Throughout his voyage, Odysseus will be dependent on the kindness of strangers, their generosity as hosts. Some of them, like the Phaeacians and Aeolus, king of the winds, will be perfect hosts, entertaining him lavishly and sending him on his way with precious gifts. Others will be savages, threatening his life and taking the lives of his crew. Still others will be importunate hosts, delaying the guest’s departure —an infraction of the code. “I’d never detain you here too long,” Menelaus says to Telemachus. “I’d find fault with another host . . . too warm to his guests.” And taking a leaf from Pope’s translation, he formulates the golden rule: “ ‘Welcome the coming, speed the parting guest!’ ” (ref, see note ref). Many of Odysseus’ hosts seem to have heard only the first half of that injunction. Circe is a charming hostess, but she charms her guests out of human shape and keeps them forever. Calypso too would have kept Odysseus forever, but in his own shape, perpetually young. The Sirens would have kept him forever also, but dead. Calypso and Circe, however, when the time comes to speed the parting guest, provide the requisite gifts. Calypso sends a fair wind to send his raft on its way, and Circe gives him precious instructions —how to deal with the Sirens, the warning not to kill the cattle of the Sun. Telemachus also has to deal with an importunate host. On his way back from Sparta to Pylos, he manages to evade what he fears will be an intolerable delay if he goes to Nestor’s palace. “Your father’s old,” he says to his companion Pisistratus,
“. . . in love with his hospitality;
I fear he’ll hold me, chafing in his palace —
I must hurry home!”
(ref)
Telemachus will return to a house where the suitors of Penelope represent an unusual infraction of the code: they are uninvited guests who abuse and waste their reluctant host’s possessions. Showing their utter contempt for the idea that wanderers, beggars and suppliants are under the special protection of Zeus, they offer insults and physical violence to Odysseus, the ragged beggar who, as they will eventually find out to their cost, is their unwilling host.
Odysseus’ first landfall after passing Cape Malea is the country of the Lotus-eaters, who offer three of his men food that would have kept them as permanent guests —
“[they] lost all desire to send a message back, much less return,
. . . all memory of the journey home
dissolved forever.”
(ref)
—if Odysseus had not dragged them, weeping, back to the ships. The Lotus-eaters, as he reports, “had no notion of killing my companions” (ref), but his next host, the Cyclops, not only kills but also eats six of them. Odysseus’ invocation of Zeus as protector of strangers is met with scorn —“We Cyclops never blink at Zeus . . . or any other blessed god” (ref) —and Odysseus’ request for a guest-gift is met with the concession that Odysseus will be eaten last, after all his crew. Odysseus makes his escape only because of the resourcefulness for which he is famous, but in order to trick the Cyclops he has to suppress his identity and give his name as Nobody.
Deceit is indispensable if he and his crew are to escape, but though he is master of all the arts of deceit, this particular subterfuge is one his whole nature rebels against. It is for his name and all that it means to him and his peers that he struggles to go on living and return to the world where it is known and honored. When, later, at the court of King Alcinous, he reveals his identity, he tells the banqueters, and us, not only his name but also the renown it carries. “I am Odysseus, son of Laertes, known to the world / for every kind of craft —my fame has reached the skies” (ref). He speaks of his fame in an utterly objective manner, as if it were something apart from himself; his words are not a boast but a statement of the reputation, the qualities and achievements, to which he must be true. Once free of the Cyclops’ cave, he insists, at great risk to himself and his ship, on telling the Cyclops who has blinded him: “Odysseus, / raider of cities, he gouged out your eye, / Laertes’ son who makes his home in Ithaca!” (ref). And this enables Polyphemus to invoke the wrath of his father, the sea god Poseidon, and ensure that Odysseus will “come home late / and come a broken man —all shipmates lost, / alone in a stranger’s ship,” to “find a world of pain at home” (ref).
With Odysseus’ next port of call, however, it begins to look as if Polyphemus’ prayer will remain unanswered. Aeolus, the keeper of the winds, is a generous host and sends his guest on a magical ride —the West Wind blowing steadily toward Ithaca and all the other winds imprisoned in a bag aboard his ship. In sight of home —“we could see men tending fires” (ref) —Odysseus, who has been at the helm for the entire voyage, finally relaxes. But the deep sleep he falls into allows the crew, suspecting that the bag contains treasure, to open it and let loose the winds. As his ships are blown back into the unknown, Odysseus faces the first of his temptations —“should I leap over the side and drown at once?” (ref) —but resolves to stay alive, even though the hurricane winds are hurrying his ships back to Aeolus, where his plea for further aid is indignantly rejected. His next encounter is with the gigantic cannibals, the Laestrygonians, from whom he makes a narrow escape, but with the loss of all his other ships and crews. Circe’s island confronts him with another danger, from which he escapes with the help of the god Hermes, but then she turns into a temptation. Circe, after she has renounced her plan to change him and his crew into swine, becomes a perfect hostess, entertaining Odysseus in her bed and his crew at the banquet table. Odysseus, if not bewitched, is certainly charmed, for at the end of a whole year of dalliance he has to be reminded by his crew of his duty: “Captain, this is madness! / High time you thought of your own home at last” (ref). Circe, unlike Calypso, is willing to release him, but tells him that he must first go down to the land of the dead to consult the ghost of the blind prophet Tiresias.
Homer’s picture of the lower world is of course the model for all later Western geographies of Hell, through Virgil’s sixth book of the Aeneid to that greatest of all visions of the life to come, the Divina Commedia of Dante. Quite apart from the consultation with Tiresias, the visit has a special significance for Odysseus. All through the trials of his voyage home, the temptation to find release in death has always been at hand — by suicide, as in his despair off Ithaca, or, more subtly, at any moment of tension, by simply relaxing momentarily the constant vigilance, the quick suspicion, the inexhaustible resilience and determination, that keep him alive. Anyone who has been under a continual strain in action and especially in command knows the weariness that can tempt a man to neglect precautions, take the shortcut, let things go for once; it is a mood in which the death that may result seems for the moment almost preferable to the unending bodily fatigue and mental strain. But when Odysseus sees for himself what it means to be dead, he loses any illusions he may have had that death is better than a life of unbroken tension and hardship. Homer’s world of the dead is dark and comfortless; it is no place of rest and oblivion. The shades crowd round the sacrificed animals, yearning for a draft of the blood that will for a moment bring them back to life, restore memory and the power of speech. Achilles reads the lesson to Odysseus, who had congratulated him on reigning like a king over the dead:
“No winning words about death to me, shining Odysseus!
By god, I’d rather slave on earth for another man —
some dirt-poor tenant farmer who scrapes to keep alive —
than rule down here over all the breathless dead.”
(ref)
The land of the dead has been hospitable, but perhaps Odysseus has overstayed his welcome, for as he waits to see still more shades of famous heroes,
“. . . the dead came surging round me,
hordes of them, thousands raising unearthly cries,
and blanching terror gripped me . . .”
(ref)
He heads for his ship and returns to Circe, who proceeds to plot them “a course and chart each seamark” (ref) for their voyage home.
They have yet to face the Sirens, ma
ke a choice between Scylla and Charybdis, and land, against Circe’s advice and Odysseus’ opposition, on Thrinacia, the island where the crew will slaughter the cattle of the Sun and so seal their own fate. The Sirens are another temptation for Odysseus, perhaps the most powerful of all, for if he had not been bound to the mast, he would have gone to join the heaps of corpses that surround them. “Come closer, famous Odysseus,” they sing. “We know all the pains that the Greeks and Trojans once endured / on the spreading plain of Troy” (ref). Odysseus is a veteran of a ten-year war; he is on his way back to a society in which a new generation has grown up in peace. There will be no one to understand him if he talks about the war — it is significant that once home and recognized, he does not mention it to Telemachus or Penelope. Only those who shared its excitement and horrors with him can talk about it. That is perhaps why Menelaus says he would have given Odysseus an estate in his own lands if he had come home: “how often,” he says, “we’d have mingled side-by-side! / Nothing could have parted us” (ref). The bonds forged by fellowship in dangerous action and suffering are very strong. And that is the strength of the Sirens’ appeal: “we know all the pains that Achaeans and Trojans once endured / on the spreading plain of Troy.” He orders his sailors to untie him, let him go. But of course the Sirens’ song is an invitation to live in the past, and that is a kind of death; the Sirens’ island is piled with the bones of dead men. It was in the land of the dead that he could relive the saga of Troy, with his fellow-veterans Achilles and Agamemnon. Those days are over, and he must look forward to the future, not backward to the past.
The choice between Scylla and Charybdis is still to be made, but Odysseus will have to face both —Scylla as a ship’s captain on his way to Thrinacia, and Charybdis as a lone shipwrecked sailor clinging to a piece of wreckage on the way back. Rescued by the goddess Calypso (whose name is formed from the Greek word that means “cover,” “hide”), Odysseus spends seven years a virtual prisoner on her island, “unwilling lover alongside lover all too willing” (ref). He rejects her offer to make him immortal and ageless, her husband forever. Ordered by Hermes to let him go, she reminds him of the offer and foretells the trials and tribulations that still await him on the voyage home:
“. . . if you only knew, down deep, what pains
are fated to fill your cup before you reach that shore,
you’d stay right here, preside in our house with me
and be immortal.”
(ref)
But he refuses.
Calypso’s offer and Odysseus’ refusal are an exchange unique in Greek literature and mythology. Immortality was a divine prerogative, grudgingly conferred. Heracles had to die a fiery, agonizing death to win it, and when the Dawn goddess obtained it for her mortal lover Tithonus, she forgot to ask also that he should never grow old. Now as she sets out on her route every morning, she leaves him behind in bed, where he lies inert, shriveled with age. But Calypso has offered to make Odysseus “immortal, ageless, all his days” (ref) and invited him to live with her in a paradisal environment so enchanting that
. . . even a deathless god
who came upon that place would gaze in wonder,
heart entranced with pleasure
(ref)
—a place before which Hermes, messenger of Zeus, “stood . . . spellbound” (ref). All this Odysseus rejects, though he knows that the alternative is to entrust himself again, this time alone and on a makeshift craft, to that sea about which he has no illusions. “And if a god will wreck me yet again on the wine-dark sea,” he says,
“Much have I suffered, labored long and hard by now
in the waves and wars. Add this to the total —
bring the trial on!”
(ref)
One more offer to forget his home and his identity is made and refused before he reaches Ithaca. In the land of the Phaeacians, where he is welcomed and honored, he is offered the hand in marriage of a young and charming princess and a life of ease and enjoyment in a utopian society. The offer is made not only by the king her father —
“. . . if only —
seeing the man you are, seeing we think as one —
you could wed my daughter and be my son-in-law
and stay right here with us”
(ref)
—but also, earlier, by the girl herself, in the subtle hints contained in her instructions to him about his approach to the city. She makes a final appeal to him as he goes to the banquet hall for the feast at which he will later identify himself and tell his story. She reminds him how much he owes her:
“Farewell, my friend! And when you are at home,
home in your own land, remember me at times.
Mainly to me you owe the gift of life.”
(ref)
This is not quite the resigned farewell it sounds like. The word she uses for what Odysseus owes her —zôagria —is an Iliadic word: “the price of a life.” Hephaestus uses it when Thetis comes to ask him to make new armor for Achilles; he will do anything for her, since she saved his life once —he owes her zôagria. Three times in the Iliad, Trojan warriors, disarmed and at the mercy of the victor, use the verb from which this noun is formed to offer rich ransom in exchange for their lives. Nausicaa is pressing Odysseus hard, with a word he fully understands; he had heard his captive Dolon use it to him in an appeal for his life, which was refused (Iliad 10.442–43). But now, reminded of how much he owes her, he tactfully evades the issue by taking her request literally; when he reaches home, he will pray to her as a deathless goddess all his days.
Loaded with treasure greater than all he had won at Troy and lost at sea, Odysseus, in a deep sleep, is transported in the magical Phaeacian ship to the real world and landed, still asleep, on the shore of Ithaca. When he wakes up, he does not recognize his own country, for Athena has cloaked the shore in a mist. Afraid that the Phaeacians have betrayed him, he repeats the agonized questions he has asked himself on so many strange shores —
“. . . whose land have I lit on now?
What are they here —violent, savage, lawless? —
or friendly to strangers, god-fearing men?”
(ref)
He has in fact reached the most dangerous of all his landfalls. To survive this last trial, he will have to call on all the qualities that mark him as a hero —the courage and martial skill of the warrior he was at Troy, but also the caution, cunning, duplicity and patience that have brought him safe to Ithaca.
HERO
“I hate that man like the very Gates of Death / who says one thing but hides another in his heart.” These are the words of Achilles, the hero of the Iliad (9.378–79), the chevalier sans peur et sans reproche of the Greek aristocratic tradition. He addressed them to Odysseus, who had come as leader of a delegation charged by Agamemnon and the Achaean chieftains to persuade Achilles to rejoin them in the attack on Troy. These are strange words with which to open an answer to what seems like a generous offer of compensation for harsh words uttered in anger, but Achilles knows his man. Odysseus has told no lie, but he has concealed the truth. He has repeated verbatim the bulk of Agamemnon’s message —the long list of splendid gifts, the offer of the hand of a daughter in marriage —but he has suppressed Agamemnon’s reiterated claim to superiority, his relegation of Achilles to inferior rank. “Let him bow down to me! I am the greater king, / . . . the greater man” (9.192–93).
For Achilles a lie is something utterly abhorrent. But for Odysseus it is second nature, a point of pride. “I am Odysseus,” he tells the Phaeacians when the time comes to reveal his identity, “known to the world / for every kind of craft” (ref). The Greek word here translated “craft” is dolos. It is a word that can be used in praise as well as abuse. Athena uses the word when, in the guise of a handsome young shepherd, she compliments Odysseus on the complicated lie he has just told her about his identity and his past, and it is with this word that Odysseus describes the wooden horse he contrived to bring Troy down in flames. On the oth
er hand, Athena, Menelaus and Odysseus use it of the trap Clytemnestra set for Agamemnon when he returned home, and it serves Homer as a description of the suitors’ plan to ambush and kill Telemachus on his way back from Pylos. But whether complimentary or accusing, it always implies the presence of what Achilles so vehemently rejects —the intention to deceive.
Odysseus has the talent necessary for the deceiver: he is a persuasive speaker. In the Iliad the Trojan prince Antenor, who had listened to Odysseus when he came with an embassy to Troy, remembered the contrast between his unimpressive appearance and the powerful magic of his speech. “When he let loose that great voice from his chest / . . . then no man alive could rival Odysseus!” (3.266–68). And in the Odyssey, in the palace of Alcinous, he holds his host spellbound with the story of his adventures. When he breaks off, pleading the lateness of the hour, Alcinous begs him to go on: “what grace you give your words, and what good sense within! / You have told your story with all a singer’s skill” (ref). In his travels on the way to Phaeacia, Odysseus has not had much occasion to give rein to his eloquent persuasion; his skill in deception will be needed and fully revealed only when at last he reaches the shore of Ithaca, where in order to survive he has to play the role of a penniless, ragged beggar. The tales he tells, to Athena, Eumaeus, Antinous, Penelope and Laertes are brilliant fictions, tales of war, piracy, murder, blood-feuds and peril on the high seas, with a cast of rogue Phoenician captains, Cretan adventurers and Egyptian Pharaohs. They are, as Homer says, “lies like truth,” thoroughly convincing, true, unlike the tale he told in Phaeacia, to the realities of life and death in the Aegean world, but nonetheless lies from beginning to end. And Homer reminds us of the contrast between Odysseus and Achilles by making Odysseus, just before he launches out on a splendidly mendacious account of his background and misfortunes, repeat the famous words Achilles addressed to him at Troy. “I hate that man like the very Gates of Death who / . . . stoops to peddling lies” (ref).
The Odyssey(Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition) Page 5