Day 24, Book 24

Odysseus reunited with Laertes,
photo of Roman sarcophagus
(Roger Ulrich)

The ghosts of Achilles and Agamemnon – both figures who have loomed large over Odysseus' martial and marital quests – unite in marveling at "Happy Odysseus!" (210) as they receive the shades of the slaughtered suitors in Hades. 

Then, another reunion (with Laertes, Odysseus' father), but not before another test through tale-telling, and another sign of "Living proof" – both his scar (that disclosed him the Eurycleia) and his trees (the vineyard here recalling the rooted bed of Book 23). 

At long last, Athena commands peace, restoring order to Ithaca and drawing closure to the epic.

Day 23, Book 23

"Tree Dream," Joan Harmon (2003)

Penelope tests Odysseus by telling Eurycleia to "move the sturdy bedstead out of our bridal chamber" – impossible, since (as the infuriated Odysseus retorts)

Not a man on earth, not even at peak strength,

would find it easy to prise it up and shift it, no,

a great sign, a hallmark lies in its construction.

I know it, I built it myself – no one else . . .

There was a branching olive-tree inside our court,

grown to its full prime, the bore like a column, thickset.

Around it I built my bedroom, finished off the walls

with good tight stonework, roofed it over soundly

and added doors, hung well and snugly wedged.

Then I lopped the leafy crown of the olive,

clean-cutting the stump bare from roots up,

planing it round with a bronze smoothing-adze –

I had the skill – I shaped it plumb to the line to make

my bedpost, bored the holes it needed with an auger.

Working from there I built my bed, start to finish,

I gave it ivory inlays, gold and silver fittings,

wove the straps across it, oxhide gleaming red.

There's our secret sign, I tell you, our life story! (210–28)

Their mutual recognition confirmed through their intimately crafted space.

Day 22, Book 22

The pent-up fury of revenge (with a guest appearance by Athena) produces gore matching any battle in The Iliad. 

Even the punishment of the women is gruesome – first, forcing them to clear the bodies and scrub the floors; then, 

as doves or thrushes beating their spread wings

against some snare rigged up in thickets – flying in

for a cozy nest but a grisly bed receives them –

so the women's heads were trapped in a line,

nooses yanking their necks up, one by one,

so all might die a pitiful, ghastly death . . . 

they kicked up their heels for a little – not for long. (494–99)

Day 21, Book 21

Apollo with lyre

Penelope has declared that she will marry the suitor who can string the bow of her supposedly absent husband. Of course everyone tries, everyone fails, and Odysseus prevails. But in the midst of the prevailing, we are given an extraordinarily lovely detail, a prolonged hesitation between the stringing of the bow and the vengeful launching of the arrows. Colum's version reads: "For long Odysseus stood with the bow in his hands, handling it as a minstrel handles a lyre when he stretches a cord or tightens a peg. Then he bent the great bow; he bent it without an effort, and at his touch the bow-string made a sound that was like the cry of a swallow."

Here's how George Chapman's translation (c. 1615) lingers further with this same pause:

But when the wise Ulysses once had laid
His fingers on it, and to proof survey’d
The still sound plight [pliability] it held—as one of skill
In song and of the harp, doth at his will,
In tuning of his instrument, extend
A string out with his pin, touch all, and lend
To ev’ry well-wreath’d string his perfect sound,
Struck all together—with such ease drew round
The king the bow. Then twang’d he up the string,
That—as a swallow in the air doth sing
With no continu’d tune, but, pausing still,
Twinks out her scatter’d voice in accents shrill—
So sharp the string sung when he gave it touch,
Once having bent and drawn it.
Listen to how Chapman stretches these lines beyond their endings—"extend / A string out with his pin," "drew round / The king the bow." Those two extended similes likewise draw out the tension before the conclusive outburst of violence.

As noted for Book 19, the great philologist Erich Auerbach famously opens his study Mimesis with a comparison between Homeric style and the Genesis account of the sacrifice of Isaac. Auerbach insists upon the "externalization" of phenomena in Homer, characterizing the narrative as concentrating on "foreground" instead of being "fraught with background": "the element of suspense is very slight in the Homeric poems; nothing in their entire style is calculated to keep the reader or hearer breathless." Perhaps true on the whole, but I'm not so certain that's the case here in this felicitous conflation of warrior and artist. The poem itself was likely sung to the accompaniment of a lyre—the epic is lyrical.

What a wonderfully self-conscious moment, then, to say that Odysseus re-familiarizing himself with his bow is somehow akin to a singer tuning a harp (and to say this via lyrics themselves performed with a lyre). As Shakespeare's Ulysses puts it, when discussing "degree" (order and hierarchy), "Take but degree away, untune that string, / And hark what discord follows." Odysseus' kingdom is a mess; it's out of tune. It's time to re-pair it. And the power compressed in the singular stringing of that bow chimes with the power compressed within the poet's lyre. Pluck it, and the string sings.

(p.s. an enigmatic line from the later Greek philosopher Heraclitus (who thought Homer should be flogged) also fixes upon this productive tautness: "that which differs with itself is in agreement: harmony consists of opposing tension, like that of the bow and the lyre" and elsewhere: "the name of the bow is life, but its work is death.")

Day 20, Book 20

More laughter from the suitors:

. . . Athena set off uncontrollable laughter in the suitors,
crazed them out of their minds—mad, hysterical laughter
seemed to break from the jaws of strangers, not their own,
and the meat they were eating oozed red with blood—
tears flooded their eyes, hearts possessed by grief. (385–89)

At that
they all broke into peals of laughter aimed at the seer—
Plybius' son Eurmachus braying first and foremost, (398–400)

So they jeered . . . (428)

Are they meant to look insipid? rude? verging on madness?

Day 19, Book 19

Bending closer
she started to bathe her master . . . then,
in a flash, she knew the scar –
       that old wound
made years ago by a boar's white tusk . . . (444–47)

This marvelous instant of recognition occasioned an extraordinary meditation by Erich Auerbach, a brilliant critic who contrasted the narration of the Homeric epic with that of the Hebrew Bible. He concludes: 

the Homeric style knows only a foreground, only a uniformly illuminated, uniformly objective present. . . . 

It would be difficult, then, to imagine styles more contrasted than those of these two equally ancient and equally epic texts. On the one hand, [the Homeric is] externalized, uniformly illuminated phenomena, at a definite time and in a definite place, connected together without lacunae in a perpetual foreground; thoughts and feeling completely expressed; events taking place in leisurely fashion and with very little of suspense. On the other hand, the [Biblical] externalization of only so much of the phenomena as is necessary for the purpose of the narrative, all else left in obscurity; the decisive points of the narrative alone are emphasized, what lies between is nonexistent; time and place are undefined and call for interpretation; thoughts and feeling remain unexpressed, are only suggested by the silence and the fragmentary speeches; the whole, permeated with the most unrelieved suspense and directed toward a single goal (and to that extent far more of a unity), remains mysterious and “fraught with background.”

The entire essay can be found here; really, I can't recommend it highly enough. Please take a moment to read it, in conjunction with Book 19. 

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!"