Odyssey 8.499-586

ταῦτ’ ἄρ’ ἀϝοιδὸς ἄϝειδε περικλυτός · αὐτὰρ Ὀδυσσεύς

τήκετο, δάκρυ δ’ ἔδευεν ὑπὸ βλεφάροισι παρειάς.

ὡς δὲ γυνὴ κλαίησι φίλον πόσιν ἀμφιπεσοῦσα,

ὅς τε ἑῆς προπάροιθε πόλιος λαϝῶν τε πέσησιν

ϝἄστει καὶ τεκέεσσιν ἀμύνων νηλεὲς ἦμαρ · 525

ἣ μὲν τὸν θνήισκοντα καὶ ἀσπαίροντ’ ἐσϝιδοῦσα

ἀμφ’ αὐτῶι χυμένη λίγα κωκύει, οἳ δέ τ’ ὄπισθεν

κόπτοντες δούρεσσι μετάφρενον ἠδὲ καὶ ὤμους

εἴρερον εἰσανάγουσι, πόνον τ’ ἐχέμεν καὶ ὀϊζύν,

τῆς δ’ ἐλεεινοτάτωι ἄχεϊ φθινύθουσι παρειαί · 530

ὣς Ὀδυσεὺς ἐλεεινὸν ὑπ’ ὀφρύσι δάκρυον εἶβεν.

That’s what the singer sang, a celebrated man: but Odysseus

Began to melt, and a tear beneath his eyebrows wet his cheeks.

And as a woman weeps and sobs, fallen round her dear husband,

Who, right in front of his own city and people, met his fall

Defending the town and its children against the pitiless day—

She had watched him dying, gasping out his last,

And she dissolves around his person and moans a piercing cry; but the men

behind

Keep prodding with their spears her mid-back and her shoulders

As they insert her in the chain gang, to bear hard labour and sorrow:

And with the most piteous grievance the woman’s cheeks waste away …

Just so Odysseus—piteously—began pouring a tear beneath his brows.

When Homer starts a simile with a ὡς clause, ‘as a woman weeps’ for example, the one thing you know will follow, surer than death and taxes, is another ὡς clause, ‘so also …’ Hence the time of a simile is suspended time, like the time in the unfolding of a sonata before the return of the melody: as one experiences this tonal unfolding, and shifts to the dominant, all the while one expects, and increasingly anticipates and longs for the return of the touchstone. Hence one is in thrall to the composer, in the sense that one cannot help the expectation he has created, while on his side he can delay and otherwise exploit our need for resolution and consummation, without in any way diminishing it. What will he try, how far will he go, how weird will his invention be? This most remarkable of Homeric similes spills its banks, over and outward, in a way that waters new ground even in comparison to the inverted, labyrinthine, self-referential and cross-dressed similes we have already encountered in the Odyssey. One could say it stretches the form to the limits of a mind’s ability to balance its elements, and so grasp it aesthetically as a whole thing.

‘As a woman weeps fallen round her dear husband … so Odysseus began pouring a tear.’ There is the skeletal structure. We imagine a noble Andromache bewailing Hector. But what in Odysseus’ case corresponds to the ‘fall around’ ἀμφιπεσοῦσα, and the dead husband? Nothing obvious to the latter, it would seem, unless there is a lost beloved we know nothing about, or Penelope is somehow intimated. But we should still assume that something about mourning the dead warrior resonates with Odysseus, so that he might mourn with the man’s widow. Is it something like mourning his youth and his prowess, as though it had died? Demodocus’ song, however, casts Odysseus as the killer, not as either of the victims, the woman or the husband. For the woman’s collapse, we go back a line, to 521-2: ‘but Odysseus / Began to melt’. The comparison to the collapsed woman perhaps suggests a physical paroxysm of grief in the seated Odysseus. Homer’s usage of τήκομαι sometimes suggests a comparison of the upwelling of tears to melting snow. Odysseus’ cheeks become wet as though they are melting. The conclusion of the vehicle says that the woman’s cheeks ‘waste away.’ Such an identity in tenor and vehicle, cheek to cheek, must be considered unusual and aggressive; it rather forces the question, can a woman’s tears be compared to a man’s? A woman’s cheeks to a man’s gristle?

The vehicle builds and builds before this point, almost losing itself in its own story. The woman actually saw her husband as he was dying, witnessed his last gasp (τὸν θνήισκοντα καὶ ἀσπαίροντ’ ἐσϝιδοῦσα). This witnessing could only happen in a domestic scene, in proximity—as is assumed in the theme of the slaughter of the Trojans inside their own city, by the Danaan soldiers emptied from the belly of the horse. Only there at home, not on a battlefield, could she fall right away upon her husband, killed hot in cold blood, and cry out shrill. But here is the consummating moment in the poet’s staging: the murderous enemies standing around prod her in the back and shoulders. A push in the back is a profoundly disquieting sensation. Patroclus in the Iliad feels the flat of Apollo’s hand shove him in the back, when he is about to meet his doom. One cannot see who pushed you, and they never own up. It is the embodied experience, on the playground or in a nightmare or on the public square, that God is not on your side. I imagine the performer of this simile’s verses poking at the air above the ground with his staff. He is ‘other’, at the far end of the stick from the bereft and savaged woman. But we in the cheap seats feel the prod and the flinch in our backs, with our imagined Andromache.

And is Odysseus also not ‘other’? How is he connected to his victim? The vehicle builds in one way dramatically, another verbally. Its verbal summit is reached in a superlative in its last line: it is with ‘the most piteous grievance’ that the woman’s cheeks waste away in tears. It is as though the successive moving images, the dying gasp, the dissolution and the piercing cry—the beastly prodding in the back—all of these build their pathos and culminate in feeling through this superlative, the most piteous grief that belongs to this witness to her husband’s slaughter, a widow bound for slavery.

Why have I translated ‘grievance’? The ἄχος (akhos, ‘grief, pain, distress’) is a concrete thing. It may even be connected to ‘Achaean’, one name for the set of allies besetting Ilium, the sons of the Achaeans (υἷες Ἀχαιῶν). Perhaps these are ‘sons of woe’, or ‘sons of men of Woe’. But one is on perilous ground when trading in single etymologies, and indeed there is a danger of mystifying words in Homer, in particular in the spurious context of an unknown and unattested oral tradition, under whose umbrella every word in Homer could be seen as some sort of totem of cultural inheritance. But ἄχος is just a word. One best looks to Homer’s usage, and infer what one can from any oppositions induced. It does seem that ἄχος connotes the state of mind induced by grief, not just the grief, which when situated in the mind can be productive, humanly, of resentment or bitterness. We do not generally hear the ‘grief’ in ‘grievance’, but it does seem plausible all the same that acts which cause grief may be at the root of grievances, whether in the political or socio-economic or familial realms. On my reading the buildup of emotion and suffering in the course of the simile’s vehicle is at once a buildup in indignance, moment by excruciating moment, culminating in a superlative knot of human anguish and frustration of impulse, a most piteous ἄχος.

In light of this, the too brief conclusion of the simile resounds most awkwardly:

Just so Odysseus—piteously—began pouring a tear beneath his brows.

The frame of the simile locks into place—the tears, the wet cheeks—but the journey of the woman to its verbal crescendo, in a most piteous superlative, can hardly and only hollowly be matched in the tenor. The same word occurs in response to the vehicle’s concluding line, but decidedly in its non-superlative form: ἐλεεινόν, ‘piteous’ modifying Odysseus’ tear, or adverbially as I take it, ‘piteously’. One wonders if one should instead translate ‘pitiably’. It is as though the already jarring comparison framing the simile itself, of Odysseus’ tears in the audience to the tears of the woman and women widowed into slavery by the likes of Odysseus himself and his men, is being undercut by the juxtaposed comparison of grammatical comparison, between a superlative (ἐλεινότατος) describing her grief, and a positive (ἐλεεινόν) characterising his blubbering.

All the same, when Alcinous describes what seems to have happened to the stranger upon hearing Demodocus’ song, he says “ἄχος from somewhere has bestridden his mind’s vessels.” There is grief, and perhaps grievance, taken hold of Odysseus’ mind as well. What is going on here? What sort of catharsis could Odysseus be undergoing, which could in any way elicit the comparison to the experience of the widow? We remember that Odysseus set this up on purpose. He bribed the singer with choice bits off the back of a hog, and assured us that Demodocus tells the stories of the Trojan war as though he’d been there himself, or heard them from a witness. We should therefore assume that there must be some essential need for Odysseus to hear the story of his actions in war, while he sits in audience, told as accurately and true to life as possible. It seems he wants to witness...

‘But Odysseus began to melt ...’: Homer in English

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