Odyssey 7.1-83

Ancient Greek writers were the source of many of the genres of literature, and academic disciplines, that still get sorted into various departments and studies in the modern university. In light of this, Homer’s works become difficult to categorise for a modern academic, in that they are a source of sources and ancient for the ancients. He comes from another world, just as Phaeacia does for himself. However, the perspectives of two modern rubrics, I must admit, colour my registration of Homer’s Phaeacia. One is called today perhaps ‘cultural anthropology’; the other ‘political science’, which has its decidedly empirical aspect, and also ‘political theory’, which sometimes does not. But in the context of post-Homeric Greece, I think of the pre-Socratics and the Socratic philosophers, most of whom at some time or another engaged in speculation about what would be the ‘ideal city’. The grandest scale of the resulting compositions was surely reached in the mathematics of Plato’s Republic and the songs of his Laws. But comparison was very much a part of this partly speculative and partly revolutionary movement: how do they do things in Crete or Sparta as opposed to Ionia, or as we might say, how do they do things in Sweden as opposed to Singapore? Both these questions lead quite naturally to, ‘how ought one to do things?’

As for the ancient origin of modern cultural anthropology, I think instead of what Herodotus called his ‘history’, his inquiry into the great events of the past and the types of the peoples instigating or involved in them. The comparative instinct is again strong here, applied to cultural norms as against political orders. But how apply even a term like ‘culture’ to Homer, a concept which cannot be translated into his language? Herodotus was a traveler, and indeed for an observant and inquisitive traveler, detailed comparison leads very quickly to both cultural anthropology and political theory. Perhaps both these fields of inquiry have their origin in traveler’s tales. Now there is a genre that spans the ages and the globe. No doubt such tales were as old and romantic for Homer as they are for our cartographers. Yet Homer’s Odyssey is somehow both the paradigm and the pioneer. Here be strange creatures. There is very little for modern map makers to say about oceans.

When Odysseus is about to enter her, however, Homer does not speak of Phaeacia as a paradigmatic or perfect city, but rather a polis erannē: a city that arouses erotic desire—‘ravishing and longed for’. This could mean simply a city that suits Odysseus’ own desire, as a staging ground for his return home—his true desire. But Homer’s objective wording and pointed predication of ἐραννή rather objectify Phaeacia as a singularly beautiful thing, a city to fall in love with. (The word perhaps encourages a notion of Odysseus’ entrance as a penetration, as indeed does the image of Athena as a young virgin with a pitcher, which immediately follows [7.18-20].) A desired one is perhaps something quite different from an ‘ideal’ city. But Homer has a blueprint: he takes pains, directly or through others’ voices, to describe the city’s physical layout and its political and social castes. He mentions Nausithous’ the founder’s communal distribution of ploughland. What should undercut some of this for an audience is the place’s isolation: the agricultural self-sufficiency makes excellent sense, but what would be the point of walls and a fleet to such a city? Perhaps these contribute to a real Hellene’s sense of what is either gorgeous or ideal in a polis, so he is inclined to forgive any incongruity in the art.

But there is also incongruity in the comparison of cultures, if Phaeacia is supposed to be idealised. Homer seeds this doubt himself with his digression on the chambermaid, Eurymedousa, whom the Phaeacians had procured from elsewhere—as though they had been on a raid of their non-existent neighbours! The name of her town, Apeira, means ‘limitless’; to carry her off from Apeira, as the Phaeacian sailors did, is to carry her off from ‘The Infinite’. Be that as it may, it is said that she was brought to Alcinous as a ‘prize’. The understanding of this term which we derive from usage in the Iliad, is that Eurymedousa was to be his concubine. Now, does that mean it’s okay, just because it’s a thing invading armies do—to hand out captured women as top prizes to leading warriors in the general distribution of booty? How is Alcinous’ august and revered wife Arete supposed to feel about such arrangements? Homer seems to tease us with such revelations. We recall that when we were introduced to Eurycleia, Telemachus’ nurse—whose name Eurymedousa also recalls—we are told that Laertes (Odysseus’ father) had bought her with his own money, and honoured her in the house on a level with his own wife. But—and Homer rather emphasises the point—he did not sleep with her (1.433). We may infer that this was unusual behaviour on Laertes’ part, the abstaining from sex with his youthful and comely purchase. But does Homer celebrate a romantic monogamy in Laertes’ and Odysseus’ household? Or are they weird? Are we to think less of Alcinous’ and the Phaeacians’ usage, in awarding such a prize and embracing its intent? At the very least, Homer must be telling us these details to prompt some reaction. The comely Eurymedousa ended up Nausicaa’s nurse and now makes her some supper, just as Eurycleia had earlier made Telemachus’ bed and folded his clothes.

Perhaps less ambiguous morally, for all that Homer hints more than he states, are the revelations of Athena as she guides Odysseus to the palace. She appears as a young maiden carrying a pitcher. Does anyone know this figure as a motif? I think of Rebeccah from Genesis carrying a pitcher to the well, only to be spotted by Abraham’s flamboyant emissary in search of a bride for his son. It is wonderfully alluring, this image of the girl on her own with the pitcher, together with the idea that the public water source might be a place to get lucky. Perhaps there is something simply fervid about this city that ‘inspires eros’ (ἐραννή). In any case, the girlish instantiation of Athena is quite the gossip. There are hints in this ideal city of things being too good to be true. We learn that Alcinous and Arete, the royal couple, are in fact uncle and niece. Surely some sort of red flag goes up? Odysseus in his travels will encounter a number of different kinds of marital arrangements, some of them proudly incestuous. Something always ends up being off, dangerously off, with these people and places.

The flirtatious Athena seems to relish the juicy bits: Arete got her name from the very same parents who birthed Alcinous, she chuckles. Nausithous the patriarch was the son of Eurymedon’s daughter, who was impregnated by Poseidon. One presumes this happened after Eurymedon, king of the Giants, “destroyed his presumptuous people … then himself”. ‘Eurymedon’ is the masculine version of the name we have just heard, Eurymedousa, the prize concubine turned Nausicaa’s nurse and maid. Is she perhaps a descendant of Giants?

This undercurrent of strangeness perhaps sets us up for a quandary that is very real for me: what do we finally make of Athena’s admiration for Phaeacian matriarchy? There are many reasons, some of which I have been developing as we proceed, to think that the place of women in the home, in society, and in the political order is something very much in the front of Homer’s mind as he tells the Odyssey. The figure of the woman of the house (or the cosmos in Calypso’s case), stationed by the house’s pillar, has already become a symbolic motif. Even in light of this, Arete’s special significance in Phaeacia is highly marked. Her husband the king “honoured her, like no woman else is honoured upon the ground, / As many women as there are these days, hold the house beneath their men.” It is several times pointed out how ancillary Alcinous really is, in general but also in Odysseus’ particular interests. It is her, Arete, that he has to impress if he is to have a chance to win passage home. She is not merely the power behind the throne; no, she is the pillar around which the whole society is erected and upon which it leans. It is clear that her influence spreads far outside the domicile: unlike the other high-born women we have encountered, including Helen, she goes out on the town, and is hailed like a god by the denizens. We are told that she solves the quarrels and strifes (νείκεα) of men, not only their wives. This is a talent that would have solved the Trojan War.

So is this ultimate centrality of the female to human order, in politics or culture, something the poet of the Odyssey acknowledges and celebrates? Or is her description of Arete’s authority instead the consummating point in Athena’s disclosing the weirdness of Phaeacia?

… off she went, Owl-Eyes Athena

Over the unfruited deep, and she left ravishing Scheria behind;

She arrived in Marathon and the broad streets of Athene,

And entered Erechtheus’ close-built house. But Odysseus …

To Alcinous’ famous house he went: and often was his heart

Troubled as he stood there, before he got to the copper threshold.

From my first book:

Note the almost over-emphatic floridity of the epithets, as the animate locations on Athena’s journey are bodied forth. But then we see the name of Odysseus, unadorned and lonely. The bounty of the goddess’s destinations, as it is expressed in the music of the epithets, seems to underscore the bereavement of the solitary traveller she has left behind with only the syllables of his name. To say that Odysseus is pushed into the background because he has no epithet is to assert the opposite, in this case, o...