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uxoriousness
it necessarily disloyal to tell the truth—to acknowledge that your spouse is no longer the beautiful girl you’d married twenty years before? The point is—and this is a big point—that his preference for Penelope, who could never be as beautiful as a goddess and who anyway is now aging, maybe approaching middle age, means something. What? Madeline waved a hand at me; the red hair shimmered. That physical beauty and good sex aren’t the basis for a marriage?
What does a good marriage look like, according to whoever composed the Odyssey? The answer to that question is given in Book 6.
It’s at the end of Odysseus’ shrewd appeal to the princess that Homer reveals what constitutes a good marriage: the kind of match, in other words, that is the opposite of those we’ve encountered thus far in the Odyssey.
husband and a home; may they grant you, too, like-mindedness, that noble thing. Nothing stronger or better than that— when a man and wife hold their home together alike in mind: great trouble to their foes, a joy to all their friends, the source of their renown.”
homo- root comes from the adjective homoios, which means “the same” and which makes itself felt in such English words as “homeopathy”—to treat a disease, pathos, with the same, homoios, thing that causes it—and “homosexual.” The phron- root has to do with the intellect, the mind; our word “phrenology” derives from it. (The word I’ve translated as “alike in mind” a few lines later is, in the original, a form of the verb that’s connected to homophrosynê: homophronein, “to think in the same way.”)
homophrosynê has become the canonical word in the study of Greek literature for the quality that is the sine qua non for a successful relationship between two people.
It’s like Johnny Mercer knew his Homer. There’s that one person made just for you by fate, and nobody else will do.
“That Old Black Magic”! he cried. Music by Harold Arlen, lyrics by Johnny Mercer?! Flapping a dismissive hand in their direction, he said, You kids don’t know anything about your own culture.
Homophrosynê, I said. Do you see how it’s being set up? Do you see what’s coming? Your physical appearance can change with time, but nobody can take away what? Brendan’s hand shot into the air. What you know, he said. Over in his corner on the left, my father had grown serious. Your memories, he said.
Book 7 describes the curious circumstances of Odysseus’ arrival at the Phaeacian court.
in flagrante delicto
Hephaestus called all the other gods to witness their adultery, shaming them publicly.
this poem-within-a-poem parallels crucial elements of Odyssey itself: abuses of hospitality, anxiety about adultery, the superiority of cunning to brute strength, the satisfactions to be had from vengeance.
My question is, Is all the hype about Odysseus validated? Has he really done that much so he should be considered a hero? I mean, your father is actually right, I think. The thing that stuck out to me the most this week was how much Athena intervenes in the story, it’s like she’s holding Odysseus’ hand even when it seems unnecessary.
My father was beaming. Exactly! Without the gods, he’s helpless.
I saw that the problem, for my father, was that Odysseus’ willingness to receive help from the gods marked him as weak, as inadequate. I stood there in front of the open text and thought of all the times he had growled, There’s nothing you can’t learn to do yourself, if you have a book! I
No wonder he can’t bear the fact that the gods intervene on Odysseus’ behalf. If you need gods, you can’t say that you did it yourself. If you need gods, you’re cheating.
one wished to examine the wanderings of Odysseus closely, he would find that they are allegorical.
We were on the “Retracing the Odyssey” cruise.
we moved farther away from home, my father seemed to shed some hard outer surface and soften.
After dinner we’d start our twelve-hour voyage across the Aegean toward Turkey, where lay Çanakkale, the site of Troy’s ruins. We’d spend all the next day visiting the site.
quay,
Sprechstimme
desultory
there had been a number of successive Troys over the millennia, each rising and falling in turn. Among the ruins of these, he went on, there was evidence of a “major catastrophe” that had occurred around 1180 B.C.—the traditional date of the Fall of Troy.
But the poem feels more real than the ruins, Dan! Over the next week this became a refrain of his. The poem feels more real! he’d say each evening as people discussed the day’s activities.
It’s like these places we’re seeing are a stage set, but the poem is the drama. I feel that that is what’s real. I beamed and said, Don’t tell me we’ve come all this way to retrace the Odyssey and now you’re telling me that we could have stayed home!
Maybe it’s like The Wizard of Oz, my father said jauntily. “There’s no place like home…” There was a small silence, and then Brendan turned to me. Would you say that that movie is actually an Odyssey-based story? It was a book first, my father interrupted. L. Frank Baum! I thought for a moment. Sure, I said. Totally. The protagonist is torn from home and family and experiences fabulous adventures in exotic locales where she meets all kinds of monstrous and fantastical beings. But all the time she’s yearning to go home. It’s amazing, actually, how similar the structure is.
How many sides did my father actually have, I asked myself, and which was the “real” one?
Children always imagine that their parents’ truest selves are as parents; but why? “Who really knows his own begetting?” Telemachus bitterly asks early in the Odyssey. Who indeed. Our parents are mysterious to us in ways that we can never quite be mysteries to them.
Maybe Daddy, too, was polytropos; maybe, as that adjective suggests so powerfully in the Odyssey, identity is less a matter of binary oppositions, the contemptuous or the kindly, the father or the husband, the father or the son, than it is of kaleidoscopic perspective. Maybe it’s a question of which section of the circle, the loop, you happen to be in a position to see.
the long-awaited narration of Odysseus’ adventures, which, for many readers, are the most memorable part of the Odyssey—is the Apologoi, the “Narratives.”
the narrator of these tales is none other than Odysseus himself.
is, in fact, Odysseus’ bragging about his talents that causes his homecoming to take so long, as we learn during the greatest of the adventures he relates in the Apologoi: his encounter with the Cyclops.
the Lotos-Eaters, a peaceable people who live off plants that are harmless to the locals but pose a mortal danger to Odysseus and his men; for the flower of the lotos makes anyone who eats it “forgetful of his homecoming.”
floating island of Aeolus, the ruler of the winds,
the territory of the Laestrygonians is distinguished by an anomalous temporal foreshortening: there is no night here,
The story of Circe is populated by uncanny animals: lions and wolves pad around her palace, beasts that she has tamed with her potions. And in the sties outside rut swine who once were men—Odysseus’ men, on whom she has worked her awful magic.
And so the first few adventures that Odysseus narrates in the Apologoi trace a progression from straightforward violence to enchantment, from the natural to the supernatural.
the Cyclops episode may be the most significant of Odysseus’ adventures because it sheds the greatest light on the hero’s personality, its strengths and weaknesses.
the Cyclopes are, literally, cavemen.
cyclops called Polyphemus,
When Polyphemus returns, he seals the opening of the cave with a huge slab of stone (“which twenty-two wagons couldn’t budge”) and proceeds to eat two of Odysseus’ men. Here, then, is a grotesque inverse of proper hospitality: the host eating, rather than feeding, his guests.
the Cyclops is able to call down a terrible curse on him.
then may he be much-delayed, may he lose all of his men, sailing on some stranger’s ship to a house that’s filled with woe. This, in fact, is why it takes Odysseus ten years to come home.
the wordplay in this remarkable passage is more intricate than any translation can convey,
by calling himself Outis, “Nobody,” he’s both telling the truth and lying at the same time. This was not only because outis and Odysseus sound a little alike but because at this point in the epic he actually is both “somebody” and “nobody”: he’s Odysseus, himself, but also a nobody, a man who has to reclaim his identity.
the single trait that distinguishes Odysseus is trickery.
Words! In the end, what dooms the Cyclops is his inability to distinguish between two homophones. It’s funny, and it’s also kind of brilliant.
