The Odyssey(Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition) Read online

  We have no record of the reasons Aristophanes gave for his reading; though they must have been spelled out in his commentaries on the poem, our manuscript tradition preserves only the fact that he proposed it. But it does give us one more important piece of information. “Aristarchus,” we are told in the same note that recorded Aristophanes’ emendation, “argues against him in his dissertations.” Aristarchus was the pupil of Aristophanes and was regarded as the most critical and correct of the Alexandrian editors —readers of Pope’s Dunciad will remember that his target Richard Bentley was portrayed as “that awful Aristarch.” So the suggestion was already contested in antiquity by Homer’s most respected editor. And though we are told nothing about Aristophanes’ reasons for suggesting the change, we may guess at them by comparing other examples of his textual criticism. He was much concerned, for example, with decorum and suspected the authenticity of lines in which royal characters fell below the level of etiquette maintained at the court of the Ptolemies. In Book 6, where Homer has Nausicaa bring her washing out of the house —“the princess brought her finery from the room / and piled it into the wagon’s polished cradle” (ref) —Aristophanes, with a slight alteration, produced: “Meanwhile the maids brought the finery from the room . . .” Princesses do not carry their own laundry.

  He shows a similar concern for propriety when dealing with the conduct of the gods. In Book 11, when Odysseus sees the shade of Ariadne, he identifies her as

  “daughter of Minos, that harsh king. One day Theseus tried

  to spirit her off from Crete to Athens’ sacred heights,

  but he got no joy from her. Artemis killed her first

  on wave-washed Dia’s shores . . .”

  (ref)

  For ekta, “killed,” Aristophanes adopted eschen, “detained,” thus unburdening Artemis of a killing for which no reason is given. So in that dialogue between Zeus and Poseidon, by introducing a negative, Aristophanes made Zeus, the greater god, more merciful than Poseidon.

  But there is no warrant for this alteration. There is indeed a very good reason —quite apart from the fact that Aristophanes’ motive is obvious —to reject it out of hand. If Homer’s Zeus had really urged such a radical revision of Poseidon’s plan, some sort of reply on Poseidon’s part —acceptance, rejection or at least acknowledgment —would be indispensable. But he says not a word. Furthermore, if the Phaeacian city was never to be cut off by a mountain, we are left with something unprecedented in Homer, an unfulfilled prophecy —Alcinous twice mentions the prophecy of his father that one day Poseidon would ring their city with a mountain. Homer does not tell us what happened: when we see the Phaeacians for the last time, they are about to engage in sacrifice and prayer to Poseidon, hoping that he will spare them. But one thing is clear: they are done with generous hospitality and conveying strangers to their destinations. A god has forced this decision; his vindictive punishment has been fully approved by Zeus. Zeus may sometimes act as the protector of suppliants, beggars and wanderers, but human concerns and conceptions of justice fade into insignificance when the maintenance of a powerful god’s prestige is the issue. Odysseus meanwhile, left asleep on the Ithacan shore with all his treasure laid out beside him, wakes to find a landscape he does not recognize —Athena has covered it in mist. He jumps to the conclusion that the Phaeacian crew has dumped him on some foreign shore. “They never kept their word,” he cries,

  “Zeus of the Suppliants

  pay them back —he keeps an eye on the world of men

  and punishes all transgressors!”

  (ref)

  He does not realize it, but Zeus of the suppliants has already paid them back. Not for breaking their word, but for keeping it.

  Poseidon and Zeus are not the only Olympians to display indifference to human codes of conduct and sense of justice. Later in the poem Athena joins them. There is among the suitors one decent man, Amphinomus, who “pleased Penelope the most, / thanks to his timely words and good clear sense” (ref). It is he who persuades the suitors to reject Antinous’ proposal to waylay and murder Telemachus on Ithaca, now that he has evaded the ship waiting for him in ambush and returned safe home. And it is Amphinomus who, after Odysseus’ victory over Irus in the boxing match, drinks his health in a golden cup and says,

  “Cheers, old friend, old father,

  saddled now as you are with so much trouble —

  here’s to your luck, great days from this day on!”

  (ref)

  Odysseus tries to save him from the imminent slaughter. He warns him solemnly that Odysseus will soon return, is now very near home, and that blood will be shed. This is dangerous ground. He calls Amphinomus by name; how could this ragged beggar who has just arrived know it? He goes even further. “You seem like a man of good sense to me,” he tells him. “Just like your father.” It is a slip he tries to cover at once, adding quickly, “at least I’ve heard his praises” (ref). Homer has made it clear what a great risk Odysseus is running in his attempt to save Amphinomus’ life, and he emphasizes his sincerity by having him pray for divine intervention on the suitor’s behalf:

  “ . . . may some power save you,

  spirit you home before you meet him face-to-face

  the moment he returns to native ground!”

  (ref)

  Far from spiriting him home, a divine power has already passed sentence on him: “Even then Athena had bound him fast to death / at the hands of Prince Telemachus and his spear” (ref). Amphinomus is the third of the suitors to die, immediately after the two principal villains, Antinous and Eurymachus.

  When they are not deciding the fate of mortals, the gods live a life of their own, on Olympus, where, they say,

  . . . the gods’ eternal mansion stands unmoved,

  never rocked by galewinds, never drenched by rains,

  nor do the drifting snows assail it, no, the clear air

  stretches away without a cloud, and a great radiance

  plays across that world where the blithe gods

  live all their days in bliss.

  (ref)

  We are given a sample of their life of pleasure in one of the tales told by the minstrel Demodocus in the great hall of the Phaeacian palace —the entrapment of the adulterous pair Ares and Aphrodite in the golden net fashioned by the wronged husband Hephaestus, and their exposure to the prurient gaze and “uncontrollable laughter” (ref) of the gods whom Hephaestus has summoned to witness his wife’s perfidy. (The goddesses, we are told, stayed modestly at home.) Hephaestus himself, when he summons the gods, refers to the spectacle he offers them as “a sight to make you laugh” (ref), and the comic aspect of the tale is made plain when Apollo asks Hermes if he would like to change places with Ares and receives the reply:

  “Oh Apollo, if only! . . .

  . . . bind me down with triple those endless chains!

  Let all you gods look on, and all you goddesses too —

  how I’d love to bed that golden Aphrodite!”

  (ref)

  This glimpse of the private lives of the Olympians has a parallel in the Iliad: the episode (14.187–421) in which Hera, armed with all the charms and magic of Aphrodite, seduces Zeus, who is watching the battle from a mountaintop, so that she can put him to sleep and then, with Poseidon, rally the Achaean fighters against Hector’s victorious assault. Zeus is overcome with desire for his wife; his lust, he tells her, is greater than anything he has felt in his mating with mortal women, whom he proceeds to list in a long speech that has been aptly named the “Leporello catalogue,” after the famous aria in Mozart’s Don Giovanni.

  In both epics the gods enjoy their pleasures and pursue their intrigues on Olympus, while on earth they decide the fate of mortals and their cities with scant regard for human conceptions of divine justice, whenever what is at stake is the interest or prestige of a major god. Human beings may indeed, like the suitors and Odysseus’ crew, bring disaster on themselves “beyond their proper share” (ref), but disaster may still
come to those who, like the Phaeacians and Amphinomus, are by human standards admirable, and in each case it is a god who serves them their “proper share.”

  WOMEN AND MEN

  The two Homeric epics are alike in their vision of the Olympian gods and their affirmation of the heroic code, but there is one striking difference between them. The Iliad celebrates the action and suffering of men at war; it is only in the poem’s similes and on the shield of Achilles that we are given occasional glimpses of a world at peace. The few women who make an appearance —Briseis, Andromache, Hecuba, Helen —are secondary figures, who play no significant part in the main action. But the Odyssey, though its climax is a scene of furious combat and mass slaughter, presents us with a world at peace: a secure and settled peace at Pylos and Sparta, a troubled and threatened peace on Ithaca, and, in the dangers and temptations of Odysseus’ voyage, intervals of peace — temptingly restful with Circe, oppressive with Calypso, and beneficent on Scheria. And almost everywhere in this peaceful world, women, human and divine, have important roles.

  In Odysseus’ wanderings they help, tempt or delay him. Calypso offers him immortality and keeps him for seven years but sends a favoring wind when he departs; Circe tries to keep him forever in her pigpen, does keep him for a year as her lover, but finally helps him on his way; the Sirens are his most dangerous temptation, but the sea-nymph Ino helps him land on Scheria, where Arete and Nausicaa smooth his path. There are female presences even among the monsters he has to face: Scylla, Charybdis and the gigantic wife —“huge as a mountain crag” (ref) —of the Laestrygonian cannibal king. On the Egyptian island of Pharos, Menelaus is rescued by the minor goddess Eidothea, daughter of the Old Man of the Sea, and at Sparta, Helen gives a dazzling performance. On Ithaca, Penelope, enigmatic to the last, is the object of the suitors’ desires and her son’s suspicions, and it is she who precipitates the final crisis by offering to marry whichever of the suitors can string the bow of Odysseus and shoot an arrow through the axes. Eurycleia too is never far from the limelight and gets full exposure when she washes her master’s feet and recognizes the scar he carries on his thigh. Meanwhile the goddess Athena encourages and supports Telemachus on his journey, and from Scheria onward she is Odysseus’ helper and then fellow-conspirator in deceit and ally in battle. Besides these principal players there is a plentiful cast of female extras: the Sicilian woman who looks after old Laertes; the Phoenician nursemaid who kidnaps the young prince Eumaeus to sell him as a slave; Eurynome, Penelope’s housekeeper; Melantho, the disloyal maid, lover of Antinous; Iphthime, Penelope’s sister, who appears to her in a dream; and the long list of famous women Odysseus sees among the dead —Tyro, Antiope, Alcmena, Epicaste, Chloris, Leda, Iphimedeia, Phaedra, Procris, Eriphyle. It is a vision that has echoed down the centuries, that lies behind Propertius’ magical line sunt apud infernos tot milia formosarum —“so many thousands of lovely women among the dead” —and Campion’s “shades of underground . . . White Iope, blithe Helen, and the rest.”

  Only when the Odyssey turns Iliadic, as Odysseus and his son and two loyal servants face the suitors in the hall, are women offstage, and even there Athena is at hand, sustaining the morale of the hero and his party, diverting the suitors’ spears from the target. Elsewhere in the poem women’s voices are heard at frequent intervals and sometimes at length. Hostile critics might well be tempted to cite the defense of his tragedies Aristophanes put in the mouth of “Euripides” in the Frogs: “They all stepped up to speak their piece, the mistress spoke, the slave spoke too, / the master spoke, the daughter spoke, and grandma spoke.” In the Iliad, scenes that present men in contact with women, though memorable, are rare —Helen and Paris, Hector and Andromache, Hecuba and Priam —but in the Odyssey, the rare exception is the scene from which women are excluded —the battle in the hall, the Cyclops in the cave. What historical reality, if any, lies behind this imagined world, so far removed from the peasant misogyny of Hesiod’s near-contemporary Works and Days, we shall never know; perhaps it reflects an aristocratic Ionian culture like that which, a century later, saw the birth of Sappho on Lesbos.

  The Odyssey owes much of its power to enchant so many generations of readers to its elegant exploitation of something that war temporarily suppresses or corrupts —the infinite variety of the emotional traffic between male and female. In his treatment of these relationships Homer displays an understanding of human psychology that many critics, especially those who believe in multiple authorship, but even some of those who accept a sole author yet deny him literacy, have been reluctant to recognize. A case in point is the first encounter between human beings of the opposite sex in the poem, the exchange between Telemachus and Penelope in Book 1. She has just told the bard Phemius, who is entertaining the suitors with a song about the return of the Achaeans from Troy, to change his tune, since this one pains her to the heart. Telemachus intervenes, to remind her that Phemius is not to blame for her sorrow; it is Zeus who allots to mortals whatever destiny he pleases. But he concludes with some words that have rightly been characterized as “harsh”:

  “. . . mother,

  go back to your quarters. Tend to your own tasks,

  the distaff and the loom, and keep the women

  working hard as well. As for giving orders,

  men will see to that . . .”

  (ref)

  These same words, with “bow” replacing “giving orders” (muthos), recur much later in the poem, in Book 21 (389–93), where Penelope insists, in opposition to Antinous, that Eumaeus should give the bow to Odysseus; and of course they are an echo of Hector’s words to Andromache in their last interview in the Iliad —“As for the fighting, / men will see to that” (6.587–88). In Book 21 Telemachus’ words are obviously essential, for Penelope has to be removed from the hall before the fighting starts, as it will do as soon as Odysseus strings the bow. But critics have thought them out of place in Book 1; in fact, Aristarchus condemned them as an interpolation. Some modern translators (Fitzgerald, for example) have omitted them, and a recent commentator has expressed uneasiness about Telemachus’ “callousness” and “adolescent rudeness.” The lines have often been defended as the first manifestation of the new fighting spirit that Athena’s visit has instilled in Telemachus, and though this is true, the fact is that his harshness here is consistent with the tone of nearly all the other remarks Telemachus addresses to his mother throughout the poem and of much of what he says about her to other people.

  His first reference to her is, at the very least, ambiguous. Asked by Athena if he is the son of Odysseus, he replies: “Mother has always told me I’m his son, it’s true, / but I am not so certain” (ref). Commentators have tried to explain his remark away as “curious but perhaps conventional” and “an idea that must already have been a commonplace,” but they produce little or no evidence for such a case. Telemachus is not, of course, suggesting that his mother is an adulteress but merely expressing a doubt that he is a worthy son of his great father. But he could have done so without mentioning his mother; there is a resentful tone in his voice, which sounds again when he describes for Athena the situation he faces in Ithaca:

  “she neither rejects a marriage she despises

  nor can she bear to bring the courting to an end —

  while they continue to bleed my household white.”

  (ref)

  Telemachus has grown to manhood without the correction and support of a father, an absence poignantly evoked in the words he addresses to Athena when, in the person of Mentes, she urges him to call an assembly, defy the suitors and take ship in search of news of his father. “You’ve counseled me with so much kindness now, / like a father to a son” (ref). He has been raised by women, Eurycleia and Penelope, and it was almost inevitable that his normal adolescent rebellion would be against his mother. The first result of Athena’s move to rouse Odysseus’ son “to a braver pitch, inspire his heart with courage” (ref) is this stern dismissal of his mother as he asserts his mas
tery in the house. Penelope has given orders to Phemius: to “break off this song” (ref) and choose some other theme. “As for giving orders” (muthos), says Telemachus, “men will see to that.” And as soon as she leaves, he announces that he will call an assembly where he will give his “orders” (muthos) to the suitors: “You must leave my palace! See to your feasting elsewhere” (ref).

  Much later, at Sparta, Athena comes to hasten his return to Ithaca; she does so by suggesting that Penelope may decide to marry, and take some treasure with her:

  “You know how the heart of a woman always works:

  she likes to build the wealth of her new groom —

  of the sons she bore, of her dear, departed husband,

  not a memory of the dead, no questions asked.”

  (ref)

  Athena is not a dream, for Telemachus is awake; she is not in disguise, as she was on Ithaca. But Telemachus makes no reply to the goddess, no acknowledgment of her presence —it is as if he had never seen or heard her. This unusual treatment of a divine epiphany may have been Homer’s attempt to suggest that Athena was only enhancing in Telemachus’ mind the fears and suspicions that were already there. He had, as Homer tells us, been sleepless all night, “tossing with anxious thoughts about his father” (ref). And when he gets back to Ithaca the first thing he says to Eumaeus shows how deeply rooted are his suspicions of his mother’s intentions. “I’ve come,” he says,

  “. . . [to] learn the news —