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…

As [Telemachus] so dreamed amidst the unheeding suitors he became aware of Athene waiting by the threshold; and went straight to her, vexed to the heart that any guest should be delayed at their door for lack of welcome. He 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.’”

Refreshed and sated?

Settled and warm?

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’.¹All excerpts are from T.E. Lawrence’s translation, better known as Lawrence of Arabia. The first aimed at a general reader. The first by one who had experienced war and delayed homecoming. The first translation this essayist read. Flawed of course, but all translations and translators are.

Tell me who you are. Tell me where you come from. Tell me what brings you to our campfire.

*Listens*

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

‘Here therefore we find ourselves supplicant at your knees, in hope of the guesting-fee or other rich gift such as is the meed of strangers.’

Ho! Let us hope I am not like the Cyclops and eat you for breakfast! Ha!

You seek one in the form of a story?

Well… I do have one for you.

It is a story about the story of ‘that mastermind like Zeus’. The story of ‘various-minded’ (or ‘many-turning’, ‘of many changes’, ‘fated to roam’, ‘resourceful’, ‘versatile’, ‘skilled in all ways of contending’)²I explain why there are all these translations here: Why Odysseus has Many Epithets. Odysseus.

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

The Odyssey was a story for sailors.

First, know this. Everyone knew their Homer in the ancient world.

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. Even to see the writing on the wall.³Not all is Shakespeare. The book of Daniel, Chapter 5. During a feast by King Belshazzar, a ghost hand appears and writes on the wall prophesying the downfall of Babylon.

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. Nor a single political entity. Instead, it was a loose archipelago of islands connected by the Greek language. The Greek trade. The Greek culture.

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

Remember, in The Iliad, it is not “multitudes of men” or “an army of armies” that Homer refers to when describing Helen’s beauty. It is the face that launched a thousand ships.⁴Each galley, a penteconter, translating as “fifty oared” would have held at least fifty men. Thus Helen’s face launched an army of fifty thousand men.

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.

I will try to plumb that depth.

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

It is also a story about xenia.

Xenia is a difficult word. How to translate xenia? The best can be “guest-host relationship”.

“[Xenia] is a reciprocal relationship between two xenoi—a word which means guest, host, stranger, friend, and foreigner. It is not based on friendship, but rather on obligation. It works only if each side does not violate the terms of xenia. To do so is to offend Zeus himself.”⁵Source: Professor Elizabeth Vandiver.

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

Imagine: A sailor sees land on the horizon. His understanding of the world being that which is flat, floating on a vast cosmic ocean⁶Thales of Miletus posited that the Earth was a disc that floated on water between 624 and 546 BC.. Where lightning is the province of Zeus, and the storms of the sea the will of Poseidon. Anything can happen and his safety lies in the hands of others he is yet to meet.

Feeling this, he might utter that phrase Odysseus says three times in his story:

“Alack now, and in what land of men do I find myself? Will they be inhospitable and savagely unjust; or kind to strangers, of god-fearing nature?”

Odysseus’s journey home is helped or hindered by xenia. He and his men encounter bad xenia with the Cyclops.⁷He 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…”

There are several more examples of xenia. Telemachus, Odysseus’s son, faces the villainous xenia of the suitors, and gracious xenia from Nestor, Menelaus, and even the famed Helen.

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.

This is the importance of xenia. You host a stranger before knowing who they are. They could be your mortal enemy. He could have bedded your wife. Yet you must still follow the forms of xenia.

For guests and strangers are protected by Zeus.

(We do not live in the world of Zeus and Homer. So, please do not attempt this outside of our campfire in the modern world. You will get a bed for the night. In jail.)

But for the sailors of Homer’s time… xenia is how a culture scattered across several islands could exist. Your very survival relied on xenia.

And 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.

We are introduced to them:

“The gateway was thronged with self-assertive suitors, whose pleasure for the moment was to sit there playing at chequers on the hides of the oxen they had killed and eaten. Round them bustled their criers and nimble pages, some mixing wine and water in the parent-bowls ready to drink, others wiping down table-tops with soft sponges or re-laying them for the next meal, while yet others were jointing huge sides of meat. If the suitors saw [Athena] they did not move or look before handsome Telemachus gave sign. He sat despondent in the hurly, fancying to himself his honest father’s sudden arrival from somewhere, somehow: and the scatter there would be, through the palace, of these wasters when they saw him stride in to regain men’s respect and king it honourably once more over his household.”

Odysseus is warned about them:

“…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…”

Odysseus is reminded of what he must do to those who harassed Penelope, his wife:

“…you must settle how to get these shameless suitors into your hands, for it is now three years that they have been lording it in your palace, plaguing your glorious wife with their suits and proffering marriage settlements while she, despite heart-racking anxieties over your return, still keeps them all in play by giving each one hope and separate promises and privy messages, while her mind set constantly elsewhere.”

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.⁸Even 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.

You told the host your name. You told them your story. You were to be a gracious guest. And one day, you too will host a guest. Perhaps it will be a son of the household that hosted you. Or another stranger. You were to return the favour. To pay it forward. To unconditionally host.

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 suitors⁹Antinous. 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.”

The suitors are shameless in their violations of xenia. Which is why Homer’s audience, sailors, yearn for justice to take its course.

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.

Hermes, delivering Zeus’s message for Calypso to release Odysseus:

“In the cavern he did not find great-hearted Odysseus, who sat weeping on the shore as was his wont, crying out his soul with groaning and griefs and letting flow his tears while he eyed the fruitless sea.”

When Calypso goes to deliver this news to him:

“She found him sitting by the water’s edge: his eyes as ever dewed with tears at this ebbing of his precious life in vain lamentations after deliverance… he haunted the rocks and pebble-beaches of the island’s shore, retching up his heart with crying and sighs and misery, his gaze fixed upon the desolate main through a blur of tears.”

As I tell this tale, I have to tell it carefully.

So, I skipped a part. But this part is important.

Because you see Odysseus so longs for home, that his pain for home isn’t diminished when Calypso forcibly takes him to bed every day.

That quote again:

“She found him sitting by the water’s edge: his eyes as ever dewed with tears at this ebbing of his precious life in vain lamentations after deliverance – seeing that the nymph no longer pleased his fancy. True, that every night would he sleep with her: he had no choice while he lived in her vaulted cave. Yet was he not willing, and she willed too much: consequently day-long he haunted the rocks and pebble-beaches of the island’s shore, retching up his heart with crying and sighs and misery, his gaze fixed upon the desolate main through a blur of tears.”

Odysseus is not willing, because he knows the suitors are pressing for Penelope, his beloved wife. He knows, that while he is trapped on this island, that at home she is under pressure to give him up for dead.

Odysseus was within touching distance of Ithaca before he was blown away¹⁰In 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 them¹¹T.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.

First, we must discuss something awkward.

Many say the works of Homer are simply entertainment cast for male fantasies. War, adventure, and nymphomaniac goddesses who fall in love with the heroes. Sexist entertainment that glorifies masculinity at the expense of femininity.

Because, when you read The Odyssey, when you understand Penelope’s dilemma, a sexual double standard becomes evident.

And some say that this double standard is the Homeric epics assuming “a masculine viewpoint throughout” and that it “reflects a kind of wish fulfilment on the part of the male bard or his male audience”.

Those are not my words traveller. They are the words of a scholar of the classics, Professor Elizabeth Vandiver. But she goes on:

“…I think there’s something else going on here. The culture reflected in The Iliad and The Odyssey both, is an absolutely patriarchal culture. In the society that we see in the Homeric epics, like in many traditional patriarchal societies where the marriages are arranged, the purpose of marriage is to perpetuate the legitimate family…”

“…if that’s the purpose of marriage… to provide legitimate male heirs for each man… female infidelity threatens that entire system. It threatens the legitimacy of children, it threatens the marriage bond, since marriage exists to provide for legitimate children, and it threatens society in general , since society cannot function without marriage and children.”

“…if a married woman in such a society is unfaithful, even once, then the whole question of the legitimacy of her children is called into doubt. The whole question of her proper behaviour in her marriage is called into doubt. There’s no way for a man–before the invention of DNA typing—-there’s no way for a man to know that the children… are his children… If Penelope were unfaithful even now in Odysseus’s absence, that could call into the question the legitimacy of Telemachus…”

“…Odysseus, on the other hand can spread ten thousand illegitimate children around the Mediterranean… and that in no way calls Telemachus’s legitimacy into question. So male sexual fidelity is not needed for this system of marriage as much as female sexual fidelity is. And, given that this is the kind of marriage this society very clearly deals with, Odysseus is not… unfaithful to Penelope… Odysseus has not committed adultery in The Odyssey because adultery, by definition for him, would mean seducing another man’s legitimate wife.”

Awkward. A touchy subject. A nuanced point. I use another’s words, for I am a man with a campfire and a story. But important. I press on:

“The sexual double standard that we see so clearly reflected in The Odyssey and The Iliad and in many other works of Greek literature, as infuriating as it seems to many modern readers, within the constructs of the society that’s being described here, Odysseus has not betrayed Penelope. Not in any sense, probably that Penelope would recognise, let alone that Odysseus would.”

While, to us, Penelope’s fidelity, and Odysseus’s seeming lack of fidelity is infuriating and grossly unfair, to the audience this epic was written for, it was normal.

And it raises the stakes for Penelope. For her choice.

For the suitors actions are not only uncouth, they threaten Penelope’s reputation. They threaten Telemachus’s legitimacy. They threaten the ties that bind Ithaca itself.

Penelope has no status as a woman unmarried. (Unfair as that is, it is the world at the time). Yet as long as Odysseus is presumed alive, she has status. She has agency.

The moment Odysseus is declared dead, her status is forfeit. No agency. The suitors can, and will, take what they want.

Odysseus’s house and deeds. Declare Telemachus illegitimate (they already conspire to kill him) and sire new heirs. Take Ithaca itself. Ithaca, home of Odysseus. The dream of which is the only thing that keeps Odysseus going.

And there will be nothing she can do to stop it.

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. Only I can do it, being his only child.¹²Laertes and Anticlea have only one child: Odysseus. Anticlea is dead (having died of a broken heart for Odysseus’s lack of return). It is thus the child’s duty to prepare the burial shroud for their parent. Odysseus is not home. Therefore, it is Penelope’s duty, and no others.

Even the suitors are not egregious enough to deny an old man 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 res¹³“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.

Telemachus is not mature enough (lacking a father for half his life)¹⁴Another lesson for sailors is what happens to their home if their boys remain fatherless. Ithaca has been without its fathers for ten years, all whom went to fight in Troy. The result: lawlessness. The suitors are the fatherless grown without guidance. They do not respect the gods. They do not respect xenia. Their selfish actions threaten the stability of Ithaca. Sailor come home. Do not stay too long at sea. to deal with the suitors. Penelope cannot forestall any longer. It must be Odysseus who saves everything.

Yet, if Penelope makes the wrong choice, horror and tragedy will strike.

Homer, “that prince of bards”¹⁵This is Dante’s epithet for Homer in The Divine Comedy. , makes us understand what is at stake.

Agamemnon, that leader of armies that sacked Troy, has his own homecoming tale. It is a tragic homecoming. A tragic nostos.

For Agamemnon returns from Troy only to find his wife, Clytemenstra ,in bed with another man, Aegisthus. Caught red-handed they kill Agamemnon.

It doesn’t end there.

Later, Orestes, Agamemnon’s son finds out. He returns home and avenges his father. Killing both his mother and her lover.

A family and lineage ripped apart. All due to a tragic homecoming. All due to choice.

It is repeatedly told. First, referenced by Zeus. Then Athena tells it to Telemachus. Nestor repeats it to Telemachus. Menelaus (Agamemnon’s brother) also repeats it to Telemachus. Then, Agamemnon’s ghost tells it to Odysseus.

The fate of the story hinges not on Odysseus’s return, but on Penelope’s agency. A limited agency. An unfair agency. But the axis upon which the story lies.

It is the tension at its heart. The “ticking bomb”. Can deep, devious Odysseus return home before Penelope gives him up for dead?

And our sailors… would they not agonise to find out? Would they not agitate for Odysseus? Surely they’d be anxious for Penelope?

This is why I say The Odyssey was written for sailors

This allows us to see more.

We understand what resonates. Why the muse tells Homer to start his tale here. We appreciate why the tale was popular in its day. Why it survived a decade of retelling. A century. Two millennia.

Of course, it is not only for Penelope that Odysseus yearns to return home. Or for the land of Ithaca, with its rugged hills, and cave of nymphs.¹⁶Almost nine hundred years after The Odyssey is composed, Porphyry of Tyre takes the ten lines written about the cave of the nymphs in Book XIII and writes ten thousand words critically exploring it as an allegory for the soul. Talk about obsession. Something I can relate to. 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 books¹⁷Ancient 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.¹⁸In 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, she¹⁹I 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 suitors²⁰Literally: “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 purposes²¹Just 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. Telemachus, also after experiencing the terrible xenia of the suitors (for three years), experiences perfect xenia on his adventure. Nestor welcomes him, and aids him to Sparta, where he can find more news.

In Sparta, Menelaus and Helen (yes, that Helen) provide him better xenia, if that were possible. The parting gifts are well bred horses and a chariot. Telemachus must decline for the hills of Ithaca are no place for equestrianism. So, Menelaus exchanges it for his finest silver made by Hephaestus himself, the god’s own blacksmith.

The xenia in the Telemachy contrast. They also foreshadow Odysseus’s plight.

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 is a master of rhetoric. On Scheria he learns that Queen Arete is the real power behind the throne. It is her he must persuade.

After Odysseus is fed and entertained, the next part of xenia is followed. The King asks for his story. Odysseus tells his tale. A gripping story, and Odysseus gets to the best part, he went to Hades and lived to tell the tale. Does he begin with meeting the great dead heroes of Troy?

No, he begins by telling of the great heroines he met. Matriarchs of myth. Heroines that Queen Arete would idolise.

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.²²Cassandra 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”²³So 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.

He makes mistakes. Mistakes that are borne of passion. He nearly reveals himself to the Phaeacians before his desired moment because of an insult, against his masculinity²⁴The Phaeacians throw a feast as part of their xeniafor Odysseus, which includes athletic games. The athletes ask Odysseus to take part, but he declines, citing exhaustion (he did just survive a shipwreck). Euryalus, one of the athletes, says “Truly, stranger, I do not reckon you a man good at games, like the generality of real men: but rather a master of peddling sailors, one who traffics up and down in a heavy merchantman, mindful always of cargo and husbanding freights, with a sharp eye on gain. You are not built like a champion.” It bears to mention here, in Ancient Greece, the goal of athletic games was to prepare young men for war. To claim someone cannot compete in athletics is to question their soldiering abilities. In the context of this society, where fifty thousand men sacked Troy for the honour of Menelaus, being a good warrior was the masculine ideal. Euryalus not only says “you are not a good warrior”, but compares him to a less masculine ideal: a mere trader. A possible pirate. Our modern-day equivalent would be to call someone a criminal sexual deviant who scams old women for their money. Yeah. It was a deep insult.. He grabs a shotput, throwing it farther than anyone else, exclaiming he was the second-best archer in the Trojan war. The events of Troy are well known. Anyone listening carefully could have deduced the stranger in their midst was Odysseus. Folly. Folly borne of passion.

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? Thundering across the sea that the Cyclops should know it was Odysseus, son of Laertes who blinded him? 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 (though of course, it is the fact they ate Helios’s oxen that sealed their fate.²⁵This is an important distinction. In the proem we learn that Odysseus failed his charge as a leader: returning none of his men alive. Yet, we are also told it was the men’s folly, eating the oxen of Helios, that doomed them. We are told this, because Odysseus is not incompetent. His competence is not the question of this story (or is it?). Whether his nostos succeeds or not is.)

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.

What captain would not empathise with Odysseus’s pain at the death of each crew member? At the grief everyone on board feels, yet still he must exhort them to go on:

“Friends, by no excess of grief can we get down to the House of Hades one day before our time. Therefore so long as there is meat and drink in the ship let us remember our stomachs and preserves ourselves from wasting away with hunger…”

Or on the withholding of information to keep morale up:

“There were my orders. All heeded them. Scylla I did not mention: for had I added her hopeless horror to my men’s burden, they might have deserted their oars in panic and run below decks to hide themselves away.”

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 tip²⁶If 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.

Remember – by the customs of xenia the guest does not reveal themselves immediately. No-one in the Phaeacians court knows who this stranger is. Odysseus has been lost at sea for ten years.

He has lost everything. Everything. He knows nothing of the world.

And 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?²⁷The 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. (Though if you must have fun, just plug your ears with wax when they sing. Perhaps the ancient equivalent of “wrap yourself up”?). You will flirt with death. Be respectful of danger. Your loved ones will miss you if you go missing.²⁸Odysseus 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.²⁹Elpenor’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. Thus, learn to spin a good yarn.³⁰The popular source of this idiom is it came from the Royal Navy as sailors would tell stories to entertain each other while doing the tedious time-consumingchore of ‘spinning yarn’, repairing ropes on the ship. Yet as has been pointed out, ‘spinning a yarn’ was probably influenced by the idiom ‘spinning a thread’ which has been around for centuries, turning up in a 1300s medieval romance. I would argue it goes further. It is Penelope weaving and unweaving the burial shroud. Learn to spin a good yarn sailor.

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.³¹Ismarus of the Cicones. He saved his men after they ate the Lotos-flower.³²A flower which makes you forget of home, so you wish to stay forever. He survived the Cyclopes after tricking (and blinding!) one of them. He lost his fleet at the fortress of Lamos. He outmanoeuvred Circe. 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.

In Greek mythology, it is only the greatest of greats who return from Hades. Heracles, or Hercules, famously does this in the final of his twelve labours. Orpheus nearly retrieves his wife from the dead. Theseus enters, gets caught, and is freed by Heracles.

And now shall another name be added: Odysseus.

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.”

In other words, my story is long. It’s getting late. I don’t want to overstay my welcome. Please provide me a ship and I’ll be on my way and trouble you no longer.

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?³³Have 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.