"Now as Odysseus approached Alcinous' famous house
a rush of feelings stirred within his heart,
bringing him to a standstill,
even before he crossed the bronze threshold . . ." (94–97)
"And there Odysseus stood,
gazing at all the bounty, a man who'd borne so much . . . " (156–58)
He pauses, as do we, suspended. In the midst of this parenthesis, we partake in an ekphrastic description of the space, a well-ordered and flourishing palace (in contrast to his palace back in Ithaca).
The "man who'd borne so much": as we've seen, Odysseus is often described as crafty, or wily, or cunning ("the man of craft" [277]); just as often, his is given the epithet "long-suffering." In Book 7, we have "how long have I suffered!" (181); "long-suffering great Odysseus" (210); "all I've suffered" (249); "How much I have suffered" (259); "doomed to be comrade still to many hardships" (310); "after many trials" (394).
As the classicist W. B. Stanford suggests in "The Homeric Etymology of the Name Odysseus":
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| Laocoon by Charles Bell (1806), Wellcome Library |
The whole career of Odysseus in European literature from the Epic Cycle to James Joyce's "Ulysses" demonstrates this nemesis of the man with Autolycan heredity, this man who suffers from the disadvantage of intellectual superiority. The Cyclic stories of the death of Palamedes and the deception of Philoctetes (which Homer ignores), the anti-Ulyssean plays of Euripides and Sophocles, the strictures of Socrates and Plato, the antipathy of Virgil together with the Latin and Romance writers on the Troy Tale, the condemnation in Dante's "Inferno," the scurrilities of Thersites in "Troilus and Cressida" . . . all attest the latent truth in the title "the man doomed to odium." Autolycus in naming his grandson showed himself a prophet as well as a humorist.
It sounds as if suffering is not unrelated to his craftiness . . .