It has a type of relief that’s good for a while, sure as hell better than any booze. Some of us ain’t drinking anymore so it’s harder.
The way we, amongst ourselves, look at it is it’s just another price we pay.
This very sad narrative is a remarkable example of persistence into the modern world of very ancient patterns of citizen-wife contrasted to slave-prostitute. The emotional distinction Wiry makes has been extensively discussed in terms of “the Madonna and the whore,” missing, I think, “the citizen and the slave.” Wiry was as addicted to sex as any alcoholic to alcohol or heroin addict to opiates. I do not use the term “sexaholic” as a metaphor.
The veterans’ counselor and prolific author on trauma Aphrodite Matsakis, now retired from the Vet Center system, wrote on this subject in her book Vietnam Wives, where she devoted a whole chapter to “PTSD and Sex.” She writes,
For some vets, sex is more than sex. It is a form of tranquillizer or sedative for their anxieties and other tensions. Not only does sex provide a sense of physical peace, but emotional peace as well. “Sex takes away my anger,” explains Tom. “After satisfying sex, for a few moments at least, all seems well, both within and without.” … Furthermore, for some vets, orgasm functions as a form of “shock treatment” for their depression. “If I don’t have at least three orgasms a day, I get so blue I can’t stand it. The minute I start feeling down, I reach for my wife …” [said another veteran]. When his wife refuses him sexually, it is not just sexual frustration which he suffers, but the full weight of some of his symptoms of PTSD.3
Homer, it could be said, thought that Odysseus spent eight of the ten years getting home taking the sex cure, one year for Circe and seven for Calypso. The Circe and Calypso episodes in the Odyssey may be interpreted as real attempts at calming the violent blowback of war with sex—lots of it.
Calypso, under Zeus’ orders, helps Odysseus build a large, seaworthy raft, provisions it, and sees him off. Twenty days later, nearly drowned and stripped naked by the storms that Poseidon sent to torment him, Odysseus washes up on the shores of the Land of the Phaeacians, bringing us to where we first met him at the beginning of Chapter 2.
From the Phaeacians he has succeeded in winning a wealth of guest-gifts and a swift ride home to Ithaca. We now turn to what he does and what kind of person he shows himself to be when he gets home. Homer isn’t through with us.
15 Odysseus at Home
By now you must wonder if I have not so turned against Odysseus as a military leader that I cannot rejoice in his long-sought reunion with son and wife as a veteran. Indeed, it is hard to warm to someone who has done so much harm. The portrait Homer gives us of his doings once actually at home on the island of Ithaca is hardly more endearing than the one painted by his adventures on the way. Constant lying, coldness toward his wife, cruelty toward his aged father, killing off more than a hundred townsmen, and ordering the extermination of a dozen of his women servants, and then after all that—he takes off again! The only thing that stands in the way of finally and completely writing him off as a stage villain is the rich and humanizing relationship revealed with his wife, Penelope—who amazingly turns out to be his equal and “better half.”1 For all the terrible things he has done to others, Odysseus emerges not as a monster, but as human like ourselves. The Odyssey shows us ugly deformities of character that trauma can cause, but these deformities are fully human such as might happen to ourselves, and, in fact, did happen to many of the veterans I work with.
Odysseus speeds home to Ithaca on the automated ship (it reads the minds of the Phaeacian sailors) belonging to King Alcinous and Queen Arete. For a third time in the Odyssey, he falls asleep, but this time without a bad outcome. The crew puts him ashore in a cove, still sleeping, with his treasure hoard of guest-gifts, and they leave.
Great Odysseus woke from sleep on native ground at last—he’d been away for years—but failed to know the land.
(13:213f, Fagles)
Many veterans experienced that disorienting bewilderment. This wasn’t the place they left. The rapid pace of social and cultural change in America, starting in the early 1960s, has been often remarked and often blamed by Vietnam veterans themselves for their sense of estrangement. But for a returning combat veteran to “fail to know the land” is typical for the return to civilian society. The whole middle third of Willard Waller’s 1944 The Veteran Comes Back is titled “The Soldier-Turned-Veteran Comes Back to an Alien Homeland.” Homer saw this first, and what he saw wasn’t pretty.
LIES, TESTS, DISGUISES
After stomping around in a rage at the deceit of the Phaeacians in marooning him (he thinks) on yet another foreign shore, Odysseus consoles himself by checking his treasure and finding it intact. This done, he wanders homesick and aimless by the shore and encounters an elegant youth—resembling the scion of a local noble’s house—who the poet tells us is the goddess Athena, Odysseus’ patroness, in disguise. He asks for sanctuary, for guest-protection and … what land is this anyway? With a flowery buildup, the youth replies, Ithaca.
Ithaca … Heart racing, Odysseus that great exile
filled with joy….
He stood on native ground at last
and he replied with a winging word to [Athena],
not with a word of truth …
always invoking the cunning in his heart:
“Ithaca … yes, I seem to have heard of Ithaca,
even … far across the sea …”
(13:284ff, Fagles)
And then for another thirty lines he spins a fluent stream of lies about who he is, where he comes from, and how he has landed here. This self-introduction is surprising in the same unsettling way that his self-introduction to the Phaeacians as master of cunning was surprising. He tells this utter stranger, who is armed, and from whom he is asking safe sanctuary, that he is a fugitive murderer from Crete. Is this aimed at intimidating the noble youth? I killed him, I could just as easily kill you, if you don’t give me what I want—all told in a breezy, confident, here’s-my-story-because-I-trust-you tone. Odysseus chatters on in this confidential way, mixing momentous revelation with trivial fictitious details about the boat and crew that provided his getaway. In the course of these thirty or so lines Odysseus spins a verbal web that says, I can kill you if I want; I am noble like you; I have reinforcements; I’m willing to bribe you; there’s lot’s more where that came from; and where’s my food, anyway. All of this was already recognized by ancient commentators, known as scholiasts, and the twelfth-century Greek churchman Eustathius.2
Phaeacian Court
Raid on Ismarus
Lotus Land
Cyclops
King of the Winds
Deadly Fjord
Circe
Among the Dead
Sirens
Scylla and Charybdis
Sun God’s Cattle
Whirlpool
Calypso
At Home, Ithaca
I have encountered this sort of threat by indirection in the VA Clinic. One veteran told me offhandedly about another psychiatrist he had choked—his tone suggested that I was not to worry, because I’m smarter and more understanding than the other psychiatrist was and that the veteran trusted me already. That was in the other building. This is a fresh start in a new building … and other easygoing and reassuring details.
Unlike a merely mortal VA psychiatrist, the goddess Athena doesn’t even break a sweat. With a big grin she drops her disguise and says,
Any man—any god who met you—would have to be
some champion lying cheat to get past you
for all-round craft and guile! You terrible man,
foxy, ingenious, never tired of twists and tricks—
those wily tales that warm the cockles of your heart!
Come, enough of this now. We’re both old hands
at the arts of intrigue. Here among mortal men
you’re far the best at tactics, spinning yarns,
a
nd I am famous among the gods for wisdom,
cunning wiles, too.
(13:329ff, Fagles)
This is one of several deliciously comic scenes in the Odyssey. But it is also a scene that waves like a banner at the top of the narrative hill, in the middle of the epic, announcing “disguise, deception, and misrecognition” as the dominant themes of the 12, 110-line poem.3
Without missing a beat, Odysseus chides the goddess for making herself scarce during the ten years of his wandering abroad.4 She ducks this, again strokes him for being so enchantingly devious, and turns Odysseus’ (and our) attention to his wife:
Anyone else, coming back from wandering long and hard,
would have hurried home at once, delighted to see
his children and his wife. Oh, but not you,
it’s not your pleasure to probe for news of them—
you must put your wife to the proof yourself!
(13:379ff, Fagles)
Recall that Agamemnon—as a ghost in the Underworld—had warned Odysseus not to trust any woman. Agamemnon’s own wife had conspired at his murder on the day of his return from Troy. Athena certifies Penelope’s fidelity, saying, “She waits in your halls, as always, her life an endless hardship…. Weeping away the days” (13:383ff, Fagles). But then when she says, “We’ll make plans so we can win the day” (417), she alludes for the first time to the suitors. Odysseus has heard about them from Teiresias in the Underworld,5 but Homer has not made us privy to his reactions, if any, to this information until Athena goads him on:
Think how to lay hands on all those brazen suitors,
lording it over your house now, three whole years,
courting your noble wife, offering gifts to win her.
(13:430ff, Fagles)
But she, forever broken-hearted for your return,
builds up each man’s hopes—
dangling promises, dropping hints to each—
but all the while with something else in mind.
This second, even stronger assurance of Penelope’s fidelity doesn’t stave off Odysseus’ rush of fear that he was walking into a trap.
“God help me!” the man of intrigue broke out:
“Clearly I might have died the same ignoble death
as Agamemnon, bled white in my own house too,
if you had never revealed this to me now….
(13:437ff, Fagles)
Come, weave us a scheme so I can pay them back!
… Stand by me …
and I would fight three hundred men, great goddess,
with you to brace me.”
While he doesn’t say it outright, to my ear he doesn’t take Athena’s word for Penelope’s faithfulness.
Using her powers, the goddess now disguises Odysseus by withering him to a shriveled, thin-haired graybeard beggar, and instructs him to make his way to the pig farm in the hills, managed by his loyal retainer, Eumaeus, there to gather intelligence. She herself, she says, will fly off to Sparta to call Telemachus home.
Let’s take Athena’s display of god powers to think for a moment about divine justice and peace—and how Homer might have told it differently. Recall that Odysseus has landed on Ithaca with not one of the six-hundred-plus fellow citizens he led abroad to Troy. The goddess greets him with words about the Jodies—Vietnam slang for civilians back home who had taken the GI’s girls—words that “push all his buttons” and get him enraged. Athena promises her assistance in the slaughter of these further 108 Ithacans and Ithacan neighbors, gloating that their blood and brains will splatter his floors (13:453f, Fagles).
For the moment, let’s imagine a different ending. For example, when Athena reveals herself to Odysseus on the beach and tells him of the villainous suitors, why could a war-weary Odysseus not have responded that he’s sick of death and bloodshed? She’s a goddess, after all, and has the power. If the gods are so interested in justice, let them see to it. She wears (or carries) the aegis, mere sight of which makes strong men’s knees go slack from terror—can’t she just go to his house and shake the aegis at the suitors? Or she could ask her dad to land a thunderbolt in front of the door every time one of the suitors approaches. They’ll get the idea … If this seems too far-fetched, remember the Odyssey ends exactly this way, with Athena and Zeus stopping the townsmen of Ithaca from getting blood revenge on Odysseus for their 108 newly dead sons and six-hundred-plus brothers who died on the way home from Troy. Aegis and thunderbolt—works every time. Or the poet could have come down somewhere in between, such as killing the ringleader Antinous with one shot, and then, again with Athena’s help, wresting blood money (poinē) from all the others. He’d be ahead of the game.
As I pointed out above, the Odyssey was originally performed by generations of improvisational singers who may have bound each other to the traditional “fact” of Odysseus’ bloody revenge on the suitors. I am not saying that a poetic genius could not have gained acceptance for a different set of “facts.” By the time we get to the Athenian tragic theater in the fifth and fourth centuries B.C.E., artists had “poetic license” to change the “facts,” so for example, Aeschylus’ Agamemnon is the king of Argos, not Mycenae, as Homer has it. It is impossible to tell how much poetic license the Homeric poets had.6
When thinking why Athena could not just have “brought him home” we need to consider Homer’s famous habit of showing every important turn in the plot as equally and convincingly motivated by both divine agendas and human aims.7 It is simply not in Odysseus’ character to make peace with anyone who has stolen his victuals and tried to steal his wife. He is implacable, but patient, self-disciplined, and cunning in his revenge. If character is destiny, the Homeric world saw character as formed by divine influence, symbolized by the patronage of the god or goddess who exemplified the leading trait of character. For Odysseus and Athena this trait is mētis.
The three-combat-tour tank veteran whose voice is heard often in Achilles in Vietnam limited his revenge:
I had a picture of her I wrapped in plastic and kept in an ammo box. Every day I would take the picture out and look at it and write her a letter. An’ every day, sometimes two or three the same day, she’d write to me. ’Course they didn’t come every day, but in big bunches when they brought the mail out to us.
Well, the letters just stopped. I wrote to her an’ wrote to her, pleading with her to tell me how I hurt her, how I made her mad at me. Not a word. No letters. Nothin’.
I guess I went a little crazy. That was when I started seeing mass wave attacks that wasn’t there. I was firing and firing and … I guess I was becoming a danger—I mean to us, not the enemy, and that’s when they tied me up and put pills in my mouth an’ put me in the bustle rack behind the [tank] turret, till they got back and they sent me home because my tour and enlistment were up anyway. I don’t remember much of that.
I get back home and find out what happened. She was at a party and drank too much and this guy rapes her, actually I knew the guy. An’ she gets pregnant and thinks she has to marry him because it’s his baby and he asks her to marry him.
When she heard I was home she threw him out and had me come over. She said, you’re the only man I’ve ever loved and I love you now. I remember it so clear. I had a glass of beer in my hand. I threw it in her face and walked out of that house. I never saw her again.
That’s just what happened.
This man grew up in an American Roman Catholic family and community very different from the zero-sum honor culture of the Homeric world. He killed neither her nor her rapist husband. The anguish and abandonment that he felt when her sustaining letters stopped mattered more to him than current sexual jealousy that another man had taken his girl. His mind and emotions were still in Vietnam, and in Vietnam she had severed the lifeline of the warm-hearted and high-minded youth who had gone to war. The “animal” who came home—the “animal” he became as a berserker8 after Timmy’s death (see page 81, above)—no longer cared about the girl or their love. I doubt tha
t the likelihood of being caught and imprisoned restrained his hand. His heart was too deadened to care one way or another.
To be fair, Odysseus’ life is in serious danger from the suitors, regardless of Penelope’s fidelity, despite his boast to Athena on the beach that he could kill off twice their number with her at his side (13:447, Fagles). His danger is greater if Penelope has been cheating on him, but usurpation is definitely in the wind—possibly in the suitors’ minds as just vengeance for the dead crews of his flotilla. The suitors plan to murder Telemachus on his way back from his visit to Pylos and Sparta. Odysseus must keep secret his solitary, unarmed, unsupported presence in Ithaca if he hopes to survive. The situation demands that he lie and dissemble to everyone, with the exception of his son, Telemachus, before he springs his ambush on the suitors—the situation motivates this as much as his devious character.9
The only real question now is whether Penelope will also end up among the dead.
Odysseus makes his way to the loyal swineherd’s hut, tells him a detailed and entertaining pack of lies. For his trouble, the swineherd calls him a liar on the one true thing he’s said: that Odysseus is alive and nearby. The swineherd’s skepticism is not without foundation. A procession of scammers has passed through Ithaca selling phony information on Odysseus’ whereabouts. Odysseus is now on notice that he will have to convince Penelope that he is genuine. However, we begin to suspect that loyal Eumaeus, the swineherd, has already guessed who this wizened beggar is, because he not only orders the fattest boar killed for their supper, but also presents Odysseus with the choicest cut from the loin.
Homer cuts to Sparta where Athena appears to Telemachus and advises him to hightail it for home, but to come in the back door to Ithaca, to avoid the assassins laying for him. At the same time, she plants a doubt in Telemachus’ mind (and ours) about the depth of Penelope’s loyalty. With this chilling thought about his mother, Athena tells him to hurry back:
Be careful lest she carry from your halls some treasure against your will.
Odysseus in America Page 16