Odysseus in America (47 page)

¹
Taking Homer at his word was the approach
Achilles in Vietnam
took to the
Iliad,
the Achilles epic: The
Iliad
opens with a thunderclap, when Achilles' commander Agamemnon betrays the moral order of his army by wrongfully seizing Achilles' prize of honor, his
geras.
Agamemnon had no more right to do that than a modern colonel taking the Medal of Honor ribbon off the tunic of a sergeant under his command. Achilles' rage at this degrading treatment leads him to withdraw physically from the battle, something that he could do legally but a modern soldier can only do psychologically. When an inspiring and effective combat leader pulls out, the result is loss upon loss to his comrades as the enemy moves in, just what happened to the Greeks. Achilles then lets his foster brother Patroclus, his closest comrade and second in command, go back into the fight. Patroclus saves the Greeks from being thrown into the sea from their beachhead, but is killed doing it. Achilles suffers profound grief and guilt, goes berserk and commits outrage after outrage in the course of winning the war for the Greeks by bringing down Hector. This is the surface story of the
Iliad,
about combat soldiers and what matters to them: the moral and social world they inhabit. This surface story
means
something in the real world.

²
Parameters: US Army War College Quarterly,
vol. 25, no. 3, Autumn 1995, p. 133.

¹
Citations are to Robert Fagles's
Odyssey
translation (New York: Viking Penguin, 1996) or to Robert Fitzgerald's
Odyssey
translation (New York: Vintage Classics, 1990). They are in the form book number: line number(s), translator's name. Where other translations are quoted, the source is identified in the same manner and referenced in the notes. Line numbers refer to the translations' numberings; where the line numbers refer to the original Greek, this is noted as “orig.” rather than with a translator's name. The Loeb Classical Library editions of Homer provide the sources
for the original Greek, respectively the
Iliad,
ed. A. T. Murray (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1924), and the
Odyssey,
ed. A. T. Murray, as revised by George E. Dimock (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995). A note on English representation of Greek words and proper names: I have followed the spelling conventions used by Professor Robert Eagles, whose
Odyssey
translation is most frequently quoted in this book. Where other translations have been quoted I have retained the spelling used in the quoted source. I have refrained from using accents when I transliterate Greek words that are not proper names, with the exception of the eta and omega, which are shown as
ē
and
ō,
respectively. I have also substituted “Greek” for Achaian, Argive, and Danaan, where they have appeared in the Homeric quotations.

²
The words in this epigraph were written in 1996, and Jim Shelby gave me permission to use them the same year. After I recontacted him this year to make certain that I still had his permission, he wrote, “I would be doing a disservice to say that I still felt that way. I am part of a community now, go to church, work a regular job, and am fortunate to have a wife and daughter. There are moments when I actually experience being alive, being vulnerable.” He credited the Kansas City Vet Center, various mental health professionals, and the community of VWAR (see
Chapter 18
) for assisting in his “return” to life.

³
Voice-over in Mick Hurbis-Cherrier and Catherine Hurbis-Cherrier,
History Lessons.
Video, 1992.

⁴
George E. Dimock, Jr., “The Name of Odysseus,”
Hudson Review
9:52-70 (1956) and “The Man of Pain” in that author's
The Unity of the Odyssey
(Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1989), pp. 246-63. John Peradotto, in
Man in the Middle Voice: Name and Narration in the Odyssey
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), p. 128, gives it simply as “Hate.”

⁵
Gregory Nagy,
The Best of the Achaeans: Concepts of the Hero in Archaic Greek Poetry
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), p. 69. For an overview of Greek heroism as dangerous to the people, see Johannes Haubold,
Homer's People
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Erwin Cook, “‘Active' and ‘Passive' Heroics in the
Odyssey
,”
Classical World
93:2 (1999), pp. 149-67, shows how Odysseus is a man of pain because he is a man of hatred, and how he uses the pain he causes and suffers to identify himself, even to members of his own household.

⁶
Cook, “‘Active' and ‘Passive' Heroics in the
Odyssey”
See also Donna Wilson's “Lion Kings: Heroes in the Epic Mirrors,”
Colby Quarterly,
in press, 2002, and Haubold,
Homer's People.

⁷
We've been offered allegorical readings of Homer at least since the sixth century
B.C.E.
with Theagenes of Regium and the first century
C.E.
with the Stoic Heraclitus. But also, I acknowledge that I have text-based problems with a strict allegorical interpretation of Books 9-12—the worst of which is the narrator's several mentions of Odysseus' marvels outside that framework. For example,
Odyssey
20:19, where Odysseus privately thinks of the Cyclops inside his own head during a snatch of interior monologue. These outside-the-frame mentions put these adventures at the same level of narrative reality as the swineherd, the gods, the Trojan War, the bow, and so on. Hugh Parry, “The
Apologos
of Odysseus: Lies, All Lies?,”
Phoenix
48 (1994), pp. 1-20; Scott Richardson, “Truth in the Tales of the Odyssey,”
Mnemosyne
49 (1996), pp. 393-402.

⁸
Jenny Strauss Clay,
The Wrath of Athena: Gods and Men in the Odyssey
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), p. 198.

⁹
The Homeric way of grieving and memorialization were explored in
Achilles in Vietnam,
Chapter 3.

¹⁰
Novato, Calif.: Presidio Press, 2002.

¹¹
New York: Atheneum/Macmillan, 1994; New York: Touchstone, 1995.

¹²
Homer's picture in the
Iliad
of the love that arises between comrades (cohesion) was fully discussed in
Achilles in Vietnam—
see index entries there under
“philia”
and “Comrades, special.” For the relationship between military cohesion and love, see “Cohesion” from the
Commandant of the Marine Corps Trust Study,
available on the Web at
www.belisarius.com/author_index.htm
.

¹³
I thank Colonel Charles J. Dunlap, Jr. (USAF), an Air Force staff judge advocate, for his comments on Odysseus from a military justice perspective. Any errors in the legal analysis of Odysseus' conduct are entirely my own.

¹⁴
W. B. Stanford,
The Ulysses Theme: A Study in the Adaptability of a Traditional Hero
(New York: Barnes & Noble, 1968), p. 5.

¹⁵
Thomas G. Palaima, “To Be a Citizen or an Idiot: The Choice Is Ours,”
Austin American-Statesman,
October 9, 2001, four weeks exactly after September 11.

¹
This all but unknown sequel to
All Quiet on the Western Front
follows the surviving men in that unit back to their hometown through their demobilization and their attempts to readjust to civilian society. Published in Germany in 1931 and then suppressed by the Nazis, it was first translated into English by A. W. Wheen, and published the same year in the United States, but forgotten. Fortunately this masterpiece was reprinted in a trade paperback by Fawcett in 1998 and is now for the first time widely available. The epigraph is from pages 115-17.

²
Pietro Pucci's
Odysseus Polutropos
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987) introduced me to the Homeric contrast between
gastēr
and
thumos.
His whole Chapter 14 is devoted to exploring this contrast. See also Charles Segal,
Singers, Heroes, and Gods in the Odyssey
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), index entries under
gastēr,
belly, and
thumos.

³
3. All these citations are to the Fitzgerald translation.

⁴
An ancient commentary on this passage in
Odyssey
8 makes this point explaining why they are at each other's throats. See Nagy,
The Best of the Achaeans,
p. 45ff. See also Erwin Cook,
The Odyssey in Athens: Myths of Cultural Origins
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), and Wilson, “Lion Kings: Heroes in the Epic Mirrors.”

⁵
Professor Erwin Cook disagrees: Odysseus' not-quite-concealed tears engineer his identification as a “man of pain,” i.e., a hero.

⁶
Charles Segal,
Singers, Heroes, and Gods in the Odyssey,
p. 90, says Homer's words in Greek could equally well mean, “I am Odysseus son of Laertes, who am a subject in song to men by all my wiles.”

¹
Translated from Latin by R. M. Adams (New York: W. W. Norton, 1975), p. 13.

²
Political Writings,
trans. and ed. Biancamaria Fontana (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 61. Thanks to Professor Eugene Garver for this quotation.

³
Now It Can Be Told
(New York: Harper, 1920), p. 547f, quoted in Willard Waller,
The Veteran Comes Back
(New York: Dryden, 1944), p. 118.

⁴
Odysseus begins his yarn in Book 9. The Ciconians, as the inhabitants of Ismarus were called, were Trojan allies (Iliad 2:846, 7:73, orig.). My calling it a pirate raid may be disputed because of this, saying it was simply a continuation of the war. However, Troy has fallen, and Odysseus offers no political justification for the attack. The booty of an undefended town is apparently all the justification needed. W. B. Stanford,
The
Odyssey of Homer,
2nd ed. (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1965), commentary to 9:39f. See note 8, below, to this chapter.

⁵
Waller,
The Veteran Comes Back,
p. 109.

⁶
Ibid., p. 143ff.

⁷
Hill & Wang, 1994.

⁸
The modern sensibility is shocked by what appears to be a gratuitous raid, but according to the standards of the day, they may have been seen as a legitimate target. In Odysseus' eyes, if he needs to explain anything, it is failing to pull out with the booty in time to evade the Ciconians' counterattack. Ancient audiences probably had a less critical reaction to this raid than we do. Piracy was a respectable occupation even into sixth century
B.C.E.
Athens, when Solon's law declared that “If … cult followers of heroes, or members of a clan, or messmates, or funerary associates … or pirates, or traders make arrangements among themselves, these shall be binding unless forbidden by public texts [laws].” Justinian's
Digest
47.22.4, quoted in W. R. Connor, “Civil Society, Dionysiac Festival, and the Athenian Democracy,” in J. Ober and C. Hedrick,
Dēmokratia: A Conversation on Democracies, Ancient and Modern
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), p. 219. Thucydides 1.5 gives the following picture:

For the Hellenes in early times … turned to piracy as soon as they increased their contacts by sea, some of the most powerful men leading the way for their own profit and to support the needy. Falling on unwalled cities consisting of villages, they plundered them and made their main living from this, the practice not yet bringing disgrace but even conferring a certain prestige; witness those mainlanders even of the present who glory in successful raiding, also the request everywhere in early poetry that men arriving by sea say whether they are pirates, as though those questioned would not deny the practice nor would those who wanted to know blame them. (
The Peloponnesian War,
trans. Steven Lattimore [Indianapolis: Hackett, 1998], p. 5.)

⁹
Richard Kulka et al.,
National Vietnam Veterans Readjustment Study
(hereinafter NVVRS) (New York: Brunner/Mazel, 1990), p. VII-21-1.

¹⁰
L. P. Croker,
Army Officer's Guide,
45th ed. (Harrisburg: Stackpole, 1989), p. 410.

¹¹
Emphasis added. Tennyson's
Ulysses
is widely anthologized. The edition I have used is
The Works of Alfred Lord Tennyson
(Ware, U.K.: Wordsworth Editions, 1994), p. 147f.

¹²
Good-bye to All That,
revised 2nd ed. (Anchor, 1957), p. 287.

¹³
Remarque,
The Road Back,
pp. 25253.

¹⁴
Mick Hurbis-Cherrier and Katherine Hurbis-Cherrier,
History Lessons.
Video, 1992.

¹
Homer calls the inhabitants of the town Ciconians. For ancient Ismarus, see F. H. Stubbings, “The Recession of Mycenaean Civilization,” in
The Cambridge Ancient History,
3rd ed., Vol. 3, Part 2, ed. I. E. S. Edwards et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), p. 351.

²
The word that Fitzgerald translates here as “browsing” is the same as used elsewhere for cows and horses grazing. Scholar Erwin Cook takes this to be a Homeric suggestion that the crewmen who ate the lotus reduced themselves to animals, i.e., dehumanized themselves. See Cook, “‘Active' and ‘Passive' Heroics,” p. 57. He finds the whole theme of demeaning or forbidden eating, crystallized by the eating of the sacred cattle of the sun god by the remnant of the flotilla, as the overall ethical
fault requiring their destruction. They yield to physical appetites. Of course, Odysseus yields to his sexual appetites and to the luxury comforts of the nymphs' homes. Are we supposed to see a scale of merit here, that yielding to sex is morally superior (in the world of Odysseus) to yielding to hunger?