The Iliad and the Odyssey (Classics of World Literature) (9 page)

With memories and tales of our annoys.

Betwixt his sorrows every human joys,

He most, who most hath felt and furthest err’d.’

After Eumaeus’ life story, the narrative shifts back to Telemachus, who avoids the suitors’ trap and makes his way to Eumaeus – a return elevated by portents and by Athene’s guidance.

Book 16

Eumaeus’ is the halfway house between shore and palace, the intermediary between father and son. There is no simple coming together between this boy who has had to grow up without a father and this man whose identity and qualities have been those of an individual hero – they have to negotiate a relationship while learning to establish their new identities on Ithaca.

The first sign of Telemachus’ place is the fawning of Eumaeus’ dogs (the dogs that were ready to attack Odysseus). Telemachus belongs here; he calls Eumaeus ‘Atta’ – a respectful and intimate term. Similes in Homer are used frequently to point to an unusual yet striking similarity (Odysseus clinging to the rocky shore in Phaeacia like an octopus). But when Eumaeus greets Telemachus Homer says:

There breath’d no kind-soul’d father that was fill’d

Less with his son’s embraces, that had liv’d

Ten years in far-off earth, now new retriev’d,

His only child too, gotten in his age,

And for whose absence he had felt the rage

Of griefs upon him . . .

The point of this simile is that it is a simile – Eumaeus is
not
Telemachus’s adoring father; the simile wonders at the gap between the emotions of the biological father, who demonstrates none of the natural sentiment of the simile and who observes his son coolly from the shadows, and the kind, tearful old man who has served as his emotional base all these years.

Looking after Odysseus is a problem for Telemachus, aware that the household structures of his youth are disintegrating and that events at the palace are moving too fast for him to be able to receive and protect a guest. Odysseus questions him about his helplessness and almost reproaches him (a very acute and timeless exchange between aging father and fully-grown son: ‘I could have done something about it at your age . . . ’). Athene intervenes by rejuvenating him, to Telemachus’ astonishment: he now thinks Odysseus to be a visiting deity. This Odysseus brusquely denies, abruptly revealing who he is:

‘I hold

No deified state. Why put you thus on me

A god’s resemblance? I am only he

That bears thy father’s name.’

Odysseus, the all-enduring, is suddenly overwhelmed at the suffering his absence has caused Telemachus, and weeping tries to embrace him. Telemachus keeps his distance, still taking him to be a god in disguise come to test him – in his wariness showing himself truly to be his father’s son. When he does finally believe, they weep together like birds whose fledglings have been stolen away from them by man – shedding common tears for the loss of the years spent separately.

Those years are lost, but they can establish a bond of common purpose: to rid the palace of the suitors and to bring the household to trial. Odysseus answers Telemachus with ‘the truth’ about his journey (as distinct from the Cretan tales he tells everyone else, even Athene!) and sends him back to the palace to put the first part of their secret plan into action. Here he must endure, as his father has had to do, whatever ill-treatment the suitors mete out.

The narrative switches to the suitors, whose ambush of Telemachus has been unsuccessful. They too talk of things coming to a crisis: Telemachus’ coming-of-age brings the need for Penelope to finally make a choice.

The book ends with Eumaeus’ return from the palace. A great deal has happened in his absence, although Athene reverses Odysseus’ rejuvenation so the scene in the hut appears the same. Telemachus and Odysseus are now bound in common secret knowledge – Eumaeus is uncertain about the figures he has seen in the ‘ambush’ ship:

The prince smil’d, and knew

They were the wooers, casting secret view

Upon his father.

Book 17

Book 17 starts with Telemachus’ return to Penelope who has been worrying about him – an emotional return vividly anticipated from the adolescent’s point of view: he must go, he says to

‘My mother . . .

. . . who, till her eyes

Mine own eyes witness, varies tears and cries

Through all extremes . . . ’

Penelope does indeed create the ‘scene’ Telemachus feared:

Her kind embraces, with effusion

Of loving tears; kiss’d both his lovely eyes,

His cheeks, and forehead; and gave all supplies

With this entreaty: ‘Welcome, sweetest light . . . ’

Telemachus uses his new assurance to hold her off (‘Move me not now’), telling her to collect her womenfolk to see to the ritual thanksgiving while he goes to call an assembly and see to his suppliant, the seer Theoclymenus. He does relent later, telling her the high points of his trip and assuring her that Odysseus is alive but detained. Theoclymenus reinforces this message, saying that Odysseus is not only alive but already on Ithaca. For the first time, Penelope does not turn down the possibility.

The theme of the avenger in disguise occupies the centre of this and the next book. In incident after incident Odysseus is abused and ill treated, although his bodily strength beneath the shabby disguise causes many a suitor to rue the insult. The motif of the poor stranger who appears in a household and who eventually throws off the disguise, rewards the worthy and generous and punishes the uncivil, is a common folk motif; the stranger is often (as Telemachus and one of the suitors suspected) a god in disguise. Odysseus’ real qualities of cunning, endurance and bodily strength can be displayed as a beggar as much as a king – this is a different world from the
Iliad
, where the noble are all brave and all beautiful, and only the low-born, foul-mouthed Thersites is ugly. In this world, Odysseus can harp on a commonality between the highest and the lowest in both being subservient to the needs of the belly. Here Odysseus is recognisably himself whether fighting a beggars’ duel, standing up to the suitors’ blows or begging his food with cunning stories.

The folk story of the disguised judge is interwoven with the narrative of the double process of recognition: of Odysseus being recognised as himself and of Odysseus learning who he now is, in the non-Iliadic world of Ithaca. On his first journey into town he sees his old dog, Argus, whom he trained for the chase before leaving for Troy, now lying on a dunghill dying of old age and neglect. The mistreatment of the once fine, prized hunting dog is distressing, a symbol of the waste by the suitors of Odysseus’ royal goods, and points to the sort of treatment anyone helpless will receive at their hands. Infinitely moving is the old dog’s summoning of his very last energy to wag his tail and prick his ears in recognition of his long absent master, before dying. For the dog, the recognition is simple, the relationship stable – no words or explanation are needed; the relationship between master and hound unchanged by twenty years. For others, Odysseus has to establish himself, to be recognised not
as
anything but
for
what he now is.

The centrepiece of Books 17–20 is the private meeting between Penelope and the still disguised Odysseus – a meeting prefigured by the nurse’s recognition of Odysseus from a scar that marked him from childhood. As with Argus, the recognition is simple – Odysseus for her is in some sense the same as the boy she suckled, who went on his first boar hunt, the scar a witness to the continuity. Odysseus prevents her from telling Penelope. Penelope’s recognition will be fuller, more complex and more difficult to achieve.

At the end of Book 17 the long-awaited meeting between Penelope and Odysseus is anticipated but is then, dramatically, postponed for a whole book. In the meantime there is a mock duel between Odysseus and Irus for the position of ‘official’ beggar, with the suitors putting forward Irus as their ‘champion’. Irus, like Argus, is an illustration of the rottenness of the palace as now infested by the suitors; his downfall is welcomed as just, prefiguring the more general punishment Odysseus will mete out, and the episode is a lively burlesque of a heroic encounter.

Books 18–20

Odysseus’ return coincides with and precipitates the new independence of both his son and his wife; Penelope’s reaction both to her son’s maturity and to the now more authoritative reports of Odysseus’ safety is carefully described. Homeric psychology maps easily onto modern – any modern novel could convincingly translate the scene where Athene put it in the heart of Penelope that after years of waiting and mourning she should now smarten herself up and show herself to the suitors in order that she should demonstrate her desirability to her husband and son . . . and herself:

Who laughing yet, to show her humour bore

No serious appetite to that light show,

She told Eurynome, that not till now

She ever knew her entertain desire

To please her wooers’ eyes, but oft on fire

She set their hate, in keeping from them still;

Yet now she pleas’d t’appear . . .

Although Penelope and her nurse Eurynome are frank about the ravages worked by time and dull grief, a beauty bath and facial and a revivifying sleep contribute, with Athene’s help, to her radiant appearance. Penelope says several times that Odysseus took with him her bloom and value as a woman (
arete
), but both are now restored: wearing

So thin a veil, that through it quite there shone

A grace so stol’n, it pleas’d above the clear,

And sunk the knees of every wooer there,

Their minds so melted in love’s vehement fires,

That to her bed she heighten’d all desires.

As a man demonstrates his
arete
in contest, in battle, in the assembly and by the gifts that accrue, so a woman demonstrates hers by the dowry she can command, by the gifts she can inspire. Odysseus, from his beggar’s seat, sees both her and the suitors’ reaction. He is going to have to compete against the others to [re]win Penelope, a wife whose status and desirability have been reasserted.

Penelope’s state of mind is sensitively described. Coming round from her beauty sleep, she had wished she could stay in that soft sleep for ever and never awake to the grief and longing that has been her life for twenty years; when she is fully awake it is as if she is reborn to another life. She acknowledges her son’s beard as a
rite de passage
for her too: she offers to marry but demands proper wooing gifts. Although she says she cannot believe reports that Odysseus is alive and coming back, in Book 19 she dreams of his return. But it is an ambivalent dream – he is the eagle that slaughters the geese of the household (the suitors) – geese that she ‘joy’d to see’ and for whose death she cries and sorrows. Odysseus’ return may be a consummation devoutly to be wished, but it is also a threat to her newly-found status as a woman.

Penelope’s consciousness of Odysseus is shown by her concern for him after his ‘duel’: she upbraids Telemachus for not taking better care of a stranger guest. Telemachus is now assured enough to feign helplessness when it will serve his and his father’s cause. For the first time, too, he speaks out against the suitors’ carousing – he sends them to their homes to sleep it off and himself goes to bed, leaving the palace quiet for Odysseus’ and Penelope’s meeting, in the half-shadows of the empty hall. In one last delay, Odysseus has to fight for his place once more, this time against the wicked maidservant Melantho. Penelope joins him in condemning the woman; when it comes, Odysseus’ purge will extend to the servants who have consorted with the suitors as well as the suitors themselves.

When Penelope and Odysseus finally come together their exchanges are in character but strike common resonances – Odysseus addresses her as one whose fame goes up to heaven, as like a king ruling as a lord (Odysseus elsewhere has cried like a woman who long missed her husband). He is too full of grief to tell his tale; Penelope represents herself, again, as one whose
arete
has been destroyed by longing. She explains the trick with which she has kept her suitors at bay for years: she has made the weaving of a shroud for her father-in-law the defining act which has to be completed before leaving Odysseus’ household for a new one. In a device worthy of ‘Odysseus, full of tricks’, weaving all day she has each night unpicked her work. In answer, Odysseus embarks on another ‘Cretan’ tale, where he claims to have entertained Odysseus. He thus establishes a bond between himself and Odysseus, one that moves Penelope to tears.

Thus many tales Ulysses told his wife,

At most but painting, yet most like the life;

Of which her heart such sense took through her ears,

It made her weep as she would turn to tears.

And as from off the mountains melts the snow. . .

So down her fair cheeks her kind tears did glide,

Her miss’d lord mourning, set so near her side.

Odysseus himself is near to tears, but conceals them. Despite her emotional sympathy with the stranger, Penelope decides to test him by asking him to describe Odysseus’ clothes and appearance. Odysseus of course can describe exactly the outfit Penelope made for him, can describe how he looked when she last saw him.

When all these signs she knew for chiefly true,

Desire of moan upon her beauties grew,

And yet, ev’n that desire suffic’d, she said:

‘Till this, my guest, a wretched state array’d

Your ill-us’d person, but from this hour forth

You shall be honour’d, and find all the worth

That fits a friend . . . ’

He has passed the test, and through his beggarly appearance she has accepted him as an worthy link to her husband. He tries to offer one further bond with Odysseus – he says he has seen his stockpile of rich gifts amassed on the way home. (He would have been home long before but has travelled to accrue wealth: a harsh statement but one which likens him to a suitor amassing wedding gifts . . . ) Penelope however will not accept such proof of his survival. But the story has turned her mind away from Odysseus as he left, the young hero, to Odysseus as he must be now, battered by experience and like the man in front of her. She orders Odysseus’ old nurse to bathe him: