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.
In Greek:
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