Odysseus in America (50 page)

¹¹
See
Dereliction of Duty
by U.S. Army armored cavalry Major H. R. McMaster (New York: HarperCollins, 1998).

¹²
Apologies to “Longinus,” the unknown, probably first-century author of
On the Sublime,
who first speculated that the
Iliad =
Homer's young maturity and the
Odyssey =
Homer's old age, based on considerations of the differing style and form of the two epics. See Howard Clarke,
Homer's Readers: A Historical Introduction to the
Iliad
and the
Odyssey (London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1981), p. 207. As much as I am temperamentally drawn to Longinus' account, I don't need to see “Homer” as one person.

¹³
The dichotomy between achieved and ascribed status is a staple of sociological analysis.

¹⁴
See Ian Morris, “The Strong Principle of Equality and the Archaic Origins of Greek Democracy,” in Ober and Hedrick,
Dēmokratia,
pp. 19-48.

¹⁵
Donna Wilson, in
Ransom, Revenge, and Heroic Identity
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), argues persuasively that the clash between Achilles and Agamemnon in the
Iliad
is fundamentally the clash between the meritocratic and aristocratic bases of legitimation of power.

¹⁶
See Hans van Wees,
Status Warriors
(Amsterdam: Gieben, 1992), for the Iliadic context and William I. Miller,
Humiliation and Other Essays on Honor, Social Discomfort, and Violence
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), for the very
Iliad-
like setting of saga Iceland.

¹⁷
Especially with regard to their love of luxury and creature comforts. Ibid., pp. 32-33.

¹⁸
See John F. Lazenby, “Mercenaries,” in Hornblower and Spawforth, eds.,
The Oxford Classical Dictionary,
p. 961f. A post-Homeric example is Xenophon, who hired out to the Spartan king Agesilaus and the Persian prince Cyrus the Younger. See Jon Hesk,
Deception and Democracy in Classical Athens,
p. 127.

¹⁹
The tensions between the “achieved” meritocracy and “ascribed” nobility never evaporated in ancient Greece nor have they since. However, once the Homeric poems got to Athens and the balance in Athens shifted in favor of meritocracy, the stock of Achilles soared and that of Odysseus crashed. The story of how the Homeric poems took up ritual and political residence in Athens is a complex and fascinating one. See Gregory Nagy,
Poetry as Performance: Homer and Beyond
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), and Cook,
The Odyssey in Athens.
My thanks to a half-dozen classicists for helping me think this through. I have accepted many of their criticisms, but stubbornly resisted others. Credit for
any
merit in this conjecture belongs to them and to the cited works. Any defects of fact or reasoning are my private property.

¹
The full text of “The Dodger Song” can be found on the Web at
www.geocities.com/ Nashville/3448/dodger.html
.

²
Portions of this section appeared in “Guilt and Good Character,”
Religion and Ethics Newsweekly
(online), June 1, 2001,
www.thirteen.org/religionandethics/ week440/vietnam.htm
, where the full commentary can be found.

³
Gregory L. Vistica, “What Happened in Thanh Phong,”
The New York Times Magazine,
April 29, 2001, pp. 50-57, 66-68, 133. Kerrey was awarded the Medal of Honor for an act of heroism during a later action unconnected to the mission at Thanh Phong.

⁴
Ibid., p. 66.

⁵
Thomas E. Ricks, “Kerrey Team Takes Issue with Report: 6 of 7 SEALs Meet on Vietnam Killings,”
The Washington Post,
April 29, 2001.

¹
1.
The Veteran Comes Back,
p. 140.

²
1:16ff and 5:1-160, Fagles.

³
Aphrodite Matsakis,
Vietnam Wives
(Kensington, Md.: Woodbine House, 1988). This book is currently available from the Sidran Press in a second edition, 1996. This citation is to the first edition.

¹
1. I do not respond quite so positively to Odysseus' warmth and truthfulness toward his son, because his son, Telemachus, is not in any sense a separate being from Odysseus. He literally lives or dies with Odysseus. If he errs or falls short, it is akin to Odysseus' throwing arm missing the mark with a spear. Penelope, despite the housebound existence of the well-born Mediterranean wife, is very much her own person, not a mere product of Odysseus' imagination and agendas.

²
Clay,
The Wrath of Athena,
p. 196f.

³
Donald Lateiner,
Sardonic Smile: Nonverbal Behavior in Homeric Epic
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), p. 245.

⁴
Clay,
The Wrath of Athena,
explores what's behind this abandonment.

⁵
Some scholars reject the notice of the suitors in the Underworld as a later insertion in the text, and claim that Odysseus hears about the suitors for the first time from Athena on the beach.

⁶
W. B. Stanford's
Enemies of Poetry
(London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980), p. 131ff, warns against “stereotype fallacies” in imagining what ancient poets could or could not do. This subject, however, is vigorously debated among scholars.

⁷
See Mark W. Edwards,
Homer: Poet of the
Iliad (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987). “Double motivation” and “overdetermination” are the terms critics have used. Peradotto, in
Man in the Middle Voice,
pp. 60-67, adds an additional dimension to the critical theme of multiple motivations. Segal,
Singers, Heroes, and Gods in the Odyssey,
p. 217, refers to “double determination” as a “common Homeric device.”

⁸
See
Achilles in Vietnam,
pp. 32f and 82f, for more of this tank veteran's words.

⁹
When Odysseus and Telemachus meet at the swineherd's hut, Odysseus levels with his son because they live or die together. He is a useful ally, but he cannot reside absolute trust in anyone else but his son. They have an identity of interests not shared by Penelope. If the suitors take down Odysseus, Telemachus is dead or exiled. Penelope survives as the new wife of the leading suitor, not the enslaved spoil of war.

¹⁰
The translator here uses the word “palace,” but we should not imagine an enormous structure built over generations by a hereditary monarchy. It is more apt to imagine a hacienda, walled for defense and with little refinement.

¹¹
The story of two angels visiting Sodom in Genesis 19 is one well-known example.

¹²
Odysseus actually declines an invitation to visit her immediately, as she asks when she hears that there is a stranger from abroad in the house. He subtly puts himself on an equal footing with the suitors by telling Eumaeus that his going to see her might further anger the suitors (17:629).

¹³
Unwittingly, when they send out their pages—thus sending out the news that Penelope is finally going to make her choice and be wed—the suitors also set up Odysseus' final strategic deception, when he has killed off all the suitors behind locked doors. Odysseus tells the harper to strike up wedding songs and dances to buy time before the townspeople figure out what Odysseus has done and that they want his blood.

¹⁴
1:149f, Fagles, describes the row on row of spears in a rack (or jar) by the entrance of Odysseus' hall.

¹⁵
Neil Sheehan,
A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam
(New York: Random House, 1988), p. 308.

¹⁶
Eurybates is mentioned in Book 2 of the
Iliad
as Odysseus' lieutenant, so he has survived the first nine years of the war.

¹⁷
After she awakens, she looks around for her geese and sees that they are not dead,
subtly hinting that she is relieved and likes having them around. This is but one of several hints that Penelope is on the verge of defecting. Athena's warning to Telemachus in Sparta is one, an even subtler one is the parallel between the jaw-gripped fawn on the brooch she gave to Odysseus and the jaw-gripped fawn in Menelaus' simile for what Odysseus would do to the suitors—and to Penelope, who is the doe! Telemachus repeats this as a subtle warning to his mother on his return. See Nancy Felson-Rubin,
Regarding Penelope
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), p. 21f. Elsewhere in this book Professor Felson-Rubin assembles the did she/didn't she evidence on whether and when she recognized Odysseus.

¹⁸
Waller,
The Veteran Comes Back,
p. 98.

¹⁹
NVVRS, p. II-45-1, and Richard A. Kulka et al.,
Trauma and the Vietnam War Generation
(New York: Brunner/Mazel, 1990), p. 28, citing U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1987.

²⁰
Matsakis,
Vietnam Wives,
p. 33.

²¹
Patience C. H. Mason,
Recovering from the War: A Woman's Guide to Helping Your Vietnam Veteran, Your Family, and Yourself
(New York: Viking, 1990), p. 241. Robert Mason wrote
Chickenhawk
(New York: Viking Penguin, 1983) and
Chickenhawk: Back in the World
(New York: Viking Penguin, 1993).

²²
Mason,
Recovering from the War,
p. 248.

²³
The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen,
ed. C. Day Lewis (New York: New Directions, 1965), p. 37.

²⁴
PTSD clinicians and researchers Lizabeth Roemer, Brett T. Lidz, Susan M. Orsillo, and Amy W. Wagner have investigated this intentional withholding of emotion in “A Preliminary Investigation of the Role of Strategic Withholding of Emotion in PTSD,”
Journal of Traumatic Stress
14:149-56 (2001).

²⁵
Leukos is not identified by his place of origin, and ten years into the war, could have come from anywhere, not necessarily Ithaca or the nearby towns. Based on the
Iliad
alone, it would appear that the casualties
at Troy
among Odysseus' original Ithacan contingent appear to be few to none! A search using the names of places, such as Ithaca, Neritos, and Korkyleia, contributing to his battalion in the Muster of the Ships in
Iliad
2, does not turn up a single death identified with these “hometowns” anywhere else in the
Iliad.

²⁶
In the episode with the King of the Winds, Odysseus (who was asleep, you recall) reports his crew as saying, “‘Heaps of lovely plunder he hauls home from Troy, while we who went through slogging just as hard, we go home empty-handed'” (10:45ff, Fagles). Despite this mention of plunder, I find the otherwise total absence of mention of booty in Odysseus' ships—and particularly of captive women—quite a noteworthy silence.

²⁷
Criterion A:2 of Code 309.81 Posttraumatic Stress Disorder. In
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders,
4th ed. (DSM-IV) (Washington: American Psychiatric Association Press, 1994), pp. 424-29. The three symptom clusters (criteria B, C, D) are reexperiencing symptoms, withdrawal and numbing symptoms, and symptoms of increased psychological and physiological mobilization (“arousal”). The detailed DSM-IV descriptive criteria can be found on literally hundreds of places on the World Wide Web, and do not require reproduction here. In the Cyclops and Scylla episodes, Odysseus has a hard time owning fear and horror. When he admits to them at all, he usually uses “we,” including himself in the fear of his men, which he then rises above, contrasting his own subsequent responses.

²⁸
This is typical of Homer's fictional method—to salt the essential information on the motivation of character and action throughout the narrative, rather than in the chronological, case-history manner found in some modern fiction. For example, Homer salts the full picture of Achilles' good character prior to the thunderbolt opening
of
Iliad
1 in little data packets throughout the
Iliad.
This is discussed in Shay, “Achilles: Paragon, Flawed Character, or Tragic Soldier Figure?”

²⁹
Nancy Felson-Rubin,
Regarding Penelope,
p. 70f. Astonishingly, Autolycus surfaces in
Iliad
10 in connection with the boar-tusk helmet (lines 261ff, orig.) that Odysseus puts on for the night reconnaissance with Diomedes. The text gives the helmet's provenance with its theft by housebreaker Autolycus, then passing through various hands, presumably as guest-gifts finally to his grandson Odysseus. See Brian Hainsworth,
The Iliad: A Commentary,
Vol. 3 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 179ff, particularly the commentary to line 10:267.

³⁰
Erwin F. Cook,
The Odyssey in Athens,
p. 85.

³¹
Dimock, “The Name of Odysseus”; also “The Man of Pain” in that author's
The Unity of the Odyssey,
pp. 246-63. John Peradotto gives it simply as “Hate” in
Man in the Middle Voice,
p. 128.

³²
Nancy Sultan,
Exile and the Poetics of Loss in Greek Tradition
(Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999), p. 43.1 have no inclination to entangle myself in the controversy that rages to this day as to whether a disposition to criminal behavior is inherited or learned, nature or nurture,
physis
or
nomos.
You can see that I lean to the latter. Homer does not make us privy to the stages of “violentization” laid out by Lonnie H. Athens in
The Creation of Dangerous Violent Criminals.