Why Homer Matters (39 page)

His inner self reflects that outer wisdom. More than any other Homeric hero, Odysseus is not at one with himself. His mental world is storm-wrecked, and these outer landscapes are a projection of that broken core. But every arrival carries its lesson. “Many were the people whose places he saw and whose minds he learned,” Homer says at the very beginning of the
Odyssey
. Odysseus may long “for his return and his woman,” but the heart of the poem is this contingency, the absence of any overriding permanence. It is the first depiction we have of “the fascinating imaginative realm,” as Milan Kundera called the novel, the great descendant of the
Odyssey
, “where no one owns the truth and everyone has the right to be understood.” Abstract certainties do not apply here. Anything you might have thought true may well be false. Anything that might have seemed good can seem bad in another light. And of nowhere is that truer than the island that is Odysseus's destination, the dream of Ithaca, the place Odysseus would like to call home, “the sweetest place any man can imagine,” but which on arrival, exactly halfway through the
Odyssey
's twenty-four books, turns out to be its very opposite.

*   *   *

Ithaca is not what the phrase “Greek island” brings to mind. There is nothing of the drought-stripped bareness of the eastern Aegean, nor of the dry Asiatic pelt of the Trojan plain. Ithaca is green and wooded, more Tuscan than Greek. There are some wonderful harbors but little good grass or arable land. It largely consists of mountains dropping to the sea. Wild pear trees blossom beside the spring meadows, but it is “rocky Ithaca,” the kind of island that has always thrived on trading or raiding but would be poor if reliant on its own resources. There are springs in the woodlands, where daisies grow in the stony turf. Magenta anemones spangle the meadows in May, and a little later in the year you can find the churchyards filled with white and purple irises. I have been there at the end of winter, which is when Odysseus arrives, and I have known nights as cold as the one in which he has to borrow a cloak to keep warm. Like him, I have sat late over an olive-wood fire, using the prunings from the vines as kindling, drinking glasses of deep black red Mavrodafni, huddled over the logs in a cold room, so that my face burned and my back froze. There was snow on the mountain paths that year, the wind was turning up the pale underside of the olive leaves and the air was more silver than golden, clarified, a distillate.

It's part of the geometry of the poems that Ithaca is like this. It is a northern country, on the northern and western edge of the Greek world, a long way from the cultivated, semi-Asiatic eastern Aegean heartland that Homer knew best. That exaggerated marginality fits Odysseus, the pirate-king of a country that is out on the edge of things. But it is a country he loves. The Phaeacians bring him here across the sea. He is asleep when he arrives, and they carry him ashore still sleeping. He wakes the next day and doesn't know where he is. He can't recognize Ithaca. Only at the prompting of Athene does he realize that this is home, and then, on seeing it, he “bends to kiss the life-giving soil.”

The
Odyssey
throughout has taunted its listeners with images of palatial comfort and luxury. The Phaeacians are the model of a rich, successful Near Eastern kingdom. Their palaces, gardens and orchards all read like scenes from an Assyrian relief. Egypt has floated just off-stage as the reservoir of gold, the Greek dream of material well-being. The kings and queens of Pylos and Sparta live embedded in authority and sumptuousness. Even Circe seems to live in a beautifully equipped palace.

Odysseus does not arrive home to find a place like that. His kingdom is in chaos, not the lovely, sweet, green, untroubled oasis he longs for it to be. It is riven with difficulty, and that tension—between the desire and the reality, between Ithaca the beautiful and Ithaca the real—leads to the fierce conclusion of this great poem. It is no easy or sentimental reunion of the loved one and the loved place. Homer says “there is nothing sweeter to a man than his own country.” That is what we want to think is true. But in Ithaca the poem enacts the opposite: nothing is more troubled than a man's own country, even if that is where the desire for sweetness is strongest.

Odysseus has repeatedly appeared as the impoverished northern wanderer not entirely at home in the Mediterranean world. Now he comes home as the broken king, the outsider with few allies. The only weapons he has are tricks of deceit and concealment, and Athene makes sure she strips him of any sign of nobility.

She withers the handsome flesh that is on his supple limbs

And thins the fair hair on his head.

She puts the skin of an old, old man over his whole body

And dims the two eyes that were once so beautiful.

Now he is at home, he has never been more at sea. But he is not at a loss. He tells lying stories about who he is and where he has come from, gradually working his way toward the confrontation that will bring him victory, slipping into his own palace much as the Trojan Horse that he devised was slipped into the citadel at Troy. Homer shapes Odysseus to be the universal man, dressed in rags, stronger for appearing weaker, but even in that disguise he consistently pretends to come not from the margins of the Homeric world—he is no northern vagabond—but from one of its centers of riches and power: Crete, the focus of the great palatial culture which Sir Arthur Evans, the English excavator of the palace complex at Knossos in the early years of the twentieth century, called the Minoan. Odysseus describes his island in the middle of the wine-dark sea as a fair, rich land, surrounded by water, with so many men in it they could not be counted and ninety cities, including “Knossos, where Minos reigned.”

Odysseus has become the man who knows the world, who has been a great warrior at Troy, a great traveler to dimensions of existence few other men will ever encounter, an absorber of the Cretan civilization, now preparing to perform his great and terrifying act of revenge. He has lost nothing in all his journeying. He has become the agent of a new fused culture, the man who will establish civility in his city by bringing war into it. He looks at Ithaca with eyes rimmed red with sea-salt, the hardened eyes of the returning king. He is the agent of reduction, there to remove the fat, and the irony of Odysseus's return is that the nearer he gets to his own house, the more uncompromisingly like Achilles he becomes, wanting to strip away the muddle and complexities and return Ithaca to an essential, Iliadic condition.

Set against this powerful and threatening presence is Penelope, his incomparable queen, the greatest woman in Homer. She does not yet know that her husband has at last returned. Her halls are filled with the suitors. Everything about them reeks of luxury and abuse, but she is withdrawn and self-protective. The epithet Homer uses of her most often is
periphr
ō
n
, meaning “wise,” or more exactly that she has a mind that encompasses all sides of a question, not exactly wary or circumspect, but “understanding the whole,” filled with an enveloping intelligence. Penelope's mind is one of the most precious places in Homer, the inner citadel of virtue and value. She is deeply identified with the well-being of her house. When she appears in front of the suitors, she always stands by the columns of the beautiful hall, as if she were one of them herself, “shining among women” just as the upper chambers to which she retires shine within the palace. This is the great woman who, as she descends her stairs, looks like Artemis and Aphrodite, the greatest of the goddesses, the queens of the wildland and of love.

Her heart is of iron, and like her husband she has “a well-balanced mind.” Like him, she can deceive and manipulate her enemies, but also like him, she is passionate in her love for her lost spouse and weeps bitterly over him. Like him, she lies awake at night and her troubles crowd around her throbbing heart. In one of Homer's most beautiful similes, she says that just as

the nightingale of the greenwood sings so sweetly when the spring is newly come, sitting perched in the thick and leafy trees, pouring out her rich voice in quavering and bubbling notes,

even so my heart is stirred to and fro in doubt.

Odysseus's great phrase,
entha kai entha
, to and fro, there and there, is hers too; but have midnight thoughts and the anxieties of a troubled mind in the dark ever been so beautifully described?

Like all the great women in Homer, she weaves, no cloth more famous than the one she is making as a shroud for her father-in-law, Laertes, weaving it every day, unweaving it every night, not only to keep the suitors at arm's length but as an emblem of her command in her world. She is a queen regnant, her fame reaching heaven for the way she rules over men, upholds justice, sees that the fertile earth brings forth wheat and barley, that her orchards are heavy with fruit and her flocks with young. All this, Homer says, comes from her “good command”—one word:
eu
ē
gesia
—while her people “grow in goodness under her.”

This is Homer's architecture of crisis: a great woman, her husband in disguise, a gang of young men who do not realize that the beggar is their king, witnessing their abuse and their vulgarity, eating his food, drinking his drink and sleeping with his serving-women. The tension builds over four long books of the poem, an unavoidable sexual metaphor at work: the king wolf has been away, the she-wolf is under siege, the promise of blood is in the air.

Odysseus is troubled. He knows that he must bring war into his own house, but when he longs to do violence to those servant-women who have betrayed him, anxiety reverberates within him.

Just as a bitch stands over her young puppies,

growling at a man she does not know,

thinking she would attack him,

so Odysseus's heart growls inside him.

He has to punch his own chest to keep it in order. But is Odysseus the growling heart? Or the man who keeps his heart down? Is he one of the puppies that needs protection? Or the bitch doing the protecting? Or even the man who is threatening the puppies? There is no primitive simplicity here: as Homer portrays it, complexity ripples through every contour of the human heart.

When the terrifying reprise of the
Iliad
erupts into the poem, it brings with it an almost orgasmic release of destructive energy, a balloon of mesmeric violence in which Odysseus slaughters all 108 of the young men. It is a frenzy of killing, an orgy of revenge that leaves the floors of the palace swimming in blood. The most horrible moment of the
Iliad
, when Odysseus and Diomedes kill Dol
ō
n even as he is begging for his life, and his head is still speaking as it lands in the dust—those same actions and words are repeated here with one of the more pathetic of the victims. Odysseus ends slobbered with their guts, his thighs shiny with their blood, filthy with it, “like a lion that comes from feeding on an ox at the farmstead, and all his chest and cheeks on either side are stained with blood and he is terrible to look at; even so was Odysseus dirty with their blood and filth, his feet red, his hands and arms red with it.”

Any idea that this is a tale of diverting fantasy is buried under the horror. Odysseus emerges from the tumult and goes through his house, looking for any sign of life from the suitors, any stirring of a limb, so that none might escape.

He finds them one and all, mired in blood and dust, all of them like fishes that the fishermen have drawn in their meshed nets from the grey sea on to the curved beach. And all the fishes, longing for the waves of the sea, lie upon the sand. And the sun shines forth and takes from them their life.

Their glazed stupidity is nothing more than the measure of Odysseus's triumph. It is a moment of ecstatic slaughter, a huge gratification, filled with delight that he has destroyed his enemies. He has won and reclaimed his woman, his house and land and life. There is no euphemism here. Melanthius had been Odysseus's goatherd but had betrayed him with the suitors.

They lead him out through the doorway and the court

And cut off his nose and his ears with the pitiless bronze

And tear out his genitals for the dogs to eat raw

And cut off his hands and his feet in the anger of their hearts.

I have read these lines on Ithaca, listening one summer night to the nightingales in a thicket nearby, rocked back by this arrival of war in the house; no political solution sought, no compensatory agreement arrived at, feeling horrified that for all Odysseus's subtlety and fineness, he has ended up as a cannibal-minded cur. Nothing in Homer is more troubling. You might have thought you knew this poem and its hero, but these scenes push far out into strange territory. Is this, in the end, for all our ships and palaces, our poetry, our beautiful cloths and veils, how we are, predatory carnivores snarling our dominance over mounds of filth-spattered corpses?

Odysseus has the place cleaned. He gets the serving-women of the house to purify it, fumigating it, using a hoe to scrape up the horror, behaving as the sanitizing angel, instructing the women to carry out the dead bodies of the men they have been sleeping with. After the work is done, he identifies the twelve women he considers guilty of that sexual crime, finds “the cable of a dark-prowed ship,” a piece of marine equipment, and ties it high up outside the house, around a pillar and some rafters, just high enough so that if someone was attached to it, their feet would not quite reach the ground.

Just as when in the evening long-winged thrushes or doves, trying to reach their roosting place for the night,

fall into a snare set in a thicket,

finding the bed that greets them filled with hate,

even so the women hold their heads out in a row,

and nooses are placed around their necks,

so that they can die most pitiably.