Odyssey 7.167-260: Polymētis Odysseus

Alcinous reveals the Phaeacians to be something of a throwback, in the mythic scheme of things. He announces his intent to provide the escort Odysseus seeks, effortless and painless, as seems to be the ancient practice of these ferrymen. But he makes clear that their service ends upon delivery; afterward, the stranger will be subject to the fate spun out for him when the thread was cut at his birth, by those “weighty ladies,” the Spinners. But this also suggests that for the time he is under their care and escort, the presently anonymous Odysseus will be outside of any deterministic bounds signified by the myth of the Spinners at our birth. This is as much as to say that the land of Phaeacia lives as far outside the rules of time and birth and place as mortals doomed to die some time, can be. But then Alcinous wonders out loud if this stranger before him might in fact be one of the deathless ones; evidently something about Odysseus’ apparition makes this plausible. In that case, complains Alcinous, the times they are a-changin’. The gods never used to hide themselves at our parties! Even if you ran into them on the street. We’re from the world of Cyclopses and Giants, God’s neighbours! It may in fact be that Homer intends the arrival of Odysseus to mark a transition in the order of the world, in which the Κύκλωπες and Γίγαντες of old, and the Phaeacians too, will obsolesce. Perhaps heroes, gods, and epic poetry as well.

Even if Alcinous does not actually suspect that Odysseus is a god, it is pretty clear, and rightly so, that he thinks the stranger is nevertheless concealing something.

To be honest, the stranger has so far been concealed from us as well. We are at the beginning of peeling the onion. Odysseus’ characteristic epithet in Homer, from Iliad I on, is πολύμητις: ‘of many counsels or devices’. Polu/poly is ‘many’, mētis is ‘mental acuity’, ‘shrewdness’, ‘mind’, or else the internal object of such faculties: a ‘cunning plan’. Personified, in stories outside Homer, she is the maternal source of Athena, in the sense that Zeus is supposed to have consumed Metis whole and given birth to their fully armed daughter from his head. If this story was common, it is no wonder that for Homer Athena is both cerebral and the source of higher thoughts, thoughts with a view to the big picture, in the minds inhabiting the heroes whom she favours with a visit. But she can also be a maiden fetching from the well, or a Taphian pirate, or Mentor, or a witch with a wand. Homer’s embodied imagination is not enslaved to a ‘mythology’, or any other modern concept which helps make it seem like the ancient Greeks had a religion.

In the context of the Odyssey, I always hear the ‘many’ in this epithet in relation to the peri in Penelope’s characteristic epithet, περίφρων. The latter is often translated ‘circumspect’, or ‘prudent’, without due regard to the mental asset expressed by phrōn. I think, however, that this is peri in the sense ‘more’ rather than ‘around’ or ‘about’, and translate ‘Penelope passing wise’. Odysseus’ ‘many’ may be ever so many, in the cognitive department, but it is not as much as Penelope’s ‘more’.

We have not yet escaped the American Homerist’s 20th Century dogma, that the epithets in noun-and-epithet phrases in Homer, like πολύμητις Ὀδυσσεύς and περίφρων Πηνελόπεια, functioned primarily to fill metrical spots in the hexameter line; in other words, they were thought to be filler, whose meaning did not necessarily register. Such phrases were thought to be part of a formulary, with which a supposed oral tradition of storytelling would allow the night’s improviser to draw on a stock of ready-made phrases to fill up the six measures of his lines, which the professional academics suppose he might otherwise have struggled to do. This dogma, however, views the Homeric verses as purely metrical things—a preposterous notion with no basis in history or text. Homer himself describes his art as singing, and his work as song; there is no such thing as purely metrical song. And the text of Homer we have is replete with a systematic set of tonal accent marks, completely ignored by the theory of oral composition-in-performance, which indicate the melodic contour of phrases and lines, together with the syllables upon which the voice lands in emphasis (rising in pitch or falling, according to a rule). These tonal emphases thereby infuse the otherwise monotonous hexameter drum-beat with both melody and rhythm. You hear them each time in my Greek rendition (below).

Apparently the repetition of phrases and themes in Homer, including the noun-and-epithet phrases like πολύμητις Ὀδυσσεύς, needed condescending explaining by mid-Century scholars raised on silent reading and ‘literature’. For some reason it did not mitigate these deficiencies that these people were also raised in the profound modern musical cultures of Europe and the Americas. I once wrote, ‘one would as soon explain repetition in music, as wetness in water.’ More recently: ‘How does one even approach a question about why there is a repetition of themes in a symphony or dramatic opera? How is it possible that Homeric scholarship can so seriously and sophisticatedly ignore the fact that Homer asks his performer to sing his verses, and act like there’s something that needs explaining or apology, in the typically musical features of the resulting song? … The ignoring of the seemingly irrelevant accent marks in texts seems to have led not to the realisation that all we could know, sadly, about the sound and performance of Greek poetry was its metre, but to the delusion that metre was all there was to know.’

Paolo Vivante first recognised that the function of noun-and-epithet phrases was evocative of their speaker or object, rather than predicating upon them; like summoning titles or names, which bring their referent to the storyteller’s foreground. Just as we don’t always register the majesty in ‘Your Majesty’, or the ‘gentleman’ when addressing a Congressman on the House floor, predication is not the primary function of these epithets. In my work I factored in the circle-dance origin of the hexameter rhythm, a medium of summoning presences, and the simply musical character of Greek verbal composition of all kinds; Greek was a language whose words, even in prose environments, had built-in tonal contours. Hence I compared these evocative Homeric phrases, like πολύμητις ʼΟδυσσεύς, to signature lines in opera, which recur significantly at dramatic moments. In Homer this is usually when he summons a character to make a speech, before delivering it in the first person. These name-and-epithet phrases summon the hero on a number of levels all at once, and hence were an unusual and powerful resource for the evocative ‘staging’ and presence of a singing soloist, playing many parts, rather than a concession to any sort of imagined metrical necessity. (One does not experience this Classicist’s ‘necessity’ in any of the works of Bach or Mozart, which are rigidly quantitative all the same; metre is a necessary condition for music, but a completely insufficient one.)

Vivante pointed out that when the same Homeric epithets, which normally resided in their summoning phrases, were displaced to other parts of the line, and became predicate adjectives, their meaning often became focussed and sometimes oddly different from their assumed sense inside the phrase. We don’t generally register the terror when an event in the day is ‘a terrible tragedy’; that phrase has become a formula, a noun-and-epithet phrase. In TV news-speak, things never simply go wrong nowadays, invariably they go “horribly wrong.” But the effect is different when predication is intended, as: “the tsunami was terrible, the destruction was horrible.” Terror and horror become real when deployed as predicates.

The question of registration then becomes a little delicate. We have already seen this early in Book 1, when Zeus refers to “blameless Aegisthus” in his opening speech, where he is pointedly singling out Aegisthus (and his fellow humans) for blame. Put most starkly, either ‘blameless’ (ἀμύμων) is a meaningless title of nobility, filling up the line, or it is a blunt satire, too on-the-point for irony, of epic norms. Unsurprisingly, I think the truth is more on the side of the latter. And yes, I find his usage in that instance something of an unsuccessful one for Homer—in part, precisely because its blunt opacity has spawned such small-minded disagreement.

In the case of Odysseus, πολύμητις seems intended to be complimentary, but it seems to me Homer means to ring changes on this Odyssean epithet—explore it, if you will—in his Odyssey. You would likely be guarded in your approach to an encounter with someone bearing such a description and reputation. Donald Trump would have probably just called him ‘Lyin’ Odysseus’, or some such, and not in fact be far off the mark if he were looking to run against the guy. What after all are these epithets like ‘clever’ or ‘intricate-minded’ in real life? Why, they describe a liar. Not just a liar, but unlike Trump, a good liar.

Homer thrusts the meaning of Odysseus’ epithets to the foreground in the line where Alcinous moves toward the suppliant, and the narrator says,

He took him by the hand, Odysseus the Clever, the Variegated Plotter,

And raised him from the hearth and sat him on a shining chair …

The two adjectives, δαίφρων and ποικιλομήτης, are each of them usually used as single epithets, joined together often with Odysseus’ name in an hexameter segment. Here, instead, they are both sounded, and together make up their own half-line, where Odysseus’ name belon...

‘Odysseus the Clever, the Variegated Plotter’: Homer in English