Avsnitt
-
On Odyssey 10.503-74 (end)
This one might take a few sittings.
I neglected to mention, when it was appropriate and to my point, that poplars and willows are riparian trees. The headland the ship of Odysseus is supposed to meet once he’s crossed through Oceanus, is described as λάχεια, which I sheepishly render ‘small’, but nobody really knows what the word means. The trees form a grove of Persephone there. The men will head off from Circe’s Isle over the salt sea, but the place they will put in is either the far bank of a river or a lake shore. The Oceanus is a fresh water stream. Of some kind.
Jno Cook’s book and site are here.
My paper on the Polar Bear is here.
A recording of this passage in my English translation is here:
A full performance of Homer’s hexameters in Greek awaits at the end of this post:
Singing Homer is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit homerist.substack.com/subscribe -
Odyssey 10.503-74
We’ve already had two members of Odysseus’ crew named, amongst a number of occasions where they speak in chorus. Sometimes we get the convention that ‘one on this side’ and ‘one on t’other’ says what follows, even though it is but a single speech enacted by a solo performer. There was Polites (‘Citizen’), the one Odysseus cared (or worried) most about (κήδιστος), who could not resist responding to the sound of a goddess’ voice. And there is Eurylochus (‘Broad-Ambush’) the antagonist, an annoying coward who nevertheless, like Thersites in the Iliad, speaks discomfiting truth to power. Now we meet young Elpenor (‘Man of Hope’), who seems most unfortunately to be used by Homer, or his present narrator Odysseus, to make some sort of point. The thing is, poor Elpenor makes this point by dying.
Who are you Elpēnor?
What is it that you’re here for?
Why did Homer make you live
To break your neck on Circe’s floor?
Who are you, sweet Elpēnor, and wherefore?
Circe has just given Odysseus assurance he needn’t worry about finding a guide to reach Hades. From where she is, apparently, it only takes a steady push from Boreas, the north wind, to get your vessel there. Hades must be somewhere to the south. But Circe does not predict or describe any sort of sea-crossing to which we have been used so far, such as crossing over the ‘deep’ (πόντος) or the ‘sea’ (θάλασσα); this is to be a crossing through a creature Homer calls Oceanus (Ὠκεανός):
Let’s not have your need for a guide on ship concern you,
But stand the mast, furl the white sails,
And sit back: the breath of Boreas, you see, will carry her.
But whenever it is, by ship, you cross through Oceanus,
There’s a small headland there, and a grove of Persephone—
Tall poplars and willows that lose their fruit— (Od.10.505-10)
If they’ve been identified correctly, these are riparian trees. We are of course in the habit of using ‘ocean’ to refer to the biggest bodies of salt water in our environment. But no part of this decadent usage can have anything to do with the referent Homer intends. Oceanus is a stream or river, not an ocean, evidently running fresh water. On the shield of Achilles, it is described as a river which is set into the shield’s outermost rim, as though it ran right ’round the cosmos inscribed within.
Needless to say, we do not presently observe any such seemingly liquid ring around the world. It will therefore take some effort of imagination to realise what Homer may be describing or referring to.
Homer describes the constellation of the Bear as at the pole of the world and the centre of the shield. It spins upon itself and never sets, as only a constellation at the pole would appear to do. But this is an impossible configuration according to the dogmas of modern astronomy, which see the earth’s present motions and attitudes as the only ones of which it was capable in human memory. In particular, a back-calculation of the present precession of the equinoxes will never result in the north pole, presently pointed at the star Polaris in the Little Bear, being located within the Great Bear. (For Homer it was simply ‘the Bear’; Ursa Minor only became a ‘thing’ in later times. The Phoenicians are supposed to have taught it to the Greeks, likely because it had replaced the Bear as the asterism to navigate by.) Current theories attribute the precession to multi-body gravitational dynamics, and so to be somewhat variable, but if we take ancient measurements seriously, as we ought, it has slowed down significantly. It is reasonable to wonder if a sudden displacement of the pole within the chronology of human history may not have left a remnant wobble in the earth’s equilibrium, from which it is gradually recovering.
Note above how the artist has replaced the Bear at the centre with the sun’s chariot surrounded by the zodiac. This is a symptom of the post-Copernican religious egoism, which Homer cannot be seen to violate. The obvious falseness of Homer’s description to their present sky at night was not lost on ancient authors. Aristotle picks out Homer’s use of οἴη ἄμμορος, ‘alone without a share’, used to describe the Bear’s unsinking property, as an example of ‘metaphor’. Elsewhere I have drawn out the implications of Aristotle’s comment:
… not just Aristotle but his whole audience feels that the only way currently to understand this line of Homer’s, readily evoked by its two opening words, is as an illustration of what the philosopher means by ‘metaphor’. Metaphor is the only option, by settled opinion, clearly because what the line literally means cannot be true! There is no dispute here, expressed or implied, about what that literal meaning really is; that would defeat the purpose of an illustrative example of metaphor. So here lies the key element in this tidbit from Aristotle: it leaves no doubt that the literal, non-metaphorical meaning of Homer’s phrase is that the Bear alone did not set …
Much later Strabo, in the Roman era, tried to defend Homer’s veracity by claiming that what Homer really meant by the Bear (ἄρκτος) must have been the ‘Arctic Circle’, or the ‘Bear’s Circle’ (ἀρκτικὸς κύκλος). One cannot navigate by the Arctic Circle, however, without going ’round in circles. One needs a fixed point. In our skies there is but one. Calypso asks Odysseus to keep the Bear to his left as he pushes off in his raft. If the Bear was a polar bear, her instruction has shown him how to head due east.
Always remember that Classicists, mythologists, astronomers, archaeologists, historians, biologists, and all manner of non-professional folk presume an awful lot about the layout of the earth and the sky in Homeric and other ancient times. (Within ‘Homeric’ we might also distinguish between the time of the telling and the time of the action.) Mainly the presumption is that nothing has changed in these things, except very slowly, which is an absurdly false one when it comes to the earth and the sky; it is a presumption in the modern uniformitarian ‘sciences’ as well, where only presently observable processes, mostly gradual, are allowed to be responsible for the manifold phenomena confronting us. These include miles-high mountains, miles-deep trenches, and vast canyons all on a supposedly gravitating sphere; the diversity of biological genera living and dead; ‘Ice Ages’; and the planet Venus. There are seashells and the bones of Amphitrite’s salt water creatures at the tops of the Himalayas. These presumptions should therefore be characterised as reflecting one or more of the developmental neuroses, or to sensory-cognitive after-effects comparable to those of brainwashing.
If we are to take Homer seriously—and what has there been written since, which should more demand our attention and discernment than the educator of Greece and Rome—then we must take his usage seriously. Homer’s comedy is serious business, unlike whatever can be meant by ‘epic’. Other musical geniuses, not only Beethoven and Bach but also Pindar and Sophocles, are allowed to remain eruptions into the timeline of human consciousness. But academic types don’t care for geniuses, especially ones they don’t themselves produce and nominate. The poet whom Pindar and Sophocles no doubt considered the greatest genius of them all is made out to be, at a deeply formative level, a product of an oral tradition. Such a tradition is entirely an invented postulate of the modern academy. It depends on the concept of a ‘metrical formula’, which in turn depends on ignoring all the marks of accentuation introduced into Homer’s text by the Alexandrian scholars of the Hellenistic era—a time when the Bear was not at the pole.
Metre is not prosody. Metre was originally performed by the feet, as the chosen name for the metrical unit, ‘foot’ (πούς), still attests. Prosody is accent (προσῳδία), ‘applied song’, performed by the voice. When these Greek accents, sharply rising and heavily falling in pitch, are applied to a metrical pattern, they produce rhythm as well as melody. The graphic accent marks demonstrate prima facie that the text of Homer, which the Alexandrians preserved and restored, was understood by them to be a musical score. If you ignore all the notes in a modern musical score, all you’ll find left are pitch-free metrical formulas. Beethoven and Homer instead generated scores that were demonstrably all three of the following: metrical (look to the time signature), rhythmic (look to the note durations and the bar lines), and melodic (look to your singing heart and the twist in your spine).
It should be clear that I find that neither Homer’s compositions nor the truth have been well served either by modern Homeric Studies or by modern science. What depresses is the extraordinary arrogance of academic closed shops, like the oral theory of Homer or gravitational cosmology. There is more than is dreamt of or realised in their philosophies, in the word-music of Homer. It may be that Homer was in some way connected, more or less intimately, to a tradition of versifying. He certainly paints more like a connoisseur than a neophyte. But how could we ever know who or what constituted such a tradition? The ‘oral tradition’ variegating now for generations like obsessive worldbuilding, is entirely based on the concept of the metrical formula: a notion that multitudes of phrases were transmitted in packets like so many clichés, to be available prepackaged to an improvising performer without, miraculously, becoming frozen or opaque in meaning over the passage of time.
Words carry meaning, and hence the transmission of phrases is meaningful tradition. But metre is not what the words contribute to Homeric poetry; the metre is already there! The Greek language cannot be the source of dactylic, isochronic metre. The dactylic hexameter is a preexistent form, an orchestic word-free tradition, which describes the steps in the ‘Dance of the Muses’ (χορεία Μουσῶν). What the words contribute to this is prosody: pitch changes and stresses—notes and bar lines—which turn metre into music. (A purely instrumental accompaniment could do the same.) Hence metrical packets or building blocks are inadequate to explain the Homeric or any other kind of musical composition. The repetition of phrases in music is wetness in water. What can be gleaned about traditions, intellectual or otherwise, which were inherited by Homer, must be inferred from his words’ melodies and meanings, not their repetitions or their metre. Could there be an inheritance of melodic phrases in Homer? Again, who can know? It should be noted that the reuse of such phrases needs no motivation but the musical. What I have demonstrated in my recent work is that there is significant melodic composition in Homer independent of the phrases that bear the accentual patterns; in particular, no less than Odysseus and Penelope seem each to have a signature melodic line, a characteristic accentual sequence unique to them, which is not generated by the same words in each case. That is a major discovery, if true, which it would seem to behoove the closed shop to consider and test, but not ignore.
I hope I shall also be convincing that the internal evidence suggests how Homer’s was a script for a solo actor’s performance, using minimal props to spark the vastness and the precision of the human imagination. But Homer grounds our imagination in verifiable facts. From his age to ours, the fixed stars have been signposts of reality; we all know Orion and the Bear and the Pleiades. When Calypso has Odysseus navigate by the Bear, he places us in the world of real boats and real sailors. Except that one can no longer navigate by the Bear, unless one use it to point to the true pole. If we take Homer seriously, there has been a pole-shifting catastrophe between the world he describes and ours. This needs saying even to catastrophists, many of whom accept the reality of our thunderbolt-chiseled and upturned earth, but deny that any of these kinds of things happened except in prehistory. The word-forms of Homer’s language, however, show it to be younger than Mycenaean Linear B and older than classical Greek. This is an absolute fact of historical linguistics: the development only goes one way. Hence its sequence represents a defining marker in relative chronology—even for those who are used to taking seriously the idea that they are living in the 2,025th ‘year’ of some rock steady process that has been continuously tallied somewhere.
Every fossil is evidence of the catastrophic energies which created it. It has proved impossible to create fossils out of living material. The present theories of gradual fossil deposition are puerile. Rather, every proto-human fossil skull fragment is itself the evidence of the catastrophe which destroyed its owner and all or nearly all its kind, and transformed their remains into rock. It is also evidence of the radioactive conditions which, to begin with, distort and otherwise invalidate methods of chemical dating for samples so produced, except perhaps in the terms of relative chronology (that is, ‘earlier’ or ‘later’ without the use of spurious numbers in years). But these conditions may have then fostered mutations and other kinds of genetic response, which ultimately resulted, perhaps quite quickly, in the next related human species or sub-species. These, in turn, only leave evidence of themselves once they also are destroyed and fossilised. Every fossil therefore points two ways: toward present decimation and destruction under catastrophic conditions, and the subsequent environmental stimulus to new, unforeseen speciation. The fossil is a punctuation; the sentences of life, past and future, occur to either side.
So with open minds we ask: in the figure Homer calls Oceanus, might we at one time have been witness to an undulating ring around our sky, like the invisible Van Allen belts around the earth, or the rings presently belted electromagnetically upon Saturn and other nearby bodies? The late Jno Cook argued for the sometime existence of such Earth rings:
I had no trouble identifying the Sumerian Absu, the Egyptian Duat, and the Maya House of Nine Bushes as a set of rings seen in the southern night sky. The rings which were called “the Absu” in Sumer, are called the Abyss or “the Deep” in the Bible. The rings were almost universally, throughout the world, understood to be an ocean standing up from the south horizon …
It is clear that both Sumer and Egypt described the southern skies (the Absu or the Duat) as a sea, although some Egyptian descriptions have more of the feel of a swamp. In Egypt, the Gods and the dead pharaohs are described as moving by boat across this sea. In Sumer, the God of water was assigned to the sector of the sky below the equatorial.
See here for Cook’s assessment of the historical and comparative evidence. It may be notable, after all, that Circe has Odysseus sail due south. Equatorial rings, seen from the north, would have looked like elongated semicircles—that is to say, nested arches.
If these were separate bands of ionised plasma, rotating at different speeds, we should expect what is called the diocotron instability, which looks wondrously fluid:
This instability results in patterned effects such as we see in planet Jupiter’s atmospheric bands.
The repeating shapes stylised in this predynastic vase seem to be inspired by witnessing diocotron instabilities:
This phenomenon, wherever it was witnessed, seems to have been the inspiration for the ‘Maeander’ (like the river) or ‘Greek key’ in geometric art, which has persisted ever since.
Border patterns on much later Greek designs may in fact have their origin in traditional, stylised depictions of the stream of Oceanus.
The heavens are described as Odysseus navigates from Calypso’s isle (5.272-5), in lines which correspond to the depiction at the centre of Achilles’ shield:
As he looked toward the Pleiades and late-setting Boötes
And the Bear, which they also call by the name ‘Wagon’,
Who spins herself there, where she is, and keeps looking out for Orion—
She alone exists without a share in the baths of Oceanus …
It is easy enough to read this to say that the Bear alone does not sink below the horizon, seeing as she was at that time, to the consternation of modern neo-astronomers, the constellation at the pole. On an island, the sea generally defines the horizon; hence the waters of the sea must be the ‘baths of Oceanus’. But salt water does not seem to qualify as a bath in the lexicon of the Odyssey; Odysseus washes and scrubs off himself precisely the alien, disfiguring brine in the fresh waters of a Scherian river, while Nausicaa and her handmaids look the other way. It is not at all clear, therefore, what sort of apparition could be meant by the ‘baths of Oceanus’ in Homer’s Greek. The comparative evidence indicates that ancient peoples north of the equator saw an abyss or ocean in the southern sky which undulated in a way that suggested liquid, and perhaps was even thought to have been a source of fresh water upon the earth during moments of electrical excitement. Hence while the ‘baths’ may have become a way of referring to the horizon, Oceanus himself may also originally have been a sky object, like the asterisms mentioned, which, unlike the northern Bear, dipped into those baths with the stars. What is clear is that he was a cosmic river, thought to be the ultimate or original source of earthly bodies and streams of fresh water.
If an undulating ring around the earth is too much to take on board, think of Oceanus as the Milky Way, which otherwise would not get a mention in Homer. To cross through a river generally means to get to its other side. Adjacent to Oceanus in Circe’s description—one assumes, past its further bank—are mentioned fully four other rivers which are not the Milky Way: into Acheron (‘swamp’?) conflow both the Pyriphlegethon (‘flaming fire’) and the Cocytus (‘mourning’), itself a branch of the Styx (‘shudder’). The Styx, therefore, perhaps is, or was once, also a visible thing. Are these, too, phenomena in the sky? Vibration of varying intensity connects the species of fiery plasma with those of grief. When Calypso swears good faith to Odysseus by the Styx, she describes it as ‘down flowing’ (κατειβόμενον, 5.185). This may mean it flowed down to the earth from above, rather than from the surface into the ground.
On occasion ordinary rivers have been nominated to represent these four, but how could these be ordinary rivers? Who ever heard of a river called ‘flaming fire’? Water tends to put out fire (“I live by the river!”—Joe Strummer). Flows of lava are generally singular, spreading events, not sources of continuing, permanent rivers. The four are generally understood, however, to be rivers of the ‘underworld’, unseen or at least no longer visible. This is also likely the implication of their being, for Homer, part of the invisible realm (‘Hades’, Ἀϝίδης). Hence they may be phenomena now gone but not forgotten, thought not to have been destroyed but still to exist beyond Oceanus, which would have then been the nearer border of the visible world. A separate river Oceanus encircling the world does not impress the senses today, however. It is judged a figment of primitive cosmological fancy, or romantic poetising, although there is still a widespread belief in an invisible hell.
Consider that the constituents of our so-called ‘ancient world’ understood themselves to have a complex and much more ancient past than ourselves. Hesiod tells of five different ages of man. Polynesia remembers nine ages, each with a different sky. Elsewhere we hear of successive ‘suns’, a number of widely dispersed texts around the world affirming that the present one is a seventh such sun. The past, and the dead, are no longer visible except as decaying and eroding remnants. Could it be that they are all still there, existent; gone but not forgotten in the invisibility beyond Oceanus? It is not hard to see, at any rate, how the idea of such a fluid barrier to an invisible reality would be attractive to a performing artist; it is like a fourth wall with a silent, peering audience beyond.
The kingdom of heaven—that is to say, the regime which at Jesus’ time, like ours, seemed to govern the erstwhile straying and discharging god-objects (or ‘planets’) which operate in the heavens—is a thing we nowadays prefer to call the ‘solar system’. We style it more a clockwork than a kingdom, in that we ascribe the present good order to mechanistic ‘laws of nature’ rather than the benevolent governing will of the sky’s Father. We imagine that the objects involved, including our own earth, are attracted to each other, but o’er-mightily to the sun; the only reason we do not act on this attraction is that we are diverted orthogonally by a native inertia, resulting in elliptical orbits around the principal beloved. It is a stupefyingly agreeable fantasy, which has to ignore the manifest nature of the sun and planets as electromagnets, where repulsions as well as attractions are involved, in motion within their own and exogenous electric and magnetic fields.
It makes no sense, however, to allow such contemporary religious blinders to alter, censor, or otherwise pervert the recordings of ancient composers and visual artists. Nor indeed the record of mountains, rocks, and sediments. In testimonies Cook gathers from around the world, the Absu and its analogues present themselves as arched rings in the southern sky, with a different number attested depending, apparently, on latitude: in the Yucatan and in India, there were nine undulating half-rings or arches, for example, but in Egypt seven. If Homer’s words are describing the same thing, he evidently knew of only five, which would then be a clue to his latitude. There are the four named infernal rivers, at times conjoined except for the Styx, while outermost, at the periphery of either the cosmos or the underworld, runs Oceanus. We might say that this configuration was associated with fresh water, and was perhaps considered a source of fresh water rivers, although not a source of briny oceans.
Whatever it is that Homer means us to be looking at or imagining during Circe’s prescription for the journey to Hades, in heaven, on earth, or beneath it, past or present, it is clear that any audience would find it difficult to get its bearings. The reorientation which seemed to have been established after a solar year on Aeaea, Circe’s Isle, has once again been upended. To cross through the stream of Oceanus, perhaps beyond the Milky Way, would seem to be a journey beyond the limit of the visible world, given the iconography of Achilles’ shield; yet on the other side, there seems to be a normal landfall:
There’s a small headland there, and a grove of Persephone—
Tall poplars and willows that lose their fruit— (10.509-10)
This familiar sort of prospect for landing, after what we should have called space travel, does not so much reassure as further disorient. It is the disconcerting sort of realism, as confronts one in dreams or nightmares or abstract art. Real frogs in imaginary gardens. Or icons appearing on your toast. How does Homer locate us, and restore our bearings?
Through Circe’s speech it seems the performer is given a series of directional cues, which I presume he acts out while his voice continues to deliver Circe. Of course, it could instead be that she uses her body to give the instructions, like a coach teaching a new technique. When she says, ‘hug close to the rock, like I’m ordering you (ὥς σε κελεύω),’ I imagine her embodying the move: ὡς carries it with it the gesture ‘this way’, ‘thus’. One remembers the ‘walk this way’ vaudeville joke from the film Young Frankenstein. (The ‘rock’ is my interpretation; the original simply says ‘draw yourself close’ after describing an area where there’s a rock or cliff and the coming together of two thundering rivers. Circe does not say which two rivers these are, of the four plus Oceanus that have been mentioned.)
The first directional cue is the journey due south, which may at one time have meant a journey towards a now unimaginable and looming cosmic apparition. When she comes to the spot by the rock, Circe mimes the ritual she deems necessary; the line,
Dig a trench, an arm’s length over here and over here, (517)
seems designed for wide-armed gestures ‘over here and over here.’ The miming out of these sacramental actions creates an intelligible space around the performer, which allows for a settling physical orientation whilst imaginatively surrounded by the frightful wonders of an heavenly underworld. A recipe guides you through chaos in the kitchen: one must offer mixed honey (μελίκρητος—milk and honey?), then wine, then water. Odysseus is to appease the ghosts with the promise of a sacrifice once he gets home, of his finest barren heifer. He’s going to ‘fill the barbecue with quality ingredients.’ For Teiresias he’ll set aside his best black ram. The sex and fertility of the beasts is as pointed as it goes unexplained. In addition, right away—not when he’s got home—Odysseus must sacrifice a ram and a black ewe.
The mechanics of this—where the sheep he needs could come from, for example—and all sorts of other logistical problems are allayed, it seems to me, by the misdirection of giving directions: turn the sacrificed animals toward Erebus, but ‘turn yourself away,/Heading for the on-flowing river’s streams …’ (528-9). Erebus seems later to mean ‘darkness’ generally, with also perhaps a connotation of dustiness. But here in the Odyssey the context seems to require a definite location, and nothing precludes a location in the sky. Jno Cook suggests that the shadow of the earth upon its riverine rings would have made the impression of a shifting starless portal through the arches. When the ghosts do in fact appear, they are said to gather out of Erebus (11.37), as through a gaping door.
We therefore focus on the pointing of the animals and the turning in another direction, inhabiting the celebrant’s movements and hands rather than trying to make sense of the scene around him. The ghosts will gather at the river it seems, where he is facing, while the sacrifice is behind him. We are to imagine his men flaying and broiling the animals behind the quasi-priest, while he (once again) must dramatically ‘draw the sharp sword from by your thigh’—and sit. Sitting down with his sword out? The Odyssean performer is a ham. The battle sword’s job, this time, is somehow to keep the dismal remnant souls from getting at the spilt blood to his rear. So we face the ghosts, seated, with butchering and cooking going on behind our backs.
… do not allow the corpses’ powerless heads
To go near the blood, before you consult with Teiresias. (536-7)
To be continued …
[You will find the Greek performance of this passage at the end of the next post, pt. 2.]
Singing Homer is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit homerist.substack.com/subscribe -
Saknas det avsnitt?
-
On Odyssey 10.408-502
An especially happy discovery of these attempts at video presentations of my performance notes for Homer’s Odyssey, is that one can, with a little post-production, present a Greek text simultaneous with its performance. (The other is the experience of trawling the internet for the stimulus of images to lose oneself in.) Once one gets the hang of the Greek alphabet, I hope the experience can become like following along with a score while listening to a piece of music. (Some of you have already been doing this, following along, with my six-volume Greek/English edition of the Odyssey, Homer Odysseia.) I find that the awakening of the analytic mind, when it is presented with a composer’s (or compositor’s) stream of symbols and notation, does no harm to the hearing, but rather can enhance one’s awareness of form and metabolism in the unfolding composition. Others may disagree, and close all books and other avenues of distraction while listening. In either case, taking on board the notion that ancient texts should all be approached for what they were, musical scores for the production of meaningful sound by the voice, does far more than enhance a private experience. From my recent book:
We did not use to know how the prosody of Greek words interacted with Greek metres. With the arrival of the new theory of the Greek accent, now we do. The ignoring of the seemingly irrelevant accent marks in texts seems to have led not to the realisation that all we could know, sadly, about the sound and performance of Greek poetry was its metre, but to the delusion that metre was all there was to know.
Not knowing how the once painstakingly recorded accents worked, led to a non-benign, positive kind of ignorance in classical scholarship, which has fostered and continues to peddle notions of metrical composition and metrical poetry. These are patent absurdities now force-fed on students. Ancient metres can instead be compared to the time signatures we find in the modern musical notation; they sit to the left, while we all know that the music is to be found in what follows to the right of the time signature, in the pitch patterns and stresses, the notes of melody and the punctuating bar lines. The independence from the metre of the accentual patterns in Greek allowed for the phenomenon of syncopation, the source of the sense of rhythm in all things musical. Syncopation with its rhythmic counterpoint in turn brings new attention to moments of cadence, where accents and metrical downbeats conjoin through the words expressing them.
So do enjoy Homer’s syncopations. They are lost on classical scholars, who scan ancient verses like metrical robots, and spin spiders’ webs of metrical traditions with no evidence from history or payoff in the form of compositional insight. The dactylic hexameter is not a metrical prison, but a template or matrix of musical freedom, as real words complete with their pitches and stresses—not metrical phrases—bring life to the metrical matrix in the telling of a story.
The quickest way to Hades is to miss out on Homer’s cheated expectations, when he draws his sword from by his thick thigh. That comic drop, and its opening eyes, are what he’s after.
Here is my original post, with complete recordings of the passage in Greek and English:
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit homerist.substack.com/subscribe -
Odyssey 10.408-502
Odysseus learns from Circe that he must travel to the Underworld, the house of Hades Invisible—his name seems to mean ‘invisible’ or ‘unseen’, ἀϝίδης—and the home of his consort the awesome Persephone. Not for the first, but only the latest time in the Odyssey, the woman and wife appears to be in charge of house and realm. For a number of reasons, a first-time listener might be taken by surprise, even shock, at this disclosure on the bed of Circe. We have so far been encouraged to think that the arrival on this bed has been a significant one, a destined one, even a kind of climactic achievement; perhaps one that might put any sort of further homesickness into perspective. But no, the need for home reasserts itself into the blissful consciousness; and without warning, this triggers the revelation from Circe that she must pass along the soul of her mortal pilgrim wanderer to the ministry of a goddess even more dread. Not only is sexual union with the wise goddess no sort of transcendence over one’s origins, it seems, nor even a substitute for that home; no, he must head back; but it turns out Odysseus cannot even think of reaching his humble Ithaca (and the woman living upstairs there) unless he first travel to the undiscovered country where the dead end up—like the farm upstate where all the good dogs go at the end of their service—to consult Teiresias’ ghost. At no point heretofore was it in any way evident that such a journey would be necessary, just to get back home. One should have thought that favourable winds would have done the trick. Hence we might be justified in thinking that the revelation of this necessity is the practical takeaway from the wisdom gained from sleeping with the goddess. There is no journey home except via death and the dead. Apparently he must hear an oracle from among them, whose content nobody yet knows, and no spoilers.
None of this is on our horizon when we begin the passage: Odysseus is on his way to the ship to persuade the remaining crew, at Circe’s encouragement, to store their stuff and come join the party at her house. These are men who have never ventured from the ship and shore since they arrived on the isle, together with Eurylochus, the man who had led the first expedition but never entered Circe’s door; he had hid himself outside instead, and saw nothing of men turning into pigs, only men disappearing within, to suffer who knows what. So we are dealing with two levels of possible initiate here, the most of them simply neophyte, while one of them is positively ignorant and prejudiced, and positively fearful. Odysseus finds them crying away, ‘pouring down a lusty tear.’ When he approaches them, we are treated to one of the great similes, applied to all the men without distinction:
‘As when the farmyard calves—around the herd cows,
Come back to the dung pile when they’ve had their fill of pasture—
All jump around together as they face them: and no longer do the pens
Contain them, no, but with constant mooing and lowing they run around them,
Their mothers: so did those men, when they saw me with their own eyes,
Pile on me in tears: and it felt to them, in their life’s breath,
That they were there! As if they’d reached their father’s earth and the city that belonged to them
Of rugged Ithaca, where they were fed and they were born.’ (Od.10.410-17)
‘ … no longer do the pens/Contain them …’ Amidst all the richness, this is the bit that sticks out, at least for me. The pens into which we place and segregate domestic animals seem to have emerged as a metaphor for any number of kinds of social constraint. Everything from being ‘pigeonholed’ in school, socially or academically, to the fateful constructs of class and caste, seem to be kinds of constructed pens. Even in democracies so radical that they recognise ‘personhood’ in a foetus, the subsequent children are nevertheless denuded of rights and separated into classes by age and aptitude. Many of us continue to mark our anniversaries by reunion, in memory of our time together in those pens. Every corporation, institution, or work force seems to segregate into the junior, senior, and executive, the officer and enlisted, and so on. The Cyclops pens off his lambs and kids by their state of development. Once Circe has fed Odysseus her spiked pottage, she says,
“Off with you now, to the sty, lay out with the rest of your comrades.” (10.320)
It is as though the penning them in the sty is as much a part of Circe’s control over humans as her turning them into pigs. They are put in their proper place. Later we shall meet a swineherd who pens himself in on purpose, builds his own pen for a steading. Perhaps we are also to think of the wall built around a city, as is described on our first sight of Phaeacia, as a kind of enclosure. So when in the simile the young calves burst out their pens, there is a rather wonderful sensation of freedom. It is at the same time a restoration of their natural rights, to be reunited with their mother cows, who have been separated from them to go to pasture for the sake of the production of milk and the fattening of meat. The repatriation restores the benefits of nature and nurture to its exploited and deprived children.
‘Repatriation’ is an oddly fitting word for what is described. In Odysseus, his men at the shore see not only their mother, as the calves their dams, but their native land, its polity and its rocky pasture. For the moment, Odysseus is their home, and return home means restoration to Odysseus. They evidently believe that their comrades have been destroyed; after they repeat in their own voice the sentiment of the simile, that their joy at Odysseus’ return is such as if they had arrived in Ithaca, they ask him to recount the tale of their compatriots’ death. It must be noted, for all that it slips one’s attention, that Odysseus himself is the source both of the simile describing their welcome and the loving words of his men. How strange when one turns the narrative upon the teller: Odysseus is building himself up like a demagogue. I am your mother. I am your home. I am your nation.
The self-idolising sits alongside the humbleness of the image he paints. For the nursing cows, home is a dung heap. My teacher and his partner used to keep a dairy herd; she would always complain about the Ladies’ habit of waiting till they got home to the milking stalls to have a shit. It meant a lot of mucking out for her, and it seemed to her that the cows timed their releases spitefully. They’d had all those hours in the fields to do their manuring! Every human habitation is never far from its dung pile, even if the stuff is nowadays piped ‘away’. To long for home is to long for the aroma of your native dung pile. How is this a thing to wish for, over abundance and a goddess’ attentions on a wooded isle?
Rise and follow me, says Odysseus, although not so they would become fishers of men. (These would instead be the Laestrygonian giants, 10.124.) It always pays to note the changes when Homer’s speakers appear to repeat lines they were instructed to say. At first Odysseus repeats Circe’s imperatives about storing their tackle in caves by the shore. She herself just adds (to paraphrase) ‘then come back—and bring your friends.’ But Odysseus here himself adopts the imperative voice, as he stands forth as demagogue and saviour, who claims he can restore the lost boys to his men’s sight:
“But yourselves—look sharp, all of you together, and follow me!
So you may see your comrades in the sacred house of Circe,
Drinking and eating: for they’ve got an unending supply.” (425-7)
Odysseus says that he (and he alone?) can guide his initiates to the eternal feast under the goddess’ roof. He will drink the wine new with them in her house.
But there is a gadfly buzzing to annoy the reverie. His name is Eurylochus. The men in Odysseus’ entourage only seem to earn a name when they serve the narrator’s ends. What a strange creature this is, then, from the perspective of the self-heroising narrator. Could Freud or Jung make sense of his role? Or is he a comic Satan? Odysseus drops an intriguing detail when he is deciding whether to execute the man summarily, for his apparent democratic resistance and speaking truth to power; here is another instance of ‘drawing the sword from by his thigh’ to do an unmanly thing:
Whether I draw my tapered sword from by my thick thigh,
Cut off his head with that, introduce it to the ground—
Even if he was my in-law, pretty close kin— (439-41)
The little aside—and revelation—that Odysseus’ enemy is actually his in-law, plays like a line from situation comedy, in the midst of a rumination on summary beheading. Eurylochus is Odysseus’ kin by marriage (πηός). Could that make him, in the stagecraft of Odysseus’ psyche, an avatar of Penelope herself? Or is he just the first ever comic deployment of the useless in-law? The former may be a possibility to consider when we assess the contra speech in re the proposition that they all trek to Circe’s house, the speech that immediately turns the people’s would-be saviour murderous.
Here is what Eurylochus had said:
“Ah my losers, where are we going? Why do you desire these evils?
To make the descent to Circe’s room—she who’ll turn the lot of us
Into pigs or wolves, or else she’ll make us lions,
Who’d guard her big house for her, even by force?
Just like the Cyclops did—when they arrived in his inner court,
Our comrades, and with them followed that Mr. Bold, Odysseus;
For that’s on him! Due his outrageous recklessness, they also were lost.” (431-7)
Note ‘make the descent’ (καταβήμεναι): presently they are speaking on the seashore, so descent makes no literal sense. It may be that Circe’s abode in the woods is circled by higher ground, as Odysseus first espies its smoke in the interior after climbing to a lookout point. The concept of κατάβασις (‘walk down’) resonates, however, with the language of mystic initiation; in the rites associated with Orpheus, the candidate enacts a descent into the Underworld. The experience there ends with an ἀνάβασις (‘walk up’), a return to the light. Eurylochus’ choice of verb prefigures the men’s own eventual descent into Hades, about which we of course know nothing yet. But it also points him up as only a partial initiate, a man who has developed conspiracy theories while surveilling Circe’s house from behind the bushes. Remember he does not know what happened to the men under his charge, only that they vanished; he now speculates about them being turned into pigs, wolves, or lions, but it was only wolves and lions, acting like solicitous dogs, whom he saw in front of the building. He did not see any pigs. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.
He follows that, however, with an observation which cuts Odysseus to the bone: his summary of the disastrous expedition into the house of the anthropophagist Polyphemus. (Eurylochus’ use of ‘inner court’ suggests that he did not know that the Cyclops lived in a cave, and once again, he may not have been been there in the party that had had the adventure, but had stayed shipside.) His taunt of “that rash one” (“Mr. Bold”, ὁ θρασύς) seems to me, for some reason, a dig worthy of Penelope herself. His final line is simply incontrovertible, and Odysseus says as much by putting it in Eurylochus’ mouth without gainsaying it, except by contemplating beheading the speaker: if you men follow Odysseus now, watch out—it was due to his abject folly that those men as well, “our comrades,” were killed. Note especially Eurylochus’ somewhat contradictory assertion that ‘Mr. Bold’ merely followed along (σὺν … εἵπετ’) with our comrades (ἡμέτεροι ἕταροι). The confident salvific leader who has just emerged, in his pomp, to say ‘follow me,’ is immediately riposted by his opponent as a tagger-along. To imply that Odysseus’ proudest victory was one where he merely followed along, and to point out the truth that to those left behind, the expedition had not been one where Odysseus ingeniously saved men, but lost them, is undoubtedly to ‘trigger’ Odysseus, as the saying now is. Eurylochus is debating to win the election, not to inform the argument.
It is the neophytes in audience who restrain Odysseus from the cold-blooded murder of Penelope’s cousin. They also play a crucial role in the ever-complexifying portrayal of the narrator’s psyche. Every time he gives voice to these personas, as here when the uninitiated members of Odysseus’ crew are given a speech—even though they remain anonymous—the performer embodies them as if they have bubbled up from within him. The layered unity of this performer, who first of all plays Homer, who presently is playing Odysseus, who in turn plays himself alongside his mostly unnamed crew in telling the story, encourages us, or at least allows us, in the singleness of his own body before us to see these embodiments as aspects of the hero’s own psyche. On the other hand, often when he comes to a speech the performer before us is more like a medium in a seance, whose body is inhabited by different alien psyches, each with their own complexities. This analogy becomes especially fitting when we are amongst the souls in Hades. But this is also the normal modus of one-man theatre. The performer’s art is such that we see the character, not the actor. When he seeks companionship in his favourite ram, or prays desperately to his father Poseidon, Odysseus the narrator fully inhabits the Cyclops, sees through what is left of his eyes. Homer becomes also Zeus and Penelope, Helen and Telemachus. It just seems that in the case of Odysseus and his crew, we are on different ground; for once we see the actor more than the characters, in the sense that this actor is Odysseus himself, the storyteller as well as the hero. This opens up their moments to the various kinds of psychological or allegorical interpretation, unlike those more usual occasions when the intent of the performer is to establish the independent reality before us of the inhabited figure. The most intriguing case of all, to my mind, is how we register the presence of Athena. She inhabits the whole poem, it seems, as well as poet, hero, and audience, in the most uncanny way.
We’ve already had reason to view Odysseus and his mostly anonymous crew as a kind of single partitioned psyche; it is, for example, exactly when the gatekeeper (Odysseus) falls asleep within sight of Ithaca, that the repressed men, with their Medusa’s head of appetites, voice their misgivings about their captain’s apparent self-aggrandisement and secret wealth, and open up the bag of Aeolian winds (10.38-45). (At that point the ringleader remained anonymous, but he sounds like Eurylochus.) That lack of self-control, in the collective sense, ended in disaster. Here the crew intercedes with ‘softening lines’ and prevents a beheading by proposing Eurylochus remain behind:
“Zeus-Born, let’s allow that this man, if you so order it,
Remain here by the ship—and protect her as well.
But for us, do you be the guide to the holy house of Circe.” (443-5)
The crew seem persuaded by their restored dear leader, that he will be the guide to a promised land. The lower psyche has gone MAGA. In general, the initiated lead the candidates through the hurdles, like a sponsor at AA or godparents at a baptism. Odysseus is their man. They have been captivated by the thought of eating and drinking at a perpetual feast in god’s house. Odysseus evidently takes satisfaction in the fact that Eurylochus did not stay alone by the ship, but himself slunk along behind: ‘He followed instead.’ The loser.
Circe’s speech to Odysseus and his men, once she’s bathed them and anointed them and they’ve reunited tearfully with their teammates who had been pigs, is so weirdly timeless that I must recount it in full:
“Zeus-Born son of Laertes, Contriver Odysseus,
No longer now trigger the full-throated grieving: for I know it even on my own
How often, to begin with, you all suffered pains in the deep, filled with fishes,
And then how often weird, cruel men have done you violence on dry land.
No, come on: get to eating food and drinking wine,
Until you grab that life’s breath back into your chests,
What you were when first you left behind the mother earth of your fathers
In rugged Ithaca. But now you’re legless and spiritless,
Always your dangerous wandering occupies your mind, and never in you
The life’s breath enjoys a state of peace; since oh, so many things you suffered.” (456-65)
She sounds for all the world like the hostess at a self-help retreat. You’re here to be restored to your best self! Turn your minds away from the stresses of work and cut-throat competition … ‘grab that life’s breath back into your chests!’ Odysseus and his men are not self-pitying businessmen, however, but soldiers and sailors who have suffered deeply at war and on the sea. I admit I find the speech deeply moving, to hear some real sympathy from God, with a genuine feeling for what might really do these harried and weary men some good. Most strangely affecting is the reechoing phrase, ‘the mother earth of your fathers’ (πατρὶς γαῖα), coming from the mouth of the goddess. What could it mean to such an one as her? She wishes to restore all of them to their youth, to what they were in figure and aspiration when first they set off into the fateful vortex of Troy. The daughter of the sun would give us back our days. It seems almost too good to be true …
‘So she spoke, and again our manly life’s breath began to be persuaded.
So in that place, through all the days up to a year fulfilling,
We sit dining on flesh beyond reckoning, along with pleasing alcohol. (466-8)
Something smells off, does it not? Have they not become like the Lotus-Eaters, and forgotten who they are and why they care? And this is so soon after the arrival at the goddess’ house has been played up to be an ascendence of the soul. Turns out it is just another test of resolve on their journey.
At least some of these—not Odysseus—are men who’ve been pigs. But that experience does not seem to have dulled their taste for pork. It would seem a stretch to suggest that Homer was anything but an omnivore like the most of us. But it is his own emphases which raise the matter. Circe’s first meal for Odysseus’ men, which included her drugs, had been vegetarian. Barley, as I understand it, is an annual plant in any case, so there is no question of sacrifice; but also the other ingredients, honey, milk, and wine, do not involve the sacrifice of an animate being. The goddess considered that mixture to constitute human sustenance, unlike the acorns she threw her guests when they had become pigs. (In Calypso’s house, gods were served ambrosia and nectar, while the human got something else: ‘… all such food,/For eating and drinking, as mortal men consume.’ [5.196-7] But we are not informed what Circe ate, if anything.) It does seem important that Odysseus and his men are said to eat ‘flesh beyond reckoning’ (κρέα ἄσπετα). The use of κρέα is pointed. I think we have here the final punch line, to the joke that began when Odysseus wouldn’t touch his food before he saw his men turned back into men. Perhaps that was in case they were to be the entrée. Nothing about their transformation has transformed them: men are men, and men are pigs, who will never stop eating barbecued pig.
Recall that the arrival on Aeaea (Circe’s Isle) is marked by a moment of profound disorientation (10.190-2). Odysseus and his men did not know where the sun went down and where it rose again. Now, in one line, a whole year passes. The word for ‘year’, ἐνιαυτός, seems to refer to the sun returning to the same place on the horizon. Circe is Helius’ daughter; perhaps hers is a fitting place for a year’s solar observation, and correlation with the seasons, to reestablish cardinal points from her sea-encircled isle.
But when the same time of year turned up, and the seasons went round
While the moons waned, and the long days came to an end … (469-70)
It seems it is only the irresistible smell of home, the local dung heap, which will awaken the men from their enchanted festal reverie, their post-turkey slumber. And it is the crew, at the bottom of the psychological hierarchy, who make the move against his highness Odysseus:
“Divinity, enough already: remember now the land of your fathers,
If it is god’s decree that you be rescued and return there
To the home with the high roof, and your own, the mother earth of your fathers.” (472-4)
They as much as call him a god. Perhaps there’s a hint that he needs pulling down from his high bed. But Odysseus does not resist; he says his ‘manly life’s breath’ was persuaded. He waits for one more day of eating ‘limitless flesh’ and ‘pleasing mead,’ but at night he once more climbs onto Circe’s gorgeous bed and makes his plea for passage home. Here he suggests that it was not only just now, after a year, that the men started pestering him, but that they had actually been wasting away his heart for a while, whenever Circe had “gone off somewhere.” That’s a charming touch, whether or not it’s true.
So Circe drops her bomb. They need no longer stay at her house any more, although it is implied that they could if they were willing. But.
“… there is first a need that you complete another journey, and arrive
In the house of Hades Invisible and awesome Persephone,
To consult the oracular soul of the Theban, Teiresias,
The blind prophet, whose mind’s vessels are yet grounded.
Even though he’s dead, she gave him a mind—Persephone—
To be honest, he alone; the rest flit around as shadows.” (490-5)
The word ‘grounded’, describing Teiresias’ phrenes, is the same word (ἔμπεδοι) as describes the mind of Odysseus’ men when their bodies had transformed into pigs’. (I think I shall change it from ‘steady’ to ‘grounded’ there as well [10.240], for being more literal.) We shall discuss Circe’s instructions, and of course the journey to the Invisible World, in due course. Odysseus calls for a guide; he has gone in this passage from pronouncing himself a guide and leader on the journey to the house of God, to once again what Eurylochus called him in mockery: a follower.
But for now, as the text for an initiate’s advice to which to hang on, and consult through what follows, consider Odysseus’ reaction to Circe’s news:
‘So she spoke, but my own heart was shattered:
I started crying, sitting there in the bed, nor did my heart now
Want to live any longer, and to see the light of Helius.’ (496-8)
Get it? Once again, that right there is a joke. Not for the first time, by my reckoning, Odysseus is suicidal. Now what better way to get to Hades, quicker—perhaps immediately—and without the need for a guide or a crew or a ship, on your schedule to boot, than suicide? Or better yet, get Circe to fix you up a special savoury potion, so ‘to cease upon the midnight with no pain.’ To my mind, the sort of person who makes such a joke, about the easy way to get to Hades, is not someone who takes seriously fairy stories about empirical journeys to the Underworld. I’m telling anyone who will listen, that Homer is post-Orphic, post-Christian, post-religious, and post-postmodern. So here is my now well-worn maxim for those following with me on this journey through the Odyssey:
The Odyssey is comedy.
In Greek:
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit homerist.substack.com/subscribe -
On Odyssey 10.336-407
Here is the latest of my audio-video readings of the notes I write for each of the performances of Homer in English. This one is mostly the same as the post, but in general I cannot help but revise and embellish, so I encourage you to watch and comment, even if you have already read my original article. My teacher Elliott Zuckerman used to tell his students that the point of going to a lecture is to learn how to be bored. Go on, it’s good for you!
Do please support my work if you can. Paid subscriptions make a huge difference.
Singing Homer is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
A brief summary of my new theory of the Ancient Greek accent, including the law of tonal prominence which applies also to Latin, can be found here.
My chapter ‘Words, Accents, and White Spaces’ can be found in my recent book, Singing Homer’s Spell: The End of Oralist Poetics, available here.
The following is my original post, which contains, as ever, a recorded performance of the whole passage in both my prosaic English and Homer’s sublime Greek verses:
Here are some previous posts I mention in my talk:
The embellished video podcast for that one is here:
And there’s also this one:
with the following video:
Finally there’s this one about the stag; must get around to doing a video for it soon:
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit homerist.substack.com/subscribe -
Odyssey 10.336-407
How long do Odysseus and Circe make love to each other? What a rude and intrusive question, but science can have little regard for privacy if it is to be comprehensive. Unfortunately no one was around with a stopwatch, or any sort of atomic timepiece from a lab. But still available to us is the original, pre-Hellenic and pre-Western measure: the hexameter. Each of these was itself already measured by a dance step, the dactyl, into sets of sixes. But the hexameter was, I believe, the primary unity and unit of measurement, the reference for the word ἔπος, whence we derive ‘epic’.
ἔπος is often translated ‘word’, but Homer and the Greeks in fact had no word for ‘word’—or rather, they used a number of different words which covered ground which may have included the sort of dictionary entry we call a word. But all of them covered much more ground than the things we enter into dictionaries, like so many names atop tombstones inscribed in an alphabetised cemetery. λόγος is famously the word translated ‘word’ at the beginning of the Gospel of John, describing what was there at the beginning. But a λόγος is a speech or an account or a count. The material of each of these involves words, plural. Likewise, a μῦθος is a disclosure, in context sometimes a command. Usually more than one dictionary word is required for such a revelation from a speaker. Later these two words can mean ‘ratio’ and ‘myth’, respectively. In a similar way, ἔπος, also ‘speech’ or ‘a speech’, refers primarily—in Homer, I would suggest—to an hexameter line. It is hard to say how Homer himself might have further divided the interior of that line, apart from its musical division into bum-ba-da dactyls. Such a line, the ἔπος, it must be emphasised, is a musical, not a grammatical form.
The articulation of words is not the obvious thing it seems to those of us used to experiencing them as visible symbols separated on a page. Such an experience is a peculiar human pathology limited to the ‘literate’. (For those of you keeping score, the fetishising of equations is a pathology of the literate. Those who ‘plug in’ numbers need to be plugged in themselves, for a reboot. Teasing or fudging the data, is the one universal experience of the lab.) Researchers into living oral poetry, hoping to illuminate the composition of Homeric music, observe the following about the non-literate experience of ‘words’:
In their field work among the guslari, the traditional oral singers of Yugoslavia, for example, Milman Parry and Albert Lord discovered that these singers thought in terms of sound groups, not individual words; the two do not necessarily coincide. Only after a Serbian or Croatian guslar had seen a printed copy of his dictated song on a sheet of paper, with the individual words set apart by the white space between them, could he understand what Parry and Lord meant by the term “word.”
Prior to the work of the Alexandrian scholars, who edited the transmitted texts of Homer in the Hellenistic era, the late centuries BCE, a line of Homer’s might have looked something like this in writing:
ΚΑΙΤΟΤΕΓΩΚΙΡΚΗΣΕΠΕΒΗΝΠΕΡΙΚΑΛΛΕΟΣΕΥΝΗΣ
The different individual symbols represent a continuous stream of sound, some of them standing for the vowels and some for the consonant stops in between them in that stream. There is no indication of melody, or stress patterns. Earlier writing, including earlier Greek writing called Linear B, used such symbols to represent whole syllables only by their leading consonants; often there was no indication of the vowel sounds at all. Such writing, using a syllabary, is therefore a shorthand, not a full recording, made for users of a language who already knew what vowels to fill in, and how to intone them. The Greek invention of the alphabet, where the symbols of a Phoenician syllabary were for the first time used to record, and hence recognise, elements more fundamental than a syllable, was a key reason the word-music of Homer could be preserved, unlike, sadly, the word-music of the psalms of David.
The recording of vowels was not enough, however, to save this music for posterity. The line above describes the moment Odysseus actually climbed on Circe’s bed. (Start your stopwatch.)
‘Exactly then was when I got up on Circe, her completely gorgeous bed of love.’
Here’s how the same ἔπος might have looked in a Byzantine manuscript, descended from the Alexandrian version, whence our modern texts emerge after modern editing and fonts:
καὶ τότ’ ἐγὼ Κίρκης ἐπέβην περικαλλέος εὐνῆς. (Od.10.347)
Aside from the introduction of lower case letters, we note the separation of what we have come to call ‘words’ by spaces, and the addition of accent and punctuation marks. It turns out that the separation of words and the addition of accentual diacritics is not, as you might suppose from modern grammars, a mere and historical coincidence. The Greek accent, a disyllabic tonal arc, up and then down in pitch, was felt to be terminal; that is, its place of commencement, the rise in pitch immediately before the fall, was limited to the last three syllables of an expression. Such expressions were therefore self-demarcating subunits of the line, the string of connected sounds recorded in the more ancient written version of the text. In other words, the recurring accentual contonation itself demarcated internal units within the whole line. Hence what were separated in the Alexandrian texts of Homer were the natural Greek prosodic units within the larger unity of the hexameter line.
Punctuation also dramatically affected accentuation, in that pauses released some otherwise suppressed rises in pitch. Hence punctuation must very much have been a planned thing in musical composition, although to be clear, the present commas and colons are often a modern editor’s choice in the texts of Homer. These editors are, in general, not trained to assess the musical implications and effects of their chosen pauses, only the grammatical ones. Thankfully, the disjunction between grammatical and musical form is not complete; but the two are not identical. An epic line is not also necessarily a sentence. These editors seem to register the accent marks, if at all, as merely visual parts of a word. Whatever the case, not only the addition of accent marks and punctuation, but also the separation of prosodic units (nascent ‘words’) appear to have been part of a single project: to make clear the tonal contours and emphases of Homer’s music. The accentual culminations of these prosodic units brought rhythmic life to the hexameter, which was otherwise an endlessly repeating dance movement. These culminations reinforced but also, crucially, syncopated its beat.
Most likely the Alexandrian scholars introduced accentuation into Homer’s text, entailing the division and separation of what we call words, to guard against a living change in the accentuation of Greek. At some time in their period, a period of the international spread and adoption of Greek, the accent became a monosyllabic stress rather than a contonation with an often disyllabic arc of pitch change. The Greek accent remains a monosyllabic stress to this day, like the English one; the stress lands on the syllable where in the ancient language, the voice rose in pitch. But in the ancient pattern, the voice also fell in pitch on the next syllable, often emphatically. Therefore, unfortunately, the new monosyllabic stress habit could not make sense of the ancient compositions, whose metres had been reinforced (and syncopated) by an often disyllabic tonal arc. The unmarked syllable following the one bearing the accent mark, was often the most tonally prominent one in its reinforcing relationship to the underlying dance beat.
To be clear, the introduction of graphic accent marks indicating the location of a culminating tonal pattern, and the momentous separation of prosodic units which resulted, were part of an attempt to preserve the original rhythmic and rhetorical movement of Homer and the other pre-Alexandrian, classical authors; but it must be said that the attempt failed, until my recent reinterpretation of the accentual reality. (My explication of the ‘law of tonal prominence’ for Greek and Latin can most easily be found here.) Hence what we who read and write have come to regard as obvious and self-evident beings, ‘words’, were once prosodic units within larger unities, such as metrical periods like the hexameter line, or grammatical ‘sentences’. Hence such different things as verbs and nouns are all, equally to us, words. In ancient Greek a single such word can constitute a whole sentence, but also an almost meaningless particle. I believe this wild ambiguity is a legacy of the literate origin of the concept of the ‘word’ in the tonal units demarcated by spaces in our Medieval Greek texts. This was an innovation advanced by Alexandrian scholars not to invent the concept of words but to preserve the melodic and rhythmic actuality of Homeric composition.
‘Show me the meaning of the word.’—The Pretenders
‘Word’ is another one of our woolly-minded, Dark Age concepts. Go ahead, try to define ‘word’ without using the word ‘word’. No joke. When my grandson learns a word, before he can read and write, what is that thing, that barely recognisable sequence of sounds coming out his mouth, which gestates in the caves of his mind?
Perhaps you think I am avoiding talking about Odysseus and Circe having sex. I’m not the only one. These are the lines that follow Odysseus’ announcement that he got on Circe’s bed:
Her attendants, meanwhile, got busy in her rooms:
Four of them, who were the working women in the house.
They were born, these lasses, from the springs and from the groves
And from the holy rivers, who flow forth into the salt sea.
Of these women one was throwing on the chairs some pretty rugs,
Sea-purple on the top, and underneath she threw a cloth cover;
The other began stretching dinner trays out in front of the chairs,
Made of silver, and on them she was putting golden baskets:
The third was by the big bowl, mixing wine of honeyed intent,
Delightful against the silver, and distributing the golden goblets.
The fourth was carrying water and lighting the fire,
A lively one under the big tripod: and the water began to warm. (Od.10.348-59)
Note the ‘meanwhile’. Homer himself is counting the time: first, second, third, fourth. Except every number is a woman, a house servant whose work gets two lines each, a fresh-water lass born from springs and groves and sacred rivers who immerse in the salt sea. We do not learn their names, only their numbers. In the lines immediately following, Odysseus gets into that preheated bath. The demarcation is the moment the water boils. So there’s our answer: these lines are timing the lovers’ encounter from beginning to end. Circe and Odysseus go at it for twelve hexameter lines, those twelve rendered in prosaic English above.
Homer is no stranger to this kind of aesthetic-mimetic move. Homer never directly describes Helen’s beauty, for example. He describes instead the effect it has around her; famously, how her presence makes the old men on Ilium’s walls have young thoughts, as they mutter among themselves like summer cicadas (Il.III.146-60). This method is ultimately far more effective than any direct attempt at word-painting; instead, vividly to the foreground, are these verbal reactions in the old men, which fence the wondrous unicorn where she lives in our imagination, quite beyond the ability of words to sell her short.
But something is off with Odysseus’ use of the quartet of riverine serving women setting tables and warming baths, one by one. Compare what is, to my mind, the most beautiful of Homeric examples of the technique in question. When Achilles first hears from Antinous, Nestor’s son, the news that Patroclus is actually dead, and that Hector has his armour, he is grimly distraught. He lies outstretched in the dust and tears out his hair. We are told also of the reactions of the people around him: even the enslaved women he and Patroclus had gathered as booty in their raids across the Troad, shrieked aloud in pain, ran outside and then around Achilles, beat their breasts and dropped to their knees. Antilochus himself
wept where he stood, bending to hold the hero’s
hands when groaning shook his heart: he feared
the man might use sharp iron to slash his throat.
(Il.XVIII.32-4, tr. Fitzgerald)
At last Achilles utters a dreadful cry (σμερδαλέον δ’ ᾤμωξεν), so outrageous that his mother Thetis heard him in the depths of the sea. She also cries out in mourning and becomes a second focal point of grief as the goddesses, the Nereids, also gather round:
… all Nêrêïdês,
who haunted the green chambers of the sea.
Glaukê, Thaleia, and Kymodokê,
Nesaiê, Speiô, Thoê, Haliê
with her wide eyes; Kymothoê, Aktaiê,
Limnôreia, Melitêm and Iaira,
Amphitoê, Agauê, Dôtô, Prôtô,
Pherousa, Dynaménê, Dexaménê,
Amphinomê, Kallianeira, Dôris,
Panopê, and storied Galateia,
Nêmertês and Apseudês, Kallianassa,
Klyméne, Ianeira, Ianassa,
Maira, Oreithyia, Amathyia,
and other Nêrêïdês of the deep sea,
filling her glimmering silvery cave …
(Il.XVIII.37-50, tr. Fitzgerald)
The words for ‘cried out’ (ᾤμωξεν, κώκυσεν) are onomatopoeic: they sound out groans and moans. But at the moment Achilles releases his primal scream of agony, we enter an area beyond the possibility of visual stimulation of the dramatic scene, and especially its vocal representation. Art fails. Instead we are transported to a place impossibly far, under the sea, where the whirlpool of human figures around the prostrate Achilles is resonantly recreated, like an induced field or ‘quantum entanglement’, by these Nereids around Thetis. Our immersion in their names, syllable by syllable, is Homer’s most extraordinary reversion to catalogue poetry, not this time to remember or memorialise, but for its unique aesthetic effect. In chanting these names in their deeply Greek sonority, like saying a rosary, we focus our minds as though in meditation, so that the grief itself and its existential expression can go on pure and untouched by our verbal and imaginative limits—in the off-stage-left of our consciousness, as it were. There it resounds more mightily than words can hope to do, from the bottom of the salt sea to the peaks of heaven.
Note the dwelling on the names. We get no names at all in Odysseus’ catalogue of fresh-water femmes. Instead they each have an ordinal number and a domestic duty. It is a most basic catalogue, like the names of the counting numbers, first, second, third, fourth. This seems to be more a cheating of expectations than an aesthetic strategy, perhaps even a sendup. Consider that Odysseus has just mounted Circe’s bed. (Yes, like a horse.) A considerable segment of us in audience are on the edge of our seats, looking for a bit of action. A tasteful sex scene might have been nice, but for some, only god-and-man pornography would have sufficed. Odysseus’ aesthetic here is almost Brechtian. If Odysseus had meant the water goddesses as a substitute for us leering plebs, he might have given them pretty names and evocative epithets for us to savour. Instead we get the tensest of the many getting-ready-for-dinner tableaux in the Odyssey, as timeless and elegant as the details always are. Always it is the objects, the bowls and baskets, pitchers and ewers of silver and gold, and the soothing, professional operations in such scenes—never the labourers themselves—which come into focus. It adds only weirdness to make the servants goddesses (especially if imagined diaphanously-clothed). We get twelve hexameters of setting the table, while God conjoins with mortal man just over there, behind the master bedroom door.
To get the measure of how this kind of thing can be done, consider the following:
Elizabeth was too much embarrassed to say a word. After a short pause, her companion added, ‘You are too generous to trifle with me. If your feelings are still what they were last April, tell me so at once. My affections and wishes are unchanged; but one word from you will silence me on this subject for ever.’
Elizabeth, feeling all the more than common awkwardness and anxiety of his situation, now forced herself to speak; and immediately, though not very fluently, gave him to understand that her sentiments had undergone so material a change since the period to which he alluded, as to make her receive with gratitude and pleasure his present assurances. The happiness which this reply produced was such as he had probably never felt before, and he expressed himself on the occasion as sensibly and as warmly as a man violently in love can be supposed to do. Had Elizabeth been able to encounter his eyes, she might have seen how well the expression of heartfelt delight diffused over his face became him; but, though she could not look, she could listen, and he told her of feelings which, in proving of what importance she was to him, made his affection every moment more valuable.
They walked on, without knowing in what direction.
In comparison to Homer, Jane Austen is a pornographer. Mr. D’Arcy is literature’s proudest erection. But generations of Janeites will continue to dress up rather than down, because suppression and sublimation allow the soul to orgasm free of the body, in the face of the sublime. As sensibly and as warmly as a man violently in love can be supposed to do. The genius is in the supposal. Just how sensibly and warmly, and violently, is that? Had Elizabeth been able to encounter his eyes … Ah the power of a negative conditional. It is like saying ‘don’t think of pink elephants.’ Never have the eyes of erotic passion been more compellingly portrayed—with the compulsion of the forbidden or impossible, upon an ambitious child: she might have seen how well the expression of heartfelt delight diffused over his face became him. If the reader keeps track of Darcy’s and especially Elizabeth’s walks and walk-taking through the course of the story, they will sink back in amazement at this line: They walked on, without knowing in what direction. The whole scene ends in this way:
After walking several miles in a leisurely manner, and too busy to know anything about it, they found at last, on examining their watches, that it was time to be at home.
Now that’s how you time a love scene. Am I the only one who does not generally imagine either Elizabeth or D’Arcy wearing a watch? ‘Examining their watches’: these two compare their readings, likely a necessary precaution with the timepieces of Austen’s day. But for D’Arcy and Elizabeth, coordinating their timekeeping—sharing a joint measurement of the extraordinary moment they have just spent—is itself an erotic act.
When I used to teach Pride and Prejudice, once upon a time, I would begin by pointing out that in the view from space, but also in every detail of its fabric and lace, this is a work of dramatic art about the French Revolution. Give that book a re-read. The action of the novel depends on the movements of soldiers, due to actions on the continent. You will find a confrontation in a garden, unheard by anyone else, between the privilege of nobility and the rights of man. This author needs, sympathetically and generously, to be rescued from the Janeites. Call her Austen.
There may also be the grooming of a certain kind of reader in Homer as well. We remember Odysseus’ favourite Polites, ‘Citizen’, who was in the initial expedition of Odysseus’ men to Circe’s house, and who is not again mentioned. He must have become a pig. He was the one who incited the men to call out in response to the singing voice of Circe. Polites does not conceal his interest in the idea that the singer might be a woman. Perhaps it is, in part anyway, lust that turns men into pigs. In that case perhaps Homer’s Brechtian turn is not an aesthetic misdirection the better to capture the union of Circe and Odysseus, so much as a bridle or warning against such prurient interest. We have no natural right to the wisdom of the moly for protection. There are perhaps enough of us streaming our movies and television shows, and fellow gawpers and groupies in Homer’s own audience, who have become swine at the trough without knowing it. Whereas the substance of Achilles’ raging grief is something Homer wishes to render by all the means his music can engender, the depiction of Odysseus sleeping with Circe perhaps brings a danger to the enchanted listener.
This is snipped from James Joyce’s Portrait:
The feelings excited by improper art are kinetic, desire or loathing. Desire urges us to possess, to go to something. These are kinetic emotions. The arts which excite them, pornographical or didactic, are therefore improper arts. The esthetic emotion (I use the general term) is therefore static. The mind is arrested and raised above desire and loathing.
The singer’s business is literally enchantment. In the case of Homer’s performer, the staff-bearing rhapsode, he is an enchanter with a wand, just like Circe. But it may be that for Hermes’ initiate, the enchantment of either singer or goddess is not one that renders his swinish soul into an acorn-eating pig. His is a state of union and communion which cannot be depicted like sex in a porno.
The mind in that mysterious instant Shelley likened beautifully to a fading coal. The instant wherein that supreme quality of beauty, the clear radiance of the esthetic image, is apprehended luminously by the mind which has been arrested by its wholeness and fascinated by its harmony is the luminous silent stasis of esthetic pleasure, a spiritual state very like to that cardiac condition which the Italian physiologist Luigi Galvani, using a phrase almost as beautiful as Shelley’s, called the enchantment of the heart.
Impishly undermining Joyce’s Thomistic rapture, at least in this case, is the ever-present spirit of comedy in the Odyssey. Indeed there is a way in which our eye seems consciously blurred to Odysseus’ nakedness. In the line, ‘She sat me in the tub and started washing from the big tripod,’ there is oddly no ‘me’ in the Greek. (M. L. West, feeling the absence, suggests in the apparatus restoring an elided ‘me’—μ’—in place of an ῥ’.) Odysseus has slipped into the scene of the servants’ preparations without anyone noticing. But as it is, the line could actually hint, with an ambiguity of voice between active and middle in the form of ‘she sat’, that it is Circe sitting in the tub. Now that’s a kinetic thought. These are, after all, Circe’s servants, who must be used to bathing her. But could Homer (or Odysseus) be cheeky enough to conjure her for us naked? It is only two lines later, after water has cascaded down the bather’s head and shoulders, that we can be sure that the bather is the speaker being washed by a handmaiden: ‘Until she took the life-destroying weariness from my limbs.’ We are certainly used by now to Odysseus’ suffering and weariness; but isn’t it slightly uproarious that the labour he is just now recovering from, has been his twelve epic lines’ worth of business on Circe’s bed?
Dinner is served. New functionaries emerge, or perhaps a couple of the fresh-water lasses doing double duty, as an attendant who pours water for washing and a house manager who brings out the bread and short eats, from her store. It is stunning to me that the anthropomorphism of Homer’s gods extends to all their classes and castes. There’s an upstairs and a downstairs, wherever you are, it seems. The notion that these roles could be eternal is more than a little chilling, and perhaps intended to be. We shall have reason to visit the idea of whether Homer thinks a mortal human being can ever move up in the world—if not to immortality, at least in social station.
When we first heard these lines about the golden pitcher and the silver basin, and the conscientious house manager, it was for the suitors’ dinner in Ithaca. But there were more lines then, and in the dynamics of musical discourse and registration, we especially note the differences when melodic passages recur.
The carver lifted and set by platters of meats,
From every kind of cut, and placed by them golden cups.
A herald checked on them often, pouring wine. (Od.1.141-3)
These two functionaries, carver and herald, are both male, and perhaps for that reason not wanted in Circe’s entourage. But the omission raises a question or two. Circe’s meal for Odysseus’ men had been vegetarian. There was honey and cheese in the mix, so perhaps she has a cow and a hive out back. We know there’ll be wine despite there being no herald, because the third of her water nymphs has already mixed it and distributed the goblets. Ah, but will there be meat? Oh dear. There’s those lovely hogs in Circe’s pens. Those of you familiar with The Rocky Horror Picture Show will know what I mean, when in answer to the question posed on screen, ‘what’s for dinner?’, the audience resoundingly responds, ‘Meatloaf!’
That a host might serve his guest the flesh of that guest’s beloveds, in the soup, is not a scenario unknown to Greek storytelling. Homer, it seems to me, is an adept at creating subliminal tensions in his Odyssean scene-painting, with just such a whiff of the macabre. Odysseus himself telegraphs this unease, vividly, but with no specificity:
ἀλλ’ ἥμην ἀλλοφρονέων, κακὰ δ’ ὄσσετο θυμός. (Od.10.374)
‘No: I sat distracted, my mind elsewhere; and my spirit foreboded ill.’
The omission of what is expected, an omission especially felt in the recurrence of a passage of music, is the source of the effect in the aural medium of Homeric poetry. ‘Something’s missing,’ or ‘what’s wrong with this picture?’ is always the prelude to discovery, often of a gruesome kind. The possibilities for the development of a scene all brood in the consciousness, until the definite action is realised. Before then, how can we know for sure how diabolical Circe’s imagination may be? Trust me, says the witch. We expect a carver to carve some meat.
‘Yet the mind within stayed steady—the way things were before, in fact.’ (10.240) This is the present condition of Odysseus’ men. It’s still them, but now looking through fattened hogs’ eyes. We remember also the thirsty stag, whom Odysseus ambushed when first venturing into Circe’s isle, to feed his crew a dinner. (I have christened him ‘Fred’, without his permission.) I cannot resist the idea that Homer may impute consciousness to the various species of mortality that we eat. What is lacking is their ability to express themselves in a way we can understand, including to express their feelings about that very mortality.
Odysseus will not touch his food. The scene plays so drolly as post-coital repartée.
“Why this way, Odysseus? You’re worth as much, sat for dinner, as a mute,
Devouring life’s breath, and you don’t touch the food—or the drink.
Or I suppose you’re expecting another trick? But there’s no need for you
To be afraid: for I already swore you a mighty oath.” (10.378-81)
And he finally lets it out:
“Ah Circe, for what man is there, who’s on the level,
Could endure to taste of food and of drink,
Before his comrades were released and he could see it with his own eyes?
No, if you mean well when you order me to drink and eat,
Free them—so I see with these eyes my trusty comrades.” (10.383-7)
The reunion with his men is sweet and tearful, but the comic imp is still buzzing around with his little stinger.
‘So I spoke, and Circe walked across and out the room
Holding the wand in her hand, and she opened the doors of the pigsty
And drove out what looked like fattened nine-year-old hogs.’ (10.388-90)
We are reminded that Odysseus is still pretty hungry. He looks at his men and sees succulent pork, like Elmer Fudd contemplating Bugs Bunny. This time Circe applies a drug like an ointment, baptising them with holy oil. Their pig hairs start flowing off.
They became men again, younger than they were before,
Both more handsome and taller to look at.
They recognised me, those fellows, and hugged me root and branch, one at a time.
And under all of them entered a longed-for ability to mourn; the house on both sides
Resounded terribly: and the goddess started to pity them—even her! (10.395-9)
They’ve gone from being good to eat to being good lookers. These men have clearly been through something. It’s too bad Odysseus did not interview them. I’m reminded of John 12:9: ‘… and they came not for Jesus’ sake only, but that they might see Lazarus also, whom he had raised from the dead.’ Jesus was still an attraction, to be sure, but Lazarus had been dead four days! (Jesus never broke this World Record.) People wanted to check this guy out, hear what he had to say. ‘What did you see there?’ ‘Did ya meet yer Mum?’ ‘Did ya meet my Mum?’
The story goes that in the Eleusinian mysteries, a pig was sacrificed as the initiate’s surrogate. The initiate emerges reborn. It does not seem unlikely to me that Homer is here profaning a mystery in sending it up. When he has Menelaus say to Telemachus, ‘do this in memory of me’ (4.591-2), in relation to a wine ritual, it seems to me that sacramental wine in memorial was already a thing, a quiddity in Homer’s day, and though it reemerges with profundity in Christian ritual and theology, Homer and his comedy are already post-Christian and post-Eleusinian. They are, even today, post-religious. That prospect I find exciting in both kinetic and contemplative ways. It is something new for the history of religions, which has never thought to see Homer as anything but given, somehow, and traditional. He is an anomaly in any alleged human timeline, not at all at the beginning of things. Everywhere I turn in the Odyssey, I meet the deepest comedy, which is always a post facto thing—not only post-Iliad.
In rendering ‘hugged me root and branch (ἔφυν τ’ ἐν χερσίν)’ I am translating the verb φύω, ‘grow’ or ‘sprout’, which is often used in this context of greeting by Homer. ἔφυν ἐν χερσίν is ‘grew into [my] arms’, hence ‘hugged’, ‘embraced’. The abstract noun from this verb is φύσις, the ‘word’ that later became ‘nature’. The mourning (γόος) of the men returned reechoes round the house. This time it does not reach the depths of the sea, but it does reach the heart of Circe:
… and the goddess started to pity them—even her!
It is striking that the men’s lamentation is described as ἱμερόεις, ‘longed-for’, ‘lovely’, usually to be taken in an erotic sense. I assume that such mourning was impossible in their porcine condition. Hence I interpret ‘a longed-for ability to mourn.’ These men have come back younger and more beautiful. Why are they still unhappy? ‘In truth I know not why I am so sad …’ The implication is that there is something characteristically human in lamentation, not generally imputed to the animals we kill and eat, like pigs and cows and potatoes. We like to think they do not mourn each other. To be human again is to mourn again, to be mortals is to mourn. But first comes the embrace, clasping each other root and branch in the awareness of our shared nature: ‘They recognised me, those fellows.’
Perhaps there is hope in the idea that if we could sleep with God, as woman and man, She might also begin to recognise us, and over a cigarette and a restorative meal, take an interest in our feelings, what it is we care about—which, in a democratic world, is each other. Not at all to acknowledge our merits, or choose us for any reason, but to pity us. Her laugh in sympathy would be better, anyway, than a deserving mockery, or wanton sport.
For Katia Mitova
Translations are mine unless otherwise indicated. In Greek:
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit homerist.substack.com/subscribe -
On Odyssey 10.274-335
The presentation here has developed since the original post, so do have a watch.
My partner suggests a possibility for the moly (μῶλυ) which intrigues me greatly, so I thought I should record it for the stimulus it might also give you. What if the μῶλυ was a fungus? The difficulty of the extraction could have to do with the extensive mycelial network of such creatures, seemingly endless, which constitutes the ‘roots’ (and brains) of the fungi. The mushrooms are merely the fruiting bodies—often beautiful, often hazardous, and often white. This possibility would also explain Homer’s (Odysseus’) complete lack of interest in the stem, leaves, or other greenery that comes with plants. It is only root (ῥίζη) and flower (ἄνθος), both of which should have been as ready metaphors for Homer as for us. (We say ‘fruiting’ bodies in reference to fruitless fungi). As I emphasise, Homer’s single use of φύσις (‘nature’) is close to its root sense (pun warmly welcomed): it refers to biotic ‘growth’ and emergent sprouting, not necessarily confined to that of herbs and other plants.
For all we know, Homer invented the word which has changed the world, for what might seem, to many, a throwaway use. But Hermes was showing Odysseus something when he showed him the ‘sprouting’ of the moly; perhaps the Greek speakers who looked over Odysseus’ shoulder at this word and this growth, saw also, and yearned after, what they and modern science came to worship: the action of Nature. Homer did not just invent a word in φύσις; he pointed the way, like Hermes the guide.
Singing Homer is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
What if the moly was a psychedelic mushroom? Could Odysseus’ stimulated state have been the proof against Circe’s drugs—perhaps also, some of them, mushrooms? The authors of the scientific paper cited in the ‘moly’ article in Wikipedia propose the opposite: that the transformations seemingly induced in Odysseus’ men were psychedelic states, and that the power of the moly was anti-psychedelic.
For the whole passage performed in Homer’s Greek hexameters and my English linear prose, please see the previous post of ‘Homer in English’:
Here we go! As Fabrizio Romano likes to say. (He’s a pundit on football transfers.) Tune in next time: Odysseus is about to get in Circe’s bed.
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit homerist.substack.com/subscribe -
Odyssey 10.274-335
So Odysseus heads away from the sea up through the ‘sacred glades of Circe,’ and is about to arrive at Circe’s house, when he is intercepted by Hermes Golden-Wand. The entrance into ‘sacred glades’ (ἱερὰς ἀνὰ βήσσας) perhaps suggests that the journey of Odysseus is both an ascent and a penetration into something mysterious, unlike that of Eurylochus and his men, who merely entered some woods (βήσσας). Those who are initiated, or capable, see more in the same vista than those who are not. Hermes’ interception seems not a chance encounter: we later learn that Circe herself, she of many drugs (πολυφάρμακος), had been forewarned by Hermes at some indefinite moment in the past, that a certain Odysseus would be visiting on his return from Troy.
Is it just me, or does Hermes seem a bit camp? He is described as
… looking like a youthful man,
With the first hairs on his lip, whose bloom is at its most ravishing … (Od.10.278-9)
There can be little doubt, in that last phrase (χαριεστάτη ἥβη), of the sexual nature of Hermes’ attractiveness. To be sure, the attraction implied is in the beholder Odysseus. But there seems to me to be an intimacy, a flirty playfulness about Hermes’ banter:
“Oh you sad man, where now? Wandering the hills all alone …
You don’t even know your way around the place!” (281-2)
There is a fixation today with typing people sexually, so that some people are ‘gay’ and others ‘straight’ and others ‘bisexual’, for example, as a matter of a supposed fixed identity. It is said with confidence that we are ‘born this way,’ as if by a combination of nature and fate. I am not sure what is behind the modern and often painful obsession with identity and allegiance to type, including an attendant hypocrisy and, in many, a deliberate obfuscation. All I know is I am a remarried man who finds just about everybody I know a little bit queer. In Homer there seems merely to be a casual obviousness that Odysseus would be attracted to a young man of such a growth and nature—two words which we shall soon be obliged to ponder. Yet it would seem as perverse to call Odysseus ‘bisexual’, as it would ‘heterosexual’.
The first signs of hair on the lip, or down on the chin, were thought to display the acme of ripeness in a boy, who was ready for the plucking. In Athens and the ancient world generally, such youths become objects for older males in the culture of paederastia. Today such interest on the part of older men is considered a toxic and even criminal pedophilia, albeit especially (but not only) when directed at prepubescent children. We perhaps see an example of ancient pederasty in the Odyssey in Athena’s disguised tale, when she is Mentes remembering Odysseus’ visit to his family home. The young Man had come there after a failed mission elsewhere to secure unholy poison for his arrows. But Mentes’ father—so says Athena, to Telemachus—used to love young Odysseus so dreadfully, that he himself gave him said poison, apparently at the risk of retribution from the gods (1.263-4). It is Mentes’ theme that young Odysseus was a helluva looker and quite a jolly lad at a party. Perhaps she hints that it will take a bowman with poisoned arrows to make her wish come true, the one where Odysseus will suddenly appear before Penelope’s suitors in his youthful form. (In the Iliad, Odysseus seemed to be no sort of bowman, something of a meta-puzzle.)
Aside from cues in Hermes’ speech—which might always reside in the imagination, merely, of a reader who fancies he’s being flirted with—one might also suspect that the Homeric performer was like any actor, who generally relishes the chance to ham it up. Camp is a staple of the male actor’s energeia (by which I mean the active fulfilment of his nature). So it makes sense that Odysseus’ description of Hermes’ inviting appearance would be a cue for him to deliver the god’s speech with a wink and a sashay. It is only an absurd sort of prudishness in scholars and front-facing teachers which prevents them registering sexuality in Homer’s depictions, so to allow them to cast him in the moral vanguard of Great Books for youth—quite the opposite of, for one, Plato’s reception of him. This repressive mindset makes a subject like Achilles’ physical intimacy with Patroclus, rather drolly, a matter of controversy. It is not generally supposed, for example, that Telemachus has sex with Peisistratus, Nestor’s son, although they sleep together and Telemachus refers to his bosom buddy as the ‘pleasurer of this, my own life’s breath’ (τῶι ἐμῶι κεχαρισμένε θυμῶι, 4.71). This does not make the boy ‘gay’, although by the end of the poem, a case could certainly be made that Telemachus is uncomfortably a misogynist. The fact is that all the rest of Peisistratus’ brothers, Nestor’s sons, go to bed with their wives. It seems to be understood—shall we say, ‘normal’—that pubescent boys not yet ready for marriage, might be expected to take the pleasure of each other. Perhaps a similar thing could be understood about girls who go unchaperoned (except by a brace of mules) to wash clothes in the woods. Unseen, except by a leering audience, Nausicaa and her maids take off their veils—a thing done on the wedding night, and also a metaphor for rape, when done to you—and play ball! (6.100). Scholars who purvey an Homer of metrical formulas and Victorian pretensions, need the grownups to tell them that neither life nor music work that way.
Hermes reveals a drug—which is to say, a plant or herb—which will protect Odysseus from the potent pharmaka Circe will be expected to mix into his meal, and somehow forestall his transformation into a piggy. But as we’ve already learned, the enhanced porridge is not enough for the trick; there must also be a gesture from the actor’s prop:
“Whenever Circe prods you with her extra-long wand,
That’s when you draw the sharp sword from by your thigh
And jump on Circe, as though minded to kill her.
She’ll get a fearful shock, and she’ll demand that you have sex with her.
There and then is where you no longer turn down sex with a goddess,
So she releases you your comrades, and—takes care of yourself.”(10.293-8)
This would be the one time in the Odyssey where the phrase about drawing ‘the sharp sword from by your thigh,’ a staple from the Iliad, is not used as a sendup, in that the action that follows is actually a threatened attack and ambush, not some ignominious retreat or a makeshift non-use of the sword. But all the same, it is slightly funny coming as an instruction in this way, rather than part of an instinctive reaction or intentional act. What is more, the instruction is to pretend to attack a goddess, a female, and then be met with a counterattack which is not mortal combat, but a demand for sex. Perhaps there’s a double meaning in that. Oh behave. A sword is just a sword.
The explicit threat Circe presents, according to Hermes, is the unmanning of Odysseus—that is, his castration. Before acceding to Circe’s bed, Odysseus is to demand a sacred oath that she not plan another “shitty calamity” (πῆμα κακόν) against him. The most feared of these possible outcomes is specified:
“Lest when you’re stripped naked she make you a lowlife with no man-balls.” (301)
μή σ’ ἀπογυμνωθέντα κακὸν καὶ ἀνήνορα θήηι.
To make a man a non-man (ἀνήνωρ) when they’re naked seems to suggest a castration or some other form of mutilation. This particular threat to manhood recurs in the Odyssey. Castration is likely the adulterer’s penalty facing Ares for his trysts with Aphrodite. Some would interpret the skewering of the eye of the Cyclops as a displaced version of the same. From now on, however, after Circe, threats from females and the feminine come to the fore in his wanderings, whether Odysseus is naked or uselessly armed.
Men don’t like to be reminded how vulnerable they are, especially when naked and aroused. The Odyssey will not spare the Man. The poem certainly seems to have a programme on the nature of the human male, the ἀνήρ (genitive ἀνδρός), quite distinct from any such thing in the Iliad, where we might perhaps speak of a programme on the nature of the ‘hero’. The Odyssey’s way, however, may simply be the way of all comedy, on the compelling haplessness of masculinity, veering always from the ridiculous to the sublime. Men are pigs. But there we come to a distinction beyond which I am not able to see clearly, the one between comedy and tragedy. I do not hesitate to try to define these things, but the things themselves, comedy and tragedy, resist reduction. They persist and reemerge through all their instances, like the varieties of mammals and insects, in multifarious manifestations, which nevertheless convince one of the their separateness and irreconcilability.
The mother of all these distinctions is Nature herself, a mother of twins and opposites.
Thou, Nature, art my goddess; to thy law
My services are bound. (Lear, I.2)
To be sure, Edmund may be addressing Nature as a proper name. Yet he could not address any other divinity or revered figure, say Athena or Aphrodite, or Mother Mary, and mean remotely the same thing, apart from his devotion to their decree. How might Edmund say what he means, declare the same thing, without using the word ‘nature’? Come to that, how might anyone say what they mean without using ‘nature’ when they need it? I have already used it several times, and have no substitutes. ‘The nature of the human male’, the ‘actor’s nature’. Words that cannot be paraphrased easily, but are also indispensable, flash red warning lights. Do not their confident use mask a sort of woolly-mindedness? There are many words like this, fundamental to our modern descriptive vocabulary: ‘instinct’, ‘gravity’, ‘evolution’, ‘human’, to mention a few. How would modern science, advertising, politics, or psychology not be struck dumb, in their attempts to describe or influence the world, if they were robbed of the use of these words? Gods and spirits have been banished, but only by their proper names. If we happened to live in a Dark Age of science and history, how would we know?
It seems to me that scientists and economists and the like, should force themselves to say it in English (as it were—you can substitute your own native language). Too often the industry jargon self-selects a members-only club, where esoteric or merely parallel nomenclatures constitute as many masonic handshakes. Many of us have experienced the abomination of ‘weed-out’ courses, at all levels of education. They reflect a pretence to competence which too easily masks an institutionalised ignorance. Nobody really knows how the calculus works, only that it does. Meanwhile, weeds themselves are too interesting for school.
Equations are actually brutally primitive kinds of sentences. They don’t have any verbs worth distinguishing, except to say that ‘equals’ does not mean ‘is’. All the operations, the additions, divisions, and so on, are nested and packed into deceptive agglomerations on each side of an ‘equals’ sign. The grossness of their shorthand constitutes both the impotence of equations as disclosive speech, and their impact as totems with a spell-like power to enchant. Some might say ‘enslave’. The principle of the conservation of energy, or the idea that every action produces an equal and opposite reaction, are a mental need before they answer to any sort of reality. Surely their a priori quality counsels caution, in applying them, as though freely, to a world where successful species go extinct, where almost all the universe is ionised plasma and not neutral inertial matter, and many or most actions do not produce a reaction, because cowardice is a very real thing, in humans and animals alike. ‘Saying it in English’, eliminating the all-explanatory jargon, would help ground scientists’ thinking in the experienced realities, and thereby both critique it and elevate it to what could be called ‘natural philosophy’. Why do things fall to the earth, and why do I feel heavy? Don’t say ‘gravity’, like an imbecile. Explain it in your own words and with your body, and any props which might help. Save the equations for when we’re under the sheets. Later.
Singing Homer is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
One of the joys of reading ancient composers and poets, especially early Greek authors, is that they did not have a dead language to draw on for technical and metaphysical terms, like ‘technical’ and ‘metaphysical’. Hence they had to say it in Greek, meaning say it in their own words. Aristotle’s Metaphysics is actually called ‘on the stuff after the physics’ (τῶν μετὰ τὰ φυσικά). Whenever Aristotle—who is not early, but was a pioneer in developing terms of art in explicating his thought—used a word to refer to the stuff that things are made of, it was ὕλη, ‘woodland’, or more to the point, ‘timber’. When Cicero translated Aristotle for his audience, he did not translate this word, but used a calque: materia, Latin ‘timber’. Hence we have ‘matter’, an abstract concept from the start, with no hint of a metaphor in its embryo. I should think this absence makes us handicapped in our conversation with the idea, as it were; matter has us at a disadvantage. It seems to be a preexistent being in the usage and understanding of people who practice modern physics, although nothing whatsoever empirical can be pointed to. Elements or atoms of matter are elements and indivisibles of what, exactly? Scientists surpass all artists, in their mostly unwitting immersion in broken metaphors.
It is not that being close to the lingual roots of a word, solves any problem in apprehending its referent. ‘Metaphysics’ remains a thing which compels an arduous climb to the summit of philosophy, although in the word itself we have a rather pure case of our reifying a lecture title, perhaps coined for the use of a compiler, rather than by an author, and which only seems to connote an appendix. (I suppose the stuff that comes after the physics is, for Aristotle, what physics itself presupposes.) Matter also remains a concept and an enigma, even in Aristotle’s timber. How, after all, does a living tree turn into wood, and wood turn into timber? And what if the timber sprouts? But it does rather make a conflict between ‘materialists’ and ‘spiritualists’ look a bit silly, does it not? A conflict suited to the confusions of a Dark Age.
When Cicero translates Aristotle’s use of Greek φύσις, however, he does not use a calque. Naturally, he uses natura. This is a word which points towards birth in referring to its concept, as indeed does Edmund the bastard. Aristotle’s own word, and the word most Greek thinkers seem obsessed with, means ‘growth’ or ‘sprouting’; φύσις is looking toward plants, while natura is gazing upon animals and all things which can be said to give birth. A φυτόν is what we somewhat deflate by calling a ‘plant’. But there is no question that animals also, and embryology, are a principal inspiration for Aristotle’s imagination in the Physics. From physis we get both ‘physics’ and ‘physical’, which can point in opposite directions. (We’d say Odysseus is going to get physical with Circe, although he might also learn some physics.)
Always with Aristotle, the way his predecessors and contemporaries actually use a word, is essential data in the process of definition. The ways φύσις is used in Greek happen to correspond pretty well with many of the ways in which we use the idea, like ‘naturally’, ‘by nature’, Mother Nature, etc. The development in animals and plants from seed and embryo, like the chicken from the egg, exhibit the unfolding of latent design, no matter the consternation of materialists. An analogy with artisans and timber plays a leading role in Aristotle’s exposition:
It is absurd to suppose that purpose is not present because we do not observe the agent deliberating. Art does not deliberate. If the ship-building art were in the wood, it would produce the same results by nature. If, therefore, purpose is present in art, it is present also in nature. The best illustration is a doctor doctoring himself: nature is like that. (Physics II.8, 119b26-31, tr. Hardie & Gaye)
The way physiologists speak of an ‘immune system’, which learns and has a memory, it seems a doctor in command of legions is already in the house, and a healing art is in the wood. We are evidently passengers.
Imagine, then, the transcendent possibilities for a budding Homerist, metaphor intended, in reading a composer of Greek who not only does not have Aristotle to draw on for learned words to use, or even a dead language, but has no word for ‘nature’ at all! How does he even talk? Yet Homer has plenty to say. Freedom beckons the Homerist, and perhaps you as well, in the music of Homer’s words. We puzzle out their referents, and move to the flow both of his native verbs and their vivid and vivifying rhythm, rather than tread the endless cloisters pondering the nature of nature. It is exhilarating to experience this earth’s and our body’s phenomena, and others as well, in Homer’s rhythms and distinctions, unblinkered of our habitual categories and formulations. There occurs a triangulation which makes the familiar unfamiliar, popping out anew at you, bringing peripheries into focus—as surely as three dimensions bring the world to two.
The word φύσις occurs only once in all of Homer, and it comes when Odysseus describes Hermes’ prophylactic gift:
So he spoke, and supplied the drug, the Slayer of Argus,
Once he drew it out of the earth, and he showed me the sprouting of it.
At the root it would be black, but the flower was like milk;
Moly is what the gods call it: it is difficult to dig up
For men who are mortal, but the gods can do everything. (Od.10.302-6)
The nature of the moly is something Hermes shows Odysseus; he need not teach or explain it; it is evident directly in its sprouting. To be truer to Homer’s actual text, its nature is its sprouting; but there’s no ‘nature’ in there at all, only the sprouting (φύσις). Homer has no dealings with the word or the notion of nature, and yet it seems that every second paragraph or sentence, I reach for this word in trying to understand what I read in him. Am I cleverly taking Homer’s hint, or is it not more plausible that I find it impossible to escape the blinkers that this mind-drowning concept, nature, throws upon me at every turn? That my response betrays a dependence, a kind of religious obscurantism, like a convert who sees everywhere, behind the people and objects he encounters, signs of faith and grace?
‘Moly is what the gods call it.’ What does Homer mean when he says that the gods use different names for things? Here, I think uniquely in Homer, we don’t also get the human name for the herb, which is doubly curious. It seems that when they name things, the gods don’t like to use Greek. Greek names are usually transparent etymologically, but many proper names, of people, places, things, and gods, are not. This includes ‘Achilles’ and ‘Odysseus’, as well as moly. I solicit your responses to this question, I don’t have a good answer. I shall only say how powerfully and pervasively modern science has also adopted this rhetoric, to the point where it is deeply infixed in our minds that there are in fact true (‘scientific’) names for things, and that they all come in Greek or Latin or some barbarous hybrid of the two. How self-satisfied do you feel—admit it—when you realise that you are a human being, and that means you are a primate? (And can use that fact in a conversation?) We do not know the real name of the herba immolum, Homer’s μῶλυ. Is it allium nigrum? Or is it a kind of galanthus (‘milk-flower’)? (It seems the latter contain an anticholinesterase, which combats poisonous anticholinergic intoxication, whose symptoms include amnesia, hallucinations, and delusions. Wikipedia seems to think these could include thinking that you have become a pig, and forgetting the mother earth of your fathers.)
At the root it is black, but the flower is like milk, somehow liquidly white. It is the root which must anchor the moly to the earth, so that it is troublesome to dig up. Apparently it could be known to our herbalists and Ayurvedics, except that it is too hard to dig up for mortals. In truth this is not a growth which lends itself easily to Aristotle’s vision. There is not an obvious way to point out material actualising form; there is no egg, embryo or chicken. To dissect a seed is to find embryonic root matter, and of course one or two cotyledons, embryonic leaves. (A flower’s petals are often modified—transformed—leaves.) One approach which seems appropriate is the modern observation of polarity in plants. Rupert Sheldrake’s youthful research into this phenomenon suggests that plants are like permanent magnets: if you cut off a stem of willow, the part that was toward the leaves will sprout leaves, while the opposite end, otherwise identical, will only grow roots. In a similar way, if you break a magnet, the fragments immediately show new north or south poles, each in the direction of the original whole magnet. This polarity is already there in the seed of a plant, and in every cell of its stem.
But polarity is, again, perhaps a reductive and overly unifying way of doing justice to the phenomena. The roots actively seek out the darkness and the earth, to hidden moisture and minerals, and whatever else is gleaming luridly there beneath the earth, while leaves and flowers reach out and upwards to the light and its radiant energy. These are opposite motives, not intuitively unifiable as form and matter. Roots and root systems have with reason been compared to neural networks. I sometimes wonder if we do not in general see plants upside down, yielding to our own habits, of supposing which way is up in this world.
To observe the growth of the moly within the Odyssey, however, and within this episode, one is drawn neither to nature nor to polarity but to transformation. What was black and earthy becomes, in one growth, white and milky. Of course we do not see the moly in motion, as though in time-lapse photography; we see it in still life. And yet this present image nevertheless suggests a process of metamorphosis, along a linear axis. Men eat barley, cheese, wine, and pork. They also produce speech, hot air, and seminal fluid. Transformation seems not only a magical power wielded by Circe, and sustained by Odysseus’ men, but a fact of growth and assimilation—dare I say, a fact of nature. It is also, vividly and immediately, a fact of the presence of the performer before you, the Homeric rhapsode, who becomes all manner of speakers and conjures all manner of things, although what he is before you is a body and a voice, a cloak and a stick.
It is notable that Hermes nowhere tells Odysseus what to do with the moly. Is he to grate it into the soup, or drop it in whole? Or is he to ingest it at all? It is never even said that Hermes gives it to Odysseus. He just heads back up to Olympus, and Odysseus walks off toward Circe’s house, his heart heaving indigo (κραδίη πόρφυρε κιόντι). Has Homer made an omission? The moly is not mentioned again, as if it has become a secret from the goddess; and it plays no physical role in Odysseus’ encounter with Circe. In point of fact, the tension builds alarmingly; Odysseus says ‘Out she came fast and opened the shining doors’, a line we’re now hearing for the third time. We’re made to think that the same surreal sequence, ending in man-pigs, is inexorably on its way again. At no point does Odysseus suddenly brandish the moly and say ‘Ha ha! Have some of this, ya witch!’ That might have relieved the tension. But it is only when he draws his sword and dares to jump her that anything changes in the sequence.
There is still another possibility, however: that actually all Odysseus needs to be safe, is to know the moly—let’s say it’s ‘lesson’, whatever that may be—in order to be protected from transformation, witting or unwitting, or any other Circean enchantment. Contemplate the μῶλυ: grok its movement. The initiate in such knowledge may hold within him the milky flower of his continuing obduracy and endurance. But it takes a god to root him out.
We hear from Circe. The significance of this moment, of their combat on the bed, and Circe’s recognition of exactly who it is now in front of her, is underscored by the first and only echo of a word from the poem’s very first line, the quality predicated uniquely of Odysseus: πολύτροπος, ‘he of many turns’ the man with ‘the twist in his spine’. (I put it that way in my rendering because the word fills exactly the leftward retrogression and return—the turn—in the ancient syrtós dance, to which each of Homer’s verses can be performed. The twist in one’s spine as one circles to the right is an unforgettable sensation for a dancer in the round.) The sounding of πολύτροπος, in the mouth of Circe, as told by Odysseus, is a ‘meta’ moment. It links back from within Odysseus’ tale of his wanderings to Homer’s first line in the poem, a musical bridge across these wanderings and the arrival in Phaeacia, Calypso, and the whole Telemachy, to connect a spine to the poem itself. It also says that the conjunction with Circe is a significant moment of arrival, perhaps a pivot. One of the many exigencies of his polytropic attribute would seem to be that it makes Odysseus slippery, twisting and turning, hard to trap even without the secret knowledge of the moly. Or perhaps there, precisely in that secret nature, which only Hermes could reveal to him, is the twist which eludes Circe entirely.
In sounding this word πολύτροπος after ten books of poetry, ‘many turns’ at its same place in the turn of the epic line, the poet who remains the unknown troubadour before us who can become all things, has nevertheless created an enduring theme across the music of his poem so far. Even if Odysseus’ characteristic is to change and transform, it is all the same an enduring characteristic. But there is more: we know Odysseus to be something else than his changing masks. We experience him in each scene from behind his turning plans and changing appearance; we are in on the game—even superior to it, through Athena’s eyes. His many turns along the way, including this one into Circe’s bed, have always had an end only sometimes expressed but always true: his home and his marriage, and the lady there waiting. Homer the performing chameleon has therefore achieved, through his most protean art form, the crafting of a being in this Odysseus who persists through all the changes. This being, like the moly, has an enduring and recognisable—what else shall I call it?—nature. But the goddess gets the last word:
“… inside that chest of yours is a mind that cannot be enchanted.
Surely it’s you, the Odysseus, the twist in his spine, the one whom he always
Used to claim would come to me— I mean Golden Wand, the Slayer of Argus—
As you came up from Troyland with your quick ship and black.
No, come off it, scabbard your sword: then let’s you and me
Mount up in my bed, so that once we fuck, the pair of us,
And make love in bed, we might trust one another.” (329-35)
In Greek:
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit homerist.substack.com/subscribe -
On Odyssey 10.230-73
I understand that my beloved alma mater, the University of Chicago, has decided to ‘pause’ the admission of graduate students in all those departments which require the study of a language. If the University doesn’t teach languages, and also, if its best teachers do not teach languages, what exactly is its point? Interpretations of texts, and theories in all the empirical fields, will come and go. But training in languages, including the languages of mathematics, is the key to the door. Show me someone who is familiar only with English, and I’ll show you someone who doesn’t understand English. The Philistines are not at the gate: they are in the Dean’s office, and elected to government.
Singing Homer is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
Following are the passages I read in Greek during the video. Follow along! For the whole passage performed in Greek (and English) see my previous post:
Od. 10.230-42
Out she came fast and opened the shining doors
And started inviting them: and all together, they followed in their stupidity.
Eurylochus stayed back—he suspected there was a trick.
She led them in and seated them on couches and chairs,
Put in cheese for them and barley groats and green honey
And stirred them into a pottage with Pramneian wine: she mixed into the muesli
Baneful drugs, so that they might altogether forget the land of their fathers
But once she gave it and they drank it off, right after
She struck with her wand, and confined them in the pig sties.
And they began to have pigs’ heads—and pigs’ voices and hair,
And build! Yet the mind within stayed steady—the way things were before, in fact.
So they’re wailing there, all penned up, while for those men Circe
Threw two kinds of acorn by, and cornel cherries
To feed on—the sort of thing ground-wallowing swine are always eating.
ἣ δ’ αἶψ’ ἐξελθοῦσα θύρας ὤειξε φαεινάς [230]
καὶ κάλει · οἳ δ’ ἅμα πάντες ἀϝϊδρίηισιν ἕποντο ·
Εὐρύλοχος δ’ ὑπέμεινεν, ὀϊσάμενος δόλον εἶναι.
εἷσεν δ’ εἰσαγαγοῦσα κατὰ κλισμούς τε θρόνους τε,
ἐν δέ σφιν τυρόν τε καὶ ἄλφιτα καὶ μέλι χλωρόν
ϝοἴνωι Πραμνείωι ἐκύκα · ἀνέμισγε δὲ σίτωι [235]
φάρμακα λύγρ’, ἵνα πάγχυ λαθοίατο πατρίδος αἴης.
αὐτὰρ ἐπεὶ δῶκέν τε καὶ ἔκπιον, αὐτίκ’ ἔπειτα
ῥάβδωι πεπληγυῖα κατὰ συφεοῖσιν ἐϝέργνυ ·
οἳ δὲ συῶν μὲν ἔχον κεφαλὰς φωνήν τε τρίχας τε
καὶ δέμας, αὐτὰρ νοῦς ἦν ἔμπεδος, ὡς τὸ πάρος περ. [240]
ὣς οἳ μὲν κλαίοντες ἐϝέρχατο, τοῖσι δὲ Κίρκη
πάρ ῥ’ ἄκυλον βάλανόν τ’ ἔβαλεν καρπόν τε κρανείης
ἔδμεναι, οἷα σύες χαμαιευνάδες αἰὲν ἔδουσιν.
Od. 10.220-3
They took their stand in front of the door of the goddess, Pretty-Braids,
And they began to hear Circe within, singing with a beautiful voice
As she went back and forth at the loom—a big one, ambrosial—a web for goddesses,
Finely woven and tasteful, and bright, as their works tend to be.
ἔσταν δ’ εἰνὶ θύρηισι θεᾶς καλλιπλοκάμοιο,
Κίρκης δ’ ἔνδον ἄκουον ἀϝειδούσης ὀπὶ καλῆι,
ἱστὸν ἐποιχομένης μέγαν ἄμβροτον, οἷα θεάων
λεπτά τε καὶ χαρίεντα καὶ ἀγλαὰ ϝἔργα πέλονται.
Od. 10.239-40
And they began to have pigs’ heads—and pigs’ voices and hair,
And build! Yet the mind within stayed steady—the way things were before in fact.
οἳ δὲ συῶν μὲν ἔχον κεφαλὰς φωνήν τε τρίχας τε
καὶ δέμας, αὐτὰρ νοῦς ἦν ἔμπεδος, ὡς τὸ πάρος περ.
Od. 10.259-60
“And they vanished at the same time as a group, nor did a one of them
Emerge into light: and I sat a long time on the lookout.”
οἳ δ’ ἅμ’ ἀϝϊστώθησαν ἀϝολλέες, οὐδέ τις αὐτῶν
ἐξεφάνη · δϝηρὸν δὲ καθήμενος ἐσκοπίαζον.
Od. 10.271-3
“Eurylochus, right you are, you stay here in this plot,
Eating and drinking by the ship, empty and black.
But me? I’m going; for a force comes upon me, of necessity.”
Εὐρύλοχ’, ἤτοι μὲν σὺ μέν’ αὐτοῦ τῶιδ’ ἐνὶ χώρωι
ἔσθων καὶ πίνων κοίληι παρὰ νηϝὶ μελαίνηι ·
αὐτὰρ ἐγὼν εἶμι · κρατερὴ δέ μοι ἔπλετ’ ἀνάγκη.
Linked here you can find my recent paper where I demonstrate that Homer composes for certain significant accentual pitch patterns, which function as ‘signature lines’ in a musical composition. Homer’s text cannot therefore be composed from purely metrical formulas, and any connection of his composition to an ‘oral tradition’ must be argued on a different basis. For the hardy, there is also a description of the law of tonal prominence, a new theory of the Greek accent which applies also to Latin.
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit homerist.substack.com/subscribe -
Odyssey 10.230-73
Out she came fast and opened the shining doors
And started inviting them: and all together, they followed in their stupidity.
Eurylochus stayed back—he suspected there was a trick.
She led them in and seated them on couches and chairs,
Put in cheese for them and barley groats and green honey
And stirred them into a pottage with Pramneian wine: she mixed into the muesli
Baneful drugs, so that they might altogether forget the land of their fathers
But once she gave it and they drank it off, right after
She struck with her wand, and confined them in the pig sties.
And they began to have pigs’ heads—and pigs’ voices and hair,
And build! Yet the mind within stayed steady—the way things were before, in fact.
So they’re wailing there, all penned up, while for those men Circe
Threw two kinds of acorn by, and cornel cherries
To feed on—the sort of thing ground-wallowing swine are always eating. (Od. 10.230-42)
Circe is invisible in this scene. Why do I say this? She’s clearly before us, doing all sorts of striking things. But the medium of Homer’s narrative is, first of all, a musical one, as well as a visual one (through the performer) and a lingual one, in the familiar literate sense that words are conveyors of ‘information’ which allow us to put together a story in our intellects and imaginations. Hence the resources available to Homer in, for example, creating a foreground, where he brings elements to the front of consciousness while suppressing others, are likely to be unique in relation to literary techniques. It is the treatment of Homer only in that final sense, the sense in which we register and assess novels and other literature, which has led to a great deal of abuse, and misuse, of Homer’s poetry in academic circles. When we assess the music, and the show, only through the close reading of its libretto, we are bound to find fault with it as a) quaintly and folksily repetitive, b) limited in its vocabulary, and c) puzzlingly roundabout, among any number of other misapprehensions and ways of missing the point. As they say about concerts and other live events, ‘you had to be there.’ An editor would send Homer’s copy back to have it purged of all its repetition and unhelpful frou-frou, with an angrily scribbled note to ‘tighten it up and get to the point!’ Imagine what he’d do with the lyrics of a Disney song or a Bach cantata. Homer is not performing a novel. Over the course of a brief passage, not even fifty lines, we shall be able to explore a surprising number of Homer’s musical resources.
Singularly and peculiarly lost in the translation, from live performance to scribbled libretto, is the role and gestalt of the numerous noun-and-epithet phrases Homer has nevertheless made famous. Their usage is not necessarily familiar to us through our experience of song. They seem instead to be children of the marriage of music and dramatic narrative Homer has developed. ‘Swift-Foot Achilles’ and ‘Poly-Wily Odysseus’ are typical. The adjectives in these phrases are not so much predicates as ‘epithets’; that is, πόδας ὠκύς and πολύμητις register not so much as assertions about Achilles and Odysseus, but as extensions, elucidations, of their names. The distinction ‘epithet’ applies in Homer to adjectives that usually register as part of the subject rather than the predicate. In some instances they function almost as titles, like ‘your majesty’. It is as though when Homer wants to evoke these characters, to put them in the foreground of his stage, he sings them out with their full titles. Most often this happens when he summons them there in the line before they deliver a speech. It seems to be a way that the performer himself ‘steps into’ the role, both announcing and simultaneously doing it, immediately before he gives a speech in the character’s first person as ‘Lord of Men’ Agamemnon or ‘Poly-Wily’ Odysseus.
Singing Homer is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
The last example illustrates that the adjective does not altogether lose its semantic power in its use as an epithet. Many is the time that we are prompted to suspect the wiliness of what follows, precisely by the announcement of Odysseus as speaker in this form. It happens at the very beginning of the Tale of the Wanderings, seemingly to keep us on our guard throughout his story! (See 9.1) The Odyssey poet’s alertness to the semantic fluidity of adjectives inside these phrases seems indicated by his use of ‘blameless Aegisthus’ immediately prior to the opening speech of Zeus (1.29), where the father of gods and men precisely blames Aegisthus for what happens him, rather than fate or the gods. Paolo Vivante cites a number of instances in Homer where, when an epithet is used outside of its customary noun-and-epithet phrase, this time separated from its intended subject as an adjective in the predicate, it can in fact acquire a sense which contrasts, even, with its apparent sense inside that phrase. I comment,
It is as though the lexical signification of these epithets is thrown into peculiarly sharp relief when they are removed from their more aural and evocative role within the [dancing] phrase. To stretch a point, one might even say that the epithet and the adjective are different words.
The instance of ‘blameless Aegisthus’ is striking, however, in that ‘blameless’ (ἀμύμων) is here very much an epithet, not a predicate adjective. Its deployment immediately before Zeus’s accusing speech seems therefore overtly provocative.
It is astounding that the oralist ideologue’s take on this phrase is that there is nothing to see (or hear) here: we are told that ‘blameless’ does not register as a predicate in its role inside a purely metrical phrase, which is supposed to do no more than refer to Aegisthus, while also filling up a segment of an hexameter line by adding three syllables to the three already in his name. But even those of us who register an obvious contextual irony in Homer’s use of the phrase, or perhaps even a difference between Homer’s assessment of Aegisthus and Zeus’s, need also to recognise the more elemental musical effect of the name-plus-epithet rhythm: Homer thereby summons Aegisthus to the forefront of our consciousness, before Zeus goes on to complain about him in his speech. It is only when Zeus has made his point about the man, affixing blame, that Homer’s prior evocation resurfaces as a dissonant resonance in the musical memory. The sequence bespeaks design. This does not mean it is good design: those who feel the cognitive dissonance too strongly, ought to have the courage to criticise Homer’s choices here, rather than join those who explain them away through the reflexes and semantic handicaps of a purely metrical theory of composition. They then make up a tradition based on this theory, as though it were some sort of primitive achievement to ‘fill up’ a line of hexameter verse, and call this tradition ‘oral’, although it completely ignores Homer’s inbuilt pitch accents and phrasal melodies. Modern ‘Homeric Studies’ explains away the libretto, after first ignoring all of Homer’s melody.
The evocative epithet occurs also in descriptive passages, not only in respect of people but objects as well. Vivante wrote the groundbreaking studies on the subject of the Homeric epithet, especially their poetic effect and registration, albeit without reference to the music of such designedly evocative, melodic naming. Ignoring the pitch accents does not, however, prevent Vivante from distinguishing poetic rhythm from its underlying metre. Although such a distinction would seem to be elemental to the nature of poetry—that poetic rhythm arises not from repetitive metre but from the way in which accented words selectively reinforce or syncopate that underlying metre—it is a distinction which seems largely to be lost on the majority of Homer’s commentators. Here is Vivante:
Take, in Il. 3.423, Helen joining Paris in his chamber: ἡ δ’ εἰς ὑψόροφον θάλαμον κίε δῖα γυναικῶν [and she, to the high-roofed chamber, she went, the divine among women]. We have a simple act of going, but notice how it is expressed. From the initial ‘she’ to the final noun, Helen’s presence spreads through the verse, quickened by the nimble verb [κίε] near the center. The effect is one of lightness and solemnity at once. The epithets give fullness to the moment by simply touching off what is there. We linger upon steadfast shapes even while the passing act removes them from our view. Transience finds solidity, and solidity is in turn dissolved. We have rest in movement and movement in rest—at once, tranquility and motion. A translation such as ‘Helen, divine among women, went to the high-roofed chamber’ would only give us embellished description. The force of Homer’s verse lies in its rhythm—in the way the words take position, in the way each pause hints suspense, and in the way the parts integrate to realize a growing presence. It would be inadequate merely to point out a combination and adaptation of metrical formulas: the verse has an intrinsic unity, and it came on one wave of rhythm.
The descriptive phrase ‘radiant among women’ (δῖα γυναικῶν) seems in this case equally predicate and fulfilling epithet, separated as it is from its subject ‘she’ (the monosyllable ἡ) at the beginning of the line. One needs to remember, when one is obliged to ingest this poetry as words on a page, that this is a separation not in space but in time: the phrase at the end knits the line into both a rhythmic and semantic whole, reaching back past an anapaestic run through the ‘high-roofed chamber’ (ὑψόροφον θάλαμον) to irradiate its solitary subject ‘she’, back at the beginning of the line. ‘Helen’s presence spreads through the verse.’
Now what does all this have to with Circe and her invisibility? It turns out that Homer is strangely coy about how he introduces her and presents her. When viewing and hearing the performer in front of you, Circe becomes obviously seen, in one way, and yet unseen, unfocussed—almost as if she’s behind you. It’s said she calls to Eurylochus and his men, but Homer (Odysseus) gives her no speech. She is merely a ‘she’ (ἡ, 230), with no further depiction or evocation beyond her several actions. Her presence does not so much spread through the verse, like Helen’s, but haunts it like a ghost. We only hear her name, at last, eleven lines later—lonely at the end of a line with no epithet or title! She had in fact been invoked earlier with a flurry of epithets and adjectives, when the men first reach her threshold:
They took their stand in front of the door of the goddess, Pretty-Braids,
And they began to hear Circe within, singing with a beautiful voice
As she went back and forth at the loom—a big one, ambrosial—a web for goddesses,
Finely woven and tasteful, and bright, as their works tend to be. (220-3)
ἔσταν δ’ εἰνὶ θύρηισι θεᾶς καλλιπλοκάμοιο, 220
Κίρκης δ’ ἔνδον ἄκουον ἀϝειδούσης ὀπὶ καλῆι,
ἱστὸν ἐποιχομένης μέγαν ἄμβροτον, οἷα θεάων
λεπτά τε καὶ χαρίεντα καὶ ἀγλαὰ ϝἔργα πέλονται.
Note, however, that though Circe, goddess of beautiful braids, is summoned to the front of the imagination’s stage by name, epithets, adjectives, and sounds, and her web and loom even more so, she is all the same invisible to the men at this point: heard not seen. Keats says, about the images on a Grecian urn, that ‘Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard/Are sweeter …’ In the Greek of the line,
Κίρκης δ’ ἔνδον ἄκουον ἀϝειδούσης ὀπὶ καλῆι,
And they began to hear Circe within, singing with a beautiful voice,
we almost hear her directly through the liquid, pitch-accented long vowels. Is a goddess heard, but not seen, even more beautiful?
When Circe actually appears, however, out the door, she’s just a ‘she’. It’s the doors themselves that are ‘shining’! The focussing power of Homeric versifying keeps her in our periphery, but illuminates the opening of her doors. You’d expect the revelation of the goddess to be the focus of the poet’s gaze—not the doors. Eurylochus suspects a trick and stays back, so we have no eyewitness to what goes on next within. Perhaps we are to suspect that Odysseus must have become intimate with Circe to find out—perhaps we have expected that intimacy all along. Eurylochus, for now, stays outside, but Odysseus the initiate must have already passed through those doors.
The lines that follow describe the wholesome cheese, barley, honey, and wine, with which Circe makes a porridge for her guests. There is not even a personal pronoun; verbs in the third person serve to supply a subject. The key ingredients, however, are ‘baneful drugs’ (φάρμακα λυγρά), which would cause the men to ‘forget the land of their fathers.’ Hence Circe’s recipe could induce an effect similar to that of the lotus flower. The description is conditional, however; it expresses an intent rather than an actual result. I say this because it is evident after their transformation, that the men are wailing in sorrow. It seems not unreasonable to suppose that their despair may stem from the drugs not quite working, and that they are in straits most of all about never reaching home.
But is it not possible that their wailing is existential, and would have been triggered even if they weren’t homesick? The reason for despair may come purely from their transformation. The next stage of Circe’s enchantment of the men, after their ingesting her pottage, is initiated by a strike of her wand. It is not clear whether she is meant to strike each of the twenty-one, or if she strikes the air over them somehow; the performer needs to decide what to do with his staff. Immediately she confines them in her pig sties, which are apparently a part of her interior design. Only then do they start to turn into pigs.
Is the sequence important? Or is it fanciful to think that merely confining men in sties is halfway to turning them into pigs? The confinement and separation from society’s table seem to be significant. These actions indeed underlie society’s rationale for imprisonment, whether as a social or individual good, or a political punishment. (Rehabilitation seems an option beyond the pale for mortals, in Circe’s eyes. All go to the sties.) Their change in diet is marked, just as it was between immortal and mortal diners at Calypso’s table: while the men enjoy barley and honeyed Pramnian wine at their last supper, in the sties they get acorns. Just as delicious intoxicating ingestables can make you forget who you are and where you’re from, perhaps imprisonment can, by itself, turn human into animal.
Separation and confinement both seem to be a feature of animal husbandry, as practiced by the Cyclops, for example. He separates the rams and billies from the ewes and nannies, then puts the lambs and kids to the teat. The sorting and the counting express his control—his dominion, shall we say—over the animals, but in Polyphemus’ case also allow him to express his care for them. Sorting and numbering his flocks seem to be essential reflexes of an overseer in the Odyssey, whether that is Proteus and his seals, Penelope and her geese, or the Sun himself over the cattle of the year’s days.
But there is an unexpected twist to the story of the men’s confinement and transformation, which appears to transcend the physical aspects of growing pig hair and being imprisoned in a sty. The sting in the tail is also an unexpected musical climax, which must be lost on those who disregard Homer’s pitch accents.
And they began to have pigs’ heads—and pigs’ voices and hair,
And build! Yet the mind within stayed steady—the way things were before in fact. (239-40)
οἳ δὲ συῶν μὲν ἔχον κεφαλὰς φωνήν τε τρίχας τε
καὶ δέμας, αὐτὰρ νοῦς ἦν ἔμπεδος, ὡς τὸ πάρος περ.
Note the three emphatic syllables in a row, νοῦς ἦν ἔμπεδος. They are three straight, long, accented syllables, two circumflexes (rising and falling in pitch within each long vowel sound), acute (rising pitch on a sonant closed syllable). The basic underlying rhythm of the dactylic hexameter is long-short-short, a long downbeat with two shorts in the upbeat. Hence three straight long and emphatic syllables must be rare and marked occurrences in the course of dactylic poetry, and indeed any poetry, whose rhythms generally propagate through alternating stressed and unstressed syllables. In paying attention to the pitch accents in Homer’s text, we are at last able to confirm what must seem intuitively obvious to the punters, that musical stresses needs best correspond to semantic ones. You cannot play the opening of Beethoven’s Fifth or the Ride of the Valkyries to scenes of toddlers playing with blocks. (For a fuller discussion of the new ‘law of tonal prominence’ for ancient Greek, please see my most recent paper here.)
‘Yet the mind within stayed steady.’ If this means what it seems to mean, never have more portentous words gone ignored by the sorts of people who write about the ‘history’ of philosophy. I have drawn the notion of ‘within’ from the constituents of ἔμπεδος, literally ‘in the ground’ and hence ‘firm-set’ or ‘steadfast’. But the context seems to justify my rendering. Externally, the men are becoming pigs, in their heads, voice, hair, and bodily frame; but their mind was steadfast. This principally means that it did not change, unlike everything else about them; but the implication is also that the effect of Circe’s wand was on everything external and sensible about the men, not what was otherwise. It must be said, however, that there is, as well, a change in what the pig-men take inside themselves from outside; that is, their food.
We take it that the men are still the men they were, though trapped inside pigs’ bodies and natures. Behind Blue Eyes is a song by the Who which suggests that their condition applies to anyone born with an human face, too. Even one with pretty blue eyes, which, by the way, I’ve known a pig to have. Perhaps lonely and misunderstood Polyphemus sings a song called Behind Blue Eye. “No one knows what it’s like …”
The shock of the rhythmic emphasis suggests that there is something shocking also, or terrifying, about the men’s minds persisting through the metamorphosis into swine. What does Homer feel is the impact? Is this like a poet or a physicist or a revered grandmother being forced to do slave labour in a field? Or is it like a foreigner unable to communicate her medical emergency? Or is the terror rather something we feel, in the case that their mind persists in its faculty, but the men do not actually know that they are pigs eating acorns? Like stockbrokers and Amazon shoppers?
We are used to the mind-body distinction since DesCartes. But DesCartes’s insight in the cogito is really more radical than that. The thinking being who doubts is separate from everything else it perceives, not only sounds and visions, textures, tastes, and smells, but dreams. One might also include what we refer to as unconscious or subconscious processes in that list. Of all the representations of our condition made since, DesCartes’s seems closest to Homer’s in these lines.
One best tells what a speaker means by a word, however, when one has in mind what words he considers to stand in opposition to the one he uses. A mind-body distinction does not hold in those terms for Homer. In point of fact, it is difficult to imagine how one might translate the notion ‘body’ into Homer’s Greek, when applied to human beings, except in the sense ‘corpse’ (σῶμα, νεκρός). Homer’s conceptions are generally concrete; even νοῦς, ‘mind’, is usually ‘intention’, ‘thought’. But in this instance he does seem to be pointing to the mind as a being or faculty. Homer’s concreteness bears out in a number of distinctions which witness a plurality in our condition, not a duality. Aside from the mind (νοῦς), there are also the usually plural φρένες (which I render ‘mind’s vessels’, taking a hint from the lungs). Then there’s the θυμός, the ‘hot, living breath’, which appears to be the main seat of consciousness. Odysseus is famous for speaking to his θυμός, chiding it to ‘bear up’ under duress. When Hector revives on the battlefield, his θυμός is said to be regathered (Il.XV.240). The ‘mind’ is not this ‘life’s breath’, but it appears to be related, like a harnessing sail to the wind. There are also the always plural πραπίδες—the lungs again? Or the ribs? The diaphragm? And of course there’s the heart, which we still conceptualise, uniquely perhaps, in the Homeric way. Perhaps special mention should be given to the eyes in Homer, as not mere conduits for vision, but special witnesses in their own right. That is, not just me, but my ‘own eyes saw it.’ All of these, and more, can be seen in Homer as what we call ‘seats of consciousness’.
Each of them would seem to suffer from the Cartesian paradox, when we try to identify a seat of consciousness with the self—that is, the entity to whom we refer in the first person or with a proper name. What is that thing which ‘I’ points at? The ‘Odysseus’ who speaks to his θυμός? The Cartesian account of vision encapsulates the paradox: an image is focused on the retina by a lens. That image is translated somehow into electrical data which transmit to the brain. Well and good. Who is watching the screen? Is there a little man with beady eyes and spectacles, behind blue eyes? This paradox puts paid to the modern fetish for identifying the mind with the brain. ‘Brainy’ actually means fatty and dumb. Homer seems to have little regard for the brain. Greek for ‘brain’ means contents of the head (ἐγκέφαλος). Homer seems more to look to the breath and the lungs. Words are winged because they move through air. They are air, in a material sense. The best we can do, with the whole of our apparatus, is give special shape, direction, and density to the air as we expel it from our lungs.
In the ancient world there developed a potent opposition between soul and body, ψυχή and σῶμα. The mind or the reason is argued to be the highest part of the soul, in the works of Plato and of Aristotle. This is the duality later supplanted by DesCartes’s, of mind and body, or mind and everything else. But the fundamental classical opposition does not register in Homer. It is true that for all the Greek thinkers, a main difference between a living being and a corpse is the absence of the soul in the latter. But ψυχή should not be translated ‘soul’, or even ‘psyche’, in Homer. It is a thing which flies off at the moment of death, gibbering like a bat, headed to a dank and dreary place. It is not our true or highest self. It still answers to the name it was used to hearing in life, but if you speak to her, she doesn’t have any news. I think ‘ghost’ gets at the idea. It survives death, but it would seem that nothing very important survives death in Homer, except one’s reputation. Although the Homeric psyche only leaves a human being at the moment of death, it doesn’t seem to contribute anything to the animation of life, like the ‘life’s breath’ and the ‘heart’ do, when one is yet living.
In light of Homer’s way of speaking and representing things, it can seem to an Homerist that the later vaunted philosophical oppositions, such as ‘soul/body’ and ‘mind/body’, are simplistic, naive, and brutally reductive. In addressing the varieties of our empirical experience and its seats, as we also do when we speak ‘from the heart’ or ‘from the gut’, Homer seems better to answer the realities of our lived experience in the nouns and verbs of his poetry; and, in my opinion at least, this is to be the better philosopher.
“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” —Hamlet
Eurylochus runs away in terror back to the ship after whatever it is he’s seen. Between his blubbering and his hysteria, he provokes and irritates everyone. But when he finally gets around to telling his tale, he stokes the oral-theory folks to life. This is because Homer (Odysseus) nearly repeats a series of lines, in Eurylochus’ mouth, which he had already used in direct description. This has to be explained, they say. It’s a singer’s rest! Such repetitions are a concession to the imagined burdens of an improviser composing from metrical formulas during a performance. But as soon as one learns his text enough to realise that Homer is arranging his words with a view to their tonal and rhythmic effects through an underlying hexameter, not pasting together hexameters from toneless metrical formulas, one realises that Homer’s narrative is at once, and natively, a musical composition. And one would as soon explain repetition in music, as wetness in water.
The rest during musical repetition is really in the auditor, if it exists anywhere, but when nearly equivalent lines are sounded, one is jarred awake at the slightest changes between the two. For one thing, this version of the lines is heard in a different voice. There is actually created an hyper-focus on the dissonances. Rather than the extraordinary sequence about men becoming pigs, and the musical climax on the persistence of the mind in the transformed men, we get simply this:
“And they vanished at the same time as a group, nor did a one of them
Emerge into light: and I sat a long time on the lookout.” (259-60)
What amazed Eurylochus, what terrified him to his core, is that the men disappeared! They were made invisible. By going into the house and not re-emerging, they vanished. He has no idea at all that they have been turned into pigs, or anything else, nor anything about what it is they have gone through, though their minds were preserved. There is clearly an hierarchy of initiates here. Eurylochus did not go in the door. He has no idea what went on within the god’s house. And yet he has escaped still to tell a tale of fear and amazement, and so to make a desperate plea, when Odysseus asks him to guide him to Circe’s abode, that he leave him there and himself steer clear of the threat—whatever it was made the men vanish.
But Odysseus will brave an approach.
“Eurylochus, right you are, you stay here in this plot,
Eating and drinking by the ship, empty and black.
But me? I’m going; for a force comes upon me, of necessity.” (271-3)
The subject, ‘necessity’ (ἀναγκή) is separated from its preceding adjective ‘strong’ (κρατερή). I infer that there is a predication going on. In my translation I try to preserve the impact of the words in the order that they appear, although inflected languages generally allow a lot more freedom in word order than is possible in English syntax. But Homer’s is a musical composition: hence nothing is free in the placement: every word and its effective intonation is placed exactly where it needs to be, not from ‘metrical necessity’ or ‘grammatical rule’—though these also have to be observed—but from musical precision, stoking desire in counter-rhythms and cadencing in consummation. To the extent that we are looking at musical compositions in inflected languages, teachers of classical languages need to realise that word order in Greek and Latin is perhaps even more important than in English, albeit for reasons unrelated to syntax.
So what is the necessity which manifests for Odysseus here? What is it that takes away his choice, as though he were at the dominant 7th chord in prospect of the tonic? He has certainly been a coward in sending forth his men like lab rats. Perhaps he needs to atone. Let’s call that a moral necessity. He also needs to rescue his men, whatever it is that’s happened them. Let’s call that a practical necessity, but also a moral one and an human one. But is there also a musical necessity? Odysseus is the man who learns the towns and the mind of men. I reckon he’s the man who needs to know. This is a very powerful necessity. Circe is a mystery, so far an invisibility. If he had to infiltrate the Cyclops’ cave—
So as I might see the man! And what if he gave me a guest gift? (9.229)
—then surely he must penetrate Circe’s mystery, her interior sanctum, go further than Eurylochus or the likes of his horny mate Polites. If Odysseus does not go to her, cross the threshold to know Circe, the song would be lost.
In Greek:
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit homerist.substack.com/subscribe -
On Odyssey 10.187-229
A friend who follows the substack told me that for various reasons, it was quite an ordeal for him to read the essays for ‘Homer in English’, my serial audio presentation of Homer’s Odyssey in both English and Greek. At his prompt I have decided to try my hand at recording the latest post as a lecture on video, so he can watch and listen instead. So do expect these offerings on occasion, either as part of each post or a separate supplement. Enjoy! My understanding is that these will also be posted automatically on YouTube, where my channel is called either ‘Amirthanayagam David’ or ‘@amirthanayagamdavid’, I’m not sure which.
Singing Homer is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
Do please consider a paid subscription to support my work: I am disabled and have no institutional support. It seems unnatural to me to sequester certain content from those who cannot afford to pay, especially students. But I am keenly aware that an Homerist in 2025 needs to monetise everything he can get his hands on. So I appeal to you, those of you who have the means, please help me do this work of singing Homer for a new generation. Founding members will receive my six-volume set Homer Odysseia, including a Greek text and my original facing translation in linear prose. Each volume is available on Amazon for $9.99 in the US. Purchasing them there is also an excellent way to support the effort. The thing is a work in progress being improved as the performance continues here: the interaction between singing in Greek, enacting in English, and translating for the record, is a living biofeedback. Subscribers who have the first editions report a rewarding experience following along in the Greek as I recite.
In the video above, at around 24 minutes, there is a glitch where somehow a portion of the recording did not register. Here is the complete text: ‘There seems to be a distinction in force, between the creatures that eat us, like lions and other androphagoi, and the creatures we eat, like the pigs, into whom Circe does transform men, and also the creatures who eat from our hand, like the dogs greeting their master after a party, who appear in Homer’s simile.’
—David
P.S. Here are the passages I read in Greek, so you can follow along:
“Ah friends … I mean, we don’t even know in which direction is the dusk nor which the Dawn,
Nor where Helius, shining for mortality, goes beneath the earth
Nor where he comes back up: no, let us have a think, and soon,
If there will yet be any cunning plan—but for my part, I don’t think so.” (10.190-3)
ὦ φίλοι, οὐ γὰρ ϝἴδμεν ὅπηι ζόφος οὐδ’ ὅπηι ἠϝώς
οὐδ’ ὅπηι ἠϝέλιος φαϝεσίμβροτος εἶσ’ ὑπὸ γαῖαν
οὐδ’ ὅπηι ἀννεῖται · ἀλλὰ φραζώμεθα θάσσον,
εἴ τις ἔτ’ ἔσται μῆτις. ἐγὼ δ’ οὐκ οἴομαι εἶναι ·
“For I saw, when I went up to the rough and rocky lookout point,
An island, around which the limitless deep is set as a crown …” (194-5)
ϝεἶδον γὰρ σκοπιὴν ἒς παιπαλόεσσαν ἀνελθών
νῆσον, τὴν πέρι πόντος ἀπείριτος ἐστεφάνωται ·
‘But no, nothing useful came of their blubbering.’ (202)
ἀλλ’ οὐ γάρ τις πρῆξις ἐγίνετο μυρομένοισιν.
These she herself bewitched, when she gave them bad drugs.
Nor did they start up against the men, no; these actually
Stood up wagging their long tails around.
Just as round their lord, when he comes from a dinner party, the dogs
Will wag their tails, for he always brings them treats for their humour:
So around the men the wolves with tough nails, not to mention the lions,
Started tail-wagging. And the men got scared, when they saw the monstrous
portents. (213-19)
τοὺς αὐτὴ κατέθελξεν, ἐπεὶ κακὰ φάρμακ’ ἔδωκεν.
οὐδ’ οἵ γ’ ὡρμήθησαν ἐπ’ ἀνδράσιν, ἀλλ’ ἄρα τοί γε
οὐρῆισιν μακρῆισι περισσαίνοντες ἀνέσταν. 215
ὡς δ’ ὅτ’ ἂν ἀμφὶ ϝἄνακτα κύνες δαίτηθεν ἰόντα
σαίνωσ’, αἰεὶ γάρ τε φέρει μειλίγματα θυμοῦ,
ὣς τοὺς ἀμφὶ λύκοι κρατερώνυχες ἠδὲ λέοντες
σαῖνον · τοὶ δ’ ἔδδεισαν, ἐπεὶ ϝἴδον αἰνὰ πέλωρα.
“It’s either a goddess or a woman. Naw, let’s speak up quick!” (228)
ἢ θεὸς ἠϝὲ γυνή · ἀλλὰ φθεγγώμεθα θάσσον.
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit homerist.substack.com/subscribe -
Odyssey 10.187-229
“Ah friends … I mean, we don’t even know in which direction is the dusk nor which the Dawn,
Nor where Helius, shining for mortality, goes beneath the earth
Nor where he comes back up: no, let us have a think, and soon,
If there will yet be any cunning plan—but for my part, I don’t think so.” (10.190-3)
These are some of Odysseus’ μῦθοι, ‘disclosures’ or ‘revelations’, to the crew of his remaining ship, upon their waking up after a day of feasting on the portentous stag he had killed in the woods and carried to shore for them. I don’t think the import of these words receives enough attention. They almost immediately fade from mind once Circe and her magic take the stage. But they say something shocking about the state of Odysseus’ disorientation—meant in the most literal sense—and frame the landing point of Circe’s isle in an extraordinary way.
Singing Homer is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
What does the man mean, that he doesn’t know where the sun sets or rises? (One might indulge in referring to Odysseus as ‘the man’, because of the poem’s opening line.) He has just filled a day from dawn to sunset: the third dawn after their arrival on Aeaea, he set out to find a lookout point; in the heat of the day, on his way home, he met the thirsty stag. At last his men uncovered themselves—they seem to have been hiding from sun, sky, and land—and feasted upon venison by the seaside until the setting of the sun. All he or his men should need to do, to indicate in which direction the sun rises or which it sets, is point. But Odysseus says he is, just this once, bereft of the signature gift which has got him past the Cyclops: his μῆτις (mētis), his cunning and kenning. This problem of direction and the sun is clearly no ordinary one.
Some fundamental disjunction in reality must underlie Odysseus’ confusion. It is not that the place where the sun rises or sets is a mystery to someone not shrouded in impenetrable cloud or blindness. It is that these places are not where, till now, these men had been wont to point to East and West, the directions from which the East and West winds (Εὖρος and Ζέφυρος) blew.
‘As sure as the sun will rise tomorrow.’ ‘As sure as the sun rises in the east.’ We are prone to using such phrases as expressions of future certainties, often in the context of promises of payment or other vows. Throughout the Odyssey’s narrative, the sun’s feminine alter ego, Eos the dawn, appears to mark and delineate the passage of time; the recurring line in Homer is always ‘when the early-born child appeared’, as though the event is a regularly expected thing, never a surprise, in line with our own habitual maxims. (Mind you, the gods, more than once in Homer, can delay the dawn.) If the sun stopped rising in the east, how would we know? Most often we ground our sense of direction and the cardinal points precisely on the present location and then the anticipated path of the sun. To be sure, GPS and compass readings on a phone are more likely to be our first recourse these days. But those of us of an astronomical fetish will likely associate objects on our horizon, or streets on a city’s grid, with due east and west (that is, the equinoctial points), also north and south, and perhaps the summer and winter solstices. Conspicuous trees or hills do nicely. When describing his homeland in relation to the nearby islands, for example, he describes Ithaca as ‘toward the dusk (πρὸς ζόφον)’, west, while the islands are eastward ‘toward Dawn and Helius (πρὸς ἠϝῶ τ’ ἠϝέλιόν τε)’. Odysseus does in fact go on, seemingly by way of explanation for his confusion, that when he looked out from his lookout on Circe’s isle, there were no discernible guideposts on the horizon:
“For I saw, when I went up to the rough and rocky lookout point,
An island, around which the limitless deep is set as a crown …” (194-5)
So perhaps this is an explanation for Odysseus’ disorientation: the horizon visible presented no familiar guideposts by which to orient himself.
This is an exceedingly strange conundrum, however, for a sailor to consider a handicap. Historians assume that the sailing of Odysseus’ time (let’s not soil ourselves with dates) consisted of ‘coasting’, which is to say, hugging the shore, or at least keeping it in sight. But Odysseus has already, more than once, found himself in open sea. Luck has played a role in finding land, especially at night: ‘some god guided us.’ Perhaps that means he did not know from which direction he had come, so that he would not know whether to go east or west or in between, if he were to leave Aeaea? But this is not what is implied by Odysseus: he seems to say that he does not know East from West at all, in relation to Ithaca or anywhere else, although he has witnessed (yesterday) where the sun now rises and sets. Something has shaken his confidence that those directions from yesterday are the same ones he used to name and know.
Aeolus had helped him by bagging the winds—one presumes, all the ones which did not send his ships straight across the sea to Ithaca. But absent these divine aids, a sailor must have had recourse to the path of the sun, and the patterns of the stars, as a guide. At the last stage of his wanderings, we know that Odysseus left Calypso’s isle, Ogygia, to navigate by night. She told him to keep the Bear on his left; Homer describes the constellation’s spinning motion in place, which implies that the pole must have lain within the Bear. Hence Calypso has advised Odysseus how to travel east, toward the equinoctial dawn. As I have noted, modern astronomers assert that this situation, where the pole was in the Bear, never obtained on this earth. But ancient records across the globe testify to the fact that the pole was once in the Bear. There is also testimony for reversals of East and West, and back again, which imply either that the earth turned upside down or reversed its spin, or both, at different times. In this case, however, the shift from a pole in the Bear to its present location in the region of Ursa Minor requires a change in the direction of the tilt of the earth’s axis, more than the slow precession we observe today will ever allow.
… 7th Century [BCE] Phoenicians were already navigating by Ursa Minor, the Little Bear. [Thales is said to have ‘taught’ the Little Bear to the Greeks, an heretofore unrecognised constellation.] Skilled sailors would only have navigated by Ursa Minor if the celestial pole had already migrated in their era into the territory of that asterism, previously unrecognised and uncelebrated, away from any centrality associated at or near the Great Bear. It was the Little Bear that now seemed to spin in place. This rather suggests that the transition may have been stepwise and sudden, and unrelated to the phenomenon of precession and its current rate, which may indeed be slowing [to judge by Ptolemaic and Mediaeval measurements].
Let us at least soften ourselves to what Homer’s witness requires, that our relationship to the sun and to the cardinal points of the horizon and the pole in the sky has not been fixed and unchanging. An Homerist cannot therefore recline assured that the sun will rise where he expects it to rise, tomorrow.
Circe is the sun’s daughter. How does this signify? The sun has arched over the narrative, like he does the day, from the moment of his mention in the opening lines of the Odyssey. It is through their own chosen folly, we are told—whether also beyond their fate or not, we are not told—that his men’s lives become forfeit, and Odysseus fails in his mission to preserve them. Their mistake is to eat from the cattle of Helius the sun, whose number seems to correspond to the days of the year, although not, it turns out, the same number of these spinning days as we experience in orbit today. Is the loss of days a catastrophic change in the earth’s orbit and the length of the year? Or is it rather metaphorical of Odysseus’ men’s attempt to steal time, to extend their lives in a way that was not allowed them? Let us see if we can make any sense of these things once we get there, to Thrinacia.
The present arrival at Aeaea, however, the realm of the Sun’s daughter, seems to be marked out by Odysseus’ speech as a fundamental moment of reorientation. It seems that perhaps Odysseus’ journey so far, perhaps the fall of Troy itself, has been an event, or series of events, of cosmic disruption and trauma, not only the vivid human drama Homer sings. Indeed, one might conceive of the human narrative Homer gives us as a way of digesting, or ‘processing’, what has in fact been a deadly cosmic upheaval.
In truth Homer does not hide or prevaricate about any of this: the gods are visibly and actively a part of the Iliad’s drama. But their anthropomorphism, which is primarily a fact required of the medium of the singer’s body, tends, for a modern literary audience, to project them into an imaginative realm, divorced from the arena where the humans, the Achilleses and the Ajaxes and the Helens, play out what registers for us as the real drama, grounded in presently tangible and human kinds of realities. From this perspective, the gods are a cultural, or merely fanciful, embellishment. (There have been filmed versions which omit the gods entirely.) But the dramatic truth of Homer is in fact that the singer is embodying agents of many shapes and sizes, not all of them human, because such were the wilful actors and players known actually to have been involved in those events. One should conclude that for Homer and his audience, the planet-gods, Ares and Aphrodite and Zeus and Athena, were visibly real and wilful agents in the drama of the Trojan War. Homer did not invent such moments as the Götterdämmerung, the war of gods against gods in the Iliad, nor the Indo-European idea that the smith god was married to the love god, and cuckolded by the god of war.
From the perspective of a composer composing for a solo performer, equipped with his voice, his body, and his prop stick—which can become everything from a sword to an oar to a thunderbolt to a weaving rod—every agent who must participate in the action must also be shown to be plausibly self-motivated. Of course Homer at times takes licence in the service of the drama, in private apparitions and the theatre of the councils of the gods. This is not bearing witness in a courtroom. Boundaries are stretched, as ever in the Odyssey, when Nestor declares that Athena’s presence alongside Odysseus in the battlefields of Troy was, in fact, manifest to everybody. Yet I submit that there is not an historian worthy of the name, however so rationalist, who is not at some point confronted with a divine hand. They are Thucydides confronting the extraordinary debacle of Athens in Sicily.
In most of this, the sun is a benign and passive agent. In the Tale of Ares and Aphrodite, for example, Helius is merely Hephaestus’ lookout man and tattletale, peeking in at windows, as the sun will do, on Aphrodite’s adulteries. The invocation of the risen dawn in the narrative is a temporal marker, a narrative clock, like Immanuel Kant’s daily walk into Königsberg. Today, however, when people imagine the end of the world, as they are perennially wont to do, they most often imagine an action, or passion, of the Sun. The sun is going to go nova, or there’s going to be a massive coronal discharge to disrupt our microwave communications, or at the end of times the sun is going to become a ‘red giant’ and swallow the earth. Otherwise some as yet unknown intruder, a comet or an asteroid or meteorite, is going to strike and blow our earth asunder, but this terrifying diabolus is never going to be any of the seemingly clockwork objects now visible in the night sky. What is perhaps impossible for us to understand or imagine, including on a purely visual level, is the world Homer directly depicts: one where Helius the sun is far from the most powerful being in the sky. Proud Jupiter, radiant Venus, ruddy Mars, now points of light, were feared and worshipped. They wielded thunderbolt, aegis, and spear. Helius, by contrast, merely shines, for the benefit both of the gods and of mortal humanity, spreading rays over ripening fruits and unharvested fields.
The importance of the sun in the Odyssey may perhaps signify the accession of a new age, one where the ethos of regularity in the sun takes over from the electric and electrifying gods, the age of Zeus and his predecessors, who take on newly quiescent and observant roles. But this is speculation, to which I welcome different takes and inspirations. We do well to remember that the settled regularity which allows Odysseus to navigate by the stars at the pole, at the end of the journey which reorients here at Circe’s isle, and perhaps again over the stretch of years on Calypso’s Ogygia at the ‘navel of the sea,’ is nevertheless not to navigate by our pole. Our pole could not have been in the Bear without the intrusion of yet another shift in the order of the world. Indeed, Homer’s invocation of the appearance of the pole in the Bear may well be a way to transport his audience into ‘that time’, rather than a reminder of the present sky over their heads. But it remains the case that Homer’s poems, including his description of the spinning of the Bear in the sky, may be musical memories actually surviving from ‘that time’.
The effect of Odysseus’ speech, especially his mention of the sight of smoke rising from a steading in the midst of the isle, is to break the men’s hearts. Of the several perilous and deadly adventures they have already had, it is said that they are put in mind only of these two: the deeds of Antiphates the Laestrygon, and the violence of the Cyclops, the man-eater. In both these episodes, giants hurl mountain-tops and mighty boulders down upon them. In the case of the Laestrygonians, eleven of Odysseus’ twelve ships are destroyed with their men. We spoke of ‘processing’ catastrophe through humanising story; are these two episodes in particular, ways of speaking about the cosmic catastrophes that might have left not only Odysseus and his men, but the earth itself disoriented? Are giants hurling stones a way of speaking about the bombardment of the earth by bolides, a rain of meteoric iron which ushered in an ‘iron age’? If Odysseus’ harried fleet is the ark of humanity, this bombardment and upheaval of the earth’s parameters must have decimated our numbers. Odysseus lost eleven twelfths of his ships and men. His crew wail aloud and burst into tears.
‘But no, nothing useful came of their blubbering.’ (202)
Odysseus moves quickly to number and divide his men, appointing a captain to a second group. He himself and Eurylochus are the two archons. Given what we know of his intentions to bribe the men with dinner, so that they, rather than he, will go to investigate the smoke—I guess Odysseus has had his fill of running toward the danger, like when he alone led his ship to the land of the Cyclopes—the whole census and democratic exercise seems rigged. Like all democratic exercises? The lots are shaken, but there’s no surprise when Eurylochus’ lot falls out.
The whole speech of disorientation and its aftermath are barely ten lines. We slip immediately into the world of Circe and her spells. So in dwelling on it, perhaps I am distorting what Homer is giving us. But it sticks out nevertheless, all the more for how we are tempted to slip by the speech without marking what the man is actually saying.
The search party is greeted at Circe’s stone house by mountain wolves and lions. These creatures also are man-eaters, androphagoi, like the Cyclopes and the Laestrygonians, yet we do not speak of such carnivores as ‘cannibals’. The description does not suggest that Circe has transformed them from humans, but merely that her drugs have tamed them somehow, so they behave like domestic dogs, fawning and wagging their tails for a treat.
These she herself bewitched, when she gave them bad drugs.
Nor did they start up against the men, no; these actually
Stood up wagging their long tails around.
Just as round their lord, when he comes from a dinner party, the dogs
Will wag their tails, for he always brings them treats for their humour:
So around the men the wolves with tough nails, not to mention the lions,
Started tail-wagging. And the men got scared, when they saw the monstrous
portents. (213-19)
There are many of us, mind you, who fear dogs instinctively. Mankind’s friend can bite. I heard from David Grene that pig dogs can be especially nasty, if, for example, you have a fall in the sty; schweinhund is a dirty word for a reason. Perhaps some canines can’t tell us apart from pigs, like the narrator at the end of Orwell’s Animal Farm. There seems to be a distinction in force, between the creatures that eat us, like lions and other androphagoi, and the creatures we eat, like the pigs, into whom Circe does transform men, and also the creatures who eat from our hand, like the dogs greeting their master after a party, who appear in Homer’s simile.
A favourite future pig is Polites, a man whom Odysseus claims is
‘The one I cared about most among my crew, and trusted best …’ (225)
He sends him on for cannon fodder all the same. Dear Polites hears Circe’s beautiful singing as she moves back and forth at the loom.
“It’s either a goddess or a woman. Naw, let’s speak up quick!” (228)
It seems clear that this sailor, and his buddies, are pretty love-starved. The cosmic fire sparks also in diminutive organs.
How does the chaos, death, and disorientation of unmitigated catastrophe, sit so close to this kind of comedy? There’s a story in that. In Lear, Edmund the villain calls his brother Edgar the ‘catastrophe of the comedy’. ‘Catastrophe’ is a word that belongs to comedy. It refers specifically to the climactic scene of resolution in a comedy, when the world turns (strephein) (upside-)down (kata). In the human realm, this means the downtrodden but deserving rise to the top, especially the plucky hero, while in a sudden twist, the villain, his allies and plans are thwarted and he is exposed, to meet his just punishment. Outside the whole scene, but illuminating it like the sun, is the woman who accepts the now proven hero to be her mate. Hence the turning over of the world becomes infused with morality and justice, crowned by a sacred marriage.
The turning over of fortune’s wheel is another, less judgmental way of figuring the reversals of catastrophe. Some go up, some go down, many are lost. In history, some human survivors of catastrophe, even after decimations, can feel themselves justified, or ‘chosen’. Edgar has the considerable misfortune of being a comic hero stuck, alas, in a harrowing tragedy. (Several generations only knew a Lear where Edgar gets to marry a still-living Cordelia. These people knew how to fix Shakespeare.) We already know that Odysseus is going to lose all his men to their folly, even his favourite Polites. At least the latter has earned a name in the cast, unlike most of his comrades. The death of Penelope’s suitors to come is not only a punishment, it is a sacrifice of the first-born, the flower of Egypt. Their slaughter amounts to the sacrifice of the sons of the fathers Odysseus took to war at Troy, and also lost. Two generations decimated. Odysseus is either himself the diabolus, the dis-aster, the cause of catastrophe, or its avatar. But the man is also the comic hero. Perhaps you’ve seen this coming: Odysseus is the Catastrophe of the Comedy. He’s the upside down man. Come on for the ride, there’ll be laughs—I promise! Sure as the sun will rise.
In Greek:
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit homerist.substack.com/subscribe -
Odyssey 10.135-86
The line in my title, said in this case about Fred, recurs through the Iliad upon the despatching of a warrior. Many a man experiences the last moment of life this way in Homer’s narrative. Here in Odyssey 10, in the midst of one of the most strangely detached and placeless moments in all Homer, these same words describe the death of a solitary stag, at the hands of a solitary Odysseus wandering in the woods. The poor deer had been heading from pasture in the wood down to the river to drink, for, as Odysseus says, ‘the strength of the Sun (μένος ἠϝελίοιο) was getting him.’
Who is this stag? And why is he in the Odyssey?
We are on Circe’s Isle, Aeaea. This fact is announced by the narrator Odysseus before it could be known either to the hero of his story or that man’s remaining ship. It must therefore be important that his audience be aware of their location, as a frame for the events that occur to them there, before the hero and his men become aware of Circe for themselves. That includes this encounter with the solitary stag. Hence we are in the unfortunate position of guessing what an audience—which might as well be us—is supposed to know, and what not, when reading this passage of Homer.
Circe is announced as a daughter to Helius the sun, and full sister to Aeetes, who figures prominently in the story of Jason, among others. Aeetes and Circe are children of Perse, daughter of Ocean. Hence these are all pre- or non-Olympian deities. About the significance of the sun, we shall have more to say in the next instalment. Jason is several times mentioned in Homer; hence his stories would likely have been things we are supposed to know. He belonged to the generation prior to that of the Trojan War. This generation, the generation of Heracles, projects an aura over the Homeric world, while the latter, which is pre-archaic or ‘mythological’ to us, all the same carries within it the aura of its own history and ancient history. In the present generation of the Trojan War, Jason’s son did not join the Achaeans, we are told, but served instead, out of Lemnos, as the army’s importer of wine. ‘Served himself’ is probably more accurate, as a war profiteer. Karl Marx notes (or footnotes) how Agamemnon and Menelaus themselves monopolised the distribution of this imported necessity and addictive commodity among the troops, gathering all manner of precious or essential commodities in barter—bronze, steel, hides, the cattle themselves, and even, notably, male slaves (Iliad VII.470 ff.). The prestige of the past translated into privileged access to a closed market, as it did for the Sacklers selling addictive pain killers.
Singing Homer is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
Circe is a witch. One does not know if using this appellation today is illuminating or distractingly offensive. Be that as it may, she fits what is for us an enduring archetype, a woman of power wielding a wand, capable of magical transformations of herself or others. In other words, hers is a dream part for a campy rhapsode wielding a stick! She is described as a ‘dread goddess (δεινὴ θεὸς) capable of speech (αὐδήεσσα).’ The word seems to imply ‘speech intelligible to humans’. On the face of it, this would seem to be an odd qualification for Homer; for all of his gods make speeches. But the direct interactions between god and man are rare. Homer’s distinction could well imply that the gods in scenes on Olympus do not in fact use human speech. When Leukothea, the White Goddess, comes to Odysseus’ rescue upon the wreck of his raft at Poseidon’s hands, she is described as having once been Ino, Cadmus’ daughter, a mortal ‘capable of speech (βροτὸς αὐδήεσσα)’. This historical fact almost seems to justify the notion that when she appears to Odysseus as a petrel, there ought to be no wonder that this particular bird knew how to talk. It is curious that Homer seems concerned with how verbal interactions between human and divinity should be made plausible, when in point of fact, gods speaking dramatic speeches in Greek would seem to be a calling card of his. His use of this distinction (αὐδήεσσα) sets off the depiction of Odysseus’ many interactions with Athena in her guises, and makes one realise how very special they are, for Homer himself.
At the end of his long tale (in Book 12), Odysseus refers to Calypso also as a ‘dread goddess endowed with speech’. Perhaps, then, the ‘good witch’ is an earth-bound, non-Olympian rank of deity (for some reason fond of consorting with an Odyssean type). But this otherwise plausible bit of categorisation is given the lie by Olympian Athena herself. In the Odyssey, her battle spear has become a magic wand, not to mention an umbrella in an umbrella stand. She is Homer the rhapsode’s genie of the story, the original Belinda of Oz, the deus in his very body’s machina. Athena as the good witch and God’s daughter, rather than an omnipotent God or God’s son, seems Homer’s way of making divinity intelligible to man in the course of the Odyssey. But, as Plato might chime in, Athena is not a ‘good’ witch because she is good or seeks the good: rather, she’s our Belinda because she favours our hero, despite all his faults, and more winningly, his long-suffering wife.
But there is no reason to suppose that Circe is a ‘good witch’. Her title, after all, is ‘dread goddess’. She must be a known quantity if this interlude with the stag is going to work. In particular, it seems we must need to know that Circe transforms humans into animals, and that this is a talent she was known and dreaded for. We may also infer that this possibility must have been instinctively terrifying for Homer’s audience. I think the audiences with which I am familiar would rather be inclined to indulge the fantasy of inhabiting an animal. Where would Disney’s economy be, without the power of this fantasy? As a youngster I daydreamed of being Dr. Doolittle. But in most such animate fantasies, the animal avatars retain the power of speech, or a level of ability to communicate with humans. Some considerable part of the terror of such a transformation, for Homer and his ‘test audience’, would therefore be in the loss of the ability to speak. I think there lies the power for him in the distinction intimated by αὐδήεσσα. What if the heifer sacrificed by Nestor and his sons could speak the sacrifice of women she embodies, while the women and mothers of Pylos ululate their alleluia? The ability to speak partly humanises otherwise dreadful divinities; the inability instead dehumanises animals and other animate or inanimate beings.
The horror of being unable to speak or make myself understood—I am thankful to say—is something I have only experienced acutely in a hospital bed. The aphasia was quite uncanny and unnerving. I couldn’t speak my name when asked, though I knew it well enough. Once, I spent the night separated by a curtain from a woman who was apparently East European or Eurasian. She was groaning from the gut all night, saying words unintelligible to the carers who looked in on her (and to me lying awake). She did not survive. I only first caught sight of her as they were wheeling her out in the morning. The distressed nurses were chatting: ‘we just couldn’t understand her.’
Odysseus is either confessional or flatly comic about his cowardice. He and his men spend two days and nights exhausted upon pulling in to Circe’s isle. At the third dawn Odysseus sets out to explore. Once again we have an evocative line from the Iliad, only to cheat expectation:
‘Just then I took up my spear and my sharp sword …’ (10.145)
But no combat ensues—at least until he meets the stag, and that encounter is more of an ambush. Spear and sword, these are not surveillance instruments. From a lookout point he discerns smoke rising from the ground,
‘From Circe in her rooms, through the thick brush and woodland.’ (151)
He thinks to himself for a bit, and decides that the better part of valour would be to get some of his men to go investigate rather than himself.
‘Thus did it seem to me the more profitable thing, as I thought about it …’ (153)
Part of the plan is to give them dinner, who were starving at their landing place, before sending a party of them out into the woods after the rising smoke. In other words, Odysseus means to bribe his men, and the formidable stag picks the wrong one of the sun’s days to cross his path. Sicut cervus desiderat ad fontes aquarum.
One almost expects Odysseus to have a conversation with the prodigious stag, the way two warriors in the Iliad would exchange vaunts, names, and lineages before engaging. The ghostly effect here, which seems to be the point of the scene, is enhanced by the fact that Homer’s audience may well have known exactly who this stag was, or suspected his identity amongst a few options. From later sources we find the story of Actaeon, for example, who was turned into a stag for having spied on Artemis when she was bathing naked. This was apparently tantamount to spoiling her sacred virginity. That story has some interesting resonances with Odysseus’ own, in that he pointedly compares Nausicaa to Artemis when he intrudes upon her in the woods. In a twist, however, of the sort proprietary to Homer, Odysseus is the naked one in that encounter. (To be honest, we don’t actually know the state of dress of Nausicaa or her companions. One presumes they did not wash all their clothes.) Is the stag Odysseus’ upside down alter ego? One consequence of seeing Homer as a figure at the dawn of classical Greek culture, rather than an achievement at the apex of a lost one, is that one closes one’s nose to the smell of satire, at every level of detail.
Satire requires, at the very least, awareness of past artists and past art. Beyond the Odyssey’s takes on the Iliad, which seem obviously to be there, modern scholarship seems only willing to posit ‘tradition’ as the context of Homer’s poems, understood more as a source than a foil. Tradition is a quick and easy recourse for academics who fear the evident miracle of authorship—not just the Homeric production, but authorship generally, a gift of inscrutable Muses unknown to them, on whom they are loth to admit their dependence. The search for their beloved ‘intertextuality’ is confronted by an ancient world whose historical library sits mostly emptied. Projecting this beloved framework onto a ‘tradition’ without a people or an history, which cannot be studied by field researchers, affords them considerable freedom of invention. But the evidence of his dialogue with the Iliad suggests that the poet of the Odyssey is a poet who knew both other poets and other poems. Homer’s invocation of the Muse by itself implies this. This episode of the thirsty stag has the sniff of lost repartee, though we only hear one side of the conversation. It tantalises with its sense of allusion and unconsummated allegory, to the point that its sense of mystery is perhaps unnaturally enhanced.
The upshot is that one cannot definitively or even sensibly answer why the unfortunate nobleman of a stag makes his appearance in the Odyssey. But he, all the same, imprints on me a powerful lesson, so I shall testify. All eating is cannibalism. Now that is not what Homer says, but it is something a Homerist might conclude, he being someone, for better or for worse, who is inclined to draw lessons from Homer’s narrative. The Cyclops shocked us with his man-eating; Antiphates the Laestrygonian made it almost seem funny. Odysseus draws forth his spear from the stag’s corpse, as though from a fallen warrior. He says exactly what he did with the spear afterward, because the performer is dealing with the concrete prop in his hand as part of his enactment. Homer does not waste an opportunity to describe Odysseus’ handiwork in plaiting a rope out of withes: in the Odyssey, all such hand-crafting, from the building a raft to his marriage bed, Penelope’s loom to weaving this rope, is worthy of the Muses’ hexameters. He then heaves the beast around his neck and leans on the spear he just put aside, so that the unencumbered performer, leaning on his staff, can nevertheless adumbrate a complete figure in mime.
Odysseus throws down the stag in front of his men—shall I call him Fred?—so they can gape in awe. He says words for the moment:
“Ah friends, not yet do we go down, though we grieve,
Into the house of Hades—not before the allotted fateful day should come.” (174-5)
I suspect, however, that we are all too aware that the fateful day has come untimely for Fred—whoever he may actually be (or have been). Does Odysseus know that he has, in effect, murdered someone? There may be a difference in this regard between the teller and the hero of his tale. The teller seems keen that his audience know that this is Circe the sorceress’ isle. The hero, meanwhile, may prefer not to look his gift stag in the mouth, so to speak. He refers to the stag as a ‘dread prodigy’ or ‘wonder’ or ‘portent’ (δϝεινοῖο πελώρου). This is an odd thing to say about a deer; not so odd about Fred. The epithet proximately recalls the epithet of the ‘dread goddess’, and suggests her agency at what we should call a ‘meta’ level if we were reading literature, but a concrete one in Homer’s native realm of sounded oral music.
Let’s remember food and drink, says Odysseus, let’s not starve. And they tuck in, for a whole sun’s passage, into Señor Stag.
‘We sat around feasting unutterable amounts of flesh and pleasing alcohol …’ (184)
How is this eating different from cannibalism? What exactly is so revolting about the idea of the Cyclops chewing his food, as you and I do? The idea that you do not know who your food might be, is similar, to my mind, to the idea underlying the culture of guest and host, that the stranger might be a god. You don’t know. An Homerist can have no objections to vegetarians; many are so through religious or cultural upbringing, for reasons of taste, digestion, health, and more. But Homerists must reject the proselytisers of vegetarianism, the ideologues who object morally to the eating of animals, as similar to racists. What have they got against plants? Why do they deny them consciousness and intelligence? Their chewing and burping is disgusting, whether eating man flesh or broccoli. Neither the felled redwood nor the poisoned alga are blessed with human voice, so their wails go unheard, at least by us. But under a microscope there is more like than different between animal and plant cells. Life must eat life, kill life and chew life, to live. It seems we stigmatise cannibals as a way of distracting ourselves from this reality of eating. Perhaps this is similar to stigmatising incest as a way of diverting attention from certain realities of sex. All life, after all, is our own kind, and kin.
When his men emerge to behold the stag, it’s said that they ‘uncovered themselves’ (ἐκ δὲ καλυψάμενοι). They have literally been in hiding, from whatever might see them, for more than two days. We shall have to discuss what it is about their recent experience had left them cowering in their ship, not even willing to set foot on land. It must be said, that more than Odysseus, it is Fred who has drawn them out. The spoil of the hunt and the joy of preparing it for a feast, and of course the meal itself, meat and drink, have served to restore these traumatised men to their humanity. The sight of Fred has made the men thankful to be alive. Being human, being grateful: it’s all part of being cannibal.
In Greek:
DUKE SENIOR
Come, shall we go and kill us venison?
And yet it irks me the poor dappled fools,
Being native burghers of this desert city,
Should in their own confines with forkèd heads
Have their round haunches gored.
FIRST LORD
Indeed, my lord,
The melancholy Jaques grieves at that …
Today my Lord of Amiens and myself
Did steal behind him as he lay along
Under an oak, whose antique root peeps out
Upon the brook that brawls along this wood;
To the which place a poor sequestered stag
That from the hunter’s aim had ta’en a hurt
Did come to languish. And indeed, my lord,
The wretched animal heaved forth such groans
That their discharge did stretch his leathern coat
Almost to bursting, and the big round tears
Coursed one another down his innocent nose
In piteous chase. And thus the hairy fool,
Much markèd of the melancholy Jaques,
Stood on th’ extremest verge of the swift brook,
Augmenting it with tears.
—As You Like It 2.1
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit homerist.substack.com/subscribe -
Odyssey 10.80-134
The episode of the Laestrygonians is a mix of old and new, familiar and unfamiliar. I suppose that in these episodes of Odysseus’ wanderings, which are relatively self-contained, one is still faced with the problem of sequencing: in the sense that whatever architectonic ideas the teller may have, from moment to moment there will be the concern with the segue, of maintaining interest and sustaining the narrative energy of what has come before. The story of the Aeolian Isle, which contains Aeolus’ musically violent rebuke of Odysseus, has managed the problem divertingly. But by any measure, the long and intensely involving episode of the Cyclops must still be considered a hard act to follow. By contrast, it seems to me the episode of the Lotus-Eaters might have been placed almost anywhere to good effect: by itself it distils the gist, of the human longing for physical satisfaction and psychic escape, countering the longing (and need) for home.
After moving on from the Aeolian Isle and the desperate frustration of almost getting home—not for the first time (see 9.79)—we are immediately regaled with the spice of a traveller’s tale:
For six days then we sailed, day and night the same,
But on the seventh we arrived at the steep citadel of Lamus,
Telepylus of Laestrygonia—where herdsman to herdsman
Calls out, as he drives them in, but the other responds as he drives them out.
There an unsleeping man could pick up two wages,
The one for tending cattle, the other pasturing flocks of white sheep:
For close by are the paths of the night and of the day. (10.80-86)
One calls this a traveller’s tale in part because it is hard to make sense of it from the perspective of, say, geography. The paths of the night and day (νυκτός τε καὶ ἤματα … κέλευθοι) must mean the track of the sun’s daily motion. The points of sunset and sunrise on the horizon do come closer and closer together the further north or south you go before reaching the arctic circle or the antarctic one, at the respective midwinters and midsummers. One presumes midsummer is on Homer’s mind here, because the night then, in those regions, would be short, with the sun briefly dipping beneath the horizon and rising again only slightly to the east. Perhaps the ambitious herdsman could skip sleep and tend two herds of crepuscular grazers, one evening and one morning. Or so the foreigners imagine. People still imagine all kinds of things about the tropics, just from spending gated vacations there. Perhaps what Homer had heard about these regions was that the shortness of the midsummer night was a permanent condition, rather than a seasonal one. Whatever the case, Homer’s audience must have been from a region further towards the equator, where the nights were always long enough for a bout of sleep, and a single day’s wages had to do for a shepherd. Traveller’s tales score points with exotic twists to daily routines and schedules, not fine points of husbandry and geography.
The prejudices induced by the premises of modern Homeric scholarship tend toward breaking apart Homer’s massive poem into smaller units: songs and episodes. Partly this instinct is natural from the premise of formulaic oral improvisation and the oral aural groupings reflected in ‘ring composition’. But it also takes its cue from depictions of performance inside the poems; we have witnessed several performances of Demodocus, for example, some by hearsay but one, the love story of Ares and Aphrodite, in full opera. These suggest after-dinner entertainments of, at most, several hundred lines, on quite a different scale from the many thousands of lines of each of the Iliad and the Odyssey. On the other hand, we have it from Athenian authorities including Plato, that a rule was instituted in Athens during the time of Hipparchus, son of the tyrant Peisistratus, that Homer’s lines needed to be performed in order: when one rhapsode finished—whether exhausted or at his preferred time—the next must take up the song exactly at the line where the first left off. One source attributes this law instead to Solon, so that performing Homer could be conceived as a sort of team relay. Both accounts suggest that Homer’s lines came to Athens as known and complete sets of things, of considerable size and a fixed order, like Wagner’s Ring or a multi-volume novel, which required a number of soloists in sequence to perform them coherently in sequence.
In the modern concert hall, it was once the standard practice to excerpt movements from different pieces and composers, so as to ‘compose’ an evening of variety, taste, and harmony … More recent audiences of ‘classical’ music, like those of Peisistratean Athens in relation to Homer, have [instead] demanded whole compositions in their original sequence. Consider that such a demand begins in the audience, and bespeaks either an intimacy with the original whole as a whole, or, at the very least, the knowledge that such a whole exists.
The Lotus-Eaters notwithstanding, there does seem to be an order to Odysseus’ episodes. Consider the mystery of his fleet’s eleven other ships. They occupy a most peculiar psychic dimension in the storyteller’s imagination. Twelve in number were the ships which escaped the Cicones and followed Odysseus to land at night, by accident—‘it was some god guided us’—at the goat-filled island opposite the Cyclopean shore. The next day nine goats went to each ship, but ten to Odysseus’; at home or encamped at Troy he might have been a king or chieftain, but in their escape from there Odysseus seems to receive the honour merely of a captain, a first among equals. Perhaps the political order of the world has changed somehow. How might this democratic flight on board ship affect the standing of his men when they arrive back home in quasi-feudal Ithaca? This is not a question we shall have to face, it turns out. But it remains the case that when he gets home, Odysseus will have to prove his worth in rags, including his worthiness to rule.
On the second day at dawn, Odysseus makes an announcement with no explanation: only he and his ship’s crew will go to explore the land opposite, the land of the Cyclopes. Hence eleven ships miss entirely the adventure with the Cyclops, the giant, the terror, and the cannibalism; and so, it seems, they miss out on any experience gained or lessons learned. They witnessed nothing, not Odysseus’ three vaunts to Polyphemus, nor the hurled mountain tops, nor the terror of the water’s backward surge. In a very real sense, we in the audience are closer witnesses to those events than they will ever be. Hence the men of these eleven ships become a sort of void or null space in the story, and in our experience of it.
The only thing evident to such non-participants may be that Odysseus’ leadership has been a failure. This conclusion would no doubt be reinforced after the harrowing round trip, blown back from the sight of Ithaca’s home fires to the distant Isle of Aeolus. Now, when they reach the inlet and cove of the Laestrygonians, it does not appear that Odysseus’s ship is in the lead any more at all. No, the eleven mystery ships traipse into the narrow inlet and blithely tie their ships in the calm waters within.
But I alone kept my black ship outside,
Where I was at the edge, having tied my cables off the cliff.
And I stood at a lookout point, once I went up the rough and rocky way.
From there neither the operations of cattle nor of men appeared,
But we saw only smoke, rising from the ground. (95-99)
Why do Odysseus and his crew not enter, but rather tie their ship outside? The man himself does not tell us. Is it that they alone have learnt the lessons of caution after nearly succumbing to the Cyclops? That could be simply true, but perhaps there is also a more sinister implication: is Odysseus no longer in charge of the fleet? Has he in fact been deposed? Odysseus hints at nothing of the kind, but the evidence is plain to see: where the other eleven ships had once been following his—‘The ships that followed me (μοι ἕποντο) were twelve in number’ (9.159)—now they’ve gone on ahead, seemingly unaware that their erstwhile captain is not with them. Could there even be hostility between him and them? No intent is apparent or hinted at, but it does so happen that it is the actions initiated by Odysseus and his ship’s crew which first alert the Laestrygonians to the presence of the rest of the fleet in the harbour, and which lead to the surreal scene of their slaughter. May one wonder if Odysseus feels, at the end of the day, that their fate had served them right?
The whole episode seems a bit of a sendup. Odysseus sends off two unnamed men, with a third ‘as a herald,’ to follow the mountain road into town and see what they see. They run into a girl fetching water, a Rebecca at the well. The scene seems set for flirtation. Chance meetings at the water well decide history. These men must not remember when they last saw a friendly girl. She turns out to be the daughter of a Laestrygonian heavy, one Antiphates, ‘Against Speech’, who, true to his name, shall have no lines. She herself is nameless, unless her epithet is her name: Ἰφθίμη, a derivation from ϝίς suggesting ‘strong’, ‘valiant’, ‘sturdy’. It is most likely functioning as a title, whose literal meaning is not necessarily in the foreground; as when subjects say, for example, ‘Your Excellency’ or ‘Majesty’ or ‘Highness’. Yet I cannot resist translating ‘Beefy’. I reckon she was a pretty big girl. There was no danger of these lonely sailors having their way with that one.
She takes the men home, they round the corner and it’s ‘Hello, Mum!’. Except she’s a giantess as tall as a mountain. They are aghast at her. Mum’s in charge around here, as she seems to be most places outside the land of the Cyclopes. The rest of Odysseus’ adventures seem to be exclusively in the face of threats to his life and masculinity from feminine forces. It’s a sorry shift for a man in arms, used to engaging on the battlefield where men know what the rules are about hitting below the belt. Mrs. Antiphates yells out for her husband, up to no good, as no doubt he usually was, hanging out in the marketplace; Antiphates dutifully rushes home and straight away eats one of Odysseus’ men. Not sure if it’s the herald who wears the red shirt.
Now, when we meet the Cyclops, the original cannibal giant, there is terror in anticipation. Homer and Odysseus paint the scene with a novelist’s and a cinematographer’s touch: Polyphemus looms long in the presence before we meet him. ‘Let’s just grab some of this cheese and get out of this creepy place!’ We hear him before we see him: he throws down a huge weight of dry timber outside the cave while Odysseus and his men tremble inside. He then blocks the door with an immense, unshiftable stone. And when he finishes his milking chores and finally notices the little men, they are terrified at the sheer depth of his voice. The sense of ‘I’ve got a bad feeling about this’ builds exquisitely. When the Cyclops snatches up and eats Odysseus’ men, there is abrupt revulsion and gruesome shock.
With Antiphates and his wife, however, and the friendly daughter, the scene is almost comical. The confrontation with the mountain-sized woman is both sudden and unanticipated, too unexpected to be shocking. The henpecked husband comes home and eats the strangers almost as a domestic duty. The effect is more surreal than revolting, macabre rather than gruesome and savage. And the tableau which follows only taps further into the surreal. The rest of the beefy Laestrygonians are roused to head to the harbour, where they proceed to go spear-fishing in a tidal pool, by throwing huge rocks like pebbles at the writhing creatures trapped within. The eleven ships provide themselves as fresh seafood for happy hour! These alien men are called ‘giants’, but I can’t help translating ‘gigantes’. This is a correct transliteration, but it is also what modern Greeks call the giant beans they cook so wonderfully.
Says Odysseus:
While they were destroying the men within the depths of the harbour,
I drew my sharp sword from beside my thigh, (125-6)
That last line recurs in the Iliad, ‘I drew my sharp sword from beside my thigh.’ Sometimes a sword is just a sword. Usually in the Iliad this line precedes the description of some exploit in battle, a use of the sword in combat. A version occurs when Achilles briefly contemplates drawing his sword to kill Agamemnon, right then and there during the public confrontation which begins that poem. If the depiction of Antiphates’ household is, in part, a self-parody of what Homer has achieved in his tale of the Cyclops, here we arrive at meta-parody, satire even, at the expense of the poet’s trade in the Iliad. A line designed to create expectation of some devastating act of war, is here allowed to poof into magician’s flowers. In the Odyssey, the lines continue:
And I struck off the stern cables of the cobalt-prowed ship with it. (127)
Odysseus’ ship is parked outside the inlet, out of sight of the mêlée within. He draws his sword to cut the cables and escape. ‘Run away! Run away!’ say Monty Python’s Knights of the Round Table.
In gladness into the deep she escaped the overhanging cliffs—
My own ship, that is; the rest of them together were destroyed where they were. (131-2)
So that was the fate of the eleven ships and their men, to be broken by rocks and fished for giants’ dinners. How sad is Odysseus about this? Recurring in these episodes are a pair of lines, saying how he and his men sailed on grieving at heart,
ἄσμενοι ἐκ θανάτοιο, φίλους ὀλέσαντες ἑταίρους.
Pleased to get away from death, having lost our dear comrades.
It seems Homer delights in exploiting the new resonances which can be drawn out when lines of music recur, as when, in a song, the chorus returns with its same words newly illuminated after the injection of new verses. When these lines of transition first occur, after the debacle of the Cicones, Odysseus relates how his ships would not proceed before they cried out three times for each man lost in battle—six men per ship for twelve ships. But this time, there’s no mention of any mourning. The line above consists of two dependent clauses, both constructed from aorist participles, with no connecting particle or explanatory conjunction. Though there is no verbal prompt so to do, context in the earlier instances has suggested inserting a ‘but’ or a ‘though’ between the clauses: for example, ‘Glad to get away from death, though having lost our dear comrades.’ But with no mention this time that Odysseus’ remaining ship mourned the loss of the others, it becomes possible to hear the line in a new way: that the loss of that particular group of guys, was actually some part of the survivors’ pleasure.
In Greek:
[Allow me to recommend following along the Greek reading with a Greek text. My own edition of Books 9-12, with facing English translation, is available here. All six volumes of my ‘Homer Odysseia’ are available on Amazon.]
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit homerist.substack.com/subscribe -
Odyssey 10.1-79
Aeolus is often described as the ‘god of the winds’. Homer does not call him a god, however; he is simply Aeolus son of Hippotas. He is described as ‘dear to the gods.’ Virgil and others may have considered him divine, but for Homer perhaps he is more of an Elon Musk. Homer’s translators usually have Aeolus and his family living on a floating island. This is implausible, not because fairy tale wonders are by nature implausible—which is of course something to think about—but because Odysseus’ narrative seems only to make sense if Aeolus’ home is in a fixed place: one which can be left directly for Ithaca with the backing of a wind directed for the purpose, eastward out of the west, and also to which a ship could be blown straight back, if the wind becomes contrary. Translators must be yielding to the joy of the miraculous, as would I if there were permission; they are supported by uses in Herodotus which suggest ‘floating’ for πλωτός. Evidently Herodotus himself may have thought that Homer was referring to a ‘floating’ island when he used the word. That is some considerable authority. All the same, I think one ought to construe a verbal adjective in -τος, formed from πλέω or Homeric πλώω, ‘sail’, ‘travel by water’, and so render ‘sailable’, i.e. ‘reachable by sail’. Perhaps the sense is that one could only get there, or put in there, with the help of wind. The rock is supposed to be sheer right round the island. Possibly the use of oars would be useless in putting in there, as would have been the usual practice in landing on a beach. And of course the traversal of the ocean to the place would only have been possible by wind and sail. The futility of oars is patent after Odysseus and his men’s second departure from the Aeolian Isle: the spirits of the men were worn out by ‘grievous rowing (εἰρεσίη, 10.78),’ in the absence of an escorting wind. The use of εἰρεσίη, ‘rowing’, at the end of the episode, may serve to contrast the initial sense of Aeolus’ island as πλωτός: sailable only. But the fabulous floating island now lives a cultural life of its own.
Aeolus is a weirdo. He is as isolated as the Cyclops, seemingly with no neighbours at all, though there is the briefest, largely inexplicable mention of a ‘city’ (πόλις, 10.13). I suppose there must have been a supply of servants, cooks, and farmhands. Someone to change the sheets. Unlike the Cyclops, Aeolus has a wife—Eve to his Adam, with whom he has had twelve children, six of each kind. We do not hear the story of his exile, if that is what it is; he’s somebody’s son, but we don’t know where Hippotas was from; perhaps his role as “storekeeper of the winds (ταμίης ἀνέμων) … Both to pause and to rouse the one that he wants”, was granted Aeolus by the son of Cronus as some kind of compensation for his brazen island imprisonment. But he does not appear to have the means—a ship or working crew, or dock—or the desire—to use that power to get wherever else he might want to be.
The coordinated incest of Aeolus’ children seems to be their father’s choice, rather than something forced on them in their isolation. The family is forever feasting, and in case we may be reading something alien into practices that were not meant to be offensive, Homer rather rubs our nose in it—in his inimitable way, not by saying something out loud but by focusing our gaze: in this case, on the fact that after the party, when night came on, the sons would sleep with their ‘bashful wives’, and ‘go to bed wrapped in blankets, and in perforated bed frames.’ The poet does not need to say anything more to let us know that they quite enjoyed each other’s company, brother and sister, within those blankets and beds.
In traveller’s tales, one should expect strange, titillating or offensive practices in exotic lands, which both tickle and shock the system for the kind of special pleasure such tales afford. Still it is hard at this distance to gauge the difference between what is odd or merely interesting, and what offensive. Sexual peculiarity, such as Polyphemus’ ovine bachelorhood, is to be expected. We shall discover, however, that Homer’s audience was quite as shocked as that of Sophocles’ Athens and Freud’s Vienna, at the thought of Oedipus sleeping with his mother. But what about Alcinous marrying his niece? Could that have been a brother’s duty upon her father’s passing away? Or a way to ensure the legitimacy or stability of his rule, and that of his descendants—a political motive? Alcinous’ brother, the king, had died without a male heir. Marrying his daughter preempts conflict. (In patriarchies, paternal uncles are generally rivals of one’s father for political legacy and bloodline. It is the maternal uncles who are ‘avuncular’. Odysseus gets his celebrated name from his maternal uncle.) All the same, one feels oneself on safe ground in registering the cosy intimacies of Aeolus’ sons and daughters as unsettlingly prurient, indulgently incestuous in such a way as to disturb one’s ease, like a false note in the soundtrack, through the whole brief episode.
One does not feel this at all about Aeolus and his wife’s prolific fertility. It feels as though time has been suspended on the isle; that there will be no more children or grandchildren, that twelve is a full complement. There will instead be perpetual banqueting and cosy sex in their blissful prison. And no adultery: scandal in the Homeric world seems to centre on heterosexual adultery, where women play decisive roles. The sexual and political intrigues of Helen, or Aegisthus and Clytemnestra, together with the cosmic cuckolding of Hephaestus by Ares and Aphrodite, provide a background to suspicions about Penelope. The world of classical Athens, however, which first inherited the Homeric poems, seems heterosexually unstoried, and taken more with male homosexual intrigue and its political consequences—first in the days of the tyranny and then in the era of Alcibiades and Socrates.
For Odysseus’ philandering, the punishment, as Jane Austen once put it, ‘is less equal than could be wished.’ Through all his tale of wanderings, and earlier to the smitten Nausicaa, he never lets on that there may be wife and son at home, still less that they are his home, and the main reason he so desperately longs for home. In the Iliad he is once actually called the ‘father of Telemachus’, uniquely among all the warriors with patronymics. Odysseus is very much a man who speaks, and forcibly suppresses others’ speech, on a need-to-know basis. To be fair, he only seems to sleep with ‘available’ goddesses.
Odysseus and his men continue to display their outward exhibition of inner psychic tensions. One might say the so far nameless men function as projections of Odysseus’ inner subversion. How else does one take his assertion of vigilance, that he kept hold of the sail’s guiding rope to harness the wind sent by Aeolus, never yielding it to another member of the crew, so that they all might the soonest get to Ithaca? The curious phrase which I translate the ‘sail’s foot rope’, πόδα νηϝός (‘ship’s foot’ or ‘heel’) refers to a contrivance to allow manipulation of the sail. (In later Greek such a phrase would be translated ‘keel’.) The physics of wind and sail, and perhaps their metaphysics, are very much on the poet’s mind. A helping wind is not enough for a human being, these are not Phaeacian boats guided by thought; the sail has to be worked or misdirection ensues. Odysseus grasps his ‘ship’s foot’ exclusively, until he doesn’t. Just when Ithaca comes into sight, the men tending the home fires already visible, sleep gets the better of the pilot. Freud’s caretaker of consciousness lets his guard down, and his suppressed inner impulses overcome the sleepwalker.
On all their adventures since leaving Troyland, Odysseus has been meticulous about dividing the booty equally among the ships. His personal benefits are modest: he is given an extra goat, he gets to eat the Cyclops’ ram. But the narrator, who is indeed Odysseus, exposes the suspicion that his pretence to equity hides the bulk of his haul from Troy itself, which is evidently hidden in his hold somehow, but known to all. It seems at Troy Odysseus was a chieftain, a minor nobleman; but in the aftermath, on the way home it seems a kind of democratic distribution has set in, and his former peasant soldiers have learnt to grumble. Now what’s he hiding in the ox-skin nutsack he got off Aeolus? Let’s get our share! And all is lost.
Upon waking Odysseus is suicidal. There are several occasions in the story when this may be the case, but here it is explicit:
… I debated,
Whether I fall out of the ship and perish in the deep,
Or I endure in silence and continue still among the living. (10.51-3)
He carries on. They arrive back on the Aeolian Isle with Odysseus at his most pitiful and weak. He explains to his erstwhile hosts:
“They blinded me in the mind! Bad comrades and, and not only them—Sleep!
The bastard. But heal me, friends: for the power is in you.”
Doesn’t even sound like him. Is he playing the supplicant or being one? The reaction he gets from Aeolus is perhaps the most vehement rebuke in all of Homer. I mean this objectively, in that Aeolus’ anger and disgust is rhythmically and harmonically obvious. There is only one dactyl in his opening line, spanning the mid-line caesura; everywhere else the two shorts have been substituted by a long, so we get a relentless sequence of long expletives:
ἔρρ’ ἐκ νήσου θάσσον, ἐλέγχιστε ζωόντων ·
[In bold are the hexameter’s downbeats.]
More than this, the Greek law of tonal prominence reveals that in almost every instance in this line, it is the upbeat of the foot which is tonally emphatic rather than the downbeat. :
ἔρρ’ ἐκ νήσου θάσσον, ἐλέγχιστε ζωόντων ·
[In bold now are the tonally emphatic or ‘stressed’ syllables; only once (θάσσον) is the downbeat rather than the upbeat reinforced.]
“Fuck off out this island—and quick, you most detestable of all things alive!”
I confess I don’t quite understand the severity of his reaction to Odysseus’ return, which is extraordinary in all of Homer for its musical impact. But I will say that because of this story it has become a superstitious habit in my life, not to turn back, if I’ve forgotten something for example, once I’ve set out on a trip. Even if you’ve forgotten your phone or your bottle of water, don’t go back in the door. Never come back for a second helping of help, is that the lesson? Aeolus is offended as though there had been a threat to his authority, or to its basis in Zeus’s dispensation, or to the very nature of things. Or is there something wrong in general about heading back home in a straight line—for a ‘man of many turns’ (πολύτροπος)—and something even wronger about expecting to be able to get that chance twice? If Odysseus’ explanation for showing up again on their doorstep, the mischief of his crew while he fell asleep at the wheel, expresses an individual and collective psychic imbalance, as I have suggested, perhaps he is wrong to think that his dismissive hosts would have had the power to heal him.
What does it mean to control the winds? Harnessing them is all we are good for. Winds have never been well explained, just like the clouds, which stay up though they are much heavier than air. Explanation of causes has never been a strong suit of the modern style of science. Serious people, although not children, live satisfied with the idea that heaviness, such as the heaviness of a cloud, is caused by ‘gravity’. Nothing out of Aristotle sounds stupid like that. It’s like saying clouds are caused by cloudiness.
The winds blow, and we know not whence or why. In Greece, the winds have proper names: Boreas, Zephyrus, Notus, Eurus. They come from directions and give direction. Classical physicists talk of temperature, pressure, convection and the like. More interesting explanations will be likely when all these measurable factors are seen as side effects of electric currents and magnetic fields, in a solar or otherwise cosmic circuit, their directions as tangents to vortices. But what is electricity, what magnetism? How does polarity—especially repulsion—work? Hurricanes and tornadoes must be watched for, not generated or controlled, as surely as the auroras and volcanic discharges or the subterranean lightning which quakes the earth. We have devised many powers over nature, to be sure, profound technologies which we do not understand apart from the tasks they are able to effect. But we are not stewards of the wind. A gently zephyr flutters an eyelid, and a woman falls in love. Fate hatches.
Homer can be an antidote for the childish pretensions of science, and its ‘laws of nature’. In that sense he is a light for an Homerist to carry in these Dark Ages. Homer has no word for ‘nature’. When it comes to that, how do we users of usage define what we mean by that word? Is there any way to do it without using the word ‘nature’? Something blindly dumbfounding, like a religious mystery, lies behind the catchwords in the cult of Science, like ‘nature’ or ‘instinct’ or ‘force’. The word translated ‘nature’ among the later Greek writers is φύσις (physis), derived from φύω, ‘grow’, ‘put forth’. A φυτόν is a plant. φύσις, broadly ‘growth’, occurs only once in Homer, in a passage we shall soon encounter. Its translation ‘nature’, from Latin, points instead toward birth. No such concept seems to operate in the way Homer paints the world. The closest one I can think of is the notion of μοῖρα, often in the phrase κατὰ μοῖραν (kata moiran), as here: ‘I recounted him everything in order (κατὰ μοῖραν).’ I have translated it freely in context as, for example, ‘by the book’ or ‘according to the recipe’. Μοῖρα freestanding means ‘portion’, and often needs to be translated ‘fate’ or ‘Fate’. In context it points to some kind of order that seems appropriate to a situation, which exerts a pressure that it be followed. Evidently, Odysseus’ return to his doorstep, after Aeolus had entrusted him with a sack containing the (unhelpful, one presumes) winds, is completely out of order. One might almost say against nature, as we also say about incest and celibacy. Aeolus invokes θέμις (themis), perhaps ‘lawful custom’, an idea which overlaps with κατὰ μοῖραν:
“For it’s not a done thing, for me to help and to send off
The very man who is despised by the blessed gods:
Get out! Since as one despised by the gods you reached this place.”
Odysseus has indeed made himself despised of at least one god. Can he be redeemed? Is the power in him (or us)? Will he one day fulfil his nature? Or are all these ways of speaking, a mathematics alien to both his causes and their effects? A man of many turns is, among other things, a thing like the wind.
Or as mathematics, a human invention
That parallels but never touches reality, gives the astronomer
Metaphors through which he may comprehend
The powers and the flow of things: so the human sense
Of beauty is our metaphor of their excellence, their divine nature: — like
dust in a whirlwind, making
The wild wind visible.
—Robinson Jeffers
In Greek:
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit homerist.substack.com/subscribe -
Odyssey 9.506-66 (end)
A lot is made of Odysseus’ second vaunt to the Cyclops when he’s already escaped and on board ship. And rightly so; the cry of “I am Odysseus, City-Sacker” seems more of a revelation than the one we’ve just witnessed, in reality so to speak, when he tells his name to the Phaeacians before embarking on his story. This one almost seems to be Odysseus’ entrance upon the stage of history, as a soloist, rather than as part of the supporting cast of the Iliad. There is a tonal aspect to this outburst, which is in fact like an operatic signature line, a recognisable melody for an Odyssean ejaculation:
Κύκλωψ, αἴ κέν τίς σε καταθνητῶν ἀνθρώπων
ὀφθαλμοῦ εἴρηται ἀϝεικελίην ἀλαωτύν, (9.502-3)
“Cyclops, if there’s any death-bound human being
Should ask after the ugly blinding of your eye …”
Notice especially the first half-line, which involves a changing pitch on every syllable (rising or falling or both on the same one), and ends in three, consecutive, acutely-accented long syllables: Κύκλωψ, αἴ κέν τίς σε. Such a sequence is exceedingly rare in Homer, to the point where it is identifying of Odysseus. It bears repeating that the nonsense taught as fact in Classics departments requires that these tonal patterns do not matter in composition; the oral theory of Homeric composition is based on purely metrical formulas, and ignores all the pitch accents. It is like a theory of Mozart which pays attention only to the lengths of the notes, and ignores all their pitches. This same sequence has already occurred earlier in the scene, when Odysseus expresses his indignation that the Cyclops must think him a fool, if he expects him to try to run out the cave entrance to be caught, as soon as the giant lets his sheep out to pasture:
οὕτω γάρ πού μ’ ἤλπετ’ ἐνὶ φρεσὶ νήπιον εἶναι. (419)
“For I suppose he expected me, in his mind’s vessel, to be such a simpleton.”
Once again we see the same sequence of accents in the half-line, culminating in three straight long acutes: οὕτω γάρ πού μ’ ἤλπετ’. I have written on this and other ‘signature lines’ discovered in the tonal patterns of Homer’s compositions in my recent book, Singing Homer’s Spell (available here). I shall have more to say on this matter after we reach Ithaca.
But there is a third and final outburst from our hero, which, it seems to me, deserves more attention than most are inclined to give it. It expresses, in most certain terms, Odysseus’ wish for himself and for the Cyclops:
αἲ γὰρ δὴ ψυχῆς τε καὶ αἰῶνός σε δυναίμην
εὖνιν ποιήσας πέμψαι δόμον Ἄϝϊδος εἴσω,
ὡς οὐκ ὀφθαλμόν γ’ ἰήσεται οὐδ’ Ἐνοσίχθων.
“If only I had the power over soul and life
To castrate you, and send you into Invisible Hades’ house,
As surely as he will not heal your eye, not even the Ground-Shaker.”
Odysseus wishes that he had the power to make an eunuch of his rival, before killing him; and measures the energy of this wish by a parallel wishful expectation, that Polyphemus’ eye will never be healed even by the power of god. This is his final statement to Polyphemus, and it is tempting to see it as a culmination, like the third of three long acute syllables.
Draughting on Homer’s authority in psychology, perhaps one should see the castration of one’s rival as an archetypal masculine wish. Freud, taking no small cue from what, by his time, had come to be called ‘Greek Mythology’, places an emphasis specially on castration of the father as an innate or developmental wish of a son. It does not seem likely that the Greek theogony, where castration of the father was essentially the method of royal succession for the chief masculine god, was absent from Homer’s imagination. Zeus is often addressed in Homer as Κρονίδης, Cronides, ‘son of Cronus’, so that whatever was known or believed about their history in Homer’s consciousness and audience, the conquest and succession of Zeus over his father to establish a new world order is an ever-present in the rhythm of Zeus’s patronymic. Also tapping into the ambient reality of this revolutionary succession is the non-visible presence of Atlas the Titan, apparently still actively holding the structural pillars of the cosmos which keep apart the earth and sky. His daughter Calypso is visible enough; her fair tresses are kept cloistered on an island at the navel of the sea, apparently to prevent her mating and having fearsome offspring. Even the unstated threat to Zeus of a seemingly disgruntled figure like Poseidon, where the business of the Odyssey has to be stealthily planned in the latter’s absence from Olympus, adds to a certain instability in the foundations cultivated by Homer to work like sinister music in his background. Who knows what cosmic strings have been pulled when Odysseus blinds Poseidon’s son? Odysseus is messing in the margins, sleeping with dangerous women.
Still I would suggest that castration of the rival is a broader and deeper drive which also encompasses Freud’s castration of the father. Perhaps we should credit Homer with the dramatisation of a psychoanalytic insight. The third outburst of Odysseus unmasks his deepest compulsion and desire. Castration of the rival speaks to men’s experience and behaviour in sports, war, and politics, oligarchies, tyrannies and corporations, the entertainment industry and holy conclaves. It also speaks to women’s empowerment over men, in ways we shall immediately encounter with Circe. Although I cannot prove this, it seems to me to be reasonable to suppose that the μοιχάγρια (moikhagria), the ‘adulterer’s ransom’ (8.332) to be extracted from Ares by the cuckolded Hephaestus, includes his balls.
Singing Homer is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
It may be instructive to view the three outbursts of Odysseus as a progression. Indeed, they are more a descent into Hell than a pilgrim’s progress. Consider the first of them:
“Cyclops, it didn’t turn out, did it, that they were comrades of a cowardly man
To be ate in your hollowed cave by means of strength and force.
Get a load of what comes on yourself—shitty results,
You bastard! Since you did not scruple with strangers in your own home,
To eat them up! That’s why Zeus paid you back, and the rest of the gods.”
The magnifying of his own power yields in this instance to Odysseus casting himself as a justicer, an agent of Zeus’s Justice. A friend who grew up in North Carolina told me of a primary school teacher who, before she administered the ruler to a whimpering child, would say, holding her hand to her heart: “This hurts me right here.” What was done to Polyphemus had to be done, because he violated the culture and tradition now celebrated for the Homeric Age, of guest-friendship. It does not matter that figures like Odysseus and Menelaus appear to exploit the privileges expected to be afforded the stranger and guest, as an opportunity to ‘get something’. Odysseus is explicit about his motives for trespassing into the cave of a giant ogre. ‘What if he gave me a guest gift?’ (229) And he ill-advisedly invokes Zeus to Polyphemus, as part of his attempted shakedown:
“We, however, approach these knees of yours
As suppliants, in hope perhaps you give a proper guest gift, or otherwise
You offer a present, which among guests is the custom.
But respect, oh mightiest one, the gods: we are your suppliants,
And Zeus is the avenger of suppliants and guests,
Zeus Guest-Friend, who goes alongside respectful and respected strangers. (266-71)
Of course the Cyclops is triggered by the invocation of Zeus. But it is a conceit of the avenger that he is actually a justicer, passive to the force of law and decency which is the tradition of guest-friendship, so that Odysseus’ acquisitive motives fade from view. It is not Odysseus, but Zeus and the rest of the gods who have paid the Cyclops back.
The city-sacking pirate’s invocation of justice, is all the same and nevertheless an invocation of Justice. It is different in kind from the two following ejaculations of Odysseus toward Polyphemus. One way to see the progression is as a successive unmasking of the man’s true motives. Justice is, at some level, other- and community-centred. From the dispassionate appeal to the decency of guest-friendship rituals guiding human beings in their most vulnerable interactions— harbouring the golden rule amidst the provisional fairness of expected reciprocation—in the face of the Cyclops’ brutality and cannibalism—we move to pure and spirited self-centred assertion: I’m not nobody, I’m Odysseus City-Sacker, Laertes’ son from Ithaca. Finally we come to the fully expressed wish from the gut: to castrate and then kill his rival, and further, that his wounds remain an unhealed, living torture.
In response to the first outburst, where Odysseus says Polyphemus is being punished for his sins as a host, he has no words, he gets angry and hurls a rock. To the second outburst, when he learns Nowan’s true name, Polyphemus recalls a prophecy that an ‘Odysseus’ would cause him to lose his vision. He had been expecting a mighty warrior, not a puny Ithacan. Now, in response to Odysseus’ castration wish, he calls to Poseidon in prayer—one imagines this is a new posture for him—and adds a provision that seems to seal Odysseus’ fate:
“Let him come ill and late, having lost all his comrades,
On a foreign ship, and may he discover calamities in his home.” (534-5)
We have heard some of this before; in the old man Halitherses’ reading of a bird omen, at the assembly called by Telemachus in Ithaca (Book 2), he details the phrase “having lost all his comrades,” so that their repetition here has the effect of a kind of confirmation. There Halitherses spoke ominously about the “twentieth year.” It helps also that we already know that all these wishes of Polyphemus will come true. Odysseus’ fate takes its final shape in this very moment, this very utterance of the Cyclops.
Now, Homer begins the Odyssey with Zeus’s speech declaring that the adulterer Aegisthus has accomplished acts ‘beyond fate’. This is a radical formulation which undermines both the artwork and the cosmology of the Iliad. To put it simply, there are new rules for the inevitability of ‘fate’, what is fated, in this poem. One might presume that the concept may have become meaningless. When Halitherses shares his prophecy in Ithaca, upon reading a bird omen, he is met with the snarkiest scepticism from the suitor Eurymachus.
“Birds? There’s rather a lot of them, under the rays of the sun,
Busy here and there; and not all of them mean something …” (2.181-2)
Modern, consumerist Ithaca has fostered an altogether modern attitude toward tradition and religion. So how is it that when one hears Polyphemus’ prayer, one all the same feels that Odysseus’ fate has been locked into place? Where does such a conviction come from when Homer appears to disown, on purpose in the Odyssey, any simple kind of fatalism?
In one sense, skepticism inside a drama generates its opposite; that is, a certain character’s disbelief serves to frame the beliefs and utterances of other characters as true, and possibly portentous. The true prophets in the story are only proved so in the outcome, but one develops working hypotheses about whom to trust and how things will work out. At the end, one prides oneself on having being right about which characters had proved to be insightful.
I believe that the repetition of phrases plays a key role here. The irony is not lost on me that the repetition of phrases in Homer is still generally thought to be a slightly unfortunate necessity of the exigencies of an improvised, oral composition, rather than a matter of musical choice. These phrases are not, however, ‘metrical building blocks’, as a directly ontological matter. They are fully fledged combinations of word, rhythm, and accentual melody, snatches of song which imprint on the memory in the way that lines of song do, so one sings rather than quotes them. There are more than one significant series of lines which recur like refrains through the Odyssey; we have met one already, in the description of Penelope weaving and unweaving her web by night. Another highly enigmatic one is to come from the ghostly lips of the prophet Tiresias. These lines recur from different mouths and in different contexts, thereby gaining a kind of independent objectivity. The effect of such passages is, to my mind, very much like the return of a chorus between verses of a song, a chorus which takes on new meanings and resonances—though the words and melody remain nearly the same—as the song’s story develops through the changing verses. The first return of a sequence of such lines magnifies them in such a peculiar way; they become infused with a sense of inevitability, including the inevitability that they will again be sung.
In the Iliad one gets the sense that every single death is a fated thing, a moment of human naming when a cut thread dangles in air, like a finished film passed through the projector and flapping on the spool. This Odyssey poet, on the other hand, seems knowingly to have set himself a challenge by gaming the inevitability of fate. Yet this poet proves masterful all the same, among all poets, in creating a sense of inevitability, and the repetition of phrases and passages is surely a key to this profoundly musical achievement. The sense that Odysseus’ fate has been sealed in Polyphemus’ prayer is felt and deep. The drama and the posture of the performer, voicing the irreligious Polyphemus now reduced to prayer, must play a role in the effect. I don’t pretend to understand how all this works, except that certain reechoed phrases become sonorous touchstones which lock the words and their implications into place somehow, so that time itself seems to rhyme. I welcome suggestions.
If one reverses the order of Odysseus’ outbursts to the Cyclops, a recognisably Platonic progression can be formulated. The initiate proceeds from the reptilian screech for castration and death, the urgings of the lowest, tyrannical part of the soul, back to the spirited assertion of identity, self, and origin: “I am Odysseus the Ithacan City-Sacker, Laertes’ son.” Finally, back at the summit, there is the appeal to justice, and a social and cosmic order higher than the self. This is the world of Zeus Xenios, Zeus of the Guest-Friend. The appeal to justice is also an appeal to the rational part of the soul. This rational part is sometimes imagined as a third eye. (See the representation of a Cyclops above). Odysseus’ fateful psychic descent to hell becomes, in reverse, a pilgrim’s progress to the opening of an eye.
Allegorists were among the first literary interpreters (and defenders) of Homer. Unfortunately allegorical readings can seem heavy-handed and reductive. Unlike the poem that the pedagogue seems keen to replace, his reading of it lacks nuance and above all, rhythm—and melody. All the same, it seems undeniable that there is a psychic progression depicted, artfully and intentionally, in the three successive ejaculations of Odysseus to the Cyclops, although it also seems intentional that the progression is in reverse to the sensibility of any sort of moralist. It also seems unavoidable that a Cyclops be symbolic of something on his own, in his name and in his nature. (He is a ‘Circle-Eye’, perhaps a ‘Circle-Face’.) Mind you, it would seem to make all the difference if one envisions him as monocular—that is, deficient in some way—or as someone with a sort of third eye. But either way, conquering whatever the giant Cyclops represents, seems to demand interpretation and exegesis. Homer certainly attracts pedagogues and moralists. Poly-Wily Homer may, however, take some delight in booby-trapping them.
Consider again, for example, the progression of the Cyclops himself in his own three stages of conversation with Ulysses. It is not a descent but an ascent. To Odysseus’ moralising about Polyphemus’ punishment, the latter has no words, and hurls the top of a mountain in anger. Next in response to Odysseus naming himself, he (funnily enough) confirms that name, as a prophesied one—although, surprise, his conqueror turned out to be an Ithacan nobody. In return he claims his status: in his own moment of spirit and self-assertion, he suggests that it is the Earth-Shaker himself who boasts of being his father, not he of being Poseidon’s son! But in response to Odysseus’ wish to castrate him, the Cyclops, perhaps for the first time, directed his voice upwards, toward the sky, and
‘Started praying, his arms stretching out toward the starry heaven:’ (527)
It is of interest that Poseidon is also to be found amid the stars in the sky, not in the earth or like Neptune in the sea. ‘Circle-Eye’ also suggests a celestial visage. Polyphemus’ journey in this interaction goes from blind rage, to boastful and competitive self-assertion, at last to an upward embrace in prayer which bespeaks an awareness of the actuality of his place in the world. In his finally humble, and humbled, position, looking up at last to powers he acknowledges to be higher than himself, the Cyclops’ prayer turns into true prophecy about what Odysseus’ journey will have to entail. While it seems that he means the prayer as a curse upon Odysseus, consider that he imagines his wish, that Odysseus never gain home, not being fulfilled: the delayed journey on an alien ship with the loss of all his men, to a home in trouble, is based on the premise that it be Odysseus’ fate—bodied forth in the Cyclops’ imagination in its full refrain—
“… to see his friends and to reach
His well-built home and the mother earth of his fathers …” (532-3)
It is odd to register these words from the Cyclops’ own mouth, as part of the Cyclops’ prayer. In contrast to Odysseus’ descent into kinetic savagery, Polyphemus has come to a moment of still awareness. ‘Stretching out’ in the line above translates Greek ὀρέγω (oregō); Aristotle uses this verb, in its middle voice, in the first sentence of his Metaphysics: ‘All men desire [reach themselves out towards] knowing, by nature.’ (980a21) Perhaps it needs saying: the brutal Cyclops is a man like us. “I stumbled when I saw.”
Is Odysseus’ story a journey of the soul? Homer leaves many signs that this is so, even more as we proceed to Circe’s Isle and the Underworld. Each episode seems a test and an initiation. Odysseus began with a sleep like death under the entwined olive bushes, to wake up to Nausicaa. Arete says he shall ride the Phaeacian ship overcome once again by ‘sweet sleep,’ before he wakes up in Ithaca. The escape from the Cyclops is an escape from death’s cave. Rebirth recurs like the days of the sun.
When Socrates tells his own story of the soul’s journey to the Underworld, in the myth of Er in Plato’s Republic, he makes allusion to the ‘Tale of Alcinous’, an ancient name for the story Odysseus tells in Alcinous’ palace. This story is evidently his model, and the shade of Odysseus plays a starring role in Socrates’ story of the soul’s choice of pattern for the next life, based on her experience in this one. Plato, at any rate, seems to have heard Odysseus’ story as just such a soul’s journey. His entire Republic is a first-person narrative, like the Tale of Alcinous, where Socrates both does the narration and plays all the parts. To be sure, there were elements of the power of the Homeric performer’s mimesis, a protean ability to project seeming truth, which must have terrified Plato; but not enough so as to not attempt it himself, with the role of Socrates in the one-man show called the Republic. By itself, Plato’s response should alert us to attend, all remaining eyes open, to our initiate’s path as we follow Odysseus in the Odyssey. Escape from the cyclopean cave was already a layered thing in Homer’s hands, before Plato got hold of the idea.
Socrates famously bans Homer and the poets from the ideal city in the Republic. Yet Plato quotes Homer extensively in that book, so that the Republic is by far our greatest source of fragments, and means of confirming the much later Alexandrian texts. The Republic itself, as opposed to the ideal city described in it, is, in effect, a curated distillation of all the best and most naughty bits in Homer—which ought to get the Republic itself banned from there as well. As my sometime teacher Allan Bloom used to ask: does Plato or doesn’t he, want you to hear Homer?
I came to Homer in graduate school in Chicago as a student of Plato’s Greek. What I discovered there, is what now seems to me to be the true sun outside Plato’s cave. Of course Socrates paints Homer as one of the gaolers and shadow-masters within. But the allegorists were on to something. It is not so much a matter of reading between the lines, as paying attention in detail to their movements, and singing them.
In Greek:
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit homerist.substack.com/subscribe -
Odyssey 9.415-505
The thing is, Odysseus is a bit of a nobody. He announces himself to the Cyclops as ‘Odysseus the City-Sacker’ (Ὀδυσσεὺς πτολιπόρθιος). That does sound like something. But ‘son of Laertes’? ‘Who has his home in Ithaca’? Laertes is an old man who has retired to potter around in the country, too feeble even to think, it seems, of defending or managing his son’s property. That Penelope purports to be weaving a funeral shroud for him rather suggests that death is all that is immediately expected of him. That her intent is actually a ruse only underscores the marginal stature of Laertes, and suggests a merely secondary interest on her part in his well-being. The old man never comes to town any more. He is one of the many constituents Odysseus has abandoned on his escapade to Troy.
As for Ithaca, Telemachus tells Menelaus that it is a rocky place, unfit for the horses which his host wishes to bestow on him. From that day to this, horses have graced the nobility of men and women. Chivalry is horse-culture. Polyphemus the lonely Cyclops wishes his bellwether ram could talk to him, like a friend, but in the Iliad, Achilles’ divine horse Xanthus does actually talk, rejecting Achilles’ blame for Patroclus’ death and prophesying the hero’s own. But there is no place for horses—or, it seems, chivalry and the chevalier—in rocky, be-goated Ithaca. Odysseus is like one of those athletes who, in his moment of glory, shouts out his hometown and his parents (while he’s thanking Jesus). The footballer briefly puts Podunk, Oklabama on the map. Odysseus seems similarly keen to trumpet his origins. The culture of patronymics is aristocratic; only important people are announced this way in Homer. But the advancing of such a humble figure as Laertes, and especially the signposting of Ithaca, seem to me to have a tinge of the democratic sensibility in their wellspring. One take’s pride in one’s origins, regardless, in a democratic constitution.
‘City-Sacker’ is also an interesting one. Odysseus certainly has a claim to the title. But it has been rather pressed on us that Odysseus sacked a great city by means of a devious stratagem, not by his martial prowess. Indeed, the operation to disable the Cyclops would have involved considerable dexterity, strength, and teamwork, not to mention the risk from anything but complete success, even though the victim was already legless. The wooden horse, by contrast, emptied its soldiers on Trojans caught unawares, essentially in their pyjamas. The recounting of his deeds under these circumstances, by Demodocus at Odysseus’ request, has just reduced the perpetrator to paroxysms of grief. The simile comparing his tears to one of the many widows he has created, destined for slavery, suggests profound catharsis and perhaps remorse. I think it may be important to remember that the man now telling the story has just undergone this gruelling, self-imposed art-therapy, when he comes to the part where he announces himself to the Cyclops as ‘Odysseus City-Sacker’. That happened close to a decade ago, when he was still fresh from Troy, and attempting to pillage the Cicones. We recall that before arriving in Scheria, for most of seven years—after the initial euphoria of cohabiting with Calypso—Odysseus has spent his days alone on a headland of an island at the ocean’s navel, looking down at the sea in tears and groans. It is not impossible to imagine that the man longing for his wife and home, in bitter mourning for his lost comrades and purpose, was also suicidal about being a devious, cold-blooded city-sacker. Imagine Odysseus at a cliff’s edge. “How fearful/And dizzy ’tis to cast one’s eyes so low …”
I find intriguing the story reported by Tacitus, that an inscription of Ulixes could be found by the Rhine in Germany, where he founded a city, which appends also the name of his father Laertes. Evidently this person was serious about memorialising his Dad in the same breath as himself, wherever he left his mark. Perhaps we may surmise that the ‘real’ Ulysses eventually came to be known as a city-founder, not a city-sacker.
Odysseus shouts out three different messages to the Cyclops from on board ship. The fateful declaration of his name, parentage and origin constitutes the middle outburst. We shall consider their developing rhetorical sequence in the next reading. Here we observe certain patterns in the music and the action which, while deployed in the telling of a most unique and dramatic event, nevertheless bear Odysseus’ and the Homeric signature, both in the tale and the telling.
Polyphemus twice throws jagged missiles at Odysseus’ fleeing ship. Both barely miss. The first lands in front of the ship and the second behind. Is the Cyclops now blind, or has he just lost his binocular depth perception? The effect is first to push the ship back perilously close to the Cyclops’ land, before the men are able to row with enough energy to pass beyond Polyphemus’ blind (or half-blind) trajectories, so that the swell from the second bit of crashing mountain hits astern, and pushes the ship forward toward the neighbouring undeveloped island full of goats. Behind there, the rest of Odysseus’ fleet has been hiding, a kind of sleeping consciousness through it all. In this sweeping motion backwards before proceeding forwards, I believe there is expressed an ethos of ‘epic’ motion. We shall see it recurring through Odysseus’ travels, on small and large scales. Earlier Menelaus had had to return to make sacrifices back where he’d come from in Egypt, before he and his men could escape starvation and the doldrums on an island, and finally proceed on their arrested journey back to Argos.
I have argued that a dactylic round dance still performed in modern Greece provides the template for the dactylic hexameter; in the middle of the third dance step of the six, the dancers’ rightward motion stops, and they turn back to the left. There is a loop of retrogression, with the rightward movement resuming spatially where it had left off, at the beginning of the fifth step of the six. This circling motion forward to the east, with loops of westward retrogression when in opposition to the sun, is observed for the outer planets such as Ares and Zeus (Mars and Jupiter), present in our sky. I do not propose that there is anything allegorical or otherwise symbolic about this motion, only that its sense is pervasive, in the way that the form of a dance—a waltz, or a mazurka, or the twist—informs the music which it inspires and is energised by. Most every line of Homer reflects the turning points of the dance in its word divisions, which produce articulations in the metre called a caesura and a diaeresis. These two moments in the unfolding of an Homeric line frame the internal retrogression in the underlying onward circling. In Homer this motion bubbles up from the feet, if you will, into what could be called a musical as well as a narrative ethos. One does not go in a straight line from A to B, or head straight home. Rather, one circles there, with necessary retrogressions. ‘In life and in storytelling, as in dance, there is a correct way of returning by turning.’
To a great extent, however, one must understand the direct effect of the dance of the Muses to be sublimated, as it is also when orchestras play symphonies in dance rhythms while everyone, players and audience, remain glued to their seats. Odysseus, and Homer with him, have taken the origin of their rhythm into themselves, and stand before us as soloists, like Bach at a clavichord playing a virtuoso gigue. No one dances to Bach’s suites any more. Nor is it likely that anyone danced to a Homeric rhapsode’s performance. The recently dancing Phaeacians stay seated for Odysseus’ story. The rhapsode’s accompanying instrument was no longer a lyre; now he was armed with his cloak and a staff, along with his voice of course. (Odysseus the character may be wearing a sword, rather than holding a stick, which he won as reparation for insults to him during the Phaeacian games.) We see strong indications that the Odyssey has been scripted for such a performer—cloaked, and wielding a stick.
Consider the moment when, after Odysseus’ first invective outburst, Polyphemus breaks off the top of a mountain and hurls it toward the boat. It just misses the steering oar at the front.
‘And the sea surged up because of the rock coming down:
There she went, quickly toward the shore—borne by the back-flowing swell,
A flood-tide out the deep drove her to reach the dry land.
But I was there, grabbed in my hands a very long pole
And pushed her off and sideways, encouraged the crew and ordered them
To throw down with the oar handles, so we might escape out from evil,
Signing with a nodding head: and they fell forward and set to rowing.’ (9.484-90)
(Note that the word ‘back-flowing’ in line 485, παλιρρόθιον (palirrhothion), fills the portion of the hexameter line where the retrogression in the circle dance would have occurred.) How convenient that Odysseus found a “very long pole” just lying around there in the stern. I think perhaps the fact that a rhapsode comes with a staff in his hands, perhaps makes less implausible, in his telling, the sudden appearance of a conveniently long pole. Perhaps there would ordinarily be such a pole there at the stern, precisely for the purpose of pushing off into deeper water. But in Odysseus’ story, it certainly seems that he has just come up with it out of the blue, happily and fortuitously; and indeed, perhaps Homer has.
The possibilities for supporting gesture become innumerable for a performer, once he starts looking for them. The actor pushes off with his staff, then nods his head in silent command. Suddenly he becomes a desperate oarsman with an oar. Are there not scripted cues here, for a thespian? The stick of olive with which Odysseus and his men dispatched the Cyclops’ eye, was only the latest opportunity for the Homeric performer’s choreographed use of his prop. It has been both a loom and a mast—the same word in Greek, ἱστός (histos), a thing ‘stood upright’—and it has been Athena’s spear and her magic wand. Indeed, in putting out Polyphemus’ eye, the vivid enacting of the various thrusting and spinning motions required may have contributed to a sexualising of the scene, which has left an occasional imprint in Homer’s diction. On the purely lingual face of it, these intimations can seem a little odd or obtrusive. Most remarkable is the line which opens our passage:
‘But the Cyclops, groaning and throbbing in the pangs of giving birth …’
Our word ‘travail’ allows translators to dodge the issue, because the English word need not refer solely to the labour of giving birth. This does not seem to be the case, however, for Homeric ὠδίνων (ōdinōn), taken here to be participial. This is shocking stuff, because it is sudden, brief, and not further explained, and the imagery is not a metaphor or part of a discernible simile. It does not appear to pay, for example, to ponder what it is being given birth by Polyphemus. Yet I can imagine that after witnessing the performer enact the putting out of the Cyclops’ eye, wielding his burning staff of olive, his pregnancy might well seem a tacit, semi-conscious consequence of the fact that Polyphemus has been, well and truly, fucked.
On the question of who might compare pain of any kind to labour pains, and specifically how, I propose that there are scientific grounds for judgement. Labour pains, experienced only by pregnant women, are therefore unlike any other vehicle in a comparison. Homer compares the pain of an arm wound to Agamemnon to the pangs of labour, in such a way as to elucidate the quality of that pain (Iliad XI.269-72). On the basis of this usage alone—but also for other reasons—I can conclude that the composer of the Iliad was female. The direct use here in describing the condition of the Cyclops—implicating instead the stricken vulnerability of the woman, helpless and passive to unpredictable recurrences of intense agony—remind one of the usage in similes from Isaiah describing the debased state of Zion (13:8, 21:3). It strongly suggests that the composer of the Odyssey was male.
I think it pays great dividends to imagine enacting the story of the Odyssey as you read it—that is, to imagine telling it to people present in front of you—perhaps while holding, or having ready access to, a staff. So I encourage you to do it. There is a feeling of seeing the poem from the inside, as I imagine an actor channeling Hamlet also channels Shakespeare. While bringing it to life, one may find, as I do, that Homer’s script regularly answers as an actor’s and a director’s prompt, seemingly by design.
I note in particular that the sympathy typically aroused when speaking someone else’s speech, is surely a necessary foundation for any act of interpretation. This is not always obvious to students, critics, and other essay writers. Sympathy can sometimes seem to conflict with one’s ability to judge morally, generally by undermining it. But there must be sympathy for the Devil in John Milton, to speak him with such feeling. Such sympathy is surely second nature to producers of dramatic imitations, a field in which Aristotle claims Homer to be a pioneer (Poetics 1448b37). Homer himself, or Odysseus his present narrator, is putting himself in someone else’s place every time he delivers a speech.
This goes even for the monstrous cannibal Polyphemus. When he is described as in labour, or he is madly hurling the tops of mountains at abusive voices over sea, we see him through the telescope as a demeaningly feminised yet terrifying villain. But in the troglodyte’s cave, his home, we experience him disarmed, dismayed, and dis-eyed. Odysseus gives him one of the most curiously affecting—and ludicrous—speeches in all of Homer. The Cyclops meets his bellwether ram as he heavily exits the open door to go to pasture. Odysseus, clinging on under his woolly belly, is in a position to hear everything.
“Ah Ram, buddy, why do you hurry up this way through the cave—of all my flocks
The last? No way before did you get left behind coming and going with the sheep,
No! Far the first you’re nibbling on the delicate flowers of the grass,
Strutting long steps; you’re first to reach the streams of the rivers,
First home to the stall, longing to return
Of an evening: but now? You’re last of all. Ah, you’re sad for your lord,
You miss his eye! The one which the evil man completely blinded
With his pathetic friends, once my mind’s vessels were defeated by wine—
Nowan, whom I tell you has not yet escaped from his destruction.
If only you could be of my same mind, and become someone to talk with,
To tell where that fellow is skulking away from my power:
In that case his brain, oh, through the cave this way and that
Gets dashed on the floor from his pummelling, and my heart
Would settle down from the evils which this nobody gave me—this Nowan.” (9.447-60)
This man loves his pet! Who among us has not projected in this way upon the psyches of our animals? Of course we are narcissistic and perhaps delusional in so doing, but who will throw the stone, and deny his sympathy? Polyphemus is a man-eater who tenderly puts his lambs and kids to their dams. That is a capitalist who loves his dog. In point of fact, Polyphemus appears to be a cheese-loving vegetarian when he’s not eating man-flesh. By contrast, Odysseus and his men seem singularly focussed, after their escape, on the animals the Cyclops tends and loves, as so much mutton to be driven and stolen. This goes even for the ram who saves Odysseus’ life, who becomes the captain’s special, edible prize. Though from the human angle Polyphemus is a lawless solipsist, for his sheep and goats he is a benevolent ruler who studies their nature and their joys, and regulates their lives in accordance.
The sympathy Odysseus summons to speak as Polyphemus is overwhelmed by the sympathy of Polyphemus himself, who seems to live vicariously through his ram. This first among sheep normally leads his fellows the pastoral way to the delicate flowers and the rivers’ streams, but lingers now the last of all. The brutish Cyclops leaks that he also has learned to love the flowers and the streams. Of course he must be missing my eye, says the pastoral Cyclops, just like I do! Sympathy is reciprocal. When Polyphemus feelingly evokes the ram’s “longing to return” to his stall in the evening, any disdain of him devolves also upon the animating pathos of the Odyssey itself. Homer not only looks through the Cyclops’ eyes, he looks through the eyes of a domestic ram and finds an Odyssey in his daily orbit, and its hesperian longing.
But apparently within the ram, Homer reaches a limit of his powers to bring thought to speech. One wonders what these limits are in the storyteller, of sympathy and imagination? Perhaps Homer could have given voice to the ram. But could a ram play the ewe?
In his wish that the ram could talk, however, Polyphemus goes even further than sympathy: he speaks of them ‘being of the same mind’, ὁμοφρονέων (homophroneōn), a word which Odysseus had once coined in his own person. This was when he first confronted Nausicaa, emerging naked from a bush. Odysseus wishes for her, and her future husband, that the gods grant them this quality, ὁμοφροσύνη (homophrosynē), ‘oneness of mind’ (6.180-5). It seems to me that ‘sameness of thought’ may refer to something different from, though not alien to, ‘togetherness of feeling’ or ‘of experience’ (sympathy). This is Odysseus at his most naked and truthful, wishing for Nausicaa truly the best thing that he knows. It is, to me, stunning—stunningly perceptive—that he imputes this thwarted wish for communion to Polyphemus, his nemesis.
We see them together in Homer’s iconic figure: the man underneath, clinging to the ram’s magnificent fleece, heart to beating heart. But they are man and mutton, not soul and soul or mind and mind. If to hear this wish for oneness of mind from the mouth of the Cyclops, meant for him and his ram, is intended to be mocking of him, then it is painfully so. This creature is terribly alone. Even his neighbouring Cyclopes cannot understand what he’s saying, to his considerable cost. His imagining Sir Ram coursing the fields with long strides, μακρὰ βιβάς (makra bibās), like a noble steed, or Achilles, is faintly ludicrous for a sheep. But again, it is painfully mocking. If we proud modern individuals are different from this Cyclops, then it behooves us to figure out how—though we travail.
My brain I’ll prove the female to my soul,
My soul the father, and these two beget
A generation of still-breeding thoughts,
And these same thoughts people this little world,
In humors like the people of this world,
For no thought is contented …
Thus play I in one person many people,
And none contented. Sometimes am I king.
Then treasons make me wish myself a beggar,
And so I am; then crushing penury
Persuades me I was better when a king …
… But whate’er I be,
Nor I nor any man that but man is
With nothing shall be pleased till he be eased
With being nothing.
(Richard II, V.5. Played by Sir Ram.)
In Greek:
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit homerist.substack.com/subscribe -
Odyssey 9.306-414
Today’s passage contains the one absolutely definite, 100% certifiable joke in Homer’s Odyssey. It scarcely needs pointing out that the way that any words or actions register with an audience, depends a great deal on whether they understand themselves to be witnessing a comedy or a tragedy. The very same words or events can seem either pitiable or laughable, depending. Hence for uncultured, inarticulate foreigners among ancient Greek speakers, which is a group that includes all modern, professional classicists and translators, there is always a high risk while expressing one’s reactions to the literature and volunteering one’s analysis, that we are, painfully and embarrassingly, not in on the joke. Consider the predicament of the alien Thermians in the film Galaxy Quest, who are feelingly convinced that the silly 1960s US sitcom Gilligan’s Island in fact depicts a heart-wrenching tragedy. All can be lost when context is lost. Even removing the psychic prompt of a laugh track from a television comedy can result in a surprisingly solemn experience. Actors’ timings, expecting the now silenced laugh, seem to fall flat instead, and prompt an awkward reflectivity in response to intended throwaway lines or zingers. Comic putdowns, like expleted imprecations, often have macabre or even diabolical connotations, when allowed to be heard in silence and sobriety.
I continue to complain that the registration of the Odyssey is handicapped and distorted when people approach it as an ‘epic’. There may be some usefulness in this term in getting at the scale and sublimity in the scene-painting, psychic and physical, of the Iliad. But even in this case I am not convinced that ‘epic’ adds anything important to what is already there in ‘tragic’ and ‘tragedy’. The Odyssey, on the other hand, is not even on the spectrum. Any transmillennial and transcultural induction of the qualities of ‘epic’, covering Virgil and Dante and Milton and Tolstoy, for example, always has its first and immediate exception in Homer’s Odyssey. Far from there being twin exemplars from the original epic poet, we have instead the genre-defining volcano of the Iliad, and then the other one, the weird one. The Odyssey.
A great hindrance for English speakers to seeing what is there, in what Homer is giving, is an entirely artificial epic aspiration, or pretension, which infects translators. Professional Classics already indoctrinates would-be renderers with its pseudo-historical fantasies about ‘oral epic’. There is posited some kind of entranced metrical-verbal substratum, taking the place of a composer ‘Homer’, which somehow, through some mysterious oral and traditional process, begets and gestates these two dissimilar children. (Is one of them perhaps a bastard?) Under the spell of such a misted and mystifying origin story, it does not occur to the consciousness that the same person may not be well suited to translating both the Iliad and the Odyssey; it is all of it, after all, but epic Greek in epic hexameters. My own eyes were only opened to the special tone of the Odyssey by Samuel Butler’s translation, which I continue to consult and recommend over all others. His deadpan, prose distillation is a distillation, but like all such rarefactions it precipitates the iron nugget in its purity. Once one sees it it can’t be unseen. It is a wonder to discover the deadpan Homer and the Odyssean hexameter’s prosaic sensibility.
One admits, however, that all of this is subjective insistence and special pleading, even if wholeheartedly for the sake of improving and advancing my reader’s experience of the Odyssey. The glow of ‘epic’ dulls the wits and the senses into a burnished, sleepy stupor at the pew. I want you all to experience instead the laugh-out-loud moments, which are always more enjoyable in company, together with the many other more private tensions, pangs, and joys of the heart which the Odyssey induces with its magnetic field. But nothing keeps you from retreating afterward to the cosiness of the ‘oral epic’ cubby, with its reassuring academic authorities and awe at what those soulful archaic primitives can accomplish, given enough time. If only there was a proof, by example, that the Odyssey as a whole may need to be approached as comedy to be better understood. Proof! Proof is not possible, or looked for, in the study of literature, oral or otherwise. But in the explanation of his joke, which Homer in this instance all but gives by himself—with only the barest need for me to clarify things for the Greekless—there may indeed be proof that the Odyssey is comedy. What is more, the idea that Homer’s poetry was built from inherited metrical phrases—metrical formulas which fit into slots of an hexameter line of verse, so that composition can be improvised and extemporised—comes directly into question, because the metrical shape of the words, the long and short syllables, do nothing to explain this joke; rather, we are pointed to an aspect of Homer’s Greek language—his contemporary language—which the oral theory of composition completely ignores. So may the primitivist fetishising mumbo-jumbo of ‘oral epic’ have its bubble burst, and leave Homer, the world’s original tonal composer of dramatic stories, to blink again in the sunlight. Again there is special pleading: it turns out my life’s work on Homer and the Greek accent may depend on the telling of this joke. So let us turn to the dull and tasteless labour of explaining a joke, to see what turns up that may seem convincing as proof in these parts.
Singing Homer is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
Odysseus tells the Cyclops that his name is Οὖτις, Oûtis, with a circumflex intonation on the first syllable. This sounds a lot like οὔ τις, oú tis, except for its acute intonation on the ou. The latter phrase is the regular negative of the indefinite pronoun: ‘no-one’. The first syllables are the same, both are accented with a pitch peak on the syllable, but they are accented differently: the circumflex rises and falls in pitch over the long vowel sound ou, while the acute rises only at the end of it. The similarity of sound is the key to Odysseus’ trick. Since Odysseus clearly means his invented name to sound like the indefinite pronoun, I translate Oûtis as ‘Nowan’. Robert Fitzgerald uses ‘Nohbdy’.
Now, these graphic accent marks, circumflex and acute, only came into existence in the written, edited texts of the Alexandrian scholars, hundreds of years at least after the poems were composed. The Alexandrian graphic system is itself likely a rearguard, a conservative, scholarly reaction to a change in the spoken accent of Greek in that era; this was a transition to a stress accent on the same syllable as the old pitch rise, which persists into modern Greek. In other words, modern Greek stresses either a circumflex or an acute equally, without a necessary difference in intonation. Such a change, applied to the inherited texts, would have made the musical emphases of the more ancient Greek verses unintelligible. Homer did not know anything about these marks—or possibly about written Greek at all, except perhaps as a scribal skill useful for recording poetic performances. Or perhaps he used the new alphabetic notation in composition him- or herself. But even so, in the earliest written versions (in Greek, at any rate) the text of Homer would not have had accentual indications or even word divisions, and the name and the indefinite pronoun would have looked identical: ΟΥΤΙΣ. In point of fact, the joke works just as well if there is no difference at all in the pronunciations; the effect would have been the same as in Abbott and Costello’s ‘Who’s on first’ routine. But the written accentual system first included in Alexandrian texts happens also to reflect a pronunciation which preserves the joke, and to my mind very much improves it.
When Greek negates a non-indicative sentence—that is, when a speaker exhorts, or orders, or doubts, or wishes, or fears, rather than simply states—it for some reason chooses a different and quite different-sounding form, μή (mē) rather than οὐ (ou), to express the negative no/not. (Neither form is accented, but the following indefinite pronoun, a so-called ‘enclitic’, induces the acute accent.) Hence in conditional questions like the following, from the neighbouring Cyclopes,
“Surely no one (ἦ μή τίς) who’s a mortal is driving off your own flocks against your will?
Surely no one’s (ἦ μή τίς) after killing you, whether by cunning or by force?” (9.405-6)
the ‘no one’ in these cases is μή τις (mé tis), not οὔ τις (oú tis). Now, this version of the negative indefinite pronoun sounds a lot like a word of great resonance for Odysseus and the Odyssey: μῆτις (mêtis), ‘skill’, ‘shrewdness’, ‘contrivance’. Personified, Metis is supposed to have been the mother of Athena herself, in the sense that father Zeus swallowed her when she was pregnant by him, for fear of her offspring. He then gave birth to Athena from his head, like a cunning thought. (The stories of Athena’s birth do not occur in Homer.) Athena’s favourite Odysseus has a characteristic epithet πολύμητις, polymētis, for which I have been saying ‘poly-wily’. Yes, the Greek word in question μῆτις, mêtis looks and sounds the same, aside from the shift of accent, as the negative indefinite pronoun in conditional sentences, μή τις (mé tis), ‘no one’. To be sure, this second pun, mé tis/mêtis, is not for confusing the Cyclopes, but for amusing the audience, and perhaps especially the readers in it. It is a metapun.
Got it? Oûtis is a made up name which could sound like it means ‘no one’ if you don’t quite hear its intonation, while mêtis is a pregnantly meaningful word (and also a proper name) which, when you don’t catch the pitch pattern, also sounds like the way Greeks say ‘no-one’ in conditional sentences. Polyphemus responds to the second question from his highland neighbours with what seems to him a simple, clarifying, indicative statement of fact:
“Friends, Nowan (Οὖτις, Oûtis) is killing me by cunning, but not (οὐδὲ) by force.” (408)
What the sleepy neighbours hear, however, is oú tis, ‘no one’, the indicative negative indefinite pronoun, not Oûtis—for them an unfamiliar, positive, proper name. The introduction of the negative into the idea has a knock-on effect, turning the following negative conjunction (οὐδὲ) into a ‘nor’ or a ‘nor either’. Polyphemus had intended, however, to clarify that his enemy had overcome him by a trick (δόλος, dolos) rather than by any sort of force, implausible against a Cyclops; in his sentence, the οὐδὲ is disjunctive, ‘but not’. The neighbours’ mishearing therefore equivocates on both Οὖτις and οὐδὲ, treating them as coordinated negatives. Thus what they hear from Polyphemus is the following, a confirmation of their incredulity in the indicative, factual mood:
“Friends, no one (οὔ τις, oú tis) is killing me by cunning, nor either (οὐδὲ) by force!”
So, somewhat at a loss in response to what they think Polyphemus has replied, the irritated neighbours think he must be crying out in pain from an illness rather than an assailant, and respond:
“If in fact there’s no one doing you violence and you’re all alone,
Disease from Big Zeus is a thing there’s no way to escape and avoid.
No; you’d best say a prayer to Daddy, Lord Poseidon.” (410-12)
What they actually hear is that no one is bothering Polyphemus, despite the painful ruckus he’s making! But the real punchline, the lynchpin of the joke, comes from Odysseus the narrator:
‘So they spoke and went off, and my own dear heart fell about laughing,
How my name thing utterly deceived him—as well as my blameless ‘No-how’ (μῆτις).’ (413-14)
‘No-how’ here stands in play for that quality of μῆτις (mêtis) which characterises Odysseus, his cunning and smarts. But for the attempt at word play in English, I should have rendered it, in honour of the joke, as ‘wit’. The whole joke therefore involves these four forms, two equivalent negative expressions bookended by a made-up proper name and a positive noun, which contain initial syllables that also serve in Greek as the two types of Greek negative particle: Οὖτις, οὔ τις, μή τις, μῆτις (Oûtis, oú tis, mé tis, mêtis).
It is true that the joke would also work if no sort of accentuation was a part of Homer’s composition. The confusion of names with pronouns (‘Who’s on first’) works on its own in the Abbott and Costello routine. But the detail of Homer’s scene requires some level of mispronunciation or mishearing. Though the neighbours have gathered around Polyphemus’ cave, they are still conversing through the giant rock of a door blocking the entrance and trapping Odysseus and his men. What is more, the Cyclopes are bleary-eyed, and Polyphemus is both hungover and groaning in severe physical distress. All the same, they hear the correct syllables and make perfect sense of them. What fits the miscommunication in this picture is a limited garbling: what the Cyclopean neighbours mishear is Polyphemus’ intonation. Besides, Οὖτις is not a person or a name that they know; it is not a usual name at all. The indefinite pronoun, however, is very familiar, and it makes sense that they would be predisposed to hear Polyphemus mean ‘no-one’ by Oûtis.
To posit that Homer ignored his Greek’s accentuation in composing rhythmic verses, is an absurd supposition about a poet or poem in any language. And yet it is a foundational premise in the absurdly prevalent theory taught in schools about Homeric composition, that the Iliad and the Odyssey are a result of oral composition on a purely metrical basis. The fact is in my recent book, Singing Homer’s Spell: The End of Oralist Poetics, I have demonstrated for the first time that the received Alexandrian accentuation can make eminent musical sense of Homer’s hexameter verses, reinforcing and syncopating the metre in a recognisably musical way. The key to interpreting the Greek accentual system is a law of tonal prominence, which, it turns out, applies also to ancient Latin. What is more, I show that in our received text both Odysseus and Penelope show distinctive, characteristic, easily recognisable tonal patterns in their impassioned exclamations; these may be compared to signature lines in Wagnerian opera, melodic patterns that both evoke and identify particular protagonists in the drama. We are therefore on the threshold of a new awakening to the dramatic life of Homeric μουσική (mousikē). The oral theory, by contrast, in its current form, clarifies literally nothing about the Homeric poems as we have them, in the tonally accented scripts bequeathed us from Alexandria. Homer’s joke based on misinterpreted accentuation, may itself be the cipher to unlock the secret of Homer’s tonal music. As I argue in my book, everything turns on the ancient pitch-accented usage which distinguishes between the circumflex voicing pattern on a long vowel, and the acute on a long vowel, a distinction which no longer obtains in the modern Greek stress accent system where both are simply stressed. This is precisely the ancient distinction between Οὖτις and οὔ τις, μῆτις and μή τις.
Let us not lose sight of the negation involved in Odysseus’ joke. Trapped in the weirdly diagnostic solipsism of the Cyclops’ cave—the tender pastoralist, who lovingly puts the lamb to the teat, and at the same time the fast-food cannibal—Odysseus declares himself to be Nobody. Is it out of court to invoke an Hegelian triad in the progress of the soul; thesis, negation, synthesis, or the joyful, sorrowful and glorious mysteries of the rosary? This point of the journey is a nadir, but also a baptism, a descent into nothing and no-one, but also the triumphant birth of a (comic) hero.
“Nowan is my name: Nowan is what they call me,
Mother and Dad, and all the rest of my friends.” (366-7)
The name and the joke are not the heart of this passage, however. Of course there is a simile in store, although not this time a cross-dressed one.
For the Circle-Eye had lying there a cudgel, by the animal pen,
Of green olive wood: now that’s one he cut so he could carry it
Once it dried. That thing—among ourselves, as we looked at it, we compared
To the length of a ship’s mast, a twenty-oarsman in black,
A berth wide for freight which traverses the great gulf:
That’s how long it was, that’s how solid it looked when you did. (319-24)
Above we find not a simile but a direct comparison. The sense of scale is truly marvellous; what is for the Cyclops a potential cudgel or crook, is for Odysseus and his men a twenty-oarsman’s mast. Once again we see Odysseus’ imagination for what is possible shaped by his experience with human industry, all of it feelingly invoked but also instantly belittled, by the sheer scale of the Cyclops and his uses in relation to back-breaking human endeavour. The literal belittling caused by the Cyclops is both dizzying and humbling. It harbours comic terror. I get this in spades when I look at this vase-painter’s work, and imagine, perhaps with him, that the large, framing graphic designs (from this perspective) are in fact the Cyclops’ eyes:
From the Cyclops’ spare toothpick Odysseus cuts off a span of his spread arms’ length, and has his men whittle it. It seems important that the stick is made of olive wood. Sometimes a stick is just a stick; but we have been given reason to identify the olive with Athena and Athena’s protection, and so with Odysseus himself. Its culture and agriculture, still nativist in Greece, are apparently irrelevant to those of the Cyclopes; in Polyphemus’ cave the olive is waste wood. Later, when they finally put it to use, Odysseus turns again to shipbuilding, this time for a true, if straightforward, simile:
Now they gripped the stake of olive, sharp at the tip,
And into the eye they thrust it: but I pressed on it from above
And twirled it, as when a man drills a ship’s plank
With an auger, and the men underneath keep vibrating it with the thong
Taken hold of at each end, and the thing runs, spinning firm and continuously.
Just so in that fellow’s eye we took the fire-tipped stake
And kept whirling it round, and the blood started flowing over it while it was hot!
All his eyelids, even around the eyebrows, the hot smoke singed
From the eyeball as it burned, and his roots sputtered in the fire. (382-90)
The unionised work of construction, the rhythm and multiplicative power of a team, together with the camaraderie of a ship’s crew, seem to be animating things on the human side of the simile which help describe the gory penetration of a monstrous eye. There may even be a nod to democratic sensibility—perhaps a new thing in a post-feudal, post-Mycenaean world. When Odysseus says that the lots fell out to pick the team with just the selection he would have wished—
The lots fell to those I also wished to choose myself!
Four men, while I was numbered the fifth among them. (334-5)
—the democratic lottery happens to coincide with the good and rational choice. This is perhaps the democratic fantasy. Or a rigged election. But the leader likes to make it seem like he’s on jury duty like everyone else, himself the fifth man and the point guard.
For those of you trying to imagine Polyphemus’ face through all this, note that he has ‘eyebrows’ (plural). Earlier Odysseus had tittered darkly that this adventure in the cave was not going to be an ‘erotic thing’ (ἐρατεινός) for his men, once the giant appeared. Was that a slip of some kind? Is what is described above, the rhythmic penetration of a sputtering monstrous eye, a sexual act?
The consummation, however, is the simile which steals the scene:
As when a man who’s a coppersmith takes a big axe or an adze
And plunges it in cold water, and it shrieks mightily
As he doctors it—for that, mind, is where iron gets its strength—
So this man’s eye hissed and sizzled around the olive-wood stake. (391-4)
Most translators mistake the process described here for ‘tempering’, a heat treatment of metal which does not involve immersion. The treatment of iron Odysseus describes is nowadays called ‘quenching’. For an indispensable discussion of metallurgy in Homer, by a chemistry professor, not a classicist, see the article linked here. It seems that whenever Homer refers to the products of metallurgy, he uses the name of the base or source metal rather than the product. The word for copper, χαλκός (khalkos), for example, often seems to refer to the hardened alloy we call bronze. In a similar way, σίδηρος (sidēros), ‘iron’, appears to refer at different times to bloom iron, wrought iron, and carburised iron, or steel. It is the latter alloy which requires the plunging or ‘quenching’ of heated iron into water (βάπτειν, baptein, whence ‘baptise’).
There are many shiny objects in Homer’s world, metals especially: gold, silver, bronze, copper, tin. The wealthy houses gleam with these elements, trading in inherited objects wrought from these ores. Amongst these boring iron holds a special place. Archaeologists populate a Middle Earth with a ‘Bronze Age’ and an ‘Iron’ one. Whatever the reality, there surely is a natural history to be told which accounts for the changing prevalence in availability, development, and use of these metals by human beings, in the wake of different natural events and circumstances. But it does seem that the world of the Odyssey is one where iron is being actively worked and its nature has a hold on the technological imagination. Iron can be shiny as well; the ‘flaming’ iron Athena pretends she is trading, when she visits Ithaca as Mentes, is most likely new-quenched steel. She says she’s carrying this product to trade for copper, or more likely bronze (χαλκός). It’s tempting to see this as a barter of the manufactured and useful for the inherited and valuable.
But mostly iron is dull and grey, like an axe-head. It is boring, dependable, strong, and above all resilient. Stubborn and unromantic, iron speaks to the character of a kind of human heart.
In most instances, “iron-heartedness” calls upon the qualities of hard-wrought iron: strong, impervious to blows. In the Odyssey, Telemachus, Calypso, and Odysseus all invoke the iron heart to describe endurance (4:292) or lack of compassion (5:190 and 23:172). Such iron hearts recall the polukmētos sidēros [‘wrought iron’], in that hardness or immovability can be, in many situations, exceedingly valuable. In Odyssey 23, for example, Penelope’s iron resolve not to yield until she tests Odysseus is as heroic as Odysseus’ ability to keep his temper and his beggarly disguise.
Often in Homer, however, the attribution of a ‘heart of iron’, as for example to Penelope in the passage mentioned, is intended as an accusation or a rebuke. We recall the hardening of Pharaoh’s heart. We ourselves much prefer to speak instead of hearts of gold. The iron horse is too relentless a locomotive. There is therefore at least a double meaning in Homer’s attribution of an iron heart. But Odysseus’ aside in the simile—that the hot plunging in cold water is where iron gets its strength—may suggest that when he plunges the olive stake into the Cyclops’ eye, he also overcomes whatever compromised nature had been his, and something new now steels within him.
The rite of baptism itself perhaps owes its inspiration to the metallurgical quenching of iron. Certainly the baptising of wrought iron into steel seems to involve the infusing of an holy spirit of some kind; the actions of both fire and water in producing the transformation to steel remain largely beyond our ken. The product seems to be improved in its inner nature. Odysseus describes the action of baptising as φαρμάσσων (pharmassōn), as though its effect were comparable to that of a healing drug or potion (pharmakon). Perhaps it was thought that the human being could also be transformed from its base metal, in the magical way that steel is born from iron in fire and water.
Is this what we have witnessed? Has Odysseus been baptised in the Cyclops’ cave, taken on the name of No-One, the name of anonymity, in an episode that is, as Shakespeare’s word so wonderfully puts it, forgetive? Through the molten despair of imprisonment in the cyclopean cave, is there a Man of Steel to emerge? Let us take this in with the delicacy and good humour, and the grain of salt, which only comedy will allow. Odysseus certainly does. He tells us in the moment that he cracked up laughing (ἐγέλασσε), at his name-trick and his wit, his Oûtis and his Mêtis. That’s selling your own joke. Let’s take him seriously.
In Greek:
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit homerist.substack.com/subscribe -
Odyssey 9.193-305
The world of the Odyssey is one where drugs and potations are often the first option for use in a pinch. One should have thought that men-in-arms would prefer to kill by the sword, honourably, man to man, over conquest by poison. The moral issue is raised quite early, by Athena playing Mentes, Lord of the Taphians; she tells Telemachus how she first met Odysseus on his way back from Ephyre, from a mission to procure a “man-killing chemical” (φάρμακον ἀνδροφόνον, pharmakon androphonon) with which to anoint his arrowheads: “but that man wouldn’t/Give it, you see, since he feared the retribution of the gods, who are forever.” Not to worry; apparently Mentes’ own father, doing his own thing, also had it and gave Odysseus the drug willingly, because “he used to love him dreadfully.” It is not clear whether a sexual fixation is meant. But as Athena would have it, her pretend father’s feeling for Odysseus was strong enough to overcome a moral scruple. In the Iliad, it is bad enough simply to be a sneaky bowman, like Paris, who kills from afar like all the cowards with a gun, in relation to a warrior fighting for his life in close quarters with shield and sword. But poisoning arrowheads to murder a warrior is despicable cheating, by any gentleman’s reckoning. Nevertheless, Odysseus is not ashamed of using poison and does not fear the resentment of the gods, if Athena’s story has any truth to it. Remember that she is choosing to tell this tale to influence his impressionable son. Poison for his arrows is what Odysseus wanted; perhaps because he was once a hot young man, that was what he got.
A value seems to be placed on ripe vintages of wine. These sorts of things are not for the battlefield; they are the savoured treasures of peace, to be found in storerooms in inmost nooks, known only to a few. Nestor’s housekeeper ‘loosened the veil’ of an eleven-year-old vintage to mix a special bowl (3.391). Helen produced an Egyptian drug, νηπενθή nēpenthē, to release old warriors and their sons from the grief of remembering the losses of war (4.220 ff.). This drug was an addition to the wine bowl. Now we hear of the wine of Maron, a priest of Apollo, a “divine drink” (θεῖον ποτόν theion poton): “no one of the slaves/Knew about this thing, nor the handmaids in the household,/But just himself, his own wife, and one solitary housekeeper.” Odysseus makes clear why he arms himself with potent wine, in addition to his usual gear: he knew in his manly spirit (θυμὸς ἀγήνωρ thumos agēnōr) that he was about to encounter an opponent, “clothed in great valour,”—so far, a line that could belong in the Iliad—but a savage, who observed “neither rights (δίκας dikas) nor laws (θέμιστας themistas)”. Perhaps this anticipated lawlessness justifies Odysseus’ own provision to handicap the traditions of man-to-man combat. He is no stranger to the poisoned tip. What Hamlet calls ‘practice’ seems of a piece with the μῆτις (mētis) for which Odysseus is celebrated among Greek speakers and by Athena herself. But we recall that this quality also allowed him to serve, in Athenian tragedy, as an out-and-out stage villain.
Odysseus’ μῆτις is also on display in his storytelling. When is he making things up? Did he really score this wine from a priest of Apollo, once upon a time, or did he put that in because he knew he’d need it in the story to come, to give him the means to defeat the prodigious Cyclops? In his telling it seemed that the attack on the Cicones of Ismarus, immediately after they sailed from Troy, had been a brief affair. Perhaps even a single day’s work; certainly the counter-attack, by the neighbouring Ciconian army from the mainland, is described as having taken place, the battle shifting one way and then the other, over a single passage of the sun. But later we hear that the men of Odysseus’ fleet had had time, before their losing battle, to store up large quantities of the defeated Cicones’ wine in two-handled jars. And now we are to believe that in the course of their invasion of the Cicones, Odysseus’ men had had the time to go house to house, so as to be able to spare the house of this Maron, his wife and child, who had the fabulous wine in stock. In point of fact, Odysseus seems to have spent a convivial evening with his grateful host, where he first smelt the wine’s astonishing bouquet, and learned that they diluted its strength with twenty parts of water. They spared Maron because he was a priest of Apollo who lived amidst the growth of Apollo’s sacred precinct: we once again touch on the idea that Odysseus’ first adventure after Troy was a mini-Iliad, with perhaps a lesson learned. We recall that Agamemnon had precisely disregarded the status of Chryses the priest of Apollo, and had taken his daughter for his concubine—preferable, he says out loud, to Clytemnestra. As a result Agamemnon brings Apollo’s plague upon his whole army. The would-be Agamemnon, Odysseus—one goat to the good, so far, as a perk for being head of the fleet—did not repeat his old commander’s impiety, or covet Maron’s child.
We recall that the Phaeacians only moved out to isolated Scheria because they were fed up with being bullied by their cousins, the Cyclopes. Does Odysseus then only tell the story of outwitting and humiliating the Cyclops to please or otherwise impress his audience? The question of Odysseus’ truth-telling presents quite the paradox. Perhaps it is a Cretan paradox. We tend to take Odysseus at his word when he tells the tale of his wanderings, despite all the fabulous elements. He seems to be as genuine and winning a teller as one finds; often he seems confessional—sometimes unwittingly so, which only adds to the feeling of authenticity. Odysseus does not hide or dress his mistakes. So we accept any number of giants and witches and monsters and metamorphoses and talking ghosts, as so many signposts, if you will, in an illustrated journey of the soul—an human soul—a male human soul. One thinks of Tolkien’s visible souls, orcs and elves and hobbits. But Homer’s dimensions here brook no comparison. The Cyclops is transcendentally true. He is a solipsist. He is MAGA. He is the asshole weirdo. All of these and less and more. (Just not ‘man in the state of nature.’) Homer has received and returned and turned these Lotus-Eaters and Sirens into unforgettable icons of truth-telling and psychic reality.
The paradox for me, and I apologise for anticipating, is that when we know he is lying, as when Odysseus is in disguise and incognito in Ithaca, everything fabulous disappears. When Odysseus is trying to convince someone else that he is a real human being with a history—a Cretan—there are not even any gods. There are not even any gods. Homer knows about realism, evidently. It’s for liars.
Two moments that arrest the attention: when his men urge Odysseus to grab some cheese, then come back to drive some animals and scarper off to sea, he responds:
Me? Nah. Not persuaded, though it would have been much more profitable.
So as I might see the man! And what if he gave me a guest gift?
But it was not destined to be a sexy thing for my comrades, when he appeared. (9.228-30)
The “sexy thing”, ἐρατεινός (‘lovely’, ‘causing eros’), leaves an unexpected taste. Is there in fact something erotic about the episode about to unfold?
And after the Cyclops falls asleep, gorged on human flesh and “undiluted milk,” Odysseus thought in his “great-heart, his life’s breath (θυμός, thumos)” to draw his sword from by his thigh—sometimes a sword is just a sword—and stab the Cyclops in the chest, after feeling with his hand for where the “lungs hold the liver.” There’s something vividly sensual, at least, about his imagination. But he then says a different thumos held him back, when he realised that he and his men could never move the giant stone the monster had used to block the door. I am not aware that Homer uses this expression elsewhere, that one thumos wants to do this, but an other one thinks better. The doubled ‘life’s breath’ of felt consciousness is strangely schizophrenic. Odysseus’ frustration is extreme. In the Iliad, the line ‘he drew his sword from by his thigh’ generally occurs before an exploit in battle. But its first use is in the opening moment when Achilles is also of two minds, as to whether he would draw the sword and kill Agamemnon on the spot, or restrain himself. There there is not the split consciousness, but Achilles is a single subject who thinks in two directions. I am not sure what to make of Odysseus’ usage.
The line about drawing the sword from by his thigh will recur in the Odyssey, several times in this tale of Odysseus’ wanderings. I shall point these out. Each time it precedes a use or an action which only underscores how ill-equipped for his new adventures, is the armed-and-ready man of the Iliad. His drawn sword must be put to strange, new, and improvised uses. It must become a thinking man’s dick, like the rhapsode’s prop that it actually is.
Polyphemus is a weirdo caveman. The rams and billy goats stay outside in the yard. He sleeps with the ewes and nannies. They are his family: he dutifully puts the lambs to the teat. But there is to be no mating inside. I believe Samuel Butler pointed out how absurd it was to go to the trouble of making cheese—although aging cheese in a cave is supposed to be the way to go—when the Cyclopes’ land was already so spontaneously abundant. But I guess the fellow likes his feta. The man’s house is also his barn. What goes unsaid, and unsmelt, is how much shit there must be lying around amidst the cheese and spilt milk, for all the neatness and good order of his pens. Meanwhile, we do not see the Cyclops eat any lamb or mutton; today he only eats the animals that can talk to him!
I do think it is important, almost everything really, to take in that what is going on in the Cyclops’ cave, is comedy. I don’t mean that it is playing for laughs. There is something truly shocking about the moment the brute snatches up two men and eats them raw. In a crunch of liquids and aspirated consonants, one mimes internally the chewing and the gristle. It is ghastly and macabre. But it is not tragic. These are not men with faces and names. They are almost subalterns or minions, minor heads in the buried hydra of the hero’s psyche. You won’t find yourself thinking about them sadly in the shower. Spectacular violence and grisly gore, it seems to me, are some of the outlets the predisposition of comedy will allow; in tragedy they would be unspeakably tasteless. One notes that Greek tragedy sets the slaughter off stage, as a rule. The point and the tragedy are not to be found there.
In the midst of the surrounding aromatic oddness, Polyphemus asks a perfectly normal and civilised question of his unexpected guests: what are you sailors at, are you pirates? More familiarly comic is Odysseus’ responding speech to the Cyclops. He is Gulliver in Brobdingnag. Juxtaposing the big and the small is always good for a laugh. So also is seeing close-up things from an imagined distance. But I believe we broach new territory for Homer here.
The armies of Atreides Agamemenon we declare ourselves to be,
Whose fame these days is the greatest under heaven:
For so massive a city did he sack, and the armies he destroyed
Were many … (263-6)
One wonders how much of the Odyssey’s comedy is actually satire at the Iliad’s expense. That city stuff don’t play down south. When little Odysseus puffs out his chest and basks in the glory of the hosts of Atreides Agamemnon, we experience not so much the sack of Troy, but the sack of the Iliad. The most potent of potions is poetry itself; in one extraordinarily disarming moment of transient drama, the spell of the Iliad is destroyed. All one need do is see those exploits and strifes and suffering, the grandeur and theatre of Achilles himself, through the eye of a disinterested giant contemplating warring ant hills. And this is precisely what the Homeric performer does, when he becomes the Cyclops and speaks his dismissive, disdainful, blasphemous words.
‘You’re a fool, stranger, or you’ve come from a very long way away,
Who asks me either to fear the gods or avoid them:
For no Cyclopes give a shit about Zeus Aegis-Holder
Nor the blessed gods …’ (273-6)
To view the Iliad with a Cyclopean eye is therefore an Homeric thing to do. But is it, also, to be missing an eye?
In Greek:
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit homerist.substack.com/subscribe -
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.
Singing Homer is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
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:
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit homerist.substack.com/subscribe - Visa fler
