Day 18, Book 18

Stephen Halliwell, Greek Laughter (2008)

"And Antinous, that grand prince, hearing them wrangle,
broke into gloating laughter . . .

All leapt from their seats with whoops of laughter . . . " (41–42, 48)

Why do we laugh? Because we are relieved, or find something incongruous? Philosophers have often puzzled over an explanation for this oddly human behavior. Plato was discomfited by the Gods' laughter at lame Hephaestus in The Iliad.  Hobbes thought laughter a sign of superior feeling, the apprehension of "sudden glory."

The suitors' laughter, here instigated by Antinous, confirms yet again their callousness, their willful delight in witnessing cruelty (sadly akin to contemporary youtube videos of fights between  homeless people). Odysseus, of course, has the last laugh.

Day 17, Book 17

Theodor van Thulden (1606–69)

Book 16 reunited father and son, with a disbelieving Telemachus ("No, you're not Odysseus! Not my father!" [220]) finally persuaded by the ipseic declaration "No other Odysseus will ever return to you. / That man and I are one, the man you see . . ." (232–33). In Book 17, in the midst of the pitiless inhospitality he must face, Odysseus has another poignant reunion, with his loyal dog (317–60):

Now, as they talked on, a dog that lay there
lifted up his muzzle, pricked his ears…
It was Argos, long-enduring Odysseus’ dog
he trained as a puppy once, but little joy he got
since all too soon he shipped to sacred Troy.
In the old days young hunters loved to set him
coursing after wild goats and deer and hares.
But now with his master gone he lay there, castaway,
on piles of dung from mules and cattle, heaps collecting
out before the gates till Odysseus’ serving-men
could cart it off to manure the king’s estates.
Infested with ticks, half-dead from neglect,
here lay the old hound Argos.

But the moment he sensed Odysseus standing by
he thumped his tail, nuzzling low, and his ears dropped,
though he had no strength left to drag himself an inch
toward his master. Odysseus glanced to the side
and flicked away a tear, hiding it from Eumaeus,
diverting his friend in a hasty, offhand way:
“Strange, Eumaeus, look, a dog like this,
lying here on a dung-hill…
what handsome lines! But I can’t say for sure
if he had the running speed to match his looks
or he was only the sort that gentry spoil at table,
show-dogs masters pamper for their points.”

You told the stranger, Euamaeus, loyal swineherd,
“Here, it’s all too true, here’s the dog of a man
who died in foreign parts. But if he had now
the form and flair he had in his glory days —
as Odysseus left him, sailing off to Troy —
you’d be amazed to see such speed, such strength.
No quarry he chased in the deepest, darkest woods
could slip this hound. A champion tracker too!
Ah, but he’s run out of luck now, poor fellow…
his master’s dead and gone, so far from home,
and the heartless women tend to him not at all…”

With that he entered the well-constructed palace,
strode through the halls and joined the proud suitors.
But the dark shadow of death closed down on Argos’ eyes
the instant he saw Odysseus, twenty years away.

Day 16, Book 16

An intriguing comment from the philosopher Hans Blumenberg:

Henri-Lucien Doucet,
Reunion of Odysseus & Telemachus (1880)

"Shipwreck, as seen by a survivor, is the figure of an initial philosophical experience. It is said that the founder of the Stoic school, Zeno of Cition, was shipwrecked with a cargo of Phoenician purple dye near Piraeus and was led thereby to philosophy, summing up: 'I was first fortunate in seafaring when I was shipwrecked.'" Vitruvius reports that the Socratic philosopher Aristippus, shipwrecked on the shores of the island of Rhodes, recognized that there were humans nearby when he saw geometrical figures traced on the beach. The account has the philosopher—who was not exactly esteemed by the other students of Socrates, because he was too well acquainted with money and pleasure—undergo a kind of conversion. He entrusted to his homebound fellow passengers the message that one ought to provide one’s children with only such possessions as could be saved from a shipwreck, for the only things important in life were those that neither the trials of fate nor revolution nor war could harm. We have here the moralizing version of an anecdote that originally related to sophistic practice: even in the hopeless situation of being shipwrecked on a foreign shore, a philosophically trained person still knows what to do, when he recognizes civilized reason in geometrical diagrams and thereupon decides to proceed immediately to the city’s gymnasium and earn through philosophical disputation what he needs to restore his lost outfit. That is, he is a man who can take care of himself rather than a man who draws lessons from the shipwreck."

Day 15, Book 15

Poor Telemachus – remember him? – has been detained at Menelaus' court since Book 4! At least he has two prophecies to encourage him.

Helen offers the first (191–200):

"Listen to me and I will be your prophet,
sure as the gods have flashed it in my mind
and it will come to pass, I know it will.
Just as the eagle swooped down from the crags
where it was born and bred, just as it snatched
that goose fattened up for the kill inside the house,
just so, after many trials and roving long and hard,
Odysseus will descend on his house and take revenge –
Unless he's home already, sowing seeds of ruin
for that whole crowd of suitors!"

The second comes from the fugitive Theoclymenus, after the return to Ithaca (594–98):

"Look, Telemachus,
the will of god just winged that bird on your right!
Why, the moment I saw it, here before my eyes,
I knew it was a sign. No line more kingly than yours
in all of Ithaca – yours will reign forever!"

Day 14, Book 14

The loyal swineherd Eumaeus urges a disguised Odysseus to "tell me the story of your troubles." Our hero launches into a semi-fictive account, one that coyly overlaps with his own life (he even gets to praise Odysseus's cunning! [530–73]) without revealing his identity. The exploits at Troy are similar, as well as the homeward travails. (The threat of his enslavement anticipates our later readings this term, whether through figures like Caliban or Crusoe or Equiano.) 

The ceaseless restlessness of "the Cretan"(/Odysseus) is captured in lines like: 

"No, it was always oarswept ships that thrilled my heart" 

and 

"Each man delights in work that suits him best" 

and 

William Blake (c. 1825)

"a spirit in me urged 'Set sail' . . ." 

The trope of the restless Odysseus recurs in Dante's (1265–1321) Canto 26 of The Inferno:

"Nor fondness for my son, nor reverence
Of my old father, nor return of love,
That should have crown'd Penelope with joy,
Could overcome in me the zeal I had
To' explore the world, and search the ways of life,
Man's evil and his virtue. Forth I sail'd
Into the deep illimitable main . . ."

Tennyson (1809–92) draws upon this inquietude as well, in his Victorian version of "Ulysses":

It little profits that an idle king,
By this still hearth, among these barren crags,
Match'd with an aged wife, I mete and dole
Unequal laws unto a savage race,
That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.
I cannot rest from travel: I will drink
Life to the lees: All times I have enjoy'd
Greatly, have suffer'd greatly, both with those
That loved me, and alone, on shore, and when
Thro' scudding drifts the rainy Hyades
Vext the dim sea: I am become a name;
For always roaming with a hungry heart
Much have I seen and known; cities of men
And manners, climates, councils, governments,
Myself not least, but honour'd of them all;
And drunk delight of battle with my peers,
Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.
I am a part of all that I have met; [on a plaque in Palmer 3rd!]
Yet all experience is an arch wherethro'
Gleams that untravell'd world whose margin fades
For ever and forever when I move.
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnish'd, not to shine in use!
As tho' to breathe were life! Life piled on life
Were all too little, and of one to me
Little remains: but every hour is saved
From that eternal silence, something more,
A bringer of new things; and vile it were
For some three suns to store and hoard myself,
And this gray spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.

          This is my son, mine own Telemachus,
To whom I leave the sceptre and the isle,—
Well-loved of me, discerning to fulfil
This labour, by slow prudence to make mild
A rugged people, and thro' soft degrees
Subdue them to the useful and the good.
Most blameless is he, centred in the sphere
Of common duties, decent not to fail
In offices of tenderness, and pay
Meet adoration to my household gods,
When I am gone. He works his work, I mine.

         There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail:
There gloom the dark, broad seas. My mariners,
Souls that have toil'd, and wrought, and thought with me—
That ever with a frolic welcome took
The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed
Free hearts, free foreheads—you and I are old;
Old age hath yet his honour and his toil;
Death closes all: but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.
The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:
The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep
Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,
'T is not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.
Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield. [on a plaque outside of Rhodes Tower!]

Day 13, Book 13

A lovely Homeric (or "epic") simile for the hunger for home:

As a man aches for his evening meal when all day long 

his brace of wine-dark oxen have dragged the bolted plowshare

down a fallow field – how welcome the setting sun to him, 

the going home to supper, yes, though his knees buckle,

struggling home at last. So welcome now to Odysseus 

the setting light of day . . . 

Here's the Czech novelist Milan Kundera on 'nostalgia' (from his beguiling novel Ignorance):

The Greek word for "return" is nostos. Algos means "suffering." So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return. To express that fundamental notion most Europeans can utilize a word derived from the Greek (nostalgia, nostalgie) as well as other words with roots in their national languages: añoranza, say the Spaniards; saudade, say the Portuguese. In each language these words have a different semantic nuance. Often they mean only the sadness caused by the impossibility of returning to one's country: a longing for country, for home. What in English is called "homesickness." Or in German: Heimweh. In Dutch: heimwee. But this reduces that great notion to just its spatial element. One of the oldest European languages, Icelandic (like English) makes a distinction between two terms: söknuour: nostalgia in its general sense; and heimprá: longing for the homeland. Czechs have the Greek-derived nostalgie as well as their own noun, stesk, and their own verb; the most moving, Czech expression of love: styska se mi po tobe ("I yearn for you," "I'm nostalgic for you"; "I cannot bear the pain of your absence"). In Spanish añoranza comes from the verb añorar (to feel nostalgia), which comes from the Catalan enyorar, itself derived from the Latin word ignorare (to be unaware of, not know, not experience; to lack or miss). In that etymological light nostalgia seems something like the pain of ignorance, of not knowing. You are far away, and I don't know what has become of you. My country is far away, and I don't know what is happening there. Certain languages have problems with nostalgia: the French can only express it by the noun from the Greek root, and have no verb for it; they can say Je m'ennuie de toi (I miss you), but the word s'ennuyer is weak, cold -- anyhow too light for so grave a feeling. The Germans rarely use the Greek-derived term Nostalgie, and tend to say Sehnsucht in speaking of the desire for an absent thing. But Sehnsucht can refer both to something that has existed and to something that has never existed (a new adventure), and therefore it does not necessarily imply the nostosidea; to include in Sehnsucht the obsession with returning would require adding a complementary phrase: Sehnsucht nach der Vergangenheit, nach der verlorenen Kindheit, nach der ersten Liebe (longing for the past, for lost childhood, for a first love).

“Odysseus and Kalypso,” Arnold Bröcklin (1882)

The dawn of ancient Greek culture brought the birth of the Odyssey, the founding epic of nostalgia. Let us emphasize: Odysseus, the greatest adventurer of all time, is also the greatest nostalgic. He went off (not very happily) to the Trojan War and stayed for ten years. Then he tried to return to his native Ithaca, but the gods' intrigues prolonged his journey, first by three years jammed with the most uncanny happenings, then by seven more years that he spent as hostage and lover with Calypso, who in her passion for him would not let him leave her island.

In Book Five of the Odyssey, Odysseus tells Calypso: "As wise as she is, I know that Penelope cannot compare to you in stature or in beauty ... And yet the only wish I wish each day is to be back there, to see in my own house the day of my return!" And Homer goes on: "As Odysseus spoke, the sun sank; the dusk came: and beneath the vault deep within the cavern, they withdrew to lie and love in each other's arms."

Day 12, Book 12

Leon Belly (1870)

Again, many of the children's retellings of The Odyssey elaborate upon these brief episodes, as if they were almost the entirety of the epic – whereas by the next book, we're already back in Ithaca, with half of the poem as yet to unfold. The proto-picaresque escapades are all related in the past tense during the narration that consumes books 9–12. 

Odysseus' resoluteness (some would say stubbornness) charts this book. Returning from the underworld, listening to the seductive sirens, not fully revealing his plans for the path between (the since proverbial) Scylla and Charybdis – all are actions characterized by defiant isolation. Not surprisingly, the insubordination by his starving "headstrong men" (349) leads to the catastrophic consumption of the "oxen of the sun." By the end of the book, we have returned to the narrative present of the Phaeacian banquet: "His tale was over now" (13.1).

Day 11, Book 11

John Flaxman (1835)

Odysseus' voyage to the kingdom of the dead . . . his unburied friend Elpenor begs for proper ceremony; the blind Tiresias prophesizes Odysseus' doom. In a poignant moment, Odysseus seeks to embrace the shade of his  mother:

Three times I rushed toward her, desperate to hold her,
three times she fluttered through my fingers, sifting away 
like a shadow, dissolving like a dream, and each time
the grief cut to the heart, sharper, yes, and I,
I cried out to her . . . 

A parade of female ghosts processes by – and suddenly, we are back with Alcinous, who interrupts the telling, before Odysseus resumes. Agamemnon relates his treacherous return home (always a threat, for both Odysseus and Telemachus).

Achilles arrives, and we have something of a face-off between the hero of The Iliad and the hero of The Odyssey. Achilles addresses Odysseus as a "reckless friend . . . what greater feat can that cunning head contrive?" Odysseus seeks "to reassure the ghost," but Achilles impatiently retorts:

No winning words about death to me, shining Odysseus! 
By god, I'd rather slave on earth for another man – 
some dirt-poor tenant farmer who scrapes to keep alive –
than rule down here over all the breathless dead.

Day 10, Book 10

Circe recalls Calypso – or rather, Circe anticipates Calypso, since the former precedes the latter in the chronology of encounter, if not narration.

The great African American artist Romare Bearden made a series of collages based on episodes from The Odyssey, displayed last year at the Brooks Museum. The images of Circe were particularly striking, as Bearden blends the tradition of the conjure woman with the Greek sorceress.

Day 9, Book 9

Book 9 is where many children's versions start – that is, at the 'beginning' of the story, with the fall of Troy, which generates the sequential wanderings of Odysseus. But it takes Homer 1/3 of the poem to reach this point, here in the midst of things.

Adorno and Horkheimer read Odysseus as a kind of proto-bourgeois venturer, anticipating one of later readings this semester:

"The wily solitary is already homo economicus, for whom all reasonable things are alike: hence the Odysseus is already a Robinsonade. Both Odysseus and Crusoe, the two shipwrecked mariners, make their weakness (that of the individual who parts from the collectivity) their social strength. Delivered up to the mercy of the waves, helplessly isolated, their very isolation forces them recklessly to pursue an atomistic interest. They embody the principle of capitalist economy, even before they have recourse to a servant; but what they preserve materially from the past for the furthering of their new enterprise is evidence for the contention that the entrepreneur has always gone about his competitive business with more initial capital than his mere physical capacity. . . . Hence the universal socialization, as outlined in the narratives of the world traveler Odysseus and the solo manufacturer Crusoe, from the start included the absolute solitude which emerged so clearly at the end of the bourgeois era. Radical socialization means radical alienation. Odysseus and Crusoe are both concerned with totality: the former measures whereas the latter produces it. Both realize totality only in complete alienation from other men, who meet the two protagonists only in alienated form—as enemies or as points of support, but always as tools, as things." (61–62)