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.
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.’
In Greek:
Share this post