Most people have at least a passing
familiarity with Odysseus’ adventures, either from reading about them in (e.g.)
a high school English class, or just because he’s influential in our zeitgeist.
But there’s so much unspoken material about Odysseus hiding in plain sight, far
beyond what might come up in an English class. For example: what does Odysseus
do for a living? He’s a pirate. Let’s not kid ourselves; he may be the
charismatic hero of the epic (the Johnny Depp of his day), but he’s still a
pirate. He supports himself by traveling around to places he doesn’t live, and
taking other people’s belongings, and either killing them or threatening to
kill them if they resist. Even though he gets billed as the King of Ithaca, who
may well have been able to support himself sufficiently through taxing his
populace, he nevertheless chooses to make various stops on his way home from
Troy for the purpose of plundering the homes of hapless strangers. Go back and read
the passage on the Cyclops’ island when
Odyssey first leads his men--just a few of his strongest and most elite men,
you’ll notice--into the Cyclops’ cave. He realizes that this cave is someone’s
dwelling (but temporarily empty), so he begins opening up containers and
looking for anything of value. When they find the baskets full of cheeses, they
begin devouring the cheeses and generally tearing into the Cyclops’ livelihood.
If you study the Odyssey, say in a
high school class, you’ll hear a lot about hospitality customs and people who
are conspicuously bad hosts to Odysseus, but you might not hear about what a
bad guest Odysseus himself is, and how his behavior in the Cyclops’ cave is parallel
to the Suitors’ behavior in his own house: just like the suitors, he offends
the host by appropriating food and other things that the uninvited guest has no
right to.
Near the end of Odysseus’ journey, when
you’d think he should have learned his lesson, Odysseus falls victim to the same
trap of being a bad guest on the Island of the Sun. The Island is full of
delicious cattle, the Sun’s personal flock, and Odysseus has been warned not to
eat it. In fact, Circe even provided Odysseus with a supply of magical food to
spare him from the necessity of eating the forbidden cattle. But taboo stories
in myth are not meaningful until someone breaks the taboo, so naturally his men
one day grow tired of magic food and decide to kill a cow. When they finally
set sail again, the sea surges up wrathfully and kills them in a storm, all of
them down to the last man except Odysseus, who clings to one of the beams of
the ship. The storm is so fierce that he’s stripped naked except for a goddess’
magic scarf that he has tied around his head (and before you ask, there are in
fact academic articles out there about Odysseus and cross-dressing). He manages
to survive, but only at the cost of everything he had. And, we hope, he learns
a valuable lesson about how to be a good guest.
(Actually, Odysseus’ wearing of the
goddess’ veil is commonly identified as one of the feminine aspects of Odysseus’
character in the Odyssey, part of a
larger pattern of narrative interest in strong feminine characters and feminine
spheres of work, as opposed to the Iliad,
which is grounded in the masculine world. Robert Graves took this so far as
to speculate that the Odyssey was
essentially a Mary Sue fanfic composed by a Sicilian princess (represented in
the epic by Nausicaa), and he wrote his novel Homer’s Daughter on this premise. It’s quite an interesting book,
if somewhat dated in its view of the Odyssey’s
composition. Still, I’ve never found anyone who seriously believes that the Odyssey was composed by a Sicilian
princess. And personally I’d be surprised if it had been, since Odysseus is a
pretty big cad for a teenaged virgin to invent.)
(And in case you have any doubts about
Odysseus’ piratical life, re-read the beginning of the Iliad, and take note of all the casual references to the Greeks
traveling up and down the coast of Asia Minor and stealing food and treasure
and people from cities not fortified as well as Troy. How do you think the
Greeks were feeding themselves in a hostile country? I know the movie Troy depicts Briseis as an innocent
young cousin of Hector, born and bred in the city of Troy, but in the epic she’s
not Trojan--she’s been enslaved after having been stolen from a nearby city, an
ordinary day's work for the marauding Greek army.)
In pursuit of this occupation, Odysseus’
most carefully honed professional skill is lying. It was second nature to him
to such a degree that it was hard for him to break the habit. There’s a
terrible scene at the end of the Odyssey--terrible
to my mind, anyway--when Odysseus has finally returned home and reveals himself
to his father. Now his father has been so distressed by Odysseus’ prolonged
absence that he’s abdicated the kingship and went to live in poverty and misery
farming a tiny strip of land, which I imagine was an awful life, since he was
well past his prime and the soil in Greece is generally very rocky. Not only
that, in the twenty years that Odysseus has been absent, his mother has died of
a broken heart, and his father is alone except for some slaves and one elderly
housekeeper. Probably Odysseus’ son is one of those inconsiderate young people
who never visits his elder relatives. But Odysseus has finally come back and
goes out to the field where his father is miserably hoeing a rocky furrow, and
Odysseus…lies to him. He thinks it over very carefully, too: when he finds his
father laboring away among the thorns in filthy clothing and general misery,
Odysseus pauses to consider whether he should just run over and embrace his
father--and on consideration, he decides that he’d rather feed his father a
pack of lies and make him even more miserable (taking time along the way to
remark on his father’s disgraceful appearance and pretend to mistake him for a
slave). So Odysseus doesn’t admit to being Odysseus. He says that he’s a
stranger who met Odysseus briefly long in the past, and he hasn’t seen Odysseus
in five years. And his father is devastated,
so much so that he starts scouring himself with dirt. And after watching this
for a while, Odysseus admits that he actually is Odysseus, and apparently
they’re fine again. This is when his professional practices have become so
entrenched that they interfere with every aspect of his life.
Speaking of his profession, didn’t
Odysseus have some other profession going on? Besides being a pirate and
inveterate liar…oh, right, he was King of Ithaca. Sounds like a nice job;
apparently Odysseus was so attached to it that he didn’t want to obey his
conscription to Troy, and feigned insanity in attempt to dodge the draft
(apparently insanity will exempt you from service in Agamemnon’s army but doesn’t
disqualify anyone from kingship on Ithaca). But what responsibilities were
entailed in this kingship? We can assume that the position granted Odysseus a
certain degree of power and wealth, but those privileges generally entail a
proportional amount of work in the form of civic planning and decision making.
When Odysseus disappeared for twenty years, who was running the government in
his place? Was he so non-essential that his absence didn’t disturb the
government’s ability to run? It’s common knowledge that the Suitors spent their
time lounging around drunk in Odysseus’ palace, so let’s assume that they
aren’t doing any heavy lifting for the local government. His son was too young
to be in power, and his wife was only valued as marriage material. Presumably
someone else was in power while Odysseus was off practicing piracy, and
Penelope was busy pretend-weaving, and Telemachus was still a callow youth. Was
this person or group forced out of power when Odysseus returned? Did they
willingly step aside?
I know, I know: sailing around to magic
islands and massacring Suitors with an heirloom bow makes for much more
compelling narrative than meetings of the local sanitary sewer committee. But
there ought to have been a power structure resistant to Odysseus when he
suddenly showed up to reclaim the job that he had managed to hold in absentia
for twenty years, and I’ve always been curious about who was actually running
the government while the King was gone.
As a final note, this post has dealt
primarily with Odysseus as the hero of the Odyssey
and all the Johnny Depp-style flair he commands in that role, but that’s
actually not how Odysseus was usually seen in the ancient world. It’s worth
comparing the Odysseus in Sophocles’ play Philoctetes,
which as a tragedy is built around different character types and relationships.
The swashbuckling hero who outsmarts the Cyclops and sails away triumphantly
doesn’t fit into the tragic world, and Odysseus in Philoctetes is someone very different. This story takes place
during the Trojan War. Philoctetes, like Odysseus, was conscripted to fight in
the war, but on a stop on the way over to Troy, he was bitten by a snake. He
didn’t die, but his wound was festering and stinking so badly that Odysseus
abandoned him alone on an island, and left him there for ten years, and only
returned to collect him because an oracle reported that Philoctetes possessed
an item that was necessary for the Greeks to win the war. Sophocles’ Philoctetes picks up when Odysseus has
just arrived on the island and is plotting how to convince Philoctetes to hand
over the item and help the war effort. Specifically, he’s corrupting the young
and principled Neoptolemus by persuading him to lie to Philoctetes until he
hands over the item. In the end, Neoptolemus is unable to deceive Philoctetes
into handing over the item, and too honorable to steal it; Odysseus’ attempt to
steal the item is also foiled, and the drama is only resolved when a god orders
Philoctetes to go to Troy already and let the Greeks win (a rather blatant and
unsatisfying deus ex machina). In
short, Odysseus still has all the same qualities as he does as the hero of the Odyssey--deceit, cunning, and a complete
lack of compunction for stealing things that he finds useful--but here these
qualities are cast as reprehensible, and everyone hates him because of them. So
if you read the Odyssey and thought
that Odysseus was a jerk, and wondered why the ancient Greeks didn’t have some
moral code that frowned on lying and stealing, fear not! They did have such a
moral code. It’s just that one of the most commonly read Greek texts in
mainstream culture happens to ignore that moral code for the sake of glorifying
its morally dubious hero.
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