The Odyssey Was For Sailors

Welcome traveller.

Shake the dust off your boots.

Accept our hospitality.

Let us relieve you of your belongings after a long journey.

Here is water to refresh yourself.

Come close to the fire. Accept this choice morsel of food.

Allow us attend to your physical needs before we ask who you are.

We follow the customs of xenia. The customs of hospitality ordained by Zeus and Athena:

“With that war spear in [Athena’s] fist she seemed some traveller seeking hospitality: she had a look of Mentes, a chief in Taphos…

[Telemachus] clapsed her right hand, relieving her of the metal spear, and spoke to her these winged words: ‘Accept, O guest, the friendliest greetings. Enter and taste our food: and thereafter make known to us your every need.’”

Are your needs taken care of traveller?

Excellent.

Then ‘do not in crafty purpose conceal the news I seek: but make a virtue of frankness. Tell us by what name they call you there at home’.

*Listens*

You seek a guest gift you say? Like how Odysseus sought a gift from the Cyclops?

You seek one in the form of a story?

Well… I do have one for you.

It is a story about why The Odyssey has survived through the millennia. About how one of the oldest western stories still resonates today.

The Odyssey was a story for sailors.

The Iliad and The Odyssey were used in passing the same way me and you use tales from the Bible. The forbidden fruit. The story of the Good Samaritan. To turn the other cheek.

It was the cultural touchpoint. In Ancient Greece, then later in Ancient Rome.

Historians believe The Iliad and The Odyssey were composed in the late eighth century BC or early seventh century BC.

Its audience would have been those that took to the sea. They would have had the hopes and dreams of sailors. The anxieties and fears of sailors. The expertise and follies of sailors.

Ancient Greece was not a nation state as we know such things today. Instead, it was a loose archipelago of islands.

To get from Rhodes to Athens you had only one route – the sea.

A civilization spread across the sea. And thus, a civilization full of sailors.

I say this, because when we see that The Odyssey was written for sailors…the story reaches a new depth.

The Odyssey is a story about nostos. Which means homecoming.

It is also a story about xenia.

Xenia would have been important to sailors. Would strange lands be welcoming or hostile?

Odysseus’s journey home is helped or hindered by xenia. He and his men encounter bad xenia with the Cyclops.¹He has a name, Polyphemus. But note how, like many of the villains of the story, the name is almost a footnote. Say “Cyclops” in a party and odds are some nerd may reply “Son of Poseidon who blinded and ate Odysseus’s men?”. Say Polyphemus you’ll probably hear “Poly-who?”. This is deliberate storytelling by Homer. The villains are infamous. The Cyclops. The giants. The suitors. But their kleios (glory) leaves them anonymous, even though they are named. There are many lessons in that. Out of respect to Homer’s craft I will deliberately mirror this. After eating Odysseus’s men, and is blinded by their escape, he utters this curse:

“Hear me, dark-haired Girdler of the earth, if indeed I am yours and you my sire. Grant that there be no homecoming for this Odysseus, son of Laertes of Ithaca. Yet if it is fated that he must see his friends once more in his stately house and fatherland, let it be late and miserable, in a strange ship, after losing all his crews. And let him find trouble there in the house.”

It is this curse, this horrible xenia, that delays Odysseus’s homecoming.

He faces good xenia with the Phaeacians who gift him the use of a ship to finally return home:

“Lord Odysseus, however great your misfortunes hitherto, now that you have eventually attained my bronze-floored house, my stately house, I think you will not suffer further deflection from your way home…”

First you are relieved of any weapons and baggage. Then you are invited to bathe and refresh yourself. To warm yourself. To eat, drink, and be merry.

Then, and only then, after your physical needs have been attended to, are you asked for your name and business.

You host a stranger before knowing who they are.

The Odyssey is not just about how these sailors lived and died on the kindness of strangers. The guest too, has obligations.

And yet, there are those that don’t follow this.

I am talking, of course, about the main villains of the story. The suitors.

“…while in your house you shall find trouble awaiting you, even overbearing men who devour your substance on pretext of courting your worshipful wife and chaffering about her marriage dues…”

Xenia was a two-way street. The guest were only to pay a call with people of the same social class. They were to observe the forms and give up their weapon upon arrival.²Even Athena, goddess of battle, gives up her weapon when she arrives disguised as Mentes to Telemachus. Even as one of the two divine patrons of xenia, she was not above a guest’s obligations.

And they were definitely: not to overstay their welcome; eat all your food; and chase your wife.

For.

Three.

Years.

Consider what the suitors do when Telemachus exhorts them to leave. They’ve overstayed their welcome. They’re harassing his mother. Do they not feel shame? Or fear the gods? One of the suitors³Antinous. He is not totally anonymous, being one of the figureheads for the suitors, especially in books XIV to XXIV (the end). replies:

“Your lost temper and haughty lips, Telemachus, conspire to smirch our conduct and link us with disgrace. Yet I tell you it is not the suitors who are guilty, among the Achaeans, but your respected mother, that far-fetched awful mistress…”

After a string of insults at the hosts mother, he goes on to say:

“The suitors will swallow up your goods and sustenance for just so long as she persists in this frowardness which heaven has let possess her mind.”

Today, the fate of the suitors is alien to us. People who overstay their welcome whilst harassing your wife, though undeserving of pity, do not deserve to be deceived and killed. Their fate at the hands of wily Odysseus.

But to the sailors hearing this tale? This outcome would be welcome.

It would comfort them that those who violate xenia are punished by Zeus and Athena. That any man foolish enough to pursue their wives while at sea had already been warned.

It is in Book V that we are finally introduced to the hero of the tale, Odysseus. This man whom Athena favours. The hero of Ilium. Idolised by his son, even though the boy, nay the man, has yet to meet him properly.

Are we introduced to him resplendent in armour? Conniving a tale or scheme to escape his predicament?

No, we are introduced to him weeping. He cries on the shores of Calypso’s island, his prison, every morning.

Odysseus was within touching distance of Ithaca before he was blown away⁴In an example of generous xenia, the Aeolian’s give Odysseus “the hide of a nine-year-old bull” which contains “the complete range of every bursting wind that blew”. The bag of the Aeloian winds (today this is the name of those who study how the winds shape geology). When Odysseus is asleep on the ship, his men, full of envy and greed for what they believe to be treasure, open the bag of winds and “out rushed the winds in a heap”. Funny how whenever his men make a mistake Odysseus is asleep…, “we raised our land’s green slopes and came so near that we could see the figures tending its fires.”

In Hades, he is told that he would get home if, and only if, he and his men do not consume the sun god’s oxen.

If they do:

“…then I certify the doom of your men and your ship; and though yourself may escape alive, it will not be till after many days, in a ship of strangers, alone and in sorry plight, that you win back, having suffered the loss of all your company: while in your house you shall find trouble awaiting you, even overbearing men who devour your substance on pretext of courting your worshipful wife and chaffering about her marriage dues…”

The man weeps because he came so close to home, he could see the people tending fires on the shore. But then fortune gets in the way. And after much trial and tribulation, surviving supernatural perils, he takes a rest, begging his men to not eat the oxen they’ve found on an island while he’s asleep.

But the fools! “The fools” as Homer calls them⁵T.E. Lawrence translation: “the fools to destroy for meat…”. Alexander Pope translation: “O men unwise…”. Emily Wilson translation: “poor fools…”, they ate the oxen they were specifically told not to eat. Oxen of Helios. And the prophecy spoken in Hades starts to come to pass.

His men are dead. He has no ship. He is a prisoner. A bedchamber toy for a goddess. He yearns to return home. To Penelope. To Telemachus. But he knows that each sunrise may be the sunrise that she finally gives up and declares him dead.

Then truly would Odysseus, King of Ithaca, be dead.

Sailors, our audience, shipwreck being an eternal fear, would not face this exact ruin. But they would understand. It would mirror their own worries.

It is now time to talk about Penelope.

It has been ten years. Ten long years since the fall of Troy and Odysseus has not returned. Penelope, they say, declare him dead and move on. Choose one of us. And they add a few gendered slurs.

Yet, Penelope too, is cunning. She has delayed them for three years. I cannot declare him dead, for I have one last job as an honourable wife, we hear her say with a twinkle in her eye. My father-in-law is old. I must perform my duty and create for him a burial shroud.

She weaves it all day but then unspools it at night. She re-weaves it the next day, claiming it unfinished. The cycle repeats for three years.

It is when she is caught that our story begins, in media res⁶“In the middle of things”. Horace would classify this narrative device in ~65 to 8 BC. Penelope cannot delay them any longer. There is now nothing standing in the way of the suitors. She has no more tricks. There is only one way to save this. Odysseus…

Must. Come. Home.

Of course, it is not only for Penelope that Odysseus yearns to return home. Or for the land of Ithaca, with its rugged hills. Odysseus yearns to see his son, Telemachus.

The first time you read The Odyssey it may be confusing. It opens with the proem – that invocation to the muse – yet never mentions Odysseus by name.

Next, the tale moves to Athena calling on Zeus to order Odysseus’s release, recounting (convenient for us) the events at Troy, and what has happened since. Zeus agrees. Now, surely the scene will shift to the hero, Odysseus. It does not.

It shifts to Telemachus.

The first four books⁷Ancient texts were divided into “books” instead of “chapters”, as they were made up of several scrolls bound into one. Each scroll would be a book. The length of the book would be bound by the physical limits of the papyrus scroll, as music albums used to be bound by the physical limits of vinyl. of The Odyssey are about Telemachus. They are referred to as the Telemachy.

Athena lands on Ithaca and disguises herself as an old man, Mentes.⁸In Book I she is in disguise as Mentes, “a chief in Taphos” who has a long-standing relationship of xenia and trade with the family of Laertes. In Book II when Telemachus holds a council to confront the suitors, we are introduced to Mentor, an old man that Odysseus had left to be steward of his household. Immediately after the council dissolves, Telemachus goes to brood, and Athena visits him disguised as Mentor. Athena uses this guise in the rest of the Telemachy and near the end of the story. After Telemachus welcomes her with gracious xenia, she⁹I follow the convention of the T.E. Lawrence translation where Athena is still referred to as “she”, “Pallas”, or “goddess” when in disguise. exhorts Telemachus to ‘be a man’ and confront the suitors¹⁰Literally: “Childishness no longer beseems your years: you must put it away. My friend (I wish to call you that, for you are man in frame and very man in form), my friend, be brave, that generations not yet born may glorify your name. Consider young Orestes and the honour he has won in all men’s mouths by putting to death his father’s murderer…”. Look at Orestes. He is a man. Be a man. A reminder though, that while this rhetoric is going out of date, this is also a story where men weep openly and without shame.. When that fails (which as a goddess she had foreseen), she recommends he go out and seek news of his father.

Athena knows the fate of Odysseus. She knows he will return. She isn’t asking Telemachus to seek out his father for Odysseus’s sake, but for his own.

Telemachus is surprisingly immature. He is nearing twenty. Yet he is polite where he should be aggressive. He is gracious where he should be assertive. He is at home with his mother when he should be seeking his fortune. Yet how could he not be? His father has not been around. He has had no guide. He has had no mentor.

So Telemachus, revealing his own cunning, sneaks off in the night. He obeys the call to adventure. He sails into the unknown. He seeks news of his father, but he will find something better: himself.

He is on a hero’s journey. From boyhood to manhood.

The Telemachy serve many purposes¹¹Just a few come to mind: They start the story in media res, creating tension and setting the pace. They reveal Odysseus to us through the eyes of others. Important as when we finally see Odysseus, he is not the man he was, but we have context. They show us Penelope in her role as a mother and dutiful wife. They show us the lawlessness of Ithaca, with the promise of resolution. They make us hate the suitors. Many promises are made: this will be a story about nostos, about xenia, about the gods of Olympus, about the sea and shipwreck. Only a few. There are several more. but for our sailors they show a fearful young man obey the call to adventure and go out to sea to find himself. A calling they would know too.

The Telemachy builds empathy in the audience for Telemachus. And in so doing, we first see Odysseus through his eyes. We learn about Odysseus through the love his son has for him.

And we yearn for them to reunite.

The xenia that Odysseus faces – are like his trials – events to demonstrate “that mastermind like Zeus” – Odysseus’s metis, his cunning. Odysseus the Cunning, is his historic epithet.

Odysseus casts his stories to appeal in the best way for his audience. It is one of the sources of his metis.

Other xenia and demonstrations of his metis. Ensuring that both Circe and Calypso tell him the truth, making them take oaths that there is no trickery when he is given what he desires. For the gods are known to deceive mortals, granting them fatal or poisoned gifts.¹²Cassandra with the gift of prophecy but no-one believes her. Achilles being invulnerable except for his heel. Tithonus being immortal but continues to age…

Or his famous trick, telling the Cyclops that his name is “No-man”¹³So that when the Cyclops yells for help, his neighbours go “who hurt you?” and he replies “no man did!” and they conclude he is playing a jape and ignore him..

But for all his cunning. For all his wiles… Odysseus is human.

Could it be anything but pride, when after escaping the Cyclops, he reveals his identity as he gets away? The identity he guarded so well? It was this folly that led him to be cursed by this son of Poseidon.

An event that ultimately cost the lives of his men.

Sailors hearing the story would have made mistakes. Their mistakes would have had grievous costs. Perhaps the lives of fellow sailors. Perhaps delaying their own nostos.

Our sailors would understand Odysseus’s yearning for redemption.

When we see Odysseus weeping on the shore of Calypso’s isle, he is not only weeping to return home, but also weeping to return to the man he was.

His nostos is not just for home. His nostos is for himself.

We learn this in a critical scene. Homer has Odysseus compliment the bard of the Phaeacians, Demodocus, sending him a prized cut of meat – the ancient equivalent of a performer coughing for a tip¹⁴If the epic was performed over three days, then the bard would have been performing for about five hours straight in day one by this point. An appropriate time to say “I am singing for my supper. Are you enjoying the story? Then you know what to do”. – and after some flattery, coyly asks him if he knows the story of the Trojan horse.

He wants to know if his reputation, his kleios, is alive. Does the world know of his deeds at Troy? Or has he been forgotten?¹⁵The Odyssey is about nostos, homecoming. However, The Iliad, where the events of the Trojan war take place, is about kleios – glory or reputation. The question at the heart of The Iliad is will your deeds outlive your death? Achilles has a choice: live to a happy old age, but no-one will know his deeds, or go to Troy, where he will die, but his name will live forever. It glorifies dying an honourable death to be remembered. The Odyssey shows the other side of this. If your dead your kleios doesn’t matter. When Odysseus goes to Hades, Achilles’s ghost says he would rather be the slave of a poor man and be alive, than be the king of all in the underworld. He regrets his quest for a glorious death. Kleios matters only whilst you are alive.

It is a simple trick. Forgotten, then Demodocus would simply say “Odysseus? Trojan horse? What are you talking about?”, and Odysseus would know his kleios is dead, and he can remain anonymous.

But that is not what happens. Demodocus “fired by the God, gave proof of his mastery”, and sings the tale of the Trojan horse, crediting Odysseus for being the mastermind of that plan.

And we hear the most beautiful and tragic simile of the story:

“Thus ran the famous singer’s song: but Odysseus melted and tears from his eyelids bedewed his cheeks. So it is when a loving wife flings herself, wailing, about the body of her man who has fallen before his township and fellow-citizens, defending the town and his children from their cruel day of sack and rapine. The sight of him labouring his last breath and dying makes her wail aloud and wind herself about him. Yet do the enemy from behind beat her with their spear-shafts across her bowed shoulders and lead her into servitude, to her fate of toil and grief. Just as that woman’s cheeks are ravaged with despair, just so piteously did the tears fall from Odysseus’ brows.”

Odysseus’s kleios is intact. He weeps. He is redeemed from the dead.

…but the source of his kleios was tragic. At the expense of the men and women of Troy…

…Odysseus knows this. He weeps.

*The Narrator turns his head towards the campfire. As he does we glimpse a glistening of dew on his eyelashes.*

There are other lessons from The Odyssey for sailors.

Don’t be greedy and eat someone else’s oxen. Be wary of seductive women on strange islands. You will flirt with death. Be respectful of danger. Your loved ones will miss you if you go missing.¹⁶Odysseus sees his mother in Hades, where he: a) finds out she died while he was away and b) she died of a broken heart. A heart broken by Odysseus going missing. She says “rather it was my longing for you… my wonderful Odysseus… which robbed me of life” It is the only time in the story that Odysseus, the great master of rhetoric, always with a line, is speechless. Bury your comrades. Do a damn headcount before you get on the boat.¹⁷Elpenor’s story is the most brutal in all of Homer. Here’s this man, the youngest of Odysseus’s men, who after many drinks fell asleep on a roof on Circe’s isle, because it’s hot. When he wakes up, he drunkenly falls off the roof, breaks his neck, and dies. And no-one notices. They just leave Circe’s isle, set sail, and no-one goes ‘hey, where’s Elpenor?’. Instead, when Odysseus goes to Hades, and he sees Elpenor’s ghost he’s like ‘hey, what are you doing here? You’re supposed to be with the men’. Odysseus was a great leader of men, but the least he could do is just do a damn headcount before you get on the boat. They weren’t even in a rush leaving Circe’s isle. Bloody hell.

But the final lesson from our tale is to be a good storyteller.

As a sailor you are the source of news to an island. This is one of your valuable gifts.

There’s a little narrative trick in The Odyssey.

As Odysseus tells the Phaeacians his adventures, Homer changes the perspective away from the narrator, and to Odysseus.

We hear Odysseus’s tale in his own words. And what a tale he tells! He was seduced by two goddesses. He casually sacked another city after doing so at Troy.¹⁸Ismarus of the Cicones. He survived the Cyclopes after tricking (and blinding!) one of them. He went to the land of the dead.

The land of the dead.

And he returned.

This story, called the nequia, casts Odysseus as one of the greats in the pantheon of Greek heroes.

It is only the greatest of greats who return from Hades. Heracles, or Hercules, famously does this in the final of his twelve labours.

And Odysseus, the master storyteller, teases the Phaeacians. After saying he went to Hades, and reels off the list of great heroines he meets, he stops. Homer tells us that “Odysseus broke off his history”.

“But how can I even name to you, much less describe, all those I saw? There were so many wives of heroes, so many daughters. Before I ended the tale the divine night itself would have worn through. Indeed, already it is time for sleep, though I know not if I should lie in the ship with the crew you have appointed me, or stay in the house. The hour of my starting rests in the hands of the Gods and in your guardian hands.”

The Phaeacians “stayed silent, spell-bound as it were”. And then they beg Odysseus to continue his story. The King beseeches him to continue, asking if he met his fellow heroes from Troy.

Odysseus already knew he had them hooked. Yet he follows the forms of xenia, not wanting to overstay his welcome. He doesn’t want to bore them. But he knows his story isn’t boring. And he wants them to know that.

A lesson all storytellers heed. When you have a reader hooked don’t give them everything up front. And a lesson for our sailors.

The Phaeacians are always generous to strangers, but they are exceptionally lavish in the gifts they send home with Odysseus. A generosity that was helped by Odysseus’s story.

It is Odysseus’s story, not his status (though it helps), that evokes this generosity.

The lesson is clear for our sailors. Learn to tell a good story and you will go far.

Oh… I’m not saying the story has to be true.

Odysseus tell his story in his own words. Not from the narrator’s perspective.

There are parts that correlate with other things in the tale. But the parts where Odysseus is the only witness?

That visit to Hades?

Where Heracles, The Heracles, greets him as a brother of trials and tribulations?

How can we know?¹⁹Have fun with this. There is an expression ‘All Cretans are liars’, which refers to a paradox in logic: The philosopher who says this is Cretan. So is he telling the truth or not? This expression was possibly around during the time of Homer. Odysseus pretends to be from Crete whenever he lies. This begs the paradoxical question: when is Odysseus telling the truth? All Cretans are liars after all. Is he lying when he says he is from Crete? Is he lying when he doesn’t say he is? Paradox. Have fun with it.

We only have Odysseus’s word for it.

…and the Phaeacians lap it up.

Perhaps cunning Odysseus, the master of rhetoric was telling the truth.

But we will never know.

And is my story true?

That The Odyssey was for sailors?

You will have to be the judge.

And that is my parting gift to you traveller.