Achilles seems to tell Odysseus in Hades that he made the wrong choice (11.488- 91), but we are not told that Odysseus had any regrets. The power of Homer's poetry, in any case, largely consists of persuading us that the morality of either choice-of Achilles in rescuing the Achaeans from a dire situation and of Odysseus in saving the life of his son and putting a stop to Penelope's tears-is overshadowed by the fatefulness of either choice. We are forced to look at justice from a perspective beyond justice, even if neither Achilles nor Odysseus ever came to such an understanding. It is here, in the difference between Odysseus's self-understanding and Homer's understanding of that self-understanding, that Homer possibly parts company with Odysseus and recovers a point of view as much beyond good and evil as he assumed so readily in the Iliad. How Achilles comes to put on his fate is shown for the most part in the events of the Iliad; we do not have and we do not need to have Achilles' own account.Our access to the grounds for Odysseus's choice, which he already made before Homer picks up his story, can only come from Odysseus himself. He has to explain from the inside, as it were, what was involved in his coming home.
Note: Self-understanding
Location 102
Highlights (33)
he must once he gets home soon depart, staying perhaps no longer than a month (cf. 14.244-45), and come once more to many cities of mortals (23.267). The Odyssey catches Odysseus betweena return and a departure. Odysseus's choice, then, seems to point not so much to home as to mortality. Odysseus chooses to be human and remain incomplete; or he understands there to be a completeness in the incompleteness of a certain kind of human life that is preferable to either the fixity of memory or the everlastingness of divinity.
Location 122In the last book, Odysseus effects a kind of reconciliation with his father whose rule he had taken over in some unknown way. The paternal rule that prevailed in Ithaca before the Trojan War and exemplified the highest possible achievement within the ancestral was gained only by a usurpation. That usurpation, which had the consequence of preventing Laertes from defending Penelope from the suitors, merely confirms the riddle in Odysseus's choice. Odysseus's former rule was only in appearance traditional; he had broken with the equation of the good with the ancestral long before he had been given the possibility of not following in the ways of the fathers. The struggle between natural and ancestral right, with which the Iliad begins, had already been settled in Ithaca in favor of the son, though the son, as Athena reminds Telemachus, is rarely superior to…
Location 128Homer seems to have reflected on the Platonic possibility of philosopher-kings, and either condemned it in advance of its explicit formulation or confirmed the necessity…
Location 137might be less operative than it seemed. Homer, however, has chosen an event after Odysseus's twelve ships had been reduced to one, and there is nothing in Odysseus's own account to warrant the view that everyone who lost his life was the victim of his own wickedness. Had it not been for Odysseus's use of force, those who wanted to remain with the Lotus-eaters would have survived. Homer, moreover, gives the impression that the Sun punished Odysseus's men; but we are later told that the Sun cannot punish…
Location 142The clarity Homer gains about the connection between justice and wisdom by simplifying the story seems not only to have a narrative advantage but also to support completely Zeus's contention that men blame the gods for their own evils while in fact they alone are responsible, by their own reckless wickedness-Zeus simply repeats Homer's own phrasing (1.7, 34)-for the suffering they have beyond their fate.10 The poem confirms the first half of Zeus's contention absolutely: there is hardly anyone who does not fault the gods and in particular Zeus. Odysseus has no sooner escaped from…
Location 162illustrate his thesis, that the gods are blameless for human evils, and all the suffering that is beyond fate is due to a…
Location 172A four-year stay with Calypso, then, instead of seven, would have allowed Odysseus to return prior to the suitors' arrival; and since Poseidon's anger is completely discharged after he stirs up a single storm against Odysseus (5.375-81), Poseidon cannot really be the sole obstacle to Odysseus's delayed return. The apparently empty time that Odysseus must spend with Calypso is dictated no less by the need for Telemachus to grow up and experience fully the indignity of his position than by the need for Polyphemus's curse, which provided for Odysseus to meet with sufferings athome (9.535), to be realized. Neither Zeus nor Athena mentions any of this. The only nonfated event involves Telemachus' achievement of maturity, of which Teiresias in Hades tells Odysseus nothing. It would seem, then, that the gods' causality as well as their justice…
Location 184Telemachus represents the political problem of succession. Penelope's entire effort for twenty years has been to preserve the throne for her son, and for the last years to distract attention from the succession by dazzling the suitors with her own attractions and making it seem that the household and not the city is at stake. Telemachus knows nothing of this. When he is directly asked whether he has called an assembly for a political reason he denies it (2.30-32). Telemachus, then, is hardly less resentful of his mother than of the…
Location 196Only in Ithaca has the war been completely devastating. An entire generation has been wiped out, not only in Ithaca but also in the other parts of Odysseus's small empire (11.631-35). The evident usurpation within Odysseus's palace has covered over this central fact; and the suspension of all political life for twentyyears-no one has called an assembly in all that time (2.26-27)-seems to have suspended time itself. Telemachus's coming of age and the death of Odysseus's dog Argus are the only measures of real time left. Odysseus's rule was so beneficent, it seems, that it could seal up Ithaca for twenty years and allow it to run for that long without a ruler. That there is no ruler shows up only in a reputed disorder…
Location 202The suitors, then, whose older brothers and cousins went with Odysseus to Troy (cf. 2.17-22), contain in themselves the general disaffection of the people (cf. 3.214-15). They make it possible for Odysseus to cut out surgically the most deeply infected part of the body politic (2.265-66)-we learn in the last book that he did not cut deeply enough (24.463-66; cf. 2.166-67)-and hand over the city in a sound enough condition for a Telemachus to rule it.', Whether the other parts of the empire…
Location 210political problem Odysseus confronts reminds one of an imaginary situation Plato's Athenian Stranger presents to a Cretan and a 16 He supposes that a single father and a single mother have many sons, most of whom are unjust, but the minority is just; and if a judge could be found for these brothers, the question he poses is who would be a better judge, one who destroyed everyone who was bad and ordered the better to rule themselves,…
Location 214Behind the supposed ingratitude of Odysseus's people, however, there lies a smoldering resentment, fueled not by his long absence, but by the universal recognition that if Odysseus does return he returns alone (2.174-75). The father of Antinous puts it strongly and irrefutably: "First, he went and lost his ships and his…
Location 221Odysseus's story is not fit for…
Location 225One wonders whether the gifts Odysseus receives from the Phaeacians, which Zeus wants to be greater than what would have been his share had he returned unscathed from Troy (5.38-40), are meant to be distributed to the Ithacans and…
Location 229The re-isolation of cities, so that the issue of their internal order becomes more important than their foreign relations, looks as if it belongs to the wider scheme of things; and it is only an apparent paradox that the instrument for bringing it about should be the man who wandered very far.This re-isolation, which the premise of the Odyssey-the illusory domestication of a political…
Location 245The Odyssey could not be a new beginning if it did not finish off the past.36 That that past isover is symbolized by Homer's statement at the beginning that the gods denied any further generation to Helen once she had borne Hermione, and at the end of Menelaus's account by Proteus's prediction that he and Helen are not going to die but are to live forever on the islands of the blest (4.12-14, 561-69). The end of becoming at Sparta is a fitting preface to that which is the undercurrent of the fifth book, Odysseus's choice of becoming.
Location 452Menelaushas nothing but praise for Peisistratus' sensible speech, and he proposes to put off until tomorrow his talk with Telemachus; but Helen, who not only has an eye for appearances but sees what is within, drugs their drinks. The drug takes away any grief and anger and makes one forget all evils: "Whoever should swallow it would not cast a tear for an entire day, not even if his mother and father should die, and they should slay his brother or son before him, and he should see it with his own eyes." There is perhaps in the entire Odyssey no single action that shows such a deep and immediate understanding of human things as Helen's drugging of everyone. She prevents them not only from going to sleep with their grief unassuaged but also from carrying a grudge against the irreversibility of time and the unfulfillability of human wishes. Helen's drug seems to be the magical counterpart to the songs of the Muses, who, according to Hesiod, in singing of gods and men of old, make men forget their malignant thoughts and sorrows.19
Note: The instability of human wishes — says Zeus, Helen’s impulse, Odyssean wanderings; both go and return from the same thing, from going against the natural order in pursuit of the glorious, numinous. Fuses Iliad and Odyssey. [e]
Location 485Odysseus disguised himself to look like a beggar before he slipped into Troy. He became someone else, Helen says, completely unlike the sort he was among the ships of the Achaeans; indeed, he beat himself with unseemly blows-the sort, one might add, with which he once threatened Thersites, just before he struck him across the back and shoulders (11.261-66). None of the Trojans paid any attention to him; Helen alone recognized him for who he was. Did Athena leave Telemachus at Pylos because she knew that Helen would see right through any disguise? Helen seems to share in the ability of Argus, and perhaps in the other dogs' ability as well who whimper in the presence of Athena even though Telemachus cannot see her (17.301-2; 16.160-63). However that may be, Odysseus was unable to evade Helen's questions, and once she had bathed and dressed him, and sworn a mighty oath, he took her into his confidence and imparted to her the entire plan (noos) of the Achaeans. In light of the story Menelaus then tells, Helen seems to have known the secret of the Trojan horse, and Odysseus put the lives of the Achaeans in her hands and made her a part of the plan to deceive the Trojans. Odysseus went out of his way to make the Trojans know that he had been in Troy, for after he had gathered much intelligence and before he left, Helen reports, he killed many Trojans. "Hereupon the Trojan women wailed and keened," she continues, "but my heart rejoiced, since my heart had turned around, to go back home, and I regretted the infatuation that Aphrodite gave when she led me away from my dear fatherland and separated me from my daughter and husband, who was inferior to no one either in wit or in looks" (4.259-64). Helen sets side by side her penetration of Odysseus's disguise with her own disguised joy: her joy at the death of Trojans, among whom she had lived for ten years, turns on her change of heart, to which no one apparently is privy except herself.The drug she had administered no doubt made it possible for Menelaus to hear her with indifference, both when she calls herself a shameless bitch and when she implies that had Menelaus been defective in any way she might have had no regrets. Clearly, Odysseus must have reported back to the Achaeans her change of heart and been convincing, for otherwise no one would have dared to enter the horse. The provisions of the oath-not to reveal his presence before he got back to the ships-make it clear that the killing of the Trojans was meant to back up Helen's story. The Trojans, moreover, must have trusted Helen just as much as Odysseus did, for otherwise they would not have used her as a lure to test whether anyone was hiding within the horse.
Note: A beggar to sneak into Troy and Ithaca
Location 507When they were sitting in the horse, Helen walked around it three times, feeling it all over, and, in calling out the names of the best of the Achaeans, imitated the voices of their wives. Diomedes and Menelaus were eager either to go out of the horse or to answer her from within; but Odysseus restrained them, and when Anticlus was going to respond, Odysseus clamped his hand over his mouth and saved the Achaeans. Odysseus alone could not be enchanted by any sorcery. Helen displays not only an uncanny intuition about the heart and a gaze before which any concealment is useless, but also she can convince Anticlus, against his knowledge, that his wife is just outside in the midst of Troy. Helen seems to have all the traits of the poet, from the coolness with which Homer depicts the most terrible things to his mimetic capacity to make things appear in all their vividness and his insight into the hiddenness of things. Her only possible rival is Odysseus, he whose eyes turn to horn while he pities Penelope in his heart (19.209-12),…
Note: Relating Homer to Helen
Location 523Menelaus seems to haverealized-perhaps Proteus's simile suggested it to him-that Aegisthus had not buried Agamemnon (11.424-26). When he got to Egypt, Menelaus erected a cenotaph to Agamemnon, "in order that his glory be unquenched" (4.584). The cenotaph recalls the sealskin that fooled Proteus. Perhaps, however, in some sense Proteus was not fooled, if appearances are always illusory. Perhaps the decisive thing was that there was still life beneath the skin. Whether we think anachronistically of Pythagorean metempsychosis, which Herodotus traces back to Egypt (2.123.2),42 or, as Herodotus also reports, of the Egyptian teaching that the gods are not what they are represented as being (2.46.2), it is clear that Menelaus has tapped into an understanding of things that involves two radical disjunctions, between being and becoming, on the one hand, and, on the other, between reality and appearance, both of which together potentially challenge the wisdom of Odysseus. That wisdom must be of a different order if Odysseus rejects the immortality Menelaus is granted.43
Location 552Antinous also claims, absurdly, that it is Penelope's mind, despite her injustice, that makes her so attractive (2.116-22). Given the short time Odysseus lived with her before the war and the shorter time he will stay home-certainly far less than the seven years with Calypso-perhaps one ought to generalize and say that it was the absence of mind in the setting of Calypso's island that had at some time made it pall.
Location 594Odysseus as his own storyteller creates the puzzle. Self-reflection necessarily distorts the order of time; so unless Homer allowed Odysseus to tell the Odyssey from start to finish, there had to be an edge that was the meeting of two narrative surfaces, one arranged by Athena to line up with the preliminary conditions for Odysseus's return, and the other fixed en bloc between his reception among the Phaeacians and his return.
Location 598Odysseus has to suffer something for the loss of six-hundred men.
Location 612Is it possible that Poseidon, whose brutality is revealed in the monstrousness of his offspring, granted other gods, with a greater sense of refinement, the opportunity to create a penitentiary, a sophronist- erion as Plato calls it, that just might have worked even on Odysseus ?49 Were that the case, Poseidon's punishment of Odysseus for the blinding of the Cyclops would have been redesigned to teach him that man too should be blind and not wander to see for himself. "Calypso" (Ka&vipc)) means "Concealer." It looks like an anagram of "Cyclops" (K1K? wlp).
Location 622"Calypso" (Ka&vipc)) means "Concealer." It looks like an anagram of "…
Location 625neither Hermes nor Calypso mentions Odysseus by name. For Hermes, Odysseus is distinguished by being the most miserable of all who fought at Troy, or at least Zeus says he is; and through an extreme compression he makes Athena, against whom the Achaeans sinned on their…
Note: Most miserable?
Location 625Odysseus believes her desertion of him occurred right after the sack of Troy, and the excuse she gives for her absence-her reluctance to contend with Poseidon-does not cover the interval between the Cicones and Polyphemus (13.316-19, 341-43). One could say, in Athena's defense, that as long as Odysseus has…
Note: Athena abandons
Location 629The two instances she mentions, Orion and lasion, certainly suggest that had Odysseus accepted her offer, he would have been killed at once. It is unclear whether Odysseus knows this; but he does treat Calypso's offer as the last temptation after the cattle of the Sun. It is certainly a curious situation in which to be caught, between the withdrawal of the gods and the possibility of becoming a god oneself, and if one resists the…
Location 636Calypso sees herself as deprived as Dawn…
Location 643Homer conveys the uniqueness of Odysseus by setting him in a labyrinth of dead ends, each of which seems at first to open out into freedom, but at the heart of which there is a double mystery, the missing seven years with Calypso and the second journey to a people who do not know the sea. It is these two experiences, one of which lies in the past, the other…
Location 645occasions on which he either talked to himself or addressed a silent prayer. There are six soliloquies in the fifth book, four in all the rest of the Odyssey.52 Once Homer has established the difference between outside and inside through Helen and Menelaus, he goes inside and brings out in speech what would otherwise be merely an opinion without any split between the speaker and his heart. Such a split becomes of the greatest importance for Plato's understanding of the soul, and since he borrows from Homer the old-fashioned word for "heart" (thumos) and cites a passage from the Odyssey to exemplify what he means by the "thumoeidetic," it is particularly important for us to consider what…
Location 662Odysseus had assured Calypso that he could take whatever the gods dish out; his great experience of war and waves gave him this certain knowledge (5.221-24). When, however, the storm is gathering and before his raft has been touched, he says:Oh my! I am wretched. What will become of me at last? I am afraid that the goddess spoke the complete truth. She said I would get my fill of sufferings at sea before returning to my country. . . . Destruction is now certain for me. Thrice and four times blessed are the Danaans, who then perished at Troy, bringing favor to the Atreidae. How I wish I had died and met my fate on that day when the greatest number of Trojans hurled their spears at me in a fight over the dead Achilles…
Note: Essayistic
Location 670