The Odyssey Read online

  STRUCTURE AND ORGANIZATION

  The Odyssey is constructed in three major interrelated sequences, which, again, may well remind a modern reader of the way a film is constructed, with parallel tracks, chronological manipulation, and occasional cross-cutting (e.g., from Sparta to the suitors [4.625] or from Telemachos' potentially dangerous voyage [15.300] to Odysseus and Eumaios at the farmstead. The first sequence, having opened with a meeting of the Olympian deities that discusses the dilemma of the poem's protagonist--isolated perforce, after shipwreck, chez Kalypso, in what many might regard as a decidedly enviable exile--then proceeds to leave him until book 5, while his wife and son are shown coping as best they can with the unwanted presence of numerous young men eager to marry Odysseus' (presumed) widow and only too happy to freeload off her until she makes up her mind.

  Penelope, Telemachos, and the leading suitors are all presented with remarkable psychological insight. Penelope is in an essentially weak position. She cannot just send her would-be suitors packing: she simply lacks the force to do so. Loyal to her absent husband she may be, but the strong likelihood of his death--of which she is unhappily conscious--both undermines her status as wife (rather than as highly eligible widow) and correspondingly encourages the lawless arrogance of her suitors. She is convincingly shown playing a desperate delaying game, in which her prime excuse of putting off any final decision until she has completed weaving a burial shroud for her father-in-law Laertes is augmented with teasing messages and promises (2.87-92) designed to string her importunate suitors along. She knows only too well that if Odysseus is dead the only possible way she can save the family fortune (and possibly stop her son from being killed) is by remarriage. As a pis aller, this--contrary to what many scholars, West (2014, 68) included, surmise--is constantly at the back of her mind, and Penelope's ambivalence over it is conveyed with percipient subtlety.

  Telemachos, too, gets insightful psychological treatment. As a fatherless boy just emerging from adolescence, his mood swings, from nervous uncertainty to brash overconfidence, are pinpointed with uncommon accuracy (1.114-36, 345-59, 365-80; 2.40-84, 129-45, 208-23, 309-20). His relationship with his mother is impatient and edgy: the effects of her prolonged mourning--unwashed person, dirty clothes--he finds distasteful. His formulaic epithet, pepnumnos, "sagacious," ironic at first, becomes step by step more appropriate as he matures. His clashes with the suitors facilitate sharp sketches of their leaders as well: Antinoos, glibly plausible (2.85-128), and Eurymachos, imperious and openly aggressive (2.178-207). Telemachos' travels to Pylos and Sparta in books 3 and 4 introduce first Nestor, splendidly garrulous in his extreme old age (3.103-200), and then the even more long-winded Menelaos (4.333-592), living in luxurious retirement with his recovered wife, that sophisticated and blithely unabashed professional survivor Helen, an unforgettable cameo portrait done in a minimum of shrewd strokes (4.120-46, 220-89).

  So we come, at last, in the second sequence, to the homonymous protagonist of the entire poem. For those who last met Odysseus in the Iliad--or even during Helen's reminiscences--this encounter can be somewhat disconcerting. At Troy, he was among the military leaders and both shrewd and valiant. He had what veterans of World War II used to describe as a "good war," distinguishing himself in a night raid against the enemy camp (Il. 10 passim), in the commando venture of the Wooden Horse (4.270-89; Little Iliad, arg. 4; West 2014, 122-23), and, with Aias, in the rescue of Achilles' corpse (Aeth., arg. 3; West 2014, 112-13). But here he is (5.81-84), the solitary survivor of shipwreck on Kalypso's island, "sitting out on the seashore, weeping,/rending his heart with tears and groans and sadness,/gazing out through his tears at the unharvested sea." For a marooned sailor, he has not done badly: seven years, no less, of luxurious cohabitation with a sexy nymph, who not only feeds and sleeps with him but has promised him immortality (5.135-36) if he stays. But now he wants to go home. Why? We do not have to wait long to learn. Because (5.153) "the nymph no longer pleased him." Our hero may long for wife and home, but chiefly because he has, very literally, a case of the seven-year itch.

  Seldom in the history of literature can a hero have had a less promising introduction, and it is a mark of this composer's narrative powers and ability to create a wholly convincing character, as it were on the wing, that after very little time our sympathies are completely with Odysseus in his struggle to return to his island home of Ithake. His powerful, and praiseworthy, masculinity is constantly stressed, from the moment Hermes delivers Zeus' ultimatum to the protesting Kalypso that her lover is to be sent on his way (5.112-47). He mightily fells the trees with which in four days he skillfully constructs a seaworthy raft (5.233-61). He stays awake, steering his homemade vessel effectively by the stars, until the land of the Phaiakians shows up on the horizon (5.270-81), and, at the last moment, a wrathful Poseidon decides to intervene.

  Odysseus can't resist the storm that the sea god inflicts on him (5.280-332), but--strong male that he is--he attracts the sympathy of a marine nymph, Ino, who gives him good advice and her magic veil to use as a life belt (5.333-53). He swims for it, and Athene--another feminine supporter--conveniently calms the storm (5.382-86). He gets safely ashore, and sleeps in a handy leaf-filled hollow under two bushes (5.445-93). Meanwhile, Athene ensures by means of an instructive dream that Nausikaa, the Phaiakian king's daughter, will make a clothes-washing expedition to the same spot, meet Odysseus, and guide him to her father's house (6.1-47). So it duly falls out; and once more Odysseus' strength and masculinity are stressed, this time with a strong sexual component: the girls' laughter wakes him, and he lurches out in front of them, naked except for a leafy branch held in front of his private parts (6.110-38). He has stripped off all his waterlogged clothes prior to swimming ashore, setting us up for what now follows. Nausikaa alone stands and faces him: he greets her, still standing carefully apart, with an elegantly flattering speech, culminating in one of the best definitions of a happy marriage ever made (6.148-85). By now his transformation for reader or listener is complete.

  This preparatory treatment is essential, since during his time on Scheria Odysseus is the narrator of his own adventures, with the Phaiakians as an eager audience. We need to assume more than usual significance in such a decision on the composer's part, since once Odysseus' ship has been driven off course beyond Cape Malea (9.79-81) by far the greater part of his narrative is literally off the map. After nine days' further sailing, he and his men encounter, in succession, the Lotus-Eaters, the Kyklops, Aiolos the wind master, the Laistrygonians (who destroy all but one of his ships, with their crews, 10.121-32), and Kirke (who turns some of his own men into swine, 10.230-43, and keeps the rest of them there for over a year, 10.466-71). Despite their protests, before they can voyage home, they are required to make a journey to the Underworld so that Odysseus can consult the shade of the seer Teiresias. He duly does so and reports seeing the ghosts of many famous old-time heroes and heroines (11, passim). After he and his men return from the Underworld, they resume their voyage. This takes them by way of the Sirens (12.36-54, 166-200) and Skylle and Charybdis (12.73-110, 223-59) to the island of Thrinakie (12.127-40, 260-398), where the famished crew kill and eat the sacred cattle of Helios, the sun god. For this offense, they perish in a divinely raised storm (12.397-419), with only Odysseus himself surviving to be washed up on Kalypso's shore (12.447-53) and--seven years later--reach Scheria and tell his story.

  That story is, in effect, the account of an improbable progress round the traditional mythic frontiers of the Greek world, culminating in a blatantly impossible venture beyond those frontiers to the dark, mysterious, and geographically vague realm of Hades and the Underworld. The relevance of either to the rest of the Odyssey is highly debatable: even Teiresias' prophecy regarding Odysseus' future seems originally to have been given, not in the Underworld, but at the very real Thesprotian Oracle of the Dead in Dodone (refs. in West 2014, 123-24). What did the composer have in mind in saddling Odysseus with such an experience, and, more imp
ortant, its subsequent lengthy narration?

  It should never be forgotten that our Odyssey was put together in a period that saw, not only the expansion of physical horizons through commerce and colonial exploration, but also the dawn of scientific rationalism, a radical questioning of old beliefs, and the new morality of thinkers like Xenophanes of Kolophon, who launched effective attacks on the all-too-human immorality, as they saw it, of the Olympian pantheon. The mythical frontiers of the Mediterranean were everywhere being challenged, and an entire fabric of belief with them.

  At the same time there was a deep psychological resistance to the new discoveries, which seemed to undermine the entire system of traditional reality. Not only liminal myths, but the very existence of the Olympian universe, of encircling Ocean, of Hades and the Underworld, was at stake. As I note elsewhere, "The mythic past was rooted in historical time, its legends treated as fact, its heroic protagonists seen as links between the 'age of origins' and the mortal, everyday world that succeeded it" (Green 2007, 14-15). This remained true long after the seventh century. For the author of the Marmor Parium, a Hellenistic epigraphic chronology, events that we would relegate to the world of fantasy are confidently dated: for example, Deukalion's Flood to 1528 b.c.e., the Amazons' alleged campaign against Athens to 1256, and (today perhaps more plausibly) the Trojan War to 1218. The fourth-century c.e. Christian historian Eusebius, with equal confidence, fixes the voyage of the Argonauts as having taken place in 1264. The postwar travels of Odysseus must have been similarly regarded. It is more than possible, when we consider the background of belief regarding them, that our composer cleverly hedged bets on their historicity by having their protagonist narrate them, leaving everyone, like Alkinoos and the Phaiakians, to make up their own minds as to whether he was telling the truth or, as so often, fabricating a tall story for the sheer pleasure of it.

  The third and final sequence of the Odyssey occupies a good half of the whole, and is entirely taken up with the events following its hero's long-delayed return home, delivered to Ithake, still sleeping, by his Phaiakian conveyers, together with a rich assortment of parting gifts from his hosts (13.70-125). It is characteristic of this composer that while we are eagerly awaiting Odysseus' reactions to his homecoming, the scene switches abruptly to Olympos, where Poseidon, though conceding that Odysseus has been granted a safe return by Zeus, is shown complaining bitterly to his brother that he nevertheless shouldn't have been given so easy, comfortable, and profitable a passage. His, Poseidon's, honor has been offended. No problem, Zeus responds: you can deal with those escorts of his how you like! You want to smash their ship--why not turn it to stone near the harbor where all can see it, as an object lesson? But that idea of yours of hiding their city with a mountain I wouldn't recommend. Wrathful Iliadic Poseidon has been met with the new postwar Olympian reasonableness. He does what Zeus suggests, but no more (13.139-64). It is a reminder, to Athene and the returning Odysseus, that excessive vengeance, old style, should now be avoided: a reminder that, as we know, will be ignored until the very end, and then only enforced, upon goddess and humans alike, by a well-aimed thunderbolt (24.539-40).

  Athene's cooperation with Odysseus in his restoration has its odd beginning now, and is marked later (18.346-48, 20.284-86) by a vengeful determination to have the suitors fully justify extreme measures against them. The mist she now sheds about him (13.189-93) not only makes him unrecognizable, even to his own wife, but also (by what seems a kind of careless excess) makes the features of his island home unrecognizable to him, so that he supposes the Phaiakians have misdelivered him, and perhaps robbed him of his presents (13.200-219). Materializing before him as a young shepherd, Athene deplores his ignorance (which she herself has caused) and reassures him that this is, indeed, Ithake (13.236-49). At which point Odysseus launches into yet another cover story, cut short by the goddess, who now takes on the appearance of a handsome woman (not, one would guess, unlike herself), reveals her true identity (13.287-310), strokes him, scatters the mist (13.352), and from then on converses with him in what can only be described as a flirtatious manner. Any other man, she says, would have made straight for home, but he has always been cautious. He must tell no one his identity. She will show him round, help him store away his treasure, and together they will plan the destruction of the suitors, something that will involve the spilling of blood and brains (13.394-96, 427-28) She then describes how she will alter his appearance to protect him. She also gives him immediate instructions: he is to go to the piggery of his faithful swineherd Eumaios, while she goes to Sparta to fetch back Telemachos, who's been seeking news of his father there. Brushing aside Odysseus' very reasonable query--why didn't she herself tell Telemachos his father was alive?--she touches him with her wand and effects his instant metamorphosis, described in detail (13.429-38), into an elderly, wrinkled, raggedly clad beggar.

  All this sets the scene for what follows. We know, as did the original audience, what the climax will be, and, like them, grow impatient at the leisurely development of the narrative. The meeting with Eumaios takes up all of book 14, is full of vivid detail and conversation--including yet another fictitious, and lengthy (199-359), cover story--but advances the narrative little except to provide the piggery as a safe and hospitable base from which Odysseus can make forays into the noisy world of the feasting suitors, and where, heroic appearance restored in a flash by Athene (16.172-76), he is reunited with the awestruck Telemachos, back from Pylos, who at first takes him for a god. Back in his role as a dirty old beggar, Odysseus, in the intervals of planning the suitors' downfall, suffers humiliation at their hands (e.g., 17.217-35, 445-65). There are predictions of their doom, none more striking than a brief moment (20.345-58), quickly forgotten, when the suitors' laughter becomes hysterical, while their food and the walls seem spattered with blood.

  Through all this moves the increasingly fraught figure of Penelope, near despair, yet tempted by a dream (19.535-53) and repeated assertions by Telemachos' traveling companion Theoklymenos (17.152-61) and, above all, by the vagrant stranger who is in fact her husband (19.300-307, 546-58) that Odysseus is alive, nearby, and about to return. It is now (19.572-80) that she sets up the contest of the bow. "Why does the queen decide at this point to set the contest of the bow for the very next day and stake her entire future on its outcome?" Joseph Russo asks (Comm., 3: 104), like many other commentators. The answers that have been suggested achieve varying degrees of improbability. This I find puzzling, since the answer strikes me--in sharp contrast to any proposed solution regarding the bowshot--as both reasonable and obvious. Penelope, after holding out for almost twenty years against all odds, is a woman in her middle or late thirties very near breaking point. Convinced that her husband must by now be dead, she is seriously contemplating remarriage, not least since her refusal to do so is threatening both the family fortune and her son's life. But at this critical juncture she receives strong hints--in particular, the assertions of the beggar, who is thought by Odysseus' old wet nurse Eurykleia to look remarkably like him (19.379-80), as well as her own dream (19.535-58)--that Odysseus just may, however improbably, still be alive. She could be further encouraged by an as yet unacknowledged sense that this beggar might indeed, even more improbably, be Odysseus himself.

  What then to do? The contest of the bow (explained or not) is a brilliant solution. If Odysseus is, by some miraculous chance, the beggar, he will be certain to reveal himself by winning it, and thus will provide the best possible solution to her dilemma. If he is not, then Penelope will do what she is already planning to do faute de mieux: marry the best of the suitors. The contest is the means by which she is giving her forlorn hope one last chance, something to make Odysseus, if it is indeed he, drop his maddening and inexplicable false role, and act. Which of course in the event it does.

  INCIDENTAL PROBLEMS

  There is a famous, and perennial, legal joke about a man facing prosecution, who, after discussion, accepts with enthusiasm the line of defense suggest
ed by his counsel. He then goes home, thinks it over, sleeps on it, and begins to worry about certain details. It gets to the point where he calls up his attorney and tells him yes, on first hearing the proposed line of defense did strike him as perfect, but overnight he's been thinking things over, and certain possible flaws in it have occurred to him, and--

  At this point the lawyer gently interrupts him to say: "But my dear fellow, the jury is only going to hear it once." Throughout my work on translating Homer's Odyssey, this anecdote, for reasons that will become all too clear as we proceed, was never very far from my mind.

  When I began the Introduction to my translation of the Iliad, it was in a mood of pessimism dictated by overwhelming ignorance. As I wrote then: "We do not know for certain who Homer was, or where he lived, or when he wrote. We cannot be absolutely certain that the same man (if it was a man) wrote both the Iliad and the Odyssey, or even that 'wrote' is a correct description of the method of composition involved. . . . Even the time at which the texts we know were actually written down, and what stage of composition they represent, are equally uncertain." In brief, I said, "in the sense that we normally consider a written work, there is no anterior background; we are at the beginning."

  The situation facing us in the Odyssey is, in several crucial ways, different from that presented by the Iliad. First, and most important, we are no longer at the beginning. In the form in which we have it, the Odyssey describes a world that is historically recognizable and different in moral, social, and religious terms from the formulaic aristocratic society portrayed in the Iliad. With the notable exception of Poseidon, the gods are no longer the spiteful and quarreling family whose vices incurred the harsh criticism of thinkers such as Xenophanes: like their human counterparts, they are acquiring middle-class ethical habits. Few now have speaking roles; for the most part, they give tacit agreement to the generally acceptable decisions of Zeus and Athene. The limits of their power remain uncertain: inexorable fate and destiny are still lurking in the background. Furthermore, though the Odyssey sets out to depict the end of the heroic age, it is made clear throughout that the postwar horizons of the Mediterranean world have definitely opened up. Peaceful sea travel has developed; destinations as far afield as Sicily, Sidon, Egypt, and the Black Sea are not uncommon. These are still remote areas, but measurably more is now known about them than can be deduced from the Iliad. In other words, we have now reached a period that not only marks a clear evolution from the world in which the Iliad was conceived, but is one that we can roughly date based on external historical evidence. It is the eastern Mediterranean world of the seventh century b.c.e.