THE ODYSSEY

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The Crimes of the Suitors

In the Odyssey the suitors are the villains, trying to destroy Odysseus's house by consuming the cattle which are his livelihood.

In their assault on Odysseus's oîkos, they threaten the very fabric of society. Their riotous feasting ignores sacrifice and abuses xeniê. And by courting Penelope and seducing the slave girls, they threaten monogamous marriage, which alone insures the survival of the patriarchal line.

marriage code is complicated:

suitors pay a bride price to the bride's fatther

bride's father offers a dowry to the suitor

Epithets of the Suitors

The formulaic epithets that Homer uses of the suitors distill the nature of their transgressions against the moral norms...

The Ithacan Assembly: Human Injustice

(2.69-75)

You should be ashamed [nemessêthête] yourselves, mortified [aidesthête] in the face of neighbors living round about! Fear the gods' wrath [mênim] - before they wheel in outrage and make these crimes recoil on your heads. I beg you by Olympian Zeus, by Themis too, who sets assemblies free and calls us into session - stop, my friends! Leave me alone to pine away in anguish. Unless, of course, you think my noble father Odysseus did the Achaean army damage, deliberate harm, and to pay me back [apotinumenoi] you'd do me in, deliberately setting these parasites against me. Better for me you were devouring all my treasure, all my cattle - if you were the ones, we'd make amends in no time. We'd approach you for reparations [tisis] round the town, demanding our goods till you'd returned the lot. Just now, look, you load my heart with grief - there's nothing I can do!"

Book 2 contrasts divine justice in the council of gods in Book 1 with human injustice in the Ithacan assembly. Unable to defend his patrimony, Telemachus appeals to the constraints on evil conduct: nemesis, the sense of fair play that makes one intervene; aidôs, that shame or fear of the god's nemesis; and Themis, precedent or custom

The Ideology of Kingship

Mentor, Odysseus's companion, left behind to preserve his household, presents Homer's ideological mystification of kingship, describing an arbitrary relation of power as the natural and loving relation o kinship:

(1.257-62)

Never let any sceptered king be kind and gentle [êpios] now, not with all his hear, or set his mind on justice [aisimos, "the will of the gods"] no, let him be cruel and always practice outrage [aisle, "what is unseemly, evil"] remembers Odysseus now, that godlike man, and Kindly as a father to his children [patêr d'hos êpios]!

Odysseus was a good king, who ruled "like a gentle father," a patriarch, badly served by his dependents; justice requires that he be restored to his geras. Mentor's words are part of the ideological defense of kingship as a natural relation of kinship rather that an arbitrary one of power.

BOOK 3: The Book of Sacrifice

The Book of Sacrifice

Sacrifice is a ritual designed to appease the jealous gods by including them within the cultural system of gift exchange ("a fair gift in exchange," 3.64). It corresponds to xeniê, guest-friendship, among mortals. With their sacrifices men hope to obligate the gods to repay their gifts.

Sacrifice

Sacrifice recompenses the gods for the gift of roasted meat that differentiates human beings from beasts. But it also separates men from the gods, declaring man's intermediary position, half way between the animality of beasts and the pure felicity of immortals who need do nothing to enjoy all good things.

Xeniê: Guest-Friendship

(3.77 - ?)

Nostos Denied: The Greeks Forget Sacrifice

The Greeks' departure from Troy was doomed by their failure to observe precedent (themis):

Zeus contrived in his heart a fatal homeward run [ligroin ... noston] For all the Achaeans who were fools, [not "thoughtful] at least, dishonest[not dikaios, "observant of custom"] too, so many met a disastrous end, thanks to the lethal rage [mênis...oloos, words from the first lines of the poem] of the might father's daughter. (3.147 - 51)

Agamemnon's Doomed Nostos

(3.220-4)

Aegisthus hatched the king's horrendous death. But what a price [<otinô] he paid, in blood, in suffering. Ah how fine it is, when a man is brought down to leave a son behind! Orestes took revenge [<tinô], he killed that cunning [polumêtis, Odysseus's own epithet]. murderous Aegisthus.

The son who avenges his father's death, Orestes, is a role model for Telemachus. He prays that the gods grant him the strength to avenge himself on the suitors:

(3.233-5)

If only the gods would arm me in such pends wower [dunamis], I'd take the revenge [tinô] on the lawless, brazen [huperbasia, "trespassing"] suitors riding roughshod [hubrizontes] over me, plotting reckless outrage [atasthaliê].

Marriage and Sacrifice

Marriage is like a sacrifice. Marriage is to sexual consummation as sacrifice is to the consumption of meat: It incorporates natural sexuality into culture. In nature beasts have "raw sex"; the offspring of "raw" sex have a mother, to whom they are linked by nature, the animal bond of childbirth, but no father. Without marriage there can be no father, no paternal filiation, no patriarchal descent.

Helen and Menelaus

On Sparta the double marriage and the reunion of Helen and her husband disclose the meaning of marriage. By having sex with another man, Helen goes from being a wife to a courtesan (only used for sex). She is transformed from a wife, potentially a mother, into an instrument of sexual pleasure. Since she can no longer provide her husband with legitimate issue, she is barren. The distinction between a wife and a courtesan corresponds to that between the raw and the cooked: sex with your wife is cooked sex, sex with a courtesan is raw sex.

The Binding of Proteus

Proteus, the ancient of the sea, serves Poseidon. Becalmed and starving, Menelaus can get home only if he can bind Proteus. Binding the gods, constraining them to serve culture, stands for what you have to do to subject nature to human will if you don't appease the gods with piety and sacrifice.

The Nostoi of the Greek Heroes

The Failed Nostoi:

​​​​​​​Ajax: Destroyed by Poseidon for his impious, insolent boast that he had thwarted the will of the gods and beaten the sea, he has is a "great fool."

Agamemnon: His return "seemed easy"; he kissed his homeland in tears. but he is killed like an ox at a trough, like an animal, before observing the ritual of sacrifice.

Odysseus: With no means of navigation, he cannot return to the realm of culture except by means of nature.

The Successful Nostos:

​​​​​​​Menelaus: His ​​​​​​​nostos ends with sacrifice. When he dies, he will be transported to Elysium, that earthly paradise "where all existence is a dream of ease" like that of the gods.

BOOK 5

The Council of the Gods

Athena's Complaint:

​​​​​​​(5.9-14)

never let any sceptered king be kind and gentle now, not with all his heart, or set his mind on justice - no, let him be cruel and always practice outrage. Think: not one of the people whom he ruled remembers Odysseus now, that godlike man, and Kindly as a father to his children.

Zeus's Decree:

​​​​​​​(5.34-46)

Announce to the nymph with lovely braids our fixed decree: Odysseus journeys home - the exile must return. But not in the convoy of the gods or mortal men. No, on a lashed, makeshift rant and wrung with pains, on the twentieth day he will make his landfall, fertile Scheria, the land of Phaecians, close kin to the gods themselves, who with all their hearts will prize him like a god and send him off in a ship to his own beloved land, giving him bronze and hoards of gold and robes - more plunder that he could ever have won from Troy if Odysseus had returned intact with his fair share. So his destiny ordains. He shall see his loved ones, reach his high-roofed house, his native land at last.

Calypso's Island: The Land of Engulfment

But it is no paradise for Odysseus, who pines for home:

...

Calypso's Island: A Natural Paradise, World's Apart

The goddess Calypso's island is a natural paradise completely outside culture, in a cave surrounded by stands of trees and spreading vines. No work of hands, human or divine, has shaped her den:

​​​​​​​(5.60-84)

But once again he gained that island worlds apart, up from the deep-blue sea he claimed to dry land and strode on till he reached the spacious cave where the nymph with lovely braids had made her home, and he found her there inside... A great fire blazed on the hearth and the smell of cedar cleanly split and sweet wood burning bright wafted a cloud of fragrance down the island. Deep inside she sang, the goddess Calypso, lifting her breathtaking as she glided back and forth before her loom, her golden shuttle weaving Thick, luxuriant woods grew round the cave... And round the mouth of the cavern trailed a vine laden with clusters, bursting with ripe grapes. Four springs in a row, bubbling clear and cold, running side-by-side, took channels left and right. Soft meadows spreading round were starred with violets, lush with beds of parsley. Why, even a deathless god who came upon that place would gaze in wonder, heart entranced with pleasure. Hermes the guide the mighty giant-killed, stood there spellbound...

Odysseus's Choice: Immortality or Toil

Calypso offers Odysseus a choice between immortality and mortality, a life of ease or a life of adversity. But Calypso's immortality is a kind of death for Odysseus, an exile from the human community. Odysseus chooses mortality -

​​​​​​​(5.239-48)

All that you say is true, how well I know. Look at my wise Penelope...

His lady at home is no equal in sexual allure to Calypso. But he chooses home over Calypso's island, not Penelopê over Calypso, and he welcomes Zeus's ordeal of suffering. The hardship of shipwreck, like that of battle, must be endured.

Navigation and the Wrath of Poseidon

​​​​​​​Because Calypso has no culture, she can't convey Odusseus back to the world of men. Laboring alone with donated tools, Odysseus constructs not a mere raft but a true vessel with a shaped hull, mast, and steering rudder; it exemplifies the technology of shipbuilding and navigation:

​​​​​​​(5.274-6)

Broad in the beam and bottom flat as a merchantman when a master shipwright turns out her hill, so broad the craft Odysseus made himself

​​​​​​​But the mere fact of Odysseus's navigation enrages the storm god Poseidon:

​​​​​​​(5.312-3)

he spied Odysseus sailing down the sea and it made his fury boil even more

Poseidon's antagonism to Odysseus represents nature's hostility towards all of the arts of culture. It arises while Odysseus is navigating and expresses the sea's inherent resistance to man's attempts to tame it.

Shipwreck

As he faces death at the hands of the sea god, Odysseus despairs not at the prospect of death but at the kind of death:

​​​​​​​(5.338-45)

Three, four times blessed...

Odysseus envies the Akhaians who died gloriously at Troy: they suffer death but enjoy kléos, have their share of funeral gifts [kterea]. Their deaths are acknowledged by the heroic community, marked by ritual.

Ino's Veil: Mediating between Nature and Culture

The storm strips Odysseus's improvised ship of its "shines" (oar, haft, mast, sail), reducing it to the bare timbers, to raw nature.

​​​​​​​Ino, a sea nymph, once mortal, now immortal, saves him. "Why is the god of earthquakes so dead set against you," she asks (5.373), using the verb odussomai, "to hate," that puns on Odysseus's name.

To make land he must abandon all man-made objects - even his sea cloak and the bare raft itself. In their place Ino gives him her veil. Immortal, proof against drowning, it has power only in the sea; it can't be brought to land but must be returned to sea.

Odysseus's Landfall: the Hero's Nadir

​​​​​​​But even when Odysseus spies land, he can't exit the sea: the land presents no harbor or shelter, no easy handholds to preserve him from the surf. To escape Poseidon;s element and return to dry land, Odysseus swim up a river, fresh water, it mediates between the salt sea and dry land, where the life-sustaining grains of the earth grow.

​​​​​​​(5.489-7)

As the river (or current?) flowed...

He abandons Ino's magical veil, which can't pass from the sea to land, and he shelters himself in a grove:

​​​​​​​(5.527-8)

beneath two...

The two olives, one natural, one cultivated, also mediate between nature and culture.

BOOK 6

The Phaeacians

Odysseus's return to the fictive world of men begins among the Phaeacians, a, people who have fled to the ends of the earth to avoid the Cyclopes' power and pillage:

​​​​​​​(6.4-12)

Years ago they lived in a land of spacious dancing-circles, Hyper, all too close to the overbearing [huperênoreontôn, "too manly"] Cyclops, stronger, violent brutes who harried them without end. So their godlike king, Nausithous, led the people off in a vast migration, settled them in Scheria, far from the men who toil on this earth ["grain-eating"] - he flung up walls around the city, built the houses, raised the gods' temples and shared the land for plowing.

Retreating to an island fortress a vast distance from other men, they try to wall out trouble:

​​​​​​​(6.223-5)

We live too far apart, out in the surging sea, off at the world's end - no other mortals come to mingle with us.

The Phaeacians embody the delusion that man can avoid pain, escape the jar of miseries.

A Race of Seafarers

The Phaeacians believe that they have mastered navigation. They sail to the ends of the earth "with no strain" [without toil, kamatos]:

​​​​​​​(8.625-31)

For we have no steersmen here among Phaeacia's crews or steering-oars that guide your common craft. Our ships know in a flash their mates' intentions, know all ports of call and all the rich green fields. With wings of the wind they cross the sea's huge gulfs, shrouded in mist and cloud - no fear in the world of foundering, fatal shipwreck.

The Phaeacians never experiencing either the weariness of rowing or the terror of shipwreck: their ships steer themselves, divining the crew's intention.

Alcinous's Orchard: An Earthly Paradise

Alcinous' garden is a terrestrial paradise, exempt from penalty of the seasons, where summer and harvest last all the year round:

​​​​​​​(130-56)

a magnificent orchard stretches four acres deep... Here luxuriant trees are always in their prime And the yield of all these trees will never flag or die, neither in winter nor in for the West Wind always breathing through will bring some fruits to the bud and others warm to ripeness - And here is a teeming vineyard planted for the kings,... bunches of unripe grapes have hardly shed their blooms while others under the sunlight slowly darken purple. And there by the last rows are beds of greens,... glistening fresh, year in, year out... Such were the gifts, the glories showered down by the gods on King Alcinous' realm.

Xeniê and the Belly

​​​​​​​Although the Phaeacians think him a god, Odysseus insists he is nothing more than a suffering mortal defined by the pains of the belly:

​​​​​​​(7.244-56)

I'm nothing like the immortal gods who rule the skies, either in build or breeding. I'm just a mortal man. Whom do you know most saddled down with sorrow? They are the ones I'd equal, grief for grief. And I could tell a tale of still more hardship, all I've suffered, thanks to the gods' will. But despite my misery, let me finish dinner. the belly's a shameless dog. There's nothing worse Always insisting, pressing, it never lets us forget - destroyed as I am, my heart racked with sadness, sick with anguish, still it keeps demanding, 'Eat, drink!'...

Alcinous recognizes their kinship. They "think as one": "Balance is best." He tempts Odysseus to stay (330-39) by offering his daughter in marriage but piously insists "no Phaeacian would hold you back by force [aekonta, "against your will"] (7.361). He offers Odysseus conveyance [pompê] home:

​​​​​​​And all that voyage long you'll lie in a deep sleep while my people sail you on through calm and gentle tides till you reach your land and house, or any place you please. True, even if landfall lies more distant than Euboea, off at the edge of the world.