Nothing can be relied on in Odysseus’s world. His stories of impossible monsters—Scylla, Charybdis, the Cyclops, the Sirens—are all told as if true. Others with real places and people—Egypt, Sicily, the Cretans—are clearly Odysseus’s own lying tales. Odysseus is an unblinking fraud who in the passing of a smile will slip from deceit to the defense of honor and back again. At his most soothingly and persuasively elegant, his words “fall like winter snowflakes.” But he is no weakling. His grandfathers were raw and primitive men: Autolycus, whose name means “the wolf himself,” and Arceisius, “Bear Man.” He comes from nature but is a multiple of multiples: polymētis, many-skilled; polymechanos, very ingenious; polytlas, much-enduring; and best of all poikilomētis, dapple-skilled, with so much woven into him that he shimmers and flickers like an embroidered cloth.
So uncatchable is Odysseus that when the poem describes his state of mind, you can never be certain where to find him. When he is lying in bed, anxious and unable to sleep, Homer says he is “tossing backwards and forwards, like a sausage that a man is turning backwards and forwards above the burning coals, doing it one side, then the other, wanting it to cook quickly. So Odysseus was turning backwards and forwards, thinking what he should do.” Entha kai entha, backwards and forwards, hither and thither, literally “there and there”; Homer repeats the phrase three times in five lines. It must be branded on his hero’s heart. But is Odysseus the cook or the sausage? Is he turning or being turned? Is he the passive victim of his life or its principal actor? Or both?
It is fitting that at the beginning of the Odyssey, this slippery figure is nowhere to be found. He is away, an absence, the longed-for man-not-there. Twenty years have passed since he left for the war in Troy. The other heroes have returned home. Only Odysseus remains missing. No one has seen him these last ten years. Meanwhile his queen, Penelope, is surviving surrounded by a herd of young men from Ithaca, and the rival kings of nearby islands, all of them clamoring for her hand, her body and her husband’s kingdom. She keeps them at bay, flirtatiously but reservedly, while her son, Telemachus, is humiliated and reduced by these wine-swilling, pork-consuming parasites. The word for them in Greek is mnēstēr, which means “a man with something in mind,” “a man with intentions.”
With the help of Athene, Telemachus escapes their clutches for a while and goes to ask for news of his father in the great palaces of the Peloponnese, at Pylos and at Sparta, where the old heroes tell him what has happened: his father is a prisoner on the distant island of Ogygia, where the love-nymph Calypso holds him in her sway. Only after four books and 2,222 lines does Odysseus, the hidden man, first appear.
Calypso’s isle of voluptuousness is the earth’s navel. She promises her captive, as all lovers do, immortality and agelessness, and she presides over him as the goddess of longing. Her hair hangs about her eyes as seductively as it does around the face of the dawn. Her island is hilly and forested, and her delicious cavern, where the scents of sweet-smelling cedar fill the air, where the owls and cormorants sit chattering in the luxuriant growth at its mouth, and the vines hold out bunches of grapes that ripen as you watch—what is this but the entrancingly shaggy cavern of desire? She is Courbet’s Origine du Monde. Fresh streams run down through her meadows starred with violets, thick with beds of what was either parsley or celery, a refuge “at which any immortal god who came there would gaze in wonder, their heart entranced with pleasure.”
One spring morning, on the southeast coast of Sicily just north of Syracuse, I went somewhere which, for that day anyway, seemed to be filled with Calypso’s overbrimmingly desirable spirit. It is known now as Penisola Magnisi but was called Thapsos by the ancient Greeks. A low, flat island, about a mile long, just off the coast, is joined to the mainland by a narrow sandy neck. North and south of that neck there is shelter and good holding, whatever the wind, the classic early Greek recipe of twin harbors. The rim of the mainland beside it is now a mess of modern oil refineries and tanker-loading bays, but Thapsos remains uninhabited. Walk along the sand of the tombolo toward it, keep your eyes looking out to sea, and you can find yourself in a virtually untouched Odyssean world.
This little island holds the earliest of all signs of the Greeks in the west. They were here in the sixteenth century BC, as the Shaft Graves were still being dug at Mycenae, moving out into the Mediterranean as they had already come south to the Aegean. Archaeologists have found Mycenaean, Cypriot and Maltese pottery here, mixed in with local Sicilian jars and plates. It was somewhere, I thought, where I could start to come close to Odysseus on one of his distant shores.
But coming to Thapsos that beautiful morning, with the Mediterranean glittering beside me, it was impossible to think I could be here for the Bronze Age, for Odysseus, or for anything that was not part of the astonishing present, because the island that morning was awash with flowers. The true wild sweet pea, the great-grandfather of all sweet peas grown in the world, was here, its scent mixed with the sugary wafts of the sweet alyssum that was growing in clumps among the limestone, smelling from yards away like plates of honey sandwiches.
According to the Roman historian Diodorus Siculus, Sicily smelled so powerfully of wildflowers that hounds there used to lose the scent of their prey and wander about “at a loss, sniffing the air with half-closed eyes, while the quarry grazed happily several miles off.” But Thapsos looked wonderful too: wine-dark stonecrop on the edges of the limestone flakes, clouds of borage everywhere, a purple-pink haze spangled with blue stars. Spires of viper’s bugloss stood among them like the banners of festival knights, and all of this surrounded by a floor of brilliant pink little Mediterranean campions, Silene colorata, with banks of yellow marigolds and wild tangerine chrysanthemums beyond them.
* * *
Odysseus came to hate Calypso’s island. He had been there too long, and by the time the poem finds him there he is weeping on the beach, pining for home, far from floweriness and Calypso’s beguilements. Out on the other side of Thapsos, facing Greece and the sparkle of the sea, is this island’s own version of the landscape of regret and loss. Here on the rocky, sea-stripped and flowerless coast is where the first Greeks in Sicily buried their dead. They made small, low, rock-cut tombs, deftly slipped into the limestone, each entrance coming in from the direction of the sea, the hollow of the tomb itself cut out of the depth of the rock. There are about three hundred of them, like the burrows of small rock-dwelling creatures, and two things strike you: they imitate in form the great tholos tombs of Mycenae and Pylos, the tombs of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, as Schliemann called them, with their giant ceremonial entrance courts, or dromoi, the towering portals and the huge corbeled vaults of the tombs themselves. That heroic vision of the dead was transported here to the distant west, but no grandeur came with it. These Thapsos tombs are poverty itself, desperate scrapings on a rocky shore, filled with dreams and illusions of home but little else. The walls of the dromoi here are often no more than eighteen inches high, the doorway accessible only if you squirm inside, the vaulted space no taller than a crouching man.
Into this island of desperate and beautiful changelessness Homer suddenly injects the opposite, the great mobilizing presence of the poem, the god who, alongside Athene, presides over Odysseus’s whole being: the quicksilver dazzle of Hermes himself. He arrives as the messenger of Zeus, bringing a shock of life, “swooping down from Pieria [the home of the Muses], down from the high clear air, plunging to the sea and skimming the swells, like a shearwater who hunts along the deep and deadly ways of the barren salt sea.”
Hermes does everything Odysseus might think of doing: he is the god of the thief, the shepherd, the craftsman, the herald, the musician, the athlete and the merchant. He is at home with all kinds of cunning and trickery, charms and spells. He is the god who invented music and discovered fire. Dangerous magic and a kind of phallic potency glimmer around him like static. He is at home outside the limits of normality and stability, and so he is the god of boundaries and thresholds, of roads and doors, of transitional and alien places, of mines and miners, of the ability to make and transform the fixities and prearrangements of the world. This is the god who watches over comings and goings. It is Hermes, in disguise, who leads Priam across the Trojan plain to the Greek camp and his world-altering encounter with Achilles. He is the god of politics and diplomacy, the great persuader, the maestro of difference, and all of that makes him the god of Odysseus.
Hermes delivers transformations, and so the Odyssey flicks to its other mode: the sea and its islands are to be not a prison but a place where movement and change are more possible than anywhere else. Hermes tells Calypso that Odysseus must leave her island and begin his journey home. And to leave, he must build himself a raft from the great trees that surround her. The very forest that made this place into a desire-trap, all that fringing luxuriance, is now seen as timber. Odysseus seeks out the deadest, driest, most juiceless trees he can find, because those are the ones that will “float lightly”—but also surely because those are the most un-Calypso-like—and they fall quickly to his ax.
Nothing in the Odyssey is described with more love or care than Odysseus making his raft. It comes together in parts, orderly, concrete, precise: ax, adze and augers, pegs and mortises, ribs, decks and gunwales, mast, yard and steering oar, braces, halyards and sheets. Odysseus assembles it just as Homer assembles his song, so that the ship becomes a poem of the sea. If its parts are right, and their relationship right, it will sail. Calypso provisions the raft with delicious drink and food for his journey and summons her warm and generous wind, a following wind, the only one that could take him home. He embarks—you can smell the new-cut wood—his spirits high, gripping the tiller, seated astern, his eye on the sail filling above him.
Now Odysseus enters his crowning moment. He is the master mariner, the great soul, godlike, commanding his own craft technēentos, a word that blurs the boundaries of “skillfully,” “cunningly” and “magisterially.” He steers by the stars, as Calypso had told him, keeping the Plow and the Great Bear, of which it is a part, on the left hand, to the north. For seventeen nights he sails with the west wind behind him like this. “Sleep never falls on his eyelids as he watches the stars above him,” seeing the Plow wheeling around the North Star and “never bathing in the waters of the ocean,” while the Plow in turn is watching Orion on the other side, the two of them circling each other in eternity, “the axis always fixed.”
You only have to sail by the stars once or twice for that connection to remain with you for the rest of your life. I can never now look up at Cassiopeia, the five bright stars of her W, and not think of those hours in a driving and stormy night that I kept them in the shrouds of the Auk, as we headed north in a storm off the south of Ireland. Nor Orion without seeing him as he was when we made our way out with the tide one summer night into the Minch, and that most herolike of constellations stood as a warrior high to the right of us, his belt and sword glittering and jeweled, his bow up and arced to the southwest, the arrow aimed high at the heart of the Pleiades.
This exposure of Odysseus to the stars is the closest I ever feel to him, knowing that the experience of being out there, alone at sea at night, for all the changes in technology that three or four thousand years might have brought, with the sky arrayed above you and the sea and its threats dark and half-hidden, is materially the same for me as it was for him. It is the most cosmic experience of the world I know, when the universe seems not like a background but a reality, and when the scale of earthliness shrinks to nothing much. There is no history here. I am in the Bronze Age, and as Odysseus stays awake, keeping sleep at bay, watching the movements of craft and sea, I do the same, and he and I are momentarily and marvelously intimate.
But constancy is not the note of the Odyssey, and again Homer flicks the switch. Odysseus is within touching distance of Scheria, the island of the Phaeacians, who will take him home, its mountains “reaching towards him now, over the misty breakers, rising like a shield,” when Poseidon spots the raft and decides to kill him. It is one of Homer’s majestic aerial views, the little raft far below him in the expanse of sea, Poseidon’s eye in the heaven far above, the midgelike fragility of our greatest man surrounded by the vast rolling dark expanse of ocean.
The storm that then erupts and blows through the next 160 lines is no dignified passage of heroic verse. It is vicious, almost formless, repetitively destructive. Every prop of every storm in every European imagination, from Virgil to Ovid and on through Shakespeare and the great composers, is brought into play here. Poseidon summons every contradictory wind. He stirs and grinds at the surface of the sea, brings clouds to hide the land, so that even the sea itself becomes invisible. Giant waves come bearing down on Odysseus and sweep though his whole being. His knees weaken, his heart melts, his giant and commanding spirit quakes before Poseidon’s chthonic power.
Poseidon is “dark-maned,” horselike, the enemy of the civility and coherence embodied in Odysseus’s beautiful raft. The verse, which had been making such steady progress on Odysseus’s starlit voyage, now churns with anxiety. Odysseus wishes he had died at Troy. At least then his death would have been heroic, not the pitiable ending now facing him.
The raft loses direction. Odysseus’s hand slips from the steering oar as Poseidon’s waves tower and break above him, spinning his raft in a circle. The hero is thrown into the sea, where the clothes that Calypso had given him grow heavy with the water and drag him under. Wave after wave drives him down. Only his mind, the great organ of Odyssean existence, stays whole in this frenzy of natural violence, and as he surfaces at last, spewing seawater from his mouth and with the sea streaming from his head like the torrents running from the boss of a fountain, he lunges after the raft, knowing it as his place of safety, the only way he can escape “death’s decision.” But Poseidon does not release him. Here and there, to and fro, entha kai entha, the sea-king drives him, urging on the south wind and the north wind, the east wind and the west wind, as each in their turn try to shake from Odysseus his last rags of coherence.
He is hanging on to life; the tightly bound raft and the woven cloth, the made things of a civilized existence, are part of the longed-for or remembered worlds. They are too fragile to last out here. He is beset with troubles, and death seems near at hand until at last, mysteriously, a seabird, aithuia in Greek, probably not a shearwater, but another fishing bird, maybe a tern or a small delicate-limbed gull like a kittiwake—no one has ever been sure—alights on the wave-swept platform of the raft and speaks to him.
It is one of the Homeric moments at which the distance between then and now shrinks away. You can imagine the listeners around the poet, fixed in their attention to this overturning crisis, with nothing in their minds but the predicament of Odysseus at sea, taken up with their anxiety for this man so helplessly exposed to Poseidon’s rage, now, quite suddenly, feeling their hearts contract with love and sympathy at the arrival of the speaking bird. Here, maybe, is a moment of hope.
It is an experience all deep-sea sailors will have had. You are out in a storm, the boat rolls and pitches, thirty degrees one way then the other, the seas coming at you in a pattern you wish would end, the battering and shrieking of the wind unstoppable in your ear. Every surface is broken. The winds cannot leave the sea alone. What has already been plowed and folded is plowed and folded again. No structure in the sea remains whole. Not even a breaking wave is allowed to break, but the wind strips the spume from the wavetop and blows it in a half element, half air, half sea, wildly down and across the wind, as if the air were now clouded with cataracts or a sudden blast of winter. Inconstancy and capriciousness rule. There is no permanence. Nothing in a storm can be inherited from one moment to the next. But if there is one fact that a storm seems to impose—it is not physically or meteorologically true, but this is the experience—it is the sea’s mysterious dominance from below. A storm-driven sea appears to acquire a vitality and viciousness, a desire to do damage, which has nothing to do with the wind but comes from inside its own enraged, destroying body. If you ever have that sensation, it is when you are meeting Poseidon.
Out of that turmoil and trouble, enacting the repeated Homeric principle of enlightenment through the arrival of the opposite, comes the delicacy and tailored perfection of the seabird. It is a sign of grace and goodness, never more than when one alights on the deck or boom beside you. I have had swallows do that, far from land, and once, briefly, a tiny dark storm petrel, a speck of life in the middle of death.
I cannot believe Homeric sailors did not also stand at the taffrails of their beloved ships watching the birds in their wake. Seabirds are too beautifully present in the poems for the sailors not to have seen them like that, godlike in their lightness above the rolling weight of the sea. I have watched them for days, equipped as they are with their own more perfect version of hull and sail, reaching and tacking beside you in the wind, dropping and climbing among the peaks and valleys below them, their primaries sometimes just nicking and flicking the surface of the sea, until without warning they make a decision and turn one wing up into the wind, exposing their belly to it, thrown upward like a cyclist on the steepest part of a banked track, and are pulled away, high and fast, in a rapid downwind run, which they end by curving slowly around to windward again, pure authority, taking up station, living with the fluency and command their liquid world requires.
Odysseus’s visiting seabird is Leucothea, the white goddess. She was once a mortal girl from Thebes, with, as Homer says, “the most beautiful ankles,” but the gods made her one of their own. She gives Odysseus a holy veil, full of the magic of the woven cloth. He is to tie it around his chest, abandon the raft and swim for shore. With those instructions she leaves him, plunging into the sea “like a diving tern, and the dark wave hid her.” But Odysseus, who already refused the offer of immortality from Calypso, and whose mind is still searchingly alive, does not obey. He trusts his own raft too much to abandon it so far from shore, and with that Poseidon and the storm submit him to the next phase of horror. The earth shaker summons a killer wave, its crest overarching, vaulted, Homer using a word he uses elsewhere to describe caves and dark bowers roofed with trees, so that the wave becomes like a vast dark hall of destruction, which he then lands on Odysseus as a sledgehammer of vengeance.
The raft is smashed and Odysseus sunk, but he emerges and climbs onto one of the scattered planks, which he then rides in the sea “like a horse.” Because finality dominates the Iliad, that poem introduces men in order to kill them, brought on one after another like the shambling line of an Aztec sacrifice; the many will always end in the same bleak place. But Odysseus meets death time and time again, and each time springs up whole and new, as if resilience were running in his veins; his central understanding, the great evolution from the Iliad to the Odyssey, is that the one needs to be many.
The storm continues for another two days. The life spirit in Odysseus is squeezed to near empty. His ability to survive has faced its greatest test. But then at last the wind drops, and calm spreads across the sea. Still, though, the groundswell is running, and Odysseus is lifted by one of those long, rolling waves high enough to see the land of Scheria and salvation within touching distance.
Just like the kind of joy that children feel when their father has been lying ill in bed, dying, taut with pain, wasting away under the grip of some angry, powerful affliction, and at last those pains begin to ebb away and they can feel a warmth and ease come back into the air of the sick room around him, so to Odysseus that land and its trees seem welcome, swimming towards them now, hungry to plant his feet on the earth itself.
For Odysseus, the missing father, the man whose son knows he is dead and gone, land itself has become fatherly, the embrace of what feels like home reaching out to him. But here, at a moment of arrival and the promise of simplicity, Homer gives the gimbaled world of the Odyssey yet another spin. The poem might long for land but will always remain at sea, and as Odysseus gets as near the shore as a man’s voice will carry, he hears the vast, destructive surf breaking on what he realizes is an iron coast, no harbors, no anchorages, all high headlands, reefs and cliffs. The hexameters, sounding as strange as a Hawaiian war chant, as heavy and hissing as the sea itself, play out what he hears:
kai dē doupon akouse |
poti spiladessi thalassēs |
and then the boom he heard |
on the slippery reefs of the sea |
rochthei gar mega kuma |
poti xeron ēpeiroio |
for roared the great wave |
on the dry land of the mainland |
deinon ereugomenon |
eiluto de panth’ halos achnē |
terrible the deep belching |
as folded up all things in sea surf |
With the brightness of Athene in his mind he casts off again and finally, thankfully, finds a place where the all-male cliff gives way and a fair-flowing river, the emergent inwardness of the land, allows him entrance and he can rest at last, “Spent to all use, and down he sank to death./The sea had soak’d his heart through.”
* * *
Of course he does not die, and from that masterfully orchestrated sequence of island, raft, storm, bird and shore—the realms of impotence, potency, threat, grace and survival—the great central section of the Odyssey floods out: Odysseus’s meeting with the princess Nausicaa, his coming to the deeply Asiatic palace of Alcinous, her father, where he tells his tales to the assembled company. Together they constitute an enormous, cumulative exploration of human consciousness, island by island, point by point, each story exploring another dimension of what it is to be alive. In this world of flux, every island shapes the life that is in it. Arrive at any of them, push your dinghy ashore on the beach, and a different atmosphere obtains: welcome, comfort, strangeness, violence. The vocabulary of beach, rock and wood may be the same, but every island uses it in a different way, to seduce or dismember you, turn you into a pig or promise you immortality, devour your friends or make you forget that anywhere else ever existed.
The Odyssey is a drama of oscillation, between inner and outer, urbanity and wildness, enclosure and exposure, the memory of home and the rewards of distance, a life that is “heartsick on the open sea” and the mixed, erotic terror-allure of the women Odysseus finds wherever he goes, their welcome, their way with drugs and potions, the caves and grottoes of their inner selves.
When he arrives at the seductions of Circe’s island—her name means “the encircler”—he finds there the poisoner-witch and the best cook in Homer. She has ever more deliciousness to offer, and with her charms seduces his men and turns them all into pigs. Odysseus knows that this is a dangerous nowhere, out in the middle of the full circle of the sea where they cannot know where the sun sets, nor where it rises, until Hermes, his great ally, the spirit of cleverness and ingenuity, gives him both an antidote to all her potions and the best possible advice: hold your sword to her throat and get her to promise that she will not make a pig of you, as she has to your men.
Odysseus arms himself with all the sharpness of Hermes, then penetrates deep inside Circe’s world, in through the doors of her palace, into her beautiful rooms and her jeweled chair, only then suddenly to draw his sword “from his thigh,” to dominate her as she kneels terrified before him. She must promise no spells, no enchantment, the freeing of his men, stripping their piggishness away, and with those promises, with his dominance secure, he mounts her in “her surpassingly beautiful bed of love.”
The erotic vibrates as the underlayer of each encounter, the male fear of enclosure in endless dialogue with the male longing to be enclosed. In Hades, whose name means “the unlit” or “the unseen,” this dance of attachment and detachment takes on its own sad colors. Everything that matters on earth, all love, life, growth and hope, is extinguished here and reduced to a gray, wraithlike half-existence, life without life. Achilles says he is surrounded there not by the dead but by the kata-phthimenoisen, the deader than dead, the dead’s own dead. It is the darkest of all the Odyssey’s inward places. There Odysseus watches the lightless ghosts walk by. There is no glory in them. They are too thin for that, evaporating as his arms try to close around them.
He sees his mother first, a longed-for shadow of the woman he knew and held, then a sequence of queens, all mortal and all dead, all of them beautiful and all once lovers of gods, each of them walking past him in somber parade. They are attendants on Persephone, the great queen of Hades itself, her own presence in the gloom of this dark cavern an emblem of all the heartache and the shocks that flesh is heir to: she is a vegetation goddess and she belongs in the bright lit world above, but Hades had abducted her and in that single act had brought winter to the earth.
These queens are all mothers of heroes, and one by one they remember their moments of intimacy with the gods: Tyro, thinking of when Poseidon in the shape of a giant wave took possession of her at a river’s mouth; Antiopē, remembering Zeus coming to her on the vast plain where their sons would later build the city of Thebes; the mother of Heracles thinking of his conception, then his wife remembering their own moments of love together; the mother of Oedipus, grieving at having slept with her own son; and Iphimedeia, who “lay in the sea-Lord’s loving waves” … and so on, too many for Odysseus to remember or tell, even though “his story held them spellbound down the shadowed halls.”
Behind them all, not present here but looming over the whole performance, stands the one great figure of the noble and absent queen: Penelope, Odysseus’s own wife, away, not dead, but waiting for him in Ithaca. Every one of these queenly wraiths is an image of the woman he longs for. She is the queen of all queens, filled with intelligence, fortitude and wit, the match for Odysseus in her greatness. Every one of these ghosts is a translation of Penelope into another form. They all speak of the moment when longing was over and intimacy was real, and every one of them now looks across the gulf of death to the time a god made love to them. Desire, longing, separation and greatness all appear in them arrayed before Odysseus like a frieze, every one the ghost of his own lost wife.
After the monstrous-beautiful Sirens, Odysseus comes to the limb-consuming Scylla and her friend the body-gulping Charybdis. Scylla is a six-headed, rock-bound, man-eating monster, with guts made of dogs’ heads, who plucks you from above; Charybdis a vast-mouthed, in-sucking, whirlwater hell-fiend who will pull you down below. Veer too far from Scylla, and Charybdis will have you. Too far from Charybdis, and Scylla will pick off your sailors. Too far in or too far out, which fate will you choose? Together they are the nightmare of female threat, either picking your life away or drowning you in who they are. Everything Odysseus loved about women in Hades is here thrown into reverse. But Odysseus makes the wise man’s choice: risk Scylla, because where Charybdis will swallow you whole, Scylla may eat a man or two, but the ship will survive. This is Odysseus’s virtue: in the face of life’s impossible choices, he is able to navigate between the whirlpool and the rock.
His inner self reflects that outer wisdom. More than any other Homeric hero, Odysseus is not at one with himself. His mental world is storm-wrecked, and these outer landscapes are a projection of that broken core. But every arrival carries its lesson. “Many were the people whose places he saw and whose minds he learned,” Homer says at the very beginning of the Odyssey. Odysseus may long “for his return and his woman,” but the heart of the poem is this contingency, the absence of any overriding permanence. It is the first depiction we have of “the fascinating imaginative realm,” as Milan Kundera called the novel, the great descendant of the Odyssey, “where no one owns the truth and everyone has the right to be understood.” Abstract certainties do not apply here. Anything you might have thought true may well be false. Anything that might have seemed good can seem bad in another light. And of nowhere is that truer than the island that is Odysseus’s destination, the dream of Ithaca, the place Odysseus would like to call home, “the sweetest place any man can imagine,” but which on arrival, exactly halfway through the Odyssey’s twenty-four books, turns out to be its very opposite.
* * *
Ithaca is not what the phrase “Greek island” brings to mind. There is nothing of the drought-stripped bareness of the eastern Aegean, nor of the dry Asiatic pelt of the Trojan plain. Ithaca is green and wooded, more Tuscan than Greek. There are some wonderful harbors but little good grass or arable land. It largely consists of mountains dropping to the sea. Wild pear trees blossom beside the spring meadows, but it is “rocky Ithaca,” the kind of island that has always thrived on trading or raiding but would be poor if reliant on its own resources. There are springs in the woodlands, where daisies grow in the stony turf. Magenta anemones spangle the meadows in May, and a little later in the year you can find the churchyards filled with white and purple irises. I have been there at the end of winter, which is when Odysseus arrives, and I have known nights as cold as the one in which he has to borrow a cloak to keep warm. Like him, I have sat late over an olive-wood fire, using the prunings from the vines as kindling, drinking glasses of deep black red Mavrodafni, huddled over the logs in a cold room, so that my face burned and my back froze. There was snow on the mountain paths that year, the wind was turning up the pale underside of the olive leaves and the air was more silver than golden, clarified, a distillate.
It’s part of the geometry of the poems that Ithaca is like this. It is a northern country, on the northern and western edge of the Greek world, a long way from the cultivated, semi-Asiatic eastern Aegean heartland that Homer knew best. That exaggerated marginality fits Odysseus, the pirate-king of a country that is out on the edge of things. But it is a country he loves. The Phaeacians bring him here across the sea. He is asleep when he arrives, and they carry him ashore still sleeping. He wakes the next day and doesn’t know where he is. He can’t recognize Ithaca. Only at the prompting of Athene does he realize that this is home, and then, on seeing it, he “bends to kiss the life-giving soil.”
The Odyssey throughout has taunted its listeners with images of palatial comfort and luxury. The Phaeacians are the model of a rich, successful Near Eastern kingdom. Their palaces, gardens and orchards all read like scenes from an Assyrian relief. Egypt has floated just off-stage as the reservoir of gold, the Greek dream of material well-being. The kings and queens of Pylos and Sparta live embedded in authority and sumptuousness. Even Circe seems to live in a beautifully equipped palace.
Odysseus does not arrive home to find a place like that. His kingdom is in chaos, not the lovely, sweet, green, untroubled oasis he longs for it to be. It is riven with difficulty, and that tension—between the desire and the reality, between Ithaca the beautiful and Ithaca the real—leads to the fierce conclusion of this great poem. It is no easy or sentimental reunion of the loved one and the loved place. Homer says “there is nothing sweeter to a man than his own country.” That is what we want to think is true. But in Ithaca the poem enacts the opposite: nothing is more troubled than a man’s own country, even if that is where the desire for sweetness is strongest.
Odysseus has repeatedly appeared as the impoverished northern wanderer not entirely at home in the Mediterranean world. Now he comes home as the broken king, the outsider with few allies. The only weapons he has are tricks of deceit and concealment, and Athene makes sure she strips him of any sign of nobility.
She withers the handsome flesh that is on his supple limbs
And thins the fair hair on his head.
She puts the skin of an old, old man over his whole body
And dims the two eyes that were once so beautiful.
Now he is at home, he has never been more at sea. But he is not at a loss. He tells lying stories about who he is and where he has come from, gradually working his way toward the confrontation that will bring him victory, slipping into his own palace much as the Trojan Horse that he devised was slipped into the citadel at Troy. Homer shapes Odysseus to be the universal man, dressed in rags, stronger for appearing weaker, but even in that disguise he consistently pretends to come not from the margins of the Homeric world—he is no northern vagabond—but from one of its centers of riches and power: Crete, the focus of the great palatial culture which Sir Arthur Evans, the English excavator of the palace complex at Knossos in the early years of the twentieth century, called the Minoan. Odysseus describes his island in the middle of the wine-dark sea as a fair, rich land, surrounded by water, with so many men in it they could not be counted and ninety cities, including “Knossos, where Minos reigned.”
Odysseus has become the man who knows the world, who has been a great warrior at Troy, a great traveler to dimensions of existence few other men will ever encounter, an absorber of the Cretan civilization, now preparing to perform his great and terrifying act of revenge. He has lost nothing in all his journeying. He has become the agent of a new fused culture, the man who will establish civility in his city by bringing war into it. He looks at Ithaca with eyes rimmed red with sea-salt, the hardened eyes of the returning king. He is the agent of reduction, there to remove the fat, and the irony of Odysseus’s return is that the nearer he gets to his own house, the more uncompromisingly like Achilles he becomes, wanting to strip away the muddle and complexities and return Ithaca to an essential, Iliadic condition.
Set against this powerful and threatening presence is Penelope, his incomparable queen, the greatest woman in Homer. She does not yet know that her husband has at last returned. Her halls are filled with the suitors. Everything about them reeks of luxury and abuse, but she is withdrawn and self-protective. The epithet Homer uses of her most often is periphrōn, meaning “wise,” or more exactly that she has a mind that encompasses all sides of a question, not exactly wary or circumspect, but “understanding the whole,” filled with an enveloping intelligence. Penelope’s mind is one of the most precious places in Homer, the inner citadel of virtue and value. She is deeply identified with the well-being of her house. When she appears in front of the suitors, she always stands by the columns of the beautiful hall, as if she were one of them herself, “shining among women” just as the upper chambers to which she retires shine within the palace. This is the great woman who, as she descends her stairs, looks like Artemis and Aphrodite, the greatest of the goddesses, the queens of the wildland and of love.
Her heart is of iron, and like her husband she has “a well-balanced mind.” Like him, she can deceive and manipulate her enemies, but also like him, she is passionate in her love for her lost spouse and weeps bitterly over him. Like him, she lies awake at night and her troubles crowd around her throbbing heart. In one of Homer’s most beautiful similes, she says that just as
the nightingale of the greenwood sings so sweetly when the spring is newly come, sitting perched in the thick and leafy trees, pouring out her rich voice in quavering and bubbling notes,
even so my heart is stirred to and fro in doubt.
Odysseus’s great phrase, entha kai entha, to and fro, there and there, is hers too; but have midnight thoughts and the anxieties of a troubled mind in the dark ever been so beautifully described?
Like all the great women in Homer, she weaves, no cloth more famous than the one she is making as a shroud for her father-in-law, Laertes, weaving it every day, unweaving it every night, not only to keep the suitors at arm’s length but as an emblem of her command in her world. She is a queen regnant, her fame reaching heaven for the way she rules over men, upholds justice, sees that the fertile earth brings forth wheat and barley, that her orchards are heavy with fruit and her flocks with young. All this, Homer says, comes from her “good command”—one word: euēgesia—while her people “grow in goodness under her.”
This is Homer’s architecture of crisis: a great woman, her husband in disguise, a gang of young men who do not realize that the beggar is their king, witnessing their abuse and their vulgarity, eating his food, drinking his drink and sleeping with his serving-women. The tension builds over four long books of the poem, an unavoidable sexual metaphor at work: the king wolf has been away, the she-wolf is under siege, the promise of blood is in the air.
Odysseus is troubled. He knows that he must bring war into his own house, but when he longs to do violence to those servant-women who have betrayed him, anxiety reverberates within him.
Just as a bitch stands over her young puppies,
growling at a man she does not know,
thinking she would attack him,
so Odysseus’s heart growls inside him.
He has to punch his own chest to keep it in order. But is Odysseus the growling heart? Or the man who keeps his heart down? Is he one of the puppies that needs protection? Or the bitch doing the protecting? Or even the man who is threatening the puppies? There is no primitive simplicity here: as Homer portrays it, complexity ripples through every contour of the human heart.
When the terrifying reprise of the Iliad erupts into the poem, it brings with it an almost orgasmic release of destructive energy, a balloon of mesmeric violence in which Odysseus slaughters all 108 of the young men. It is a frenzy of killing, an orgy of revenge that leaves the floors of the palace swimming in blood. The most horrible moment of the Iliad, when Odysseus and Diomedes kill Dolōn even as he is begging for his life, and his head is still speaking as it lands in the dust—those same actions and words are repeated here with one of the more pathetic of the victims. Odysseus ends slobbered with their guts, his thighs shiny with their blood, filthy with it, “like a lion that comes from feeding on an ox at the farmstead, and all his chest and cheeks on either side are stained with blood and he is terrible to look at; even so was Odysseus dirty with their blood and filth, his feet red, his hands and arms red with it.”
Any idea that this is a tale of diverting fantasy is buried under the horror. Odysseus emerges from the tumult and goes through his house, looking for any sign of life from the suitors, any stirring of a limb, so that none might escape.
He finds them one and all, mired in blood and dust, all of them like fishes that the fishermen have drawn in their meshed nets from the grey sea on to the curved beach. And all the fishes, longing for the waves of the sea, lie upon the sand. And the sun shines forth and takes from them their life.
Their glazed stupidity is nothing more than the measure of Odysseus’s triumph. It is a moment of ecstatic slaughter, a huge gratification, filled with delight that he has destroyed his enemies. He has won and reclaimed his woman, his house and land and life. There is no euphemism here. Melanthius had been Odysseus’s goatherd but had betrayed him with the suitors.
They lead him out through the doorway and the court
And cut off his nose and his ears with the pitiless bronze
And tear out his genitals for the dogs to eat raw
And cut off his hands and his feet in the anger of their hearts.
I have read these lines on Ithaca, listening one summer night to the nightingales in a thicket nearby, rocked back by this arrival of war in the house; no political solution sought, no compensatory agreement arrived at, feeling horrified that for all Odysseus’s subtlety and fineness, he has ended up as a cannibal-minded cur. Nothing in Homer is more troubling. You might have thought you knew this poem and its hero, but these scenes push far out into strange territory. Is this, in the end, for all our ships and palaces, our poetry, our beautiful cloths and veils, how we are, predatory carnivores snarling our dominance over mounds of filth-spattered corpses?
Odysseus has the place cleaned. He gets the serving-women of the house to purify it, fumigating it, using a hoe to scrape up the horror, behaving as the sanitizing angel, instructing the women to carry out the dead bodies of the men they have been sleeping with. After the work is done, he identifies the twelve women he considers guilty of that sexual crime, finds “the cable of a dark-prowed ship,” a piece of marine equipment, and ties it high up outside the house, around a pillar and some rafters, just high enough so that if someone was attached to it, their feet would not quite reach the ground.
Just as when in the evening long-winged thrushes or doves, trying to reach their roosting place for the night,
fall into a snare set in a thicket,
finding the bed that greets them filled with hate,
even so the women hold their heads out in a row,
and nooses are placed around their necks,
so that they can die most pitiably.
They writhe a little with their feet but not for very long.
It is, in Odysseus and Telemachus, a moment of pure pitilessness and, in Homer, of pure pity. Homer loves birds. Athene has been there, just a moment before, as a swallow up in the rafters of the palace. The word Homer uses for the pitiability of the girls’ death, oiktista, is always used to describe the mournful notes of the song of the nightingale, Penelope’s own heart-bird. There can be no doubt where Homer’s sympathies lie. The suffering of those poor hanged girls, strung up with their feet quivering and kicking under the noose, their toes an inch or so from the ground beneath them, summons all the ghosts of Beslan, Srebrenica and Aleppo. An air of trouble thickens around this crime, and any identity you might have felt with Odysseus is threatened by it. An unbridgeable distance seems to open between us. It is a step too far, an ancientness too far. But Homer remains on our side of the divide, and it is clear that if Odysseus thinks he can solve life’s problems by the ferocious imposition of moral authority, Homer, the poem, knows you cannot.
* * *
All that remains is for Odysseus to be at one again with Penelope. She tests him, famously, with the suggestion that they should move their bed from “the well-built bridal chamber,” where it had been ever since he left for Troy. She knows, and he knows, but she does not yet know that the man in front of her knows, that the bed can never be moved, because Odysseus had built it around a living, long-leafed olive tree that had been growing in the courtyard for more years than anyone could remember. Their marriage bed is no temporary construction, but built for continuity and fixity, not afloat on the world but rooted in it. Odysseus, the great storyteller, had made it from living, inherited materials, had cut it and trimmed it and had beautified it with gold, silver and ivory inlays. The bed, in other words, like the raft he made, is another version of the great epic poem, made and remade, the reshaping of an inheritance to a new and ever more beautiful purpose.
When Penelope sees that Odysseus knows what she knows, that theirs is a marriage of true minds, and that their companionship is in the knowledge of the world they share, “her knees are loosened where she sits, and her heart melts … and in tears she throws her arms around his neck and kisses his face.”
This is what, in the most literal translation that makes sense in English, Homer says:
As when the land appears welcome to those who are swimming, after Poseidon has smashed their strong-built ship on the open water, pounding it with the weight of wind and the heavy seas, and only a few escape the grey water by swimming to the land, with a thick scurf of salt coated on them, and happily they set foot on the shore, escaping the evil; so welcome is her husband to her as she looks at him, and she cannot let him go from the embrace of her white arms.
These verses dance around the edges of tenderness. Odysseus has returned from the sea, but Penelope recognizes him as her homeland, the shore on which she can at last set foot after too long adrift on the chaos of her life. Understanding comes in seeing things from the other side. The language is clotted with formulas, the stock phrases used in every part of the poem: the strong-built ship, the gray water, the description of the sea merely as evil, her white arms. These are the words of antiquity, a frame of inherited sobriety and seriousness for the emotion that can scarcely be contained within them. What is painfully and marvelously real lies within the embrace of what is profoundly shared and ancient.