Let us now consider what does happen in Books XVII and XVIII. If I am right in dividing the poem into six performances, these Books with XIX and XX make up the fifth. Early in XVII Telémakhos leaves the swineherd’s hut, goes home to the manor hall, and passes on to his mother the news given him by Meneláos at Sparta—that Odysseus is not dead but alive. The words are barely out of his mouth before his supercargo, the diviner, swears to Penélopê that her husband is not only alive but on the island at that very moment. Since the first piece of news is certainly authentic, the second—though it may seem fantastic—must at least quicken her interest in any stranger who appears. The only stranger about to appear is Odysseus in his rags. We may or may not recall Helen’s boast of having recognized him through a similar disguise in a similar situation at Troy; if we do—and after all we heard the story only the other evening—our feeling of suspense may be heightened. Presently, strange to relate, Odysseus is in fact recognized just outside the manor. A dying old hunting dog who hasn’t seen him for twenty years knows him by the sound of his voice.
Odysseus now enters the hall, begging, and one of the suitors banqueting there hits him with a footstool. Pénelopê has heard the scene from her room. She orders the swineherd to fetch the beggar in case he has news of Odysseus, and the swineherd tells her the beggar does indeed have news, at least he has sworn that Odysseus is nearby on the mainland and will soon be home. “If Odysseus comes, he will repay the violence of the suitors,” she says, using the future tense for that eventuality in the most hopeful speech she has yet made. At this point Telémakhos, downstairs in hall, sneezes, and Penélopê laughs at the good omen—the first time she has laughed in The Odyssey. She goes eagerly to the door, but Eumaios returns without the beggar, who wishes to put off a meeting until the young men have left the hall for the night. In spite of her impatience, the lady concedes that the stranger is right and is no fool.
Are we to suppose here, at the end of XVII, that it has even crossed her mind who the stranger might be? For the audience, this is already a very interesting question. The answer is, probably not—though it is clear how excited she has become.
In the next Book, XVIII, Penelope feels impelled for reasons she cannot analyze to go downstairs among the suitors, to dazzle the young men with her beauty and to be solicitous of the beggar, who has come off well in a fist fight. She is now in the beggar’s presence. Is it his presence that prompts her to a rather gratuitous speech, a speech with an air of being “to whom it may concern,” recalling her husband’s instructions when he left for the Trojan War? Her point is that she cannot hold out much longer against marriage with one of her suitors. She induces the young men to give her some gifts (to the amusement of Odysseus) and then withdraws until the evening is over and the suitors have left the place. We come to Book XIX. It is after dark. From the empty banquet hall Odysseus and his son remove the arms and put them back in a storeroom. Before they do this, however, Telémakhos has the old servant, Eurýkleia, temporarily lock all the maids in the women’s quarters. Why? Because among these women there are a dozen mistresses and accomplices of the suitors, who are only waiting until the house is quiet to slip out and join their lovers in the town. We already know one of these girls, Melántho, mistress of Eurymakhos. When Penelope comes down to interview the beggar by firelight, this girl is with her, as the poet carefully makes us see. The whole interview is conducted in her presence. If she should suspect the identity of the beggar, Odysseus’ tactical plan—to catch the suitors in hall without spears and trust to Athena—will miscarry, to say the least.
As the interview begins, Penelope follows the usual formula and asks the stranger who he is. His reply is evasive, though it is moving if we remember that these are the first words he has spoken to her in twenty years. She proceeds to explain to him—to him, a stranger and vagabond—what her predicament is. She tells him of the famous feat of weaving and unweaving by which she had kept her suitors waiting for more than three years. It is as if she were justifying herself aloud for being, as she tells him she is now, at the end of her resources. Justifying herself to her husband? That is the fact, but it may still be something of which we are meant to be aware while she is not. In return for her confidence, Odysseus confides that he is a grandson of King Minos of Crete and that he once entertained Odysseus at Knossos. The lady weeps. She dries her eyes and asks him to prove it by recalling how Odysseus looked. He does so, very accurately, describing a brooch and tunic that Penélopê had given him. He adds, with a typical Odyssean touch, that the Cretan women had found him a fine sight in his tunic. The lady weeps a second time and remarks that she will never lay eyes on Odysseus again.
The beggar now contradicts her. He now ventures a speech that, taken along with all that has led up to it, looks like a serious effort to impart information. He not only repeats what he has already told the swineherd and the swineherd has relayed to her—that Odysseus is on the mainland and coming home—but he swears very solemnly that Odysseus will arrive (306)
“this very λυκβας” and “between the waning and the new moon.” Nobody can be sure what λυκβας means, but it may well mean “the going of daylight” and the phrase could have the sense “before another day passes.” As to the phrase about the new moon, there is very little doubt that this is precise. The next day, as we will hear in Book XX, is a feast day to Apollo, and that would be the festival of the new moon awaited in the evening. So he is telling her twice, cryptically and elliptically for the benefit of the maids in earshot, that her husband will be home tomorrow.
Now we, the audience, must suppose that this lady, who has been represented often as extremely intelligent, will be asking herself with some urgency how the vagabond before her could possibly swear to anything so definite. She is controlled, as usual. She answers that if he were right he would soon know her love, but no, he can’t be right. Odysseus cannot return. She offers him a footbath and he declines it unless there is an old maid-servant to give it to him. Penélopê says there is in fact an old woman who nursed Odysseus in infancy, and she tells Eurýkleia to bathe him. Here is an actor’s line (358).
“Bathe your master’s—” the line begins, and a shiver runs through the audience. The next word, however, is not πδας “feet” but µλκα “coeval” or “contemporary.” (I think that Sophocles, for one, noted this feat of brinkmanship in a single line.) Now we have the well-known episode of the footbath during which Eurýkleia recognizes Odysseus by his scar, but he throttles her and keeps her quiet. This has been generally held to be the only recognition that takes place in Book XIX. At the climax when the old woman glances toward Penélopê as if to reveal Odysseus, the poet tells us that Athena has turned the lady’s mind elsewhere so that she doesn’t notice. Penélopê, in other words, is lost in thought, and we are aware of all that she has to think about. I find the outcome of her thinking very impressive.
When Penélopê speaks again, she tells the beggar that she has a dream for him to interpret—the dream of her pet geese killed by an eagle who professed to be Odysseus. In this there is a remarkable little confession that she had grown fond, in a way, of having the suitors about her, but there is more to it than that. When she says that on waking she saw the dream geese still there, what can she possibly mean except, “It is a dream to think that you can kill them; they are so many, they will survive and you will not.” This at any rate is what the beggar answers. He assures her that there is no other way to interpret the dream than as Odysseus, in the dream, has already done: the suitors will be killed. Assuming the presence of the unfaithful maid—or maids—he takes a serious risk here in order to make it clear to her that he is ready for battle. She now remarks that dreams are not to be counted on, but that she has one more thing to tell him: listen carefully. She has made up her mind that tomorrow will be the day of decision as to whom she will marry, and the decision will be reached through the test of the bow. In reply to this the beggar says in effect that that will be excellent and tomor
row will not be too soon.
I agree with the late Philip Whaley Harsh, of Stanford, that this is one of the most interesting recognition scenes ever devised. Part of my argument was anticipated by Professor Harsh in the American Journal of Philology, Vol. 71 (1950). It is possible—though I think barely possible—to read the scene in the previously accepted way as involving no more communication between the man and woman than is compatible with their respective roles of lady and beggar, the roles they stick to, though so precariously. On this reading all evidence of understanding between them is coincidence and irony. But that is simply not consistent with the situation as a whole—a situation built up for the audience in the course of this performance. During the day, before the evening, Penélopê has been told first that her husband is alive, second that he is on the island, and third that he is coming soon. She has been waiting for ten years with no such authentic news and no such startling expectations and had made the suitors wait for nearly four. Are we, the audience, to believe that she wouldn’t wait a few days longer to see if her husband turns up? Is it conceivable that, instead of waiting, the woman so distinguished for tenacity would this very evening give up the waiting game and seriously propose to marry the next day? How could she come to this abrupt decision in the course of her evening scene with Odysseus unless she realized that the stranger before her was indeed her husband?
Why, in short, underrate the high and beautiful tension of the scene and the nerve, the magnificence of Penélopê? Not Kalypso, not Nausikaa, not Kirkê could have played this scene. Consider what she bestows on Odysseus. Up to now his plan of action, as I have noticed, has been fairly desperate. Now it is she, not he, who remembers the big hunting bow that has hung in an inner room since he left Ithaka. Archery against men who have no missiles is in fact the only practical way of beating the numerical odds. Penelope supplies the weapon for the suitors’ downfall, and she does so for that purpose and no other. At the opening of the Book XXI when Athena sends her for the bow, the goddess is said to prompt her to this as “the contest and start of slaughter”—a phrase that goes naturally by the syntax with what is in Penelope’s mind. In the course of that Book it is Penelope who insists at the crucial moment that the beggar be given a try at the bow; she all but literally places it in his hands. I conclude that for the last and greatest of Odysseus’ feats of arms his wife is as responsible as he is. The reasons for his affection should now be clear.
VI
If in other Books, especially in XXIII, there are details inconsistent with the interpretation I have given, we may regard these as instances of what Professor Lord has called the varying “pulls” of previous versions. But I am not sure there are any real inconsistencies. There is a certain mystery, if you like, but so is there mystery in Daisy Miller. Harsh explained Penelope’s affected incredulity and hesitation in XXIII as due to emotional exhaustion (she had been terribly afraid that Odysseus couldn’t do it) and to the need to collect herself before resuming a marriage interrupted for twenty years. Twenty years is no trifle. If you left home to take part in the Second World War, imagine yourself lost to view afterward and only now returning; or if your father went to the war, imagine it of him. One difference between Homer and many of his commentators is that Homer could imagine people in situations. Some commentators even call it an “inconsistency” that the shade of Amphímedon in Book XXIV credits Odysseus with having thought up the archery contest—as though Amphímedon could have known any better, or made any better assumption.
As I noted earlier, Book XXIV has often been regarded as a later addition to the poem. This is mainly because two early critics, Aristophanes and Aristarchus, are said to have called line 296 of XXIII the “goal” or “end” of The Odyssey. This line, on which Odysseus and Penelope retire to bed, could have been the conclusion of an old-fashioned movie but not of a poem like this. It is true that there are also some linguistic grounds, but they do not appear to be probative. Even if they were, I could only say that in substance Book XXIV is fully “Homeric” and that whoever composed it knew what he was doing. The many references to Laërtês throughout the poem require Book XXIV; so do at least two previous allusions by Odysseus to the aftermath of the fight with the suitors. In this Book the comparison between Penelope and Klytaimnéstra, recurrent throughout the poem, is rounded off by Agamemnon himself. But there is another artistic reason for Book XXIV, and a great one. If Homer’s incidental purpose in The Odyssey was to complete and complement The Iliad, XXIV in effect completes both poems at once. The Akhaian antagonists of The Iliad, Agamemnon and Akhilleus, are here reconciled among the dead, and as The Iliad closed with Hektor’s funeral, The Odyssey does not come to a close until the funeral of Akhilleus has been described.
A page or so more and I will have done with my reflections. I have named Professor Lord’s book and Professor Harsh’s article, each illuminating in its way. Two more books that I have valued are Homer and the Monuments, by H. L. Lorimer (Macmillan, London, 1950) and The Poetry of Homer by S. E. Bassett (University of California Press, 1938). Rhys Carpenter on Folk Tale, Fiction and Saga in the Homeric Epics (University of California Press, 1946) is full of interesting arguments. So, as I have said, is Denys Page’s book on The Odyssey, though I read it rather as a brief than as a judgment. His later book, History and the Homeric Iliad (University of California Press, 1959), is more brilliant still. The most recent good annotated edition is W. B. Stanford’s (Macmillan, London, 1947). D. B. Monro’s annotated edition of Books XIII-XIV, with its long Appendix (Oxford, 1901), is a superb monument of scholarship and good sense in its time. I am indebted to it for my excision of lines 275-278 in Book I, an excision that obviates one of Page’s chief criticisms. I like Monro’s statement about the Te-lemakheia: “It secures that gradual heightening of interest which is the chief secret of dramatic art.” I also owe to Monro, and to J. D. Denniston’s wonderful book, The Greek Particles (Oxford, 1954), confirmation of my sense that the colloquial entered into Homer’s style in The Odyssey.31
A word about “translation.” The Odyssey, considered strictly as an aesthetic object, is to be appreciated only in Greek. It can no more be translated into English than rhododendron can be translated into dogwood. You must learn Greek if you want to experience Homer, just as you must go to the Acropolis and look at it if you want to experience the Parthenon. There is a sense, however, in which the Greek poem was itself a translation. It was a translation into Homer’s metered language, into his narrative and dramatic style, of an action invented and elaborated in the imagination. This action and the personages involved in it were what mattered most to poet and audience.
It might be possible to translate, or retranslate, this action into our language. We may assume that Homer used all the Greek he knew, all the resources of the language available to him and amenable to his meter. Three or more Greek dialects and perhaps half a millennium of Greek hexameter poetry contributed to Homer’s language; so did a wide spectrum of idiom from the hieratic to the colloquial. Anglo-Irish-American provides comparable linguistic and poetic resources, a spectrum of idiom comparably wide. If you can grasp the situation and action rendered by the Greek poem, every line of it, and by the living performer that it demands, and if you will not betray Homer with prose or poor verse, you may hope to make an equivalent that he himself would not disavow.
Why care about an old work in a dead language that no one reads, or at least no one of those who, glancing at their Rolex watches, guide us into the future? Well, I love the future myself and expect everything of it: better artists than Homer, better works of art than The Odyssey. The prospect of looking back at our planet from the moon seems to me to promise a marvelous enlargement of our views.32 But let us hold fast to what is good, hoping that if we do anything any good those who come after us will pay us the same compliment. If the world was given to us to explore and master, here is a tale, a play, a song about that endeavor long ago, by no means neglecting self-mastery, which in a sense is the whole po
int. Electronic brains may help us to use our heads but will not excuse us from that duty, and as to our hearts—cardiograms cannot diagnose what may be most ill about them, or confirm what may be best. The faithful woman and the versatile brave man, the wakeful intelligence open to inspiration or grace—these are still exemplary for our kind, as they always were and always will be. Nor do I suppose that the pleasure of hearing a story in words has quite gone out. Even movies and TV make use of words. The Odyssey at all events was made for your pleasure, in Homer’s words and in mine.
Perugia, June 1962
Robert Fitzgerald
CRITICAL WRITING ON THE ODYSSEY AND HOMERIC POETRY
Amory, Anne. “The Reunion of Odysseus and Penelope.” In Essays on the Odyssey: Selected Modern Criticism, ed. C. H. Taylor. Indianapolis, 1963.
The Odyssey: The Fitzgerald Translation Page 54