Anyone who uses the word “odyssey” nowadays generally means nothing more than wandering around. Such wandering can lead to a safe and sound homecoming – thus the comfortable and circumspect way of thinking, which does not wish to hear about roaming around unless the story ends with the reminder that there is no place like home. But wandering around can lead to distant horizons, and this corresponds to the modern sensibility that generally mistrusts arrivals and praises those who keep going – because all places seem in principle to be equally good or bad. Thus I can tell whether you are a conservative or a modern if you tell me whether you prefer for an odyssey to end at home or whether the name “Ithaca” only refers to a stage on a journey that continues further, to a familiar destination or to parts unknown.
If we open the Odyssey, attributed to a poet by the name of Homer, who is supposed to be the same person responsible for the Iliad, a book about the rage of Achilles and the fall of Troy, then simply reading it will convince us that its famous stories of wandering have merely an episodic function – they constitute just four of the twenty-four books that form the corpus of Odysseus’ tale (although this way of arranging the text was a late addition by an Alexandrine editor). The other twenty books have a single theme: how it could happen that Odysseus, the man who for a long time could not find his way back from Asia Minor to Ithaca, still finally arrived back home after a twenty-year absence, by the will of the gods and in keeping with his own heartfelt desire? Thus any actual reader of the Odyssey – or better, any listener who allows him- or herself to be enchanted by the rhapsodic recital as though at a concert – will be quite certain that it is a story of coming back home after a war, even more: an apotheosis of the return to domesticity. What the Odyssey celebrates in twenty of its twenty-four books is the ability to put a monstrous ten-year war on foreign soil behind one, and to then suffer ten years of nautical and erotic catastrophe on various islands and at sea, and yet to be able to once more become a Greek among one’s own kind at the end, a friend among friends, a man of the house with his wife, in a word: a man who returns home to peace. Only in this way is the story structured in a decidedly Ithaca-centric manner. And this was the only way to convince all post-Homeric generations of Greeks, initially listeners but later readers of the songs, too, that a Greek is someone who succeeds in returning from a foreign war to once more devote himself to the binding powers and dynamic vital energies that are to be found in a place of his own – and even to the tragedies that not seldom follow the homecoming.
In short: Even today, when we open the Odyssey, we read the greatest story of re-civilization in Western literature. It provides an answer to the existential question of Greek culture: “Is there life after the Trojan War?” It can affirm that there is, by showing how the process of the heroes’ return home tends to end up subtly disarming the heroes – along with a tragic local politics and endless dramas having to do with relationships.1
So let us turn to the much-read beginning of the Odyssey once again and listen to how the singer provides a framework and perspective for his subject-matter:
Sing in me, Muse, and through me tell the story
Of that man skilled in all ways of contending,
The wanderer, harried for years on end,
After he plundered the stronghold
On the proud height of Troy.
He saw the townlands
And learned the minds of many distant men,
And weathered many bitter nights and days
In his deep heart at sea, while he fought only
To save his life, to bring his shipmates home …
And when long years and seasons
Wheeling brought him around that point of time
Ordained for him to make his passage homeward,
Trials and dangers, even so, attended him
Even in Ithaka, near those he loved …2
We have said enough for now about the epic plot. In fact, the Odyssey, from the thirteenth up to the twenty-fourth and final book, only recounts the details of Odysseus’ difficulties after he returns to Ithaca – he has come home and yet is far from reclaiming his property. In his formerly wealthy home, a host of parasites have established themselves and gotten used to enjoying the delights of a freeloading life, in some ways comparable here to a modern society of those who live off the interest from their trust funds while devoting themselves to amusements. The homecoming hero must avoid their murderous intentions, and the former ruler of Ithaca must match his own sense of wounded honor, which must be made right, against their exploitative impudence, even if the price to be paid is a massacre.
The epithet that first provides a closer description of the story’s hero is key to the issue under consideration. We find the first instance of Odysseus’ name in the forty-eighth verse, yet the first verse already introduces his winged epithet: polytropos, a word whose adequate translation has racked the brains of Hellenists and Homeric experts since the Roman era. Livius Andronicus, whose rather loose translation Odusia inaugurated Roman literature around 200 BCE, decided on the Latin expression virum versutum [Tr. – “well-versed man”]. In 1781, Voss, for a long time the most successful of the German translators of Homer, rendered it in a philologically faithful manner as “der Vielgewanderte” [Tr. – “he who has wandered much”]. The translation used above, by Robert Fitzgerald from 1963, uses “that man skilled in all ways of contending.”3 Earlier English Hellenists used expressions such as “much-traveled” or “crafty” for this passage, while more recent ones, provide a free poetic rendering, such as Robert Fagles’ “the man of twists and turns.” The French poet Lecomte de Lisle adapts polytropos in his translation of the Odyssey from 1867 with: l’homme subtil qui erra si longtemps – which is unquestionably quite a stretch from the spirit of the original. Ippolito Piedemonte, the author of the classic Italian translation, renders the critical passage with the phrase l’eroe multiforme che tanto vagò. If we realize that Homeric epithets are the soul of rhapsodic movement, we know that translating them is anything but a minor issue. Just as Hegel will later speak of “the labor of the concept,” so we must speak of “the labor of the epithet” in the world of Homeric formulation. On this critical question, I believe that we should award first prize to the translation of old Voss, with second prize going to Robert Fagles, who caused a furor in 1990 with his new translation of the Odyssey – in which he risked breaking up Homer’s epithet too much with his “in twists and turns”4 – harming the authentic rhapsodic tone quite a bit, which requires the eternal return of concise stock phrases.
Anyone wishing to know who Odysseus is must start with the fact that from the very first line he is polytropos: the man of many paths, who has been put to the test by his detours, a sufferer of setbacks, someone who has been storm-tossed, a man who is played with in many ways and yet who always manages to ensure that the moves made by circumstance ultimately lead to a single result on which everything hinges, the completion of his return home. Because his difficulties in returning home can be traced back to a divine grudge, his wanderings are to be understood as a punishment. They are not an endless sentence, but rather an assignment that he can complete in a certain amount of time with the assistance of Athena and a good deal of his own ingenuity. Thus ten years of divinely sent obstacles are added to ten years of absence caused by war. A large part of the second decade is spent by the hero on two different islands under the spell of women who are skilled in magic, first with Calypso, who demands seven years of love-bondage in her grotto, and then with Circe, who claims an additional year for herself and her marvelous bed. A shorter part of the journey’s time is spent in actual seafaring, facing storms, shipwreck, and the famous adventures with the oblivious lotus eaters, the one-eyed man-eater Polyphemus, the eccentric Laestrygonian giants, and finally the fairy-tale-like friendly Phaeacians, to whom he relates his adventures one long evening as thanks for their hospitality – the odyssey within the Odyssey.
The polytropos is thus the hero of delayed movement toward a goal. This predestines him for all manner of metaphorical reinterpretation and spiritual appropriation, since Odysseus is directly or indirectly a factor any time the structure of the complicated return voyage is taken up again in later European culture. For early Christians, paradise is an Ithaca of the soul, for Augustine the human heart is always restless and is storm-tossed by exercises until it finds rest in God, while in Novalis the correct Romantic answer to the question “Where are we going?” is “always back home,” and even for Hegel the Odyssey is a symbol of spirit’s journey around the world, which after its long exile in externality finally returns as the reflective arrival of the idea at home with itself.
As polytropos, Odysseus is a man who is stretched on the rack of delay. Hence his maneuverability is only the flip side of his constant suffering. In truth, he is a passion-hero, a man of sorrows who encounters obstacles on his return home, even when circumstances seem to ensure that his delays are enjoyable. He is not just a passion-hero when he is tossed about in the flood sent by Poseidon, which lasts for days, with death seemingly right around the corner, or when barbarians eat his traveling companions while they are still alive, he is also one when he takes a year off to rest in the arms of the nymph Calypso. As the goddess’s nightly lover, he sits on the shore of the island of Ogygia by day and weeps bitter tears, feeling homesick. He heroically perseveres in sleeping with the goddess, of course, but his heart is not really in it, since his home and his wife are always on his mind. He only analogically shares a bed with another woman, insofar as she is a respectable surrogate for his wife. He agrees to pay tribute to femininity at another point, since from his distinctly faithful perspective every attractive woman is more or less created in the image of Penelope. Thus he can never be entirely unfaithful when he is attracted to other women – traveling around the world has its price. But since Odysseus’ love, in the final analysis, is bound to his native soil – patrida gaia – and to his marital furrow, he must be disappointed by every woman that makes him weak in the knees but cannot provide him with that great feeling of finally arriving home and seeing his herds in the fields, when the wandering traveler comes back for his own. Even the incredibly voluptuous Circe finds this out and has every reason to say to the reluctant hero: “Hale must your heart be and your tempered will. / Odysseus then you are, O great contender …”5 – we again hear the key word, polytropos, which characterizes the hero’s being tossed back and forth. Odysseus climbs into the bed of the witch of Aeaea after she makes a solemn vow to not harm him. Otherwise, he would have to fear that: “now it is I myself you hold, enticing / into your chamber, to your dangerous bed, / to take my manhood when you have me stripped.”6 After Circe’s pledge he is nevertheless ready to give it a try, even if the homecoming temporarily fades from view here.
The much-wandering hero’s frequent movement even includes an encounter with his own epic shadow. Odysseus undergoes a primal staging of the encounter with the self, indeed of self-reflection, near the half-way point of his journey, when he attends a banquet at the court of the Phaiacian King Alcinous, where the blind rhapsode Demodocus (whose name literally means “honored by the people”) performs in the midst of the festivities. Incredibly, Demodocus sings of the very events in the war from which our hero has escaped not long before. At the Phaiacian king’s table, Odysseus hears the song of the fall of Troy and of the unspeakable suffering of the heroes who died there, indeed he even hears the story of the Trojan Horse and the sack of the city: this is more than he can bear, and he loses his composure. To conceal his distress, he draws a veil over his face and freely weeps tears that his host cannot see: “And Odysseus / let the bright molten tears run down his cheeks, / weeping the way a wife mourns for her lord / on the lost field where he has gone down fighting.”7
In this moment of emotional reflection, he first fully becomes polytropos, a man who got around so much that he had to stumble across the reflections of his own past. Here reflexivity emerges from maneuverability, an encounter with the self emerges from being tossed about. In this staging of subjective memory, the oldest in European literature, the epic reunion with his own fate still initially seems to be a superficial coincidence, and yet here memory is already linked to emotional pain – centuries before tragedy and millennia before psychoanalysis. Catharsis immediately follows anamnesis. If even tears must somehow be learned, then we could say that Europe has learned a beneficial kind of crying from Odysseus and first realized how stories and tears belong together by observing him, a storm-tossed man. Of course, Odysseus weeps to himself over everything that has happened, everything in which he was actively involved and everything that he suffered, and sheds ecumenical tears for friend and foe alike.
Many centuries later, Virgil still adheres to this principle that depiction and storytelling renew pain, when he has the Roman Odysseus, Aeneas, a refugee who is on his way from the old Troy in the East to Rome, the new Troy in the West, encounter ornate images that immortalize the Trojan catastrophe, shortly after landing on the coast of Carthage – images before which he stands stunned, “sighing often the while, and his face wet with a full river of tears.”8 Though in convulsions, Aeneas manages to say Sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt: “Even things themselves have their tears, and mortal fates touch the soul.”9 Virgil provides a formula for how the realist art of narration functions in Aeneas’ subsequent telling of the story to Dido, when it occurs to the hero to say to his listener: Infandum, regina, iubes renovare dolorem, or “Dreadful, O Queen, is the woe thou bidst me recall.”10 Theodor Haecker was probably right when he remarked that Virgil here managed to write one of the most sonorous lines of all time with five of the most ordinary words in Latin.11
The epithet most used by Homer for Odysseus is polymētis, which literally means “of many counsels” or “the powerful schemer” – since in Greek mētis refers to good counsel and the ability to cleverly ensure that things turn out well; it means the stratagem, the simulation, the hunter’s trap, the feint, and inspired wit. Hence it is the quick-witted man’s virtue par excellence.12 At the same time, Mētis is the proper name of a goddess of intelligence, whom Zeus pursues in his usual manner. He fathers a child with her, whose birth he fears, since it had been foretold that the child would be his equal in intelligence – which prompts him to devour the pregnant mother. He winds up with a very difficult brain-pregnancy as a result. Hephaestus relieves the headache by striking Zeus on the skull with a double axe, so that Athena can leap out of his head armed with a lance and wearing a full suit of armor. Zeus later comes to terms with his exceptionally wise daughter, and when Athena offers candid opinions during the gods’ council, he contents himself by saying to her in a paternal tone: “My child, what strange remarks you let escape you.”13
In what follows, I would like to make a case for my basic thesis that ancient Greek intellectual culture, informed by mētis as it appears in the Odyssey and is reflected in various Hellenistic myths about cunning, represents a distant prelude to what in our view is the most Greek of all phenomena – the Sophistic movement, which led to the secession of philosophy in the fourth century. In contemporary German, a society animated by sophistic arts would be called a Streitkultur [Tr. – “agonistic culture”] – we can see here that even though Germany has a word for this phenomenon, it lacks the thing itself, because, instead of a Streitkultur, we have an accusatory culture [Hetzkultur], a culture of denunciation, a culture of disparagement, in which things are decided in advance, before they have a chance to become controversial. In contrast, the Greek polis was organized on an agonistic basis. Not only were there organized interests and divergent classes in every city, there was a ubiquitous pluralism of claims to nobility and excellence that could not have been made without a rhetorically articulated competition between the claimants.
To truly understand the Sophistic movement in its original sense, we must rid it of the bad name given to it by the Academy, a reputation it received partly on valid logical grounds, and partly from dubious strategic motives. One of the positive effects of Nietzsche’s epochal emergence in the recent history of ideas was that even academic philosophy was compelled to reevaluate the Sophistic movement. In our present context, we can resume this reconsideration by observing that the Sophistic movement signifies precisely the continuation of the Odyssean praxis of intelligence with urban means. The homecoming hero’s capacity to negotiate a viable future for himself with every power in the world, with the gods, with human beings, indeed with the sea itself, recurs in the polis as the capacity of orators and lawyers to navigate the sea of disputes within the city and between cities and to conclude their mandates successfully.
If Homer often endows the storm-tossed voyaging hero with the epithet polymētis, he is not merely labeling a specific person, but characterizing a type of masculine existence in which renowned heroic vigor (in other words, the ability to make an impact) for the first time concludes a new kind of compromise with cunning – with a purely navigational or operative cunning. Such cunning thought still remains entirely bound to current situations. This early version of cunning is still a long way from abstract theory. The characteristic feature of Odyssean intelligence is that it understands itself to be dealing with the challenges that fate has posed for it from day to day, from port to port, and from case to case. The challenges to be overcome by the seafarer on his delayed journey home are prototypes of what will one day be called “problems” – but there can only be “problems” at all, if homecoming heroes have turned into argumentative citizens and if they have they transformed the monsters at the ends of the Earth into mere legal adversaries. In urban space, a free-ranging intelligence forms concepts that are gradually detached from the level of given cases and concrete examples. The desire to have and to solve “problems” begins to flourish when the cunning of polymētis Odysseus changes into the maneuverability of the urban or “political” rhetoric that distinguished lawyers and orators at the peak of Hellenistic culture. There is a moving episode in the Odyssey that is a powerful example of polymētis Odysseus’ art. I am thinking of the shipwrecked sailor landing on the beach on the island of Phaeacia, after a storm has destroyed the raft that was supposed to bring him home when he left the nymph Calypso behind. More than half-drowned, with his last bit of strength he saves himself, and after several days of floating around on the tempestuous sea ends up on the beach, where, stumbling into the bushes, he falls into a deep sleep, concealed by a hedge. On the following day, Nausicaa, the daughter of King Alcinous, and her maids head to the shore to wash their clothing and discover the unkempt shipwrecked voyager, who emerges from his hiding place at that very moment.
Homer sets the scene, showing how the unclothed foreigner winds up in the young women’s view:
Odysseus had this look, in his rough skin
Advancing on the girls with pretty braids;
And he was driven on by hunger, too.
Streaked with brine, and swollen, he terrified them,
So that they fled, this way and that. Only
Alkínoös’ daughter stood her ground, being given
A bold heart by Athena, and steady knees …14
Odysseus is now faced with a fateful choice: he can either throw himself at the feet of “this beauty” and clasp her knees – or stand away from the young woman and appeal to her from afar with flattering words. After deliberating for a moment, he realizes that he prefers the second option, because he is mindful that a daughter from a good house might become easily annoyed if he were to presume to touch her knees without permission. This consideration leads to the shipwrecked voyager’s speech on the shore – or, as Homer puts it, he “let the soft words fall.”15 In terms of the history of rhetoric, this can be viewed as the first plea ever made by a lawyer pro se on European soil. The naked speaker mounts the rostrum that his need has erected, and devotes himself to the task of winning the harshest public in the world, the bold heart of a young woman, over to his side.
Mistress: please: are you divine, or mortal?
If one of those who dwell in the wide heaven,
You are most near to Artemis, I should say –
Great Zeus’s daughter – in your grace and presence.
If you are one of Earth’s inhabitants,
How blest your father, and your gentle mother,
Blest all your kin. I know what happiness
Must send the warm tears to their eyes, each time
They see their wondrous child go to the dancing!
But one man’s destiny is more than blest –
He who prevails, and takes you as his bride.
Never have I laid eyes on equal beauty
In man or woman. I am hushed indeed.
So fair, one time, I thought a young palm tree
At Delos near the altar of Apollo –
I had troops under me when I was there
On the sea route that later brought me grief –
But that slim palm tree filled my heart with wonder:
Never came shoot from Earth so beautiful.
So now, my lady, I stand in awe so great
I cannot take your knees. And yet my case is desperate:
Twenty days, yesterday, in the winedark sea,
On the ever-lunging swell, under gale winds,
Getting away from the Island of Ogygia.
And now the terror of Storm has left me stranded
Upon this shore – with more blows yet to suffer,
I must believe, before the gods relent.
Mistress, do me a kindness!
After much weary toil, I come to you,
And you are the first soul I have seen – I know
No others here. Direct me to the town,
Give me a rag that I can throw around me,
Some cloth or wrapping that you brought along.
And may the gods accomplish your desire:
A home, a husband, and harmonious
Converse with him …16
But the white-armed maiden, Nausicaa, says: “Stranger, there is no quirk or evil in you that I can see.”17
We can clearly see that Odysseus on the shores of Phaeacia does not have what we would call a “problem” at all. He is in need, in a tight squeeze with only one way out, precisely where the young woman is standing. The man whom Homer calls polymētis is a warrior who has learned to transform every hardship into a challenge. From his nakedness he makes an argument, and he forms a project out of his destitution. He is literally someone who is never at a loss. We should never forget that at the inception of European rhetoric, we find a sea monster making its plea and frightening off young women. Only one brave maiden holds her ground to form an audience. A miracle occurs in her ears – the salt-encrusted monster opens its mouth and reveals itself to be the most human of all human beings. The zōion logon echon, as defined a half-millennium later by Aristotle, the living being that has speech – here stands on the beach, with his irresistible flattery, his musical declamation, and his ability to make a virtue, that of beautiful speech, out of the most urgent necessity. It then occurs to Nausicaa that she might fall in love with a man who speaks to her this way, not so much because of his quite forward compliments, which drift past her like a warm breeze, but because she feels and suspects that a good and clever man stands before her. She has experienced a logophany – proof that language, as soon as it comes into its own, elevates the human being. If the disheveled foreigner is not a god, he has provided proof of his humanity by speaking as no beast, no fool, and no villain could.
From here, we can proceed further in an almost direct line to a scene that played out centuries later in Athens. In one of his dialogues, Plato tells us how a father brings his teenage son to Socrates the sophist, who was known for his ability to educate youth. Socrates turned to the young man with a single request, “Speak boy, so that I may see you.”18 The belief in the logophanic revelation of the human being’s essential nature reaches its culmination here. At the same time, Odysseus’ plea on the beach also leads directly to other fifth-century sophists who were famous for their ability to argue any position. Isocrates, the prince of Greek lawyers, demonstrates how significant this influence was in his notorious Helenē Encōmion (Encomium of Helen), which is supposed to prove that a good lawyer can win a case that seems lost in advance. What case could be more hopeless than the one against the most fatal woman of antiquity, the unfaithful beauty for whose sake the Trojan War must be fought?
We learn of Gorgias that, in his case, the ability to speak about anything at all degenerated into his really being a know-it-all. In one anecdote we read: “For coming into the theater of the Athenians he had the boldness to say ‘suggest a subject,’ and he was the first to proclaim himself willing to take this chance, showing apparently that he knew everything and would trust to the moment to speak on any subject.”19 Only one aspect of this story is of interest here: Gorgias has walked every step of the path that leads from a distress that still can find words to playing with mere “problems” – this can be observed in the word he uses to challenge the Athenian public to propose a topic for him: this word is proballete – from the verb proballein, meaning “to throw something” at him, “to suggest” something to him, “to pose a topic,” a word from which both ancient and modern problemata derive. The “problem” that Gorgias wanted to “solve” in the theater was simply a random topic for an expert to develop a thesis on or for a virtuoso to use as a basis for extemporization.
If the Sophistic movement is supposed to involve the translation of existential hardships into a kind of relaxed playing with topics, then Odysseus is not yet a sophist in this sense. Odyssean intelligence is still bound to the harsh necessities of the struggle for survival, and cannot claim the privilege of relaxed observation for itself. Nevertheless, we can trace a line of descent from him to the Sophistic movement, since we discover in polymētis Odysseus the first signs of a general craft consciousness that is an essential feature of Classical Greek civilization. From a distance, the Odyssey already heralds that great event in the history of thought which can only be called the Greek miracle: the birth of problems from the proud awareness of being able to deal with them. The brilliant words of an Austrian essayist, written before the First World War, seem appropriate for fifth-century Greeks: “Culture has a wealth of problems, and the more mysteries it discovers, the more enlightened it is.”20 We could even say instead that culture is the sum of relief efforts [Entlastungen] in response to primal needs. Decadence sets in the moment that the recipients of such relief forget why they needed culture to relieve them in the first place.
If we advance further in our examination of Homeric epithets, which make the hero into a man with qualities, we come to the most dramatic epic formula of all: the oft-recurring expression polytlas dios Odysseus – godlike much-enduring Odysseus, or der göttliche Dulder Odysseus [Tr. – “the divine sufferer Odysseus”], to make use of Voss’ translation once more, while English translators here introduce phrases such as “much-suffering brilliant Odysseus” or “long-suffering godlike Odysseus.” Thus readers of the Iliad naturally recall the analogous expression podarkes dios Achilleus: godlike swift-footed Achilles. This stock figure of speech, which according to expert philologists surfaces 37 times, always in the nominative case and at the end of a verse, as needed to maintain hexameter, once more reminds us of the connection between traveling and suffering, which is essential for understanding the epic psychology of the Odyssey. For ancient Mediterranean cultures, travel – or sailing – and suffering are indissolubly linked. A stormy sea with the obligatory shipwreck strikes them as a universal metaphor for existence. The statement attributed to Pompey: navigare necesse est, vivere non necesse – “to sail is necessary, to live is not necessary” – suggests that suffering is necessary and that we lose our lives in any case, even if we remain on land, but more quickly at sea. Prior to the Romans, the Greeks thought the same thing, as indicated by their saying plein anagkē, zēn ouk anagkē [Tr. – “to sail is necessary, to live is not necessary”], and even in the nineteenth century the narrator of Moby Dick is of this opinion – which is why, on the very first page of his book, he explains to the reader that when a cold November arrives in his soul and he really finds himself feeling suicidal, he simply climbs aboard a ship.
Polytlas dios Odysseus – with this solemn stereotypical figure of speech, the narrator invokes an existential position that broadly characterized the Greeks returning from Troy. Anyone who believed that the city’s fall meant that the heroes’ battle was over saw his hopes dashed – the battle is never over, even when confrontations shift from the battlefield to the high seas and from an epic distance to the home front. The battle is not even over when arguments replace weapons and local rivals step in to take the place of foreign enemies.
Yet this Homeric phrase already expresses a tendency to interpret the endurance of suffering in active terms. If Odysseus is often addressed as the man of much sorrow (polypenthēs), of many tribulations (polytlēmōn), and of much endurance (polytlas), the purpose of these epithets is not to depict him as a victim – a modern type of victimology is the last thing on the mind of the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Rather, such epithets serve to characterize the hero as a man whose suffering never made him wretched and whose constant ordeal never made him weary of himself and of life. In the language of later philosophy, we would probably say here that the hero’s many sufferings are mentioned because he constitutes a substance whose attributes are suffering. Incidentally, we can trace the development of thought in this formulation: classical philosophy no longer has any place for heroes and heroism, because it is trying to carry out thought’s task of dissolving subject into substance – in contrast, modernity proclaims the counter-formulation: substance is to be developed as subject. Substance is the only hero of metaphysics, whether it is called God, physis, being, or matter. Once this logical monstrosity is conceived, the only thing left for brave human beings to do, in their vile individuality, is to get rid of themselves for the sake of this colossus – to be a wise human being thus means to be very good at imitating lifeless substance, but wisest is he who obliterates himself, like Empedocles (the Etna diver), to abolish the troubling difference between self and absolute fundament.
Such reductive measures are not alien to the epic interpretation of the world. An epic hero is a determined adventurer who repeatedly passes the test and in doing so seems to be on the way to a certain kind of “substantiality” that would be synonymous with a certain kind of “subjectivity.” Yet the epic hero always remains utterly enveloped by particular struggles, he is always involved in an ongoing adventure, and even his thoughts are entirely related to some current conflict, though he has occasionally been celebrated as the protagonist of a nascent inner life. To again put this into philosophical terminology: he is only alive to the extent that he bears attributes – the establishment of a permanently stable Odysseus-substance or the preservation of a permanently stable Odysseus-subject is the least of his worries.
Odysseus does not yet need to either establish such a substance or preserve such a subject because what endures [das Bleibende] in him is concealed in another mode of lasting. The epic world requires that he hold on [Bleibe-Leistung], and he is able to do so precisely because he is distinguished for being polytlas, someone who endures much suffering. His endurance of suffering cannot simply be equated with passivity, it has a fortiori nothing to do with the metaphysical and religious forms of masochism that later flourished in fatalism, mysticism, and dolorism. The performative character of heroically enduring suffering is unquestionable to the narrator of the Odyssey, and if Homer repeatedly calls him polytlas dios Odysseus, someone who has suffered much, someone who divinely perseveres, he is simply emphasizing that Odyssean suffering is a skillful kind of suffering that has little or nothing to do with the way we are ordinarily overwhelmed by circumstances that render us passive.
The relevant locus classicus for obtaining a picture of the hero’s endurance of suffering can be found in the story Odysseus tells at the Phaeacian court. He there recounts how he and his companions had already seen the shepherd’s fire on the coast of Ithaca and were about to rejoice over their successful return home, when a catastrophic storm drove them back to the island of Aeolia, from which they had embarked not long before. The storm seems all the more ominous since it was provoked by Odysseus’ companions. While Odysseus was dozing at the ship’s helm, they found what they believed to be treasure that he had concealed from them, and opened the closed bag that the wind god had given to the hero to take along on the voyage. The crew’s lack of trust in their captain was the source of the catastrophe. At this point, we hear what Odysseus thinks of the situation:
Roused up, despairing in that gloom, I thought:
“Should I go overside for a quick finish
Or clench my teeth and stay among the living?”21
Endurance of suffering is the practical ability to avoid becoming impatient enough to lose all hope. This is precisely what we observe in the Odyssey’s most famous episode, when Odysseus would like to kill the sleeping Polyphemus with his sword, after the cyclops has eaten a few of his companions, but refrains from giving in to this initial impulse because he sees that the cave’s exit is blocked off and only the giant can open it. Philosophically inclined readers of the Odyssey have long celebrated this as the first depiction of having “second thoughts.”22 This episode suggests a link between thought and hesitation that will eventually culminate in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, at the inception of the modern era. Twentieth-century sociologists call this link “the inhibition of action by reflection.” We observe something analogous after the hero’s return to Ithaca, when he has the appearance of a ragged beggar and one of the suitors gives him the kind of kick that would have sent any other man reeling.23 Odysseus pauses for a moment to consider how he should avenge himself: should he strike the man with a club from behind or lift the man up and slam his head into the ground? Restraint prevails: “Then he controlled himself, and bore it quietly.”24
The spectrum of the endurance of suffering in the Odyssey is quite broad. In the first place, as noted, the hero must put up with the hardships of sailing, already mentioned in the fourth (of twelve thousand) verses: “harried for years on end.”25 We are thus programmatically given notice that a good number of the tests the hero will face will occur in the maritime realm, where education, paideia, happens on the high seas, before it becomes the business of schools.
The frequent loss of companions while underway is an additional hardship that must be suffered – as is the price the hero must pay for the stupidity and outrages of those same companions, whether they are slaughtering the cattle of Helios or opening up Aeolus’ wind-bag. Odysseus is not a solitary hermit, he is rather collegial, and he puts up with and may well even enjoy being together with his companions (or hetairoi) for long stretches of time. And if such men are not available, even women companions do not seem to be unwelcome to him. The name for such feminine companions has been better understood in its more than two-millennia-long voyage into the modern lexicon than its masculine form was – we merely have to look up the word “hetaera” to see how unconcerned the Greeks generally were with gender when thinking about companionship. We have already discussed Odysseus’ two time-consuming feminine companions on the islands of Ogygia and Aeaea, and we have also already noted that these erotic evasions could fall under the rubric of endurance – embraces are to be counted as tests when the embraced would prefer to pursue another agenda.
Finally, misrecognition is yet another misfortune that must be endured by Odysseus after he returns to Ithaca, when he first goes unrecognized, if not unnoticed, as he reenters his own house in the guise of an old and ragged beggar. There, lying on the steps like a proto-Diogenes, he is fed on the leftovers that the suitors toss his way. Indeed, to experience complete degradation, he fights with another beggar for a food prize that has been offered as a reward by the cynical suitors. Modern social philosophers would undoubtedly say that Odysseus must undergo alienation from his true self in order to preserve himself. Admittedly, such thoughts would be anachronistic in an epic context, since the singer has no interest in either substance or subject. The singer is merely concerned with the hero’s transformations according to the law of the situation. If the situation demands that the hero be incognito, this happens without self-pity – with a wave of her wand, Athena changes the homecoming hero’s outward appearance so that even those most closely related to him no longer recognize him. There is no mention of alienation when this occurs. Even as a beggar, polytropos Odysseus is no one but himself – yet he is himself precisely in the endurance of suffering. He accepts the basic law of life, according to which enjoying ourselves is an exception and suffering the rule in a harsh world. Endurance is the hero’s cunning and resilient ability to hold on through an entire range of situations, to become what the situation demands of him, beyond identity and non-identity. The author of the Odyssey has a special epithet for such resilient prudence: talasiphronos, which Anton Weiher reliably and precisely translates as “standhaftklug” [Tr. – “cunningly firm”].
There is no final exam in the Homeric world. Yet the homecoming hero will be severely tested one more time – a tougher test than dodging the volley of spears heaved by the suitors, when he later engages in a life-and-death battle with them. Odysseus’ ideally faithful wife Penelope is the next to last person to recognize him – his father, the aged Laertes, is last – and her obstinate failure to recognize him, her incredulity, her refusal to believe the words of the wet-nurse who had recognized Odysseus after noticing his scar while washing his feet, forms the key obstacle that must be overcome before the hero may trust that he has really arrived back home. Worried that she might be disappointed, she is unwilling to recognize him, although he completely reverts to his old form after the bath and stands before her fully ready to be recognized, saying to her: “Strange woman, / the immortals of Olympus made you hard / harder than any… / Her heart is iron in her breast.”26 So he must pass the final test that Penelope’s cunning has devised for him: she insists that their old marriage bed should be moved from its present location to another spot – and as soon as his answer proves that he has seen through the riddle (having built it with his own hands from a massive, ancient olive tree that could not possibly have been uprooted, Odysseus knows something that only he can, namely that the bed is immobile), Penelope relents and is ready to believe and to recognize him. Now, after the homecoming hero has given the “sign” and provided intimate proof that he is Odysseus, the spell is broken, and what generally follows an anagnōrismos then occurs, when those who had been inseparable finally recognize each other after so long a time apart – composure is overcome by tears, until dawn finally breaks, though not as early as usual on this occasion because rhododactylos Eōs, the rosy-fingered goddess of dawn, is deliberately a bit late on this special day so as to allow the magnificent couple some time. Tears of recognition tell their own stories – as we already know. The reunited couple, already sharing their bed, do not fall asleep before Odysseus has recounted his entire story one more time.
Odysseus told
Of what hard blows he had dealt out to others /
And of what blows he had taken – all that story.
She could not close her eyes till all was told.27
We can again trace a path from this scene of recognition to nascent dimensions of Greek thought, in this case to the quite marvelous, suggestive, and fateful Platonic hyperbole that all cognition is essentially remembrance and recognition – namely, glimpsing the ideas that were present in the soul prior to its birth. What the Odyssey’s ancient editor called Penelope’s anagnōrismos is the original depiction of everything that comes to be known as anamnēsis in the Platonic tradition. It is obvious that Homeric recognition follows entirely different laws than does Platonic memory. While anamnēsis is guided by eidetic constants and grounded in the alignment between a priori formal archetypes and a posteriori manifestations of those formal archetypes, Homeric anagnōrismos stems from the discovery of a distinctive feature. Neither his wet-nurse nor his wife recognize Odysseus from the way he looks, or from how his outward appearance resembles the formal-archetypical self that we would find in a universe operating according to Platonic rules of the game. Instead, they determine his identity by means of a discrete distinctive feature – Homer explicitly says: sēma, just as with modern passports today there is talk of “unalterable distinguishing features” – in the case of the elder Eurycleia this is the scar from the boar’s tusk on his foot, while in Penelope’s case it is the secret of the bed made from an olive tree. Nevertheless, Odysseus’ return prepares the Greeks in advance for Platonism and its subtle logic of returning. Even later Gnostics, who were interested in the soul’s return home to its ancestral world beyond, did not fail to note the edifying analogies to the Odyssean nexus between recognition and returning home.28 Incidentally, Plato memorialized the sublation of the epic ethos into a philosophical and non-tragic attitude, when in the tenth book of the Republic he expounded on the myth in which Odysseus’ soul, at its reincarnation, chooses the life of a private individual who minds his own business: “remembering its former sufferings, it rejected love of honor [philotimias].”29 Plato knows his conceptual terminology: where philotimia was, there philosophia shall be. The motif of homecoming first really comes into its own in philosophical leisure – as true retreat into the contemplative life. Philosophy is the mother of the idyll and utopia its granddaughter: reckless, like all heirs, it would like to send the entire human race to Ithaca.
The clearest trace that leads from Odyssean motifs to later positions in Greek thought begins with an image of divine endurance of suffering and perhaps inevitably brings us close to Stoicism, that is, to a philosophical movement that could be summed up as a general system of being-in-the-world-enduring-suffering. There are two essential elements to Stoicism: the theoretical conviction that the world is a place where human beings are exposed to burdens, and the practical resolution to harmonize with this belief by performing daily exercises that involve burdens. Thus sapientia and patientia are slowly fused together. So it is no accident when Odysseus, in Roman stoicism, is stylized into the archetype of the wise philosopher – yet we also find a contrasting tradition in Rome, which elaborates a disagreeable image of Odysseus, not least in Virgil, who transfers the radiant virtues of Greek seafaring heroes to Aeneas, so as to leave only dubious qualities for the original. Among Stoics in general, as a metaphor for life, seafaring remains as self-evident as it is indispensable, and philosophy was considered by them to be a preschool for foundering. We thus read in Seneca: “… who sails this sea that has no other shore but death.” In which case, to philosophize means daring to cross the sea of life, and, indeed, not on the raft of emotions and bad habits, but on the carefully constructed boat of practice and tranquility.
None of Odysseus’ frequently recurring epithets is as sonorous and full of prescient undertones as the word polymēchanos. It brings to mind the connection, already evident to the Greeks, between cunning, guile, and contrivance [Maschine]. If, in the parlance of our times, we speak of “machines” [Maschinen] (a term that can be traced back to the Latin machina, the equivalent of the Greek mēchanē), we ordinarily do not still have this term’s basic meaning in mind. Originally, a mēchanē or machina is just a ruse, a subterfuge, a trick, hitting an opponent below the belt. Its “setting in life” (as Biblical philologists put it) is initially only to be found in the way that human beings deal with rivals and adversaries who are considered to have violated the rules of the game. Only with the concept’s extension to complex instruments do we arrive at a machine from what was originally a ruse. This extension occurs with good reason, insofar as we are ready to define machines as devices for the circumvention of nature, whose assistance allows human activity to sidestep a problem that cannot be directly resolved, in order to handle it indirectly.30 As is well known, the lever is the paradigm for every cunning mechanical effect in antiquity. With levers, human beings are able to transport loads that would otherwise be impossible to move. In ancient times, levers were often used to operate a theater crane, which allowed tragic poets to have the gods float down into a scene from above – something still familiar to us today as deus ex machina, the first special effect, which can be traced back to this technological device. A while later, we find something comparable in the Church Father Ignatius of Antioch, when he declares in his Letter to the Ephesians, about 100 years after Christ, that the cross (stauros) is a mēchanē of Christ,31 an expression that has to be translated as “rope attached to a hoisting crane.” This device’s usefulness in constructing the realm of God must be acknowledged – which is precisely what Ignatius means when he says that such machines of Christ first make it possible to erect a temple for the Father’s glorification. In contrast, until the eighteenth century, every use of the word machina was subjectively characterized by strategic orientation, indeed sheer cunning and making a move was so present in the term’s usage that one can only decide on a case-by-case basis whether a given discourse is concerned with a ruse or with a machine. In Lorenzo Da Ponte’s libretto The Marriage of Figaro from 1786, we find the semantically and musically crucial passage: tutte le macchine rovescerò [Tr. – “All your plots I’ll overthrow!”] in the aria “Se vuol ballare, Signor Contino,” and it is here evident that the word macchine here does not mean “machines,” but rather “machinations,” by means of which the Count would like to enforce his feudal privilege with the lovely Susanna – the very woman with whom Figaro is head over heels in love.
If Homer frequently describes his hero as polymēchanos, it is not enough to translate this word as “cunning,” “resourceful,” “deviser of intrigues,” and so forth, as though we were simply confronted with a sly character’s incidental features. We must bear in mind that the machine’s triumphal procession through the human sphere had already begun in Homer’s time. Polymēchanos is thus not merely an attribute that adorns a single clever hero, at a basic level it can already be used to broadly characterize the civilizing work environment of that era – including metallurgy, navigation, urban planning, and epic poetry. Because war has always involved the polytechnical education of engineers, it is no wonder that the epithet polymēchanos is initially attributed to a warrior. It has often been noted that Odysseus represents a new type of hero, who, very much in distinction from the purely thymotic and violently raging type (exemplified by Achilles), can be described as a cognitive hero, proficient in delay. The defining feature of the character Odysseus is not merely a more advanced operation of reflective qualities, but more importantly his quite pronounced manipulative attitude toward human beings and things, from a strategic perspective.
This shift of perspective already defines the conclusion of the Iliad. It is well known that Achilles’ wild raging power does not decide the Trojan War, but rather Odysseus’ war machine, the sinister hollow horse, in whose belly some of the best Greek warriors are hiding – and, incidentally, we should note that we have traditionally been provided with more names of passengers than there were spots available in the horse’s interior. With the apparent retreat of the Greek fleet from the Trojan shore, the strategic aspect of this mēchanē is emphasized, namely that it makes the gift seem plausible. The horse-machine not only outwits the Trojans, at the same time it plays the gods off against each other, since while it is an apparent offering to Poseidon, who was favorably disposed toward the Trojans, it is really intended as a tribute to Athena, who was favorably disposed toward the Greeks.
Yet the cunning of polymechanical Odysseus does not celebrate its greatest intellectual-historical triumph in Troy, but on the high seas, when he constructs the first machine of self-inhibition while his ship subtly sails past the treacherous rocks on which the Sirens perched, which has since become legendary in the European tradition. The technical simplicity of the hero’s fettering should not deceive us – even here we have a genuine case of mechanical engineering. Odysseus constructs a dispositif by building a functional ad hoc wax-rope-mast-machine. Stoics were already able to easily expand on this image, by interpreting the fettered sailor as a prototype of the sage, who traverses the temptations of the world bound to the mast of exercise and reflection. The mast symbolizes the fundamental Stoic distinction between the things that are up to us – these, of course, are our own thoughts, feelings, and judgments – and the things that are not up to us – in other words, the colossal remainder, which with explicit disparagement is referred to as the external world or adiaphora. Only someone tied to his or her own mast has the chance for a happy life, insofar as such a person will be happy in a philosophical sense by keeping to what falls within their own sphere of power, a life that has found refuge from temptation.
The analogies between the mast and the cross obviously did not escape the early Christians. Maximus of Tyre is the clearest example of this when, in the first half of the fifth century, he writes that “Christ … was bound to the cross so that we can be drawn through the tempting dangers of the world as though with closed ears.” The Christian community is here interpreted as a group of hetairoi, who row through the world under the command of their crucified captain, with the wax of the gospel in their ears.
Over the last two millennia countless authors have assimilated the episode of the sirens into their own respective frameworks, drawing on this kind of unscrupulous reinterpretation. Not too long ago, the unorthodox Marxist Theodor Adorno showed us where such reinterpretation can lead: he seriously thought that we could recognize Odysseus as the first citizen, who, bound to the mast of delayed gratification, misses out on what he desires, yet does so in a conscious and culturally enlightened way, while the rowers represent the unconscious proletariat, who have the wax of mass culture in their ears and never experience what he is able to avoid. Had Adorno not speculated from memory, but consulted the original, he might have noted that the sirens are not prostitutes who offer their charms for free and feign erotic socialism, nor are they singers in a Wagnerian opera who glorify the love of death. Their lethal charm is based on their ability to charm the hero sailing by into believing that he is experiencing his apotheosis, so that he feels transported from their mouths to the realm of myths and gods – this divinization while alive is what drives men out of their minds, leading them to jump overboard only to perish at the foot of the transfiguring rocks.
Bazon Brock has more likely adopted the right approach, when he would like to recognize Odysseus as the father of “artists of self-captivation,” or, in other words, of the rare species of artists, at least to this point, who are ready to shield the contemporary social world [Mitwelt] from its own delusions of grandeur and from its fury for self-actualization. On this reading, we find ourselves back in Stoic territory, since Stoics not only learn to be on their guard against external distractions, but are also cautious when it comes to the ambivalent tendencies of their own internal states. The sirens would thus be accomplices of the megalomaniacal dispositions that are so easy to arouse in the souls of warriors and artists – and that today provide the cues for the art market and celebrity complex. That Odysseus resists the Sirens’ temptation should ultimately not surprise us, indeed we might even ask whether he would have made it past them without rope and mast, since he had already refused private immortality at Calypso’s side. But since the Sirens’ overtures concern great or popular immortality, it was perhaps sensible to avail himself of rope in the case of such temptation.
Nevertheless, I do not think that the Stoic appropriation of the figure of Odysseus should have the last word here. If we take the epithet polymēchanos seriously, it once again leads us to the Sophistic movement, which had a much higher potential for genuinely philosophical content than might have been apparent after Plato’s lethal denunciations. We can see that the Sophistic movement had an indispensable and unparalleled spiritual and philosophical significance, as soon as we acknowledge its fundamental ethical figure. It puts all of its best energy into a single gesture – supporting the revolt of human beings against helplessness, which has proven to be an essential element of the adventure of European civilization.
Helplessness had a name among the Greeks: amēchania – which literally means the complete absence of cunning, guile, and contrivance, the lack of an art or wits that would show a way out, to be without the resources that could help those in need avert what is ailing them. It is the condition human beings descend into when the spirit of mēchanē, the polymēchanos-attitude, is dormant. They then sink into a stupor, or become resigned to their lack of resources, falling into a kind of contented misfortune. They succumb to dejection when faced with the challenge of finding ways out and ways around adversity to something better. Thus if we are unwilling to translate amēchania as “helplessness,” we could perhaps instead render it as “oblivious to resources” or “refusing to see that there is a way out” – phrases that horrifyingly sum up what most of humanity has actually accomplished throughout history.
Among the Greeks, as we know, divinity easily emerges from a general concept, and thus they recognized a goddess or daimōn by the name of Amēchania (Helplessness), the sister of Penia (ragged Poverty). The latter – as we may recall – is the goddess of not-having, who is depicted in Plato’s Symposium as the mother of the demigod Eros – that forceful rogue who guides human beings toward what they are lacking. Both daimones, Helplessness and Poverty, played a role in a famous diplomatic dispute that is recounted by Herodotus: when Themistocles wanted to impose a tribute on the Andrians with the argument that Athens had two powerful and obliging gods on its side, Persuasion (Peithō) and Necessity (Anagkē), the Andrians are supposed to have replied that this alliance might well explain Athens’ good fortune, but that, in contrast, they were the homeland of two less obliging goddesses, Penia and Amēchania: “… the Andrians being possessed of these deities would not give money; for never could the power of the Athenians get the better of their inability.”32 Today it would appear that the Andrians have the upper hand nearly everywhere. Incidentally, it is a testament to Sigmund Freud’s classical education, when, shortly before the publication of The Interpretation of Dreams, he remarks in a letter to Wilhelm Fliess from September 1899: “I have made the acquaintance of helpless poverty and am constantly in fear of her” – he is thus quite aware of how Penia and Amēchania go hand in hand, and moreover knows that speaking and being allowed to speak can help us against both of them. To be sure, money earned by the psychoanalytic sophistic is a still greater help to him, and not for nothing does Freud say in the same passage: “Money is my laughing gas,” since where money flows, helplessness has lost the game.
In making these observations, we touch on the dynamic of Greek cultural life and approach everything of concern to Europe via a detour through Greece: if we find the struggle between ability and inability at the basis of our culture (and ultimately at the basis of all other cultures), then philosophy should take a stance in this primal dispute. As long as philosophy is well-disposed to knowledgeable and proficient ability, it reveals itself to be partisan. It only comes into its own when it sets to work to expand the initially still small island of ability out into the ocean of inability. However, as soon as philosophy separates knowledge from ability, only to pursue impotent theory, it is eaten away by ressentiment – precisely as happened in the theoretical tendencies of later Platonism, with its grudge against rivals who could also address themselves to the masses, and which is also prominent in more than one present-day school of philosophy, when we find polemics against authors who are attempting a philosophical conception of the world in terms their contemporaries can actually understand.
To advocate the vital unity of knowledge and ability was the Sophistic movement’s sole historic mission, insofar as it represented the first educational system and first training ground for capability in general. Yet since Greeks of the classical era considered being able to speak well to be the most dazzling of all abilities, the sophists put great stock in the rhetorical training of human beings so as to equip the latter with the necessary quick-wittedness for any situation in life. Seen in this light, the Sophistic movement is something like a shipping company that wishes to make human beings seaworthy in the broadest sense of the term – it thus has the right word for every storm and an impressive conclusion anytime there is foundering.
True sophists are utterly convinced that succumbing to amēchania is never advisable for human beings. The living being that has speech never seems entirely at a loss, is never entirely inept, without any counsel, and lacking in techniques that can provide a way out. And because the Sophistic movement unprecedentedly and unforgettably validates the fundamental human claim to not being helpless, polymēchanos Odysseus is on board every enterprise that involves this clever praxis. Athena once said of this pre-Socratic from Ithaca that he was the cleverest of all men – the Oracle of Delphi later says the same thing of Socrates, so that the seafarer and the sophist are thus subtly associated with each other. From this perspective and despite Plato’s objections, the Sophistic movement is the better philosophy, both before and after Socrates, because it much better supports the human emergence from self-imposed helplessness than does the exclusively obstinate and perpetually offended Academy.
Helplessness, which may initially be blameless, is self-incurred from the moment when the poor and less able for some reason refuse to learn what is necessary from those who are more capable and wealthier, so that they could become their rivals. Who could deny that this temptation today puts half of humanity on a slippery slope? If nothing else, Europeans, who are about to be transformed into a nation of lotus-eaters, are in peril as they willingly break with their own tradition. Anyone who wishes to offer a new explanation of Europe to languishing Europeans, who would like to motivate them to return to their former glory, should again open ancient books, the European testaments to necessary sailing, travel stress, tests, crosses, cranes, masts, and contrivances for clever living. The great homecoming hero remains an indispensable, paradigmatic, absolutely exhilarating ally, the versatile teacher of how to not be helpless: polymēchanos, polytropos, polymētis, talasiphronos, polyphronos, polytlas dios Odysseus.