4
Nothing the peoples of Europe have produced is worth the first known poem that appeared among them. Perhaps they will yet discover the epic genius, when they learn that there is no refuge from fate, learn not to admire force, not to hate the enemy, nor to scorn the unfortunate.
Simone Weil, L’Iliade ou la Poème de la Force, 371
Homer’s Iliad: The Wrath of Achilles
The Greeks placed the epic poem at the head of their hierarchy of genres, with Homer as its premier exponent. And rightly so: Homer’s Iliad and the Odyssey represent our first meaningful examples of European poetry, and they justifiably enjoy unparalleled respect. However, we don’t know precisely who ‘Homer’ was, where he (or she) came from, whether he wrote both poems, or indeed whether each poem was written by just one author, although it is likely that the Iliad was committed to writing maybe around 750BCE and the Odyssey some 25 years later.
Nor can we tell whether Homer physically wrote the poems or dictated them to scribes, or whether they were memorized by ‘rhapsodes’ (public reciters) and transcribed later. It is generally agreed, however, that, the Greek alphabet, adapted from the Phoenician alphabet during the eighth century BCE, was developed at just the right time. Prior to that, the poems had been passed on by illiterate oral bards, operating in a tradition that goes back generations.
There is sound evidence that some people could indeed memorize Homer’s poems in their entirety, and it is likely that they went through countless different versions before they crystallized into the form in which we know them. An oral poet beginning a recitation is rather like a jazz musician at a jam session: everyone knows the piece, where it starts and finishes, and what the underlying structure is, but, having performed it many times before, they can give it endless new twists and turns. They each have their own distinctive phrases, and finding an entertaining and creative route through the piece is essential – oime, ‘path/song-way’, is the Greek for a poet’s song. To assist this process, Homer uses highly formulaic language: phrases, lines or even whole passages recur constantly; events such as warriors arming, scenes of arrival or departure, and descriptions of fighting are related using the same words; and objects and people have stock epithets – ‘swift-footed Achilles’, ‘the wine-dark sea’, ‘lovely-ankled nymphs’, and so on.
The 15,693 lines of the Iliad are divided into 24 ‘books’ of dactylic hexameter poetry. In what is quite a simple story, we experience just over seven weeks of incredibly intense action set during the Trojan War. It is important to be aware that the author of theIliad does not narrate the entire Trojan War, nor mention the Wooden Horse. Rather, he begins in the final year of the war, in which a coalition of Greeks – called Achaeans (men of Achaea), Argives (men of Argos) or Danaans (descendants of Danaos) – is besieging Troy under the leadership of Agamemnon. Their objective is to recover Helen, the wife of Agamemnon’s brother Menelaus, who had been abducted by the Trojan prince Paris. Agamemnon has been allocated a captive Trojan girl called Chryseis as a concubine, but, when her father Chryses comes to ransom her, Agamemnon simply insults him. Chryses prays to Apollo, and the god inflicts a plague on the Achaean army. When the soothsayer Calchas explains the reasons for Apollo’s actions, Agamemnon grudgingly agrees to return the girl, which ends the plague. When Agamemnon demands a replacement, Achilles, who is unarguably the finest Greek warrior, albeit with less standing than Agamemnon, opposes him. Agamemnon responds by seizing Briseis, Achilles’ prize-girl.
Homer’s heroes are intensely competitive and the ensuing dispute is all about who gets public rewards: the best fighters or the leaders (regardless of whether they are right or wrong). The key issue at stake here is time (‘honour’), which is equated with a person’s social value. Hence its importance to the heroes. Their ultimate goal is to win eternal fame (kleos), so what matters above all else is the opinion of their peers.
In Homer’s world many attributes confer time, such as wealth, the number of your subjects, or even the quality of the advice you give. Later in the narrative Sarpedon explains the heroic value-system as focused on a reciprocal relationship with society:
Glaukos, why is it you and I are honoured before others
with pride of place, the choice meats and the filled wine cups
in Lykia, and all men look on us as if we were immortals,
and we are appointed a great piece of land by the banks of Xanthos,
good land, orchard and vineyard, and ploughland for the planting of wheat?
Therefore it is our duty in the forefront of the Lykians
to take our stand, and bear our part of the blazing of battle.2
Achilles is not a team player, but a helpful model for understanding his cultural values is that of a team game: individual stardom often conflicts with the interests of the team; everyone knows who the opposition are, and tries to defeat them; when games are played in public, they become vehicles for conspicuous displays of success; and winning is the only thing that counts. Achilles feels devalued, so he retires to his tent under a pall of heroic anger, accompanied by his close friend Patroclus. His sea-goddess mother Thetis appeals to Zeus to allow the Achaeans to be defeated in his absence, just to prove the point.
The Iliad’s very first word, ‘wrath’ (menis), has told us what the poem is about – the wrath of Achilles – and it immediately begins to explore this theme. Odysseus doesn’t really care about the rights and wrongs of the quarrel, but he does know that by alienating the finest fighter, Agamemnon has done something that could well lead to failure; if the Greeks return empty-handed from a ten-year war they will lose time: and it will all be Agamemnon’s fault.
So, having set up the situation, Homer then interrupts the narrative and outlines a vast ‘Catalogue of Ships’ on the Achaean side, plus details the Trojans and their allies. The armies are mighty, and, as they now engage in combat, Paris chickens out of a duel with Menelaus that would have resolved the conflict instantly. His brother Hector, Troy’s finest warrior, who judges behaviour partly in terms of stereotypes of how men should behave and partly in terms of consequences, feels ashamed by this:
Surely now the flowing-haired Achaeans laugh at us,
thinking you are our bravest champion, only because your
looks are handsome, but there is no strength in your heart, no courage.3
Awesome feats of heroism take place elsewhere on the battlefield, however, as when the Greek hero Diomedes wounds the goddess Aphrodite and the war god Ares, but events are inconclusive. If a common complaint about the Iliad is that it is a poem told by a man, for men and about men, it should be pointed out that there is a sensitive awareness of the domestic perspective, too. Before Hector’s impending return to the fray in Book 6, we meet his wife Andromache and their baby son. Unlike Paris, Hector will not skulk away from the battle – the sanction of public opinion from both women and men is too strong, and there is simply too much at stake. Hector tells Andromache that he cannot bear the thought of her being dragged into captivity by some bronze-armoured Achaean, and their exchange leads to an incredibly powerful moment that is clearly not concerned with male dominance. As he holds out his arms to their son, the baby sees Hector’s helmet and screams with fright. But this makes his parents laugh, and Hector takes off his helmet and puts it on the ground.
Then taking
up his dear son he tossed him about in his arms, and kissed him,
and lifted his voice in prayer to Zeus and the other immortals …
So speaking he set his child again in the arms of his beloved
wife, who took him back again to her fragrant bosom
smiling in her tears; and her husband saw, and took pity upon her,
and stroked her with his hand.4
Hector is constantly described as ‘manslaughtering’, but he is not mindlessly violent. He and the other heroes would rather not fight at all. But fight Hector does, notably with ‘Great’ Aias (Ajax) of the terrible sevenfold-ox-hide shield. Both warriors survive with honour.
The Greeks then decide to build a wall to protect their encampment, and as the Trojans start to get the upper hand they become confident enough to bivouac (set up camp) on the plain with the intention of storming the Greek position the next day. There is such pessimism in the Greek high command that Agamemnon publicly acknowledges that the quarrel with Achilles was his own fault. He dispatches an embassy to Achilles, offering to give back Briseis in pristine condition, along with many other valuable compensatory gifts. It is interesting that the offer includes a number of cities, the existence of which is corroborated by Linear B tablets, but which actually formed part of Nestor’s kingdom at Pylos, not Achilles’ own. Nevertheless, Achilles’ old tutor, Phoinix (Phoenix), stresses the importance of accepting the gifts:
But if without gifts you go into the fighting where men perish,
Your honour [time] will no longer be as great, though you drive back the battle.5
Without concrete evidence of compensation, the Greeks would simply assume that Achilles had given in. And in any case Achilles rejects the ambassador’s offer out of hand.
These events are followed by a night-time scouting expedition by Odysseus and Diomedes (an unheroic oddity that scholars generally agree was not written by Homer). Dawn then rises from her bed at the start of Book 11 to herald a day of intense fighting that takes up eight books.
The Achaeans initially gain the initiative, but as many of their key fighters – Agamemnon, Diomedes, Odysseus, Eurypylus, Machaon – are rendered hors de combat, the Trojans storm right into their camp. The Greeks recover momentarily, memorably when Zeus is seduced by his wife Hera, who anoints herself with ambrosial oil, arranges her hair, puts on an exquisite robe with a hundred-tasselled belt, adds gorgeous earrings, completes the outfit with embossed sexy sandals, and then borrows a girdle from Aphrodite with depictions of beguilement, loveliness and passion for sex and whispered endearments. Zeus cannot resist. Somewhat insensitively he tells her that none of his lengthy back-catalogue of lovers has aroused him like this. They make love, and heimmediately falls asleep, allowing a brief, but temporary Greek ascendancy before he wakes up seething; Apollo smashes the Greek defences, and Hector’s onslaught leaves the Greeks fighting to save their ships. Nestor’s exhortation shows that the common soldiers have public opinion as their sanction, too:
Dear friends, be men; let shame be in your hearts and discipline
in the sight of other men, and each of you remember
his children and his wife, his property and his parents.6
The Greek reverses are precisely what Achilles wanted, but Patroclus has become increasingly uneasy. He talks Achilles into allowing him to borrow his armour and lead out his Myrmidons, although Achilles adds one caveat:
But obey to the end this word I put upon your attention
so that you can win, for me, great honour [time] and glory [kudos]
in the sight of all the Danaans …
When you have driven them from the ships, come back.7
Achilles is still primarily concerned with his own status, which would be diminished if Patroclus went any further. To regard him as motivated by personal vendetta, lacking social responsibility, or just plain childish, misses the fundamental reason for his wrath: histime, the value/worth/honour that is his entire raison d’être, has been undermined.
The battle-weary Trojans think that the new arrival is Achilles himself, and Patroclus saves the ships and slaughters, among dozens of others, Zeus’ special favourite Sarpedon. But he forgets Achilles’ instructions, and pushes his success too far. Apollo disorients him, Euphorbus strikes him in the back with a spear, and Hector finishes him off before stripping Achilles’ armour from Patroclus’ body. The Greeks manage to retrieve the corpse itself, but they end up in headlong retreat.
At the news of Patroclus’ death Achilles descends into intense grief, remorse and rage, and when Thetis tells him that he will die almost immediately if he takes revenge on Hector, he accepts the price:
I must die soon, then; since I was not to stand by my companion
when he was killed. And now, far away from the land of his fathers,
he has perished, and lacked my fighting strength to defend him.8
The Iliad has framed the fundamental question: ‘What is a man’s life worth?’; and Achilles knows the answer: he values his life at the price of revenge on the person who killed his dearest friend. He imposes his own death sentence, not to win everlasting kleos or to champion the Greek cause, but because he feels responsible for Patroclus’ death.
Achilles’ fearsome war cry is enough to make the Trojans turn back. In the meantime, Thetis gets Hephaistos to forge him some superb new armour, including a magnificent shield depicting various scenes of war and peace.
Achilles’ anger towards Agamemnon now mutates into a much more savage hatred for Hector, and with that inmind he calls off the feud with Agamemnon, and announces his willingness to re-enter the war. Agamemnon responds favourably, justifies his conduct on the basis that Zeus, Destiny, Erinys and Delusion were responsible, and offers gifts in abundance. Satisfied, Achilles then sets out to kill Hector, in the clear knowledge that this will accelerate his own death – a fact prophesied to him by his own horse, Xanthos. Meanwhile, Hector has latched on to the hope of achieving a decisive Trojan victory and has rejected some sound advice to retreat back to Troy. Zeus allows the gods to participate in the battle, and Achilles’ onslaught is so ferocious that Poseidon has to save Aeneas, and Apollo rescues Hector.
The carnage is so extreme that the river god, Scamander, tries to drown Achilles because he has clogged up his channels with corpses. Hephaistos intervenes and the other gods engage: Athene defeats Ares and Aphrodite; Poseidon wins a war of words with Apollo; and Hera makes Artemis burst out crying. All the Trojans except Hector are driven inside their city. As he stands alone to face Achilles, with his parents and fellow Trojans looking on, the sanction of public opinion provides such a powerful motivationthat Hector has to fulfil his obligations. He regards the recent Trojan defeat as his own fault:
I feel shame before the Trojans and the Trojan women with trailing
robes, that someone who, is less of a man than I will say of me:
‘Hector believed in his own strength and ruined his people.’
Thus they will speak; and, as for me, it would be much better
at that time, to go against Achilles, and slay him, and come back,
or else be killed by him in glory in front of the city.9
Isolated at the key moment, Hector’s nerve fails him. He makes a dash for safety. Achilles gives chase for three circuits of the walls and, as one of his defining epithets is ‘swift-footed’, Hector cannot outrun him. As Achilles bears down on him, Homer mixes horror and violence with beauty and tranquillity in a brilliant simile:
And as a star moves among stars in the night’s darkening,
Hesper, who is the fairest star who stands in the sky, such
was the shining from the pointed spear Achilleus was shaking
in his right hand with evil intention toward brilliant Hector.10
Hector knows that his chances are minimal. He is no match for Achilles. He goes down fighting.
Achilles strips Hector’s body (he was wearing Achilles’ original armour, taken from Patroclus), and drags it behind his chariot back to the Greek camp. All this should have resolved Achilles’ anger, but it does nothing of the sort, and so, rather than glorifying the achievements of the victors, Homer takes us to two funerals, which frame one of the most extraordinary personal confrontations in Greek literature.
Patroclus receives magnificent obsequies, complete with sacrifices of animals and Trojan prisoners, plus a series of spectacular athletic competitions that are contested with intense commitment. There are those who argue that a homosexual relationship between Achilles and Patroclus lies at the heart of the Iliad. Achilles cannot keep his ‘manslaughtering hands’ off Patroclus’ corpse, but sex has nothing to do with it: this is military male-bonding, not homoerotic passion, and they both sleep with women.
Homer’s focus then shifts from the public to the private. Achilles will not hand over Hector’s body, and he is trying to mutilate it by dragging it behind his chariot. But Apollo prevents any damage to the corpse, and ultimately, assisted by Hermes, Hector’s father Priam makes his way into Achilles’ tent to negotiate the ransom of the body. There is no standard protocol for such an encounter. Priam, who is weak, old and vulnerable, puts his request to his frighteningly violent enemy:
Honour then the gods, Achilles, and take pity upon me
Remembering your father, yet I am more pitiful;
I have gone through what no other mortal on earth has gone through;
I put my lips to the hands of the man who has killed my children.11
Achilles sees reflections of his own father Peleus in Priam, and the two men weep together for their lost loved ones. Achilles finally takes the old king by the hand, and speaks to him:
Surely you have had much evil to endure in your spirit.
How could you dare to come alone to the ships of the Achaeans
and before my eyes, when I am the one who has killed in such numbers
such brave sons of yours? The heart in you is iron. Come, then,
and sit down upon this chair, and you and I will even let
our sorrows lie still in the heart for all our grieving.’12
Killing Hector did not bring ‘closure’ to Achilles, which is why this moment where he and Priam look at each other with respect is so astonishing: it becomes clear that there is more to life than revenge, and more to manhood than slaughtering other men. Achilles grants Priam his request.
Homer then takes us to Hector’s funeral, and the lamentations not only from his wife Andromache and his mother Hecabe, but also, rather surprisingly, from Helen, who praises his honour and gentleness (The Iliad has well been described as ‘the tragedy of Hector’13).
Homer opened the poem by asking the Muse to help him sing of the wrath of Achilles, and he has found the perfect conclusion. The wrath and the Iliad are ended.
The Odyssey
The tale of the fall of Troy is not unique to Homer’s poems. Greek epics of lesser status dealt with that theme, and the definitive version is to be found in Virgil’s Aeneid. The Odyssey’s 24 books (12,110 lines) tell the story of the homecoming of one of the Achaeans’ greatest warriors: Odysseus. He has been away from his home on Ithaca for twenty years in total: ten fighting the Trojan War; seven with the nymph Calypso; and three having the adventures that he recounts in Books 9–12, one of which was with Circe.
For roughly the last three years, 108 bachelors from Ithaca and the nearby islands had been paying court to Odysseus’ wife Penelope. In Homer’s world, ‘excellence’ depends on birth, wealth, power and position. Males must be manly and brave – Christian virtues such as humility, meekness or unselfishness are signs of weakness – and females have to be chaste and loyal, although beauty may count for more. The suitors come from such a background, but they are behaving outrageously, even if Penelope is well worth pursuing. She is (presumably) a widow, physically attractive, accomplished, intelligent and (best of all) the queen of a significant realm. However, she is clinging to the hope that Odysseus will return and, to keep the suitors at bay, she formulates a ploy of weaving a shroud for Odysseus’ father Laertes’ future funeral. They must wait until it is finished.
Thereafter, in the daytime she would weave at her great loom,
But in the night she would have torches set by, and undo it.14
Meanwhile, the suitors simply make themselves at home in Odysseus’ palace, at his expense, and ultimately discover Penelope’s trick.
In these circumstances, the Odyssey begins with an invocation to the Muse, which makes it clear that Odysseus is not a drifter ‘off to see the world’: his focus is his nostos (‘homecoming’), and he is strongly motivated by love for his wife, his son Telemachus and his kingdom. The opening lines also give huge importance to Odysseus’ often difficult relationship with his comrades, and emphasise that his failure to get them home is not his fault. He will ultimately resume his rightful place as the head of a family and the leader of a state, which is why his accountability to his followers is heavily stressed at the outset. So there are two levels of action: one about the problems of an individual (the story of one man’s return to his home and family), and the other about the function of a society (the tale of the return of a king who justly eliminates potential usurpers, and re-establishes his rule).
The narrative structure of the Odyssey is not linear, and a divine level is also introduced when Athene addresses a Council of the Olympian Gods, at which Zeus agrees that Odysseus should be allowed to head for home. However, before we can hear about this, Homer narrates the ‘Telemachy’.
Athene tells Telemachus to go and look for his father. Telemachus is not a mature adult, and although he is outraged by the behaviour of Penelope’s suitors, and wants to assume power in the household, he simply cannot handle the situation, in which the suitors are transgressing every precept of xenia (‘hospitality’) in an orgy of song, dance, food and booze. One of the poem’s primary concerns is how to receive and treat xenoi, ‘stranger-guests’, and Telemachus immediately shows us the correct way:
Thinking it a shame that a stranger should be kept standing at the gates, he went straight up to his visitor, shook hands, relieved him of his bronze spear and gave him cordial greetings.
‘Welcome, sir, to our hospitality!’ he said. ‘You can tell us what has brought you when you have had some food.’16
The suitors, on the other hand, are behaving as though they were (very bad) hosts rather than guests, and when Telemachus asks them to leave they refuse point blank; they really deserve what is coming to them.
Telemachus and Athene (now disguised as Mentor, a friend of Odysseus who looked after his household while he was away) now make their way to Pylos, where they are sumptuously entertained by Nestor, who got back from Troy long ago. Telemachus makes a positive impression on the garrulous old man, and his son Peisistratus joins Telemachus on a visit to Menelaus and Helen at Sparta. From Menelaus we receive important information about Odysseus’ talent for disguise and self-control, and also a report that he is alive, ‘weeping big tears in the palace of the nymph Calypso’.17
As a perfect host, Menelaus offers gifts of horses and a chariot to Telemachus, which he politely declines, in words that say much about Ithaca and its place in the tale:
In Ithaca are no broad horselands or meadows. Goat-pasture it is, and more lovely than horse-pasture. None of the islands that lie out to sea is good for horse-riding or full of meadows, least of all Ithaca.18
Perversely, the fact that Ithaca is a remote, infertile fastness makes Telemachus love it even more. The island will end up in safe hands, but at that moment in time the suitors have discovered Telemachus’ absence and are preparing to ambush him. We thus know precisely what Odysseus is coming home to.
In Book 5 we finally meet Odysseus in person. Zeus dispatches Hermes to tell Calypso (her name derives from the Greek kalypto, ‘I conceal/cover’) to let Odysseus go. For seven years she has kept him on her island of Ogygia, offering him immortality if will stay, but that is not what he wants. He wants to go home. So he sets sail on a raft, only to be wrecked in a storm sent by Poseidon. The goddess ‘Ino called Leukothea’ comes to his rescue in the form of a gannet, and Athene helps, too. Mentally and physically battered, Odysseus finally swims ashore on the island of Scherie.
His initial thoughts on Scherie are illuminating:
What are the people whose land I have come to this time,
and are they violent and savage, and without justice,
or hospitable to strangers, with godly mind?19
The positive qualities here are obvious: hospitality and justice; the negative traits are violence and savagery (which indicate a lack of civilized society). It is noticeable that the sanction is fear of the gods, indicating a very different moral compass from that of theIliad.
The grisly, naked Odysseus now meets the gorgeous Nausikaa, princess of the Phaeacians, who respect strangers, live in an enchanted place far from civilization, and are expert seafarers. Using his considerable social skills, and benefitting from a bath, Odysseus wins over Nausikaa, and she takes him home to meet her parents, Alkinoos and Arete. They live in an amazing palace, constantly supplied with fruit and vegetables by a miraculous garden. But there is to be no fairy-tale romance, just a touching parting. Odysseus prays that he will see the day of his homecoming, but tells Nausikaa:
So even when I am there I will pray to you, as to a goddess,
all the days of my life. For, maiden, my life was your gift.20
Despite pressure from Arete, Odysseus does not yet divulge his identity, although he shows what kind of man he is when, during the ensuing feasting and athletic contests, he wins a discus contest by a massive margin. The bard Demodokos sings songs that make him weep: one about a quarrel between Odysseus and Achilles (Odysseus is already a celebrity), and another about the Trojan Horse (again cementing Odysseus’ heroic status). Odysseus’ tears prompt Alkinoos to ask him who he is, and this time he answers honestly:
I am Odysseus, son of Laertes, known to all men for my cunning; my fame has gone up to heaven. My home is Ithaca … a rough land, but a good nurse of real men. For myself, I cannot imagine anything sweeter than one’s own place.21
There has been an endless quest to pinpoint the historical and geographical ‘reality’ of Odysseus’ travels. Yet even ancient geographical writers such as Eratosthenes and Strabo were sceptical; the problem is that once the North Wind blows him off course, we only get vague information. In any case, some of Odysseus’ adventures are borrowed from the tale of Jason and the Argonauts, and we have serious difficulties making sense of the places that do seem historically authentic. However, the search for Homer’s Ithaca continues apace, with geologists and classicists recently suggesting that Odysseus’ homeland was on a part of Kephallenia, which could have been a separate island in the Bronze Age. This is fascinating and impressively argued, but has zero literary importance.
The ‘Great Wanderings’ are now told by Odysseus in flashback. After leaving Troy, Odysseus reaches Ismaros in Thrace, a city of the Kikones, which he pillages, sparing only Maro, a priest of Apollo who gives him splendid presents, including twelve jars of red wine, in return for his and his wife’s lives. From there, Odysseus sails to the country of the Lotus-eaters in North Africa. When some of his crew taste the ‘honey-sweet fruit of the lotus’, which makes them forget everything and want to stay with the Lotus-eaters, Odysseus has to drag them back to the ships by force.
Odysseus’ itinerary then takes him to the land of the Cyclopes, where we witness his defining quality of metis (‘cunning intelligence’). One of his stock epithets is polymetis (= ‘of much cunning intelligence’, often rendered as ‘wily’ or ‘resourceful’), and, as such, he is tricky, adaptable and a brilliant improviser, possessed of what the Italians call furbizia: if he were a footballer he would dive to win a penalty, and applaud Maradonna’s ‘hand of God’ goal. It’s just not cricket, but it does mean that he can survive by outwitting violent and lawless adversaries. The episode begins with Odysseus taking just one ship and landing with twelve companions. The adventure is immediately given a social context:
We came to the land of the Cyclopes, a fierce, uncivilized people who never lift a hand to plant or plough but put their trust in Providence. [They] have no assemblies for the making of laws, nor any settled customs, but live in hollow caverns in the mountain heights, where each man is lawgiver to his children and his wives, and nobody cares a jot for his neighbours.22
The Cyclops Polyphemus is a son of Poseidon, and while he is out tending his flocks Odysseus and his comrades enter his cave, taking with them a skinful of the priest Maro’s wine. In the hope of receiving gifts, they make themselves at home, but the return of the monstrous one-eyed creature puts a very different slant on the situation: Polyphemus brings in his flocks and puts a massive stone across the entrance, and only then realizes that he has visitors:
‘Strangers!’ he said. ‘And who may you be? Where do you hail from over the highways of the sea?’23
This violates the protocol for entertaining guests: Polyphemus should entertain first and ask questions afterwards. He rejects Odysseus’ appeal for hospitality, boasts that the Cyclopes do not concern themselves about Zeus and the Olympians, and then grabs two sailors, smashes their brains against the ground, and eats them, bones and all. He has two more men for breakfast before heading to his pastures, sealing the cave. He consumes two more on his return. Odysseus uses his metis to formulate a plan to blind the Cyclops with a huge olive-wood stake, and he succeeds in getting him drunk on Maro’s potent wine. At this point Odysseus tells Polyphemos that his name is ‘Nobody’, and asks for a guest-gift, so the Cyclops promises to eat Odysseus last of all – a stomach-churningparody of the rules of hospitality that removes any sympathy for him whatsoever. Then he slumps to the ground, drunk and vomiting in his sleep.
Sleep usually brings release from pain, but not here. Odysseus shoves the stake into some cinders, and when it glows ‘terribly incandescent’ his comrades seize it and drive it into the monster’s eye:
So seizing the fire-point-hardened timber we twirled it
in his eye, and the blood boiled around the hot point, so that
the blast and scorch of the burning ball singed all his eyebrows
and eyelids, and the fire made the roots of his eye crackle …
He gave a giant horrible cry and the rocks rattled
to the sound, and we scuttled away in fear. He pulled the timber
out of his eye, and it blubbered with plenty of blood.24
The description is riddled with technical difficulties: the stake is hardened and holds its heat like metal, not wood; the Cyclops’ eye would not burst into flames; and he would surely have reacted and crushed Odysseus instantaneously. But the narrative is so wonderfully engaging that none of this matters; we simply enjoy seeing Odysseus at his polymetis best.
Polyphemus screams to the neighbouring Cyclopes for help, but when they ask who is hurting him, he answers ‘Nobody’, and they think it is a false alarm.
The seven survivors are still blocked in the cavern. So Odysseus tethers rams together in threes, and straps his men underneath them, tying himself below the finest beast in the flock. At dawn, as the animals head out to pasture, Polyphemus feels their backs, but misses the men underneath. Odysseus releases his comrades, drives the rams to the ships, and sails off hurling taunts at Polyphemos, who hurls back a massive rock, which almost wrecks Odysseus’ ship. Odysseus at last divulges his identity:
You were blinded by Odysseus, sacker of cities,
Laertes is his father, and he makes his home in Ithaca.25
Polyphemos had actually received a prophecy that he would be blinded by Odysseus, but he expected a handsome, tall, powerful man, not the ‘little, feeble person’ who incapacitated him with wine. So, again, we see the power of metis. Polyphemos prays to his father Poseidon to prevent Odysseus’ homecoming, or, if that is impossible:
Let him come late, in bad case, with the loss of all his companions, in someone else’s ship, and find troubles in his household.26
Polyphemos heaves one final gargantuan missile at Odysseus’ vessel, narrowly missing it and creating a tsunami that carries it to the safety of a neighbouring island.
Odysseus’ next port of call is the island of Aeolia, ruled by Aeolus, the keeper of the winds. He presents Odysseus with an oxhide bag containing all the winds apart from the West, which blows Odysseus homewards. At the point when Odysseus can make out the men of Ithaca tending the fires, he falls asleep. His idiotic crew, thinking that the bag contains treasure, undo it. The terrible storm that follows drives them back to Aeolia, but Aeolus denies hospitality to a man that he now thinks must be hateful to the gods.
Sailing on, Odysseus reaches the land of the Laistrygones. He dispatches a reconnaissance party, who are led to King Antiphates’ residence. Unfortunately the Laistrygones are giant cannibals, and Antiphates eats one of the crew for dinner. The others flee back to the ship pursued by tens of thousands of Laistrygones, who smash the ships with man-sized rocks, and eat the sailors. Odysseus severs the cable of his ship, which is now the only surviving one out of the original twelve, and puts to sea.
The sole vessel makes landfall at the Aiaian isle, home of the enchantress Circe, who is very adept at pharmaka (‘drugs’/ ‘enchantments’/‘charms’). Eurylochus and twenty-two others go to check out Circe’s house, a weird place where doped lions and wolves behave like domesticated dogs. All except Eurylochus accept her offer of a potion of cheese, honey, barley, wine and drugs, whereupon she turns them into pigs. Eurylochus reports back to Odysseus, who sets off for Circe’s house. En route he encounters Hermes, who gives him a plant called moly, plus some useful instructions that enable him to subdue Circe, and make her unmetamorphose his men. He then accepts her invitation to sleep together, which turns into a year-long sensual interlude, before his ‘nostalgia’ (nostos = ‘homecoming’ and algos = ‘pain’) resurfaces.
Acquiescing to his departure, Circe tells Odysseus to go into the home of Hades and consult the prophet Teiresias. So he heads north to the land of the Cimmerians, where the sun never breaks through the darkness, digs a pit, and performs blood-sacrifices to Teiresias and the dead. This nekyia (‘calling-up of ghosts’) summons the dead to him: Elpenor, who had fallen from the roof of Circe’s palace in a drunken stupor; Teiresias, who predicts Odysseus’ homecoming ‘in bad case, with the loss of all your companions, in someone else’s ship, and finding troubles in your household’27, and also his death; and his mother Antikleia, who describes the situation in Ithaca. It is a desperately emotional meeting:
Three times
I started towards her, and my heart was urgent to hold her,
and three times she fluttered out of my hands like a shadow
or a dream, and the sorrow sharpened at the heart within me.28
Odysseus then tells of various females, including Heracles’ mother (Alcmene) Oedipus’ mother (Epicaste), Leda, Phaedra and Ariadne, until he is interrupted by Alkinoos and Arete. Tales then follow of encounters with the ghosts of his comrades at Troy: Agamemnon, who tells of his death at the hands of Aegisthus ‘with the help of my sluttish wife’,29 Achilles and ‘Great’ Aias (Ajax), who refuses to speak with him. We are then told about Minos, the judge of the dead; the mighty hunter Orion; Tityos, whose liver was constantly devoured by vultures; Tantalus, hungry and thirsty, but ‘tantalized’; Sisyphos, rolling an enormous stone up a hill; and Heracles, who empathizes with Odysseus’ tribulations. In the end Odysseus is overcome with ‘green fear’ and returns to his ship.
After a brief return to Circe’s island, they sail past the Isle of the Sirens, the singing enchantresses who would seduce sailors to their deaths with their music. Homer does not describe them, although he uses a grammatical form of ‘Sirens’ known as the ‘dual’, indicating that there were two of them. Not wanting to miss out on their singing, Odysseus follows Circe’s advice and blocks up his comrades’ ears with wax, and has himself lashed to the mast. The Sirens’ song lives up to expectations, but Odysseus’ begging only persuades Perimedes and Eurylochus to bind him tighter still, and he sails away safely.
Further navigational hazards then appear in the shape of a choice between the Wandering Rocks, and Scylla and Charybdis, which lie on either side of a narrow strait. Scylla is a ghastly monster, with twelve feet and six long necks, each with a horrible head with three rows of teeth. She lurks holed up inside a cavern, but with her heads poking out. In the other cliff is the equally terrifying Charybdis, a whirlpool that makes the sea boil up in turbulence, spattering the pinnacles of the rocks with spume and sucking down the water so that the sand shows at the sea’s bottom. On Circe’s advice, Odysseus takes the channel between Scylla and Charybdis, but despite standing fully armed on the foredeck, he cannot prevent Scylla snatching six of his comrades and eating them alive.
Odysseus’ last surviving crewmen die at the island of Thrinakia, the grazing ground of the sheep and oxen of Hyperion/Helios, the sun god. Odysseus has already continually warned his companions about the consequences of harming these animals, but when adverse winds maroon them on the island for more than a month, and they run out of provisions, the men slaughter some oxen while Odysseus is sleeping. When the winds eventually turn and Odysseus puts to sea, Zeus blasts the ship with a thunderbolt. All the crew are lost, but Odysseus ties the mast and keel together and clings to them. He is driven back towards Charybdis, but when the wreckage gets sucked down he grabs an overhanging tree, hangs like a bat until the timbers shoot back up again, drops down into the water, mounts the wreckage, and paddles to safety. Ten nights later he is washed up on Calypso’s island, bringing his narrative of his travels to an end.
The poet of the Odyssey resumes the story in the land of the Phaeacians. Alkinoos bestows generous gifts on Odysseus and a Phaeacian ship returns him, still sleeping, to Ithaca. Athene pours a mist over everything, which initially prevents Odysseus realizing where he is, but then, masquerading as an Ithacan shepherd, she tells him the truth. She teases him for not recognizing his own home, yet she introduces a hint of ironic humour by telling him that the name of Ithaca has spread even as far as Troy; the depreciatory tone that Telemachus used in Sparta is gone. Odysseus responds by lying about who he is, which Athene enjoys (she is the daughter of Metis, ‘cunning intelligence’). She then reveals her true identity, disperses the mist, and shows Odysseus his homeland. He kisses the ‘grain-giving’ earth.
Odysseus is unquestionably brave and adaptable, but will he have the mental, verbal, technical and social intelligence to prevail? He certainly thinks so. Experience has equipped him well, and if disguise and violence can defeat the Cyclops, they should also be able to overcome Penelope’s suitors.
Athene disguises Odysseus as a crusty old beggar, and when he arrives at the shelter of his aged, loyal swineherd, Eumaios, he tells a false story of his life. Athene prompts Telemachus to come home, and his first stop is also at Eumaios’ hut. When he sends the swineherd to announce his return to Penelope, Odysseus takes the opportunity to reveal himself. His disguise miraculously fades, and father and son are overwhelmed with tearful emotion.
Meanwhile, the suitors as they plot their revenge, realize that their scheme to ambush Telemachus has misfired. Antinoos proposes murdering Telemachus, but Amphinomos vetoes him. Telemachus returns to the palace, followed by a redisguised Odysseus and Eumaios. Odysseus has to exert considerable self-control when the goatherd Melanthios provokes him, although the disguise fails to deceive his old dog, Argos. The once magnificent creature is terribly neglected, but, as he recognizes his master, he wags his tail, lays his ears back, and dies happy. Odysseus surreptitiously wipes away a tear.
Arriving at the palace, Odysseus gets to experience the suitors’ behaviour in person, and particularly to ascertain which of them lack themis (i.e. does not acknowledge any rules, divine or human). Regardless of this, however, Athene is not going to save any of them: they might be agathoi (noble/powerful/rich/good), but they will be treated as though they were kakoi, its opposite. Antinoos hurls a footstool at Odysseus, which even offends the other suitors, and Penelope asks Eumaios to summon the stranger to her presence. Odysseus says he will wait until sunset: it is essential that he and Penelope talk in private.
Meanwhile Odysseus gets embroiled in a turf-war with Iros, a rival down-and-out who rashly challenges him to a boxing match. One fatal blow from Odysseus is enough to account for him:
He dropped, bleating, in the dust, with his face set in a grimace, and kicking at the ground with his feet.30
When Penelope makes an appearance the suitors go weak at the knees with passion, and they each pray for the privilege of lying beside her. She drops some hints about marriage, and implies that nice presents would facilitate her decision making. Her husband adores her for this:
Odysseus was happy
because she beguiled gifts out of them, and enchanted their spirits
with blandishing words, while her own mind had other intentions.31
Melantho, a maid who is sleeping with the suitor Eurymakhos, is disrespectful to Odysseus, and he is nearly hit by another footstool, but when Telemachus attributes the bad behaviour to too much food and alcohol, and suggests that everyone goes to bed, the suitors agree. Odysseus and Telemachus hide all the weapons that are in the house, and Penelope and Odysseus meet. She tells him her story; he tells her another false one, although he does affirm that Odysseus is alive and about to return. Pessimistic Penelope – one of her epithets is periphron (= ‘very thoughtful/careful’, ‘circumspect’) – orders Eurykleia, who had been Odysseus’ nurse, to wash his feet. She notices a distinctive scar, and recognizes him instantly. Swearing her to silence, he resumes his conversation with Penelope, during which she dreams up the idea of having a contest with Odysseus’ bow. This involves setting up twelve axes in a row and firing an arrow through them, like Odysseus used to do. Whoever can take his bow, string it and shoot an arrow clean through all the twelve axes will win her hand.
The next day Penelope announces the contest. Odysseus has to prevent Telemachus from stringing the bow himself, before Leiodes makes an unsuccessful attempt, after which Odysseus reveals himself to Eumaios and Philoitios. Eurymakhos tries to shoot the twelve arrows but fails, after which Odysseus asks for a turn. Penelope overrules the suitors’ objections; Telemachus sends her away, but details Eurykleia and Philoitios to bar the exits from the palace. The suitors have their last laugh at Odysseus’ expense, but when he strings the bow without the slightest difficulty they blanch with fear, and Zeus sends portentous thunder.
Odysseus’ first arrow flies straight through the axes and out the other end; his second pierces Antinoos’ throat. Now, finally, he announces his identity. He catalogues the suitors’ transgressions – despoiling his household, forcibly taking his serving women to sleep beside them, seeking to win his wife while he was still alive, and having no respect for gods or men.
Now upon all of you the terms of destruction are fastened.32
The next arrow hits Eurymakhos in the chest; Telemachus spears Amphinomos; Odysseus slays suitor after suitor until he runs out of ammunition; Melanthios secures some weaponry for the suitors, but he is captured and tied to a column; Athene appears on Odysseus’ side in the guise of Mentor, and makes a simultaneous volley of six spears; four more suitors fall; more spears are deflected by Athene; Telemachus and Eumaios suffer flesh wounds; another six suitors bite the dust; Athene spreads panic with heraegis; Leiodes is decapitated by Odysseus, but the singer Phemios and the herald Medon are spared on Telemachus’ intervention. Not one suitor survives. Everyone involved is an agathos, a ‘real man’, but the suitors are hyperenoreon, ‘excessively manly’: they deserve to die.
Two grisly acts complete the massacre: twelve serving women who have behaved immorally with the suitors are forced to clean up the bloody mess, before Telemachus supervises their execution.
Their heads were all in a line, and each had her neck caught
fast in a noose, so that their death would be most pitiful.
They struggled with their feet for a little, not for very long.33
Melanthios is then hideously mutilated before Odysseus fumigates the palace.
Penelope continues to be ‘circumspect’ when Eurykleia tells her that the stranger is Odysseus. Her response oscillates between total disbelief and semi-belief; Odysseus’ filthy appearance hinders her acknowledgment of the truth (despite him taking a bath), and she will only trust a recognition by special signs. These centre on the marriage bed that Odysseus built, incorporating a living olive tree into the structure. No one else knows this. So when Penelope tells Eurykleia to bring out the bed, Odysseus is outraged: ‘What man has put my bed in another place?’ Penelope’s circumspection evaporates, and he falls weeping into her arms. They make love, and then talk, she of her troubles, he of his travels, until sweet sleep overtakes them.
Hermes conveys the souls of the suitors down into the Underworld, while Odysseus makes his way to his father Laertes’ farm, where he puts him to the test by telling another of his false stories, which has a devastating emotional effect on Laertes, before Odysseus says who he really is. When the shocked old man demands a sign, Odysseus reveals his scar, tells of the fifty trees that his father once gave him, and the two of them embrace. Their joy is curtailed when the suitors’ relatives advance on the palace seeking revenge. The three generations of Odysseus’ family confront them. Athene puts a stop to the conflict, but, when Odysseus ignores her advice, Zeus throws a thunderbolt at her, which terminates the violence. The Odyssey ends with pledges being given by each side, and ratified by Athene.
The Afterlife of the Epics
Homer’s poems have generated constant fascination since antiquity. On a Hellenistic relief in the British Museum known as the Apotheosis of Homer, the great man sits amid the Muses and is crowned by Time and the Inhabited World, with the Iliad andOdysseypersonified as his children. The Roman poet Virgil wore his influences on his sleeve by opening his Aeneid with arma uirumque cano (‘I sing of arms and the man’), where ‘arms’ stands for the Iliad and ‘man’ for the Odyssey. In the Byzantine Era, Homer was read by the educated elite, and generated romances set in Troy like the much imitated Roman de Troie by Benoît de Sainte-Maure (c.1160), but when the Renaissance rediscovered Homer, it did not always like him. The translations of Homer by George Chapman (c.1559–1634) influenced Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, and were greatly admired by Keats:
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That deep-browed Homer rule as his demesne,
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold.34
However, the scholar J.C. Scaliger (1484–1558) was less impressed – ‘It is ridiculous, it is stupid, it is Homeric’ – and John Dryden (1631–1700) felt that Virgil’s Aeneas was a much better role-model than any Homeric hero.
In the eighteenth century important translations appeared, in German by Johann Heinrich Voss (1781) into ‘megalithic hexameters’, and by Alexander Pope (1720 and 1725), although the classical scholar Richard Bentley famously told Pope, ‘it is a pretty poem, Mr Pope; but you must not call it Homer’, and Keats still preferred Chapman. Robert Wood published An Essay on the Original Genius of Homer in 1767,35 which applauded Homer’s direct simplicity, and influenced Goethe, who wrote his Achilleis (1808, translated as Achilleid, 1890), picking up from the last line of the Iliad.
Meanwhile, Flaxman’s design of The Apotheosis of Homer had graced a Wedgwood vase in 1778, and Ingres painted the same theme in 1827, depicting Homer surrounded by the likes of Apelles, Raphael, Dante, Virgil, Plato and Socrates.
In the nineteenth century Homer occupied a central place in Victorian public school education, just as he overshadows Shakespeare, Milton and Dante in the centre of the poetry frieze on the Albert Memorial in London; and Tennyson (1809–1892) took Odysseus’ inspirational story to his heart as he launched his great literary journey.
As the twentieth century dawned, the Alexandrian Greek poet C.P. Cavafy made effective use of the duel between Achilles and Hector in his ‘Trojans’ (1905):
Our efforts are like those of the Trojans.
We think we’ll change our luck
by being so resolute and daring,
so we move outside ready to fight.
But when the big crisis comes,
our boldness and resolution vanish;
our spirit falters, paralysed,
and we scurry around the walls
trying to save ourselves by running away.
He also used the Odyssey as the inspiration for his wonderful ‘Ithaca’ (1911):
When you set out for Ithaca
ask that your way be long,
…
But do not in the least hurry the journey.
Better that it last for years,
so that when you reach the island you are old,
rich with all you have gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaca to give you wealth.
Ithaca gave you the splendid journey.
…
And if you find her poor, Ithaca has not deceived you.
So wise have you become, of such experience,
that already you will have understood what these Ithacas mean.36
James Joyce, who regarded the story of Odysseus as ‘the most beautiful, all-embracing theme – greater, more human, than that of Hamlet, Don Quixote, Dante, Faust’,37 used the myth in Ulysses ‘as a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving shape and significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history’.38
In the poems of Rupert Brooke, Homer came face to face with the onset of the First World War, particularly since Troy is so close to the Gallipoli peninsula:
They say Achilles in the darkness stirred …
And Priam and his fifty sons
Wake all amazed, and hear the guns,
And shake for Troy again.39
Patrick Shaw-Stewart fought at Gallipoli with the Iliad in mind:
Was it so hard, Achilles,
So very hard to die?
Thou knowest and I know not –
So much the happier I.
I will go back this morning
From Imbros over the sea;
Stand in the trench, Achilles,
Flame-capped, and fight for me.40
There are times when Homer has seemed just too raw: in John Buchan’s words, ‘to speak of glory seemed a horrid impiety. That was perhaps why I could not open Homer.’41 Perhaps this is because Homer never shies away from addressing the horrors of war, and remains sharply aware of the victim as well as the victor. Drawing parallels between modern wars and Homer’s work remains fashionable, most recently in the comparisons that are readily made between Wolfgang Petersen’s 2004 film Troy and the Iraq war. It seems unlikely that Petersen intended it that way, and the harder the analogies are forced, the less convincing they appear, yet the willingness even to look for these correspondences is eloquent testimony to the enduring relevance of Homer’s poetry.
Notes – Chapter 4
1. Trans. M. McCarthy, in S. Weil and R. Bespaloff, War and the Iliad, New York: New York Review of Books Classics, 2005.
2. Homer, Iliad 12.310 ff., trans. R. Lattimore, in The Iliad of Homer, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1951.
3. Ibid., 3.38 ff.
4. Ibid., 6.466 ff.
5. Ibid., 9.604 f.
6. Ibid., 15.661 ff.
7. Ibid., 16.83 ff.
8. Ibid., 18.98 ff.
9. Ibid., 22.104 ff.
10. Ibid., 22.317 ff.
11. Ibid., 24.503 ff.
12. Ibid., 24.518 ff.
13. J. Redfield, Nature and Culture in the Iliad: The Tragedy of Hector, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1975.
14. Homer, Odyssey 2.104 f., trans. R. Lattimore, in The Odyssey of Homer, New York: Harper, 1999.
15. Lyrics from ‘Moon River’ by Henry Mancini.
16. Homer, Odyssey 1.119 ff., trans. E.V. Rieu, in Homer: The Odyssey, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1946.
17. Homer, Odyssey 4.556 f., trans. Lattimore.
18. Homer, Odyssey 4.605 ff., trans. D.M. Gaunt, in Surge and Thunder: Critical Readings in Homer’s Odyssey, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971, 106.
19. Homer, Odyssey 6.119 ff., trans. Lattimore.
20. Ibid., 9.466 f.
21. Homer, Odyssey 9.19 ff., trans. Gaunt.
22. Homer, Iliad 9. 105 ff., trans. E.V. Rieu, in Homer: The Illiad, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1950.
23. Ibid., 9.252 f.
24. Homer, Iliad 9.387 ff., trans. R. Lattimore.
25. Ibid., 9.504 f.
26. Ibid., 9.534 f.
27. Ibid., 11.114 f., exactly echoing Polyphemus’ hopes: cf. 9.534 f.
28. Ibid., 11.205 ff.
29. Ibid., 11.410 f. In Aeschylus’ Agamemnon it is Clytemnestra who takes the lead role in the murder, with Aegisthus a rather cringing weakling. See below, p. 173.
30. Ibid., 18.96 ff.
31. Ibid., 18.281 ff.
32. Ibid., 22.41.
33. Ibid., 22.470 ff.
34. John Keats, On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer, 1816.
35. Published privately – the first public edition, published posthumously, was 1775.
36. Trans. T.E. Kennedy and P. Sherrard, in C.P. Cavafy, Collected Poems, The Hogarth Press, 1984.
37. Recorded by Joyce’s pupil Georges Borach in his journal on 1 August 1917. See R. Ellman, James Joyce, Oxford: Oxford University Press, rev. edn, 1983, 429–30.
38. T.S. Eliot, ‘Ulysses, Order, and Myth’, Dial 75.5, November 1923, 480.
39. Rupert Brooke, Fragment 2, 1915, published in Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke with a Memoir, London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1918.
40. P. Shaw-Stewart, ‘Achilles in the Trench’, 1916, Found after his death, written in his copy of A.E. Houseman’s A Shropshire Lad, now in Eton College library.
41. J. Buchan, Memory Hold-the-door, London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1940.