Odysseus in America (23 page)

Any man—any god who met you—would have to be
some champion lying cheat to get past
you
for all-round craft and guile! You terrible man,
foxy, ingenious, never tired of twists and tricks—
those wily tales that warm the cockles of your heart!
Come, enough of this now. We're both old hands
at the arts of intrigue. Here among mortal men
you're far the best at tactics, spinning yarns,
and I am famous among the gods for wisdom,
cunning wiles, too.

(13:329ff, Fagles)

This is one of several deliciously comic scenes in the
Odyssey.
But it is also a scene that waves like a banner at the top of the narrative hill, in the middle of the epic, announcing “disguise, deception, and misrecognition” as the dominant themes of the 12, 110-line poem.
³

Without missing a beat, Odysseus chides the goddess for making herself scarce during the ten years of his wandering abroad.
⁴
She ducks this, again strokes him for being so enchantingly devious, and turns Odysseus' (and our) attention to his wife:

Anyone else, coming back from wandering long and hard,
would have hurried home at once, delighted to see
his children and his wife. Oh, but not you,
it's not your pleasure to probe for news of them—
you
must put your wife to the proof yourself!

(13:379ff, Fagles)

Recall that Agamemnon—as a ghost in the Underworld—had warned Odysseus not to trust any woman. Agamemnon's own wife had conspired at his murder on the day of his return from Troy. Athena certifies Penelope's fidelity, saying, “She waits in your halls, as always, her life an endless hardship…. Weeping away the days” (13:383ff, Fagles). But then when she says, “We'll make plans so we can win the day” (417), she alludes for the first time to the suitors. Odysseus has heard about them from Teiresias in the Underworld,
⁵
but Homer has not made us privy to his reactions, if any, to this information until Athena goads him on:

Think how to lay hands on all those brazen suitors,
lording it over your house now, three whole years,
courting your noble wife, offering gifts to win her.

(13:430ff, Fagles)

But she, forever broken-hearted for your return,
builds up each man's hopes—
dangling promises, dropping hints to each—
but all the while with something else in mind.

This second, even stronger assurance of Penelope's fidelity doesn't stave off Odysseus' rush of fear that he was walking into a trap.

“God help me!” the man of intrigue broke out:
“Clearly I might have died the same ignoble death
as Agamemnon, bled white in my own house too,
if you had never revealed this to me now….

(13:437ff, Fagles)

Come, weave us a scheme so I can pay them back!
… Stand by me …
and I would fight three hundred men, great goddess,
with you to brace me.”

While he doesn't say it outright, to my ear he doesn't take Athena's word for Penelope's faithfulness.

Using her powers, the goddess now disguises Odysseus by withering
him to a shriveled, thin-haired graybeard beggar, and instructs him to make his way to the pig farm in the hills, managed by his loyal retainer, Eumaeus, there to gather intelligence. She herself, she says, will fly off to Sparta to call Telemachus home.

Let's take Athena's display of god powers to think for a moment about divine justice and peace—and how Homer might have told it differently. Recall that Odysseus has landed on Ithaca with not one of the six-hundred-plus fellow citizens he led abroad to Troy. The goddess greets him with words about the Jodies—Vietnam slang for civilians back home who had taken the GI's girls—words that “push all his buttons” and get him enraged. Athena promises her assistance in the slaughter of these further 108 Ithacans and Ithacan neighbors, gloating that their blood and brains will splatter his floors (13:453f, Fagles).

For the moment, let's imagine a different ending. For example, when Athena reveals herself to Odysseus on the beach and tells him of the villainous suitors, why could a war-weary Odysseus not have responded that he's sick of death and bloodshed? She's a goddess, after all, and has the power. If the gods are so interested in justice, let them see to it. She wears (or carries) the aegis, mere sight of which makes strong men's knees go slack from terror—can't she just go to his house and shake the aegis at the suitors? Or she could ask her dad to land a thunderbolt in front of the door every time one of the suitors approaches. They'll get the idea … If this seems too far-fetched, remember the
Odyssey
ends
exactly
this way, with Athena and Zeus stopping the townsmen of Ithaca from getting blood revenge on Odysseus for their 108 newly dead sons and six-hundred-plus brothers who died on the way home from Troy. Aegis and thunderbolt—works every time. Or the poet could have come down somewhere in between, such as killing the ringleader Antinous with one shot, and then, again with Athena's help, wresting blood money (
poinē
) from all the others. He'd be ahead of the game.

As I pointed out above, the
Odyssey
was originally performed by generations of improvisational singers who may have bound each other to the traditional “fact” of Odysseus' bloody revenge on the suitors. I am not saying that a poetic genius could not have gained acceptance for a different set of “facts.” By the time we get to the Athenian tragic theater in the fifth and fourth centuries
B.C.E.,
artists had “poetic license” to change the “facts,” so for example, Aeschylus' Agamemnon is the king of Argos, not Mycenae, as Homer has it. It is impossible to tell how much poetic license the Homeric poets had.
⁶

When thinking why Athena could not just have “brought him home” we
need to consider Homer's famous habit of showing every important turn in the plot as equally and convincingly motivated by both divine agendas and human aims.
⁷
It is simply not in Odysseus' character to make peace with anyone who has stolen his victuals and tried to steal his wife. He is implacable, but patient, self-disciplined, and cunning in his revenge. If character is destiny, the Homeric world saw character as formed by divine influence, symbolized by the patronage of the god or goddess who exemplified the leading trait of character. For Odysseus and Athena this trait is
mētis.

The three-combat-tour tank veteran whose voice is heard often in A
chilles in Vietnam
limited his revenge:

I had a picture of her I wrapped in plastic and kept in an ammo box. Every day I would take the picture out and look at it and write her a letter. An' every day, sometimes two or three the same day, she'd write to me. 'Course they didn't come every day, but in big bunches when they brought the mail out to us.

Well, the letters just stopped. I wrote to her an' wrote to her, pleading with her to tell me how I hurt her, how I made her mad at me. Not a word. No letters. Nothin'.

I guess I went a little crazy. That was when I started seeing mass wave attacks that wasn't there. I was firing and firing and … I guess I was becoming a danger—I mean to us, not the enemy, and that's when they tied me up and put pills in my mouth an' put me in the bustle rack behind the [tank] turret, till they got back and they sent me home because my tour and enlistment were up anyway. I don't remember much of that.

I get back home and find out what happened. She was at a party and drank too much and this guy rapes her, actually I knew the guy. An' she gets pregnant and thinks she has to marry him because it's his baby and he asks her to marry him.

When she heard I was home she threw him out and had me come over. She said, you're the only man I've ever loved and I love you now. I remember it so clear. I had a glass of beer in my hand. I threw it in her face and walked out of that house. I never saw her again.

That's just what happened.

This man grew up in an American Roman Catholic family and community very different from the zero-sum honor culture of the Homeric world. He killed neither her nor her rapist husband. The anguish and abandonment that he felt when her sustaining letters stopped mattered more to him than current sexual jealousy that another man had taken his girl. His mind and
emotions were still in Vietnam, and in Vietnam she had severed the lifeline of the warm-hearted and high-minded youth who had gone to war. The “animal” who came home—the “animal” he became as a berserker
⁸
after Timmy's death (see page 81, above)—no longer cared about the girl or their love. I doubt that the likelihood of being caught and imprisoned restrained his hand. His heart was too deadened to care one way or another.

To be fair, Odysseus' life is in serious danger from the suitors, regardless of Penelope's fidelity, despite his boast to Athena on the beach that he could kill off twice their number with her at his side (13:447, Fagles). His danger is greater if Penelope
has
been cheating on him, but usurpation is definitely in the wind—possibly in the suitors' minds as just vengeance for the dead crews of his flotilla. The suitors plan to murder Telemachus on his way back from his visit to Pylos and Sparta. Odysseus
must
keep secret his solitary, unarmed, unsupported presence in Ithaca if he hopes to survive. The situation demands that he lie and dissemble to everyone, with the exception of his son, Telemachus, before he springs his ambush on the suitors—the situation motivates this as much as his devious character.
⁹

The only real question now is whether Penelope will also end up among the dead.

Odysseus makes his way to the loyal swineherd's hut, tells him a detailed and entertaining pack of lies. For his trouble, the swineherd calls him a liar on the one true thing he's said: that Odysseus is alive and nearby. The swineherd's skepticism is not without foundation. A procession of scammers has passed through Ithaca selling phony information on Odysseus' whereabouts. Odysseus is now on notice that he will have to convince Penelope that he is genuine. However, we begin to suspect that loyal Eumaeus, the swineherd, has already guessed who this wizened beggar is, because he not only orders the fattest boar killed for their supper, but also presents Odysseus with the choicest cut from the loin.

Homer cuts to Sparta where Athena appears to Telemachus and advises him to hightail it for home, but to come in the back door to Ithaca, to avoid the assassins laying for him. At the same time, she plants a doubt in Telemachus' mind (and ours) about the depth of Penelope's loyalty. With this chilling thought about his mother, Athena tells him to hurry back:

Be careful lest she carry from your halls some treasure against your will.

(15:19ff orig., Dimock, prose trans.)

For you know what sort of spirit there is in a woman's breast; she wishes to
increase the house of the man who marries her, but of her former children and staunch spouse she takes no thought.

She tells him to head for the swineherd's hut and send the servant into town to tell Penelope that he's safe. This will set up the reunion of father and son and get Eumaeus out of the way for a while. Meanwhile back at the farm, Odysseus tells the swineherd more entertaining lies, and hears the latter's sad life story.

The youth arrives, Eumaeus goes off, and Athena undoes Odysseus' disguise, so he now appears tall, clean, ruddy, and dark-bearded. Telemachus is staggered, disbelieving, and he wonders if this shape-changer is a god. Odysseus straightens him out saying,

No other Odysseus will ever return to you.

(16:232ff, Fagles)

That man and I are one, the man you see …
here after many hardships,
endless wanderings, after twenty years
I have come to native ground at last.

My changing so? Athena's work, the Fighter's Queen—
she has that power, she makes me look as she likes,
now the beggar, the next moment a young man….
It's light work for the gods who rule the skies.

Father and son weep together, “Both men so filled with compassion, eyes streaming with tears” (16:249, Fagles).

With but one or two lines about how he got from Troy to Ithaca, Odysseus launches into strategy planning with his son, giving him various practical instructions for “prepping the battlefield,” and telling him to expect a switch back to the old beggar disguise. Telemachus gives him the “order of battle,” the size and makeup of the forces arrayed against them. But Odysseus will do his own reconnaissance in disguise and warns Telemachus not to react when the impious, overweening suitors mistreat the apparently helpless old man. And Telemachus is to maintain
complete
secrecy, even from his mother and grandfather and the most trusted servants, such as Eumaeus.

Telemachus is mostly on the receiving end of instructions, plans, and warnings, but when Odysseus says he plans to assess the strength of his support among his own retainers, Telemachus says this will be a waste of
time, “probing the fieldhands man by man.” He knows these men well and can give his father the rundown. The women, however, are another story, “But I advise you to sound the women out: who are disloyal to you, who are guiltless?” (16: 347ff, Fagles). This outspoken breach of youthful humility—advising his father to take the measure of the women—must refer indirectly to Penelope. Remember that Telemachus still has Athena's cynical warning in his head about his mother's possible defection. And despite Athena's apparent endorsement of Penelope's loyalty, Odysseus still has Agamemnon's warning in mind.

So when Odysseus, now magically reshriveled, makes his way with the swineherd to his great hall, the listener is in suspense about both how this lone man will survive the encounter with more than a hundred young lions, and whether the lioness around which they gather will eat him alive also.

Just by the front door Homer brings Odysseus to one of the great sentimental tear-jerks of all literature: