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.1
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.
In Greek:
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