Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea

by Thomas Cahill

  Doom is dark and deeper than any sea-dingle.

  Upon what man it fall

  In spring, day-wishing flowers appearing,

  Avalanche sliding, white snow from rock-face,

  That he should leave his house,

  No cloud-soft hand can hold him, restraint by women;

  But ever that man goes

  Through place-keepers, through forest trees,

  A stranger to strangers over undried sea,

  Houses for fishes, suffocating water,

  Or lonely on fell as chat,

  By pot-holed becks

  A bird stone-haunting, an unquiet bird.

  There head falls forward, fatigued at evening,

  And dreams of home,

  Waving from window, spread of welcome,

  Kissing of wife under single sheet;

  But waking sees

  Bird-flocks nameless to him, through doorway voices

  Of new men making another love.

  Save him from hostile capture,

  From sudden tiger’s leap at corner;

  Protect his house,

  His anxious house where days are counted

  From thunderbolt protect,

  From gradual ruin spreading like a stain;

  Converting number from vague to certain,

  Bring joy, bring day of his returning,

  Lucky with day approaching, with leaning dawn.

  Odysseus makes it home in the end, is reunited with his son, clears his home of interlopers,4 and once more sleeps with his faithful wife Penelope in the great rooted bed. (“Warm beds,” muses Leopold Bloom, “warm fullblooded life.”)

  Penelope is herself a fascinating character, utterly different from all the Homeric prima donnas and self-dramatizing primo divos we have been in the presence of up to now. Though he scarcely awards her an aria of her own, Homer constantly shifts his description of her, as if to underscore her many facets. She is “reserved,” “discreet,” “cautious,” “wary,” “poised,” “alert,” “guarded,” “composed,” “well aware,” “self-possessed,” “warm, generous,” of “great wisdom,” “the soul of loyalty.” She, too, weeps in private, draws a veil across her face in public. She is the female equivalent of her husband, secretly strategic, full of wiles, keeping the overbearing suitors at bay for years with one deception after another. Odysseus, who in his years of travel has lived with the nymph Calypso and slept with the enchantress Circe—and would hardly have been expected to do otherwise by Homer, Penelope, or anyone else—remains in Penelope’s eyes “always the most understanding man alive.” Her most important virtue, more important even than her considerable discernment and fortitude, is her faithfulness.

  Unsure if it is at long last her husband who stands before her, she tests him, asking her maid to move their bed, a bed no one has ever seen but the woman who sleeps in it, her loyal maidservants, and her husband, who carved its posts out of a branching olive tree rooted in the midst of their house. The bed is unmovable; and Odysseus’s fury at hearing her ask that it be moved (“Woman—your words, they cut me to the core! / Who could move my bed?”), tells her that her husband is home at last.

  Theirs is the ultimate result of all ambition, the end to which all labors tend, the “great rooted place,” in Yeats’s words, that Odysseus in Book 6 of the poem wished for Nausicaa, the beautiful young princess he met on the Phaeacian shore:5

  “And may the good gods give you all your heart desires:

  husband, and house, and lasting harmony too.

  No finer, greater gift in the world than that …

  when man and woman possess their home, two minds,

  two hearts that work as one. Despair to their enemies,

  joy to all their friends. Their own

  best claim to glory.”

  We may leave them now, Odysseus and Penelope, bidding farewell in the words with which Homer sees them off, the words that end with line 296 of Book 23:

  So husband and wife confided in

  each other

  while nurse and Eurynome, under the flaring brands,

  were making up the bed with coverings deep and soft.

  And working briskly, soon as they’d made it snug,

  back to her room the old nurse went to sleep

  as Eurynome, their attendant, torch in hand,

  lighted the royal couple’s way to bed and,

  leading them to their chamber, slipped away.

  Rejoicing in each other, they returned to their bed,

  the old familiar place they loved so well.

  These may be the last lines Homer wrote before he died, leaving the remainder of his poem to be finished by a disciple. At the outset of Book 1, “sparkling-eyed” Athena delivered to Telemachus the extraordinary news “I tell you great Odysseus is not dead.” Not dead after twenty years away. Not dead after 2,700 years. Did Homer understand that his comic, weeping, warm Odysseus would at some time in the distant future seem more alive than all his bully-boy heroes and their moribund military traditions? Was an ancient song entitled (in Fagles’s translation) “The Strife Between Odysseus and Achilles” known to the audiences of Homer’s day or is it a fictional construct of Homer’s, sounded in the Odyssey to reverberate in listeners’ minds, a whisper of the conflict in Homer himself between war as a way of life—really, death to others as a way of life—and a life of connection to other human beings, a life that draws on all the resources of mind and heart? We look back over the great arc of Homer’s art that takes us from the rage of Achilles amid the clanging of battle on the Trojan shore to the modest domestic peace with which the Odyssey closes and ask ourselves: Is there any way to characterize Homer’s intent over the lifetime of his evolving art? Perhaps there is. For, in the end, the rage of Achilles is stilled only in the bed of Penelope.

  1 The oldest examples of an alphabet-in-the-making were found in the Sinai at Serabit el-Khadim, a honeycomb of ancient copper and turquoise mines, once worked by Semitic slaves and their Egyptian overseers. Though there is no reason to suppose that the idea of the alphabet first arose at this particular site (just that it offers our oldest extant evidence), there is good reason to think that the Sinai lies on the route of cultural transmission that takes us from Egyptian hieroglyphs to the fully articulated Semitic alphabet. Is it only coincidence that Moses, the greatest of all Hebrew figures and the one to whom the earliest Hebrew writings are credited, was known to have had an upper-class Egyptian education (and therefore to have been literate in hieroglyphs) and to have led Semitic slaves through the Sinai sometime toward the middle of the second millennium? Is it possible that the legend of Moses’s authorship of the ancient Torah possesses a kernel of historical truth—that he invented alphabetic writing or, more likely, that he found the first truly literary use for this invention by committing the Commandments of the Hebrew god to stone tablets?

  2 Hephaestus the Cripple—in one of the great fakeouts of Greek myth—is married to (surprise!) Aphrodite. When she and Ares bed down together, artful Hephaestus exposes their adultery by a cunning ruse that holds them up (literally) to public ridicule by the other gods. A “gossamer-fine” net wrought by Hephaestus scoops up the lovers in flagrante delicto, as Hephaestus calls the other gods to witness the humiliation of the lovers, naked and writhing for all to see. “A bad day for adultery!” quip the laughing gods. The story is recounted in Book 8 of the Odyssey by the bard Demodocus as “The Love of Ares and Aphrodite Crowned with Flowers.”

  3 “Between Scylla and Charybdis” is one of the most useful metaphors of world literature. The monstrous alternatives were real enough to ancient sailors who, navigating the narrow Straits of Messina between Italy and Sicily, often came to grief. Scylla was imagined to be a monster with six heads, each bristling with six rows of sharp teeth, who sat on her perilous rock. Charybdis, who lived under an immense fig tree, swallowed the waters of the sea three times each day, throwing them up again from her great throat.

  4 The interlopers
are the suitors of Penelope, who wants none of them but cannot drive them out, despite the fact that they are depleting her resources. Odysseus kills them all (in concert with his son Telemachus) in what can only be called a comic, even a ghoulishly humorous, episode. Such rough comedy, not quite to our taste, is nonetheless not far from the comic violence of Saturday morning cartoons and movies made for teenage boys. It may be violence, but it’s zany violence, full of physical unlikelihoods and impossibilities, alerting us to the fact that we are not to take it too seriously, just enjoy the revenge to our hearts’ content.

  5 In Odysseus’s nude encounter with Nausicaa—she and her maids having just had a swim, he, shipwrecked, having been tossed up naked on their beach—he attempts to shield his private parts with an olive branch and figure out whether, in such extremities, he can assume the posture of a suppliant and “clasp her knees.” The whole business could almost be silent cinema slapstick.

  III

  THE POET

  HOW TO PARTY

  Let us begin our singing from the Heliconian Muses

  who possess the great and holy mountain of Helicon

  and dance there on soft feet by the dark blue water

  of the spring, and by the altar of the powerful son of Cronus;

  who wash their tender bodies in the waters of Permessus

  or Hippocrene, spring of the Horse, or holy Olmeus,

  and on the high places of Helicon have ordered their dances

  which are handsome and beguiling, and light are the feet they

  move on.…

  And it was they who once taught Hesiod his splendid singing

  as he was shepherding his lambs on holy Helicon,

  and these were the first words of all the goddesses spoke to me,

  the Muses of Olympia, daughters of Zeus of the aegis:

  “You shepherds of the wilderness, poor fools, nothing but bellies,

  we know how to say many false things that seem like true sayings,

  but we know also how to speak the truth when we wish to.”

  So they spoke, these mistresses of words, daughters of great Zeus,

  and they broke off and handed me a staff of strong-growing

  olive shoot, a wonderful thing; they breathed a voice into me,

  and power to sing the story of things of the future, and things past.

  They told me to sing the race of the blessed gods everlasting,

  but always to put themselves at the beginning and end of my singing.

  So begins Hesiod’s Theogony with his call from the Muses to be a poet and to sing the genealogy of the gods. Hesiod’s poetry, which lacks the sweeping drama and unforgettable characterizations of Homer, is exceedingly useful to us because it catalogues so much mythological information. Hesiod, a struggling farmer in Boeotia and younger contemporary of Homer (and something of a regional chauvinist), discovers the Muses dancing on Mount Helicon in his own neighborhood, though their traditional home was on the slopes of Mount Olympus.

  The Muses were the nine goddesses of song and poetry or, perhaps better, sung poetry, since the Greeks did not distinguish one from the other. Their name is the root of the word music. In early times, all public utterances were chanted, so that the voice of the speaker—who, needless to say, had no microphone—could reach as far as possible. This is the origin of chanting by priests at religious services, though the sung poems of the Greeks were often chanted not by single performers but by dancing choruses.

  The Muses could be capricious in awarding their favors and vindictive in withholding them. Thus Homer’s need to placate his Muse regularly, lest she withdraw his gift of inspiration. Inspiration and truth were two different things, however. The success of a poetic performance lay in the emotional transformation it wrought on its audience. The Muses didn’t care whether what they inspired was true or false as long as it grabbed the listeners. Each Muse came to have her specialty: Calliope inspired epic poetry, Clio historical narrative, Euterpe aulos playing, Erato poetry sung to the lyre, Terpsichore dance, Melpomene tragedy, Thalia comedy, Polyhymnia prayers and ritual, Urania astronomical demonstrations or perhaps pageants under the stars.

  IN THE PREVIOUS CHAPTER, wishing to distinguish Homer’s two great poems, I underscored how different are their approaches to both militarism and what might best be called personal feeling—that is, the ability to sympathize, to mourn, and to cherish familial relationships, an ability which, in the ancient world, was almost exclusively the domain of women. Though I call the military traditions of the Greeks “moribund,” I am well aware that they have much life left in them. Simone Weil, whose insight into Greek culture was profound, wrote in 1939: “Those who had dreamed that force, thanks to progress, now belonged to the past, have seen the [Iliad] as a historical document; those who can see that force, today as in the past, is at the center of all human history, find in the Iliad its most beautiful, its purest mirror.” These words, from an essay written for Nouvelle Revue Française, were never published there, for before the issue could be printed Paris had fallen to the Nazis. Little more than half a century after that event, I can hardly claim that the Greek military spirit is dead; it is still, as it was in Weil’s day, “at the center of all human history.” At most, one could hope that more human beings than in the past have come to love peace more deeply than they wish for war, that the sensibility of Odysseus continues to gain adherents.

  To name this realm of personal feeling “the sensibility of Odysseus” is, of course, to write paradoxically and in a kind of symbolic shorthand. For Odysseus, though he may afterward have wept over the consequences (and may therefore stand as Homer’s literary exemplar of an evolved sensibility), was the Greek who designed the treacherous ruse that brought Troy to ruin, steeped in the blood of so many innocents, the man distrusted as too clever by half—distrusted not only by his fellow Greeks but, later, by the Romans as well. In the last decades of the pre-Christian era, just before the birth of Jesus, the great Roman poet Virgil worked in declining health on a massive epic, the Aeneid, about the founding of the city of Rome at the pristine bend in the River Tiber by Aeneas, a Trojan prince who escaped as Troy burned. Virgil modeled large parts of his long poem quite consciously on the Iliad. There was, after all, no alternative: if a Roman poet wished to summon his fellow countrymen to greatness by recalling the feats of their glorious ancestors, the Homeric epic was the only pattern available to him. But if he had no recourse but to employ a Greek literary model, Virgil exhibited typical Roman ambivalence toward the Greeks themselves by bringing before us Odysseus’s Wooden Horse and putting in the mouth of a truth-telling Trojan the famous line “I am wary of Greeks even when they bring gifts.” The ancient world seethed with ethnic caricatures, none more constant than the warning against gift-bearing Greeks, this people too subtle to be trusted.

  If Virgil views Odysseus as the embodiment of Greek shiftiness, it is also true that the Roman poet makes explicit a somewhat hidden strand of Homer’s narrative: Troy in the Iliad functions as a kind of utopia. It is a doomed utopia—doomed, it must be pointed out, by Odysseus’s preternatural stealth, for otherwise its walls had proved impregnable. Troy is a place of greater justice and harmony than Greek society, the place the Romans would rather think of themselves as hailing from. Like the City of Peace on the miraculous shield of Achilles, Troy is an ideal, not the begrimed, imperfect world of the Greeks, not a world of give-and-take, of compromise and equivocation, but the uncompromised paradise of lost nobility—of brave, loving Hector and generous-hearted, compassionate Priam—where we would all rather claim our origin.

  Here in Homer is the first faint note of a dream that will become ever more present to the Greeks, who, despite their unswerving realism and proud practicality—or perhaps because of their unblinking understanding of things as they truly are—yearn, however unrealistically, however impractically, for a great, good place beyond the unsatisfying ambiguities of the world we must actually live in. (Odysseus and Penelope’s
Ithaca was, by the time the Odyssey was known, a second lost ideal, a utopia of aristocratic virtue where, as Yeats would have it, “innocence and beauty” are born “in custom and in ceremony.”) This striking combination of seemingly opposite qualities—of practicality and grounded realism united to a longing for a state of being beyond anything one has ever known (and, beyond the longing, an ability to imagine what such a state might be like)—fostered the germination of the first nontraditional, nonconservative society in world history, the first culture that did not give as its knee-jerk response to every challenge “This is the way we’ve always done things.”

  Like Tennyson’s Ulysses seeking “a newer world,” like the adventurous Greek sailors whose graceful, elongated vessels plied ever farther—from the Aegean to the Adriatic to the Mediterranean to the far Atlantic—Greece quickly morphed from the usual custom-ruled society into a civilization characterized by open questioning and experimentation. In the words of the contemporary British classicist Oliver Taplin, “The poems [of Homer] seem to emerge … as a kind of opener of discussion, an invitation to think about and scrutinize the structures and allocations of power and of respect. Thus, while everyone within the poems agrees that honour … should be given where honour is due, they do not agree on the criteria for its allocation. So while Homer does not positively advocate any particular kind of political change, this is surely not the poetry of political conservatism or retrenchment either. It is part and parcel of an era of radically widening horizons; and it is a catalyst to change.”

  The questioning and experimentation, though centered on political matters, will eventually spin far beyond the political sphere—to such an extent that the Greek world will continue in almost constant cultural revolution from the time of Homer to the day Rome brings Greece to its knees in the second century B.C. This period—more than half a millennium of conscious change—marks the longest trajectory of fluid development in any society known to history.