A Guide to the Odyssey: A Commentary on the English Translation of Robert Fitzgerald
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MEN AND WOMEN, FAMILIES AND COUPLES
The transfer of power in battle and in governance from father to son to grandson, for all its importance to the history of a single family, is ultimately a public act. It is in the public sphere that fathers and sons, as males, have a place. The Odyssey is remarkable among epics for the wide scope it gives to private relationships, which it figures in relations between men and women. This is not to say that these do not also have their public function. A couple need not be so prominent as Odysseus and Pénélopê for their partnership to have ramifications in the common weal. Their marriage represents a joining of two clans or kin groups, and, by the exchange of money or other property, a new economic unit is formed. Or rather, in Homer, the woman joins the economic unit of her husband’s family.
While such social facts provide the background, The Odyssey gives a deeper and more nuanced picture. We would not have needed Homer’s poem to know that the wife serves as mistress of the household, keeping watch over provisions and property and supervising the slaves. What Homer tells us, particularly in the person of Pénélopê and her relationship with Odysseus, is that a woman could be conceived of as having a relationship of equality with her husband. She is at least his equal and perhaps his superior in prudence and craft; indeed, Homer has a special term, homophrosunê, which means something along the lines of “like-mindedness” or “harmony of spirits,” to describe what Odysseus and Penélopê, and few other couples, have. The compass in which Penélopê can work her wiles is admittedly narrower—no battles or sea journeys for her—but the fact that she cannot leave her home on Ithaka without some man’s permission only forces her to be that much more inventive in manipulating the largely symbolic systems at her disposal. The prime example of this is of course the famous trick whereby she holds off the suitors. This is a sincerely pious charade: under the guise of fulfilling a duty that the system of honor (i.e., male esteem and expectations) demands of her, she claims that before she can choose a new husband she must weave a burial shroud for her absent husband’s father. She then uses the secrecy afforded her by the male-mandated seclusion of honorable women to unravel each day’s pensum. She is foiled in this delaying tactic only by women, those unfaithful maidservants who have formed liaisons with some of the suitors. I need hardly point out the blatant double standard: the suitors’ dalliance with these serving wenches is no bar to their suitability, but the least suspicion of infidelity on Penélopê’s part might well lead to her destruction.
Women no less than men are represented in The Odyssey at all stages of life, from youth to old age, and as slaves and free. Still, apart from the goddesses who from time to time aid Odysseus—and it is probably inappropriate to subsume divine females in all instances under the category of women—and the slaves, who are property and are not strictly marriageable (although they may be used or bestowed for sexual purposes in unions of any duration), all the women are presented in some way with reference to marriage. This is hardly surprising, since marriage was the central event of the life of a woman in ancient Greek society (as in so many other cultures), marking a girl’s true coming-of-age.
That I except the goddesses is also not surprising, since besides the fact that goddesses cannot be exchanged by male-dominated mortal families to form alliances, one of the essential differences between mortals and immortals is that the latter, for better and for worse, do not form lasting relationships of mutual dependency. (Marriages between gods are not characterized by dependency.) They need not, and they cannot. Kalypso is the exception, for she attempts to cross this boundary and make Odysseus her own; Odysseus, preferring the mutuality of a relationship with his mortal wife, for all the risks that entails, turns down what is tantamount to an offer of immortal bliss. Of course the will of Zeus seconds his choice, the right and proper one for a mortal. Kirkê is different in precisely this regard and for this reason emerges as a true foil to Kalypso (and not as a mere doublet, as is often alleged). Kirkê uses her divine status to exercise power over mortal men the way males normally do over women. She can enslave them or she can enjoy them as temporary sexual partners, with no second thoughts.
Among free mortal females we see Arêtê, Alkinoös’ consort; their daughter, Nausikaa, who is just arriving at the age of marriageability; and Antikleía, Odysseus’ mother, now among the dead, grieving for both son and husband. Odysseus describes immediately thereafter the shades of many mortal women, a list he introduces significantly as “consorts or daughters of illustrious men” (XI.258), echoing the point at the end of the episode (“daughters and wives of kings,” XI.382): in each case their fame or infamy is calculated with respect to the men to whom other men assume the women owe allegiance. This catalog of heroines provides a set of females whose behavior exemplifies either good or bad ways of being a woman, i.e., wife, daughter, or mother. The exemplary function of women also accounts for the importance in The Odyssey of Penélopê’s famous first cousins, daughters of her uncle Tyndáreus, Klytaimnéstra and Helen, who serve as potential models for or counterexamples to Penélopê.
The first, Klytaimnéstra, never appears in a scene of direct narration in The Odyssey, but her name is on the lips of men—by which I mean males—as the central figure in a tale with admonitory messages for all the members of Odysseus’ family. The Greeks traveling home from Troy had various fates, and it was a commonplace to contrast them, as Nestor and Meneláos do in their accounts to Telémakhos in Books III and IV. The fate of Agamémnon, who reached home only to fall victim to the plotting of his wife, Klytaimnéstra, and her paramour, Aigísthos, is presented not just as a frightening counterexample to Odysseus but as an alternative plot into which The Odyssey on several occasions might veer. A meditation on what we might call the master antiplot of The Odyssey is the subject of the very first speech of the epic, from the mouth of no less a figure than Olympian Zeus (I.42–62). Nor is it merely the fame of Agamémnon as the supreme commander of the Greeks at Troy and the violent treachery of his murder which make this such an apt cautionary tale. There are roles in the Agaménon story for homecoming hero, wife, rival or rivals, and son, Orestês, mentioned already by Zeus as the slayer of Aigísthos and avenger of his father’s murder (I.46 and 59). Later in the first book Athena, in the guise of Mentês, emphasizes Orestês’ part in the family drama as “he” exhorts Telémakhos to plot his reckoning with the suitors:
You need not bear this insolence of theirs,
you are a child no longer. Have you heard
what glory young Orestês won
when he cut down that two-faced man, Aigísthos,
for killing his illustrious father? (I.343–47)
Focus remains on Aigísthos as sole or prime villain, on Agamémnon as victim, and above all on Orestês as slayer of the first and avenger of the second throughout the Telemachy.16 Klytaimnéstra takes center stage as the real villain, the adulterous betrayer of her husband, only when the story is related to Odysseus by the shade of Agamémnon (XI.471–535), who extensively vilifies all women and explicitly warns Odysseus to take care, even of Penélopê—a warning that Odysseus clearly takes to heart, for he speaks of Agamémnon’s fate to Athena soon after landing on Ithaka (XIII.472–85).
While it is up to Telémakhos (ultimately as his father’s helper) to see that his part and that of the suitors coincide with the roles of Orestês and Aigísthos in the story of the Argive royal house, it is up to Penélopê to avoid becoming a second Klytaimnéstra.17 This she does by remaining faithful to her absent husband and not giving in to any suitor. Indeed, she does more, whether consciously or not, by setting up the contest with Odysseus’ bow at just the right moment. Only after the suitors’ souls have borne report of the massacre in Odysseus’ hall to the other dead (in which report Penélopê is presented as actively involved in the plot against the suitors) will Agamémnon bring to a close the cycle of comparisons between his own fate and that of Odysseus, with the ultimate glorification of Penélopê. She is glorious insofar as she
is different from Klytaimnéstra. The limits of this praise in the mouth of a man are clear: despite Penélopê’s avoidance of the Klytaimnéstrian model, it is still Klytaimnéstra who establishes (male) expectations of female behavior: “A bad name / she gave to womankind, even the best” (XXIV.227–28; see further my note on XXIV.226–28).
To the shade of Agamémnon in its first appearance, Odysseus had described a fatal link between “intrigues of women” and “both sons of Atreus,” Meneláos and Agamémnon: “Myriads / died by Helen’s fault, and Klytaimnéstra / plotted against you half the world away” (XI.508–12). The fateful and fraught relationship of Meneláos and Helen also serves as a foil to the relationship between Odysseus and Penélopê. In Book IV Homer presents Telémakhos visiting Meneláos and Helen reunited and once more at home, as Odysseus and penélopê will be by the end of The Odyssey, but there is no simple parallel between the pairs.
In the case of the Spartan couple, man and woman alike required a homecoming, since, as we know, Helen’s absence from Sparta was the origin of the entire Trojan War. (It is to this of course that Odysseus’ “Myriads died” refers.) In many ways, Helen’s case is more like Odysseus’ than Penélopê’s—and such gender crossing is usually an indication that we should take special notice. Odysseus in The Odyssey has been away from Ithaka and Penélopê not just ten years, the time required for the Greeks to take Troy, but nearly twenty years, because he has been traveling ten years since Troy’s fall. Helen was separated from her husband for about the same number of years, since some time—traditions vary—intervened between her departure from Sparta with Paris and the arrival of the Greeks to begin their ten-year siege of Troy. Furthermore, Meneláos did not bring Helen back from Troy directly; he had first to visit and make expiation in Egypt, a lengthy process.18 Helen’s foreign travels and erotic detentions, then, are strongly reminiscent of Odysseus’ wanderings and dallyings; in neither case is it clear how much the will of each was involved. To complete the symmetry, while Meneláos sailed to Troy and fought there to regain his wife, in his dogged loyalty to his erring spouse he resembles Penélopê more than Odysseus.
The Agamémnon-Klytaimnéstra plot is contrasted with that of Odysseus and Penélopê at the level of dramatic action, while the comparison of the Spartan and Ithakan couples reveals differences in the inner workings of their relationships, as can be seen when we analyze the discordant anecdotes with which Helen and Meneláos regale their guests and from which a final set of uncanny symmetries and asymmetries among the quartet emerge. Helen and Meneláos each tell their guest a story about Odysseus from their time at Troy. Helen begins. She recounts the story of Odysseus’ foray into Troy disguised as a beggar. She claims that, although she penetrated his disguise, she did not betray him. This episode, which at first blush might seem more appropriate for a version of The Iliad or some other segment of the cycle of the Trojan War, when placed in The Odyssey foreshadows Odysseus’ disguising himself as a beggar to enter his own house. Helen’s reference to her questioning him and his putting her off (IV.270) looks forward to Penélopê’s interrogation of the beggar and Odysseus’ clever verbal parrying in Book XIX. “I knew him” (IV.268), Helen says, and any comparison of her in this episode with Penélopê will raise the possibility that Odysseus’ lady too had penetrated his disguise. (This remains a nagging question in interpretation of The Odyssey; see the Commentary on XIX.620–42, XIX.678–99, and XX.69ff.) Helen’s anticipation of Book XIX continues, for, so she claims, she “bathed … and anointed him / … and swore an oath / not to give him away” (IV.271–73). This foreshadows the footbath Odysseus receives at Eurýkleia’s hands, just out of Penélopê’s earshot. (On the momentous importance of this bath, see pp. lxvii-lxix.)
“An excellent tale, my dear, and most becoming,” responds Meneláos with no little irony (IV.287). Too refined to contradict her openly, Meneláos makes his point by telling a narrative in which Helen appears in a considerably more ambiguous light, and in which her behavior seems to give the lie to the pro-Greek stance Helen attributed to herself in her own story. Meneláos recounts a part of the episode of the Trojan horse, in particular the dicey moment when the Trojans, suspecting the truth, have Helen call out to the horse and imitate the voices of the wives of the Greek heroes in the hope that any soldier inside the horse would give the ruse away. Antiklos is on the verge of doing so, but Odysseus stifles him. Meneláos is presenting Telémakhos with a seductive Helen, parallel to Penélopê, potentially seductive throughout and openly seductive when, with the disguised Odysseus already in her house, and even if she herself doesn’t fully understand why, she appears before the suitors in all her beauty and asks for their tributes (XVIII.200ff.). If the parallels and foreshadowings are less clear here, that may be the point. Penélopê is unambiguously unlike Klytaimnéstra—it is a simple ratio of opposites. Helen is a more complex and potentially more troubling model: like Helen, Penélopê has her hidden depths and surprises. Like Helen, she is not ultimately predictable. And if Odysseus foiled Helen when she tried to negate his ruse of the wooden horse by causing the Greek heroes to identify themselves to their “wives,” Penélopê evens the score when, in Book XXIII, she tricks Odysseus into confirming his identity as her husband by means of another wooden artifact of his devising: their marriage bed.
MEMORY
I suggested that The Odyssey centers its treatment of the passage of time on the theme of fathers and sons, but even though the culture of Homer’s time led him to display issues in terms of generations of males, there is no reason for us not to read The Odyssey as a poem more justly about generations, about memory and ideals, and about each generation growing into the ideals it claims to have inherited from its predecessors. As we know from our own century, memories, regrets, and ideals tend to crystallize around wars. Earthquakes and other disasters, however destructive, may punctuate the otherwise undifferentiable flow of time more neatly, but wars and other cataclysmic events of some duration (plagues, famines) seem to gather larger swatches of time into a bundle. It is said of certain countries that they suffer from an excess of history. Wars too seem to pull into their wake more than their share of history, as if time were passing by a vortex or black hole—the new Kharybdis of space—and bent toward it. What wars mean to those who fight them is one thing; The Iliad is the first and will ever be the supreme poem about war. Its presentation of the heat of battle, of death of comrades in combat, and of siege and sack ring true, say those who have experienced these things. Digging archeologically into recent response to The Iliad, we note that scholars, readers, and poets touched by the epic struggle of World War II have a special appreciation of The Iliad—earned at a terrible price.19
The Odyssey is set at a cooler pitch, representing a more domestic world, less tragic but no less subtle. As The Iliad presents—in the figures of Akhaians—Greeks at war and—in the figures of Trojans—Greeks at home, the first group ravaging and at the edge of order, the latter defending their home and city, a city still very much in order, The Odyssey presents the Greek man traveling and at home. In other words, The Odyssey is a postwar poem. If World War II is the war that most readily comes to mind to readers of the previous generation when they read The Iliad, for my generation (of Americans) The Odyssey speaks to many issues that seem to engage us in a society still obsessed with Vietnam and its aftermath. The post-Vietnam War era is doubly postwar: most obviously, the end of that conflict lies now some decades in the past, but, more subtly, that war was already post-World War II. However unjustly, the country constantly compares the two wars. In its own eyes, America emerged victorious over unambiguous evil in the first, but in the second it was forced to walk away from a conflict which was considerably more controversial. The debates that still swirl around our involvement in Vietnam, the wounds and losses still unhealed, sensitize us to a certain dimension of The Odyssey which addresses a similar issue, so that we would not be wrong in seeing The Odyssey as the quintessential postwar epic.
We ca
n see Odysseus’ challenge as that of readjustment to a civil society. Perhaps ten years of decompression is not so bad an idea; perhaps Agamémnon would have acted less arrogantly had he not come directly from the high command at Troy to Argos (not that this would necessarily have saved him from Aigísthos or Kassandra from Klytaimnéstra’s ax). Returning veterans too need to become reacquainted with their country, which will have undergone its own development while the fighting forces were away. They need to reestablish contact with their spouses and parents, and often to establish contact with children for the first time. The emotions of those left behind also need to be addressed. Those (usually males) who are too young to have gone to the war or were otherwise unfit for military service need to deal with their diminished prestige. Telémakhos looks up to his heroic father. The suitors, by contrast, while they are not “protesters,” are in the awkward position of seeking honor and glory in a sphere where it cannot be obtained, and for personal reasons it is not in their interest to remain ever subordinate to the absent Odysseus. Political candidates whose war records (or lack thereof) remain the subject of public debate will be sensitive to the feelings of all the Ithakans. I take it that the reason feelings run so high in every postwar generation is that all of us are haunted by the question: Would we have measured up?