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 reminded 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.
In an extremely moving scene with his mother he also learns about death itself – he tried to embrace her but she evaded his grasp:
. . . 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.
She who gave him life shows him the insubstantiality and irreversibility of death. This lesson is strengthened by Achilles (who in the
Iliad
is obsessed by heroism, the risking of death for eternal glory) saying
‘I rather wish to live in earth a swain,
Or serve a swain for hire, that scarce can gain
Bread to sustain him, than, that life once gone,
Of all the dead sway the imperial throne.’
Human life looks different from the Underworld; only Telamonian Ajax is intransigent, keeping enmity in death as he did in life.
Book 12
The Underworld divides the two parallel sets of Odysseus’ adventures, the latter informed by his experiences there. In the Underworld Odysseus gains knowledge and sense of self; he also gains distance on the heroic ethic that powered the society in Troy. Instead, he can see punishment and retribution at work; from Books 11–14 we see him put what he has learned into sometimes harsh practice.
As Odysseus approaches each new world there is the challenge and danger of what customs, what practices, will be current there. The later set of adventures are a darker version of the earlier: the Sirens of Book 12 offer not just happy forgetfulness of self and home, as the lotus eaters did, but access to the record of the hero’s doing that only the Muses, who can see and record everything, hold:
‘Come here, thou worthy of a world of praise,
That dost so high the Grecian glory raise,
Ulysses! Stay thy ship, and that song hear
That none pass’d ever but it bent his ear,
But left him ravish’d, and instructed more
By us, than any ever heard before.
For we know all things whatsoever were
In wide Troy labour’d; whatsoever there
The Grecians and the Trojans both sustain’d
By those high issues that the gods ordain’d.
And whatsoever all the earth can show
T’inform a knowledge of desert, we know.’
To turn that down is to turn down all remaining access to the [now lost] heroic world of Troy. Odysseus the all-experiencing does not turn anything down easily – following Circe’s warning he has blocked up his men’s ears but allowed himself, lashed to the mast, to hear the blandishments. His men are oblivious both of the Sirens and Odysseus’ pleas to be freed, and all survive. In this second set of adventures Odysseus asserts his cunning and uses experiences gained in the Cyclops’ cave to cheer his crew through; he conceals the human ‘toll’ Scylla will extort and, despite Circe’s advice, he arms himself to do battle with her on their behalf. His comment on his pain at their death shows the emotional range he now possesses:
Six friends had Scylla snatch’d out of our keel,
In whom most loss did force and virtue feel.
When looking to my ship, and lending eye
To see my friends’ estates, their heels turn’d high,
And hands cast up, I might discern, and hear
Their calls to me for help, when now they were
To try me in their last extremities.
And as an angler . . . for surprise
Of little fish. . . hoists them high
Up to the air, then slightly hurls them by,
When helpless sprawling on the land they lie:
So easily Scylla to her rock had rapt
My woeful friends, and so unhelp’d entrapp’d
Struggling they lay beneath her violent rape,
Who in their tortures, desp’rate of escape,
Shriek’d as she tore, and up their hands to me
Still threw for sweet life. I did never see,
In all my suff’rance ransacking the seas,
A spectacle so full of miseries.
The adventures end with Charybdis stripping Odysseus of his last remaining companions, leaving him clinging to a fig tree. He is described as waiting for the whirlpool to vomit back a spar from his wrecked ship like a judge listening to civil cases:
At length time frees him from their civil wars,
When glad he riseth and to dinner goes:
So time, at length, releas’d with joys my woes.
Stripped of his last warrior companions, experienced, cunning and vengeful from his various adventures, he moves now to civil rather than heroic life.
After finishing the long story of his adventures, Odysseus accomplishes the final part of his journey swiftly and painlessly, with gifts and in a ship provided by the Phaeacians. The transition is almost magical; as at other crucial times he falls asleep ‘bound so fast it scarce gave way to breath . . . next of all to death’ but this time the punishment falls after his safe landing – Poseidon turns the Phaeacian ship to stone.
Books 13–14
Telemachus at Menelaus’ court was told of his father’s heroic world and Odysseus’ stature within it. But what will Odysseus’ stature be in the non-heroic world of barren, suitor-infested Ithaca? How will his son, or anyone else, recognise the man who left nearly twenty years ago? And in what sense, if at all, can he be identified (and identify himself) as the same man?
Pallas Athene’s first act is to disguise his homeland, to complicate and delay Odysseus’ recognition and announcement of his identity:
. . . to make strange the more
His safe arrival, lest upon his shore
He should make known his face, and utter all
That might prevent th’event that was to fall.
Which she prepar’d so well that not his wife,
Presented to him, should perceive his life –
No citizen, no friend, till righteous fate
Upon the wooers’ wrongs were consummate.
Odysseus’ first contact on Ithaca is with the disguised Athene; checking his immediate joy that he is home he conceals his identity in a long ‘Cretan’ tale (the Cretans were famous for their lies). Athene is overjoyed at his tricksiness, his subtlety, his alikeness to her, his desire to test Penelope rather than rush to her arms :
‘Thou of men art far,
For words and counsels, the most singular,
But I above the gods in both may boast . . .
Another man, that so long miseries
Had kept from his lov’d home, and thus return’d
To see his house, wife, children, would have burn’d
In headlong lust to visit . . . ’
Athene tells him that Penelope is constant and equally cunning in keeping herself free from the suitors; that Telemachus is safely returned from a journey that has won him renown on his own account. She will help and glory in the bloodletting of the suitors that Odysseus will initiate:
‘I hope the bloods
And brains of some of these that waste thy goods
Shall strew thy goodly pavements. Join we then . . . ’
Athene disguises him as an old beggar and sends him off to an elderly, faithful swineherd, Eumaeus, who receives him with the simple hospitality due to wanderers.
From Eumaeus’ words we get a stark (Dark Age?) account of the suitors’ offences – they are eating too much in a poor country with not enough food – literally eating up Telemachus’ inheritance. In this world Odysseus’ fluency can be turned to good account – his lying tale succeeds in begging a cloak, but he is warned that news of Odysseus, such as that for which beggars have up till now been rewarded, will no longer be believed or recompensed at the palace.
Book 15
Athene goes to Sparta to bring Telemachus home – the trap set in Book 4 by the suitors, who have gone unchecked while Telemachus was a boy and Odysseus absent, is now gradually closing in on the suitors themselves. Athene represents to the newly-mature Telemachus that his mother may not always remain locked in the past – with his adulthood comes the possibility of her independence; she may choose to reward the most persistent of her suitors . . . Telemachus skilfully negotiates his departure and his parting gifts (including a robe from Helen for his future bride). He arrived like a boy but leaves as hero among heroes.
On his return journey he accepts the supplication of a fugitive: he is now able, in his own right as the man in charge, to offer sacred guest-friendship and his protection.
Meanwhile Odysseus has asked Eumaeus for news of his mother and father – news he already has from the Underworld is now told to him on earth. This elicits memories of Eumaeus’ childhood, which Odysseus asks him to tell properly. In a vivid reference to the world of those who listened to Homer’s stories, Eumaeus agrees – there’s nothing else to do in the long evenings other than listen to stories or sleep the clock round. Besides, tales are a way of turning pain to good – the suffering is metamorphosed into pleasure as the story is recounted for men’s delight.
We two . . . will our bosoms cheer