Odyssey 8.381-498
We are building inexorably to the telling of Odysseus’ famous tale of his wanderings, which it seems we must already know to some extent before it is told. There is a rather nifty prolepsis when Odysseus, at Queen Arete’s bidding, ties a knot to secure the lid of the chest which is to carry his treasures new-gathered from the high society of Phaeacia. It is a special knot which Circe had taught him. We are reminded that the Odysseus to whom we have just been introduced, naked, shivering and alone on the island of Scheria, is already someone who has seen a bit of the world, perhaps even the underworld, and has come to learn a thing or two of the wise woman’s arts. The whole tale lies in this man’s past and belongs to his inner makeup, although for us, it is still a thing anticipated. One wonders if Arete, when she calls on him to tie a knot, then peeks over his shoulder as he proceeds, as though to confirm a suspicion. She is yet another inscrutable female who knows what’s what.
One advantage of there being such a gulf—not merely a distance—between our reception of Homer’s text and its original ‘concert experience’, is that we can we read its dead letters at our leisure—like studying a score, or reading album lyrics. That is, for all that we are excluded forever from the inner circle, of those privileged to register and respond to Homer’s words in their original dialects and tempo, we can sit down with our dictionaries and grammars and pore over Homer’s lines in our sweet time—all the time that Homer’s artwork appears to deserve. We all know very well, from experience with recordings and paintings and even television series, how much we are prone to miss on a first hearing or viewing. Yet the tiny fraction of Mozart’s contemporaries who ever got to witness one of his operas, only ever took in such a performance once. Once! They couldn’t play the CD. Likely this was true also for the first audiences of performances from Homer’s compositions. It seems crucial for our experience of works of art, however, that we have the opportunity to revisit and deepen our awareness of their riches. Through the apparatuses of grammars and lexica, even our first encounters of Homer today are revisits. Surely many distortions build on each other, like successive prisms upon the transmission of light, in our approach to texts otherwise unreadable except by these means. But surely also, those privileged first auditors of Homer, experiencing the Muse together at a show, must have missed something of the substance and perhaps the skill and wisdom of the art, simply for hearing it virgin and in real time? There is joy in the study that is quite different from joys in the moment.
Consider this business of the knot, for example. It is but a passing detail, as we are carried along in the tide of the storyteller’s momentum, toward the revelation of the stranger’s name among the Phaeacians. But I reckon an artist would take a special interest in such a thing as a knot, however quickly he deals with it. Odysseus’ one is called a ποικίλος δεσμός (poikilos desmos), an ‘intricate bond’. The adjective can describe refinement and design in works of art as well as a complexity of mind (ποικιλομήτης, poikilomētēs, a uniquely Odyssean epithet). The seal on Odysseus’ Phaeacian treasure, both the treasure and the seal, seem to demand an interpretation of symbols. Storytellers are constantly in the business of tying and loosening knots. The loosening of a knot can well describe the experience of the climax of a drama. Paradoxically, the marriage at comedy’s end is once again a tying of the knot, a reinforcing of the social bonds that had risked being unraveled through all the escapades and plot twists. “There’s a double meaning in that.” By contrast, a knot intrinsic, which cannot be untied, speaks more to tragedy. It remains to be seen what a knot contrived by Circe may portend.
All the knot of tension caused by Euryalus the mock giant’s challenge to the stranger, resulting in his explosive and frightening discus throw, is now released. Odysseus initiates this change: sensitive to how embarrassed his host Alcinous has become over his failed boasts—and possibly fearful or hostile, in that he no longer seems to fancy the stranger as a son-in-law—the hero volunteers unsolicited his admiration for the dance display he has just seen. “Wonder owns me as I look on.” Alcinous’ Phaeacians really are the best at singing and dancing (and perhaps also feasting and sex).
Alcinous in grateful response calls for a collection of gifts, a levy upon all the significant oligarchs in the land, and calls out Euryalus in particular, to make it up to the stranger with words and a gift. I do not have any notes in particular on the exchange between Euryalus and Odysseus. Perhaps someone else has seen the drama in it? There is ceremony and cosplayed gentility. The gift is a copper sword with silver hilt, encased in a scabbard of worked ivory, with a whirling pattern on both sides. Swords are phallic things which kill people; I suppose when there’s not a war on, they could also cut knots, and vegetables.
The stranger puts the sword around his shoulders. When does he next take it off? Can he wear it when he sits to dinner? I only ask because a sword will be a useful and much-used prop for Odysseus when he tells the tale of his wanderings. I do believe this text works on a meta-level where its performer, who is of course playing both Euryalus and the stranger in this exchange, might want it made clear how Odysseus could have a sword to draw from its scabbard, when Homer takes on his persona for the four books of the Tale. Of course the performer must use his staff to stand in for all such objects. But when he becomes Odysseus, who is soon to become Odysseus playing Odysseus in his story, I believe it helps if we know that Odysseus the teller in Alcinous’ hall has a sword to draw on, when he plays Odysseus the hero in his adventure story. A concern for this kind of stage logic in Homer—for all that such a concern is as paradoxical as it is pragmatic—seems partly to motivate a line which makes it explicit that the stranger has slung and worn the sword that was gifted him. This visual fact would ultimately serve Homer’s audience, in that it anticipates and puts to bed a question that may annoy the punters: how did Odysseus telling stories in Phaeacia, get hold of a prop sword?
A sense of elegiac ritual comes to enhance the exchanges in this moment. Alcinous recalls the words and the gift of Menelaus to Telemachus (4.591-2) when he offers a gift to the stranger of his own beautiful golden chalice,
… so that in remembrance of me, all the days,
He may pour libation in his hall to Zeus, and the rest of the gods. (8.431-2)
Of course both these benedictions foreshadow the eucharistic prayer over the wine from the synoptic gospels. It is not always clear how lines from the Scriptures become lines in the mass ritual; David Tracy would speak of the ‘sacramental imagination’, not a thing subject in obvious ways to dogma or logic. Likely some lines or scenes originating in Homer came to play a part in Hellenic ritual as well. But the prayer over communion at the Passover supper—really a ‘Last Symposium’, on that quasi-Hellenistic occasion—seems self-aware even in the text of the gospels that it is meant to be reenacted in ritual. (There is no such eucharistic moment, however, in John’s telling of the Last Symposium.) What is extraordinary is to find this ritual feeling fully there in the Homeric voice—which must be considered pre-Greek, let alone pre-Hellenistic—over the pouring of wine from a memorial cup: ‘Whenever you do this, do this in memory of me.’
Most wondrous is the final exchange between Nausicaa and the still anonymous stranger. She is the latest woman in the Odyssey—I should venture, for the first time as herself a grown woman—to take a stand ‘by the pillar of the close-constructed roof.’ She also asks to be remembered, whenever the man she rescued gets home to the mother earth of his fathers:
Remember me: because it’s me first of all you owe your life’s ransom. (8.462)
‘Life’s ransom’ (ζωάγρια, zōagria) is a starkly arresting concept for Nausicaa to invoke. In form it recalls the μοιχάγρια (moikhagria), ‘adulterer’s ransom’, which was expected for the release of Ares in Demodocus’ song. (There was reason to speculate that the adulterer’s price was his castration.) The zōagria is the ransom that must be paid to release a prisoner alive from the enemy, rather than leave him to suffer execution or slavery. I think it permissible to conclude that Nausicaa feels a property in the naked river man; that he owes her something, perhaps even that she has been betrayed of an expectation. Perhaps the last is too much to read into to the tone and import of her diction, but it’s an edgy word, ζωάγρια. It implies the prisoner is her enemy, but that she will show mercy—for a price.
All that Odysseus can offer to pay his debt, is a word. When either Menelaus or Alcinous asked his guest to remember him whenever they poured wine from their gifted chalice, there was no response. But when Nausicaa also asks to be remembered, the stranger invokes Zeus as ‘husband of Hera’, and promises that should he get home, he would worship Nausicaa “continually all the days,” as though to a god:
σὺ γάρ μ’ ἐβιώσαο, κούρη. (8.468)
For you lifed me, girl.
Odysseus has here invented a word, to describe what Nausicaa has done for him. There are two forms for the aorist tense (or aspect) of Greek verbs, called the first and second. The first has a sigma added to the stem, like Odysseus’ ἐβιώσαο above. Usually a verb has only one or the other type of aorist form. βιόω, to live, generally uses a second aorist. When a verb uses both, however, an opposition is set up, where the first aorist, with the -s- sound, becomes transitive in a causative sense, while the second aorist becomes intransitive. One might compare ‘she walks with her dog,’ intransitive, with ‘she walks her dog.’ Odysseus here conjures a first aorist, a causative sense of the verb ‘to live’, which never again appears in Homer. I somewhat haplessly say in translation, ‘you lifed me.’
One must also contrast the sense of ζωός (zōos) ‘alive’, in Nausicaa’s ζωάγρια, to that of βίος (bios), ‘life’. ‘Alive’, zōos, is what we might call (somewhat unhelpfully) ‘biologically’ alive, as in, ‘not dead’. Whereas bios intends what you might call ‘biographical’ life, life lived humanly with its historical series of loves and disappointments, its property and its legacy. Odysseus is therefore saying that Nausicaa has restored him to the possibility of his own life, not just saved him from death. ‘This is your life’ speaks to a somewhat integrated story, not the sort of truncated, fragmented, unrecognised and anonymous thing that must happen if you are a victim of the Gaza onslaught, or a woman sold into slavery. But also disintegrated would be the life of an anonymous stranger settling down with Nausicaa in blissful Scheria. Or Odysseus in stasis with Calypso. Indeed, truncation from one’s childhood home appears to be the regular experience of Homeric wives. A story of ‘return’ could never, therefore, have quite the significance or resonance for Penelope, as for Odysseus. Her home is not the mother earth of her fathers, but her husband’s fathers.
Stories, or individual lives, in order to be held in the imagination as such, nevertheless need to have a sort of arc. I have been in the habit of reading ‘you lifed me’ as deeply, and naively, romantic. It is what some men perhaps feel in the mid-life crisis, towards the object of their distraction. Or their latest wife or ‘hookup’. But I now think the conditional quality of Odysseus’ response is important: were he to reach home and see the day of his return, so would he worship Nausicaa as a god. His bios is this return and restoration. The possibility of this life’s arc for him, more the completion of an orbit, is what Nausicaa has revived. But all she gets in return is a coined word. From the heart, mind you. But Odysseus is what some aggressive Americans call a ‘taker’. There is no return for the gifts of the Phaeacians. There is no requital for the heart of a girl, tall as a shoot of palm, who moves like Artemis. So we now say goodbye to her, forever—as surely as we shall remember her always.
The stranger bribes Demodocus the singer, divvying from the best cut of the back bacon. He praises Demodocus’ uncanny skill in telling the story of Troy—
As though somehow you were there yourself, or heard it of another.
This is not just fawning. For a number of reasons, I think it is important for Odysseus that the story he requests be sung as accurately as possible. The stranger says his own name out loud; he wants the story of ‘radiant Odysseus’, a tale of brave Ulysses, who led in that fateful horse as a trick, to empty its belly full of killers and so devour the Trojans. Why does he set this up, so he can sit secretly and anonymously in the audience, while the grievous tale is told in detail—to his radiant glory? Let’s find out.
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