Odysseus in America (24 page)

Now … a dog that lay there
lifted up his muzzle, pricked his ears….

(17:317ff, Fagles)

It was Argos, long-enduring Odysseus' dog
he trained as a puppy once….

But now with his master gone he lay there, castaway,
on piles of dung … heaps collecting
out before the gates till Odysseus' serving-men
could cart it off to manure the king's estates.

Infested with ticks, half-dead from neglect,
here lay the hound, old Argos.

But the moment he sensed Odysseus standing by
he thumped his tail, nuzzling low, and his ears dropped,
though he had no strength to drag himself an inch
toward his master. Odysseus glanced to the side
and flicked away a tear, hiding it from Eumaeus.

Odysseus pretends to see in this decrepit wreck—much like he himself appears to be—the fine lines of the once strong, once swift tracker. To this Eumaeus replies that

“He's run out of luck poor fellow …
his master's dead and gone, so far from home,
and the heartless women tend him not at all.”
…
With that he entered the well-constructed palace.
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…
But the dark shadow of death closed down on Argos' eyes
the instant he saw Odysseus, twenty years away.

(17:349ff, Fagles)

Recall that at this point Eumaeus doesn't know, or pretends not to know, the identity of this beggarman.

What follows is a long and entertaining scene of Odysseus' first encounter with the villainous suitors and their ringleader, the archvillain Antinous. Odysseus baits the suitors to the extent he can without blowing his disguise. He supplicates them for donations—of his own victuals! He fits himself into the cultural theme of the indigent stranger who is maybe a god in disguise, but under the gods' protection at the very least. This theme, that the gods visit mortals to test their hospitality and their generosity to the helpless, is widespread in myth, literature, and sacred writings.
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It is the poet's opportunity to display the suitors' sacrilegious disregard of “what's right,” their arrogant hubris. This culminates in Antinous throwing his footstool at Odysseus. This attack is an affront to the nominal master of the house, Telemachus, who has extended guest-protection to this beggar and given him permission to beg among the other “guests,” the suitors. It also affronts the gods, under whose protection the beggar stands, and, of course, Odysseus personally.

Penelope in her upstairs apartment overhears the commotion. But always the master of the tantalizing delay, Homer inserts a further scene in which the suitors attempt to abuse Odysseus.
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They pit him against an overweight local scrounger who has staked out the suitors' feasting as his turf, and gotten fat on the droppings as they stuff themselves with Odysseus' food and wine. With sadistic humor, the suitors set up a mock-heroic single combat between the young but flabby moocher and the seemingly aged and broken-down stranger. Amid great hilarity—which distracts the suitors' attention from the subtle chill they get when they see what a powerful and efficient fighter this old hulk is—Odysseus trounces and ejects the former beggar-king of the suitors' feasts.

Something—vibrations in the ether? inspiration from the goddess Athena?—prompts Penelope to pick this evening to tease and flirt with the suitors. She bathes and naps before showing herself to them. Ever ready with the makeup, Athena transforms Penelope from a grief-worn middle-aged widow to a young Grace touched by Aphrodite, the love goddess.
Veiled, with modest escort of two handmaids, she descends the steps to the hall where the suitors go weak-kneed with lust. The language Homer uses for weak-kneed here is the same used in the
Iliad
for a warrior collapsing from a wound—and thus foreshadows the suitors' deaths. This word-play identifies her as another potential Helen, another cause of many deaths. The same train of associations raises questions about her fidelity. Whether from instinct or cunning, she knows she needs a diversion, an excuse to let her allure build up. She scolds Telemachus for permitting the stranger to be abused, and he answers her, further extending the pause to admire. Of course, Odysseus is in the room, too! This is the first time he has seen his wife in twenty years.

Eurymachus, the most respectable of the suitors, bursts out in a babble of praise of her beauty, refinement, and steadiness of mind. This gives her the opening to say—contrary to the testimony of all their senses—that all her beauty and all her other merit were destroyed the day her husband took ship for Troy, that she is nothing without him, her life a torment without him. Then, almost as though she knows he is there listening and might have forgotten, she repeats his departing instructions that if he has not returned by the time their son, Telemachus, sprouts a beard—which has now happened—she is free to remarry. She then chides them for eating her food, rather than bringing her gifts to court her favor.

Her appearance among them in this manner, her recitation of her absent husband's terms of release, and the mention of courting gifts is tantamount to declaring a gift-contest for her hand. The suitors instantly get the message.

“Gifts?”
… Antinous took her point at once.

(18:319ff, Fagles)

“… Sensible Penelope,
whatever gifts your suitors would like to bring,
accept them. How ungracious to turn those gifts away!
We won't go back to our own estates, or anywhere else,
till you have wed the man you find the best.”

This contest of the courting gifts—which the suitors
all
lose—is often forgotten in the later, more famous contest of the bow. But Odysseus “glowed with joy … to hear his wife's trickery luring gifts from her suitors now” (18:316f, Fagles).

Antinous is thinking, after three years of frustrated courting—caught at last! Odysseus is thinking, you're all dead meat, and whatever you bring to her is
mine!
All the suitors send retainers home to fetch courting gifts,
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and they return with ultra-high-value goods of the sort readers have already encountered as guest-gifts: embroidered robes festooned with gold clasps, gold necklaces, bejeweled chokers, and so on. These prestige goods were so valuable, that even three years of supplying food and wine for a hundred young men might have been more than made up for. The courting gifts arrive and Penelope, now with all her maids as bearers, returns to her apartment above with the loot parading behind her.

The scene closes with further demonstration of the suitors' arrogance and disorder, finally causing Telemachus to tell them all to drink up the last round and go home to bed. When they clear out, leaving Odysseus behind, he sees that the big battle is coming soon and prepares the battlefield by helping his son stow all the arms that decorate the great hall. These are real, functional, deadly weapons—but also trophies of Odysseus' and his father's military victories as well as gifts, a store of wealth, and emblems of political legitimacy. In any case, Odysseus has no interest in fighting 108 men armed with
his
weapons, grabbed from the walls and weapon racks of
his
great hall.
¹⁴

Odysseus' astute foresight generates a painful historical irony for us. Odysseus is partially successful at denying the enemy a chance to arm from his own resources. In Vietnam, during the first years of American involvement, the enemy was armed largely, not with Russian, Chinese, Japanese, or French weapons, but with
American
weapons that the Viet Minh bought, stole, or captured from the South Vietnamese Civil Guard, Self-Defense Corps, and Army to whom we had given them!
¹⁵

The weapons stowed, the stage is set, finally, for the long-suspended first meeting of Odysseus and Penelope. He dismisses his son to bed with the words, “Off you to bed. I'll stay here behind to test the women, test your mother too” (19:47f, Fagles). Odysseus is still not sure about Penelope's loyalty, whatever Athena has said about it, and whatever Odysseus himself supposedly thought about it (“Staunch Odysseus glowed … to hear … his wife's trickery … enchanting [the suitors'] hearts … but all the while with something else in mind” 18:316ff, Fagles).

The interview opens without privacy, Penelope surrounded by her maids. These include at least one, Melantho, whom the narrator has already revealed as in bed with the suitors. This maid and Odysseus
bandy words. Penelope tongue-lashes her, calling her a “brazen, shameless bitch … you will pay for it with your life, you will!” and then continues that she wants to know what this stranger knows “about my husband … my heart breaks for
him”
(18:99f, Fagles).

Penelope asks him to give his origins, and like the scene in the palace of the Phaeacians, Odysseus evades the question with many elegant words. Penelope again declares how much she yearns for Odysseus and tells him about the delaying trick of the shroud that she wove each day for her father-in-law, Laertes—the pious duty of a good daughter-in-law while the old man still lives—but unwove in secret each night. The same maids that now surround her revealed her deception to the suitors, and so now she is up against it and has to pick one of the suitors to marry. And again she presses the beggar to identify himself. She says, in effect, my pain is as great as yours. You speak to one who understands.

Odysseus then launches into another of his colorful, fictitious autobiographies—saying his name is Aethon from Crete—this time weaving details of an encounter with Odysseus into it.

Falsehoods all,
but he gave his falsehoods all the ring of truth.

(19:234ff, Fagles; emphasis added)

As [Penelope] listened on, her tears flowed and soaked her cheeks …
so she dissolved in tears …
weeping for him, her husband, sitting there beside her.

Odysseus' heart went out to his grief-stricken wife
but under his lids his eyes remained stock-still—
they might have been made of horn or iron—
his guile fought back his tears.

We shall come back to Homer's amazing portrait of Odysseus' emotional blankness in the face of his wife's anguish, and to Homer's insight that it was his
dolos,
his guile, that strategically suppresses his emotions. Vietnam veterans' wives have endured such blankness.

He meets with her to test her, but she tells him,

Now, stranger, I think I'll test you, just to see if …
you actually entertained my husband as you say.

(19:248ff, Fagles)

Because Odysseus' fiction claimed a meeting on the outward voyage to Troy she asks him what Odysseus was wearing. The beggar feigns difficulty remembering from twenty years ago and proceeds to describe every detail of the clothing, including the golden brooch, that Penelope had herself given him on his departure. He throws in the extra detail of the name and physical description of Odysseus' herald, Eurybates.
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This sends Penelope into further agonies of weeping—during which the beggar sits as expressionless as a block of stone—prompting him to repeat what he has said to Eumaeus, that he has heard that Odysseus is alive, nearby, and on his way home, and tells her a quick, partial summary of the adventures he told to the Phaeacians. He repeats the blame-casting story that all Odysseus' men-at-arms were drowned because they had killed the cattle of the sun god (19:318), and describes the mass of treasure Odysseus is bringing home. Penelope has heard much like this before from other travelers and is not willing to expose herself yet again to the pain of hope. She says, “Odysseus, I tell you, is never coming back” (19:358, Fagles). She instructs her maids to make up a luxury bed for the stranger, bathe him and rub him down. He demurs, saying that living rough for so long, he's not used to such things, but if there were an old sufferer like himself among her household, he would let that servant minister to him.

The stage directions are not clear on how the spying maids (plural, at line 19:317, orig.) exit and the single aged retainer Eurycleia enters. Penelope seems to flirt with recognition herself, saying that the beggar's hands and feet must resemble those of Odysseus, now twenty years after she has seen him last (19:408, Fagles). But by the time Eurycleia, who was Odysseus' wet-nurse when he was a baby, bathes his feet, only Odysseus, Penelope, and the old nurse are present. The famous recognition scene between Eurycleia and Odysseus follows, in which the old nurse recognizes him by the scar on his thigh, plowed there by the tusk of a wild boar. This scene is unthinkable as presented, with even
one
of the other maids present.

Despite the flowery words and fine emotions that flow between the disguised Odysseus and his wife, a tremendous atmosphere of threat hangs over the scene. One wrong step and he is a dead man. Within the frame of the epic fiction, Odysseus' mortal danger is a reality, a “fact.” This in itself is something worth taking in as a metaphor of the sense of vulnerability that some combat veterans feel even in the most intimate, apparently safe settings. Although we work constantly to discourage it, many of the
veterans we work with—even if they share a bed with their wives—sleep within a hand's reach of weapons.

During the long, dramatic exchange with Eurycleia, the goddess Athena puts Penelope into a trance, or so the narrator tells us. The trance ended, Penelope takes the beggar to an even deeper level of her private confidence. She tells him a dream she had of an eagle swooping in on her flock of domestic geese, snapping all their necks and leaving them dead in heaps about the hall. She wails for her dead geese in the dream, but the eagle returns and tells her to rejoice that he, the eagle, is Odysseus and the geese are her suitors.
¹⁷

Perhaps Penelope was not in such a deep trance as we were told during Eurycleia's recognition scene, because immediately after telling this dream of the Odysseus-eagle and hearing the beggar pronounce it a true portent of mayhem to come, she tells him that tomorrow she will announce the contest of the bow and twelve axe heads. If she has recognized Odysseus, she knows that he can pull this off. She knows that he is a master bowman and that the “contest” would position him to be powerfully armed when the suitors would not be. Her plan, in effect sets the suitors up to face Odysseus as the only man in the hall already “locked and loaded.” She says,