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.1 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.
In Greek:
A. P. David, Singing Homer’s Spell: The End of Oralist Poetics. Chandler: Mother Pacha, 2024.
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