Odyssey 6.285-331 (end)

Off Odysseus goes down the yellow brick road, following the mule car of Nausicaa and a gaggle of her attendants. The passage is mostly the second half of Nausicaa’s speech of instruction to the initiate. That is how the speech should be characterised. This is a journey that begins at the edge of wilderness, in what seems like a boar’s lair, sheltered under twinned trees, one of whom is Athena’s cultivated olive. Hence the river’s mouth where Odysseus meets Nausicaa is a liminal zone, where civilisation meets the wild and wet, and ‘liquid mortals’ may be prowling. The journey home will proceed along past the farms, at whose presence the hybrid bushes on the forest’s edge have already hinted. Here the pilgrim must keep his distance. But the real gauntlet the girls’ party has to run, comes just before the city wall: there lies the dockyard with private slips, where there are ships to trade what the locals cultivate, or to go pirating and take what others make. But Phaeacia is weirdly isolated, so neither of these scenarios makes sense; why after all are these people so bothered, obsessed even, with ships? Almost all the Phaeacian’s names, including Nausicaa’s, seem connected to boats or the sea. There is not a hint of an interest in fishing. What sort of a sailor is it who never deals with foreign ports? We shall need to dig into the nature of these mariners, these dedicated escorts, these ferrymen across to undiscovere’d countries, who also make it back.

The salty seamen whose comments Nausicaa disdains preoccupy themselves in this second liminal zone, between the farms and the city wall. They have their market set up there marked by hauled stones in trenches, like a henge, right next a lovely temple to Poseidon. That god’s protection must have been much on any mariner’s mind, let alone the Phaeacians’, who claim his kinship. Odysseus, not for the first time, is therefore infiltrating enemy territory. Nausicaa instructs him to duck into a grove beforehand, to avoid the spectacle his presence would create before the sailors. This grove is sacred instead to the now friendly Athena. We leave Odysseus praying to her there in her sanctuary.

Nowadays, I understand, we find in Greek towns a shrine to St. Nicholas by the sea, and to the Virgin in town. Of course Poseidon is not St. Nicholas, and the Virgin (parthenos) has been transformed from Athena into Mary. She is thought now to have given birth, once upon a time. But there is surely something awesome in the continuity of the genotype, in the thought of which two archetypes of superhuman power must be instituted there to protect a seagoing city. Phaeacia is a Neverland, an Oz, even to ancient Homer; and yet there is uncanny recognition in her salty idyll.

Yet Odysseus’ final pilgrimage and penetration of the sanctum is still only to begin once he crosses into the city proper. From farmers to sailors, we cross the wall to mingle with the citizens. But once again, we must distinguish qualities. Alcinous’ house is not at all like any of the others. Nausithous, their founding father, had built the wall and ‘distributed the ploughlands’. I suppose this portends a jolly sort of Soviet oligarchy. His son Alcinous now enjoys the perks.

At last Alcinous’ palace itself has to have its layers peeled before one reaches the hearth. The whole journey is a nested labyrinth, mysteries opening upon mysteries. Pass the courtyard, cross the great room until you reach the hearth, the central fire, where you’ll find Nausicaa’s mother. There she spins the sea-purple wool, leaning against a pillar. Right nearby, his drinking chair also leaning against the pillar—although the single intensive/reflexive αὐτῆι in Greek makes it seem as though he’s leaning against her—sits the tipsy Alcinous, “like an immortal.”

Everything does lean on her. She is the pillar. Nausicaa owns as much about the father she exalts as ‘hero’ and ‘immortal’, when she says to Odysseus, in Butler’s translation, ‘never mind him!’ Arete, her mother, is the source of power. It is her knees, not Nausicaa’s, which he must be brave enough actually to clasp. The whole vision of the Phaeacian civilisation can be seen to centre on, to lean against, this house’s pillar, which therefore grows in the imagination to be an axis mundi. In Book 1 Penelope descended the stairs and stood next the pillar of Odysseus’ house. Calypso is Atlas’ daughter, he who keeps the pillars of the cosmos. Women stand at the fixed axis of things in this cosmos. They constitute the central, stabilising power, as well as the hidden treasure encased in the labyrinth, the acquisition most prized within the protection of the city wall, beyond anything a ship can fetch. Only Helen among Homer’s leading women does not descend a stair and stand by a pillar. No, she bursts in upon the scene and drapes herself on a couch. With a footstool. (4.136) She, of course, is the woman who moves—or moved—and it is possible that it was more than the axis of international politics and war—though it certainly was those—which got displaced with her. The Trojan event certainly included a war. That’s the part we sing about.

In the midst of his outwardly simple but deceptively anagogical journey, in the train of Nausicaa’s steerage, Odysseus prays to Athena in the most bluntly human and intimate terms. What can compare to this picture of man talking to god, as though complaining to his mother that she did not protect him from his bullies? “Listen to me this time,” he says, seeing as “before you never listened, as I was battered …” Such intimacy between the human and the powers-that-be would seem to be a particular focus and point of Homer’s depiction. One wonders at the poet who feels this intimacy to be possible. One might think that all the layers of the onion in his pilgrimage to the hearth of Phaeacia have been peeled for the sake of disclosing such a conjunction. But the sense of constraint and containment within this depiction is nevertheless palpable. Even Athena will not yet appear to Odysseus face to face, out of shame before her uncle Poseidon.

What is the connection between the shame felt by women—Athena before her uncle, Nausicaa before her father (who, it turns out, is also her great uncle)—and that central pillar of civilisation by which Queen Arete spins the sea-purple thread? Is there anything at all shameless, by contrast, in Odysseus whining at a goddess? Perhaps it is significant that the intimacy presumed in Odysseus’ prayer to Athena, that he come to the Phaeacians as a friend and a thing to be pitied, needs to take place outside the city—or at least this city. As when he crawled under the olive bushes at the end of Book 5, here at the end of 6 Odysseus is once again safe outside, under Athena’s trees.

In Greek:

N.B. I shall have to travel across the planet next week. No free passage from the Phaeacians. There will sadly be a brief hiatus before Book 7.

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‘She applied the whip with judgement’: Homer in English

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