has long puzzled me about Odysseus’ great speech to Nausicaa—quite as much as it has moved me—is his memory of observing a shoot of palm by the altar at Delos:
In Delos, once, was a kind of a thing, next the altar of Apollo—
The phoenix, a young shoot of palm coming up—I marked it, thought about it;
For I did go, even over there, and a large host followed me;
None of this is mentioned anywhere else. But I imagine Odysseus had gone to this place, wherever it was, to consult Apollo—who later had an oracle on the Greek island of Delos, among other places—before setting out on the journey to Troy:
That journey which was going to be, for me, a shitload of trouble.
There must have been desperate uncertainty about the future, when he caught sight of the shooting plant. What is it about Nausicaa which makes him remember that palm? He calls it a ‘spear’. The name he uses for it is ‘phoenix’, which also referred to a prized red-purple dye, as well as the people associated by trade with the dye’s origin, the Phoenicians. Not in the Homeric picture, it would seem, is the phoenix bird, a symbol of rebirth, which we might have done a lot with here. Perhaps the sight of a palm tree was something incredible for someone who had only known temperate flora. It does grow tall and spindly without branches; the palm is in fact a kind of grass rather than a tree. If the palm was unknown to him—although clearly it is known to Homer’s audience—Odysseus must have grown up far enough north and Delos must have been far enough south for such ignorance to be possible. He says he was mesmerised, because never had such a ‘spear’ come up out of the earth. I suppose this could be a response to seeing one’s first palm, on the understanding that it was supposed to be a tree. (It grows already lopped and smoothed, without bark, like a spear.) But what did it portend, and why should that come to mind when he first sees Nausicaa? Is she also to be the start of big trouble? Or is it purely the vision of exotic new growth, in palm and girl, to a world-wearied man? Please let me know if you have any insights about this Phoenician palm.
Odysseus’ speech to Nausicaa has long been indwelling in the psyche. It is hard now to be objective about it. It’s already almost thirty years since I recited it, in Greek and English—these habits start early—at my own sister’s wedding. Having been divorced myself in the meantime, it is hard to say what I now might wish, for a couple embarking. I suppose everything turns on what is meant by the thing Odysseus particularly celebrates in a couple: ὁμοφροσύνη, ‘oneness of mind’ or ‘sameness of thinking’. What is that? Surely it does not mean simply agreeing all the time.
The resources of the dual number (as opposed to singular or plural) do a lot for Odysseus’ lesson. We still have English remnants of this Indo-European feature, in our use of ‘both’, for example, along with ‘either’, and ‘neither’, and perhaps in plurals like ‘oxen’, or ‘eyne’ for ‘eyes’ in Shakespeare. But the idea that there are natural pairs deserving of special noun and verb forms, which is perhaps supported by nature, rather sets us up for this possibility in human marriages. Perhaps couples of all kinds would use it, if theirselves could be expressed as a dual subject, or even a singular one, rather than a plural. The metaphysics of this is expressed in Odysseus’ theme that same-mindedness is an excellent thing, than which nothing is better or stronger:
When, thinking as one in their plans, the pair keeps house,
The man and the woman: many the pains for their enemies,
But rejoicings for those who mean them well; and they hear the story best themselves.
In ‘thinking as one’ they are a dual subject (ὁμοφρονέοντε), who in the next line become two singulars: ‘the man and the woman’ (ἀνὴρ ἠδὲ γυνή). One is reminded of the conundrum in Genesis (1:27): “in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.” But are ‘man and woman’ a natural pair, or natural opposites? The same can be asked of other possible translations of ἀνὴρ ἠδὲ γυνή, including ‘male and female’ or ‘husband and wife’, even ‘warrior’ and ‘matron’: do these constitute a natural pair or a natural opposition? It would seem that friends or partners of the same sex would constitute a pairing at least equally natural, without any inherent opposition. As Aristotle discusses (I think taking up a common saying), a friend is ἑτερος αὐτός, ‘another self.’ Does Homer’s use of the dual participle then suggest that the realm of thinking and mind is somehow apart or above the distinction between male and female and men and women, which is seemingly emphasised in the very next line by the very different words with very different referents, ἀνήρ and γυνή?
It seems that with a couple the whole can be greater than the parts. Per Odysseus, they become a kind of protective talisman. It is hard to say, however, what that last phrase in his line means: “they hear the story best themselves.” “They hear” translates κλύον, whose internal object is κλέος. The latter word’s trajectory goes all the way from ‘thing heard’ to ‘repute’ to ‘glory’. Perhaps Odysseus means that a couple is best positioned to know its own story; in other words, what is an anxious and stressful concern for others, one’s reputation and its dependence on the opinion of others, is overcome and internalised somehow in the true couple: they become the best audience for their own story. Now that part rings true.
Odysseus and Penelope come to test each other ruthlessly as to their fealty and even their own identity. To this end they hide from each other in plain sight, even at night when they’re alone together and there’s no one else in earshot, as we shall see. But all this seems to stem from an extraordinary oneness or sameness of mind. It takes an iron heart to know one, or to find one out. They do know one another, perhaps as profoundly as a living thing can be known. I wonder; do Odysseus and Penelope ever surprise each other?
It is immensely touching that Odysseus tries to pass on his experience in the form of a wish for the tall young creature before him, and the security of her future. But this teacher is himself the very greatest danger to Nausicaa’s opening heart.
In Greek:
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Odyssey 6.1-109
These lines are about girls bathing and playing naked in the woods. Everything seems meant to arouse. They throw off their veils and play with a ball: taking off her veil is the job for a husband on his wedding night. (It is sometimes a metaphor for the bedroom action that comes after; to ‘loosen the veil’ can also connote rape, however, and in this latter sense is applied to the sacking of a city. We have even heard it used to describe the opening of vintage wine [3.392].) Off they go a-washing in the woods, without a care in the world.
We do come to realise that there aren’t strangers around in Phaeacia to worry about. The city was founded where no men come, to get away from the Cyclopes, their original brutish neighbours. (Everything ‘original’ in the human world of the Iliad and the Odyssey seems only to be two or three generations old.) The city has been walled, like a later, classical Greek polis, though there do not seem to be enemies to threaten her. That makes it an oddly insular move. They’ve been bullied. But outside the walls, what about the wild beasts in their lairs, whom Odysseus was so worried about? As I think we’ve been disclosing in various ways, Homer prefers such questions to hang in the atmosphere, to juice it up, if you will. The detail about unhitching the mules to be set free to feed by the river, is pure scene-painting, but it is of a piece with all the loosening of restrictions on domestic animals and women in this environment free of men and men’s rule. And the most human moment, to my mind, is when the women start competing in the natural washing tubs. They are absorbed in themselves and their activity. Men turn tasks into contests almost by instinct. Left to themselves, Homer seems to say, so do women. Freedom and gamesmanship come to them amidst the necessary drudgery, even when it comes to the glittery ones, of washing clothes.
Nausicaa is a tall girl, evidently, rhythmic and athletic, who takes the lead in the song and dance with a ball; this movement must be something like the rhythmic gymnastics at the modern Olympics. Her very name, which is four syllables in Greek, has a stately dactylic rhythm; the late metricians call this shape a choriamb, —∪∪—, NAU-sik-ah-AH. She is a girl who expresses herself in her rhythm. This calls forth an unusually uncomplicated simile from Homer:
Such an Artemis she goes! Down the mountains, Arrow-Shedder,
Whether it’s Taygetus’ extended slopes, or down Erymanthus,
Delighting in the wild boar and the speeding deer:
And with her play the Nymphs, Aegis-Holder Zeus’s girls
From the countryside; and she rejoices in her mind’s vessel, Mother Leto—
Above all the other girls she holds her head and forehead,
And easily is her daughter known, though all of them are beautiful;
Just so was she conspicuous among her attendants, this unbroken virgin.
The last words translate παρθένος ἀδμής. We last encountered this word admēs ‘unbroken’ in describing the heifer, who was sacrificed by the sons at Nestor’s house in honour of female Athena, to the ululation of Nestor’s elder wife and the rest of the household’s women. Nestor asks for a cow who was “A virgin [ἀδμήτην]: who never yet was brought under the yoke by a man.” [3.383] This is the fate that most contrasts the subjects in the simile: the forever free and roaming Artemis, the joy in her mother Leto’s eye at her transcendence, filling seven lines in the vehicle, and the single anonymous line in the tenor for the human daughter. Each is an unbroken virgin, parthenon admēs, but Nausicaa cannot remain so. Dislocation, impregnation, nostalgia and the pain of loss are to come to her, while the gods live in eternal bliss and being. Even now there is a wild beast lurking in his lair nearby, an epic peeping Tom sleeping naked, waiting for his cue.
[Most of what follows is taken from a lecture I gave at St. John’s College in Annapolis, in 2003.]
‘Athena enters Nausicaa’s bedroom like a breath of wind. The doors are shut, and sleeping by the doorposts are her handmaidens like the Graces. Nausicaa herself is said to be just like the female immortals. The whole tableau is a temple entrance, where the statuary doorposts have fallen asleep, and sleeping also is the goddess in the inner sanctum. Freud must have appreciated this setup for the entrance of the dream wish, although I am not aware of his having written about it.
‘The wind’s breath assumes the identity of Nausicaa’s girlfriend and stands over her head, suggesting to the suggestible one that the day of her wedding is near, and that she had better get her laundry done. Athena the ever-virgin sets into motion a longing in the young girl, who is not after all a goddess but only a virgin, for something she cannot understand in any experiential sense, a chain of becoming that apparently excites her, but that must lead to a subjection of individuality and freedom in body and soul to a husband and to pregnancy. For Athena, Nausicaa is a means of Odysseus’ conveyance home. For Nausicaa, it is hard to say—she is a veiled thing—but if it is not a day that dawns for heartbreak, it is perhaps a day that gets her to a nunnery.’
There is a cruelty, woman to woman, in the way Athena sets the girl up for meeting Odysseus. Athena is a virgin also in the sense that she has never been human. She reminds her that the day of her womanhood is going to be one of these coming, and reminds her of her bourgeois, insular Phaeacian suitors clamouring for a go. But her mind and spirit are awakened to the possibility of a man; and the man she is suddenly going to be presented with is the naked Odysseus. Here is an exotic and mysterious and ‘manly’ foreigner, forever to change and to cheat her expectations of the possible.
‘As for Athena, her job done, a seed of turbulence planted in the world of becoming within the heart of a girl, off she goes …
Οὔλυμπόνδ’, ὅθι φασὶ θεῶν ἕδος ἀσφαλὲς αἰεί
ἔμμεναι · οὔτ’ ἀνέμοισι τινάσσεται οὔτε ποτ’ ὄμβρωι
δεύεται οὔτε χιὼν ἐπιπίλναται, ἀλλὰ μάλ’ αἴθρη
πέπταται ἀνέφελος, λευκὴ δ’ ἐπιδέδρομεν αἴγλη · 45
τῶι ἔνι τέρπονται μάκαρες θεοὶ ἤματα πάντα.
ἔνθ’ ἀπέβη Γλαυκῶπις, ἐπεὶ διεπέφραδε κούρηι.
Toward Olympus, where they say the seat of the gods, untippable always,
Has its being. Neither in the winds does it tremble, nor ever by the rainstorm
Is it moistened, nor does the snow come near it; rather, a prodigious aether
Is spread out cloudless, and a whiteness all over it, a sheen;
In this they delight, the blessed gods, through all the days.
Up she went, Owl-Eyes, once she instructed the pubescent girl.
‘Note the enjambment of ἔμμεναι in the second line. It is not always a thing to note in Homer when the infinitive of ‘being’ is enjambed; but in the context of this passage, with Homer’s longest way of expressing such an infinitive, the conclusion seems inescapable, that he means to describe the radiant weatherless Olympus as a realm of being. Athena has agitated the heart of a girl, having descended like a wind into the world of becoming, and then disappeared carefree, concrete as ever, and pure as ever, into the place of forever and all days. Where philosophers talk about the riddle of being and becoming, Homer renders it.’
The old philosophers, men after Homer but before Socrates, used to pontificate and fuss about being and motion. πάντα ρεῖ said Heraclitus, ‘everything flows’ or ‘all is flux’. There were a number of these pioneers who struggled to understand how there could be certain knowledge of anything—paradoxically, like that contained in the phrase panta rei—when the whole universe seemed to be constantly in mid-flow. In their face Parmenides asserts ἕν τὸ πάν: in fact ‘the all is one’, or ἕν τὸ ὄν, ‘being is one’. Was Homer, a pre-pre-Socratic, also a proto-philosopher? Does the world of the gods stand for the eternal beings and knowable truths, while the world of men and women is the world of coming-to-be and passing away? Artemis, for one, would muddy such generalities. Where would she be without her earthly hunts, her arrows, her wild boar and mountain deer? Even Olympians need to get away, it seems. But Athena’s return to the sheen of Olympus, weather-free for all time, after causing arousal and unnameable stirrings in Nausicaa below, could hardly be more illustrative not only of the separation of being from becoming, but of the intrusion or penetration of the one into the other.
‘There are some among us—and what is a community of Greeks, without a Phoenician Philistine to teach it the alphabet—who can be expected to say that Homer has merely ‘dressed up,’ or ‘sensualised,’ a truth which philosophy understands without the beautiful and seductive trappings. Such people do not know rhythm, and hence they do not know philosophy; because to know rhythm is to know the riddle—by direct encounter—not the answer to it, but the enigma itself—of being and becoming.
‘Rhythm is being moving through becoming; it is the one moving through the many; it is the singular distended through the plural. ἔμμεναι enjambed is a vortex hedged against the pressure of the stream, a stream which would prefer to keep within the banks of the line. Words enjambed in the stream of rhythm are not sugared and sweetened; they are placed and focused, so that their meaning becomes squeezed and clarion. ἔμμεναι enjambed is ‘being’ rendered.
‘In light of such a passage, it is tempting to see the development of philosophy as a kind of abstractive regression in men who were raised on the rhythm of Homer. Whoever he or she was, Homer alone had the imaginative insight to see the problem of being and becoming distilled in the dream of a pubescent girl.’
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Odyssey 5.424-93 (end)
When Odysseus escapes the surge and clings to the rugged cliff face—at Athena’s prompt!—but is then ripped off and tossed back by the undertow, Homer sings:
As when from an octopus, dragged out from her bedroom,
The pebbles cling on thickly upon her suckers,
So from the man upon the rocks, off his strong hands
The skin was stripped away …
The first strange thing is the octopus itself. There are of course very many strange life forms in the world, many of whom we cannot imagine being. It must be of some comfort to certain vegetarians that they cannot imagine the consciousness, and breath, of plants. But there is no lack of imagination in children when it comes to the octopus. I think most everyone imagines at some point what it would be like to have the eight arms (or legs). All the same, the octopus must seem like a freak to mammals generally, as well as fish, not to mention their fellow mollusks lugging shells. She combines a tactile relatableness with an otherworldly otherness. An octopus in a simile must therefore be somewhat surreal, for she is about as incomparable as things get.
But Odysseus isn’t the octopus! Read it again. This is what I’m calling an Odyssean simile, which turns things upside down and unsettles as much as it clarifies. If the Odyssey’s Homer is after a peculiar kind of impression or reaction, it is not with the broad brush and canvas of an Iliadic simile, but a surgeon’s knife for some reason fitted with barbs. The pebbles stick to the octopus’s suckers, Odysseus’ skin sticks to the cliff face. The man is the rock, who has his pebbles stripped like so many bits of skin! What on earth (or above it) is the octopus? Once again the simile is slightly dizzying.
Just a few lines earlier, we hear,
There he’d have been stripped of his skin, bones broken to pieces,
If she had not put in his mind’s vessel, the goddess, Owl-Eyes Athena:
‘Rush with both arms and grab at the rock!’
Well, Odysseus’ bones appear to remain intact, but his skin, not so much. The formula, ‘then such and such would have happened [beyond fate] unless the god had not suggested to the hero …’, a suspenseful trope in the Iliad, seems here to be somewhat brutally mocked. The goddess’ advice is precisely what leads to one of the narrator’s feared outcomes. We are directly challenged to question the power of Athena’s protection—Mother Mary, you done me in!—as surely as the octopus may begin to question the safety of her bedroom when the fisherman finds it. Ah, the fisherman. Is he a part of the simile—perhaps the undertow that pulls Odysseus off the rock? In which case Odysseus is the octopus. Or rather, is he unmentioned because he is the unmentionable, who haunts the whole figure like a death’s head wielding a hunting spear?
Similes depend on at least one part of the comparison, tenor or vehicle, being familiar. Often it is the vehicle that is familiar, so that it can illuminate a narrative happening that may be hard to convey vividly to an audience. Such a happening is Odysseus being scraped off the rocks by the receding wave. Hence we may assume an audience would at least be familiar with the vehicle: the difficulties of hunting octopus, of finding the nest in the first place, what the whole thing looks like when you drag the intelligent animal with knowing eyes out of its secret refuge, her boudoir.
The deceptive bedchamber and the doubtful protection of Athena, both energising motifs of the story, seem to set us up for the remarkable scene which closes Book 5.
He walked into the wood, the one he found nearest the water
In a place visible right round: there were twin bushes he came under,
Planted from the same root: one of wild stock, one of olive.
These neither the strength of the winds got through, when they blew wet,
Nor did ever the blazing sun strike them with its rays,
Nor did the thunderstorm use to penetrate right the way through; for tight indeed
To one another did they grow, intertwined in a give-and-take: under these, Odysseus
Entered.
Many have celebrated this passage for its poetry, and claim it for their favourite bit of the Odyssey. ‘Twin bushes … planted from the same root’: the Greek ἐπαμοιβαδίς, ‘intertwined in a give-and-take’, filling up the backwards turn in the hexameter dance between caesura and diaeresis—its accent stressing the weakest part of the dactylic foot—mimes in the mouth the interlacing of the branches from different directions. The olive is Athena’s gift to the Greeks. Ancient Americans credit mysterious redheads from across the sea with the knowledge of agriculture which has given us the potato, the non-poisonous tomato, and the chilli pepper, without whose varieties the world would be absent much of its taste. Similarly, Greek speakers credit the cultivation of the olive to Athena; it seems our ancestors did not feel they could have come up with these things on their own. The fruitful olive in particular is usually grown by graft; a hardy if unfruitful wild root stock provides the security for an abundant scion, cut and pasted to itself. These twinned trees on the edge of nowhere show the hand of human effort, guided by Athena, and it is likely that Odysseus recognises this.
In many ways this is a recognition scene, though there is no other human being present. After all his struggles, even injury from following that god’s advice, Odysseus seems reassured by what he sees in the tableau. Indeed, he rejoices. My question is, what is it that makes him rejoice? In the first instance, the referent seems to be the fall of leaves with which he proceeds to make both bed and blanket. That is referent enough for a man who is naked, freezing, and half dead, a pile of leaves which would do for two or three men caught out in winter.
But it seems the whole vision is inspiring. The twinned trees could be thought of as a symbol of marriage; a couple united in oneness of mind, brains intertwined as though sharing neurons, is a theme Odysseus will later extol to Nausicaa. (Between Odysseus and Penelope, which one is the graft?) Greek allows for a ‘dual’ subject, distinct from singular and plural. They handily exclude what is without, and protect what is within their sphere of domicile, while still drawing nourishment on the sly from the radiant sun and the penetrating rain. The mere presence of the cultivated olive (ἐλαίη) is a sign of humanity somewhere hereabouts, just as for some, pyramidal stones and cyclopean walls are signs that there must have been giants.
And, of course, every room is a womb. This crib of cultivated nature at the edge of the woods is indeed to be the scene of the barely living Odysseus’ rebirth. The closing image surely takes the breath away, whether it is your first encounter or your latest:
As when a fellow hides a firebrand in the black ash,
At the farthest farm, who has no other neighbours by,
Saving the seed of fire, that he need not get a light from who knows where—
So Odysseus hid himself in leaves …
‘Saving the seed of fire’ (σπέρμα πυρός)—“there’s a double meaning in that!” I was wrong to say there is no other human being present, at least in the vision that the poetry energises. There’s the fellow (or two!) who might have shared his leaf-bed. But the predicament of this lonely farmer, managing on the edge of human habitation to preserve a seed for the morrow’s work, so as to avoid the trouble of hunting down a light, must be an image full of sympathy for both Odysseus and his author. Politicians annoy with their “keep hope alive”. In saving the seed of human rekindling, Homer gives us the real thing. In using such an image, the author seems to commit to his hero; there is a promise of something salvific of humanity, it would seem, in the idea of Odysseus. And Athena herself comes in at the end, unannounced but not unexpected, almost to give a benediction—with the impression given somehow that she had been there the whole time. Athena belongs in scenes where mere humans come to recognise something.
She sheds sleep upon his eyes, but the last line-and-a-half—
… that he might the soonest rest
From his hard labour and exhaustion, once she’d covered those dear eyelids round.
—make it seem like she is treating a corpse newly dead. The closing of the eyelids, by someone else, leaves an impression that can’t be erased once it occurs to one.
Yes there is an undertow, even in this scene of hope and refuge. Recall Odysseus’ deliberation at the river bank: either he would risk dying of exposure in the morning chill by the river, or risk becoming prey for some wild animal if he retired to the nearby woods. And what does Homer describe when Odysseus chooses (b)? The image of the twinned trees with an empty pile of leaves within seems very much to suggest that it has functioned as a predator’s lair, and likely does now. The passage describing the boar’s lair, which sprung the fearsome creature who scarred Odysseus for life, is very like this one, and though its description comes many books in the future, there is no question but that it recalls this hallowed moment under the trees at the end of Book 5. This poet has a way, an art, of hinting all around at imminent death. It’s even there in Athena’s cosmic spear left behind in Odysseus’ spear rack. It is the unmentioned unmentionable. A friend describes the affect such a lurking unnoticed presence creates as the ‘uncanny’, which I recognise through a feeling in the pit of my stomach, familiar since childhood, that infuses passage after passage when I read the Odyssey all grown up.
Home? It’s an octopus’s bedroom. Hope? It’s pebbles in your suckers. Yet Odysseus rejoices.
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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: “Finally, a human voice!” This saying does not only occur to us when one is dealing with machines, or ‘machine learning’; in dealing with any bureaucracy, there is the simple relief of stress when someone talks back. You are a hapless petitioner; they are a chaotically interconnected hierarchy—a contradiction in terms—who hold all the levers, look up all the by-laws, and make all the decisions, with authority, in your case. This relief in ‘the thick of it’ is what comes to mind as a goddess, Ino, comes to our hero’s aid when his situation is dire. This episode is not the first; earlier, Eidothea, Proteus’ daughter, took pity on Menelaus, comes to him when he is alone without his men, and betrays her father by instructing the man how to overpower a shapeshifter. (Hold him tight, even when he turns to water!) It is all too clear that these mid-tier ladies are doing what they can inside the system: “if it was up to me …”
Now here is Odysseus, in straits and on death’s precipice, a tumbleweed on the wind, on a self-made raft, in dark and surging seas. Ino comes to him, a daughter of Cadmus and Harmony. Or else she’s just a petrel who lands on his raft. But either way, she ‘was mortal, once upon a time, speaking human language.’ Odysseus has been completely alone for eighteen days. Finally, a human voice! Someone who can understand and sympathise! Ino was once a mortal, who suffered at the hands of the gods; among other things she was a nurse for her nephew Dionysus, a transformative figure in the development of religion, a son of her sister Semele by Zeus (the Holy Spirit). One does not know if it is a thing to note or ignore about Homer, that Dionysus only receives scant or tangential mention in his poems. But it seems each of the divinities in Homer knows their place. Even as far from Olympus as Calypso’s Isle, when they are all alone and intimate, Hermes asserts his office as Zeus’s message man, and bullies Calypso when she dares to complain. She rescued Odysseus all by herself, when no one else (not even Athena) seemed to care. But no, she’d better not hook up with a human guy.
Ino is also Leucothea, the White Goddess, a saviour of mariners. I suspect that modern mariners still believe in Her, though they are no longer so foolish as to admit it. The White Goddess embodies a highly local and, we might say, superstitious experience of the divine. Homer merely mentions the name, we don’t exactly know what allusions he understands to be entangled in its aura. But he is explicit that, ‘officially’ as it were, she has ‘now in the salt-water depths … got her portion of honour from the gods …’ In other words, she’s been assigned a job in the basement. It seems consonant with this comic world that the gods are in amongst it, plugged into an hierarchy where some of them work the kitchen. It helps make plausible their occasional sympathy, when there is an actual sense in Homer that we’re all in this together, witches, warlocks, angels and saints. Even Zeus often comes across not so much as an omnipotent, as a lame duck still henpecked in office. In the Odyssey, it seems we are always looking forward to retirement.
It helps to know someone inside the system, even if they work in a basement cubicle. It is extraordinary to me that Homer understands this intensely modern and bureaucratic mode of connection, where it becomes salient that one is talking in sympathy to someone who was once a mortal human being, before they became a corporate official. She speaks our language. This poet’s society has vanished, but it must have known intimately the experience one has when assigned a job (a ‘portion’) in a bureaucracy, so much so that it defines the experience of what came to be called ‘fate’, but is also projected onto the imagined life-experience of the gods. We know this condition (and this comedy) from the necessary bureaucracies of modern societies and infrastuctures. How does Homer know this?
A teacher once told me that the most relatable thing Odysseus ever did was ignore Ino’s advice and the gift of her immortal veil, and stick to his raft, until his rational empirical judgement forced the issue. Cling to the protection you yourself have made, the evidence of your own eyes about its sturdiness, and your sighting of the promised land; trust your eyes and hands, before some divine trickery! And trust in Calypso’s clothes to keep you warm and free from harm. But her magic island is now far distant. At the crunch he bestrides a plank like a racehorse—what an image!—and strips himself naked, except for Ino’s veil tied beneath his breastbone.
Ino’s veil is ἄμβροτον, ‘immortal’. One wonders if it may work like ambrosial food, and make him immortal too. If he keeps it he could walk around like Bilbo with his ring, with this veil tied round his sternum, hidden under his shirt. But without a comment about his deliberations or hints at thoughts about the subject, when the time comes, he follows Ino’s instructions and throws the powerful object backwards into the brine. Odysseus always chooses mortality, it seems.
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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 Man—mankind—on a raft of his own artifice riding upon the turbulence and violence of nature? The Odyssey may intend all four, but I don’t think the last one is quite right, as temptingly romantic and bleak as it is. I can’t help but feel that there is something masculine about Homer’s image. The opening word of the poem, ἄνδρα, is decidedly male. But all the same, that picture, of Odysseus braving the stormy sea on a raft, is iconic in the world’s imagination, like the astronauts’ photo of earthrise over the moon, or the crucifix. Penelope at her loom weaving and unpicking a web to keep her options open, by contrast, seems decidedly feminine, but equally tempting to see as an image of Man’s situation. The same word, ἱστός, a thing stood upright, is translated either mast or loom in context.
Much of the present passage is descriptive narrative, Homer going solo rather than filling his mask with speeches or dialogue. He positively immerses in the building of the raft; one feels the connections between segments of his crafted hexameters like the morticing of Odysseus’ craft. I wrote the following in my first book:
… the works of art represented within the Odyssey itself bespeak an aesthetic of construction, wholeness, unity, form, and function. Three wondrous artefacts buttress the story: Penelope’s web, Odysseus’ raft, and the couple’s marriage bed of denatured olive. All three depend upon a frame: all three must therefore be conceived at some level as wholes before they are executed. All three involve transformations of various kinds—from vertical to horizontal (web to shroud, trees to planks, trunk to bed); from raw material to finished, humanly purposive artefact. All three are unadorned: they are each perfect marriages of form and function.
By contrast again, the art works represented in the Iliad point to a different aesthetic. Two exemplars come to mind. Helen’s web (3.125–8) is a Bayeux Tapestry; episodes of the struggle between the Achaeans and the Trojans on her account appear to be embroidered (ἐμπάσσειν) upon a web already woven. In the case of the great shield as well, the artwork is an adornment, superadded upon a highly functional implement. One is made to feel this rather vividly when the shield is penetrated by Aeneas’ spear. A nightmare for the art crowd. In the distinction between art as a perfect marriage of form and purpose, and art as an adornment superadded, gracing the necessary and the useful, and perhaps also transforming them, I believe we have as real a distinction as can be made between the aesthetic sensibilities of the poet of the Odyssey and the poet of the Iliad. Achilles’ lyre is extravagantly silver-bridged; Demodocus’ lyre is merely—and resonantly—hollow.
Homer’s evocation of the storm is also vocal miming, of a bravura kind. One thinks of King Lear’s storm. Much energy is often spent on visual and sonic effects in the staging of that play; but just as in Homer, the storm comes to torrential life in the consonants, vowels, and rhythms of the poet’s words. The performer’s breath is the breath of the four winds.
The consummation of the vision, to my mind, comes from the god’s view. The gods are Homer’s genius and his arsenal. Poseidon is returning from his festival in the land of the Aethiopians, and spots the little man on the limitless sea. Boy is he pissed! Mostly, it seems, at the other gods going behind his back. But one cannot but feel the visceral venal energy of the jealous sibling, stumbling on his useless brother’s turreted sandcastle, and kicking it to oblivion. From the distance the god’s-eye-view gives us, Odysseus’ vessel of tall trees’ timber proudly jointed, becomes a speck, a tumbleweed upon the immense briny swell. He himself becomes a no-man. Calypso’s pines become toothpicks, Odysseus’ days’ long labour and shipwright’s engineering, so much broken Lego™ and wasted hexameter verses.
As flies to wanton boys are we to th’ gods;
They kill us for their sport.
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Odyssey 5.116-227
Odysseus does not explain himself. He just says it. When Calypso asks him the obvious thing—how can he choose an ageing Penelope and his own mortality over herself—and himself not ageing? With his only job, protecting her isolated house? The man acknowledges the facts of the case, and then just states the facts of his case: “But even so, I wish and I long, through all the days, / To get myself home and see my day of restoration.” Athena had been moved to real and felt poetry, outside her own experience, in Book 1: Odysseus, she said, “eager to make out just the hearth-smoke leaping up / From his mother land, longs to die a death.” I think precisely in not trying to explain or otherwise describe this longing, Odysseus renders it most purely and unfiltered for the rest of us, without psychoanalysis or the special pleading of a moral lesson.
Why does one long to be home? It almost feels a tautological question. What is ‘home’? That is a word which cannot be translated back into the Greek, and yet it dominates the way we experience the pull of the Odyssey in English. The Greek word in its place is οἶκος, more ‘house’ or ‘household’ than home. The word ‘home’, of such peculiar power in English, arises in translation mostly from the notion of νόστος, ‘return’ or ‘restoration’, as being implicit in the latter idea. Is there something to be made of the ‘seeing’, in the longing to see the day of one’s return? We ourselves are certainly drawn to the spectacle when hostages return, or lost siblings are reunited. In Proteus’ story, Agamemnon kissed his native earth in passion, upon his doomed return. There is a concentrated joy in such moments, which overflows even upon its disinterested witnesses. Less interesting are the moments that follow, the being home and doing the dishes.
I think Yeats has perhaps done Homer one better, in capturing this inexplicable longing, although for most of his auditors, as with Homer’s, the images do not belong to one’s own surroundings or experience. To be sure, the Irish poet says he will arise and go, as though away from home. But what he discovers at the lake seems to be a universal human apprehension, that in fact we all are hostages, displaced, with our every step on the pavement, from ‘the deep heart’s core’:
The Lake Isle of Innisfree
by William Butler Yeats
I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.
And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet’s wings.
I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.
Mind you, what is not at all in Yeats’s vision is the coupling that seems to define Odysseus’ longing. Yeats will “live alone”. In a sense Odysseus has already found his Innisfree on Calypso’s isle; perhaps he’d have stayed there if he’d had a copy of Yeats to enchant him. But he wants to return to Penelope, whoever she is nowadays, and he cannot explain this to his jealous interlocutor. “For she is mortal, but you …” All the same, his brief and simple expression of longing seems to have the effect of seducing Calypso. His predicament, from the moment she found him half dead, bestriding a ship’s keel, has made her want to rescue and protect him. Her very name, Calypso, suggests hiding or concealing; Homer’s Greek for ‘veil’ derives from the same root. Her love, perhaps, is driven precisely by his loneliness and longing. And couple they do, goddess and man, as soon as he expresses it. Homer had earlier described their sexual encounters as ‘he who does not want, alongside she who wants’ (παρ’ οὐκ ἐθέλων ἐθελούσηι). I rendered ‘a man unwilling next a woman all too.’ But at the end of this passage, they do really seem to come together, without any qualification, in her hollowed cave’s deep core. Would we describe Odysseus as ‘unfaithful’?
The conjunction of God and man was a subject Michelangelo attempted on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Homer’s version is Odyssey 5.
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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 we’re getting back to the main plot. Even Zeus expresses his exasperation at Athena’s posing the question of Odysseus again, and he seems to allude to the fact that they’d already decided a plan of action. Remember how hush hush and strategic that meeting had been, taking advantage of the absence of Poseidon. Evidently he’s still gone. But in this way Homer rather forces the question: what has the Telemachy, the story of Telemachus’ journey and the stories told by Nestor and Menelaus and Helen along the way, served the tale he himself means to tell? I for one find immense richness in the encounters we have witnessed, and I cannot imagine being without them. I am still thinking about Proteus counting his seals. But what do you think? We haven’t even heard from Odysseus yet, the man in question from line 1. But we have heard about him, broad strokes and little hints. Does the Odyssey need the Telemachy (Books 1-4)?
The same phrase and prosodic figure, νῦν αὖ παῖδ’ ἀγαπητὸν, with three straight circumflexes, occurs twice in Penelope’s speeches at the end of Book 4, and then again immediately at the beginning of Book 5, this time in the mouth of Athena at the council of the gods (5.18). In such a context it is impossible not to hear Athena’s use as a quotation and an evocation, of Penelope’s recent and peculiar prosodic usage. Athena also is speaking of Telemachus, but makes no further allusion to Penelope. All the same her evocation is unmistakable, not only in her same words but their distinctive prosodic music. It is Penelope’s emotive motif surfacing in Athena’s voice.
Surely the echoing of the consecutive circumflected contonations, the prosodic inflection we observe and register here, reflects a real connection by design between the characters of Penelope and Athena, and indeed the Homeric performer himself. Breath and harmony unite these characters with a tactile immediacy that seems only possible at the musical level of the representation of the psyche. One cannot see bottom for the significance of this signature echoing for one’s assessment of the composer and the composition, and the kind of mimesis they are trying to achieve. The three straight circumflexes take you there, immediately, in the way a distinctive line of melody invokes every time in history that it has ever been sounded or sung. Such unities of representation seem only to be possible through music, and it is essential that Homer’s composition be recognised at last for its musical art and intention.
One could wish for a true Homeric voice, rather than mine, for this passage. Might as well listen to my Greek all the same. The descriptive poetry around Calypso’s cave means to take you there, to hear her singing, to breathe the aromas. Homer has not attempted anything like that in the preceding books. Perhaps as Odysseus finally comes on stage, some effort is needed to transport us and convince us. The world of Telemachus, by contrast, has been altogether too realistic, uncannily familiar, a transactional world that needs no special effects to ring true to our modern, post- (or inter-) catastrophic experience.
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Odyssey 4.742-847
Homer compares Penelope’s 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 lion’s feints at the men’s shifting perimeter. The comparison of Penelope’s mind to the lion’s 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 they’re supposed to be. Art makes ‘AI’ look like a joke. Athena does such things, as Iphthime says, “because she can!” 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, Odysseus’ 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 Homer’s 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 ‘besties’, as they say; everything on Penelope’s 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 sister’s 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 frustrations—roundly taken, replete with a repeat of her anguished, circumflected, tonal motif—but 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, “somewhere there will still be one who can keep / The house of the lofty roof, and in the distance the fatting farms.” It is not altogether clear who this mysterious saviour will be. There’s plenty of suitors! A principal motive of Telemachus’ 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 Penelope’s thirty-something comeliness as a bit of an asset in their predicament—which needs to be preserved. Penelope herself asks her sister about Odysseus’ 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 Odysseus’ fate, so she can see what her options really are. May the best man win, sister.
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Odyssey 4.625-741
Noemon’s 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 Homer’s is an ‘epic’ 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 hexameter’s 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 ‘epic’ 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 one’s 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 fellow’s trip-up is another’s 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 comedy—whether 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; that’s a very awkward place to be. My own experience teaches me to try to help people get in on it, even if they’re classical scholars, rather than snub them because they don’t ‘get it’, 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 ‘epic’. It is very important to know, in ways that are hard to define—before one sits down in one’s seat—that 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 Butler’s translation of the Odyssey with my Greek recitations; it is readily available in the public domain. He rendered Homer into English prose—and so do I—but that both is and is not the reason for his translation’s 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 Homer’s 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 Butler’s does, for all that they also sidestep the hexameter rhythm and ambience. Most feel they must strike a reverential, King James posture if they’re 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 he’s speaking to us from the other side, where Homer is, distilling his author’s verses and versified speeches back into their original, deadpan, Victorian prose.
That it is Butler’s sympathy for Homer’s own comic disposition, in the texture and subtext of the Odyssey—rather than his skill at decoding the words—which leads to his translation’s insight, is evidenced by Butler’s translation of the Iliad. Clearly Butler’s 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 (‘Minder’) 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 (‘Counter-Mind’) and asks after his ship. And so Telemachus’ game is up. But the real nod and wink here is Noemon’s amazement at having seen Mentor locally yesterday morning; because he’d 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 it’s he who has been playing all these people, including Athena becoming Mentor. Mentor in particular, I would suggest, is the performer’s 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 performer’s alter ego. That’s the joke when Noemon says the man he saw yesterday was either “Mentor or a god—he looked the very same man in every way.” That’s a limitation of a solo actor playing all the parts: he’s only got one face and body. Wink wink.
‘In sooth I know not why I am so sad.’ 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 women’s 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 bedroom’s wooden threshold, is an image speaks a thousand words. She is guarded about Odysseus: no ‘personal’ 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 Homer’s art, which has arranged her words to utter three straight circumflexes: νῦν αὖ παῖδ’ ἀγαπητὸν ἀνηρείψαντο θύελλαι / ἀκλέα ἐκ μεγάρων, οὐδ’ ὁρμηθέντος ἄκουσα. “But again now, my son, beloved—they’ve snatched him up, the storm winds, / An unknown out of these rooms, and I didn’t even hear of his setting off.” Rhythm usually arises from the alternation of stressed and unstressed beats. Here we have three straight emphases, three full Greek contonations, like Lear’s four cries, “Howl, howl, howl, howl!” This utterance of three straight circumflexes turns out to be a motif of Penelope’s. 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 Telemachus’ 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 Shakespeare’s comedy, a kind of undertow to the fun that is only hinted at in the notion of ‘melancholy’. 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, Homer’s narrator addresses Menelaus in the second person—him 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, he’s not going to die in Argos, but the deathless ones will escort him to the Elysian plain, where it’s always summer with a cool breeze. This may mean that he will never die; but it may also just mean that he’ll be moved somewhere where the “way of life comes out easiest for mankind.” 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 he’s got Helen, so that “you’re Zeus’s son-in-law!”
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 Aegisthus’ 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. Let’s hope she has a decent stash of nepenthe for their happy hours. Proteus also says that in the Elysian plain, there is a “blonde Rhadamanthys.” 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 ‘myth’. Hesiod also uses ‘blonde’ of Rhadamanthys, but he may have been aping Homer. ‘Blonde’, ‘tawny’ (ξανθός) 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 Sidonians’ king, when his house protected him on his return there. Apparently Sidon among the Phoenicians had been a kind of base for Menelaus’ activities. From whom did he need protection? Other Phoenician operators, or the very Egyptians from whom he managed to source his wealth? ‘Protected’ translates άμφεκάλυψεν, ‘enfolded’, ‘hid [him] on both [or all] sides’.
But there are hints—perhaps comic—of Menelaus’ own divinity, not only by marriage. Telemachus, at any rate, seems ready to worship him. When he refuses the gift of horses, he says he’ll leave them here as an offering (ἄγαλμα) to Menelaus himself. Such a thing, an ἄγαλμα, 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 he’s destined for the Elysian plain: Telemachus thinks he’s already there.
Once again Homer takes an interest to portray Telemachus’ wide-eyed inexperience, seemingly at the boy’s expense. He thinks the forecourt of Menelaus’ palace must be the sort of fancy digs that Zeus himself has. He’s 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 suitors’ generation, and the experience of Helen, Menelaus, Odysseus.
Most uncanny is a kind of future echo in Menelaus’ wish for a beautiful cup he means to gift Telemachus: “I’ll give you a gorgeous chalice, so you may pour it out to the gods … in memory of me, every day that you do it.” ‘Whenever you do this, do it in memory of me.’ 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 “that’s why I’ve come to these your knees,” we expect him to ask for military help to solve the problem of his overrun household. (Peisistratus had earlier made clear his companion’s need for real allies.) At Nestor’s 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 Telemachus’ 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 “tell the tale of that man’s grievous obliteration.” He asks for the eyewitness account of his father’s death, whose premise in fact precludes any source of aid for Telemachus’ own predicament.
When he hears about Telemachus’ situation at home, Menelaus wishes that Odysseus would appear “in the shape he was once,” when back on the campaign he won a wrestling match in front of everybody. “In that shape may Odysseus come have a chat with the suitors.” This wish says an awful lot about what is delusional in the human notion of return or restoration or rebirth (νόστος), 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 Menelaus’ tacit admission, a shapeshifter.
In his answer to Telemachus, Menelaus gives us the original shapeshifter, the protean Proteus, the Old Man of the Sea—yet 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 “most terrible … ever.” After all those years of war and lying in wait, this one was the worst: “for it stressed us dreadfully, / The most deadly smell from the seals fed in the brine.” These manly men, the bravest for “every mission,” couldn’t stomach a fishy odour.
The men’s strength and endurance is expressed by their ability, not to tackle or fight their victim, but to keep on squeezing him (πιέζειν) though he changes form and shape. The verb recalls Odysseus ‘squeezing’ (πιέζειν) the throat of the warrior crouched inside the Trojan Horse, who wanted to answer Helen’s 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 thinkers’ speculation into ontology and epistemology. Proteus himself performs one action: he counts (ἀριθμεῖν). Why does he do this? Does counting his seals reassure him in some way? Does counting one’s things do this generally? I wanna go out tonight, I wanna find out what I got—Bruce 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 appearances—skins—not substances. Have the men invalidated Proteus’ 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 ‘the hides of cattle they themselves killed.’ 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 Odysseus’ 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 ‘big bang’!) 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 time—and our skins—a cosmic reckoner, and a cosmic reckoning?
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Odyssey 4.155-305
I have translated νηπενθές ‘anti-depressant’, which is a depressing thing to do. The mere sound of some of Homer’s words conjures sensations and intimations that make semantic translation seem like butchery. But I have gone for a modern medicinal property, rather than to ‘cease upon the midnight with no pain.’
Helen and Menelaus have lived life on a grand scale. Now they have ‘come down to earth,’ 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: you’d 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 ‘happy hour’ bespeaks a general need to drown or distract from our predicament, at a certain time of day. Poor Peisistratus says he doesn’t like to get all sad around dinner time. Perhaps he speaks for himself. Tell him he buys the next round.
Homer describes Helen’s Aegyptian drugs as μητιόεντα, filled with mētis, ‘intelligence’, ‘kenning’, ‘cunning’, 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 πολλὰ μὲν ἐσθλὰ μεμιγμένα πολλὰ δὲ λυγρά, ‘many of quality when mixed, but many mischievous.’ The perfect balance of the Greek phrasing, however, with ‘mixed’ 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.
‘She turned her thought to other things, Helen, Zeus’s begotten …’ It was Athena who had earlier ‘thought of other things,’ directing from behind the scenes the preparations for Telemachus’ trip. Here it is Helen who earns the line of the divine directrix. In the nepenthe passage she is twice addressed as Zeus’s 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 Homer’s (the narrator’s) purpose in his allusions to Aegypt? Talking of coming down to earth, the Achaean world seems well impressed with Menelaus’ 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 Menelaus’ palace, but the narrator makes it clear that he himself knows better. Sparta ain’t all that. It’s 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. Helen’s 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 Menelaus’ parting gift of horses, because, he says, they’re no use in Ithaca. The epic, chivalric, noble animal has no place there; she’s a rocky country best fit for goats.
There is something funny and affecting about this narrator’s 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 they’re 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 Athena’s late blessing brings some late prosperity to the old man, who came home in such a rush …
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, he’s 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 Menelaus’ precious metals, and thinks this must be what Zeus’s front room looks like. The boy’s naïveté contrasts with Menelaus’ 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 beholder’s eyes.
But Menelaus also is clearly racked with regret and loss. He’d keep a third (!) of his goods if he could get his dead friends back. I suspect we’re supposed to note such a valuation, as one does the ⅗ 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. ‘Nah,’ says Menelaus (to paraphrase): ‘it was for me.’ I bet that sort of exchange gets old pretty fast. Doesn’t everything.
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Odyssey 3.330-497 (end)
The sacrifice of the heifer, with the women of Nestor’s house ululating in ecstasy, seems to demand a symbolic reading; what do you make of it? The men encamped on the beach like an invading army were sacrificing quantities of bulls, exclusively male animals. The object seemed to be placating or thanking Poseidon. Here, Nestor calls for an unbroken heifer to honour Athena, the Virgin. The sexual metaphor is made quite explicit in Nestor’s request, quoted in the title above. It seems the honouring of Poseidon involves the sacrifice of male animals, whereas the honouring of Athena calls for the sacrifice of a female, and in particular, a ‘virgin’.
But there are levels upon levels. It would seem the return home of the Pylian men from Troy involves a kind of acknowledgment of sin, to be atoned vicariously (in the wishful supplicant’s reasoning) through the sacrifice of bulls. Much of this transgression is in fact involved in the violation of women. A line that rather sticks out from Nestor’s description of his breathless escape from Troy, is this about the loading of his cargo: “And we loaded in our acquisitions, along with the women in their plunging girdles (βαθυζώνους τε γυναῖκας) …” Nestor in particular is remembered in the Iliad for some particularly unsavoury calls to the men for what to do with the Trojan women when they are captured. He is a nasty old man always up for a boast about his youthful prowess and for ginning up the youngsters to be ruthless and rapine in battle. ‘Loosening the veil,’ an event for the wedding night, can also be a metaphor for rape, applied to the sacking of a citadel, but here to the opening of a vintage wine. Now that Nestor’s home, restored it seems to a revered wife Eurydice, who doesn’t get a mention in the Iliad, and whom he pointedly invokes in his prayer to Athena—is there a need for atonement, and perhaps abasement on his part, toward the domestic reality of life? It seems likely that coming home in the Odyssey involves a restoration of a balance, if that is possible after war, between the needs and predilections of men and the dignity of women. What has happened, one wonders, to all those low-girdled women shipped in the hold with other commodities? Are they now the slave women preparing the feast for after the virgin sacrifice?
In turn the sacrifice of the heifer seems to embody the sacrifice of women for the sake of the Trojan misadventure, and masculine fantasy generally. It is conducted by Nestor’s sons who stayed home, who missed or never knew their warrior brother Antilochus; and it seems to be consummated by the guttural cry of the women of Nestor’s household. I find both a dignity and an unspoken acknowledgement in this wordless ululation (ὀλολύζειν) of the women. The price that women pay is perhaps more than can be acknowledged in words. No amount of gilding can adorn this. One really feels the passing of this heifer’s ghost. It feels like a release from suffering.
In Greek:
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Odyssey 3.201-329
Why does Homer introduce a singer and poet into the story of Aegisthus and Clytemnestra? In Nestor’s telling, Agamemnon left behind a singer, like the ones Homer depicts. and perhaps is, with the order to “protect my wife”. How is it that an artist could do that? What sort of song would preserve her virtue—keep her on the straight and narrow? (What language is there any more to speak of this sort of mission?) We know that Nestor had his disagreements with Agamemnon, so that in the aftermath of the Trojan war, he led or joined a faction which fled home rather than try to appease Athena with sacrifice. The army was split fifty-fifty. Odysseus changed his mind and made Agamemnon’s contingent a democratic majority. Is Nestor perhaps mocking Agamemnon’s judgement over his provision for securing his marriage while he was away, busily deserting it? The poor singer meets a terrible fate at Aegisthus’ hands, abandoned to become food for vultures on a desert island. What might Homer himself be saying about the inefficacy of his own art to guide human behaviour and morality? Is there a criticism here of moralising poets? “He wants it—she wants it!” Erotic passion and lust for power conquer in real life, and even win a seven-year term.
[I shall be taking a brief hiatus for some emergency travel. Will be back soon!]
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Odyssey 3.1-200
Meeting Nestor is like watching a reunion special for a 20-year-old show. There is that same awkward sense that things will never be the same. Giants walked the earth back then. There is the slightly prurient interest in how old and overweight the cast have got.
Here we are, camped on the beach in companies like an invading army, leaving the WAGs down the road at home, as though we’d never left Troy. But it’s our own beach. There is an uneasy incompleteness about Nestor’s return, even now, after many years. There is consciousness of guilt: something needs to be expiated by sacrifice. It was apparently Athena whom the Achaeans offended in the sacking of Troy. Now it is Poseidon they are appeasing, perhaps in gratitude for their passage home? The wind never failed him, says Nestor. One wonders what the strange festival means for Peisistratus, his youngest son, for whom, like Telemachus, the whole Trojan expedition is a thing of story, full of glorified models of male conduct in war. ‘Dad, why are we all sitting around in groups in our armour, on beach towels, on the beach?’ I well remember from my own youth the looming shadow of World War II, still the source of our playground games (along with cowboys and Indians) and the subject of solemn movies with nary a deadpan. It was always an event for me to speak with veterans of that war, from teachers to students in Chicago. Nestor is quite honest about his own actions, as Athena foretells: it was a pirate raid, following Achilles around Troyland, looting stuff and women, before they finally got round to besetting the Trojan city of Ilium.
But there seems also a lot concealed. It seems he may have come home with less than a full share of the loot, for example. This may have been a price of breaking with Agamemnon, and possibly a reason why Odysseus began as an ally of his breakaway faction, but then changed his mind and went back to Agamemnon. There are hints that unlike Menelaus, whom we are yet to meet, Nestor is living under diminished circumstances. Telemachus avoids going back there on his way home. Neither Nestor nor Menelaus are a transparent window in their memories of Odysseus: he was a character who aroused the most mixed of mixed feelings.
They are honouring Poseidon, but Athena is actually present as Mentor, Homer’s (the performer’s) alter ego (I suggest). ‘Mentor’ joins in the prayer, that glory come to Nestor and his sons, but the performer cannot resist breaking his guise, to tell us that actually Athena fulfilled the whole prayer herself. These half-line asides are precious kinds of connections … But the suggestion is that this visit of Athena (and Telemachus) may result in a kind of healing for Nestor and his people, at least at the material level. But one reads the psyche from the material in Homer. Clearly there had been a real break with Odysseus, after which Nestor and he never met again. Perhaps there is some resolution in the next generation, with this visit.
There is genuine depth of feeling, an embodiment of real distance and loss, in Nestor’s litany of the comrades buried at Troy: There lies Ajax, Achilles, Patroclus … And his own beloved son Antilochus, who beat Menelaus (under dispute) in the chariot race at the funeral games set up by Achilles (Iliad XXIII—I mention this because it will figure when we meet Menelaus in the next book). It is marvellous how these lines conjure those men like so many waxworks. One is made conscious of distance and time precisely by our distance from that first encounter with the Iliad. One wonders if the poet himself joins in the affect of Nestor’s loss and evocation: the world of the Iliad, perhaps, with all the figures in whom he or she had invested all her art, belongs to this poet’s younger years and can never return.
The figure of Odysseus, however, yet remains, and Homer is not done with him. He is well remembered by Plato, the Odysseus of the Odyssey: Socrates seems to admire him. But the Athenian tragic stage remembers a different man, perhaps independently of Homer’s telling. There he is the original Machiavel, an unprincipled opportunist, spin doctor and henchman. Advisor to the Prince. Nestor knew this guy. He more than once emphasises Odysseus’ brilliance in the sense of his cunning, his skill with ‘all manner of deceits’ (παντοίοισι δόλοισι). Their final parting was clearly not amicable, and likely a prime example of Odysseus cheating expectations.
It is possible that Athena’s intention, an authorial intention in the highest sense, is some redemption for this shadowy and brutally efficient figure. Perhaps this possibility was always there in his youthful and fruitful love for Penelope, seemingly abandoned for the Trojan high life. But Athena had been his enemy, before the sudden change of heart at the council of the gods in Book 1. She had been the enemy of all the Achaeans attempting to return home after the desecration of Ilium. The opening of the Odyssey on Olympus is shown to be a moment of opportunity: Poseidon, Odysseus’ motivated persecutor, is absent. But nothing would have happened unless Athena had changed her mind. Why does she do this? What is it about him, or what is missing within or for Odysseus, that makes her move?
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Odyssey 2.323-434 (end)
Since I started again after my illness, I’ve now spent two years without performing past Book 4 of the Odyssey. Now, I have translated the whole thing in that time, to be fair; and I am a self-confessed Homerist, so there is endless fascination for me in every part of every line. But this does mean that I have not yet encountered Odysseus himself. Homer does not make you wait two years, but he does make you wait four books, a pretty long time. An ongoing question, raised by modern critics—the ancients seem not to have complained—is does the Telemachy (Books 1-4) cut it? Does Telemachus sustain our interest? Why does Homer delay the introduction of his hero? Or does he in fact? Subscribers, do please respond in comments or over in Chat.
I shall admit it is hard to square the master fabulist of Books 5-12, and the Hollywood storyteller of 16-24—meant in a good way—a novelist who writes a real page-turner—with the relaxed buildup of Telemachus’ situation in Ithaca at the beginning of the Odyssey. There is also an apparent lull when Odysseus first arrives in Ithaca—Books 13-15—filled with conversations, and many lies, in the lowly dwelling of Eumaeus the swineherd. Coming up in Book 3, Nestor will literally talk until the sun goes down. How does one understand these two apparent lulls, one which sets in right at the beginning, and the other which interrupts sequences of (to us) intense mythic and dramatic interest? The Tale of Odysseus’ Wanderings and the Plot Against the Suitors and the Reunion with Penelope?
The oral theory of Homeric composition allows us to shunt all aesthetic questions to a mysterious primitive realm beyond our ken or ability to participate. Let us avoid this ungrounded laziness. Plato’s world was not infected with the fascination for orality. It was, however, keenly insightful into the qualities of poetry and aesthetic craft, and it does not seem to register a problem with any parts of the Odyssey on these grounds. Perhaps occasional doldrums are a part of the rhythm of sea journeys and traveller’s tales? But it may be our own predilections for mythic tales of (super)heroes, or for the dramatic dovetailing of storylines to a climax, which are distorting our sense for those parts of Homer’s art which do not aim to satisfy those kinds of arousal.
I do love the ship cleaving through the water. It is such a release, felt in the rhythms, when the journey finally gets underway. By itself that is a clue to how effectively Homer has conjured the feeling of adolescent inertia and its privileged frustrations, the invisible bonds that tie young men to their dice and tables, and leave the loyal, experienced men, and all the women, with a choice of service also to their appetites, or to a now distant memory of an ideal from their youth which may or may not be dead forever. Bring me a traveller’s wind!
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Odyssey 2.157-322
This episode marks the first—and I believe, only—in-person appearance of Mentor, Odysseus’ appointed estate manager, in the whole Odyssey. But he appears twice in this passage, the second time as Athena’s disguise. She then appears as Mentor on multiple occasions in the course of the telling. Indeed, the line,
Μέντορι ϝεἰδομένη ἠμὲν δέμας ἠδὲ καὶ αὐδήν
Seeming to be Mentor, not just in build but in her voice as well
which appears in this passage before Athena’s speech to Telemachus, is also the last line of the whole poem. Of course in this guise Athena is to be a ‘mentor’ to Telemachus in the first part of the Odyssey. But it almost seems as if the performer hits on an idea here that gives him some flexibility and comic potential. For one thing, the announcement about the voice means he doesn’t have to keep doing Athena’s voice, however that was handled, but the voice of a regular sort of male. And as we shall see, this figure of Mentor allows the performer to engage in some ‘fourth-wall’ comedy. Mentor in this way becomes a very thin mask for the performer himself, who, as a matter of course, has to imitate a variety of people ‘not just in build, but in their voice as well.’
It seems to me to be pointed that the Odyssey ends by pointing to this fourth wall, or rather to the performer himself. The Iliad performer seems rather to aim for transparency, to get out of the way of the simile or the scene. That poem’s last line is an evocation of Hector Horse-Tamer at his funeral, to which we are made witnesses or auditors. Such a name-and-epithet evocation raises the question what Hector has become, now that he has been burnt to ashes and bones. The scene is the thing, not the artist. But throughout the Odyssey, the teller seems to get involved in the telling, trying on his guises with a sense of fun, and participatory fun at that. Let me suggest this as an hypothesis, at any rate, which you are invited to test or try on as we proceed.
Also in Greek:
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