“There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail”
The quotation is from Ulysses, by Alfred, Lord Tennyson and I remember it from our high school English book. The year before I left our small town to attend university in the city, these words symbolized the idea of seeing the wider world beyond our town, and I copied them out and put them on my bedroom wall.
This week I took Rosemary Sutcliff’s children’s version of The Odyssey out of the library, wondering if it would interest my grandchildren. As I leafed through, admiring Alan Lee’s beautiful illustrations, I realized I’d never actually read the tale, central though it is to the culture that has always surrounded me.
It was interesting, if a bit dismaying, to read about the return of Odysseus (another name for Ulysses). The same old tropes.
To understand the context, we must return to the Iliad, in which Odysseus leaves his wife Penelope and his infant son Telemachus and allies himself with King Menelaus, whose wife Helen has run off with Paris. Odysseus joins the irate king and and they follow the fleeing couple to Troy to take Helen back.
Admittedly, this trouble was originally instigated by the vanity of Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite, and condoned by Zeus, who roped in Paris to choose which of the three goddesses was most beautiful. Determined to win, Aphrodite took advantage of his cupidity and vanity by bribing him with the promise of power and a beautiful wife. (Apparently the goddess didn’t consider it relevant that Helen was already married to Menelaus.)
But I digress. When the Odyssey begins, Troy (Ilium) has already fallen to the Greeks. This tale portrays the return of Odysseus to his waiting wife and son in Ithaca. The journey takes many years, and involves many challenges and delays. On his homeward way, Odysseus dallies with various women, spending a jaw-dropping seven years as the lover of Calypso. Again, the gods are partly to blame for this delay.
Involved since the Trojan war broke out, they periodically interfere, leaving big messes between their fateful forays. Meanwhile Penelope waits faithfully for her husband Odysseus to return. She is besieged by potential suitors, who see her as a widow and try to take advantage of her apparent availability by vying for her hand in marriage. Not because they fancy her, but because they want the kingship and the wealth and power that goes with it.
Under the onslaught of the many suitors, only a few members of the household have remained loyal to Odysseus. Telemachus, though now grown to adulthood, cannot make the suitors stop bothering his mother.
“This is my son, mine own Telemachus, to whom I leave the scepter and the isle,” says Odysseus in Tennyson’s poem. All very well, but how is the young man (who grew up awaiting his father’s return from Troy) to fight off a hundred bullies singlehanded?
But in the end, Odysseus does get back, and the story closes in a classical fashion. Locking the women in their own quarters, Odysseus and his son, with the help of a few faithful retainers, take revenge on the would-be suitors by killing them all. Interestingly, the goddess Athene comes to the aid of Odysseus while this is done. Afterwards, the doors are unlocked and Penelope’s women are summoned to clean up the blood. Success means Odysseus and Telemachus kill all the bad guys. Just like your standard Hollywood move.
What else does this reveal? In our heroic story, Odysseus leaves his wife and infant son to help out the guy whose wife shamed him by running off with Paris. Penelope has waited at home patiently, raising her son alone and refusing to marry any of the ambitious suitors even when she believes her husband is dead. Once she is certain of her husband’s identity (he returns in disguise), she greets him joyfully and accepts being locked up in the women’s quarters (presumably for her own safety) during the battle. After her husband and son have killed all the suitors and dragged their bodies outside, at his behest, she willingly sends her women out to clean up the mess from the bloodbath.
According to our current cultural values, the behaviour of Odysseus seems sexist, irresponsible and selfish: running off on a wild goose chase with his male friends while his patient and compliant wife awaits his return and raises their son alone.
There are other ways to look at this. We can acknowledge how deeply we are mired in the cultures that birthed and nurtured us, and make an effort to stretch our imagination beyond our usual interpretations.
In the world of the ancient Greeks, the killing of the suitors would inevitably have led to a blood feud. It was deemed necessary that the families of the slain should wreak vengeance against Odysseus, for the sake of their honour, so that their names would not “stink in the nostrils” of those who came after. It seems the idea of honour (in this case making sure other men didn’t get away with hassling your womenfolk) trumps the proscription against killing. We see echoes of this idea in modern “honour killings” and other blood feuds, for instance, the sectarian revenge killings that perpetuated the Troubles in Northern Ireland. As Tommy Sands wrote so poignantly in There Were Roses, “A Catholic would be killed tonight to even up the score. Oh, Christ it’s young O’Malley they’ve taken from the door.”
In The Odyssey, gods and goddesses routinely take sides for and against individual humans and often step in to influence the outcome of a situation. Early on, Odysseus blinds the Cyclops, son of the sea god Poseidon. In spite of being undetaken in self-defence, this action has consequences far beyond the storms the sea god stirs up to punish the sinner. In fact, on the first night Odysseus is reunited with his wife after two decades, he informs her that he must take another trip, this time by land. As foretold by Tiresias in Hades, he explains, the journey will end in faraway place where he must make sacrifices to atone to Poseidon and thus free himself from the sea-god’s wrath.
Through this we glimpse the fatalistic outlook of the Greeks, as well as their ideas about how wrongs must be atoned for. We also see how once more the wife is expected to wait around while the husband goes travelling on business. The new journey raises the obvious possibility that Odysseus will indulge in more affairs along the way. The double standard for male and female loyalty seems abundantly clear. Men are loyal to their comrades at arms and women are either “enchantresses” or patient, faithful and loyal wives and mothers.
Though the Greeks deities share human vices like jealousy, anger and violence, they are not all bad. Near the end of the Odyssey, Athene comes between feuding men and orders them to break off the fighting before more blood is spilled. When Zeus sees that Odysseus still has “the smell of battle in his nostrils,” he flings down a thunderbolt in front of him and Athene once again orders him to stop. Thus with the help of the gods, the reawakened battle ardour of Odysseus is cooled, and peace is restored to the islands.
Meanwhile, back in Troy, Queen Hecuba and her daughter-in-law Andromache must cope not only with the loss of their husbands and sons, but the prospect of being enslaved by their Greek captors, as described in The Trojan Women. When my daughter was in high school, the drama majors staged this tragedy by Euripides. I was amazed by the outstanding performances of the teenage girls who played Hecuba, Andromache, and Cassandra (the prophetess cursed with foresight, combined with the fact that nobody believes her prognostications). They were completely believable as bereaved wives and mothers and frustrated seer.
Using ships driven by wind and oar, Odysseus travels from Troy, now in Turkey, and overshoots his home island, visiting parts of Italy, Sicily, Malta and North Africa. On a personal note, I have now seen many of the places mentioned in the tale. Last summer I travelled with my amateur choir to sing in Malta, and we visited the island of Gozo, onetime home of Odysseus’s temporary wife Calypso. Strangely, the tour guide, though she showed us many churches and ancient ruins, failed to mention this bit of lore.
In the end, what can we make of The Odyssey today? The unfortunate behaviours indulged in by the hero are still very much in evidence, which raises the question of whether and how much we’ve progressed as a species.
As I have said, there are different ways to view this old story. Always, we understand stories through the lens of the culture we inhabit. Discussing her recent novel entitled Helen’s Judgment, Susan C. Wilson classifies the ancient Greek world as a shame culture, which she contrasts with modern western guilt culture, in which “Social order is maintained through the individual’s private conscience and the anticipation of punishment for breaking rules.” With this in mind, readers may interpret the withdrawal of Achilles from the fighting as a necessary response to being dishonoured. Similarly, Helen may be viewed as the victim of the goddess Aphrodite’s self-serving interference, indulged in to shore up her own vanity.
In spite of the cultural gap between ancient Greek values and modern western ones, our contemporary propensity for dramatic art, stories and films suggests that the Greek idea of catharsis, the ability to release our pent-up emotions through the experience of art, is something we moderns still resort to with regularity and gusto.