Odysseus in America

by Jonathan Shay

  Horses most royal …

  whiter than snow and swift as the seawind.

  [The king’s] chariot is a masterwork in gold and silver.

  Homer puts the idea to go after this booty in Diomedes’ mouth, but Odysseus never says, “Whoa! Let’s keep our eye on the ball,” and wholeheartedly goes for the booty.3 I’m trying to give a fair account of Odysseus’ military virtues, but everywhere I turn I stub my toe on the defects of his character—in this case he has lost sight of the military purpose of the night reconnaissance. There’s a fair chance that in the next morning’s battle the Greeks would be thrown out of their beachhead and all slaughtered. Nestor had said, just before he proposed the night reconnaissance, (Iliad 10:19Iff, Fitzgerald)

  Terrible pressure is on us….

  The issue teeters on a razor’s edge

  for all [Greeks]—whether we live or perish.

  Odysseus and Diomedes find the Thracian camp, kill the Thracian king and a lot of sleeping soldiers, and race away with the prize team and chariot, outrunning the hue and cry. They drive their prize into the Greek beachhead. Amidst all the crowing and congratulations on their flashy prize, amid the relief that both Odysseus and Diomedes have returned safely, nobody remembers to debrief them. Iliad 10 ends with the two warriors having a hot bath and a stiff drink.

  The Greeks are saved the next day, not by Odysseus, but by Achilles’ releasing his fresh troops under Patroclus’ command to take the Trojans on the flank by surprise.

  THE TROJAN HORSE

  The towering achievement, the one that secures Odysseus’ place in the pantheon of military imagination, is the ruse of the Horse. This deception, conceived and carried out by Odysseus, turned Greek defeat into victory.4

  We hear about the Horse twice in the Odyssey, first when Menelaos describes Helen’s attempt to smoke out the Greek fighters concealed inside by imitating their wives’ voices (4:307ff, Fagles), and second when Odysseus tips the singer Demodocus and requests that he sing about the Horse (8:552ff, Fagles). There’s no taking this accomplishment away from Odysseus—he did it. The basic story is a familiar one: The Greeks build a large hollow wooden horse big enough to hold a force of picked fighters. The army then embarks, pretending to give up, and the ships sail away, but they only withdraw out of sight behind the offshore island of Tenedos. The Trojans celebrate their victory and the lifting of the siege, and are deceived into bringing the Horse inside the city walls. That night while the city sleeps, the Greek ships return, while the troops inside the Horse spread out, killing Trojans and opening the gates.

  The most detailed account, based on Epic Cycle texts that have not survived to the present, except as summaries, is in Virgil’s Aeneid. Because Virgil’s analysis is so penetrating and still relevant to military surprise today, I shall rely upon it.

  The deception of the so-called Trojan Horse was complex and subtle, and deserves to be rescued from the trivializing presentation it usually receives. The Horse, according to Virgil, was “too big for the gate, not to be hauled inside!”5 Successful deception requires a dynamic falsehood, an untruth with beauty and appeal.6

  The key figure is Sinon, ingenious liar, who persuades the Trojans that he’s a Greek traitor, by scarring himself as Odysseus had done to penetrate Troy. He points out a thing that would not have been obvious on the beach some distance from the walls: the Horse was too big to be taken into the city. This endowed the deception with the innocence and certainty of truth. Sinon proclaims that if anyone violates the Horse, which he says is an offering to Athena, all of Troy will suffer. On the other hand, if they contrive to bring it up into the citadel—which on the face of it was impossible because it was too big—it would more than replace the stolen Palladium as a talisman of the city’s safety. The Palladium was a miraculous guardian statue of Athena previously stolen from the citadel of Troy by Odysseus and Diomedes.7

  The leading Trojans were dead set against having anything to with the Horse, fearing that it was a trick or a siege engine. They wanted to build a bonfire under it or throw it into the sea, and one of them, Laocoön, was so angered by the sight of it that he hurled his spear at its side.

  The response of the Trojans was not, as our schools usually teach it, “Look at the beautiful gift the Greeks left us!”

  The Trojans would probably have kept it on the beach where it was built, if the gods had not lent horrifying credence to Sinon’s claim that Athena would punish desecration of her offering—thus lending credence to the whole deception. Laocoön drew the lot as priest for that day’s sacrifice to Poseidon, and just as he was about to slaughter the bull by the water’s edge, two giant snakes crawled out of the sea and ate Laocoön’s sons and then tangled him in their coils. Almost everyone in Troy saw this as his punishment for violating Athena’s offering with his spear, and the cry went up to bring the Horse inside. It was irresistible. They even had to tear down part of the wall and dismantle the gate to get the Horse through. The false idea had taken root. Cassandra’s warnings could not dissuade them. Even the testimony of the senses could not get through: four times the Horse lurched with such force that the soldiers inside were thrown against one another, making a great clatter of their arms.

  Students at all levels of education will profit if the Trojan Horse is rescued from the children’s book treatment that it now receives, and is taught as something from which we can learn valuable lessons about the dynamic of self- deception.

  A study by James J. Wirtz, The Tet Offensive: Intelligence Failure in War,8 provides examples of how successful military deception is mostly self-deception by the target. The most prominent and appealing untruth that the Americans fell for was the Repeat-the-Glorious-Victory-of-Dien-Bien-Phu narrative. The Vietnamese had broken the French will to continue fighting in 1954 by successfully attacking and forcing the surrender of a high-profile sixteen-thousand-man French force at Dien Bien Phu. Historian Wirtz describes the grip that this appealing, but false, analysis had on the American leadership:

  Dien Bien Phu exerted a powerful influence on [American] intelligence analysts and commanders more than a year before the onset of the Tet attacks. Intelligence analysts believed that, given General Giap’s earlier victory and the devastating impact it had on French public opinion, the North Vietnamese would attempt to inflict another “Dien Bien Phu” on the United States [at Khe Sanh]. U.S. Commanders … [welcomed] the prospect of engaging the communists in a set piece battle…. U.S. commanders hoped that the communists would attempt to repeat their earlier victory, thereby allowing U.S. firepower to be fully utilized. As the siege of Khe Sanh materialized on the eve of the Tet offensive, it appeared that these hopes would finally be realized.9

  The North Vietnamese created the impression that their main effort in what is now remembered as the Tet Offensive was the Marine Combat Base at Khe Sanh. The siege of Khe Sanh successfully riveted and deceived American attention—the main effort was elsewhere. The senior American leadership had congratulated itself that the Khe Sanh Marine Combat Base worked a tether-the-goat-to-lure-the-tiger-out-of-the-mountains strategy, drawing the North Vietnamese into a position where they would be destroyed by American firepower.

  Americans endured persistent, multilayered mental assaults by their skillful and tenacious Vietnamese enemy. Booby traps, camouflage, ambush, and unexpected appearances and disappearances play with the mind. As common as the mind games of mētis are in the Odyssey, they are rare in the Iliad.10 However, the reader should not imagine that somehow the war crafts of mētis— deception, concealment, cunning, ambush, and surprise—were in general abhorrent to the warrior ethos of the noble gentlemen fighting at Troy.11 However, the Iliad is dominated by the figure of Achilles, whose personal understanding of a noble character rejected everything deceitful and devious. In his famous reply, looking straight at Odysseus, after the latter has conveyed Agamemnon’s buyout offer to him, he says, (Iliad 9:377ff, Fitzgerald)

  Odysseus, master soldier and mariner,

  I
owe you a straight answer….

  I hate

  as I hate Hell’s own gate that man who hides

  one thought within him while he speaks another.

  Duplicity was not unheroic per se in the Homeric world, but was personally hateful to Achilles, Homer’s antithesis to Odysseus. Centuries later Achilles’ enormous prestige in classical Athens made “openness [the opposite of guile]” into “the largest part of noble character “for that culture.12 Athenian contempt for secrecy and deceit was a theme in Pericles’ famous funeral oration in Thucydides: (Thucydides 2.39.1)

  And then we are different … [from the Spartans] with regard to military preparations. Our city is open to the world, and we have no periodic deportations of foreigners in order to prevent people seeing or learning our secrets which might be of military advantage to the enemy. This is because we rely, not on … deceits but on our own real courage…. The Spartans, from boyhood are submitted to the most laborious training in courage, whereas we pass our lives without such restrictions but we are no less ready to face the same dangers as they are.13

  Pericles connects deception with fear, a lack of manly courage. A character in one of Euripides’ plays says, “No brave man would choose to kill an enemy by stealth rather than confront him face on.”14 Our own culture has adopted many of the Athenian ideals. I believe that when President George W. Bush called the men who flew to their own deaths by crashing airplanes into the New York World Trade Center “cowards,” he voiced this aspect of the American classical inheritance, connecting military deception with fear and thus “cowardice.”

  SUMMARY OF THE CHARGES AGAINST CAPTAIN ODYSSEUS

  In Part One I laid out the evidence that warranted at the very least a court of inquiry if not a court-martial:

  Overall:

  • The loss of twelve ships and crews, in excess of six hundred of the youth of Ithaca and environs, who accompanied Odysseus to Troy.

  Specifically:

  • Unable to control his troops in a relatively simple situation, seventy-two lost unnecessarily at Ismarus.15

  • Takes troops into needless danger on a selfish or irresponsible impulse, six lost in the Cyclops’ cave.

  • Protects himself when he could have protected everyone, approximately 480 lost in the Laestrygonian fjord.

  • Fails to muster his crew in an orderly way for first departure from Circe’s island, one lost.

  • Unable to control his crew with regard to the Sun god’s beef, all the remaining, approximately forty, lost.

  The following would generally not give rise to charges, but reflect badly on his qualities as a leader:

  • Rarely disagrees with his boss, Agamemnon, even when the latter is disastrously wrong.

  • Doesn’t tell his men the truth: lies of both commission and omission.

  • Doesn’t trust them to do even the simplest things right, staying awake nine days and nights manning the tiller from Aeolia to Ithaca. Had this leadership failure not occurred, he would have arrived at Ithaca with approximately 530 of his crew within months of leaving Troy.

  • Indulges his own pleasures at the expense of the mission of bringing his troops home, lingering with Circe.

  And in the name of giving the defense an even break, I repeat items in Odysseus’ favor:

  • A talented and brave warrior who takes initiative and personal risks on behalf of others in a fight.

  • Brilliant in the construction of deception plans.

  • Brave, resourceful, self-sacrificing as a solo spy and as a reconnaissance leader.

  • Loyal and resourceful in carrying out his boss’s wishes.

  Odysseus seems to get into trouble when he is responsible for others. Scholars can rightly point out that applying standards for a modern military officer to Odysseus is an anachronism. For one thing, Odysseus was the independent political chief, the king if you like, of the men in his command, with arbitrary and ill-defined powers. His fiduciary duties, if any, to these men arose from a likewise ill-defined mix of personal obligations to each man and his father individually, and the very real sanction of blood revenge when he got home, if he seriously violated the town’s moral consensus.

  ACHILLES, ODYSSEUS, AND AGAMEMNON16

  These three Homeric leaders are alike in being courageous and effective fighters in their form of warfare. Achilles was a standout in speed, stamina, and spear-work. Odysseus was a brilliant archer, but also good with a spear. Agamemnon didn’t stand out in any particular military skill, but was personally brave and competent enough to win some duels.17

  But in every other dimension of leadership and military practice they contrast sharply with each other:

  The Iliad portrays Achilles as having broad, other-regarding care for all the troops, not just his own. He is famous among them for his skill and interest in treating wounds. When a plague ravages the army, it is Achilles who steps in to end it, both by obtaining a correct diagnosis and prescribing treatment. He leads by example and is lavish in his generosity to both peers and subordinates. He shows moral courage, standing up to Agamemnon, as well as great physical courage.18 As the commander of the Greek maneuver force, he has taken twelve cities by sea and eleven by land, making him the most admired fighter and troop commander in the Greek army. He is habitually blunt and truthful to the point of being tactless. What you see is what you get; he speaks the same to everyone. When angry, his language gets ungrammatical and somewhat coarse.19 He is idealistic, passionate, and energetic, letting his emotions show. He is also perfectionistic and given to self-righteousness, which makes other people not want to upset him.

  Achilles died in the final year of the war, so we know nothing of how he would have conducted himself during the homeward trip with the Myrmidons, the contingent he brought with him to Troy. We have watched Odysseus and his men on their way home. But earlier, during the war (in the Iliad), we hardly saw him with his men at all. Unlike the tongue-tied Ajax and the unadorned Achilles, Odysseus in the Iliad was eloquent in his persuasion and artistically scathing in his ridicule. He was mainly on stage as Agamemnon’s principal staff officer, or as a fighter on the battlefield where he related almost exclusively to other Greek leaders or to Trojan adversaries, but hardly at all to his own men. Agamemnon gave him the task of returning the captive woman Chryseis to her father in Iliad 1; Odysseus stopped the stampede to the ships in Iliad 2, which Agamemnon caused, saving his neck. In Iliad 2, Odysseus took the initiative as Agamemnon’s deputy to humiliate the critic Thersites and to give him a public beating. Odysseus functioned as Agamemnon’s representative where “the general’s” presence was not required, such as pacing off the dueling ground with Hector in Iliad 3. In the “Embassy” to buy out Achilles in Iliad 9, Odysseus was clearly Agamemnon’s negotiator, with Ajax and old Phoenix along to soften Achilles up. In Iliad 14, we find the only occasion where Odysseus did anything but agree with Agamemnon. With his boss in a terminal funk, ready to bolt for his ship, Odysseus said to him, (Iliad 14:95ff, Fitzgerald)

  Hell’s misery! …

  Would you, then,

  quit and abandon forever the fine town

  of Troy that we have fought for all these years,

  taking our losses? Quiet! or some other

  [Greeks] may get wind of this. No man

  … could ever

  allow that thought to pass his lips—no man

  who bore a staff, whom army corps obeyed,

  as [Greeks] owe obedience to you.

  Contempt, no less, is what I feel for you

  after the sneaking thing that you propose.

  While the two armies are in desperate combat,

  haul our ships into the sea? …

  As for ourselves, sheer ruin is what it means.

  While our long ships are hauled down, will the soldiers

  hold the line? Will they not look seaward

  and lose their appetite for battle? There,

  commander, is your way to wreck us all.”

>   Agamemnon was as much a failure as the commander of the static siege force around Troy as Achilles was a success as the commander of the mobile strike force.20 The whole tragedy of the Iliad was kicked off by Agamemnon’s breathtaking twin violations of his army’s moral order, first by impiously refusing to ransom the captive girl Chryseis to her father, the Priest of Apollo, and then by publicly dishonoring his most esteemed, most effective subordinate commander, Achilles. The next day, Agamemnon was so obtuse that he demanded the following bizarre demonstration of the army’s loyalty:

  Agamemnon tells his officers he’s going to pretend to give up the war. It’s the day after he has dishonored Achilles in front of the troops by seizing his geras, Achilles’ Medal of Honor.21 Agamemnon does one of the nuttiest things in the annals of military leadership, real or fictional. He says to his officers— (Iliad 2:77ff, Lombardo, trans.; emphasis added)

  We’d better move if we’re going to get the men [ready].

  But I’m going to test them first with a little speech,

  The usual drill— order them to beat a retreat in their ships.

  It’s up to each one of you [officers] to persuade them to stay.

  Apparently he has done this before enough times that it seems normal, and nobody says to him, “That’s a really bad idea!” Odysseus never says, “Boss, you sure you want to do that?” Then, with the whole army mustered, Agamemnon stands before them and says that even though they came ashore with a ten-to-one advantage over the Trojans, Zeus has decreed their failure after so much struggle and sacrifice: (2:150ff, Lombardo)

  Now this is what I say, and I want us all to obey:

  Let’s clear out with our ships and head for home.

  There’s no more hope we will take Troy’s … town.