by Homer
Pity an old man, like thy sire, different in only this,
That I am wretcheder, and bear that weight of miseries
That never man did, my curs’d lips enforc’d to kiss that hand
That slew my children.’
His words stirs a passion of grieving for his own father in Achilles, who cries now for him, now for Patroclus. A tragic sympathy binds the two bitter enemies: they grieve for their common, human lot. He sets the old man on his feet: ‘Sit, And settle we our woes, though huge, for nothing profits it. Cold mourning wastes but our lives’ heats.’ Achilles describes the way the gods spin life for unfortunate mortals, lying in unhappiness while the gods themselves have no sorrows. There are two urns at the door of Zeus, from which he dispenses evils and blessings. Peleus was given all blessings, but only one son:
‘One blossom but myself; and I, shaken as soon as blown.
Nor shall I live to cheer his age, and give nutrition
To him that nourish’d me . . . Thyself that did enjoy
(As we have heard) a happy life . . . but when the gods did turn
Thy blest state to partake with bane, war and the bloods of men
Circled thy city, never clear – sit down and suffer then,
Mourn not inevitable things; thy tears can spring no deeds
To help thee, nor recall thy son . . . ’
‘Give me no seat, great seed of Jove, when yet unransomed
Hector lies riteless in thy tents; but deign with utmost speed
His resignation, that these eyes may see his person freed,
And thy grace satisfied with gifts. Accept what I have brought.’
This request provokes Achilles, though already minded to give Hector back. He masters himself and thoughtfully orders that the corpse be washed, anointed and dressed, himself lifting the body on to the litter. He weeps, then:
Cried out for anger, and thus pray’d: ‘O friend, do not except
Against this favour to our foe (if in the deep thou hear),
And that I give him to his sire; he gave fair ransom.’
He provides food for them both. As even Niobe ate when she was worn out with grieving for the loss of her children, so must they. They gaze at each other in wonder, Priam at Achilles’ beauty and grace, Achilles at Priam’s dignity and power of speech. Priam asks for a bed, worn out as he is with lack of food and sleep; Achilles orders two to be made, asking Priam how long a truce he would like for the proper celebration of Hector’s funeral. Eleven days is agreed.
Priam returns with Hector’s body, which is lamented by Cassandra, Andromache, Hecuba and finally Helen, who remembers that he was always kind to her. During the truce they mourn for Hector, until on the eleventh day they build a grave barrow over the bones.
And so horse-taming Hector’s rites gave up his soul to rest.
Introduction to the Odyssey
Much have I travelled in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse have I been told
That deep-browed Homer ruled as his demesne;
Yet never did I breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He stared at the Pacific – and all his men
Looked at each other with a wild surmise –
Silent upon a peak in Darien.
John Keats
The Odyssey is the story of all-experiencing Odysseus (Ulysses as Chapman, following Latin usage, called him) who insisted on hearing the Sirens sing – the adventurer among monsters, the lover of goddesses, the traveller flung on foreign shores, the teller of tales. It is the story of Odysseus’ travels, his visits to every sort of human and monstrous society, from those who eat fruit dropping from the trees to those who work a double agricultural shift; from the Aeolians who give divine gifts to their guest – Aeolus’ bag of winds to get them home – to the Cyclops whose guest gift is to eat the guest last. It is also the story of the hero’s return from Troy, being gradually stripped of his men and his standing, the victim of fate and the gods. He is driven to return home not because home is better than the delights of the Lotus eaters or of Calypso – Ithaca is rocky, only good for goats – but because it is where he belongs. Odysseus is stripped even of his name, but he still has a wife, son and father on Ithaca.
Calypso is blunt about their inferior charms – she is a divinely beautiful goddess who can offer him immortality and lordship of her domain; Odysseus agrees that his wife
‘In wit is far inferior to thee,
In feature, stature, all the parts of show,
She being a mortal, an immortal thou,
Old ever growing, and yet never old.
Yet her desire shall all my days see told,
Adding the sight of my returning day,
And natural home.’
Odysseus, gone nearly two decades, may still see Ithaca as his ‘natural home’ but the opening books show that he is on the edge of being displaced. His son is no longer a child but is coming into man’s estate; his wife, pursued by suitors presuming on his death, is being forced to give up her status as his wife and create an independent identity for herself. Odysseus’ identity is not sitting for him back home, waiting with his wife and son to be reclaimed; it must be forged anew in his relationships with an adolescent son and a newly independent, courted woman. The major part of the Odyssey is not about one-eyed monsters and clashing rocks, it is about the recognition of others and by Odysseus of who he is.
That recognition is complex and subtle – only for the old dog on the dungheap is recognition easy, only for him is his master the same person as he was twenty years ago. The idea of ‘the return home’, the nostos (the word that gives us nostalgia – the pain of longing for home and the past) which runs through the poem is rendered complex by setting it against questions of identity and of stability of personality. Odysseus is self-conscious; there are levels of thought, acuity and strategy in his projection of himself that deepen everything he does, every speech he makes, every tale he tells. His story is that of the ultimate story-teller (his actions at Troy and the accounts of his travels are nearly all presented within the narrative, by himself or a bard). The Odyssey is full of archetypal stories: various societies that are mirror images of the norm; various women who seduce or bewitch men; sailors’ tales – whirlpools and clashing rocks, nine-headed monsters and sacred cattle, wicked witches and sirens. The frame for the telling of these stories is the court of Nausicaa – the young princess dreaming (literally) of marriage who goes down to the shore and finds and saves a shipwrecked man. He is gradually discovered to be a great hero of Troy; her father offers him her hand and holds betrothal games at which the hero triumphs. There cannot be a fairy tale ending however, because the unknown hero has a life and wife elsewhere. In becoming part of Odysseus’ story Nausicaa, Calypso, Polyphemus the Cyclops and the rest, lose their control of the ending of their stories; they become figures in a story of one man’s encounter with myth.
Chapman’s Odyssey
Odysseus’ characteristic quality in Homer is to be polytropos, poikilometis – multifaceted, various-minded. The many sides of Odysseus’ (or Ulysses’) story have fascinated story-tellers from the time of Homer to the twentieth century’s James Joyce and Derek Walcott. Odysseus is the most represented as well as the most variously represented figure of European literature. In Greek tragedy he is the devious, amoral politician; in the Troy Tales popular in the Roman world he is a figure of romance; a long-established moralising
tradition was concerned to interpret his story as exemplary (Odysseus bound to the mast a type of Christ’s crucifixion): his wanderings as expiatory and exemplifying the Roman and Christian virtues of patience, fortitude and prudence.
Chapman revered Odysseus and revelled in the richness and resonance of his stories. He responded to and could convey all the different sides of Odysseus – his craftiness and inventiveness, his ability to survive, his extraordinary venturesomeness, his passion and his careful reserve. He can render with wonderful ease the many shades of Odysseus’ experiences – the moments of searing emotion, such as when Odysseus tries to embrace his mother’s shade in the Underworld:
‘ . . . when I had great desire to prove
My arms the circle where her soul did move.
Thrice prov’d I, thrice she vanish’d like a sleep,
Or fleeting shadow, which struck much more deep
The wounds my woes made, and made ask her why
She would my love to her embraces fly,
And not vouchsafe that ev’n in hell we might
Pay pious Nature her unalter’d right.’
and moments of high fantasy: the Sirens
‘ . . . sit amidst a mead,
And round about it runs a hedge or wall
Of dead men’s bones, their wither’d skins and all
Hung all upon it . . . ’
the strange landscapes, such as Calypso’s magic isle:
A grove grew
In endless spring about her cavern round,
With odorous cypress, pines and poplars, crown’d,
Where hawks, sea-owls and long-tongu’d bitterns bred,
And other birds their shady pinions spread –
All fowls maritimal; none roosted there
But those whose labours in the water were.
A vine did all the hollow cave embrace,
Still green, yet still ripe bunches gave it grace.
Four fountains, one against another, pour’d
Their silver streams, and meadows all enflow’r’d
With sweet balm-gentle and blue violets hid,
That deck’d the soft breast of each fragrant mead.
Ithaca is a starker setting than the Phaeacia and Mycenae of the earlier books, both physically (Ithaca is economically and materially a Dark Age society) and morally – Odysseus is disguised as a beggar, bringing bloody revenge on the suitors. Chapman is at home in both settings – in both he moves from sensitive emotional perceptions to high drama; he is extraordinary in being able to follow Homer in endowing the everyday world of Ithaca with a sheen of graceful materiality. Chapman, like Homer and like Odysseus, delights in both a well-crafted door and a well-fabricated tale.
One description stands out as an example – Odysseus’ description of his making of the marriage bed out of a living olive tree. This is the central moment of the Odyssey, the final proof that Odysseus is who he is, the final recognition of Odysseus by Penelope after doubt, trickery and disguise. It is significant that Odysseus is recognised by his description of his act of craftsmanship; the bed, immovable, stands as the symbol of Odysseus’ return to the centre of his household, never to be dislodged; the olive tree stands for shelter and resource for generations past and future. All this resonates in Chapman’s description of the ‘masterpiece, a wonder done By me and none but me.’
‘There was an olive tree that had his growth
Amidst a hedge, and was of shadow proud,
Fresh, and the prime age of his verdure show’d,
His leaves and arms so thick that to the eye
It showed a column for solidity.
To this had I a comprehension
To build my bridal bow’r; which all of stone,
Thick as the tree of leaves, I rais’d, and cast
A roof about it nothing meanly grac’d,
Put glu’d doors to it, that op’d art enough.
Then from the olive every broad leav’d bough
I lopp’d away, then fell’d the tree, and then
Went over it both with my axe and plane,
Both govern’d by my line. And then I hew’d
My curious bedstead out; in which I shew’d
Work of no common hand. All this begun,
I could not leave till to perfection
My pains had brought it; took my wimble, bor’d
The holes as fitted, and did last afford
The varied ornament which showed no want
Of silver, gold, and polished elephant.
An ox hide dyed in purple then I threw
Above the cords . . . ’
Homer, and Chapman, are master story-tellers of an age now gone, an age of heroes and craft traditions now lost. Both inlay into the everyday, material world descriptions of the miraculous fashioning of the heirlooms from that heroic past. When Telemachus visits Sparta, Menelaus offers him a guest gift:
‘Of all my house-gifts then, that up I lay
For treasure there, I will bestow on thee
The fairest, and the greatest price to me.
I will bestow on thee a rich carv’d cup,
Of silver all, but all the brims wrought up
With finest gold: it was the only thing
That the heroical Sidonian king
Presented to me, when we were to part
At his receipt of me, and ’twas the art
Of that great artist that of heav’n is free –
And yet ev’n this will I bestow on thee.’
It seems likely that Homer not so much wrote as stitched together the Odyssey: bound Dark Age and Golden Age reflections into a multi-layered, beautifully crafted whole. Chapman had the versatility, responsiveness and poetic craft to convey those many layers and to set within and against them a variegated, various-minded, heroic Odysseus:
A much-sustaining, patient, heav’nly man
Whose genius turns through many ways to truth.
Chapman, drawing on the creative energy, language and ethos of an age opening itself up to the masterpieces of the past, felt particularly in tune with Homer. Coleridge said that Chapman’s translations were as Homer would have written if he had lived in Elizabethan England; Chapman’s translations make one feel moreover that Homer would have enjoyed living in Elizabethan England – that he would have felt at home and that his works would have been richly and popularly appreciated. Chapman’s Homer was not performed at the Globe, but maybe that omission can be rectified . . .
Books 1–4
The opening books of the Odyssey deal not with Odysseus himself but with what his absence means to those left behind. Odysseus has lost the battle to bring his men safe home from Troy and is alone with the nymph Calypso, who has trapped him in her caves. The story opens as the deadlock and inactivity on Calypso’s island and on Ithaca are about to be broken by the gods’ intervention – Odysseus is about to be released from his very pleasant gaol and go home.
On Ithaca Odysseus’ baby son of nearly twenty years ago is about to enter manhood. Both he and his mother Penelope are trapped by Odysseus’ disappearance – he is neither son nor king, she neither wife nor widow: they cannot move on until they hear news of Odysseus’ safety or death. In the absence of a head of the household a swarm of suitors have settled in the house, devouring Telemachus’ inheritance. From the perspective of Mount Olympus, the home of the gods, it is clear that it is time the stalemate is broken.
Hermes is dispatched to order Calypso to release Odysseus while Athene, disguised as Odysseus’ old friend Mentas, goes to Telemachus to give him self-confidence. Her very arrival prompts Telemachus’ first adult responsible act – looking up from musing on his absent father, he notes with displeasure that a guest is not being attended to. He haste
ns to greet and entertain him, as is proper to the master of the household. The goddess sits down to advise him, recommending that he set out to find what has happened to his father. In the course of talking to the goddess Telemachus grows from a despondent, unsure child to a young adult, encouraged by Athene/Mentas to take action in the same way that Apollo impelled the young Orestes to avenge his father King Agamemnon.
His new maturity is immediately evident to Penelope, who is told to look to her handiwork and leave discussion to the men, and especially to him who is now master of the house:
‘Go you then in, and take your work in hand,
Your web, and distaff, and your maids command
To ply their fit work. Words to men are due,
And those reproving counsels you pursue –
And most to me of all men, since I bear
The rule of all things that are manag’d here.’
Book 1 ends with Telemachus speaking sharply to the suitors, Book 2 starts with him exerting himself over the Assembly, called for the first time since Odysseus went away.
The suitors are minor lords of Ithaca and of surrounding areas. Those eligible to come to the Ithacan assembly protest against Telemachus’ complaints that for nearly four years they have eaten up house and home – it is Penelope, they claim, who is causing the delay:
‘Your mother, first in craft, is first in cause.
Three years are past, and near the fourth now draws,
Since first she mock’d the peers Achaian.
All she made hope, and promis’d every man,
Sent for us ever, left love’s show in nought,
But in her heart conceal’d another thought.’
She has refused to remarry until she has woven a shroud for her father-in-law:
‘Laertes the heroë, it shall deck
His royal corse, since I should suffer check
In ill report of every common dame,
If one so rich should show in death his shame.’
A proper sentiment in a noble lady – concern for propriety and for her good name. But for three years she has woven by day and unpicked her work by night, showing herself to be cunning and resourceful, a worthy partner of Odysseus the ‘resourceful/tricky-minded’ spinner of tales. Her cunning has increased her desirability and reputation, making the suitors even more desperate to win a lady so wise, skilled and beautiful. If Odysseus manages to return, he comes back to a wife who has come to be valued in her own right, desired and famous for qualities developed in the twenty years of his absence.
