In the Ramayana, when searching for Sita, Hanuman and his fellow monkeys are given food and shelter by the damsel Swayamprabha. She is lonely and desperate for companionship so she tries to make them forsake their mission and stay with her. But Hanuman insists on leaving. Unable to persuade Hanuman, impressed by his single-mindedness, she lets them go. In the tale, Swayamprabha functions like Calypso.
Calypso is the daughter of the Titan Atlas. She hopes that Odysseus will forget his home and embrace immortality. But Odysseus resists. He yearns for home, his place in the world and society, and accepts his mortality. He knows that immortality, like death, means giving up the good life that only humans can experience even as they yearn for their place in the world and dread the inevitability of death.
Unlike in his adventures with Polyphemus and Circe, Odysseus has neither the physical nor the psychological strength left now to break free from Calypso’s island on his own. The gods have to intervene: and so Athena complains to Zeus who sends his messenger ordering Calypso to let Odysseus go.
In the twentieth century, Captain Jacques Cousteau, the French mariner, became famous for his books and films on undersea research. His ship, the Calypso, became as famous as him. The Odyssey is structured as a flashback. It begins with Odysseus on the island of Calypso, ten years after the Trojan War, having spent three of those years wandering the seas on various adventures and seven imprisoned by the nymph.
Homer’s Odyssey is written in a Greek dialect which is often called Homeric Greek.
Phaeacians
While Zeus had forgiven Odysseus his many faults, Poseidon had not. He knew that he could not stop Odysseus from reaching home, but he refused to let it be easy. So he whipped up a storm that shattered Odysseus’s raft, and watched as Odysseus tossed and tumbled on the waves, and was dragged naked to the island of the Phaeacians, covered in salt and filth.
Here, the local princess Nausicaa—who was playing ball on the beach while her maids were washing clothes—found him, gave him clothes and invited him to her father’s house where he was made welcome, though not without some suspicion, by the king and his queen. ‘Tell us your story,’ said the queen Arete after Odysseus had been bathed and fed and made comfortable. So Odysseus told them his great adventure since he had left Troy, tales that involved monsters and gods and nymphs and cannibals. At the end of it, the king and queen were not sure if he was lying or telling the truth. They found it hard to believe that this was the legendary Odysseus.
‘But the Trojan War ended ten years ago!’ they remarked.
Odysseus started to weep for he realized his son would now be twenty, if alive, and his wife no longer the young maid he had left behind. Would his father still be alive? Feeling sorry for him, the king Alcinous decided to take him at his word. ‘Our sailors will take you to Ithaca. They know where it is.’
Odysseus was in a deep sleep when the Phaeacian ship reached Ithaca. Not wanting to disturb his slumber, the sailors left him sleeping on the beach and returned home. When Odysseus awoke, he was not sure where he was. He asked a passing shepherd who said, ‘Ithaca!’
In Mohiniattam, a classical dance form that emerged in the state of Kerala, beautiful young women often play with balls to enchant men. They are often free to play in the midst of household chores like washing and collecting water, performed outside the house. A similar scene is played out on the beach on the island of the Phaeacians.
It is suggested that there is unrequited love between Nausicaa and Odysseus as he never shares any information about Nausicaa with his wife, Penelope.
Since Nausicaa is the first mythic character shown to be playing a game with a ball, she is considered an inventor of ball games.
Scholars have speculated that Nausicaa may have been the real author of the Odyssey considering the realistic description of the washing scene.
According to Aristotle, Odysseus’s son Telemachus eventually marries Nausicaa.
A common technique in ancient Greek epics is the use of narration by the hero of the tale. In the Odyssey, Odysseus narrates his adventures to the king of the Phaeacians. In the Aeneid, Aeneas narrates his adventures to Dido.
Penelope
Odysseus did not reveal his identity to anyone, for Tiresias had told him that there would be trouble when he arrived home.
As there had been no sign of Odysseus in the ten years since the Trojan War, his neighbours had assumed he was dead. They were eager to claim his beautiful wife and his lands and his sheep as their own, ignoring the protests of young Telemachus. The suitors came every evening to his house and ate all they could find in the kitchen and the larder, forcing the servants to serve them. ‘You must select one of us as your husband,’ they threatened Penelope when she protested, ‘or we will rape you and your servants, kill your son and burn down your house.’
Penelope managed to keep the men at bay by declaring that she would marry them after she finished weaving a shroud for her father-in-law, Laertes, who was old but still alive. All day she would weave the shroud, but at night, she would unravel it, removing the threads, so that the shroud was never finished.
Every day she hoped that Odysseus would return before her deception was caught, yet there was no sign of him, and now she had no choice but to choose a new husband from amongst the suitors, or risk rape and plunder.
Chastity is a very important notion in Hindu mythology. The chastity of a wife grants protection to the husband, while her infidelities make him vulnerable. Chastity is admired in Roman and Christian mythology too, with Penelope being lauded as the epitome of wifely virtue and chastity. However, in these mythologies chastity is not associated with any mystical powers.
Widow remarriage is rare in Hindu mythology, and limited mostly to vanara (monkey) and rakshasa (barbarian) women, not women of high status like epic heroines.
Weaving is a feminine activity in Greek mythology. Penelope, like Circe and Calypso, is shown weaving by Homer. When Heracles is forced to cross-dress as a woman and serve Omphale, he too is portrayed holding a spindle.
For three years, Penelope weaves by day and unravels by night the shroud meant for her father-in-law. This act resembles the meaningless, monotonous, repetitive suffering of those cast into Tartarus.
Suitors
When Odysseus entered his own house, he found that Penelope had organized a contest, the winner of which could claim her and her husband’s house as his trophy. No one recognized him, except his old dog Argus, who wagged his tail before breathing his last. The servants were too distracted to notice him, as they were busy catering to Penelope’s suitors.
Unable to ignore their attentions any further for fear that they would harm her son and her servants, Penelope declared to the suitors that she would marry the man who could perform a particular feat: string Odysseus’s bow and shoot an arrow through the metal hoops of twelve axes placed in a single row. ‘Odysseus could do it. So must my next husband,’ said Penelope.
The suitors liked the idea and began to try one by one. But to their shock none could even string the bow. This made them angry: Was this yet another ploy by Penelope to keep them away?
Odysseus suddenly walked up and said, ‘May I try?’ The suitors scowled at the temerity of the stranger but Penelope said that no guest in the House of Odysseus would be turned away.
To everyone’s astonishment, the stranger effortlessly strung the bow, and shot an arrow through the twelve hoops of the axes. This was no stranger—this was Odysseus! Before anyone could utter a word, Odysseus picked up another arrow and struck one of the men who had abused his wife. Then he shot another arrow, and another. Telemachus joined him, as did the servants of the household. Before long, every ‘suitor’ had been killed.
Like the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, the Odyssey also speaks of an archery contest as a method to identify a suitable groom for a noble lady. This suggests a common Indo-European root, an ancient tribal custom according to which, in case of a conflict, the better warrior wins the woman.
Reunion
Penelope greeted her husband with tears in her eyes, and introduced her son to his father. All the servants hugged their master. An old maid checked his thigh and found an old hunting scar, thus confirming that this was indeed Odysseus. Odysseus’s father, the old Laertes, who had refused to live in the house of his son after it had been invaded by the suitors, returned to embrace his son. Everyone was happy.
Still, Penelope was doubtful.
‘Shall I ask the servants to move our bed to the courtyard so that we can spend this night of reunion beneath the stars?’ she asked.
Odysseus smiled. ‘My clever and faithful wife, you know that bed cannot be moved for it was carved out of the trunk of an old olive tree with roots still in the ground. Did we not build our house around this fixed bed?’
Penelope nodded in delight as her husband took her in his arms. Yes, her husband was finally home.
Secrets that bind married couples is a theme we find in Hindu mythology too. In the Ramayana, Ram and Sita share tales with each other that they do not tell anyone else. When Hanuman comes to Sita, she narrates one such tale to him—of how Indra’s son Revanta tried to attack her in the forest in the form of a crow and how Ram stopped him—so that Hanuman can prove to Ram that he indeed met Sita in Lanka.
We would like to believe that the story of Odysseus ends with a happily-ever-after, but in keeping with Greek mythic structure, tragedy follows soon after the reunion.
Telegonus
Odysseus knew that lasting peace was impossible until he appeased Poseidon. And for that, as advised by Tiresias, he had to go inland and find a place where people had never seen the sea, had never eaten salt, and so would mistake a rowing oar which he carried over his shoulder to be a winnowing fan. Odysseus found such a place, and set up an altar and made oblations to Poseidon. Only then came peace.
But then fears of death enveloped him. Some oracles told him that his son would be his killer, and so he exiled his son Telemachus, paying no heed to Penelope’s pleas. The words of Tiresias, that he would not die at sea but that death would come from the sea haunted him. So he kept watch on the sea, wary of strangers and pirates.
One day, Odysseus found a young man stealing his cattle. Without trying to find out who he was, Odysseus attacked him and in the fight that followed he was killed by a spear tipped with the poison of the stingray fish. This indeed was death from the sea. And the killer was his son, a son that Odysseus never knew he had: Telegonus, son of Circe, who had come to Ithaca looking for his father and had failed to identify the island as his father’s.
Telegonus carried Odysseus’s body to his house, met Penelope and then fetched Telemachus. He took mother and son to the enchanted island of Circe. There, he married his stepmother Penelope and Telemachus married Circe. Telegonus fathered Italus, whose name is given to the country Italy, and Telemachus fathered Latinus, whose name is given to the Latins.
In the Mahabharata, Babruvahana attacks and kills Arjuna, failing to recognize the latter as his father. Later, Arjuna is brought back to life by a Naga-mani, the magical snake jewel, provided by Babruvahana’s mother Uloopi, who informs him that he committed no crime and that this was the fulfilment of a curse. Arjuna had been cursed by Ganga that just as he had killed his grand-uncle Bhishma, he would suffer death at the hands of his own son. Thus the horror of patricide is explained using karma.
The story of Telegonus comes from the now-lost epic Telegony.
Information about Latinus and Italus comes to us from Hyginus’s Fabulae.
In Greek mythology, Latinus and Italus are described as both the children and grandchildren of Odysseus, since his sons Telegonus and Telemachus married their stepmothers, Penelope and Circe. But the timelines don’t quite match.
House of Odysseus
Book Eight
Aeneas
‘What a homecoming,’ sighed the gymnosophist after listening to the tale of Odysseus. ‘And what of those who lost their homes?’
‘There is a reason why the Olympians let humans have hope. It sustains even the shattered,’ said Alexander. ‘Let me tell you the story of Aeneas, he who escaped the fires of Troy, and went on to establish a great new city.’
‘And what was the price the Olympians demanded?’
‘The rejection of love.’
Anchises
Only three Olympians were immune to the powers of Aphrodite: Athena, Artemis and Hestia. Everyone else was made to fall in love with mortals. To prevent Aphrodite from bragging, Zeus decided to make her fall in love with a Trojan youth called Anchises.
Anchises, who was tending cattle on the hills near Mount Ida, had no clue that the beautiful woman who seduced and made love to him was a goddess. From this union was born Aeneas.
‘Do not reveal this secret to anyone,’ Aphrodite warned Anchises, when it was time for her to leave. ‘Our son will be the father of a new line of kings, after the fall of Troy,’ she prophesied.
Unfortunately, Anchises could not stop himself from boasting to his friends one evening after drinking a lot of wine. For his insolence, he was struck by Zeus’s thunderbolt and lost the use of his legs, becoming forever dependent on his son Aeneas.
This happened long before the abduction of Helen, when Troy was at the height of its glory. All his life Anchises knew the dreadful fate that awaited his city and its residents, but he never told anyone. He was well aware of the terrible price one paid for revealing the secrets of the gods.
How can Alexander tell the story of Aeneas when it is chronicled in the Aeneid, a Latin epic by Virgil, composed 300 years after Alexander? The tale was probably known even before. For example, the story of Aphrodite and Anchises is part of the Homeric Hymns, attributed to Homer but of unknown authorship, that were composed 400 years before Alexander.
Like Anchises, who knows the fate of Troy but can do nothing to change it, in the Mahabharata, Sahadeva knows the fate of his clan but can do nothing to stop the war.
It is curious why the Romans would associate their roots with the losing Trojan side rather than the winning Greek side. Perhaps it indicates the attitude of the Romans towards the Greeks. At one level the Romans envied and imitated the Greeks and adopted many things Greek, including their gods, their architecture and their philosophers; but at another level, they looked down upon the Greeks, viewing them as too talkative and fun-loving, lacking the respect for tradition that formed the cornerstone of the Roman Empire.
Asteroids around the planet Jupiter are conventionally called Trojans and one of the larger asteroids is named Anchises.
Creusa
As Troy was being sacked, the men killed and women raped, Aeneas was warned in a vision by his mother Aphrodite to escape the city and sail to a land across the Mediterranean to the west.
So he gathered his things, picked up his father and fled. The Greek soldiers who saw him would surely have killed him had Agamemnon not stopped them, saying, ‘Look how this youth risks his own life to save his old and frail father. He deserves to live. So few like him in the world any more.’
Aeneas then went back to fetch his wife Creusa, one of Priam’s many daughters. But sadly, by then, she had been killed. Her ghost advised him to carry on, to find a new home and a new wife.
With his father and his young son Iulus by his side, Aeneas hid in a cave near the sea until the triumphant Greeks left. He then gathered around him the few Trojans who had managed to escape, mostly old and infirm, and set sail in the direction of the setting sun, hoping to find refuge and eventually a new home. They came to call themselves the Aeneads.
Both Greek and Hindu mythologies reveal the human anxiety over the survival of the family tree. In the Mahabharata, the only survivor of the Pandava clan at the end of the Kurukshetra war is Arjuna’
s unborn grandchild.
Virgil’s Aeneid marks the end of the more democratic Roman republic, and the rise of Roman dictatorship under the Caesars. It became essential to connect the new rulers with the gods to justify their claim to rule. Through Aeneas, the Romans were connected with Aphrodite. Aeneas demonstrates the Roman idea of ‘pietas’ or piety and filial respect by taking care of his father at the risk of his own life. Iulus or Julus, also known as Ascanius, son of Aeneas, inspired the name Julia, the family to which Julius Caesar and Augustus Caesar belonged. Thus Iulus played an important role in Roman mythology.
In some versions, Iulus was born in Italy, not Troy, to the Latin wife of Aeneas.
Creusa, wife of Aeneas, must not be confused with Creusa, princess of Corinth, killed by Medusa.
Polydorus
The Aeneads first sailed to Thrace whose king was an ally of Troy. But next to the rocky beach were trees that oozed human blood. Aeneas took this as some kind of warning. Rather than proceed he stopped under the trees, where he encountered the ghost of Polydorus, Priam’s youngest and Hecabe’s favourite son.
The ghost whispered, ‘My father, king of Troy, sent me to Thrace to ensure at least one member of the family would survive should Troy fall. I carried sacks of gold with me to pay for my upkeep. But as soon as Troy fell, Polymestor, the king of Thrace, realized it was more profitable to just kill me and keep the gold. And so, disregarding all rules of hospitality, he ordered that I be killed and my body be thrown into the sea, without a proper burial. The waves pushed me back to the shore, and the spears that impaled me took root on this rocky beach, growing into trees that ooze my blood. Do not come to Thrace, Aeneas. Make a home elsewhere, where people are more hospitable.’
Olympus Page 19