Odysseus in America (49 page)

²
Achilles in Vietnam,
“Guilt and Wrongful Substitution” chapter.

³
This is essentially Sophocles' version in the Ajax. In case you are thinking that Odysseus received the arms of Achilles as an apt reward for the ruse of the Trojan Horse, Achilles' death and the award of his arms occurred before the war's sudden end in victory for the Greeks. In some respects this play about Ajax's suicide presents one of the most sympathetic pictures of Odysseus in all of Athenian tragedy. See Charles Segal,
Tragedy and Civilization: An Interpretation of Sophocles
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981), pp. 148-50. Sophocles'
Philoctetes
is more representative in that it foregrounds Odysseus' manipulativeness and deceit toward the noble-spirited son of Achilles, Neoptolemus.

⁴
Sometime around the beginning of the fourth century
B.C.E.,
an associate of Socrates named Antisthenes “wrote a pair of speeches as if they had been delivered by Ajax and Odysseus during the infamous dispute over which of them should inherit … the armour.” Jon Hesk,
Deception and Democracy in Classical Athens
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 118-21, gives a fascinating summary and analysis of these speeches.

⁵
William Mullen, “Pindar and Athens,”
Arion
New Series ⅓, 1974. I thank Professor Mullen for drawing this to my attention and supplying the quotation.

⁶
Gregory Nagy, Introduction to the Knopf edition of Fitzgerald's
Iliad
translation, p. xv.

⁷
Nemean 3:48ff (deer and lions); Isthmian 5:38ff (combat kills).

⁸
Stanford,
The Ulysses Theme,
pp. 102-17.

⁹
Ibid., p. 110.

¹⁰
Ibid. p. 111. Classicist Charles Segal describes Odysseus' religious views thus: “His gods are simply the appendage of his own purposes.”
Sophocles' Tragic World,
p. 100.

¹¹
John P. A. Gould, “Sophocles,”
Oxford Classical Dictionary,
3rd ed., ed. Simon Hornblower and Anthony Spawforth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 1423. For the military background of Athenian tragic theater see J. Shay, “The Birth of Tragedy—Out of the Needs of Democracy,”
Didaskalia: Ancient Theater Today,
vol. 2, no. 2, April 1995. Online:
didaskalia.berkeley.edu/issues/vol2no2/ Shay. html
.

¹²
The ellipses are Mary Garvey's. E-mail of December 10, 2001. Quoted by permission. “Hierarchies of suffering” were discussed in
Achilles in Vietnam,
pp. 192 and 239
n
10.

¹³
See pp. 65-75 and 192.

¹⁴
The text leans in the direction of Odysseus being aware of the death, but being unwilling to take the time to perform the death rites. Nothing in what Circe says to him suggests that he would have to return to her island after the trip to Hades, so at the time he left, he could not have been thinking, “We'll do this when we get back.” This is either another example of Odysseus' indifference to the welfare of those serving under him, or of his being so “fried” that he just says, “Don' mean nothing, drive on.”

¹⁵
Perhaps Odysseus was responding to the threat “or my curse may draw god's fury
on your head” (11:81, Fagles), which Elpenor also said. Who knows what the dead are capable of?

¹⁶
7th Annual Meeting, International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies, Washington, D.C., 1991.

¹⁷
Achilles in Vietnam,
p. 198ff.

¹⁸
Ibid., p. 71.

¹⁹
Frederick Ahl and Hanna Roisman in their book
The Odyssey Re-Formed
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), p. 131.

²⁰
Ibid. I owe this insight, slapping my forehead with my hand, to the classical scholars Frederick Ahl and Hanna Roisman in
The Odyssey Re-Formed.
At 15:399f the loyal swineherd Eumaeus confirms this, saying Anticleia “died of grief for her boy.”

²¹
While some veterans with complex PTSD seem devoid of conscience, others seem to suffer an excess of it. Their conscience stands in the way of their getting help from people who both want to help and have demonstrated ability to help. These veterans
know
about “secondary trauma,” psychological injury to mental health professionals working with them. Because the veterans know, they keep silent about their worst demons, until they have observed the therapist and his or her setting long enough to know that it is safe—for themselves and for the therapist. About ten years ago, when I had only three years experience and was still quite green, I was sitting eating a sandwich in a group therapy room a quarter hour before a therapy group I was to conduct. Because our program is based on the concept that the veterans heal one another through the power of their community together, they are encouraged to consider the rooms “theirs” and to come early and stay late. One veteran came with some photographs of enemy soldiers he had blown apart with his M-79 Thumper, the shotgun-style grenade launcher. Out of respect for the dead, I put down my sandwich, but made the error of not explaining why I put down my sandwich. The veteran grabbed back the pictures looking stricken, fearing he had made me sick to my stomach. These photographs were intensely meaningful, important, and also probably harmful for him to dwell on privately, without anyone to “process” the feelings, memories, and thoughts that they evoked. His fear of hurting me shut down his chance at that bit of recovery. He never brought the pictures to the clinic again, despite offers to structure the encounter any way he felt safe. The subject of clinician self-care and prevention of secondary trauma in the mental health workplace is a large one. Dealing with secondary trauma is not a secondary issue to the success of the treatment enterprise. See J. Shay and J. Munroe, “Group and Milieu Therapy for Veterans with Complex Posttraumatic Stress Disorder,” in
Posttraumatic Stress Disorder: A Comprehensive Text,
ed. Philip A. Saigh and J. Douglas Bremner (Boston: Allyn & Bacon, 1999), pp. 391-413. Access to the literature of secondary trauma as an occupational exposure in many fields of work can be found in the bibliography to the second edition of
Secondary Traumatic Stress,
ed. Beth Hudnall-Stamm (Lutherville, Md.: Sidran Press, 1999).

²²
Yael Danieli,
International Handbook of Multigenerational Legacies of Trauma
(New York: Plenum, 1998).

²³
Lawrence A. Tritle,
From Melos to My Lai: War and Survival
(London and New York: Routledge, 2000), p. 184.

¹
George Hoffman and a number of other veterans who have never been my patients speak in their own names and have generously allowed me to use their words here. This is excerpted from the complete “War Story,” which can be found in a collection
of George “Sonny” Huffman's writings on the Web at
www.vietvet.org/sonny.htm
. George Huffman reserves all rights.

²
In fairness to those who recall the songs' appeal as sexual, there are strong sexual associations to the grassy meadow (
lēimon
was also used to refer to the female genitals) on which they sing and the “” (
thelgousin
) effect of their songs. See Jean-Pierre Vernant, “The Refusal of Odysseus,” trans. V. Farenga, in Schein,
Reading the Odyssey,
p. 186
n
9.

³
Pietro Pucci, “The Song of the Sirens,” in Schein,
Reading the Odyssey,
p. 191.

⁴
Ibid. This is one of the main points of Pucci's paper.

⁵
The Sirens, in a line not quoted above, speak of veterans “delighting in” (
terpsamenos
) their song, 12:188, orig.

⁶
Willy Peter: white phosphorus incendiary.

⁷
Ahl and Roisman,
The Odyssey Re-formed,
p. 147. Elsewhere, I have tried to put the Homeric word
thumos
back into current circulation as a less pathologizing and prejudicial term than “narcissism.” See Shay and Munroe, “Group and Milieu Therapy for Veterans,” pp. 391-413, especially the section “Destruction of Normal Narcissism.” See also J. Shay, “Killing Rage:
Physis
or
Nomos—
or Both?,” in
War and Violence in Ancient Greece,
ed. Hans van Wees (London: Duckworth and Classical Press of Wales, 2000), pp. 31-56, especially the section “Honor, Narcissism, and
Thumos
.”

⁸
Pucci,
Odysseus Polutropos,
p. 212
n
7.

⁹
J. Shay, “Achilles: Paragon, Flawed Character, or Tragic Soldier Figure?”
Classical Bulletin
71:117-24 (1995).

¹⁰
Republic
X 621c.

¹¹
2.583.

¹²
Translated by Janet Lloyd (New York: Zone Books, 1999), p. 87.

¹³
Segal,
Singers, Heroes, and Gods in the Odyssey,
p. 103.

¹⁴
In the eyes of bureaucracies, more syllables is always better: Is there any substantive difference in meaning between the four-syllable verb “adjudicate” and the one-syllable verb “judge”?

¹⁵
My esteemed colleague in
Commandant of the Marine Corps Trust Study
Bruce Gudmundsson, a world-class military historian, gives the following comments on the
“Dolchstoss von hinten.”
First, many soldiers from the front felt that they had not been beaten—much like many American Vietnam veterans say “we won every battle”—and thus were baffled and humiliated by the surrender. Second, the phrase was not originally a nationalist, right-wing coinage, but actually first used by Friedrich Ebert, a Social Democrat, the first chancellor of the Weimar Republic, to some army troops. When I asked Gudmundsson what Ebert had in mind, he said it probably referred to (a) the British blockade, which Germany saw as a violation of international law and illegitimate, and (b) Germany's geographical “back,” which was exposed to the knife by the collapse of Bulgaria and the Austro-Hungarian Empire after the Battle of Salonica. The phrase was subsequently appropriated and exploited to great effect by ultranationalist groups such as the Nazis.

¹
12:113, Fagles.

²
Lieutenant General Harold G. Moore and Joseph L. Galloway,
We Were Soldiers Once … and Young
(New York: Random House, 1992), p. 345.

³
More dangerous women! Both Scylla and Charybdis are gendered female.

⁴
Cook, 1999, p. 157.

⁵
The text is not crystal clear as to whether Circe's instruction to put everything into
speed was aimed at avoiding Scylla's jaws altogether, not veering into the whirlpool, or at limiting her catch to six, not giving her a shot at another six by hanging around to fight. Heubeck and a number of other scholars come down squarely that Circe's warning is that Scylla “may sally forth a
second
time … with six heads, and attack you
again.”
See his commentary to 12:122-23, orig.

⁶
A. Heubeck and A. Hoekstra,
A Commentary on Homer's Odyssey,
vol. 2. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 130.

¹
12:298, Fagles.

²
Cattle rustling was apparently a major sideline for Greek warriors. I imagine their society being much like the present-day herding society in the horn of Africa, where herdsman and warrior are called by the same word and where men are
always
armed to the teeth when they tend their cattle. When Achilles and Agamemnon blow up in the opening book of the
Iliad,
Achilles sneers, (
Iliad
1:175ff, Fitzgerald; emphasis added) You thick-skinned, shameless, greedy fool!
Can any [Greek] care for you, or obey you,
after this on marches or in battle?
As for myself, when I came here to fight,
I had no quarrel with Troy or Trojan spearmen:
they never stole my cattle or my horses.
This is an insight into the world of these Greek warriors of the Archaic Period. Achilles doesn't say “the Trojans never burned our town or raided our shipping,” but “they never stole my cattle.”

³
Scholars Ahl and Roisman comment, “Eurylochus usually spots Odysseus' intent to endanger his comrades or treat them unfairly.”

⁴
Homer scholar Erwin Cook disagrees with my finding irony here and says that here “Zeus” simply means “the gods” and that the sun god's island and the gale are simply workings out of the divine plan set in train by the Cyclops' curse (personal communication).

⁵
24:468ff, Fitzgerald.

⁶
See Segal,
Singers, Heroes and Gods in the Odyssey,
p. 217.

⁷
We can recall that the other time Odysseus fell asleep, on the way from the island of the King of the Winds straight home to Ithaca, it didn't come out well.

⁸
Ahl and Roisman,
The Odyssey Re-Formed,
p. 151.

⁹
Ibid., p. 150.

¹⁰
Ex. 32. Homeric scholar Donna Wilson: “a traditional theme common to Homer and Israelite tradition alike that the people fail to restrain themselves in the long absence of a leader; the suitors do the same thing” (e-mail, December 18, 2001).