Singing Homer Podcast

Odyssey 11.260-80

In Greek:

Odysseus (as Homer) has just told us the story of Tyro, whose ghost has come to meet him in Hades. The climax comes when he steps forward and speaks as Poseidon, in the moment after the god has himself climaxed with a sleeping Tyro, whose own speech climaxes thus for the performer on stage: “It’s me, I tell you: I, Poseidon the Ground-Shaker.” There are more sex acts to come in Odysseus’ revue, but none, shall we say, so verbally realised. In tonal Greek, with the accentually emphatic syllables in bold (note that these are often the long syllables which follow the acute sign):

αὐτὰρ ἐγώ τοί εἰμι Ποσειδάων ἐνοσίχθων. (Od.11.252)

A rising pair of successive long oxytones cascades down on εἰμι, ‘I am’. How does one top that, or even follow it?

I have been approaching the text of the Odyssey as a script for a solo performer, not without reward. Although the diction and rhythm of Homeric poetry are highly stylised, within those textures Homer appears to contrive extraordinary opportunities for a solo performer to immerse himself in emotive and vivid characterisation, most obviously in the speeches like that of Poseidon. But between narratives and similes, proems and invocations, the Homeric score presents a veritable buffet of styles and registers for an hexameter singer to engage. That the manuscripts preserve a script or a score, rather than (for example) the record of an improvisation of some kind, is demonstrated by certain seemingly scored elements in the poetry’s pitch patterns. Most famous is Odysseus’ use of the joke name Οὖτις to fool the Cyclops; the joke can only work if the accentual system adopted by Hellenistic scholars in their text of Homer is true to the poet’s original composition, whether or not that original itself involved a written score. The joke depends on there being an audible difference in tonality, and yet a similarity when communicating through a massive boulder sealing a cave, between οὖτις and οὔ τις, μή τις and μῆτις.

To be clear, the usual linguistic analysis has it that there is no difference between the members of these pairs in their phonemes or their syllables, nor indeed in the location of the accented syllable—that is, the particular syllable which is dynamically reinforced or stressed by the voice. It is the first syllable in each case. The only difference between οὖ and οὔ or μῆ and μή is whether the voice sharply rises in pitch and then emphatically falls (circumflex, ῀ ) over the course of the long vowel sound, or else rises only at the end of that long vowel (acute ´ ), to fall on the subsequent unmarked syllable. (Such a following syllable carrying heavy falling pitch becomes the emphatic one when it happens to be long, but in each of these cases the τις element is short, and the rising acute syllable is itself the emphatic one.) Since in English we do not distinguish between pitch patterns when we stress a syllable, but rise or fall or both willy-nilly, while we (typically) increase the volume and the length of the syllable, we cannot reproduce the actual joke in English. We have to reduce it to a spelling joke: that is, same sound but different spelling (in my rendering, ‘Nowan’ = ‘no-one’). But in a pre-Alexandrian text of Homer, written without accentual information and the separation of words, the spellings would have been identical: ΟΥΤΙΣ and ΜΗΤΙΣ. The only differences in the sounds represented by these letters arise from their tonal prosody. Hence the joke would only have emerged when the text was performed by someone who knew where and how to sing the Greek accents. Anyone else reading a written text of Homer before Aristophanes of Byzantium introduced the extant system of accent marks, would have been as confused by Odysseus’ trick on Polyphemus as a foreigner reading the ‘potato-potato, tomato-tomato’ song. ‘Let’s call the whole thing off.’

That is why it seems Christopher Nolan has had to cut this epically Odyssean and Homeric bit of wit in his film called The Odyssey. What a loss, but it is essentially a musical joke native to ancient Greek which cannot be reproduced. Indeed I shall expect Nolan, in a most general way across his traversal, not to have not been in on the joke—an observation made all the same without prejudice—when I go to see a matinée of his latest hero’s tale.

I have further demonstrated that Odysseus and Penelope each have distinctive accentual motifs in Homer’s Greek, respectively three straight long oxytones and three successive circumflexes, each of which makes itself felt as an intrusion, whenever it recurs, into the usual strong-weak (LONG-short-short) alternation of dactylic rhythm. In an audience that needs to distinguish readily and purely between a long rising oxytone (οὔ, μή) and a rising and falling circumflex (οὖ, μῆ) to register the music of Homer’s poetry—as we have shown above—a succession of three straight of either must have caused both a melodic and a rhythmic jolt inside an hexameter line. Such moments in the speech patterns of Penelope or Odysseus seem most naturally taken as intentional melodic gestures in a musical medium; they are, in effect, signature lines, functioning like leitmotifs in opera. Greek poetry, after all, and more besides, was referred to by its poets as μουσική or ‘music’. It was composed not only of ῥυθμός ‘rhythm’ but ἁρμονία ‘harmony’, whose elements were described in the very same way as the two adjacent elements of the Greek pitch accent: as ὀξύς (‘sharp’ ‘acute’ ‘rising’) and βαρύς (‘heavy’ ‘grave’ ‘falling’). It is not therefore metaphorical to call Homer’s poetry music; it was in fact analogous more to recitative than it was to Paradise Lost.

Since these leitmotifs of identical harmonic sequences do not always inhere in the same words, it is impossible to locate them within a theory of oral improvisation by means of purely metrical verbal formulas. The so-called metrical formulas of Homeric, or traditional, or even a purported Indo-European epic, ignore all the language’s pitch accents. Hence the prevailing modern dogma proposes a theory of Mozart which ignores all his notes! It is claimed, sometimes explicitly, that ancient Greek poetry does not inform its metres with the dynamic accents of its words to produce its poetic rhythms. It would be the only known language, the only known poetry, the only known music so to do. We must expose this entrenched absurdity. In the light of unambiguous evidence, the text of Homer, as we have it from the Alexandrian transmission, cannot therefore be approached any longer as an end product of a tradition of improvised composition via fixed verbal formulas, with no regard in the composing for words’ and phrases’ intrinsic pitch accents. It must instead learn at last to be registered as a score for histrionic, mimetic performance, which intentionally celebrates and exploits the infixed tonal nature of Greek expression to realise the individual character of both speaker and speech, even within a highly stylised medium. At moments of intense emotion, Odysseus and Penelope break out of the grooves of hexameter rhythm when they speak, and they each do this in highly distinctive, dynamically melodic ways.

Odysseus’ Catalogue of Women is admittedly a puzzle from the histrionic point of view. After such a rousing speech and interlude as that of Poseidon waking Tyro after sex in a river bed, how does one slip successfully into the faceless chant of the catalogue form? I have been wont to understand the catalogue form as the original for Homer’s and Hesiod’s poetry, the spring from which it sprung. Here again is the performance from the beginning of the Iliad’s Catalogue of Ships—just one ship’s worth—which I helped reconstruct about a quarter-century ago while tutoring at St. John’s College. The idea is that catalogues were lists, such as genealogies, or the sequence of events in plain prose which has come down to us as the ‘epic cycle’, which could have been rendered into dactylic hexameters so as to accompany an ancient round dance. A dactylic syrtós is extant in Greece today.

The round dance had the conjuring power of circle dance: it was a participatory experience in which the community of dancers felt their ancestors joining them, summoned within the circle by their full melodic names, which scholars call ‘noun-and-epithet phrases’. Odysseus’ invocation of Heracles, as son of Alcmene whose ghost he meets (266-8), takes almost a whole line: Ἡρακλῆϝα θρασυμέμνονα θυμολέοντα (‘Heracles, Bold-Spirit, Lion Breath’). The epithets are not predicates, not assertions about the man, but an extended overflowing of his name. The singer intoned such an extended name, savouring every syllable, to the rhythm of the dancers’ feet and the motion, rightward with regular retrogressions, of their bodies:

The experience for the dancer is not one of listening to poetry, nor is it for the singer one of selling them on his verses. This is not mimetic representation but ritual evocation and participation in the living presence of the past, like Odysseus present amongst Persephone’s parade of ghosts.

The path from cataloguing to storytelling is, however, spontaneous and straightforward, as straightforward as a relative pronoun. In a catalogue of women an entry will include her single name and, instead of a patronymic, the ascription of a filial or maternal or spousal relation to some man. One need only, optionally, elaborate with a relative clause, ‘she who …’ (ἡ …), usually at the beginning of the next line, and you’re off on a digression which can last as many lines as you please. In the case of Tyro, there are three such: ‘She who stated (ἣ φάτο …) that she was the offspring of blameless Salmoneus’; ‘She it was (ἣ ποταμοῦ ἠράσσατ’ …) fell physically in love with the river, divine Enipeus’—this is the digression that inspires a speech; and finally, after the date rape in the eddies and the vaunting speech by Poseidon, ‘But she got pregnant (ἣ δ’ ὑποκυσαμένη …) and bore Pelias and Neleus …’ To my mind the speech is a destination and a climax dramatically, and the material which follows the third relative clause about her children comes across aesthetically as a coda or appendix.

I cannot help but feel that once Homer discovered the power of a speech as a dramatic event, in which an audience member participates not as a dancer or onlooker but as an enthralled and inwardly moved spectator—like a seated theatre- or concert-goer—he had let the genie out of the bottle. A similar situation recurred in the telling of stories in songs which were danced and sung by a group of circle-dancing men (a ‘chorus’), a kind of song which came to be called ‘tragedy’: as soon as the composer thought to pull out a chorus member to sing the part of a protagonist at a story’s critical moment, something happened.

… how and whenever it was that the soloists stepped forward, instantly they became actors; theatrical drama made its appearance in the Greek world and turned that world into a stage. The poetic sensibility of a Pindar, with its fluidity of identity between poet and chorus, its mesmeric, stylized, verbal-orchestic narration of myth, was instantly antiquated; the dramatist emerged; the actor entered upon the stage of history. The histrionic presence of the actor, the dramatic representation of life, the impetus towards realism in the artistic ideal, were developments that were bound to revolutionize the relation between artist, performer, and audience.

But it seems that the revolution which turned the world into a stage had already occurred within the Homeric milieu:

… such a development was paralleled in the emergence of the rhapsode—a solo, standing, staff-bearing, lyre-less declaimer in the theatre, playing all the parts—as against the depictions inside Homer of the bard, who is a seated, lyre-playing singer, circled on occasion by a ring of dancers. It is no wonder that in the fourth century, philosophical reflection on art should have been fixated on this new ‘rhapsodic’ power, concentrated by the poet-dramatist through the actor; it is no wonder that imitation should have been at the focus of the philosophical lens. The performer and his story became the central facts of Greek poetry, dimming by comparison the centuries-long tradition of danced verse from which he emerged.

In the case of Athenian drama, the song-and-dance chorus from which tragic storytelling actually emerged turned suddenly into a problem for the dramatist—who was still called a ‘chorus teacher’ (χοροδιδάσκαλος)—to solve: what to do with the chorus? Although the ancient poets’ solutions proved inspired enough for modern dramatists sometimes to emulate, the use of a chorus on a modern stage is experimental and more than a little ingratiatingly historical. It becomes another actor’s part. There was no need for the original chorus, which had been everything, once drama happened.

One should have thought that a similar thing might have dawned on the poet composing for a rhapsode and his theatre. What would a motionless audience have to do with the participatory dance rhythms of a chanted catalogue? Once they’d had a taste of it, they would have wanted to hear what happened not as a list, like an historian’s timeline, but as though it were happening before them in real time, unfolding in pace and rhythm, and to see the harried protagonists not only summoned by name, but to come to life and speak in living deliberation. Whatever the spell of the communal catalogue experience, surely the expanding digressions of the rhapsode, developing into the vivid narrative of events, the expression through speeches as though the women and heroes were standing before you, and the sublime power of the similes as asides to arrest narrative time and capture somehow its experience and meaning, took him to a place where to return to the list would be like returning to a time before running water. Why should catalogue poetry ever again make an entrance when we have discovered the once-discovered but seemingly eternal pleasure of epic narrative and actorly immersion?

And yet here is Odysseus himself—after giving the Phaeacians the story of his sorry adventures among Cicones and Laestrygonians and Lotus-Eaters and Cyclopes, his plentiful ‘ah me’s, the imprecations of Aeolus and the solipsistic lament of Polyphemus, and the journey to Hades itself with Teiresias’ enigmatic prophecy and the epiphany of his mother’s ghost—here he is, turning to a catalogue-y catalogue of dead women. Evidently Homer and his audience were still close to the experience of dancing dactyls to hexameters composed for the purpose. Demodocus sang warrior’s tales to the Phaeacians, however, not lists, and they danced to a song about naughty activities of the gods, replete with tasty speeches and dialogue (8.258-369). But Odysseus’ own hexameters were to be listened to in silence, from that day to this, just as no one now dances to a Bach minuet. And still he chose, after all his narrative and thespian virtuosity, to deliver his audience catalogue poetry. There must have been something to it, something which worked aesthetically, but beyond relative pronouns and lavishly extended dactylic names, I confess I have to say—at least in part—‘I guess you had to be there.’ There is not a student who does not skim through or skip the lengthy Catalogue of Ships when it interrupts—or so one feels—the momentum of the Iliad.

The introductions of Antiope, Alcmene and Megara, and Epicaste mother of Oedipodes, give us little nuggets of fact and narrative which more hint and imply than tell, perhaps deliberately. This seems to be the usual thing for catalogue poetry, in which I include Hesiod’s Theogony. There may indeed be an aesthetic of teasing half-disclosures involved, something like in movie trailers, but it can sometimes feel as though the poet is waving his hand at something he would rather not get too far into. Perhaps it would try the patience of an over-familiar audience who only needed a prompt. This is what frustrates, for us who are not privy to almost all of Homer’s world, or past, or his or her aesthetic landscape.

Mind you, the format of extended name and relative pronoun, ‘he who …’ or ‘she who …’ which can initiate a story, a sort of two-line base, proved a fecund aesthetic and narrative template. Consider the famous proems of the Iliad and the Odyssey, how they each exhibit and depart from the form. The first line of the Iliad, for example, is dominated by the name and patronymic Πηληϝιάδεω Ἀχιλῆϝος, ‘of Peleïades Achilles’, but the relative pronoun which begins the next line is not ‘he who’ but ‘she who’; ἣ picks up not a person, but the feminine subject of the song requested of the Muse by the singer. This is the μῆνις, the wrath of Achilles, the first word of the Iliad. Books, dissertations, and essays have been written explaining how the whole action of the Iliad unfolds as the completion of this relative clause, describing the manifold action and consequence of the anger of Achilles. She places grief, she hurls souls, she makes dog food of heroes. Some see this arc completed with Achilles’ ostensible reconciliation with Agamemnon in Book XVIII; others see the rage as deeper and more resilient than a reaction to that quarrel, a thing briefly susceptible but ultimately impervious to aesthetic or passionate sublimity, an indignance at mortality itself and at the rest of the human status imposed on us by nature and society. However one reads it—even if one thinks the proem is merely a late addition—the genius of making anger rather than someone’s name the subject of both the song and the inevitable relative clause, ‘she who …’, belongs to a poet literally versed in catalogue poetry, in a way that shapes fundamentally his narrative thought.

The Odyssey, on the other hand, ends its first line with an enjambed relative clause, ‘he who many …’ (ὃς μάλα πολλά), but this time there is no named subject at all. The subject the Muse is asked to versify is ἀνήρ, ‘man’, although this is not the man who is everyman or Man, but the masculinity whose counter in a multipolar and threatening but also initiatory cosmos, we are soon enough to realise, is called γυνή, ‘woman’ and the feminine. It is in fact quite some time, twenty-one lines, before we ever hear (in passing) the name of this putative warrior, replete with a fitting epithet. The relative clause here feigns generality, hints suspense, and delights in not revealing too much too soon, like its subject.

Given our predicament as foreigners who know neither Greek nor the events nor the stories that recount them, what poetry can we find in Odysseus’ nuggety catalogue entries? To begin with there is the agenda in this poet which I touched on last time, to bring forward the women; perhaps they were heretofore unsung, perhaps such a celebratory parade of ancient women was unprecedented, we have no way of knowing. Certainly the notion of meeting these women’s souls one after another must have transformed the experience of reciting their poetic memorial. The catalogue becomes, vicariously, almost an interactive medium.

Women made possible the men and even the towns who populate the sort of tales called κλέα ἀνδρῶν, of which the Iliad is either an example, or the iconoclastic heir who broke their mould. These are the ‘glories of men’ or Men’s News magazines, depending on your perspective. After a night in Zeus’s arms, Antiope gave birth to a brace of boys

Who first established the seat of Thebe of the Seven Gates,

And fortified it with towers, since without towers they could not

Settle in Thebe, her wide dancing ground, for all that they were strong.

(11.263-5)

It is at least curious that these presumed-to-be mighty sons, Amphion and Zethus, who founded a city and built its battlements, immediately have their prowess undercut by the statement that they could never have defended their new town without the fortifications. Evidently they were trying to appropriate a place that was already discovered and populated, like America or Palestine. It is possible, however, that they established only what is called here the ‘seat’ of Thebe and fortified that, a sort of government stronghold, because of the hostility of the Thebans who were already there. One only says this because elsewhere Cadmus is the founder of Thebes. Ino who saved Odysseus at sea with her veil, was Cadmus’ daughter.

There is a sense of sanctuary in the notion of the wide dancing ground enclosed by defensive walls and towers. There is instead a sense of intrusion if the towers represent a new and imposed usurpation from within. In either case, the place for dancing and μουσική—the possibility of poetry, including the memorialising of Antiope, Amphion, and Zethus in the face of the other anonymous mothers and sons dwelling outside—is predicated on an outward facing, hostile and militant political establishment. But there are seven gates in and out, if you want to join the dancing boys and girls.

Alcmene next gets a minimal three lines, giving her name, her spouse’s name, and the full line for the name of her famous son:

And after her I saw Alcmene, the spouse of Amphitryon;

Mother to Heracles, Bold-Spirit—Lion Breath;

She conceived him when she had sex in the bent arms of big Zeus.

(266-8)

The stories about Heracles the original Superman must have been legion, but they get not so much as a nod. Odysseus does not tap into his august and scary predecessor’s greatest hits. Whether he is steering clear for some reason, we cannot know; but perhaps the third line is a clue to Odysseus’ focus in these nuggets: it’s the sex! Alcmene had sex in big Zeus’s embraces (ἀγκοίνηισι Διὸς μεγάλοιο μιγεῖσα). Is this the through line (pun intended) from Tyro and Poseidon on, that the focus in each of these entries in Odysseus’ catalogue is the line describing sex and conception? Have we perhaps stumbled on the clue to the ellipsis and brevity and handwaving allusion? The focus is actually on the one, soft-core moment which in its overwhelming immersion, as though one is enclosed within a mountainous purple wave, makes to fade all the interesting details of past and future, consequence and fate. Homer has invented a soft porn catalogue, which we might recognise as a narrative genre where the details of the story only serve loosely as a frame, as prompts of a sort to tickle and whet the imagination for the money shot.

Megara, a sexual partner of Heracles, then gets only two lines. She is the first of the women Odysseus meets who has not slept with a god. But the second line confirms the clue as to Odysseus’ sexual focus:

τὴν ἔχεν Ἀμφιτρύωνος υἱὸς μένος αἰὲν ἀτειρής.

She’s the one Amphitryon’s son would have, his energy relentless and constant.

(270)

Heracles is known for his many labours, but surely the ‘energy relentless and constant’ here is meant to put one in mind of what Megara experienced in bed, when he’d ‘have her’ (τὴν ἔχεν).

Between Tyro, Antiope, and Alcmene, we find the sources of heroes at Troy and Argonauts, the foundation of Thebes of the Seven Gates (Thebe in Homer), around which so many traditional stories revolve, and of course the towering figure of Heracles, to whom all modern superheroes owe a debt. He satisfies the conceit that we can be players in the heavens, that one of the bodies raging in the sky may actually be on our side—even one of us, born of woman. The labours of Hercules turn Odysseus’ journeys and sufferings into a sort of satyr play. In each of these instances the fulcrum is the moment the woman has sex with either Poseidon or Zeus. Each of these so far can be construed to be rape. Hence these women are the womb of history. Is this a catalogue of women or a catalogue of wombs? There is a reductive aspect to the catalogue so far, whether that is a side effect of the form or an intention. The beauty of the woman conspires with the lust of the god to generate history. Lucretius would perhaps sympathise, that a fire burning in Helen for Paris is an ignition which ultimately sets fire to Ilium. Hitler’s mum took a fancy. History is wombs of fire.

Things complicate, however. After Heracles and Megara—Homer breaks the pattern and mentions no offspring in their case, but later stories say Heracles kills them—we continue our descent into the ways of mortal erotica when we come to what we know as the story of Oedipus. In Odysseus’ telling it is actually the story of his mother, whom he calls Epicaste. The son Homer calls Oedipodes.

And I saw the mother of Oedipodes, beautiful Epicaste;

She’s the one did a big piece of work—in the witlessness of her thought—

When she was wedded to her own son: the guy slew and stripped his father,

Then mated her: and right away, the gods made the thing notorious among folk.

(271-4)

For the first time in the catalogue we hear of a deed being done. Of course the deed in question centres on an act of sex, but this time there’s a difference; it is a ‘big deed’ (μέγα ϝἔργον) in the sense of an outrageous one. Evidently there are rules when it comes to human coupling, but there has been no comment on divine rape of human women, or inter-divinity incest. There is no word for ‘incest’ in Greek, but it can perhaps be taken for granted that the parent-child relation was forbidden, though speaking of it between mother and son was seemingly not taboo. Indeed, the gods themselves were keen to publish the thing right away! The shock is concretely rendered in the melodic tonal prosody: γημαμένη ὧι υἷι, ‘wedded to her own son’, contains four straight syllables of changing pitch, the last three of them long and dynamically prominent or stressed, with two consecutive circumflexes. This is what justifies the appalled emphases in my translation. It is striking that the gods’ scruples mirror the human, and mean to amplify them. In point of fact they are tattletales.

Let us note the details in Odysseus’ nugget: it is not said that Oedipodes did anything in ignorance. He killed and despoiled his father, then had sex (‘married’) with his mother. It is said that Epicaste did her ‘big deed’ with this qualification in the dative case: ἀϝιδρίηισι νόϝοιο. Translators say ‘in the ignorance of her mind’, but I do not think Homer’s usage will yet bear the notion of ‘mind’ for νόϝος; this word seems always to signify something concrete in him, as I would style a ‘thought’ or a ‘plan’ or an ‘intention’, a product of thinking (νόειν), rather than an underlying faculty (‘mind’, ‘intelligence’). νόϝος (more familiarly in the contracted form νοῦς) most certainly came to have this meaning in philosophy and more popularly. But it seems to me all the text requires of Epicaste is an ignorant or stupid thought, whose folly resided principally in an expectation that she wouldn’t be caught—as perhaps might have been contrived somehow, if the pesky gods had not blown the couple’s cover.

Oedipodes himself continued to rule among the Cadmeans in ‘ravishing’ Thebe. He was one himself, in the line of Cadmus like his father. One rather feels the city’s epithet as a predicate, perhaps especially as it is separated from its subject after the mid-line break (caesura). Thebe was indeed a place of ‘much erotic desire’ (Θήβηι πολυηράτωι). It is said he suffers griefs but they are not explained, nor are the ‘baneful plans’ (ὀλοὰς βουλάς) of the gods which somehow underpin his continued rule. These are the frustrations of catalogue poetry, and Homeric allusion. We hear in the Iliad that Oedipodes had a big funeral. There’s no mention that he was blinded.

But she? Walked into Hades’ house, the mighty Gatekeeper,

Once she’d strapped a noose high from the lofty roof-tree,

In the grip of her own grief: and for him, she left pains behind—

A ton of them, what a mother’s Furies accomplish till they’re done.

(277-80)

Epicaste took her own life. As Jane Austen noted, in relation to the punishment dealt to the male partner in the violation of taboo: ‘In this world, the penalty is less equal than could be wished.’ It is intriguing to speculate that Homer’s phrase ἀϝιδρίηισι νόϝοιο made some formative impression on Sophocles, where he may have understood it as ‘ignorance of mind’. “How could she not have known? He must not have known either. But how could he have killed his father in ignorance? Hmm. There’s a plot point there. But the whole thing is really about him.” And so Sophocles and Freud. (And Nolan).

In both stories the mother-wife commits suicide. But why does Epicaste curse her son? There are explanations both for the suicide and the curse, which do not depend on unwitting action or incest. Shame is shame in either case, but the one is not intrinsic, it is the shame of being exposed. Perhaps she is angry at being seduced or raped, now that the plan, of which she had been persuaded and convinced, has been shown to be witless. Is she, however, the first of these women to be angry at being deceived or raped? Or the first to become impossibly sad? Their speeches are muzzled. Yet they bear silent witness.

The Odyssey already has a song within a song, before the catalogue of episodes which constitute Odysseus’ wanderings, or the catalogue of women in Hades within that ‘Tale of Alcinous’. This is the love affair of Ares and Aphrodite, sung by Demodocus while the Phaeacian boys dance in its rhythm. It seems to offer a different paradigm for the possibilities of sexual congress, albeit in a divine realm and not without consequence at the hands of a jealous cuckold. Poseidon will pay, for Ares, the adulterer’s price. But Aphrodite emerges without shame, amidst the lustful laughter of the boy-gods looking longingly on:

ἣ δ’ ἄρα Κύπρον ἵκανε φιλομμειδὴς Ἀφροδίτη,

ἐς Πάφον · ἔνθα δέ ϝοἱ τέμενος βωμός τε θυήεις.

ἔνθα δέ μιν Χάριτες λοῦσαν καὶ χρῖσαν ἐλαίωι

ἀμβρότωι, οἷα θεοὺς ἐπενήνοθεν αἰὲν ἐόντας, 365

ἀμφὶ δὲ εἵματα ἕσσαν ἐπήρατα, θαῦμα ϝἰδέσθαι.

… she arrived at Cyprus, Love-Smile, Aphrodite,

To Paphus: where she has a precinct and redolent altar.

There the Graces bathed her and anointed her with olive oil,

Ambrosial, the kind which emerges on the surface of gods who exist forever,

And they dressed her round in love-arousing clothes, amazing to look at.

(8.362-6)

For Aphrodite, there’s always a happy ending. Perhaps that is not possible in the human realm. But it remains to be seen what can be made of the song without the song, what sort of paradigm it may propose: the song of Odysseus’ struggle to return to Penelope. Is that also to be exposed as the ‘witlessness of his thought’? These are the two people who each emote in their own accents. There is more to identify them than a name and a lineage. That is the musical reality of the Odyssey. I understand why teachers and filmmakers want to make this a poem about an epic hero. But there is no one who speaks in tones like either Penelope or Odysseus. This is a fact of Homer’s Greek. This is a couple who, despite the difference in their melodic energies, will come to exhibit that oneness of thinking (ὁμοφροσύνη) which Odysseus wishes, upon meeting her, for Nausicaa and her imagined husband. Is there possible in the human realm a sort of timeline that is not merely a catalogue of seductions and impositions, love affairs and broken promises, but a ‘love story’? One cannot translate this last concept into Greek, except to say, by name, The Odyssey.

Epicaste was left no option. She is no goddess of love. Instead she walked into Hades’ house, the mighty gatekeeper (πυλάρταο κρατεροῖο), and indeed her soul has made the walk back, to meet Odysseus just within that gate. Her story ends abruptly, because that is how catalogues work.

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Odyssey 11.225-59

In Greek:

Persephone’s first called witness, and the first soul permitted by Odysseus to drink the sheep’s blood and thus to speak, is Tyro. Once again Odysseus puts front and centre the gory ritual of the blood-drinking from a dug trench, which, one presumes, would have been done on all fours like an animal. Whatever the impact of this foregrounding upon how we take in the series of souls of noble women to follow, it seems most likely to be a reductive and equalising feint from the world of comedy, unsuited to the Boeotian tragedies to which these women and their stories will, one day, pregnantly attach.

There the first that I saw was Tyro, well-fathered,

Who stated that she was the offspring of blameless Salmoneus,

And claimed to be the lady wife of Cretheus son of Aeolus. (Od.11.235-7)

It’s not clear whether Tyro was the original tyro; etymologists connect our word to a Latin tiro, meaning ‘new soldier’ or ‘recruit’, but that -y- needs explaining. Usually representation of a sound by -y- in Latin suggests an origin in Greek short -υ-. It does seem that Homer’s Τυρώ (whose -υ- is long or lengthened in Homer’s verse) was a newcomer to social and political prominence, conspicuous, no doubt, for an extraordinary sexual attractiveness, although she does not appear to merit a ‘fair-tressed’ or a ‘ravishing’. Instead her introductory epithet is εὐπατέρεια, ‘of a good father’ or ‘good parentage’, which amounts to a claim that is strangely, if gently, undermined. At least, it seems a thing to remark on, despite crickets from the commentaries, on the sense of ‘stated’ (φάτο) and ‘claimed’ (φῆ) in the lines that follow. Why should Tyro’s status as either daughter or wife require any sort of assertion on her part? As if she were some sort of nouvelle claimant, a tyro?

Continuing in the spirit of what came to be called comedy, Odysseus decides that the best way to deal with the crowd of women’s souls gathered around the blood was to draw his ‘sharp-edged sword’ from by his ‘firm thigh’ so they could not drink all at once. Hence the women, in the face of the hero’s brandished phallus,

… came on, one before the other, and each woman

Would announce her own lineage fully; while I was for questioning all of them. (233-4)

Though he tells us that the women spoke, he does not say their lines but only gives us reported speech; she ‘stated’ and ‘claimed’. By itself this introduces the element of doubt about their veracity; one wonders to what end? The choice of reported speech is expensive dramatically. It is also not clear if the women actually said anything else but their lineage (γόνος), or indeed if Odysseus asked any other question of them. The story told of them in the third person goes on to begin with a relative clause, ‘she who did such and such,’ which is the style of a catalogue. The details of the story then related are therefore separated in origin from either Odysseus’ question or each woman’s answer. They do not come from the horse’s mouth. The distance thus created rather obtrudes when we are used to Homer delighting in embodying speakers and speeches in his art. None of the souls of the ancient women speaks in their own person before the audience, whereas those of the warriors whom Odysseus had known will later be full of things to say.

It should be noted that only men in Homer’s poems receive epithets which we classify as ‘patronymics’, and which function almost as surnames (Lāertiadēs or Pēlēïadēs, e.g., for Odysseus and Achilles, or Cronidēs for Zeus). Tyro’s reputed husband Cretheus, for example, is Aiolidāo, ‘son of Aeolus’. Tyro herself, however, must be located genealogically by either or both of her father and husband, and it would seem that there can be uncertainty about these attributions in later generations; whereas the certainty seems to be absolute when it comes to male patronymics. This is true even when the Aeolus who is Tyro’s grandfather is thought not to be the same Aeolus who controls the winds and marries his children to each other. Perhaps that is why there is extant a Catalogue of Women in hexameter verses; it would seem the mnemonic reinforcement sometimes aided by musical settings would be more necessary in the case of ancestral women than the men, who live lives with their patronymics ever present. The spirit of Father Cronus, for example, himself long departed with the golden age, is present throughout the Iliad and the Odyssey in the regular sounding of Zeus’s patronymics Κρονίδης or Κρονίων. But Hera is not known as ‘daughter of Cronus’. She is remembered as Zeus’s no.1 wife, not his sister, except of course in titillating Roman or Victorian mythology books.

I say this because the evident cultural certainty about male patrilineal descent is so at odds with human nature and experience. One should have thought that women would have the best guess at who might have fathered their child. The culture of patronymics seems, in light of this fact, to protest too much its certainty. Although Homer has Tyro claim to be a daughter and a wife, she seems altogether free of what those claims may claim on her. She acts fully in the power, and under the power, of her own erotic being. As the relative clause of her listing relates,

ἣ ποταμοῦ ἠράσσατ’ Ἐνιπῆϝος θείοιο,

ὃς πολὺ κάλλιστος ποταμῶν ἐπὶ γαῖαν ἵησιν.

καί ῥ’ ἐπ’ Ἐνιπῆϝος πωλέσκετο καλὰ ῥέεθρα ·

She it was fell physically in love with the river, divine Enipeus,

Who was much the most beautiful of the rivers who move upon the earth,

And she was often coming and going for Enipeus’ lovely currents. (238-40)

What can my readers make of the idea of sexual attraction for, and relations with, a river? I suppose there is a dreamily poetic way to take this, where the river becomes an evocative metaphor for the forces and currents one experiences in sexual arousal and orgasm, coursing within and around the participants. It may help colour the picture that Tyro is at this point a virgin—what is described as her ‘virgin zone’ (παρθενίην ζώνην, 245) is later removed, one should think for the first time—and so her thoughts of erotic rivers may be adolescent or pubescent and involve pink unicorns.

The clue, however, that Homer is not in metaphorical mode, is that more often than not, his allusions to encounters between rivers and women result in pregnancy. The characters in Homer’s poems generally cannot name their human ancestors beyond two generations; at that point divine agents intervene, among them your lusty rivers. The Homeric people are evidently two generations removed from a decimating cosmic upheaval, or emigration under duress; their economies no longer forge weapons, it seems, but only inherit or trade or win them in battle. The present activity of the gods suggests that nothing has yet settled, that cosmic equilibria remain unstable; but that prior to the great generations of the truly World Wars, first involving Heracles or Theseus or Atreus and then Agamemnon, Achilles, and Odysseus, there was an Hiroshima, as it were, from beyond which Homer traces no descent. There some time emerged on the nascent Hellenic scene, as if from stage right, the likes of Agamemnon’s grandfather, Pelops for whom the present Peloponnese was named—perhaps when it was still an island (nēsos)—and Aeacus and Arceisias, patrilineal grandfathers of Achilles and Odysseus. And a number of Homer’s present-day heroes trace their ancestry to a river who made love to their grandmother.

In other fora, I have suggested spontaneous pregnancy as a non-miraculous occurrence amongst women and other mammals, the fortunate or unfortunate survivors of cosmic thunderbolts and their associated vorticial winds, earth-shakes, and deluges. It would seem to be impossible, alas, to recreate the conditions of such electrified and radiative environments under experimental conditions, to test their effects on ova and gametes generally. Perhaps it is in such environments that the degenerate, mutant y-chromosome itself first emerged. But what is evident is that fresh water rivers are non-conducting, and therefore can present an oversized insulated obstruction and telluric guide to the extravagant voltages, expressing themselves around them in diverse fantastical rock-melting, mountain-building winds and discharged veins of copper and gold. The following is an experiment conducted by Billy Yelverton, at the request of the late Michael Steinbacher, showing two opposite electrodes suspended over sand, with a channel of fresh water snaking between them. Do not miss the final still images (15:39):

No less than the Grand Canyon in Arizona, with its adjacent catastrophic deposits of uranium, is stupendous testimony to the almost absurd power of an already present fresh water flow on the polarised forces discharging on either side. The banks of a river, in such circumstances, would have been extraordinary places of radiative flux and interaction, and possibly also of safety from the worst effects. Probably they still are. Life hugs the Nile. Lovers take river walks.

Despite all the human reasons to lie about paternity, let us not close our minds to the possibility of riparian parentage. Homer is not speaking of virgin births, nor does he (or Tyro) clumsily attempt to divert gossip about adulterous liaisons. We do not know what we do not know, and I propose it best to suppose that Homer knew something we do not know about the erotic and progenitive power of certain rivers, under special historical circumstances no longer as present in his (or our) present. In the Iliad the river Scamander is shown to be capable of flooding and drowning people, like our rivers; in the past, however, it (he) had fathered humans and the progenitors of heroes. There is no reason to suppose that Homer was not serious about this, whether in the spirit of tragedy or of comedy, and I am more inclined to take him seriously than I am the theatre of the fatuous, where authorities declaim that a river gradually eroded the sheer-faced crack of the Grand Canyon, leaving no delta or detritus. No age ascribes more magical powers to rivers, including on bone-dry neighbouring planets, than the present Age of Uniformitarian Science. There is, to be sure, something wondrous about electrical insulation, and rivers, but not something magical.

This is not to say that Homer does not have fun with the idea that rivers can be lovers and fathers, only that he does not question the fact of it. How does one imagine the copulation, for example? He has the enraptured Tyro frequent the world’s most beautiful river’s beautiful currents; does that mean she had a swim, and that was the sex of it? This could certainly explain how Poseidon caught sight of her naked and was bitten with fateful desire. But it seems the river must have had to take on the form and endowment of the human male, to give the woman some incentive and something to grapple. And indeed, in order to do the deed himself with Tyro, Poseidon takes on the likeness of the river Enipeus, in a form human enough such that he can ‘lie alongside’ (παρελέξατο) a woman. But where does he do this?

In the mouths of the eddying river, he went to bed with her. (242)

The Earth-Shaker Poseidon disguises himself as Enipeus and makes love to Tyro in the eddies—of the river Enipeus! Rather than stipulate or attempt to resolve the problem of how a river can make love to and impregnate a woman, Homer rather exults in the paradox, tickling a feeling for ‘meta’ humour in him to which we are getting used and coming to expect. Perhaps Enipeus can’t spot the clandestine lovers at his mouths, where his currents run into Poseidon’s sea?

Enipeus himself was never so lucky as to father children by Tyro, unless her later children, alleged to be by her husband Cretheus, need to get paternity tests. But the engendering achieved by Poseidon is something quite astounding in the description, even for Homer:

πορφύρεον δ’ ἄρα κῦμα περιστάθη οὔρεϊ ϝἶσον

κυρτωθέν, κρύψεν δὲ θεὸν θνητήν τε γυναῖκα ·

Purple indeed was the wave stood up over them—equal of a mountain,

Its back arched—that hid the god and the death-bound woman. (243-4)

One can no longer know what apparition inspired these words, but it must have been known concretely to his audience to be evoked in so few words: a mountain-high wave the colour of purple dye, arched in stasis over the eddying mouth of a river to frame a couple making love. That is one for the Hollywood magicians. Did any becalmed or frantic Israelites make love between the Red Sea’s watery walls?

Homer’s description is explicit, at least from a masculine point of view, and as explicit as Homer ever gets about such things. Sometimes a sword is not just a sword, but this time there’s no double entendres:

λῦσε δὲ παρθενίην ζώνην, κατὰ δ’ ὕπνον ἔχευεν.

αὐτὰρ ἐπεί ῥ’ ἐτέλεσσε θεὸς φιλοτήσια ϝἔργα,

ἔν τ’ ἄρα ϝοἱ φῦ χειρί, ϝἔπος τ’ ἔφατ’ ἔκ τ’ ὀνόμαζεν ·

He undid the virgin’s zone and poured sleep down on her.

But once the god climaxed his acts of love,

He grew into her with his arm, spoke a line and called it what it was: (245-7)

Although the impression is strong that Poseidon would have got his way no matter what, the story is still framed as a matter of Tyro’s desire and consent. She is fooled by Poseidon into thinking that she is sleeping with the ‘man’ that she has in fact already chosen. It seems important somehow that the intent of this erotic woman is kept pure, at least of the smell of rape, and perhaps of the idea of desiring Poseidon directly. There is positive spin going on: Odysseus’ whole catalogue of femmes fatales is making statements on many levels, including to its internal audience: seated among the Phaeacians, one might say presiding over them, is Queen Arete, in whose approval the possibility of Odysseus’ home return is known to lie. As we shall see, Arete is effusive about Odysseus’ lineup of women and his elaboration of their stories; Odysseus scores.

Note that after undoing her maiden girdle, but before he climaxes, Poseidon puts Tyro to sleep. Is this date rape? Is Poseidon Bill Cosby? Again I wonder what readers may speculate. It may be that there is a quality of mercy in this backdoor rapist, in that there is good reason to suppose that sex with a divinity (perhaps especially a male one) may be too physically overwhelming or even mortal for a mortal. It may also be that there is a delicacy about representing the female orgasm. According to one of the non-Homeric stories, Teiresias was one who had experienced being both a man and a woman; hence he was asked by Zeus and Hera to decide their dispute, as to whether the man or the woman got the greatest pleasure from sex. When he answered truthfully—we’ll have to take his word—that it was the woman by as much as ten times, Hera blinded him in anger. But one cannot be sure if her anger was from a Victorian shame or indignance, or rather for losing a bet to Zeus. At any rate, Odysseus exempts Tyro from pleasure with her lover, or else himself from describing or otherwise expressing it; and denies her memory of their moment beyond the awesome liquid purple arch above, and the undoing below of her virgin garment. Perhaps he is conscious of Arete in his audience. But he is not therefore shy of depicting Poseidon, his enemy but also the Phaeacians’ patriarch, as a deceiver and a roofie rapist.

The only speech Odysseus composes and performs in his catalogue of women he delivers as the successful lover Poseidon. This itself is striking, and calls attention to his choice, both why him? and why not any of the women? Whatever the answer, Poseidon’s speech is an extraordinary moment for Homeric poetics, when one understands this concept in the frame of a solo performer embodying the composition as its method of delivery. As a sculptor works in stone, so does Homer through his rhapsode. First Poseidon wakes her up in his arms and makes his annunciation to Tyro:

χαῖρε γύναι φιλότητι · περιπλομένου δ’ ἐνιαυτοῦ

τέξεις ἀγλαὰ τέκνα, ἐπεὶ οὐκ ἀποφώλιοι εὐναί

ἀθανάτων · σὺ δὲ τοὺς κομέειν ἀτιταλλέμεναί τε.

“Thanks and be well, woman, for this lovemaking: this same time when the year comes round,

You will bear splendid children, for it’s not completely useless, going to bed

With the deathless ones: see that you look after them and rear them …” (248-50)

The children she had by Poseidon were Pelias and Neleus, fathers respectively of Achilles and Nestor, without whom there would be no Iliad. It might seem odd to elevate Nestor’s significance on par with Achilles’, since he is a bellicose, rapine old windbag, but it seems in classical authors Homer’s Nestor was remembered as an exemplar of sagacity and oratorical skill. It need not be the case that classical authors knew what they had in Nestor, or Homer, any more than the ‘oral theory’ academics do today. It must be said, however, that there seems to be a sense of humour in Homer’s elevation of Neleus alongside Pelias, in the comparison of their dwelling-places:

τὼ κρατερὼ θεράποντε Διὸς μεγάλοιο γενέσθην255

ἀμφοτέρω · Πελίης μὲν ἐν εὐρυχόρωι Ἰαωλκῶι

ναῖε πολύρρηνος, ὃ δ’ ἄρ’ ἐν Πύλωι ἠμαθόεντι.

Those two that became strong ministers of big Zeus,

The pair of them: Pelias in the wide dancing grounds of Iolcus—

He lived there, rich in sheep—while the other was in sandy Pylos. (255-7)

Nestor’s ‘sandy’ Pylos sounds, and is meant to sound, distinctly, prosaically sandy in the shadow of Iolcus, rich with sheep on grazing land, and her wide spaces for dancing.

Among her other children, attributed to her sometime husband Cretheus as sire, is Aison, the father of Jason. Between the story of the Argonauts and the Trojan War, Tyro can therefore be said to be the mother of the greatest hits among those stories which supply the κλέα ἀνδρῶν (klea andrōn), the ‘glories of men’ or the ‘tales of heroes’. I have been making a case, since the sacrifice of Nestor’s heifer, that the Odyssey itself means to foreground the experience of the women who made possible that Trojan War, not only the obvious Helen, but the mothers and wives who counterpose with their labour, patience, and endurance, the supposed exploits of men. Students in college may encounter the phrase klea andrōn among a handful of other phrases transliterated from ancient Greek; the Iliad and the Odyssey are supposed to belong to their genre. But when we walk in on Achilles (an ἀνήρ [sg. ‘man’] among ἀνδρῶν [pl. ‘men’]) singing from these klea andrōn to Patroclus—a possibly reluctant audience of one—we know we are in ‘meta’ territory. As I read the Odyssey the phrase begins to register in rather a different way, as, literally, ‘men’s tales’; even ‘men’s news’, in the sense that one speaks of ‘women’s magazines’.

Note that in Greek ἀνήρ/ἀνδρός always means ‘man’ in the sense of ‘male’ and usually ‘warrior’, not ‘man’ in the sense of ‘human’. ἄνθρωπος (anthrōpos) is the generic term (as we say) meaning ‘human being’. γυνή (gynē), on the other hand, the principal word for ‘woman’, does not give the appearance of being derivative, as do ‘woman’ and ‘female’. It evidently refers to a distinct species. A phrase with surprising implications is Zeus’s title ‘father of gods and men’ (πατὴρ ἀνδρῶν τε θεῶν τε, e.g. 1.28). He is not the father of all living, or of human beings (anthrōpoi), but ‘warrior men’ (andres). Zeus is not boss of the feminine, but a son of a mother who has won his way into a kind of authoritarian political governance over gods and fighting men.

This is not to suggest that the Odyssey ought to be understood as a ‘women’s tale’. It’s very first word announces its subject: ἄνδρα, a man or the man. One might do worse, however, than to compare the poem about the man to the dead women in Odysseus’ catalogue: they must be identified by claims as to their father or their husband or their children—that is, relationally, not directly by a patronymic. Some essential part of the Odyssey lives in reaction or response to the Iliad, but not the other way around; and to this extent (I claim) she acts and draws her power sometimes as a corrective and at others as a complement. Yes, both the Iliad and the Odyssey are usefully addressed as klea andrōn—another set of songs are called nostoi, ‘homecomings’, to accommodate the Odyssey—but their respective takes on the genres brood with self-reflectivity and critique, to result, in the case of the Odyssey, not in tragic sublimity but in comedy’s savage bite and bellyful. More on this next time.

In the Odyssey’s opening lines the word andra (‘warrior man’) is almost immediately juxtaposed by the word anthrōpos (‘human’): ‘so many the peoples (anthrōpōn) whose towns he saw, whose thought he came to know’ (1.3). Hence its relational sense is drawn out. This is not a poem about ‘man’ or an everyman, but a particular warrior who went wandering on an unintended journey of discovery, once the fighting was done. Soon (1.13) he is described as νόστου κεχρημένον ἠδὲ γυναικός, which I have rendered thus: ‘in want of his return home, as well as his woman—the wife—’. This seemed okay as exposition, as it draws out the relational quality and the possible peculiar signification of the one word gynaikos as a silent reference to Penelope. But I’ve used too many words. Homer’s phrase is actually a pithy four words which describe the man, also as yet unnamed, as ‘in need of restoration and [a] woman’. The poet as much as says that the warrior is an homeless man in need of woman, not the de facto sufficient and independent subject of ‘tales of heroes’.

The notions of ‘hero’ and ‘heroic verse’ are misleading in the extreme in the way they have come to frame Homer. The subject is too vast and interesting to burden the passage on Tyro and Poseidon’s tryst, except that their verses help to point out that heroes have mums who sleep around and give birth to the Iliad and Jason and the Argonauts, and so give them parts to play. To study the ‘hero’ of Greek cult is to study religion and anthropology. To study the universe of the Sophoclean ἥρως (hērōs) is to study the universe. The one thing these heroes may have in common with Homer’s, is that they are all victims, in a sense that Christian martyrs would share if they had not borne witness to a gospel. It is possible that the heroes bore witness to something in their sacrifice. But it was not heroism, in our usage, nor were they ‘role models’ so much as choice victims, prime grade meat, though some might be called paradigms or archetypes. To pay attention to Homer’s own usage, consider the opening lines of the Iliad: ‘ten thousand souls of heroes … hurled into Hades, themselves made a feast for jackals and omen birds …’ They were not special, there were a myriad of them. One should therefore begin one’s investigation into Homer’s usage with the working hypothesis that an Homeric ‘hero’ is a nameless male human who dies futilely while fighting. Those are five italicised qualities from different parts of speech which inhere essentially in Homer’s hero. His destiny is to be dog food.

Finally in Poseidon’s speech to Tyro arrives the god’s dramatic epiphany through the voice and body of the performer. We come at last to the promised moment of histrionic apotheosis. The rhapsode, being Odysseus among the Phaeacians playing Odysseus in Hades, reciting his encounter with a catalogue of women who are mothers of epic narrative, becomes his own great nemesis, the god Poseidon himself. He mugs the role as a secretive backdoor lover who nevertheless says who he is on the way out: the performer presents himself alone on stage basking in his sexual glory:

νῦν δ’ ἔρχευ πρὸς δῶμα, καὶ ἴσχεο μηδ’ ὀνομήνηις ·

αὐτὰρ ἐγώ τοί εἰμι Ποσειδάων ἐνοσίχθων.

“Now go to your house, and keep to yourself and do not say my name;

Ah but it’s me, I tell you: I, Poseidon, the Ground-Shaker.” (251-2)

Ensconced as it is at the start of the procession of women’s souls, the dramatic power of this moment gets lost in the literate, academic approach to the poetry of the Odyssey. This is in fact a poetry which scripts (not suggests) performance; that is likely a formulation abstract enough to apply to all ancient Greek epic and lyric poetry. On this spectrum Odysseus’ story has been a series of dramatic announcements of his name, starting with Outis (‘Nowan’) and then ‘Odysseus’ to Polyphemus the Cyclops, Poseidon’s son, seemingly to climax here with this declaration: ‘I am Poseidon’ (ἐγώ τοί εἰμι Ποσειδάων).

Before us stands the god. The performer presents himself as one who has just had sex with Tyro. He has just undressed her, put her to sleep, and climaxed within her in front of us. This is as close to public erotica as Greek mimesis will get, unless one admits the vases. The use of ἐγώ is always emphatic in Greek; that is, the subject ‘I’ is already contained in the verb εἰμί, so it is never necessary to add ego. It is therefore in the script that the performer launch into this moment. He removes the clothes of his disguise and stands there splayed on stage like an erection. To the Phaeacians, he is Poseidon who says, ‘I’m your Daddy.’

So who is this ‘I am’, this Poseidon? Next time we shall return to the journey of the oar and the winnowing-fan. They are what they are. But when you plant either one upright in the ground, its double meanings become red herrings for the perennial double entendre: the thing is a phallus, a lingam. It is a maypole. From my first book (with an embedded quotation):

… the customs of the village festival gave rise to two types of dance. There was the processional dance of the band of worshippers in progress round their boundaries and from field to field, from house to house, from well to well of the village … The other type of folk-dance, the ronde or ‘round’, is derived from the comparatively stationary dance of the group of worshippers around the more especially sacred objects of the festival, such as the tree or the fire. The custom of dancing round the Maypole has been more or less preserved wherever the Maypole is known.

The phallic song and dance, which was still current in many cities in Aristotle’s time (Poetics 1449a12–13)—perhaps also with the function of marking and consecrating the boundaries, farms, and water sources of the unwalled village (κώμη)—was the ancient Greek version of the processional type of village chorus.

Aristotle connects the name of comedy (κωμῳδία) to this village processional (the word would be composed of village+song in Greek). The ribald festal revel called a κῶμος, from which modern scholars prefer to derive ‘comedy’, may well also refer to the phallic processions of Aristotle’s reportage. What could grumpy Poseidon, the backdoor lover and the earthquake, have to do with the spirit of comedy? I shall attempt to tell this tale next time.

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Odyssey 11.152-224

Odysseus’ encounter with his mother begins in the same hideous way in which, one presumes, all his encounters with the souls of the dead and gone begin. All that is said is that she came up and drank the dark animal blood. Who knows what the performer mimes or enacts. But if we let our imaginations work, we see a sad old woman squatting down or on all fours, lapping up spilt blood like a dog, or perhaps she cups her hands and draws from the pool. Either way there’s blood dripping down her face, and maybe staining her motherly hands as well, the while she talks to her son. Or where does the blood go in an insubstantial thing? What does it become? Clearly it is up to the performer how far forward in our imaginations to bring the clumsily gory possibilities, but it is Homer himself who has prescribed the bloody ritual, overseen by Odysseus’ sword, as a precondition of any dialogue. Homer has no interest in hiding the deadness of the dead; he wants the disquieting sensual ambience, a slightly farcical macabre, to frame and colour his scene.

Homer seems to suggest that the quaff of blood causes the instant recognition of Odysseus in his mother (αὐτίκα δ’ ἔγνω), but it seems she must have been aware of who he was to have been hanging around already, first in line for a drink. Odysseus had to fend her off with his sword, remember, so Teiresias could go first. Perhaps among human souls, Odysseus’ mother was an exceptionally thirsty one. I don’t think this would be a profitable comic implication, however. It seems rather that Homer has gone out of logic’s way to emphasise, at least here, a kind of unawareness in the psyche prior to the tasting—or ingestion?—of fresh blood. It is not even human blood in the communion, but sacrificed blood of the flock. It seems there is no life after death, properly speaking; the souls have no strength, even to communicate, except with fuel they cannot procure by themselves. Teiresias is exceptional among them in being able to prophesy truth. The others seem able only, when prompted, of memories and renewing old interests or old stories. We shall see, however, that Odysseus’ mother, who remains nameless after her introduction as ‘Anticleia’ (Od.11.85)—she’s simply ‘Mother mine’, μῆτερ ἐμή—may prove uniquely and movingly capable. But there is no question of an Homeric theology or a consistent eschatology, beyond the proximate needs of the story; the rules of engagement Teiresias expounds have been preemptively broken by the insertion of Elpenor who has already spoken first, against Circe’s instructions, and without a hint of blood on his ghostly lips. Homer has therefore created an air of ambiguity about the rules, which is generally a feature rather than a bug in horror films.

‘How’d you get here?’ says Mum, like anyone who meets a traveler in Homer; ‘you must have had some ship! There’s that cosmic Ocean in between. Are you fresh from Troy, or did you manage a stop-in at home?’ (I paraphrase.) Odysseus tells her his story, as would any other soul over there. There’s no lack of self-pity: ‘always clinging to sorrow I’ve wandered …’ (αἰὲν ἔχων ἀλάλημαι ὀϊζύν, 11.167). No, he’s not had a chance to go home. He’s been forced to come here to consult the soul of Teiresias. He’s not come down—or over, or up beyond the sky—in order to see his Mum. (It must be said, Hades lives in a dark place, like the adjacent land of the Cimmerians, but in Homer it does not seem that we are prompted to imagine an ‘under’ world; on Achilles’ shield the stream of Oceanus encircles the cosmos, and seems, therefore, to be celestial. Hades is somewhere beyond its farther bank.) Now, is there a joke in this? Dionysus, in one of his manifestations anyway, is famous for braving Hades’ realm precisely in order to rescue his mortal mother Semele. Such a motive must surely resonate with humanity in general, as well as Greek speakers, both of whom tend to miss their mothers. To be sure, our Odysseus does not know beforehand that his mother is dead. But Homer rather moots this point, in the sense of making it irrelevant, by going out of his way to show that even if he’d known about her plight, Odysseus would not have attempted a voyage to Hades to find his mother—if not to rescue her, at least to meet her one last time—like Dionysus to save his mother, or Orpheus his Eurydice—before he would do so to consult Teiresias:

On there came the soul of my mother, dead and gone,

Daughter of Autolycus Great-Heart—Anticleia.

I left her behind alive, when I went to sacred Ilium.

Now, I burst into tears soon as I saw her, and pitied her in my life’s breath:

But no way was I for letting her in early—no matter the density of my grief—

To get near the blood, until I heard from Teiresias. (11.84-89)

The man had ‘burst into tears’ upon seeing Elpenor’s ghost as well, but there was no scruple then about remembering his mission or following Circe’s orders. There is a bloody-minded determination that rules and characterises this hero. There is not sentiment or romance. It seems to me that Homer makes him look a bit ridiculous, all in all. Wait your turn, Mum. I’m not here for you.

Of course we have no idea if Odysseus is an avatar of Dionysus, or whether Homer’s story about the sea journey south to Hades is instead the original for Dionysus’ descent to his mother. It does seem odd that the parody or sendup should appear before the religious tale, but there is no use in presuming about the mysteries of history—especially when there are more lacunas than continuous or contiguous wholes in the data—or the unpredictable twists of religious and cultural development. Few in the ancient world seem to have registered the Odyssey as comedy, with the conspicuous and notable exception of Aristotle (Poetics 1453a36). But perhaps we should consider that from our position, and more importantly our disposition, not a single joke would seem to have been told in the entire Judaeo-Christian corpus. The cultural sway of that corpus perhaps prevents us from best assessing what’s actually there, in the wrinkles of the flesh. If there’s jokes, we’re not in on them. What can I do but bear witness to what I experience in Homer’s Invisible Realm, rather than dismiss the macabre, the surreal, and the flat-out ludicrous, as unsuited to the ceremonies at the altar to that stately unicorn the professors call ‘epic’?

Let us look again at Odysseus’ responsive self-pity:

For I have not yet come near her, Achaea, nor yet have I set foot

On my own mother earth, no; always clinging to sorrow I’ve wandered,

From the very first I began to follow radiant Agamemnon

To Ilium of the fine foals, so I might do battle with Trojans. (11.166-9)

I hope my reader will correct me if I’m wrong, but this may be the first hint at an expression of regret from Odysseus about his decision to go to Troy. To be sure, there has been plenty of sadness in Odysseus’ story so far, perhaps even second-guessing. There has been the mourning over the men lost, several times repeated, a general air of mourning settled upon the whole voyage. The debacle in the Cyclops’ cave seems told in a tone, meanwhile, in equal parts confessional and proud. It was foolish and fateful for the rest of his journey, but in the consequence Odysseus announced himself by his name: no regrets, I should have thought. At the banquets in Phaeacia, tales of brave Ulysses, among other famous Achaeans, have been sung to men in their cups; they are evidently fascinating and entertaining in the Scherian theatre, these exploits of foreign heroes in foreign lands. Clearly they have been rather more complex experiences for Odysseus himself, also in audience. But I should not characterise that experience as one of regret. He sobs uncontrollably, until finally Alcinous demands his identity and Odysseus’ cover is broken. His tears are then compared to those of a widow fallen over her Trojan husband, as spears prod her in the back to join the chain of the enslaved. (One responds to this simile differently if one thinks of the newly widowed Andromache, or the newly re-widowed Helen.) At the very least, Odysseus is ‘going through’ something he must have to, in order to cope with hearing his story, where the experience of his many victims, and possibly one in particular, are made present to his consciousness as though he were reliving trauma in therapy. He goes so far as to bribe the singer to sing the slaughter after the Horse, the very episode of his butchery which traumatises him. But that does not suggest by itself, of necessity, that he feels regret. His seeking the means for a good cry seems to answer a larger and less focussed need, like choosing to see a tragedy. Grand releases of psychic energy, from diverse people of diverse backgrounds, explode in the stands at a home game. I suppose that’s why we go?

But when confronted by the soul of his dead mother, there is a glimpse of an almost nihilistic resignation to futility. Odysseus says he has been united with grief ‘from the very first’ he followed Agamemnon, so he ‘might do battle with Trojans.’ ‘From the very first’ (ἐξ οὗ τὰ πρώτιστα) takes us to the very beginning of a catalogue of consequent events, the beginning before the beginning that he makes to his Phaeacian audience with his first stops after leaving Troy. The phrase recalls the opening of the Iliad (I.6), when Homer asks the goddess to begin singing from the time when (ἐξ οὖ δὴ τὰ πρῶτα) first Agamemnon and Achilles ‘stood apart, paired in strife.’ One suspects that for the first time Odysseus, as a consequence of this encounter with his mother, sees his decision to follow Agamemnon and fight his war as the moment that began his catalogue of pain and grief. This catalogue now goes much further back than his hubris with the Cyclops and the vengeance of Poseidon that has wrecked his journey home. ‘That he might do battle with Trojans’ and ‘follow Agamemnon’ ring with painful hollowness in the presence of his mother whom he has lost meanwhile. “You been out, son? What you been up to? No good?” Mum has a power to elicit clarity about oneself, even from the grave. A word and a look from her can undercut the pretensions of heroic action and heroic song. Penelope has already once come down from her room and tried to change the channel (Od.1.337-44). His mother appears to have made Odysseus extend the catalogue of his life much further back than heretofore, not to his childhood but to the moment he left Mum behind to go to war.

Immediately he asks after his mother’s death. Was it a long illness, or was it Artemis’ gentle arrows? The latter must have brought some sort of sudden death which was thought, for some reason, not to be painful. Then Odysseus asks after his father and his son, not about their health, but their status; did they still possess the wealth he had gained in lands and livestock, or had some other dude become boss? It seems clear that Odysseus had made more of himself than he had inherited in Ithaca. But it is not clear just how he had acquired lands and livestock, and how he had maintained them. Once supposed facts of history like a Mediaeval era of feudalism are now up for reinterpretation; all there have ever been about ancient and pre-ancient (e.g. ‘Homeric’) economies are projections of recent theory and experience. As early a theorist (and historian) as Thucydides, for example, did not entertain the idea that Helen played any significant role in the causes of the Trojan War. It was all down to Agamemnon’s inheritance of consolidated lands, a naval power, and his humanly greedy acquisitiveness. No gods or women or even loyalty need be involved in his gathering an invasive armada, when the motivations of rational acquisitiveness or consumerism, or those of an ambitious mob boss would suffice.

The story of the Odyssey does seem to showcase a monogenetic patriarchy, in the line of Laertes to Odysseus to Telemachus. But it is all too clear that it is Odysseus who has both elevated his father and the prospects of his son, and that without him, there is a vacuum in Ithaca which is not likely to sustain either of them. He is the trinity, without him there’s a poor old man and a callow, unpromising grandson of no use to each other. Odysseus’ seems to have been a de facto kind of rule, where the mere threat of his prowess was enough to cause fealty, without a standing army or police; and to grant him the ability to levy oarsman-soldiers for the expedition to Troy, like a local version of Agamemnon. And yet he must have had a sort of magical something, or Odysseus would not have caught Homer’s attention, or those of his subjects. In the story we have, we are allowed and perhaps encouraged to project the monarchist’s dream of a benevolent king, a father rather than a patriarch, un upright man to whom disputants spontaneously come as a judge.

But Odysseus’ questions of his mother do not climax with the concern for his patriarchy. One of the joys of reading the Odyssey is that whatever Homer grew up with, he was not brainwashed by the institutionalised delusions of modern education. All of our ‘departments’ from sociology to economics to political science, physics to philosophy to theology, seem to have managed to theorise about the realities of our condition, or our creation, without a need to acknowledge that woman and the feminine could play any role that matters to the theory, except as an occasionally intransigent factor or given. Composed ‘history’ shows much the same delusional quality. I am not saying that Homer calls for a revisionist feminism. Such a thing seems to me to reinforce the delusion with its blinkers. What is called for—which is to say, what I am not used to seeing—is history which accounts for the ways that women shape events, whatever niche this majority of humans is thought to occupy politically or socially. Its seems to me a premise evident to children and the childlike, which is all the same missing in what passes for history and theory, that women cause events, in premises, process, and outcomes. Anyone who’s grown up in a family, which includes your Alexanders and your Adolfs, knows this. And yet there is no hesitation in even the most dispassionate accounts for averring that a certain rational masculinity, whether it is prudent or daring, is imputed to history-making decision-makers and the moment of their decisions. The explicit delusion lies in the idea that femininity has not played a role, that nothing has been missed in locating fateful decisions entirely behind a brave and chiseled masculine mask. Was mother whispering in his ear, or speaking through that mask? Astrophysicists waste billions in public money trying to prove the existence of fantasies, such as multiple black holes, dark matter, and dark energy, simply to shore up their gravitational cosmology and its Big-Bang god ex nihilo; while they ignore the electric currents which literally blow through their hair, and make it stand on end.

The feminine motives and agency amidst the heavenly powers in Homer’s universe are too explicit to require comment. But his depiction in the Odyssey of mortal women could be described as feminist, only in that it seems to demand an acknowledgment which corrects a wrong of neglect and abuse, rather than depict neutrally an obvious reality, or demand a revolution of the patriarchy. I recall the sacrifice of the heifer upon the departure of Athena from Nestor’s feast (3.371-463):

The sacrifice of the heifer, with the women of Nestor’s house ululating in ecstasy, seems to demand a symbolic reading … The men encamped on the beach like an invading army were sacrificing quantities of bulls, exclusively male animals. The object seemed to be placating or thanking Poseidon. Here, Nestor calls for an unbroken heifer to honour Athena, the Virgin. The sexual metaphor is made quite explicit in Nestor’s request [for the unbroken heifer] … It seems the honouring of Poseidon involves the sacrifice of male animals, whereas the honouring of Athena calls for the sacrifice of a female, and in particular, a ‘virgin’ …

[T]he sacrifice of the heifer seems to embody the sacrifice of women for the sake of the Trojan misadventure, and masculine fantasy generally … it seems to be consummated by the guttural cry of the women of Nestor’s household. I find both a dignity and an unspoken acknowledgement in this wordless ululation (ὀλολύζειν) of the women. The price that women pay is perhaps more than can be acknowledged in words. No amount of gilding can adorn this. One really feels the passing of this heifer’s ghost. It feels like a release from suffering.

Teiresias has just told Odysseus that even once he has succeeded in reestablishing himself at home, he must make a final journey inland, carrying an oar on his shoulder until some passerby mistakes it for a winnowing-fan. He must then, and there, plant the oar and perform a sacrifice of three male animals to Poseidon. The whole journey and ritual seems to be one of atonement, not one that changes any patriarchy but an atonement that must be made before it can be allowed to continue. The winnowing fan is sacred to Demeter; this seems a safely taken allusion. But there is no mention of her name, and it could be that a syncretism is Homer’s notion. The reconciliation between male and female, sea-piracy and landed agriculture, Olympian and chthonic, the gods and the Goddess, all seem to be wrapped up in the parable of the oar and the winnowing fan. It is perhaps a stretch to see Athena on the side of the earth goddess and Poseidon as the Olympian; I shall discuss this in a later post. Remember that in the stately wand-wielding goddess, the single Homeric performer embodies both the forest witch Circe and Olympian Athena, and also mortal Penelope at her loom. This unity in the archetypal posture of the performer may go a long way toward linking entities that seem, on paper, impossible to combine. That’s a flex that Homer has. It may be that on his final journey, Odysseus is to be an emissary in aid of reconciling the feminine power in the world to the rapine masculine, by means of a sacrifice of the male.

So Odysseus’ last question to his mother’s psyche is not about her own death or the status of his father and son, but about his wife. This is a rising triad which suggests that his wife surpasses the patriarchy in her importance to himself. His character of Elpenor had been the first to introduce Penelope’s existence to the awareness of the Phaeacian audience; he invokes her as ‘wife’, literally ‘bedmate’ (ἄλοχος), among the list of people Odysseus had abandoned at home. (One must always remember that it is Odysseus telling the story, playing both himself and Elpenor, so these disclosures have a certain staginess about them.) Now, playing himself, she is his ‘wooed and wedded’ bedmate (μνηστῆς ἀλόχου); another layer is being peeled off the onion, in a staged dialogue for solo onion. Penelope’s suitors are called μνηστῆρες; Odysseus has already been a successful one. Consider that it is neither her health nor her status that Odysseus asks after:

And tell me about my wooed and wedded wife—her plan (βουλή) and her thought (νόϝος)—

Does she remain by her son and guard everything securely,

Or did she already mate an Achaean man, whoever’s the best of them? (11.177-9)

Βουλή (boulē) and νοῦς (νόϝος, nous) are often translated ‘will’ and ‘mind’ respectively, but these are not mental or psychic faculties, in the modern or philosophical style, or biological ones, like the θυμός (thumos, ’life’s breath’) or indeed the ψυχή (psychē, ‘soul’ or ‘ghost’), but rather the concrete manifestations of seemingly hidden inner processes; hence always in Homer, ‘plan’, and ‘thought’ or ‘intent’. A word often translated ‘word’ or ‘speech’ or ‘command’ is μῦθος (mythos), which of course has a fraught semantic development in Greek as well as later use. But in Homer it is opposed to ἔπος (epos), a concrete ‘word’ or sonic grouping, like an hexameter line; the quasi-physical quality intuited in ἔπος is suggested by its characteristic epithet, ‘winged’ (πτερόεις), which identifies it as a movement of air. μῦθος in Homer instead points to the act of speech as a concrete ‘disclosure’, of what had before been hidden in the unseen process of human cogitation. It is the disclosure of a plan or thought. And it is the social status of the speaker which can make such a disclosure, in effect, a command.

Odysseus is therefore interrogating his mother’s ghost about his wife’s strategy. He seems to approach Penelope’s situation in a surprisingly distanced and pragmatic way, as though either option would make sense to him—that is, in her position, as a matter of survival: has she taken the risk of sticking by her son and somehow guarding their assets, or has she sought the relative security of marrying the ‘best of the Achaeans’? That is, Odysseus does not seem to be a patriarch asking if his submissive wife is still being submissive; instead he is asking his mum about Penelope’s decisions, and the state of mind they imply. It seems to be a vivifying ambiguity in the Odyssey (rather than a thing due our cultural and historical ignorance) that we have no idea who runs Ithaca or how, or even what it would mean to ‘run’ Ithaca or any other Homeric settlement. There is no police or bureaucracy. There is no throne room. The strongest man has no army but the retainers of his own household. The farms seem to run themselves, with no trouble to the herders from the loss of a daily pig to the feasters. Does the Odyssey actually contain a view of just, or at least effective kingship? The suitors seem to think that Penelope’s new husband will be a king. But what’s the racket he’ll be running? And in the meantime, what or who is making things happen? What Odysseus seems instinctively to know, is that the plan and the thought of the woman are crucial to what may develop. If there is an Homeric thought about history and political science, not to mention theology and cosmology, this would be it.

Historians, excepting father Herodotus, seem to have been uninterested in whole worlds of human motivation, to the point of being delusional. Even on a battlefield and its high-ground strategies, one might ask why do soldiers fight? Does it matter who bakes their bread? And why is your ship always ‘she’ when you defend her?

(Continued immediately in the next post, where you will find the recitation of the passage in Greek at the end, as usual.)

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Let’s take stock of what’s been said. I was stopped short in this performative journey through the Odyssey by the problem of how to think and talk about Persephone. Perhaps there is a significance hidden to me in such a blockage. Homer himself gives us next to nothing about the goddess, apart from her epithets such as ἐπαινή ‘dreaded’ or ἀγαυός (‘noble’? ‘handsome’?). While I feed happily off internal reverberations, it does seem, as in the case of Persephone, that there are definite allusions to figures and stories beyond and behind the stage of Homer’s foreground. This has led me to consider, in the first case, that allusion is itself, in species, a kind of musical resonance, like memory; and then to focus on the figure performing solo on Homer’s stage like Odysseus, without a musical instrument, wielding a staff, and the ways he conjures presences in the course of his storytelling. The most obvious of these is when he takes on the persona of a protagonist, and speaks hexameters in his or her voice. At least as visible, however, must be the use of his body and especially his staff. There may be evidence that the Homeric poems were composed for such a thespian performer, a rhapsode or rhabdode—the latter variant means ‘staff-’ or ‘wand-singer’—rather than a bard playing a sort of lyre, a tableau described several times in Homer.

The depiction of these bards strongly suggests that Homer’s own artwork participates in a musical tradition. Today let us focus on Homer’s harmony. Insofar as musicology studies such historical transmissions, including in the relation of written notation to physical and auditory performance, there should be insights there, in musicology, to be mined in the investigation of the transmission of Homer. Something, at any rate, must free us from the cultivated opacity of the preferred academic debate which surrounds orality and literacy, with its lingering whiff of the noble savage. I suppose the distinction between orality and literacy is one that makes us feel intellectual, without having actually to think. There is in fact reason to believe that alphabetic writing arose in Greek as a musical notation, literally a way to record Homeric μουσική, for which a syllabary such as the Mycenaean was inadequate.

Please also note, however, that there is no reason whatsoever, and never has been, to believe that Homer was an oral poet serving in some sort of tradition of oral poetry, no matter that all academic authorities you may see, hear, or read, will usually now assume these things as given, and to be historical facts. These authorities will even soil their intellects by pronouncing certain dates for ‘Homer’ measured in Centuries B.C.E., though they have no background in scientific chronology, and are wont to invent a whole swath of an ancient Greek timeline, ominously called a ‘Dark Age’, by denying the stratigraphic facts of empirical archaeology. Instead they assign dates to artefacts in the Greek Mediterranean (outside of Cyprus! by reason of some code of the guild) by coordinating with the notoriously unscientific, jury-rigged, humanly motivated construct called Egyptian chronology. This coordination is the only source of a Greek Dark Age of hundreds of years, separating the Mycenaean ware and writing in Linear B, dated via Egypt, from the immediately contiguous and even overlapping archaic strata in Hellenic-speaking lands.

But surely the most damning deficit in the present oral orthodoxy about Homer has to do with its direct neglect of Homer’s text as we have received it from the Alexandrian Greeks. This text is visibly and manifestly a musical score, as surely as Homer’s artwork was universally described in the ancient world as music (μουσική) and, within Homer himself, as song (ἀϝοιδή). The entire stream of Homer’s composition is, in the descendent manuscripts, divided visually into what we now call lexical words and word-like groupings, and each of these ‘words’ is marked with an accent which notates a pitch contour of both a rise and a fall; different ancient grammarians have indicated that the interval of this contour may have been either a fourth or a fifth. Usually the whole ‘contonation’ takes two or at most three syllables to complete, limited to the last three syllables of the word, although the accent sign only marks the syllable within which the rise in pitch begins. Note that the fall goes unmarked except in the case of those vowels marked with a circumflex, in which case the whole uprise and downfall, a ‘contonation’, happens over the length of that vowel. But the comparison with Vedic strongly suggests that the down-glide also occurred in Greek, on the unmarked syllable or syllables immediately following the marked rise. I have shown how either the rise or the fall in pitch becomes dynamically prominent, or ‘stressed’, depending on the duration of the syllable on which the falling pitch lands. Hence amidst each word-level pitch contour there arises a most prominent syllable which can dynamically accent a beat in the underlying dactylic feet, LONG-short-short, so that syncopation can break up the reinforcement of that beat and create musical rhythm, rather than the robotic metronome of metrical scansion. Punching the metrical downbeats, what classicists call ‘scanning’, gives you this:

ἄνδρά μοι ἔννεπε, Μοῦσα, πολύτροπον, ὃς μάλα πολλά

while intoning the pitches and stresses gives you

ἄνδρά μοι ἔννεπε, Μοῦσα, πολύτροπον, ὃς μάλα πολλά

In a comparable way, English stresses occasionally syncopate the iambic pentameter to turn monotony into rhythm. Nor sháll deáth brág thou wander’st in his shade.

There emerges out of my work, for Homeric and classical Greek as well as Latin, a Law of Tonal Prominence. Let’s illustrate it by example. These are the opening three words of the Iliad:

μῆνιν ἄ[ϝ]ειδε θεά,

First off, the digamma is there in brackets because it does not appear in our inherited texts, but the presence of its -w- sound in Homer’s composition has been inferred from a number of angles, such as comparison with Indo-European cognates, fitting the Alexandrian syllables to the dactylic hexameter, and saving Homer from hiatus, the clashing of vowel upon vowel. This latter avoidance was anciently ascribed to Homer, but in our present text his second word is guilty:

ἄ-ειδε

Fortunately we can reconstruct a form:

ἄϝειδε (pron. a-wei-de)

I have suggested that avoiding hiatus is not the expression of some esoteric aesthetic or grammarian’s fetish, but a feature sprung from the concrete reality of singing:

The ‘avoidance of hiatus’ is in fact the way grammarian philologists register a phenomenon that was actually caused by a cantor’s need, and desire, to articulate and voice the vowel of any sung syllable with a distinct, specific, initial consonant. It is not about separating vowels like naughty sheep, but articulating them as the bearers of melody in song.

The story of the digamma illustrates that language is something we inherit, but that even among the attentive and the reverent, something gets lost in the transmission; and at the best of times, even without the damage of catastrophe or upheaval, we nevertheless fail to pass on our language unchanged. One witnesses more changes the longer one lives, in real time, and increasingly they become topics of whining conversation among peers in age. Sounds change, meanings change, accents shift. British and American stress habits coexist though we speak the same language. Where Americans disappear the first ‘o’ in LAB-ra-TO-ry and stress the second, the British do the opposite to their ‘o’s when they stress the antepenult, lab-OR-a-try, while both conserve the spelling ‘laboratory’.

Tracing the history of such changes is a forensic work with uncertain results. The consensus is that the Proto-Indo-European accent was similar to the Vedic one, a tonal contonation like the one we find in Homer, rising and then falling in pitch, within a syllable or on adjacent syllables. But there is evidence in some Greek forms of an historical stress accent in Greek, earlier than Homer, which weakened unstressed vowels. All the same, the pitch accent in Homeric and later Greek appears to have the same nature as the Vedic tonal accent, which does not result in the weakening of adjacent vowels. And unlike the descendants in Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit, the Vedic accent was not recessive, that is, tied to the last syllables of a verbal unit. Instead its high pitch point appeared to be free to occur anywhere in a polysyllable.

The upshot is that when the ancestor of a Greek word was accented too early, the onset of the accent would have had to be shifted forward to become Hellenised. That is, the Greek accentual habit, whatever its source in the mysterious workings of the will or the brain or culture, imposed its ways on inherited words. But its influence was not tyrannical; if the inherited onset of the contonation already occurred within the final three syllables of a word, it was allowed to maintain its place rather than be forced to recede. Hence we have attested μητήρ, μητέρος, ‘mother’ or ‘mother’s’, rather than recessive μήτερος. Such inherited accent places are said to be ‘lexical’ in that they belong to the lexeme itself and are not forced, as when singing the finite verbs, by the Greek recessive proclivity. The circumflex in μῆνιν is lexical in this sense, although it happens to conform to the recessive rule. In most of the Greek dialects only the verbal forms, with few exceptions, show a recessive onset of the accent (the part with rising pitch), on the antepenult if the ultima was short but the penult if the ultima was long. Hence in Homer’s first verb ἄϝειδε, ‘sing’, the short ultima requires that the rising onset recede to the antepenult; but this in turn causes the down-glide in pitch to fall on the long penult -ϝει-. My proposed law of tonal prominence says that whenever the post-acute down-glide falls on a metrically long syllable, the combination is dynamically prominent, or stressed, and -ϝει-, the unmarked but most stressed syllable, is the one that coincides with the long downbeat of the dactylic step.

Words carry with them their history, and sometimes resist the recessive accentual impulse of contemporary Greek speakers. Evidently in the Aeolic dialect of Greek, the recessive rule was applied universally, to both noun and verb, but this was not the case in Attic, or in the Homeric dialectal melange. θεά and other oxytone-final words (conventionally called simply ‘oxytones’) appear to have their accents suppressed when used within phrases or sentences, whenever another word follows without a pause. They are then marked with a grave sign, θεὰ. It has been argued, however, that the ubiquitous oxytones in Greek, including the word for ‘god’ or ‘goddess’, do not actually have (or remember) an historical, lexical accent; they are ‘lexically unaccented, but receive their H [high] tone by phrasal default.’ There are two ways in which these final acutes can be allowed to sound out: there are little postpositive words called ‘enclitics’ which induce the rising tone on final syllables, sometimes a second one for the word, if they do not already have a falling tone on them. The contonation induced to begin on the final syllable of an oxytone word lands its falling pitch on the enclitic itself, often thereby making it emphatic. The second way is by a pause following, whether grammatical or poetic—that is, at the end of a sentence or clause, or at the end of a line or period of verse. Such pauses are thought to permit the rising accent on a final syllable. It seems one should think of the comma usually printed after θεά as part of Homer’s composition, even if the poet, almost certainly, had no part in writing it. Otherwise the first midline cadence of Homer’s Iliad would go without intonation:

μῆνιν ἄϝειδε θεὰ Πηληϊάδεω Ἀχιλῆϝος

rather than,

μῆνιν ἄϝειδε θεά!

Modern Greeks but also those who attempt to recreate ancient performance and pronunciation—whether at Oxford University or on YouTube or both—will invariably stress the graphically accented syllables, where the voice is supposed to rise in pitch, something like

mēnin a-i-de the-a or mênin á-ei-de the-á

This is where it becomes crucial, and historically fateful, that the Alexandrian system of graphic accentuation left unmarked the immediately following down-glides in pitch, one presumes because they were automatic. The elegance of their shorthand in this decision appears to have caused a most unproductive enigma. The graphic marks which show the moraic position of the rise in pitch do not seem to correspond in a discernibly musical way with the strong beats of the metre. Hence no sense or use could be made of the pitch accents as long as one ignored the adjacent long syllables which bore the unmarked, but emphatic, falling glide. There was even sponsored a fetish for the music of the ancient Greek soul remaining an aetherial unknown. As Keats puts it in his ode, ‘Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard/Are sweeter …’

Modern scholars, and very likely the literate ancient people who taught Greek under empire, want to emphasise vocally the marked syllable; today as well, such emphasis is almost a Pavlovian response to reading the accent mark. The law of tonal prominence, however, together with modern linguistic analysis, determine that when the subsequent down-glide in pitch, after the high pitch point, falls on a long syllable, that long syllable is itself the prominent one, not the one marked acute. In those situations the acute rise in pitch becomes anticipatory of the true accentual event. The Greek accent wants to land, not to rise; it wants to fall heavily in pitch upon a long syllable. This is the principal phenomenon which gives Greek poetry and music its sense of cadence. Only when the subsequent syllable is metrically short does the vowel marked acute (‘sharp’) occupy the dynamically prominent or stressed syllable. Here is the situation of the second word of the Iliad: the acute accent on its first short syllable does not make it the stressed one; rather, the following syllable, a long one bearing a heavy down-glide, carries the weight, and lands it on the dactylic downbeat. The ancients called this effect βαρύτονος, that is, a ‘heavy accent’. It is almost embarrassing to report that in the prevailing academic interpretation, this word that transparently means ‘heavy accent’ is taken to mean ‘unaccented’. In short order you see there in what sort of dark age the modern professor of Homer’s music lives, and also how unaware they are of their condition.

The acute, on the other hand, when it is prominent, is called ὀξύτονος, a ‘sharp accent’. Such a rising stress occurs at the end of the last long vowel in the phrase:

μῆ-νιν ἄ-ϝει-δε θε-ά,

Hence each of the dactylic downbeats is stressed by Homer’s opening three words. This is surely also the case for Virgil’s opening three words. You will hear them performed by Latinists as

Arma virumque canō

This is to deploy the rules for the so-called Latin stress. Final syllables are never stressed in Latin. But she is a pitch-accented language in a way that is cognate with Greek and Sanskrit, and the law of tonal prominence suggests that in iambic shapes like canō, the down-glide will fall on the second syllable, and be prominent because that syllable is long. (Excluding monosyllables, the only possible way for a final syllable to be stressed in Latin, if I am right, would be in disyllabic words of an iambic shape, short-long; it is possible that even in these cases, only in poetry do they receive a final stress.) Canō falls at the first midline cadence of Virgil’s Aeneid, that is, the first meeting of accentual stress with the midline metrical downbeat; it is highly unlikely that Virgil has syncopated it. Ask any musician—not a Classicist; this is how Virgil’s first line goes:

Árma vírumque cánō, quîprîmus ab ôrīs

Virgil’s word ‘I sing’, after a rise in pitch on ca-, culminates in a stentorian descent on nō, canō. (The unusual use of diacritics above is meant to suggest that there is a variety of tonal phenomena in Latin—acute, grave, and flex, according to Quintilian—though none of it is marked with diacritic signs. The tonally prominent syllables, in bold, are also the ones assigned stress according to the conventional grammatical rule, except in the case of cano. This is why modern Latinists butcher Virgil’s opening salvo.)

The first line of the Odyssey also begins by reinforcing the metrical downbeat, or ictus:

ἄνδρά μοι ἔννεπε Μοῦσα

but the rest of it finishes, or fails to cadence, by introducing acute syncopations:

πολύτροπον, ὃς μάλα πολλά

Here is the line with the metrical downbeats italicised, so one can see where the stresses agree and where they disagree with the underlying dactylic beat:

ἄνδρά μοι ἔννεπε, Μοῦσα, πολύτροπον, ὃς μάλα πολλά

(In this version of the text, μοι, ‘me’ or ‘my’, is an enclitic which induces a secondary oxytonal accent on ἄνδρα.) You can see that in the first four feet, the stressed syllables (bold) reinforce the metrical downbeats (in italics). But there are syncopations in the first word (‘man’) and the last phrase, where the beat says hos mala polla but the pitch accents sing hos mála pollá. This syncopated rhythm springs the line forward rather than closes it. The musical cadence actually comes in enjambment, on the first word of the next line:

ἄνδρά μοι ἔννεπε, Μοῦσα, πολύτροπον, ὃς μάλα πολλά

πλάγχθη ’πει Τροίης ἱερὸν πτολίεθρον ἔπερσεν

Versify my man, Muse, the twist in his spine: so many times

He strayed, once he sacked Troy’s sacred city …

The rhythm lands on the enjambed word meaning ‘he strayed’, πλάγχθη. The displaced cadence is married to the sense of the word, the rhythmic effect to the lexical meaning. The cadence itself wanders!

Clearly, Homer’s text is a musical score, not an oral or otherwise improvised composition. I showed last time how the composer of the Odyssey has arranged his words so as to produce extraordinary accentual patterns recognisably distinctive of each of Penelope and Odysseus. These leitmotifs, three straight long oxytonal syllables for Odysseus and three straight circumflexes for Penelope, are not natural occurrences in spoken Greek, let alone rhythmic Greek; it is likely a universal truth that in normal conversation—unless one is making a point—but also in poetry—the stressed syllables are separated by one or more unstressed ones. You could not generate rhythm if this were not so. We have experience of the exceptions: admonition of a pet or a child, ‘you put those cookies down, mister!’; or in the movies, Gandalf’s ‘YOU SHALL NOT PASS!’ What is more, the Odyssean and Penelopean signature lines are not only three consecutive long stresses, but three repeated pitch patterns. The up-and-down of Penelope’s circumflexes each take one back to one’s base tone, something like you·put·those·cookies down, so there is less hardship in repeating the sequence:

εὖ ϝοἶδ’ οἷος ἔησθα

But in Odysseus’ sequence, there are three straight acute pitch rises at the end of each syllable, so there would seem to be little time to return to the base tone:

μή τίς τ’ ἄλλος

This is why I suggested that in his case there may have been a staircase effect, a kind of rising shrillness. In other words, Penelope’s leitmotif bespeaks controlled intensity, while Odysseus’ is more frantic, a hissed outburst.

Such unusual sequences must be produced in Greek by the use of elisions and little word particles called ‘enclitics’ which alter accentuation. Hence these leitmotifs are designed, intentional melodic features which do not appear to be tied to the particular words which produce them. Hence they cannot be explained as reflexes of merely verbal or lexical formulas. Hence in turn, a theory of Homeric composition based on purely metrical formulas, without regard to their pitch accents, such as the oral theory of Milman Parry and Albert Lord, is wholly inadequate to account for the Homeric composition as we have it. This is now a matter of demonstrable fact. It is a shame that professional Classics continues to impose this bankrupt theory on new students of Homer. In point of fact, I make so bold as to suggest, sight unseen, that the Bosnian oral poetry which serves as a comparate for Homeric epic in the oral theory, is likely also to have been ill-served by a lack of attention to its significant prosody. I only make so bold, where I have no experience or even interest in the facts of this local tradition, because on the face of it a purely metrical poetry, such as is assumed for Bosnian and Homeric epic, would seem to be a rank absurdity. It would be a poetry for robots, not for human beings, who tend to emphasise certain things, and put some swing into their walk. At the idea of rhythmless (because unaccented), intonation-free poetry, even AI would balk.

We are reduced to some fundamental questions:

What is an accent? Why should words have accents, where particular syllables are for some reason emphasised?

Computers don’t need them. Daleks don’t need them. AI slop only uses them to sound more realistic.

Beginning Greek students are usually told that the accent is lexical, in that in some instances words otherwise identical in their spelling are distinguished only by the location or quality of their accent mark. But this is a relatively rare phenomenon in Greek—where confusion could arise without an accent mark to distinguish between otherwise identical words—and it could not motivate a general strategy, where a word already distinguished by its phonemes and morphology in conveying its peculiar meaning, needs also a particular syllable accented.

We do not use accent marks in written English, because evidently, even for foreign speakers, context is usually sufficient to distinguish, e.g., rébel as a noun and rebél as a verb.

Generations of classics students have managed to translate texts while ignoring accentuation. When the lexical function is not evident or essential, as it is in the Chinese tonal system, it is not clear what purpose accentual emphasis serves … There seems to be some unexplained cognitive or physical process at work here … where human speakers pick out certain syllables to emphasise in some way, in either a learned or an habitual pattern, when they speak.

The notion of ‘picking out’ a syllable is consistent with the idea that accentuation is an added thing; ‘prosody’ and ‘accent’ both suggest in their prefixes (προσ- and ad-) that they are a kind of intonation added to an already existent thing, just as, in Alexandria, accent marks were added to the letters in written texts which were already in use and existence without their added instruction, both the letters and the texts.

This pros-odic story of accent may be upside down and backwards, however. As literate people who use and depend on dictionaries, we are confident in our sense for what words themselves are, and how to use them. But try to define ‘word’, without using the word ‘word’. Literate people are used to seeing groups of letters separated from each other on a page, and are habituated to identifying each separate grouping as a ‘word’, without regard to their meaning or their grammatical function. Hence the mere separation of these groups in the lines of a written or a printed page prompts the mind to recognise them as substantial things, as individuals of some kind.

Native users of Greek writing once saw no need to demarcate individual words at all. Letters in inscriptions were strung together continuously. Sometimes they would reverse direction at the end of a line and turn back, left to right then right to left, like an ox at the plough who’s reached the end of his field. The beginning of King Lear’s opening speech looks like this in such a scriptio continua, without, in this case, the ox’s turnaround:

MEANTIMEWESHALLEXPRESSOURDARKERPURPOSEGIVEMETHEMAPTHEREKNOWTHATWEHAVEDIVIDEDINTHREEOURKINGDOMANDTISOURFASTINTENTTOSHAKEALLCARESANDBUSINESSFROMOURAGECONFERRINGTHEMONYOUNGERSTRENGTHSWHILEWEUNBURTHENEDCRAWLTOWARDDEATH

Try reading this block of English without any stresses, one syllable at a time as a Dalek might. Do you find yourself stressing certain syllables anyway? Do words ‘take over’ as your eyes scan along? And does every word have a stressed syllable, or only some or a few? At some point perhaps some sequences resolve into lines of iambic pentameter. Would it help to have the stresses marked for the sake of these ‘lines’, whether or not the words were separated? Do the stresses then belong to these pentameters, or still to the individual words?

Accent marks, meanwhile, only appeared in the Alexandrian period, an innovation ascribed to Aristophanes of Byzantium. The following observation may be instructive:

In their field work among the guslari, the traditional oral singers of Yugoslavia … Milman Parry and Albert Lord discovered that these singers thought in terms of sound groups, not individual words; the two do not necessarily coincide. Only after a Serbian or Croatian guslar had seen a printed copy of his dictated song on a sheet of paper, with the individual words set apart by the white space between them, could he understand what Parry and Lord meant by the term “word.”

Let us emphasise that the oral singers could not understand what was meant by ‘word’. There was no natural unit there in their consciousness. Note that in the author’s eyes, ‘individual words’ are taken as a given, a fact of life, without any need for explanation or definition. The disconnect seems even greater than the commentator suggests; it is not as though the singers merely preferred to think in sound groups rather than words, it seems instead that the only units they were aware of were sound groups, before being confronted by purported transcriptions of their speech filled with all manner of strange white spaces.

In light of this, perhaps we should take note of the history of Greek inscriptions and manuscripts: the development of a notation to indicate pitch contours either preceded or coincided with what we nowadays interpret as the division of words in texts. Perhaps, then, there is a causal relation between these two innovations in the writing of Greek: the adding of accent marks and the division of words. Attention to prosody would inevitably have led, after all, to identifying the natural Greek ‘sound groups,’ defined in a way that demarcates specific syllables as ultimas—as final syllables of such groups—in relation to which the beginning of the prosodic contonation was recessive, according to rule, never more than the third syllable before the end. It is the separating of the ultimate syllables from what follows, and recognising that consequent initial syllables were also thus defined—into which the contonation was ordinarily not allowed to cross—that led to separating these sonic groups in their graphic representation. It was therefore the articulated nature of the things themselves which forced the so-called word division: the prosodic habits and traditions of classical speakers, as they came to be better formalised, self-organised the continuous stream of language into sonic groups with final and initial syllables. From a literate point of view, it was therefore likely that the study of recessive prosodic rules, understood as such, led to the habit of separation in writing that underlies our conception—now second nature, and generally unexamined—of words as distinct beings.

The prosodic rules themselves, however, strongly suggest that word boundaries, and perhaps also line boundaries, existed in some sense prior to the accentual contonations that played among them. In Greek, no more than one vowel mora (= short vowel) could follow the syllable which bore the fall in pitch that closed the contonation, so that if an Indo-European ancestral form had had an initial rising acute too far back, to the left, it would have had to have moved forward and rightward in Homeric Greek. Conversely, if the rise had started too late to allow the fall to occur within the sound group—this would only occur if the acute had occurred on the final syllable—the acute was suppressed. In words, what goes up, must come down; if it cannot come down, it had better not go up. The sign in writing was turned from acute ´ to grave ` .

This has caused immense confusion: gravis is the Latin for βαρύς, or ‘heavy’. The use of this term for the suppressed accent surely contributed to the perverse and pervasive interpretation today, that ‘barytone’ means ‘unaccented’. It transparently meant the opposite: heavily accented, opposed both to sharply accented, and to unaccented. There’s three distinctions here—four, in fact, when you add the +sharp+heavy circumflex—not simply stressed vs. unstressed. As we have pointed out, however, pauses for punctuation, or at the ends of poetic lines or periods, allowed these oxytone-final accents to be released. Examples include θεά before a comma, as we saw in Iliad I.1, and πολλά at line end in Odyssey 1.1. (Editors have often printed πολλὰ here, grave, yielding to a grammatical prejudice, because there is no pause in the sentence. The musical reality, however, is that there is a pause at line’s end; this is in fact an important way that enjambement registers as a formal—that is, musical—intrusion into grammar’s order. M. L. West’s editions of Homer’s Greek text have happily restored these line’s-end oxytones.) Hence by the time of Homeric Greek and through the classical period, there was a mutually defining relationship between verbal boundaries caused by grammar or verse, and the accentual contonation.

Special trailing words could also release final oxytone accents. These ‘enclitics’ were suffix-like appendages (or ‘words’) which extended the sonic group’s boundary, so that the rise in pitch was no longer prevented from descending. This happens twice in Odysseus’ trademarked phrase, μή τίς τ’ ἄλλος, where the first enclitic τις induces a released acute accent on the μή, while a second elided enclitic τε (τ’) induces an accent on the first enclitic τις. Such an arrangement has to be composed, in the sense pre-planned, if it is to function as a leitmotif, as it does in fact in the Odyssey. Indeed, the use of enclitics and pauses is a key to drawing out the musical potential of Greek, especially in the case of the innumerable oxytones, such as the word for ‘god’. This specific Odyssean collocation twists the accentual rules, if you will, because the rises in pitch on long syllables, especially on the long vowel in μή, must occur at the end of the syllable, so there is little or no time for the voice to descend in pitch. Hence I suggest that there was an accentual ‘special effect’, a kind of stepwise rise in shrillness.

I said earlier that words which share the exact same letters, or phonemes, but different accentuation, are unusual in Greek. But oh does Homer exploit this potential. Surely the most non-spontaneous joke in the Odyssey is the famous accentual pun on μῆτις, with the circumflex: ‘intelligence’, ‘cunning’; and μή τις with the acute (printed as two so-called words): ‘no-one’. One of Odysseus’ most frequent epithets is of course πολύμητις, ‘many’ plus mētis—one word!—for which I have rendered ‘Poly-Wily’. It therefore cannot be coincidence, but rather ripe with this poet’s sense of musical humour and even satire, that Odysseus’ serious outburst in the Iliad, which expresses an accentual sequence that becomes his melodic leitmotif in the Odyssey, contains the perky oxytonal crescendo, μή τίς!

If we pay attention to the befuddlement of the guslari at the concept until they saw the ‘white spaces’ in the transcriptions, it is impossible to underestimate the influence of this visual division of sound groups in the development of the modern literate and linguistic conception of the ‘word’. In this sense, the notion of a ‘word-level accent’ remains a true description; but one which implies an historical/genetic development that may be opposite to the truth. It is as likely their prosody that determined the individuality of words, as the other way around. It is perhaps now an unshakeable grammatical prejudice, strongly influenced by the use of dictionaries and lexica, that words are primarily semantic or syntactic entities. But meanings and uses are not fixed. The historical development traced here, based on the ancient grammarians, suggests that the original demarcation of a ‘word’ was as a prosodic unit. It further suggests that the prosodic definition for ‘word’ is in fact the only all-encompassing and therefore the most empirically defensible one. I suspect it is precisely our literate upbringing, in the graphic habits derived ultimately from the Alexandrian innovations which separated prosodic units as words on a page, which has led to our more-or-less undefined and unexamined concept of ‘word’. Such ‘words’ are now treated as substantial entities given separate entries in a dictionary, like so many epitaphs in an alphabetised cemetery.

It should be said that from the perspective of phonology, it remains a mystery how to define or predict the ‘white spaces’ in the stream of sounds which demarcate a language’s separable words. I point you to a fascinating lecture on the subject by John Goldsmith of the University of Chicago, the originator of auto-segmental phonology, who gave the Ryerson lecture in 2014: Language and the Mind: Encounters in the Mind Fields. One advance of auto-segmental phonology is that the role of prosodic phenomena in the sound-stream is raised from an optional addition in the representation of language to an integral, parallel tier to those of the other features of phonemes in the sequence of sounds, such as voicing, aspiration and so on. It seems that in the case of Greek and perhaps the other Indo-European languages showing a recessive pitch accent, the creation of white spaces in the graphic record of language was a result of separating prosodic units demarcated, in part, by the accentual contonation, a sharp rise and heavy fall in pitch whose location determined and was determined by the boundaries of a ‘sonic group’. It should also be said, however, that while the separation of prosodic units may have been the proximate cause of separating words in texts, the division did in fact reveal naturally pre-existing units, in that some prosodic rules themselves depend on interactions between the contonation and already existing boundaries, rather than ones it creates. It remains to be seen whether prosody generally, including non-recessive stress and tonal examples, can play an heuristic role in the phonological account of words as individual things. In Greek the semantic and/or syntactic integrity of a verbal sign was reinforced, at the very least, by an accentual integrating factor which could stretch over more than one syllable, and operated at the level of the mora. The semantic and syntactic and sometimes merely sonic units of speech (‘Oh!’ ‘Alleluia!’ ὀλολύζω) were also prosodic units. There was no Greek word for such units. There was no Greek word for ‘word’. But if there is to be a phonological account of the ‘white spaces’ in continuous speech, perhaps there are witnesses to be investigated in the elements of accentual harmony.

ἁρμονία in Greek does not mean ‘harmony’. At root it means, roughly, ‘joining’. It does not mean, as an English dictionary says, ‘the combination of simultaneously sounded musical notes to produce a pleasing effect.’ To the best of our knowledge—although here our limitations must be emphasised—ancient music did not engage in this kind of vertical consonance. We do not know how ancient musical accompaniment worked in this regard; if one has ever heard attempts to make music with a reconstructed double-reeded aulos, (see here) it is obvious that different tones simultaneously produce an astounding effect; there must at least have been the sounding of a drone on the tonic alongside the modal melody, or why have a double barrel to your oboe? But simultaneous sound is not the primary experience of ἁρμονία in the ancient world.

In Plato’s usage, the elements of harmonia are precisely ὀξύτης and βαρύτης, ‘sharpness’ and ‘heaviness’. The identification is such that the pairing ὀξύτης τε καὶ βαρύτης, ‘sharpness-and-heaviness’, sometimes stands in for the word ἁρμονία, just as ‘even-and-odd’ can stand in Plato’s prose as a synonym for ‘number’. These elements correspond, of course, to rising pitch and falling pitch. In an extended sense which was likely in use in Plato’s time, ‘sharpness’ also came to refer to ‘high pitch’, the end result of tuning a string by its rising pitch, while ‘heaviness’ came to refer to ‘low pitch’, the end result of lowering the pitch of a string. ἁρμονία, meanwhile, in Plato’s usage, had also developed an extended sense: it had come to refer to a tuned scale, of the kind we now call ‘modal’, again the result of tuning rather than the sound of tightening or loosening a plucked string. You can guess the story: the extended sense of ὀξύτης and βαρύτης, high pitch and low pitch, together with the connotations, ancient and modern, of harmonia in scales and chords, have thoroughly confused the reception of the Greek reality. In Greek accentuation, sharpness and heaviness always come together joined at the hip—ἁρμονία is joining—sharpness rising short and sharp, and heaviness falling mightily after. The relation is temporal and cadential, never simultaneous. The high pitch point was more often than not an anticipation rather than the accentual event.

The importance of the heavy fall was such that accentuation was suppressed rather than permitted in a word without the space for a fall. In point of fact, a reasonable translation of this original sense of ἁρμονία is W. Sidney Allen’s term ‘contonation’. The ‘con-’ suggests the unifying quality of this phenomenon. ‘Harmony’ is therefore the integral and integrating way to speak of the accentual phenomenon which, already in Plato as well, was referred to in an extrinsic sense as ‘prosody’. The Greek accentual harmony did its joining on so many levels. Immediately it joined two syllables, but beyond them, it looked to the boundaries of larger sonic units, defining them implicitly and acknowledging them explicitly in its suppression when crossing non-enclitic boundaries. Hence it could be said that accentual harmony joined together a verbal unit. At the very least, in calling attention to such consequential boundaries, Greek harmony later caused the separation of words in Greek manuscripts, which had such a profound impact on everyday, literary, and linguistic consciousness. An account of the white spaces so far eludes modern phonology.

But the impact of the ὀξύτης τε καὶ βαρύτης, harmonia, was not only horizontal. The dynamic prominence of the rising pitch before short syllables, or especially the falling pitch landing on long ones, allowed them to stress certain elements of any underlying metre, reinforcing the downbeats but also syncopating them to make words hit, swing, and dance. The motion of metre is properly the motion of literal feet, human legs; the accentual motion is a motion of the voice. At moments of metrical cadence we experience a remarkable kind of unity, a vertical integration of the human being with her head among the stars and her feet resounding upon the earth.

The notion of periodic reinforcement would seem to link footstep, gesture, voice, and meaning; it is a shaft driven through and beyond the tiers of a segmental analysis, linking bodily ictus with accent, phone, word, and clause.

There is to this day a tradition of dancing to heroic verse, still practised in the Faroe Islands. A modern study uses the tradition as a metaphor for Faroese culture:

In writing these pieces we have kept in mind the image of the dansiringur—the ‘ring’ of dancers singing ballads of wars and loves of heroic times. This kind of ballad dancing is not a Faroese custom (almost nothing is); it is the last survival of a dancing style once common throughout Europe. Late medieval woodcuts and drawings show dancers forming a real circle in the open air, arms linked as the Faroese still link arms, moving round with a step that looks very much like the Faroese step …

The mood is high; the turning circle fills the room; the floor resounds to the beat as the dancers, backs straight and heads turned, ‘tread the measure underfoot’, two steps forward and one, with a slight kick, back.

The Faroese themselves call attention to the moments of unity between the verbal accent and the downbeat of the foot. The internal quotation is from a description in 1906:

Faroese dancing is an exercise in continuity and self-control. It links the dancers with their legendary past, mingles all members of the community and focuses their activity. It removes conflicts from the realm of everyday life to a story realm, while the dancers coordinate their voices and movements. ‘What, moreover, should be well looked after in the ballad singing is to “get the word under the foot”, as the old ones used to say. One gets the word under the foot when one stresses one word or syllable at the same time that one steps along with the foot.’

Can you imagine getting Homer’s word under your foot? I do not believe that Homer intended that the compositions we have were meant to be danced, except perhaps for the Catalogue of Ships; there is too much material designed for the use of a rhapsode (rhabdode) and his staff. But all the same; can you imagine it? To join the foot to Homer’s word, and feel the twist in your spine?

Socrates in the Phaedo disproves the idea that the soul is an harmony. But this does not mean that the soul does not have an ἁρμονία, an optimal joining in both a temporal—rhythmic or historical—and a vertical sense both psychic and ontological. Tuning and fine-tuning the soul has always been a reason to read Homer; even more so, to perform him. Even if you sing him with a heavy accent, like me.

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The idea of ‘the haunted text’ began while confronting the problem of Persephone in the Odyssey, which in terms of the circulatory system of the Singing Homer idea proved to be an arterial blockage. Persephone made the blood run cold. In this your singer has proved far less doughty than Odysseus himself on his journey. The end in sight was an essay on Homer’s Persephone, which is still a ‘part 3’ for the future. But as these things go, my little tale has grown in the telling, and the lessons learnt from this interlude will continue to shape the nature of the effort in this publication. The material on Persephone is looking increasingly like a footnote rather than a conclusion. I shall continue to do a rhapsodic reading of Homer and to revise my translation in each post. But the attempt to come to grips with the problem of allusion in Homer has led to a broader meditation on all kinds of musical reverberation. The ambition of my accompanying notes has turned into producing what the scholars call a ‘commentary’ on Homer, focusing on the point of contact with the Homeric performer; as I say in this talk, to meet him on his stage. My own work in progress has come round to seeing Homer’s script for his performer as also a ‘work in progress’.

To come, on our ongoing mission, once the three parts of this therapeutic talk are delivered: we return to passages from Homer’s Odyssey in English—we are about to meet Odysseus’ mother, whose soul is patiently waiting—with voicing of the Greek text, linear prose translation, and actor’s notes. Let’s go!

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Odyssey 11.90-151

‘Why ever, you wretched man, did you leave the light of the Sun

And come to see the corpses and the cheerless place?’ (Od.11.93-4)

One of Teiresias’ jobs is what the screenwriters call ‘exposition’, filling in the essential things in the background or foreground which the audience will need to know in order to make sense of the plot. A certain generation will always call this the Morgan Freeman role. But I find Teiresias’ brief entrance to be a jolt of tactility and perspective. There is a fuss of stage business, where Teiresias asks Odysseus to put up his absurdly threatening sword so he can drink blood; there follows the enacted sheathing and the old man’s imagined stooping and drinking of fresh animal blood from a trench, like a wildebeest at the watering hole. In a world already peopled with gods and monsters, this is nevertheless farcical and surreal. A stately man introduced wielding a golden sceptre is immediately on all fours lapping up gore like a jackal.

Note especially that phrase, ‘cheerless place’; it might register these days as a bit of a cliché, when it comes to describing hell or the underworld or a haunted cemetery, but no one, that we know of, had really described these things before. Teiresias’ ‘cheerless place’ (ἀτερπέα χῶρον), a land absent of sources of pleasure or delight, including the delights of dance and song, therefore deserves to strike the imagination with all the sombre awe with which it evidently struck the likes of Virgil and Dante and then Milton. It is a place foreign, or immune, to poetry, and yet a wellspring. There is now, forever, such a place in the landscape. And it continues to live in the cultural imagination and to be perversely productive of poetry and art, first of all in the tale of the wanderings of Odysseus and eminently here in the speech of Teiresias. If the ‘cheerless place’ is an idea not original to Homer, he is nevertheless, in our literary history, the source of its apostolic touch. The elements of Teiresias’ comparatively brief and pithy speech echo and resound, backwards and forwards in the Odyssey—literally re-sound—so that it becomes a true crux for both Odysseus’ tale to the Phaeacians and the whole of Homer’s poem.

It would seem that Teiresias needs to establish his authority with Homer’s audience, rather than let it be assumed, as he later might amongst the likes of Oedipus and Antigone on the Athenian stage. He does this first by already knowing, without being told, who Odysseus is—‘he knew me’ (ἐμὲ δ’ ἔγνω) says the teller—as well as the answer to his own opening question above, why’d you leave the light of the sun for the cheerless place? He knows what Odysseus means to ask about:

‘It’s a return home you’re after, sweet as honey, brilliant Odysseus …’ (100)

That shows he’s at least a little mantic, if not quite divinely omniscient. Teiresias also knows that Odysseus is at risk of destruction by Poseidon, in anger for the blinding of his son the Cyclops. That is a past and done deed for Odysseus and ourselves in audience, hence a credential of the prophet’s awareness.

But what comes next establishes Teiresias’ authority within the poetic world of the Odyssey: He warns Odysseus that when they reach the Thrinacian Isle, he must restrain himself and his crew from harming the cattle and flocks of Helius the sun who graze there.

‘Now, if you would leave them be, unharmed, and focus on returning home,

You might even still make it to Ithaca, though suffering crappy things;

But if you harm them, I read the signs of destruction at that time,

For both your ship and crew.’ (110-13)

This episode is in Odysseus’ future; he first hears about it now. We, however, have known since the opening lines of the poem (1.8-9) that this encounter does not end well. Odysseus will fail to restrain his men and lose both ship and crew, although to be clear, Homer blames the men’s failure squarely on their own (σφετέρηισιν) folly, not their leader’s weakness. The effect here in the Odyssey’s theatre is to certify, by internal validation, Teiresias’ acumen as a prophet. He knows how to read the signs (τεκμαίρομαι—his name, Τειρεσίας, may well mean ‘portent reader’); we are confident because, with respect to the sun’s cattle at least, we already know how that story ends. By grounding Teiresias’ credibility in this way, reaching back to the very framing of the poem, Homer primes us to take heed of the revelations about to come. We are on the edge of our seat for words from Teiresias which, it turns out, will haunt the rest of the Odyssey like a recurring refrain, and as much as any other of its musical features, turns the story into a song.

Spoiler alert: Odysseus is going to kill Penelope’s suitors, provided he manages to get home. Teiresias is in no doubt. But he leaves it open—not yet plotted by Homer, perhaps—whether he kills them ‘by stratagem, or openly with the sharp blade …’ (120). There’s still options, all suspense has not been lost. But that victory will not be the end of the story. For what follows from Teiresias’ mouth, and is therefore to follow in Odysseus’ life, nothing has yet prepared us. Note that Teiresias is no longer predicting, or entertaining choices and possibilities, but giving directions in the imperative voice; if he still has in mind Odysseus’ return home, it would have to be in some extended sense, beyond Ithaca and wife and child. That presents a significant shift of horizon for the arc of the Odyssey as we generally experience it. All roads lead to the cheerless place, no doubt; but is there anything going to distinguish Odysseus’ odyssey? What shall be written on his tombstone?

‘Travel, then, afterward—grab an oar that fits you well—

Until you reach those men who do not know the sea,

Men who do not even eat food seasoned with salt:

Nor do they actually know about ships with purple cheeks

Nor well-fitted oars, which become the wings for ships.’ (121-5)

Extraordinarily evocative are ‘those men who do not know the sea’; one knows the very heart of such men and their pragmatic wives. They sing Thracian harvest songs. But what does one do with men who do not season their food with salt? Do such people exist? Google searches suggest hunter-gatherers, but it becomes obvious that Teiresias intends people who engage in agriculture to sustain themselves. Surely salt is a non-negotiable necessity of human metabolism and survival? Can anyone reading me help with this?

‘Grab an oar.’ (It’s what I feel like saying to those just starting the Odyssey.) Not for nothing has been Odysseus’ interview, just concluded, with the ghost of Elpenor. His lost crewman had asked Odysseus to pile him a tomb, a monument to the Unfortunate Man (σῆμα … ἀνδρὸς δυστήνοιο, 75-6), on top of which he is to affix Elpenor’s oar ‘with which I used to row when I also was alive and with my comrades.’ (79) The oar planted on top of the mound (sēma) is itself a symbol (sēma) of the labour of the buried man’s bones and, at the same time and intrinsically, of the necessary team, his crew of oarsmen, with both of which Elpenor’s ghost identifies.

It is not clear whether Homer equivocates on the word sēma, as we would have to, between ‘tomb’ or ‘burial mound’ and ‘sign’ or ‘symbol’. A ‘tombstone’ may well unite these ideas for us as well, although our sense, aside from crucifixes or other religious symbols, would depend on the epitaph, the legible and intelligible writing on the tomb. Homer does not knowingly refer to writing of this sort, the sort in which his own poem has come to be notated and transmitted. Such a notation, including the accent marks, is a particular deployment of an independent set of symbols used to represent the sound, including its emphases, of a spoken language. Such sounds would need to be decoded by someone familiar with the language, into groupings we have come to call ‘words’, ‘phrases’, ‘clauses’ and ‘sentences’, for example, before they could have any meaning, and therefore become signs for something more than their associated sounds.

What is clear is that sēma can mean ‘symbol’ in Homer without any reference to a tomb. When in the Iliad a champion among the foremost Achaeans must be chosen to face Hector mano-a-mano, they each somehow put a mark or sign (σημαίνω, Il.VII.175 ff.) on a lot, before dropping it in a helmet. When the helmet is shaken and one falls out, the lot is taken round the circle, one by one, until the man who recognises the sign (sēma) acknowledges he made it. (It was Ajax.) These must have been pictograms, what the corporations call ‘logos’, except that they are private; they have no meaning beyond ‘I made this’, while even that meaning is only apparent to the maker. Hence it is a non-communicative sign and, one might say, almost insignificant.

Elsewhere in the Iliad, when Bellerophon is sent to Lycia, after having secretly been accused, by his host’s wife, of making unwelcome advances, he is to carry with him a folded tablet (πίναξ πτυκτός) inscribed with ‘baleful signs’ (σήματα λυγρά). These signs, which are said to be many and deadly (θυμόφθορα πολλά), evidently instruct the recipient to kill their bearer. (Bellerophon does not, after all, suffer the fate of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. see Iliad VI.160 ff.) Now, these signs could well have been pictograms, like skulls and crossbones. But then how to make their intent unambiguous, and why were there so many of them on the tablet? The endlessly intriguing fact is that the manyness of the signs, and the fact that they are inscribed on a folded tablet, suggest that they were the writing of spoken language, and that Homer had actually seen written documents, but had not understood them for what they were. It would seem to have been quite beyond his ken that, in a sufficiently alphabetic form, the baleful signs could have been a brilliant means to record the sounds of his poetry, not just its meaning but its music. The inference is that Homer was not responsible for the written form in which his composition comes down to us; that inference is borne out by the absence of representation, in the dialect and alphabet in which we receive it, of certain forms and sounds which must have been in Homer’s ear, most famously a sound, with consonantal function, represented in some early Greek alphabets by a digamma (ϝ). These digammas have been restored where necessary, and sometimes where not, in my performance text of the Odyssey.

The fact that Greek was recorded in different systems of writing (e.g. the syllabary of Linear B and various later alphabets) points to Saussure’s idea, of great influence and suitability to modern taste, of the arbitrariness of the sign. There is, after all, no necessary connection between the signifier and the signified, but rather a sort of time-bound social agreement. As a student I learned that Hindi and Urdu were one language written in different scripts, and likewise Serbian and Croatian in, respectively, Cyrillic and Roman alphabets. But linguists could not say these things out loud for the political and social vitriol they would cause. Linguists, at the end of the day, are not the ultimate arbiters of identity. Apart from the significant differences in religion and culture between these groups, people identify with the signs they use, and identify the signs themselves with the things to which they refer. Educated people, even mathematicians, act as if the Arabic signs they use are not signs for numbers but the numbers themselves, particularly when they use them in operations like multiplying and dividing, where the factors put in and the products generated are mentally identified by permutations of these Arabic symbols. These facts and ideas may or may not prove useful, as grists and foils, when trying to take in what Teiresias next offers:

‘And I’ll tell you a sign—oh so very clear—not even you will miss it:

Whenever it is you fall in the way of another traveller on the road

Who swears that you have a winnowing fan on your brilliant shoulder,

Exactly then: fix it in the earth, your well-fitted oar.’ (Od.11.126-9)

The only thing, it seems to me, that is clear about the sign Teiresias describes, is what to do when it is observed. That is, to plant the oar in the ground, upright one presumes, just like Elpenor’s oar, but this time with no purpose of marking a tomb or any other evident purpose at all, and then and there, sacrificing three male animals to Lord Poseidon:

‘A ram and a bull, and the mounter of sows, a boar …’ (131)

To be honest, Teiresias need intend nothing more than this clarity, about what exactly to do when some stranger mistakes the oar on Odysseus’ shoulder for a winnowing fan. But it should be equally clear that Homer intends something more by the mistaken oar. He has set us up, after all, with Elpenor’s oar, which perhaps somewhat better than the crewman’s name (‘Hopeman’), embodies his function within Odysseus’ journey. Elpenor is an oar. Does that mean Odysseus is also an oar, but with a double-meaning? Or is he a symbol whose meaning depends on his surroundings, and can be easily misunderstood? Despite the enduring hero and bowman of Homer’s treatment, Odysseus also lives on as a brutalist, cunning enforcer and henchman, the Machiavel of the Athenian stage. He has had a double life and a double estimation, perhaps in the Athenian consciousness, but certainly in our reception of Athenian consciousness.

What would an Homeric semiotics look like? We have no reason to suppose anything unusual about the way Homeric language works as language, apart from its peculiar abilities in bringing syncopating rhythm and melody to a fixed and repeating dance measure. We might as well note here Homer’s extravagant, polysyllabic, long-syllabled coinage, accent-free in context, and not elsewhere used in extant Greek authors: ἀθηρηλοιγός, apparently ‘chaff’s bane’. It is taken to refer to a winnowing fan. Homer’s words exult in their sonorities quite as much as in their meanings. But in the Homeric performance, attention is focused through voice, body, and prop. To begin with, the performer narrates in different registers, sometimes with definite moral judgement, as when he blames the crew for eating the sun’s cattle, but sometimes with the distance of a stage direction. He is a voiceover. He invokes the sunrises and dusks with ‘brief incantations,’ but he steps into the spotlight and centres his voice as he develops limpid-seeming similes which can also seem intentionally to entangle and dizzy their identifying elements.

Most dramatic, however, are the moments when Homer disappears as a narrator and vividly becomes someone else, whether god, human, or even animal, and speaks with their voice. Though there is no costume change, both voice and body become signs for other referents, so that in audience the assumed speaker stands before them. More protean still is the performer’s staff, which is rarely meant to be a simple stick; we shall continue to point up its possible uses as a sort of new key to interpreting the Homeric ‘script’, in the sense of ‘prescription for performance’. This is generally the function of ancient texts, whether they were originally composed with the use of letters, or the letters were the means of recording the music of a performance. I think it important that performance be scrutinised when broaching an Homeric semiotics; what the Alexandrian texts first separated for us as the ‘words’ of the poem, do not do all the work of this poet (or of any of the Greek lyric choreographers called ‘poets’). I conceive the performer’s rendering of old Teiresias as one not to exclude his becoming a mime in mid-speech, and swing his staff over his shoulder to demonstrate Odysseus and his oar. In his staff the rhapsode carries an implement whose meaning can change in an instant; it is therefore a sign of signs. (Of course Teiresias himself is being rendered by Odysseus, who is, in turn, Homer’s own Trojan horse.) This Protean rhapsode and his sign of signs are the vehicles which frame each and every of Homer’s words, and so the interpretation of his poetry. Indeed, the only winnowing fans I can find that could be thought to resemble oars are properly called winnowing shovels. I presume one scoops up the threshed harvest with these and tosses it into the wind. But their blades are too wide to be plausible as oars. Yet oars do have blades! And it seems to me crucial to the working of the joke that the performer can throw his blade-less staff, neither oar-like nor fan-like, over his ‘brilliant shoulder’, and let imagination do the rest. This would include letting prejudices work about the unimaginative IQ of farm dwellers.

But there does seem to be serious business going on in the mission, or embassy, prescribed for Odysseus. The oar, unlike the performer’s staff, stays an oar; Odysseus is to travel inland until it reaches the limit of its intelligibility as an oar, where such a thing would have no use. Its shape there becomes a sign within a different language, like the ancient and global emblem of a plasma configuration which became a Nazi swastika. Most obviously there is to be a personal reconciliation with Poseidon, or so it seems; Odysseus is to set up a sort of holy space around his now totemic oar, and sacrifice a ram and a bull and a boar. Then perhaps Poseidon will leave him alone? But this does not seem to be entirely the gist of it. The winnowing fan is a sacred implement in the rites of Eleusis, sacred variously to Demeter, Persephone, and Dionysus. Separating the wheat from the chaff takes on all manner of moral and otherwise supernatural meanings in the rites of these chthonic, harvest and vintage deities. Has Odysseus come as an initiate? Is he the winnowed—or the winnower? Or has he indeed come to atone on behalf of the pirates of the sea, including the glorified pirates of the Achaean army in Troyland, by making a surrogate sacrifice of their rampant masculinity within the precincts of Demeter? Instead of beating swords into ploughshares, is he swinging oars into winnowing fans?

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I cannot resolve or order these questions, though they seem forced on us by the script. Homer layers nested levels of meaning for different recipients. Perhaps Teiresias is in fact a model for Homer’s ideal auditor: we are to be interpreters of signs. I cannot help but think, for example, that the sacrifice to Poseidon, the lord of the salt-water piratical domains, is a sacrifice of Poseidon, an emasculation, required by the plaintiffs, the goddesses of vintage and harvest, for the sea-goers’ rapine plunder of the products and livestock of people who labour on the land. The Achaeans at Troy, and Odysseus and his crew afterwards, are not traders like the Mentes whom Athena portrays in Book 1, or the Phoenicians, who also ply the sea; they are men-in-arms, not traders but raiders.

The reconciliation may not after all be between Odysseus and the Olympian version of Poseidon, but between broader and deeper and older forces, for whom Odysseus is merely the pilgrim vehicle. Teiresias tells Odysseus to go back home before he even acknowledges the Olympian newcomers,

‘… the deathless gods who hold the wide heaven—

All of them! Very much one at a time.’ (133-4)

One must assume that Poseidon is also in the Olympian list. The sacrifices to the Olympians seem almost an afterthought in relation to the solemnity that has gone before, next an oar planted in the heartland. What does it all mean, the sacrifice of the male, the disjunction of meaning between oar and winnowing fan, sea and land? Perhaps there is a rift in the cosmos in need of healing, like that between Oberon and Titania, between Poseidon and Demeter? We shall have to discuss this further.

Teiresias ends his prophecy:

‘… And death, out the salt sea,

A very soft kind, will come for thee, which slays you

Worn out by a plump old age: around you the people

Will be prosperous. That’s what I’m telling you, and no mistake.’ (134-7)

I must say these lines have a singular effect on me. I compare it to the codas of certain novels, when we hear what happens to everyone ‘afterward’; we hear about Natasha in drab middle age, after War and Peace, and get hints about the married life of D’Arcy and Elizabeth. There is the line from the appendices to the Lord Of the Rings, where Legolas and Gimli depart together for the West upon the death of King Elessar, and there was at last an end to the fellowship of the ring in Middle Earth. There is a strong feeling, an ache, of mourning, I suppose in part because we sense the artwork itself passing away from us. We are detached from the lived experience shared, as it were, with these people, and see them now in a strangely televisual way. There are also those biographies we get at the end of films telling us what ends up happening our characters, sometimes comic and sometimes documentary, which put one in a similar state of detachment.

Teiresias’ lines about Odysseus are ambiguous enough to inspire lively commentary and perhaps a good deal of what we would call fan fiction. What, for example, does death from ‘out the salt sea’ (ἐξ ἁλός) mean? Or does it mean ‘away from’ the sea? There is no mention of the fate of either wife or son. The sea, of course, is the realm of the oar, not the winnowing fan; perhaps the idea is that some unfinished business from Odysseus’ marauding days will come back to bite him at the end, where one of the enemies he has made along the way will learn his address and appear out the salt sea. There is supposed to have been a poem, Telegony, named after Odysseus’ son by Circe, who arrives in Ithaca and kills his Dad, perhaps in self-defence. Some have him be the son of Calypso. Telegonus ends up marrying Penelope.

You can’t make this stuff up, but I reckon somebody did. Classicists take an epic poem Telegony as canon, along with much else besides in lost and also non-memorable epic, but in reality I suspect such a poem is ‘canon’ in the way that word is used in present movie universes—as the lingo has it—such as Star Wars or Star Trek or the Marvel films. Even Middle Earth is spinning off tales. The idea that such a process took place in relation to the Homeric poems, including in relation to parts of the so-called epic cycle, needs to be taken seriously, before these hints and fragments are biblicised into the monstrous modern concept of ‘mythology’, and its brain-eating cousin, ‘tradition’. Stories about Thebes, its divinities and protagonists, are demonstrably part of Homer’s world, although not, also demonstrably, in the forms with which we are familiar from the Attic stage. The Telegony, on the other hand, is not in Homer’s universe, anymore than his boy Telegonus would have been a thought in Odysseus’ mind until he appeared. It is possible that, where art gave licence or impetus, poets (who were the Hellenes’ prophets and theologians) made things up, even within traditional catalogues; and to answer questions of acceptability to the canon, the audience voted with their feet.

That the Death which comes for Odysseus will be ‘a very soft kind’ (ἀβληχρὸς μάλα τοῖος) is immediately belied by the fact that it will slay him (πέφνηι); the sense of φένω is violent. (The composer(s) of the Telegony evidently had a nose for this detail.) Perhaps what is meant is explained in the next line, that Odysseus was ‘worn out by a plump old age’. As Herodotus says, count no man happy until he is dead. A quick death without the wasting of disease, in well-oiled health and surrounded by a people enjoying prosperity—probably because of your transformation into a benevolent, chthonic king from an ocean marauder—would seem to be a good way to go. Perhaps the Ayatollah Khamenei had a death like that, from out the sea. As Herodotus might have it, such a death for Odysseus, however unlucky or violent, would not have been a ruination, but a right place at a right time.

Odysseus responds by addressing Teiresias by his name, without honorific or epithet. This strikes me as odd, but I cannot parse it. He asks plaintively after his mother. We remember Odysseus saw her first, before Teiresias approached. Now here is the vintage Odysseus whom any Athenian theatre-goer would recognise: he denied his own mother a draught of sheep’s blood so Teiresias could be first in line. This is a man who would kill his mother—twice!—if she stood in the way of what he wanted. That’s the man.

‘Tell me, Lord, how might she recognise that it’s me alive?’ (144)

Now he calls Teiresias ‘lord’ (ϝάναξ), also inexplicably, and emphatically. The one thing we can be pretty sure of, about Theban Teiresias, is that he was never a wanax or ‘lord’ (‘warlord’, ‘king’). He was a seer who served generations of kings, starting with Cadmus. Again I cannot parse this, except to say that Homer means to put his imprimatur on the authority of Teiresias’ utterances.

A lesson for modern Homeric Studies from Homer’s ‘Theban Teiresias’, the wanax, is that to try to cast Homer as an operator within a tradition is a mug’s game. Everything about his ancient reception indicates that he was an original, if anything a source, but not a product, of tradition. I must not tire of pointing out that the entire theory of metrical formulas, from which it is inferred that Homer’s poems are a product of an oral tradition, is empirically and intellectually bankrupt. One cannot ignore the pitch accentuation of the Greek language. One should have thought that did not need saying in any context, let alone in the study of ancient Greek poetry. But in particular, I have shown that Homer has composed significant leitmotifs with intrinsic word- and phrase-level pitch contours, and selective dynamic reinforcements of the long and short elements of the underlying hexameter. The words are the music for the dance. To account for the origin of Homer’s music by an oral tradition is like attempting to explain baroque or classical music by composition out of metrical formulas, which is to say, by the ubiquitous repeating metrical patterns which do in fact exist there, most of them based in dance steps. Such an explanation would travesty Beethoven’s music, by ignoring all its melodies, harmonies, rhythms and syncopations. The application to Homer needs must have an identical result. It would be, and is, a travesty. If there is interest in Homer’s relation to tradition, perhaps we are blessed with the data for the use of a field as yet unploughed by the academy: what is the effect of epochal musical works upon the musical culture that surrounds and succeeds them? Works like Bach’s Goldberg Variations or Well-Tempered Clavier, or Mozart’s operas, or Beethoven’s symphonies, or Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue, or the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band? To what extend does previous music help to explain their eruptions? What is the process of their canonisation? At all levels of the phenomenon, from the physical to the auditory to the historical to the societal and cultural, how is music transmitted? This is the question for anyone interested in traditions, including intellectual ones. It is a question for a new university. There will likely be a Socrates there who asks us, ‘what is this thing, music?’ Let him wander the quadrangles and pester people into truth. Let us, for now, focus, like the modern sciences, on equations of transmission. The first lesson, for poet and mathematician, physicist and historian alike, is that Greek measures are dance steps.

The soul of Lord Teiresias leaves the stage with a farewell stint as Morgan Freeman. He explains to Odysseus that

‘Whomsoever you allow among the corpses that are dead and gone

To come near the blood, that’s one will recite for you with no mistake …

But the one whom you begrudge, he’ll go back again for you behind.’ (147-9)

This implies that Odysseus will choose the order of the people he would like to speak. In that sense his poem will be no sort of traditional—in the sense ‘received’—catalogue. So Odysseus knows what to do to get his dead mother to speak first. And that’s what’s next.

In Greek:

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Odyssey 11.20-89

[Part 2 of ‘The Haunted Text’, on Persephone herself—perhaps the ultimate ‘background’ figure of those named in Homer’s foreground—will resume when she herself prompts the interrogation. For now we return to the banks of Oceanus, to sing a bit of Homer.]

Odysseus says that he and his men came to the place Circe had pointed out. He does not describe it again. We should recall what Circe had said, but it must be acknowledged that a performer takes the path of prudence in not revisiting her words, as they seem a little difficult to embody coherently on a stage:

There’s a small headland there, and a grove of Persephone—

Tall poplars and willows that lose their fruit—

That’s the spot, first off, to put the ship in—by Oceanus, Deep-Eddies;

But go by yourself into Hades’ place, the mouldy house. (Od.10.509-12)

Even though it’s supposed to be very dark outside in the Cimmerians’ land, it seems possible to imagine the grove and the trees; but what sort of thing is Hades’ mouldy house? Does it have a door and windows, inner rooms and porticoes? A δόμος needs to be some sort of building. The following vista somehow unfolds inside, as though one had entered an IMAX theatre:

Now, there, into Acheron Pyriphlegethon flows,

Along with Cocytus, which is a branch from the water of Styx.

And there’s a cliff and the coming together of two thunderous rivers … (10.113-15)

The performer does not put us in mind of this fantastic and dimly lit landscape. Instead, as is his wont, he focalises his body and his prop. Recall that Odysseus the character has received a sword from a Phaeacian lad in Book 8, in compensation for his rude challenge to the hero in the lists. I suspect that one purpose of this gift of a sword, which he straps over his shoulder and forgets, was plausibly to equip Odysseus the narrator, who was about to take the stage, with the rhapsode’s prop, the magic staff, which of course Homer’s performer had already in hand. I have pointed out a running joke in the Odyssey, where a line from the Iliad, ‘he drew the sharp sword from by his thigh,’—invariably followed in that poem with a masculine martial exploit—is in this poem followed by some incongruous action which tends to make the armed man look awkward or silly. Circe had instructed Odysseus to ‘draw the sharp sword from by your thigh/And sit …’ (10.535-6). Not ‘attack’ or ‘spill the blood of your foe,’ but sit … to guard already spilt sacrificial blood from a thirsty queue of ghosts. Now, at or within Hades’ door, he follows Circe’s instructions to dig a trench for that sacrifice, but innovates in the means, which she had not thought to mention.

… but me, I drew my sharp sword from by my thigh

And dug a trench as much as an arm’s length over here and over here … (11.24-5)

The lines seem designed for an actor’s gesture with his prop, blocking and animating a stage. But to dig a trench with a sword? Recall the demand on King Arthur from the Knights who say ‘Ni!’, that he must cut down the mightiest tree in the forest with a herring. I suppose in life as well as in performance art, one has to make do with what is to hand.

… and they gathered,

Souls out from Erebus below, of the corpses of the dead and gone.

There’s brides and lusty boys, much-endured old men,

Tender virgins whose life’s breath is new to sorrow,

Many wounded by copper-tipped spears,

Men slain by Ares wearing equipment covered in human gore:

These began coming in numbers, from one side and the other,

In a supernatural uproar: the yellow-green fear got hold of me. (10.36-44)

I think it bears repeating, and then contemplating and diagnosing, this vision of the dead streaming forth from some hidden location behind the screen of reality, where they are thought to remain in some sort of half-aware relation to our history and consciousness. I suppose there is nothing unusual about this idea by now, nothing that offends our sense of realism or plausibility, at least when we are telling stories or saying prayers. One accommodates this parallel reality, at least at certain times, when it comes to grandparents and parents and children and dead presidents and saints, and of course beloved pets. But I find myself wondering, would there ever have been such things as ghosts without ghost stories? Our susceptibility to stories and storytellers, to their ability to conjure the absent and make it act and speak before our eyes, may well be of a piece with our susceptibility to the belief, or even the perception, of ghosts. The dead, after all, are merely one species of the absent and missed. Of course this passes onward to the fear of their noxiousness or malevolence as independent agents, who might attend you even if they don’t know you; the success of horror films and stories bespeaks this extension of the realm of the dead beyond a space of sanctuary for the beloved and the missed. Odysseus describes a terrifying sensurround experience (θεσπεσίηι ϝἰϝαχῆι); his response describes the one in the movie theatre at a horror show: ‘the yellow-green fear got hold of me.’ It is not finally clear how they make the sound that terrifies him. Perhaps with their feet? Perhaps they moan and clank in their armour, like Marley’s ghost? We learn later on—from Teiresias—that they cannot speak articulately or thoughtfully until they drink of Odysseus’ blood sacrifice.

From T. S. Eliot—who may be the man in the hat in front of the bicyclists—quoting Dante—‘I had not thought death had undone so many.’ The sentiment morphs into David Bowie’s ‘I never thought I’d need so many people …’ A vision of the dead becomes at once a vision of the almost burdensome immensity of human population. Bowie’s doomed cityscape (Five Years) and Eliot’s vision of a busy London Bridge (The Waste Land) are of a piece with the earlier infernal visions in that the realisation that these people had stopped living is at once a taking in of their sheer number. Odysseus’ vision here, which inspired so many different kinds of poet across the ages, may in fact be the origin of them all. My only hesitation when it comes to Homer’s originality, is the hint at parody and sendup which runs through the veins of the Odyssey, including in this episode of Odysseus in Hades, whose undercurrents are felt despite our lack of objects for their direction (outside the Iliad). Perhaps, for example, there were stories and perhaps also rites due to Orpheus, or about him, to which Homer was responding in a somewhat parodic way, but there is no evidence for their priority. There seems to be only genuine sentiment running through Homer’s lines. We do not know how the brides and grooms came to their presumed sudden end—must have been horrible—nor the virgins new to sorrow. But they all died untimely, like men killed in battle, and evidently keep the semblance with which they died; the soldiers’ ghosts’ equipment is still covered, rather gratuitously, with real gore.

The odd ones out are the old men who have endured much (πολύτλητοι); they must be wearing their endurance in their posture and gait. Perhaps they also died at a wedding, like the people killed by drones in Afghanistan? It does not seem that we are shown people who died of old age, or disease. There are no old women mentioned, for example, nor cripples, nor others who might not elicit the sought-for poignance in the sense of lost opportunity and bloom. These are sad songs in a comedy, not tragic eruptions into the score. The ghosts are Homeric psyches who lust for the blood from which they have been forever separated. We are supposed to think that they would fear Odysseus’ sword, which stands brandished in their way. ‘Wot are you gonna do, kill me?’

Odysseus draws his sword anyway, and repeats, in his own assertive voice, Circe’s command that he will not let the ‘corpses’ powerless heads’—which sound like ‘skulls’, but must be recognisable, like zombies’ faces—approach the sheep’s blood before he can question Teiresias. The rule is immediately broken, however, when the ghost of Elpenor shows up first. He does not take a drink, but starts right up talking in response to Odysseus’ question. No explanation is given for his ability or privilege in line, unless it can be found in the fact that he’s not yet been acknowledged in death, but lies there ‘unwept and without a funeral’ in Circe’s house. But this seems, rather, to be an explanation of why he is dead at all. Elpenor tells the story of his drunken misadventure. Odysseus’ question of him had served as a chance to repeat a joke which doesn’t, perhaps, improve with age: how’d you get here so fast, the quickest way to Hades? ‘You beat me here on foot, though I came with my black ship.’ (11.58)

Elpenor’s presence in the story, at first blush anyway, seems in every way a contrivance. Unkind people would call him an insertion. My own sense is that the poet of the Odyssey, who is scripting a one-man show on a bare stage, is someone who embraces both the imaginative challenges placed upon him by the conditions of his art, and a performer who must be more a medium than an actor, a necessarily multilayered vehicle who will not be shy to indulge things ‘meta’. This layering will include breaking what we call the ‘fourth wall’; we have seen this already in his use of the figure of Mentor, who is at times the performer’s alter ego rather than an assumed character. (I here anticipate the rich examples to come at exciting moments.) I have suggested that in Elpenor’s case, the manner of his death, which he now recounts in his own voice, stands as a sort of parable for an ‘epic movement’. Instead of retracing his steps down the long staircase, he falls straight through the roof, which results in his neck being severed from its spine.

Circling with a retrogression midway is the movement of a dactylic round dance which supplies the poet with an hexameter beat. The timely retrogression becomes a fulcrum which makes the six-measure movement a unity—that is, a ‘line’ or ἔπος. In the twist in his neck the dancer also feels the unity between his head and spine. The movement of such a round dance is, not coincidentally, an image of the motion of an outer planet, like the gods Jupiter/Zeus or the present Mars/Ares, as we see them from earth: these beings seem to stop and retrogress westward at the approach of each solar opposition, before resuming their eastward motion among the fixed stars. From the dancer’s point of view, every four dactyls there comes a retrogression, a pausing step for almost two feet. From the accompanist’s or composer’s point of view, the retrogression is not the beginning or end but the fulcrum, a balancing point just past the middle, of an Homeric line. (This line’s beginning, its first foot, is always marked by a new word; the later resumption of rightward motion after the retrogression is also often marked by a new word, in a phenomenon called the ‘bucolic diaeresis’ between the fourth and fifth feet of the six.)

Elpenor himself becomes the vehicle for Odysseus and his men to accomplish a retrogression in their journey, as though this was the right way to travel: in the round, like the planetary gods when they are on good behaviour, rather than in straight lines. Rather than head home immediately upon hearing Teiresias’ prophecy, they must now first return to Aeaea, Circe’s Isle, to do the last rites for their comrade. Elpenor does not depend on them to do this out of love, for all that Odysseus is in tears at the sight of him; no, he threatens them in a rather striking way:

‘Do not abandon me unwept, without a funeral, left behind

With your back turned, lest I become a concretion of the gods’ wrath against you …’ (11.72-3)

The θεῶν μήνιμα is an ‘object of the gods’ mēnis’, where μῆνις is a kind of wrath usually distinguished as emanating from divine agents, gods in the sky, rather than human beings who tend instead to harbour χόλος (kholos, ‘anger’), a liquid humour within the chest. I say ‘usually’ because μῆνις is the first word of the Iliad, and that particular anger notably stems from and belongs to Achilles, who is mortal. One does not know what teeth or influence this now bloodless ghost still has; but Elpenor plays all his cards in making his threat. You will be the victim of a divine smiting if you do not cremate me on a proper pyre, and give me the burial I prescribe. The implication is that neglecting or otherwise violating what is due to the dead remnants of an human being would elicit not only societal or cultural opprobrium, like our ubiquitous mass graves, but offend also the divine consciousness, chthonic or cosmic, so as to bring on a supernatural and superhuman threat of punishment. It is a conceit which is in no small part strengthened by the very existence of Elpenor’s conscious soul after death.

But Elpenor’s vehicle does more than take us back to Circe’s Isle. This is only a local, topographical retrogression; many adventures lie beyond Aeaea, including Ogygia, Calypso’s island at the sea’s navel—surely the centre of some different circle from Aeaea—not to mention Scheria itself, where Odysseus is now among the Phaeacians. It is to this audience that Elpenor is also a storyteller’s vehicle, for in making his plea to Odysseus, he calls on those who are absent, both in the sense of ‘not in Hades yet’, but also absent to the storyteller in the present, and as yet unknown to those listening to him:

‘But now I beseech you by those left behind, who are not present:

By your wife and father, who fed you when you were little,

And Telemachus, whom you abandoned an only child in your rooms.’ (11.66-8)

The notion of those ‘behind’, like ghosts behind your back you cannot see, is striking in this context. The forced absence of the beloved seems very much to be a feature of modern life (not a bug!), not only the lot of the prisoner or the deportee; it seems usefully comparable in feeling to the felt absence of the dead. I, at least, find Elpenor’s invocation strangely powerful. What can get lost in the reverie is that this is the first time, through Elpenor, that Odysseus has revealed the existence of these people to the Phaeacians. (At the beginning of the tale, he did announce himself as ‘son of Laertes.’) What Elpenor confirms, somehow, is something that Odysseus cannot honestly know: that these people are still alive. Note in particular the mention of ‘the wife’ (ἄλοχος, ‘bedmate’). She has no name, no epithet, but she has suddenly become a presence hidden behind the speaker. Odysseus has a wife. The once prospective husband for Nausicaa has been outed by his own narrative vehicle, Elpenor.

The dead lad’s work is not yet done. The signpost that is Elpenor demands the construction of a sign, one might say a symbol:

‘ … Put me to the pyre with my equipment, the sum that is mine,

And pile me a tomb on the shore of the grey sea,

The sign of an unfortunate man—to learn by, even for those yet to come.

Finish this for me, and affix on my barrow the oar,

With which I used to row when I was also alive and with my comrades.’ (11.74-8)

‘Tomb’ and ‘sign’ both translate the single word σῆμα (sēma), not because Elpenor equivocates, but because a sēma is a mark or point, which points, just as a tomb points to its resident. Hence we derive ‘semantic’. Homer may not have a word for ‘word’, but he is of course as fixated as any artist on both the investiture of signs and their possible interpretation. Why should one pay attention to an unfortunate man? It is a curious case, Elpenor is too ‘random’ a person, as the kids say, to contain a lesson such as ‘there but for the grace of God go I.’ This whole Elpenor project, shall we call it, seems to come to Homer’s purpose in the affixing of an oar on top of a barrow, as the creation of some sort of incontrovertible and unambiguous sign. Of course there is no such thing. But Elpenor seems to stand for this idea, this aspiration, toward a monovalent sign like a pictogram. I am my oar, I am my work, I am a comrade amongst a rowing team who made me feel alive and of whom I’m proud. Elpenor’s oar wants to be a non-arbitrary sign.

But the oar must be transformed to become a sign for his tomb, a sēma for his sēma. In life the oar was an horizontal extension of his arms, which turned them into a paddle by which to manipulate the alien liquid and traverse the gulfs of the sea. Now it must be planted upright on his barrow, like a loom or a mast. There are so many uses for a stick! But will people still know that it is an oar, an oar meant to represent an oar, when it is stuck upright into the ground? Will Elpenor’s oar still mean anything at all, when the art crowd arrives and disagrees on how to interpret the installation?

‘This, my sad one (δύστηνε, dystēne), I shall fulfil for you, and I’ll do it too,’ says Odysseus (11.80). In addressing him this way Odysseus confirms that Elpenor’s tomb will be, as he wishes, a monument to the unfortunate man (ἀνὴρ δύστηνος, anēr dystēnos, 11.76), like a tomb for the unknown soldier. Why is he wretched? Is it because Elpenor died in such a pratfallish way, untimely and by absent-mindedness? Or is it because he is, at the end of the day, just an oarsman? Odysseus called himself Ὀῦτις to the Cyclops, which sounds a lot like the Greek for ‘no-one’, what the grammarians call an indefinite pronoun. The name he later reveals to the Cyclops, Odysseus, we call a ‘proper’ name. It belongs to its referent. There are whole poems and other artworks which memorialise that name and its referent. But even this most proper of proper names has become, in part through the import of its associated stories, an abstract noun; an adventurous, god-inspired journey has become an ‘odyssey’, a word more like ‘oar’ than ‘Odysseus’. Hence Odysseus’ name, in his own telling of the journey, verges from witting anonymity to the full disclosure of a peculiarly talented individual and family, and beyond that to the realm of the archetypes that some would call ‘heroic’. That guy is a proper Ulysses! For Elpenor, by contrast, the arc is toward the anonymous tomb of the unfortunate man, topped by a sometime oar now planted like a tree. Like the oar put to another use, Elpenor’s life has been inserted into Odysseus’ story to serve as a useful vehicle. Its insertion into the epic lends his life its true immortality, so it seems; his usefulness to the telling of Odysseus’ odyssey is his true memorial.

So the pair of us, taking turns exchanging lines we hated,

Sat there—me away from him, holding my sword over the blood,

But the phantom of my comrade on the other side, talking volumes. (11.81-3)

The contradiction could not be made more explicit by Odysseus and Homer: they were separated, Odysseus with his sword over the blood so Elpenor could not get at it. Yet Elpenor can talk, and talk, and he comes first before Teiresias. Odysseus no sooner repeats Circe’s rule and instruction, than breaks it. There will be a payoff in Teiresias’ prophecy, but for some reason Homer wants the muffler on his vehicle to make a sound.

Odysseus says he saw the soul of his mother, learnt then and there that she was dead. His mother! But he would not yet let her speak to him. No ma’am.

But no way was I for letting her in early—no matter the density of my grief—

To get near the blood, until I heard from Teiresias. (11.88-9)

No cutting in line for Mum. Once again, Odysseus repeats Circe’s command about letting no one drink or speak before Teiresias. By repeating the partly flouted command, Homer closes the ring, forever, on Elpenor’s story, and the soul of Theban Teiresias comes on.

In Greek:

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Odyssey 11.1-19

And so the journey begins. Well, begins again. There is a new breath filling the sails, a second wind. It is in fact the breath of Circe, ‘dread goddess of intelligible voice.’ Her entrance into the story has been literally pivotal; it sends Odysseus and his remaining men southward, toward the invisible place where the dead people go, and to the ministry of yet another divine mistress.

Olympian Athena at this moment is nowhere to be seen; Calypso, the island-bound and hence earth-bound Titan’s daughter, is as yet an unknown. Circe, the Sun’s daughter also seemingly island-bound, has been Odysseus’ bedmate for a year; now she sends him on to dread Persephone beyond the visible horizon. In the Odyssey the latter seems to be permanently ensconced beyond and beneath the earth. Athena stands out in Odysseus’ list as belonging to the sky or Olympus, always having to descend from there and return, when she is finished intervening in his life. Persephone seems to be the least visible of these beings, both to us and as a fact of the story.

The prospect of encountering the walking dead blows new life through the sonority of now familiar lines, invoking the launching of a ship and standing its mast. The ship herself is as animate in Greek as Circe: ‘the wind and the helmsman directed her.’ Even in English a ship is rarely an ‘it’. She and her men are on a wind-blown heading to Hell. One line rings a tad strangely this time: ‘Helius went down and all the lanes grew shadowed.’ (Od.11.12) ἄγυια is properly ‘street’. We speak of ‘sea lanes’ but these are abstract cartographic impositions upon the fluid. The lexicon suggests ‘paths of the sea’—which are what, exactly? Neither the wind nor the pilot are driving a road. The metaphor rather drives home the alienness of liquid depths to both the human and the buoyant. The sea is a roadless watery abyss.

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At the border of Oceanus, the river of ‘deep currents’, there be men. There are six lines about the Cimmerians in the Odyssey:

ἔνθα δὲ Κιμμερίων ἀνδρῶν δῆμός τε πόλις τε,

ἠέρι καὶ νεφέληι κεκαλυμμένοι · οὐδέ ποτ’ αὐτούς

ἠϝέλιος φαϝέθων ἐπιδέρκεται ἀκτίνεσσιν,

οὔθ’ ὁπότ’ ἂν στείχησι πρὸς οὐρανὸν ἀστερόεντα

οὔθ’ ὅτ’ ἂν ἂψ ἐπὶ γαῖαν ἀπ’ οὐρανόθεν προτράπηται,

ἀλλ’ ἐπὶ νὺξ ὀλοὴ τέταται δειλοῖσι βροτοῖσιν. (11.14-19)

There one finds the Cimmerian men, their country and city,

Hidden in mist and cloud: not ever upon them

Does shining Helius peer with his rays,

Neither when he moves toward starry heaven,

Nor when back to earth from heaven he turns his forward way,

But a deadly night is stretched over wretched mortals.

They have a country and a city (δῆμός τε πόλις τε), these Cimmerians. It is not clear how they have managed these things, how they grow food for themselves or what they get up to without any sun. What would they argue about in court or at the assembly? What outlet or venue might there be for fighting men (ἄνδρες) to display? It is not that the sun never rises there, it seems, but that it is forever obscured by thick fog and cloud. The land of the Laestrygonians saw very short nights, so that a busy shepherd could earn two wages, bringing home the cattle and taking out the flocks (10.84-5). It seems we have moved from somewhere far in the north not to the opposite pole, but southwards toward the equator. Evidently the view south in illo tempore presented something at the same time spectacular and gloomy, not an horizon but a barrier of some kind, beyond which was held to be the Invisible Realm (Ἀϝίδης, Hades) where the dead and gone go to hide. At its border, the farther shore of the stream of Oceanus, dwell people with a name, who could hardly see for looking … or be seen. We proceed through gradations of invisibility, and meet Cimmerians on the way.

What might it serve Homer’s vision that there be people who dwell there on the edge, however implausibly, in the valley of the shadow of death? Circe does not mention this possibility in advance; perhaps that is a first hint that following her instructions for a ritual engagement with the dead, will not be without its last-minute adjustments, like Neil Armstrong’s moon landing. (‘Rocket’ is not, despite the proverbs, one of the hard sciences.) Certainly there would be some anxiety about unforeseen events or hindrances to the playbook in such a frankly scary environment. Odysseus and his men take no chances engaging with these Cimmerians, as they might otherwise have been expected to do, to see what they could get from them. They disembark there, one assumes near the town, and proceed along Oceanus’ banks to the grove of Persephone.

Apparently this is a grove consecrated by the Cimmerians, like the grove of Athena in which Odysseus lays low on his way to the town of Phaeacia. One presumes (though one does not know) that within the Phaeacians’ town, there is a temple to Poseidon. They are descendants of Poseidon, after all. There is evidently a tension between Poseidon and Athena which plays out in the opening of the Odyssey, a tension which devolves in this instance upon the fate of the figure of Odysseus. Perhaps this tension is reflected politically in the location of these sacred sites, one within the walls and one a suburban grove. In historical Athens the situation is reversed, with Athena’s house on the Acropolis and Poseidon’s temple away in Sounion. One honours the one god centrally, but covers one’s bases by keeping the opposition at arm’s length, which is also of course within arm’s reach. But within the Acropolis is also the famous house of Erectheus, still extant; the latter was a founding hero who historically comes to be associated with a cult of Poseidon. It is striking that when Athena leaves Odysseus on the Phaeacian king’s doorstep, she heads off to the house of Erechtheus, called out by name, in a place called Athene (7.81). Whether for Homer also this refuge-seeking of Athena’s represents some kind of reconciliation with Poseidon, or only a resort to her own city’s founder, is a matter lost to time. But their historical practices seem to suggest a place for Poseidon within the Athenians’ acropolis. We may speculate, by analogy, that Hades himself is a central divinity in the Cimmerian polis, while his consort Persephone haunts her grove on Oceanus’ banks. I therefore venture to infer, merely from the fact that there is a grove of Persephone apart from the Cimmerian town, that they acknowledge a tension between her and her husband. Circe does not appear to rate the town and its Cimmerians, only the grove.

Herodotus knew of Cimmerians in eastern lands who were expunged by the Scythians. These were indeed a people who had disappeared, but left mementos of their existence in the names of certain landmarks, like the ‘Cimmerian walls’ or the ‘Cimmerian Bosporus’. The Bible knows a corresponding people as Gomer. But there is no mention in classical Greece of Cimmerians living anywhere to the south across the sea. Here is an opportunity to point out what is not obvious even to professional historians: that there is no good topographical reason to connect any of the places named and described in Homer to places so named by classical Greek authors (or ourselves). Homer’s Aegypt has no pyramids to speak of. But beyond that, the place Herodotus calls Aegypt (Egypt), applying Homer’s name, has never been called this by the peoples who are native there. To this day, local peoples have somewhat accommodated themselves to inherited imperial naming, like the dwellers in the ‘Arctic’ or around the ‘Gulf of Mexico’.

Efforts continue, but fail, even to identify the places Homer names which are supposed to be within Greece itself. The situation is such that it seems to me most likely that the places were named from the poems, rather than the other way around. With the exception of Athens, which is a place which proves to have been a significant bottleneck or filter in the transmission of Homer’s music, I believe the Greek place names for towns domestic and foreign were assigned by migrants from parts northern who ventured south into a decimated land, bringing with them the Homeric poems and its names, either on their lips or in their hands. To be sure, there was a significant servant population of some kind, who already used Greek amidst the bureaucracy of the Mycenaean citadels. These stock-keeping scribes wrote in Linear B, which was a syllabary inadequate to record Homer. There is clearly a puzzle here: its solution must be allowed to involve the catastrophic breakdowns of societies, sudden migrations of populations into devastated regions (sometimes misinterpreted as ‘invasions’), and changes in coastlines, topography, and even cardinal points before any satisfaction will be had. It is a salient fact that Greek speakers do not speak a language closely related to the other Indo-European languages presently surrounding them.

There must be a programmatic interest for Homer in the Cimmerians, for he tells us next to nothing about them, save that they have a country and some sort of recognisable city, and that the perpetual noxious weather and dark of their circumstances oppresses them and leaves them wretched. But Odysseus does not encounter deserts, as we define them; and when he encounters a deserted isle, overrun by goats, he breaks into a reverie about how admirably it might be developed if humans could make their way there, across from the land of the Cyclopes. His world seems everywhere fertile, and ready for human population.

The brief narrative window upon the Cimmerians quite interrupts the second wind of Odysseus’ sea voyage. So why do they appear? Or rather, get a mention, for we don’t exactly see them? One remembers the far-flung Aethiopians from near the beginning of Book 1. We learn very little about them, either, except that unlike the Cimmerians, their name might mean something in Greek, perhaps ‘flaming-eyes’ or ‘flame-faces’. They live divided farthest west and farthest east, where the sun sets and where the sun rises (1.24), yet somehow remain one people. They keep cattle and flocks; Poseidon visits them for a sacrifice of male animals, bulls and rams. Now how does he do that? Does he go east or does he go west, or can he be both places at once? Or was there an intuition like that of the European prospectors, that if you head in either direction you end up in the Indies? At any rate, ‘there’ is where he was, preoccupied, when the gods held their council and moved on a plan to rescue Odysseus behind Poseidon’s back. Since this junket of Poseidon’s seems the only way that the plot of the Odyssey can come into existence, perhaps there is a place in Homer’s imagination to be noted, in these obscure peoples centred in their own worlds of religious observance. They are thought by the rest of us to be exotic and far-flung, the stuff of traveler’s tales, but it seems that sometimes they attract the god’s attention to our neglect.

The peoples Herodotus encounters on his itinerant investigations seem to him all to worship the same gods, but by different names. Homer, however, only glancingly acknowledges that some of the Trojan allies speak foreign languages, while Odysseus himself has no call for such an observation of the people he encounters in the course of his vast travels. It seems that both authors, the poet and the much later historian, find no disagreement among humans about whether there were gods and who they were and what they did. Different names evidently did not use to register as disagreements, as when monotheists take up arms if one of them, for example, invokes God’s name in Arabic. Even for us, identifying Homer’s names for the gods with some of the present planets is a much less tricky business than identifying what he meant by, say, Aegyptians, Aethiopians, and Cimmerians. But it seems that Homer sees a plot point, at the very least, in the idea that human beings are scattered, beyond easy communication, but are nevertheless everywhere in a certain sense civilised, with a recognisable structure to their habitation—there is a polis with temples within, and also a grove outside on the fringes, amidst or beyond the worked land, dedicated to a certain divinity kept at arm’s reach.

Be that as it may, not only the Cimmerians but nearly all the people Odysseus visits and harasses and infiltrates live isolated, from Aeolus to the Cyclopes to the Phaeacians, not to mention the island goddesses Circe and Calypso. The scattered situation of devotional people, starting in this story with the Aethiopians, who are divided at opposite ends of the earth (διχθὰ δεδαίαται, ‘divided in two’, 1.23), creates a peculiar situation with respect to theology and theodicy. It is not that there is no God, obviously, and it is not simply that there are many gods. Some of these gods may be omniscient or omnipotent; how could one know? One can only know that when they act, they act with irresistible strength, and apparently on purpose. But the very scattering of our settlements, and so our devotions, seems to require that the gods cannot be omnipresent, even if they can, like Poseidon, somehow simultaneously attend a dinner in the far east and the far west. Poseidon cannot also attend the council of Zeus, that’s the point, wherever he’s gone to dinner. The reality to which Homer’s poetry answers is not one where God knows and loves you while he notes the hairs on your head and the fall of a sparrow, nor one where there is nobody minding the store. The plot of the Odyssey, and the world, rather depend on a parliament of gods who don’t see eye to eye, who cannot possibly respond to all the cries for notice from their constituents, and on significant occasions are unable, or uninterested, to pay attention. Our own experience therefore answers to a politics in the sky where things can be made to happen behind the back of God.

But it must be admitted that here I am made to venture beyond my zone of comfort. I like to interpret Homer from Homer. He rewards me like no other author with his transparency; he has always repaid attention to the detail of his narrative and choice of words, including when he coins words. But the Cimmerians represent an example where Homer trades in opacity, whether this is because he does not wish to bore his audience with something they ought already to know, or whether it is because there are certain things to be mooted without being explicated, things which it might be indelicate or impious or even dangerously blasphemous to say out loud.

Part of the aesthetic here is that elements of the past and of the environment remain atmospheric, so that a too detailed backstory would kill the effect. Tolkien demonstrates that passing allusions to a rich and peopled past can create a powerful third, or even fourth, dimension to the narration of present acts. Modern Homeric scholars called ‘neo-analysts’ indulge the pull of this kind of world-building by trying to contextualise the storytelling involved in Homer’s music (something they do not study) in the light of an ‘epic cycle’ (something they largely invent). Needless to say, this allusive aesthetic of storytelling complicates matters for a researcher or a critic. But it is impossible to take anything about Persephone as a given for Homer, for he just does not let on what she is, for all that it is impossible to inhabit his story without some idea of this. Joel Christensen recently blogged, in response to the convolutions of neoanalysis, that it is “[a]lmost as if Homeric epic transcends the need for any other stories at all.” Yes sir, but in this case we absolutely do need some guidance from without, about the significance of Persephone.

Hence next time we shall have to, for Homer’s sake, go beyond the explicit direction Homer gives us, and broach the historical semantic realms invoked by the name of Persephone. I think we shall find her a spring-loaded symbol waiting to be trodden, like a land mine.

In Greek:

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On Odyssey 10.503-74 (end)

This one might take a few sittings.

I neglected to mention, when it was appropriate and to my point, that poplars and willows are riparian trees. The headland the ship of Odysseus is supposed to meet once he’s crossed through Oceanus, is described as λάχεια, which I sheepishly render ‘small’, but nobody really knows what the word means. The trees form a grove of Persephone there. The men will head off from Circe’s Isle over the salt sea, but the place they will put in is either the far bank of a river or a lake shore. The Oceanus is a fresh water stream. Of some kind.

Jno Cook’s book and site are here.

My paper on the Polar Bear is here.

A recording of this passage in my English translation is here:

A full performance of Homer’s hexameters in Greek awaits at the end of this post:

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Odyssey 10.503-74

We’ve already had two members of Odysseus’ crew named, amongst a number of occasions where they speak in chorus. Sometimes we get the convention that ‘one on this side’ and ‘one on t’other’ says what follows, even though it is but a single speech enacted by a solo performer. There was Polites (‘Citizen’), the one Odysseus cared (or worried) most about (κήδιστος), who could not resist responding to the sound of a goddess’ voice. And there is Eurylochus (‘Broad-Ambush’) the antagonist, an annoying coward who nevertheless, like Thersites in the Iliad, speaks discomfiting truth to power. Now we meet young Elpenor (‘Man of Hope’), who seems most unfortunately to be used by Homer, or his present narrator Odysseus, to make some sort of point. The thing is, poor Elpenor makes this point by dying.

Who are you Elpēnor?

What is it that you’re here for?

Why did Homer make you live

To break your neck on Circe’s floor?

Who are you, sweet Elpēnor, and wherefore?

Circe has just given Odysseus assurance he needn’t worry about finding a guide to reach Hades. From where she is, apparently, it only takes a steady push from Boreas, the north wind, to get your vessel there. Hades must be somewhere to the south. But Circe does not predict or describe any sort of sea-crossing to which we have been used so far, such as crossing over the ‘deep’ (πόντος) or the ‘sea’ (θάλασσα); this is to be a crossing through a creature Homer calls Oceanus (Ὠκεανός):

Let’s not have your need for a guide on ship concern you,

But stand the mast, furl the white sails,

And sit back: the breath of Boreas, you see, will carry her.

But whenever it is, by ship, you cross through Oceanus,

There’s a small headland there, and a grove of Persephone—

Tall poplars and willows that lose their fruit— (Od.10.505-10)

If they’ve been identified correctly, these are riparian trees. We are of course in the habit of using ‘ocean’ to refer to the biggest bodies of salt water in our environment. But no part of this decadent usage can have anything to do with the referent Homer intends. Oceanus is a stream or river, not an ocean, evidently running fresh water. On the shield of Achilles, it is described as a river which is set into the shield’s outermost rim, as though it ran right ’round the cosmos inscribed within.

Needless to say, we do not presently observe any such seemingly liquid ring around the world. It will therefore take some effort of imagination to realise what Homer may be describing or referring to.

Homer describes the constellation of the Bear as at the pole of the world and the centre of the shield. It spins upon itself and never sets, as only a constellation at the pole would appear to do. But this is an impossible configuration according to the dogmas of modern astronomy, which see the earth’s present motions and attitudes as the only ones of which it was capable in human memory. In particular, a back-calculation of the present precession of the equinoxes will never result in the north pole, presently pointed at the star Polaris in the Little Bear, being located within the Great Bear. (For Homer it was simply ‘the Bear’; Ursa Minor only became a ‘thing’ in later times. The Phoenicians are supposed to have taught it to the Greeks, likely because it had replaced the Bear as the asterism to navigate by.) Current theories attribute the precession to multi-body gravitational dynamics, and so to be somewhat variable, but if we take ancient measurements seriously, as we ought, it has slowed down significantly. It is reasonable to wonder if a sudden displacement of the pole within the chronology of human history may not have left a remnant wobble in the earth’s equilibrium, from which it is gradually recovering.

Note above how the artist has replaced the Bear at the centre with the sun’s chariot surrounded by the zodiac. This is a symptom of the post-Copernican religious egoism, which Homer cannot be seen to violate. The obvious falseness of Homer’s description to their present sky at night was not lost on ancient authors. Aristotle picks out Homer’s use of οἴη ἄμμορος, ‘alone without a share’, used to describe the Bear’s unsinking property, as an example of ‘metaphor’. Elsewhere I have drawn out the implications of Aristotle’s comment:

… not just Aristotle but his whole audience feels that the only way currently to understand this line of Homer’s, readily evoked by its two opening words, is as an illustration of what the philosopher means by ‘metaphor’. Metaphor is the only option, by settled opinion, clearly because what the line literally means cannot be true! There is no dispute here, expressed or implied, about what that literal meaning really is; that would defeat the purpose of an illustrative example of metaphor. So here lies the key element in this tidbit from Aristotle: it leaves no doubt that the literal, non-metaphorical meaning of Homer’s phrase is that the Bear alone did not set …

Much later Strabo, in the Roman era, tried to defend Homer’s veracity by claiming that what Homer really meant by the Bear (ἄρκτος) must have been the ‘Arctic Circle’, or the ‘Bear’s Circle’ (ἀρκτικὸς κύκλος). One cannot navigate by the Arctic Circle, however, without going ’round in circles. One needs a fixed point. In our skies there is but one. Calypso asks Odysseus to keep the Bear to his left as he pushes off in his raft. If the Bear was a polar bear, her instruction has shown him how to head due east.

Always remember that Classicists, mythologists, astronomers, archaeologists, historians, biologists, and all manner of non-professional folk presume an awful lot about the layout of the earth and the sky in Homeric and other ancient times. (Within ‘Homeric’ we might also distinguish between the time of the telling and the time of the action.) Mainly the presumption is that nothing has changed in these things, except very slowly, which is an absurdly false one when it comes to the earth and the sky; it is a presumption in the modern uniformitarian ‘sciences’ as well, where only presently observable processes, mostly gradual, are allowed to be responsible for the manifold phenomena confronting us. These include miles-high mountains, miles-deep trenches, and vast canyons all on a supposedly gravitating sphere; the diversity of biological genera living and dead; ‘Ice Ages’; and the planet Venus. There are seashells and the bones of Amphitrite’s salt water creatures at the tops of the Himalayas. These presumptions should therefore be characterised as reflecting one or more of the developmental neuroses, or to sensory-cognitive after-effects comparable to those of brainwashing.

If we are to take Homer seriously—and what has there been written since, which should more demand our attention and discernment than the educator of Greece and Rome—then we must take his usage seriously. Homer’s comedy is serious business, unlike whatever can be meant by ‘epic’. Other musical geniuses, not only Beethoven and Bach but also Pindar and Sophocles, are allowed to remain eruptions into the timeline of human consciousness. But academic types don’t care for geniuses, especially ones they don’t themselves produce and nominate. The poet whom Pindar and Sophocles no doubt considered the greatest genius of them all is made out to be, at a deeply formative level, a product of an oral tradition. Such a tradition is entirely an invented postulate of the modern academy. It depends on the concept of a ‘metrical formula’, which in turn depends on ignoring all the marks of accentuation introduced into Homer’s text by the Alexandrian scholars of the Hellenistic era—a time when the Bear was not at the pole.

Metre is not prosody. Metre was originally performed by the feet, as the chosen name for the metrical unit, ‘foot’ (πούς), still attests. Prosody is accent (προσῳδία), ‘applied song’, performed by the voice. When these Greek accents, sharply rising and heavily falling in pitch, are applied to a metrical pattern, they produce rhythm as well as melody. The graphic accent marks demonstrate prima facie that the text of Homer, which the Alexandrians preserved and restored, was understood by them to be a musical score. If you ignore all the notes in a modern musical score, all you’ll find left are pitch-free metrical formulas. Beethoven and Homer instead generated scores that were demonstrably all three of the following: metrical (look to the time signature), rhythmic (look to the note durations and the bar lines), and melodic (look to your singing heart and the twist in your spine).

It should be clear that I find that neither Homer’s compositions nor the truth have been well served either by modern Homeric Studies or by modern science. What depresses is the extraordinary arrogance of academic closed shops, like the oral theory of Homer or gravitational cosmology. There is more than is dreamt of or realised in their philosophies, in the word-music of Homer. It may be that Homer was in some way connected, more or less intimately, to a tradition of versifying. He certainly paints more like a connoisseur than a neophyte. But how could we ever know who or what constituted such a tradition? The ‘oral tradition’ variegating now for generations like obsessive worldbuilding, is entirely based on the concept of the metrical formula: a notion that multitudes of phrases were transmitted in packets like so many clichés, to be available prepackaged to an improvising performer without, miraculously, becoming frozen or opaque in meaning over the passage of time.

Words carry meaning, and hence the transmission of phrases is meaningful tradition. But metre is not what the words contribute to Homeric poetry; the metre is already there! The Greek language cannot be the source of dactylic, isochronic metre. The dactylic hexameter is a preexistent form, an orchestic word-free tradition, which describes the steps in the ‘Dance of the Muses’ (χορεία Μουσῶν). What the words contribute to this is prosody: pitch changes and stresses—notes and bar lines—which turn metre into music. (A purely instrumental accompaniment could do the same.) Hence metrical packets or building blocks are inadequate to explain the Homeric or any other kind of musical composition. The repetition of phrases in music is wetness in water. What can be gleaned about traditions, intellectual or otherwise, which were inherited by Homer, must be inferred from his words’ melodies and meanings, not their repetitions or their metre. Could there be an inheritance of melodic phrases in Homer? Again, who can know? It should be noted that the reuse of such phrases needs no motivation but the musical. What I have demonstrated in my recent work is that there is significant melodic composition in Homer independent of the phrases that bear the accentual patterns; in particular, no less than Odysseus and Penelope seem each to have a signature melodic line, a characteristic accentual sequence unique to them, which is not generated by the same words in each case. That is a major discovery, if true, which it would seem to behoove the closed shop to consider and test, but not ignore.

I hope I shall also be convincing that the internal evidence suggests how Homer’s was a script for a solo actor’s performance, using minimal props to spark the vastness and the precision of the human imagination. But Homer grounds our imagination in verifiable facts. From his age to ours, the fixed stars have been signposts of reality; we all know Orion and the Bear and the Pleiades. When Calypso has Odysseus navigate by the Bear, he places us in the world of real boats and real sailors. Except that one can no longer navigate by the Bear, unless one use it to point to the true pole. If we take Homer seriously, there has been a pole-shifting catastrophe between the world he describes and ours. This needs saying even to catastrophists, many of whom accept the reality of our thunderbolt-chiseled and upturned earth, but deny that any of these kinds of things happened except in prehistory. The word-forms of Homer’s language, however, show it to be younger than Mycenaean Linear B and older than classical Greek. This is an absolute fact of historical linguistics: the development only goes one way. Hence its sequence represents a defining marker in relative chronology—even for those who are used to taking seriously the idea that they are living in the 2,025th ‘year’ of some rock steady process that has been continuously tallied somewhere.

Every fossil is evidence of the catastrophic energies which created it. It has proved impossible to create fossils out of living material. The present theories of gradual fossil deposition are puerile. Rather, every proto-human fossil skull fragment is itself the evidence of the catastrophe which destroyed its owner and all or nearly all its kind, and transformed their remains into rock. It is also evidence of the radioactive conditions which, to begin with, distort and otherwise invalidate methods of chemical dating for samples so produced, except perhaps in the terms of relative chronology (that is, ‘earlier’ or ‘later’ without the use of spurious numbers in years). But these conditions may have then fostered mutations and other kinds of genetic response, which ultimately resulted, perhaps quite quickly, in the next related human species or sub-species. These, in turn, only leave evidence of themselves once they also are destroyed and fossilised. Every fossil therefore points two ways: toward present decimation and destruction under catastrophic conditions, and the subsequent environmental stimulus to new, unforeseen speciation. The fossil is a punctuation; the sentences of life, past and future, occur to either side.

So with open minds we ask: in the figure Homer calls Oceanus, might we at one time have been witness to an undulating ring around our sky, like the invisible Van Allen belts around the earth, or the rings presently belted electromagnetically upon Saturn and other nearby bodies? The late Jno Cook argued for the sometime existence of such Earth rings:

I had no trouble identifying the Sumerian Absu, the Egyptian Duat, and the Maya House of Nine Bushes as a set of rings seen in the southern night sky. The rings which were called “the Absu” in Sumer, are called the Abyss or “the Deep” in the Bible. The rings were almost universally, throughout the world, understood to be an ocean standing up from the south horizon …

It is clear that both Sumer and Egypt described the southern skies (the Absu or the Duat) as a sea, although some Egyptian descriptions have more of the feel of a swamp. In Egypt, the Gods and the dead pharaohs are described as moving by boat across this sea. In Sumer, the God of water was assigned to the sector of the sky below the equatorial.

See here for Cook’s assessment of the historical and comparative evidence. It may be notable, after all, that Circe has Odysseus sail due south. Equatorial rings, seen from the north, would have looked like elongated semicircles—that is to say, nested arches.

If these were separate bands of ionised plasma, rotating at different speeds, we should expect what is called the diocotron instability, which looks wondrously fluid:

This instability results in patterned effects such as we see in planet Jupiter’s atmospheric bands.

The repeating shapes stylised in this predynastic vase seem to be inspired by witnessing diocotron instabilities:

This phenomenon, wherever it was witnessed, seems to have been the inspiration for the ‘Maeander’ (like the river) or ‘Greek key’ in geometric art, which has persisted ever since.

Border patterns on much later Greek designs may in fact have their origin in traditional, stylised depictions of the stream of Oceanus.

The heavens are described as Odysseus navigates from Calypso’s isle (5.272-5), in lines which correspond to the depiction at the centre of Achilles’ shield:

As he looked toward the Pleiades and late-setting Boötes

And the Bear, which they also call by the name ‘Wagon’,

Who spins herself there, where she is, and keeps looking out for Orion—

She alone exists without a share in the baths of Oceanus …

It is easy enough to read this to say that the Bear alone does not sink below the horizon, seeing as she was at that time, to the consternation of modern neo-astronomers, the constellation at the pole. On an island, the sea generally defines the horizon; hence the waters of the sea must be the ‘baths of Oceanus’. But salt water does not seem to qualify as a bath in the lexicon of the Odyssey; Odysseus washes and scrubs off himself precisely the alien, disfiguring brine in the fresh waters of a Scherian river, while Nausicaa and her handmaids look the other way. It is not at all clear, therefore, what sort of apparition could be meant by the ‘baths of Oceanus’ in Homer’s Greek. The comparative evidence indicates that ancient peoples north of the equator saw an abyss or ocean in the southern sky which undulated in a way that suggested liquid, and perhaps was even thought to have been a source of fresh water upon the earth during moments of electrical excitement. Hence while the ‘baths’ may have become a way of referring to the horizon, Oceanus himself may also originally have been a sky object, like the asterisms mentioned, which, unlike the northern Bear, dipped into those baths with the stars. What is clear is that he was a cosmic river, thought to be the ultimate or original source of earthly bodies and streams of fresh water.

If an undulating ring around the earth is too much to take on board, think of Oceanus as the Milky Way, which otherwise would not get a mention in Homer. To cross through a river generally means to get to its other side. Adjacent to Oceanus in Circe’s description—one assumes, past its further bank—are mentioned fully four other rivers which are not the Milky Way: into Acheron (‘swamp’?) conflow both the Pyriphlegethon (‘flaming fire’) and the Cocytus (‘mourning’), itself a branch of the Styx (‘shudder’). The Styx, therefore, perhaps is, or was once, also a visible thing. Are these, too, phenomena in the sky? Vibration of varying intensity connects the species of fiery plasma with those of grief. When Calypso swears good faith to Odysseus by the Styx, she describes it as ‘down flowing’ (κατειβόμενον, 5.185). This may mean it flowed down to the earth from above, rather than from the surface into the ground.

On occasion ordinary rivers have been nominated to represent these four, but how could these be ordinary rivers? Who ever heard of a river called ‘flaming fire’? Water tends to put out fire (“I live by the river!”—Joe Strummer). Flows of lava are generally singular, spreading events, not sources of continuing, permanent rivers. The four are generally understood, however, to be rivers of the ‘underworld’, unseen or at least no longer visible. This is also likely the implication of their being, for Homer, part of the invisible realm (‘Hades’, Ἀϝίδης). Hence they may be phenomena now gone but not forgotten, thought not to have been destroyed but still to exist beyond Oceanus, which would have then been the nearer border of the visible world. A separate river Oceanus encircling the world does not impress the senses today, however. It is judged a figment of primitive cosmological fancy, or romantic poetising, although there is still a widespread belief in an invisible hell.

Consider that the constituents of our so-called ‘ancient world’ understood themselves to have a complex and much more ancient past than ourselves. Hesiod tells of five different ages of man. Polynesia remembers nine ages, each with a different sky. Elsewhere we hear of successive ‘suns’, a number of widely dispersed texts around the world affirming that the present one is a seventh such sun. The past, and the dead, are no longer visible except as decaying and eroding remnants. Could it be that they are all still there, existent; gone but not forgotten in the invisibility beyond Oceanus? It is not hard to see, at any rate, how the idea of such a fluid barrier to an invisible reality would be attractive to a performing artist; it is like a fourth wall with a silent, peering audience beyond.

The kingdom of heaven—that is to say, the regime which at Jesus’ time, like ours, seemed to govern the erstwhile straying and discharging god-objects (or ‘planets’) which operate in the heavens—is a thing we nowadays prefer to call the ‘solar system’. We style it more a clockwork than a kingdom, in that we ascribe the present good order to mechanistic ‘laws of nature’ rather than the benevolent governing will of the sky’s Father. We imagine that the objects involved, including our own earth, are attracted to each other, but o’er-mightily to the sun; the only reason we do not act on this attraction is that we are diverted orthogonally by a native inertia, resulting in elliptical orbits around the principal beloved. It is a stupefyingly agreeable fantasy, which has to ignore the manifest nature of the sun and planets as electromagnets, where repulsions as well as attractions are involved, in motion within their own and exogenous electric and magnetic fields.

It makes no sense, however, to allow such contemporary religious blinders to alter, censor, or otherwise pervert the recordings of ancient composers and visual artists. Nor indeed the record of mountains, rocks, and sediments. In testimonies Cook gathers from around the world, the Absu and its analogues present themselves as arched rings in the southern sky, with a different number attested depending, apparently, on latitude: in the Yucatan and in India, there were nine undulating half-rings or arches, for example, but in Egypt seven. If Homer’s words are describing the same thing, he evidently knew of only five, which would then be a clue to his latitude. There are the four named infernal rivers, at times conjoined except for the Styx, while outermost, at the periphery of either the cosmos or the underworld, runs Oceanus. We might say that this configuration was associated with fresh water, and was perhaps considered a source of fresh water rivers, although not a source of briny oceans.

Whatever it is that Homer means us to be looking at or imagining during Circe’s prescription for the journey to Hades, in heaven, on earth, or beneath it, past or present, it is clear that any audience would find it difficult to get its bearings. The reorientation which seemed to have been established after a solar year on Aeaea, Circe’s Isle, has once again been upended. To cross through the stream of Oceanus, perhaps beyond the Milky Way,would seem to be a journey beyond the limit of the visible world, given the iconography of Achilles’ shield; yet on the other side, there seems to be a normal landfall:

There’s a small headland there, and a grove of Persephone—

Tall poplars and willows that lose their fruit— (10.509-10)

This familiar sort of prospect for landing, after what we should have called space travel, does not so much reassure as further disorient. It is the disconcerting sort of realism, as confronts one in dreams or nightmares or abstract art. Real frogs in imaginary gardens. Or icons appearing on your toast. How does Homer locate us, and restore our bearings?

Through Circe’s speech it seems the performer is given a series of directional cues, which I presume he acts out while his voice continues to deliver Circe. Of course, it could instead be that she uses her body to give the instructions, like a coach teaching a new technique. When she says, ‘hug close to the rock, like I’m ordering you (ὥς σε κελεύω),’ I imagine her embodying the move: ὡς carries it with it the gesture ‘this way’, ‘thus’. One remembers the ‘walk this way’ vaudeville joke from the film Young Frankenstein. (The ‘rock’ is my interpretation; the original simply says ‘draw yourself close’ after describing an area where there’s a rock or cliff and the coming together of two thundering rivers. Circe does not say which two rivers these are, of the four plus Oceanus that have been mentioned.)

The first directional cue is the journey due south, which may at one time have meant a journey towards a now unimaginable and looming cosmic apparition. When she comes to the spot by the rock, Circe mimes the ritual she deems necessary; the line,

Dig a trench, an arm’s length over here and over here, (517)

seems designed for wide-armed gestures ‘over here and over here.’ The miming out of these sacramental actions creates an intelligible space around the performer, which allows for a settling physical orientation whilst imaginatively surrounded by the frightful wonders of an heavenly underworld. A recipe guides you through chaos in the kitchen: one must offer mixed honey (μελίκρητος—milk and honey?), then wine, then water. Odysseus is to appease the ghosts with the promise of a sacrifice once he gets home, of his finest barren heifer. He’s going to ‘fill the barbecue with quality ingredients.’ For Teiresias he’ll set aside his best black ram. The sex and fertility of the beasts is as pointed as it goes unexplained. In addition, right away—not when he’s got home—Odysseus must sacrifice a ram and a black ewe.

The mechanics of this—where the sheep he needs could come from, for example—and all sorts of other logistical problems are allayed, it seems to me, by the misdirection of giving directions: turn the sacrificed animals toward Erebus, but ‘turn yourself away,/Heading for the on-flowing river’s streams …’ (528-9). Erebus seems later to mean ‘darkness’ generally, with also perhaps a connotation of dustiness. But here in the Odyssey the context seems to require a definite location, and nothing precludes a location in the sky. Jno Cook suggests that the shadow of the earth upon its riverine rings would have made the impression of a shifting starless portal through the arches. When the ghosts do in fact appear, they are said to gather out of Erebus (11.37), as through a gaping door.

We therefore focus on the pointing of the animals and the turning in another direction, inhabiting the celebrant’s movements and hands rather than trying to make sense of the scene around him. The ghosts will gather at the river it seems, where he is facing, while the sacrifice is behind him. We are to imagine his men flaying and broiling the animals behind the quasi-priest, while he (once again) must dramatically ‘draw the sharp sword from by your thigh’—and sit. Sitting down with his sword out? The Odyssean performer is a ham. The battle sword’s job, this time, is somehow to keep the dismal remnant souls from getting at the spilt blood to his rear. So we face the ghosts, seated, with butchering and cooking going on behind our backs.

… do not allow the corpses’ powerless heads

To go near the blood, before you consult with Teiresias. (536-7)

To be continued …

[You will find the Greek performance of this passage at the end of the next post, pt. 2.]

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On Odyssey 10.408-502

An especially happy discovery of these attempts at video presentations of my performance notes for Homer’s Odyssey, is that one can, with a little post-production, present a Greek text simultaneous with its performance. (The other is the experience of trawling the internet for the stimulus of images to lose oneself in.) Once one gets the hang of the Greek alphabet, I hope the experience can become like following along with a score while listening to a piece of music. (Some of you have already been doing this, following along, with my six-volume Greek/English edition of the Odyssey, Homer Odysseia.) I find that the awakening of the analytic mind, when it is presented with a composer’s (or compositor’s) stream of symbols and notation, does no harm to the hearing, but rather can enhance one’s awareness of form and metabolism in the unfolding composition. Others may disagree, and close all books and other avenues of distraction while listening. In either case, taking on board the notion that ancient texts should all be approached for what they were, musical scores for the production of meaningful sound by the voice, does far more than enhance a private experience. From my recent book:

We did not use to know how the prosody of Greek words interacted with Greek metres. With the arrival of the new theory of the Greek accent, now we do. The ignoring of the seemingly irrelevant accent marks in texts seems to have led not to the realisation that all we could know, sadly, about the sound and performance of Greek poetry was its metre, but to the delusion that metre was all there was to know.

Not knowing how the once painstakingly recorded accents worked, led to a non-benign, positive kind of ignorance in classical scholarship, which has fostered and continues to peddle notions of metrical composition and metrical poetry. These are patent absurdities now force-fed on students. Ancient metres can instead be compared to the time signatures we find in the modern musical notation; they sit to the left, while we all know that the music is to be found in what follows to the right of the time signature, in the pitch patterns and stresses, the notes of melody and the punctuating bar lines. The independence from the metre of the accentual patterns in Greek allowed for the phenomenon of syncopation, the source of the sense of rhythm in all things musical. Syncopation with its rhythmic counterpoint in turn brings new attention to moments of cadence, where accents and metrical downbeats conjoin through the words expressing them.

So do enjoy Homer’s syncopations. They are lost on classical scholars, who scan ancient verses like metrical robots, and spin spiders’ webs of metrical traditions with no evidence from history or payoff in the form of compositional insight. The dactylic hexameter is not a metrical prison, but a template or matrix of musical freedom, as real words complete with their pitches and stresses—not metrical phrases—bring life to the metrical matrix in the telling of a story.

The quickest way to Hades is to miss out on Homer’s cheated expectations, when he draws his sword from by his thick thigh. That comic drop, and its opening eyes, are what he’s after.

Here is my original post, with complete recordings of the passage in Greek and English:

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Odyssey 10.408-502

Odysseus learns from Circe that he must travel to the Underworld, the house of Hades Invisible—his name seems to mean ‘invisible’ or ‘unseen’, ἀϝίδης—and the home of his consort the awesome Persephone. Not for the first, but only the latest time in the Odyssey, the woman and wife appears to be in charge of house and realm. For a number of reasons, a first-time listener might be taken by surprise, even shock, at this disclosure on the bed of Circe. We have so far been encouraged to think that the arrival on this bed has been a significant one, a destined one, even a kind of climactic achievement; perhaps one that might put any sort of further homesickness into perspective. But no, the need for home reasserts itself into the blissful consciousness; and without warning, this triggers the revelation from Circe that she must pass along the soul of her mortal pilgrim wanderer to the ministry of a goddess even more dread. Not only is sexual union with the wise goddess no sort of transcendence over one’s origins, it seems, nor even a substitute for that home; no, he must head back; but it turns out Odysseus cannot even think of reaching his humble Ithaca (and the woman living upstairs there) unless he first travel to the undiscovered country where the dead end up—like the farm upstate where all the good dogs go at the end of their service—to consult Teiresias’ ghost. At no point heretofore was it in any way evident that such a journey would be necessary, just to get back home. One should have thought that favourable winds would have done the trick. Hence we might be justified in thinking that the revelation of this necessity is the practical takeaway from the wisdom gained from sleeping with the goddess. There is no journey home except via death and the dead. Apparently he must hear an oracle from among them, whose content nobody yet knows, and no spoilers.

None of this is on our horizon when we begin the passage: Odysseus is on his way to the ship to persuade the remaining crew, at Circe’s encouragement, to store their stuff and come join the party at her house. These are men who have never ventured from the ship and shore since they arrived on the isle, together with Eurylochus, the man who had led the first expedition but never entered Circe’s door; he had hid himself outside instead, and saw nothing of men turning into pigs, only men disappearing within, to suffer who knows what. So we are dealing with two levels of possible initiate here, the most of them simply neophyte, while one of them is positively ignorant and prejudiced, and positively fearful. Odysseus finds them crying away, ‘pouring down a lusty tear.’ When he approaches them, we are treated to one of the great similes, applied to all the men without distinction:

‘As when the farmyard calves—around the herd cows,

Come back to the dung pile when they’ve had their fill of pasture—

All jump around together as they face them: and no longer do the pens

Contain them, no, but with constant mooing and lowing they run around them,

Their mothers: so did those men, when they saw me with their own eyes,

Pile on me in tears: and it felt to them, in their life’s breath,

That they were there! As if they’d reached their father’s earth and the city that belonged to them

Of rugged Ithaca, where they were fed and they were born.’ (Od.10.410-17)

‘ … no longer do the pens/Contain them …’ Amidst all the richness, this is the bit that sticks out, at least for me. The pens into which we place and segregate domestic animals seem to have emerged as a metaphor for any number of kinds of social constraint. Everything from being ‘pigeonholed’ in school, socially or academically, to the fateful constructs of class and caste, seem to be kinds of constructed pens. Even in democracies so radical that they recognise ‘personhood’ in a foetus, the subsequent children are nevertheless denuded of rights and separated into classes by age and aptitude. Many of us continue to mark our anniversaries by reunion, in memory of our time together in those pens. Every corporation, institution, or work force seems to segregate into the junior, senior, and executive, the officer and enlisted, and so on. The Cyclops pens off his lambs and kids by their state of development. Once Circe has fed Odysseus her spiked pottage, she says,

“Off with you now, to the sty, lay out with the rest of your comrades.” (10.320)

It is as though the penning them in the sty is as much a part of Circe’s control over humans as her turning them into pigs. They are put in their proper place. Later we shall meet a swineherd who pens himself in on purpose, builds his own pen for a steading. Perhaps we are also to think of the wall built around a city, as is described on our first sight of Phaeacia, as a kind of enclosure. So when in the simile the young calves burst out their pens, there is a rather wonderful sensation of freedom. It is at the same time a restoration of their natural rights, to be reunited with their mother cows, who have been separated from them to go to pasture for the sake of the production of milk and the fattening of meat. The repatriation restores the benefits of nature and nurture to its exploited and deprived children.

‘Repatriation’ is an oddly fitting word for what is described. In Odysseus, his men at the shore see not only their mother, as the calves their dams, but their native land, its polity and its rocky pasture. For the moment, Odysseus is their home, and return home means restoration to Odysseus. They evidently believe that their comrades have been destroyed; after they repeat in their own voice the sentiment of the simile, that their joy at Odysseus’ return is such as if they had arrived in Ithaca, they ask him to recount the tale of their compatriots’ death. It must be noted, for all that it slips one’s attention, that Odysseus himself is the source both of the simile describing their welcome and the loving words of his men. How strange when one turns the narrative upon the teller: Odysseus is building himself up like a demagogue. I am your mother. I am your home. I am your nation.

The self-idolising sits alongside the humbleness of the image he paints. For the nursing cows, home is a dung heap. My teacher and his partner used to keep a dairy herd; she would always complain about the Ladies’ habit of waiting till they got home to the milking stalls to have a shit. It meant a lot of mucking out for her, and it seemed to her that the cows timed their releases spitefully. They’d had all those hours in the fields to do their manuring! Every human habitation is never far from its dung pile, even if the stuff is nowadays piped ‘away’. To long for home is to long for the aroma of your native dung pile. How is this a thing to wish for, over abundance and a goddess’ attentions on a wooded isle?

Rise and follow me, says Odysseus, although not so they would become fishers of men. (These would instead be the Laestrygonian giants, 10.124.) It always pays to note the changes when Homer’s speakers appear to repeat lines they were instructed to say. At first Odysseus repeats Circe’s imperatives about storing their tackle in caves by the shore. She herself just adds (to paraphrase) ‘then come back—and bring your friends.’ But Odysseus here himself adopts the imperative voice, as he stands forth as demagogue and saviour, who claims he can restore the lost boys to his men’s sight:

“But yourselves—look sharp, all of you together, and follow me!

So you may see your comrades in the sacred house of Circe,

Drinking and eating: for they’ve got an unending supply.” (425-7)

Odysseus says that he (and he alone?) can guide his initiates to the eternal feast under the goddess’ roof. He will drink the wine new with them in her house.

But there is a gadfly buzzing to annoy the reverie. His name is Eurylochus. The men in Odysseus’ entourage only seem to earn a name when they serve the narrator’s ends. What a strange creature this is, then, from the perspective of the self-heroising narrator. Could Freud or Jung make sense of his role? Or is he a comic Satan? Odysseus drops an intriguing detail when he is deciding whether to execute the man summarily, for his apparent democratic resistance and speaking truth to power; here is another instance of ‘drawing the sword from by his thigh’ to do an unmanly thing:

Whether I draw my tapered sword from by my thick thigh,

Cut off his head with that, introduce it to the ground—

Even if he was my in-law, pretty close kin— (439-41)

The little aside—and revelation—that Odysseus’ enemy is actually his in-law, plays like a line from situation comedy, in the midst of a rumination on summary beheading. Eurylochus is Odysseus’ kin by marriage (πηός). Could that make him, in the stagecraft of Odysseus’ psyche, an avatar of Penelope herself? Or is he just the first ever comic deployment of the useless in-law? The former may be a possibility to consider when we assess the contra speech in re the proposition that they all trek to Circe’s house, the speech that immediately turns the people’s would-be saviour murderous.

Here is what Eurylochus had said:

“Ah my losers, where are we going? Why do you desire these evils?

To make the descent to Circe’s room—she who’ll turn the lot of us

Into pigs or wolves, or else she’ll make us lions,

Who’d guard her big house for her, even by force?

Just like the Cyclops did—when they arrived in his inner court,

Our comrades, and with them followed that Mr. Bold, Odysseus;

For that’s on him! Due his outrageous recklessness, they also were lost.” (431-7)

Note ‘make the descent’ (καταβήμεναι): presently they are speaking on the seashore, so descent makes no literal sense. It may be that Circe’s abode in the woods is circled by higher ground, as Odysseus first espies its smoke in the interior after climbing to a lookout point. The concept of κατάβασις (‘walk down’) resonates, however, with the language of mystic initiation; in the rites associated with Orpheus, the candidate enacts a descent into the Underworld. The experience there ends with an ἀνάβασις (‘walk up’), a return to the light. Eurylochus’ choice of verb prefigures the men’s own eventual descent into Hades, about which we of course know nothing yet. But it also points him up as only a partial initiate, a man who has developed conspiracy theories while surveilling Circe’s house from behind the bushes. Remember he does not know what happened to the men under his charge, only that they vanished; he now speculates about them being turned into pigs, wolves, or lions, but it was only wolves and lions, acting like solicitous dogs, whom he saw in front of the building. He did not see any pigs. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.

He follows that, however, with an observation which cuts Odysseus to the bone: his summary of the disastrous expedition into the house of the anthropophagist Polyphemus. (Eurylochus’ use of ‘inner court’ suggests that he did not know that the Cyclops lived in a cave, and once again, he may not have been been there in the party that had had the adventure, but had stayed shipside.) His taunt of “that rash one” (“Mr. Bold”, ὁ θρασύς) seems to me, for some reason, a dig worthy of Penelope herself. His final line is simply incontrovertible, and Odysseus says as much by putting it in Eurylochus’ mouth without gainsaying it, except by contemplating beheading the speaker: if you men follow Odysseus now, watch out—it was due to his abject folly that those men as well, “our comrades,” were killed. Note especially Eurylochus’ somewhat contradictory assertion that ‘Mr. Bold’ merely followed along (σὺν … εἵπετ’) with our comrades (ἡμέτεροι ἕταροι). The confident salvific leader who has just emerged, in his pomp, to say ‘follow me,’ is immediately riposted by his opponent as a tagger-along. To imply that Odysseus’ proudest victory was one where he merely followed along, and to point out the truth that to those left behind, the expedition had not been one where Odysseus ingeniously saved men, but lost them, is undoubtedly to ‘trigger’ Odysseus, as the saying now is. Eurylochus is debating to win the election, not to inform the argument.

It is the neophytes in audience who restrain Odysseus from the cold-blooded murder of Penelope’s cousin. They also play a crucial role in the ever-complexifying portrayal of the narrator’s psyche. Every time he gives voice to these personas, as here when the uninitiated members of Odysseus’ crew are given a speech—even though they remain anonymous—the performer embodies them as if they have bubbled up from within him. The layered unity of this performer, who first of all plays Homer, who presently is playing Odysseus, who in turn plays himself alongside his mostly unnamed crew in telling the story, encourages us, or at least allows us, in the singleness of his own body before us to see these embodiments as aspects of the hero’s own psyche. On the other hand, often when he comes to a speech the performer before us is more like a medium in a seance, whose body is inhabited by different alien psyches, each with their own complexities. This analogy becomes especially fitting when we are amongst the souls in Hades. But this is also the normal modus of one-man theatre. The performer’s art is such that we see the character, not the actor. When he seeks companionship in his favourite ram, or prays desperately to his father Poseidon, Odysseus the narrator fully inhabits the Cyclops, sees through what is left of his eyes. Homer becomes also Zeus and Penelope, Helen and Telemachus. It just seems that in the case of Odysseus and his crew, we are on different ground; for once we see the actor more than the characters, in the sense that this actor is Odysseus himself, the storyteller as well as the hero. This opens up their moments to the various kinds of psychological or allegorical interpretation, unlike those more usual occasions when the intent of the performer is to establish the independent reality before us of the inhabited figure. The most intriguing case of all, to my mind, is how we register the presence of Athena. She inhabits the whole poem, it seems, as well as poet, hero, and audience, in the most uncanny way.

We’ve already had reason to view Odysseus and his mostly anonymous crew as a kind of single partitioned psyche; it is, for example, exactly when the gatekeeper (Odysseus) falls asleep within sight of Ithaca, that the repressed men, with their Medusa’s head of appetites, voice their misgivings about their captain’s apparent self-aggrandisement and secret wealth, and open up the bag of Aeolian winds (10.38-45). (At that point the ringleader remained anonymous, but he sounds like Eurylochus.) That lack of self-control, in the collective sense, ended in disaster. Here the crew intercedes with ‘softening lines’ and prevents a beheading by proposing Eurylochus remain behind:

“Zeus-Born, let’s allow that this man, if you so order it,

Remain here by the ship—and protect her as well.

But for us, do you be the guide to the holy house of Circe.” (443-5)

The crew seem persuaded by their restored dear leader, that he will be the guide to a promised land. The lower psyche has gone MAGA. In general, the initiated lead the candidates through the hurdles, like a sponsor at AA or godparents at a baptism. Odysseus is their man. They have been captivated by the thought of eating and drinking at a perpetual feast in god’s house. Odysseus evidently takes satisfaction in the fact that Eurylochus did not stay alone by the ship, but himself slunk along behind: ‘He followed instead.’ The loser.

Circe’s speech to Odysseus and his men, once she’s bathed them and anointed them and they’ve reunited tearfully with their teammates who had been pigs, is so weirdly timeless that I must recount it in full:

“Zeus-Born son of Laertes, Contriver Odysseus,

No longer now trigger the full-throated grieving: for I know it even on my own

How often, to begin with, you all suffered pains in the deep, filled with fishes,

And then how often weird, cruel men have done you violence on dry land.

No, come on: get to eating food and drinking wine,

Until you grab that life’s breath back into your chests,

What you were when first you left behind the mother earth of your fathers

In rugged Ithaca. But now you’re legless and spiritless,

Always your dangerous wandering occupies your mind, and never in you

The life’s breath enjoys a state of peace; since oh, so many things you suffered.” (456-65)

She sounds for all the world like the hostess at a self-help retreat. You’re here to be restored to your best self! Turn your minds away from the stresses of work and cut-throat competition … ‘grab that life’s breath back into your chests!’ Odysseus and his men are not self-pitying businessmen, however, but soldiers and sailors who have suffered deeply at war and on the sea. I admit I find the speech deeply moving, to hear some real sympathy from God, with a genuine feeling for what might really do these harried and weary men some good. Most strangely affecting is the reechoing phrase, ‘the mother earth of your fathers’ (πατρὶς γαῖα), coming from the mouth of the goddess. What could it mean to such an one as her? She wishes to restore all of them to their youth, to what they were in figure and aspiration when first they set off into the fateful vortex of Troy. The daughter of the sun would give us back our days. It seems almost too good to be true …

‘So she spoke, and again our manly life’s breath began to be persuaded.

So in that place, through all the days up to a year fulfilling,

We sit dining on flesh beyond reckoning, along with pleasing alcohol. (466-8)

Something smells off, does it not? Have they not become like the Lotus-Eaters, and forgotten who they are and why they care? And this is so soon after the arrival at the goddess’ house has been played up to be an ascendence of the soul. Turns out it is just another test of resolve on their journey.

At least some of these—not Odysseus—are men who’ve been pigs. But that experience does not seem to have dulled their taste for pork. It would seem a stretch to suggest that Homer was anything but an omnivore like the most of us. But it is his own emphases which raise the matter. Circe’s first meal for Odysseus’ men, which included her drugs, had been vegetarian. Barley, as I understand it, is an annual plant in any case, so there is no question of sacrifice; but also the other ingredients, honey, milk, and wine, do not involve the sacrifice of an animate being. The goddess considered that mixture to constitute human sustenance, unlike the acorns she threw her guests when they had become pigs. (In Calypso’s house, gods were served ambrosia and nectar, while the human got something else: ‘… all such food,/For eating and drinking, as mortal men consume.’ [5.196-7] But we are not informed what Circe ate, if anything.) It does seem important that Odysseus and his men are said to eat ‘flesh beyond reckoning’ (κρέα ἄσπετα). The use of κρέα is pointed. I think we have here the final punch line, to the joke that began when Odysseus wouldn’t touch his food before he saw his men turned back into men. Perhaps that was in case they were to be the entrée. Nothing about their transformation has transformed them: men are men, and men are pigs, who will never stop eating barbecued pig.

Recall that the arrival on Aeaea (Circe’s Isle) is marked by a moment of profound disorientation (10.190-2). Odysseus and his men did not know where the sun went down and where it rose again. Now, in one line, a whole year passes. The word for ‘year’, ἐνιαυτός, seems to refer to the sun returning to the same place on the horizon. Circe is Helius’ daughter; perhaps hers is a fitting place for a year’s solar observation, and correlation with the seasons, to reestablish cardinal points from her sea-encircled isle.

But when the same time of year turned up, and the seasons went round

While the moons waned, and the long days came to an end … (469-70)

It seems it is only the irresistible smell of home, the local dung heap, which will awaken the men from their enchanted festal reverie, their post-turkey slumber. And it is the crew, at the bottom of the psychological hierarchy, who make the move against his highness Odysseus:

“Divinity, enough already: remember now the land of your fathers,

If it is god’s decree that you be rescued and return there

To the home with the high roof, and your own, the mother earth of your fathers.” (472-4)

They as much as call him a god. Perhaps there’s a hint that he needs pulling down from his high bed. But Odysseus does not resist; he says his ‘manly life’s breath’ was persuaded. He waits for one more day of eating ‘limitless flesh’ and ‘pleasing mead,’ but at night he once more climbs onto Circe’s gorgeous bed and makes his plea for passage home. Here he suggests that it was not only just now, after a year, that the men started pestering him, but that they had actually been wasting away his heart for a while, whenever Circe had “gone off somewhere.” That’s a charming touch, whether or not it’s true.

So Circe drops her bomb. They need no longer stay at her house any more, although it is implied that they could if they were willing. But.

“… there is first a need that you complete another journey, and arrive

In the house of Hades Invisible and awesome Persephone,

To consult the oracular soul of the Theban, Teiresias,

The blind prophet, whose mind’s vessels are yet grounded.

Even though he’s dead, she gave him a mind—Persephone—

To be honest, he alone; the rest flit around as shadows.” (490-5)

The word ‘grounded’, describing Teiresias’ phrenes, is the same word (ἔμπεδοι) as describes the mind of Odysseus’ men when their bodies had transformed into pigs’. (I think I shall change it from ‘steady’ to ‘grounded’ there as well [10.240], for being more literal.) We shall discuss Circe’s instructions, and of course the journey to the Invisible World, in due course. Odysseus calls for a guide; he has gone in this passage from pronouncing himself a guide and leader on the journey to the house of God, to once again what Eurylochus called him in mockery: a follower.

But for now, as the text for an initiate’s advice to which to hang on, and consult through what follows, consider Odysseus’ reaction to Circe’s news:

‘So she spoke, but my own heart was shattered:

I started crying, sitting there in the bed, nor did my heart now

Want to live any longer, and to see the light of Helius.’ (496-8)

Get it? Once again, that right there is a joke. Not for the first time, by my reckoning, Odysseus is suicidal. Now what better way to get to Hades, quicker—perhaps immediately—and without the need for a guide or a crew or a ship, on your schedule to boot, than suicide? Or better yet, get Circe to fix you up a special savoury potion, so ‘to cease upon the midnight with no pain.’ To my mind, the sort of person who makes such a joke, about the easy way to get to Hades, is not someone who takes seriously fairy stories about empirical journeys to the Underworld. I’m telling anyone who will listen, that Homer is post-Orphic, post-Christian, post-religious, and post-postmodern. So here is my now well-worn maxim for those following with me on this journey through the Odyssey:

The Odyssey is comedy.

In Greek:

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On Odyssey 10.336-407

Here is the latest of my audio-video readings of the notes I write for each of the performances of Homer in English. This one is mostly the same as the post, but in general I cannot help but revise and embellish, so I encourage you to watch and comment, even if you have already read my original article. My teacher Elliott Zuckerman used to tell his students that the point of going to a lecture is to learn how to be bored. Go on, it’s good for you!

Do please support my work if you can. Paid subscriptions make a huge difference.

Singing Homer is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

A brief summary of my new theory of the Ancient Greek accent, including the law of tonal prominence which applies also to Latin, can be found here.

My chapter ‘Words, Accents, and White Spaces’ can be found in my recent book, Singing Homer’s Spell: The End of Oralist Poetics, available here.

The following is my original post, which contains, as ever, a recorded performance of the whole passage in both my prosaic English and Homer’s sublime Greek verses:

Here are some previous posts I mention in my talk:

The embellished video podcast for that one is here:

And there’s also this one:

with the following video:

Finally there’s this one about the stag; must get around to doing a video for it soon:

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Odyssey 10.336-407

How long do Odysseus and Circe make love to each other? What a rude and intrusive question, but science can have little regard for privacy if it is to be comprehensive. Unfortunately no one was around with a stopwatch, or any sort of atomic timepiece from a lab. But still available to us is the original, pre-Hellenic and pre-Western measure: the hexameter. Each of these was itself already measured by a dance step, the dactyl, into sets of sixes. But the hexameter was, I believe, the primary unity and unit of measurement, the reference for the word ἔπος, whence we derive ‘epic’.

ἔπος is often translated ‘word’, but Homer and the Greeks in fact had no word for ‘word’—or rather, they used a number of different words which covered ground which may have included the sort of dictionary entry we call a word. But all of them covered much more ground than the things we enter into dictionaries, like so many names atop tombstones inscribed in an alphabetised cemetery. λόγος is famously the word translated ‘word’ at the beginning of the Gospel of John, describing what was there at the beginning. But a λόγος is a speech or an account or a count. The material of each of these involves words, plural. Likewise, a μῦθος is a disclosure, in context sometimes a command. Usually more than one dictionary word is required for such a revelation from a speaker. Later these two words can mean ‘ratio’ and ‘myth’, respectively. In a similar way, ἔπος, also ‘speech’ or ‘a speech’, refers primarily—in Homer, I would suggest—to an hexameter line. It is hard to say how Homer himself might have further divided the interior of that line, apart from its musical division into bum-ba-da dactyls. Such a line, the ἔπος, it must be emphasised, is a musical, not a grammatical form.

The articulation of words is not the obvious thing it seems to those of us used to experiencing them as visible symbols separated on a page. Such an experience is a peculiar human pathology limited to the ‘literate’. (For those of you keeping score, the fetishising of equations is a pathology of the literate. Those who ‘plug in’ numbers need to be plugged in themselves, for a reboot. Teasing or fudging the data, is the one universal experience of the lab.) Researchers into living oral poetry, hoping to illuminate the composition of Homeric music, observe the following about the non-literate experience of ‘words’:

In their field work among the guslari, the traditional oral singers of Yugoslavia, for example, Milman Parry and Albert Lord discovered that these singers thought in terms of sound groups, not individual words; the two do not necessarily coincide. Only after a Serbian or Croatian guslar had seen a printed copy of his dictated song on a sheet of paper, with the individual words set apart by the white space between them, could he understand what Parry and Lord meant by the term “word.”

Prior to the work of the Alexandrian scholars, who edited the transmitted texts of Homer in the Hellenistic era, the late centuries BCE, a line of Homer’s might have looked something like this in writing:

ΚΑΙΤΟΤΕΓΩΚΙΡΚΗΣΕΠΕΒΗΝΠΕΡΙΚΑΛΛΕΟΣΕΥΝΗΣ

The different individual symbols represent a continuous stream of sound, some of them standing for the vowels and some for the consonant stops in between them in that stream. There is no indication of melody, or stress patterns. Earlier writing, including earlier Greek writing called Linear B, used such symbols to represent whole syllables only by their leading consonants; often there was no indication of the vowel sounds at all. Such writing, using a syllabary, is therefore a shorthand, not a full recording, made for users of a language who already knew what vowels to fill in, and how to intone them. The Greek invention of the alphabet, where the symbols of a Phoenician syllabary were for the first time used to record, and hence recognise, elements more fundamental than a syllable, was a key reason the word-music of Homer could be preserved, unlike, sadly, the word-music of the psalms of David.

The recording of vowels was not enough, however, to save this music for posterity. The line above describes the moment Odysseus actually climbed on Circe’s bed. (Start your stopwatch.)

‘Exactly then was when I got up on Circe, her completely gorgeous bed of love.’

Here’s how the same ἔπος might have looked in a Byzantine manuscript, descended from the Alexandrian version, whence our modern texts emerge after modern editing and fonts:

καὶ τότ’ ἐγὼ Κίρκης ἐπέβην περικαλλέος εὐνῆς. (Od.10.347)

Aside from the introduction of lower case letters, we note the separation of what we have come to call ‘words’ by spaces, and the addition of accent and punctuation marks. It turns out that the separation of words and the addition of accentual diacritics is not, as you might suppose from modern grammars, a mere and historical coincidence. The Greek accent, a disyllabic tonal arc, up and then down in pitch, was felt to be terminal; that is, its place of commencement, the rise in pitch immediately before the fall, was limited to the last three syllables of an expression. Such expressions were therefore self-demarcating subunits of the line, the string of connected sounds recorded in the more ancient written version of the text. In other words, the recurring accentual contonation itself demarcated internal units within the whole line. Hence what were separated in the Alexandrian texts of Homer were the natural Greek prosodic units within the larger unity of the hexameter line.

Punctuation also dramatically affected accentuation, in that pauses released some otherwise suppressed rises in pitch. Hence punctuation must very much have been a planned thing in musical composition, although to be clear, the present commas and colons are often a modern editor’s choice in the texts of Homer. These editors are, in general, not trained to assess the musical implications and effects of their chosen pauses, only the grammatical ones. Thankfully, the disjunction between grammatical and musical form is not complete; but the two are not identical. An epic line is not also necessarily a sentence. These editors seem to register the accent marks, if at all, as merely visual parts of a word. Whatever the case, not only the addition of accent marks and punctuation, but also the separation of prosodic units (nascent ‘words’) appear to have been part of a single project: to make clear the tonal contours and emphases of Homer’s music. The accentual culminations of these prosodic units brought rhythmic life to the hexameter, which was otherwise an endlessly repeating dance movement. These culminations reinforced but also, crucially, syncopated its beat.

Most likely the Alexandrian scholars introduced accentuation into Homer’s text, entailing the division and separation of what we call words, to guard against a living change in the accentuation of Greek. At some time in their period, a period of the international spread and adoption of Greek, the accent became a monosyllabic stress rather than a contonation with an often disyllabic arc of pitch change. The Greek accent remains a monosyllabic stress to this day, like the English one; the stress lands on the syllable where in the ancient language, the voice rose in pitch. But in the ancient pattern, the voice also fell in pitch on the next syllable, often emphatically. Therefore, unfortunately, the new monosyllabic stress habit could not make sense of the ancient compositions, whose metres had been reinforced (and syncopated) by an often disyllabic tonal arc. The unmarked syllable following the one bearing the accent mark, was often the most tonally prominent one in its reinforcing relationship to the underlying dance beat.

To be clear, the introduction of graphic accent marks indicating the location of a culminating tonal pattern, and the momentous separation of prosodic units which resulted, were part of an attempt to preserve the original rhythmic and rhetorical movement of Homer and the other pre-Alexandrian, classical authors; but it must be said that the attempt failed, until my recent reinterpretation of the accentual reality. (My explication of the ‘law of tonal prominence’ for Greek and Latin can most easily be found here.) Hence what we who read and write have come to regard as obvious and self-evident beings, ‘words’, were once prosodic units within larger unities, such as metrical periods like the hexameter line, or grammatical ‘sentences’. Hence such different things as verbs and nouns are all, equally to us, words. In ancient Greek a single such word can constitute a whole sentence, but also an almost meaningless particle. I believe this wild ambiguity is a legacy of the literate origin of the concept of the ‘word’ in the tonal units demarcated by spaces in our Medieval Greek texts. This was an innovation advanced by Alexandrian scholars not to invent the concept of words but to preserve the melodic and rhythmic actuality of Homeric composition.

‘Show me the meaning of the word.’—The Pretenders

‘Word’ is another one of our woolly-minded, Dark Age concepts. Go ahead, try to define ‘word’ without using the word ‘word’. No joke. When my grandson learns a word, before he can read and write, what is that thing, that barely recognisable sequence of sounds coming out his mouth, which gestates in the caves of his mind?

Perhaps you think I am avoiding talking about Odysseus and Circe having sex. I’m not the only one. These are the lines that follow Odysseus’ announcement that he got on Circe’s bed:

Her attendants, meanwhile, got busy in her rooms:

Four of them, who were the working women in the house.

They were born, these lasses, from the springs and from the groves

And from the holy rivers, who flow forth into the salt sea.

Of these women one was throwing on the chairs some pretty rugs,

Sea-purple on the top, and underneath she threw a cloth cover;

The other began stretching dinner trays out in front of the chairs,

Made of silver, and on them she was putting golden baskets:

The third was by the big bowl, mixing wine of honeyed intent,

Delightful against the silver, and distributing the golden goblets.

The fourth was carrying water and lighting the fire,

A lively one under the big tripod: and the water began to warm. (Od.10.348-59)

Note the ‘meanwhile’. Homer himself is counting the time: first, second, third, fourth. Except every number is a woman, a house servant whose work gets two lines each, a fresh-water lass born from springs and groves and sacred rivers who immerse in the salt sea. We do not learn their names, only their numbers. In the lines immediately following, Odysseus gets into that preheated bath. The demarcation is the moment the water boils. So there’s our answer: these lines are timing the lovers’ encounter from beginning to end. Circe and Odysseus go at it for twelve hexameter lines, those twelve rendered in prosaic English above.

Homer is no stranger to this kind of aesthetic-mimetic move. Homer never directly describes Helen’s beauty, for example. He describes instead the effect it has around her; famously, how her presence makes the old men on Ilium’s walls have young thoughts, as they mutter among themselves like summer cicadas (Il.III.146-60). This method is ultimately far more effective than any direct attempt at word-painting; instead, vividly to the foreground, are these verbal reactions in the old men, which fence the wondrous unicorn where she lives in our imagination, quite beyond the ability of words to sell her short.

But something is off with Odysseus’ use of the quartet of riverine serving women setting tables and warming baths, one by one. Compare what is, to my mind, the most beautiful of Homeric examples of the technique in question. When Achilles first hears from Antinous, Nestor’s son, the news that Patroclus is actually dead, and that Hector has his armour, he is grimly distraught. He lies outstretched in the dust and tears out his hair. We are told also of the reactions of the people around him: even the enslaved women he and Patroclus had gathered as booty in their raids across the Troad, shrieked aloud in pain, ran outside and then around Achilles, beat their breasts and dropped to their knees. Antilochus himself

wept where he stood, bending to hold the hero’s

hands when groaning shook his heart: he feared

the man might use sharp iron to slash his throat.

(Il.XVIII.32-4, tr. Fitzgerald)

At last Achilles utters a dreadful cry (σμερδαλέον δ’ ᾤμωξεν), so outrageous that his mother Thetis heard him in the depths of the sea. She also cries out in mourning and becomes a second focal point of grief as the goddesses, the Nereids, also gather round:

… all Nêrêïdês,

who haunted the green chambers of the sea.

Glaukê, Thaleia, and Kymodokê,

Nesaiê, Speiô, Thoê, Haliê

with her wide eyes; Kymothoê, Aktaiê,

Limnôreia, Melitêm and Iaira,

Amphitoê, Agauê, Dôtô, Prôtô,

Pherousa, Dynaménê, Dexaménê,

Amphinomê, Kallianeira, Dôris,

Panopê, and storied Galateia,

Nêmertês and Apseudês, Kallianassa,

Klyméne, Ianeira, Ianassa,

Maira, Oreithyia, Amathyia,

and other Nêrêïdês of the deep sea,

filling her glimmering silvery cave …

(Il.XVIII.37-50, tr. Fitzgerald)

The words for ‘cried out’ (ᾤμωξεν, κώκυσεν) are onomatopoeic: they sound out groans and moans. But at the moment Achilles releases his primal scream of agony, we enter an area beyond the possibility of visual stimulation of the dramatic scene, and especially its vocal representation. Art fails. Instead we are transported to a place impossibly far, under the sea, where the whirlpool of human figures around the prostrate Achilles is resonantly recreated, like an induced field or ‘quantum entanglement’, by these Nereids around Thetis. Our immersion in their names, syllable by syllable, is Homer’s most extraordinary reversion to catalogue poetry, not this time to remember or memorialise, but for its unique aesthetic effect. In chanting these names in their deeply Greek sonority, like saying a rosary, we focus our minds as though in meditation, so that the grief itself and its existential expression can go on pure and untouched by our verbal and imaginative limits—in the off-stage-left of our consciousness, as it were. There it resounds more mightily than words can hope to do, from the bottom of the salt sea to the peaks of heaven.

Note the dwelling on the names. We get no names at all in Odysseus’ catalogue of fresh-water femmes. Instead they each have an ordinal number and a domestic duty. It is a most basic catalogue, like the names of the counting numbers, first, second, third, fourth. This seems to be more a cheating of expectations than an aesthetic strategy, perhaps even a sendup. Consider that Odysseus has just mounted Circe’s bed. (Yes, like a horse.) A considerable segment of us in audience are on the edge of our seats, looking for a bit of action. A tasteful sex scene might have been nice, but for some, only god-and-man pornography would have sufficed. Odysseus’ aesthetic here is almost Brechtian. If Odysseus had meant the water goddesses as a substitute for us leering plebs, he might have given them pretty names and evocative epithets for us to savour. Instead we get the tensest of the many getting-ready-for-dinner tableaux in the Odyssey, as timeless and elegant as the details always are. Always it is the objects, the bowls and baskets, pitchers and ewers of silver and gold, and the soothing, professional operations in such scenes—never the labourers themselves—which come into focus. It adds only weirdness to make the servants goddesses (especially if imagined diaphanously-clothed). We get twelve hexameters of setting the table, while God conjoins with mortal man just over there, behind the master bedroom door.

To get the measure of how this kind of thing can be done, consider the following:

Elizabeth was too much embarrassed to say a word. After a short pause, her companion added, ‘You are too generous to trifle with me. If your feelings are still what they were last April, tell me so at once. My affections and wishes are unchanged; but one word from you will silence me on this subject for ever.’

Elizabeth, feeling all the more than common awkwardness and anxiety of his situation, now forced herself to speak; and immediately, though not very fluently, gave him to understand that her sentiments had undergone so material a change since the period to which he alluded, as to make her receive with gratitude and pleasure his present assurances. The happiness which this reply produced was such as he had probably never felt before, and he expressed himself on the occasion as sensibly and as warmly as a man violently in love can be supposed to do. Had Elizabeth been able to encounter his eyes, she might have seen how well the expression of heartfelt delight diffused over his face became him; but, though she could not look, she could listen, and he told her of feelings which, in proving of what importance she was to him, made his affection every moment more valuable.

They walked on, without knowing in what direction.

In comparison to Homer, Jane Austen is a pornographer. Mr. D’Arcy is literature’s proudest erection. But generations of Janeites will continue to dress up rather than down, because suppression and sublimation allow the soul to orgasm free of the body, in the face of the sublime. As sensibly and as warmly as a man violently in love can be supposed to do. The genius is in the supposal. Just how sensibly and warmly, and violently, is that? Had Elizabeth been able to encounter his eyes … Ah the power of a negative conditional. It is like saying ‘don’t think of pink elephants.’ Never have the eyes of erotic passion been more compellingly portrayed—with the compulsion of the forbidden or impossible, upon an ambitious child: she might have seen how well the expression of heartfelt delight diffused over his face became him. If the reader keeps track of Darcy’s and especially Elizabeth’s walks and walk-taking through the course of the story, they will sink back in amazement at this line: They walked on, without knowing in what direction. The whole scene ends in this way:

After walking several miles in a leisurely manner, and too busy to know anything about it, they found at last, on examining their watches, that it was time to be at home.

Now that’s how you time a love scene. Am I the only one who does not generally imagine either Elizabeth or D’Arcy wearing a watch? ‘Examining their watches’: these two compare their readings, likely a necessary precaution with the timepieces of Austen’s day. But for D’Arcy and Elizabeth, coordinating their timekeeping—sharing a joint measurement of the extraordinary moment they have just spent—is itself an erotic act.

When I used to teach Pride and Prejudice, once upon a time, I would begin by pointing out that in the view from space, but also in every detail of its fabric and lace, this is a work of dramatic art about the French Revolution. Give that book a re-read. The action of the novel depends on the movements of soldiers, due to actions on the continent. You will find a confrontation in a garden, unheard by anyone else, between the privilege of nobility and the rights of man. This author needs, sympathetically and generously, to be rescued from the Janeites. Call her Austen.

There may also be the grooming of a certain kind of reader in Homer as well. We remember Odysseus’ favourite Polites, ‘Citizen’, who was in the initial expedition of Odysseus’ men to Circe’s house, and who is not again mentioned. He must have become a pig. He was the one who incited the men to call out in response to the singing voice of Circe. Polites does not conceal his interest in the idea that the singer might be a woman. Perhaps it is, in part anyway, lust that turns men into pigs. In that case perhaps Homer’s Brechtian turn is not an aesthetic misdirection the better to capture the union of Circe and Odysseus, so much as a bridle or warning against such prurient interest. We have no natural right to the wisdom of the moly for protection. There are perhaps enough of us streaming our movies and television shows, and fellow gawpers and groupies in Homer’s own audience, who have become swine at the trough without knowing it. Whereas the substance of Achilles’ raging grief is something Homer wishes to render by all the means his music can engender, the depiction of Odysseus sleeping with Circe perhaps brings a danger to the enchanted listener.

This is snipped from James Joyce’s Portrait:

The feelings excited by improper art are kinetic, desire or loathing. Desire urges us to possess, to go to something. These are kinetic emotions. The arts which excite them, pornographical or didactic, are therefore improper arts. The esthetic emotion (I use the general term) is therefore static. The mind is arrested and raised above desire and loathing.

The singer’s business is literally enchantment. In the case of Homer’s performer, the staff-bearing rhapsode, he is an enchanter with a wand, just like Circe. But it may be that for Hermes’ initiate, the enchantment of either singer or goddess is not one that renders his swinish soul into an acorn-eating pig. His is a state of union and communion which cannot be depicted like sex in a porno.

The mind in that mysterious instant Shelley likened beautifully to a fading coal. The instant wherein that supreme quality of beauty, the clear radiance of the esthetic image, is apprehended luminously by the mind which has been arrested by its wholeness and fascinated by its harmony is the luminous silent stasis of esthetic pleasure, a spiritual state very like to that cardiac condition which the Italian physiologist Luigi Galvani, using a phrase almost as beautiful as Shelley’s, called the enchantment of the heart.

Impishly undermining Joyce’s Thomistic rapture, at least in this case, is the ever-present spirit of comedy in the Odyssey. Indeed there is a way in which our eye seems consciously blurred to Odysseus’ nakedness. In the line, ‘She sat me in the tub and started washing from the big tripod,’ there is oddly no ‘me’ in the Greek. (M. L. West, feeling the absence, suggests in the apparatus restoring an elided ‘me’—μ’—in place of an ῥ’.) Odysseus has slipped into the scene of the servants’ preparations without anyone noticing. But as it is, the line could actually hint, with an ambiguity of voice between active and middle in the form of ‘she sat’, that it is Circe sitting in the tub. Now that’s a kinetic thought. These are, after all, Circe’s servants, who must be used to bathing her. But could Homer (or Odysseus) be cheeky enough to conjure her for us naked? It is only two lines later, after water has cascaded down the bather’s head and shoulders, that we can be sure that the bather is the speaker being washed by a handmaiden: ‘Until she took the life-destroying weariness from my limbs.’ We are certainly used by now to Odysseus’ suffering and weariness; but isn’t it slightly uproarious that the labour he is just now recovering from, has been his twelve epic lines’ worth of business on Circe’s bed?

Dinner is served. New functionaries emerge, or perhaps a couple of the fresh-water lasses doing double duty, as an attendant who pours water for washing and a house manager who brings out the bread and short eats, from her store. It is stunning to me that the anthropomorphism of Homer’s gods extends to all their classes and castes. There’s an upstairs and a downstairs, wherever you are, it seems. The notion that these roles could be eternal is more than a little chilling, and perhaps intended to be. We shall have reason to visit the idea of whether Homer thinks a mortal human being can ever move up in the world—if not to immortality, at least in social station.

When we first heard these lines about the golden pitcher and the silver basin, and the conscientious house manager, it was for the suitors’ dinner in Ithaca. But there were more lines then, and in the dynamics of musical discourse and registration, we especially note the differences when melodic passages recur.

The carver lifted and set by platters of meats,

From every kind of cut, and placed by them golden cups.

A herald checked on them often, pouring wine. (Od.1.141-3)

These two functionaries, carver and herald, are both male, and perhaps for that reason not wanted in Circe’s entourage. But the omission raises a question or two. Circe’s meal for Odysseus’ men had been vegetarian. There was honey and cheese in the mix, so perhaps she has a cow and a hive out back. We know there’ll be wine despite there being no herald, because the third of her water nymphs has already mixed it and distributed the goblets. Ah, but will there be meat? Oh dear. There’s those lovely hogs in Circe’s pens. Those of you familiar with The Rocky Horror Picture Show will know what I mean, when in answer to the question posed on screen, ‘what’s for dinner?’, the audience resoundingly responds, ‘Meatloaf!’

That a host might serve his guest the flesh of that guest’s beloveds, in the soup, is not a scenario unknown to Greek storytelling. Homer, it seems to me, is an adept at creating subliminal tensions in his Odyssean scene-painting, with just such a whiff of the macabre. Odysseus himself telegraphs this unease, vividly, but with no specificity:

ἀλλ’ ἥμην ἀλλοφρονέων, κακὰ δ’ ὄσσετο θυμός. (Od.10.374)

‘No: I sat distracted, my mind elsewhere; and my spirit foreboded ill.’

The omission of what is expected, an omission especially felt in the recurrence of a passage of music, is the source of the effect in the aural medium of Homeric poetry. ‘Something’s missing,’ or ‘what’s wrong with this picture?’ is always the prelude to discovery, often of a gruesome kind. The possibilities for the development of a scene all brood in the consciousness, until the definite action is realised. Before then, how can we know for sure how diabolical Circe’s imagination may be? Trust me, says the witch. We expect a carver to carve some meat.

‘Yet the mind within stayed steady—the way things were before, in fact.’ (10.240) This is the present condition of Odysseus’ men. It’s still them, but now looking through fattened hogs’ eyes. We remember also the thirsty stag, whom Odysseus ambushed when first venturing into Circe’s isle, to feed his crew a dinner. (I have christened him ‘Fred’, without his permission.) I cannot resist the idea that Homer may impute consciousness to the various species of mortality that we eat. What is lacking is their ability to express themselves in a way we can understand, including to express their feelings about that very mortality.

Odysseus will not touch his food. The scene plays so drolly as post-coital repartée.

“Why this way, Odysseus? You’re worth as much, sat for dinner, as a mute,

Devouring life’s breath, and you don’t touch the food—or the drink.

Or I suppose you’re expecting another trick? But there’s no need for you

To be afraid: for I already swore you a mighty oath.” (10.378-81)

And he finally lets it out:

“Ah Circe, for what man is there, who’s on the level,

Could endure to taste of food and of drink,

Before his comrades were released and he could see it with his own eyes?

No, if you mean well when you order me to drink and eat,

Free them—so I see with these eyes my trusty comrades.” (10.383-7)

The reunion with his men is sweet and tearful, but the comic imp is still buzzing around with his little stinger.

‘So I spoke, and Circe walked across and out the room

Holding the wand in her hand, and she opened the doors of the pigsty

And drove out what looked like fattened nine-year-old hogs.’ (10.388-90)

We are reminded that Odysseus is still pretty hungry. He looks at his men and sees succulent pork, like Elmer Fudd contemplating Bugs Bunny. This time Circe applies a drug like an ointment, baptising them with holy oil. Their pig hairs start flowing off.

They became men again, younger than they were before,

Both more handsome and taller to look at.

They recognised me, those fellows, and hugged me root and branch, one at a time.

And under all of them entered a longed-for ability to mourn; the house on both sides

Resounded terribly: and the goddess started to pity them—even her! (10.395-9)

They’ve gone from being good to eat to being good lookers. These men have clearly been through something. It’s too bad Odysseus did not interview them. I’m reminded of John 12:9: ‘… and they came not for Jesus’ sake only, but that they might see Lazarus also, whom he had raised from the dead.’ Jesus was still an attraction, to be sure, but Lazarus had been dead four days! (Jesus never broke this World Record.) People wanted to check this guy out, hear what he had to say. ‘What did you see there?’ ‘Did ya meet yer Mum?’ ‘Did ya meet my Mum?’

The story goes that in the Eleusinian mysteries, a pig was sacrificed as the initiate’s surrogate. The initiate emerges reborn. It does not seem unlikely to me that Homer is here profaning a mystery in sending it up. When he has Menelaus say to Telemachus, ‘do this in memory of me’ (4.591-2), in relation to a wine ritual, it seems to me that sacramental wine in memorial was already a thing, a quiddity in Homer’s day, and though it reemerges with profundity in Christian ritual and theology, Homer and his comedy are already post-Christian and post-Eleusinian. They are, even today, post-religious. That prospect I find exciting in both kinetic and contemplative ways. It is something new for the history of religions, which has never thought to see Homer as anything but given, somehow, and traditional. He is an anomaly in any alleged human timeline, not at all at the beginning of things. Everywhere I turn in the Odyssey, I meet the deepest comedy, which is always a post facto thing—not only post-Iliad.

In rendering ‘hugged me root and branch (ἔφυν τ’ ἐν χερσίν)’ I am translating the verb φύω, ‘grow’ or ‘sprout’, which is often used in this context of greeting by Homer. ἔφυν ἐν χερσίν is ‘grew into [my] arms’, hence ‘hugged’, ‘embraced’. The abstract noun from this verb is φύσις, the ‘word’ that later became ‘nature’. The mourning (γόος) of the men returned reechoes round the house. This time it does not reach the depths of the sea, but it does reach the heart of Circe:

… and the goddess started to pity them—even her!

It is striking that the men’s lamentation is described as ἱμερόεις, ‘longed-for’, ‘lovely’, usually to be taken in an erotic sense. I assume that such mourning was impossible in their porcine condition. Hence I interpret ‘a longed-for ability to mourn.’ These men have come back younger and more beautiful. Why are they still unhappy? ‘In truth I know not why I am so sad …’ The implication is that there is something characteristically human in lamentation, not generally imputed to the animals we kill and eat, like pigs and cows and potatoes. We like to think they do not mourn each other. To be human again is to mourn again, to be mortals is to mourn. But first comes the embrace, clasping each other root and branch in the awareness of our shared nature: ‘They recognised me, those fellows.’

Perhaps there is hope in the idea that if we could sleep with God, as woman and man, She might also begin to recognise us, and over a cigarette and a restorative meal, take an interest in our feelings, what it is we care about—which, in a democratic world, is each other. Not at all to acknowledge our merits, or choose us for any reason, but to pity us. Her laugh in sympathy would be better, anyway, than a deserving mockery, or wanton sport.

For Katia Mitova

Translations are mine unless otherwise indicated. In Greek:

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On Odyssey 10.274-335

The presentation here has developed since the original post, so do have a watch.

My partner suggests a possibility for the moly (μῶλυ) which intrigues me greatly, so I thought I should record it for the stimulus it might also give you. What if the μῶλυ was a fungus? The difficulty of the extraction could have to do with the extensive mycelial network of such creatures, seemingly endless, which constitutes the ‘roots’ (and brains) of the fungi. The mushrooms are merely the fruiting bodies—often beautiful, often hazardous, and often white. This possibility would also explain Homer’s (Odysseus’) complete lack of interest in the stem, leaves, or other greenery that comes with plants. It is only root (ῥίζη) and flower (ἄνθος), both of which should have been as ready metaphors for Homer as for us. (We say ‘fruiting’ bodies in reference to fruitless fungi). As I emphasise, Homer’s single use of φύσις (‘nature’) is close to its root sense (pun warmly welcomed): it refers to biotic ‘growth’ and emergent sprouting, not necessarily confined to that of herbs and other plants.

For all we know, Homer invented the word which has changed the world, for what might seem, to many, a throwaway use. But Hermes was showing Odysseus something when he showed him the ‘sprouting’ of the moly; perhaps the Greek speakers who looked over Odysseus’ shoulder at this word and this growth, saw also, and yearned after, what they and modern science came to worship: the action of Nature. Homer did not just invent a word in φύσις; he pointed the way, like Hermes the guide.

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What if the moly was a psychedelic mushroom? Could Odysseus’ stimulated state have been the proof against Circe’s drugs—perhaps also, some of them, mushrooms? The authors of the scientific paper cited in the ‘moly’ article in Wikipedia propose the opposite: that the transformations seemingly induced in Odysseus’ men were psychedelic states, and that the power of the moly was anti-psychedelic.

For the whole passage performed in Homer’s Greek hexameters and my English linear prose, please see the previous post of ‘Homer in English’:

Here we go! As Fabrizio Romano likes to say. (He’s a pundit on football transfers.) Tune in next time: Odysseus is about to get in Circe’s bed.

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Odyssey 10.274-335

So Odysseus heads away from the sea up through the ‘sacred glades of Circe,’ and is about to arrive at Circe’s house, when he is intercepted by Hermes Golden-Wand. The entrance into ‘sacred glades’ (ἱερὰς ἀνὰ βήσσας) perhaps suggests that the journey of Odysseus is both an ascent and a penetration into something mysterious, unlike that of Eurylochus and his men, who merely entered some woods (βήσσας). Those who are initiated, or capable, see more in the same vista than those who are not. Hermes’ interception seems not a chance encounter: we later learn that Circe herself, she of many drugs (πολυφάρμακος), had been forewarned by Hermes at some indefinite moment in the past, that a certain Odysseus would be visiting on his return from Troy.

Is it just me, or does Hermes seem a bit camp? He is described as

… looking like a youthful man,

With the first hairs on his lip, whose bloom is at its most ravishing … (Od.10.278-9)

There can be little doubt, in that last phrase (χαριεστάτη ἥβη), of the sexual nature of Hermes’ attractiveness. To be sure, the attraction implied is in the beholder Odysseus. But there seems to me to be an intimacy, a flirty playfulness about Hermes’ banter:

“Oh you sad man, where now? Wandering the hills all alone …

You don’t even know your way around the place!” (281-2)

There is a fixation today with typing people sexually, so that some people are ‘gay’ and others ‘straight’ and others ‘bisexual’, for example, as a matter of a supposed fixed identity. It is said with confidence that we are ‘born this way,’ as if by a combination of nature and fate. I am not sure what is behind the modern and often painful obsession with identity and allegiance to type, including an attendant hypocrisy and, in many, a deliberate obfuscation. All I know is I am a remarried man who finds just about everybody I know a little bit queer. In Homer there seems merely to be a casual obviousness that Odysseus would be attracted to a young man of such a growth and nature—two words which we shall soon be obliged to ponder. Yet it would seem as perverse to call Odysseus ‘bisexual’, as it would ‘heterosexual’.

The first signs of hair on the lip, or down on the chin, were thought to display the acme of ripeness in a boy, who was ready for the plucking. In Athens and the ancient world generally, such youths become objects for older males in the culture of paederastia. Today such interest on the part of older men is considered a toxic and even criminal pedophilia, albeit especially (but not only) when directed at prepubescent children. We perhaps see an example of ancient pederasty in the Odyssey in Athena’s disguised tale, when she is Mentes remembering Odysseus’ visit to his family home. The young Man had come there after a failed mission elsewhere to secure unholy poison for his arrows. But Mentes’ father—so says Athena, to Telemachus—used to love young Odysseus so dreadfully, that he himself gave him said poison, apparently at the risk of retribution from the gods (1.263-4). It is Mentes’ theme that young Odysseus was a helluva looker and quite a jolly lad at a party. Perhaps she hints that it will take a bowman with poisoned arrows to make her wish come true, the one where Odysseus will suddenly appear before Penelope’s suitors in his youthful form. (In the Iliad, Odysseus seemed to be no sort of bowman, something of a meta-puzzle.)

Aside from cues in Hermes’ speech—which might always reside in the imagination, merely, of a reader who fancies he’s being flirted with—one might also suspect that the Homeric performer was like any actor, who generally relishes the chance to ham it up. Camp is a staple of the male actor’s energeia (by which I mean the active fulfilment of his nature). So it makes sense that Odysseus’ description of Hermes’ inviting appearance would be a cue for him to deliver the god’s speech with a wink and a sashay. It is only an absurd sort of prudishness in scholars and front-facing teachers which prevents them registering sexuality in Homer’s depictions, so to allow them to cast him in the moral vanguard of Great Books for youth—quite the opposite of, for one, Plato’s reception of him. This repressive mindset makes a subject like Achilles’ physical intimacy with Patroclus, rather drolly, a matter of controversy. It is not generally supposed, for example, that Telemachus has sex with Peisistratus, Nestor’s son, although they sleep together and Telemachus refers to his bosom buddy as the ‘pleasurer of this, my own life’s breath’ (τῶι ἐμῶι κεχαρισμένε θυμῶι, 4.71). This does not make the boy ‘gay’, although by the end of the poem, a case could certainly be made that Telemachus is uncomfortably a misogynist. The fact is that all the rest of Peisistratus’ brothers, Nestor’s sons, go to bed with their wives. It seems to be understood—shall we say, ‘normal’—that pubescent boys not yet ready for marriage, might be expected to take the pleasure of each other. Perhaps a similar thing could be understood about girls who go unchaperoned (except by a brace of mules) to wash clothes in the woods. Unseen, except by a leering audience, Nausicaa and her maids take off their veils—a thing done on the wedding night, and also a metaphor for rape, when done to you—and play ball! (6.100). Scholars who purvey an Homer of metrical formulas and Victorian pretensions, need the grownups to tell them that neither life nor music work that way.

Hermes reveals a drug—which is to say, a plant or herb—which will protect Odysseus from the potent pharmaka Circe will be expected to mix into his meal, and somehow forestall his transformation into a piggy. But as we’ve already learned, the enhanced porridge is not enough for the trick; there must also be a gesture from the actor’s prop:

“Whenever Circe prods you with her extra-long wand,

That’s when you draw the sharp sword from by your thigh

And jump on Circe, as though minded to kill her.

She’ll get a fearful shock, and she’ll demand that you have sex with her.

There and then is where you no longer turn down sex with a goddess,

So she releases you your comrades, and—takes care of yourself.”(10.293-8)

This would be the one time in the Odyssey where the phrase about drawing ‘the sharp sword from by your thigh,’ a staple from the Iliad, is not used as a sendup, in that the action that follows is actually a threatened attack and ambush, not some ignominious retreat or a makeshift non-use of the sword. But all the same, it is slightly funny coming as an instruction in this way, rather than part of an instinctive reaction or intentional act. What is more, the instruction is to pretend to attack a goddess, a female, and then be met with a counterattack which is not mortal combat, but a demand for sex. Perhaps there’s a double meaning in that. Oh behave. A sword is just a sword.

The explicit threat Circe presents, according to Hermes, is the unmanning of Odysseus—that is, his castration. Before acceding to Circe’s bed, Odysseus is to demand a sacred oath that she not plan another “shitty calamity” (πῆμα κακόν) against him. The most feared of these possible outcomes is specified:

“Lest when you’re stripped naked she make you a lowlife with no man-balls.” (301)

μή σ’ ἀπογυμνωθέντα κακὸν καὶ ἀνήνορα θήηι.

To make a man a non-man (ἀνήνωρ) when they’re naked seems to suggest a castration or some other form of mutilation. This particular threat to manhood recurs in the Odyssey. Castration is likely the adulterer’s penalty facing Ares for his trysts with Aphrodite. Some would interpret the skewering of the eye of the Cyclops as a displaced version of the same. From now on, however, after Circe, threats from females and the feminine come to the fore in his wanderings, whether Odysseus is naked or uselessly armed.

Men don’t like to be reminded how vulnerable they are, especially when naked and aroused. The Odyssey will not spare the Man. The poem certainly seems to have a programme on the nature of the human male, the ἀνήρ (genitive ἀνδρός), quite distinct from any such thing in the Iliad, where we might perhaps speak of a programme on the nature of the ‘hero’. The Odyssey’s way, however, may simply be the way of all comedy, on the compelling haplessness of masculinity, veering always from the ridiculous to the sublime. Men are pigs. But there we come to a distinction beyond which I am not able to see clearly, the one between comedy and tragedy. I do not hesitate to try to define these things, but the things themselves, comedy and tragedy, resist reduction. They persist and reemerge through all their instances, like the varieties of mammals and insects, in multifarious manifestations, which nevertheless convince one of the their separateness and irreconcilability.

The mother of all these distinctions is Nature herself, a mother of twins and opposites.

Thou, Nature, art my goddess; to thy law

My services are bound. (Lear, I.2)

To be sure, Edmund may be addressing Nature as a proper name. Yet he could not address any other divinity or revered figure, say Athena or Aphrodite, or Mother Mary, and mean remotely the same thing, apart from his devotion to their decree. How might Edmund say what he means, declare the same thing, without using the word ‘nature’? Come to that, how might anyone say what they mean without using ‘nature’ when they need it? I have already used it several times, and have no substitutes. ‘The nature of the human male’, the ‘actor’s nature’. Words that cannot be paraphrased easily, but are also indispensable, flash red warning lights. Do not their confident use mask a sort of woolly-mindedness? There are many words like this, fundamental to our modern descriptive vocabulary: ‘instinct’, ‘gravity’, ‘evolution’, ‘human’, to mention a few. How would modern science, advertising, politics, or psychology not be struck dumb, in their attempts to describe or influence the world, if they were robbed of the use of these words? Gods and spirits have been banished, but only by their proper names. If we happened to live in a Dark Age of science and history, how would we know?

It seems to me that scientists and economists and the like, should force themselves to say it in English (as it were—you can substitute your own native language). Too often the industry jargon self-selects a members-only club, where esoteric or merely parallel nomenclatures constitute as many masonic handshakes. Many of us have experienced the abomination of ‘weed-out’ courses, at all levels of education. They reflect a pretence to competence which too easily masks an institutionalised ignorance. Nobody really knows how the calculus works, only that it does. Meanwhile, weeds themselves are too interesting for school.

Equations are actually brutally primitive kinds of sentences. They don’t have any verbs worth distinguishing, except to say that ‘equals’ does not mean ‘is’. All the operations, the additions, divisions, and so on, are nested and packed into deceptive agglomerations on each side of an ‘equals’ sign. The grossness of their shorthand constitutes both the impotence of equations as disclosive speech, and their impact as totems with a spell-like power to enchant. Some might say ‘enslave’. The principle of the conservation of energy, or the idea that every action produces an equal and opposite reaction, are a mental need before they answer to any sort of reality. Surely their a priori quality counsels caution, in applying them, as though freely, to a world where successful species go extinct, where almost all the universe is ionised plasma and not neutral inertial matter, and many or most actions do not produce a reaction, because cowardice is a very real thing, in humans and animals alike. ‘Saying it in English’, eliminating the all-explanatory jargon, would help ground scientists’ thinking in the experienced realities, and thereby both critique it and elevate it to what could be called ‘natural philosophy’. Why do things fall to the earth, and why do I feel heavy? Don’t say ‘gravity’, like an imbecile. Explain it in your own words and with your body, and any props which might help. Save the equations for when we’re under the sheets. Later.

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One of the joys of reading ancient composers and poets, especially early Greek authors, is that they did not have a dead language to draw on for technical and metaphysical terms, like ‘technical’ and ‘metaphysical’. Hence they had to say it in Greek, meaning say it in their own words. Aristotle’s Metaphysics is actually called ‘on the stuff after the physics’ (τῶν μετὰ τὰ φυσικά). Whenever Aristotle—who is not early, but was a pioneer in developing terms of art in explicating his thought—used a word to refer to the stuff that things are made of, it was ὕλη, ‘woodland’, or more to the point, ‘timber’. When Cicero translated Aristotle for his audience, he did not translate this word, but used a calque: materia, Latin ‘timber’. Hence we have ‘matter’, an abstract concept from the start, with no hint of a metaphor in its embryo. I should think this absence makes us handicapped in our conversation with the idea, as it were; matter has us at a disadvantage. It seems to be a preexistent being in the usage and understanding of people who practice modern physics, although nothing whatsoever empirical can be pointed to. Elements or atoms of matter are elements and indivisibles of what, exactly? Scientists surpass all artists, in their mostly unwitting immersion in broken metaphors.

It is not that being close to the lingual roots of a word, solves any problem in apprehending its referent. ‘Metaphysics’ remains a thing which compels an arduous climb to the summit of philosophy, although in the word itself we have a rather pure case of our reifying a lecture title, perhaps coined for the use of a compiler, rather than by an author, and which only seems to connote an appendix. (I suppose the stuff that comes after the physics is, for Aristotle, what physics itself presupposes.) Matter also remains a concept and an enigma, even in Aristotle’s timber. How, after all, does a living tree turn into wood, and wood turn into timber? And what if the timber sprouts? But it does rather make a conflict between ‘materialists’ and ‘spiritualists’ look a bit silly, does it not? A conflict suited to the confusions of a Dark Age.

When Cicero translates Aristotle’s use of Greek φύσις, however, he does not use a calque. Naturally, he uses natura. This is a word which points towards birth in referring to its concept, as indeed does Edmund the bastard. Aristotle’s own word, and the word most Greek thinkers seem obsessed with, means ‘growth’ or ‘sprouting’; φύσις is looking toward plants, while natura is gazing upon animals and all things which can be said to give birth. A φυτόν is what we somewhat deflate by calling a ‘plant’. But there is no question that animals also, and embryology, are a principal inspiration for Aristotle’s imagination in the Physics. From physis we get both ‘physics’ and ‘physical’, which can point in opposite directions. (We’d say Odysseus is going to get physical with Circe, although he might also learn some physics.)

Always with Aristotle, the way his predecessors and contemporaries actually use a word, is essential data in the process of definition. The ways φύσις is used in Greek happen to correspond pretty well with many of the ways in which we use the idea, like ‘naturally’, ‘by nature’, Mother Nature, etc. The development in animals and plants from seed and embryo, like the chicken from the egg, exhibit the unfolding of latent design, no matter the consternation of materialists. An analogy with artisans and timber plays a leading role in Aristotle’s exposition:

It is absurd to suppose that purpose is not present because we do not observe the agent deliberating. Art does not deliberate. If the ship-building art were in the wood, it would produce the same results by nature. If, therefore, purpose is present in art, it is present also in nature. The best illustration is a doctor doctoring himself: nature is like that. (Physics II.8, 119b26-31, tr. Hardie & Gaye)

The way physiologists speak of an ‘immune system’, which learns and has a memory, it seems a doctor in command of legions is already in the house, and a healing art is in the wood. We are evidently passengers.

Imagine, then, the transcendent possibilities for a budding Homerist, metaphor intended, in reading a composer of Greek who not only does not have Aristotle to draw on for learned words to use, or even a dead language, but has no word for ‘nature’ at all! How does he even talk? Yet Homer has plenty to say. Freedom beckons the Homerist, and perhaps you as well, in the music of Homer’s words. We puzzle out their referents, and move to the flow both of his native verbs and their vivid and vivifying rhythm, rather than tread the endless cloisters pondering the nature of nature. It is exhilarating to experience this earth’s and our body’s phenomena, and others as well, in Homer’s rhythms and distinctions, unblinkered of our habitual categories and formulations. There occurs a triangulation which makes the familiar unfamiliar, popping out anew at you, bringing peripheries into focus—as surely as three dimensions bring the world to two.

The word φύσις occurs only once in all of Homer, and it comes when Odysseus describes Hermes’ prophylactic gift:

So he spoke, and supplied the drug, the Slayer of Argus,

Once he drew it out of the earth, and he showed me the sprouting of it.

At the root it would be black, but the flower was like milk;

Moly is what the gods call it: it is difficult to dig up

For men who are mortal, but the gods can do everything. (Od.10.302-6)

The nature of the moly is something Hermes shows Odysseus; he need not teach or explain it; it is evident directly in its sprouting. To be truer to Homer’s actual text, its nature is its sprouting; but there’s no ‘nature’ in there at all, only the sprouting (φύσις). Homer has no dealings with the word or the notion of nature, and yet it seems that every second paragraph or sentence, I reach for this word in trying to understand what I read in him. Am I cleverly taking Homer’s hint, or is it not more plausible that I find it impossible to escape the blinkers that this mind-drowning concept, nature, throws upon me at every turn? That my response betrays a dependence, a kind of religious obscurantism, like a convert who sees everywhere, behind the people and objects he encounters, signs of faith and grace?

‘Moly is what the gods call it.’ What does Homer mean when he says that the gods use different names for things? Here, I think uniquely in Homer, we don’t also get the human name for the herb, which is doubly curious. It seems that when they name things, the gods don’t like to use Greek. Greek names are usually transparent etymologically, but many proper names, of people, places, things, and gods, are not. This includes ‘Achilles’ and ‘Odysseus’, as well as moly. I solicit your responses to this question, I don’t have a good answer. I shall only say how powerfully and pervasively modern science has also adopted this rhetoric, to the point where it is deeply infixed in our minds that there are in fact true (‘scientific’) names for things, and that they all come in Greek or Latin or some barbarous hybrid of the two. How self-satisfied do you feel—admit it—when you realise that you are a human being, and that means you are a primate? (And can use that fact in a conversation?) We do not know the real name of the herba immolum, Homer’s μῶλυ. Is it allium nigrum? Or is it a kind of galanthus (‘milk-flower’)? (It seems the latter contain an anticholinesterase, which combats poisonous anticholinergic intoxication, whose symptoms include amnesia, hallucinations, and delusions. Wikipedia seems to think these could include thinking that you have become a pig, and forgetting the mother earth of your fathers.)

At the root it is black, but the flower is like milk, somehow liquidly white. It is the root which must anchor the moly to the earth, so that it is troublesome to dig up. Apparently it could be known to our herbalists and Ayurvedics, except that it is too hard to dig up for mortals. In truth this is not a growth which lends itself easily to Aristotle’s vision. There is not an obvious way to point out material actualising form; there is no egg, embryo or chicken. To dissect a seed is to find embryonic root matter, and of course one or two cotyledons, embryonic leaves. (A flower’s petals are often modified—transformed—leaves.) One approach which seems appropriate is the modern observation of polarity in plants. Rupert Sheldrake’s youthful research into this phenomenon suggests that plants are like permanent magnets: if you cut off a stem of willow, the part that was toward the leaves will sprout leaves, while the opposite end, otherwise identical, will only grow roots. In a similar way, if you break a magnet, the fragments immediately show new north or south poles, each in the direction of the original whole magnet. This polarity is already there in the seed of a plant, and in every cell of its stem.

But polarity is, again, perhaps a reductive and overly unifying way of doing justice to the phenomena. The roots actively seek out the darkness and the earth, to hidden moisture and minerals, and whatever else is gleaming luridly there beneath the earth, while leaves and flowers reach out and upwards to the light and its radiant energy. These are opposite motives, not intuitively unifiable as form and matter. Roots and root systems have with reason been compared to neural networks. I sometimes wonder if we do not in general see plants upside down, yielding to our own habits, of supposing which way is up in this world.

To observe the growth of the moly within the Odyssey, however,and within this episode, one is drawn neither to nature nor to polarity but to transformation. What was black and earthy becomes, in one growth, white and milky. Of course we do not see the moly in motion, as though in time-lapse photography; we see it in still life. And yet this present image nevertheless suggests a process of metamorphosis, along a linear axis. Men eat barley, cheese, wine, and pork. They also produce speech, hot air, and seminal fluid. Transformation seems not only a magical power wielded by Circe, and sustained by Odysseus’ men, but a fact of growth and assimilation—dare I say, a fact of nature. It is also, vividly and immediately, a fact of the presence of the performer before you, the Homeric rhapsode, who becomes all manner of speakers and conjures all manner of things, although what he is before you is a body and a voice, a cloak and a stick.

It is notable that Hermes nowhere tells Odysseus what to do with the moly. Is he to grate it into the soup, or drop it in whole? Or is he to ingest it at all? It is never even said that Hermes gives it to Odysseus. He just heads back up to Olympus, and Odysseus walks off toward Circe’s house, his heart heaving indigo (κραδίη πόρφυρε κιόντι). Has Homer made an omission? The moly is not mentioned again, as if it has become a secret from the goddess; and it plays no physical role in Odysseus’ encounter with Circe. In point of fact, the tension builds alarmingly; Odysseus says ‘Out she came fast and opened the shining doors’, a line we’re now hearing for the third time. We’re made to think that the same surreal sequence, ending in man-pigs, is inexorably on its way again. At no point does Odysseus suddenly brandish the moly and say ‘Ha ha! Have some of this, ya witch!’ That might have relieved the tension. But it is only when he draws his sword and dares to jump her that anything changes in the sequence.

There is still another possibility, however: that actually all Odysseus needs to be safe, is to know the moly—let’s say it’s ‘lesson’, whatever that may be—in order to be protected from transformation, witting or unwitting, or any other Circean enchantment. Contemplate the μῶλυ: grok its movement. The initiate in such knowledge may hold within him the milky flower of his continuing obduracy and endurance. But it takes a god to root him out.

We hear from Circe. The significance of this moment, of their combat on the bed, and Circe’s recognition of exactly who it is now in front of her, is underscored by the first and only echo of a word from the poem’s very first line, the quality predicated uniquely of Odysseus: πολύτροπος, ‘he of many turns’ the man with ‘the twist in his spine’. (I put it that way in my rendering because the word fills exactly the leftward retrogression and return—the turn—in the ancient syrtós dance, to which each of Homer’s verses can be performed. The twist in one’s spine as one circles to the right is an unforgettable sensation for a dancer in the round.) The sounding of πολύτροπος, in the mouth of Circe, as told by Odysseus, is a ‘meta’ moment. It links back from within Odysseus’ tale of his wanderings to Homer’s first line in the poem, a musical bridge across these wanderings and the arrival in Phaeacia, Calypso, and the whole Telemachy, to connect a spine to the poem itself. It also says that the conjunction with Circe is a significant moment of arrival, perhaps a pivot. One of the many exigencies of his polytropic attribute would seem to be that it makes Odysseus slippery, twisting and turning, hard to trap even without the secret knowledge of the moly. Or perhaps there, precisely in that secret nature, which only Hermes could reveal to him, is the twist which eludes Circe entirely.

In sounding this word πολύτροπος after ten books of poetry, ‘many turns’ at its same place in the turn of the epic line, the poet who remains the unknown troubadour before us who can become all things, has nevertheless created an enduring theme across the music of his poem so far. Even if Odysseus’ characteristic is to change and transform, it is all the same an enduring characteristic. But there is more: we know Odysseus to be something else than his changing masks. We experience him in each scene from behind his turning plans and changing appearance; we are in on the game—even superior to it, through Athena’s eyes. His many turns along the way, including this one into Circe’s bed, have always had an end only sometimes expressed but always true: his home and his marriage, and the lady there waiting. Homer the performing chameleon has therefore achieved, through his most protean art form, the crafting of a being in this Odysseus who persists through all the changes. This being, like the moly, has an enduring and recognisable—what else shall I call it?—nature. But the goddess gets the last word:

“… inside that chest of yours is a mind that cannot be enchanted.

Surely it’s you, the Odysseus, the twist in his spine, the one whom he always

Used to claim would come to me— I mean Golden Wand, the Slayer of Argus—

As you came up from Troyland with your quick ship and black.

No, come off it, scabbard your sword: then let’s you and me

Mount up in my bed, so that once we fuck, the pair of us,

And make love in bed, we might trust one another.” (329-35)

In Greek:

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On Odyssey 10.230-73

I understand that my beloved alma mater, the University of Chicago, has decided to ‘pause’ the admission of graduate students in all those departments which require the study of a language. If the University doesn’t teach languages, and also, if its best teachers do not teach languages, what exactly is its point? Interpretations of texts, and theories in all the empirical fields, will come and go. But training in languages, including the languages of mathematics, is the key to the door. Show me someone who is familiar only with English, and I’ll show you someone who doesn’t understand English. The Philistines are not at the gate: they are in the Dean’s office, and elected to government.

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Following are the passages I read in Greek during the video. Follow along! For the whole passage performed in Greek (and English) see my previous post:

Od. 10.230-42

Out she came fast and opened the shining doors

And started inviting them: and all together, they followed in their stupidity.

Eurylochus stayed back—he suspected there was a trick.

She led them in and seated them on couches and chairs,

Put in cheese for them and barley groats and green honey

And stirred them into a pottage with Pramneian wine: she mixed into the muesli

Baneful drugs, so that they might altogether forget the land of their fathers

But once she gave it and they drank it off, right after

She struck with her wand, and confined them in the pig sties.

And they began to have pigs’ heads—and pigs’ voices and hair,

And build! Yet the mind within stayed steady—the way things were before, in fact.

So they’re wailing there, all penned up, while for those men Circe

Threw two kinds of acorn by, and cornel cherries

To feed on—the sort of thing ground-wallowing swine are always eating.

ἣ δ’ αἶψ’ ἐξελθοῦσα θύρας ὤειξε φαεινάς [230]

καὶ κάλει · οἳ δ’ ἅμα πάντες ἀϝϊδρίηισιν ἕποντο ·

Εὐρύλοχος δ’ ὑπέμεινεν, ὀϊσάμενος δόλον εἶναι.

εἷσεν δ’ εἰσαγαγοῦσα κατὰ κλισμούς τε θρόνους τε,

ἐν δέ σφιν τυρόν τε καὶ ἄλφιτα καὶ μέλι χλωρόν

ϝοἴνωι Πραμνείωι ἐκύκα · ἀνέμισγε δὲ σίτωι [235]

φάρμακα λύγρ’, ἵνα πάγχυ λαθοίατο πατρίδος αἴης.

αὐτὰρ ἐπεὶ δῶκέν τε καὶ ἔκπιον, αὐτίκ’ ἔπειτα

ῥάβδωι πεπληγυῖα κατὰ συφεοῖσιν ἐϝέργνυ ·

οἳ δὲ συῶν μὲν ἔχον κεφαλὰς φωνήν τε τρίχας τε

καὶ δέμας, αὐτὰρ νοῦς ἦν ἔμπεδος, ὡς τὸ πάρος περ. [240]

ὣς οἳ μὲν κλαίοντες ἐϝέρχατο, τοῖσι δὲ Κίρκη

πάρ ῥ’ ἄκυλον βάλανόν τ’ ἔβαλεν καρπόν τε κρανείης

ἔδμεναι, οἷα σύες χαμαιευνάδες αἰὲν ἔδουσιν.

Od. 10.220-3

They took their stand in front of the door of the goddess, Pretty-Braids,

And they began to hear Circe within, singing with a beautiful voice

As she went back and forth at the loom—a big one, ambrosial—a web for goddesses,

Finely woven and tasteful, and bright, as their works tend to be.

ἔσταν δ’ εἰνὶ θύρηισι θεᾶς καλλιπλοκάμοιο,

Κίρκης δ’ ἔνδον ἄκουον ἀϝειδούσης ὀπὶ καλῆι,

ἱστὸν ἐποιχομένης μέγαν ἄμβροτον, οἷα θεάων

λεπτά τε καὶ χαρίεντα καὶ ἀγλαὰ ϝἔργα πέλονται.

Od. 10.239-40

And they began to have pigs’ heads—and pigs’ voices and hair,

And build! Yet the mind within stayed steady—the way things were before in fact.

οἳ δὲ συῶν μὲν ἔχον κεφαλὰς φωνήν τε τρίχας τε

καὶ δέμας, αὐτὰρ νοῦς ἦν ἔμπεδος, ὡς τὸ πάρος περ.

Od. 10.259-60

“And they vanished at the same time as a group, nor did a one of them

Emerge into light: and I sat a long time on the lookout.”

οἳ δ’ ἅμ’ ἀϝϊστώθησαν ἀϝολλέες, οὐδέ τις αὐτῶν

ἐξεφάνη · δϝηρὸν δὲ καθήμενος ἐσκοπίαζον.

Od. 10.271-3

“Eurylochus, right you are, you stay here in this plot,

Eating and drinking by the ship, empty and black.

But me? I’m going; for a force comes upon me, of necessity.”

Εὐρύλοχ’, ἤτοι μὲν σὺ μέν’ αὐτοῦ τῶιδ’ ἐνὶ χώρωι

ἔσθων καὶ πίνων κοίληι παρὰ νηϝὶ μελαίνηι ·

αὐτὰρ ἐγὼν εἶμι · κρατερὴ δέ μοι ἔπλετ’ ἀνάγκη.

Linked here you can find my recent paper where I demonstrate that Homer composes for certain significant accentual pitch patterns, which function as ‘signature lines’ in a musical composition. Homer’s text cannot therefore be composed from purely metrical formulas, and any connection of his composition to an ‘oral tradition’ must be argued on a different basis. For the hardy, there is also a description of the law of tonal prominence, a new theory of the Greek accent which applies also to Latin.

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Odyssey 10.230-73

Out she came fast and opened the shining doors

And started inviting them: and all together, they followed in their stupidity.

Eurylochus stayed back—he suspected there was a trick.

She led them in and seated them on couches and chairs,

Put in cheese for them and barley groats and green honey

And stirred them into a pottage with Pramneian wine: she mixed into the muesli

Baneful drugs, so that they might altogether forget the land of their fathers

But once she gave it and they drank it off, right after

She struck with her wand, and confined them in the pig sties.

And they began to have pigs’ heads—and pigs’ voices and hair,

And build! Yet the mind within stayed steady—the way things were before, in fact.

So they’re wailing there, all penned up, while for those men Circe

Threw two kinds of acorn by, and cornel cherries

To feed on—the sort of thing ground-wallowing swine are always eating. (Od. 10.230-42)

Circe is invisible in this scene. Why do I say this? She’s clearly before us, doing all sorts of striking things. But the medium of Homer’s narrative is, first of all, a musical one, as well as a visual one (through the performer) and a lingual one, in the familiar literate sense that words are conveyors of ‘information’ which allow us to put together a story in our intellects and imaginations. Hence the resources available to Homer in, for example, creating a foreground, where he brings elements to the front of consciousness while suppressing others, are likely to be unique in relation to literary techniques. It is the treatment of Homer only in that final sense, the sense in which we register and assess novels and other literature, which has led to a great deal of abuse, and misuse, of Homer’s poetry in academic circles. When we assess the music, and the show, only through the close reading of its libretto, we are bound to find fault with it as a) quaintly and folksily repetitive, b) limited in its vocabulary, and c) puzzlingly roundabout, among any number of other misapprehensions and ways of missing the point. As they say about concerts and other live events, ‘you had to be there.’ An editor would send Homer’s copy back to have it purged of all its repetition and unhelpful frou-frou, with an angrily scribbled note to ‘tighten it up and get to the point!’ Imagine what he’d do with the lyrics of a Disney song or a Bach cantata. Homer is not performing a novel. Over the course of a brief passage, not even fifty lines, we shall be able to explore a surprising number of Homer’s musical resources.

Singularly and peculiarly lost in the translation, from live performance to scribbled libretto, is the role and gestalt of the numerous noun-and-epithet phrases Homer has nevertheless made famous. Their usage is not necessarily familiar to us through our experience of song. They seem instead to be children of the marriage of music and dramatic narrative Homer has developed. ‘Swift-Foot Achilles’ and ‘Poly-Wily Odysseus’ are typical. The adjectives in these phrases are not so much predicates as ‘epithets’; that is, πόδας ὠκύς and πολύμητις register not so much as assertions about Achilles and Odysseus, but as extensions, elucidations, of their names. The distinction ‘epithet’ applies in Homer to adjectives that usually register as part of the subject rather than the predicate. In some instances they function almost as titles, like ‘your majesty’. It is as though when Homer wants to evoke these characters, to put them in the foreground of his stage, he sings them out with their full titles. Most often this happens when he summons them there in the line before they deliver a speech. It seems to be a way that the performer himself ‘steps into’ the role, both announcing and simultaneously doing it, immediately before he gives a speech in the character’s first person as ‘Lord of Men’ Agamemnon or ‘Poly-Wily’ Odysseus.

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The last example illustrates that the adjective does not altogether lose its semantic power in its use as an epithet. Many is the time that we are prompted to suspect the wiliness of what follows, precisely by the announcement of Odysseus as speaker in this form. It happens at the very beginning of the Tale of the Wanderings, seemingly to keep us on our guard throughout his story! (See 9.1) The Odyssey poet’s alertness to the semantic fluidity of adjectives inside these phrases seems indicated by his use of ‘blameless Aegisthus’ immediately prior to the opening speech of Zeus (1.29), where the father of gods and men precisely blames Aegisthus for what happens him, rather than fate or the gods. Paolo Vivante cites a number of instances in Homer where, when an epithet is used outside of its customary noun-and-epithet phrase, this time separated from its intended subject as an adjective in the predicate, it can in fact acquire a sense which contrasts, even, with its apparent sense inside that phrase. I comment,

It is as though the lexical signification of these epithets is thrown into peculiarly sharp relief when they are removed from their more aural and evocative role within the [dancing] phrase. To stretch a point, one might even say that the epithet and the adjective are different words.

The instance of ‘blameless Aegisthus’ is striking, however, in that ‘blameless’ (ἀμύμων) is here very much an epithet, not a predicate adjective. Its deployment immediately before Zeus’s accusing speech seems therefore overtly provocative.

It is astounding that the oralist ideologue’s take on this phrase is that there is nothing to see (or hear) here: we are told that ‘blameless’ does not register as a predicate in its role inside a purely metrical phrase, which is supposed to do no more than refer to Aegisthus, while also filling up a segment of an hexameter line by adding three syllables to the three already in his name. But even those of us who register an obvious contextual irony in Homer’s use of the phrase, or perhaps even a difference between Homer’s assessment of Aegisthus and Zeus’s, need also to recognise the more elemental musical effect of the name-plus-epithet rhythm: Homer thereby summons Aegisthus to the forefront of our consciousness, before Zeus goes on to complain about him in his speech. It is only when Zeus has made his point about the man, affixing blame, that Homer’s prior evocation resurfaces as a dissonant resonance in the musical memory. The sequence bespeaks design. This does not mean it is good design: those who feel the cognitive dissonance too strongly, ought to have the courage to criticise Homer’s choices here, rather than join those who explain them away through the reflexes and semantic handicaps of a purely metrical theory of composition. They then make up a tradition based on this theory, as though it were some sort of primitive achievement to ‘fill up’ a line of hexameter verse, and call this tradition ‘oral’, although it completely ignores Homer’s inbuilt pitch accents and phrasal melodies. Modern ‘Homeric Studies’ explains away the libretto, after first ignoring all of Homer’s melody.

The evocative epithet occurs also in descriptive passages, not only in respect of people but objects as well. Vivante wrote the groundbreaking studies on the subject of the Homeric epithet, especially their poetic effect and registration, albeit without reference to the music of such designedly evocative, melodic naming. Ignoring the pitch accents does not, however, prevent Vivante from distinguishing poetic rhythm from its underlying metre. Although such a distinction would seem to be elemental to the nature of poetry—that poetic rhythm arises not from repetitive metre but from the way in which accented words selectively reinforce or syncopate that underlying metre—it is a distinction which seems largely to be lost on the majority of Homer’s commentators. Here is Vivante:

Take, in Il. 3.423, Helen joining Paris in his chamber: ἡ δ’ εἰς ὑψόροφον θάλαμον κίε δῖα γυναικῶν [and she, to the high-roofed chamber, she went, the divine among women]. We have a simple act of going, but notice how it is expressed. From the initial ‘she’ to the final noun, Helen’s presence spreads through the verse, quickened by the nimble verb [κίε] near the center. The effect is one of lightness and solemnity at once. The epithets give fullness to the moment by simply touching off what is there. We linger upon steadfast shapes even while the passing act removes them from our view. Transience finds solidity, and solidity is in turn dissolved. We have rest in movement and movement in rest—at once, tranquility and motion. A translation such as ‘Helen, divine among women, went to the high-roofed chamber’ would only give us embellished description. The force of Homer’s verse lies in its rhythm—in the way the words take position, in the way each pause hints suspense, and in the way the parts integrate to realize a growing presence. It would be inadequate merely to point out a combination and adaptation of metrical formulas: the verse has an intrinsic unity, and it came on one wave of rhythm.

The descriptive phrase ‘radiant among women’ (δῖα γυναικῶν) seems in this case equally predicate and fulfilling epithet, separated as it is from its subject ‘she’ (the monosyllable ἡ) at the beginning of the line. One needs to remember, when one is obliged to ingest this poetry as words on a page, that this is a separation not in space but in time: the phrase at the end knits the line into both a rhythmic and semantic whole, reaching back past an anapaestic run through the ‘high-roofed chamber’ (ὑψόροφον θάλαμον) to irradiate its solitary subject ‘she’, back at the beginning of the line. ‘Helen’s presence spreads through the verse.’

Now what does all this have to with Circe and her invisibility? It turns out that Homer is strangely coy about how he introduces her and presents her. When viewing and hearing the performer in front of you, Circe becomes obviously seen, in one way, and yet unseen, unfocussed—almost as if she’s behind you. It’s said she calls to Eurylochus and his men, but Homer (Odysseus) gives her no speech. She is merely a ‘she’ (ἡ, 230), with no further depiction or evocation beyond her several actions. Her presence does not so much spread through the verse, like Helen’s, but haunts it like a ghost. We only hear her name, at last, eleven lines later—lonely at the end of a line with no epithet or title! She had in fact been invoked earlier with a flurry of epithets and adjectives, when the men first reach her threshold:

They took their stand in front of the door of the goddess, Pretty-Braids,

And they began to hear Circe within, singing with a beautiful voice

As she went back and forth at the loom—a big one, ambrosial—a web for goddesses,

Finely woven and tasteful, and bright, as their works tend to be. (220-3)

ἔσταν δ’ εἰνὶ θύρηισι θεᾶς καλλιπλοκάμοιο, 220

Κίρκης δ’ ἔνδον ἄκουον ἀϝειδούσης ὀπὶ καλῆι,

ἱστὸν ἐποιχομένης μέγαν ἄμβροτον, οἷα θεάων

λεπτά τε καὶ χαρίεντα καὶ ἀγλαὰ ϝἔργα πέλονται.

Note, however, that though Circe, goddess of beautiful braids, is summoned to the front of the imagination’s stage by name, epithets, adjectives, and sounds, and her web and loom even more so, she is all the same invisible to the men at this point: heard not seen. Keats says, about the images on a Grecian urn, that ‘Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard/Are sweeter …’ In the Greek of the line,

Κίρκης δ’ ἔνδον ἄκουον ἀϝειδούσης ὀπὶ καλῆι,

And they began to hear Circe within, singing with a beautiful voice,

we almost hear her directly through the liquid, pitch-accented long vowels. Is a goddess heard, but not seen, even more beautiful?

When Circe actually appears, however, out the door, she’s just a ‘she’. It’s the doors themselves that are ‘shining’! The focussing power of Homeric versifying keeps her in our periphery, but illuminates the opening of her doors. You’d expect the revelation of the goddess to be the focus of the poet’s gaze—not the doors. Eurylochus suspects a trick and stays back, so we have no eyewitness to what goes on next within. Perhaps we are to suspect that Odysseus must have become intimate with Circe to find out—perhaps we have expected that intimacy all along. Eurylochus, for now, stays outside, but Odysseus the initiate must have already passed through those doors.

The lines that follow describe the wholesome cheese, barley, honey, and wine, with which Circe makes a porridge for her guests. There is not even a personal pronoun; verbs in the third person serve to supply a subject. The key ingredients, however, are ‘baneful drugs’ (φάρμακα λυγρά), which would cause the men to ‘forget the land of their fathers.’ Hence Circe’s recipe could induce an effect similar to that of the lotus flower. The description is conditional, however; it expresses an intent rather than an actual result. I say this because it is evident after their transformation, that the men are wailing in sorrow. It seems not unreasonable to suppose that their despair may stem from the drugs not quite working, and that they are in straits most of all about never reaching home.

But is it not possible that their wailing is existential, and would have been triggered even if they weren’t homesick? The reason for despair may come purely from their transformation. The next stage of Circe’s enchantment of the men, after their ingesting her pottage, is initiated by a strike of her wand. It is not clear whether she is meant to strike each of the twenty-one, or if she strikes the air over them somehow; the performer needs to decide what to do with his staff. Immediately she confines them in her pig sties, which are apparently a part of her interior design. Only then do they start to turn into pigs.

Is the sequence important? Or is it fanciful to think that merely confining men in sties is halfway to turning them into pigs? The confinement and separation from society’s table seem to be significant. These actions indeed underlie society’s rationale for imprisonment, whether as a social or individual good, or a political punishment. (Rehabilitation seems an option beyond the pale for mortals, in Circe’s eyes. All go to the sties.) Their change in diet is marked, just as it was between immortal and mortal diners at Calypso’s table: while the men enjoy barley and honeyed Pramnian wine at their last supper, in the sties they get acorns. Just as delicious intoxicating ingestables can make you forget who you are and where you’re from, perhaps imprisonment can, by itself, turn human into animal.

Separation and confinement both seem to be a feature of animal husbandry, as practiced by the Cyclops, for example. He separates the rams and billies from the ewes and nannies, then puts the lambs and kids to the teat. The sorting and the counting express his control—his dominion, shall we say—over the animals, but in Polyphemus’ case also allow him to express his care for them. Sorting and numbering his flocks seem to be essential reflexes of an overseer in the Odyssey, whether that is Proteus and his seals, Penelope and her geese, or the Sun himself over the cattle of the year’s days.

But there is an unexpected twist to the story of the men’s confinement and transformation, which appears to transcend the physical aspects of growing pig hair and being imprisoned in a sty. The sting in the tail is also an unexpected musical climax, which must be lost on those who disregard Homer’s pitch accents.

And they began to have pigs’ heads—and pigs’ voices and hair,

And build! Yet the mind within stayed steady—the way things were before in fact. (239-40)

οἳ δὲ συῶν μὲν ἔχον κεφαλὰς φωνήν τε τρίχας τε

καὶ δέμας, αὐτὰρ νοῦς ἦν ἔμπεδος, ὡς τὸ πάρος περ.

Note the three emphatic syllables in a row, νοῦς ἦν ἔμπεδος. They are three straight, long, accented syllables, two circumflexes (rising and falling in pitch within each long vowel sound), acute (rising pitch on a sonant closed syllable). The basic underlying rhythm of the dactylic hexameter is long-short-short, a long downbeat with two shorts in the upbeat. Hence three straight long and emphatic syllables must be rare and marked occurrences in the course of dactylic poetry, and indeed any poetry, whose rhythms generally propagate through alternating stressed and unstressed syllables. In paying attention to the pitch accents in Homer’s text, we are at last able to confirm what must seem intuitively obvious to the punters, that musical stresses needs best correspond to semantic ones. You cannot play the opening of Beethoven’s Fifth or the Ride of the Valkyries to scenes of toddlers playing with blocks. (For a fuller discussion of the new ‘law of tonal prominence’ for ancient Greek, please see my most recent paper here.)

‘Yet the mind within stayed steady.’ If this means what it seems to mean, never have more portentous words gone ignored by the sorts of people who write about the ‘history’ of philosophy. I have drawn the notion of ‘within’ from the constituents of ἔμπεδος, literally ‘in the ground’ and hence ‘firm-set’ or ‘steadfast’. But the context seems to justify my rendering. Externally, the men are becoming pigs, in their heads, voice, hair, and bodily frame; but their mind was steadfast. This principally means that it did not change, unlike everything else about them; but the implication is also that the effect of Circe’s wand was on everything external and sensible about the men, not what was otherwise. It must be said, however, that there is, as well, a change in what the pig-men take inside themselves from outside; that is, their food.

We take it that the men are still the men they were, though trapped inside pigs’ bodies and natures. Behind Blue Eyes is a song by the Who which suggests that their condition applies to anyone born with an human face, too. Even one with pretty blue eyes, which, by the way, I’ve known a pig to have. Perhaps lonely and misunderstood Polyphemus sings a song called Behind Blue Eye. “No one knows what it’s like …”

The shock of the rhythmic emphasis suggests that there is something shocking also, or terrifying, about the men’s minds persisting through the metamorphosis into swine. What does Homer feel is the impact? Is this like a poet or a physicist or a revered grandmother being forced to do slave labour in a field? Or is it like a foreigner unable to communicate her medical emergency? Or is the terror rather something we feel, in the case that their mind persists in its faculty, but the men do not actually know that they are pigs eating acorns? Like stockbrokers and Amazon shoppers?

We are used to the mind-body distinction since DesCartes. But DesCartes’s insight in the cogito is really more radical than that. The thinking being who doubts is separate from everything else it perceives, not only sounds and visions, textures, tastes, and smells, but dreams. One might also include what we refer to as unconscious or subconscious processes in that list. Of all the representations of our condition made since, DesCartes’s seems closest to Homer’s in these lines.

One best tells what a speaker means by a word, however, when one has in mind what words he considers to stand in opposition to the one he uses. A mind-body distinction does not hold in those terms for Homer. In point of fact, it is difficult to imagine how one might translate the notion ‘body’ into Homer’s Greek, when applied to human beings, except in the sense ‘corpse’ (σῶμα, νεκρός). Homer’s conceptions are generally concrete; even νοῦς, ‘mind’, is usually ‘intention’, ‘thought’. But in this instance he does seem to be pointing to the mind as a being or faculty. Homer’s concreteness bears out in a number of distinctions which witness a plurality in our condition, not a duality. Aside from the mind (νοῦς), there are also the usually plural φρένες (which I render ‘mind’s vessels’, taking a hint from the lungs). Then there’s the θυμός, the ‘hot, living breath’, which appears to be the main seat of consciousness. Odysseus is famous for speaking to his θυμός, chiding it to ‘bear up’ under duress. When Hector revives on the battlefield, his θυμός is said to be regathered (Il.XV.240). The ‘mind’ is not this ‘life’s breath’, but it appears to be related, like a harnessing sail to the wind. There are also the always plural πραπίδες—the lungs again? Or the ribs? The diaphragm? And of course there’s the heart, which we still conceptualise, uniquely perhaps, in the Homeric way. Perhaps special mention should be given to the eyes in Homer, as not mere conduits for vision, but special witnesses in their own right. That is, not just me, but my ‘own eyes saw it.’ All of these, and more, can be seen in Homer as what we call ‘seats of consciousness’.

Each of them would seem to suffer from the Cartesian paradox, when we try to identify a seat of consciousness with the self—that is, the entity to whom we refer in the first person or with a proper name. What is that thing which ‘I’ points at? The ‘Odysseus’ who speaks to his θυμός? The Cartesian account of vision encapsulates the paradox: an image is focused on the retina by a lens. That image is translated somehow into electrical data which transmit to the brain. Well and good. Who is watching the screen? Is there a little man with beady eyes and spectacles, behind blue eyes? This paradox puts paid to the modern fetish for identifying the mind with the brain. ‘Brainy’ actually means fatty and dumb. Homer seems to have little regard for the brain. Greek for ‘brain’ means contents of the head (ἐγκέφαλος). Homer seems more to look to the breath and the lungs. Words are winged because they move through air. They are air, in a material sense. The best we can do, with the whole of our apparatus, is give special shape, direction, and density to the air as we expel it from our lungs.

In the ancient world there developed a potent opposition between soul and body, ψυχή and σῶμα. The mind or the reason is argued to be the highest part of the soul, in the works of Plato and of Aristotle. This is the duality later supplanted by DesCartes’s, of mind and body, or mind and everything else. But the fundamental classical opposition does not register in Homer. It is true that for all the Greek thinkers, a main difference between a living being and a corpse is the absence of the soul in the latter. But ψυχή should not be translated ‘soul’, or even ‘psyche’, in Homer. It is a thing which flies off at the moment of death, gibbering like a bat, headed to a dank and dreary place. It is not our true or highest self. It still answers to the name it was used to hearing in life, but if you speak to her, she doesn’t have any news. I think ‘ghost’ gets at the idea. It survives death, but it would seem that nothing very important survives death in Homer, except one’s reputation. Although the Homeric psyche only leaves a human being at the moment of death, it doesn’t seem to contribute anything to the animation of life, like the ‘life’s breath’ and the ‘heart’ do, when one is yet living.

In light of Homer’s way of speaking and representing things, it can seem to an Homerist that the later vaunted philosophical oppositions, such as ‘soul/body’ and ‘mind/body’, are simplistic, naive, and brutally reductive. In addressing the varieties of our empirical experience and its seats, as we also do when we speak ‘from the heart’ or ‘from the gut’, Homer seems better to answer the realities of our lived experience in the nouns and verbs of his poetry; and, in my opinion at least, this is to be the better philosopher.

“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,

Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” —Hamlet

Eurylochus runs away in terror back to the ship after whatever it is he’s seen. Between his blubbering and his hysteria, he provokes and irritates everyone. But when he finally gets around to telling his tale, he stokes the oral-theory folks to life. This is because Homer (Odysseus) nearly repeats a series of lines, in Eurylochus’ mouth, which he had already used in direct description. This has to be explained, they say. It’s a singer’s rest! Such repetitions are a concession to the imagined burdens of an improviser composing from metrical formulas during a performance. But as soon as one learns his text enough to realise that Homer is arranging his words with a view to their tonal and rhythmic effects through an underlying hexameter, not pasting together hexameters from toneless metrical formulas, one realises that Homer’s narrative is at once, and natively, a musical composition. And one would as soon explain repetition in music, as wetness in water.

The rest during musical repetition is really in the auditor, if it exists anywhere, but when nearly equivalent lines are sounded, one is jarred awake at the slightest changes between the two. For one thing, this version of the lines is heard in a different voice. There is actually created an hyper-focus on the dissonances. Rather than the extraordinary sequence about men becoming pigs, and the musical climax on the persistence of the mind in the transformed men, we get simply this:

“And they vanished at the same time as a group, nor did a one of them

Emerge into light: and I sat a long time on the lookout.” (259-60)

What amazed Eurylochus, what terrified him to his core, is that the men disappeared! They were made invisible. By going into the house and not re-emerging, they vanished. He has no idea at all that they have been turned into pigs, or anything else, nor anything about what it is they have gone through, though their minds were preserved. There is clearly an hierarchy of initiates here. Eurylochus did not go in the door. He has no idea what went on within the god’s house. And yet he has escaped still to tell a tale of fear and amazement, and so to make a desperate plea, when Odysseus asks him to guide him to Circe’s abode, that he leave him there and himself steer clear of the threat—whatever it was made the men vanish.

But Odysseus will brave an approach.

“Eurylochus, right you are, you stay here in this plot,

Eating and drinking by the ship, empty and black.

But me? I’m going; for a force comes upon me, of necessity.” (271-3)

The subject, ‘necessity’ (ἀναγκή) is separated from its preceding adjective ‘strong’ (κρατερή). I infer that there is a predication going on. In my translation I try to preserve the impact of the words in the order that they appear, although inflected languages generally allow a lot more freedom in word order than is possible in English syntax. But Homer’s is a musical composition: hence nothing is free in the placement: every word and its effective intonation is placed exactly where it needs to be, not from ‘metrical necessity’ or ‘grammatical rule’—though these also have to be observed—but from musical precision, stoking desire in counter-rhythms and cadencing in consummation. To the extent that we are looking at musical compositions in inflected languages, teachers of classical languages need to realise that word order in Greek and Latin is perhaps even more important than in English, albeit for reasons unrelated to syntax.

So what is the necessity which manifests for Odysseus here? What is it that takes away his choice, as though he were at the dominant 7th chord in prospect of the tonic? He has certainly been a coward in sending forth his men like lab rats. Perhaps he needs to atone. Let’s call that a moral necessity. He also needs to rescue his men, whatever it is that’s happened them. Let’s call that a practical necessity, but also a moral one and an human one. But is there also a musical necessity? Odysseus is the man who learns the towns and the mind of men. I reckon he’s the man who needs to know. This is a very powerful necessity. Circe is a mystery, so far an invisibility. If he had to infiltrate the Cyclops’ cave—

So as I might see the man! And what if he gave me a guest gift? (9.229)

—then surely he must penetrate Circe’s mystery, her interior sanctum, go further than Eurylochus or the likes of his horny mate Polites. If Odysseus does not go to her, cross the threshold to know Circe, the song would be lost.

In Greek:

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On Odyssey 10.187-229

A friend who follows the substack told me that for various reasons, it was quite an ordeal for him to read the essays for ‘Homer in English’, my serial audio presentation of Homer’s Odyssey in both English and Greek. At his prompt I have decided to try my hand at recording the latest post as a lecture on video, so he can watch and listen instead. So do expect these offerings on occasion, either as part of each post or a separate supplement. Enjoy! My understanding is that these will also be posted automatically on YouTube, where my channel is called either ‘Amirthanayagam David’ or ‘@amirthanayagamdavid’, I’m not sure which.

Singing Homer is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Do please consider a paid subscription to support my work: I am disabled and have no institutional support. It seems unnatural to me to sequester certain content from those who cannot afford to pay, especially students. But I am keenly aware that an Homerist in 2025 needs to monetise everything he can get his hands on. So I appeal to you, those of you who have the means, please help me do this work of singing Homer for a new generation. Founding members will receive my six-volume set Homer Odysseia, including a Greek text and my original facing translation in linear prose. Each volume is available on Amazon for $9.99 in the US. Purchasing them there is also an excellent way to support the effort. The thing is a work in progress being improved as the performance continues here: the interaction between singing in Greek, enacting in English, and translating for the record, is a living biofeedback. Subscribers who have the first editions report a rewarding experience following along in the Greek as I recite.

In the video above, at around 24 minutes, there is a glitch where somehow a portion of the recording did not register. Here is the complete text: ‘There seems to be a distinction in force, between the creatures that eat us, like lions and other androphagoi, and the creatures we eat, like the pigs, into whom Circe does transform men, and also the creatures who eat from our hand, like the dogs greeting their master after a party, who appear in Homer’s simile.’

—David

P.S. Here are the passages I read in Greek, so you can follow along:

“Ah friends … I mean, we don’t even know in which direction is the dusk nor which the Dawn,

Nor where Helius, shining for mortality, goes beneath the earth

Nor where he comes back up: no, let us have a think, and soon,

If there will yet be any cunning plan—but for my part, I don’t think so.” (10.190-3)

ὦ φίλοι, οὐ γὰρ ϝἴδμεν ὅπηι ζόφος οὐδ’ ὅπηι ἠϝώς

οὐδ’ ὅπηι ἠϝέλιος φαϝεσίμβροτος εἶσ’ ὑπὸ γαῖαν

οὐδ’ ὅπηι ἀννεῖται · ἀλλὰ φραζώμεθα θάσσον,

εἴ τις ἔτ’ ἔσται μῆτις. ἐγὼ δ’ οὐκ οἴομαι εἶναι ·

“For I saw, when I went up to the rough and rocky lookout point,

An island, around which the limitless deep is set as a crown …” (194-5)

ϝεἶδον γὰρ σκοπιὴν ἒς παιπαλόεσσαν ἀνελθών

νῆσον, τὴν πέρι πόντος ἀπείριτος ἐστεφάνωται ·

‘But no, nothing useful came of their blubbering.’ (202)

ἀλλ’ οὐ γάρ τις πρῆξις ἐγίνετο μυρομένοισιν.

These she herself bewitched, when she gave them bad drugs.

Nor did they start up against the men, no; these actually

Stood up wagging their long tails around.

Just as round their lord, when he comes from a dinner party, the dogs

Will wag their tails, for he always brings them treats for their humour:

So around the men the wolves with tough nails, not to mention the lions,

Started tail-wagging. And the men got scared, when they saw the monstrous

portents. (213-19)

τοὺς αὐτὴ κατέθελξεν, ἐπεὶ κακὰ φάρμακ’ ἔδωκεν.

οὐδ’ οἵ γ’ ὡρμήθησαν ἐπ’ ἀνδράσιν, ἀλλ’ ἄρα τοί γε

οὐρῆισιν μακρῆισι περισσαίνοντες ἀνέσταν. 215

ὡς δ’ ὅτ’ ἂν ἀμφὶ ϝἄνακτα κύνες δαίτηθεν ἰόντα

σαίνωσ’, αἰεὶ γάρ τε φέρει μειλίγματα θυμοῦ,

ὣς τοὺς ἀμφὶ λύκοι κρατερώνυχες ἠδὲ λέοντες

σαῖνον · τοὶ δ’ ἔδδεισαν, ἐπεὶ ϝἴδον αἰνὰ πέλωρα.

“It’s either a goddess or a woman. Naw, let’s speak up quick!” (228)

ἢ θεὸς ἠϝὲ γυνή · ἀλλὰ φθεγγώμεθα θάσσον.

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Odyssey 10.187-229

“Ah friends … I mean, we don’t even know in which direction is the dusk nor which the Dawn,

Nor where Helius, shining for mortality, goes beneath the earth

Nor where he comes back up: no, let us have a think, and soon,

If there will yet be any cunning plan—but for my part, I don’t think so.” (10.190-3)

These are some of Odysseus’ μῦθοι, ‘disclosures’ or ‘revelations’, to the crew of his remaining ship, upon their waking up after a day of feasting on the portentous stag he had killed in the woods and carried to shore for them. I don’t think the import of these words receives enough attention. They almost immediately fade from mind once Circe and her magic take the stage. But they say something shocking about the state of Odysseus’ disorientation—meant in the most literal sense—and frame the landing point of Circe’s isle in an extraordinary way.

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What does the man mean, that he doesn’t know where the sun sets or rises? (One might indulge in referring to Odysseus as ‘the man’, because of the poem’s opening line.) He has just filled a day from dawn to sunset: the third dawn after their arrival on Aeaea, he set out to find a lookout point; in the heat of the day, on his way home, he met the thirsty stag. At last his men uncovered themselves—they seem to have been hiding from sun, sky, and land—and feasted upon venison by the seaside until the setting of the sun. All he or his men should need to do, to indicate in which direction the sun rises or which it sets, is point. But Odysseus says he is, just this once, bereft of the signature gift which has got him past the Cyclops: his μῆτις (mētis), his cunning and kenning. This problem of direction and the sun is clearly no ordinary one.

Some fundamental disjunction in reality must underlie Odysseus’ confusion. It is not that the place where the sun rises or sets is a mystery to someone not shrouded in impenetrable cloud or blindness. It is that these places are not where, till now, these men had been wont to point to East and West, the directions from which the East and West winds (Εὖρος and Ζέφυρος) blew.

‘As sure as the sun will rise tomorrow.’ ‘As sure as the sun rises in the east.’ We are prone to using such phrases as expressions of future certainties, often in the context of promises of payment or other vows. Throughout the Odyssey’s narrative, the sun’s feminine alter ego, Eos the dawn, appears to mark and delineate the passage of time; the recurring line in Homer is always ‘when the early-born child appeared’, as though the event is a regularly expected thing, never a surprise, in line with our own habitual maxims. (Mind you, the gods, more than once in Homer, can delay the dawn.) If the sun stopped rising in the east, how would we know? Most often we ground our sense of direction and the cardinal points precisely on the present location and then the anticipated path of the sun. To be sure, GPS and compass readings on a phone are more likely to be our first recourse these days. But those of us of an astronomical fetish will likely associate objects on our horizon, or streets on a city’s grid, with due east and west (that is, the equinoctial points), also north and south, and perhaps the summer and winter solstices. Conspicuous trees or hills do nicely. When describing his homeland in relation to the nearby islands, for example, he describes Ithaca as ‘toward the dusk (πρὸς ζόφον)’, west, while the islands are eastward ‘toward Dawn and Helius (πρὸς ἠϝῶ τ’ ἠϝέλιόν τε)’. Odysseus does in fact go on, seemingly by way of explanation for his confusion, that when he looked out from his lookout on Circe’s isle, there were no discernible guideposts on the horizon:

“For I saw, when I went up to the rough and rocky lookout point,

An island, around which the limitless deep is set as a crown …” (194-5)

So perhaps this is an explanation for Odysseus’ disorientation: the horizon visible presented no familiar guideposts by which to orient himself.

This is an exceedingly strange conundrum, however, for a sailor to consider a handicap. Historians assume that the sailing of Odysseus’ time (let’s not soil ourselves with dates) consisted of ‘coasting’, which is to say, hugging the shore, or at least keeping it in sight. But Odysseus has already, more than once, found himself in open sea. Luck has played a role in finding land, especially at night: ‘some god guided us.’ Perhaps that means he did not know from which direction he had come, so that he would not know whether to go east or west or in between, if he were to leave Aeaea? But this is not what is implied by Odysseus: he seems to say that he does not know East from West at all, in relation to Ithaca or anywhere else, although he has witnessed (yesterday) where the sun now rises and sets. Something has shaken his confidence that those directions from yesterday are the same ones he used to name and know.

Aeolus had helped him by bagging the winds—one presumes, all the ones which did not send his ships straight across the sea to Ithaca. But absent these divine aids, a sailor must have had recourse to the path of the sun, and the patterns of the stars, as a guide. At the last stage of his wanderings, we know that Odysseus left Calypso’s isle, Ogygia, to navigate by night. She told him to keep the Bear on his left; Homer describes the constellation’s spinning motion in place, which implies that the pole must have lain within the Bear. Hence Calypso has advised Odysseus how to travel east, toward the equinoctial dawn. As I have noted, modern astronomers assert that this situation, where the pole was in the Bear, never obtained on this earth. But ancient records across the globe testify to the fact that the pole was once in the Bear. There is also testimony for reversals of East and West, and back again, which imply either that the earth turned upside down or reversed its spin, or both, at different times. In this case, however, the shift from a pole in the Bear to its present location in the region of Ursa Minor requires a change in the direction of the tilt of the earth’s axis, more than the slow precession we observe today will ever allow.

… 7th Century [BCE] Phoenicians were already navigating by Ursa Minor, the Little Bear. [Thales is said to have ‘taught’ the Little Bear to the Greeks, an heretofore unrecognised constellation.] Skilled sailors would only have navigated by Ursa Minor if the celestial pole had already migrated in their era into the territory of that asterism, previously unrecognised and uncelebrated, away from any centrality associated at or near the Great Bear. It was the Little Bear that now seemed to spin in place. This rather suggests that the transition may have been stepwise and sudden, and unrelated to the phenomenon of precession and its current rate, which may indeed be slowing [to judge by Ptolemaic and Mediaeval measurements].

Let us at least soften ourselves to what Homer’s witness requires, that our relationship to the sun and to the cardinal points of the horizon and the pole in the sky has not been fixed and unchanging. An Homerist cannot therefore recline assured that the sun will rise where he expects it to rise, tomorrow.

Circe is the sun’s daughter. How does this signify? The sun has arched over the narrative, like he does the day, from the moment of his mention in the opening lines of the Odyssey. It is through their own chosen folly, we are told—whether also beyond their fate or not, we are not told—that his men’s lives become forfeit, and Odysseus fails in his mission to preserve them. Their mistake is to eat from the cattle of Helius the sun, whose number seems to correspond to the days of the year, although not, it turns out, the same number of these spinning days as we experience in orbit today. Is the loss of days a catastrophic change in the earth’s orbit and the length of the year? Or is it rather metaphorical of Odysseus’ men’s attempt to steal time, to extend their lives in a way that was not allowed them? Let us see if we can make any sense of these things once we get there, to Thrinacia.

The present arrival at Aeaea, however, the realm of the Sun’s daughter, seems to be marked out by Odysseus’ speech as a fundamental moment of reorientation. It seems that perhaps Odysseus’ journey so far, perhaps the fall of Troy itself, has been an event, or series of events, of cosmic disruption and trauma, not only the vivid human drama Homer sings. Indeed, one might conceive of the human narrative Homer gives us as a way of digesting, or ‘processing’, what has in fact been a deadly cosmic upheaval.

In truth Homer does not hide or prevaricate about any of this: the gods are visibly and actively a part of the Iliad’s drama. But their anthropomorphism, which is primarily a fact required of the medium of the singer’s body, tends, for a modern literary audience, to project them into an imaginative realm, divorced from the arena where the humans, the Achilleses and the Ajaxes and the Helens, play out what registers for us as the real drama, grounded in presently tangible and human kinds of realities. From this perspective, the gods are a cultural, or merely fanciful, embellishment. (There have been filmed versions which omit the gods entirely.) But the dramatic truth of Homer is in fact that the singer is embodying agents of many shapes and sizes, not all of them human, because such were the wilful actors and players known actually to have been involved in those events. One should conclude that for Homer and his audience, the planet-gods, Ares and Aphrodite and Zeus and Athena, were visibly real and wilful agents in the drama of the Trojan War. Homer did not invent such moments as the Götterdämmerung, the war of gods against gods in the Iliad, nor the Indo-European idea that the smith god was married to the love god, and cuckolded by the god of war.

From the perspective of a composer composing for a solo performer, equipped with his voice, his body, and his prop stick—which can become everything from a sword to an oar to a thunderbolt to a weaving rod—every agent who must participate in the action must also be shown to be plausibly self-motivated. Of course Homer at times takes licence in the service of the drama, in private apparitions and the theatre of the councils of the gods. This is not bearing witness in a courtroom. Boundaries are stretched, as ever in the Odyssey, when Nestor declares that Athena’s presence alongside Odysseus in the battlefields of Troy was, in fact, manifest to everybody. Yet I submit that there is not an historian worthy of the name, however so rationalist, who is not at some point confronted with a divine hand. They are Thucydides confronting the extraordinary debacle of Athens in Sicily.

In most of this, the sun is a benign and passive agent. In the Tale of Ares and Aphrodite, for example, Helius is merely Hephaestus’ lookout man and tattletale, peeking in at windows, as the sun will do, on Aphrodite’s adulteries. The invocation of the risen dawn in the narrative is a temporal marker, a narrative clock, like Immanuel Kant’s daily walk into Königsberg. Today, however, when people imagine the end of the world, as they are perennially wont to do, they most often imagine an action, or passion, of the Sun. The sun is going to go nova, or there’s going to be a massive coronal discharge to disrupt our microwave communications, or at the end of times the sun is going to become a ‘red giant’ and swallow the earth. Otherwise some as yet unknown intruder, a comet or an asteroid or meteorite, is going to strike and blow our earth asunder, but this terrifying diabolus is never going to be any of the seemingly clockwork objects now visible in the night sky. What is perhaps impossible for us to understand or imagine, including on a purely visual level, is the world Homer directly depicts: one where Helius the sun is far from the most powerful being in the sky. Proud Jupiter, radiant Venus, ruddy Mars, now points of light, were feared and worshipped. They wielded thunderbolt, aegis, and spear. Helius, by contrast, merely shines, for the benefit both of the gods and of mortal humanity, spreading rays over ripening fruits and unharvested fields.

The importance of the sun in the Odyssey may perhaps signify the accession of a new age, one where the ethos of regularity in the sun takes over from the electric and electrifying gods, the age of Zeus and his predecessors, who take on newly quiescent and observant roles. But this is speculation, to which I welcome different takes and inspirations. We do well to remember that the settled regularity which allows Odysseus to navigate by the stars at the pole, at the end of the journey which reorients here at Circe’s isle, and perhaps again over the stretch of years on Calypso’s Ogygia at the ‘navel of the sea,’ is nevertheless not to navigate by our pole. Our pole could not have been in the Bear without the intrusion of yet another shift in the order of the world. Indeed, Homer’s invocation of the appearance of the pole in the Bear may well be a way to transport his audience into ‘that time’, rather than a reminder of the present sky over their heads. But it remains the case that Homer’s poems, including his description of the spinning of the Bear in the sky, may be musical memories actually surviving from ‘that time’.

The effect of Odysseus’ speech, especially his mention of the sight of smoke rising from a steading in the midst of the isle, is to break the men’s hearts. Of the several perilous and deadly adventures they have already had, it is said that they are put in mind only of these two: the deeds of Antiphates the Laestrygon, and the violence of the Cyclops, the man-eater. In both these episodes, giants hurl mountain-tops and mighty boulders down upon them. In the case of the Laestrygonians, eleven of Odysseus’ twelve ships are destroyed with their men. We spoke of ‘processing’ catastrophe through humanising story; are these two episodes in particular, ways of speaking about the cosmic catastrophes that might have left not only Odysseus and his men, but the earth itself disoriented? Are giants hurling stones a way of speaking about the bombardment of the earth by bolides, a rain of meteoric iron which ushered in an ‘iron age’? If Odysseus’ harried fleet is the ark of humanity, this bombardment and upheaval of the earth’s parameters must have decimated our numbers. Odysseus lost eleven twelfths of his ships and men. His crew wail aloud and burst into tears.

‘But no, nothing useful came of their blubbering.’ (202)

Odysseus moves quickly to number and divide his men, appointing a captain to a second group. He himself and Eurylochus are the two archons. Given what we know of his intentions to bribe the men with dinner, so that they, rather than he, will go to investigate the smoke—I guess Odysseus has had his fill of running toward the danger, like when he alone led his ship to the land of the Cyclopes—the whole census and democratic exercise seems rigged. Like all democratic exercises? The lots are shaken, but there’s no surprise when Eurylochus’ lot falls out.

The whole speech of disorientation and its aftermath are barely ten lines. We slip immediately into the world of Circe and her spells. So in dwelling on it, perhaps I am distorting what Homer is giving us. But it sticks out nevertheless, all the more for how we are tempted to slip by the speech without marking what the man is actually saying.

The search party is greeted at Circe’s stone house by mountain wolves and lions. These creatures also are man-eaters, androphagoi, like the Cyclopes and the Laestrygonians, yet we do not speak of such carnivores as ‘cannibals’. The description does not suggest that Circe has transformed them from humans, but merely that her drugs have tamed them somehow, so they behave like domestic dogs, fawning and wagging their tails for a treat.

These she herself bewitched, when she gave them bad drugs.

Nor did they start up against the men, no; these actually

Stood up wagging their long tails around.

Just as round their lord, when he comes from a dinner party, the dogs

Will wag their tails, for he always brings them treats for their humour:

So around the men the wolves with tough nails, not to mention the lions,

Started tail-wagging. And the men got scared, when they saw the monstrous

portents. (213-19)

There are many of us, mind you, who fear dogs instinctively. Mankind’s friend can bite. I heard from David Grene that pig dogs can be especially nasty, if, for example, you have a fall in the sty; schweinhund is a dirty word for a reason. Perhaps some canines can’t tell us apart from pigs, like the narrator at the end of Orwell’s Animal Farm. There seems to be a distinction in force, between the creatures that eat us, like lions and other androphagoi, and the creatures we eat, like the pigs, into whom Circe does transform men, and also the creatures who eat from our hand, like the dogs greeting their master after a party, who appear in Homer’s simile.

A favourite future pig is Polites, a man whom Odysseus claims is

‘The one I cared about most among my crew, and trusted best …’ (225)

He sends him on for cannon fodder all the same. Dear Polites hears Circe’s beautiful singing as she moves back and forth at the loom.

“It’s either a goddess or a woman. Naw, let’s speak up quick!” (228)

It seems clear that this sailor, and his buddies, are pretty love-starved. The cosmic fire sparks also in diminutive organs.

How does the chaos, death, and disorientation of unmitigated catastrophe, sit so close to this kind of comedy? There’s a story in that. In Lear, Edmund the villain calls his brother Edgar the ‘catastrophe of the comedy’. ‘Catastrophe’ is a word that belongs to comedy. It refers specifically to the climactic scene of resolution in a comedy, when the world turns (strephein) (upside-)down (kata). In the human realm, this means the downtrodden but deserving rise to the top, especially the plucky hero, while in a sudden twist, the villain, his allies and plans are thwarted and he is exposed, to meet his just punishment. Outside the whole scene, but illuminating it like the sun, is the woman who accepts the now proven hero to be her mate. Hence the turning over of the world becomes infused with morality and justice, crowned by a sacred marriage.

The turning over of fortune’s wheel is another, less judgmental way of figuring the reversals of catastrophe. Some go up, some go down, many are lost. In history, some human survivors of catastrophe, even after decimations, can feel themselves justified, or ‘chosen’. Edgar has the considerable misfortune of being a comic hero stuck, alas, in a harrowing tragedy. (Several generations only knew a Lear where Edgar gets to marry a still-living Cordelia. These people knew how to fix Shakespeare.) We already know that Odysseus is going to lose all his men to their folly, even his favourite Polites. At least the latter has earned a name in the cast, unlike most of his comrades. The death of Penelope’s suitors to come is not only a punishment, it is a sacrifice of the first-born, the flower of Egypt. Their slaughter amounts to the sacrifice of the sons of the fathers Odysseus took to war at Troy, and also lost. Two generations decimated. Odysseus is either himself the diabolus, the dis-aster, the cause of catastrophe, or its avatar. But the man is also the comic hero. Perhaps you’ve seen this coming: Odysseus is the Catastrophe of the Comedy. He’s the upside down man. Come on for the ride, there’ll be laughs—I promise! Sure as the sun will rise.

In Greek:

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Odyssey 10.135-86

The line in my title, said in this case about Fred, recurs through the Iliad upon the despatching of a warrior. Many a man experiences the last moment of life this way in Homer’s narrative. Here in Odyssey 10, in the midst of one of the most strangely detached and placeless moments in all Homer, these same words describe the death of a solitary stag, at the hands of a solitary Odysseus wandering in the woods. The poor deer had been heading from pasture in the wood down to the river to drink, for, as Odysseus says, ‘the strength of the Sun (μένος ἠϝελίοιο) was getting him.’

Who is this stag? And why is he in the Odyssey?

We are on Circe’s Isle, Aeaea. This fact is announced by the narrator Odysseus before it could be known either to the hero of his story or that man’s remaining ship. It must therefore be important that his audience be aware of their location, as a frame for the events that occur to them there, before the hero and his men become aware of Circe for themselves. That includes this encounter with the solitary stag. Hence we are in the unfortunate position of guessing what an audience—which might as well be us—is supposed to know, and what not, when reading this passage of Homer.

Circe is announced as a daughter to Helius the sun, and full sister to Aeetes, who figures prominently in the story of Jason, among others. Aeetes and Circe are children of Perse, daughter of Ocean. Hence these are all pre- or non-Olympian deities. About the significance of the sun, we shall have more to say in the next instalment. Jason is several times mentioned in Homer; hence his stories would likely have been things we are supposed to know. He belonged to the generation prior to that of the Trojan War. This generation, the generation of Heracles, projects an aura over the Homeric world, while the latter, which is pre-archaic or ‘mythological’ to us, all the same carries within it the aura of its own history and ancient history. In the present generation of the Trojan War, Jason’s son did not join the Achaeans, we are told, but served instead, out of Lemnos, as the army’s importer of wine. ‘Served himself’ is probably more accurate, as a war profiteer. Karl Marx notes (or footnotes) how Agamemnon and Menelaus themselves monopolised the distribution of this imported necessity and addictive commodity among the troops, gathering all manner of precious or essential commodities in barter—bronze, steel, hides, the cattle themselves, and even, notably, male slaves (Iliad VII.470 ff.). The prestige of the past translated into privileged access to a closed market, as it did for the Sacklers selling addictive pain killers.

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Circe is a witch. One does not know if using this appellation today is illuminating or distractingly offensive. Be that as it may, she fits what is for us an enduring archetype, a woman of power wielding a wand, capable of magical transformations of herself or others. In other words, hers is a dream part for a campy rhapsode wielding a stick! She is described as a ‘dread goddess (δεινὴ θεὸς) capable of speech (αὐδήεσσα).’ The word seems to imply ‘speech intelligible to humans’. On the face of it, this would seem to be an odd qualification for Homer; for all of his gods make speeches. But the direct interactions between god and man are rare. Homer’s distinction could well imply that the gods in scenes on Olympus do not in fact use human speech. When Leukothea, the White Goddess, comes to Odysseus’ rescue upon the wreck of his raft at Poseidon’s hands, she is described as having once been Ino, Cadmus’ daughter, a mortal ‘capable of speech (βροτὸς αὐδήεσσα)’. This historical fact almost seems to justify the notion that when she appears to Odysseus as a petrel, there ought to be no wonder that this particular bird knew how to talk. It is curious that Homer seems concerned with how verbal interactions between human and divinity should be made plausible, when in point of fact, gods speaking dramatic speeches in Greek would seem to be a calling card of his. His use of this distinction (αὐδήεσσα) sets off the depiction of Odysseus’ many interactions with Athena in her guises, and makes one realise how very special they are, for Homer himself.

At the end of his long tale (in Book 12), Odysseus refers to Calypso also as a ‘dread goddess endowed with speech’. Perhaps, then, the ‘good witch’ is an earth-bound, non-Olympian rank of deity (for some reason fond of consorting with an Odyssean type). But this otherwise plausible bit of categorisation is given the lie by Olympian Athena herself. In the Odyssey, her battle spear has become a magic wand, not to mention an umbrella in an umbrella stand. She is Homer the rhapsode’s genie of the story, the original Belinda of Oz, the deus in his very body’s machina. Athena as the good witch and God’s daughter, rather than an omnipotent God or God’s son, seems Homer’s way of making divinity intelligible to man in the course of the Odyssey. But, as Plato might chime in, Athena is not a ‘good’ witch because she is good or seeks the good: rather, she’s our Belinda because she favours our hero, despite all his faults, and more winningly, his long-suffering wife.

But there is no reason to suppose that Circe is a ‘good witch’. Her title, after all, is ‘dread goddess’. She must be a known quantity if this interlude with the stag is going to work. In particular, it seems we must need to know that Circe transforms humans into animals, and that this is a talent she was known and dreaded for. We may also infer that this possibility must have been instinctively terrifying for Homer’s audience. I think the audiences with which I am familiar would rather be inclined to indulge the fantasy of inhabiting an animal. Where would Disney’s economy be, without the power of this fantasy? As a youngster I daydreamed of being Dr. Doolittle. But in most such animate fantasies, the animal avatars retain the power of speech, or a level of ability to communicate with humans. Some considerable part of the terror of such a transformation, for Homer and his ‘test audience’, would therefore be in the loss of the ability to speak. I think there lies the power for him in the distinction intimated by αὐδήεσσα. What if the heifer sacrificed by Nestor and his sons could speak the sacrifice of women she embodies, while the women and mothers of Pylos ululate their alleluia? The ability to speak partly humanises otherwise dreadful divinities; the inability instead dehumanises animals and other animate or inanimate beings.

The horror of being unable to speak or make myself understood—I am thankful to say—is something I have only experienced acutely in a hospital bed. The aphasia was quite uncanny and unnerving. I couldn’t speak my name when asked, though I knew it well enough. Once, I spent the night separated by a curtain from a woman who was apparently East European or Eurasian. She was groaning from the gut all night, saying words unintelligible to the carers who looked in on her (and to me lying awake). She did not survive. I only first caught sight of her as they were wheeling her out in the morning. The distressed nurses were chatting: ‘we just couldn’t understand her.’

Odysseus is either confessional or flatly comic about his cowardice. He and his men spend two days and nights exhausted upon pulling in to Circe’s isle. At the third dawn Odysseus sets out to explore. Once again we have an evocative line from the Iliad, only to cheat expectation:

‘Just then I took up my spear and my sharp sword …’ (10.145)

But no combat ensues—at least until he meets the stag, and that encounter is more of an ambush. Spear and sword, these are not surveillance instruments. From a lookout point he discerns smoke rising from the ground,

‘From Circe in her rooms, through the thick brush and woodland.’ (151)

He thinks to himself for a bit, and decides that the better part of valour would be to get some of his men to go investigate rather than himself.

‘Thus did it seem to me the more profitable thing, as I thought about it …’ (153)

Part of the plan is to give them dinner, who were starving at their landing place, before sending a party of them out into the woods after the rising smoke. In other words, Odysseus means to bribe his men, and the formidable stag picks the wrong one of the sun’s days to cross his path. Sicut cervus desiderat ad fontes aquarum.

One almost expects Odysseus to have a conversation with the prodigious stag, the way two warriors in the Iliad would exchange vaunts, names, and lineages before engaging. The ghostly effect here, which seems to be the point of the scene, is enhanced by the fact that Homer’s audience may well have known exactly who this stag was, or suspected his identity amongst a few options. From later sources we find the story of Actaeon, for example, who was turned into a stag for having spied on Artemis when she was bathing naked. This was apparently tantamount to spoiling her sacred virginity. That story has some interesting resonances with Odysseus’ own, in that he pointedly compares Nausicaa to Artemis when he intrudes upon her in the woods. In a twist, however, of the sort proprietary to Homer, Odysseus is the naked one in that encounter. (To be honest, we don’t actually know the state of dress of Nausicaa or her companions. One presumes they did not wash all their clothes.) Is the stag Odysseus’ upside down alter ego? One consequence of seeing Homer as a figure at the dawn of classical Greek culture, rather than an achievement at the apex of a lost one, is that one closes one’s nose to the smell of satire, at every level of detail.

Satire requires, at the very least, awareness of past artists and past art. Beyond the Odyssey’s takes on the Iliad, which seem obviously to be there, modern scholarship seems only willing to posit ‘tradition’ as the context of Homer’s poems, understood more as a source than a foil. Tradition is a quick and easy recourse for academics who fear the evident miracle of authorship—not just the Homeric production, but authorship generally, a gift of inscrutable Muses unknown to them, on whom they are loth to admit their dependence. The search for their beloved ‘intertextuality’ is confronted by an ancient world whose historical library sits mostly emptied. Projecting this beloved framework onto a ‘tradition’ without a people or an history, which cannot be studied by field researchers, affords them considerable freedom of invention. But the evidence of his dialogue with the Iliad suggests that the poet of the Odyssey is a poet who knew both other poets and other poems. Homer’s invocation of the Muse by itself implies this. This episode of the thirsty stag has the sniff of lost repartee, though we only hear one side of the conversation. It tantalises with its sense of allusion and unconsummated allegory, to the point that its sense of mystery is perhaps unnaturally enhanced.

The upshot is that one cannot definitively or even sensibly answer why the unfortunate nobleman of a stag makes his appearance in the Odyssey. But he, all the same, imprints on me a powerful lesson, so I shall testify. All eating is cannibalism. Now that is not what Homer says, but it is something a Homerist might conclude, he being someone, for better or for worse, who is inclined to draw lessons from Homer’s narrative. The Cyclops shocked us with his man-eating; Antiphates the Laestrygonian made it almost seem funny. Odysseus draws forth his spear from the stag’s corpse, as though from a fallen warrior. He says exactly what he did with the spear afterward, because the performer is dealing with the concrete prop in his hand as part of his enactment. Homer does not waste an opportunity to describe Odysseus’ handiwork in plaiting a rope out of withes: in the Odyssey, all such hand-crafting, from the building a raft to his marriage bed, Penelope’s loom to weaving this rope, is worthy of the Muses’ hexameters. He then heaves the beast around his neck and leans on the spear he just put aside, so that the unencumbered performer, leaning on his staff, can nevertheless adumbrate a complete figure in mime.

Odysseus throws down the stag in front of his men—shall I call him Fred?—so they can gape in awe. He says words for the moment:

“Ah friends, not yet do we go down, though we grieve,

Into the house of Hades—not before the allotted fateful day should come.” (174-5)

I suspect, however, that we are all too aware that the fateful day has come untimely for Fred—whoever he may actually be (or have been). Does Odysseus know that he has, in effect, murdered someone? There may be a difference in this regard between the teller and the hero of his tale. The teller seems keen that his audience know that this is Circe the sorceress’ isle. The hero, meanwhile, may prefer not to look his gift stag in the mouth, so to speak. He refers to the stag as a ‘dread prodigy’ or ‘wonder’ or ‘portent’ (δϝεινοῖο πελώρου). This is an odd thing to say about a deer; not so odd about Fred. The epithet proximately recalls the epithet of the ‘dread goddess’, and suggests her agency at what we should call a ‘meta’ level if we were reading literature, but a concrete one in Homer’s native realm of sounded oral music.

Let’s remember food and drink, says Odysseus, let’s not starve. And they tuck in, for a whole sun’s passage, into Señor Stag.

‘We sat around feasting unutterable amounts of flesh and pleasing alcohol …’ (184)

How is this eating different from cannibalism? What exactly is so revolting about the idea of the Cyclops chewing his food, as you and I do? The idea that you do not know who your food might be, is similar, to my mind, to the idea underlying the culture of guest and host, that the stranger might be a god. You don’t know. An Homerist can have no objections to vegetarians; many are so through religious or cultural upbringing, for reasons of taste, digestion, health, and more. But Homerists must reject the proselytisers of vegetarianism, the ideologues who object morally to the eating of animals, as similar to racists. What have they got against plants? Why do they deny them consciousness and intelligence? Their chewing and burping is disgusting, whether eating man flesh or broccoli. Neither the felled redwood nor the poisoned alga are blessed with human voice, so their wails go unheard, at least by us. But under a microscope there is more like than different between animal and plant cells. Life must eat life, kill life and chew life, to live. It seems we stigmatise cannibals as a way of distracting ourselves from this reality of eating. Perhaps this is similar to stigmatising incest as a way of diverting attention from certain realities of sex. All life, after all, is our own kind, and kin.

When his men emerge to behold the stag, it’s said that they ‘uncovered themselves’ (ἐκ δὲ καλυψάμενοι). They have literally been in hiding, from whatever might see them, for more than two days. We shall have to discuss what it is about their recent experience had left them cowering in their ship, not even willing to set foot on land. It must be said, that more than Odysseus, it is Fred who has drawn them out. The spoil of the hunt and the joy of preparing it for a feast, and of course the meal itself, meat and drink, have served to restore these traumatised men to their humanity. The sight of Fred has made the men thankful to be alive. Being human, being grateful: it’s all part of being cannibal.

In Greek:

DUKE SENIOR

Come, shall we go and kill us venison?

And yet it irks me the poor dappled fools,

Being native burghers of this desert city,

Should in their own confines with forkèd heads

Have their round haunches gored.

FIRST LORD

Indeed, my lord,

The melancholy Jaques grieves at that …

Today my Lord of Amiens and myself

Did steal behind him as he lay along

Under an oak, whose antique root peeps out

Upon the brook that brawls along this wood;

To the which place a poor sequestered stag

That from the hunter’s aim had ta’en a hurt

Did come to languish. And indeed, my lord,

The wretched animal heaved forth such groans

That their discharge did stretch his leathern coat

Almost to bursting, and the big round tears

Coursed one another down his innocent nose

In piteous chase. And thus the hairy fool,

Much markèd of the melancholy Jaques,

Stood on th’ extremest verge of the swift brook,

Augmenting it with tears.

—As You Like It 2.1

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Odyssey 10.80-134

The episode of the Laestrygonians is a mix of old and new, familiar and unfamiliar. I suppose that in these episodes of Odysseus’ wanderings, which are relatively self-contained, one is still faced with the problem of sequencing: in the sense that whatever architectonic ideas the teller may have, from moment to moment there will be the concern with the segue, of maintaining interest and sustaining the narrative energy of what has come before. The story of the Aeolian Isle, which contains Aeolus’ musically violent rebuke of Odysseus, has managed the problem divertingly. But by any measure, the long and intensely involving episode of the Cyclops must still be considered a hard act to follow. By contrast, it seems to me the episode of the Lotus-Eaters might have been placed almost anywhere to good effect: by itself it distils the gist, of the human longing for physical satisfaction and psychic escape, countering the longing (and need) for home.

After moving on from the Aeolian Isle and the desperate frustration of almost getting home—not for the first time (see 9.79)—we are immediately regaled with the spice of a traveller’s tale:

For six days then we sailed, day and night the same,

But on the seventh we arrived at the steep citadel of Lamus,

Telepylus of Laestrygonia—where herdsman to herdsman

Calls out, as he drives them in, but the other responds as he drives them out.

There an unsleeping man could pick up two wages,

The one for tending cattle, the other pasturing flocks of white sheep:

For close by are the paths of the night and of the day. (10.80-86)

One calls this a traveller’s tale in part because it is hard to make sense of it from the perspective of, say, geography. The paths of the night and day (νυκτός τε καὶ ἤματα … κέλευθοι) must mean the track of the sun’s daily motion. The points of sunset and sunrise on the horizon do come closer and closer together the further north or south you go before reaching the arctic circle or the antarctic one, at the respective midwinters and midsummers. One presumes midsummer is on Homer’s mind here, because the night then, in those regions, would be short, with the sun briefly dipping beneath the horizon and rising again only slightly to the east. Perhaps the ambitious herdsman could skip sleep and tend two herds of crepuscular grazers, one evening and one morning. Or so the foreigners imagine. People still imagine all kinds of things about the tropics, just from spending gated vacations there. Perhaps what Homer had heard about these regions was that the shortness of the midsummer night was a permanent condition, rather than a seasonal one. Whatever the case, Homer’s audience must have been from a region further towards the equator, where the nights were always long enough for a bout of sleep, and a single day’s wages had to do for a shepherd. Traveller’s tales score points with exotic twists to daily routines and schedules, not fine points of husbandry and geography.

The prejudices induced by the premises of modern Homeric scholarship tend toward breaking apart Homer’s massive poem into smaller units: songs and episodes. Partly this instinct is natural from the premise of formulaic oral improvisation and the oral aural groupings reflected in ‘ring composition’. But it also takes its cue from depictions of performance inside the poems; we have witnessed several performances of Demodocus, for example, some by hearsay but one, the love story of Ares and Aphrodite, in full opera. These suggest after-dinner entertainments of, at most, several hundred lines, on quite a different scale from the many thousands of lines of each of the Iliad and the Odyssey. On the other hand, we have it from Athenian authorities including Plato, that a rule was instituted in Athens during the time of Hipparchus, son of the tyrant Peisistratus, that Homer’s lines needed to be performed in order: when one rhapsode finished—whether exhausted or at his preferred time—the next must take up the song exactly at the line where the first left off. One source attributes this law instead to Solon, so that performing Homer could be conceived as a sort of team relay. Both accounts suggest that Homer’s lines came to Athens as known and complete sets of things, of considerable size and a fixed order, like Wagner’s Ring or a multi-volume novel, which required a number of soloists in sequence to perform them coherently in sequence.

In the modern concert hall, it was once the standard practice to excerpt movements from different pieces and composers, so as to ‘compose’ an evening of variety, taste, and harmony … More recent audiences of ‘classical’ music, like those of Peisistratean Athens in relation to Homer, have [instead] demanded whole compositions in their original sequence. Consider that such a demand begins in the audience, and bespeaks either an intimacy with the original whole as a whole, or, at the very least, the knowledge that such a whole exists.

The Lotus-Eaters notwithstanding, there does seem to be an order to Odysseus’ episodes. Consider the mystery of his fleet’s eleven other ships. They occupy a most peculiar psychic dimension in the storyteller’s imagination. Twelve in number were the ships which escaped the Cicones and followed Odysseus to land at night, by accident—‘it was some god guided us’—at the goat-filled island opposite the Cyclopean shore. The next day nine goats went to each ship, but ten to Odysseus’; at home or encamped at Troy he might have been a king or chieftain, but in their escape from there Odysseus seems to receive the honour merely of a captain, a first among equals. Perhaps the political order of the world has changed somehow. How might this democratic flight on board ship affect the standing of his men when they arrive back home in quasi-feudal Ithaca? This is not a question we shall have to face, it turns out. But it remains the case that when he gets home, Odysseus will have to prove his worth in rags, including his worthiness to rule.

On the second day at dawn, Odysseus makes an announcement with no explanation: only he and his ship’s crew will go to explore the land opposite, the land of the Cyclopes. Hence eleven ships miss entirely the adventure with the Cyclops, the giant, the terror, and the cannibalism; and so, it seems, they miss out on any experience gained or lessons learned. They witnessed nothing, not Odysseus’ three vaunts to Polyphemus, nor the hurled mountain tops, nor the terror of the water’s backward surge. In a very real sense, we in the audience are closer witnesses to those events than they will ever be. Hence the men of these eleven ships become a sort of void or null space in the story, and in our experience of it.

The only thing evident to such non-participants may be that Odysseus’ leadership has been a failure. This conclusion would no doubt be reinforced after the harrowing round trip, blown back from the sight of Ithaca’s home fires to the distant Isle of Aeolus. Now, when they reach the inlet and cove of the Laestrygonians, it does not appear that Odysseus’s ship is in the lead any more at all. No, the eleven mystery ships traipse into the narrow inlet and blithely tie their ships in the calm waters within.

But I alone kept my black ship outside,

Where I was at the edge, having tied my cables off the cliff.

And I stood at a lookout point, once I went up the rough and rocky way.

From there neither the operations of cattle nor of men appeared,

But we saw only smoke, rising from the ground. (95-99)

Why do Odysseus and his crew not enter, but rather tie their ship outside? The man himself does not tell us. Is it that they alone have learnt the lessons of caution after nearly succumbing to the Cyclops? That could be simply true, but perhaps there is also a more sinister implication: is Odysseus no longer in charge of the fleet? Has he in fact been deposed? Odysseus hints at nothing of the kind, but the evidence is plain to see: where the other eleven ships had once been following his—‘The ships that followed me (μοι ἕποντο) were twelve in number’ (9.159)—now they’ve gone on ahead, seemingly unaware that their erstwhile captain is not with them. Could there even be hostility between him and them? No intent is apparent or hinted at, but it does so happen that it is the actions initiated by Odysseus and his ship’s crew which first alert the Laestrygonians to the presence of the rest of the fleet in the harbour, and which lead to the surreal scene of their slaughter. May one wonder if Odysseus feels, at the end of the day, that their fate had served them right?

The whole episode seems a bit of a sendup. Odysseus sends off two unnamed men, with a third ‘as a herald,’ to follow the mountain road into town and see what they see. They run into a girl fetching water, a Rebecca at the well. The scene seems set for flirtation. Chance meetings at the water well decide history. These men must not remember when they last saw a friendly girl. She turns out to be the daughter of a Laestrygonian heavy, one Antiphates, ‘Against Speech’, who, true to his name, shall have no lines. She herself is nameless, unless her epithet is her name: Ἰφθίμη, a derivation from ϝίς suggesting ‘strong’, ‘valiant’, ‘sturdy’. It is most likely functioning as a title, whose literal meaning is not necessarily in the foreground; as when subjects say, for example, ‘Your Excellency’ or ‘Majesty’ or ‘Highness’. Yet I cannot resist translating ‘Beefy’. I reckon she was a pretty big girl. There was no danger of these lonely sailors having their way with that one.

She takes the men home, they round the corner and it’s ‘Hello, Mum!’. Except she’s a giantess as tall as a mountain. They are aghast at her. Mum’s in charge around here, as she seems to be most places outside the land of the Cyclopes. The rest of Odysseus’ adventures seem to be exclusively in the face of threats to his life and masculinity from feminine forces. It’s a sorry shift for a man in arms, used to engaging on the battlefield where men know what the rules are about hitting below the belt. Mrs. Antiphates yells out for her husband, up to no good, as no doubt he usually was, hanging out in the marketplace; Antiphates dutifully rushes home and straight away eats one of Odysseus’ men. Not sure if it’s the herald who wears the red shirt.

Now, when we meet the Cyclops, the original cannibal giant, there is terror in anticipation. Homer and Odysseus paint the scene with a novelist’s and a cinematographer’s touch: Polyphemus looms long in the presence before we meet him. ‘Let’s just grab some of this cheese and get out of this creepy place!’ We hear him before we see him: he throws down a huge weight of dry timber outside the cave while Odysseus and his men tremble inside. He then blocks the door with an immense, unshiftable stone. And when he finishes his milking chores and finally notices the little men, they are terrified at the sheer depth of his voice. The sense of ‘I’ve got a bad feeling about this’ builds exquisitely. When the Cyclops snatches up and eats Odysseus’ men, there is abrupt revulsion and gruesome shock.

With Antiphates and his wife, however, and the friendly daughter, the scene is almost comical. The confrontation with the mountain-sized woman is both sudden and unanticipated, too unexpected to be shocking. The henpecked husband comes home and eats the strangers almost as a domestic duty. The effect is more surreal than revolting, macabre rather than gruesome and savage. And the tableau which follows only taps further into the surreal. The rest of the beefy Laestrygonians are roused to head to the harbour, where they proceed to go spear-fishing in a tidal pool, by throwing huge rocks like pebbles at the writhing creatures trapped within. The eleven ships provide themselves as fresh seafood for happy hour! These alien men are called ‘giants’, but I can’t help translating ‘gigantes’. This is a correct transliteration, but it is also what modern Greeks call the giant beans they cook so wonderfully.

Says Odysseus:

While they were destroying the men within the depths of the harbour,

I drew my sharp sword from beside my thigh, (125-6)

That last line recurs in the Iliad, ‘I drew my sharp sword from beside my thigh.’ Sometimes a sword is just a sword. Usually in the Iliad this line precedes the description of some exploit in battle, a use of the sword in combat. A version occurs when Achilles briefly contemplates drawing his sword to kill Agamemnon, right then and there during the public confrontation which begins that poem. If the depiction of Antiphates’ household is, in part, a self-parody of what Homer has achieved in his tale of the Cyclops, here we arrive at meta-parody, satire even, at the expense of the poet’s trade in the Iliad. A line designed to create expectation of some devastating act of war, is here allowed to poof into magician’s flowers. In the Odyssey, the lines continue:

And I struck off the stern cables of the cobalt-prowed ship with it. (127)

Odysseus’ ship is parked outside the inlet, out of sight of the mêlée within. He draws his sword to cut the cables and escape. ‘Run away! Run away!’ say Monty Python’s Knights of the Round Table.

In gladness into the deep she escaped the overhanging cliffs—

My own ship, that is; the rest of them together were destroyed where they were. (131-2)

So that was the fate of the eleven ships and their men, to be broken by rocks and fished for giants’ dinners. How sad is Odysseus about this? Recurring in these episodes are a pair of lines, saying how he and his men sailed on grieving at heart,

ἄσμενοι ἐκ θανάτοιο, φίλους ὀλέσαντες ἑταίρους.

Pleased to get away from death, having lost our dear comrades.

It seems Homer delights in exploiting the new resonances which can be drawn out when lines of music recur, as when, in a song, the chorus returns with its same words newly illuminated after the injection of new verses. When these lines of transition first occur, after the debacle of the Cicones, Odysseus relates how his ships would not proceed before they cried out three times for each man lost in battle—six men per ship for twelve ships. But this time, there’s no mention of any mourning. The line above consists of two dependent clauses, both constructed from aorist participles, with no connecting particle or explanatory conjunction. Though there is no verbal prompt so to do, context in the earlier instances has suggested inserting a ‘but’ or a ‘though’ between the clauses: for example, ‘Glad to get away from death, though having lost our dear comrades.’ But with no mention this time that Odysseus’ remaining ship mourned the loss of the others, it becomes possible to hear the line in a new way: that the loss of that particular group of guys, was actually some part of the survivors’ pleasure.

In Greek:

[Allow me to recommend following along the Greek reading with a Greek text. My own edition of Books 9-12, with facing English translation, is available here. All six volumes of my ‘Homer Odysseia’ are available on Amazon.]

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Odyssey 10.1-79

Aeolus is often described as the ‘god of the winds’. Homer does not call him a god, however; he is simply Aeolus son of Hippotas. He is described as ‘dear to the gods.’ Virgil and others may have considered him divine, but for Homer perhaps he is more of an Elon Musk. Homer’s translators usually have Aeolus and his family living on a floating island. This is implausible, not because fairy tale wonders are by nature implausible—which is of course something to think about—but because Odysseus’ narrative seems only to make sense if Aeolus’ home is in a fixed place: one which can be left directly for Ithaca with the backing of a wind directed for the purpose, eastward out of the west, and also to which a ship could be blown straight back, if the wind becomes contrary. Translators must be yielding to the joy of the miraculous, as would I if there were permission; they are supported by uses in Herodotus which suggest ‘floating’ for πλωτός. Evidently Herodotus himself may have thought that Homer was referring to a ‘floating’ island when he used the word. That is some considerable authority. All the same, I think one ought to construe a verbal adjective in -τος, formed from πλέω or Homeric πλώω, ‘sail’, ‘travel by water’, and so render ‘sailable’, i.e. ‘reachable by sail’. Perhaps the sense is that one could only get there, or put in there, with the help of wind. The rock is supposed to be sheer right round the island. Possibly the use of oars would be useless in putting in there, as would have been the usual practice in landing on a beach. And of course the traversal of the ocean to the place would only have been possible by wind and sail. The futility of oars is patent after Odysseus and his men’s second departure from the Aeolian Isle: the spirits of the men were worn out by ‘grievous rowing (εἰρεσίη, 10.78),’ in the absence of an escorting wind. The use of εἰρεσίη, ‘rowing’, at the end of the episode, may serve to contrast the initial sense of Aeolus’ island as πλωτός: sailable only. But the fabulous floating island now lives a cultural life of its own.

Aeolus is a weirdo. He is as isolated as the Cyclops, seemingly with no neighbours at all, though there is the briefest, largely inexplicable mention of a ‘city’ (πόλις, 10.13). I suppose there must have been a supply of servants, cooks, and farmhands. Someone to change the sheets. Unlike the Cyclops, Aeolus has a wife—Eve to his Adam, with whom he has had twelve children, six of each kind. We do not hear the story of his exile, if that is what it is; he’s somebody’s son, but we don’t know where Hippotas was from; perhaps his role as “storekeeper of the winds (ταμίης ἀνέμων) … Both to pause and to rouse the one that he wants”, was granted Aeolus by the son of Cronus as some kind of compensation for his brazen island imprisonment. But he does not appear to have the means—a ship or working crew, or dock—or the desire—to use that power to get wherever else he might want to be.

The coordinated incest of Aeolus’ children seems to be their father’s choice, rather than something forced on them in their isolation. The family is forever feasting, and in case we may be reading something alien into practices that were not meant to be offensive, Homer rather rubs our nose in it—in his inimitable way, not by saying something out loud but by focusing our gaze: in this case, on the fact that after the party, when night came on, the sons would sleep with their ‘bashful wives’, and ‘go to bed wrapped in blankets, and in perforated bed frames.’ The poet does not need to say anything more to let us know that they quite enjoyed each other’s company, brother and sister, within those blankets and beds.

In traveller’s tales, one should expect strange, titillating or offensive practices in exotic lands, which both tickle and shock the system for the kind of special pleasure such tales afford. Still it is hard at this distance to gauge the difference between what is odd or merely interesting, and what offensive. Sexual peculiarity, such as Polyphemus’ ovine bachelorhood, is to be expected. We shall discover, however, that Homer’s audience was quite as shocked as that of Sophocles’ Athens and Freud’s Vienna, at the thought of Oedipus sleeping with his mother. But what about Alcinous marrying his niece? Could that have been a brother’s duty upon her father’s passing away? Or a way to ensure the legitimacy or stability of his rule, and that of his descendants—a political motive? Alcinous’ brother, the king, had died without a male heir. Marrying his daughter preempts conflict. (In patriarchies, paternal uncles are generally rivals of one’s father for political legacy and bloodline. It is the maternal uncles who are ‘avuncular’. Odysseus gets his celebrated name from his maternal uncle.) All the same, one feels oneself on safe ground in registering the cosy intimacies of Aeolus’ sons and daughters as unsettlingly prurient, indulgently incestuous in such a way as to disturb one’s ease, like a false note in the soundtrack, through the whole brief episode.

One does not feel this at all about Aeolus and his wife’s prolific fertility. It feels as though time has been suspended on the isle; that there will be no more children or grandchildren, that twelve is a full complement. There will instead be perpetual banqueting and cosy sex in their blissful prison. And no adultery: scandal in the Homeric world seems to centre on heterosexual adultery, where women play decisive roles. The sexual and political intrigues of Helen, or Aegisthus and Clytemnestra, together with the cosmic cuckolding of Hephaestus by Ares and Aphrodite, provide a background to suspicions about Penelope. The world of classical Athens, however, which first inherited the Homeric poems, seems heterosexually unstoried, and taken more with male homosexual intrigue and its political consequences—first in the days of the tyranny and then in the era of Alcibiades and Socrates.

For Odysseus’ philandering, the punishment, as Jane Austen once put it, ‘is less equal than could be wished.’ Through all his tale of wanderings, and earlier to the smitten Nausicaa, he never lets on that there may be wife and son at home, still less that they are his home, and the main reason he so desperately longs for home. In the Iliad he is once actually called the ‘father of Telemachus’, uniquely among all the warriors with patronymics. Odysseus is very much a man who speaks, and forcibly suppresses others’ speech, on a need-to-know basis. To be fair, he only seems to sleep with ‘available’ goddesses.

Odysseus and his men continue to display their outward exhibition of inner psychic tensions. One might say the so far nameless men function as projections of Odysseus’ inner subversion. How else does one take his assertion of vigilance, that he kept hold of the sail’s guiding rope to harness the wind sent by Aeolus, never yielding it to another member of the crew, so that they all might the soonest get to Ithaca? The curious phrase which I translate the ‘sail’s foot rope’, πόδα νηϝός (‘ship’s foot’ or ‘heel’) refers to a contrivance to allow manipulation of the sail. (In later Greek such a phrase would be translated ‘keel’.) The physics of wind and sail, and perhaps their metaphysics, are very much on the poet’s mind. A helping wind is not enough for a human being, these are not Phaeacian boats guided by thought; the sail has to be worked or misdirection ensues. Odysseus grasps his ‘ship’s foot’ exclusively, until he doesn’t. Just when Ithaca comes into sight, the men tending the home fires already visible, sleep gets the better of the pilot. Freud’s caretaker of consciousness lets his guard down, and his suppressed inner impulses overcome the sleepwalker.

On all their adventures since leaving Troyland, Odysseus has been meticulous about dividing the booty equally among the ships. His personal benefits are modest: he is given an extra goat, he gets to eat the Cyclops’ ram. But the narrator, who is indeed Odysseus, exposes the suspicion that his pretence to equity hides the bulk of his haul from Troy itself, which is evidently hidden in his hold somehow, but known to all. It seems at Troy Odysseus was a chieftain, a minor nobleman; but in the aftermath, on the way home it seems a kind of democratic distribution has set in, and his former peasant soldiers have learnt to grumble. Now what’s he hiding in the ox-skin nutsack he got off Aeolus? Let’s get our share! And all is lost.

Upon waking Odysseus is suicidal. There are several occasions in the story when this may be the case, but here it is explicit:

… I debated,

Whether I fall out of the ship and perish in the deep,

Or I endure in silence and continue still among the living. (10.51-3)

He carries on. They arrive back on the Aeolian Isle with Odysseus at his most pitiful and weak. He explains to his erstwhile hosts:

“They blinded me in the mind! Bad comrades and, and not only them—Sleep!

The bastard. But heal me, friends: for the power is in you.”

Doesn’t even sound like him. Is he playing the supplicant or being one? The reaction he gets from Aeolus is perhaps the most vehement rebuke in all of Homer. I mean this objectively, in that Aeolus’ anger and disgust is rhythmically and harmonically obvious. There is only one dactyl in his opening line, spanning the mid-line caesura; everywhere else the two shorts have been substituted by a long, so we get a relentless sequence of long expletives:

ἔρρ’ ἐκ νήσου θάσσον, ἐλέγχιστε ζωόντων ·

[In bold are the hexameter’s downbeats.]

More than this, the Greek law of tonal prominence reveals that in almost every instance in this line, it is the upbeat of the foot which is tonally emphatic rather than the downbeat. :

ἔρρ’ ἐκ νήσου θάσσον, ἐλέγχιστε ζωόντων ·

[In bold now are the tonally emphatic or ‘stressed’ syllables; only once (θάσσον) is the downbeat rather than the upbeat reinforced.]

“Fuck off out this island—and quick, you most detestable of all things alive!”

I confess I don’t quite understand the severity of his reaction to Odysseus’ return, which is extraordinary in all of Homer for its musical impact. But I will say that because of this story it has become a superstitious habit in my life, not to turn back, if I’ve forgotten something for example, once I’ve set out on a trip. Even if you’ve forgotten your phone or your bottle of water, don’t go back in the door. Never come back for a second helping of help, is that the lesson? Aeolus is offended as though there had been a threat to his authority, or to its basis in Zeus’s dispensation, or to the very nature of things. Or is there something wrong in general about heading back home in a straight line—for a ‘man of many turns’ (πολύτροπος)—and something even wronger about expecting to be able to get that chance twice? If Odysseus’ explanation for showing up again on their doorstep, the mischief of his crew while he fell asleep at the wheel, expresses an individual and collective psychic imbalance, as I have suggested, perhaps he is wrong to think that his dismissive hosts would have had the power to heal him.

What does it mean to control the winds? Harnessing them is all we are good for. Winds have never been well explained, just like the clouds, which stay up though they are much heavier than air. Explanation of causes has never been a strong suit of the modern style of science. Serious people, although not children, live satisfied with the idea that heaviness, such as the heaviness of a cloud, is caused by ‘gravity’. Nothing out of Aristotle sounds stupid like that. It’s like saying clouds are caused by cloudiness.

The winds blow, and we know not whence or why. In Greece, the winds have proper names: Boreas, Zephyrus, Notus, Eurus. They come from directions and give direction. Classical physicists talk of temperature, pressure, convection and the like. More interesting explanations will be likely when all these measurable factors are seen as side effects of electric currents and magnetic fields, in a solar or otherwise cosmic circuit, their directions as tangents to vortices. But what is electricity, what magnetism? How does polarity—especially repulsion—work? Hurricanes and tornadoes must be watched for, not generated or controlled, as surely as the auroras and volcanic discharges or the subterranean lightning which quakes the earth. We have devised many powers over nature, to be sure, profound technologies which we do not understand apart from the tasks they are able to effect. But we are not stewards of the wind. A gently zephyr flutters an eyelid, and a woman falls in love. Fate hatches.

Homer can be an antidote for the childish pretensions of science, and its ‘laws of nature’. In that sense he is a light for an Homerist to carry in these Dark Ages. Homer has no word for ‘nature’. When it comes to that, how do we users of usage define what we mean by that word? Is there any way to do it without using the word ‘nature’? Something blindly dumbfounding, like a religious mystery, lies behind the catchwords in the cult of Science, like ‘nature’ or ‘instinct’ or ‘force’. The word translated ‘nature’ among the later Greek writers is φύσις (physis), derived from φύω, ‘grow’, ‘put forth’. A φυτόν is a plant. φύσις, broadly ‘growth’, occurs only once in Homer, in a passage we shall soon encounter. Its translation ‘nature’, from Latin, points instead toward birth. No such concept seems to operate in the way Homer paints the world. The closest one I can think of is the notion of μοῖρα, often in the phrase κατὰ μοῖραν (kata moiran), as here: ‘I recounted him everything in order (κατὰ μοῖραν).’ I have translated it freely in context as, for example, ‘by the book’ or ‘according to the recipe’. Μοῖρα freestanding means ‘portion’, and often needs to be translated ‘fate’ or ‘Fate’. In context it points to some kind of order that seems appropriate to a situation, which exerts a pressure that it be followed. Evidently, Odysseus’ return to his doorstep, after Aeolus had entrusted him with a sack containing the (unhelpful, one presumes) winds, is completely out of order. One might almost say against nature, as we also say about incest and celibacy. Aeolus invokes θέμις (themis), perhaps ‘lawful custom’, an idea which overlaps with κατὰ μοῖραν:

“For it’s not a done thing, for me to help and to send off

The very man who is despised by the blessed gods:

Get out! Since as one despised by the gods you reached this place.”

Odysseus has indeed made himself despised of at least one god. Can he be redeemed? Is the power in him (or us)? Will he one day fulfil his nature? Or are all these ways of speaking, a mathematics alien to both his causes and their effects? A man of many turns is, among other things, a thing like the wind.

Or as mathematics, a human invention

That parallels but never touches reality, gives the astronomer

Metaphors through which he may comprehend

The powers and the flow of things: so the human sense

Of beauty is our metaphor of their excellence, their divine nature: — like

dust in a whirlwind, making

The wild wind visible.

—Robinson Jeffers

In Greek:

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Odyssey 9.506-66 (end)

A lot is made of Odysseus’ second vaunt to the Cyclops when he’s already escaped and on board ship. And rightly so; the cry of “I am Odysseus, City-Sacker” seems more of a revelation than the one we’ve just witnessed, in reality so to speak, when he tells his name to the Phaeacians before embarking on his story. This one almost seems to be Odysseus’ entrance upon the stage of history, as a soloist, rather than as part of the supporting cast of the Iliad. There is a tonal aspect to this outburst, which is in fact like an operatic signature line, a recognisable melody for an Odyssean ejaculation:

Κύκλωψ, αἴ κέν τίς σε καταθνητῶν ἀνθρώπων

ὀφθαλμοῦ εἴρηται ἀϝεικελίην ἀλαωτύν, (9.502-3)

“Cyclops, if there’s any death-bound human being

Should ask after the ugly blinding of your eye …”

Notice especially the first half-line, which involves a changing pitch on every syllable (rising or falling or both on the same one), and ends in three, consecutive, acutely-accented long syllables: Κύκλωψ, αἴ κέν τίς σε. Such a sequence is exceedingly rare in Homer, to the point where it is identifying of Odysseus. It bears repeating that the nonsense taught as fact in Classics departments requires that these tonal patterns do not matter in composition; the oral theory of Homeric composition is based on purely metrical formulas, and ignores all the pitch accents. It is like a theory of Mozart which pays attention only to the lengths of the notes, and ignores all their pitches. This same sequence has already occurred earlier in the scene, when Odysseus expresses his indignation that the Cyclops must think him a fool, if he expects him to try to run out the cave entrance to be caught, as soon as the giant lets his sheep out to pasture:

οὕτω γάρ πού μ’ ἤλπετ’ ἐνὶ φρεσὶ νήπιον εἶναι. (419)

“For I suppose he expected me, in his mind’s vessel, to be such a simpleton.”

Once again we see the same sequence of accents in the half-line, culminating in three straight long acutes: οὕτω γάρ πού μ’ ἤλπετ’. I have written on this and other ‘signature lines’ discovered in the tonal patterns of Homer’s compositions in my recent book, Singing Homer’s Spell (available here).I shall have more to say on this matter after we reach Ithaca.

But there is a third and final outburst from our hero, which, it seems to me, deserves more attention than most are inclined to give it. It expresses, in most certain terms, Odysseus’ wish for himself and for the Cyclops:

αἲ γὰρ δὴ ψυχῆς τε καὶ αἰῶνός σε δυναίμην

εὖνιν ποιήσας πέμψαι δόμον Ἄϝϊδος εἴσω,

ὡς οὐκ ὀφθαλμόν γ’ ἰήσεται οὐδ’ Ἐνοσίχθων.

“If only I had the power over soul and life

To castrate you, and send you into Invisible Hades’ house,

As surely as he will not heal your eye, not even the Ground-Shaker.”

Odysseus wishes that he had the power to make an eunuch of his rival, before killing him; and measures the energy of this wish by a parallel wishful expectation, that Polyphemus’ eye will never be healed even by the power of god. This is his final statement to Polyphemus, and it is tempting to see it as a culmination, like the third of three long acute syllables.

Draughting on Homer’s authority in psychology, perhaps one should see the castration of one’s rival as an archetypal masculine wish. Freud, taking no small cue from what, by his time, had come to be called ‘Greek Mythology’, places an emphasis specially on castration of the father as an innate or developmental wish of a son. It does not seem likely that the Greek theogony, where castration of the father was essentially the method of royal succession for the chief masculine god, was absent from Homer’s imagination. Zeus is often addressed in Homer as Κρονίδης, Cronides, ‘son of Cronus’, so that whatever was known or believed about their history in Homer’s consciousness and audience, the conquest and succession of Zeus over his father to establish a new world order is an ever-present in the rhythm of Zeus’s patronymic. Also tapping into the ambient reality of this revolutionary succession is the non-visible presence of Atlas the Titan, apparently still actively holding the structural pillars of the cosmos which keep apart the earth and sky. His daughter Calypso is visible enough; her fair tresses are kept cloistered on an island at the navel of the sea, apparently to prevent her mating and having fearsome offspring. Even the unstated threat to Zeus of a seemingly disgruntled figure like Poseidon, where the business of the Odyssey has to be stealthily planned in the latter’s absence from Olympus, adds to a certain instability in the foundations cultivated by Homer to work like sinister music in his background. Who knows what cosmic strings have been pulled when Odysseus blinds Poseidon’s son? Odysseus is messing in the margins, sleeping with dangerous women.

Still I would suggest that castration of the rival is a broader and deeper drive which also encompasses Freud’s castration of the father. Perhaps we should credit Homer with the dramatisation of a psychoanalytic insight. The third outburst of Odysseus unmasks his deepest compulsion and desire. Castration of the rival speaks to men’s experience and behaviour in sports, war, and politics, oligarchies, tyrannies and corporations, the entertainment industry and holy conclaves. It also speaks to women’s empowerment over men, in ways we shall immediately encounter with Circe. Although I cannot prove this, it seems to me to be reasonable to suppose that the μοιχάγρια (moikhagria), the ‘adulterer’s ransom’ (8.332) to be extracted from Ares by the cuckolded Hephaestus, includes his balls.

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It may be instructive to view the three outbursts of Odysseus as a progression. Indeed, they are more a descent into Hell than a pilgrim’s progress. Consider the first of them:

“Cyclops, it didn’t turn out, did it, that they were comrades of a cowardly man

To be ate in your hollowed cave by means of strength and force.

Get a load of what comes on yourself—shitty results,

You bastard! Since you did not scruple with strangers in your own home,

To eat them up! That’s why Zeus paid you back, and the rest of the gods.”

The magnifying of his own power yields in this instance to Odysseus casting himself as a justicer, an agent of Zeus’s Justice. A friend who grew up in North Carolina told me of a primary school teacher who, before she administered the ruler to a whimpering child, would say, holding her hand to her heart: “This hurts me right here.” What was done to Polyphemus had to be done, because he violated the culture and tradition now celebrated for the Homeric Age, of guest-friendship. It does not matter that figures like Odysseus and Menelaus appear to exploit the privileges expected to be afforded the stranger and guest, as an opportunity to ‘get something’. Odysseus is explicit about his motives for trespassing into the cave of a giant ogre. ‘What if he gave me a guest gift?’ (229) And he ill-advisedly invokes Zeus to Polyphemus, as part of his attempted shakedown:

“We, however, approach these knees of yours

As suppliants, in hope perhaps you give a proper guest gift, or otherwise

You offer a present, which among guests is the custom.

But respect, oh mightiest one, the gods: we are your suppliants,

And Zeus is the avenger of suppliants and guests,

Zeus Guest-Friend, who goes alongside respectful and respected strangers. (266-71)

Of course the Cyclops is triggered by the invocation of Zeus. But it is a conceit of the avenger that he is actually a justicer, passive to the force of law and decency which is the tradition of guest-friendship, so that Odysseus’ acquisitive motives fade from view. It is not Odysseus, but Zeus and the rest of the gods who have paid the Cyclops back.

The city-sacking pirate’s invocation of justice, is all the same and nevertheless an invocation of Justice. It is different in kind from the two following ejaculations of Odysseus toward Polyphemus. One way to see the progression is as a successive unmasking of the man’s true motives. Justice is, at some level, other- and community-centred. From the dispassionate appeal to the decency of guest-friendship rituals guiding human beings in their most vulnerable interactions— harbouring the golden rule amidst the provisional fairness of expected reciprocation—in the face of the Cyclops’ brutality and cannibalism—we move to pure and spirited self-centred assertion: I’m not nobody, I’m Odysseus City-Sacker, Laertes’ son from Ithaca. Finally we come to the fully expressed wish from the gut: to castrate and then kill his rival, and further, that his wounds remain an unhealed, living torture.

In response to the first outburst, where Odysseus says Polyphemus is being punished for his sins as a host, he has no words, he gets angry and hurls a rock. To the second outburst, when he learns Nowan’s true name, Polyphemus recalls a prophecy that an ‘Odysseus’ would cause him to lose his vision. He had been expecting a mighty warrior, not a puny Ithacan. Now, in response to Odysseus’ castration wish, he calls to Poseidon in prayer—one imagines this is a new posture for him—and adds a provision that seems to seal Odysseus’ fate:

“Let him come ill and late, having lost all his comrades,

On a foreign ship, and may he discover calamities in his home.” (534-5)

We have heard some of this before; in the old man Halitherses’ reading of a bird omen, at the assembly called by Telemachus in Ithaca (Book 2), he details the phrase “having lost all his comrades,” so that their repetition here has the effect of a kind of confirmation. There Halitherses spoke ominously about the “twentieth year.” It helps also that we already know that all these wishes of Polyphemus will come true. Odysseus’ fate takes its final shape in this very moment, this very utterance of the Cyclops.

Now, Homer begins the Odyssey with Zeus’s speech declaring that the adulterer Aegisthus has accomplished acts ‘beyond fate’. This is a radical formulation which undermines both the artwork and the cosmology of the Iliad. To put it simply, there are new rules for the inevitability of ‘fate’, what is fated, in this poem. One might presume that the concept may have become meaningless. When Halitherses shares his prophecy in Ithaca, upon reading a bird omen, he is met with the snarkiest scepticism from the suitor Eurymachus.

“Birds? There’s rather a lot of them, under the rays of the sun,

Busy here and there; and not all of them mean something …” (2.181-2)

Modern, consumerist Ithaca has fostered an altogether modern attitude toward tradition and religion. So how is it that when one hears Polyphemus’ prayer, one all the same feels that Odysseus’ fate has been locked into place? Where does such a conviction come from when Homer appears to disown, on purpose in the Odyssey, any simple kind of fatalism?

In one sense, skepticism inside a drama generates its opposite; that is, a certain character’s disbelief serves to frame the beliefs and utterances of other characters as true, and possibly portentous. The true prophets in the story are only proved so in the outcome, but one develops working hypotheses about whom to trust and how things will work out. At the end, one prides oneself on having being right about which characters had proved to be insightful.

I believe that the repetition of phrases plays a key role here. The irony is not lost on me that the repetition of phrases in Homer is still generally thought to be a slightly unfortunate necessity of the exigencies of an improvised, oral composition, rather than a matter of musical choice. These phrases are not, however, ‘metrical building blocks’, as a directly ontological matter. They are fully fledged combinations of word, rhythm, and accentual melody, snatches of song which imprint on the memory in the way that lines of song do, so one sings rather than quotes them. There are more than one significant series of lines which recur like refrains through the Odyssey; we have met one already, in the description of Penelope weaving and unweaving her web by night. Another highly enigmatic one is to come from the ghostly lips of the prophet Tiresias. These lines recur from different mouths and in different contexts, thereby gaining a kind of independent objectivity. The effect of such passages is, to my mind, very much like the return of a chorus between verses of a song, a chorus which takes on new meanings and resonances—though the words and melody remain nearly the same—as the song’s story develops through the changing verses. The first return of a sequence of such lines magnifies them in such a peculiar way; they become infused with a sense of inevitability, including the inevitability that they will again be sung.

In the Iliad one gets the sense that every single death is a fated thing, a moment of human naming when a cut thread dangles in air, like a finished film passed through the projector and flapping on the spool. This Odyssey poet, on the other hand, seems knowingly to have set himself a challenge by gaming the inevitability of fate. Yet this poet proves masterful all the same, among all poets, in creating a sense of inevitability, and the repetition of phrases and passages is surely a key to this profoundly musical achievement. The sense that Odysseus’ fate has been sealed in Polyphemus’ prayer is felt and deep. The drama and the posture of the performer, voicing the irreligious Polyphemus now reduced to prayer, must play a role in the effect. I don’t pretend to understand how all this works, except that certain reechoed phrases become sonorous touchstones which lock the words and their implications into place somehow, so that time itself seems to rhyme. I welcome suggestions.

If one reverses the order of Odysseus’ outbursts to the Cyclops, a recognisably Platonic progression can be formulated. The initiate proceeds from the reptilian screech for castration and death, the urgings of the lowest, tyrannical part of the soul, back to the spirited assertion of identity, self, and origin: “I am Odysseus the Ithacan City-Sacker, Laertes’ son.” Finally, back at the summit, there is the appeal to justice, and a social and cosmic order higher than the self. This is the world of Zeus Xenios, Zeus of the Guest-Friend. The appeal to justice is also an appeal to the rational part of the soul. This rational part is sometimes imagined as a third eye. (See the representation of a Cyclops above). Odysseus’ fateful psychic descent to hell becomes, in reverse, a pilgrim’s progress to the opening of an eye.

Allegorists were among the first literary interpreters (and defenders) of Homer. Unfortunately allegorical readings can seem heavy-handed and reductive. Unlike the poem that the pedagogue seems keen to replace, his reading of it lacks nuance and above all, rhythm—and melody. All the same, it seems undeniable that there is a psychic progression depicted, artfully and intentionally, in the three successive ejaculations of Odysseus to the Cyclops, although it also seems intentional that the progression is in reverse to the sensibility of any sort of moralist. It also seems unavoidable that a Cyclops be symbolic of something on his own, in his name and in his nature. (He is a ‘Circle-Eye’, perhaps a ‘Circle-Face’.) Mind you, it would seem to make all the difference if one envisions him as monocular—that is, deficient in some way—or as someone with a sort of third eye. But either way, conquering whatever the giant Cyclops represents, seems to demand interpretation and exegesis. Homer certainly attracts pedagogues and moralists. Poly-Wily Homer may, however, take some delight in booby-trapping them.

Consider again, for example, the progression of the Cyclops himself in his own three stages of conversation with Ulysses. It is not a descent but an ascent. To Odysseus’ moralising about Polyphemus’ punishment, the latter has no words, and hurls the top of a mountain in anger. Next in response to Odysseus naming himself, he (funnily enough) confirms that name, as a prophesied one—although, surprise, his conqueror turned out to be an Ithacan nobody. In return he claims his status: in his own moment of spirit and self-assertion, he suggests that it is the Earth-Shaker himself who boasts of being his father, not he of being Poseidon’s son! But in response to Odysseus’ wish to castrate him, the Cyclops, perhaps for the first time, directed his voice upwards, toward the sky, and

‘Started praying, his arms stretching out toward the starry heaven:’ (527)

It is of interest that Poseidon is also to be found amid the stars in the sky, not in the earth or like Neptune in the sea. ‘Circle-Eye’ also suggests a celestial visage. Polyphemus’ journey in this interaction goes from blind rage, to boastful and competitive self-assertion, at last to an upward embrace in prayer which bespeaks an awareness of the actuality of his place in the world. In his finally humble, and humbled, position, looking up at last to powers he acknowledges to be higher than himself, the Cyclops’ prayer turns into true prophecy about what Odysseus’ journey will have to entail. While it seems that he means the prayer as a curse upon Odysseus, consider that he imagines his wish, that Odysseus never gain home, not being fulfilled: the delayed journey on an alien ship with the loss of all his men, to a home in trouble, is based on the premise that it be Odysseus’ fate—bodied forth in the Cyclops’ imagination in its full refrain—

“… to see his friends and to reach

His well-built home and the mother earth of his fathers …” (532-3)

It is odd to register these words from the Cyclops’ own mouth, as part of the Cyclops’ prayer. In contrast to Odysseus’ descent into kinetic savagery, Polyphemus has come to a moment of still awareness. ‘Stretching out’ in the line above translates Greek ὀρέγω (oregō); Aristotle uses this verb, in its middle voice, in the first sentence of his Metaphysics: ‘All men desire [reach themselves out towards] knowing, by nature.’ (980a21) Perhaps it needs saying: the brutal Cyclops is a man like us. “I stumbled when I saw.”

Is Odysseus’ story a journey of the soul? Homer leaves many signs that this is so, even more as we proceed to Circe’s Isle and the Underworld. Each episode seems a test and an initiation. Odysseus began with a sleep like death under the entwined olive bushes, to wake up to Nausicaa. Arete says he shall ride the Phaeacian ship overcome once again by ‘sweet sleep,’ before he wakes up in Ithaca. The escape from the Cyclops is an escape from death’s cave. Rebirth recurs like the days of the sun.

When Socrates tells his own story of the soul’s journey to the Underworld, in the myth of Er in Plato’s Republic, he makes allusion to the ‘Tale of Alcinous’, an ancient name for the story Odysseus tells in Alcinous’ palace. This story is evidently his model, and the shade of Odysseus plays a starring role in Socrates’ story of the soul’s choice of pattern for the next life, based on her experience in this one. Plato, at any rate, seems to have heard Odysseus’ story as just such a soul’s journey. His entire Republic is a first-person narrative, like the Tale of Alcinous, where Socrates both does the narration and plays all the parts. To be sure, there were elements of the power of the Homeric performer’s mimesis, a protean ability to project seeming truth, which must have terrified Plato; but not enough so as to not attempt it himself, with the role of Socrates in the one-man show called the Republic. By itself, Plato’s response should alert us to attend, all remaining eyes open, to our initiate’s path as we follow Odysseus in the Odyssey. Escape from the cyclopean cave was already a layered thing in Homer’s hands, before Plato got hold of the idea.

Socrates famously bans Homer and the poets from the ideal city in the Republic. Yet Plato quotes Homer extensively in that book, so that the Republic is by far our greatest source of fragments, and means of confirming the much later Alexandrian texts. The Republic itself, as opposed to the ideal city described in it, is, in effect, a curated distillation of all the best and most naughty bits in Homer—which ought to get the Republic itself banned from there as well. As my sometime teacher Allan Bloom used to ask: does Plato or doesn’t he, want you to hear Homer?

I came to Homer in graduate school in Chicago as a student of Plato’s Greek. What I discovered there, is what now seems to me to be the true sun outside Plato’s cave. Of course Socrates paints Homer as one of the gaolers and shadow-masters within. But the allegorists were on to something. It is not so much a matter of reading between the lines, as paying attention in detail to their movements, and singing them.

In Greek:

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Odyssey 9.415-505

The thing is, Odysseus is a bit of a nobody. He announces himself to the Cyclops as ‘Odysseus the City-Sacker’ (Ὀδυσσεὺς πτολιπόρθιος). That does sound like something. But ‘son of Laertes’? ‘Who has his home in Ithaca’? Laertes is an old man who has retired to potter around in the country, too feeble even to think, it seems, of defending or managing his son’s property. That Penelope purports to be weaving a funeral shroud for him rather suggests that death is all that is immediately expected of him. That her intent is actually a ruse only underscores the marginal stature of Laertes, and suggests a merely secondary interest on her part in his well-being. The old man never comes to town any more. He is one of the many constituents Odysseus has abandoned on his escapade to Troy.

As for Ithaca, Telemachus tells Menelaus that it is a rocky place, unfit for the horses which his host wishes to bestow on him. From that day to this, horses have graced the nobility of men and women. Chivalry is horse-culture. Polyphemus the lonely Cyclops wishes his bellwether ram could talk to him, like a friend, but in the Iliad, Achilles’ divine horse Xanthus does actually talk, rejecting Achilles’ blame for Patroclus’ death and prophesying the hero’s own. But there is no place for horses—or, it seems, chivalry and the chevalier—in rocky, be-goated Ithaca. Odysseus is like one of those athletes who, in his moment of glory, shouts out his hometown and his parents (while he’s thanking Jesus). The footballer briefly puts Podunk, Oklabama on the map. Odysseus seems similarly keen to trumpet his origins. The culture of patronymics is aristocratic; only important people are announced this way in Homer. But the advancing of such a humble figure as Laertes, and especially the signposting of Ithaca, seem to me to have a tinge of the democratic sensibility in their wellspring. One take’s pride in one’s origins, regardless, in a democratic constitution.

‘City-Sacker’ is also an interesting one. Odysseus certainly has a claim to the title. But it has been rather pressed on us that Odysseus sacked a great city by means of a devious stratagem, not by his martial prowess. Indeed, the operation to disable the Cyclops would have involved considerable dexterity, strength, and teamwork, not to mention the risk from anything but complete success, even though the victim was already legless. The wooden horse, by contrast, emptied its soldiers on Trojans caught unawares, essentially in their pyjamas. The recounting of his deeds under these circumstances, by Demodocus at Odysseus’ request, has just reduced the perpetrator to paroxysms of grief. The simile comparing his tears to one of the many widows he has created, destined for slavery, suggests profound catharsis and perhaps remorse. I think it may be important to remember that the man now telling the story has just undergone this gruelling, self-imposed art-therapy, when he comes to the part where he announces himself to the Cyclops as ‘Odysseus City-Sacker’. That happened close to a decade ago, when he was still fresh from Troy, and attempting to pillage the Cicones. We recall that before arriving in Scheria, for most of seven years—after the initial euphoria of cohabiting with Calypso—Odysseus has spent his days alone on a headland of an island at the ocean’s navel, looking down at the sea in tears and groans. It is not impossible to imagine that the man longing for his wife and home, in bitter mourning for his lost comrades and purpose, was also suicidal about being a devious, cold-blooded city-sacker. Imagine Odysseus at a cliff’s edge. “How fearful/And dizzy ’tis to cast one’s eyes so low …”

I find intriguing the story reported by Tacitus, that an inscription of Ulixes could be found by the Rhine in Germany, where he founded a city, which appends also the name of his father Laertes. Evidently this person was serious about memorialising his Dad in the same breath as himself, wherever he left his mark. Perhaps we may surmise that the ‘real’ Ulysses eventually came to be known as a city-founder, not a city-sacker.

Odysseus shouts out three different messages to the Cyclops from on board ship. The fateful declaration of his name, parentage and origin constitutes the middle outburst. We shall consider their developing rhetorical sequence in the next reading. Here we observe certain patterns in the music and the action which, while deployed in the telling of a most unique and dramatic event, nevertheless bear Odysseus’ and the Homeric signature, both in the tale and the telling.

Polyphemus twice throws jagged missiles at Odysseus’ fleeing ship. Both barely miss. The first lands in front of the ship and the second behind. Is the Cyclops now blind, or has he just lost his binocular depth perception? The effect is first to push the ship back perilously close to the Cyclops’ land, before the men are able to row with enough energy to pass beyond Polyphemus’ blind (or half-blind) trajectories, so that the swell from the second bit of crashing mountain hits astern, and pushes the ship forward toward the neighbouring undeveloped island full of goats. Behind there, the rest of Odysseus’ fleet has been hiding, a kind of sleeping consciousness through it all. In this sweeping motion backwards before proceeding forwards, I believe there is expressed an ethos of ‘epic’ motion. We shall see it recurring through Odysseus’ travels, on small and large scales. Earlier Menelaus had had to return to make sacrifices back where he’d come from in Egypt, before he and his men could escape starvation and the doldrums on an island, and finally proceed on their arrested journey back to Argos.

I have argued that a dactylic round dance still performed in modern Greece provides the template for the dactylic hexameter; in the middle of the third dance step of the six, the dancers’ rightward motion stops, and they turn back to the left. There is a loop of retrogression, with the rightward movement resuming spatially where it had left off, at the beginning of the fifth step of the six. This circling motion forward to the east, with loops of westward retrogression when in opposition to the sun, is observed for the outer planets such as Ares and Zeus (Mars and Jupiter), present in our sky. I do not propose that there is anything allegorical or otherwise symbolic about this motion, only that its sense is pervasive, in the way that the form of a dance—a waltz, or a mazurka, or the twist—informs the music which it inspires and is energised by. Most every line of Homer reflects the turning points of the dance in its word divisions, which produce articulations in the metre called a caesura and a diaeresis. These two moments in the unfolding of an Homeric line frame the internal retrogression in the underlying onward circling. In Homer this motion bubbles up from the feet, if you will, into what could be called a musical as well as a narrative ethos. One does not go in a straight line from A to B, or head straight home. Rather, one circles there, with necessary retrogressions. ‘In life and in storytelling, as in dance, there is a correct way of returning by turning.’

To a great extent, however, one must understand the direct effect of the dance of the Muses to be sublimated, as it is also when orchestras play symphonies in dance rhythms while everyone, players and audience, remain glued to their seats. Odysseus, and Homer with him, have taken the origin of their rhythm into themselves, and stand before us as soloists, like Bach at a clavichord playing a virtuoso gigue. No one dances to Bach’s suites any more. Nor is it likely that anyone danced to a Homeric rhapsode’s performance. The recently dancing Phaeacians stay seated for Odysseus’ story. The rhapsode’s accompanying instrument was no longer a lyre; now he was armed with his cloak and a staff, along with his voice of course. (Odysseus the character may be wearing a sword, rather than holding a stick, which he won as reparation for insults to him during the Phaeacian games.) We see strong indications that the Odyssey has been scripted for such a performer—cloaked, and wielding a stick.

Consider the moment when, after Odysseus’ first invective outburst, Polyphemus breaks off the top of a mountain and hurls it toward the boat. It just misses the steering oar at the front.

‘And the sea surged up because of the rock coming down:

There she went, quickly toward the shore—borne by the back-flowing swell,

A flood-tide out the deep drove her to reach the dry land.

But I was there, grabbed in my hands a very long pole

And pushed her off and sideways, encouraged the crew and ordered them

To throw down with the oar handles, so we might escape out from evil,

Signing with a nodding head: and they fell forward and set to rowing.’ (9.484-90)

(Note that the word ‘back-flowing’ in line 485, παλιρρόθιον (palirrhothion), fills the portion of the hexameter line where the retrogression in the circle dance would have occurred.) How convenient that Odysseus found a “very long pole” just lying around there in the stern. I think perhaps the fact that a rhapsode comes with a staff in his hands, perhaps makes less implausible, in his telling, the sudden appearance of a conveniently long pole. Perhaps there would ordinarily be such a pole there at the stern, precisely for the purpose of pushing off into deeper water. But in Odysseus’ story, it certainly seems that he has just come up with it out of the blue, happily and fortuitously; and indeed, perhaps Homer has.

The possibilities for supporting gesture become innumerable for a performer, once he starts looking for them. The actor pushes off with his staff, then nods his head in silent command. Suddenly he becomes a desperate oarsman with an oar. Are there not scripted cues here, for a thespian? The stick of olive with which Odysseus and his men dispatched the Cyclops’ eye, was only the latest opportunity for the Homeric performer’s choreographed use of his prop. It has been both a loom and a mast—the same word in Greek, ἱστός (histos), a thing ‘stood upright’—and it has been Athena’s spear and her magic wand. Indeed, in putting out Polyphemus’ eye, the vivid enacting of the various thrusting and spinning motions required may have contributed to a sexualising of the scene, which has left an occasional imprint in Homer’s diction. On the purely lingual face of it, these intimations can seem a little odd or obtrusive. Most remarkable is the line which opens our passage:

‘But the Cyclops, groaning and throbbing in the pangs of giving birth …’

Our word ‘travail’ allows translators to dodge the issue, because the English word need not refer solely to the labour of giving birth. This does not seem to be the case, however, for Homeric ὠδίνων (ōdinōn), taken here to be participial. This is shocking stuff, because it is sudden, brief, and not further explained, and the imagery is not a metaphor or part of a discernible simile. It does not appear to pay, for example, to ponder what it is being given birth by Polyphemus. Yet I can imagine that after witnessing the performer enact the putting out of the Cyclops’ eye, wielding his burning staff of olive, his pregnancy might well seem a tacit, semi-conscious consequence of the fact that Polyphemus has been, well and truly, fucked.

On the question of who might compare pain of any kind to labour pains, and specifically how, I propose that there are scientific grounds for judgement. Labour pains, experienced only by pregnant women, are therefore unlike any other vehicle in a comparison. Homer compares the pain of an arm wound to Agamemnon to the pangs of labour, in such a way as to elucidate the quality of that pain (Iliad XI.269-72). On the basis of this usage alone—but also for other reasons—I can conclude that the composer of the Iliad was female. The direct use here in describing the condition of the Cyclops—implicating instead the stricken vulnerability of the woman, helpless and passive to unpredictable recurrences of intense agony—remind one of the usage in similes from Isaiah describing the debased state of Zion (13:8, 21:3). It strongly suggests that the composer of the Odyssey was male.

I think it pays great dividends to imagine enacting the story of the Odyssey as you read it—that is, to imagine telling it to people present in front of you—perhaps while holding, or having ready access to, a staff. So I encourage you to do it. There is a feeling of seeing the poem from the inside, as I imagine an actor channeling Hamlet also channels Shakespeare. While bringing it to life, one may find, as I do, that Homer’s script regularly answers as an actor’s and a director’s prompt, seemingly by design.

I note in particular that the sympathy typically aroused when speaking someone else’s speech, is surely a necessary foundation for any act of interpretation. This is not always obvious to students, critics, and other essay writers. Sympathy can sometimes seem to conflict with one’s ability to judge morally, generally by undermining it. But there must be sympathy for the Devil in John Milton, to speak him with such feeling. Such sympathy is surely second nature to producers of dramatic imitations, a field in which Aristotle claims Homer to be a pioneer (Poetics 1448b37). Homer himself, or Odysseus his present narrator, is putting himself in someone else’s place every time he delivers a speech.

This goes even for the monstrous cannibal Polyphemus. When he is described as in labour, or he is madly hurling the tops of mountains at abusive voices over sea, we see him through the telescope as a demeaningly feminised yet terrifying villain. But in the troglodyte’s cave, his home, we experience him disarmed, dismayed, and dis-eyed. Odysseus gives him one of the most curiously affecting—and ludicrous—speeches in all of Homer. The Cyclops meets his bellwether ram as he heavily exits the open door to go to pasture. Odysseus, clinging on under his woolly belly, is in a position to hear everything.

“Ah Ram, buddy, why do you hurry up this way through the cave—of all my flocks

The last? No way before did you get left behind coming and going with the sheep,

No! Far the first you’re nibbling on the delicate flowers of the grass,

Strutting long steps; you’re first to reach the streams of the rivers,

First home to the stall, longing to return

Of an evening: but now? You’re last of all. Ah, you’re sad for your lord,

You miss his eye! The one which the evil man completely blinded

With his pathetic friends, once my mind’s vessels were defeated by wine—

Nowan, whom I tell you has not yet escaped from his destruction.

If only you could be of my same mind, and become someone to talk with,

To tell where that fellow is skulking away from my power:

In that case his brain, oh, through the cave this way and that

Gets dashed on the floor from his pummelling, and my heart

Would settle down from the evils which this nobody gave me—this Nowan.” (9.447-60)

This man loves his pet! Who among us has not projected in this way upon the psyches of our animals? Of course we are narcissistic and perhaps delusional in so doing, but who will throw the stone, and deny his sympathy? Polyphemus is a man-eater who tenderly puts his lambs and kids to their dams. That is a capitalist who loves his dog. In point of fact, Polyphemus appears to be a cheese-loving vegetarian when he’s not eating man-flesh. By contrast, Odysseus and his men seem singularly focussed, after their escape, on the animals the Cyclops tends and loves, as so much mutton to be driven and stolen. This goes even for the ram who saves Odysseus’ life, who becomes the captain’s special, edible prize. Though from the human angle Polyphemus is a lawless solipsist, for his sheep and goats he is a benevolent ruler who studies their nature and their joys, and regulates their lives in accordance.

The sympathy Odysseus summons to speak as Polyphemus is overwhelmed by the sympathy of Polyphemus himself, who seems to live vicariously through his ram. This first among sheep normally leads his fellows the pastoral way to the delicate flowers and the rivers’ streams, but lingers now the last of all. The brutish Cyclops leaks that he also has learned to love the flowers and the streams. Of course he must be missing my eye, says the pastoral Cyclops, just like I do! Sympathy is reciprocal. When Polyphemus feelingly evokes the ram’s “longing to return” to his stall in the evening, any disdain of him devolves also upon the animating pathos of the Odyssey itself. Homer not only looks through the Cyclops’ eyes, he looks through the eyes of a domestic ram and finds an Odyssey in his daily orbit, and its hesperian longing.

But apparently within the ram, Homer reaches a limit of his powers to bring thought to speech. One wonders what these limits are in the storyteller, of sympathy and imagination? Perhaps Homer could have given voice to the ram. But could a ram play the ewe?

In his wish that the ram could talk, however, Polyphemus goes even further than sympathy: he speaks of them ‘being of the same mind’, ὁμοφρονέων (homophroneōn), a word which Odysseus had once coined in his own person. This was when he first confronted Nausicaa, emerging naked from a bush. Odysseus wishes for her, and her future husband, that the gods grant them this quality, ὁμοφροσύνη (homophrosynē), ‘oneness of mind’ (6.180-5). It seems to me that ‘sameness of thought’ may refer to something different from, though not alien to, ‘togetherness of feeling’ or ‘of experience’ (sympathy). This is Odysseus at his most naked and truthful, wishing for Nausicaa truly the best thing that he knows. It is, to me, stunning—stunningly perceptive—that he imputes this thwarted wish for communion to Polyphemus, his nemesis.

We see them together in Homer’s iconic figure: the man underneath, clinging to the ram’s magnificent fleece, heart to beating heart. But they are man and mutton, not soul and soul or mind and mind. If to hear this wish for oneness of mind from the mouth of the Cyclops, meant for him and his ram, is intended to be mocking of him, then it is painfully so. This creature is terribly alone. Even his neighbouring Cyclopes cannot understand what he’s saying, to his considerable cost. His imagining Sir Ram coursing the fields with long strides, μακρὰ βιβάς (makra bibās), like a noble steed, or Achilles, is faintly ludicrous for a sheep. But again, it is painfully mocking. If we proud modern individuals are different from this Cyclops, then it behooves us to figure out how—though we travail.

My brain I’ll prove the female to my soul,

My soul the father, and these two beget

A generation of still-breeding thoughts,

And these same thoughts people this little world,

In humors like the people of this world,

For no thought is contented …

Thus play I in one person many people,

And none contented. Sometimes am I king.

Then treasons make me wish myself a beggar,

And so I am; then crushing penury

Persuades me I was better when a king …

… But whate’er I be,

Nor I nor any man that but man is

With nothing shall be pleased till he be eased

With being nothing.

(Richard II, V.5. Played by Sir Ram.)

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Odyssey 9.306-414

Today’s passage contains the one absolutely definite, 100% certifiable joke in Homer’s Odyssey. It scarcely needs pointing out that the way that any words or actions register with an audience, depends a great deal on whether they understand themselves to be witnessing a comedy or a tragedy. The very same words or events can seem either pitiable or laughable, depending. Hence for uncultured, inarticulate foreigners among ancient Greek speakers, which is a group that includes all modern, professional classicists and translators, there is always a high risk while expressing one’s reactions to the literature and volunteering one’s analysis, that we are, painfully and embarrassingly, not in on the joke. Consider the predicament of the alien Thermians in the film Galaxy Quest, who are feelingly convinced that the silly 1960s US sitcom Gilligan’s Island in fact depicts a heart-wrenching tragedy. All can be lost when context is lost. Even removing the psychic prompt of a laugh track from a television comedy can result in a surprisingly solemn experience. Actors’ timings, expecting the now silenced laugh, seem to fall flat instead, and prompt an awkward reflectivity in response to intended throwaway lines or zingers. Comic putdowns, like expleted imprecations, often have macabre or even diabolical connotations, when allowed to be heard in silence and sobriety.

I continue to complain that the registration of the Odyssey is handicapped and distorted when people approach it as an ‘epic’. There may be some usefulness in this term in getting at the scale and sublimity in the scene-painting, psychic and physical, of the Iliad. But even in this case I am not convinced that ‘epic’ adds anything important to what is already there in ‘tragic’ and ‘tragedy’. The Odyssey, on the other hand, is not even on the spectrum. Any transmillennial and transcultural induction of the qualities of ‘epic’, covering Virgil and Dante and Milton and Tolstoy, for example, always has its first and immediate exception in Homer’s Odyssey. Far from there being twin exemplars from the original epic poet, we have instead the genre-defining volcano of the Iliad, and then the other one, the weird one. The Odyssey.

A great hindrance for English speakers to seeing what is there, in what Homer is giving, is an entirely artificial epic aspiration, or pretension, which infects translators. Professional Classics already indoctrinates would-be renderers with its pseudo-historical fantasies about ‘oral epic’. There is posited some kind of entranced metrical-verbal substratum, taking the place of a composer ‘Homer’, which somehow, through some mysterious oral and traditional process, begets and gestates these two dissimilar children. (Is one of them perhaps a bastard?) Under the spell of such a misted and mystifying origin story, it does not occur to the consciousness that the same person may not be well suited to translating both the Iliad and the Odyssey; it is all of it, after all, but epic Greek in epic hexameters. My own eyes were only opened to the special tone of the Odyssey by Samuel Butler’s translation, which I continue to consult and recommend over all others. His deadpan, prose distillation is a distillation, but like all such rarefactions it precipitates the iron nugget in its purity. Once one sees it it can’t be unseen. It is a wonder to discover the deadpan Homer and the Odyssean hexameter’s prosaic sensibility.

One admits, however, that all of this is subjective insistence and special pleading, even if wholeheartedly for the sake of improving and advancing my reader’s experience of the Odyssey. The glow of ‘epic’ dulls the wits and the senses into a burnished, sleepy stupor at the pew. I want you all to experience instead the laugh-out-loud moments, which are always more enjoyable in company, together with the many other more private tensions, pangs, and joys of the heart which the Odyssey induces with its magnetic field. But nothing keeps you from retreating afterward to the cosiness of the ‘oral epic’ cubby, with its reassuring academic authorities and awe at what those soulful archaic primitives can accomplish, given enough time. If only there was a proof, by example, that the Odyssey as a whole may need to be approached as comedy to be better understood. Proof! Proof is not possible, or looked for, in the study of literature, oral or otherwise. But in the explanation of his joke, which Homer in this instance all but gives by himself—with only the barest need for me to clarify things for the Greekless—there may indeed be proof that the Odyssey is comedy. What is more, the idea that Homer’s poetry was built from inherited metrical phrases—metrical formulas which fit into slots of an hexameter line of verse, so that composition can be improvised and extemporised—comes directly into question, because the metrical shape of the words, the long and short syllables, do nothing to explain this joke; rather, we are pointed to an aspect of Homer’s Greek language—his contemporary language—which the oral theory of composition completely ignores. So may the primitivist fetishising mumbo-jumbo of ‘oral epic’ have its bubble burst, and leave Homer, the world’s original tonal composer of dramatic stories, to blink again in the sunlight. Again there is special pleading: it turns out my life’s work on Homer and the Greek accent may depend on the telling of this joke. So let us turn to the dull and tasteless labour of explaining a joke, to see what turns up that may seem convincing as proof in these parts.

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Odysseus tells the Cyclops that his name is Οὖτις, Oûtis, with a circumflex intonation on the first syllable. This sounds a lot like οὔ τις, oú tis, except for its acute intonation on the ou. The latter phrase is the regular negative of the indefinite pronoun: ‘no-one’. The first syllables are the same, both are accented with a pitch peak on the syllable, but they are accented differently: the circumflex rises and falls in pitch over the long vowel sound ou, while the acute rises only at the end of it. The similarity of sound is the key to Odysseus’ trick. Since Odysseus clearly means his invented name to sound like the indefinite pronoun, I translate Oûtis as ‘Nowan’. Robert Fitzgerald uses ‘Nohbdy’.

Now, these graphic accent marks, circumflex and acute, only came into existence in the written, edited texts of the Alexandrian scholars, hundreds of years at least after the poems were composed. The Alexandrian graphic system is itself likely a rearguard, a conservative, scholarly reaction to a change in the spoken accent of Greek in that era; this was a transition to a stress accent on the same syllable as the old pitch rise, which persists into modern Greek. In other words, modern Greek stresses either a circumflex or an acute equally, without a necessary difference in intonation. Such a change, applied to the inherited texts, would have made the musical emphases of the more ancient Greek verses unintelligible. Homer did not know anything about these marks—or possibly about written Greek at all, except perhaps as a scribal skill useful for recording poetic performances. Or perhaps he used the new alphabetic notation in composition him- or herself. But even so, in the earliest written versions (in Greek, at any rate) the text of Homer would not have had accentual indications or even word divisions, and the name and the indefinite pronoun would have looked identical: ΟΥΤΙΣ. In point of fact, the joke works just as well if there is no difference at all in the pronunciations; the effect would have been the same as in Abbott and Costello’s ‘Who’s on first’ routine. But the written accentual system first included in Alexandrian texts happens also to reflect a pronunciation which preserves the joke, and to my mind very much improves it.

When Greek negates a non-indicative sentence—that is, when a speaker exhorts, or orders, or doubts, or wishes, or fears, rather than simply states—it for some reason chooses a different and quite different-sounding form, μή (mē) rather than οὐ (ou), to express the negative no/not. (Neither form is accented, but the following indefinite pronoun, a so-called ‘enclitic’, induces the acute accent.) Hence in conditional questions like the following, from the neighbouring Cyclopes,

“Surely no one (ἦ μή τίς) who’s a mortal is driving off your own flocks against your will?

Surely no one’s (ἦ μή τίς) after killing you, whether by cunning or by force?” (9.405-6)

the ‘no one’ in these cases is μή τις (mé tis), not οὔ τις (oú tis). Now, this version of the negative indefinite pronoun sounds a lot like a word of great resonance for Odysseus and the Odyssey: μῆτις (mêtis), ‘skill’, ‘shrewdness’, ‘contrivance’. Personified, Metis is supposed to have been the mother of Athena herself, in the sense that father Zeus swallowed her when she was pregnant by him, for fear of her offspring. He then gave birth to Athena from his head, like a cunning thought. (The stories of Athena’s birth do not occur in Homer.) Athena’s favourite Odysseus has a characteristic epithet πολύμητις, polymētis, for which I have been saying ‘poly-wily’. Yes, the Greek word in question μῆτις, mêtis looks and sounds the same, aside from the shift of accent, as the negative indefinite pronoun in conditional sentences, μή τις (mé tis), ‘no one’. To be sure, this second pun, mé tis/mêtis, is not for confusing the Cyclopes, but for amusing the audience, and perhaps especially the readers in it. It is a metapun.

Got it? Oûtis is a made up name which could sound like it means ‘no one’ if you don’t quite hear its intonation, while mêtis is a pregnantly meaningful word (and also a proper name) which, when you don’t catch the pitch pattern, also sounds like the way Greeks say ‘no-one’ in conditional sentences. Polyphemus responds to the second question from his highland neighbours with what seems to him a simple, clarifying, indicative statement of fact:

“Friends, Nowan (Οὖτις, Oûtis) is killing me by cunning, but not (οὐδὲ) by force.” (408)

What the sleepy neighbours hear, however, is oú tis, ‘no one’, the indicative negative indefinite pronoun, not Oûtis—for them an unfamiliar, positive, proper name. The introduction of the negative into the idea has a knock-on effect, turning the following negative conjunction (οὐδὲ) into a ‘nor’ or a ‘nor either’. Polyphemus had intended, however, to clarify that his enemy had overcome him by a trick (δόλος, dolos) rather than by any sort of force, implausible against a Cyclops; in his sentence, the οὐδὲ is disjunctive, ‘but not’. The neighbours’ mishearing therefore equivocates on both Οὖτις and οὐδὲ, treating them as coordinated negatives. Thus what they hear from Polyphemus is the following, a confirmation of their incredulity in the indicative, factual mood:

“Friends, no one (οὔ τις, oú tis) is killing me by cunning, nor either (οὐδὲ) by force!”

So, somewhat at a loss in response to what they think Polyphemus has replied, the irritated neighbours think he must be crying out in pain from an illness rather than an assailant, and respond:

“If in fact there’s no one doing you violence and you’re all alone,

Disease from Big Zeus is a thing there’s no way to escape and avoid.

No; you’d best say a prayer to Daddy, Lord Poseidon.” (410-12)

What they actually hear is that no one is bothering Polyphemus, despite the painful ruckus he’s making! But the real punchline, the lynchpin of the joke, comes from Odysseus the narrator:

‘So they spoke and went off, and my own dear heart fell about laughing,

How my name thing utterly deceived him—as well as my blameless ‘No-how’ (μῆτις).’ (413-14)

‘No-how’ here stands in play for that quality of μῆτις (mêtis) which characterises Odysseus, his cunning and smarts. But for the attempt at word play in English, I should have rendered it, in honour of the joke, as ‘wit’. The whole joke therefore involves these four forms, two equivalent negative expressions bookended by a made-up proper name and a positive noun, which contain initial syllables that also serve in Greek as the two types of Greek negative particle: Οὖτις, οὔ τις, μή τις, μῆτις (Oûtis, oú tis, mé tis, mêtis).

It is true that the joke would also work if no sort of accentuation was a part of Homer’s composition. The confusion of names with pronouns (‘Who’s on first’) works on its own in the Abbott and Costello routine. But the detail of Homer’s scene requires some level of mispronunciation or mishearing. Though the neighbours have gathered around Polyphemus’ cave, they are still conversing through the giant rock of a door blocking the entrance and trapping Odysseus and his men. What is more, the Cyclopes are bleary-eyed, and Polyphemus is both hungover and groaning in severe physical distress. All the same, they hear the correct syllables and make perfect sense of them. What fits the miscommunication in this picture is a limited garbling: what the Cyclopean neighbours mishear is Polyphemus’ intonation. Besides, Οὖτις is not a person or a name that they know; it is not a usual name at all. The indefinite pronoun, however, is very familiar, and it makes sense that they would be predisposed to hear Polyphemus mean ‘no-one’ by Oûtis.

To posit that Homer ignored his Greek’s accentuation in composing rhythmic verses, is an absurd supposition about a poet or poem in any language. And yet it is a foundational premise in the absurdly prevalent theory taught in schools about Homeric composition, that the Iliad and the Odyssey are a result of oral composition on a purely metrical basis. The fact is in my recent book, Singing Homer’s Spell: The End of Oralist Poetics, I have demonstrated for the first time that the received Alexandrian accentuation can make eminent musical sense of Homer’s hexameter verses, reinforcing and syncopating the metre in a recognisably musical way. The key to interpreting the Greek accentual system is a law of tonal prominence, which, it turns out, applies also to ancient Latin. What is more, I show that in our received text both Odysseus and Penelope show distinctive, characteristic, easily recognisable tonal patterns in their impassioned exclamations; these may be compared to signature lines in Wagnerian opera, melodic patterns that both evoke and identify particular protagonists in the drama. We are therefore on the threshold of a new awakening to the dramatic life of Homeric μουσική (mousikē). The oral theory, by contrast, in its current form, clarifies literally nothing about the Homeric poems as we have them, in the tonally accented scripts bequeathed us from Alexandria. Homer’s joke based on misinterpreted accentuation, may itself be the cipher to unlock the secret of Homer’s tonal music. As I argue in my book, everything turns on the ancient pitch-accented usage which distinguishes between the circumflex voicing pattern on a long vowel, and the acute on a long vowel, a distinction which no longer obtains in the modern Greek stress accent system where both are simply stressed. This is precisely the ancient distinction between Οὖτις and οὔ τις, μῆτις and μή τις.

Let us not lose sight of the negation involved in Odysseus’ joke. Trapped in the weirdly diagnostic solipsism of the Cyclops’ cave—the tender pastoralist, who lovingly puts the lamb to the teat, and at the same time the fast-food cannibal—Odysseus declares himself to be Nobody. Is it out of court to invoke an Hegelian triad in the progress of the soul; thesis, negation, synthesis, or the joyful, sorrowful and glorious mysteries of the rosary? This point of the journey is a nadir, but also a baptism, a descent into nothing and no-one, but also the triumphant birth of a (comic) hero.

“Nowan is my name: Nowan is what they call me,

Mother and Dad, and all the rest of my friends.” (366-7)

The name and the joke are not the heart of this passage, however. Of course there is a simile in store, although not this time a cross-dressed one.

For the Circle-Eye had lying there a cudgel, by the animal pen,

Of green olive wood: now that’s one he cut so he could carry it

Once it dried. That thing—among ourselves, as we looked at it, we compared

To the length of a ship’s mast, a twenty-oarsman in black,

A berth wide for freight which traverses the great gulf:

That’s how long it was, that’s how solid it looked when you did. (319-24)

Above we find not a simile but a direct comparison. The sense of scale is truly marvellous; what is for the Cyclops a potential cudgel or crook, is for Odysseus and his men a twenty-oarsman’s mast. Once again we see Odysseus’ imagination for what is possible shaped by his experience with human industry, all of it feelingly invoked but also instantly belittled, by the sheer scale of the Cyclops and his uses in relation to back-breaking human endeavour. The literal belittling caused by the Cyclops is both dizzying and humbling. It harbours comic terror. I get this in spades when I look at this vase-painter’s work, and imagine, perhaps with him, that the large, framing graphic designs (from this perspective) are in fact the Cyclops’ eyes:

From the Cyclops’ spare toothpick Odysseus cuts off a span of his spread arms’ length, and has his men whittle it. It seems important that the stick is made of olive wood. Sometimes a stick is just a stick; but we have been given reason to identify the olive with Athena and Athena’s protection, and so with Odysseus himself. Its culture and agriculture, still nativist in Greece, are apparently irrelevant to those of the Cyclopes; in Polyphemus’ cave the olive is waste wood. Later, when they finally put it to use, Odysseus turns again to shipbuilding, this time for a true, if straightforward, simile:

Now they gripped the stake of olive, sharp at the tip,

And into the eye they thrust it: but I pressed on it from above

And twirled it, as when a man drills a ship’s plank

With an auger, and the men underneath keep vibrating it with the thong

Taken hold of at each end, and the thing runs, spinning firm and continuously.

Just so in that fellow’s eye we took the fire-tipped stake

And kept whirling it round, and the blood started flowing over it while it was hot!

All his eyelids, even around the eyebrows, the hot smoke singed

From the eyeball as it burned, and his roots sputtered in the fire. (382-90)

The unionised work of construction, the rhythm and multiplicative power of a team, together with the camaraderie of a ship’s crew, seem to be animating things on the human side of the simile which help describe the gory penetration of a monstrous eye. There may even be a nod to democratic sensibility—perhaps a new thing in a post-feudal, post-Mycenaean world. When Odysseus says that the lots fell out to pick the team with just the selection he would have wished—

The lots fell to those I also wished to choose myself!

Four men, while I was numbered the fifth among them. (334-5)

—the democratic lottery happens to coincide with the good and rational choice. This is perhaps the democratic fantasy. Or a rigged election. But the leader likes to make it seem like he’s on jury duty like everyone else, himself the fifth man and the point guard.

For those of you trying to imagine Polyphemus’ face through all this, note that he has ‘eyebrows’ (plural). Earlier Odysseus had tittered darkly that this adventure in the cave was not going to be an ‘erotic thing’ (ἐρατεινός) for his men, once the giant appeared. Was that a slip of some kind? Is what is described above, the rhythmic penetration of a sputtering monstrous eye, a sexual act?

The consummation, however, is the simile which steals the scene:

As when a man who’s a coppersmith takes a big axe or an adze

And plunges it in cold water, and it shrieks mightily

As he doctors it—for that, mind, is where iron gets its strength—

So this man’s eye hissed and sizzled around the olive-wood stake. (391-4)

Most translators mistake the process described here for ‘tempering’, a heat treatment of metal which does not involve immersion. The treatment of iron Odysseus describes is nowadays called ‘quenching’. For an indispensable discussion of metallurgy in Homer, by a chemistry professor, not a classicist, see the article linked here. It seems that whenever Homer refers to the products of metallurgy, he uses the name of the base or source metal rather than the product. The word for copper, χαλκός (khalkos), for example, often seems to refer to the hardened alloy we call bronze. In a similar way, σίδηρος (sidēros), ‘iron’, appears to refer at different times to bloom iron, wrought iron, and carburised iron, or steel. It is the latter alloy which requires the plunging or ‘quenching’ of heated iron into water (βάπτειν, baptein, whence ‘baptise’).

There are many shiny objects in Homer’s world, metals especially: gold, silver, bronze, copper, tin. The wealthy houses gleam with these elements, trading in inherited objects wrought from these ores. Amongst these boring iron holds a special place. Archaeologists populate a Middle Earth with a ‘Bronze Age’ and an ‘Iron’ one. Whatever the reality, there surely is a natural history to be told which accounts for the changing prevalence in availability, development, and use of these metals by human beings, in the wake of different natural events and circumstances. But it does seem that the world of the Odyssey is one where iron is being actively worked and its nature has a hold on the technological imagination. Iron can be shiny as well; the ‘flaming’ iron Athena pretends she is trading, when she visits Ithaca as Mentes, is most likely new-quenched steel. She says she’s carrying this product to trade for copper, or more likely bronze (χαλκός). It’s tempting to see this as a barter of the manufactured and useful for the inherited and valuable.

But mostly iron is dull and grey, like an axe-head. It is boring, dependable, strong, and above all resilient. Stubborn and unromantic, iron speaks to the character of a kind of human heart.

In most instances, “iron-heartedness” calls upon the qualities of hard-wrought iron: strong, impervious to blows. In the Odyssey, Telemachus, Calypso, and Odysseus all invoke the iron heart to describe endurance (4:292) or lack of compassion (5:190 and 23:172). Such iron hearts recall the polukmētos sidēros [‘wrought iron’], in that hardness or immovability can be, in many situations, exceedingly valuable. In Odyssey 23, for example, Penelope’s iron resolve not to yield until she tests Odysseus is as heroic as Odysseus’ ability to keep his temper and his beggarly disguise.

Often in Homer, however, the attribution of a ‘heart of iron’, as for example to Penelope in the passage mentioned, is intended as an accusation or a rebuke. We recall the hardening of Pharaoh’s heart. We ourselves much prefer to speak instead of hearts of gold. The iron horse is too relentless a locomotive. There is therefore at least a double meaning in Homer’s attribution of an iron heart. But Odysseus’ aside in the simile—that the hot plunging in cold water is where iron gets its strength—may suggest that when he plunges the olive stake into the Cyclops’ eye, he also overcomes whatever compromised nature had been his, and something new now steels within him.

The rite of baptism itself perhaps owes its inspiration to the metallurgical quenching of iron. Certainly the baptising of wrought iron into steel seems to involve the infusing of an holy spirit of some kind; the actions of both fire and water in producing the transformation to steel remain largely beyond our ken. The product seems to be improved in its inner nature. Odysseus describes the action of baptising as φαρμάσσων (pharmassōn), as though its effect were comparable to that of a healing drug or potion (pharmakon). Perhaps it was thought that the human being could also be transformed from its base metal, in the magical way that steel is born from iron in fire and water.

Is this what we have witnessed? Has Odysseus been baptised in the Cyclops’ cave, taken on the name of No-One, the name of anonymity, in an episode that is, as Shakespeare’s word so wonderfully puts it, forgetive? Through the molten despair of imprisonment in the cyclopean cave, is there a Man of Steel to emerge? Let us take this in with the delicacy and good humour, and the grain of salt, which only comedy will allow. Odysseus certainly does. He tells us in the moment that he cracked up laughing (ἐγέλασσε), at his name-trick and his wit, his Oûtis and his Mêtis. That’s selling your own joke. Let’s take him seriously.

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Odyssey 9.193-305

The world of the Odyssey is one where drugs and potations are often the first option for use in a pinch. One should have thought that men-in-arms would prefer to kill by the sword, honourably, man to man, over conquest by poison. The moral issue is raised quite early, by Athena playing Mentes, Lord of the Taphians; she tells Telemachus how she first met Odysseus on his way back from Ephyre, from a mission to procure a “man-killing chemical” (φάρμακον ἀνδροφόνον, pharmakon androphonon) with which to anoint his arrowheads: “but that man wouldn’t/Give it, you see, since he feared the retribution of the gods, who are forever.” Not to worry; apparently Mentes’ own father, doing his own thing, also had it and gave Odysseus the drug willingly, because “he used to love him dreadfully.” It is not clear whether a sexual fixation is meant. But as Athena would have it, her pretend father’s feeling for Odysseus was strong enough to overcome a moral scruple. In the Iliad, it is bad enough simply to be a sneaky bowman, like Paris, who kills from afar like all the cowards with a gun, in relation to a warrior fighting for his life in close quarters with shield and sword. But poisoning arrowheads to murder a warrior is despicable cheating, by any gentleman’s reckoning. Nevertheless, Odysseus is not ashamed of using poison and does not fear the resentment of the gods, if Athena’s story has any truth to it. Remember that she is choosing to tell this tale to influence his impressionable son. Poison for his arrows is what Odysseus wanted; perhaps because he was once a hot young man, that was what he got.

A value seems to be placed on ripe vintages of wine. These sorts of things are not for the battlefield; they are the savoured treasures of peace, to be found in storerooms in inmost nooks, known only to a few. Nestor’s housekeeper ‘loosened the veil’ of an eleven-year-old vintage to mix a special bowl (3.391). Helen produced an Egyptian drug, νηπενθή nēpenthē, to release old warriors and their sons from the grief of remembering the losses of war (4.220 ff.). This drug was an addition to the wine bowl. Now we hear of the wine of Maron, a priest of Apollo, a “divine drink” (θεῖον ποτόν theion poton): “no one of the slaves/Knew about this thing, nor the handmaids in the household,/But just himself, his own wife, and one solitary housekeeper.” Odysseus makes clear why he arms himself with potent wine, in addition to his usual gear: he knew in his manly spirit (θυμὸς ἀγήνωρ thumos agēnōr) that he was about to encounter an opponent, “clothed in great valour,”—so far, a line that could belong in the Iliad—but a savage, who observed “neither rights (δίκας dikas) nor laws (θέμιστας themistas)”. Perhaps this anticipated lawlessness justifies Odysseus’ own provision to handicap the traditions of man-to-man combat. He is no stranger to the poisoned tip. What Hamlet calls ‘practice’ seems of a piece with the μῆτις (mētis) for which Odysseus is celebrated among Greek speakers and by Athena herself. But we recall that this quality also allowed him to serve, in Athenian tragedy, as an out-and-out stage villain.

Odysseus’ μῆτις is also on display in his storytelling. When is he making things up? Did he really score this wine from a priest of Apollo, once upon a time, or did he put that in because he knew he’d need it in the story to come, to give him the means to defeat the prodigious Cyclops? In his telling it seemed that the attack on the Cicones of Ismarus, immediately after they sailed from Troy, had been a brief affair. Perhaps even a single day’s work; certainly the counter-attack, by the neighbouring Ciconian army from the mainland, is described as having taken place, the battle shifting one way and then the other, over a single passage of the sun. But later we hear that the men of Odysseus’ fleet had had time, before their losing battle, to store up large quantities of the defeated Cicones’ wine in two-handled jars. And now we are to believe that in the course of their invasion of the Cicones, Odysseus’ men had had the time to go house to house, so as to be able to spare the house of this Maron, his wife and child, who had the fabulous wine in stock. In point of fact, Odysseus seems to have spent a convivial evening with his grateful host, where he first smelt the wine’s astonishing bouquet, and learned that they diluted its strength with twenty parts of water. They spared Maron because he was a priest of Apollo who lived amidst the growth of Apollo’s sacred precinct: we once again touch on the idea that Odysseus’ first adventure after Troy was a mini-Iliad, with perhaps a lesson learned. We recall that Agamemnon had precisely disregarded the status of Chryses the priest of Apollo, and had taken his daughter for his concubine—preferable, he says out loud, to Clytemnestra. As a result Agamemnon brings Apollo’s plague upon his whole army. The would-be Agamemnon, Odysseus—one goat to the good, so far, as a perk for being head of the fleet—did not repeat his old commander’s impiety, or covet Maron’s child.

We recall that the Phaeacians only moved out to isolated Scheria because they were fed up with being bullied by their cousins, the Cyclopes. Does Odysseus then only tell the story of outwitting and humiliating the Cyclops to please or otherwise impress his audience? The question of Odysseus’ truth-telling presents quite the paradox. Perhaps it is a Cretan paradox. We tend to take Odysseus at his word when he tells the tale of his wanderings, despite all the fabulous elements. He seems to be as genuine and winning a teller as one finds; often he seems confessional—sometimes unwittingly so, which only adds to the feeling of authenticity. Odysseus does not hide or dress his mistakes. So we accept any number of giants and witches and monsters and metamorphoses and talking ghosts, as so many signposts, if you will, in an illustrated journey of the soul—an human soul—a male human soul. One thinks of Tolkien’s visible souls, orcs and elves and hobbits. But Homer’s dimensions here brook no comparison. The Cyclops is transcendentally true. He is a solipsist. He is MAGA. He is the asshole weirdo. All of these and less and more. (Just not ‘man in the state of nature.’) Homer has received and returned and turned these Lotus-Eaters and Sirens into unforgettable icons of truth-telling and psychic reality.

The paradox for me, and I apologise for anticipating, is that when we know he is lying, as when Odysseus is in disguise and incognito in Ithaca, everything fabulous disappears. When Odysseus is trying to convince someone else that he is a real human being with a history—a Cretan—there are not even any gods. There are not even any gods. Homer knows about realism, evidently. It’s for liars.

Two moments that arrest the attention: when his men urge Odysseus to grab some cheese, then come back to drive some animals and scarper off to sea, he responds:

Me? Nah. Not persuaded, though it would have been much more profitable.

So as I might see the man! And what if he gave me a guest gift?

But it was not destined to be a sexy thing for my comrades, when he appeared. (9.228-30)

The “sexy thing”, ἐρατεινός (‘lovely’, ‘causing eros’), leaves an unexpected taste. Is there in fact something erotic about the episode about to unfold?

And after the Cyclops falls asleep, gorged on human flesh and “undiluted milk,” Odysseus thought in his “great-heart, his life’s breath (θυμός, thumos)” to draw his sword from by his thigh—sometimes a sword is just a sword—and stab the Cyclops in the chest, after feeling with his hand for where the “lungs hold the liver.” There’s something vividly sensual, at least, about his imagination. But he then says a different thumos held him back, when he realised that he and his men could never move the giant stone the monster had used to block the door. I am not aware that Homer uses this expression elsewhere, that one thumos wants to do this, but an other one thinks better. The doubled ‘life’s breath’ of felt consciousness is strangely schizophrenic. Odysseus’ frustration is extreme. In the Iliad, the line ‘he drew his sword from by his thigh’ generally occurs before an exploit in battle. But its first use is in the opening moment when Achilles is also of two minds, as to whether he would draw the sword and kill Agamemnon on the spot, or restrain himself. There there is not the split consciousness, but Achilles is a single subject who thinks in two directions. I am not sure what to make of Odysseus’ usage.

The line about drawing the sword from by his thigh will recur in the Odyssey, several times in this tale of Odysseus’ wanderings. I shall point these out. Each time it precedes a use or an action which only underscores how ill-equipped for his new adventures, is the armed-and-ready man of the Iliad. His drawn sword must be put to strange, new, and improvised uses. It must become a thinking man’s dick, like the rhapsode’s prop that it actually is.

Polyphemus is a weirdo caveman. The rams and billy goats stay outside in the yard. He sleeps with the ewes and nannies. They are his family: he dutifully puts the lambs to the teat. But there is to be no mating inside. I believe Samuel Butler pointed out how absurd it was to go to the trouble of making cheese—although aging cheese in a cave is supposed to be the way to go—when the Cyclopes’ land was already so spontaneously abundant. But I guess the fellow likes his feta. The man’s house is also his barn. What goes unsaid, and unsmelt, is how much shit there must be lying around amidst the cheese and spilt milk, for all the neatness and good order of his pens. Meanwhile, we do not see the Cyclops eat any lamb or mutton; today he only eats the animals that can talk to him!

I do think it is important, almost everything really, to take in that what is going on in the Cyclops’ cave, is comedy. I don’t mean that it is playing for laughs. There is something truly shocking about the moment the brute snatches up two men and eats them raw. In a crunch of liquids and aspirated consonants, one mimes internally the chewing and the gristle. It is ghastly and macabre. But it is not tragic. These are not men with faces and names. They are almost subalterns or minions, minor heads in the buried hydra of the hero’s psyche. You won’t find yourself thinking about them sadly in the shower. Spectacular violence and grisly gore, it seems to me, are some of the outlets the predisposition of comedy will allow; in tragedy they would be unspeakably tasteless. One notes that Greek tragedy sets the slaughter off stage, as a rule. The point and the tragedy are not to be found there.

In the midst of the surrounding aromatic oddness, Polyphemus asks a perfectly normal and civilised question of his unexpected guests: what are you sailors at, are you pirates? More familiarly comic is Odysseus’ responding speech to the Cyclops. He is Gulliver in Brobdingnag. Juxtaposing the big and the small is always good for a laugh. So also is seeing close-up things from an imagined distance. But I believe we broach new territory for Homer here.

The armies of Atreides Agamemenon we declare ourselves to be,

Whose fame these days is the greatest under heaven:

For so massive a city did he sack, and the armies he destroyed

Were many … (263-6)

One wonders how much of the Odyssey’s comedy is actually satire at the Iliad’s expense. That city stuff don’t play down south. When little Odysseus puffs out his chest and basks in the glory of the hosts of Atreides Agamemnon, we experience not so much the sack of Troy, but the sack of the Iliad. The most potent of potions is poetry itself; in one extraordinarily disarming moment of transient drama, the spell of the Iliad is destroyed. All one need do is see those exploits and strifes and suffering, the grandeur and theatre of Achilles himself, through the eye of a disinterested giant contemplating warring ant hills. And this is precisely what the Homeric performer does, when he becomes the Cyclops and speaks his dismissive, disdainful, blasphemous words.

‘You’re a fool, stranger, or you’ve come from a very long way away,

Who asks me either to fear the gods or avoid them:

For no Cyclopes give a shit about Zeus Aegis-Holder

Nor the blessed gods …’ (273-6)

To view the Iliad with a Cyclopean eye is therefore an Homeric thing to do. But is it, also, to be missing an eye?

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Odyssey 9.105-92

“Next there’s an island”: the ἔπειτα of narration signals what happens next in time. In argument it signals a consequence, which is to use a common temporal metaphor in an otherwise timeless logic: the conclusion follows as the night the day. We use ‘since’ or ‘hence’, for example, in a comparable way. But Odysseus is not here narrating the sequence of their journey, nor observing a consequence; his use here seems more like a ‘what is more’. That is an unusual, non-temporal transition. There is evidently a point he and Homer want to make in describing this small island just opposite the land of the lawless Cyclopes.

She’s neither near nor far; and she’s overrun by goats, who are not constrained by the patter of human feet, nor any hunters with packs of dogs roaming the woodland peaks. There’s trees aplenty. The sense of unrestraint then shifts from the goats to the land herself:

“Nor is she kept down by flocks of sheep, nor by the ploughs,

No; unsown and unploughed all her days,

She is widowed of men, and feeds the bleating goats.”

The final image surprisingly consummates the feminine character of the land in Odysseus’ vision of the isle; previously it had been a sort of lingual fact, at best a latency. Γαῖα (Gaia) is always a feminine noun, but this particular earth is a woman widowed of men—who, one presumes, would have done something about all the goats. Γαῖα appears most often in the Odyssey in the phrase πατρίδα γαῖαν (patrida gaian), ‘fathers’ earth’, the destination of one’s home return (nostos); I render the phrase the ‘mother earth of my fathers.’

It is the following hypotheticals which catch my attention, for the distinctly Odyssean, and dare I say ‘western’, vision they express. In many ways the passage anticipates John Locke, or at least a common invocation of Locke about the use of land, in the name of colonialism and industrial development. The sort of men whom the island is missing are men who make things and transform things. In particular, they build ships, so their energy can literally be transported. The Cyclopes, by contrast, are men, or humanoids, who take things as they are given, “trusting in the gods” rather than their industry. They are blessed with a land that spontaneously grows them not only abundant grapes on the vine, but agriculturally developed crops like wheat and barley—something of a miracle without dedicated, ploughed fields. And it does not occur to the Cyclopes to see any possibilities worth getting organised about, in the abundant yet humanly desolate goat island visible across the water. She is not a woman to arouse a cyclops’ interest. Odysseus’ hypothetical is made with a knowing confidence in the assessment, but also a wistfulness which carries real longing. If only these Cyclopes had had some shipwrights and sailors:

“Those fellows would’ve done them the island as well, made her well-developed.

For it’s not at all bad, and would bear all things in their season.

For there are meadows along the banked shores of the grey salt sea,

Watered and soft; their vines would be virtually imperishable!

And there’s level ploughing: very deep the corn, perpetually

They would harvest season by season, since the soil under is very rich.”

I presently live in the Valley of the Sun, near Phoenix, Arizona. As one drives toward this area, or flies in, it is obvious that one is dangerously in the midst of a blistering desert, where javelinas and antelope roam and rattlesnakes rattle, and the occasional jaguar finds refuge in the surrounding mountains—which from a climatic perspective are considered ‘islands’. There is no visible source of water. No part of my perhaps cyclopean imagination could conceive of human settlement here, let alone a vast grid of plumbed and electrified streets and highways. Yet some Americans, or proto-Americans, saw the same vistas and envisioned this metropolis as within their means and ambition. It has ended up neatly laid out, spaced, and gardened, overseen by planted Australian eucalyptus and spindly avenues of palms, and its interiors are thoroughly air-conditioned. Here I sit, in an apartment of someone else’s ant colony. In place of ships there are cars and trucks for transport, although these means seem designed to isolate; even travel by bus or train in the Western world is generally an anonymous, self-absorbed affair, where one sits in one’s pew. There is none of the labour and camaraderie of the ship’s crew involved in every endeavour, nor indeed the prompts in such company to acts of group violence.

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Odysseus seems purposely vague when he mentions “the many sorts of things / That men manage when they cross to one another by ship on the sea …” Of course there are all kinds of uplifting or erotic human intercourse and trade in the unarticulated list, but also piracy, rape, plunder, and war. But one joins in Odysseus’ genuine feeling for the life of the sea, for the sense of possibility in every port, and for the joy of an exhausted crew finding safe anchor. The harbour of the goat island offers what must be a rare privilege to the sailors, of freedom from chores, and choice of when to resume their journey:

“And there’s a harbour of safe anchor, where there’s no need for mooring,

Neither throwing out anchor stones nor attaching the stern cables—

No, just put into shore and mark time until the sailors’

Life breath urges them, and the winds blow fair in aid …”

His record of attempting to sack and enslave the Cicones does not seem to tarnish Odysseus’ enthusiasm, which I reckon we share, for establishing a functioning, symbiotic community, where there are possibilities of meadows for grazing, vines for the vintage, and level ploughing and rich soil for the corn. The vision of the seaman pulling into land, both desiring to plunder what he sees in the development of others, but also to develop what he sees into full function and vibrancy—truly to land, and land with the prospect of home—are perhaps two sides of the same coin of an opportunistic masculinity. Such a man sees a woman as a field not yet furrowed. Control is expressed in the seemingly reciprocal actions between man and matter, involved in ploughing, reaping, tending the herd, and taking to sea and wind for barter and trade. Whether the relationship is consensual is not clear, but that it is mutually beneficial, to man and matter, is a point that could be argued. Husbandry, like sex, has pleasures and bears fruit. Equally masculine, however, is the isolationist, authoritarian patriarchy and rigid myopia of the Cyclopes. (There is a mention of them having wives and children, to whom they each lay down the domestic law, but there is no sign in the tale of women and kids. If they do exist, Polyphemus is evidently a loner, even among loners.) Thucydides famously contrasts the naval mentality of the Athenians, busily free but always ready to drop tools to evacuate into their boats, and the landed, militarised culture of the Spartans in perpetual readiness for war. Odysseus anticipates the Athenian mentality, it seems to me, as surely as he does the land-bound founders of Greater Phoenix, served by automobiles and planes replete with nautical metaphors in their use.

I sense a kind of sadness in Odysseus looking on this island ‘going to waste’. There is an ocean of moral, political, cultural, physical, and metaphysical judgement loaded into our very concept of ‘wasteland’. But unlike in Locke and the other Enlightenment sophists, there is no way to draw in Homeric language a fundamental distinction between ‘nature’ and ‘civilisation’ or the ‘artificial’. The Cyclopes are not men in the ‘state of nature’, in contrast with men who build ships and maraud. A cyclopean myopia is surely endemic in the business world, for example, if not the human race, and seems to me to typify more the modern, urbane native than any naked savage. The Cyclops is a do-it-yourselfer. That is an American ideal. We speak of blinkers and blind spots. Certainly, Homer the craftsman immerses us in descriptions of craft, and it is fair to say that Odysseus’ very soul is invested in his raft and in his marriage bed, both of which he made. But in Homer the production of artifice, its poetry, seems to be a completely natural process, for lack of a better word—an human process—that leads from the tree, to the timber (Latin materia), to the raft. And in the case of his bed made from an olive tree, it is not clear if the whole construction is not also still alive. Odysseus’ reaction to seeing an island with such potential for richly sustaining human life and industry, and sustaining human life through industry, is consistent, to my mind, with an historical Odysseus/Ulysses who not only visited but founded cities, like Lisbon. The joy is there in discerning the lay of the land and spotting the opportunity; I imagine someone who was not after empire or leaving monuments to himself, but who relished the founding of settlements and farm economies—where there were also harbours and timber to build ships for trading and raiding—all for its own sake.

‘Nature’ is another word that seems to be impossible to translate into Homeric Greek. Nature is Latin-derived and is a form rooted in the idea of birth; the word translated ‘nature’ in later Greek is φύσις (physis), an abstract derived instead from a verb to grow or sprout. It is the root sense of this botanical verb which prevails in Homer. Young Nausicaa is a shoot of palm. The animals which appear in the Odyssey are not ‘biological’, not simply ‘natural’; rather, they all signify humanly in story-land, whether as metaphors or in similes or directly in human interaction. The human being and body are the focus of all interaction with the non-human.

We often hear that the Greek gods were ‘anthropomorphic’. This is of course to put them in a box, to explain them and ‘the Greeks’ away. But anthropomorphism is first of all a needlessly abstract way of naming a fact of storytelling, the way the teller invests himself in and animates all things and people, not only gods. We have seen seals whose skins replace the skins of men; we shall see men who become humanly conscious pigs. There is a wild boar who scars Odysseus for life, a solitary stag, a loyal dog, mortal doves and sea crows and a gaggle of geese at Penelope’s trough. But in the world of the Odyssey, you cannot tell if a pig is a pig or a human being, just by looking at him. Perhaps the protean quality of the performer and the performance extends to an animist view of the world which is humanly projective, and investive of consciousness wherever there are eyes, or a single eye, to see through. I suspect that those who trouble to sift out material which they agglomerate under rubrics, like ‘Homeric psychology’ or even ‘Homeric theology’, would do well to look at the fact and the physics of Homeric solo performance for guidance and inspiration, alongside the many silent written words over which they already pore.

Myths about the planet gods, and ‘myth’ generally, do not live in some abstract cultural repository, or an academic mysterium called ‘mythology’: its point of contact with reality is through a human storyteller who stands (or sits) before you bodily. If he wants to be compelling or even intelligible, he has no option but at some level to ‘anthropomorphise’. One should approach this activity in Homer, however, not as a primitive or cultural necessity, but as a prime opportunity for his artwork—physical, vocal, and verbal. Even academics forget that Greek poetry—embodied in intoned voices gesturing in front of you—along with other visual arts—are the only source of Greek mythology, not the other way around. (There is nothing corresponding to an authoritative Bible which Greek poets consulted for their stories. Often the only exposure for a modern student to ancient poetry is a Mythology class. The reifying delusion engendered by this state of affairs is such that one will overhear students, fresh from an A in their high school Mythology class, say that Homer, or Aeschylus, had ‘got it wrong’.)

There is of course a vivid distinction for Homer between man/male, woman/female, and the ‘human’ (ἀνήρ anēr, γυνή gynē, ἄνθρωπος anthrōpos). The poem’s first word is ‘man’ in the sense of male, husband, warrior. Odysseus, the man uniquely of many turns, is therefore, all the same, immediately an instance of something. In this passage we are led to contrast how Cyclopean men and Odysseus, captaining his male labourers at sea, regard or disregard a fertile, undeveloped island across the water. Again, perhaps the salience of these distinctions stems, in part, from the performer’s reality of expressing masculinity, femininity, and humanity, all through his own single body. This is not to say that abstractions do not exist in the Homeric visions and conceptions, but only that the instinct of such a performer must always be concretising, instantiating, and embodying.

All the description of the island is suddenly upended, when Odysseus goes on to say that they ran aground upon her unaware, in the dark of a moonless night shrouded in mist. It must have been only after dawn rose that Odysseus took the lay of the land, and was struck that next day how the Cyclopes, who had no “ships with vermilion cheeks,” could so neglect such a promising place. I find it a little disorienting, that we get the evocative description of the island first, before learning that the ships had in fact run aground on her in the dark, blind and unaware and in some peril. Such disorientation seems intentional on the storyteller’s part. Certainly it contributes to a growing sense of ominousness, of backing into something. Retrogressions in an orbit, equally characteristic of a dactylic Greek folk dance and the motion of Mars, are also characteristic of Homer’s narrative and narrator at many levels.

I feel I should continue to note the numbers, when Homer or Odysseus does, and I continue to solicit any help about what they might signify. We learn that there are twelve ships in Odysseus’ entourage. Each of them has already lost six men among the Cicones, bewailed three times each. Hence the number of the mourning cries was 216. When they hunt the goats of the island, split up into three parties, they end up apportioning nine goats to each ship—so 72 in total. But Odysseus makes a fuss about them giving his ship a special tenth goat. So 73, a prime.

There is also a curious emphasis when Odysseus proposes that only his ship should make the expedition across the water to the land of the Cyclopes:

‘Now, the rest of you, hang out, my trusty fellows:

Meanwhile with my own ship, and my own crew, I am myself

Going to go and try out these men here, whoever they are,

Whether they’re rapists and savages without a sense of right,

Or they’re friendly to strangers, and their thought is god-fearing.’

The first two lines are a festival of self-reference. For whatever reason, Odysseus seems keen to portray himself to the Phaeacians as self-absorbed, possessive, and vain. Is he perhaps interested in a favourable distribution of the booty, by taking on the Cyclopes’ country with his own ship? The last lines mostly echo the question Alcinous asked (8.575-6) before Odysseus named himself. It seems a question from someone who wants to be entertained by savagery, lawlessness, and exotica in his traveller’s tales; one wouldn’t be so interested in how nice everybody is. It is a question which redounds upon themselves: are Odysseus and his men, a mini-fleet of Achaeans, and by extension the defunct Achaean army at Troy, rapine pirates or civilising justicers? The episode with the Cicones rather suggests the former. Odysseus seems conscious of his dramatic audience, and in repeating Alcinous’ question is perhaps explicitly responding to a request. It is only this self-consciousness that puts Odysseus in a good light, and perhaps also his willingness to sell himself short for the sake of the story.

After mercilessly sacking the Cicones, he initially advised, unsuccessfully, that they run away. Evidently he could not then win the day in argument among twelve ships’ worth of men. Amongst his fleet, it seems he is no Agamemnon or Achilles. Here Odysseus asserts his authority, growing into his position as a privileged captain—now with his prized extra goat!—only to recklessly risk his own ship’s crew against a giant, while the other eleven ships hide in safety behind the isle. But perhaps he only feels confident, so far, in commanding his own ship’s crew. In facing the risks of confrontation and deploying stratagems, a certain nimbleness will be required; perhaps Odysseus cannot risk the insubordination of the larger fleet, already in evidence, which is not constituted as an army with an overlord. Its tendency, after all, is rather to think each ship for itself when it comes to the distribution of booty. So far the fleet-wide respect Odysseus commands, has only one goat to show for it.

There are always different permutations in these adventures, as to whether to send his men ahead to scout the danger, or face it himself, together with how much Odysseus is willing to let on to them about what he knows to expect. I wonder if Freud or Jung ever had a go at interpreting the relationship between Odysseus and his men? In any case, the floridity of his ego—or is it id?—seems to set Odysseus up for a fall, and contributes to the building sense of doom. Upcoming is a cyclopean mountain to climb.

‘For he constituted a wondrous prodigy, nor did he resemble

A man who eats bread, but rather a wooded peak

Among the high mountains, which appears set off alone, away from the rest.’

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Odyssey 9.1-104

What’s in a name? Most Greek names are transparent, like ‘Smith’ or ‘Carpenter’. ‘Alcinous’ is a ‘Brave Mind’, ‘Telemachus’ a ‘Battler Afar’. ‘Odysseus’, however, does not look like it’s Greek. Homer has some fun in deriving it from ὀδύσσομαι, ‘to be angry’ or to ‘cause anger against oneself’. More ‘pissed on’ than ‘pissed off’. But this verb is very unlikely to be the source of the hero’s name. The -d- is in the Homeric and the Attic variant; elsewhere in Greece the man can be remembered as Ὀλυσσεύς, Οὐλίξης or other forms with an -l-. Of course from Latin we know him as Ulysses. Etruscan says Uthuze. One theory has it that a Minoan form is the source for all these; a fricative sound not native to either the various types of Greek or Latin or Etruscan, resulted in the different outputs, -d-, -l-, and -th-.

Tacitus passes on reports—incredulously—that Ascibergium in Germany (modern Asberg), once at the confluence of the Ruhr and the Rhine, was founded by Ulixes, and that an altar was found there dedicated to him which mentions also his father Laertes. Classical sources attribute the founding of Ulysippo or Olisippo (modern Lisbon in Portugal!) to the legendary wanderer. Was there a man behind the myth, who really traveled around the world? And not only came to know the towns and the thought of many peoples, but actually founded settlements which became cities?

We don’t even know how to say his name. Homer’s generation likely no longer knew what his name might have meant, against the naming habits of their own culture. But the lingual evidence, that he was known locally in the way that local speakers pronounced his name, from Odysseus to Ulysses, suggests that there is an original, historical reality standing behind these phenomena, a man who was known very widely and locally, a man perhaps known to Minoans by a name which uses a consonant we would not recognise. How these antediluvian Minoans were related to anyone who fought in a Trojan War, is anybody’s guess. But it seems to me that there really once was a wanderer and warrior and founding father who could say, in his own language,

“I am Odysseus, Laertes’ son: with all my cunning deceits

I trouble the attention of humanity; and my repute reaches heaven.”

As he begins his story, Odysseus says,

“What first, what next for you, what the very last shall I recount?”

I would suggest, perhaps perversely, that there is something to note here. A catalogue (καταλέγω, ‘recount’) is a list, and more importantly, a sequence. The counting numbers are the original catalogue. The names we give the numbers cannot be separated from their sequence. In English we start grouping the numbers by tens—after thirteen, at any rate, the first twelve are a dozen who each get a proper name—but changing their sequence would ruin the catalogue, the way that when you’re interrupted at counting pennies, you have to start over. We recall this in our own usage, in the sense that we ‘recount’ a tale, as though its catalogue were like a number. Changing the sequence is not an option, without catastrophic consequences for one’s recall. When a tribal elder recites a genealogy, he must begin at the beginning and follow the sequence. You cannot ask him to skip a bit to get to your ancestor. “[O]ne remembers that one element follows another in a catalogue or list (whether shopping or genealogical) in the way that one remembers that six follows five; and the way that one remembers the latter is lost in the very first functioning of the active memory.”

Hence I would suggest that Homer and Odysseus are innovating here, to some extent. The idea of choosing the sequence of his tale of woes, in something other than their linear, historical order, belongs to art rather than to memory. It rather suggests that we are to pay special attention to the way in which he orders the episodes in his tale, that he is choosing the sequence for a purpose, rather than following the necessity of memory. Once upon a time, some real storyteller invented the ‘flashback’. We remember, stepping back ourselves, that we are finally getting to the tale of Odysseus’ wanderings—the reason we all came here—but that this only happens after four books of a Telemachy, and then four books setting the scene and the stage in Scheria. There have been all the layers peeling the onion, culminating in the extraordinary simile comparing the still hidden Odysseus’ tears to those of a woman widowed by war, collapsed upon her fallen husband while feeling the prod of slavery in her back. There have been several journeys undergone, it would seem, before the journey can begin. Homer’s art has been, in part, re-sequencing the tally of the tale, to set it in a Phaeacian frame. For no less a rationalist than Thucydides, Scheria and the Phaeacians were historical realities. Be that as it may, I think we might all agree that the palace of these painless ferrymen creates an element of fantasy, a fantastic setting in which to frame the Wanderings of Odysseus.

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We also have to go backward in order to go forward. This happens on many levels in Homer’s Odyssey as a whole, but will also happen literally in Odysseus’ wanderings. I remind you that the form of a six-measure syrtós, a round dance with a dactylic foot which I believe may have been the source of the hexameter, involves a rightward circling, punctuated within the third foot of each line by a leftward retrogression, and a resumption rightward at the fifth foot. I suspect this is the dance the Phaeacians were performing during Demodocus’ song about Ares and Aphrodite: the dance of the Muses. The dancers move back leftward as they go forward to the right, like Mars, appearing to retrogress over a couple of months in the night sky, but eventually they come full circle rightward to where they began. The form of such a dance must influence our sense of what can constitute a ‘sequence’.

After the pitch of emotion reached, the stranger in paroxysms of tears after listening to the tale of Odysseus’ exploits in war, the opening episode of his travels is a bit of a let down. The first place they come to immediately after exiting Troy, the land of the Cicones, they set about sacking a city again. Whatever spiritual, moral, practical, or military lessons may have been learnt in the ten years since, and at Alcinous’ court, are not evident at the outset. They kill the men, and divide up the wives and property—equitably! Odysseus claims he wanted to haul ass out of there, with a “fluid foot”, but the men preferred to have a party. This gives time for the locals on the mainland to gather and avenge their kin, assembling a proper army with the modern know-how to fight from chariots. Once again the Achaeans are made to fight by their ships, just like at Troy. Six men from each of Odysseus’ ships are lost. These men are merely numbered, unlike all the victims in the Iliad, who are named. There is a bit of the Keystone Cops in these men of Odysseus.

After escaping a storm, phonically evoked (τριχθά τε καὶ τετραχθὰ, trikhtha te kai tetrhakhtha, ‘thrice and in quarters’ was the sail ripped by the force of the wind), not for the last time they are about to sight home only to be pushed back and aside by wind and tide: backwards on the way to going forwards, orbiting home with retrogressions.

‘Home’ is not a concept that can easily be translated into Greek. It is probably impossible to translate generally, by means of a single foreign word. It is English’s hygge. Realtors nowadays are in the business of selling ‘homes’, but I think their usage can still make us cringe; a house is not a home. The οἶκος in Greek is concretely a house, but also a household, an economic unit. These concrete senses are never far away, but when the suffix -δε is present, of motion towards (οἶκόνδε), it can seem right to translate ‘homeward’. But the word which carries more of the sense of our ‘home’, as well as other things besides, is νόστος (nostos), ‘return’ or ‘going home’. Indeed it seems the idea of return, and the sort of mapless directionality of ‘homing’, very much play their part also in the untranslatable quality of English ‘home’. The sense for home, the longing for it and the happiness, relief, and renewal of arriving there, seem all to be encompassed in Homer’s nostos.

The danger presented by the land of the Lotus-Eaters is precisely that eating the lotus flower causes Odysseus’ men to forget their nostos. The episode of the Lotus-Eaters is brief, barely twenty lines, but it pulls far beyond its weight. It is almost as though each of these episodes is a microcosm, a separate window into the whole enigma of ‘return’, and Odysseus’ return. Odysseus, the narrator, stresses that the Lotus-Eaters did not intend the destruction of his comrades. This is perhaps the most chilling aspect of the peril, that there is no hostile intent. One thinks of all the distractions and addictions that can lead one to forget one’s purpose. Careers could be examples of such distractions. The word ‘career’ suggests the hurtling round a track to preoccupy all one’s strengths and senses, so that one loses the sense and direction of life off the race course. We do not know what plant the lotus is, but evidently it stands for any number of benign-seeming perils to our health and nature, from addictive drugs to lucrative or absorbing careers. The story seems to diagnose a terrifying susceptibility in human nature to forget one’s purpose, or perhaps to forget to seek a purpose, and to that extent to be dead to life and to live on unaware. Odysseus’ hapless men “no longer wished to report back nor return.” His only option (so he thinks) is brute force, to tie these men down to their rowing benches by himself. Which is the freer life, I wonder, chewing the lotus in peace and company, or rowing in the galley, eyes forward to the rear, for Odysseus?

How are the Lotus-Eaters different from the audience Odysseus eulogises at the beginning of his speech?

I tell you this is a beautiful thing, to listen to a singer

Of such a quality as this one is—like the gods in his voice-work.

For to my taste I swear there is no perfection so gratifying

As when good intent prevails in an entire country,

And feasters in their houses listen to the singer

Sitting in rows; by them the dinner trays are full

Of bread and slices of meat, and he draws mead from the mixing bowl

And carries it—the wine bearer—and pours it into their cups:

This, for me, looks the most beautiful thing of all, to my mind’s vessel.

It seems it is a benign intent of the poet and the artist generally, to have his audience eat of his flora and lose themselves in its powers. The audience for art is another group tied to their benches. Odysseus has them sitting in rows. I know very well the experience of chewing over Homer’s poetry for a penniless career. I wonder if the poet of the Odyssey feels this way about his upbringing in the Iliad. The student of Plato would call attention to the last line above: this vision of dinner theatre in peacetime only looks the most beautiful thing of all. It is a vision unexamined, of people perhaps disconnected from other possibilities. Melville has a word for such living death, in Moby Dick:

Only one sweeter end can readily be recalled—the delicious death of an Ohio honey-hunter, who seeking honey in the crotch of a hollow tree, found such exceeding store of it, that leaning too far over, it sucked him in, so that he died embalmed. How many, think ye, have likewise fallen into Plato’s honey head, and sweetly perished there? (Ch.78)

But is Odysseus’ purpose, the destination to which he is slowly circling round, really his homeland? It would seem so. He sings an ode to Ithaca, a rough-and-ready land, than which he is “unable to see any other thing sweeter.” But in an attempt to prove his point, he seems to leak a different possibility. Calypso detained him in her hollowed caves, he says, longing that he be her husband. Circe, the cunning mistress of Aeaea, also held him back, also longing that he be her husband (or so he claims). But neither of these goddesses managed to persuade him, he proudly declares. No, he chooses the country of his birth, and his parents. Really? Don’t his two examples rather point to the woman who lives there, the woman who actually has him as her husband?

Odysseus is once again hiding Penelope from Alcinous, Arete, Nausicaa and the Phaeacians. Why is this? Could it suit him to be single for the sake of his story, so that his temptations not be interpreted as temptations to bigamy, or adultery? Or is it that no-one would take him seriously, if all the resistance to goddesses and subjection to suffering over twenty years, were for the sake of returning to his aging, mortal, and likely estranged wife? Or is it that the bond he shares with the remarkable woman he will not name, is not something he is either willing or adequate to divulge to strangers, or communicate generally?

But never did they win over the life’s breath in my chest;

As nothing sweeter than one’s father’s earth, nor than one’s parents

Comes along—even if, away off in a rich house

In a foreign land one lives far apart from one’s parents.

There may be something to note in that final qualification. It could be read as an excuse for his wanting to return home rather than marry Nausicaa—even though, as we shall learn and Odysseus already knows, at least one of his parents has died. But consider that the experience he evokes, of living apart from one’s parents in a rich house in a foreign land, is precisely the experience of each and every high-born wife. At the beginning of Book 4, we witness the practice renewed for a new generation, in the departure of Hermione, Helen’s only child, to travel far and meet her fate in an arranged marriage to the dead Achilles’ son—a marriage once arranged on a battlefield. On Odysseus’ terms, these wives must make do with a life of permanent exile from what he himself finds sweeter than anything else imaginable. Hence we must allow that there may be behind his mask the sympathy for a woman’s condition that was suggested by the simile describing his tears. The lot of women of different classes, who do not happen to be goddesses, seems to span a spectrum from domestic slavery to exile from home, with no possibility of nostos. It may be that Odysseus, a pissed-on man who pisses people off, feels something in his heart for what he has perpetrated upon the women of Troy, and also upon his abandoned, besieged, long-suffering wife.

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Odyssey 8.499-586

ταῦτ’ ἄρ’ ἀϝοιδὸς ἄϝειδε περικλυτός · αὐτὰρ Ὀδυσσεύς

τήκετο, δάκρυ δ’ ἔδευεν ὑπὸ βλεφάροισι παρειάς.

ὡς δὲ γυνὴ κλαίησι φίλον πόσιν ἀμφιπεσοῦσα,

ὅς τε ἑῆς προπάροιθε πόλιος λαϝῶν τε πέσησιν

ϝἄστει καὶ τεκέεσσιν ἀμύνων νηλεὲς ἦμαρ · 525

ἣ μὲν τὸν θνήισκοντα καὶ ἀσπαίροντ’ ἐσϝιδοῦσα

ἀμφ’ αὐτῶι χυμένη λίγα κωκύει, οἳ δέ τ’ ὄπισθεν

κόπτοντες δούρεσσι μετάφρενον ἠδὲ καὶ ὤμους

εἴρερον εἰσανάγουσι, πόνον τ’ ἐχέμεν καὶ ὀϊζύν,

τῆς δ’ ἐλεεινοτάτωι ἄχεϊ φθινύθουσι παρειαί · 530

ὣς Ὀδυσεὺς ἐλεεινὸν ὑπ’ ὀφρύσι δάκρυον εἶβεν.

That’s what the singer sang, a celebrated man: but Odysseus

Began to melt, and a tear beneath his eyebrows wet his cheeks.

And as a woman weeps and sobs, fallen round her dear husband,

Who, right in front of his own city and people, met his fall

Defending the town and its children against the pitiless day—

She had watched him dying, gasping out his last,

And she dissolves around his person and moans a piercing cry; but the men

behind

Keep prodding with their spears her mid-back and her shoulders

As they insert her in the chain gang, to bear hard labour and sorrow:

And with the most piteous grievance the woman’s cheeks waste away …

Just so Odysseus—piteously—began pouring a tear beneath his brows.

When Homer starts a simile with a ὡς clause, ‘as a woman weeps’ for example, the one thing you know will follow, surer than death and taxes, is another ὡς clause, ‘so also …’ Hence the time of a simile is suspended time, like the time in the unfolding of a sonata before the return of the melody: as one experiences this tonal unfolding, and shifts to the dominant, all the while one expects, and increasingly anticipates and longs for the return of the touchstone. Hence one is in thrall to the composer, in the sense that one cannot help the expectation he has created, while on his side he can delay and otherwise exploit our need for resolution and consummation, without in any way diminishing it. What will he try, how far will he go, how weird will his invention be? This most remarkable of Homeric similes spills its banks, over and outward, in a way that waters new ground even in comparison to the inverted, labyrinthine, self-referential and cross-dressed similes we have already encountered in the Odyssey. One could say it stretches the form to the limits of a mind’s ability to balance its elements, and so grasp it aesthetically as a whole thing.

‘As a woman weeps fallen round her dear husband … so Odysseus began pouring a tear.’ There is the skeletal structure. We imagine a noble Andromache bewailing Hector. But what in Odysseus’ case corresponds to the ‘fall around’ ἀμφιπεσοῦσα, and the dead husband? Nothing obvious to the latter, it would seem, unless there is a lost beloved we know nothing about, or Penelope is somehow intimated. But we should still assume that something about mourning the dead warrior resonates with Odysseus, so that he might mourn with the man’s widow. Is it something like mourning his youth and his prowess, as though it had died? Demodocus’ song, however, casts Odysseus as the killer, not as either of the victims, the woman or the husband. For the woman’s collapse, we go back a line, to 521-2: ‘but Odysseus / Began to melt’. The comparison to the collapsed woman perhaps suggests a physical paroxysm of grief in the seated Odysseus. Homer’s usage of τήκομαι sometimes suggests a comparison of the upwelling of tears to melting snow. Odysseus’ cheeks become wet as though they are melting. The conclusion of the vehicle says that the woman’s cheeks ‘waste away.’ Such an identity in tenor and vehicle, cheek to cheek, must be considered unusual and aggressive; it rather forces the question, can a woman’s tears be compared to a man’s? A woman’s cheeks to a man’s gristle?

The vehicle builds and builds before this point, almost losing itself in its own story. The woman actually saw her husband as he was dying, witnessed his last gasp (τὸν θνήισκοντα καὶ ἀσπαίροντ’ ἐσϝιδοῦσα). This witnessing could only happen in a domestic scene, in proximity—as is assumed in the theme of the slaughter of the Trojans inside their own city, by the Danaan soldiers emptied from the belly of the horse. Only there at home, not on a battlefield, could she fall right away upon her husband, killed hot in cold blood, and cry out shrill. But here is the consummating moment in the poet’s staging: the murderous enemies standing around prod her in the back and shoulders. A push in the back is a profoundly disquieting sensation. Patroclus in the Iliad feels the flat of Apollo’s hand shove him in the back, when he is about to meet his doom. One cannot see who pushed you, and they never own up. It is the embodied experience, on the playground or in a nightmare or on the public square, that God is not on your side. I imagine the performer of this simile’s verses poking at the air above the ground with his staff. He is ‘other’, at the far end of the stick from the bereft and savaged woman. But we in the cheap seats feel the prod and the flinch in our backs, with our imagined Andromache.

And is Odysseus also not ‘other’? How is he connected to his victim? The vehicle builds in one way dramatically, another verbally. Its verbal summit is reached in a superlative in its last line: it is with ‘the most piteous grievance’ that the woman’s cheeks waste away in tears. It is as though the successive moving images, the dying gasp, the dissolution and the piercing cry—the beastly prodding in the back—all of these build their pathos and culminate in feeling through this superlative, the most piteous grief that belongs to this witness to her husband’s slaughter, a widow bound for slavery.

Why have I translated ‘grievance’? The ἄχος (akhos, ‘grief, pain, distress’) is a concrete thing. It may even be connected to ‘Achaean’, one name for the set of allies besetting Ilium, the sons of the Achaeans (υἷες Ἀχαιῶν). Perhaps these are ‘sons of woe’, or ‘sons of men of Woe’. But one is on perilous ground when trading in single etymologies, and indeed there is a danger of mystifying words in Homer, in particular in the spurious context of an unknown and unattested oral tradition, under whose umbrella every word in Homer could be seen as some sort of totem of cultural inheritance. But ἄχος is just a word. One best looks to Homer’s usage, and infer what one can from any oppositions induced. It does seem that ἄχος connotes the state of mind induced by grief, not just the grief, which when situated in the mind can be productive, humanly, of resentment or bitterness. We do not generally hear the ‘grief’ in ‘grievance’, but it does seem plausible all the same that acts which cause grief may be at the root of grievances, whether in the political or socio-economic or familial realms. On my reading the buildup of emotion and suffering in the course of the simile’s vehicle is at once a buildup in indignance, moment by excruciating moment, culminating in a superlative knot of human anguish and frustration of impulse, a most piteous ἄχος.

In light of this, the too brief conclusion of the simile resounds most awkwardly:

Just so Odysseus—piteously—began pouring a tear beneath his brows.

The frame of the simile locks into place—the tears, the wet cheeks—but the journey of the woman to its verbal crescendo, in a most piteous superlative, can hardly and only hollowly be matched in the tenor. The same word occurs in response to the vehicle’s concluding line, but decidedly in its non-superlative form: ἐλεεινόν, ‘piteous’ modifying Odysseus’ tear, or adverbially as I take it, ‘piteously’. One wonders if one should instead translate ‘pitiably’. It is as though the already jarring comparison framing the simile itself, of Odysseus’ tears in the audience to the tears of the woman and women widowed into slavery by the likes of Odysseus himself and his men, is being undercut by the juxtaposed comparison of grammatical comparison, between a superlative (ἐλεινότατος) describing her grief, and a positive (ἐλεεινόν) characterising his blubbering.

All the same, when Alcinous describes what seems to have happened to the stranger upon hearing Demodocus’ song, he says “ἄχος from somewhere has bestridden his mind’s vessels.” There is grief, and perhaps grievance, taken hold of Odysseus’ mind as well. What is going on here? What sort of catharsis could Odysseus be undergoing, which could in any way elicit the comparison to the experience of the widow? We remember that Odysseus set this up on purpose. He bribed the singer with choice bits off the back of a hog, and assured us that Demodocus tells the stories of the Trojan war as though he’d been there himself, or heard them from a witness. We should therefore assume that there must be some essential need for Odysseus to hear the story of his actions in war, while he sits in audience, told as accurately and true to life as possible. It seems he wants to witness himself and his actions in the third person, as though on hidden camera.

One reading has it that Odysseus is prescribing his own therapy; on this line he must, through Demodocus’ song, relive the trauma and the guilt of an harrowing action in his life, so that he may ‘process’ the episode in rehabilitation before he can assimilate again into a world at peace. Most pointedly, or so the reading goes, he must see his actions from the perspective of their victims, even to the point of crying with, or as, the woman he has just so bloodily widowed. Does such a reading satisfy, at the end of the day? Surely there must be some therapeutic process undergone before soldiers can reenter society; in the modern world we are all too familiar with the crime, the homelessness and addiction, the suicides of ex-soldiers who cannot adjust to domestic political life. But surely also there must be punishment for war crimes? Art can paint arresting pictures of daring and glory; art can whitewash and beautify; art can heal; art can lie. What does Odysseus need from Demodocus’ art?

We noted how in The Love Affair of Ares and Aphrodite, there seemed to be no difference between the tale reported by Homer and the song sung by Demodocus: the narrator fades into the singer, movie-style, and there is only one set of syllables and words. Demodocus’ last song about the Trojan horse seems also to operate this way, when it tells of the Trojans’ three-way split in council, as to how to deal with the wooden offering. But suddenly the narrator says ‘he continued singing’ (514) and keeps intruding this way (‘he sang’ 516, ‘he said’ 519), so that there is a conscious distance established between Homer’s report of it and the song itself. It seems that this time Homer does not want us to hear the actual song Demodocus sang, which so moves Odysseus root and branch, after all the fuss the man makes about the singer seeming actually to have been there. ‘There it was, he said, he dared the most terrible act of battle …’ What was this most terrible thing Odysseus did—again, a superlative—so terrible, it would seem, that Homer doesn’t want it shown as part of his Odyssey?

A clue from what we’re given is that Odysseus, like Ares the war god, went with godlike Menelaus to the house of Deiphobus. That is where the story breaks off; there is where the terrible act of war occurred. I don’t think they were going to meet and greet. Deiphobus was Helen’s latest Trojan husband, after the demise of Paris. Menelaus surely felt a grudge, an ἄχος. But Odysseus? He was his Iliadic self, the king and his brother’s hatchet man and henchman. What was Deiphobus to him, or he to Deiphobus? Yet he must have slaughtered him in an unforgettable way.

Wait a minute: the convulsive tears and the elaborately top-heavy simile immediately follow. Does that mean the grieving newly-widowed woman is … Helen? (So much for Andromache.) Hasn’t Helen told us her heart had already turned by then, returned, toward Argos and her husband Menelaus? Have all these tears—on both sides of the simile, in point of fact—been crocodile tears?

There’s more to this sauce than can be easily digested. Yes there is the possibility of redemption, or at least cathartic healing, even for a war criminal, through the empathy and sympathy called forth by the artistic representation of trauma. Consciousness can find its home in any number of nooks and crannies within a story or a simile. But this simile does not belong to Demodocus’ song of the horse and the battle inside Ilium, nor does it belong to Odysseus: it belongs to Homer. And among the many veins of light that run through his artwork, are many more of the dark veins of comedy.

Out of the mouth of babes … Homer’s hexameter distillations of simple truths can sometimes take one’s breath away. From Alcinous:

For there’s no one altogether anonymous among mankind,

Not the rubbish and not, mind you, the quality, not when they’re first born;

No, they give all of them names when they get them—the parents.

For all the pie charts and the census, the vote counts and the body counts, we each of us get a name—whether or not our parents keep us. Everyone who dies in the Iliad gets a name and a birthright, not a number. (Not so in the Odyssey!) No-one is called No-One. Odysseus has spent three books among the Phaeacians, starting with Nausicaa, and has never said his name. It is clearly a name well-known to them all in song. When they find out, what will they already know?

Alcinous remembers his father’s pronouncement, that Father Poseidon does not care for the Phaeacians’ painless escorts across the deep for all-comers to their door. Painless passage across the water must break some unwritten rules of Poseidon’s deep. The next petitioner they carry on their magic ships may well be their last: upon their return they risk a mountain burying their city. Yet they remain devoted, these ferrymen, to their savvy and their task. One might think that people with ships capable of travelling wherever their own minds could wish, might know a thing or two about the world. But Alcinous asks all the questions of the stranger a local dreamer might ask a visitor from afar: where have you visited? What are the people like, their cities? Are they savages or civilised? Perhaps the escorts never land or mingle.

As he rather comically prompts him for traveler’s tales, Alcinous wonders out loud why the stranger is so moved and distraught upon hearing a song about the Trojan War—indeed, a tale of brave Ulysses.

Surely there was for you someone, an in-law even, perished before Ilium,

Who was a quality guy, son- or father-in-law, those who become

Most cared for after blood kin and their offspring?

It is striking that there was in fact no one like this for Odysseus. He is an only son of an only son, the father of another one. He had no brother or other kin in the army. Helen was someone else’s wife. So what is his investment? Alcinous goes on to wonder about a comrade, perhaps, a soul brother. Nestor and Menelaus especially have spoken in the warmest terms about their sometime colleague Odysseus, but the latter has so far given no indication that the feelings are reciprocated. So Alcinous’ questions unwittingly reopen the question already raised by Odysseus’ intrusive crying, which I do not find resolved by the astonishing simile: what is it that so moves and even transfixes this stranger about the poetry of the Trojan War, its action and its passion? Why must he re-live it, rather than drink nepenthe? Perhaps this poetry itself represents a hazard to his well-being, or to the prospect of his completing the journey home?

Resolution is for the faint of heart. Open-ended questions, on the other hand, better suit our embarkation, like a favourable wind as his voyage sets sail—or rather, the tale of his odyssey begins—and the stranger earns his name.

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Odyssey 8.381-498

We are building inexorably to the telling of Odysseus’ famous tale of his wanderings, which it seems we must already know to some extent before it is told. There is a rather nifty prolepsis when Odysseus, at Queen Arete’s bidding, ties a knot to secure the lid of the chest which is to carry his treasures new-gathered from the high society of Phaeacia. It is a special knot which Circe had taught him. We are reminded that the Odysseus to whom we have just been introduced, naked, shivering and alone on the island of Scheria, is already someone who has seen a bit of the world, perhaps even the underworld, and has come to learn a thing or two of the wise woman’s arts. The whole tale lies in this man’s past and belongs to his inner makeup, although for us, it is still a thing anticipated. One wonders if Arete, when she calls on him to tie a knot, then peeks over his shoulder as he proceeds, as though to confirm a suspicion. She is yet another inscrutable female who knows what’s what.

One advantage of there being such a gulf—not merely a distance—between our reception of Homer’s text and its original ‘concert experience’, is that we can we read its dead letters at our leisure—like studying a score, or reading album lyrics. That is, for all that we are excluded forever from the inner circle, of those privileged to register and respond to Homer’s words in their original dialects and tempo, we can sit down with our dictionaries and grammars and pore over Homer’s lines in our sweet time—all the time that Homer’s artwork appears to deserve. We all know very well, from experience with recordings and paintings and even television series, how much we are prone to miss on a first hearing or viewing. Yet the tiny fraction of Mozart’s contemporaries who ever got to witness one of his operas, only ever took in such a performance once. Once! They couldn’t play the CD. Likely this was true also for the first audiences of performances from Homer’s compositions. It seems crucial for our experience of works of art, however, that we have the opportunity to revisit and deepen our awareness of their riches. Through the apparatuses of grammars and lexica, even our first encounters of Homer today are revisits. Surely many distortions build on each other, like successive prisms upon the transmission of light, in our approach to texts otherwise unreadable except by these means. But surely also, those privileged first auditors of Homer, experiencing the Muse together at a show, must have missed something of the substance and perhaps the skill and wisdom of the art, simply for hearing it virgin and in real time? There is joy in the study that is quite different from joys in the moment.

Consider this business of the knot, for example. It is but a passing detail, as we are carried along in the tide of the storyteller’s momentum, toward the revelation of the stranger’s name among the Phaeacians. But I reckon an artist would take a special interest in such a thing as a knot, however quickly he deals with it. Odysseus’ one is called a ποικίλος δεσμός (poikilos desmos), an ‘intricate bond’. The adjective can describe refinement and design in works of art as well as a complexity of mind (ποικιλομήτης, poikilomētēs, a uniquely Odyssean epithet). The seal on Odysseus’ Phaeacian treasure, both the treasure and the seal, seem to demand an interpretation of symbols. Storytellers are constantly in the business of tying and loosening knots. The loosening of a knot can well describe the experience of the climax of a drama. Paradoxically, the marriage at comedy’s end is once again a tying of the knot, a reinforcing of the social bonds that had risked being unraveled through all the escapades and plot twists. “There’s a double meaning in that.” By contrast, a knot intrinsic, which cannot be untied, speaks more to tragedy. It remains to be seen what a knot contrived by Circe may portend.

All the knot of tension caused by Euryalus the mock giant’s challenge to the stranger, resulting in his explosive and frightening discus throw, is now released. Odysseus initiates this change: sensitive to how embarrassed his host Alcinous has become over his failed boasts—and possibly fearful or hostile, in that he no longer seems to fancy the stranger as a son-in-law—the hero volunteers unsolicited his admiration for the dance display he has just seen. “Wonder owns me as I look on.” Alcinous’ Phaeacians really are the best at singing and dancing (and perhaps also feasting and sex).

Alcinous in grateful response calls for a collection of gifts, a levy upon all the significant oligarchs in the land, and calls out Euryalus in particular, to make it up to the stranger with words and a gift. I do not have any notes in particular on the exchange between Euryalus and Odysseus. Perhaps someone else has seen the drama in it? There is ceremony and cosplayed gentility. The gift is a copper sword with silver hilt, encased in a scabbard of worked ivory, with a whirling pattern on both sides. Swords are phallic things which kill people; I suppose when there’s not a war on, they could also cut knots, and vegetables.

The stranger puts the sword around his shoulders. When does he next take it off? Can he wear it when he sits to dinner? I only ask because a sword will be a useful and much-used prop for Odysseus when he tells the tale of his wanderings. I do believe this text works on a meta-level where its performer, who is of course playing both Euryalus and the stranger in this exchange, might want it made clear how Odysseus could have a sword to draw from its scabbard, when Homer takes on his persona for the four books of the Tale. Of course the performer must use his staff to stand in for all such objects. But when he becomes Odysseus, who is soon to become Odysseus playing Odysseus in his story, I believe it helps if we know that Odysseus the teller in Alcinous’ hall has a sword to draw on, when he plays Odysseus the hero in his adventure story. A concern for this kind of stage logic in Homer—for all that such a concern is as paradoxical as it is pragmatic—seems partly to motivate a line which makes it explicit that the stranger has slung and worn the sword that was gifted him. This visual fact would ultimately serve Homer’s audience, in that it anticipates and puts to bed a question that may annoy the punters: how did Odysseus telling stories in Phaeacia, get hold of a prop sword?

A sense of elegiac ritual comes to enhance the exchanges in this moment. Alcinous recalls the words and the gift of Menelaus to Telemachus (4.591-2) when he offers a gift to the stranger of his own beautiful golden chalice,

… so that in remembrance of me, all the days,

He may pour libation in his hall to Zeus, and the rest of the gods. (8.431-2)

Of course both these benedictions foreshadow the eucharistic prayer over the wine from the synoptic gospels. It is not always clear how lines from the Scriptures become lines in the mass ritual; David Tracy would speak of the ‘sacramental imagination’, not a thing subject in obvious ways to dogma or logic. Likely some lines or scenes originating in Homer came to play a part in Hellenic ritual as well. But the prayer over communion at the Passover supper—really a ‘Last Symposium’, on that quasi-Hellenistic occasion—seems self-aware even in the text of the gospels that it is meant to be reenacted in ritual. (There is no such eucharistic moment, however, in John’s telling of the Last Symposium.) What is extraordinary is to find this ritual feeling fully there in the Homeric voice—which must be considered pre-Greek, let alone pre-Hellenistic—over the pouring of wine from a memorial cup: ‘Whenever you do this, do this in memory of me.’

Most wondrous is the final exchange between Nausicaa and the still anonymous stranger. She is the latest woman in the Odyssey—I should venture, for the first time as herself a grown woman—to take a stand ‘by the pillar of the close-constructed roof.’ She also asks to be remembered, whenever the man she rescued gets home to the mother earth of his fathers:

Remember me: because it’s me first of all you owe your life’s ransom. (8.462)

‘Life’s ransom’ (ζωάγρια, zōagria) is a starkly arresting concept for Nausicaa to invoke. In form it recalls the μοιχάγρια (moikhagria), ‘adulterer’s ransom’, which was expected for the release of Ares in Demodocus’ song. (There was reason to speculate that the adulterer’s price was his castration.) The zōagria is the ransom that must be paid to release a prisoner alive from the enemy, rather than leave him to suffer execution or slavery. I think it permissible to conclude that Nausicaa feels a property in the naked river man; that he owes her something, perhaps even that she has been betrayed of an expectation. Perhaps the last is too much to read into to the tone and import of her diction, but it’s an edgy word, ζωάγρια. It implies the prisoner is her enemy, but that she will show mercy—for a price.

All that Odysseus can offer to pay his debt, is a word. When either Menelaus or Alcinous asked his guest to remember him whenever they poured wine from their gifted chalice, there was no response. But when Nausicaa also asks to be remembered, the stranger invokes Zeus as ‘husband of Hera’, and promises that should he get home, he would worship Nausicaa “continually all the days,” as though to a god:

σὺ γάρ μ’ ἐβιώσαο, κούρη. (8.468)

For you lifed me, girl.

Odysseus has here invented a word, to describe what Nausicaa has done for him. There are two forms for the aorist tense (or aspect) of Greek verbs, called the first and second. The first has a sigma added to the stem, like Odysseus’ ἐβιώσαο above. Usually a verb has only one or the other type of aorist form. βιόω, to live, generally uses a second aorist. When a verb uses both, however, an opposition is set up, where the first aorist, with the -s- sound, becomes transitive in a causative sense, while the second aorist becomes intransitive. One might compare ‘she walks with her dog,’ intransitive, with ‘she walks her dog.’ Odysseus here conjures a first aorist, a causative sense of the verb ‘to live’, which never again appears in Homer. I somewhat haplessly say in translation, ‘you lifed me.’

One must also contrast the sense of ζωός (zōos) ‘alive’, in Nausicaa’s ζωάγρια, to that of βίος (bios), ‘life’. ‘Alive’, zōos, is what we might call (somewhat unhelpfully) ‘biologically’ alive, as in, ‘not dead’. Whereas bios intends what you might call ‘biographical’ life, life lived humanly with its historical series of loves and disappointments, its property and its legacy. Odysseus is therefore saying that Nausicaa has restored him to the possibility of his own life, not just saved him from death. ‘This is your life’ speaks to a somewhat integrated story, not the sort of truncated, fragmented, unrecognised and anonymous thing that must happen if you are a victim of the Gaza onslaught, or a woman sold into slavery. But also disintegrated would be the life of an anonymous stranger settling down with Nausicaa in blissful Scheria. Or Odysseus in stasis with Calypso. Indeed, truncation from one’s childhood home appears to be the regular experience of Homeric wives. A story of ‘return’ could never, therefore, have quite the significance or resonance for Penelope, as for Odysseus. Her home is not the mother earth of her fathers, but her husband’s fathers.

Stories, or individual lives, in order to be held in the imagination as such, nevertheless need to have a sort of arc. I have been in the habit of reading ‘you lifed me’ as deeply, and naively, romantic. It is what some men perhaps feel in the mid-life crisis, towards the object of their distraction. Or their latest wife or ‘hookup’. But I now think the conditional quality of Odysseus’ response is important: were he to reach home and see the day of his return, so would he worship Nausicaa as a god. His bios is this return and restoration. The possibility of this life’s arc for him, more the completion of an orbit, is what Nausicaa has revived. But all she gets in return is a coined word. From the heart, mind you. But Odysseus is what some aggressive Americans call a ‘taker’. There is no return for the gifts of the Phaeacians. There is no requital for the heart of a girl, tall as a shoot of palm, who moves like Artemis. So we now say goodbye to her, forever—as surely as we shall remember her always.

The stranger bribes Demodocus the singer, divvying from the best cut of the back bacon. He praises Demodocus’ uncanny skill in telling the story of Troy—

As though somehow you were there yourself, or heard it of another.

This is not just fawning. For a number of reasons, I think it is important for Odysseus that the story he requests be sung as accurately as possible. The stranger says his own name out loud; he wants the story of ‘radiant Odysseus’, a tale of brave Ulysses, who led in that fateful horse as a trick, to empty its belly full of killers and so devour the Trojans. Why does he set this up, so he can sit secretly and anonymously in the audience, while the grievous tale is told in detail—to his radiant glory? Let’s find out.

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Odyssey 8.256-380

I’m not one for the ‘god of war’ and ‘god of love’ shtick. Such formulations do not advance any understanding, of either love or war, it seems to me, nor why either one should be something treated as a god—that is, something to be worshipped, and sacrificed to. It is not likely that these ancient people deified anything, let alone abstractions or objects or actions or psychic states; there was no ‘god of fertility’ or ‘rain’. Rather, the sky gods, and perhaps also the chthonic ones, came as they were. They were empirical givens, though their names differed in different languages. It was thought, perhaps wishfully, that various ones among the Olympians, with their different natures, adopted such abstractions or concepts or phenomena, as patrons. Under such guises it became possible for offerings to them to become transactional, in the hopes of returns in the areas of rain, fertility, and so on, or protections, for example, against covenantal violation by Zeus Xenios, the patron saint of guest-friendship. But the Olympian gods themselves were who they were, potent beings displaying in the sky, whose help with regard to fertility or rain, love or war, was entirely derived from that original, empirical potency. Such neo-allegorical ‘god of’ formulations, aping ‘patron saints’, are tastelessly patronising of ancient peoples who evidently felt some level of regard, awe, and fear for the figures of Ares and Aphrodite. I shall assume that such attitudes were deserved, in respect of the beings in question. What might there be in Aphrodite, in particular, to cause terror in the heart when she is sensibly present and active? Even if you psychologise her, merely, there is nevertheless much, sometimes everything, to fear from her power.

There is a lot written about ‘Venus and Mars’ and the ‘Age of Venus and Mars’. I do in fact believe that there was such an age in the earth’s history and ours. But there is reason to believe that the once cometary planet Venus was in fact Athena and/or Hephaestus, who share a number of attributes as gods despite their obvious differences, while of course Ares was the Roman planet Mars. Aphrodite in the love affair was likely the Moon, although her name is also associated with the Great Mother, like the Roman Venus—chthonic as well as astral. One speaker in Plato’s Symposium in fact distinguishes two Aphrodites, one primordial and heavenly and the other, Homer’s, Olympian erotic. But the story of these names, their alter egos, and the beings once inhabiting them takes us beyond any area of certainty. Suffice it to say that with good evidence, Homer’s sky was not the same as ours. Helius our mighty sun, for one, seems to have been a relatively minor and benign player in relation to Zeus and company—a peeping, tattling courtier in Demodocus’ tale. I’ll mention a book which first opened my eyes to the god-planets and our witness of their recent active history: Celestial Sex, Earthly Destruction, and Dramatic Sublimation in Homer’s Odyssey: The Disastrous Love Affair of Moon and Mars, by Alfred de Grazia.

All the same I am a fellow with an open mind. If there are any among you reading who have an idea what a love affair between Aphrodite and Ares, patron saints of sex and war, the erotic goddess and the archetypal warrior, might symbolise in the larger scheme—please write a comment. Comments are welcome and open to all for this one.

About the rôle of Demodocus’ song in the Odyssey, one feels oneself on firmer ground. The adultery of Ares and Aphrodite writes a paradigm quite literally in the sky. The story of Clytemnestra, Aegisthus, and Agamemnon already stands in the background, and in the present of the Odyssey, it is the story everyone already knows. Odysseus has every reason to suspect that during his inexplicable absence, himself cohabiting with other females, that Penelope also has found a successful suitor, her own Aegisthus. In the political vacuum created by the departure of kings and their leading men to Troy, such a move by an abandoned queen would have been, beyond all moral scruples, simply prudent for her safety and position. The rational fear that he might suffer Agamemnon’s fate, walk into a calamitous trap, adds charge and worth to Odysseus’ pursuit of his return home, despite this fear.

A political dimension seems not so relevant to Ares and Aphrodite’s motives, although heavenly politics are certainly at play in the aftermath of the bedroom farce. An anonymous god, a bystander, mentions an ‘adulterer’s ransom’ (μοιχάγρια) that will have to be paid, after his version of the tortoise (lame Hephaestus) who catches the hare (quick-moving Ares, in a few senses). In his rage Hephaestus calls out Aphrodite’s father, the son of Cronus Zeus himself, to whom he had paid copious wedding gifts. Now he wants them all back. Poseidon worriedly steps in, it seems to prevent an astral catastrophe between Hephaestus and Our Father of gods and men, mighty Zeus. This time, Poseidon plays the peacemaker, and guarantees the debt himself. (The Phaeacian audience is Poseidon’s kin.) It is not clear, however, that this repayment of wedding gifts has anything to do with the adulterer’s punishment. Perhaps it is the latter that Poseidon feels he has an obligation to ensure. A student in Chicago once told me that the adulterer’s wages were castration, and that the Areopagus, the famous rock in Athens where the original court for homicide was established, and where St. Paul later preached, was one of Ares’ testicles. I don’t know where he got this account, and I am unable to corroborate it. But all the same, it does seem that the castration of the warrior is a theme that resonates richly through the adventures Odysseus is about to relate. The man-in-arms is presented with situation after situation where his equipment is shown up for useless, as indeed it has always been in the bedroom, and he is made to face the danger naked—in at least one case, with the explicit danger of castration. We shall see.

Ares is clearly conquered by the power of Aphrodite. In the Iliad Zeus detests his son for a lying thug obsessed with violence for its own sake, the “most hateful of all the gods.” Here Ares comes off instead as rather slick and a bit of a snob; he woos with plenty of gifts—he remembers the flowers—and seems to disparage the smith Hephaestus, and the savage-tongued Sintians whom he frequents. This is Ares’ only utterance. Of course the last laugh is on him. But Aphrodite, who, it must be said, remains dreamily silent throughout, seems well-pleased by the contrast of her dashing back door warrior and her limping husband. No deliberation is hinted at by Homer, before they head to bed. There is no stripping, there is no sex scene, but they are clearly naked. This must be one source of the humour for the onlookers, at least at the expense of the mighty Ares. But Aphrodite is able to proceed silently through the scene with her dignity all intact. Indeed, she seems completely to conquer the males who’ve come along for the porn. It is Hermes’ lust which reduces everyone to laughter, not the seriously naked and bound Aphrodite. Her nudity is emphasised not by its description, but by letting our imagination dwell on it while she is dressed in slow syllables upon being freed from her husband’s fetters. We follow her nude to Paphus in Cyprus, where the Graces enrobe her in ‘love-arousing clothes’ (εἵματα ἐπήρατα). The ‘punishment’ seems unequal. But we have been seduced and titillated into compliance.

There seems to be an emphasis on the transactional. Ares brings his love plenty of gifts, Hephaestus had brought her father plenty more. One presumes that paying the father was the more honourable course in human terms; but Hephaestus makes clear that it was Aphrodite’s sexual desirableness that motivated the effort, so that each lover is, in effect, paying for sex. The difference is paying the woman versus paying the pimp. (Hephaestus had been married to one ‘Charis’ in the Iliad.) Herodotus’ survey of peoples and their customs leads one to think that there is always a delicate line between accepting gifts of wooing, and being paid for service. In American culture, a decided ambiguity prevails between the sexes about the obligations incurred by a dinner paid for. Different peoples draw this line in different places, but there is in each group a way to tar a woman, on the far side of the local line on the transactional menu, as a ‘whore’. It is as though the opportunity created for such vilification fulfils a social need. Homer’s Aphrodite, however, seems to float away unsullied. Homer’s Clytemnestra, on the other hand, appeared to stray only when Aegisthus got rid of the hapless poet whom Agamemnon had left her for company and counsel. There is no caveat like this needed in Aphrodite’s case. She is not tarnished! There is no sin, she emerges in her Cyprian grove as beautiful as ever. Both her lovers are johns, but she is no prostitute.

Helen herself, the woman who used to follow her heart, and brought war in her train—once vilified and hardly fertile—became, in due course, a fertility goddess. Herodotus and others posit that Helen was never at Troy, correcting Homer as part of her restitution. But even in her appearances in the Odyssey, there are signs of her rehabilitation and divine status. Homer’s Helen is at times Aphrodite’s protégé, at times her avatar.

Odysseus is clearly a warrior, an Ares who gets people angry—it’s in his name. But to the listener in Greek there is no question with whom Odysseus is associated in Demodocus’ song. Hephaestus is twice given the epithet πολύφρων, which I over-translate ‘over-thinker’. He is a man of many (πολυ-) acts of mind (-φρων). He shares this epithet uniquely in Homer with Odysseus himself. Hence the identification is very obvious and even forced. I have suggested that in Odysseus’ case, we hear his ‘many’ (πολυ-) in relation to Penelope’s ‘more’ (περι in the sense ‘above’), heard in her own characteristic epithet περίφρων (περι- + -φρων). Odysseus’ epithet seems, all the same, generally complimentary, except the irony is rather savage if your cleverness is clever enough only to trap your slippery wife and her watchful lover into proving you’re a cuckold. I spoke too soon: the last, bitter, abject laugh is on Over-Thinker Hephaestus. Even if Odysseus wins his home by the most brilliant stratagem, neither he nor we will ever know the truth. Penelope is as silent on this matter as Aphrodite robed in arousal, a thing ‘amazing to look at.’

All the same, the possibility remains that Odysseus and Penelope embody a union which transcends, or undermines, or is irrelevant to the transactional. This type of union would evidently be a rare treasure, whether in heaven or on earth.

In the Greek I sing a portion of Demodocus’ song in a way that might be danced. I do not attempt to play a phorminx as well. But I revert to what I imagine to be the rhapsodic way of delivery when we get to the speeches. The proof is in the pudding, and the speeches are the pudding. Homer’s Odyssey was composed to be declaimed and embodied solo, for all that its music originated in participatory dance and plucked and chanted catalogue. I shall again append the video of the shouted version we rendered indoors in the Great Hall of St. John’s College, Annapolis in 2002. At the end, two acrobats reenact the closing passage of our reading, playing Halius and Laodamas, to the same Greek verses which describe their ball dance.

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Odyssey 8.96-255

I continue to be impressed by how fully realised are the dramatic presences in Homer. Most every character who speaks in the Odyssey has at least one angle on what they are saying, often more than one, which serves to give them dramatic life and vulnerability, even to undercut them in comic ways. This is all wonderful fodder for an actor. But it is in a way embarrassing to announce this Homeric thespian realisation as a discovery. I presume many of Homer’s modern readers have already seen the dimensions of Homer’s speeches for themselves. But for better or worse, I have been initiated in the ways of academic Homeric Studies, which means I have been primed to think in terms of ‘epic’ and ‘hero’ and even ‘epic hero’, or other concepts which turn out to be almost completely useless for the empirical engagement with the score for performing Homer which the ancient world has left us. We need not even mention notions of ‘oral theory of composition’ and ‘composition-in-performance’, even more useless for the interpretation of this artefact’s intent. All the oral theories are purely metre-based notions, which I have proved structurally inapplicable to Homer’s tonal poetry, or indeed any melodic composition. The Iliad and the Odyssey are, in point of fact, tonal poems, a point of fact which seems completely lost on the blinkered professionals who make a living in Homeric Studies.

To perform Homer for this project, however, has proved a step in real time beyond a negative theoretical proof, to an immersion in vivid dramatic reality. Aristotle tells us that prior to tragedy and comedy, ‘Homer alone … in particular crafted dramatic imitations (μιμήσεις δραματικὰς ἐποίησεν, Poetics 1448b37).’ Little attention has been paid to this priceless historical observation, as a clue to what rhapsodic performance in a theatre was actually like. The dramatic mimesis most obviously occurs when the narrator becomes one of his protagonists, and speaks a speech in that character’s voice. Something magic happens in these moments, however used we are now to the experience of staged theatre and film. A primary experience of Homeric performance was evidently not of traditional songs sung traditionally, or of improvisation, but of transformation, of the performer before one’s eyes into people and gods, and even horses, of different ages and sexes and voices, all within the hexameter rhythm and diction. And of course there is so much more to Homer’s one-man-show than this becoming other people. So while I apologise for perhaps overreacting to a myopia induced by a number of academic prejudices, I must also testify, to all those who love Greek regardless of their ability or familiarity, that this experience of entering into Homer’s speeches, in the flesh, has been exhilarating!

We begin with Odysseus hiding his sobs behind his cloak. The man is still mostly a cipher. We begin to peel the onion. Alcinous alone knows that the song of Demodocus (about a quarrel between Achilles and Odysseus) has caused the strong reaction in his guest. But he knows nothing more. Could this stranger be a god? Or could he be a fit husband for his daughter, a man of his own heart? His move as a host is to calm things down, to divert and distract from possible discomfort. But he seems a nervous host; despite his isolation, and the irrelevance of other people’s opinions to his status, he is worried what the stranger may think and report of his Phaeacians. The braggart takes over; let’s show this guy, he says, “how much we surpass all comers / At boxing and wrestling, long jumps and foot races.”

Homer warns us that the Phaeacians are going to set Odysseus some testing trials. Why are we on his side? Why should we trust this hidden man, who lies at every turn—whom the Athenian tragedians remembered, after all, as a scheming villain, a Machiavel who would say anything, manipulate the innocent, to serve his and his master’s end? Even now he is actively concealing himself, creating exploitable ambiguities in his hosts’ minds. I think an awful lot of work was done in his brief conversation with Calypso about Penelope. Whatever one makes of his judgement and decision, however much we may falsely invest it with our own romantic fantasies, Odysseus does in fact reject immortality, reject unending sex with a goddess and divine cooking and care on a desert isle, for the chance to reunite with his ageing wife at home. There is a core to this decision which cannot be dissembled, and whose significance cannot be denied—whatever it actually means! And of course through countless epochs, this decision of Odysseus has resonated with audiences who will fill it with any amount of their own sentimentality. Perhaps not knowing why he chose Penelope and mortality is part of his appeal. Hence we readily join Odysseus behind his mask through his scenes of dissembling, in hopes we both ‘get away with it.’

Clark Kent also is a total liar. But we are in complete sympathy with him while he lies his way through life at the Daily Planet, and even through his intimacy with Lois Lane. We know he has a secret power meant for good, which he could not wield effectively if he were to be found out. (James Bond is another whom we join as a secret agent. His revealing of his name is always an anticipated moment. Bond is always working for Her Majesty, like Odysseus for Athena.) I think there is something of watching Clark Kent in the way we watch Odysseus through this episode. There will be a right time and place for his revelation, we feel. A particular quality of Clark Kent, however, is that he resists the temptation to use his power on personal grounds. No amount of direct challenges to his manhood will phase him. He cannot be called out. He bites his lip and pushes up his glasses, until circumstances force him to find a phone booth. Odysseus, by contrast, is made of weaker stuff than Superman, though he sheds a superman’s tears behind his cape.

Homer has a good time with the Phaeacians’ names. There is a bit of Gilbert & Sullivan in the catalogue of nautical pronomens for the athletes. In the Greek reading I even start to intone the lines, often as line segments rather than single breaths. I shall have to have discuss these concrete possibilities for Homeric performance in a separate post, especially as we are about to witness a performance by Demodocus surrounded by dancers. One line, announcing the man who succeeds in calling him out and getting under Odysseus’ skin, sticks out amidst the list:

ἂν δὲ καὶ Εὐρύαλος βροτολοιγῶι ϝἶσος Ἄρηϊ

And up rose Euryalus, the equal of Ares, Bane-of-Mortals, (8.115)

Euryalus’ name, ‘Broad Sea’, fits in with the rest (‘Seagirtus, son of Manyship, son of Carpenterman’), but there is a (no doubt) comic resonance which alerts us to the fact that this fellow will cause trouble. He gets a whole line, for one thing. But ‘Euryalus’ is a name which is known to have belonged to one of the Giants who participated in the Gigantomachy, the war between the Olympians and the mighty Giants of old. This event belongs to a realm which was evidently myth and legend for Homer himself. The line above could easily have once stood, verbatim, in a lost epic poem about that prehistoric contest which shaped the fate of the world. Euryalus the Giant could literally have been a match for Ares, rather than flatteringly. The Phaeacians, now removed to the suburbs, used once to be neighbours and kin of actual Giants and Cyclopses. In Homer’s conceit, they ‘step from’ that time into our dramatic present. If the Phaeacians’ own Euryalus is a sendup of the ancient Giant, then Odysseus, the subject of his challenge—a weather-worn older man—stands in for Ares and the Olympians. The latter group in the contest is the one with God, and history, on its side.

Homer’s narrative is itself therefore suffused with the ambient comedy which also drives the expressions of his speakers. Laodamas, Alcinous’ son, seems a nice sort of chap. It was his seat Odysseus displaced when he first arrived at Alcinous’ house; he was described then as ‘man-friendly’ (ἀγαπήνορα), and that he used to sit closest to his father, who loved him specially. This word expresses a preference for the masculine, not simply a kind of humanist philanthropy. It is not at all clear, however, whether agapēnōr connotes a sexual preference for men, or if anything weird is being suggested about the relationship with his father. (As we shall see, Alcinous is a man who is evidently quite fond of sex, and he has already married his niece.) It is best to acknowledge that we do not have our bearings in the world of Homer’s usage, and that this can be perilous in gauging comedy. But it is also good to check the stifling prudishness that often biases Classicist assessments, which can prevent areas of Homer’s detail from even registering. What is clear from the presentation is that Laodamas is a nice guy—the good cop in the scene, in relation to Euryalus’ bad one—and that he also rather conspicuously checks out Odysseus’ masculine physique. He goes from his thighs and his calves, to dwell on his arms, and then his sturdy neck and great strength. He rhapsodises that Odysseus is not lacking any of his hēbē, his ‘youthful bloom’, despite his suffering. It is not certain whether he means some general healthy glow by ἥβη, or if he is actually looking at another part of Odysseus’ anatomy.

In response, Euryalus encourages Laodamas to literally call Odysseus out (prokalessai). Laodamas, for his part, does this in a most friendly and encouraging way. He’s almost prescribing exercise as a way to relieve stress! And he reminds Odysseus that his escort home is already prepared for afterward, the ship is already drawn up. Odysseus demurs, saying he’s got other things on his mind than track and field. He rather indecorously points out that he’s just sitting there wallowing in limbo, longing for home, while they ponce about at games. (I paraphrase.) Odysseus plays a rôle, and it briefly works to keep him undiscovered. But Euryalus moves in on him: Hello sailor! You’re no man’s man. You’re a merchantman peddling wares, or a petty thief and pirate on the seas. No athlete you. (Again, I paraphrase.) Homer has set up the revealing of his Odysseus in such a way as to force its drama on us internally, if we have been taking his side. No male, unless perhaps he is Clark Kent, can take direct challenges and insults to his manhood, without at least making some attempt to show ‘what he’s really made of.’ What a splendid way to make a man drop his cover! Odysseus takes the bait, not just from Euryalus but from Homer.

The hurl of the discus is highly charged aurally and musically. Homer’s hexameter is capable of ‘special effects’, like the storm on the heath all captured in King Lear’s syllables.

βόμβησεν δὲ λίθος · κατὰ δ’ ἔπτηξαν ποτὶ γαίηι

And the stone boomed and whizzed: they crouched in fear upon the earth! (8.190)

There are two trisyllables (βόμβησεν and ἔπτηξαν), each of whose middle syllable is long and stressed with falling pitch, but each of which lands in between the dactylic downbeats (1 & 2, and 4 & 5 of the 6). This simple, potent syncopation captures the earthquake, and the Phaeacians reduced to cowering creatures. It is in any case impossible to say bombēsen without miming a bomb. There is a sudden change in the mood and the scene. Superman has shown his thighs and his arms, and a real menace is both heard and felt. (It must be said, both of these syncopations, following the law of tonal prominence I have discovered for Greek and Latin, are ignored or unknown to those professionals who now teach Homer in universities.)

Amidst this seriousness and bombast, Homer next turns up as Athena in the lists, out measuring the throws like an Olympic umpire. Why does Homer hint that maybe she cheated for her beloved, nudged his big discus along a bit? Homer’s playfulness in the wake of a scene-changing passage of surround-sound verse, is a striking way to shift the mood. I wonder in particular about Athena saying that even a blind man could tell Odysseus’ mark was far ahead of his competitors, “by feeling his way.” For some reason I think of blind Demodocus feeling for his lyre, hung from a peg on the pillar of Alcinous’ house. Is there a meta-level of exegesis due here?

Odysseus takes on a new rôle now; he makes a long speech in easy confidence of his stature. He’s encouraged he has a buddy somewhere out there, who was Athena the umpire. For the first time we hear him say “we Achaeans” and “in the country of the Trojans.” This begins to identify him. He also, like the Phaeacians, is someone who is going to step out of the story-world they inhabit, and enter into the present of Homer’s stage. His mention of Philoctetes, the famous bowman among the Achaean allies, about whom Sophocles composed a tragedy, is curious. In the play Odysseus plays a typically fiendish rôle, both in marooning Philoctetes and eventually, after ten years, trying to deceive him and steal his bow, which, it turns out, was to be essential to their army’s victory at Troy. Odysseus himself was never noted for his skill with the bow. But this prowess seems to be central to his identity in the Odyssey. Of course we can only speculate about the sense of Odysseus’ allusion here. I have even heard it argued, seriously, that this Odysseus is actually Philoctetes, the true bowman, and that his journey to Ithaca is like The Return of Martin Guerre. I don’t think so. Clearly I must have some bearings, albeit unconscious ones. Note that the poets, Homer and Sophocles et al, are our sources for all these stories. It is a falsifying fantasy that there is some body of Greek Mythology, like a Bible, standing behind the Greek poets, which they consult or cite, or otherwise have any interest in. Neither Homer nor his late descendant Sophocles cares about making their stories consistent with each other. These authors are in fact the authorities for their stories. What works, in the story or the drama, including surprises if need be, determines more than anything else what happens, in the hands of these iconoclastic artists. They should better be understood as founders or sources, rather than any sort of expression, of either religion or ‘mythology’.

The menace continues in Odysseus’ speech, despite that he’s relaxed from the heat of the challenge and the throw. Having been called out, and been made to drop his guard and partly reveal himself, he tells a story about Eurytus, a hero of Heracles’ vintage who challenged Apollo to a contest of the bow. The lesson for Euryalus, Odysseus’ would-be bully, as well as for the crowd present, is delivered in no uncertain terms: Apollo killed him. But as we come to expect, there is some sort of meta-lesson involved. For this Eurytus left his bow to his son Iphitus; and Iphitus gifted it to Odysseus, once upon a time and a place. This is the very bow now hung up in a store room in Ithaca, waiting for the man who can string it to return. Those who dare to call out this Apollo in disguise—and want to sleep with his wife—ought to know what’s coming to them.

Alcinous alone takes up the challenge of breaking the silence after Odysseus’ speech, a man much changed in the tone and the substance of his speech. That throw of the discus really has had almost a percussive, stunning effect on those witnessing it. Alcinous had been impressed enough on a first impression to wonder about the stranger marrying his daughter Nausicaa. Now he seems rather more keen on putting some distance between himself and this possibly dangerous individual. He still cares what the stranger might say about him and his country to others. But note how he now imagines the telling: when “[y]ou take dinner with your wife and with your children.” There’s a wish there now, based on exactly no new evidence, that the stranger already has a wife and family somewhere. That’s telling about poor Alcinous, the ex-would-be father-in-law. Not just the discus itself, the man’s boast about his athletes has exploded in his face. Alcinous reverses himself completely, shamelessly, publicly:

For we’re not fist-fighters, without blame, nor are we wrestlers,

No; but on foot we run right quick, and we’re the very best at ships—

And with us a feast is always welcome, the cithara and the dances,

Changing clothes and cross-dressing; baths that are hot; and sex! (8.246-9)

He still harps on the fact that they’re good runners, because Odysseus himself gave him that out, suggesting he might have lost a step on his journey; but Alcinous actually boasts that the Phaeacians are good at sex! Thankfully, Odysseus does not take that claim as a challenge.

The King calls for a display of dancing and song. Go quickly for Demodocus’ phorminx! It’s lying “somewhere there in my house.” Now, Homer tells us, before the people head to the place for athletics, that the herald had brought Demodocus along; but first, he had hung up Demodocus’ lyre back on its peg, on the pillar of Alcinous’ house (8.105). In other words, we know exactly where that phorminx is in Alcinous’ house. It seems impossible not to read a little heavily here: Alcinous not knowing where the instrument is in his house suggests that he is not aware of the central, axial significance of poetry, song, and music in the structure of his household and the body politic. And with his own pointed, intrusive concern for the location of pillar, woman, and lyre, Homer is suggesting that perhaps, we should be.

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Odyssey 8.1-95

The dawn rises now upon the most extraordinary book, Book 8 of Homer’s Odyssey. We finally start to peel the onion. Athena somewhat comically announces Homer’s programme as the town crier, more of a carnival barker: come have a look at the mysterious wanderer who’s just showed up at Alcinous’ house. He’s built like the immortals! It’s said she thus aroused the Phaeacians’ fighting spirit (μένος) and heat (θυμός, ‘life’s breath’), suggesting a kind of competitive emulation. She sheds grace (χάρις) upon the stranger, however, making him seem taller and more solid, to help him withstand the trials his hosts will make of him. But it turns out it is the inner trials which will take centre stage, as Odysseus undergoes the torture, as we colourfully describe some kinds of emotional torment, simply of hearing his own story in song. We are invited, almost for the first time after seven books, to come along with the Phaeacians and have a good look at the prodigy who clothes in flesh the all-this-time hidden heart of our story.

We also meet Demodocus, since ancient times taken (by some) to be Homer’s alter ego. The Muse loved him wisely and too well, it seems, in that she gave him a good thing and a bad one. She robbed him of sight in his eyes, but granted him ‘pleasing song’. One doesn’t know if the pleasure of song resides in the singer, the audience, or both? Does the loss or lack of sight by itself impregnate the power and meaning of music? Homer’s parataxis simply lays out one bad thing and one good one; we are left to ourselves to synthesise causal connections and conspiracy theories. At any rate, it seems likely that Homer’s own depiction of Demodocus is itself the source and inspiration, when Homer’s ancient hymnodists and late quasi-biographers describe ‘him’ as a blind bard, and we continue to so imagine Homer.

I have called attention to a number of the potent women in the Odyssey, how they appear to express their power and centrality by stationing themselves adjacent to a fixed pillar of the household. Such a pillar connects the earth to the roof, or in Calypso’s case (if she borrows Daddy’s keys) the earth to the heaven. Much is made in this passage that Demodocus also is stationed by the pillar, and that his kithara hangs from a peg on it. He reaches above and behind himself to pluck it down from there to play and sing, once he’s had his fill of the food and wine in front of him. A cosmic source and significance for his singing seems evident, if there is anything to Homer’s symbolism. I am curious what connection might be drawn, however, between the blind bard and an axial feminine power. Or is Homer a woman?

Demodocus sings the latest song on the airwaves, ‘The Quarrel of Odysseus and Peleus’ son Achilles’. How he knows it, isolated as Phaeacia is, remains a mystery. I believe there is something mysterious in general about things ‘going viral’, even if the means of transmission is evident. That is, on Scheria, even if we can solve the problem of how the new songs could reach their distant market, there is still the problem of what makes a hit a hit. There seems to be something galvanising about certain songs or trends or news stories, so that the magnetic metaphor becomes physics: there is in fact an action effected at a distance, sometimes in a sense orthogonal to the direction of the magnetic force.

Let us hypothesise that the Iliad was already a ‘hit song’ in the world of the Odyssey’s composer. It begins with a quarrel between Agamemnon, king of men, and radiant Achilles. This is a quarrel between a King by right, a potency defined somewhat by circumstance, and a male warrior who is supreme by nature. What, by contrast, is a quarrel between two subordinates, while the King looks on approvingly? Is this Homer being ‘meta’? Is this some kind of joke?

The problem with recognising the Odyssey as comedy, is that it makes life perilous for a critic. There are broad, general patterns of action which make the identification secure: the hero begins his journey out of his natural place and merited station, but spends the plot regaining his stature and proving himself worthy of, or at least suited to, the exalted woman he marries at the end. At this level of generality we encompass not only the Odyssey but Dante’s Commedia, Shakespeare’s comedies, and (sometimes with gender switches) Austen’s novels. But scene by scene, detail by detail, we are never on sure ground. Even among contemporaries, a sizeable proportion of any audience is not in on the joke, and there is no shame in having punch lines explained to you. In point of fact, this generally makes the explainer feel very clever. But our grammars and lexica do not even put us in the room with Homer’s crowd. We would not get the vibe, even if we could be there. We are in a lower rung of desolation than the stupid fuck who needs everything explained to them. (He, at least, speaks our language.)

It is possible, for example, that the very idea of Odysseus being a hero worthy of his own epic, was once a joke. If so, it must have been a joke lost on the classical Greek writers we have left, as it is lost on most of us, but the fact remains that polymētis Odysseus was a liar and a schemer who became the machiavel of the Athenian stage. Definitively a subordinate, not the prince but adviser to the prince, he was in the Iliad an enforcer, and Agamemnon’s trusted yes-man and negotiator. The Odyssey poet does of course seem to have great sympathy for his hero. This is nowhere better expressed than by his extraordinary scenes with Athena, who is like a Penelope who can go where she wants, be who she wants, and do what she wants (avoiding Poseidon), with a magic wand in her pocket. It is hard to deny the love there, almost a love triangle or prism, if one includes author and audience among the lovers. But how do we know this plot schematic is not Homer’s own fantastic innovation? The fact is that the tragedians never forgot the scheming devil. Was it Homer himself who made Odysseus a hero—albeit a comic one—just as Plato heroised Socrates?

To cast Achilles as the opponent of Odysseus, while Agamemnon delights in his cabinet of rivals, fulfilling an Apolline oracle, is very much to bring Achilles down to earth. He is a force of nature, in fundamental conflict with any political would-be monarch. It is also very much to elevate Odysseus. Agamemnon may think these two are the “best of the Achaeans,” but there would be a number of other claimants for being the best after Achilles, ahead of Odysseus. Agamemnon may in fact miss entirely the point of Apollo’s riddling oracle, like Croesus in Herodotus. There Croesus was told that if he invaded Persia, a great empire would fall. It did not occur to him that it could be his own one. In Agamemnon’s case, he does not see that as king, he is the ‘best of the Achaeans’ in a way that even Achilles cannot rival. It is that conflict between the best of the Achaeans, between the great king and the greatest warrior, which the oracle is most likely to intend, as to be the beginning of suffering for the Trojans and the Danaans alike. Cf. the Iliad. Hence even if there was a poem there about a real conflict between Achilles and Odysseus—and Homer’s lines surely read like the proem to such a poem—the Iliad and its quarrel would trump it, on the very same terms Demodocus’ proem delineates. The Iliad sings Apollo’s prophecy fulfilled, this time with the true duo, paired in strife, who were the ‘best of the Achaeans’.

The simplest meta-reading of Demodocus’ song is that a quarrel between Achilles and Odysseus is really about a quarrel between the Iliad and the Odyssey, via the proxies of the human subjects at their centres. I have already made a case that there is such a quarrel from the point of view of the later poem. It sometimes seems that the Odyssey means to resolve somehow or atone, even, for a disruption of the cosmic order and the balance between male and female. The first marker for this to catch my eye was the sacrifice of the heifer to Athena, at the hands of Nestor’s sons. The women surrounding ululate for their own sacrifice, as well as for the unfortunate freshly-gilded cow. Something needs to be reconciled, or otherwise dealt with, at this halfway house Phaeacia, before Odysseus returns home.

And of course he cries about it. The sobbing Odysseus from Calypso’s Isle has already become an icon. One literally does not know whether to laugh or cry—that is, to feel sympathy or to keep our distance from the crybaby. This time Odysseus hides his ‘beautiful face’; so cloaked, we can only imagine what is going on within. But that very often is Homer’s art, to delineate quite vividly the exterior, an outside, the sobbing figure enveloped in a purple cloak, so only his physical neighbour could intuit any discomfort, while prompting our own imaginations and projections to fill the space behind the mask. What is it about Demodocus’ song and art that has so infiltrated behind the beautiful face, so that hidden tears stream out the eyeholes like water through a leak?

She pulls the eyes out with a face like a magnet—Elvis Costello

Is it simply the memories that cause pain, about the passage of time, the loss of companions, all of it threaded through by bad decisions? There was plenty of crying at Menelaus’ table, ostensibly prompted by the thought of Odysseus, although Telemachus had never met the man, and his bedmate Peisistratus was crying for the brother he lost to the war (again whom he’d never met). The representation of tears of loss in such cases, as facts of the psyche despite their being no memory of the lost father or brother, seems to me to be psychologically true. But Menelaus’ tears may perhaps be compared to Odysseus’s, while he listens to Demodocus sing. They are both has-been warriors, lonely veterans.

Let me suggest, however, that unlike Menelaus, Odysseus is experiencing something cathartic, something purifying through his tears. We are not privileged with any detail or much context. But the play’s the thing. Demodocus is singing the play within the play, and Odysseus is caught in the conscience. When he is confronted with himself and his words and actions, Odysseus cannot help but weep. It is possible that he only sees these words and actions for what they are, for the first time, through Demodocus’ depiction and art. I remember when a film by Oliver Stone called Platoon came out, there was quite a cultural moment in America, when more than a decade after the end of the Vietnam war, American veterans felt together a kind of public catharsis. Many testified that they had not been able to face or think about or ‘process’ their memories of war, until they saw that movie. For Menelaus, the only remedy for his grief was Helen’s drugs. Drugs were often a first recourse for Vietnam veterans as well. But perhaps for Odysseus, in the fantastic theatre of Phaeacia, there is also the possibility of catharsis and self-awareness through art.

Insight is the inaudible gift of the blind bard. It hides behind a purple cloak. In this growing awareness I am encouraged to imagine that there, perhaps, is a true and final victory for Odysseus, over either splendid Achilles or Agamemnon, lord of warrior-men, or any other would-be rival for him whose acts and words we sing about, or sermonise.

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Odyssey 7.261-347 (end)

Let me call attention to two moments in the close of Odysseus’ speech to Queen Arete. The first is Odysseus’ comment that Calypso ordered him to return home “because of a message from Zeus—or perhaps even her own mind was turned …” The truth is that when Hermes delivered Zeus’s message to her island, Odysseus had been alone on a headland, wasting away in tears. He may not have known the visit had happened, and so we are left with him at this point perhaps genuinely unsure what Calypso’s motivation had been. This could be a moment of rare, unmotivated honesty on Odysseus’ part. Perhaps he supposes it possible that she had tired of him, in the way it is said explicitly by the poet that he had tired of her (5.153)? The fact is that Calypso had never let on that Hermes had visited—Homer seems to enjoy pointing out that Odysseus had later sat to dinner in the exact chair on which the Olympian had just been sitting, presumably unbeknownst to himself—and she breathed no word of the fact that Hermes had actually departed with a threat of violence from Zeus if she should disobey (5.146-7). No, Calypso announces the return on a raft as her own idea, swears an oath (to satisfy Odysseus’ suspicions) that she’s not intending him harm, and even offers him sustenance and immortal clothing to protect him—which does not, at the end of the day, do much for the fellow but weigh him down. It seems that when it comes to speakers, this Homer particularly enjoys composing for ones who dissemble, Calypso no exception.

But Odysseus’ own big lie comes at the end of his speech. He claims that for all his grief, he has recounted the truth (ἀληθείην κατέλεξα). But we know that ‘in reality’, Odysseus had been too modest to be naked among Nausicaa’s handmaids, and had asked them to leave the area while he bathed himself in the river. The girls then go off and report this to Nausicaa, who is of course out of the picture. As she later tells the stranger:

… I would be indignant with another, any girl that does this sort of thing,

Who against the will of her own father and mother, yet living,

Would have sex with men, before they go for a public wedding. (Odyssey 6.286-8)

(One notes the plural ‘men’.) But Odysseus tells her own parents that Nausicaa herself bathed him, and then dressed him in the clothes he’s now wearing, which her own mother had made. What’s he playing at? Why this lie direct, falsely impugning their Nausicaa’s propriety and judgement, titillating the idea that they had been intimate? Is this to suggest that he’s now willing to do the honourable thing by their daughter, as a previous one of our generations might have put it?

Alcinous does not acknowledge the possibility of this scandalous impropriety, but deflects to another one: that his daughter and her attendants should have brought the stranger to him themselves, as he came to Nausicaa first as a suppliant. But we shall soon see that the stranger’s possible marriage to his daughter is very much top of mind.

Odysseus then purports to defend Nausicaa’s judgement, after imputing acts to her she had no part in. He then lies and attributes to himself, not to Nausicaa, the decision to separate from their entourage on the way to the town. He claims he wanted to avoid rousing resentment and jealousy. This from a man who’s just made her parents imagine their virginal daughter bathing him herself, a naked old hunk in a river.

In response Alcinous prays to Zeus, Athena, and Apollo that a man “of the sort you actually are—thinking the things that I myself do,” would settle down in Phaeacia and possess his daughter in marriage. He doesn’t even know the stranger’s name! And what is it about the stranger that makes him suppose they think exactly alike, share the same tastes? Well, there is this. If Odysseus did fancy Nausicaa, and want to marry her, as he has given Alcinous ample reason to suppose, the King would have found a buddy who also likes to rob the cradle. (His wife Arete is his brother’s daughter.) Peas in a pod.

Alcinous is quite the braggart. Homer’s dramaturgy is fully developed when it comes to the speeches. (In academic environments, such seemingly obvious things still need to be said.) His speakers have an angle which they leak, to Homer’s (and his performer’s) evident delight. The stranger gives him a rare outside audience to impress, and one gets the sense that his proposed escort is as much a chance to show off the prowess of his shipmen as it is a sacred service to the passenger. There is a fascinating but frustratingly vague allusion to a journey the Phaeacians undertook, to carry Rhadamanthys, the blonde judge in the Elysian Fields where blonde Menelaus is destined to dwell, to see Tityus the Gaian giant. Apparently this Earth-born prodigy was something to go a distance to see, unlike, say, some washed-up hero from the Trojan War. I find no elucidating footnote to give this episode any context, but it certainly serves once again to link the Phaeacians to figures from a past who were ‘mythical’ already to Homer. They are a bridge to an age of giants that has passed, just as, in a slightly different way, Odysseus himself bridges the poetic world of the Iliad, of the berserkers who kill by nines and the Götterdämmerung, and that of the unformed, rudderless, bourgeois youth of Telemachus and the suitors.

The mention of Euboea strikes a particular note. Alcinous is boasting of how vast the sea journeys are, which the Phaeacian seamen can make in a day. Of course one does not at all know to where Homer’s place names refer, but for a classical audience, Euboea is just over there. It’s New Jersey. To my mind, it suits the Odyssean humour for Alcinous’ so distant-to-be-legendary Euboea, to be comically local for us. To adapt Monty Python’s ‘Nudge Nudge’ sketch: “Euboea? Euboea! Say no mowah!”

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Odyssey 7.167-260: Polymētis Odysseus

Alcinous reveals the Phaeacians to be something of a throwback, in the mythic scheme of things. He announces his intent to provide the escort Odysseus seeks, effortless and painless, as seems to be the ancient practice of these ferrymen. But he makes clear that their service ends upon delivery; afterward, the stranger will be subject to the fate spun out for him when the thread was cut at his birth, by those “weighty ladies,” the Spinners. But this also suggests that for the time he is under their care and escort, the presently anonymous Odysseus will be outside of any deterministic bounds signified by the myth of the Spinners at our birth. This is as much as to say that the land of Phaeacia lives as far outside the rules of time and birth and place as mortals doomed to die some time, can be. But then Alcinous wonders out loud if this stranger before him might in fact be one of the deathless ones; evidently something about Odysseus’ apparition makes this plausible. In that case, complains Alcinous, the times they are a-changin’. The gods never used to hide themselves at our parties! Even if you ran into them on the street. We’re from the world of Cyclopses and Giants, God’s neighbours! It may in fact be that Homer intends the arrival of Odysseus to mark a transition in the order of the world, in which the Κύκλωπες and Γίγαντες of old, and the Phaeacians too, will obsolesce. Perhaps heroes, gods, and epic poetry as well.

Even if Alcinous does not actually suspect that Odysseus is a god, it is pretty clear, and rightly so, that he thinks the stranger is nevertheless concealing something.

To be honest, the stranger has so far been concealed from us as well. We are at the beginning of peeling the onion. Odysseus’ characteristic epithet in Homer, from Iliad I on, is πολύμητις: ‘of many counsels or devices’. Polu/poly is ‘many’, mētis is ‘mental acuity’, ‘shrewdness’, ‘mind’, or else the internal object of such faculties: a ‘cunning plan’. Personified, in stories outside Homer, she is the maternal source of Athena, in the sense that Zeus is supposed to have consumed Metis whole and given birth to their fully armed daughter from his head. If this story was common, it is no wonder that for Homer Athena is both cerebral and the source of higher thoughts, thoughts with a view to the big picture, in the minds inhabiting the heroes whom she favours with a visit. But she can also be a maiden fetching from the well, or a Taphian pirate, or Mentor, or a witch with a wand. Homer’s embodied imagination is not enslaved to a ‘mythology’, or any other modern concept which helps make it seem like the ancient Greeks had a religion.

In the context of the Odyssey, I always hear the ‘many’ in this epithet in relation to the peri in Penelope’s characteristic epithet, περίφρων. The latter is often translated ‘circumspect’, or ‘prudent’, without due regard to the mental asset expressed by phrōn. I think, however, that this is peri in the sense ‘more’ rather than ‘around’ or ‘about’, and translate ‘Penelope passing wise’. Odysseus’ ‘many’ may be ever so many, in the cognitive department, but it is not as much as Penelope’s ‘more’.

We have not yet escaped the American Homerist’s 20th Century dogma, that the epithets in noun-and-epithet phrases in Homer, like πολύμητις Ὀδυσσεύς and περίφρων Πηνελόπεια, functioned primarily to fill metrical spots in the hexameter line; in other words, they were thought to be filler, whose meaning did not necessarily register. Such phrases were thought to be part of a formulary, with which a supposed oral tradition of storytelling would allow the night’s improviser to draw on a stock of ready-made phrases to fill up the six measures of his lines, which the professional academics suppose he might otherwise have struggled to do. This dogma, however, views the Homeric verses as purely metrical things—a preposterous notion with no basis in history or text. Homer himself describes his art as singing, and his work as song; there is no such thing as purely metrical song. And the text of Homer we have is replete with a systematic set of tonal accent marks, completely ignored by the theory of oral composition-in-performance, which indicate the melodic contour of phrases and lines, together with the syllables upon which the voice lands in emphasis (rising in pitch or falling, according to a rule). These tonal emphases thereby infuse the otherwise monotonous hexameter drum-beat with both melody and rhythm. You hear them each time in my Greek rendition (below).

Apparently the repetition of phrases and themes in Homer, including the noun-and-epithet phrases like πολύμητις Ὀδυσσεύς, needed condescending explaining by mid-Century scholars raised on silent reading and ‘literature’. For some reason it did not mitigate these deficiencies that these people were also raised in the profound modern musical cultures of Europe and the Americas. I once wrote, ‘one would as soon explain repetition in music, as wetness in water.’ More recently: ‘How does one even approach a question about why there is a repetition of themes in a symphony or dramatic opera? How is it possible that Homeric scholarship can so seriously and sophisticatedly ignore the fact that Homer asks his performer to sing his verses, and act like there’s something that needs explaining or apology, in the typically musical features of the resulting song? … The ignoring of the seemingly irrelevant accent marks in texts seems to have led not to the realisation that all we could know, sadly, about the sound and performance of Greek poetry was its metre, but to the delusion that metre was all there was to know.’

Paolo Vivante first recognised that the function of noun-and-epithet phrases was evocative of their speaker or object, rather than predicating upon them; like summoning titles or names, which bring their referent to the storyteller’s foreground. Just as we don’t always register the majesty in ‘Your Majesty’, or the ‘gentleman’ when addressing a Congressman on the House floor, predication is not the primary function of these epithets. In my work I factored in the circle-dance origin of the hexameter rhythm, a medium of summoning presences, and the simply musical character of Greek verbal composition of all kinds; Greek was a language whose words, even in prose environments, had built-in tonal contours. Hence I compared these evocative Homeric phrases, like πολύμητις ʼΟδυσσεύς, to signature lines in opera, which recur significantly at dramatic moments. In Homer this is usually when he summons a character to make a speech, before delivering it in the first person. These name-and-epithet phrases summon the hero on a number of levels all at once, and hence were an unusual and powerful resource for the evocative ‘staging’ and presence of a singing soloist, playing many parts, rather than a concession to any sort of imagined metrical necessity. (One does not experience this Classicist’s ‘necessity’ in any of the works of Bach or Mozart, which are rigidly quantitative all the same; metre is a necessary condition for music, but a completely insufficient one.)

Vivante pointed out that when the same Homeric epithets, which normally resided in their summoning phrases, were displaced to other parts of the line, and became predicate adjectives, their meaning often became focussed and sometimes oddly different from their assumed sense inside the phrase. We don’t generally register the terror when an event in the day is ‘a terrible tragedy’; that phrase has become a formula, a noun-and-epithet phrase. In TV news-speak, things never simply go wrong nowadays, invariably they go “horribly wrong.” But the effect is different when predication is intended, as: “the tsunami was terrible, the destruction was horrible.” Terror and horror become real when deployed as predicates.

The question of registration then becomes a little delicate. We have already seen this early in Book 1, when Zeus refers to “blameless Aegisthus” in his opening speech, where he is pointedly singling out Aegisthus (and his fellow humans) for blame. Put most starkly, either ‘blameless’ (ἀμύμων) is a meaningless title of nobility, filling up the line, or it is a blunt satire, too on-the-point for irony, of epic norms. Unsurprisingly, I think the truth is more on the side of the latter. And yes, I find his usage in that instance something of an unsuccessful one for Homer—in part, precisely because its blunt opacity has spawned such small-minded disagreement.

In the case of Odysseus, πολύμητις seems intended to be complimentary, but it seems to me Homer means to ring changes on this Odyssean epithet—explore it, if you will—in his Odyssey. You would likely be guarded in your approach to an encounter with someone bearing such a description and reputation. Donald Trump would have probably just called him ‘Lyin’ Odysseus’, or some such, and not in fact be far off the mark if he were looking to run against the guy. What after all are these epithets like ‘clever’ or ‘intricate-minded’ in real life? Why, they describe a liar. Not just a liar, but unlike Trump, a good liar.

Homer thrusts the meaning of Odysseus’ epithets to the foreground in the line where Alcinous moves toward the suppliant, and the narrator says,

He took him by the hand, Odysseus the Clever, the Variegated Plotter,

And raised him from the hearth and sat him on a shining chair …

The two adjectives, δαίφρων and ποικιλομήτης, are each of them usually used as single epithets, joined together often with Odysseus’ name in an hexameter segment. Here, instead, they are both sounded, and together make up their own half-line, where Odysseus’ name belongs to the line’s first half (before the caesura). The effect is to disattach them from name-and-epithet phrases, breaking their musical spell, so to throw their meaning into particular relief as predicates. Because we are so used to treating these two words only as epithets, such a move by Homer makes us pay special attention, I feel, also to Odysseus’ regular epithets employed in their normal rhythmic phrases. So let us do that. The message, I would suggest in advance, is not subtle: not only Alcinous and Arete, but we ourselves are to treat the mysterious stranger with the highest suspicion. The seemingly long-suffering suppliant whom Alcinous takes by the hand, is in fact a schemer of the highest order, a variegated plotter whom we should expect to be manipulating us at every turn—even in his genuflection and exhausted supplication. Odysseus is putting on a show. Improvising nervously, perhaps, but not letting on. The Phaeacians, we recall—with the possible exception of Demodocus the bard—do not know either his name or his characteristic epithets.

“When someone asks you if you’re a god, you say YES!” Odysseus does not follow this advice from Ghostbusters. Instead the Poly-Wily one plays to the crowd, first to elicit sympathy from them for his suffering, then sings a lament about the tyranny of the stomach. The shtick about that bitch the stomach is just that, what the comedians call a ‘bit’, played to the groundlings. He is keen to dispense with any advantage he might have had in the Phaeacians’ readiness to see him as a god—his presence there, having crossed an ocean which they knew to be traversable only by themselves, is a miracle after all—but no, he’s just eaten and drunk ravenously in front of them, and embracing his needy humanity is the better look and the better odds. But at the same time, he does not want to come off himself as a groundling, just to play to them. Odysseus appears conscious of the importance of perceived status with these people, who value their closeness to the gods. Note how at the end of his speech, he claims he could die if he were just to see his native land: “My property, my slaves and the high-roofed big house.”

Note the expressed content of his longing: it is all for his property, his slaves! There is not a breath or a word to hint that a Penelope is anywhere in his thoughts. This is not the open book he seemed on Calypso’s Isle, to Calypso herself. Here he sounds like he might even be single! In the end does he want to seem eligible, for whatever eventuality, to take Nausicaa’s hand? Yes this is a Poly-Wily Odysseus, holding, tossing, and playing different cards at once.

When the guests all leave, there is a moment of silence. Odysseus is left alone with Alcinous and Arete while the servants clean up. Here he is ‘radiant Odysseus’, δῖος Ὀδυσσεύς, which to my mind is an epithet phrase that suggests he is briefly himself. Silence is truth. But of course Arete must ask about the origin of his clothes, which she knows she made herself; and in his response, Odysseus is once again announced as polymētis. He tells the story of his surviving the shipwreck bestriding the keel, and arriving at Ogygia. But Calypso is now, for the first time, a ‘dread goddess’ (δϝεινὴ θεός), a term that applied earlier in Book 7 to Athena herself, when she had shed a mist to hide Odysseus as he made his way to the city. It later applies to the witch Circe. It does seem to imply that Calypso wielded somewhat ominous or sinister powers over him. Odysseus also refers to her as δολόεσσα Καλυψώ, as though she were a creature of snares and tricks. He speaks as if her tendance of him was almost forcible. One remembers vividly, however, Odysseus’ interchange with Calypso, whose sexual relationship moves from Homer’s description, ‘a man unwilling next a woman all too,’ to the moment after they discuss the concept of mortal Penelope, when they become a dual subject—a pair neither singular nor plural:

So they went, the pair of them, into a nook of the hollowed cave

And began making love; and they stayed by one another.

One may presume that Odysseus’ characterisation of the many years under Calypso could be tailored somewhat for the seamstress Queen Arete, who may indeed be measuring up a son-in-law. At the moment we break off from his speech, he has brought up the issue of his clothing, which is on the Queen’s mind, to point out how his tears had continually soaked the clothes Calypso gave him. Ah, but those were immortal, even immortalising clothes (ambrota). Arete is no doubt interested to learn, halfway through his explanation, that the stranger now seated by her has turned down immortality and immortal clothes, before arriving naked on the shore to be clothed in the opportunities before him.

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Odyssey 7.84-166

I know a bank where the wild thyme blows,

Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows,

Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine,

With sweet musk-roses and with eglantine:

There sleeps Titania sometime of the night,

Lull’d in these flowers with dances and delight …

How do these lines of Oberon’s work? Certainly they evoke images with their colours, and more astoundingly, the sniffed-in aromas of flowers—words do have this power of transport in representation, within or outside of verse, though they do not always seem to exercise it. Prompts to the memory, from words or otherwise, seem to be as unpredictable as they may be galvanising or devastating. But the rhythms of poetry and song seem uncannily able to marshal, and spotlight, the power of words. Beyond sight and smell, there is a virtually tactile miming of these floral beings in the rhythmically engaged structures of tongue, palate, throat, and lips, even the saliva. ‘Luscious’ is a luscious word. ‘Oxlips’ come to life in the slowly sibilant saying of them. The nature of words is therefore more than simply referential: in the rhythm of the poet’s lines they become themselves embodied substances. Poets and songwriters remind us of this substance of words, by revealing it.

Homer of course was the original word musician and evoker of substances. Odysseus has been left standing alone on the threshold of the estate of Alcinous in mysterious Phaeacia, contemplating what is within, and Homer does not resist the temptation to join him in conjuring the rhythm of his vista. No speech occurs in this passage, in which he might immerse as an actor; Homer instead invests himself in the sheer description of things that are very hard to relate to anything normal. Hence similes are rare—in fact there is only one—and it is unusually elusive.

Homer has engaged in such contemplation already in the Odyssey; more a propos of Oberon’s lines was the description of Calypso’s eco-cave, as Hermes stood on its threshold in awe and admiration (5.57-74). Earlier than that was Telemachus gaping at Menelaus’ interior space, wondering if this was what Zeus’s front room was like (4.74). It is that encounter which most comes to mind now; once again we hear how Alcinous’ house shone ‘like the light of the sun … or the moon.’ But Phaeacia outdoes anything that Menelaus may have scrounged from Egypt. The structure is made of shining metals, where humbler folk must settle for timbers. The walls and threshold are made of copper, the doorposts silver, and the doors made of gold. Though they are exceptionally extravagant and high tech, the works of art in Alcinous’ house combine form and function, true to the spirit of the Odyssey’s aesthetic philosophy: the dogs crafted of gold and silver, by Hephaestus, actually keep guard; boys made of gold, do in fact hold the torches needed to light the feast. (At a dramatic moment later on, Odysseus himself becomes such a torch-bearer, in his own dinner hall.)

Everything is in excess; this calls forth not similes but proportions, so that one can use the imagination to project scales rather than contemplate striking comparisons. For example, by as much as the men are superior to all others in their know-how at sea-faring, so also superior are the Phaeacian women in the arts of spinning and textiles: the art of the text.

But the topmost splendour (literally topmost) are the seat coverings, the draperies woven by human women. Immediately following the torch-boys made of gold are fifty real slave women, some grinding at the mill, while others weave at the loom and still others sit and spin the wool. It is these last, the slaves in a heavenly textile factory, who call forth the only brief simile: their motion in their seats as they spin is like ‘the leaves on a tall, tapering poplar.’ One does not actually know the tree for sure, or, therefore, the intended motion. Now, when it comes to Homer’s trees and birds, we can only make guesses. Here is a question that is an instant path to desert island metaphysics: how do we know that we each see the same colour orange, or merely call what we see the same name? Homer has no word for ‘blue’, unless it is the pigment of Alcinous’ cornice, called cyanus. The Iliad’s sky is ‘coppered’ or ‘brazen’. I really don’t think that Homer’s sky was the colour of ours. One can only infer that the rhythm of these spinner-women bobbing at their work waved through them like the familiar rustle through the leaves of a tall and handsome tree. Colours, leaves, winds, and women must all be imagined.

Right alongside the work in progress, we see the finished product: the hung linens drip with olive oil. This is a significant feature of the qualities of Phaeacia, this simultaneity. As in art, so in nature: we move into an extraordinary orchard, where the grapes are in flower, ripening, being harvested, being dried, or being trod into wine all at the same time. On the shield of Achilles (Iliad XVIII), the scenes are depicted in sequence, from spring marriages to communal ploughing to summer wars to harvest songs, in a catalogue, although, to be sure, the framing of the shield itself does suspend the separate vignettes in an ever-present. But one feels the passage of time all the same. In the harvest scene in particular, Homer himself sings a singer, a boy playing a lyre who sings the Linos song as the villagers gather the grapes. The harvest song captures the whole in mid-motion, the predicament of people who live in the temperate zones: its tones look back to the bloom of spring, and call a halt to the wars of the summer season, as it accompanies the reaping of the mature fruit. But reaping is killing; the harvest heralds the coming of winter and death. Without being able to hear or understand a word of it, one knows that awareness of the coming cold and bleak infuses the poignant notes of the Linos song.

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard

Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on …. —Keats

There seems to be no winter in Alcinous’ orchard. Or rather, the fruit trees seem oblivious to it; all the stages of ripening fruit are present at once. I have seen this only once in my life, in what the Kandyans call a kamaranga tree—in the tropics, a region without winter beyond Odysseus’ travels and ken. It is Poseidon who travels among the Aethiopes.

The flowers and new star fruits were on the tree simultaneously with last season’s lot. But all the other fruit trees there seemed to have their seasons, though these weren’t defined by winters. The Phaeacian fantasy is indeed one for the temperate zones which are defined by winter, and so dreams not of no seasons, but for the joys of the other seasons and the absence of that one. Hence in Phaeacia there is none of the looming dearth against which we harvest, but also therefore, none of the beauty of the Linos song unheard.

τάων οὔ ποτε καρπὸς ἀπόλλυται οὐδ’ ἀπολείπει

χείματος οὐδὲ θέρευς, ἐπετήσιος · ἀλλὰ μάλ’ αἰεί

Ζεφυρίη πνείουσα τὰ μὲν φύει, ἄλλα δὲ πέσσει.

ὄγχνη ἐπ’ ὄγχνηι γηράσκει, μῆλον δ’ ἐπὶ μήλωι,

αὐτὰρ ἐπὶ σταφυλῆι σταφυλή, σῦκον δ’ ἐπὶ σύκωι. Odyssey 7.117-21

Of these the fruit never dies, nor even diminishes,

Neither winter nor summer, all year long: no, quite continuously

The Zephyr breathes out of the west, sprouting some, ripening the rest.

Pear grows old upon pear, apple on apple,

But upon a cluster it’s a cluster, and ripening fig on fig.

What in English is pear upon pear, the new upon the ripe, and apple upon apple, is in Greek onkhnē ep’ onkhnēi, mēlon epi mēlōi, nominative upon dative case. Hence there is a change of ending between pear and pear and apple and apple, unlike in English, as well as cluster upon cluster and fig on fig, staphulēi staphulē and sūkon epi sūkōi, creating a complex of rhymes in lines 120-1. It is commonly taught, somewhat proudly following Milton, that the ancients did not ‘do’ end rhymes, as so tenderly executed in Oberon’s couplets above. But just look at the emphatic endings of Homer’s lines, 7.117-21. Even if you can’t sound them out, you can see the rhyming shapes of the syllables at the lines’ ends, printed in bold: ἀπολείπει, αἰεί, πέσσει, followed by μήλωι, σύκωι. There is a song-like quality to these, describing the fecundity of a land that perhaps only exists in song.

Classics students take pride in understanding what they call ‘agreement’, between noun and adjective, which means agreement between case endings. But the audible cue for this agreement is almost always rhyme, rhyming word-endings. The clever ones feel especially clever when they remember that some feminine nouns have masculine declensions, so that the feminine endings on their adjectives do not seem to agree, or that some adjectives don’t have feminine forms, so that feminine nouns have to agree with what look like masculine epithets or predicates. But this classicist’s ethos should not obscure the fact that rhyme—from the perspective of a line, ‘internal’ rhyme—is actually everywhere in Greek and Latin poetry and prose. It is indicative of how tone deaf is the Enlightenment Classics tradition, that it teaches visual written agreement over the aural, oral fact that rhyming endings are the principal cues which connect subjects to intended predicates in its dead languages. And we see here that in literally florid passages, Homer himself likes him a bit of end rhyme.

The avoiding or denying of winter and death only makes their silent presence—underlying things nevertheless—the more ominous. At least that is how it seems to me. There is something too good to be true about Phaeacia. Their ships are quick, like a wing or a thought. Their orchards enjoy all seasons but winter at once, all year-round. Their feast days also are unending. And Arete is married to her drunk uncle: for some reason, clearly intended, Odysseus calls attention to this fact, addressing her at first blush with his arms ’round her knees as “daughter of Rhexenor,” her husband’s only brother. This blue lineage was a tidbit that had been revealed to him by Athena as the virgin carrying a pitcher; perhaps he took her gossip as an instruction for his pitch? Perhaps that was the intent of Athena’s chat, to prep him for this crucial moment of public supplication? In the rest of his short address, he wishes that the children of the Phaeacians’ nobility inherit their things—not, say, a simple wish for everyone’s prosperity, and hence slightly puzzling—together with any prizes the demos bestows. Now, we have had only one mention of a prize bestowed by the people, in last time’s reading; is this a reference to Eurymedousa, the concubine turned Nausicaa’s nurse and chambermaid, whom the Phaeacians had gifted to Arete’s husband Alcinous? That was a perhaps slightly indelicate fact revealed to us by Homer himself, not Athena. (Is there a difference?) Hence one wonders if Odysseus’ supplication is meant as a provocation for some reason. Or is the whole thing rather a colossal faux pas, intended for our (the audience’s) amusement? The quite rapid drama of the moment perhaps detracts from our attention to the substance of Odysseus’ words, but when there is time to reflect on them, the result is more unsettling and unresolved than satisfying.

Is all as it seems to be, or is the ‘city of desire’ a figment of wish-fulfilment and death denial, a modern supermarket of year-round apples, oranges and mangoes? We recall that on his escape from the sea, Odysseus feared that he would die from exposure to the cold, and that the fall of leaves under his chosen twinned olive trees would protect two or three men from a winter storm. Winter and death are there lurking, even in Phaeacia, even if spring is coming and girls think of washing their dancing clothes in the wild wood.

But Odysseus does not die wondering. He penetrates the dream.

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Odyssey 7.1-83

Ancient Greek writers were the source of many of the genres of literature, and academic disciplines, that still get sorted into various departments and studies in the modern university. In light of this, Homer’s works become difficult to categorise for a modern academic, in that they are a source of sources and ancient for the ancients. He comes from another world, just as Phaeacia does for himself. However, the perspectives of two modern rubrics, I must admit, colour my registration of Homer’s Phaeacia. One is called today perhaps ‘cultural anthropology’; the other ‘political science’, which has its decidedly empirical aspect, and also ‘political theory’, which sometimes does not. But in the context of post-Homeric Greece, I think of the pre-Socratics and the Socratic philosophers, most of whom at some time or another engaged in speculation about what would be the ‘ideal city’. The grandest scale of the resulting compositions was surely reached in the mathematics of Plato’s Republic and the songs of his Laws. But comparison was very much a part of this partly speculative and partly revolutionary movement: how do they do things in Crete or Sparta as opposed to Ionia, or as we might say, how do they do things in Sweden as opposed to Singapore? Both these questions lead quite naturally to, ‘how ought one to do things?’

As for the ancient origin of modern cultural anthropology, I think instead of what Herodotus called his ‘history’, his inquiry into the great events of the past and the types of the peoples instigating or involved in them. The comparative instinct is again strong here, applied to cultural norms as against political orders. But how apply even a term like ‘culture’ to Homer, a concept which cannot be translated into his language? Herodotus was a traveler, and indeed for an observant and inquisitive traveler, detailed comparison leads very quickly to both cultural anthropology and political theory. Perhaps both these fields of inquiry have their origin in traveler’s tales. Now there is a genre that spans the ages and the globe. No doubt such tales were as old and romantic for Homer as they are for our cartographers. Yet Homer’s Odyssey is somehow both the paradigm and the pioneer. Here be strange creatures. There is very little for modern map makers to say about oceans.

When Odysseus is about to enter her, however, Homer does not speak of Phaeacia as a paradigmatic or perfect city, but rather a polis erannē: a city that arouses erotic desire—‘ravishing and longed for’. This could mean simply a city that suits Odysseus’ own desire, as a staging ground for his return home—his true desire. But Homer’s objective wording and pointed predication of ἐραννή rather objectify Phaeacia as a singularly beautiful thing, a city to fall in love with. (The word perhaps encourages a notion of Odysseus’ entrance as a penetration, as indeed does the image of Athena as a young virgin with a pitcher, which immediately follows [7.18-20].) A desired one is perhaps something quite different from an ‘ideal’ city. But Homer has a blueprint: he takes pains, directly or through others’ voices, to describe the city’s physical layout and its political and social castes. He mentions Nausithous’ the founder’s communal distribution of ploughland. What should undercut some of this for an audience is the place’s isolation: the agricultural self-sufficiency makes excellent sense, but what would be the point of walls and a fleet to such a city? Perhaps these contribute to a real Hellene’s sense of what is either gorgeous or ideal in a polis, so he is inclined to forgive any incongruity in the art.

But there is also incongruity in the comparison of cultures, if Phaeacia is supposed to be idealised. Homer seeds this doubt himself with his digression on the chambermaid, Eurymedousa, whom the Phaeacians had procured from elsewhere—as though they had been on a raid of their non-existent neighbours! The name of her town, Apeira, means ‘limitless’; to carry her off from Apeira, as the Phaeacian sailors did, is to carry her off from ‘The Infinite’. Be that as it may, it is said that she was brought to Alcinous as a ‘prize’. The understanding of this term which we derive from usage in the Iliad, is that Eurymedousa was to be his concubine. Now, does that mean it’s okay, just because it’s a thing invading armies do—to hand out captured women as top prizes to leading warriors in the general distribution of booty? How is Alcinous’ august and revered wife Arete supposed to feel about such arrangements? Homer seems to tease us with such revelations. We recall that when we were introduced to Eurycleia, Telemachus’ nurse—whose name Eurymedousa also recalls—we are told that Laertes (Odysseus’ father) had bought her with his own money, and honoured her in the house on a level with his own wife. But—and Homer rather emphasises the point—he did not sleep with her (1.433). We may infer that this was unusual behaviour on Laertes’ part, the abstaining from sex with his youthful and comely purchase. But does Homer celebrate a romantic monogamy in Laertes’ and Odysseus’ household? Or are they weird? Are we to think less of Alcinous’ and the Phaeacians’ usage, in awarding such a prize and embracing its intent? At the very least, Homer must be telling us these details to prompt some reaction. The comely Eurymedousa ended up Nausicaa’s nurse and now makes her some supper, just as Eurycleia had earlier made Telemachus’ bed and folded his clothes.

Perhaps less ambiguous morally, for all that Homer hints more than he states, are the revelations of Athena as she guides Odysseus to the palace. She appears as a young maiden carrying a pitcher. Does anyone know this figure as a motif? I think of Rebeccah from Genesis carrying a pitcher to the well, only to be spotted by Abraham’s flamboyant emissary in search of a bride for his son. It is wonderfully alluring, this image of the girl on her own with the pitcher, together with the idea that the public water source might be a place to get lucky. Perhaps there is something simply fervid about this city that ‘inspires eros’ (ἐραννή). In any case, the girlish instantiation of Athena is quite the gossip. There are hints in this ideal city of things being too good to be true. We learn that Alcinous and Arete, the royal couple, are in fact uncle and niece. Surely some sort of red flag goes up? Odysseus in his travels will encounter a number of different kinds of marital arrangements, some of them proudly incestuous. Something always ends up being off, dangerously off, with these people and places.

The flirtatious Athena seems to relish the juicy bits: Arete got her name from the very same parents who birthed Alcinous, she chuckles. Nausithous the patriarch was the son of Eurymedon’s daughter, who was impregnated by Poseidon. One presumes this happened after Eurymedon, king of the Giants, “destroyed his presumptuous people … then himself”. ‘Eurymedon’ is the masculine version of the name we have just heard, Eurymedousa, the prize concubine turned Nausicaa’s nurse and maid. Is she perhaps a descendant of Giants?

This undercurrent of strangeness perhaps sets us up for a quandary that is very real for me: what do we finally make of Athena’s admiration for Phaeacian matriarchy? There are many reasons, some of which I have been developing as we proceed, to think that the place of women in the home, in society, and in the political order is something very much in the front of Homer’s mind as he tells the Odyssey. The figure of the woman of the house (or the cosmos in Calypso’s case), stationed by the house’s pillar, has already become a symbolic motif. Even in light of this, Arete’s special significance in Phaeacia is highly marked. Her husband the king “honoured her, like no woman else is honoured upon the ground, / As many women as there are these days, hold the house beneath their men.” It is several times pointed out how ancillary Alcinous really is, in general but also in Odysseus’ particular interests. It is her, Arete, that he has to impress if he is to have a chance to win passage home. She is not merely the power behind the throne; no, she is the pillar around which the whole society is erected and upon which it leans. It is clear that her influence spreads far outside the domicile: unlike the other high-born women we have encountered, including Helen, she goes out on the town, and is hailed like a god by the denizens. We are told that she solves the quarrels and strifes (νείκεα) of men, not only their wives. This is a talent that would have solved the Trojan War.

So is this ultimate centrality of the female to human order, in politics or culture, something the poet of the Odyssey acknowledges and celebrates? Or is her description of Arete’s authority instead the consummating point in Athena’s disclosing the weirdness of Phaeacia?

… off she went, Owl-Eyes Athena

Over the unfruited deep, and she left ravishing Scheria behind;

She arrived in Marathon and the broad streets of Athene,

And entered Erechtheus’ close-built house. But Odysseus …

To Alcinous’ famous house he went: and often was his heart

Troubled as he stood there, before he got to the copper threshold.

From my first book:

Note the almost over-emphatic floridity of the epithets, as the animate locations on Athena’s journey are bodied forth. But then we see the name of Odysseus, unadorned and lonely. The bounty of the goddess’s destinations, as it is expressed in the music of the epithets, seems to underscore the bereavement of the solitary traveller she has left behind with only the syllables of his name. To say that Odysseus is pushed into the background because he has no epithet is to assert the opposite, in this case, of the poetic reality. A more effective means can scarcely be imagined to present the situation of Odysseus in all its poignancy, alone and unknown before a strange and awesome palace, than the solitary name. From Homer’s perspective, it would seem that the rules of his poetry are made to be broken.

In Greek:

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Odyssey 6.285-331 (end)

Off Odysseus goes down the yellow brick road, following the mule car of Nausicaa and a gaggle of her attendants. The passage is mostly the second half of Nausicaa’s speech of instruction to the initiate. That is how the speech should be characterised. This is a journey that begins at the edge of wilderness, in what seems like a boar’s lair, sheltered under twinned trees, one of whom is Athena’s cultivated olive. Hence the river’s mouth where Odysseus meets Nausicaa is a liminal zone, where civilisation meets the wild and wet, and ‘liquid mortals’ may be prowling. The journey home will proceed along past the farms, at whose presence the hybrid bushes on the forest’s edge have already hinted. Here the pilgrim must keep his distance. But the real gauntlet the girls’ party has to run, comes just before the city wall: there lies the dockyard with private slips, where there are ships to trade what the locals cultivate, or to go pirating and take what others make. But Phaeacia is weirdly isolated, so neither of these scenarios makes sense; why after all are these people so bothered, obsessed even, with ships? Almost all the Phaeacian’s names, including Nausicaa’s, seem connected to boats or the sea. There is not a hint of an interest in fishing. What sort of a sailor is it who never deals with foreign ports? We shall need to dig into the nature of these mariners, these dedicated escorts, these ferrymen across to undiscovere’d countries, who also make it back.

The salty seamen whose comments Nausicaa disdains preoccupy themselves in this second liminal zone, between the farms and the city wall. They have their market set up there marked by hauled stones in trenches, like a henge, right next a lovely temple to Poseidon. That god’s protection must have been much on any mariner’s mind, let alone the Phaeacians’, who claim his kinship. Odysseus, not for the first time, is therefore infiltrating enemy territory. Nausicaa instructs him to duck into a grove beforehand, to avoid the spectacle his presence would create before the sailors. This grove is sacred instead to the now friendly Athena. We leave Odysseus praying to her there in her sanctuary.

Nowadays, I understand, we find in Greek towns a shrine to St. Nicholas by the sea, and to the Virgin in town. Of course Poseidon is not St. Nicholas, and the Virgin (parthenos) has been transformed from Athena into Mary. She is thought now to have given birth, once upon a time. But there is surely something awesome in the continuity of the genotype, in the thought of which two archetypes of superhuman power must be instituted there to protect a seagoing city. Phaeacia is a Neverland, an Oz, even to ancient Homer; and yet there is uncanny recognition in her salty idyll.

Yet Odysseus’ final pilgrimage and penetration of the sanctum is still only to begin once he crosses into the city proper. From farmers to sailors, we cross the wall to mingle with the citizens. But once again, we must distinguish qualities. Alcinous’ house is not at all like any of the others. Nausithous, their founding father, had built the wall and ‘distributed the ploughlands’. I suppose this portends a jolly sort of Soviet oligarchy. His son Alcinous now enjoys the perks.

At last Alcinous’ palace itself has to have its layers peeled before one reaches the hearth. The whole journey is a nested labyrinth, mysteries opening upon mysteries. Pass the courtyard, cross the great room until you reach the hearth, the central fire, where you’ll find Nausicaa’s mother. There she spins the sea-purple wool, leaning against a pillar. Right nearby, his drinking chair also leaning against the pillar—although the single intensive/reflexive αὐτῆι in Greek makes it seem as though he’s leaning against her—sits the tipsy Alcinous, “like an immortal.”

Everything does lean on her. She is the pillar. Nausicaa owns as much about the father she exalts as ‘hero’ and ‘immortal’, when she says to Odysseus, in Butler’s translation, ‘never mind him!’ Arete, her mother, is the source of power. It is her knees, not Nausicaa’s, which he must be brave enough actually to clasp. The whole vision of the Phaeacian civilisation can be seen to centre on, to lean against, this house’s pillar, which therefore grows in the imagination to be an axis mundi. In Book 1 Penelope descended the stairs and stood next the pillar of Odysseus’ house. Calypso is Atlas’ daughter, he who keeps the pillars of the cosmos. Women stand at the fixed axis of things in this cosmos. They constitute the central, stabilising power, as well as the hidden treasure encased in the labyrinth, the acquisition most prized within the protection of the city wall, beyond anything a ship can fetch. Only Helen among Homer’s leading women does not descend a stair and stand by a pillar. No, she bursts in upon the scene and drapes herself on a couch. With a footstool. (4.136) She, of course, is the woman who moves—or moved—and it is possible that it was more than the axis of international politics and war—though it certainly was those—which got displaced with her. The Trojan event certainly included a war. That’s the part we sing about.

In the midst of his outwardly simple but deceptively anagogical journey, in the train of Nausicaa’s steerage, Odysseus prays to Athena in the most bluntly human and intimate terms. What can compare to this picture of man talking to god, as though complaining to his mother that she did not protect him from his bullies? “Listen to me this time,” he says, seeing as “before you never listened, as I was battered …” Such intimacy between the human and the powers-that-be would seem to be a particular focus and point of Homer’s depiction. One wonders at the poet who feels this intimacy to be possible. One might think that all the layers of the onion in his pilgrimage to the hearth of Phaeacia have been peeled for the sake of disclosing such a conjunction. But the sense of constraint and containment within this depiction is nevertheless palpable. Even Athena will not yet appear to Odysseus face to face, out of shame before her uncle Poseidon.

What is the connection between the shame felt by women—Athena before her uncle, Nausicaa before her father (who, it turns out, is also her great uncle)—and that central pillar of civilisation by which Queen Arete spins the sea-purple thread? Is there anything at all shameless, by contrast, in Odysseus whining at a goddess? Perhaps it is significant that the intimacy presumed in Odysseus’ prayer to Athena, that he come to the Phaeacians as a friend and a thing to be pitied, needs to take place outside the city—or at least this city. As when he crawled under the olive bushes at the end of Book 5, here at the end of 6 Odysseus is once again safe outside, under Athena’s trees.

In Greek:

N.B. I shall have to travel across the planet next week. No free passage from the Phaeacians. There will sadly be a brief hiatus before Book 7.

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Odyssey 6.198-284

“Do you take him for a robber or a murderer? Neither he nor any one else can come here to do us Phaeacians any harm, for we are dear to the gods …” tr. Butler

“Ye do not think, surely, that he is an enemy? That mortal man lives not, or exists nor shall ever be born who shall come to the land of the Phaeacians as a foeman, for we are very dear to the immortals.” tr. Murray

“Do you really suppose he’s some kind of enemy?

There’s no mortal alive, nor could there ever be one,

Who’d show up in this land of Phaiakian men

With hostile intent, so dear are we to the immortals!” tr. Green

“Do you believe he is an enemy?

No living person ever born would come

to our Phaeacia with a hostile mind,

since we are much beloved by the gods.” tr. Wilson

“Do you think he is part of an enemy invasion?

There is no man on earth, nor will there ever be,

Slippery enough to invade Phaeacia,

For we are very dear to the immortal gods …” tr. Lombardo

I line up these translations of a not very famous passage (6.200-3) because I think the Greek is actually saying something pretty odd. Here it is for good measure, from my edition Homer Odysseia:

ἦ μή πού τινα δυσμενέων φάσθ’ ἔμμεναι ἀνδρῶν;

οὐκ ἔσθ’ οὗτος ἀνὴρ διερὸς βροτὸς οὐδὲ γένηται,

ὅς κεν Φαιήκων ἀνδρῶν ἐς γαῖαν ἵκηται

δηϊοτῆτα φέρων · μάλα γὰρ φίλοι ἀθανάτοισιν.

Surely you didn’t decide he was some enemy man?

This man is not the one, the liquid mortal—nor will he be born!—

Who would reach the land of the Phaeacian men

Bringing violence and harm: for we are very dear to the deathless ones.

That second line contains the phrase dieros brotos, filling the retrogression from caesura to diaeresis. Brotos is ‘mortal’; dieros is variously treated in the translations—either ignored completely (by Butler), or translated somehow ‘living’ or ‘alive’ or thereabouts, and ‘slippery’ by Lombardo. The latter is a decent finesse, in that after its only two uses in Homer, only in the Odyssey, this word exclusively means ‘wet’ or ‘soaked’ or ‘fluid’ in Greek. I think these translators ignore their grammar and syntax, for the sake of finding something that makes sense, but here is how I reckon the second line actually runs with its demonstrative predication: “This man (οὗτος ἀνὴρ) is not him, the ‘liquid mortal’ (διερὸς βροτὸς), nor will he be born, / Who would reach the land of the Phaeacians bringing violence and harm …” It is as though these insular Phaeacians have a fear of a peculiar bogey-man, a fluid being. Perhaps it would take such a liquid human, an aquaman, to cross an ocean to attack them. It is as though there is a fear that some sort of swamp creature would come terrorise Phaeacia. Nausicaa is evidently trying to reassure her servants that this naked dude is not that guy, along with the idea that the common fear is irrational, in that the gods love them too much to allow it. The fear of the visitor or xenophobia, however, may not be so irrational after all. The other girls are not wrong that the arrival of Odysseus may be some kind of ominous portent for Phaeacia’s well-being. But Nausicaa nevertheless stands up for xenia, guest friendship, with true religion: “ … for from Zeus are they all, / The strangers and the beggars, and a gift is both meagre and their own.”

Odysseus modestly insists on washing himself alone, rather than being bathed by the girls, and he emerges looking like a god, his locks flowering like hyacinth. Is this Athena’s magic, as the poet says, comparing her handiwork to that of a skilled goldsmith who overlays gold upon silver; or is this rather Homer’s way of speaking about the freshness and vigour one generally feels upon stepping out of the shower? Is the transformation objective or subjective? Either way, Nausicaa most certainly takes notice, and goes a bit weak in her knees. Amongst her servant girls she says the quiet part out loud: at first the naked stranger looked a right loser,

“But now, he’s like the gods who hold wide heaven.

If only, for me, such a man as this would be called ‘husband’ …”

After Odysseus eats and drinks, Homer says Nausicaa ‘turned her mind to other things.’ We first heard this turn of phrase in reference to Athena, when she was planning Telemachus’ journey from behind the scenes at Ithaca. There is something affective about Athena’s mental attention. We next heard it about Helen, when she decided to save the dinner at Lacedaemon from unending tears by slipping something into the wine. Now we hear it of Nausicaa. Homer is constantly shaping scenes in this story around the behind-the-scenes machinations of its leading women. The contrast is pointed as well, however: Nausicaa is not nearly as in control of her stage as she thinks she is, sadly, nor as her counterparts Athena and Helen are.

In this case, Nausicaa plots Odysseus’ entrance and introduction to her parents and the rest of the Phaeacians, ostensibly so he could make a good impression with the right people to win his passage home—wherever that is. But the rest of Nausicaa’s wish, expressed only to her handmaids, is quite the opposite: that the anonymous stranger and future husband would settle “in the neighbourhood, and it would please him to remain here.” Hence the stage is set for a rather hilarious performance, where Nausicaa orders the stranger to keep his distance on the trail toward the city, by warning him what a salty seaman, such as they are likely to meet on the way, might say and be expected to think, when he espies the famous princess leading a foreign hunk of a man into town. In her own evocation of such a mariner:

“Who’s this here, trailing Nausicaa, a handsome and a tall

Stranger? Where’d she find him? Any day now he’s gonna be her husband.

Surely he’s someone driven off course, that she’s carried off his ship,

Come from far off men, since there aren’t any nearby.

Or else it’s some god—come much prayed for, to the girl praying—

Stepped down out of heaven, and she’ll keep him all her days …”

The problem for Nausicaa, such as it is, is that her surrogate salty seaman is an avatar of the truth! Truth gets told in the Odyssey, it seems, via conscious indirection. The only way to bring this guy home to meet Mama is to say, out loud, that he’s a charity case she’s trying to help get home. Nausicaa goes on to point out, rather cannily, again through the eyes of the salty mariner, both how disdainful she has been of the local men, and how very much the best of them have been wooing her. “Good for her she’s bagged a foreigner instead.” Does not this dramatised embarrassment seem intended rather to entice the stranger, by letting on how sought after a prize she is?

Courtship, and couple dancing, are about following and leading, although mostly the leader or follower must make her partner seem the opposite, if things are going to look good. Athena has made Nausicaa think she is in the driver’s seat, but she is only literally so. The poor thing is being used.

When one watches a play, one invests the character in the actor, or vice versa; part of the transport of the theatre or television experience is participating in the fusion of actor and hero. This option is not available to the Homeric performer. His is a one-man show. He must play all the parts, stepping into each of those speaking rôles as he narrates in propria persona between them. Hence he faces a peculiar problem in approaching the rendering: is he, for now, Nausicaa pretending to be a salty seaman, or is his modus more fluid, switching from maiden to mariner and then back? How does he change, if at all, the register of his voice? Of course we don’t know how this was handled. I do hope that in our day, actors who are serious about their craft will try Homer out, and find out. One-man shows are nothing new, nowadays, but I do wonder how often characters are scripted to immerse themselves in their own stories, turning into actors again, nesting illusion within illusion. Perhaps the whole thing is as fluid as can be when it comes off. For long stretches, already in the cases of Menelaus and Nestor, we have seen the character become the narrator, who delivers speeches by others in their own person. Odysseus will later do this for four whole books straight.

In Proteus, from Menelaus’ sojourn in Aegypt, we encountered someone whose shape shifts. The instruction to his captors was to hold on tight, even if he turns into water. This instruction could perhaps work on an audience for the Homeric performer. He too is a Proteus. Thales was known to believe ‘all is water’, in the sense that he thought liquid was the fundamental material principle out of which and into which all the other states of matter could devolve. Perhaps he had had a drink of what Homer had to offer in playing all the parts of gods and human beings, and even sounding out in verbal mime the surging sea and beetling rocks, and stars like fires in the aether. It is the Homeric performer, after all, who is the original ‘fluid mortal’, the dieros brotos. Phaeacians beware! Homer is coming for you.

These our actors,

As I foretold you, were all spirits and

Are melted into air, into thin air;

And – like the baseless fabric of this vision –

The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,

The solemn temples, the great globe itself,

Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,

And like this insubstantial pageant faded,

Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff

As dreams are made on, and our little life

Is rounded with a sleep.

—Prospero

Does Phaeacia exist? Though Thucydides locates its geographical vicinity, it is sometimes said that Phaeacia only exists in Homer’s imagination. The place certainly serves as a halfway house, a vehicle for both Homer’s story and a staging venue for his unfettered and most inspired storytelling. Just in Homer’s imagination? Let this land of Phaeacia then join the world within and without us, the great sum of our rhythmically articulable empirical reality, which already lives there.

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Odyssey 6.110-197

The thing about Odysseus and Nausicaa, is that nothing happens. They do not touch; he says the words of a suppliant who holds the knee of his benefactor, but her knees are not in play; he chooses to keep his distance, hiding his nakedness with some shrubbery. Yet the whole scene is charged with erotic possibility. An intriguing element in Homer’s total scene-painting and narrative strategy is, once again, a simile. While Odysseus in his words and actions is completely ‘beyond reproach’, he is described upon his emergence in this way:

He walked like a lion raised in the mountains, cocksure strong,

Who goes around rained on and buffeted, but in his eyes

There’s fire: all the same he goes among the cattle, or the sheep,

Or after the wild deer: and it calls him, his stomach,

To try the flocks and approach the close-built house.

Just so was Odysseus on the point, with the girls and their beautiful hair,

Of broaching intercourse—though he was naked; for the need was on him.

Consider the details: he’s weathered like Odysseus, but the lion is not weakened and meek about his nakedness. His hunger is rather more active and opportunistic than desperate. The lion approaches what’s offered like a buffet: cattle followed by sheep, domestically herded and easy pickings, but also the wild deer scavenging off human settlement, as a more difficult and hence challenging and tasty prize. But at the last he turns his attention to the heart of it all, the humans at home in the farm house. ‘Just so was Odysseus … with the girls and their beautiful hair …’ What, do you mean to say he’s not a sheepish embarrassed naked man, humbly approaching these unsuspecting women out of doors, but is actually a lustful orgiast looking forward to a sort of wild girl buffet, savouring the thought of each different type? No girl in particular is his type—he’ll take on the domesticated ones and the wild ones, with gusto, and then have a go at the snooty princess in the big house!

Homer’s delicate indelicacy is consummated with the enjambment of the uncommon future infinitive μείξεσθαι. This means literally ‘to be mixed with’, and has all the double entendre of our ‘to have intercourse with’. The effect is not subtle, and yet it is plausibly deniable; Odysseus is simply about to ‘go mingle’ with these lovely heads of hair.

The surface picture is clear enough: Odysseus is genuinely worried about the people he’s come to, as to whether they’re rapists or savages, and he is as self-controlled under duress as a mortal man might aspire to be. Self-control also distinguishes Nausicaa, and Homer says so directly. But the idea of what is being controlled in a self-controlled person—all us ladies and gentlemen—is deeply and almost subliminally expressed through the vehicle of the simile. We have in fact a strong naked man among scantily clad pubescent girls, one of them a tall and sexually unconquerable Artemis. But Homer both does and doesn’t want to say so. He is like Nausicaa, who does not want to talk about her own marriage before Alcinous and Arete (that is, she is embarrassed to talk about sex with her parents), and makes out that the clothes-washing is for her father and her brothers. But she basically gets it said anyway. Where there is erotic possibility, there is also tremendous erotic force, and Homer’s art captures this sublimated reality in the most unique way, by the slyly indirect promptings of an Odyssean simile.

There are many among us who feel compelled to view Homer as a primitive, even if they do not subscribe to the absurdities of the oral theory of this composition, the Odyssey. For us, there was no great artist before (prior to) Homer. But not for himself. I hope it is becoming clearer that Homer was in fact a Daedalus, his predecessor in the arts, who knew that to contain and to express—both—the reality of our nature and condition, one must construct a labyrinth.

On a side note, I wonder if the Homeric words δαιδάλεος, δαίδαλον, and the verb δαιδάλλω, ‘to ornament curiously,’ point to a Celtic-style labyrinthine geometry. For various reasons, most especially in contrast with an aesthetic celebrated in the Iliad, I expect the poet of the Odyssey to be picky about what sorts of ornamentation would be appropriate for a crafted work. Of course one does not know if the name of Daedalus himself precedes or follows the word formations mentioned above. But rather than a style or motif in design, the Odyssey likes to versify an unadorned marriage of form and function. Think of Penelope’s waxing and waning shroud for Laertes, and Odysseus’ timbered raft and rooted marriage bed. There is no frou-frou. Contrast these with the Iliad’s celebrated artworks: the phantasmagoric Shield of Achilles, and Helen’s web embroidered with images of her war, like a Bayeux Tapestry. Each is a fully functional manufactured thing, shield and web, but their mere use appears transcended by the art work super-adorned upon them. One does not know which poem’s aesthetic vision better represents the legacy of Daedalus—transcendent adornment immortalising an instrument, or the perfect unity of form and function in the design of that instrument.

For the ancients as well, there was also no great artist before Homer, but ‘before’ in the sense ‘above’.

One thing that has long puzzled me about Odysseus’ great speech to Nausicaa—quite as much as it has moved me—is his memory of observing a shoot of palm by the altar at Delos:

In Delos, once, was a kind of a thing, next the altar of Apollo—

The phoenix, a young shoot of palm coming up—I marked it, thought about it;

For I did go, even over there, and a large host followed me;

None of this is mentioned anywhere else. But I imagine Odysseus had gone to this place, wherever it was, to consult Apollo—who later had an oracle on the Greek island of Delos, among other places—before setting out on the journey to Troy:

That journey which was going to be, for me, a shitload of trouble.

There must have been desperate uncertainty about the future, when he caught sight of the shooting plant. What is it about Nausicaa which makes him remember that palm? He calls it a ‘spear’. The name he uses for it is ‘phoenix’, which also referred to a prized red-purple dye, as well as the people associated by trade with the dye’s origin, the Phoenicians. Not in the Homeric picture, it would seem, is the phoenix bird, a symbol of rebirth, which we might have done a lot with here. Perhaps the sight of a palm tree was something incredible for someone who had only known temperate flora. It does grow tall and spindly without branches; the palm is in fact a kind of grass rather than a tree. If the palm was unknown to him—although clearly it is known to Homer’s audience—Odysseus must have grown up far enough north and Delos must have been far enough south for such ignorance to be possible. He says he was mesmerised, because never had such a ‘spear’ come up out of the earth. I suppose this could be a response to seeing one’s first palm, on the understanding that it was supposed to be a tree. (It grows already lopped and smoothed, without bark, like a spear.) But what did it portend, and why should that come to mind when he first sees Nausicaa? Is she also to be the start of big trouble? Or is it purely the vision of exotic new growth, in palm and girl, to a world-wearied man? Please let me know if you have any insights about this Phoenician palm.

Odysseus’ speech to Nausicaa has long been indwelling in the psyche. It is hard now to be objective about it. It’s already almost thirty years since I recited it, in Greek and English—these habits start early—at my own sister’s wedding. Having been divorced myself in the meantime, it is hard to say what I now might wish, for a couple embarking. I suppose everything turns on what is meant by the thing Odysseus particularly celebrates in a couple: ὁμοφροσύνη, ‘oneness of mind’ or ‘sameness of thinking’. What is that? Surely it does not mean simply agreeing all the time.

The resources of the dual number (as opposed to singular or plural) do a lot for Odysseus’ lesson. We still have English remnants of this Indo-European feature, in our use of ‘both’, for example, along with ‘either’, and ‘neither’, and perhaps in plurals like ‘oxen’, or ‘eyne’ for ‘eyes’ in Shakespeare. But the idea that there are natural pairs deserving of special noun and verb forms, which is perhaps supported by nature, rather sets us up for this possibility in human marriages. Perhaps couples of all kinds would use it, if theirselves could be expressed as a dual subject, or even a singular one, rather than a plural. The metaphysics of this is expressed in Odysseus’ theme that same-mindedness is an excellent thing, than which nothing is better or stronger:

When, thinking as one in their plans, the pair keeps house,

The man and the woman: many the pains for their enemies,

But rejoicings for those who mean them well; and they hear the story best themselves.

In ‘thinking as one’ they are a dual subject (ὁμοφρονέοντε), who in the next line become two singulars: ‘the man and the woman’ (ἀνὴρ ἠδὲ γυνή). One is reminded of the conundrum in Genesis (1:27): “in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.” But are ‘man and woman’ a natural pair, or natural opposites? The same can be asked of other possible translations of ἀνὴρ ἠδὲ γυνή, including ‘male and female’ or ‘husband and wife’, even ‘warrior’ and ‘matron’: do these constitute a natural pair or a natural opposition? It would seem that friends or partners of the same sex would constitute a pairing at least equally natural, without any inherent opposition. As Aristotle discusses (I think taking up a common saying), a friend is ἑτερος αὐτός, ‘another self.’ Does Homer’s use of the dual participle then suggest that the realm of thinking and mind is somehow apart or above the distinction between male and female and men and women, which is seemingly emphasised in the very next line by the very different words with very different referents, ἀνήρ and γυνή?

It seems that with a couple the whole can be greater than the parts. Per Odysseus, they become a kind of protective talisman. It is hard to say, however, what that last phrase in his line means: “they hear the story best themselves.” “They hear” translates κλύον, whose internal object is κλέος. The latter word’s trajectory goes all the way from ‘thing heard’ to ‘repute’ to ‘glory’. Perhaps Odysseus means that a couple is best positioned to know its own story; in other words, what is an anxious and stressful concern for others, one’s reputation and its dependence on the opinion of others, is overcome and internalised somehow in the true couple: they become the best audience for their own story. Now that part rings true.

Odysseus and Penelope come to test each other ruthlessly as to their fealty and even their own identity. To this end they hide from each other in plain sight, even at night when they’re alone together and there’s no one else in earshot, as we shall see. But all this seems to stem from an extraordinary oneness or sameness of mind. It takes an iron heart to know one, or to find one out. They do know one another, perhaps as profoundly as a living thing can be known. I wonder; do Odysseus and Penelope ever surprise each other?

It is immensely touching that Odysseus tries to pass on his experience in the form of a wish for the tall young creature before him, and the security of her future. But this teacher is himself the very greatest danger to Nausicaa’s opening heart.

In Greek:

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Odyssey 6.1-109

These lines are about girls bathing and playing naked in the woods. Everything seems meant to arouse. They throw off their veils and play with a ball: taking off her veil is the job for a husband on his wedding night. (It is sometimes a metaphor for the bedroom action that comes after; to ‘loosen the veil’ can also connote rape, however, and in this latter sense is applied to the sacking of a city.) Off they go a-washing in the woods, without a care in the world.

We do come to realise that there aren’t strangers around in Phaeacia to worry about. The city was founded where no men come, to get away from the Cyclopes, their original brutish neighbours. (Everything ‘original’ in the human world of the Iliad and the Odyssey seems only to be two or three generations old.) The city has been walled, like a later, classical Greek polis, though there do not seem to be enemies to threaten her. That makes it an oddly insular move. They’ve been bullied. But outside the walls, what about the wild beasts in their lairs, whom Odysseus was so worried about? As I think we’ve been disclosing in various ways, Homer prefers such questions to hang in the atmosphere, to juice it up, if you will. The details about unhitching the mules to be set free to feed by the river, is pure scene-painting, but it is of a piece with all the loosening of restrictions on domestic animals and women in this environment free of men and men’s rule. And the most human moment, to my mind, is when the women start competing in the natural washing tubs. They are absorbed in themselves and their activity. Men turn tasks into contests almost by instinct. Left to themselves, Homer seems to say, so do women. Freedom and gamesmanship come to them amidst the necessary drudgery, even when it comes to the glittery ones, of washing clothes.

Nausicaa is a tall girl, evidently, rhythmic and athletic, who takes the lead in the song and dance with a ball; this movement must be something like the rhythmic gymnastics at the modern Olympics. Her very name, which is four syllables in Greek, has a stately dactylic rhythm; the late metricians call this shape a choriamb, —∪∪—, NAU-sik-ah-AH. She is a girl who expresses herself in her rhythm. This calls forth an unusually uncomplicated simile from Homer:

Such an Artemis she goes! Down the mountains, Arrow-Shedder,

Whether it’s Taygetus’ extended slopes, or down Erymanthus,

Delighting in the wild boar and the speeding deer:

And with her play the Nymphs, Aegis-Holder Zeus’s girls

From the countryside; and she rejoices in her mind’s vessel, Mother Leto—

Above all the other girls she holds her head and forehead,

And easily is her daughter known, though all of them are beautiful;

Just so was she conspicuous among her attendants, this unbroken virgin.

The last words translate παρθένος ἀδμής. We last encountered this word admēs ‘unbroken’ in describing the heifer, who was sacrificed by the sons at Nestor’s house in honour of female Athena, to the ululation of Nestor’s elder wife and the rest of the household’s women. Nestor asks for a cow who was “A virgin [ἀδμήτην]: who never yet was brought under the yoke by a man.” [3.383] This is the fate that most contrasts the subjects in the simile: the forever free and roaming Artemis, the joy in her mother Leto’s eye at her transcendence, filling seven lines in the vehicle, and the single anonymous line in the tenor for the human daughter. Each is an unbroken virgin, parthenon admēs, but Nausicaa cannot remain so. Dislocation, impregnation, nostalgia and the pain of loss are to come to her, while the gods live in eternal bliss and being. Even now there is a wild beast lurking in his lair nearby, an epic peeping Tom sleeping naked, waiting for his cue.

[Most of what follows is taken from a lecture I gave at St. John’s College in Annapolis, in 2003.]

‘Athena enters Nausicaa’s bedroom like a breath of wind. The doors are shut, and sleeping by the doorposts are her handmaidens like the Graces. Nausicaa herself is said to be just like the female immortals. The whole tableau is a temple entrance, where the statuary doorposts have fallen asleep, and sleeping also is the goddess in the inner sanctum. Freud must have appreciated this setup for the entrance of the dream wish, although I am not aware of his having written about it.

‘The wind’s breath assumes the identity of Nausicaa’s girlfriend and stands over her head, suggesting to the suggestible one that the day of her wedding is near, and that she had better get her laundry done. Athena the ever-virgin sets into motion a longing in the young girl, who is not after all a goddess but only a virgin, for something she cannot understand in any experiential sense, a chain of becoming that apparently excites her, but that must lead to a subjection of individuality and freedom in body and soul to a husband and to pregnancy. For Athena, Nausicaa is a means of Odysseus’ conveyance home. For Nausicaa, it is hard to say—she is a veiled thing—but if it is not a day that dawns for heartbreak, it is perhaps a day that gets her to a nunnery.’

There is a cruelty, woman to woman, in the way Athena sets the girl up for meeting Odysseus. Athena is a virgin also in the sense that she has never been human. She reminds her that the day of her womanhood is going to be one of these coming, and reminds her of her bourgeois, insular Phaeacian suitors clamouring for a go. But her mind and spirit are awakened to the possibility of a man; and the man she is suddenly going to be presented with is the naked Odysseus. Here is an exotic and mysterious and ‘manly’ foreigner, forever to change and to cheat her expectations of the possible.

‘As for Athena, her job done, a seed of turbulence planted in the world of becoming within the heart of a girl, off she goes …

Οὔλυμπόνδ’, ὅθι φασὶ θεῶν ἕδος ἀσφαλὲς αἰεί

ἔμμεναι · οὔτ’ ἀνέμοισι τινάσσεται οὔτε ποτ’ ὄμβρωι

δεύεται οὔτε χιὼν ἐπιπίλναται, ἀλλὰ μάλ’ αἴθρη

πέπταται ἀνέφελος, λευκὴ δ’ ἐπιδέδρομεν αἴγλη · 45

τῶι ἔνι τέρπονται μάκαρες θεοὶ ἤματα πάντα.

ἔνθ’ ἀπέβη Γλαυκῶπις, ἐπεὶ διεπέφραδε κούρηι.

Toward Olympus, where they say the seat of the gods, untippable always,

Has its being. Neither in the winds does it tremble, nor ever by the rainstorm

Is it moistened, nor does the snow come near it; rather, a prodigious aether

Is spread out cloudless, and a whiteness all over it, a sheen;

In this they delight, the blessed gods, through all the days.

Up she went, Owl-Eyes, once she instructed the pubescent girl.

‘Note the enjambment of ἔμμεναι in the second line. It is not always a thing to note in Homer when the infinitive of ‘being’ is enjambed; but in the context of this passage, with Homer’s longest way of expressing such an infinitive, the conclusion seems inescapable, that he means to describe the radiant weatherless Olympus as a realm of being. Athena has agitated the heart of a girl, having descended like a wind into the world of becoming, and then disappeared carefree, concrete as ever, and pure as ever, into the place of forever and all days. Where philosophers talk about the riddle of being and becoming, Homer renders it.’

The old philosophers, men after Homer but before Socrates, used to pontificate and fuss about being and motion. πάντα ρεῖ said Heraclitus, ‘everything flows’ or ‘all is flux’. There were a number of these pioneers who struggled to understand how there could be certain knowledge of anything—paradoxically, like that contained in the phrase panta rei—when the whole universe seemed to be constantly in mid-flow. In their face Parmenides asserts ἕν τὸ πάν: in fact ‘the all is one’, or ἕν τὸ ὄν, ‘being is one’. Was Homer, a pre-pre-Socratic, also a proto-philosopher? Does the world of the gods stand for the eternal beings and knowable truths, while the world of men and women is the world of coming-to-be and passing away? Artemis, for one, would muddy such generalities. Where would she be without her earthly hunts, her arrows, her wild boar and mountain deer? Even Olympians need to get away, it seems. But Athena’s return to the sheen of Olympus, weather-free for all time, after causing arousal and unnameable stirrings in Nausicaa below, could hardly be more illustrative not only of the separation of being from becoming, but of the intrusion or penetration of the one into the other.

‘There are some among us—and what is a community of Greeks, without a Phoenician Philistine to teach it the alphabet—who can be expected to say that Homer has merely ‘dressed up,’ or ‘sensualised,’ a truth which philosophy understands without the beautiful and seductive trappings. Such people do not know rhythm, and hence they do not know philosophy; because to know rhythm is to know the riddle—by direct encounter—not the answer to it, but the enigma itself—of being and becoming.

‘Rhythm is being moving through becoming; it is the one moving through the many; it is the singular distended through the plural. ἔμμεναι enjambed is a vortex hedged against the pressure of the stream, a stream which would prefer to keep within the banks of the line. Words enjambed in the stream of rhythm are not sugared and sweetened; they are placed and focused, so that their meaning becomes squeezed and clarion. ἔμμεναι enjambed is ‘being’ rendered.

‘In light of such a passage, it is tempting to see the development of philosophy as a kind of abstractive regression in men who were raised on the rhythm of Homer. Whoever he or she was, Homer alone had the imaginative insight to see the problem of being and becoming distilled in the dream of a pubescent girl.’

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Odyssey 5.424-93 (end)

When Odysseus escapes the surge and clings to the rugged cliff face—at Athena’s prompt!—but is then ripped off and tossed back by the undertow, Homer sings:

As when from an octopus, dragged out from her bedroom,

The pebbles cling on thickly upon her suckers,

So from the man upon the rocks, off his strong hands

The skin was stripped away …

The first strange thing is the octopus itself. There are of course very many strange life forms in the world, many of whom we cannot imagine being. It must be of some comfort to certain vegetarians that they cannot imagine the consciousness, and breath, of plants. But there is no lack of imagination in children when it comes to the octopus. I think most everyone imagines at some point what it would be like to have the eight arms (or legs). All the same, the octopus must seem like a freak to mammals generally, as well as fish, not to mention their fellow mollusks lugging shells. She combines a tactile relatableness with an otherworldly otherness. An octopus in a simile must therefore be somewhat surreal, for she is about as incomparable as things get.

But Odysseus isn’t the octopus! Read it again. This is what I’m calling an Odyssean simile, which turns things upside down and unsettles as much as it clarifies. If the Odyssey’s Homer is after a peculiar kind of impression or reaction, it is not with the broad brush and canvas of an Iliadic simile, but a surgeon’s knife for some reason fitted with barbs. The pebbles stick to the octopus’s suckers, Odysseus’ skin sticks to the cliff face. The man is the rock, who has his pebbles stripped like so many bits of skin! What on earth (or above it) is the octopus? Once again the simile is slightly dizzying.

Just a few lines earlier, we hear,

There he’d have been stripped of his skin, bones broken to pieces,

If she had not put in his mind’s vessel, the goddess, Owl-Eyes Athena:

‘Rush with both arms and grab at the rock!’

Well, Odysseus’ bones appear to remain intact, but his skin, not so much. The formula, ‘then such and such would have happened [beyond fate] unless the god had not suggested to the hero …’, a suspenseful trope in the Iliad, seems here to be somewhat brutally mocked. The goddess’ advice is precisely what leads to one of the narrator’s feared outcomes. We are directly challenged to question the power of Athena’s protection—Mother Mary, you done me in!—as surely as the octopus may begin to question the safety of her bedroom when the fisherman finds it. Ah, the fisherman. Is he a part of the simile—perhaps the undertow that pulls Odysseus off the rock? In which case Odysseus is the octopus. Or rather, is he unmentioned because he is the unmentionable, who haunts the whole figure like a death’s head wielding a hunting spear?

Similes depend on at least one part of the comparison, tenor or vehicle, being familiar. Often it is the vehicle that is familiar, so that it can illuminate a narrative happening that may be hard to convey vividly to an audience. Such a happening is Odysseus being scraped off the rocks by the receding wave. Hence we may assume an audience would at least be familiar with the vehicle: the difficulties of hunting octopus, of finding the nest in the first place, what the whole thing looks like when you drag the intelligent animal with knowing eyes out of its secret refuge, her boudoir.

The deceptive bedchamber and the doubtful protection of Athena, both energising motifs of the story, seem to set us up for the remarkable scene which closes Book 5.

He walked into the wood, the one he found nearest the water

In a place visible right round: there were twin bushes he came under,

Planted from the same root: one of wild stock, one of olive.

These neither the strength of the winds got through, when they blew wet,

Nor did ever the blazing sun strike them with its rays,

Nor did the thunderstorm use to penetrate right the way through; for tight indeed

To one another did they grow, intertwined in a give-and-take: under these, Odysseus

Entered.

Many have celebrated this passage for its poetry, and claim it for their favourite bit of the Odyssey. ‘Twin bushes … planted from the same root’: the Greek ἐπαμοιβαδίς, ‘intertwined in a give-and-take’, filling up the backwards turn in the hexameter dance between caesura and diaeresis—its accent stressing the weakest part of the dactylic foot—mimes in the mouth the interlacing of the branches from different directions. The olive is Athena’s gift to the Greeks. Ancient Americans credit mysterious redheads from across the sea with the knowledge of agriculture which has given us the potato, the non-poisonous tomato, and the chilli pepper, without whose varieties the world would be absent much of its taste. Similarly, Greek speakers credit the cultivation of the olive to Athena; it seems our ancestors did not feel they could have come up with these things on their own. The fruitful olive in particular is usually grown by graft; a hardy if unfruitful wild root stock provides the security for an abundant scion, cut and pasted to itself. These twinned trees on the edge of nowhere show the hand of human effort, guided by Athena, and it is likely that Odysseus recognises this.

In many ways this is a recognition scene, though there is no other human being present. After all his struggles, even injury from following that god’s advice, Odysseus seems reassured by what he sees in the tableau. Indeed, he rejoices. My question is, what is it that makes him rejoice? In the first instance, the referent seems to be the fall of leaves with which he proceeds to make both bed and blanket. That is referent enough for a man who is naked, freezing, and half dead, a pile of leaves which would do for two or three men caught out in winter.

But it seems the whole vision is inspiring. The twinned trees could be thought of as a symbol of marriage; a couple united in oneness of mind, brains intertwined as though sharing neurons, is a theme Odysseus will later extol to Nausicaa. (Between Odysseus and Penelope, which one is the graft?) Greek allows for a ‘dual’ subject, distinct from singular and plural. They handily exclude what is without, and protect what is within their sphere of domicile, while still drawing nourishment on the sly from the radiant sun and the penetrating rain. The mere presence of the cultivated olive (ἐλαίη) is a sign of humanity somewhere hereabouts, just as for some, pyramidal stones and cyclopean walls are signs that there must have been giants.

And, of course, every room is a womb. This crib of cultivated nature at the edge of the woods is indeed to be the scene of the barely living Odysseus’ rebirth. The closing image surely takes the breath away, whether it is your first encounter or your latest:

As when a fellow hides a firebrand in the black ash,

At the farthest farm, who has no other neighbours by,

Saving the seed of fire, that he need not get a light from who knows where—

So Odysseus hid himself in leaves …

‘Saving the seed of fire’ (σπέρμα πυρός)—“there’s a double meaning in that!” I was wrong to say there is no other human being present, at least in the vision that the poetry energises. There’s the fellow (or two!) who might have shared his leaf-bed. But the predicament of this lonely farmer, managing on the edge of human habitation to preserve a seed for the morrow’s work, so as to avoid the trouble of hunting down a light, must be an image full of sympathy for both Odysseus and his author. Politicians annoy with their “keep hope alive”. In saving the seed of human rekindling, Homer gives us the real thing. In using such an image, the author seems to commit to his hero; there is a promise of something salvific of humanity, it would seem, in the idea of Odysseus. And Athena herself comes in at the end, unannounced but not unexpected, almost to give a benediction—with the impression given somehow that she had been there the whole time. Athena belongs in scenes where mere humans come to recognise something.

She sheds sleep upon his eyes, but the last line-and-a-half—

… that he might the soonest rest

From his hard labour and exhaustion, once she’d covered those dear eyelids round.

—make it seem like she is treating a corpse newly dead. The closing of the eyelids, by someone else, leaves an impression that can’t be erased once it occurs to one.

Yes there is an undertow, even in this scene of hope and refuge. Recall Odysseus’ deliberation at the river bank: either he would risk dying of exposure in the morning chill by the river, or risk becoming prey for some wild animal if he retired to the nearby woods. And what does Homer describe when Odysseus chooses (b)? The image of the twinned trees with an empty pile of leaves within seems very much to suggest that it has functioned as a predator’s lair, and likely does now. The passage describing the boar’s lair, which sprung the fearsome creature who scarred Odysseus for life, is very like this one, and though its description comes many books in the future, there is no question but that it recalls this hallowed moment under the trees at the end of Book 5. This poet has a way, an art, of hinting all around at imminent death. It’s even there in Athena’s cosmic spear left behind in Odysseus’ spear rack. It is the unmentioned unmentionable. A friend describes the affect such a lurking unnoticed presence creates as the ‘uncanny’, which I recognise through a feeling in the pit of my stomach, familiar since childhood, that infuses passage after passage when I read the Odyssey all grown up.

Home? It’s an octopus’s bedroom. Hope? It’s pebbles in your suckers. Yet Odysseus rejoices.

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Odyssey 5.327-423

We know this experience when dealing with the Department of Motor Vehicles, or on the phone with the cable company, of finding a sympathetic agent on the other end: “Finally, a human voice!” This saying does not only occur to us when one is dealing with machines, or ‘machine learning’; in dealing with any bureaucracy, there is the simple relief of stress when someone talks back. You are a hapless petitioner; they are a chaotically interconnected hierarchy—a contradiction in terms—who hold all the levers, look up all the by-laws, and make all the decisions, with authority, in your case. This relief in ‘the thick of it’ is what comes to mind as a goddess, Ino, comes to our hero’s aid when his situation is dire. This episode is not the first; earlier, Eidothea, Proteus’ daughter, took pity on Menelaus, comes to him when he is alone without his men, and betrays her father by instructing the man how to overpower a shapeshifter. (Hold him tight, even when he turns to water!) It is all too clear that these mid-tier ladies are doing what they can inside the system: “if it was up to me …”

Now here is Odysseus, in straits and on death’s precipice, a tumbleweed on the wind, on a self-made raft, in dark and surging seas. Ino comes to him, a daughter of Cadmus and Harmony. Or else she’s just a petrel who lands on his raft. But either way, she ‘was mortal, once upon a time, speaking human language.’ Odysseus has been completely alone for eighteen days. Finally, a human voice! Someone who can understand and sympathise! Ino was once a mortal, who suffered at the hands of the gods; among other things she was a nurse for her nephew Dionysus, a transformative figure in the development of religion, a son of her sister Semele by Zeus (the Holy Spirit). One does not know if it is a thing to note or ignore about Homer, that Dionysus only receives scant or tangential mention in his poems. But it seems each of the divinities in Homer knows their place. Even as far from Olympus as Calypso’s Isle, when they are all alone and intimate, Hermes asserts his office as Zeus’s message man, and bullies Calypso when she dares to complain. She rescued Odysseus all by herself, when no one else (not even Athena) seemed to care. But no, she’d better not hook up with a human guy.

Ino is also Leucothea, the White Goddess, a saviour of mariners. I suspect that modern mariners still believe in Her, though they are no longer so foolish as to admit it. The White Goddess embodies a highly local and, we might say, superstitious experience of the divine. Homer merely mentions the name, we don’t exactly know what allusions he understands to be entangled in its aura. But he is explicit that, ‘officially’ as it were, she has ‘now in the salt-water depths … got her portion of honour from the gods …’ In other words, she’s been assigned a job in the basement. It seems consonant with this comic world that the gods are in amongst it, plugged into an hierarchy where some of them work the kitchen. It helps make plausible their occasional sympathy, when there is an actual sense in Homer that we’re all in this together, witches, warlocks, angels and saints. Even Zeus often comes across not so much as an omnipotent, as a lame duck still henpecked in office. In the Odyssey, it seems we are always looking forward to retirement.

It helps to know someone inside the system, even if they work in a basement cubicle. It is extraordinary to me that Homer understands this intensely modern and bureaucratic mode of connection, where it becomes salient that one is talking in sympathy to someone who was once a mortal human being, before they became a corporate official. She speaks our language. This poet’s society has vanished, but it must have known intimately the experience one has when assigned a job (a ‘portion’) in a bureaucracy, so much so that it defines the experience of what came to be called ‘fate’, but is also projected onto the imagined life-experience of the gods. We know this condition (and this comedy) from the necessary bureaucracies of modern societies and infrastuctures. How does Homer know this?

A teacher once told me that the most relatable thing Odysseus ever did was ignore Ino’s advice and the gift of her immortal veil, and stick to his raft, until his rational empirical judgement forced the issue. Cling to the protection you yourself have made, the evidence of your own eyes about its sturdiness, and your sighting of the promised land; trust your eyes and hands, before some divine trickery! And trust in Calypso’s clothes to keep you warm and free from harm. But her magic island is now far distant. At the crunch he bestrides a plank like a racehorse—what an image!—and strips himself naked, except for Ino’s veil tied beneath his breastbone.

Ino’s veil is ἄμβροτον, ‘immortal’. One wonders if it may work like ambrosial food, and make him immortal too. If he keeps it he could walk around like Bilbo with his ring, with this veil tied round his sternum, hidden under his shirt. But without a comment about his deliberations or hints at thoughts about the subject, when the time comes, he follows Ino’s instructions and throws the powerful object backwards into the brine. Odysseus always chooses mortality, it seems.

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Odyssey 5.228-326

Is it a man on a raft, or the man on a raft; or is it this man, long-suffering Odysseus, adrift on a raft on the wilful, monstrous, god-driven ocean, or Man—mankind—on a raft of his own artifice riding upon the turbulence and violence of nature? The Odyssey may intend all four, but I don’t think the last one is quite right, as temptingly romantic and bleak as it is. I can’t help but feel that there is something masculine about Homer’s image. The opening word of the poem, ἄνδρα, is decidedly male. But all the same, that picture, of Odysseus braving the stormy sea on a raft, is iconic in the world’s imagination, like the astronauts’ photo of earthrise over the moon, or the crucifix. Penelope at her loom weaving and unpicking a web to keep her options open, by contrast, seems decidedly feminine, but equally tempting to see as an image of Man’s situation. The same word, ἱστός, a thing stood upright, is translated either mast or loom in context.

Much of the present passage is descriptive narrative, Homer going solo rather than filling his mask with speeches or dialogue. He positively immerses in the building of the raft; one feels the connections between segments of his crafted hexameters like the morticing of Odysseus’ craft. I wrote the following in my first book:

… the works of art represented within the Odyssey itself bespeak an aesthetic of construction, wholeness, unity, form, and function. Three wondrous artefacts buttress the story: Penelope’s web, Odysseus’ raft, and the couple’s marriage bed of denatured olive. All three depend upon a frame: all three must therefore be conceived at some level as wholes before they are executed. All three involve transformations of various kinds—from vertical to horizontal (web to shroud, trees to planks, trunk to bed); from raw material to finished, humanly purposive artefact. All three are unadorned: they are each perfect marriages of form and function.

By contrast again, the art works represented in the Iliad point to a different aesthetic. Two exemplars come to mind. Helen’s web (3.125–8) is a Bayeux Tapestry; episodes of the struggle between the Achaeans and the Trojans on her account appear to be embroidered (ἐμπάσσειν) upon a web already woven. In the case of the great shield as well, the artwork is an adornment, superadded upon a highly functional implement. One is made to feel this rather vividly when the shield is penetrated by Aeneas’ spear. A nightmare for the art crowd. In the distinction between art as a perfect marriage of form and purpose, and art as an adornment superadded, gracing the necessary and the useful, and perhaps also transforming them, I believe we have as real a distinction as can be made between the aesthetic sensibilities of the poet of the Odyssey and the poet of the Iliad. Achilles’ lyre is extravagantly silver-bridged; Demodocus’ lyre is merely—and resonantly—hollow.

Homer’s evocation of the storm is also vocal miming, of a bravura kind. One thinks of King Lear’s storm. Much energy is often spent on visual and sonic effects in the staging of that play; but just as in Homer, the storm comes to torrential life in the consonants, vowels, and rhythms of the poet’s words. The performer’s breath is the breath of the four winds.

The consummation of the vision, to my mind, comes from the god’s view. The gods are Homer’s genius and his arsenal. Poseidon is returning from his festival in the land of the Aethiopians, and spots the little man on the limitless sea. Boy is he pissed! Mostly, it seems, at the other gods going behind his back. But one cannot but feel the visceral venal energy of the jealous sibling, stumbling on his useless brother’s turreted sandcastle, and kicking it to oblivion. From the distance the god’s-eye-view gives us, Odysseus’ vessel of tall trees’ timber proudly jointed, becomes a speck, a tumbleweed upon the immense briny swell. He himself becomes a no-man. Calypso’s pines become toothpicks, Odysseus’ days’ long labour and shipwright’s engineering, so much broken Lego™ and wasted hexameter verses.

As flies to wanton boys are we to th’ gods;

They kill us for their sport.

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Odyssey 5.116-227

Odysseus does not explain himself. He just says it. When Calypso asks him the obvious thing—how can he choose an ageing Penelope and his own mortality over herself—and himself not ageing? With his only job, protecting her isolated house? The man acknowledges the facts of the case, and then just states the facts of his case: “But even so, I wish and I long, through all the days, / To get myself home and see my day of restoration.” Athena had been moved to real and felt poetry, outside her own experience, in Book 1: Odysseus, she said, “eager to make out just the hearth-smoke leaping up / From his mother land, longs to die a death.” I think precisely in not trying to explain or otherwise describe this longing, Odysseus renders it most purely and unfiltered for the rest of us, without psychoanalysis or the special pleading of a moral lesson.

Why does one long to be home? It almost feels a tautological question. What is ‘home’? That is a word which cannot be translated back into the Greek, and yet it dominates the way we experience the pull of the Odyssey in English. The Greek word in its place is οἶκος, more ‘house’ or ‘household’ than home. The word ‘home’, of such peculiar power in English, arises in translation mostly from the notion of νόστος, ‘return’ or ‘restoration’, as being implicit in the latter idea. Is there something to be made of the ‘seeing’, in the longing to see the day of one’s return? We ourselves are certainly drawn to the spectacle when hostages return, or lost siblings are reunited. In Proteus’ story, Agamemnon kissed his native earth in passion, upon his doomed return. There is a concentrated joy in such moments, which overflows even upon its disinterested witnesses. Less interesting are the moments that follow, the being home and doing the dishes.

I think Yeats has perhaps done Homer one better, in capturing this inexplicable longing, although for most of his auditors, as with Homer’s, the images do not belong to one’s own surroundings or experience. To be sure, the Irish poet says he will arise and go, as though away from home. But what he discovers at the lake seems to be a universal human apprehension, that in fact we all are hostages, displaced, with our every step on the pavement, from ‘the deep heart’s core’:

The Lake Isle of Innisfree

by William Butler Yeats

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,

And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;

Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,

And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,

Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;

There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,

And evening full of the linnet’s wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day

I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;

While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,

I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

Mind you, what is not at all in Yeats’s vision is the coupling that seems to define Odysseus’ longing. Yeats will “live alone”. In a sense Odysseus has already found his Innisfree on Calypso’s isle; perhaps he’d have stayed there if he’d had a copy of Yeats to enchant him. But he wants to return to Penelope, whoever she is nowadays, and he cannot explain this to his jealous interlocutor. “For she is mortal, but you …” All the same, his brief and simple expression of longing seems to have the effect of seducing Calypso. His predicament, from the moment she found him half dead, bestriding a ship’s keel, has made her want to rescue and protect him. Her very name, Calypso, suggests hiding or concealing; Homer’s Greek for ‘veil’ derives from the same root. Her love, perhaps, is driven precisely by his loneliness and longing. And couple they do, goddess and man, as soon as he expresses it. Homer had earlier described their sexual encounters as ‘he who does not want, alongside she who wants’ (παρ’ οὐκ ἐθέλων ἐθελούσηι). I rendered ‘a man unwilling next a woman all too.’ But at the end of this passage, they do really seem to come together, without any qualification, in her hollowed cave’s deep core. Would we describe Odysseus as ‘unfaithful’?

The conjunction of God and man was a subject Michelangelo attempted on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Homer’s version is Odyssey 5.

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Odyssey 5.1-115

I suppose the second council of the gods, echoing the opening one in Book 1, is a bit of a concession from Homer. Now we’re getting back to the main plot. Even Zeus expresses his exasperation at Athena’s posing the question of Odysseus again, and he seems to allude to the fact that they’d already decided a plan of action. Remember how hush hush and strategic that meeting had been, taking advantage of the absence of Poseidon. Evidently he’s still gone. But in this way Homer rather forces the question: what has the Telemachy, the story of Telemachus’ journey and the stories told by Nestor and Menelaus and Helen along the way, served the tale he himself means to tell? I for one find immense richness in the encounters we have witnessed, and I cannot imagine being without them. I am still thinking about Proteus counting his seals. But what do you think? We haven’t even heard from Odysseus yet, the man in question from line 1. But we have heard about him, broad strokes and little hints. Does the Odyssey need the Telemachy (Books 1-4)?

The same phrase and prosodic figure, νῦν αὖ παῖδ’ ἀγαπητὸν, with three straight circumflexes, occurs twice in Penelope’s speeches at the end of Book 4, and then again immediately at the beginning of Book 5, this time in the mouth of Athena at the council of the gods (5.18). In such a context it is impossible not to hear Athena’s use as a quotation and an evocation, of Penelope’s recent and peculiar prosodic usage. Athena also is speaking of Telemachus, but makes no further allusion to Penelope. All the same her evocation is unmistakable, not only in her same words but their distinctive prosodic music. It is Penelope’s emotive motif surfacing in Athena’s voice.

Surely the echoing of the consecutive circumflected contonations, the prosodic inflection we observe and register here, reflects a real connection by design between the characters of Penelope and Athena, and indeed the Homeric performer himself. Breath and harmony unite these characters with a tactile immediacy that seems only possible at the musical level of the representation of the psyche. One cannot see bottom for the significance of this signature echoing for one’s assessment of the composer and the composition, and the kind of mimesis they are trying to achieve. The three straight circumflexes take you there, immediately, in the way a distinctive line of melody invokes every time in history that it has ever been sounded or sung. Such unities of representation seem only to be possible through music, and it is essential that Homer’s composition be recognised at last for its musical art and intention.

One could wish for a true Homeric voice, rather than mine, for this passage. Might as well listen to my Greek all the same. The descriptive poetry around Calypso’s cave means to take you there, to hear her singing, to breathe the aromas. Homer has not attempted anything like that in the preceding books. Perhaps as Odysseus finally comes on stage, some effort is needed to transport us and convince us. The world of Telemachus, by contrast, has been altogether too realistic, uncannily familiar, a transactional world that needs no special effects to ring true to our modern, post- (or inter-) catastrophic experience.

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Odyssey 4.742-847

Homer compares Penelope’s state of mind, before she falls asleep, to that of a male lion encircled craftily by huntsmen; her thoughts start, it would seem, like the lion’s feints at the men’s shifting perimeter. The comparison of Penelope’s mind to the lion’s is not the last cross-dressed simile in the Odyssey. We shall note them! Do such similes bear with them a claim or a thesis? That the natures and experiences of the sexes can be compared in such a way as to bring insight and truth? Strange, then, that the famous similes of the Iliad do not explore this transgressive technique. Such cross-comparisons are Odyssean territory.

To ease her mind Athena sends Penelope a phantom in the shape of her sister Iphthime, long since married and moved far away. We are not troubled by the impossibility of ghostly emissaries who can slip through door latches, be conscious and engage in meaningful conversation, and still look like the human beings they’re supposed to be. Art makes ‘AI’ look like a joke. Athena does such things, as Iphthime says, “because she can!” We indulge this storyteller the power of his wand.

But her reassuring apparition rather makes me focus on what is truly impossible: that Penelope can somehow turn to her own sister in her grief and anxiety. Women, at least of a certain class it seems, do not move, except when they are transported to their wedding and the household they will join and preside over. That is, such women are born, move once forever away, and then become fixed local features of the earth. Helen, by contrast, is the woman who moves, and in so doing becomes the cause of war, separation, chaos, and bereavement. Penelope is only the first of the high-born women in the Odyssey who stays put, and when she appears, she descends and stands by a pillar, like an immovable axis. Calypso the nymph, Odysseus’ concealer, is the daughter of Atlas himself, the Titan who holds the very pillars that keep apart the earth and the heaven. Such pillars, of course, connect the two of them as well.

Once again I am confronted by the predicament of women. I do not suggest that Homer has an agenda other than being a telling observer in his way of telling the tale. But it does seem extraordinarily poignant that so intimate a companionship as that between childhood sisters, something I have had the joy to observe in my mother and daughters, is a companionship routinely sacrificed without acknowledgment in Homer’s society, except perhaps by Homer. Loss and separation are clearly not uniquely feminine experiences, but the appearance of her sister must take Penelope back to the time when they both were unmarried, and ‘besties’, as they say; everything on Penelope’s mind now causing her unbearable pain, both her husband and the son they produced, can perhaps still seem to lie in the future, while she is in her sister’s company. This is a way in which the appearance of Iphthime can be construed to be a Freudian wish-fulfilment by way of the gates of dream. The relief that Iphthime brings her, I would suggest, is not only by her presence, or the opportunity it gives Penelope to vent her frustrations—roundly taken, replete with a repeat of her anguished, circumflected, tonal motif—but also the fulfilled wish of the unthinkable thing, that she is virgin again with neither husband to mourn nor foolish son to fret over.

And that is not such an outlandish state of mind for her to be in. Nurse Eurycleia tells her to bathe and freshen up, and Penelope obeys. Eurycleia says, wishfully, “somewhere there will still be one who can keep / The house of the lofty roof, and in the distance the fatting farms.” It is not altogether clear who this mysterious saviour will be. There’s plenty of suitors! A principal motive of Telemachus’ secrecy about his voyage was supposed to be to prevent Penelope from weeping, and thereby marring her beauty. It would seem that both these members of the household see Penelope’s thirty-something comeliness as a bit of an asset in their predicament—which needs to be preserved. Penelope herself asks her sister about Odysseus’ situation, alive or dead. Of course the ghost (the storyteller) has some fun at our expense, keeping us in suspense. No doubt Penelope needs to know, for her psychic health. But she also needs to know, as a pragmatic fact. There really are suitors for her, control over whom is crucial for the well-being of her house; and therefore whom she needs to keep aroused in their pursuit, whenever she appears to them. Bathing is not optional. Penelope needs to know Odysseus’ fate, so she can see what her options really are. May the best man win, sister.

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Odyssey 4.625-741

Noemon’s charming cameo in Odyssey 4, when he walks in among the suitors who are throwing the discus and hurling javelins, was my first clue that it was okay to laugh at what was being said and what was going on. The notion that this poem of Homer’s is an ‘epic’ can create obstacles to registering a number of modes that seem very dear to this storyteller, from irony to wistfulness to downright satire. To be sure, the hexameter’s rhythms, inflections, and ethos are a constant and omnipresent enchantment, which do indeed create a modus or state of mind which deserves a name; and ‘epic’ will do. The Iliad everywhere demonstrates the power of this rhythmic consciousness in depicting war and its wounds, physical or otherwise, achieving a measure of distance from its protagonists and their expressed experience which can only be called sublime. But the Iliad also reminds us in the Catalogue of Ships that this rhythm most originally was the vehicle and setting for memorial lists, like genealogies, danced out in a space that conjured the names of the past to the present. In other words, the epic rhythm was something that proved adaptable to singing such a song as the Iliad; it was not necessarily born for such tragic sublimity. In light of this, I would suggest that comedy also both represents and induces a distinctly felt state of mind, one which profoundly affects one’s registration of words, people, and events. One can laugh at certain things in comedy, for example, which it would be impossible, or insufferable, to laugh at in tragic circumstances. One fellow’s trip-up is another’s calamity. The only argument against the idea that the epic rhythm cannot be adapted to comedy, is perhaps the fact that the Odyssey does not generally register in this way, as a comedy—whether in the ancient world or the modern. All the same, one does not want to be one of those people who are not in on the joke; that’s a very awkward place to be. My own experience teaches me to try to help people get in on it, even if they’re classical scholars, rather than snub them because they don’t ‘get it’, as one is often tempted to do; because for me the Odyssey came extraordinarily to life when I realised I was sitting at a comedy, rather than an ‘epic’. It is very important to know, in ways that are hard to define—before one sits down in one’s seat—that one has come to see a comedy, and not a tragedy or a horror show. Are the suitors comic villains, or truly evil ones? Would their deaths count in the same way, one way or the other?

When I began this substack I would post Samuel Butler’s translation of the Odyssey with my Greek recitations; it is readily available in the public domain. He rendered Homer into English prose—and so do I—but that both is and is not the reason for his translation’s greatness. On the one hand, prose does rather break the spell of epic rhythm and music. That can seem a deficit; in my case at least I have kept to Homer’s lines and as much as possible his word order, so you get his lines treated as semantically timed units, if you will, albeit not rhythmic ones. But what Butler captures also is the prosaic quality of what is being said: and this is a revelation. Butler opened my eyes to the fact that comedy was happening, all around. But translation is not decoding. Other prose translations do not achieve what Butler’s does, for all that they also sidestep the hexameter rhythm and ambience. Most feel they must strike a reverential, King James posture if they’re going to sound epic in prose. The comic modus, however, requires a peculiar sympathy between poet and audience, and poet and translator. Butler translating the Odyssey is someone who seems like he’s speaking to us from the other side, where Homer is, distilling his author’s verses and versified speeches back into their original, deadpan, Victorian prose.

That it is Butler’s sympathy for Homer’s own comic disposition, in the texture and subtext of the Odyssey—rather than his skill at decoding the words—which leads to his translation’s insight, is evidenced by Butler’s translation of the Iliad. Clearly Butler’s philological acumen is everywhere the same. But his translation of the Iliad has never seemed anything special to me. There is not the same sympathetic resonance with the ethos of that work.

Noemon is a comic superstar. He comes out of nowhere, asking for his boat back, the one he had lent to Athena in disguise as Telemachus. Noemon (‘Minder’) has been having mules bred across the water, and he wants to fetch one and break him in. So he sidles up to to the mean suitor Antinous (‘Counter-Mind’) and asks after his ship. And so Telemachus’ game is up. But the real nod and wink here is Noemon’s amazement at having seen Mentor locally yesterday morning; because he’d already gone on board ship with Telemachus, as the captain! That, of course, had been Athena playing Mentor. The joke is one for the solo performer to ham up, because it’s he who has been playing all these people, including Athena becoming Mentor. Mentor in particular, I would suggest, is the performer’s special stand-in to break the fourth wall with the audience. You see, Mentor, who will keep turning up, including in the last line of the whole poem, is [wink wink] the performer’s alter ego. That’s the joke when Noemon says the man he saw yesterday was either “Mentor or a god—he looked the very same man in every way.” That’s a limitation of a solo actor playing all the parts: he’s only got one face and body. Wink wink.

‘In sooth I know not why I am so sad.’ Sadness is no stranger to comedy. The constant crying and wailing among the men already, to which Odysseus will make a plentiful contribution, and which Helen resorts to drugging them to curtail, certainly seems a bit funny. But in women’s tears I think we find a refuge of seriousness which comedy protects. Penelope gets the best poetry, and that is the mark of a heroine. That she could not even sit on a chair, for all that the house had plenty round, and that she sat on her bedroom’s wooden threshold, is an image speaks a thousand words. She is guarded about Odysseus: no ‘personal’ feelings are disclosed, only the outward fact that he was a man and a husband with a tremendous reputation. But when it comes to her son, she bursts out in a way captured by Homer’s art, which has arranged her words to utter three straight circumflexes: νῦν αὖ παῖδ’ ἀγαπητὸν ἀνηρείψαντο θύελλαι / ἀκλέα ἐκ μεγάρων, οὐδ’ ὁρμηθέντος ἄκουσα. “But again now, my son, beloved—they’ve snatched him up, the storm winds, / An unknown out of these rooms, and I didn’t even hear of his setting off.” Rhythm usually arises from the alternation of stressed and unstressed beats. Here we have three straight emphases, three full Greek contonations, like Lear’s four cries, “Howl, howl, howl, howl!” This utterance of three straight circumflexes turns out to be a motif of Penelope’s. The genuineness of her feeling is scripted in the score, as is the bitterness at her apparent betrayal at the hands of her servants, who had kept her in the dark about Telemachus’ adventure.

The Odyssey captures an aching sadness, it seems to me. It is a kind of feeling wholly absent in tragedy, but which seems very much at home in Shakespeare’s comedy, a kind of undertow to the fun that is only hinted at in the notion of ‘melancholy’. Intimations of paradise are full of heartbreak. Am I wrong, or is it unhelpful somehow, to connect this sadness to comedy?

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Odyssey 4.464-624

In the Iliad, Homer’s narrator addresses Menelaus in the second person—him and Patroclus. The hapless-seeming, cuckolded brother of the Warlord Agamemnon, without whom all the superheroes would not have had a cause to fight, may well have endeared himself to an audience (and the narrator) as someone perhaps relatable amongst the human titans. At any rate, Homer gives him a special sendoff.

When the time comes, says Proteus, the Old Man of the Sea, he’s not going to die in Argos, but the deathless ones will escort him to the Elysian plain, where it’s always summer with a cool breeze. This may mean that he will never die; but it may also just mean that he’ll be moved somewhere where the “way of life comes out easiest for mankind.” That is, life will become storm- and winter-free, but it is not clear if that is like moving to Florida, or whether he will actually become immortal as well. But either way, this final journey is due him because he’s got Helen, so that “you’re Zeus’s son-in-law!”

Menelaus leads a charmed life, it seems. Of course having Helen to wife, has been, and continues to be, a mixed blessing. On his circuitous return with her, Menelaus failed entirely to save his brother from Aegisthus’ treachery, as Proteus again reminds him. Now he lives a life grieving comrades, lost or absent because of the ten-year combat to steal Helen back. Let’s hope she has a decent stash of nepenthe for their happy hours. Proteus also says that in the Elysian plain, there is a “blonde Rhadamanthys.” I do not know if this is an unusual way to describe the Cretan figure, who belongs, for Homer as well, to the realm of what we call ‘myth’. Hesiod also uses ‘blonde’ of Rhadamanthys, but he may have been aping Homer. ‘Blonde’, ‘tawny’ (ξανθός) is, however, a frequent Homeric epithet for Menelaus. There also, perhaps, is a hint of a mixed blessing. The shared epithet may imply some sympathy among gingers; but it seems also to be suggested that in a Rhadamanthys, Menelaus will face his last judgement.

Has Menelaus done anything wrong? When he substitutes the gift of a mixing bowl, because Telemachus and rocky Ithaca have no use for horses, Menelaus says he got the piece from the Sidonians’ king, when his house protected him on his return there. Apparently Sidon among the Phoenicians had been a kind of base for Menelaus’ activities. From whom did he need protection? Other Phoenician operators, or the very Egyptians from whom he managed to source his wealth? ‘Protected’ translates άμφεκάλυψεν, ‘enfolded’, ‘hid [him] on both [or all] sides’.

But there are hints—perhaps comic—of Menelaus’ own divinity, not only by marriage. Telemachus, at any rate, seems ready to worship him. When he refuses the gift of horses, he says he’ll leave them here as an offering (ἄγαλμα) to Menelaus himself. Such a thing, an ἄγαλμα, might be dedicated at an altar. Telemachus goes on to describe Menelaus as lord of a wondrous plain, and gives us several lines of real botanical poetry describing its horse-friendly flora. Proteus tell Menelaus that he’s destined for the Elysian plain: Telemachus thinks he’s already there.

Once again Homer takes an interest to portray Telemachus’ wide-eyed inexperience, seemingly at the boy’s expense. He thinks the forecourt of Menelaus’ palace must be the sort of fancy digs that Zeus himself has. He’s never known life beyond Ithaca: he sees the plain of Argos and thinks Menelaus is the king of Elysium. There is a disconnect between the imagination of Telemachus and the suitors’ generation, and the experience of Helen, Menelaus, Odysseus.

Most uncanny is a kind of future echo in Menelaus’ wish for a beautiful cup he means to gift Telemachus: “I’ll give you a gorgeous chalice, so you may pour it out to the gods … in memory of me, every day that you do it.” ‘Whenever you do this, do it in memory of me.’ The foreshadowing of the lines from the synoptic gospels, now at the heart of Catholic ritual, is difficult to make sense of. Was the covenant in wine already something for Homer to parody, long before it took its place in Christian sacrament? The pouring of wine is for memory and memorial, it would seem, at least when it is free of nepenthe.

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Odyssey 4.306-463

There is a great non sequitur in Telemachus plea to Menelaus. When he says “that’s why I’ve come to these your knees,” we expect him to ask for military help to solve the problem of his overrun household. (Peisistratus had earlier made clear his companion’s need for real allies.) At Nestor’s Pylos, there was a whole army camped on the beach, ready to be doing! Yet we never hear this plea from Telemachus, for the aid of manpower, which is surely no more than what the suitors themselves are expecting from Telemachus’ adventure. It will later become clear how pitifully small are the human resources available on Ithaca itself for the scouring of the Shire and the salvation of Toad Hall. No, the plea is for Menelaus to “tell the tale of that man’s grievous obliteration.” He asks for the eyewitness account of his father’s death, whose premise in fact precludes any source of aid for Telemachus’ own predicament.

When he hears about Telemachus’ situation at home, Menelaus wishes that Odysseus would appear “in the shape he was once,” when back on the campaign he won a wrestling match in front of everybody. “In that shape may Odysseus come have a chat with the suitors.” This wish says an awful lot about what is delusional in the human notion of return or restoration or rebirth (νόστος), to which Odysseus and his admirers aspire. If only Joe Biden would tackle Trump the way he did back in 2020. Time, to which Homer never seems to refer abstractly as we do, moves onward inexorably. Everyone and everything move on. Clytemnestra and Helen move on. Is Penelope alone in staying put? No amount of weaving and unweaving can mask the fact of aging, however. Aging is, after all, a motion as well, though not in place. For Odysseus to be of any use nowadays in purging the suitors from his domain, he would therefore have to be, by Menelaus’ tacit admission, a shapeshifter.

In his answer to Telemachus, Menelaus gives us the original shapeshifter, the protean Proteus, the Old Man of the Sea—yet another Aegyptian wonder. Again, men of war are put into situations where their strength, prowess, and weaponry are all but useless. Yet Menelaus describes their ambush of Proteus as their “most terrible … ever.” After all those years of war and lying in wait, this one was the worst: “for it stressed us dreadfully, / The most deadly smell from the seals fed in the brine.” These manly men, the bravest for “every mission,” couldn’t stomach a fishy odour.

The men’s strength and endurance is expressed by their ability, not to tackle or fight their victim, but to keep on squeezing him (πιέζειν) though he changes form and shape. The verb recalls Odysseus ‘squeezing’ (πιέζειν) the throat of the warrior crouched inside the Trojan Horse, who wanted to answer Helen’s seductive call. I suppose it is the strength of a wrestler, to squeeze. But squeezing a throat, or clinging on, are not typical postures of masculine heroism. Although, it must be said, Homer achieves a picture here beyond the reach of Hollywood special effects, or even the logic of the imagination: Proteus turns into water, a liquid incompressible. And yet Menelaus and his men give him a good squeeze, and Proteus does not run through their fingers.

The shape shifter Proteus is a substance shifter; this seems to be one point of his becoming water. And yet he maintains his identity, as something separable from his matter and form. He embodies a germ, a protean germ, for later thinkers’ speculation into ontology and epistemology. Proteus himself performs one action: he counts (ἀριθμεῖν). Why does he do this? Does counting his seals reassure him in some way? Does counting one’s things do this generally? I wanna go out tonight, I wanna find out what I got—Bruce Springsteen.

But Proteus the substance shifter is himself tricked by a mere skin. Things must be sorted, as apples and oranges, before they can be counted. In effect, Proteus only counts appearances—skins—not substances. Have the men invalidated Proteus’ count, or earned their place in it? They have, after all, through the sacrifice of their briny surrogates, attained an audience with the god.

The four seals, for Menelaus and his three men, have been newly flayed. The otherwise charming Eidothea has apparently gone underwater and dispatched and skinned these poor creatures. I am reminded of our first encounter with the suitors, in Book I (108), where they are described as seated on ‘the hides of cattle they themselves killed.’ The skins of things are their appearances, but detached they are also substances which clothe and blanket us. We remember also the opening lines of the poem, where Odysseus’ comrades are said to have lost their return home for killing and eating the cattle of the sun. These solar cattle appear to be the days of a year. It does seem that for Homer, the fact of animal sacrifice is not somehow in the cultural background, a given or assumed thing, but rather a matter much within his consciousness and contemplation.

One presumes that Helius likes to count his cattle, and Proteus his seals, just as we count, name and variously number our days. Both would get extremely upset if any go missing. We ourselves quite absurdly believe in all kinds of dating schemes from various self-styled sciences, and would be very upset if this was not actually the 2,024th year CE, or if the world had never had a beginning (in a ‘big bang’!) or was only a few hundred years old. I shall have more to say about counting and storytelling, but does it not seem that Homer is entertaining an idea here about being counted as well as counting; that there is, behind and beneath all the feasting, and the stealing our days and our time—and our skins—a cosmic reckoner, and a cosmic reckoning?

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Odyssey 4.155-305

I have translated νηπενθές ‘anti-depressant’, which is a depressing thing to do. The mere sound of some of Homer’s words conjures sensations and intimations that make semantic translation seem like butchery. But I have gone for a modern medicinal property, rather than to ‘cease upon the midnight with no pain.’

Helen and Menelaus have lived life on a grand scale. Now they have ‘come down to earth,’ a multivalent sort of movement in both the Iliad and the Odyssey. They have settled into retirement in the gated suburbs. The inevitable talk of the past leads to uncontrollable tears of regret and longing. Helen has an Aegyptian remedy, her little helper, to fortify the wine. Nepenthe is strong stuff: you’d sit there unmoved even if your mother or father dropped dead in front of you, if your brother or your own child were slaughtered before your eyes. It would seemingly get you through torture. At least, while the drug lasted. But despite the scale of the events this fatefully married couple have set into motion, they are surely not the only couple, or the only people, living into later years haunted by their memories, losses, and regrets. Drug use, even to literal oblivion, pervades modern societies and households. Our euphemism of the ‘happy hour’ bespeaks a general need to drown or distract from our predicament, at a certain time of day. Poor Peisistratus says he doesn’t like to get all sad around dinner time. Perhaps he speaks for himself. Tell him he buys the next round.

Homer describes Helen’s Aegyptian drugs as μητιόεντα, filled with mētis, ‘intelligence’, ‘kenning’, ‘cunning’, the quality for which Odysseus is famous. She chooses the perfect painkiller to heal her parlour evening. But the narrator also describes the Egyptian drugs (pharmaka) as being πολλὰ μὲν ἐσθλὰ μεμιγμένα πολλὰ δὲ λυγρά, ‘many of quality when mixed, but many mischievous.’ The perfect balance of the Greek phrasing, however, with ‘mixed’ in the middle, perhaps suggests that these drugs are both at once, like a number of double-sided objects in the Odyssey. We could certainly testify ourselves that painkillers are a mixed bag.

‘She turned her thought to other things, Helen, Zeus’s begotten …’ It was Athena who had earlier ‘thought of other things,’ directing from behind the scenes the preparations for Telemachus’ trip. Here it is Helen who earns the line of the divine directrix. In the nepenthe passage she is twice addressed as Zeus’s daughter, like Athena. But the divine power she exerts over the scene comes from an Egyptian drug, a gift from an Egyptian wife. This is curious.

What is Homer’s (the narrator’s) purpose in his allusions to Aegypt? Talking of coming down to earth, the Achaean world seems well impressed with Menelaus’ wealth, but the narrator tells us the very richest houses are actually in Aegypt. That is where Menelaus spent his time acquiring all his stuff somehow, while his brother back home was assassinated. Telemachus gapes in awe at Menelaus’ palace, but the narrator makes it clear that he himself knows better. Sparta ain’t all that. It’s no Aegypt.

Helen of course is virtually a goddess among Greek speakers. But here we find her well domesticated. All the best drugs, for good or ill, are to be found over in Aegypt, not here; everyone there is a healer, who understands more than all other men. Helen’s technology, intimating her divine superpower, is borrowed from superiors overseas. Her finest implements, her golden distaff and wheeled silver basket, all hail as gifts from a non-epic, but fabulous, household in the Aegyptian Thebes. Later, at the end of the visit, Telemachus refuses Menelaus’ parting gift of horses, because, he says, they’re no use in Ithaca. The epic, chivalric, noble animal has no place there; she’s a rocky country best fit for goats.

There is something funny and affecting about this narrator’s perspective on things, amidst the shifting perspectives of his characters, which he delimits and diminishes with his Aegyptian asides. The comedy of the Odyssey often seems to thrive on (gently) cutting the pretensions of Greek-speaking epic, and its protagonists, down to size.

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Odyssey 4.1-154

Just like Helen, the fading beauty queen, there is a sense of expectations cheated as they’re met, of things being cut down to size in the same breath that they are exalted. Menelaus is supposed to be fabulously wealthy, at least in local terms. His house positively gleams. Nestor had attempted to fob his visitors off on Menelaus, because, it would seem, he had rather more resources at his disposal for taking care of guests. After speaking at them all day, he somewhat rudely insists that they go on to Sparta. But when Mentor (Athena) and Telemachus actually head off to go sleep on board ship, Nestor protests rather too much, and boasts about his blankets and towels. Let us hope Athena’s late blessing brings some late prosperity to the old man, who came home in such a rush …

Menelaus himself boasts that there may be some other mortal could compete with his acquisitions, but Homer himself lets us know that the richest houses are in Egyptian Thebes, where in fact Menelaus and Helen have mooched their finest stuff. Menelaus was a traveller, all right, but not exactly the man who comes to know the cities and the thought of men (see line 3 of the Odyssey). No, he’s on a mission to accumulate their goods. The bounteous Libyan sheep, born horned, impress him because they erase a key difference between the rich and the poor: over there, the shepherd as well, not just the king, gets all the cheese, mutton and lovely milk he wants.

Meanwhile, Telemachus gawps and gapes at the shine of Menelaus’ precious metals, and thinks this must be what Zeus’s front room looks like. The boy’s naïveté contrasts with Menelaus’ worldliness, but both display aggrandisement and self-aggrandisement. One wonders what Homer is up to in shifting the perceived size of things as he changes the beholder’s eyes.

But Menelaus also is clearly racked with regret and loss. He’d keep a third (!) of his goods if he could get his dead friends back. I suspect we’re supposed to note such a valuation, as one does the ⅗ of a man from the U.S. constitution. Menelaus would never lose everything to get his friends back.

And out comes Helen. What a simply awful household. We get a starter course right away: Helen says, in her inimitable way, that all those men died for my sake, the bitch, in their brave little war. ‘Nah,’ says Menelaus (to paraphrase): ‘it was for me.’ I bet that sort of exchange gets old pretty fast. Doesn’t everything.

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Odyssey 3.330-497 (end)

The sacrifice of the heifer, with the women of Nestor’s house ululating in ecstasy, seems to demand a symbolic reading; what do you make of it? The men encamped on the beach like an invading army were sacrificing quantities of bulls, exclusively male animals. The object seemed to be placating or thanking Poseidon. Here, Nestor calls for an unbroken heifer to honour Athena, the Virgin. The sexual metaphor is made quite explicit in Nestor’s request, quoted in the title above. It seems the honouring of Poseidon involves the sacrifice of male animals, whereas the honouring of Athena calls for the sacrifice of a female, and in particular, a ‘virgin’.

But there are levels upon levels. It would seem the return home of the Pylian men from Troy involves a kind of acknowledgment of sin, to be atoned vicariously (in the wishful supplicant’s reasoning) through the sacrifice of bulls. Much of this transgression is in fact involved in the violation of women. A line that rather sticks out from Nestor’s description of his breathless escape from Troy, is this about the loading of his cargo: “And we loaded in our acquisitions, along with the women in their plunging girdles (βαθυζώνους τε γυναῖκας) …” Nestor in particular is remembered in the Iliad for some particularly unsavoury calls to the men for what to do with the Trojan women when they are captured. He is a nasty old man always up for a boast about his youthful prowess and for ginning up the youngsters to be ruthless and rapine in battle. ‘Loosening the veil,’ an event for the wedding night, can also be a metaphor for rape, applied to the sacking of a citadel, but here to the opening of a vintage wine. Now that Nestor’s home, restored it seems to a revered wife Eurydice, who doesn’t get a mention in the Iliad, and whom he pointedly invokes in his prayer to Athena—is there a need for atonement, and perhaps abasement on his part, toward the domestic reality of life? It seems likely that coming home in the Odyssey involves a restoration of a balance, if that is possible after war, between the needs and predilections of men and the dignity of women. What has happened, one wonders, to all those low-girdled women shipped in the hold with other commodities? Are they now the slave women preparing the feast for after the virgin sacrifice?

In turn the sacrifice of the heifer seems to embody the sacrifice of women for the sake of the Trojan misadventure, and masculine fantasy generally. It is conducted by Nestor’s sons who stayed home, who missed or never knew their warrior brother Antilochus; and it seems to be consummated by the guttural cry of the women of Nestor’s household. I find both a dignity and an unspoken acknowledgement in this wordless ululation (ὀλολύζειν) of the women. The price that women pay is perhaps more than can be acknowledged in words. No amount of gilding can adorn this. One really feels the passing of this heifer’s ghost. It feels like a release from suffering.

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Odyssey 3.201-329

Why does Homer introduce a singer and poet into the story of Aegisthus and Clytemnestra? In Nestor’s telling, Agamemnon left behind a singer, like the ones Homer depicts. and perhaps is, with the order to “protect my wife”. How is it that an artist could do that? What sort of song would preserve her virtue—keep her on the straight and narrow? (What language is there any more to speak of this sort of mission?) We know that Nestor had his disagreements with Agamemnon, so that in the aftermath of the Trojan war, he led or joined a faction which fled home rather than try to appease Athena with sacrifice. The army was split fifty-fifty. Odysseus changed his mind and made Agamemnon’s contingent a democratic majority. Is Nestor perhaps mocking Agamemnon’s judgement over his provision for securing his marriage while he was away, busily deserting it? The poor singer meets a terrible fate at Aegisthus’ hands, abandoned to become food for vultures on a desert island. What might Homer himself be saying about the inefficacy of his own art to guide human behaviour and morality? Is there a criticism here of moralising poets? “He wants it—she wants it!” Erotic passion and lust for power conquer in real life, and even win a seven-year term.

[I shall be taking a brief hiatus for some emergency travel. Will be back soon!]

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Odyssey 3.1-200

Meeting Nestor is like watching a reunion special for a 20-year-old show. There is that same awkward sense that things will never be the same. Giants walked the earth back then. There is the slightly prurient interest in how old and overweight the cast have got.

Here we are, camped on the beach in companies like an invading army, leaving the WAGs down the road at home, as though we’d never left Troy. But it’s our own beach. There is an uneasy incompleteness about Nestor’s return, even now, after many years. There is consciousness of guilt: something needs to be expiated by sacrifice. It was apparently Athena whom the Achaeans offended in the sacking of Troy. Now it is Poseidon they are appeasing, perhaps in gratitude for their passage home? The wind never failed him, says Nestor. One wonders what the strange festival means for Peisistratus, his youngest son, for whom, like Telemachus, the whole Trojan expedition is a thing of story, full of glorified models of male conduct in war. ‘Dad, why are we all sitting around in groups in our armour, on beach towels, on the beach?’ I well remember from my own youth the looming shadow of World War II, still the source of our playground games (along with cowboys and Indians) and the subject of solemn movies with nary a deadpan. It was always an event for me to speak with veterans of that war, from teachers to students in Chicago. Nestor is quite honest about his own actions, as Athena foretells: it was a pirate raid, following Achilles around Troyland, looting stuff and women, before they finally got round to besetting the Trojan city of Ilium.

But there seems also a lot concealed. It seems he may have come home with less than a full share of the loot, for example. This may have been a price of breaking with Agamemnon, and possibly a reason why Odysseus began as an ally of his breakaway faction, but then changed his mind and went back to Agamemnon. There are hints that unlike Menelaus, whom we are yet to meet, Nestor is living under diminished circumstances. Telemachus avoids going back there on his way home. Neither Nestor nor Menelaus are a transparent window in their memories of Odysseus: he was a character who aroused the most mixed of mixed feelings.

They are honouring Poseidon, but Athena is actually present as Mentor, Homer’s (the performer’s) alter ego (I suggest). ‘Mentor’ joins in the prayer, that glory come to Nestor and his sons, but the performer cannot resist breaking his guise, to tell us that actually Athena fulfilled the whole prayer herself. These half-line asides are precious kinds of connections … But the suggestion is that this visit of Athena (and Telemachus) may result in a kind of healing for Nestor and his people, at least at the material level. But one reads the psyche from the material in Homer. Clearly there had been a real break with Odysseus, after which Nestor and he never met again. Perhaps there is some resolution in the next generation, with this visit.

There is genuine depth of feeling, an embodiment of real distance and loss, in Nestor’s litany of the comrades buried at Troy: There lies Ajax, Achilles, Patroclus … And his own beloved son Antilochus, who beat Menelaus (under dispute) in the chariot race at the funeral games set up by Achilles (Iliad XXIII—I mention this because it will figure when we meet Menelaus in the next book). It is marvellous how these lines conjure those men like so many waxworks. One is made conscious of distance and time precisely by our distance from that first encounter with the Iliad. One wonders if the poet himself joins in the affect of Nestor’s loss and evocation: the world of the Iliad, perhaps, with all the figures in whom he or she had invested all her art, belongs to this poet’s younger years and can never return.

The figure of Odysseus, however, yet remains, and Homer is not done with him. He is well remembered by Plato, the Odysseus of the Odyssey: Socrates seems to admire him. But the Athenian tragic stage remembers a different man, perhaps independently of Homer’s telling. There he is the original Machiavel, an unprincipled opportunist, spin doctor and henchman. Advisor to the Prince. Nestor knew this guy. He more than once emphasises Odysseus’ brilliance in the sense of his cunning, his skill with ‘all manner of deceits’ (παντοίοισι δόλοισι). Their final parting was clearly not amicable, and likely a prime example of Odysseus cheating expectations.

It is possible that Athena’s intention, an authorial intention in the highest sense, is some redemption for this shadowy and brutally efficient figure. Perhaps this possibility was always there in his youthful and fruitful love for Penelope, seemingly abandoned for the Trojan high life. But Athena had been his enemy, before the sudden change of heart at the council of the gods in Book 1. She had been the enemy of all the Achaeans attempting to return home after the desecration of Ilium. The opening of the Odyssey on Olympus is shown to be a moment of opportunity: Poseidon, Odysseus’ motivated persecutor, is absent. But nothing would have happened unless Athena had changed her mind. Why does she do this? What is it about him, or what is missing within or for Odysseus, that makes her move?

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Since I started again after my illness, I’ve now spent two years without performing past Book 4 of the Odyssey. Now, I have translated the whole thing in that time, to be fair; and I am a self-confessed Homerist, so there is endless fascination for me in every part of every line. But this does mean that I have not yet encountered Odysseus himself. Homer does not make you wait two years, but he does make you wait four books, a pretty long time. An ongoing question, raised by modern critics—the ancients seem not to have complained—is does the Telemachy (Books 1-4) cut it? Does Telemachus sustain our interest? Why does Homer delay the introduction of his hero? Or does he in fact? Subscribers, do please respond in comments or over in Chat.

I shall admit it is hard to square the master fabulist of Books 5-12, and the Hollywood storyteller of 16-24—meant in a good way—a novelist who writes a real page-turner—with the relaxed buildup of Telemachus’ situation in Ithaca at the beginning of the Odyssey. There is also an apparent lull when Odysseus first arrives in Ithaca—Books 13-15—filled with conversations, and many lies, in the lowly dwelling of Eumaeus the swineherd. Coming up in Book 3, Nestor will literally talk until the sun goes down. How does one understand these two apparent lulls, one which sets in right at the beginning, and the other which interrupts sequences of (to us) intense mythic and dramatic interest? The Tale of Odysseus’ Wanderings and the Plot Against the Suitors and the Reunion with Penelope?

The oral theory of Homeric composition allows us to shunt all aesthetic questions to a mysterious primitive realm beyond our ken or ability to participate. Let us avoid this ungrounded laziness. Plato’s world was not infected with the fascination for orality. It was, however, keenly insightful into the qualities of poetry and aesthetic craft, and it does not seem to register a problem with any parts of the Odyssey on these grounds. Perhaps occasional doldrums are a part of the rhythm of sea journeys and traveller’s tales? But it may be our own predilections for mythic tales of (super)heroes, or for the dramatic dovetailing of storylines to a climax, which are distorting our sense for those parts of Homer’s art which do not aim to satisfy those kinds of arousal.

I do love the ship cleaving through the water. It is such a release, felt in the rhythms, when the journey finally gets underway. By itself that is a clue to how effectively Homer has conjured the feeling of adolescent inertia and its privileged frustrations, the invisible bonds that tie young men to their dice and tables, and leave the loyal, experienced men, and all the women, with a choice of service also to their appetites, or to a now distant memory of an ideal from their youth which may or may not be dead forever. Bring me a traveller’s wind!

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This episode marks the first—and I believe, only—in-person appearance of Mentor, Odysseus’ appointed estate manager, in the whole Odyssey. But he appears twice in this passage, the second time as Athena’s disguise. She then appears as Mentor on multiple occasions in the course of the telling. Indeed, the line,

Μέντορι ϝεἰδομένη ἠμὲν δέμας ἠδὲ καὶ αὐδήν

Seeming to be Mentor, not just in build but in her voice as well

which appears in this passage before Athena’s speech to Telemachus, is also the last line of the whole poem. Of course in this guise Athena is to be a ‘mentor’ to Telemachus in the first part of the Odyssey. But it almost seems as if the performer hits on an idea here that gives him some flexibility and comic potential. For one thing, the announcement about the voice means he doesn’t have to keep doing Athena’s voice, however that was handled, but the voice of a regular sort of male. And as we shall see, this figure of Mentor allows the performer to engage in some ‘fourth-wall’ comedy. Mentor in this way becomes a very thin mask for the performer himself, who, as a matter of course, has to imitate a variety of people ‘not just in build, but in their voice as well.’

It seems to me to be pointed that the Odyssey ends by pointing to this fourth wall, or rather to the performer himself. The Iliad performer seems rather to aim for transparency, to get out of the way of the simile or the scene. That poem’s last line is an evocation of Hector Horse-Tamer at his funeral, to which we are made witnesses or auditors. Such a name-and-epithet evocation raises the question what Hector has become, now that he has been burnt to ashes and bones. The scene is the thing, not the artist. But throughout the Odyssey, the teller seems to get involved in the telling, trying on his guises with a sense of fun, and participatory fun at that. Let me suggest this as an hypothesis, at any rate, which you are invited to test or try on as we proceed.

Also in Greek:

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Spread the word! We’re editing, translating, and performing Homer’s Odyssey, in English (on the podcast) and Greek (in Substack), all for free! Subscribers and sponsors welcome! We’re now on Book 2, catch up on previous episodes of the Odyssey on Singing Homer with ‘Homer in English’ in the title.

Antinous, the most villainous suitor, openly complains about Penelope’s wiles and duplicity, but wow! What a woman. Neither he nor his fellows had ever seen or heard of her equal:

ἔργα τ’ ἐπίστασθαι περικαλλέα καὶ φρένας ἐσθλάς

κέρδεά θ’, οἷ’ οὔ πώ τιν’ ἀκούομεν οὐδε παλαιῶν,

τάων αἳ πάρος ἦσαν ἐϋπλοκαμῖδες ’Αχαιαί,

Τυρώ τ’ Ἀλκμήνη τε ἐϋστέφανός τε Μυκήνη·.

τάων οὔ τις ὁμοῖα νοϝήματα Πηνελοπείηι

ϝἤιδη · 2.117-22

To know how to make gorgeous works, and excellent brains

To profit by them, the like of no other woman we hear about—

not even among the ancients,

Those women who once upon a time were the Fair-Tresses,

Achaean alumnae,

Tyro and Alcmene, and Mycene of the beautiful coronal:

None of these knew thoughts like those Penelope

Knows.

The accentuation of the sequence κέρδεά θ’, οἷ’ οὔ πώ τιν’, in the new technical parlance, follows a short oxytone released by an elided enclitic with a circumflex and two long oxytones. Never mind the jargon; if you inspect the Greek text, you will notice the phrase with bolded syllables contains consecutive pitch accent marks, unlike most of the rest of Homer’s phrases (or the stress patterns in English poetry). Most likely this sequence climaxed at a peak of pitch. As genuinely bitter as Antinous seems to be about Penelope’s behaviour, the thought of her bursts in on him and sends him into a reverie about the skilful intelligences of the past, to whom she seems, to him, superior—the women Antinous had heard about from story and song. That there is such evident transport in the feeling of Antinous, conveyed by the harmony and rhythm of his poetry, seems to me to do essential work for Homer, who by the mere letter of his poem could be thought to present a barely two-dimensional character in Antinous, and almost comic villains in the suitors generally. The musical breakout transforms a moment with a lasting effect outside the work done by words and dramatic premises: there is, it seems, a real longing in these villains, and with this apparent outburst of harmonic energy, which seemingly escapes the speaker’s mouth, through Antinous’ eyes Penelope is shown to be a real and worthy object for such longing. This is an instance where the prosodic transport cuts through any poses or rhetorical hypocrisy on the part of the speaker, to project an immediacy of awareness and feeling. Penelope is evidently far more a causal agent, an αἴτιον, in the speaker’s consciousness, than the object of blame Antinous is attempting to make of her.

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What are Telemachus’ redeeming qualities? Let me know in chat about the way he treats his mother.

We have already seen Telemachus daydreaming when he first appears in the Odyssey. He is seeing his absent father in his ‘mind’s eye’, as Shakespeare famously put it. Homer seems interested in what we think of as a psychological space, and one part of his depiction of the gods seems to be as an internal, psychological phenomenon. Telemachus’ experience in the aftermath of his encounter with Athena, in disguise as a mentor named Mentes, seems to speak to a kind of encounter that seems familiar in life, the way one remembers a conversation that somehow changed everything. Only in retrospect do we realise that something inexplicable has happened; the world doesn’t look the same any more, that particular conversation brought something home that forever changed us. That couldn’t have just been who it seemed to be, talking to us or playing that song: that was a god!

In Greek:

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One of the reasons I included Samuel Butler’s translation in earlier posts, is that he alone, I feel, has captured the comic tone of the Odyssey. There is something deadpan about his Victorian prose and sensibility that reveals something real about the Odyssey, cutting through all the trappings of the hexameter rhythm and epic expectations. I also have translated into prose but I’ve done it line for line, to be a helpful prompt to students of the Greek. I am painfully conscious that there is something about what Butler renders that is beyond the scope of my attempt. Sometimes translators can be revelatory; there is more to the business than decoding. Once in a while there is a translation of souls, so that you feel the Greek author is behind the English author’s eyes, anticipating his phrases. I could never manage the denser parts of Thucydides without the help of Thomas Hobbes’ English. There was a real meeting of souls. I feel something only slightly less extraordinary in the meeting of Samuel Butler with the composer of the Odyssey.

Try listening to the Odyssey as if it were playing as a comedy. I think you will find the experience transformative. Think of the performer, having to pretend to be Athena, having to pretend be some Mentes or other, a ‘king’ among Taphian pirates. It’s almost as if she’s making it up as she goes along. Wait a minute, what about my ship … oh let’s just say we parked it so far away that you can’t see it, off in the country. I’m a Lord!

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We begin the great tale of the Odyssey again, with articulated breath. All recordings will be free, but let me encourage subscribers to become paid members to support my work. I would like to offer paid subscribers the opportunity to participate in a chat about the passages I cover in each instalment. I shall begin the chat with a question, which will always be a question which is alive to me. I like leading seminars, and prefer that my own plentiful opinions earn their way into a conversation, rather than I privilege them by delivering them from a lecturer’s podium. I also only like real questions, not leading ones, so don’t expect in me a ready-made answer man for my own questions; I hope that subscribers will react and interact, and that I shall learn something on the way. Look for a chat notification at some point after each post. I also hope that participants will have helpful and critical things to say about the translation, my English impression in linear prose. I do hope to improve it as a result, and perhaps see if someone would like to publish it. The Greek text is my own, based on the edition by M. L. West. It has been published in six volumes on Amazon, complete with my translation on the facing page. They are available at these links, for $9.99 each:

https://a.co/d/gdd3Hm2

https://a.co/d/b1HL789

https://a.co/d/0cqP26l

https://a.co/d/dtveMin

https://a.co/d/j7cb0uf

https://a.co/d/j61s9Ug

Needless to say, purchasing any of these volumes would also be an excellent way to support my work. If you are interested in the Greek performance, they will give you a complete text to follow along. I shall send along the whole set by mail to founding members. If you are a student, e-mail me and I can arrange to ship them to you at cost.

I am disabled but recovering from a transplant, and am grateful that there’s still air enough in my lungs to sing Homer. Aside from my disability, my findings have proved too controversial for me to be licensed to teach in professional Classics. Hence any financial support for my efforts is deeply appreciated.

Below is my recording of the Greek for Homer’s Odyssey, 1.1-135:

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Ἄνδρά μοι ἔννεπε, Μοῦσα, πολύτροπον, ὃς μάλα πολλά

πλάγχθη, ’πεὶ Τροίης ἱερὸν πτολίεθρον ἔπερσεν ·

πολλῶν δ’ ἀνθρώπων ϝἴδεν ἄστεα καὶ νόϝον ἔγνω,

πολλὰ δ’ ὅ γ’ ἐν πόντωι πάθεν ἄλγεα ὃν κατὰ θυμόν

ἀρνύμενος ἥν τε ψυχὴν καὶ νόστον ἑταίρων.

ἀλλ’ οὐδ’ ὧς ἑτάρους ἐρρύσατο, ἱέμενός περ·

αὐτῶν γὰρ σφετέρηισιν ἀτασθαλίηισιν ὄλοντο,

νήπιοι, οἳ κατὰ βοῦς Ὑπερίονος Ἠϝελίοιο

ἤσθιον· αὐτὰρ ὃ τοῖσιν ἀφείλετο νόστιμον ἦμαρ.

τῶν ἁμόθεν γε, θεά, θύγατερ Διός, ϝεἰπὲ καὶ ἡμῖν.

I hereby present first fruits of my mission to sing Homer: it amounts to a reaffirmation of the single articulated breath of the Homeric epos. I shall explain what I mean. The Homeric hexameter has a rich prehistory. It was born in a circle dance, emulating the newly stable paths of the sun’s outer planets with their regular retrogressions at opposition. (The leftward steps in the dance occurred from steps 9 to 12 of the 17, corresponding to the syllables between the trochaic caesura and the bucolic diaeresis.) It lent its rhythm to the chanting of catalogues, memorialising by bringing to orchestic life the list of ancestors and events that were shared in common by a people and a place. As these catalogues expanded internally, like a concertina, into episodic narratives, the hexameter’s story ends as a choice vehicle for epic narrative and drama, like the English pentameter. It persisted in this guise, somewhat remarkably, in the Latin language and the Roman era.

When I began this project, I tended to pause at what I have demonstrated to be a mid-line accentual cadence in Homer’s hexameter. This accentual cadence generates the two kinds of caesura in the third foot of the six. There is often a pause in sense at this location, and when one attempts to sing the pitch changes indicated in the score, a pause here is often welcome to separate the pitched rhythms before and after. In its history as a medium, the hexameter may well have observed a pause at mid-line, for example, in citharodic and other styles of melodic performance, including when using Homer’s verses. But I have become convinced by the texts we have that the Iliad and the Odyssey were composed for performance by a thespian rhapsode bearing a wand; and that in the composer’s hands the hexameter line had become a unit of expression—a single articulated breath. It was of course rhythmic and syncopated, and tonally inflected, but it was a single breath of speech. The articulation or articulations were phrasal, shaped by the pitch accent, but not necessarily requiring pauses. The necessary pause for breath was generally at line end, but I believe the performer’s freedom was comparable to a Shakespearean’s: a pause anywhere was permissible if it counted, and was always welcome at mid-line or at the diaeresis, if that worked better than at line end.

Stephen Daitz argued that the hexameter should be recited without a pause. I have given evidence that some lines in Homer seem to be scripted with a pause (in my new book, Singing Homer’s Spell, now available on Amazon, and soon in an Apple ebook complete with audio demonstrations). Yet I agree with Daitz about the integrity of the Homeric line in performance. It seems somehow to live in the consciousness of the performer, who will not breathe only at the end of each line, but when the lines and phrases themselves instruct him to. The orchestration of the breath is not beyond Homer’s scripting. That is a discovery about Homer’s stature and nature awaiting every Homeric performer! If Shakespeare has had his way with you, you will know what I mean: real verse sprung from a poet knows how to articulate itself.

Here, for now, is the opening of the Odyssey.

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The shaping and self-organising of phrases in recitation is the ultimate proof in the pudding, that the law of tonal prominence has at last released the rhythmic tonal motion, the music, of ancient Greek prose and verse. Perhaps the greatest treasury of all to be tapped by the new law is that of ancient tragic and comic dialogue. Nowhere is the reward so immediately present as when Greek iambic verse comes to life. The words seem to answer their speaker and sing themselves, just like when you crack the reading of a line from Shakespeare. Here is the opening speech, or salvo, of Sophocles’ Antigone, spoken by the heroine:

ὦ κοινὸν αὐτάδελφον | Ἰσμήνης κάρα,

ἆρ᾽ οἶσθ᾽ ὅ τι Ζεὺς | τῶν ἀπ᾽ Οἰδίπου κακῶν

ὁποῖον οὐχὶ νῷν | ἔτι ζώσαιν τελεῖ;

οὐδὲν γὰρ οὔτ᾽ ἀλγεινὸν | οὔτ᾽ ἄτης ἄτερ

οὔτ᾽ αἰσχρὸν οὔτ᾽ ἄτιμόν (|) ἐσθ᾽, ὁποῖον οὐ

τῶν σῶν τε κἀμῶν | οὐκ ὄπωπ᾽ ἐγὼ κακῶν.

καὶ νῦν τί τοῦτ᾽ αὖ φασι | πανδήμῳ πόλει

κήρυγμα θεῖναι | τὸν στρατηγὸν ἀρτίως;

ἔχεις τι κεἰσήκουσας; | ἤ σε λανθάνει

πρὸς τοὺς φίλους στείχοντα | τῶν ἐχθρῶν κακά;

In Gilbert Murray’s translation:

My own, mine sister, O beloved face,

Tell me—of all the curses of our race,

What curse shall God not shelf off thee and me?

Surely in is no pain, no misery,

No vileness or dishonour, that we two

Have not already seen; and now this new

Edict, proclaimed by our new Prince's word

On whole our people . . . knowst thou? Hast thou heard?

Or is it hid from thee? There comes a fate

On one we love meet for the worst we hate.

Listen, and try it yourself! Such operatic iambs—ah Shakespeare’s soft English can only dream!

David

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The key to reading Greek aloud—that is, the first step in treating ancient texts in the way that they were intended to be used—is to know which syllables were weighted in the delivery. This is to pay attention to ancient Greek usage, which describes the pitch changes in Greek prosody with the words ‘sharp’ (ὀξύς) and ‘heavy’ (βαρύς). With respect to prosodic pitch these do not mean, as is often erroneously stated, ‘high’ and ‘low’, but ‘sharply rising’ and ‘heavily falling’. When one applies them to a voice, sharpness and heaviness intuitively connote different kinds of intensity, not only tonal shifts. It is therefore reasonable to suppose that these Greek prosodic qualities of sharp and heavy intonations were not unlike the sounds, including pitch changes, associated with the familiar English stress prosody. In particular, when one determines which Greek syllables bore the heavy Greek prosody, one knows which syllables ‘anchor’ the delivery, and which ones the speech lands on. The sharp syllables, on the other hand, propel and energise the line, including at the ends.

καὶ ὅσοι φθόγγοι ταχεῖς τε καὶ βραδεῖς φαίνονται, τοτὲ μὲν ἀνάρμοστοι φερόμενοι δι’ ἀνομοιότητα τῆς ἐν ἡμῖν ὑπ’ αὐτῶν κινήσεως, τοτὲ δὲ ξύμφωνοι δι’ ὁμοιότητα. τὰς γὰρ τῶν προτέρων καὶ θαττόνων οἱ βραδύτεροι κινήσεις, ἀποπαυομένας ἤδη τε εἰς ὅμοιον ἐληλυθυίας αἷς ὕστερον αὐτοὶ προσφερόμενοι κινοῦσιν ἐκείνας, καταλαμβάνουσι, καταλαμβάνοντες δὲ οὐκ ἄλλην ἐπεμβάλλοντες ἀνετάραξαν κίνησιν, ἀλλ’ ἀρχὴν βραδυτέρας φορᾶς κατὰ τὴν τῆς θάττονος ἀποληγούσης δὲ ὁμοιότητα προσάψαντες μίαν ἐξ ὀξείας καὶ βαρείας ξυνεκεράσαντο πάθην, ὅθεν ἡδονὴν μὲν τοῖς ἄφροσιν, εὐφροσύνην δὲ τοῖς ἔμφροσι διὰ τὴν τῆς θείας ἁρμονίας μίμησιν ἐν θνηταῖς γενομένην φοραῖς παρέσχον. (Timaeus 80a ff.)

[We must pursue] also those sounds which appear quick and slow, sharp [ὀξεῖς] and heavy [βαρεῖς], at one time borne in discord because of the disagreement of the motion [κίνησις] caused by them in us, but at another in concord because of agreement. For the slower sounds overtake the movements [κινήσεις] of those earlier and quicker ones, when these are already ceasing and have come into agreement with those motions with which afterwards, when they are brought to bear, the slow sounds themselves move [κινοῦσιν] them; and in overtaking they did not cause a disturbance, imposing another motion [κίνησις], but once they had attached the beginning of a slower passage, in accord with the agreement of the quicker one, which was fading, they mixed together a single experience out of sharp and heavy sound, whence they furnished pleasure to the mindless, but peace of mind to the thoughtful, because of the imitation of the divine harmony arisen in mortal orbits.

I demonstrate here how intuitive performance can become, when I apply the law of tonal prominence to Greek prose. The new law finally makes sense of Greek rhythm, in prose speech as well as poetry. The accent marks preserved in our texts had appeared to have a purely random relation to emphasis in lines and sentences. The breakthrough was to discover that whenever the syllable following the acute mark was long, it bore a down-glide in pitch which carried the prosodic weight. That is, in certain definite circumstances it was the syllable following, rather than the graphically accented syllable, which was prominent. Now, with the discovery of the new law, phrases and sentences seem to take sonic shape in a way that makes sense to those raised in Indo-European languages. Phrases seem to ‘self-organise’, rather than intone suddenly and randomly. An author’s voice emerges.

I have picked the most obscure passage in Plato I know. I shall not attempt to explain it here. I have merely recited it in the new way, and supplied my translation below. In speaking it out I wish to share the simple experience I have been blessed with: even if it occasionally seems that what Plato is saying is ‘all Greek to me,’ at least now one is not decoding symbols, but listening to someone talking, someone trying to describe something subtle.

It seems to me Plato is describing the musical motion of an Homeric hexameter, both objectively and subjectively as we like to say: at once both outside and inside. I say in my recent book, Singing Homer’s Spell: “[he] is trying to describe the phenomenology of a poetic or melodic line, the way it moves and cadences both internally and finally, and seems to be trying to describe the experience of the hexameter dance of the Muses in particular. Remember that Greek writers had no recourse to abstract terms derived from Greek or Latin, like even our ‘rhythm’ and ‘accent’, to help describe phenomena that are hard to get a perspective on at the best of times, so as to put them into words and sound scientific when doing so.”

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Greek text hyperlinked to lexica via Perseus (perseus.tufts.edu):

αὐτὰρ ἐγὼν ἐπὶ νῆας ἅμ᾽ ἀντιθέοις ἑτάροισιν

ἤια, πολλὰ δέ μοι κραδίη πόρφυρε κιόντι.

αὐτὰρ ἐπεί ῥ᾽ ἐπὶ νῆα κατήλθομεν ἠδὲ θάλασσαν,

δόρπον θ᾽ ὁπλισάμεσθ᾽, ἐπί τ᾽ ἤλυθεν ἀμβροσίη νύξ,

δὴ τότε κοιμήθημεν ἐπὶ ῥηγμῖνι θαλάσσης.

ἦμος δ᾽ ἠριγένεια φάνη ῥοδοδάκτυλος Ἠώς,

νῆας μὲν πάμπρωτον ἐρύσσαμεν εἰς ἅλα δῖαν,

ἐν δ᾽ ἱστοὺς τιθέμεσθα καὶ ἱστία νηυσὶν ἐίσῃς,

ἂν δὲ καὶ αὐτοὶ βάντες ἐπὶ κληῖσι καθῖζον:

ἑξῆς δ᾽ ἑζόμενοι πολιὴν ἅλα τύπτον ἐρετμοῖς.

ἂψ δ᾽ εἰς Αἰγύπτοιο διιπετέος ποταμοῖο

στῆσα νέας, καὶ ἔρεξα τεληέσσας ἑκατόμβας.

αὐτὰρ ἐπεὶ κατέπαυσα θεῶν χόλον αἰὲν ἐόντων,

χεῦ᾽ Ἀγαμέμνονι τύμβον, ἵν᾽ ἄσβεστον κλέος εἴη.

ταῦτα τελευτήσας νεόμην, ἔδοσαν δέ μοι οὖρον

ἀθάνατοι, τοί μ᾽ ὦκα φίλην ἐς πατρίδ᾽ ἔπεμψαν.

ἀλλ᾽ ἄγε νῦν ἐπίμεινον ἐνὶ μεγάροισιν ἐμοῖσιν,

ὄφρα κεν ἑνδεκάτη τε δυωδεκάτη τε γένηται:

καὶ τότε σ᾽ εὖ πέμψω, δώσω δέ τοι ἀγλαὰ δῶρα,

τρεῖς ἵππους καὶ δίφρον ἐύξοον: αὐτὰρ ἔπειτα

δώσω καλὸν ἄλεισον, ἵνα σπένδῃσθα θεοῖσιν

ἀθανάτοις ἐμέθεν μεμνημένος ἤματα πάντα.’

Samuel Butler’s translation with certain names Hellenised:

‘… whereon I turned back to the

ships with my companions, and my heart was clouded with care as I

went along. When we reached the ships we got supper ready, for night

was falling, and camped down upon the beach. When the child of morning,

rosy-fingered Dawn appeared, we drew our ships into the water, and

put our masts and sails within them; then we went on board ourselves,

took our seats on the benches, and smote the grey sea with our oars.

I again stationed my ships in the heaven-fed stream of Egypt, and

offered hecatombs that were full and sufficient. When I had thus appeased

heaven's anger, I raised a barrow to the memory of Agamemnon that

his name might live for ever, after which I had a quick passage home,

for the gods sent me a fair wind.

‘And now for yourself—stay here some ten or twelve days longer, and

I will then speed you on your way. I will make you a noble present

of a chariot and three horses. I will also give you a beautiful chalice

that so long as you live you may think of me whenever you make a drink-offering

to the immortal gods.’

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Greek text hyperlinked to lexica via Perseus (perseus.tufts.edu):

ὣς ἐφάμην, ὁ δέ μ᾽ αὐτίκ᾽ ἀμειβόμενος προσέειπεν:

‘‘υἱὸς Λαέρτεω, Ἰθάκῃ ἔνι οἰκία ναίων:

τὸν δ᾽ ἴδον ἐν νήσῳ θαλερὸν κατὰ δάκρυ χέοντα,

νύμφης ἐν μεγάροισι Καλυψοῦς, ἥ μιν ἀνάγκῃ

ἴσχει: ὁ δ᾽ οὐ δύναται ἣν πατρίδα γαῖαν ἱκέσθαι:

οὐ γάρ οἱ πάρα νῆες ἐπήρετμοι καὶ ἑταῖροι,

οἵ κέν μιν πέμποιεν ἐπ᾽ εὐρέα νῶτα θαλάσσης.

σοι δ᾽ οὐ θέσφατόν ἐστι, διοτρεφὲς ὦ Μενέλαε,

Ἄργει ἐν ἱπποβότῳ θανέειν καὶ πότμον ἐπισπεῖν,

ἀλλά σ᾽ ἐς Ἠλύσιον πεδίον καὶ πείρατα γαίης

ἀθάνατοι πέμψουσιν, ὅθι ξανθὸς Ῥαδάμανθυς,

τῇ περ ῥηίστη βιοτὴ πέλει ἀνθρώποισιν:

οὐ νιφετός, οὔτ᾽ ἂρ χειμὼν πολὺς οὔτε ποτ᾽ ὄμβρος,

ἀλλ᾽ αἰεὶ Ζεφύροιο λιγὺ πνείοντος ἀήτας

Ὠκεανὸς ἀνίησιν ἀναψύχειν ἀνθρώπους:

οὕνεκ᾽ ἔχεις Ἑλένην καί σφιν γαμβρὸς Διός ἐσσι.’’

ὣς εἰπὼν ὑπὸ πόντον ἐδύσετο κυμαίνοντα.

Samuel Butler’s translation with certain names Hellenised:

“‘The third man,’ he answered, ‘is Odysseus who dwells in Ithaca. I can see him in an island sorrowing bitterly in the house of the nymph Calypso, who is keeping him prisoner, and he cannot reach his home for he has no ships nor sailors to take him over the sea. As for your own end, Menelaus, you shall not die in Argos, but the gods will take you to the Elysian plain, which is at the ends of the world. There fair haired Rhadamanthus reigns, and men lead an easier life than any where else in the world, for in Elysium there falls not rain, nor hail, nor snow, but Oceanus breathes ever with a West wind that sings softly from the sea, and gives fresh life to all men. This will happen to you because you have married Helen, and are Zeus’s son in law.’

“As he spoke he dived under the waves …

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Greek text hyperlinked to lexica via Perseus (perseus.tufts.edu):

ὣς ἔφατ᾽, αὐτὰρ ἐμοί γε κατεκλάσθη φίλον ἦτορ,

κλαῖον δ᾽ ἐν ψαμάθοισι καθήμενος, οὐδέ νύ μοι κῆρ

ἤθελ᾽ ἔτι ζώειν καὶ ὁρᾶν φάος ἠελίοιο.

αὐτὰρ ἐπεὶ κλαίων τε κυλινδόμενός τε κορέσθην,

δὴ τότε με προσέειπε γέρων ἅλιος νημερτής:

‘μηκέτι, Ἀτρέος υἱέ, πολὺν χρόνον ἀσκελὲς οὕτω

κλαῖ᾽, ἐπεὶ οὐκ ἄνυσίν τινα δήομεν: ἀλλὰ τάχιστα

πείρα ὅπως κεν δὴ σὴν πατρίδα γαῖαν ἵκηαι.

ἢ γάρ μιν ζωόν γε κιχήσεαι, ἤ κεν Ὀρέστης

κτεῖνεν ὑποφθάμενος, σὺ δέ κεν τάφου ἀντιβολήσαις.’

ὣς ἔφατ᾽, αὐτὰρ ἐμοὶ κραδίη καὶ θυμὸς ἀγήνωρ

αὖτις ἐνὶ στήθεσσι καὶ ἀχνυμένῳ περ ἰάνθη,

καί μιν φωνήσας ἔπεα πτερόεντα προσηύδων:

‘τούτους μὲν δὴ οἶδα: σὺ δὲ τρίτον ἄνδρ᾽ ὀνόμαζε,

ὅς τις ἔτι ζωὸς κατερύκεται εὐρέι πόντῳ

ἠὲ θανών: ἐθέλω δὲ καὶ ἀχνύμενός περ ἀκοῦσαι.’

Samuel Butler’s translation with certain names Hellenised:

“Thus spoke Proteus, and I was broken hearted as I heard him. I sat

down upon the sands and wept; I felt as though I could no longer bear

to live nor look upon the light of the sun. Presently, when I had

had my fill of weeping and writhing upon the ground, the old man of

the sea said, ‘Son of Atreus, do not waste any more time in crying

so bitterly; it can do no manner of good; find your way home as fast

as ever you can, for Aegisthus be still alive, and even though Orestes

has been beforehand with you in killing him, you may yet come in for his

funeral.’

“On this I took comfort in spite of all my sorrow, and said, ‘I know,

then, about these two; tell me, therefore, about the third man of

whom you spoke; is he still alive, but at sea, and unable to get home?

or is he dead? Tell me, no matter how much it may grieve me.’

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Greek text hyperlinked to lexica via Perseus (perseus.tufts.edu):

‘σὸς δέ που ἔκφυγε κῆρας ἀδελφεὸς ἠδ᾽ ὑπάλυξεν

ἐν νηυσὶ γλαφυρῇσι: σάωσε δὲ πότνια Ἥρη.

ἀλλ᾽ ὅτε δὴ τάχ᾽ ἔμελλε Μαλειάων ὄρος αἰπὺ

ἵξεσθαι, τότε δή μιν ἀναρπάξασα θύελλα

πόντον ἐπ᾽ ἰχθυόεντα φέρεν βαρέα στενάχοντα,

ἀγροῦ ἐπ᾽ ἐσχατιήν, ὅθι δώματα ναῖε Θυέστης

τὸ πρίν, ἀτὰρ τότ᾽ ἔναιε Θυεστιάδης Αἴγισθος.

ἀλλ᾽ ὅτε δὴ καὶ κεῖθεν ἐφαίνετο νόστος ἀπήμων,

ἂψ δὲ θεοὶ οὖρον στρέψαν, καὶ οἴκαδ᾽ ἵκοντο,

ἦ τοι ὁ μὲν χαίρων ἐπεβήσετο πατρίδος αἴης

καὶ κύνει ἁπτόμενος ἣν πατρίδα: πολλὰ δ᾽ ἀπ᾽ αὐτοῦ

δάκρυα θερμὰ χέοντ᾽, ἐπεὶ ἀσπασίως ἴδε γαῖαν.

τὸν δ᾽ ἄρ᾽ ἀπὸ σκοπιῆς εἶδε σκοπός, ὅν ῥα καθεῖσεν

Αἴγισθος δολόμητις ἄγων, ὑπὸ δ᾽ ἔσχετο μισθὸν

χρυσοῦ δοιὰ τάλαντα: φύλασσε δ᾽ ὅ γ᾽ εἰς ἐνιαυτόν,

μή ἑ λάθοι παριών, μνήσαιτο δὲ θούριδος ἀλκῆς.

βῆ δ᾽ ἴμεν ἀγγελέων πρὸς δώματα ποιμένι λαῶν.

αὐτίκα δ᾽ Αἴγισθος δολίην ἐφράσσατο τέχνην:

κρινάμενος κατὰ δῆμον ἐείκοσι φῶτας ἀρίστους

εἷσε λόχον, ἑτέρωθι δ᾽ ἀνώγει δαῖτα πένεσθαι.

αὐτὰρ ὁ βῆ καλέων Ἀγαμέμνονα, ποιμένα λαῶν

ἵπποισιν καὶ ὄχεσφιν, ἀεικέα μερμηρίζων.

τὸν δ᾽ οὐκ εἰδότ᾽ ὄλεθρον ἀνήγαγε καὶ κατέπεφνεν

δειπνίσσας, ὥς τίς τε κατέκτανε βοῦν ἐπὶ φάτνῃ.

οὐδέ τις Ἀτρεΐδεω ἑτάρων λίπεθ᾽ οἵ οἱ ἕποντο,

οὐδέ τις Αἰγίσθου, ἀλλ᾽ ἔκταθεν ἐν μεγάροισιν.’

Samuel Butler’s translation with certain names Hellenised:

“‘Your brother and his ships escaped, for Hera protected him, but

when he was just about to reach the high promontory of Malea, he was

caught by a heavy gale which carried him out to sea again sorely against

his will, and drove him to the foreland where Thyestes used to dwell,

but where Aegisthus was then living. By and by, however, it seemed

as though he was to return safely after all, for the gods backed the

wind into its old quarter and they reached home; whereon Agamemnon

kissed his native soil, and shed tears of joy at finding himself in

his own country.

“‘Now there was a watchman whom Aegisthus kept always on the watch,

and to whom he had promised two talents of gold. This man had been

looking out for a whole year to make sure that Agamemnon did not give

him the slip and prepare war; when, therefore, this man saw Agamemnon

go by, he went and told Aegisthus who at once began to lay a plot

for him. He picked twenty of his bravest warriors and placed them

in ambuscade on one side the cloister, while on the opposite side

he prepared a banquet. Then he sent his chariots and horsemen to Agamemnon,

and invited him to the feast, but he meant foul play. He got him there,

all unsuspicious of the doom that was awaiting him, and killed him

when the banquet was over as though he were butchering an ox in the

shambles; not one of Agamemnon's followers was left alive, nor yet

one of Aegisthus', but they were all killed there in the cloisters.’

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Greek text hyperlinked to lexica via Perseus (perseus.tufts.edu):

ἀλλὰ καὶ ὣς μύθοισιν ἀμειβόμενος προσέειπον:

‘ταῦτα μὲν οὕτω δὴ τελέω, γέρον, ὡς σὺ κελεύεις.

ἀλλ᾽ ἄγε μοι τόδε εἰπὲ καὶ ἀτρεκέως κατάλεξον,

ἢ πάντες σὺν νηυσὶν ἀπήμονες ἦλθον Ἀχαιοί,

οὓς Νέστωρ καὶ ἐγὼ λίπομεν Τροίηθεν ἰόντες,

ἦέ τις ὤλετ᾽ ὀλέθρῳ ἀδευκέι ἧς ἐπὶ νηὸς

ἠὲ φίλων ἐν χερσίν, ἐπεὶ πόλεμον τολύπευσεν.’

ὣς ἐφάμην, ὁ δέ μ᾽ αὐτίκ᾽ ἀμειβόμενος προσέειπεν:

Ἀτρεΐδη, τί με ταῦτα διείρεαι; οὐδέ τί σε χρὴ

ἴδμεναι, οὐδὲ δαῆναι ἐμὸν νόον: οὐδέ σέ φημι

δὴν ἄκλαυτον ἔσεσθαι, ἐπὴν ἐὺ πάντα πύθηαι.

πολλοὶ μὲν γὰρ τῶν γε δάμεν, πολλοὶ δὲ λίποντο:

ἀρχοὶ δ᾽ αὖ δύο μοῦνοι Ἀχαιῶν χαλκοχιτώνων

ἐν νόστῳ ἀπόλοντο: μάχῃ δέ τε καὶ σὺ παρῆσθα.

εἷς δ᾽ ἔτι που ζωὸς κατερύκεται εὐρέι πόντῳ.

Αἴας μὲν μετὰ νηυσὶ δάμη δολιχηρέτμοισι.

Γυρῇσίν μιν πρῶτα Ποσειδάων ἐπέλασσεν

πέτρῃσιν μεγάλῃσι καὶ ἐξεσάωσε θαλάσσης:

καί νύ κεν ἔκφυγε κῆρα καὶ ἐχθόμενός περ Ἀθήνῃ,

εἰ μὴ ὑπερφίαλον ἔπος ἔκβαλε καὶ μέγ᾽ ἀάσθη:

φῆ ῥ᾽ ἀέκητι θεῶν φυγέειν μέγα λαῖτμα θαλάσσης.

τοῦ δὲ Ποσειδάων μεγάλ᾽ ἔκλυεν αὐδήσαντος:

αὐτίκ᾽ ἔπειτα τρίαιναν ἑλὼν χερσὶ στιβαρῇσιν

ἤλασε Γυραίην πέτρην, ἀπὸ δ᾽ ἔσχισεν αὐτήν:

καὶ τὸ μὲν αὐτόθι μεῖνε, τὸ δὲ τρύφος ἔμπεσε πόντῳ,

τῷ ῥ᾽ Αἴας τὸ πρῶτον ἐφεζόμενος μέγ᾽ ἀάσθη:

τὸν δ᾽ ἐφόρει κατὰ πόντον ἀπείρονα κυμαίνοντα.

ὣς ὁ μὲν ἔνθ᾽ ἀπόλωλεν, ἐπεὶ πίεν ἁλμυρὸν ὕδωρ.’

Samuel Butler’s translation with certain names Hellenised:

“ … nevertheless, I answered, ‘I will do

all, old man, that you have laid upon me; but now tell me, and tell

me true, whether all the Achaeans whom Nestor and I left behind us

when we set sail from Troy have got home safely, or whether any one

of them came to a bad end either on board his own ship or among his

friends when the days of his fighting were done.’

“‘Son of Atreus,’ he answered, ‘why ask me? You had better not know

what I can tell you, for your eyes will surely fill when you have

heard my story. Many of those about whom you ask are dead and gone,

but many still remain, and only two of the chief men among the Achaeans

perished during their return home. As for what happened on the field

of battle—you were there yourself. A third Achaean leader is still

at sea, alive, but hindered from returning. Ajax was wrecked, for

Poseidon drove him on to the great rocks of Gyrae; nevertheless, he

let him get safe out of the water, and in spite of all Athena’s hatred

he would have escaped death, if he had not ruined himself by boasting.

He said the gods could not drown him even though they had tried to

do so, and when Poseidon heard this large talk, he seized his trident

in his two brawny hands, and split the rock of Gyrae in two pieces.

The base remained where it was, but the part on which Ajax was sitting

fell headlong into the sea and carried Ajax with it; so he drank salt

water and was drowned …

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‘δαιμονίη μή μοί τι λίην ἀκαχίζεο θυμῷ:

οὐ γάρ τίς μ᾽ ὑπὲρ αἶσαν ἀνὴρ Ἄϝϊδι προϊάψει:

μοῖραν δ᾽ οὔ τινά φημι πεφυγμένον ἔμμεναι ἀνδρῶν,

οὐ κακὸν οὐδὲ μὲν ἐσθλόν, ἐπὴν τὰ πρῶτα γένηται.

ἀλλ᾽ εἰς ϝοἶκον ἰοῦσα τὰ σ᾽ αὐτῆς ϝἔργα κόμιζε

ἱστόν τ᾽ ἠλακάτην τε, καὶ ἀμφιπόλοισι κέλευε

ϝἔργον ἐποίχεσθαι: πόλεμος δ᾽ ἄνδρεσσι μελήσει

πᾶσι, μάλιστα δ᾽ ἐμοί, τοὶ Ἰλίῳ ἐγγεγάασιν.’ (VI.486-493)

‘Divinity, do not on my account grieve yourself too much at heart;

For there is no one, no man, who beyond my fate will throw me forth into Hades:

No one escapes his portion; I say, no such man exists,

Not a coward, not even a brave man, from the moment he was first born.

But go into the house, and manage the works that do belong to you—

The loom and the distaff—and instruct the assistants

Going back and forth at the work. War shall be the concern of men—

All of us, but me especially, of those who are native in Ilium.’

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‘δᾶϝερ ἐμεῖο κυνὸς κακομηχάνου ὀκρυοέσσης,

ὥς μ᾽ ὄφελ᾽ ἤματι τῷ ὅτε με πρῶτον τέκε μήτηρ

οἴχεσθαι προφέρουσα κακὴ ἀνέμοιο θύελλα

εἰς ὄρος ἢ εἰς κῦμα πολυφλοίσβοιο θαλάσσης,

ἔνθά με κῦμ᾽ ἀπόϝερσε πάρος τάδε ϝἔργα γενέσθαι.

αὐτὰρ ἐπεὶ τάδε γ᾽ ὧδε θεοὶ κακὰ τεκμήραντο,

ἀνδρὸς ἔπειτ᾽ ὤφελλον ἀμείνονος εἶναι ἄκοιτις,

ὃς ϝᾔδη νέμεσίν τε καὶ αἴσχεα πόλλ᾽ ἀνθρώπων.

τούτῳ δ᾽ οὔτ᾽ ἂρ νῦν φρένες ἔμπεδοι οὔτ᾽ ἄρ᾽ ὀπίσσω

ἔσσονται: τὼ καί μιν ἐπαυρήσεσθαι ὀΐω.

ἀλλ᾽ ἄγε νῦν εἴσελθε καὶ ἕζεο τῷδ᾽ ἐπὶ δίφρῳ

δᾶϝερ, ἐπεί σε μάλιστα πόνος φρένας ἀμφιβέβηκεν

εἵνεκ᾽ ἐμεῖο κυνὸς καὶ Ἀλεξάνδρου ἕνεκ᾽ ἄτης,

οἷσιν ἐπὶ Ζεὺς θῆκε κακὸν μόρον, ὡς καὶ ὀπίσσω

ἀνθρώποισι πελώμεθ᾽ ἀϝοίδιμοι ἐσσομένοισι.’ (Iliad VI.344-58)

‘Oh brother mine, of me the b***h-dog, the evil-contriver, a woman abhorrent,

If only on that day when first my mother bore me

There had come and carried me off an evil blast of storm wind

Into a mountain or a wave of the thunderous crashing sea

Where a wave had swept me away before these deeds came to pass.

But since the gods have thus ordained these things—

If only I had been a better man's wife,

A man who was sensible of the indignation and the many revilings of people.

But this man’s mind is not now stable, nor indeed will be

In future; so I suppose he shall reap the fruit of it.

But come now—enter in—and sit upon this chair,

Brother dear, since it is you most of all whose mind is beset with trouble,

Because of me, the b***h, and because of Alexander’s folly—

We upon whom Zeus has placed an evil fate, so that even in the hereafter

Of humanity we be sung about—songs for men yet to be.’

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ὣς οἵ γ᾽ ἀμφίεπον τάφον Ἕκτορος ἱπποδάμοιο.

This is the last line of the Iliad: ‘So did the men arrange the burial of Hector, tamer of horses.’

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3. Quintilian’s witness

It is often claimed that Quintilian’s description of the Latin accent is hampered or confused by the use of descriptive terms borrowed from Greek grammarians:

The Roman accent was a stress, while the Greek was a pitch accent … Roman grammarians borrow the Greek terminology and speak of accents in terms of pitch.

And in a more recent Loeb edition:

The use of Greek terminology gave rise to considerable confusion and difficulty for the Latin grammarians, who have to use gravis for unaccented syllables, and acutus both for the tonic acute accent of Greek and for the stressed syllables of Latin.

There are in fact three terms in Quintilian’s description of Latin prosody: ‘acute’, ‘flex’ and ‘grave’. The more recent editor does not even mention Quintilian’s use of ‘flex’, one presumes because he is embarrassed to impute to Quintilian the idea that Latin had a circumflex. He is also misleading about Quintilian’s use of gravis, as we shall see. It is thought that a sort of Greek envy, or emulation, guides Roman poetry and scholarship generally, in this case to the point of misrepresenting the Latin accent as though it were defined by a Greek-style pitch change.

These descriptors are indeed calques of the Greek terms ὀξύς, (περι)σπώμενον and βαρύς. The confusion, however, seems largely to be in the modern interpretation rather than the ancient author. A Latin theory of the contonation will be seen to vindicate Quintilian’s use of Greek terms, to describe completely homologous phenomena in Latin in a completely homologous way.

It will be shown in particular that Quintilian does not mean ‘unaccented syllables’ when he designates them as ‘grave’, but is using this term to describe specifically the svarita, the down-glide of the contonation that automatically follows the pitch rise. In this sense his description, applying Greek concepts in a correct way to describe Latin phenomena, may serve to correct the misdirection caused by the use of this term ‘grave’ in the notational practice of written Greek manuscripts, where it indicates by a downward angled sign the suppression of an acute, rather than a positive phonic feature in its own right.

In Greek grammar a whole class of words (heretofore pointlessly) were called ‘barytone’. Such a word is ἄνθρωπος; under the new theory, we describe this word as ‘barytone on the penult.’ The voice rises on the antepenult, as indicated by the acute sign, then falls in pitch over the two moras of the long penult. The prominent syllable according to Allen’s stress rules is this penult. Latin is supposed to stress a long penult, and for Quintilian this means it must bear the acute or the flex (e.g. anthrôpus). Quintilian cites a name of Greek origin that Latin speakers pronounce with apparent error in relation to Latin usage: Céthēgus. He cites other names of Greek origin that from his youth were pronounced with pitch rise on the antepenult, although the penult is long, whereas the Latin habit should yield Cethêgus. He also cites Cámillus, a Latin name that shows this prosody in pronunciation, where the Latin rule expects Camíllus.

The errors in question are described as switching acute and grave—as when Camíllus is pronounced acute on the first syllable, and so the penult switches from acute to grave—or switching grave for flex, as happens in the penult when Cethêgus is pronounced with initial acute. (Quintilian seems always to focus on the pitch pattern of the penult.) Translators err badly in this passage when they have Quintilian say that acute on the intitial syllable Céthegus causes the quantity of the middle syllable to change; they presume upon the text—there is no mention of quantity; the only change (mutatur, Inst. Orat. 1.5.23) the author is discussing in the passage is the change from one kind of accent to another, not long to short. The middle ‘e’ remains long, but is pronounced grave rather than flex.

It is in fact a salient feature of both classical Latin and Greek accentuation that the accented syllables do not affect the quantity or vowel grade of neighbouring syllables in pronunciation. (There is of course evidence that the historical initial stress in old Latin did produce these effects in unstressed syllables.) In this sense the alleged Latin ‘stress’ does not bring with it the usual most obvious effects of stress upon unstressed syllables, and by itself this suggests its nature may have more kinship with the pitch accent of Greek than is generally thought.

When Quintilian articulates the Latin accent rule, where the acute must occur within the last three syllables of a word (1.5.30-31), but never the last one, it is worth noting how he describes the case of a short penult: ‘a short syllable in this place will invariably have a grave accent, and so will make the syllable which precedes it (the antepenultimate) acute.’ Note that a grave necessitates an immediately prior acute. This is an odd way of putting things if the story was simply that the acute located the stressed syllable in a word, and that all unstressed syllables are ‘grave’. Quintilian again focuses on the penult, or as he puts it, the middle syllable of the terminal three: whether this syllable is acute, flex, or grave, determines the accentual melody of the whole word. In point of fact, ‘grave’ cannot mean simply unstressed: Quintilian’s usage describes a prosodic phenomenon that is immediately, and necessarily, post-acute. The Greek borrowings can present the non-Latinate shape of a long penult that is all the same grave: that is, not ‘unaccented’, and neither acute nor flex (‘accented’), but grave post-acute. In this entire passage (Inst. Orat. 1.5.22-31), ‘grave’ therefore refers to the second part of the contonation when it occurs on its own syllable, rather than as part of the circumflex.

Quintilian’s description decides in favour of the first formulation of the Latin contonation rule:

In every word, the acute falls within three syllables, whether these are the only syllables in the word or the last three, and in these it is either on the penultimate or on the antepenultimate. Moreover, of the three syllables of which I speak, the middle, if long, will be either acute or circumflex; a short syllable in this place will invariably have a grave accent, and so will make the syllable which precedes it (the antepenultimate) acute.

The formulation in terms of moras predicts that closed penults (where the vowel is ‘long by position’) will show pitch rise on the short vowel with the contonation completed within the syllable (círcus), and that naturally long penults will show the circumflex (mandâre). It seems clear that Quintilian excludes from native Latin the shape of Greek ἄνθρωπος, with rise on the antepenult and long svarita or grave on the penult, but remembers this shape from his youth in the pronunciation of certain Greek names in Latin (plus the name Cámillus!).

What emerges is that these three calques of terms from Greek grammar—acute, grave and (circum)flex—are in fact perfectly natural descriptors for the prosody of Latin, as suited for Latin as they ever were for Greek. This is because Latin also had natural quantity in its vowels and a recessive contonation, which results in these three possible effects when the contonation is placed in such a way as to be either disyllabic or monosyllabic. The key difference lies in the fact Quintilian points out: that the acute (the beginning of a contonation) is differently restricted in its recession than in Greek; it can never occur on the ultima, and because the circumflex contains an acute, neither can the circumflex land there except in the case of monosyllables. In Greek, the restrictions are on the number of moras allowed after the end of the contonation—that is, its immediately trailing βαρύς or svarita component—the feature Quintilian calls ‘grave’, ‘heavy’. Hence in Greek there are oxytone final words that can sound with enclitics, and perispomenon words (circumflex-final), neither of which can occur except in particular circumstances in Latin. Quintilian mentions grammarians who encourage pronouncing certain prepositions with acute-final accents, in the case of circum to avoid confusion with the noun (1.5.25-7), although he himself treats them as proclitics which lose their accent in favour of the accent of the word governed; he cites qui primus (qui prîmus) and ab oris (ab ôris) from line 1 of the Aeneid.

There is therefore no Greek envy going on here. In sharing the disyllabic contonation, and therefore being both tonal and quantitative, same as Greek, Latin is naturally suited to reinforcing Greek-style metres. Of course there is a level of abstraction involved, if these idiosyncratic metres were simply borrowed rather than grounded in traditional Roman dance practice. Some of the Greek metres had no doubt become classical forms rather than stimulants of a living jazz. But the German Mozart set new standards for Italian opera, and brought Italian coloratura to the German Magic Flute. Quintilian is not the least bit confused or filtered when he uses the terms acute, grave and flex to describe Latin prosody. Just as in Greek, this prosody in the classical period was genuinely tonal, and did not have the deleterious effects of stress on unstressed syllables.

As I mentioned, the prehistory of Latin does show direct evidence of the effects of stress; Quintilian’s contemporary forms show the evidence of an antique initial stress upon the following syllable, which persists in the spelling when the accent (mysteriously) became a recessive tonal prominence (e.g., ínimicus > inamicus). I maintain that there is something as yet unexplained about the emergence of this species of recessive, tonal accentuation across Greek, Latin and classical Sanskrit.

It is possible Quintilian gives us a snapshot that describes only the practice of his day, which may once have been different. He himself speaks about the pronunciation of Greek names that he heard from teachers in his youth, who performed the grave (svarita) on a long penult where the vetus lex,as he understood it, required a flex. Hence it is possible to wonder how old the old law really was, and if perhaps the practice in the era of Virgil, or in the idiomatic usage of Virgil, may have been different—perhaps more Greek in the sense that it was possible in some cases for the down-glide to occupy two moras. Quintilian, for example, declares solemnly that the heroic verse does not allow an iambus (1.5.29). And yet there is the third word of the Aeneid.

4. Virgil

In other writing I have already made the case for the prosody of canō. Let us now also add the Aeneid’s second word, virum—or virumque with its influencing enclitic. Both these disyllables are unheroic iambs, where the long final coincides with the thesis of the dactyl. The Latin rule stresses them as vírum and cánō, however, each accenting in context the second short of their respective dactyls, and leaving the ictus unstressed. This seems an unlikely effect to be intentional in the first line of the poem, for its very first phrase and cadence at mid-line. In the case of virumque one grammatical school allows that the enclitic causes the accent to shift to the ictus position, virúmque, but we are still left with cánō accenting the foot and line audibly out of place. I am well aware that there may be many educated modern generations used to pronouncing cáno here, from a distance beyond that of Quintilian’s barbarians. But the truth of the matter lies in the Latin contonation.

This is not to deny that Quintilian’s ‘old law’ is not old. It is rather to claim that Virgil’s hexameter, like Homer’s, was a locus of excepta for the sake of the music—Musae gratia. Iambic disyllables represent the only shape where recession of the acute portion of the contonation requires that the down-glide occupy a long syllable of two moras. It seems more than plausible that Virgil deployed such shapes for a rare ultima emphasis. The voice still rises on the short penult, but descends on pitch on the incantation of cánò, ‘I sing’.

The dispute about accentual shifts due to enclitics is also resolved by means of the Latin contonation: the idea that the accent does shift may have come precisely from examples like vírùmque, where the enlitic happens to close the final syllable of virum. This brings the grave down-glide into prominence, perceived as a shift in prominence from the preceding acute. Such a shift is indeed highly unlikely in cases like egomet and amāreve, cited by Gildersleeve and Lodge, which the disputed enclitic rule would stress as egómet and amāréve. The enclitics here do not change the equation of moras, however, and one should expect the old law applied to the whole collocation, in these cases causing no shift: égomet and amáreve. (In the latter case, however, we see perhaps a change from flex to acute, amâre + ve = amáreve.) In this way, analysing in light of the contonation, as I would claim does Quintilian, helps explain an occasional accentual shift caused by enclitics in a completely straightforward way.

There follows a suggested performance text for the opening of Virgil, using acutes for the pitch rise of the contonation and for short vowels in closed syllables, circumflexes for the contonations completed within long vowels, and graves written to follow acutes only on the rare occasions when they are more prominent than the acutes in Virgil. One rediscovers a pattern, familiar to the method from Homer, of syncopation yielding to moments of agreement, but with all the nasalisations and falling cadences of Latin.

Árma vírùmque cánò, Troîae qui prîmus ab ôris

Itáliam, fâto prófugus, Lavíniaque vênit

lítora, múltum ílle et térris iactâtus et álto

vî súperum saêvae mémorem Iunônis ob îram;

múlta quoque et béllo pássus, dum cónderet úrbem,

inférrètque déòs Látio, génus únde Latînum,

Albánìque pátrès, atque áltae moénia Rômae.

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This performance indulges the actor more than the reciter. It serves to demonstrate the histrionic possibilities inherent in the composition when it is no longer constrained by the reciter’s feeling for an underlying dance movement. The text is Allen’s Oxford edition, and I am calling the pronunciation ‘Attic’ for its lack of digamma and other infelicities; but the prosodic data, and the theory of its implementation, is exactly the same as for the recitations already uploaded. You are warmly invited to compare them on this site! Homeric poetry is extraordinarily adaptable. This poetry can also be rendered as isometric dance music, and, in the opposite direction, more indulgently histrionic than is attempted here. An actor can only feel with each rendering that there are still many roads untaken. Enjoy!

ἄνδρα μοι ἔννεπε, μοῦσα, πολύτροπον, ὃς μάλα πολλὰ

πλάγχθη, ἐπεὶ Τροίης ἱερὸν πτολίεθρον ἔπερσεν:

πολλῶν δ᾽ ἀνθρώπων ἴδεν ἄστεα καὶ νόον ἔγνω,

πολλὰ δ᾽ ὅ γ᾽ ἐν πόντῳ πάθεν ἄλγεα ὃν κατὰ θυμόν,

ἀρνύμενος ἥν τε ψυχὴν καὶ νόστον ἑταίρων.

ἀλλ᾽ οὐδ᾽ ὣς ἑτάρους ἐρρύσατο, ἱέμενός περ:

αὐτῶν γὰρ σφετέρῃσιν ἀτασθαλίῃσιν ὄλοντο,

νήπιοι, οἳ κατὰ βοῦς Ὑπερίονος Ἠελίοιο

ἤσθιον: αὐτὰρ ὁ τοῖσιν ἀφείλετο νόστιμον ἦμαρ.

τῶν ἁμόθεν γε, θεά, θύγατερ Διός, εἰπὲ καὶ ἡμῖν.

ἔνθ᾽ ἄλλοι μὲν πάντες, ὅσοι φύγον αἰπὺν ὄλεθρον,

οἴκοι ἔσαν, πόλεμόν τε πεφευγότες ἠδὲ θάλασσαν:

τὸν δ᾽ οἶον νόστου κεχρημένον ἠδὲ γυναικὸς

νύμφη πότνι᾽ ἔρυκε Καλυψὼ δῖα θεάων

ἐν σπέσσι γλαφυροῖσι, λιλαιομένη πόσιν εἶναι.

ἀλλ᾽ ὅτε δὴ ἔτος ἦλθε περιπλομένων ἐνιαυτῶν,

τῷ οἱ ἐπεκλώσαντο θεοὶ οἶκόνδε νέεσθαι

εἰς Ἰθάκην, οὐδ᾽ ἔνθα πεφυγμένος ἦεν ἀέθλων

καὶ μετὰ οἷσι φίλοισι. θεοὶ δ᾽ ἐλέαιρον ἅπαντες

νόσφι Ποσειδάωνος: ὁ δ᾽ ἀσπερχὲς μενέαινεν

ἀντιθέῳ Ὀδυσῆι πάρος ἣν γαῖαν ἱκέσθαι.

ἀλλ᾽ ὁ μὲν Αἰθίοπας μετεκίαθε τηλόθ᾽ ἐόντας,

Αἰθίοπας τοὶ διχθὰ δεδαίαται, ἔσχατοι ἀνδρῶν,

οἱ μὲν δυσομένου Ὑπερίονος οἱ δ᾽ ἀνιόντος,

ἀντιόων ταύρων τε καὶ ἀρνειῶν ἑκατόμβης.

ἔνθ᾽ ὅ γ᾽ ἐτέρπετο δαιτὶ παρήμενος: οἱ δὲ δὴ ἄλλοι

Ζηνὸς ἐνὶ μεγάροισιν Ὀλυμπίου ἁθρόοι ἦσαν.

τοῖσι δὲ μύθων ἦρχε πατὴρ ἀνδρῶν τε θεῶν τε:

μνήσατο γὰρ κατὰ θυμὸν ἀμύμονος Αἰγίσθοιο,

τόν ῥ᾽ Ἀγαμεμνονίδης τηλεκλυτὸς ἔκταν᾽ Ὀρέστης:

τοῦ ὅ γ᾽ ἐπιμνησθεὶς ἔπε᾽ ἀθανάτοισι μετηύδα:

‘ὢ πόποι, οἷον δή νυ θεοὺς βροτοὶ αἰτιόωνται:

ἐξ ἡμέων γάρ φασι κάκ᾽ ἔμμεναι, οἱ δὲ καὶ αὐτοὶ

σφῇσιν ἀτασθαλίῃσιν ὑπὲρ μόρον ἄλγε᾽ ἔχουσιν,

ὡς καὶ νῦν Αἴγισθος ὑπὲρ μόρον Ἀτρεΐδαο

γῆμ᾽ ἄλοχον μνηστήν, τὸν δ᾽ ἔκτανε νοστήσαντα,

εἰδὼς αἰπὺν ὄλεθρον, ἐπεὶ πρό οἱ εἴπομεν ἡμεῖς,

Ἑρμείαν πέμψαντες, ἐύσκοπον ἀργεϊφόντην,

μήτ᾽ αὐτὸν κτείνειν μήτε μνάασθαι ἄκοιτιν:

ἐκ γὰρ Ὀρέσταο τίσις ἔσσεται Ἀτρεΐδαο,

ὁππότ᾽ ἂν ἡβήσῃ τε καὶ ἧς ἱμείρεται αἴης.

ὣς ἔφαθ᾽ Ἑρμείας, ἀλλ᾽ οὐ φρένας Αἰγίσθοιο

πεῖθ᾽ ἀγαθὰ φρονέων: νῦν δ᾽ ἁθρόα πάντ᾽ ἀπέτισεν.'

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David’s Performance Text

The most prominent syllables under the new theory of the ancient accent are printed in bold; syllables are seasoned with occasional digammas.

τοῦ ὅ γ᾽ ἐπιμνησθεὶς ἔπε᾽ ἀθανάτοισι μετηύδα:

‘ὢ πόποι, οἷον δή νυ θεοὺς βροτοὶ αἰτιόωνται:

ἐξ ἡμέων γάρ φασι κάκ᾽ ἔμμεναι, οἳ δὲ καὶ αὐτοί

σφῇσιν ἀτασθαλίῃσιν ὑπὲρ μόρον ἄλγε᾽ ἔχουσιν,

ὡς καὶ νῦν Αἴγισθος ὑπὲρ μόρον Ἀτρεϝΐδαο

γῆμ᾽ ἄλοχον μνηστήν, τὸν δ᾽ ἔκτανε νοστήσαντα,

ϝεἰδὼς αἰπὺν ὄλεθρον, ἐπεὶ πρό ϝοἱ εἴπομεν ἡμεῖς,

Ἑρμείαν πέμψαντες, ἐύσκοπον ἀργεϊφόντην,

μήτ᾽ αὐτὸν κτείνειν μήτε μνάασθαι ἄκοιτιν:

ἐκ γὰρ Ὀρέσταο τίσις ἔσσεται Ἀτρεϝΐδαο,

ὁππότ᾽ ἂν ἡβήσῃ τε καὶ ἧς ἱμείρεται αἴης.

ὣς ἔφαθ᾽ Ἑρμείας, ἀλλ᾽ οὐ φρένας Αἰγίσθοιο

πεῖθ᾽ ἀγαθὰ φρονέων: νῦν δ᾽ ἁθρόα πάντ᾽ ἀπέτεισεν.

From ‘A literal impression of Homer’s Odyssea from someone who’s literally heard it’, by A. P. David:

Preoccupied with that, he voiced his lines among the deathless:

‘God damn, get a load of how these mortals blame the gods:

For it’s down to us they say that bad things exist, but it’s that lot themselves

Through their very own recklessness, get grief beyond what is budgeted,

As just now, Aegisthus, beyond the budget, went and fucked Atreides’

Wined and wedded wife—and the man himself he murdered upon his return home—

Knowing full well his steep destruction! Since we told him beforehand ourselves—

We sent Hermes, the watcher, the Slayer of Argus,

“Don’t be killing the man, no, don’t seduce his wife—

From Orestes there will be a reckoning for Atreides,

Whenever he comes of age and lusts for his livelihood.”

That’s how Hermes spoke, but he did not persuade the mind of Aegisthus

Well-meaning as he was: now he’s paid the price, all in a heap.’

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David’s Performance Text:

ἔνθ᾽ ἄλλοι μὲν πάντες, ὅσοι φύγον αἰπὺν ὄλεθρον,

οἴκοι ἔσαν, πόλεμόν τε πεφευγότες ἠδὲ θάλασσαν:

τὸν δ᾽ οἶον νόστου κεχρημένον ἠδὲ γυναικὸς

νύμφη πότνι᾽ ἔρυκε Καλυψὼ δῖα θεάϝων

ἐν σπέσσι γλαφυροῖσι, λιλαιομένη πόσιν εἶναι.

ἀλλ᾽ ὅτε δὴ ϝἔτος ἦλθε περιπλομένων ἐνιαυτῶν,

τῷ οἱ ἐπεκλώσαντο θεοὶ ϝοἶκόνδε νέεσθαι

εἰς Ἰθάκην, οὐδ᾽ ἔνθα πεφυγμένος ἦεν ἀέθλων

καὶ μετὰ οἷσι φίλοισι. θεοὶ δ᾽ ἐλέαιρον ἅπαντες

νόσφι Ποσειδάϝωνος: ὁ δ᾽ ἀσπερχὲς μενέαινεν

ἀντιθέῳ Ὀδυσῆϝι πάρος ἣν γαῖαν ἱκέσθαι.

ἀλλ᾽ ὁ μὲν Αἰθίοπας μετεκίαθε τηλόθ᾽ ἐόντας,

Αἰθίοπας τοὶ διχθὰ δεδαίαται, ἔσχατοι ἀνδρῶν,

οἱ μὲν δυσομένου Ὑπερίονος οἱ δ᾽ ἀνιόντος,

ἀντιόων ταύρων τε καὶ ἀρνειῶν ἑκατόμβης.

ἔνθ᾽ ὅ γε τέρπετο δαιτὶ παρήμενος: οἱ δὲ δὴ ἄλλοι

Ζηνὸς ἐνὶ μεγάροισιν Ὀλυμπίου ἁθρόοι ἦσαν.

τοῖσι δὲ μύθων ἦρχε πατὴρ ἀνδρῶν τε θεῶν τε:

μνήσατο γὰρ κατὰ θυμὸν ἀμύμονος Αἰγίσθοιο,

τόν ῥ᾽ Ἀγαμεμνονίδης τηλεκλυτὸς ἔκταν᾽ Ὀρέστης:

From ‘A literal impression of Homer’s Odyssea from someone who’s literally heard it’, by A. P. David:

There were all the rest of them, as many as fled steep destruction,

Already at home; escapees from war, not to mention the sea.

It was that man alone, in want of his return home, not to mention his woman—the wife—

Whom a bossy young nymph was holding back: Calypso, radiant among goddesses,

Within her hollowed caves, desiring him as her husband.

But when the year arrived, as round and around they come to the point again,

Within which the gods spun for him to make his return home

Into Ithaca, not even there was he escaped from his struggles,

Even among his own near and dear. And all of the gods felt pity

Apart from Poseidon; that one used to rage in a frenzy

Against Odysseus, god’s match, before he reached his motherland.

The thing is, that god was gone visiting among the Flaming-Eyes, who exist afar off.

Your Aethiopes are divided in two, the furthest distant of men,

Some where Hyperion sets and some where he rises.

He went to attend a roasted cookout of bulls and young rams.

There he was, at any rate, having a good time seated at the feast. But the rest of them

Were gathered in the chambers of Zeus, the Olympian.

And amongst them he started the conversation, the father of men and of gods,

For he minded, in his life’s breath, about blameless Aegisthus,

The man whom Agamemnon’s son killed—far-famed Orestes.

Greek text hyperlinked to lexica via Perseus (perseus.tufts.edu):

ἔνθ᾽ ἄλλοι μὲν πάντες, ὅσοι φύγον αἰπὺν ὄλεθρον,

οἴκοι ἔσαν, πόλεμόν τε πεφευγότες ἠδὲ θάλασσαν:

τὸν δ᾽ οἶον νόστου κεχρημένον ἠδὲ γυναικὸς

νύμφη πότνι᾽ ἔρυκε Καλυψὼ δῖα θεάων

ἐν σπέσσι γλαφυροῖσι, λιλαιομένη πόσιν εἶναι.

ἀλλ᾽ ὅτε δὴ ἔτος ἦλθε περιπλομένων ἐνιαυτῶν,

τῷ οἱ ἐπεκλώσαντο θεοὶ οἶκόνδε νέεσθαι

εἰς Ἰθάκην, οὐδ᾽ ἔνθα πεφυγμένος ἦεν ἀέθλων

καὶ μετὰ οἷσι φίλοισι. θεοὶ δ᾽ ἐλέαιρον ἅπαντες

νόσφι Ποσειδάωνος: ὁ δ᾽ ἀσπερχὲς μενέαινεν

ἀντιθέῳ Ὀδυσῆι πάρος ἣν γαῖαν ἱκέσθαι.

ἀλλ᾽ ὁ μὲν Αἰθίοπας μετεκίαθε τηλόθ᾽ ἐόντας,

Αἰθίοπας τοὶ διχθὰ δεδαίαται, ἔσχατοι ἀνδρῶν,

οἱ μὲν δυσομένου Ὑπερίονος οἱ δ᾽ ἀνιόντος,

ἀντιόων ταύρων τε καὶ ἀρνειῶν ἑκατόμβης.

ἔνθ᾽ ὅ γ᾽ ἐτέρπετο δαιτὶ παρήμενος: οἱ δὲ δὴ ἄλλοι

Ζηνὸς ἐνὶ μεγάροισιν Ὀλυμπίου ἁθρόοι ἦσαν.

τοῖσι δὲ μύθων ἦρχε πατὴρ ἀνδρῶν τε θεῶν τε:

μνήσατο γὰρ κατὰ θυμὸν ἀμύμονος Αἰγίσθοιο,

τόν ῥ᾽ Ἀγαμεμνονίδης τηλεκλυτὸς ἔκταν᾽ Ὀρέστης:

Samuel Butler’s prose translation with certain names Hellenised:

So now all who escaped death in battle or by shipwreck had got safely

home except Odysseus, and he, though he was longing to return to his

wife and country, was detained by the goddess Calypso, who had got

him into a large cave and wanted to marry him. But as years went by,

there came a time when the gods settled that he should go back to

Ithaca; even then, however, when he was among his own people, his

troubles were not yet over; nevertheless all the gods had now begun

to pity him except Poseidon, who still persecuted him without ceasing

and would not let him get home.

Now Poseidon had gone off to the Ethiopians, who are at the world's

end, and lie in two halves, the one looking West and the other East.

He had gone there to accept a hecatomb of sheep and oxen, and was

enjoying himself at his festival; but the other gods met in the house

of Olympian Zeus, and the sire of gods and men spoke first. At that

moment he was thinking of Aegisthus, who had been killed by Agamemnon's

son Orestes;

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David’s performance text:

The most prominent syllables under the new theory of the ancient accent are printed in bold. On occasion the presence of digamma obtrudes into the convention; a discussion of the issues involved for both text and performance will be forthcoming as this project unfolds.

ἄνδρα μοι ἔννεπε, μοῦσα, πολύτροπον, ὃς μάλα πολλά

πλάγχθη, ’πεὶ Τροίης ἱερὸν πτολίεθρον ἔπερσε:

πολλῶν δ᾽ ἀνθρώπων ἴδεν ἄστεα καὶ νόϝον ἔγνω,

πολλὰ δ᾽ ὅ γ᾽ ἐν πόντῳ πάθεν ἄλγεα ὃν κατὰ θυμόν, 5

ἀρνύμενος ἥν τε ψυχὴν καὶ νόστον ἑταίρων.

ἀλλ᾽ οὐδ᾽ ὧς ἑτάρους ἐρρύσατο, ἱέμενός περ:

αὐτῶν γὰρ σφετέρῃσιν ἀτασθαλίῃσιν ὄλοντο,

νήπιοι, οἳ κατὰ βοῦς Ὑπερίονος Ἠϝελίοιο

ἤσθιον: αὐτὰρ ὁ τοῖσιν ἀφείλετο νόστιμον ἦμαρ. 10

τῶν ἁμόθεν γε, θεά, θύγατερ Διὸς εἰπὲ καὶ ἡμῖν.

Samuel Butler’s prose translation, with certain names Hellenised:

Tell me, O muse, of that ingenious hero who travelled far and wide

after he had sacked the famous town of Troy. Many cities did he visit,

and many were the nations with whose manners and customs he was acquainted;

moreover he suffered much by sea while trying to save his own life

and bring his men safely home; but do what he might he could not save

his men, for they perished through their own sheer folly in eating

the cattle of the Sun-god Hyperion; so the god prevented them from

ever reaching home. Tell me, too, about all these things, O daughter

of Zeus, from whatsoever source you may know them.

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