Who were your lovers and bridegrooms? Tammuz the slain, whose festival wailing is heard, year after year …
You broke the great wild horse and snaffled him:
he drinks the water his hobbled hooves have muddied.
The goatherd who brought you cakes and daily for you
slaughtered a kid, you turned him into a wolf …
You loved Ishullanu, your father’s gardener,
who brought you figs and dates to adorn your table …
Some say the goddess turned him into a frog …
some say into a mole whose blind foot pushes
over and over again against the loam
in the dark of the tunnel, baffled and silent, forever.
And you would do with me as you did with them.13
Odysseus is content simply to negotiate his own safety and, having done so, demands that she return his men to human form. She does so and a strange scene follows:
Their eyes upon me, each one took my hands, and wild regret and longing pierced them through, so the room rang with sobs …
That their restoration should be an emotional moment is understandable, but why the wild regret and longing? (More literally, “a yearning sorrow,” which amounts to much the same thing.) What is it that they yearn for? Can it really be that they would sooner have been left as they were to gruntle in their sty rather than be forced back into human life with all its trials and dangers? A strange suggestion but one that the poem will support. There were those who were willing to accept the groundling existence offered by the Lotos Eaters and had to be driven back wailing to their ships. Odysseus himself accepted the slothful ease that Kalypso offered and he does the same thing here, spending a year as Kirke’s lover and getting under way again only when his men reproach him: “‘Captain, shake off this trance, and think of home.’” Even his iron will can be softened14—as Menelaos’ will was softened by Helen, who, like Kirke, adds to the wine she offers her guests a substance that allays sorrow, a milder form of Kirke’s potion but working to the same end, a variation of the same theme.
They cannot make directly for home, Kirke tells them. They must first journey to the underworld. The famous episode that follows, Homer’s book of the dead, which inspired Virgil and through Virgil Dante, has often been seen as occupying a pivotal place in the poem. It should, but does it? Aeneas’ descent to the dead in Book 6 of the Aeneid really is pivotal, preparing him for the role he is to play in the second half of the poem as founder of a new civilization on Italian soil. He is granted a vision of Roman heroes to come and learns of the nature of Rome’s destined achievement as notable in the political sphere as that of Greece in the cultural. Nothing comparable is found in Homer’s book of the dead. The ostensible purpose of Odysseus’ visit is to consult the prophet Teiresias, who gives him only one useful piece of advice: not to lay hands on the cattle of the Sun god when he comes to his island of Thrinakia. The prophet also tells him of some rough sea passages he must still face, and that on reaching Ithaka he will find the lawless suitors of his wife Penelope in possession of his house. But he is not told how to deal with the situation there.
Not that Odysseus’ descent is irrelevant. There is a moving encounter with the shade of his mother that reveals an aspect of his character we had not suspected. She says to him:
“only my loneliness for you, Odysseus,
for your kind heart and counsel, gentle Odysseus,
took my own life away.”
And there is the vision he is granted (lines 267 ff. in the translation) of what Stanford calls “a masque or pageant of beautiful women” (the classical profession prefers to speak of a catalogue, a word best left to Sears, Roebuck). This is not essential, yet Fitzgerald claims—and if anyone has a right to speak of The Odyssey he has—that “the honor roll of lovely dead ladies … is fully appropriate to this poem.”15 Appropriate that a work so much concerned with women, young and beautiful or seemingly so like the goddesses, judicious like Queen Arete, wise like Penelope, should include this accolade, this pageant of storied beauties some of whom enjoyed the supreme privilege of marriage with a god, the gracious infusion of divine strength in mortal stock that antiquity called the Sacred Marriage (hieros gamos), a stumbling block to some in later classical days and a scandal to Christian readers. Strangely, this ancient mystery has come to life again in the poetry of our own century, in Yeats and Pound.
After this there is a break in the narrative and we return to Phaiákia, where Odysseus is telling his story:
Down the shadowy hall
the enchanted banqueters were still. Only
the queen with ivory pale arms, Arete, spoke …
Here indeed is a man to honor! she tells them; we must load him with precious gifts when he leaves us.
The tone grows darker when he resumes his account. He speaks first of his meeting with some of his old companions-in-arms, a reminder, after so many folktale adventures, of the heroic breed to which he belongs. Agamemnon tells how on coming home he was killed by his wife, one of the poem’s several contrasts between his return and that of Odysseus. Akhilleus tells of the wretched life of the dead—better to be the meanest serf on earth than a prince in the world below. Odysseus next sees some of the archetypal sinners, Tantalos and others, paying for their crimes. Only at the very end of the book are we made to feel that he is coming face-to-face with death itself, the terror of death. There is a commotion among the shades and he is afraid that Persephone “had brought from darker hell some saurian death’s head,” Fitzgerald’s powerful rendering of a strange line, rather more literally “the grim spectral head of some dread monster” (Stanford), still more literally “the head of the Gorgon [which had the power to turn into stone whoever looked upon it], that dread monster.” Elsewhere the splendor of the poetic imagination brings the shades so vividly to life that we have little sense of being in the world of the dead or that Odysseus, in going down there, has himself experienced a kind of death. Hence Homer’s descensus ad inferos does not have the pivotal effect it might otherwise have possessed, with Odysseus’ “death” serving as the prelude to the rebirth that awaits him when finally he sets foot on his native land.
Odysseus’ little company now returns to Kirke, no longer a dangerous figure, who welcomes them warmly and tells of perils to come. First are the Sirens—or Seirenes, as Fitzgerald calls them—who sing a man’s mind away. He who hears their song, she tells him, “will not see his lady nor his children/in joy, crowding about him, home from sea”—like those who ate the Lotos plant and became “forgetful of their homeland”—another link or recall. Next comes the narrow sea-pass between the whirlpool Kharybdis and the man-eating monster Skylla before whom he must take flight; then the island of the Sun of which Teiresias spoke. It may not be clear why Odysseus’ final adventures are predicted in this way, with the risk of weakening the force of the adventures when they come, but it serves to give his voyages a new sense of direction. Hitherto he made land on this coast or that largely by chance or impelled by some power beyond his control. However this may be, we can combine prediction and event.
As he draws near the island of the Sirens, they address him in a lilting line that asks to be sung:
Deur’ ag’ in, poluain’ Oduseu, mega kudos Akhaion …
Literally, “Come hither, famous Odysseus, great glory of the Akhaians,” but Fitzgerald hears the sweetly rhyming vowels—in ain, lu ku, ain ai—and he turns Homer’s hexameter into a lyric:
This way, oh turn your bows,
Akhaia’s glory,
As all the world allows—
Moor and be merry …
What they go on to offer, however, is not the South Seas beguilement we expect from these enchantresses but knowledge, knowledge of the Trojan War and of all that happens on the fruitful earth. (Fitzgerald’s “No life on earth can be/ Hid from our dreaming” plays down the sense of the Greek.)
Sea rovers here take joy
Voyaging onward,
As from our song of Troy
Greybeard and rower-boy
Goeth more learned.
All feats on that great field
In the long warfare,
Dark days the bright gods willed,
Wounds you bore there …
Had he stayed to listen to their singing he would have been trapped in the memory of his past instead of going forward into the future where a more difficult victory is to be won. The temptation to stay on this deadly shore strewn with the bones of those who let themselves be enchanted is so powerful that he must be tied to the mast and have the sailors’ ears plugged with wax to prevent them from hearing the siren call or hearing him when he begs to be set free.
This is the keenest test that Odysseus has had to face, but something worse and stranger is coming, the encounter with Skylla. Kirke told him:
“That nightmare cannot die, being eternal
evil itself—horror, and pain, and chaos;
there is no fighting her, no power can fight her,
all that avails is flight.”
Readers who cannot directly consult the original are likely to wonder if they can trust the translation here. Surely “eternal evil” intensified by “itself” belongs to a religious thinking beyond Homer’s ken? Other translators have thought so. Lattimore writes: “Scylla is no mortal thing but a mischief immortal”; Fagles has “Scylla’s no mortal, she’s an immortal devastation.” Earlier translators fought shy of the Greek in the same way.16 There is no nightmare or chaos in the Greek, it must be granted, but there is athanaton kakon, for which immortal or eternal evil is a valid translation. Beyond the range of Homeric diction the expression is not, for in The Iliad we find the war god Ares described as a tukton kakon (5.831), “a wrought evil,” or however one should translate it. If, however, the expression does seem to be beyond the bounds of Greek thought, we should allow that great poets can on occasion reach past the limits of their culture: witness only Antony and Cleopatra, where, in Christian England, Shakespeare creates a world untouched by the religion. Can we be so sure of the Greek master’s range that we deny him a comparable power?
We should not take the words athanaton kakon out of their context, but neither should we underrate their presence there. If we let them mean what they say, they assume an importance out of all proportion to the brevity of the scene. This is the supreme challenge that Odysseus must face to prepare him to return home and set the great wrong right. His visit to the underworld might have presented such a challenge, but it is hard to believe that it does. Here he meets something worse than death, evil, not so much metaphysical evil but rather a power, a malevolence, in nature that threatens man’s tenure in the world. He had known the cruelty of the sea, but here it is concentrated in the single figure of the devil hag waiting to grab and devour his men. To put heart in them, he compares this danger with a previous one which they survived, just as he paired his experiences with Kalypso and Kirke before he began the story of his travels. “‘Have we never been in danger before this?’” he asks them. “‘More fearsome, is it now, than when the Kyklops/penned us in his cave?’” Forgetting Kirke’s injunction not to try to fight Skylla, he arms himself and picks up his two spears, a foolish piece of Iliadic bravado. He fails the test, in a sense—perhaps it is too much for any man—but he and his men get away, all but six, whom Skylla seizes.
They next make landfall at Thrinakia, “the island of the world’s delight, the Sun,” where the cattle he cherishes pasture, seven herds and flocks with fifty beasts in each (three hundred and fifty, approximately the days of the solar year). These cattle, Teiresias had warned, must not be touched, for they are sacred to the great deity who shines on the Mediterranean world with a splendor he has nowhere else. The men are mad enough to ignore the interdiction and, taking advantage of Odysseus’ absence while he catches an hour or so of sleep, they seize the cattle, slaughter and devour them. The episode is not in itself among the most memorable, yet it is the last one that Odysseus narrates, and the poet obviously thought it important, for in the prelude to his poem he singles it out from all the others telling how Odysseus’ men were destroyed by their own reckless folly:
children and fools, they killed and feasted on
the cattle of Lord Hêlios, the Sun,
and he who moves all day through heaven
took from their eyes the dawn of their return.
A little later, when the scene moves to Ithaka, Telemakhos complains to Athena that the suitors “eat their way through all we have,” an offense that will bring them to their deaths. The crime of transgressive eating is a theme that the great poets of our tradition have dwelt on with a curious insistence. We may understand why it has bulked so large if we reflect that one of our most beautiful human achievements has been to transform the ingestion of food, a simple biological necessity, into cultural ceremony, from the homely family dinner to the high formality of the banquet. Greek piety attributed a special sanctity to the meal, which “knits the partakers together in a sacred community,” and a poet can speak of “the great oath by table and salt.”17 The Iliad begins with an anger that makes men’s bodies the food of wild beasts and reaches down to encompass the abomination of Akhilleus’ threat to hack off the flesh of his enemy and devour it. The horror that sets the Oresteia in motion is the act of brother tricking brother into eating the flesh of his own children. Paradise Lost begins with Milton calling on the muse to sing of “the Fruit/ Of that Forbidden Tree whose mortal tast/Brought death into the World and all our woe.” This great theme is at the heart of the Odyssey.
The Sun, enraged by what the sailors have done, complains to Zeus, who, as soon as Odysseus’ ship puts to sea again, shatters it with a thunderbolt. He alone survives—it takes more than a thunderbolt to do this man in—and, fastening together bits of timber, straddles his makeshift craft and is driven once again to the straits guarded by Skylla and Kharybdis. Keeping clear of the monster, he gets too close to Kharybdis and, to avoid being sucked down by the whirlpool, manages to jump onto an overhanging fig tree and waits till the dreadful gulf spews up his raft. Using his hands to paddle, he drifts for nine days in the open sea until on the tenth he is washed up on Kalypso’s island, “naked Ulysses [the Latin form of his name], clad in eternal fiction,” as Chapman saw him. We are back where we started and the tale of his travels is over.
THE RETURN
Half yet remains unsung, but narrower bound.
—Paradise Lost, 7.21
When Odysseus has completed his story, Alkinoos tells him that a ship is ready to take him home and promises a swift and safe journey. He is as good as his word, and on the evening of the next day Odysseus is taken on board. He falls asleep as the vessel skims across the water:
Slumber, soft and deep like the still sleep of death, weighed on his eyes as the ship hove seaward …
Hour by hour she held her pace; not even a falcon wheeling downwind, swiftest bird, could stay abreast of her in that most arrowy flight through open water, with her great passenger—godlike in counsel, he that in twenty years had borne such blows in his deep heart, breaking through ranks in war and waves on the bitter sea.
This night at last he slept serene, his long-tried mind at rest.
When he is carried ashore to Ithaka he cannot recognize the place: “The landscape then looked strange, unearthly strange/to the Lord Odysseus.” This magical voyage over the night sea is the first indication that the poem is changing gears. The voyage is a rebirth, bringing a new Odysseus to an old place that looks new. Nothing like this has happened before.
The previous twelve books led us to queer places, to an ogre’s cave, a witch’s dwelling in the woods, a land where natives live on nothing but the Lotos plant. The person we took for an attractive young hostess waved a wand and turned her visitors into pigs. A very large man—he had only one eye in the middle of his forehead, as it happened—ate people who came to see him. Oh well, autres pays, autres moeurs. With Odysseus back in Ithaka, we
spend most of our time in a human household and expect to feel relatively at home there even though the story is set in distant times. The central theme, the long train of hints and guesses, of revelation and occlusion, which at last brings husband and wife into each other’s arms, is within our imaginative reach, for Homer is pioneering here in territory that novelists were later to make their own. Yet the atmosphere in Odysseus’ house is stranger than anything we have met so far, for divinity is at work here in the person of Athena and her presence creates a sense of psychic disquiet and even panic. Zeus himself periodically gives intimations of his purposes. Most readers probably take this in their stride—odd Greek happenings, just part of the plot. The learned of course know all about this sort of thing and are unperturbed, since long habituation has made ancient ways of being in the world seem quite familiar. The religious, their bumper stickers bearing the message “Jesus loves you,” are likely to be puzzled, for the divine acts here with no care for our comfort and pursues ends of its own.
Best perhaps not to pay too much attention to all this—not much attention has in fact been paid. The Odyssey is after all a poem, not a treatise on Homeric theology, and we are free to accept its invitation to sit back and enjoy the lively play of the action. All the same, it might be worth a good reader’s while to look below the surface of the action to discover what is going on there.
The Odyssey: The Fitzgerald Translation Page 46