Odysseus seems to have complicated feelings about his own past history. The temptation offered by the Sirens is to listen forever, and know everything that the Greeks and Trojans suffered in the war. One might think that Odysseus would want this, above all, as an ego boost: the Sirens address him as the “glory of the Greeks,” and their songs promise an endless retelling of Odysseus’ own finest hours; they call to him to listen,
“since we know everything the Greeks and Trojans
suffered in Troy, by gods’ will; and we know
whatever happens anywhere on earth.” (12.189–91)
The temptation is as much knowledge as glory. The Sirens offer Odysseus what no single individual engaged in the conflict can have: a full and complete understanding of what happened in the war and what it meant. In resisting the Sirens, Odysseus acknowledges that he will have to go on acting out the consequences of the war, without ever being able fully to know what it was all about.
Odysseus puts in a special request to Demodocus, the Phaeacian bard, to sing the story of the Wooden Horse—the trick that Odysseus himself devised in order to infiltrate and sack the city. Demodocus complies, and tells how the Greek warriors, including Odysseus, hid inside the manufactured horse; how the Trojans pulled the horse inside, and left it at the summit of their city, as an offering to the gods; and how, during the night, the gang of fighters jumped out of the hollow cavity, scattered across the city, and began slaughtering the people of Troy. One might expect that Odysseus would be happy to hear the story of his own greatest military triumph—a story that, after all, he had just asked to hear. But his response is surprising. Rather than being glad (as he was glad to hear the story of Aphrodite committing adultery), he bursts into tears, and a striking simile seems to conflate his emotional response with that of his own victims.
Odysseus was melting into tears;
his cheeks were wet with weeping, as a woman
weeps, as she falls to wrap her arms around
her husband, fallen fighting for his home
and children. (8.521–25)
The simile compares the desperate weeping of Odysseus, a military conqueror, to the grief of a woman who is a victim of war, a woman whose husband is dying and who knows that she herself, and her children, will soon be led off into slavery by the victors. Perhaps the comparison suggests that Odysseus himself feels some kind of deep guilt over the suffering that he himself has caused, in his instrumental role in sacking not only Troy but many other towns and settlements. Or perhaps the simile works to downplay Odysseus’ responsibility for the suffering he has caused, by inviting us to see him as a suffering victim, even in his role as the sacker of cities.
In the final book of the Odyssey, after Odysseus has slaughtered the suitors, Eupeithes, the father of one of the dead men, urges the people of Ithaca to rise up together and kill Odysseus in revenge. He offers a searing indictment of Odysseus.
“This scheming man,
my friends, has done us all most monstrous wrongs.
First, he took many good men off to sail
with him, and lost the ships, and killed the men!
Now he has come and murdered all the best
of Cephallenia. Come on, before
he sneaks away to Pylos or to Elis,
we have to act! We will be shamed forever
unless we take revenge on him for killing
our sons and brothers. I would have no wish
to live; I would prefer to die and join
the boys already dead. We have to stop them
escaping overseas! Come on, right now!” (24.425–37)
The words come from the mouth of a grieving parent whose young son has been shot by Odysseus the day before. It represents a limited, highly personal point of view. Moreover, Eupeithes presumably does not know how unpleasantly his son behaved, when he had the chance to lord it up in the household of the absent Odysseus.
But Eupeithes, whose name means “Persuasive,” is making a point that readers of the poem may find surprisingly persuasive—as do the people of Ithaca. Antinous is depicted as an arrogant, supercilious young man, who drinks too much, exploits the resources of an absent home owner, treats Penelope and Telemachus with disrespect, and is cruel and unwelcoming to Odysseus in his guise as a poor migrant. Yet the grief of his father reminds us that the murdered Antinous was very young, probably not much older than Telemachus. Young men often behave oafishly, but they may mature in time—unless they get an arrow through the neck first. Eupeithes’ speech reminds us also that the killing of the suitors is not an isolated incident; Odysseus has made an unfortunate habit of leading young men to their deaths. When Odysseus addresses the men who row his ship, he repeatedly calls them “friends,” philoi, a word that suggests a close tie of kinship or love. Odysseus is a smart talker, who knows the best words to use for a particular audience. But the narrator instead calls these men hetairoi, “companions” or “servants,” a term that can suggest a much more hierarchical relationship. Of the troops Odysseus rounded up to take with him to Troy, some fell in battle, and all the rest die in various horrible ways in the course of their leader’s journey home.
The first lines of the poem invite us to see these deaths in terms of the dead men’s own folly or childish naïveté, because they chose to eat the Cattle of the Sun. They were “poor fools” (nepioi), a term that suggests childish thoughtlessness. This foolishness is sharply contrasted with Odysseus’ own characteristic qualities of scheming intelligence, quick planning, and forward thinking (metis). But this prologue does not hint at the numerous other deaths suffered by the men in Odysseus’ crew—including those who are eaten alive by the sea-monster Scylla when Odysseus chooses to sail past her island; those who are devoured by the Cyclops, thanks to Odysseus’ insistence on visiting his cave; or those who are skewered from their ships and eaten by the man-eating giants, the Laestrygonians, when Odysseus docks the fleet at their island and moors only his own ship in a safe place outside the harbor. These deaths clearly have nothing to do with the men’s cognitive or moral qualities. The prophet Tiresias predicts that, if Odysseus hurts the Cattle of the Sun, he will arrive home only “late and exhausted, in a stranger’s boat, / having destroyed [his] men,” and a similar prophesy is made by the goddess Circe. The participle here translated as “having destroyed” can also mean “having lost.” The ambiguous phrasing matters, because the ultimate responsibility for all these deaths remains an open question.
Endings
The traditional poetic stories of archaic Greece included tales of how the heroes came home from the Trojan War—the Nostoi, as they were known. The Odyssey is obviously a story of nostos, meaning “homecoming” (the word from which we get “nostalgia,” the pain of missing home). But the poem suggests that it may not be entirely easy to see what a homecoming is, and when exactly it happens. Coming home means more than simply reaching a particular spatial or geographical location. The hero reaches his home country of Ithaca when the poem is almost exactly halfway through. The remaining books trace a series of journeys across a tiny geographical area: from the port of Ithaca to the loyal swineherd’s hut; back and forth between the hut and the palace; from the hallway to the marriage bed, and back again; out from the palace to the orchard, and back again to slaughter his fellow countrymen who are assembled in front of his house. Each of these locations seems to offer a different version of home, and one can wonder when and where Odysseus feels most fully that he has arrived.