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.”1
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.
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.
In Greek:
A. P. David, The Dance of the Muses: Choral Theory and Ancient Greek Poetics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006, 140.
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