As Odysseus is looking round for the gifts that the Phaiákians put on board the ship, Athena, disguised as a young man, turns up. She left him to prove himself until near the end of his voyages she came to his aid, providing him with the means of getting away from Kalypso and smoothing his way in Phaiákia. Her guidance is now more urgently needed, for a greater task awaits Odysseus: the restoration of order in his house. She tells him that the strange land he has come to is Ithaka. Ah yes, he says, “‘Far away in Krete I learned of Ithaka,’” and spins an entirely fictitious story. This amuses Athena and she reveals herself, then dispels the mist that had prevented him from recognizing his own country. They sit down together, clever goddess by clever man, planning “to work the suitors death and woe.” Revenge, the first of the three themes that dominate this half of the poem. She transforms him into a wrinkled old man, the poet’s oblique way of introducing the second theme, Recognition. To be recognized in his home, he must go there in disguise. She tells him to make his way to the faithful swineherd Eumaios while she goes to Sparta to bring Telemakhos back, preparing for the third main theme, Reunion.
The poet leaves Odysseus in the swineherd’s steading for three whole books, 14, 15, 16. Why not send him to his troubled home at once? There are practical reasons for not doing so. Had he gone there in his own person, he would probably have been killed. Nonetheless, in comparison with the fast-moving action of the first part of the poem the second seems to take its time unduly and one can’t help wishing that Homer would get a move on. Great narrator that he is, he knows that he can afford to take his time here and that he needs the time to domesticate the voyager in strange seas and set him solidly on terra firma among ordinary people—like Eumaios, the first of the allies who will help him to settle his score with the suitors. A decent straightforward man, the swineherd is like no one we have met in the poem and Homer describes his life in loving detail. “‘All wanderers/and beggars come from Zeus,’” he says piously as he sets Odysseus down to a good plain meal of roast pork, explaining that the best pork has gone to feed the suitors, “cold-hearted men, who never spare a thought/for how they stand in the sight of Zeus.” He warms Odysseus’ heart by speaking of his love for his old master, now dead and gone, he laments. Having fed his guest, he asks where he has come from, giving Odysseus his cue for another long slice of autobiographical fiction, not quite so fictional this time, since it includes an incident that resembles his own raid on the Phaiákia, and he claims that on one occasion he met Odysseus preparing to return home. You might have spared us that, Eumaios says; too many travelers on the make have been arriving with tales of this kind. The evening turning cold, Odysseus feels the need for some warm wear, but instead of asking this kindly host for something to put on, he comes out with a rather pointless story of how on an ambush in wartime he played a trick to get a comrade’s cloak. Not to be outdone, Eumaios now tells the story of his life, presumably a true story. The poet needs to take his time, but does he really need quite so much time?
Athena has now set off for Sparta, where she finds Telemakhos still enjoying Menelaos’ princely hospitality. She takes him to the steading, where father and son, reunited, fall into each other’s arms and together they too begin to plan for the day of revenge; the armor in the great hall of Odysseus’ house must all be stored away to prevent the suitors from getting at it.
At last the time has come for Odysseus to return home, disguised by Athena as a beggar. She tells him to see what he may get from the suitors:
“You may collect a few more loaves, and learn
who are the decent lads, and who are vicious—
although not one can be excused from death!”
We understand that the goddess intends to help Odysseus to recover his estate and punish the intruders who have been paying court to his wife, the bad and not so bad alike, it seems. But why is she so malignant? And why in later scenes do we find her leading them on and making them behave worse than they usually do? The reader is likely to miss the ancient religious thinking that lies below the action. Athena is doing what churchgoers repeating the Lord’s Prayer on Sunday morning ask God not to do: “lead us not into temptation.”18 This dark old fear is more fully expressed in later Greek poetry. Aeschylus grimly spells it out in some lines from The Persians where he speaks of “the crafty deception of Zeus” through whose agency “Delusion with kindly seeming leads men into her nets” (lines 95 ff.). Heaven, working through involuntary mortal agents, is bringing about the restoration of order. Disorder in the home or state shakes the very sum of things and cannot be allowed to continue.
Intimations of the return of Odysseus, the conscious agent of heaven’s will, are beginning to gather. Telemakhos, back from his trip abroad, tells Penelope what he heard from Menelaos, that his father is alive but unable to come home, detained on a remote island by Kalypso. Theoklymenos, a visionary whom Telemakhos met while on his travels and brought home with him, intervenes and sets the matter straight:
“O gentle lady,
wife of Odysseus Laertiades …”
This is the first time that she has been addressed in this way: she is the wife, not the widow, of Odysseus. He goes on:
“Zeus be my witness, and the table set
for strangers and the hearth to which I’ve come—
the lord Odysseus, I tell you,
is present now, already, on this island!
Quartered somewhere, or going about, he knows
what evil is afoot. He has it in him
to bring a black hour on the suitors.”
“‘If only this came true,’” she says sadly; it will be some time before she recognizes as her husband the man who is coming to the house.
Odysseus is in fact already on his way there and arrives without being recognized by anyone except his old dog Argos, whom he sees lying neglected on a heap of dung. He had trained him as a hunter before sailing for Troy. Hearing his master’s voice, the dog is just able to wag his tail but is too weak to get up. Odysseus says a few words about his bravery and skill:
but death and darkness in that instant closed
the eyes of Argos, who had seen his master,
Odysseus, after twenty years.
In no country are dogs so valued as they are in England, yet English poetry has nothing to match the solemnity and beauty of this brief scene.
Odysseus goes in and begins plying his beggarly business. He asks Antinoos, the nastiest of the suitors, for a morsel to eat, getting in return a footstool thrown at him. Upstairs, Penelope hears the noise and asks Eumaios to fetch the new visitor—who knows, he may have some information about Odysseus. He is not far away, Eumaios tells her, up north in Thesprotia, collecting treasure on his way home. “‘Ah, if he comes again,’” she says,
“no falcon ever
struck more suddenly than he will, with his son,
to avenge this outrage!”
Ah, if he comes again … As though in answer to these words something happens:
The great hall below
at this point rang with a tremendous sneeze—
“kchaou!” from Telémakhos—like an acclamation.
And laughter seized Penélopê.
Why does she laugh—because she hears her son sneeze? A sneeze is a disruption of the body’s economy, to us a matter of small moment, but in Homer’s world it can be something more; it may carry a message, it may be an omen. The Homeric omen, Norman Austin writes, “assumes order [in this instance disorder] and meaning in the external world, and sees in one small event a paradigm of the order. It is man’s part to discern that structure from a single clue and then to modify his behavior in accordance with it.” “Penelope laughs,” he explains, “because Telemakhos’ sneeze is an omen of the same sort that her laughter is to us. She has just felt some change in the atmosphere of her hall, and has sensed its connection with the stranger’s arrival.”19 The atmosphere has indeed changed, for heaven is taking a hand in Odysseus’ affairs, and the simple
st action or event may be fraught with meaning. Homeric man lives in an intelligible world where things mean. His world does not have the omnipresent meaningfulness of The Divine Comedy, which can seem oppressive; it is rather one where man enjoys an open, companionable relation to natural phenomena in which he may sometimes detect a divine hand.
In comes a professional beggar, one Iros, who tells Odysseus to get off his turf. Odysseus accepts the challenge and with a single blow hooks him under the ear and shatters his jawbone. The suitors like this sort of thing—they “whooped and swung their arms, half dead/with pangs of laughter.” The Greek is stranger, literally, “they died with laughter.” They will before long, but not with laughter. The house is charged with Athena’s presence and men are not masters of themselves. The suitors are grateful to Odysseus for giving them this fine sport and wish him the best—“‘May the gods grant your heart’s desire!’” He “found grim cheer in their good wishes,” Fitzgerald translates, but again we need a more literal rendering: “he was pleased by the omen.” A verbal omen of this sort consists of any chance utterance that can carry a significance not intended by the speaker and may be a portent of what is to come.
Amphinomos, the most decent of the suitors and potentially a tragic character, hands the supposed beggar a fine plate of food and wishes him good luck. Another omen—they are coming thick and fast now. A design is at work, but not of man’s designing. “‘You seem gently bred,’” Odysseus says and speaks gravely of the radical insecurity of the human condition:
“Of mortal creatures, all that breathe and move,
earth bears none frailer than mankind. What man
believes in woe to come, so long as valor
and tough knees are supplied him by the gods?
But when the gods in bliss bring miseries on,
then willy-nilly, blindly, he endures.
Our minds are as the days are, dark or bright,
blown over by the father of gods and men.”
He adds:
“So I, too, in my time thought to be happy.”
This recalls the words that Akhilleus addressed to Priam in the final book of The Iliad, the highest point that poetry has ever reached: “We heard that you too, old man, were once happy” (line 543). The Odyssey has not sounded a note like this before, nor have we heard Odysseus speak at this reflective depth. Like the chorus in an ode of Greek tragedy, he stands back from and above the immediate action and looks beyond it to the universal laws that govern the lives of all men on earth.
Amphinomos listens to these solemn words, but they cannot help him. “Now his heart foreknew/the wrath to come, but he could not take flight,/being by Athena bound there.” He will die at Telemakhos’ hands. The workings of heaven are like a landslide carrying all before it, innocent and guilty alike, creating the mental disturbance we sensed in the suitors’ crazy laughter, and sense again as Penelope, prompted by Athena, says that she feels
a wish to show herself before the suitors;
for thus by fanning their desire again
Athena meant to set her beauty high
before her husband’s eyes, before her son.
Knowing no reason, laughing confusedly,
she said:
“Eurýnomê, I have a craving
I never had at all—I would be seen
Among those ruffians, hateful as they are.”
No wonder she laughs confusedly, for the wish is not hers but Athena’s; the goddess is using her to lead the suitors to their destruction. When she appears, her beauty heightened by the goddess, “their hearts grew faint with lust;/not one but swore to god to lie beside her.” Or can it be, for we should let the deliberate ambiguity in these lines play both ways, that she herself wishes to woo the man who might just be her husband by flirting with the suitors in order to make him jealous? Whatever in her confusion she may have in mind, Athena’s intentions are made clear a little later when Telemakhos says to them:
“Bright souls, alight with wine, you can no longer
hide the cups you’ve taken. Aye, some god
is goading you.”
For once the translation misses something essential. In the Greek, Telemakhos calls them daimonioi, literally “driven by a daimn,” a more than human power. You are maddened, he goes on, driven by a mania sent by a god. Understandably, Fitzgerald is trying to avoid taking us out of our depths, for divinity actively present in human affairs is beyond the compass of our thought and experience today, hard for the secular person even to imagine and disturbing to the Laodicean religious who are no longer taught that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom and suppose that should the divine take a hand in our affairs its purposes will be benign. The older world thought otherwise and knew how disruptive its inroads may be. It may manifest itself as light, a sudden more than natural radiance, as it does near the start of Book 19 when Athena holds up a golden lamp. “‘Oh, Father,’” Telemakhos cries:
“here is a marvel! All around I see
the walls and roof beams, pedestals and pillars,
lighted as though by white fire blazing near.
One of the gods of heaven is in this place!”
Or it may make itself manifest as terror. Near the end of Book 20, Telemakhos says that he does not oppose his mother’s marriage, though he cannot pack her off against her will. At this
Pallas Athena touched off in the suitors
a fit of laughter, uncontrollable.
She drove them into nightmare, till they wheezed
and neighed as though with jaws no longer theirs,
while blood defiled their meat, and blurring tears
flooded their eyes, heart-sore with woe to come.
Then said the visionary, Theoklymenos:
“O lost sad men, what terror is this you suffer?
Night shrouds you to the knees, your heads, your faces;
dry retch of death runs round like fire in sticks;
your cheeks are streaming; these fair walls and pedestals
are dripping crimson blood. And thick with shades
is the entry way, the courtyard thick with shades
passing athirst toward Erebos, into the dark,
the sun is quenched in heaven, foul mist hems us in …”
The daemonic seizure that Athena impels on the suitors has collapsed the walls that shield mortals from the dread invasion of divinity. Our human earth has turned into hell, a reverse transfiguration—Christian terminology can hardly be avoided. To find speech for this, the poet must strain his language to a point where most translators dare not go. The Greek words that follow “your heads, your faces,” oimg de dede, “and groaning bursts into flame,” are too much for Fitzgerald, who substitutes a line of his own invention. Only Chapman stands up to the wildness of the synesthesia: “shriekes burn about. you.” Theoklymenos sees—sees, not foresees; this is vision, not prophecy—the suitors transformed into their shades, dead living men on their way to the world below. The sun itself cannot look on this horror and is “quenched,” extinguished.
This vision from Book 20 is still to come. Before the suitors are readied for what they are to suffer, Odysseus, the human agent of their fate on earth, must become what the whole poem has been preparing him to be, the husband of Penelope. The discord of their long separation must be resolved into the harmony—in the Greek sense of the word, a joining or putting together—of their marriage. This is the matter of the decisive Nineteenth Book, which brings them together for the first time.20 Sitting with him in the great hall, Penelope asks him who he is and where he has come from. It is the practice of this rusé personnage when questioned to start talking about something else. He did this in Phaiákia when Queen Arete asked him where he had got the clothes he was wearing. He does the same thing here. He begins by praising Penelope’s fame and wisdom, in this way winning her confidence so that she tells him about the trick she played to keep off the day when she must marry one of the suitors. She would do so, she assured them,
when she had completed the web she was working on, an indefinite time ahead, since she unraveled by night what she had woven during the day.
She resumes her questioning, and Odysseus comes out with one more of his fictitious tales, describing how he once entertained her husband at home in Krete. He sounds so convincing that she is moved to tears. A delicately transparent simile reveals that her defenses are beginning to dissolve:
The skin
of her pale face grew moist the way pure snow
softens and glistens on the mountains, thawed
by Southwind after powdering from the West,
and, as the snow melts, mountain streams run full:
so her white cheeks were wetted by these tears
shed for her lord—and he close by her side.
Her defenses nonetheless still just stand, and she asks the stranger for some proof of his story, not so much doubting it perhaps as asking for fuller confirmation of what she is coming to believe. What was Odysseus wearing? A fleecy purple cloak fastened by a broach depicting an elaborately wrought hunting scene. She remembers both the cloak and the broach, but still she resists: “‘I will not meet the man again/returning to his own home fields,’” she says mournfully, yet she has moved closer to him and just called him her “‘respected guest and friend.’”
Odysseus, sensing that he has gained ground, presses on and tells her that he has positive news that her husband will soon be back in Ithaka. “‘Here is my sworn word for it,’” he says impressively:
The Odyssey: The Fitzgerald Translation Page 47