Odysseus in America (19 page)

Odysseus is the only one who knows the danger of Scylla, having decided not to mention her to his men. This means that he alone can be on the lookout against her sudden appearance. But along with everyone else on board he becomes riveted by the sucking vortex below and to the left and misses Scylla's first attack. Odysseus only turns in time to see six of his crewmen drawn upward, writhing like hooked fish at the ends of the monster's six long necks.

The poet throws dangers at this terrified crew from left and right, above and below. Veterans have described their own need to “wail in fear” when ambushed in a particularly skillful way, using combined arms: mortars
and grenades from above, mines and punji stakes below, and automatic fire from the side and front. I've already commented above in Chapter 7 on some veterans' expectancy of attack from any direction, or as with Odysseus' ship,
all
directions.

As a metaphor for some combat veterans' response to the civilian world, this episode has a number of unfortunate echoes. Various powers in the civilian world—the police, the IRS, an employer's personnel department, the Department of Social Services, the Social Security Administration, the Veterans Administration, the gas company, the electric company, the telephone company, the Department of Motor Vehicles, the criminal courts, the divorce courts, the bank that financed the pickup, the company that insured it, the agency that financed the college loan, the collection agency, the ex-wife's lawyer—these all seem to have the capacity to swoop out of the sky and snatch the veteran, writhing, and carry him to some dark place to devour him. In such a state of vulnerability, they often want to do what Odysseus did, to arm themselves and fight the foe the only way they know how. Direct, courageous, armed action that we associate with military heroism is wildly out of place. There is literally no place for it.
⁴

Scholars have debated whether six more of his men die horrible deaths because Odysseus cannot take Circe's instruction, or whether the first six were unavoidable. Her advice runs counter to
his
way of doing things.
⁵
Does he risk his life for them when he dons his armor, or risk
their
lives? Possibly he will lose six
no matter what
he does (12:109f, orig.). Scholar Alfred Heubeck clucks his tongue at Odysseus as if to say, “heroes will be heroes”—

His heroic stature is no more diminished by his ignoring of a warning … than by his clever tactics towards his own men [i.e., keeping them in the dark]. Ignoring all that he knows of [Scylla], Odysseus attempts the impossible and foolish because it is also the heroic. He must be true to his own nature, and, faced with a hopeless situation, nevertheless risks his own life for the sake of his men.

The heroic gesture of arming against an [unpreventable disaster] in a world where there is no place for the heroic, is here almost grotesque, but it also vividly illustrates the tragedy of the hero with his limited outlook.
⁶

Six shipmates lost at Ismarus, six more to the Cyclops, then eleven entire ships and crews destroyed in the fjord, now six more shipmates snatched by Scylla. More than 550 deaths have occurred before the remaining ship reaches the island where the sun god keeps his cattle. Recall that the narrator has blamed Odysseus' men—all of them—for their own destruction, because they had transgressed by eating the god's sacred beef:

But [Odysseus] could not save them from disaster, hard as he strove—
the recklessness of their own ways destroyed them all,
the blind fools, they devoured the cattle of the Sun
and the Sun god blotted out the day of their return.

(1:7-10, Fagles)

Odysseus has been warned authoritatively, warned twice (by both Teiresias and Circe) not to molest the herds belonging to the sun god on the island of Thrinacia, which now heaves into sight after the horrors of the strait. True to form, Odysseus has not shared this knowledge with his crew and only tells them in general terms—forcefully to be sure—“the worst disaster awaits us.”
¹
He orders them to just row right on by.

He says nothing about the sun god's cattle, even though the sailors can hear them mooing across the water. The men are exhausted, strung out from their latest near-death experience, and they see nothing wrong with camping for the night on this green shore. They have food, but these men
love
beef.
²
Even though he knows how his men are drooling at the thought of spitted roast, Odysseus doesn't tell his men not to touch the cattle or the reason why—don't mess with a god! His kinsman Eurylochus
³
complains about their fatigue and the risks of sailing at night in stormy unknown waters:

Phaeacian Court

Raid on Ismarus

Lotus Land

Cyclops

King of the Winds

Deadly Fjord

Circe

Among the Dead Sirens

Scylla and Charybdis

Sun God's Cattle

Whirlpool

Calypso

At Home, Ithaca

Night falling fast, you'd have us desert
this haven and blunder off into the mist-bound seas?
Out of the night come winds that shatter vessels.

(12:308ff, Fagles)

Now Odysseus finally mentions the cattle—he makes his men take an oath not to kill them—but without explaining the prophecy from Teiresias and Circe that the sun god will slaughter all the men if they take any of his cattle. Why does he not tell them the most important, life-or-death facts? The text gives no explanation. It appears to be part of Odysseus' leadership philosophy to be an information miser, disclosing to his subordinates only what he absolutely must, and sometimes not even that.

Odysseus relents, and they land on Thrinacia, but he has set up Eurylochus to take the blame from his audience and from “history.” He has warned the men not to land there, “But Eurylochus waded in at once—with mutiny on his mind” (12:301, Fagles). What Eurylochus said was hardly mutinous, it's simply stating the facts: the crew is half dead with fatigue and sleep deprivation, night is falling, and storms can wreck ships in the dark (12:305ff, Fagles). It is typical Homeric irony that we have been led to see Eurylochus as a whiner who just wants to bed down, but we learn a few lines later that during the night, just as Eurylochus had warned, “Zeus … loosed a ripping wind, a howling demonic gale”
⁴
(12:138f, Fagles).

Previously, in Book 10 (line 437, orig.), Homer again put the truth in the mouth of the same low-prestige player, when the not-very-heroic Eurylochus blurted out that Odysseus' calling his crew to feast in Circe's palace was leading them into another death trap like the Cyclops' cave. He explicitly blames the deaths in the cave on Odysseus'
atasthaliai—
wanton recklessness. This is more vintage Homeric irony, because this same word,
atasthaliai,
is used in the prologue to explain that the death of Odysseus' men was their own fault, thereby acquitting him of any blame. We shall see below that Homer has a discredited voice speak the truth again near the end of the epic when he has the father of Antinous, the most despicable suitor, say that Odysseus has killed two generations of the town's youth.
⁵
He has!

The next morning, finally, Odysseus tells his men that the cattle belong to Helios, the sun god. But now begins a solid month of powerful, non-stop southwest winds that lock them against the shore. Homer's audience would have been reminded of the horror that
opened
the Trojan War, Agamemnon's sacrifice of his daughter Iphigenia to free the wind-locked fleet at Aulis, allowing them to begin their amphibious operation against Troy.

The ship's company begins to run out of the food that Circe had given them, and they have to hunt birds, small game, and fish for their food. Apparently they do not have enough; hunger is getting to them, but the text is a bit unclear as to whether the main problem is that their food is not to their taste, or that there is not enough of it.
⁶
Odysseus picks this moment, when he knows full well that they are getting desperate—to take a long walk in the countryside to find a quiet place to pray! On top of that he takes a quiet nap, blaming that on the gods.
⁷
Again scholars Ahl and Roisman are skeptical:

Under the pretext of piety, Odysseus seeks to absolve himself of responsibility for his comrades' act…. Yet the nap he takes … lasts long enough not only for Eurylochus to make a subversive speech to the crew … to kill the cattle, but long enough to allow for the killing, flaying, roasting, and consuming.
⁸

These scholars conclude that “the whole point of the story is that Odysseus will remain guiltless…. In the course of his self-exculpation, elements show through which cast doubt on his pose of guiltlessness.”
⁹
The biblical book Exodus contains an intriguing parallel. While Moses is away from the people on Mount Sinai, his kinsman, Aaron, leads the people into trouble with another form of sacred beef, the Golden Calf.
¹⁰
However, there is no irony in the biblical account, and no doubt that Moses' hands are clean.

Odysseus speaks to the Phaeacian court in his own voice, saying in effect that there is no reason for them to think less of him, arriving there, his entire command lost. It was his companions' fault, not his! But why does the
narrator,
the poet himself, single out felonious feasting on Sun-brand beef as the cause of six hundred deaths, when at least 550 are already dead? Why does the narrator transfer blame for the catastrophic Ithacan losses after the war was already over?

The men I work with in the VA Clinic have vast stores of bitterness over being blamed for the U.S. defeat in Vietnam. They feel that those really responsible have weaseled out of taking responsibility and the blame—people such as Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, President Lyndon
Johnson, and National Security Adviser/Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, as well as the spineless senior military leadership.
¹¹
Veterans were confronted with intergenerational blame when World War II veterans crudely spurned them with taunts that, unlike themselves, Vietnam soldiers had lost their war. The prejudicial doped-up, violent, crazy “Vietnam Vet Stereotype” further created the idea that the men who fought in Vietnam were themselves solely responsible for how badly it turned out.

The tension between the life experience of Odysseus, a veteran of prolonged heavy combat, and the pampered lives of safe, complacent civilian Phaeacians gives rise to the fairy-tale atmosphere and content of
Odyssey
Books 9-12. I have made this case from the text alone, without reference to any speculations on the Homeric poets' own ways of making a living and being influenced by what their customers wanted to hear.

Up to this point I have spoken of “Homer” as if there were a single person, like Shakespeare, who created these massive epics. The consensus of scholars is that the epics were originally
oral
narratives composed in performance by traditional bards using a store of traditional stories, stock scenes, stock lines, and groups of lines (“formulae”). While there might have been one or more Shakespeare-class towering geniuses among them, there was no single Homer, and he never wrote either the
Iliad
or the
Odyssey.
There were no audio recordings—
somebody
wrote them down. The written epics as we have them were the product of cultural-political editing during the seventh and sixth centuries
B.C.E.—
with bards continuing to perform them all the while. In Athens this culminated in an official text that became part of the religious life of the city. Homer's epics were performed to crowds in the thousands during the main summer festival, the Panathenaea, by professional Homeric singers known as rhapsodes. Plato's short dialogue
Ion
gives a sketch portrait of a rhapsode and a public festival performance. The epic texts we have are canonical in the same way and from the same kind of official editing as the written books of the Old Testament were edited by high-level committees over a couple hundred years. To avoid the clumsy wording “Homeric poets” in this book, I've referred to “Homer” as if I were speaking of a single artist. But the reader should understand this to mean the whole class of performers who gave rise to our written texts.

To return to my speculations on how the interaction between the Homeric poets and their customers shaped the two epics—even though
we're unlikely ever to have evidence to disprove or prove any of them—here is my just-so story
¹²
: