Odyssey 11.90-151

‘Why ever, you wretched man, did you leave the light of the Sun

And come to see the corpses and the cheerless place?’ (Od.11.93-4)

One of Teiresias’ jobs is what the screenwriters call ‘exposition’, filling in the essential things in the background or foreground which the audience will need to know in order to make sense of the plot. A certain generation will always call this the Morgan Freeman role. But I find Teiresias’ brief entrance to be a jolt of tactility and perspective. There is a fuss of stage business, where Teiresias asks Odysseus to put up his absurdly threatening sword so he can drink blood; there follows the enacted sheathing and the old man’s imagined stooping and drinking of fresh animal blood from a trench, like a wildebeest at the watering hole. In a world already peopled with gods and monsters, this is nevertheless farcical and surreal. A stately man introduced wielding a golden sceptre is immediately on all fours lapping up gore like a jackal.

Note especially that phrase, ‘cheerless place’; it might register these days as a bit of a cliché, when it comes to describing hell or the underworld or a haunted cemetery, but no one, that we know of, had really described these things before. Teiresias’ ‘cheerless place’ (ἀτερπέα χῶρον), a land absent of sources of pleasure or delight, including the delights of dance and song, therefore deserves to strike the imagination with all the sombre awe with which it evidently struck the likes of Virgil and Dante and then Milton. It is a place foreign, or immune, to poetry, and yet a wellspring. There is now, forever, such a place in the landscape. And it continues to live in the cultural imagination and to be perversely productive of poetry and art, first of all in the tale of the wanderings of Odysseus and eminently here in the speech of Teiresias. If the ‘cheerless place’ is an idea not original to Homer, he is nevertheless, in our literary history, the source of its apostolic touch. The elements of Teiresias’ comparatively brief and pithy speech echo and resound, backwards and forwards in the Odyssey—literally re-sound—so that it becomes a true crux for both Odysseus’ tale to the Phaeacians and the whole of Homer’s poem.

It would seem that Teiresias needs to establish his authority with Homer’s audience, rather than let it be assumed, as he later might amongst the likes of Oedipus and Antigone on the Athenian stage. He does this first by already knowing, without being told, who Odysseus is—‘he knew me’ (ἐμὲ δ’ ἔγνω) says the teller—as well as the answer to his own opening question above, why’d you leave the light of the sun for the cheerless place? He knows what Odysseus means to ask about:

‘It’s a return home you’re after, sweet as honey, brilliant Odysseus …’ (100)

That shows he’s at least a little mantic, if not quite divinely omniscient. Teiresias also knows that Odysseus is at risk of destruction by Poseidon, in anger for the blinding of his son the Cyclops. That is a past and done deed for Odysseus and ourselves in audience, hence a credential of the prophet’s awareness.

But what comes next establishes Teiresias’ authority within the poetic world of the Odyssey: He warns Odysseus that when they reach the Thrinacian Isle, he must restrain himself and his crew from harming the cattle and flocks of Helius the sun who graze there.

‘Now, if you would leave them be, unharmed, and focus on returning home,

You might even still make it to Ithaca, though suffering crappy things;

But if you harm them, I read the signs of destruction at that time,

For both your ship and crew.’ (110-13)

This episode is in Odysseus’ future; he first hears about it now. We, however, have known since the opening lines of the poem (1.8-9) that this encounter does not end well. Odysseus will fail to restrain his men and lose both ship and crew, although to be clear, Homer blames the men’s failure squarely on their own (σφετέρηισιν) folly, not their leader’s weakness. The effect here in the Odyssey’s theatre is to certify, by internal validation, Teiresias’ acumen as a prophet. He knows how to read the signs (τεκμαίρομαι—his name, Τειρεσίας, may well mean ‘portent reader’); we are confident because, with respect to the sun’s cattle at least, we already know how that story ends. By grounding Teiresias’ credibility in this way, reaching back to the very framing of the poem, Homer primes us to take heed of the revelations about to come. We are on the edge of our seat for words from Teiresias which, it turns out, will haunt the rest of the Odyssey like a recurring refrain, and as much as any other of its musical features, turns the story into a song.

Spoiler alert: Odysseus is going to kill Penelope’s suitors, provided he manages to get home. Teiresias is in no doubt. But he leaves it open—not yet plotted by Homer, perhaps—whether he kills them ‘by stratagem, or openly with the sharp blade …’ (120). There’s still options, all suspense has not been lost. But that victory will not be the end of the story. For what follows from Teiresias’ mouth, and is therefore to follow in Odysseus’ life, nothing has yet prepared us. Note that Teiresias is no longer predicting, or entertaining choices and possibilities, but giving directions in the imperative voice; if he still has in mind Odysseus’ return home, it would have to be in some extended sense, beyond Ithaca and wife and child. That presents a significant shift of horizon for the arc of the Odyssey as we generally experience it. All roads lead to the cheerless place, no doubt; but is there anything going to distinguish Odysseus’ odyssey? What shall be written on his tombstone?

‘Travel, then, afterward—grab an oar that fits you well—

Until you reach those men who do not know the sea,

Men who do not even eat food seasoned with salt:

Nor do they actually know about ships with purple cheeks

Nor well-fitted oars, which become the wings for ships.’ (121-5)

Extraordinarily evocative are ‘those men who do not know the sea’; one knows the very heart of such men and their pragmatic wives. They sing Thracian harvest songs. But what does one do with men who do not season their food with salt? Do such people exist? Google searches suggest hunter-gatherers, but it becomes obvious that Teiresias intends people who engage in agriculture to sustain themselves. Surely salt is a non-negotiable necessity of human metabolism and survival? Can anyone reading me help with this?

‘Grab an oar.’ (It’s what I feel like saying to those just starting the Odyssey.) Not for nothing has been Odysseus’ interview, just concluded, with the ghost of Elpenor. His lost crewman had asked Odysseus to pile him a tomb, a monument to the Unfortunate Man (σῆμα … ἀνδρὸς δυστήνοιο, 75-6), on top of which he is to affix Elpenor’s oar ‘with which I used to row when I also was alive and with my comrades.’ (79) The oar planted on top of the mound (sēma) is itself a symbol (sēma) of the labour of the buried man’s bones and, at the same time and intrinsically, of the necessary team, his crew of oarsmen, with both of which Elpenor’s ghost identifies.

It is not clear whether Homer equivocates on the word sēma, as we would have to, between ‘tomb’ or ‘burial mound’ and ‘sign’ or ‘symbol’. A ‘tombstone’ may well unite these ideas for us as well, although our sense, aside from crucifixes or other religious symbols, would depend on the epitaph, the legible and intelligible writing on the tomb. Homer does not knowingly refer to writing of this sort, the sort in which his own poem has come to be notated and transmitted. Such a notation, including the accent marks, is a particular deployment of an independent set of symbols used to represent the sound, including its emphases, of a spoken language. Such sounds would need to be decoded by someone familiar with the language, into groupings we have come to call ‘words’, ‘phrases’, ‘clauses’ and ‘sentences’, for example, before they could have any meaning, and therefore become signs for something more than their associated sounds.

What is clear is that sēma can mean ‘symbol’ in Homer without any reference to a tomb. When in the Iliad a champion among the foremost Achaeans must be chosen to face Hector mano-a-mano, they each somehow put a mark or sign (σημαίνω, Il.VII.175 ff.) on a lot, before dropping it in a helmet. When the helmet is shaken and one falls out, the lot is taken round the circle, one by one, until the man who recognises the sign (sēma) acknowledges he made it. (It was Ajax.) These must have been pictograms, what the corporations call ‘logos’, except that they are private; they have no meaning beyond ‘I made this’, while even that meaning is only apparent to the maker. Hence it is a non-communicative sign and, one might say, almost insignificant.

Elsewhere in the Iliad, when Bellerophon is sent to Lycia, after having secretly been accused, by his host’s wife, of making unwelcome advances, he is to carry with him a folded tablet (πίναξ πτυκτός) inscribed with ‘baleful signs’ (σήματα λυγρά). These signs, which are said to be many and deadly (θυμόφθορα πολλά), evidently instruct the recipient to kill their bearer. (Bellerophon does not, after all, suffer the fate of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. see Iliad VI.160 ff.) Now, these signs could well have been pictograms, like skulls and crossbones. But then how to make their intent unambiguous, and why were there so many of them on the tablet? The endlessly intriguing fact is that the manyness of the signs, and the fact that they are inscribed on a folded tablet, suggest that they were the writing of spoken language, and that Homer had actua...

‘The Cheerless Place’: Homer in English