by Homer
Telemachus, helped by Athene, assembles stores and a team of young bloods and takes command of a ship to search for definite news of his father. He goes secretly, but by the time he returns he will have assumed the status and learned the manners and duties of a prince: when Odysseus returns he, too, will be a force to be reckoned with.
The emotions and character of the adolescent Telemachus are tellingly charted. At the start of the Book 1 he is despondent and unselfconfident, feeling his position to be hard. Athene/Mentas gives him a sense of the stature of his absent father and the courage to act as one favoured by the gods. His speeches in the Assembly in Book 2, the first of his manhood, swing from self-assertive to self-pitying and back to decisive. When in Book 3 he arrives in Pylos in the Peloponnese at King Nestor’s palace, he is too embarrassed to approach his host because he doesn’t know what to say. He is so overawed by the splendour of the Spartan palace in Book 4 that he whispers to his companion that it seems like the court of the king of the gods. However, from the old hero Nestor and from the powerful king of Sparta, Menelaus, and his wife Helen of Troy, he learns how to behave, how to sacrifice and pray to the gods, to celebrate a feast, to entertain guests and to talk fittingly to his father’s peers. He is also given a powerful sense of his father as a public man for the first time – of his cleverness, skill in speaking and effectiveness in council, of his strength, leadership and craftiness, of the impression he made on the great ones at Troy over the years of fighting. Finally, in his diplomacy in asking for a different, more wieldy parting gift from Menelaus, he is proclaimed to be his father’s son. He has journeyed to find out about his father; in so doing he has found out about himself.
The world of Ithaca where there isn’t enough grain or grass to pasture a horse, of adolescence, of drunken guests outstaying their welcome, offer portraits of a real world. Menelaus’ court at Sparta provides a bridge into the heroic world of Troy: the wooden horse, the beautiful, divine Helen with potions that can give insensibility to the most terrible human tragedy, King Menelaus who only managed to return home after a fight with the Old Man of the Sea. The Odyssey constantly juxtaposes the real world of human relationships and human tragedy with the heroic and fabulous world of stories – stories which are in the main told by the heroes themselves.
Books 5–8
Book 4 ends on a dramatic note, with the suitors waiting in ambush to kill the returning Telemachus and clear the obstacle to Odysseus’ throne and bed. The scene then shifts to Odysseus detained by the nymph Calypso, spending nights of love with the goddess and days of weeping for home. Hermes, alighting to tell Calypso of the gods’ decision to help Odysseus return home, is enchanted by the beauties of the place – fountains playing in four directions, the all-important vine flourishing, sweet meadows and a luxurious variety of trees and birds. Yet Odysseus weeps for rocky Ithaca and his aging wife: he has been offered a paradise, the love of an ever young nymph and immortality, but he has turned them all down. Instead he will brave the dangers of the sea and the sea god’s continued vendetta against him in the hope of returning home.
Calypso does not want to let him go – she complains of sexism on Olympus, such that gods can take any number of human lovers but goddesses’ love affairs are punished and abruptly terminated. But she accepts Zeus’s decree and shows Odysseus how to build a raft – he must use his famous resourcefulness to fashion his own means of escape from his desert island. When Poseidon’s anger catches up with him and his raft is broken beneath him by the tempest, Odysseus reaches, literally, rock bottom: rather than dying nameless and tombless he wishes he had died at Troy:
In which despair he thus spake: ‘Woe is me!
What was I born to, man of misery! . . .
Then had I been allotted to have died,
By all the Greeks with funerals glorified
(Whence death, encouraging good life, had grown),
Where now I die by no man mourn’d nor known.’
But somehow, resourceful even now, he manages to grab hold of a spar and with the help of an amulet given him by the sea goddess Leucothea he makes it to within sight of land. His joy at seeing land is described by a telling, touching simile of human love:
The winds grew calm, and clear was all the air,
Not one breath stirring. Then he might descry,
Rais’d by the high seas, clear, the land was nigh.
And then, look how to good sons that esteem
Their father’s life dear (after pains extreme . . . )
When on their pray’rs they see descend at length
Health from the heav’ns, clad all in spirit and strength,
The sight is precious: so since here should end
Ulysses’ toils . . . for his own sake to see
The shores, the woods so near, such joy had he.
All journeys in the Odyssey are significant; this one takes Odysseus away from the nurture of the nymph who wanted to keep him for ever (whose name means the Hider or Burier) and strips him of everything but his life. He left Troy with ships and men which were successively lost; this last battle with the sea casts him naked and half-dead on the shore of Phaeacia. Like an exhausted animal, he buries himself in leaves and saves his last spark of energy like a man saving the seed of fire by covering the last embers in ash.
The first half of the Odyssey falls into three parts – Telemachus growing up and Odysseus turning down Calypso, immortality and a home in paradise (1–4); Odysseus as the unknown stranger in Phaeacia (5–8); and Odysseus telling his adventures among savages and immortals, who endanger his safe return to Ithaca either by threats or blandishment (9–12). Phaeacia is a half-way house between the exotic worlds, dangers and excitements of his adventures and the very domestic world and relationship problems of Ithaca. Like Calypso’s though, the princess Nausicaa’s hospitality, in offering an alternative home for the hero, poses a threat.
Nausicaa decides to go down to the beach with her maids to wash the palace clothes so they are fine and clean for the wedding she has been dreaming of. Her youth, beauty and innocence, her wheedling of her ‘dear father’ are charmingly painted, as is her adolescent embarrassment at mentioning her forthcoming marriage. Yet when, while playing a ball game on the beach, she is faced with a battered, naked, rime-covered sailor, she acts with nobility and mature grace. Her acute consciousness of her attraction to Odysseus and of the impropriety of being alone with him, she turns into a thoughtful strategy to get him received and tended by her mother, Queen Arete. Odysseus is saved from death from exposure and exhaustion by the care of a lovely girl.
Book 7 paints a full picture of the court of King Alcinous of Phaeacia. The Phaeacians used to live near the Cyclopes; harassed by them they moved, and now live ‘far apart by themselves, very dear to the gods’: they are a powerful, independent and carefree people who are wary of strangers. They have automata of gold and silver designed by the blacksmith god Hephaestus – guard dogs and young serving men – and lush grass and fruit continuously ripened by the West wind independent of the seasons. They have the skill of seamanship to take Odysseus home if he can persuade them to – the sea god Poseidon is Alcinous’ grandfather. However, Odysseus is hated by Poseidon, who will punish those who help him, so he must keep his identity secret. He must be accepted, but not too much – he cannot stay to marry Nausicaa but must not slight her. As Telemachus needed all his wits to deal with tricky social situations on his journey, so his father needs all his. Athene looks after both father and son in much the same way – encouraging them by appearing in disguise as a helpmeet, giving them a sheen of vigour and grace. But whereas the point of Telemachus’ journey was to establish his identity, to be accepted as his father’s son, Odysseus has to avoid his identity becoming known prematurely. So the stories of the Trojan war to which both are treated by their hosts serve very different purposes: Telemachus gains a sense of his father as a he
ro at Troy, and of his cunning and subtlety when he hears the story of the Trojan Horse, but Odysseus has to hide his face, acutely conscious of his tears and the heroic sensibility aroused by hearing his fame as a hero resung.
Both Telemachus and Odysseus feel a complex response when hearing the bard sing of Odysseus and the Trojan war: as a hero passed into history, into song – ‘heroised’. It is positive for Telemachus, who had seen his father’s absence only as a problem or a source of potential shame. For Odysseus the effect of hearing of his own deeds and now dead companions as passed into song is to induce overwhelming grief. Vergil writes of a similar upwelling of feeling in Aeneas when he sees Troy depicted on temple doors in the backwoods of Africa – sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt – ‘tears in the nature of things, the mind touched by human mortality’. To be heroised is not to be adored as a living star but to be canonised – accepted as part of that community of dead heroes whose deeds will be sung at feasts throughout the generations. It is a reminder that the only sort of participation in life for the hero is that of his fame on men’s lips. Odysseus hears his deeds canonised in a way that distances him from them. In the same way, the sublimely comic story of Hephaestus entangling his wife and her lover in a net distances the laughing human audience from the gods, confirming them in their status as mortals, alive now round the feast hearth.
Odysseus in Phaeacia needs the two skills of the hero – effectiveness in council and effectiveness in contest. Both are tested when he is challenged to take part in a mini festival games, put on for his entertainment after the feasting and song. Odysseus is conscious that he is out of condition and out of training and that it would be neither fitting nor politic for a married man begging safe passage home to shine in a contest designed to test and demonstrate the prowess of young men. He declines, but is abused as one more concerned with profit than excellence; his fighting spirit roused by the insult, he makes a fearfully long discus throw. Behind the story motif – the unknown hero challenged to demonstrate his mettle – is the vivid placing of Odysseus, the hero-survivor of war, storm and hostile cultures against this people who live apart, priding themselves on their seafaring, dancing and athleticism. Accepted for what he is, as worthy of guest-friendship, he is given gifts, promised return, and given a final feast. He now can reveal his identity, an identity introduced to the Phaeacians by the bard who at Odysseus’ request sings again of Troy, this time of the wooden horse. In Books 9–12 Odysseus will become his own bard, telling the tale of his adventures.
Books 9–10
Odysseus’ tales are both delightful and resonant with significance, as befits a master story-teller: throughout the Odyssey listeners take pleasure in and are moved by the stories they hear and by the subtle timing and placing of stories for effect. The Cyclops, Scylla and Charybdis, the lotus eaters, the enchantress Circe who turns Odysseus’ men into swine – are stories well known and delighted in through generations. Odysseus shapes them into well-constructed narrative – the lotus eaters (threat to the return through enchantment); the Cyclops Polyphemus (a man-eating monster in a cave); Aeolus (wind god’s island, safe return vitiated by Odysseus’ men who open the bag of winds while Odysseus sleeps); the Laestrygonians (man-eating giants) – form the first set, which are neatly paralleled by the second set: the Sirens (threat to the return through enchantment); Scylla (a man-eating monster in a cave) and the whirlpool Charybdis; Helios (sun god’s island, safe return vitiated by Odysseus’ men who kill the sacred cattle, Odysseus sleeps); Scylla and Charybdis again. Between the two sets comes the major figure of Circe, who first detains him as her lover and then sends him on his way (via the Underworld), a figure paralleled by Calypso who finally sends him on his way to Ithaca via Phaeacia.
In the course of his travels he visits every sort of location on the earth and under it – clashing rocks, a floating island, a whirlpool, the Underworld. He experiences every sort of society – people who live in caves (Calypso, Cyclops), in a hall in a forest (Circe); pastoralists who don’t practise agriculture (the Cyclopes), who feed off flowery blossoms (the lotus eaters), who work a day shift and a night shift (the Laestrygonians), whose fruit ripens regardless of season (the Phaeacians); those who practise incest (Aeolus), who don’t have assemblies, laws or ships to travel (the Cyclopes), who are served by automata (the Phaeacians). In each new place Odysseus has to find out whether the inhabitants are ‘of rude disdain, churlish and tyrannous or . . . pious and hospitable’ – what kind of society, what kind of agriculture, what kind of laws. And, most importantly, whether they respect the god-validated universal law of hospitality, whereby strangers must be cared for, entertained and given guest presents. Odysseus finds out in this instance that the Cyclopes are anything but pious and hospitable – Polyphemus’ offer of a guest gift to Odysseus is to eat him last.
The satisfaction of the symmetry and order of the well-crafted tale is appropriate to Odysseus the crafty, various-minded, the resourceful. Perhaps because of the teller, perhaps because the tales, themselves archetypal folk and sailors’ motifs, seem to signify more than lies on the surface, the story of the journey of Odysseus intrigues the mind as well as satisfies the ears. The Sirens do not just sing sailors to their deaths on the rocks, as mermaids do in many cultures – they entice by promising knowledge of ‘Whatsoever all the earth can show’; by the ability to see, inter alia, ‘wide Troy’ and ‘whatsoever there The Grecians and the Trojans both sustain’d By those high issues that the gods ordain’d.’ The sailor is lured not by song but by access to the material from which they can make immortal song, an access that only the all-seeing, omniscient Muses have.
Similarly, the pleasure of the childlike joke of Odysseus calling himself ‘No-man’, so that the Cyclops yells ‘No-man hath giv’n me death’, is deepened by the running questioning of who Odysseus is now he is no longer one of the famous heroes at Troy. To the Greeks and Trojans of the Iliad Odysseus’ name, his reputation for prowess and cunning, was his identity. But in the worlds he now inhabits anonymity is safer – the consequence of his vaunting his triumph over the Cyclops by shouting out to him from a safe distance that ‘No-man’ was a pseudonym is that the victory and, it turns out, Poseidon’s punishment, can be fixed firmly to ‘Odysseus’. As he travels he is gradually stripped of his companions from Troy: to the Cyclops, Circe and Calypso he is a human body; he goes down to the underworld away from all living creatures and ends up alone, naked, dependent on Calypso (the goddess) and then Nausicaa and Arete (the maid and the mother). There is development as well as symmetry in the stories – there is a unifying onward thrust of narrative as Odysseus moves from being the hero at Troy and leader of men to a leader of a small band using his wits to get out of one situation after another until he ends up on Calypso and Nausicaa’s island as ‘but a man’.
There is a strong thread running through the Odyssey that memory and recognition are the two stable markers of identity. So the lotus eaters are as dangerous as Poseidon to him, because they have the power to make men forget home. The magic root given to Odysseus by Hermes protects him from being turned into an animal with human consciousness (horror of horrors – remembrance without outward form) but does not protect him from the power of Circe’s bed, which entices him to forget about home. Unlike Calypso, who wants to keep him as her husband as well as lover and is willing to change him into an immortal in order to do it, the bond between Circe and Odysseus is explicitly and solely sexual – he needs protection from the gods to prevent her unmanning him when he is naked; he needs to master her in bed before she will release his companions from her spell. The sexual union of Circe and Odysseus is a form of self-forgetfulness – his men have to remind him of home. Losing himself sexually is followed by a visit to the Land of the Dead: a linking of sex and death. In the Underworld Circe’s spell of forgetfulness will be finally broken, his identity and purpose reasserted: he is recognised as Odysseus by his former companions at Troy, and is vividly re
minded of his home by meeting the shades of his parents. It is this theme of Odysseus’ loss and reinvention of his identity that binds the well-loved tales into the Odyssey as a whole. They take their place between Telemachus’ search for identity at the start and the final books, which deal with the complex process of Odysseus gaining recognition and a renewed identity on Ithaca.
Book 11 – The Underworld
Odysseus, unbeknown to him, has a new ghost to follow, his companion Elpenor who broke his neck in the night. This is a narrative reworking of the traditional human sacrifice needed as a prelude to raiding the Halls of Death; no golden bough but blood and the promise of more sacrifice make Odysseus able to talk to the dead. The first, very personal encounters are with Elpenor and with his mother, neither of whom he expected to see here. But, prudent as ever, he keeps his mother away from the blood until he has consulted the great prophet Tiresias. From him he learns of the need to punish the suitors in his palace; that his return will be made very hard because he has offended Poseidon by tricking and blinding his Cyclops son. Finally he learns how to make peace with Poseidon by travelling inland until he can find a people who know nothing of the sea (a society more difficult for a Greek to imagine than all the monsters he has encountered!) and about his own death – from the sea, in prosperous old age.
Many of the scenes are vivid stories from myth – of women who bore the gods’ children, of men who suffer in the afterlife for sins committed on earth. But the majority of the encounters are woven into Odysseus’ story – the dead souls warn him about women long left to plan revenge on absent husbands (Clytemnestra – will Penelope really be different?), teach him lessons about judgment and punishment (Minos, Tityus, Tantalus, Sisyphus), about suffering and endurance (Heracles), all of which he will draw on when he returns to Ithaca.
