“I will say nothing terrible to you, not how
You wander the earth an exile from your father hand,
Nor how your father killed a blood relative
And then settled as a foreigner in Argos or even
How right before the walls of Thebes he made a meal of human flesh
When he cut off the head of the child of Astacus.”
The mythical and poetic traditions around the Trojan War make the Judgment of the Arms (the contest for Achilles’ weapons between Odysseus and Ajax) a common motif in art and literature. The Roman Tragedian Accius had his own version. Here are some fragments.
103-108
“His words [i.e. Achilles’] speak clearly, if you understand them.
He commands that his weapons be given to the kind of man
Who bore them, if we desire to overpower Pergamum.
I declare that I am that man, that it is right for me to use
The weapons of my kin, that they be allotted to me
Either because I am his relative or his rival in bravery.”
Aperte fatur dictio, si intellegas:
Tali dari arma, qualis qui gessit fuit,
Iubet, potiri si studeamus Pergamum.
Quem ego me profiteor esse, me est accum frui
Fraternis armis mihique adiucarier
Vel quod propinquus vel quod virtuti aemulus.
109-114
“This man [Odysseus] was the only man who ignored the sworn oath
Which he took first and you all made together.
He tried to pretend to be insane to avoid the fighting.
If observant Palamedes in his wisdom
Had not noticed the malicious daring of this coward
The law of sacred oath would be meaningless forever.”
Cuius ipse princeps iuris iurandi fuit
Quod omnes seitis, solus neglexit fidem;
Furere adsimulare, ne coiret, institit
Quod ni Palamedi perspicax prudentia
Istius percepset malitosam audaciam,
Fide sacratae ius perpetuo falleret.
115-117
“Yeah, saw you, Ulysses, breaking Hector on a rock.
I watched you defending the Greek fleet with your shield,
While I, trembling, clamored for shameful flight.”
Vidi, te, Ulixes, saxo sternentem Hectora,
Vidi tegentem clipeo classem Doricam;
Ego tunc pudendum trepidus hortabar fugam.
“Those light-weight, annoying and pointless talkers who, though they cannot rely on any strong foundation, pour out lolling, liquid words, are correctly believed to draw only as deep as the lips and not the heart. Indeed, most people say that the tongue should not be free but should be guided by lines tied to the deepest part of the chest and the heart, as if by a ship’s captain. But still you may see certain men who toss around words without any semblance of judgment, but instead with a certainty so great and profound that even while they are speaking they do not seem to understand that they speak.
Homer has his Ulysses, however,–a man suffused with wise eloquence–move his voice not from his mouth but from his chest. This depiction is not so much about the sound and style of his voice as it is indicative of the considerable weight of the thoughts conceived within. And Homer also said quite appropriately that teeth are a wall built to contain immature and dangerous words—not just so that the watchful guardian of the heart could restrain them, but that they may be stopped by a guardhouse of sorts positioned at the mouth. The Homeric lines which I mentioned above are: “But when he released the great voice from his chest” (Il.3.221) and “What kind of word has escaped the bulwark of your teeth”? (Il. 4.350)
1 Qui sunt leves et futtiles et inportuni locutores quique nullo rerum pondere innixi verbis uvidis et lapsantibus diffluunt, eorum orationem bene existimatum est in ore nasci, non in pectore; linguam autem debere aiunt non esse liberam nec vagam, sed vinclis de pectore imo ac de corde aptis moveri et quasi gubernari. 2 Sed enim videas quosdam scatere verbis sine ullo iudicii negotio cum securitate multa et profunda, ut loquentes plerumque videantur loqui sese nescire.
3 Ulixen contra Homerus, virum sapienti facundia praeditum, vocem mittere ait non ex ore, sed ex pectore, quod scilicet non ad sonum magis habitumque vocis quam ad sententiarum penitus conceptarum altitudinem pertineret, petulantiaeque verborum coercendae vallum esse oppositum dentium luculente dixit, ut loquendi temeritas non cordis tantum custodia atque vigilia cohibeatur, sed et quibusdam quasi excubiis in ore positis saepiatur. 4 Homerica, de quibus supra dixi, haec sunt:
ἀλλ’ ὅτε δὴ ὄπα τε μεγάλην ἐκ στήθεος εἵη (Il.3.221)
et:
… ποῖόν σε ἔπος φύγεν ἕρκος ὀδόντων; (4.350)
This topic is covered in other authors like Plutarch. It seems obvious to say but still merits saying that in our modern world where everyone has a platform and is encouraged to speak, the choice not to speak becomes ever so rarer and precious.
(Gentle Readers: The following is a summary of several posts about Odysseus for my myth class.)
Homer’s Odyssey, read by many as the story of Odysseus, has perhaps exerted a fantastic influence on the reception of the survivor of the Trojan War. One of the things I like to encourage is the idea that rather than representing the standard view of the figure, the Homeric epic goes to great lengths to reform and re-present a traditional figure whose broader mythical tradition may have been a bit more positive.
Odysseus’ Magic Raft
(And it is fair to say that a close reading of the Odyssey itself can produce less-than-favorable revelations regarding the man it sings about.)
Part of the difference represented by Odysseus, I think, is that he is not strictly speaking a demi-god: instead of being a child of a god endowed with super-human ability, he is something somewhat mundane, a human being one step closer to the messy world of his audiences. He is, as the epic announces, the “many-minded man” and a “man of many shapes”. For this reason especially, he becomes a protean figure in myth.
Odysseus Declaims to Sirens?
The epic may play with this when Odysseus reveals himself to Telemachus in book 16, his son at first balks, certain that this man in front of him is a god or some delusion. Odysseus responds memorably (16.204):
“No other Odysseus will ever come home to you”
οὐ μὲν γάρ τοι ἔτ’ ἄλλος ἐλεύσεται ἐνθάδ’ ᾿Οδυσσεύς
A groundbreaking television documentary in the ancient world entitled “So You Think You Know Odysseus” might start out with his biography as popularly known and then look more closely at the epic itself. For instance, though we often talk about his son Telemachus, his wife Penelope and his father Laertes, we often miss the small detail presented in the epic that Odysseus has a sister named Ktimene. What is going on with her? Well, it seems that she was married off into the murky relationships that pervade the background of the Odyssey‘s rather unclear presentation of the geography and politics of the islands around Ithaca, a tale which makes Laertes out to be a conqueror and brings Odysseus’ rule into question.
But if we leave the Odyssey and look into the mythical tradition, we find that Odysseus dies–according to some–because he is defecated upon by a bird. He has a grandson related to Nestor. And he has up to 18 separate children apart from Telemachus. He was, in many ways, a classic, wandering inseminator.
Odysseus Prepares to Expose his ‘Sword’
But he was also a bit of a scoundrel. According to one tradition, he tried to stab Diomedes in the back while they slipped out of Troy. The negative associations of Odysseus become standard during the classical age when he appears often (but not always) as a bit of a villain in Tragedy and as a counter-figure in oratory where Socrates prefers Palamedes to Homer’s hero.
But it would certainly be unfair to say that the dangers of Odysseus weren’t present in the epic itself: during the middle of his own story, Odysseus as much admits that his own actions were in part cause of his (and his family’s) suffering. In the mythical tradition, Odysseus is positioned as the remorseful cause of Ajax’ madness, the vengeful scourge of Palamedes, the manipulative master of Philoktetes, and the captain who loses all his ships. His suffering is endemic. He is never innocent. But he carries on.
Odysseus and Eurykleia
I think that this traces in part to his essential humanity: for Plato, Achilles was the best man who went to Troy, and Odysseus was the “most shifty“. His changeable nature, rather than seeming heroic, is more real, more relatable, and far less than ideal. And this is what makes him so much more like us.
The “human-ness” of Odysseus is part of what made him appealing to later philosophers, the Stoics, as a survivor. The continuation of his tale makes him an apt metaphor or available allegory for the struggle of mankind to survive after the stories are done being told.
This year the annual meeting of CAMWS gathers in Colorado, where they bring new meaning to Higher Education. Oh, how we worry about the dangers plaguing our many-minded colleagues on their journeys.
Odyssey 9.82-97
“From there for nine days I was carried by ruinous winds
over the fish-bearing sea. On the tenth we came to the land
of the Lotus-Eaters where they eat the florid food.
There we disembarked to the short and we drew water;
soon my companions made dinner around the swift ships.
But after we had shared the food and drink
I sent out companions to go and find out
whatever men there were who ate the fruit of the earth.
I chose two men and send a herald as a third.
They went and met the Lotus-eating men.
The Lotus-Eaters didn’t bring any harm to my companions,
but they gave them their lotus to share.
Whoever ate the honey-sweet fruit of the lotus
no longer wished to report back or return home,
but just longed to stay there among the Lotus-eating men
to wait and pluck the lotus, forgetting his homecoming.”
“…One could imagine the poet deciding that drugs, too, are a part of experience, and maybe one could learn even from them. And, that being granted, given the poem’s frequent points of contact with a drug culture of some kind, it is not altogether implausible that in book 11 the poet conducts his hero on a hallucinogenic trip to the Underworld precisely when and where it will do him the most good. But only then, and for very special reasons, does it earn something like his grudging respect”
-Douglas J. Stewart. The Disguised Guest. 1976, 212.
Stewart makes this conclusion after analyzing drug use in the Odyssey: nepenthe in Sparta (administered to wine by Helen; compared by some to opiates); Lotus (book nine, he calls it “cannabis-like”); Circe’s drug (like LSD, according to Stewart) and Hermes’ antidote moly (book 10); dangerous wine (Polyphemos and Elpenor are undone); The Underworld “trip” (which Stewart suggests might be viewed as a grand hallucination which “shows signs of having been a drug experience”, 208).
Oh, and though I should not, I must, a moral from a different muse:
Is there a someone out there stalwart enough to write Classics-themed lyrics? I feel that one could rhyme Smyth with ‘high’…
“What shall I say first and what shall I say last?
The Ouranian gods gave me so many pains.
But first I will say my name so that you all will know it
since I have avoided a pitiless day and have come
to join you as a guest in these halls.
I am Odysseus, the son of Laertes, known among all men
for tricks: my fame reaches even up to heaven.”
“The fact that I will die unjustly shouldn’t burden my thoughts. No, this is a matter of shame for those who convicted me. The case of Palamedes, who died like me, provides some comfort. For even now he furnishes more beautiful songs than that Odysseus who killed him unjustly. So I know that it will be known on my part in the future as time passes that I did nothing wrong and that I never corrupted any man—instead, I have worked hard on the behalf of those I encounter, teaching them whatever good I can.”
In the Trojan War tradition Palamedes is the one who tricks Odysseus to showing he isn’t insane when Agamemnon and Nestor arrive in Ithaca to bring him to war. Once they get to Troy, Odysseus frames Palamedes as a traitor and arranges to have him stoned to death. According to fragments and ancient scholiasts, the major tragedians each had plays on Palamedes. We have none of them. Plato has Socrates mention Palamedes too (Apology 41b):
“Then it would be a wondrous way for me to spend my time there [in the afterlife], whenever I would meet Palamedes or Telemonian Ajax or if there is any other of the ancients who died thanks to an unjust judgment, I could compare the things I have suffered to what they did…”
The details are different-—notice the inclusion of another anti-Odysseus figure in Ajax—-but the tone is the same (Socrates enrolling himself in a list of wronged heroes). Plato’s Socrates seems a bit bolder, though, as he imagines hanging out with the unjustly dead.
Either after the end of the Trojan War or the completion of the second Seven Against Thebes, Diomedes is recorded by some as returning to Calydon (from where his father Tydeus had been exiled only to perish fighting around Thebes with Eteokles and Polyneikes). Diomedes returns to his ancestral land to restore the throne to the line of Oeneus (which had been pushed out by Agrios). According to this tradition, Diomedes restores Andraimon, the father of Thoas (who appears in the Iliad) to the throne.
Euripides’ play Oeneus on this subject is lost, but we do have a passage where Diomedes’ arrives:
“Dearest field of my father’s land, Hail,
Kalydon, from where Tydeus fled the shedding of kin-blood
that son of Oineus, my own father
who settled at Argos and took as wife a child of Adrastos”
This fragment doesn’t tell us much about the myth that we didn’t already know. But the story doesn’t go so well for elderly Oeneus. Diomedes takes him from Calydon to the Peloponnese where he is ambushed and killed by the surviving descendants of Agrios. The name Agrios—“wild one”—appears rather blandly in the Iliad. But outside that epic he is listed as the father of Thersites, thus a cousin of Diomedes.
According to the epic tradition, Achilles eventually kills Thersites and Diomedes makes the former go through a purification. Thersites is famous in book 2 for his destructive speech. Diomedes proves himself to be a capable speaker increasingly through the Iliad. And, his relative Thoas is quite good himself:
The use of Thoas here is intriguing. He is listed in the catalogue as the leader of the Aitolians (2.638) but he is also marked out for being exceptional in speech (Iliad 15.281-4):
“Then Thoas the son of Andraimon spoke among them.
Of the Aitolians he was the most knowledgeable with the spear
And best at running. But few Achaeans could surpass him in the assembly
Whenever the young men used to make a contest of words.”
