Odyssey 10.408-502

Odysseus learns from Circe that he must travel to the Underworld, the house of Hades Invisible—his name seems to mean ‘invisible’ or ‘unseen’, ἀϝίδης—and the home of his consort the awesome Persephone. Not for the first, but only the latest time in the Odyssey, the woman and wife appears to be in charge of house and realm. For a number of reasons, a first-time listener might be taken by surprise, even shock, at this disclosure on the bed of Circe. We have so far been encouraged to think that the arrival on this bed has been a significant one, a destined one, even a kind of climactic achievement; perhaps one that might put any sort of further homesickness into perspective. But no, the need for home reasserts itself into the blissful consciousness; and without warning, this triggers the revelation from Circe that she must pass along the soul of her mortal pilgrim wanderer to the ministry of a goddess even more dread. Not only is sexual union with the wise goddess no sort of transcendence over one’s origins, it seems, nor even a substitute for that home; no, he must head back; but it turns out Odysseus cannot even think of reaching his humble Ithaca (and the woman living upstairs there) unless he first travel to the undiscovered country where the dead end up—like the farm upstate where all the good dogs go at the end of their service—to consult Teiresias’ ghost. At no point heretofore was it in any way evident that such a journey would be necessary, just to get back home. One should have thought that favourable winds would have done the trick. Hence we might be justified in thinking that the revelation of this necessity is the practical takeaway from the wisdom gained from sleeping with the goddess. There is no journey home except via death and the dead. Apparently he must hear an oracle from among them, whose content nobody yet knows, and no spoilers.

None of this is on our horizon when we begin the passage: Odysseus is on his way to the ship to persuade the remaining crew, at Circe’s encouragement, to store their stuff and come join the party at her house. These are men who have never ventured from the ship and shore since they arrived on the isle, together with Eurylochus, the man who had led the first expedition but never entered Circe’s door; he had hid himself outside instead, and saw nothing of men turning into pigs, only men disappearing within, to suffer who knows what. So we are dealing with two levels of possible initiate here, the most of them simply neophyte, while one of them is positively ignorant and prejudiced, and positively fearful. Odysseus finds them crying away, ‘pouring down a lusty tear.’ When he approaches them, we are treated to one of the great similes, applied to all the men without distinction:

‘As when the farmyard calves—around the herd cows,

Come back to the dung pile when they’ve had their fill of pasture—

All jump around together as they face them: and no longer do the pens

Contain them, no, but with constant mooing and lowing they run around them,

Their mothers: so did those men, when they saw me with their own eyes,

Pile on me in tears: and it felt to them, in their life’s breath,

That they were there! As if they’d reached their father’s earth and the city that belonged to them

Of rugged Ithaca, where they were fed and they were born.’ (Od.10.410-17)

‘ … no longer do the pens/Contain them …’ Amidst all the richness, this is the bit that sticks out, at least for me. The pens into which we place and segregate domestic animals seem to have emerged as a metaphor for any number of kinds of social constraint. Everything from being ‘pigeonholed’ in school, socially or academically, to the fateful constructs of class and caste, seem to be kinds of constructed pens. Even in democracies so radical that they recognise ‘personhood’ in a foetus, the subsequent children are nevertheless denuded of rights and separated into classes by age and aptitude. Many of us continue to mark our anniversaries by reunion, in memory of our time together in those pens. Every corporation, institution, or work force seems to segregate into the junior, senior, and executive, the officer and enlisted, and so on. The Cyclops pens off his lambs and kids by their state of development. Once Circe has fed Odysseus her spiked pottage, she says,

“Off with you now, to the sty, lay out with the rest of your comrades.” (10.320)

It is as though the penning them in the sty is as much a part of Circe’s control over humans as her turning them into pigs. They are put in their proper place. Later we shall meet a swineherd who pens himself in on purpose, builds his own pen for a steading. Perhaps we are also to think of the wall built around a city, as is described on our first sight of Phaeacia, as a kind of enclosure. So when in the simile the young calves burst out their pens, there is a rather wonderful sensation of freedom. It is at the same time a restoration of their natural rights, to be reunited with their mother cows, who have been separated from them to go to pasture for the sake of the production of milk and the fattening of meat. The repatriation restores the benefits of nature and nurture to its exploited and deprived children.

‘Repatriation’ is an oddly fitting word for what is described. In Odysseus, his men at the shore see not only their mother, as the calves their dams, but their native land, its polity and its rocky pasture. For the moment, Odysseus is their home, and return home means restoration to Odysseus. They evidently believe that their comrades have been destroyed; after they repeat in their own voice the sentiment of the simile, that their joy at Odysseus’ return is such as if they had arrived in Ithaca, they ask him to recount the tale of their compatriots’ death. It must be noted, for all that it slips one’s attention, that Odysseus himself is the source both of the simile describing their welcome and the loving words of his men. How strange when one turns the narrative upon the teller: Odysseus is building himself up like a demagogue. I am your mother. I am your home. I am your nation.

The self-idolising sits alongside the humbleness of the image he paints. For the nursing cows, home is a dung heap. My teacher and his partner used to keep a dairy herd; she would always complain about the Ladies’ habit of waiting till they got home to the milking stalls to have a shit. It meant a lot of mucking out for her, and it seemed to her that the cows timed their releases spitefully. They’d had all those hours in the fields to do their manuring! Every human habitation is never far from its dung pile, even if the stuff is nowadays piped ‘away’. To long for home is to long for the aroma of your native dung pile. How is this a thing to wish for, over abundance and a goddess’ attentions on a wooded isle?

Rise and follow me, says Odysseus, although not so they would become fishers of men. (These would instead be the Laestrygonian giants, 10.124.) It always pays to note the changes when Homer’s speakers appear to repeat lines they were instructed to say. At first Odysseus repeats Circe’s imperatives about storing their tackle in caves by the shore. She herself just adds (to paraphrase) ‘then come back—and bring your friends.’ But Odysseus here himself adopts the imperative voice, as he stands forth as demagogue and saviour, who claims he can restore the lost boys to his men’s sight:

“But yourselves—look sharp, all of you together, and follow me!

So you may see your comrades in the sacred house of Circe,

Drinking and eating: for they’ve got an unending supply.” (425-7)

Odysseus says that he (and he alone?) can guide his initiates to the eternal feast under the goddess’ roof. He will drink the wine new with them in her house.

But there is a gadfly buzzing to annoy the reverie. His name is Eurylochus. The men in Odysseus’ entourage only seem to earn a name when they serve the narrator’s ends. What a strange creature this is, then, from the perspective of the self-heroising narrator. Could Freud or Jung make sense of his role? Or is he a comic Satan? Odysseus drops an intriguing detail when he is deciding whether to execute the man summarily, for his apparent democratic resistance and speaking truth to power; here is another instance of ‘drawing the sword from by his thigh’ to do an unmanly thing:

Whether I draw my tapered sword from by my thick thigh,

Cut off his head with that, introduce it to the ground—

Even if he was my in-law, pretty close kin— (439-41)

The little aside—and revelation—that Odysseus’ enemy is actually his in-law, plays like a line from situation comedy, in the midst of a rumination on summary beheading. Eurylochus is Odysseus’ kin by marriage (πηός). Could that make him, in the stagecraft of Odysseus’ psyche, an avatar of Penelope herself? Or is he just the first ever comic deployment of the useless in-law? The former may be a possibility to consider when we assess the contra speech in re the proposition that they all trek to Circe’s house, the speech that immediately turns the people’s would-be saviour murderous.

Here is what Eurylochus had said:

“Ah my losers, where are we going? Why do you desire these evils?

To make the descent to Circe’s room—she who’ll turn the lot of us

Into pigs or wolves, or else she’ll make us lions,

Who’d guard her big house for her, even by force?

Just like the Cyclops did—when they arrived in his inner court,

Our comrades, and with them followed that Mr. Bold, Odysseus;

For that’s on him! Due his outrageous recklessness, they also were lost.” (431-7)

Note ‘make the descent’ (καταβήμεναι): presently they are speaking on the seashore, s...

‘Flesh beyond reckoning ...’—Homer in English