The Odyssey(Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)

by Robert Fagles

  4.6. the son of great Achilles: Neoptolemus, who married Hermione, the daughter of Helen and Menelaus. See refff. and note ref.

  4.96. Three times in the circling year the ewes give birth: A typical traveler’s yarn about a far-off region —it is an impossibility for ewes to bear three cycles of lambs in every year, since the gestation period for sheep is about 150 days.

  4.106. I lost this handsome palace built for the ages: Presumably because he did not see it for seventeen years; but also because Paris and Helen, when they left, stripped it of all its treasures. In the Iliad the terms of the duel between Menelaus and Paris in Book 3 are that if Paris wins he will keep “Helen and all her wealth”; if not, the Trojans will surrender Helen and “those treasures” (3.86–88).

  4.144. tripods: Large metal pots or cauldrons standing on three legs so they can straddle a fire. Often highly ornamented for presentation as a gift or prize, they were unusually valuable and rare.

  4.165. Odysseus’ feet were like the boy’s: Since ancient Greeks went barefoot or wore sandals most of the time, familiarity with the shape of someone else’s foot was nothing strange. In Aeschylus’ tragedy The Libation Bearers Electra recognizes the footprints left on the ground by her brother Orestes.

  4.304. What a piece of work the hero dared: Odysseus’ most famous exploit, celebrated in song at the court of Alcinous (ref) and invoked by Athena disguised as Mentor to spur him on in the fight against the suitors (ref), was to plan and participate in the stratagem that brought about the fall of Troy —the wooden horse in which he and a band of Achaean heroes were concealed while the Trojans brought it into the city as an offering to Athena.

  4.454. his lovely ocean-lady: The wife of Proteus, who is either Thetis or Amphitrite.

  4.560. Ajax . . . went down: Little Ajax, son of Oileus. See note ref.

  4.574. Agamemnon got away / in his beaked ships: This passage shows Homer’s uncertain grasp of the geography of the western side of the Aegean Sea. Agamemnon’s home is Argos; he would have no reason to sail as far south as Cape Malea on his way home. Furthermore, the prevailing wind at the cape is NE; it is the wind that blows Odysseus’ ship SW into the unknown world. It is also far from clear exactly where Aegisthus’ home is. It must be close to Agamemnon’s if Aegisthus is able to prepare an ambush in his palace, then go out to meet the king as soon as his spy reports his arrival, yet at 581–83 it sounds as if it were far away. The confusion here may stem from the amalgamation of two different accounts of Agamemnon’s return home. See Introduction, p. ref.

  4.590. One whole year he’d watched: Presumably Aegisthus posted the watchman during the tenth year of the Trojan War, the year that Calchas has prophesied would see the city’s fall. A simple hireling of Aegisthus in the Odyssey, the watchman becomes a loyal servant of Agamemnon in Aeschylus’ Oresteia, where he unwittingly ensures the king’s death by rushing the news of his arrival to Clytemnestra, his queen.

  4.632. it’s not for you to die: This special dispensation for Menelaus has nothing to do with merit: he qualifies for Elysium simply because he is the husband of Helen, who will later be worshiped as a goddess at Sparta and elsewhere in Greece.

  4.663. three stallions and a chariot: Two under the yoke and a third to serve as a trace horse.

  4.738. he boarded ship for Pylos days ago: Actually Athena did, disguised as Mentor, and the goddess set sail with Telemachus for Pylos four days before.

  4.857. sifting barley into a basket: Barley is scattered on the sacrificial animal before it is killed (see ref). We do not know what Penelope intends to do with it: pour it out as a sort of libation? offer it to the goddess?

  5.60. that island worlds apart: Ogygia, home of Calypso.

  5.134. Orion . . . Demeter . . . Iasion: Orion was a giant huntsman with whom Eos, the dawn goddess, fell in love; after his death he became a constellation. Demeter was the goddess of the crops and especially of wheat; the place where she made love with Iasion was a field ritually plowed with a triple furrow at the beginning of the plowing season.

  5.161. the guide and giant-killer: In the Greek, two regular epithets of Hermes. He is called the guide or escort (the meaning of the word is disputed) because he is often sent by Zeus to act in that role, as at the start of Book 24, when he escorts the dead souls of the suitors to the underworld. The other epithet refers to the fact that, at the request of Zeus, Hermes killed a monster of immense strength called Argos, who had eyes all over his body, so that he could keep some of them open when he slept. He was killed because Hera had sent him to guard Io, a woman Zeus was in love with, whom Hera had changed into a cow.

  5.205. the Styx: The main river of the underworld was the guarantor of oaths sworn by the gods. Any one of the gods, Hesiod tells us (Theogony 793–806), who pours a libation of the river’s water and swears falsely is paralyzed for one year and for nine years after that is excluded from the feasts and assemblies of the gods. See note ref.

  5.299. the stars . . . the Plowman . . . the Great Bear . . . the Hunter: “Plowman” is the English equivalent of the Greek name Boôtes, a constellation that sets in the late evening. “The Wagon” is the constellation also known as the Big Dipper and the Great Bear. As seen from the northern hemisphere, it never disappears below the horizon or, as Homer puts it, “plunge[s] in the Ocean’s baths.” The Great Bear is referred to as “she” (301) because she was originally the nymph Callisto, who ranged the woods as one of the virgin companions of the goddess Artemis. Zeus made her pregnant, and when this could no longer be concealed, Artemis changed her into a bear and killed her. Zeus in turn changed her into the constellation. The Hunter is Orion.

  5.367. Ino, a mortal woman once: Ino, daughter of Cadmus, jumped into the sea at Corinth with her infant son in her arms, in flight from her insane husband, Athamas. Her new name —Leucothea —means “white goddess.”

  6.156. fling his arms around her knees . . . / plead for help: What Odysseus declines to adopt is the position of the suppliant —kneeling, clasping the knees of the person supplicated, reaching up to his (or her) chin. It is a gesture that symbolizes the utter helplessness of the suppliant, his abject dependence, but at the same time applies a physical and moral constraint on the person so addressed. The Greeks believed that Zeus was the protector and champion of suppliants. See ref, ref.

  6.245. I would be embarrassed: He has of course been naked all along, but shielding his privates with the olive branch —“the first gentleman in Europe,” as Joyce described Odysseus in this scene. Since, however, men are regularly bathed by young women elsewhere in the poem (ref, ref), his modesty here seems strange. It may be due to the fact that, unlike Telemachus when he is bathed by Nestor’s youngest daughter and Odysseus himself when bathed by Circe’s handmaids, he is now “a terrible sight . . . all crusted, caked with brine.” From Homer’s point of view, of course, it is necessary to get him off by himself so that Athena can make him “taller to all eyes, / his build more massive now.”

  7.62. Arete, she is called, and earns the name: / she answers all our prayers: The name brings to mind the Greek verb araomai, “pray,” which suggests the meaning “prayed for” (by her parents) as well as “prayed to” (by suppliants like Odysseus).

  7.64. the same stock that bred our King Alcinous: See Genealogy (adapted from Garvie), p. ref.

  7.233. Spinners: The Fates. They were visualized as three women spinning thread, a normal household occupation for Greek women: the thread was a human life. After Homer they were given names: Clotho (“Spinner”), Lachesis (“Allotter” — she decided how long the thread should be), and Atropos (“one who cannot be turned back”), who cuts the thread.

  7.368. more distant than Euboea: A long, narrow island off the eastern coast of Greece; for the Phaeacians, who apparently live in the fabulous west, it is “off at the edge of the world” (369).

  7.371. Rhadamanthys . . . Tityus: Rhadamanthys was a legendary Cretan king who after his death went to Elysium (ref). Tityus was one of the great legenda
ry sinners; for his attempt to rape the goddess Leto, the mother of Apollo and Artemis, he was eternally tortured in the lower world (ref). Why Rhadamanthys went to Euboea to visit him we do not know.

  8.41. a crew of fifty-two young sailors: The ship is apparently a penteconter, and so requires fifty oarsmen plus two officers.

  8.89. The Strife Between Odysseus and Achilles: Our sources do not explain the cause of the strife between the two. See Introduction, p. ref.

  8.129. young champions rose for competition: The translation attempts to gloss the Homeric names of the Phaeacian competitors in terms of their root meanings in Greek, all of them fittingly nautical for a seafaring people. In doing so, the translator has followed the lead of earlier translators of the Odyssey, W. H. D. Rowse (1937) and Robert Fitzgerald (1961), as well as his own practice in glossing the names of the Nereids in the Iliad (18.43–56). The translator uses the same strategy with other, though far from all, “significant names” in the Odyssey: with those of Odysseus’ forebears, for example, as Autolycus cites them in Book ref, and with Odysseus’ fictitious parents in Book ref. See notes ref, ref, ref, ref.

  8.144. the length two mules will plow a furrow: This length (ouron) is the customary length Greek plowmen went before turning; we have no accurate figure for it, and the usual guess is 30 to 40 meters.

  8.302. The Love of Ares and Aphrodite: Hephaestus, the smith god, is lame. This may be a reflection of the fact that in a community where agriculture and war are the predominant features in the life of its men, someone with weak legs and strong arms would probably become a blacksmith. He seems to have been lame from birth: in the Iliad (18.461–64) he says that his mother, Hera, threw him out of Olympus because of this defect.

  8.321. Lemnos: A center of the cult of Hephaestus, Lemnos was an island noted for its volcanic gas and inhabited by people whom Homer identifies as Sintians (see ref), who rescued Hephaestus after his fall from Mount Olympus.

  8.361. our Father: Zeus, the father of both Aphrodite and Hephaestus.

  9.27. [Ithaca] lies low and away, the farthest out to sea: For the vagueness of Homeric geography see Introduction, p. ref, and note ref.

  9.74. the triple cry: A funeral rite, presumably a farewell to the dead; three times presumably to make sure the dead hear the cry.

  9.232. twenty cups of water he’d stir in one of wine: A powerful wine indeed. Ancient Greeks drank their wine diluted with water (as do many modern Greeks), but the usual proportions of water to wine were 3:1 or 3:2.

  9.410. Nobody —that’s my name: The Greek word outis, the name Odysseus gives himself, is formed from the normal Greek locution for “nobody” —ou tis, “not anybody.” This enables Homer to make brilliant use of wordplay that cannot be adequately reproduced in English. When his fellow Cyclops ask Polyphemus why he is making such an uproar and he tells them “Nobody’s killing me now by fraud and not by force,” they naturally misunderstand it and reply, “If . . . nobody’s trying to overpower you . . .” (456–57). But in Greek their reply has a different form for “no one”: not ou tis but mê tis, the usual form for use after the word “if.” But mê tis, “not anyone,” sounds exactly the same as mêtis, a key word of the Odyssey, the main characteristic of its hero: craft, cunning. And Polyphemus is in fact being overpowered by the mêtis, the craft and cunning of Odysseus. See, for example, ref, ref, ref, 508, 573, ref, ref.

  9.560. Odysseus, / raider of cities . . . / Laertes’ son who makes his home in Ithaca: For the importance of Odysseus’ declaration of his name, see Introduction, pp. ref, ref.

  9.590. if he’s fated to see / his people once again . . . let him find a world of pain at home: Polyphemus’ curse will be repeated by Tiresias as prophecy in the underworld (ref) and by Circe as a solemn warning on the island of Aeaea (ref).

  10.563. there into Acheron . . . rivers flow: The names Acheron and Styx are glossed in the translation; the Greek name of the River of Fire is Pyriphlegethon and that of the River of Tears, Cocytus. Milton has made their names and etymologies resound in Paradise Lost:

  . . . four infernal Rivers that disgorge

  Into the burning Lake their baleful streams:

  Abhorred Styx the flood of deadly hate,

  Sad Acheron of sorrow, black and deep;

  Cocytus, nam’d of lamentation loud

  Heard on the rueful stream; fierce Phlegeton

  Whose waves of torrent fire inflame with rage.

  2.575–81

  11.146. a fan to winnow grain: Before the invention of a threshing machine in 1784, grain was beaten on a flat surface on a windy hill; it was then thrown up into the wind to blow away the chaff in a shallow basket fixed to the end of a long handle, a winnowing fan.

  11.154. a gentle, painless death, far from the sea: Aeschylus and Sophocles may have understood the words as “out of the sea,” for they both wrote tragedies based on a legend that Odysseus was killed by a fishbone, either through blood poisoning from a scratch or as the result of a wound inflicted by a spear tipped with fishbone, which Telegonus, his son by Circe, wielded. But the words “a gentle, painless death” tell against this interpretation.

  11.268. Tyro: Among her descendants are Nestor, Jason, the leader of the Argonauts, and Melampus, the grandfather of Theoclymenus. For Tyro’s line, see Introduction, p. ref, and Genealogies (adapted from Jones and Stanford), pp. ref, ref.

  11.307. Epicaste: She is called Iocaste (Jocasta) in Sophocles’ play Oedipus the King, in which Oedipus, when he learns the truth, blinds himself and leaves Thebes, in exile.

  11.318. Chloris: Daughter of Amphion of Orchomenos (not the Amphion who founded Thebes; see ref). She was married to Neleus, father of Nestor. Neleus would give the hand of their daughter Pero only to the man who could recover his stolen cattle from Iphiclus, who had driven the herd from Pylos to his home at Phylace in Thessaly. Melampus, captured in an attempt to recover the cattle, was imprisoned but released because of his prophetic skills. A different form of the story is given at ref. See note ad loc., and Genealogies, pp. ref, ref.

  11.343. Castor . . . Polydeuces: Twin sons of Leda, who are often referred to as the Dioscuri —“sons of Zeus.” The extraordinary privilege granted them —that they should come back to life on alternate days —was attributed to the fact that one was the son of Zeus and the other of Tyndareus, Leda’s human husband. (The usual English form of Polydeuces is Pollux.)

  11.351. Otus . . . Ephialtes: The best-known version of the story is that they piled Mount Pelion on Mount Ossa in Thessaly to reach Mount Olympus, the home of the gods; here the gods are imagined as living in the sky.

  11.364. Ariadne: She helped Theseus kill the Minotaur and left Crete with him but, according to the usual version of the story, was abandoned by him on the island of Dia off the northern shore of Crete (on the island of Naxos in other accounts), where Dionysus came to take her as his bride, and she “play[ed] the queen,” as Robert Graves has said, “to nobler company.” Why the god denounced her in Homer’s version we do not know.

  11.369. Eriphyle: She accepted from Polynices, leader of the Seven Against Thebes, a necklace as a bribe for persuading her husband, the prophet Amphiaraus, to join the expedition, in which he met his death.

  11.591. Eurypylus: Like Amphiaraus, he lost his life as the result of a bribe, this time one accepted from King Priam of Troy by his mother, who persuaded her son to fight on the Trojan side.

  11.625. Pallas and captive Trojans served as judges: The captured sons of the Trojans would obviously be competent judges of the fighting qualities of their opponents. Athena, however, who favored Odysseus in all things, was hardly an impartial judge. The unexpected decision was such a shock to Ajax that he went berserk and tried to kill Agamemnon, Menelaus and Odysseus but, thwarted, killed himself instead. His suicide is the subject of Sophocles’ tragedy Ajax. See note ref.

  11.660. Tityus: See note ref.

  11.669. Tantalus: Homer takes for granted the audience’s knowledge of Tantalus’ offense. Later acco
unts of it differ in detail, but food and drink play a part in most of them. One version has Tantalus, who was a confidant and often invited guest of the gods, invite them to his palace for a feast and serve up to them the cooked flesh of his son Pelops, as a test of their divine powers of perception. They all refused the meat, except Demeter, who gnawed on a shoulder. After Tantalus was dispatched to his everlasting punishment in Hades —doomed, fittingly enough, to eternal thirst and hunger —Pelops was put back together again and brought to life; the missing part of his shoulder was replaced by a marble prosthesis, which was on display centuries later at Olympia, the site of the games founded by Pelops.

  11.681. Sisyphus: A great trickster (in some accounts he is the real father of Odysseus), who tricked even the God of Death. On his deathbed he told his wife not to perform the funeral rituals for him. Once in Hades, he complained that his wife had left him unburied and asked permission to return and persuade her to do her duty. Permission was given, but once at home, he refused to return and lived on to a ripe old age.