Odyssey 11.1-19

And so the journey begins. Well, begins again. There is a new breath filling the sails, a second wind. It is in fact the breath of Circe, ‘dread goddess of intelligible voice.’ Her entrance into the story has been literally pivotal; it sends Odysseus and his remaining men southward, toward the invisible place where the dead people go, and to the ministry of yet another divine mistress.

Olympian Athena at this moment is nowhere to be seen; Calypso, the island-bound and hence earth-bound Titan’s daughter, is as yet an unknown. Circe, the Sun’s daughter also seemingly island-bound, has been Odysseus’ bedmate for a year; now she sends him on to dread Persephone beyond the visible horizon. In the Odyssey the latter seems to be permanently ensconced beyond and beneath the earth. Athena stands out in Odysseus’ list as belonging to the sky or Olympus, always having to descend from there and return, when she is finished intervening in his life. Persephone seems to be the least visible of these beings, both to us and as a fact of the story.

The prospect of encountering the walking dead blows new life through the sonority of now familiar lines, invoking the launching of a ship and standing its mast. The ship herself is as animate in Greek as Circe: ‘the wind and the helmsman directed her.’ Even in English a ship is rarely an ‘it’. She and her men are on a wind-blown heading to Hell. One line rings a tad strangely this time: ‘Helius went down and all the lanes grew shadowed.’ (Od.11.12) ἄγυια is properly ‘street’. We speak of ‘sea lanes’ but these are abstract cartographic impositions upon the fluid. The lexicon suggests ‘paths of the sea’—which are what, exactly? Neither the wind nor the pilot are driving a road. The metaphor rather drives home the alienness of liquid depths to both the human and the buoyant. The sea is a roadless watery abyss.

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At the border of Oceanus, the river of ‘deep currents’, there be men. There are six lines about the Cimmerians in the Odyssey:

ἔνθα δὲ Κιμμερίων ἀνδρῶν δῆμός τε πόλις τε,

ἠέρι καὶ νεφέληι κεκαλυμμένοι · οὐδέ ποτ’ αὐτούς

ἠϝέλιος φαϝέθων ἐπιδέρκεται ἀκτίνεσσιν,

οὔθ’ ὁπότ’ ἂν στείχησι πρὸς οὐρανὸν ἀστερόεντα

οὔθ’ ὅτ’ ἂν ἂψ ἐπὶ γαῖαν ἀπ’ οὐρανόθεν προτράπηται,

ἀλλ’ ἐπὶ νὺξ ὀλοὴ τέταται δειλοῖσι βροτοῖσιν. (11.14-19)

There one finds the Cimmerian men, their country and city,

Hidden in mist and cloud: not ever upon them

Does shining Helius peer with his rays,

Neither when he moves toward starry heaven,

Nor when back to earth from heaven he turns his forward way,

But a deadly night is stretched over wretched mortals.

They have a country and a city (δῆμός τε πόλις τε), these Cimmerians. It is not clear how they have managed these things, how they grow food for themselves or what they get up to without any sun. What would they argue about in court or at the assembly? What outlet or venue might there be for fighting men (ἄνδρες) to display? It is not that the sun never rises there, it seems, but that it is forever obscured by thick fog and cloud. The land of the Laestrygonians saw very short nights, so that a busy shepherd could earn two wages, bringing home the cattle and taking out the flocks (10.84-5). It seems we have moved from somewhere far in the north not to the opposite pole, but southwards toward the equator. Evidently the view south in illo tempore presented something at the same time spectacular and gloomy, not an horizon but a barrier of some kind, beyond which was held to be the Invisible Realm (Ἀϝίδης, Hades) where the dead and gone go to hide. At its border, the farther shore of the stream of Oceanus, dwell people with a name, who could hardly see for looking … or be seen. We proceed through gradations of invisibility, and meet Cimmerians on the way.

What might it serve Homer’s vision that there be people who dwell there on the edge, however implausibly, in the valley of the shadow of death? Circe does not mention this possibility in advance; perhaps that is a first hint that following her instructions for a ritual engagement with the dead, will not be without its last-minute adjustments, like Neil Armstrong’s moon landing. (‘Rocket’ is not, despite the proverbs, one of the hard sciences.) Certainly there would be some anxiety about unforeseen events or hindrances to the playbook in such a frankly scary environment. Odysseus and his men take no chances engaging with these Cimmerians, as they might otherwise have been expected to do, to see what they could get from them. They disembark there, one assumes near the town, and proceed along Oceanus’ banks to the grove of Persephone.

Apparently this is a grove consecrated by the Cimmerians, like the grove of Athena in which Odysseus lays low on his way to the town of Phaeacia. One presumes (though one does not know) that within the Phaeacians’ town, there is a temple to Poseidon. They are descendants of Poseidon, after all. There is evidently a tension between Poseidon and Athena which plays out in the opening of the Odyssey, a tension which devolves in this instance upon the fate of the figure of Odysseus. Perhaps this tension is reflected politically in the location of these sacred sites, one within the walls and one a suburban grove. In historical Athens the situation is reversed, with Athena’s house on the Acropolis and Poseidon’s temple away in Sounion. One honours the one god centrally, but covers one’s bases by keeping the opposition at arm’s length, which is also of course within arm’s reach. But within the Acropolis is also the famous house of Erectheus, still extant; the latter was a founding hero who historically comes to be associated with a cult of Poseidon. It is striking that when Athena leaves Odysseus on the Phaeacian king’s doorstep, she heads off to the house of Erechtheus, called out by name, in a place called Athene (7.81). Whether for Homer also this refuge-seeking of Athena’s represents some kind of reconciliation with Poseidon, or only a resort to her own city’s founder, is a matter lost to time. But their historical practices seem to suggest a place for Poseidon within the Athenians’ acropolis. We may speculate, by analogy, that Hades himself is a central divinity in the Cimmerian polis, while his consort Persephone haunts her grove on Oceanus’ banks. I therefore venture to infer, merely from the fact that there is a grove of Persephone apart from the Cimmerian town, that they acknowledge a tension between her and her husband. Circe does not appear to rate the town and its Cimmerians, only the grove.

Herodotus knew of Cimmerians in eastern lands who were expunged by the Scythians. These were indeed a people who had disappeared, but left mementos of their existence in the names of certain landmarks, like the ‘Cimmerian walls’ or the ‘Cimmerian Bosporus’. The Bible knows a corresponding people as Gomer. But there is no mention in classical Greece of Cimmerians living anywhere to the south across the sea. Here is an opportunity to point out what is not obvious even to professional historians: that there is no good topographical reason to connect any of the places named and described in Homer to places so named by classical Greek authors (or ourselves). Homer’s Aegypt has no pyramids to speak of. But beyond that, the place Herodotus calls Aegypt (Egypt), applying Homer’s name, has never been called this by the peoples who are native there. To this day, local peoples have somewhat accommodated themselves to inherited imperial naming, like the dwellers in the ‘Arctic’ or around the ‘Gulf of Mexico’.

Efforts continue, but fail, even to identify the places Homer names which are supposed to be within Greece itself. The situation is such that it seems to me most likely that the places were named from the poems, rather than the other way around. With the exception of Athens, which is a place which proves to have been a significant bottleneck or filter in the transmission of Homer’s music, I believe the Greek place names for towns domestic and foreign were assigned by migrants from parts northern who ventured south into a decimated land, bringing with them the Homeric poems and its names, either on their lips or in their hands. To be sure, there was a significant servant population of some kind, who already used Greek amidst the bureaucracy of the Mycenaean citadels. These stock-keeping scribes wrote in Linear B, which was a syllabary inadequate to record Homer. There is clearly a puzzle here: its solution must be allowed to involve the catastrophic breakdowns of societies, sudden migrations of populations into devastated regions (sometimes misinterpreted as ‘invasions’), and changes in coastlines, topography, and even cardinal points before any satisfaction will be had. It is a salient fact that Greek speakers do not speak a language closely related to the other Indo-European languages presently surrounding them.

There must be a programmatic interest for Homer in the Cimmerians, for he tells us next to nothing about them, save that they have a country and some sort of recognisable city, and that the perpetual noxious weather and dark of their circumstances oppresses them and leaves them wretched. But Odysseus does not encounter deserts, as we define them; and when he encounters a deserted isle, overrun by goats, he breaks into a reverie about how admirably it might be developed if humans could make their way there, across from the land of the Cyclopes. His world seems ...